  In this paper, we collect and study Twitter communications to understand the
socio-economic impact of COVID-19 in the United States during the early days of
the pandemic. Our analysis reveals that COVID-19 gripped the nation during this
time as is evidenced by the significant number of trending hashtags. With
infections soaring rapidly, users took to Twitter asking people to self isolate
and quarantine themselves. Users also demanded closure of schools, bars, and
restaurants as well as lockdown of cities and states. The communications reveal
the ensuing panic buying and the unavailability of some essential goods, in
particular toilet paper. We also observe users express their frustration in
their communications as the virus spread continued. We methodically collect a
total of 530,206 tweets by identifying and tracking trending COVID-related
hashtags. We then group the hashtags into six main categories, namely 1)
General COVID, 2) Quarantine, 3) Panic Buying, 4) School Closures, 5)
Lockdowns, and 6) Frustration and Hope, and study the temporal evolution of
tweets in these hashtags. We conduct a linguistic analysis of words common to
all the hashtag groups and specific to each hashtag group. Our preliminary
study presents a succinct and aggregated picture of people's response to the
pandemic and lays the groundwork for future fine-grained linguistic and
behavioral analysis.
