key: cord-0922779-rgiuipyj authors: Barkur, Gopalkrishna; Vibha,; Kamath, Giridhar B. title: Sentiment Analysis of Nationwide Lockdown due to COVID 19 Outbreak: Evidence from India date: 2020-04-12 journal: Asian J Psychiatr DOI: 10.1016/j.ajp.2020.102089 sha: 40bb0bd1e9fba1cc6850098eb17e13188c1c6e94 doc_id: 922779 cord_uid: rgiuipyj nan Corona Virus Disease or COVID19 is a new virus disease that originated in Wuhan, China (Wang et al., 2020) . The virus has now spread across the world and the almost all the countries are battling against this virus and are trying their best to curb the spread as much as possible. The World Health Organisation has declared it as a Pandemic (World Health Organisation, 2020) and is leaving no stone unturned to control the pandemic and is awaiting a vaccine to cure it (El Zowalaty and Järhult, 2020). There are not many academic studies Billion people, was at a high risk of suffering from irreversible damage, and strict measures were expected to "flatten the curve." The Prime Minister of India announced the lockdown ("COVID-19", 2020), but it did not come as a surprise because Indians were actually given a feel of what it had in store through a one-day curfew named as "Janata Curfew" of 14 hours on March 22 nd from 7 AM to 9 PM (The Economic Times, 2020). Thus, Indians were exposed to a lockdown situation partially, and this helped in preparing mentally for the nationwide lockdown, and the announcement did not come as a shocker to them. Looking at the statistics of COVID19 infected, recovered, and death cases of Italy and other countries, Indians knew that drastic measures were needed in India to stop the numbers from rising exponentially. This paper deals with the sentiment analysis of Indians after the lockdown announcements were made. We used the social media platform Twitter for our analysis. Tweets were studied to gauge the feelings of Indians towards the lockdown. Tweets were extracted using the two prominent hashtags used namely: #IndiaLockdown and #IndiafightsCorona from March 25 th to March 28 th 2020. A total of 24000 tweets were considered for the analysis. Analysis was done using the software R and a wordcloud was generated that depicts the sentiments of the tweets. Figure 1 shows that the prominent sentiment was positive. Indians were clear that they had to flatten the curve and were committed to it. The next sentiment that stood out was trust. Seemingly, the Indians trusted their government and were probably sure that government would implement the lockdown successfully and see that no citizens would struggle for basic essentials during the lockdown and the government would make arrangements for the same. Some tweets expressed total surprise about the decision but overall, it seemed like people were expecting such a measure as lockdown to contain the spread of the virus and this was possible only through social distancing and by practicing hygiene measures like washing hands frequently using soap or alcohol based sanitizer. Future studies can look in to pre and post lockdown tweets and understand whether there was a change in sentiments from the beginning to the end of the lockdown. Also, future studies can look in to factors that affect metal health during lockdowns and pandemic spreads. Another area for future research could be tackling of fake news that gets circulated through social media, impacting the mental health of the receivers. There is no conflict of interest among the authors. This research did not receive any funding from any agency. Contributors All the authors. BBC (2020) India's 1.3bn population told to stay at home COVID 2019 Outbreak: The disappointment in Indian Teachers Risk assessment of novel coronavirus COVID-19 outbreaks outside From SARS to COVID-19: A previously unknown SARS-CoV-2 virus of pandemic potential infecting humans-Call for a One Health approach Fear of COVID 2019: First suicidal case in India The Economic Times Phase-adjusted estimation of the number of coronavirus disease 2019 cases in Wuhan World Health Organization None.