  The pandemic required efficient allocation of public resources and
transforming existing ways of societal functions. To manage any crisis,
governments and public health researchers exploit the information available to
them in order to make informed decisions, also defined as situational
awareness. Gathering situational awareness using social media has been
functional to manage epidemics. Previous research focused on using discussions
during periods of epidemic crises on social media platforms like Twitter,
Reddit, or Facebook and developing NLP techniques to filter out relevant
discussions from a huge corpus of messages and posts. Social media usage varies
with internet penetration and other socioeconomic factors, which might induce
disparity in analyzing discussions across different geographies. However, print
media is a ubiquitous information source, irrespective of geography. Further,
topics discussed in news articles are already newsworthy, while on social media
newsworthiness is a product of techno-social processes. Developing this
fundamental difference, we study Twitter data during the second wave in India
focused on six high-population cities with varied macroeconomic factors.
Through a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods, we further analyze
two Indian newspapers during the same period and compare topics from both
Twitter and the newspapers to evaluate situational awareness around the second
phase of COVID on each of these platforms. We conclude that factors like
internet penetration and GDP in a specific city influence the discourse
surrounding situational updates on social media. Thus, augmenting information
from newspapers with information extracted from social media would provide a
more comprehensive perspective in resource deficit cities.
