Omicron, boom online and on social networks for the new variant

The variant conventionally called 'Omicron' is advancing in the world and of course people are scared by the spread of this strain of Covid19.

So ANSA and DataMediaHub analyzed online conversations to understand people's emotions about it.

Since November 27, there have been 2.8 million online citations relating to Omicron worldwide.

As regards specifically our country, the online citations (social + online news + blogs and forums) in just over 47 hours were almost 65 thousand thousand, by over 8 thousand unique authors, whose contents involved more than 441 thousand people, mainly young and male.

Volumes that obtain an 'opportunity to be seen' of 97.8 billion impressions.

Even if we reasonably estimate the actual reach compared to the potential for impressions at 5%, the actual exposures to content related to the South African variant were approximately 4.9 billion, gross of duplications.

A flood of terabytes obviously generated by the amplification provided by the media at the news of the spread of the virus.

In fact, the content that generates the most involvement is an article in the Corriere della Sera, dated 27 November last, which also announces the first case in Italy.

Even one of the articles by ANSA on the subject, also dated 27/11, generated a high level of involvement and a transversal diffusion to all online channels from social media to online news that have taken it up through blogs and forums, as shown by the " virality map ”in the infographic summarizing the results of our analysis.

As can be seen from the word cloud of the terms most associated with online citations on Omicron, people invoke the various ways and terms promptness in the action to contrast this variant and wonder how it is possible that contact tracing with whom it is infected, is not yet implemented effectively. There is also a clear awareness that as long as the poor countries of the world do not have a good vaccination rate, the rich countries, and therefore Italy, will also pay the price.

There is no lack of controversy on the part of some about the fact that the infected Italian was vaccinated, underestimating that in fact he was affected in a mild form thanks to the vaccination.

While Prof Zangrillo is lapidary who writes on Twitter “Thanks to the #Omicron variant, the irresponsible and disgusting media debate between experts on nothingness will ruin this last part of 2021”.

All that remains is to hope that this is not the case.