Social determinant trends of COVID-19: An analysis using knowledge graphs from published evidence and online trends

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a new approach to discover related health and social factors during the COVID-19 pandemic. The approach leverages a knowledge graph of related concepts mined from a corpus of published evidence (PubMed) prior to the pandemic. Population trends from online searches were used to identify social determinants of health (SDoH) concepts that trended high at the outset of the pandemic from a list of SDoH topics from the World Health Organization (WHO). The trending concepts were then mapped to the knowledge graph and a subsequent analysis of the derived insights, spanning two years, was conducted. This paper suggests an approach to derive new related health and social factors that may have either played a role in, or been affected by, the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, our results show how, from a list of SDoH topics, Food Security, Unemployment trended the highest at the start of the pandemic. Further work is needed to continue to ascertain the validity of the derived relations in a population health context and to improve mining insights from published evidence. © 2021 European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) and IOS Press.