Outbreak and integration of social media in public health surveillance systems: a policy review through BERT embedding technique

The COVID-19 pandemic posed significant challenges for statesmen and policymakers, especially in healthcare crisis management. During the spread of emerging infectious diseases, proactive governments’ responses and real-time implementation of precautionary measures may help countries to better manage the emergency and gradually return to normality, reducing an excessive resource waste as well as safeguarding citizens’ well-being. In this context, social media platforms represents a useful tool in predicting and early detecting outbreaks, with the potential of counteracting the rapid sequence of pre-pandemic events. This paper aims to present a bibliometric study based on a BERT embedding technique to overview the literature themes on the relation between social media alerts and infectious disease spread. Our findings underline the key role of social media platforms and the urgency of setting up an integrated digital surveillance system in which social media data can help to geo-localize chains of contagion and, in general, improve the effectiveness of public health interventions.