  Objectives: To assess self-reported population oral health conditions amid
COVID-19 pandemic using user reports on Twitter. Method and Material: We
collected oral health-related tweets during the COVID-19 pandemic from 9,104
Twitter users across 26 states (with sufficient samples) in the United States
between November 12, 2020 and June 14, 2021. We inferred user demographics by
leveraging the visual information from the user profile images. Other
characteristics including income, population density, poverty rate, health
insurance coverage rate, community water fluoridation rate, and relative change
in the number of daily confirmed COVID-19 cases were acquired or inferred based
on retrieved information from user profiles. We performed logistic regression
to examine whether discussions vary across user characteristics. Results:
Overall, 26.70% of the Twitter users discuss wisdom tooth pain/jaw hurt, 23.86%
tweet about dental service/cavity, 18.97% discuss chipped tooth/tooth break,
16.23% talk about dental pain, and the rest are about tooth decay/gum bleeding.
Women and younger adults (19-29) are more likely to talk about oral health
problems. Health insurance coverage rate is the most significant predictor in
logistic regression for topic prediction. Conclusion: Tweets inform social
disparities in oral health during the pandemic. For instance, people from
counties at a higher risk of COVID-19 talk more about tooth decay/gum bleeding
and chipped tooth/tooth break. Older adults, who are vulnerable to COVID-19,
are more likely to discuss dental pain. Topics of interest vary across user
characteristics. Through the lens of social media, our findings may provide
insights for oral health practitioners and policy makers.
