Plano is the nation’s second most stressed-out city when it comes to worrying about COVID-19, according to a study by Babylon, Inc.
Babylon, a digital health care company, came to that conclusion by analyzing posts on Twitter. The tweets were gathered from May 14 to May 18 and then analyzed using a program that detects stress in text.
According to Babylon’s analysis, 40.7% of tweets from Plano showed high levels of stress. That earned the city the No. 2 ranking in the nation. Stockton, Calif., came in first with 43.7%. Forty percent of tweets from Naperville, Ill., indicated high levels of stress, earning it the third spot.
No other Texas cities were in the top 10, and the state did not register among the top 10 most stressed states. The top three were Wyoming (40.1%), Delaware (38.8%) and Mississippi (38.7%).
Plano, a city of nearly 300,000, had 684 active cases of COVID-19 and 253 recoveries as of Tuesday afternoon. Ten residents have died from the illness.
“The coronavirus pandemic is undoubtedly causing stress for millions of people across the US, but after analyzing Twitter to tap into local consciousness around the virus, we’ve found that some states and cities are much more stressed than others,” Babylon’s study states.
The study identified tweets containing at least one or more words relating to COVID-19, such as quarantine, corona, virus, COVID, self-isolation, social distancing, pandemic, epidemic, vaccine, mask, PPE (personal protective equipment), ventilator, antibody and antibodies.
Babylon determined the level of stress using a tool called TensiStrength, which was developed by Mike Thelwall, professor of information technology at Wolverhampton University in the United Kingdom. TensiStrength estimates the stress levels in short texts based on the classification of words in the text related to stress, frustration, anxiety, anger and negativity.
More than 2.5 million tweets were collected and 155,177 were included in the final analysis, according to the study.
