(Un)Masked COVID-19 Trends from Social Media

Wearing masks is a useful protection method against COVID-19, which has caused widespread economic and social impact worldwide. Across the globe, governments have put mandates for the use of face masks, which have received both positive and negative reaction. Online social media provides an exciting platform to study the use of masks and analyze underlying mask-wearing patterns. In this article, we analyze 2.04 million social media images for six US cities. An increase in masks worn in images is seen as the COVID-19 cases rose, particularly when their respective states imposed strict regulations. We also found a decrease in the posting of group pictures as stay-at-home laws were put into place. Furthermore, mask compliance in the Black Lives Matter protest was analyzed, eliciting that 40% of the people in group photos wore masks, and 45% of them wore the masks with a fit score of greater than 80%. We introduce two new datasets, VAriety MAsks - Classification (VAMA-C) and VAriety MAsks - Segmentation (VAMA-S), for mask detection and mask fit analysis tasks, respectively. For the analysis, we create two frameworks, face mask detector (for classifying masked and unmasked faces) and mask fit analyzer (a semantic segmentation based model to calculate a mask-fit score). The face mask detector achieved a classification accuracy of 98%, and the semantic segmentation model for the mask fit analyzer achieved an Intersection Over Union (IOU) score of 98%. We conclude that such a framework can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of such public health strategies using social media platforms in times of pandemic.