  World Health Organization (WHO) characterized the novel coronavirus
(COVID-19) as a global pandemic on March 11th, 2020. Before this and in late
January, more specifically on January 27th, while the majority of the infection
cases were still reported in China and a few cruise ships, we began crawling
social media user postings using the Twitter search API. Our goal was to
leverage machine learning and linguistic tools to better understand the impact
of the outbreak in China. Unlike our initial expectation to monitor a local
outbreak, COVID-19 rapidly spread across the globe. In this short article we
report the preliminary results of our study on automatically detecting the
positive reports of COVID-19 from social media user postings using
state-of-the-art machine learning models.
