Fig 1.
Proportion of mask tweets (N = 7024) of 592,317 COVID-19 tweets between January 24 and July 7, 2020 across pandemic phases.
Fig 2.
Six derived mask tweet COVID-19 risk perception codes.
Each mask tweet could be coded for more than one risk perception category therefore, percentages do not add up to 100%. Mask effectiveness (N = 749/7004; 10.7%); Mask guidelines & policies (N = 1091/7004; 15.6%); COVID-19 severity (N = 1260/7004; 18.0%); Political legitimizing of COVID-19 risk N = 1281/7004; 18.3%); Who is at risk (N = 1850/7004; 26.4%); and Mask behavior of others (N = 2214/7004; 31.6%).
Fig 3.
Frequency of the six COVID-19 risk perception themes for the three major phases of the early pandemic response between January 24 and July 7, 2020.
The three phases are: Evolving COVID-19 risk (1/24/20–04/03/20), School and economic shutdown (04/04/20–05/25/20), and Gradual Economic Reopening (05/26/20–07/07/20).
Fig 4.
COVID-19 risk perception themes and external events in 2020.
Data points are aggregated by 7-day periods (weeks). For each month in the graph, there are 4 data points. Each data point represents the frequency for a certain label during the past 7-day period.
Table 1.
Government, health, and other institutions mentioned (@) in mask tweets.
Table 2.
Locations of mask-wearing observations signaling risk in public settings, 2020.
Table 3.
Mask hashtags.