  In recent months, COVID-19 has become a global pandemic and had a huge impact
on the world. People under different conditions have very different attitudes
toward the epidemic. Due to the real-time and large-scale nature of social
media, we can continuously obtain a massive amount of public opinion
information related to the epidemic from social media. In particular,
researchers may ask questions such as "how is the public reacting to COVID-19
in China during different stages of the pandemic?", "what factors affect the
public opinion orientation in China?", and so on. To answer such questions, we
analyze the pandemic related public opinion information on Weibo, China's
largest social media platform. Specifically, we have first collected a large
amount of COVID-19-related public opinion microblogs. We then use a sentiment
classifier to recognize and analyze different groups of users' opinions. In the
collected sentiment orientated microblogs, we try to track the public opinion
through different stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, we analyze more
key factors that might have an impact on the public opinion of COVID-19 (e.g.,
users in different provinces or users with different education levels).
Empirical results show that the public opinions vary along with the key factors
of COVID-19. Furthermore, we analyze the public attitudes on different
public-concerning topics, such as staying at home and quarantine.
