Topic modeling analysis of COVID-19 news articles issues among people with disabilities

Objectives: People with disabilities are reported to be greatly affected by physical and mental health threats and social isolation due to COVID-19. By examining the major difficulties of people with disabilities during the COVID-19 period, we attempted an exploratory approach to confirm understanding of environmental changes such as COVID-19 and social empathy for health management of vulnerable groups. Methods: We collected keywords and documents related to COVID-19 for the disabled that appeared in major domestic search engines such as Naver, Daum, and Google. Data was collected from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2022, and was collected mainly based on the keywords 'disabled + COVID-19'. Data was collected using the Textom program. Topic modeling was used to conduct latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) analysis. Results: First, a total of 25,414 major keywords related to COVID-19 for the disabled appeared. In the first half of 2022, when the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Korea was the highest, reports related to the disabled did not appear prominently. Second, the core keywords related to COVID-19 for the disabled were facilities (16,526), vaccination (13,834), support (12,905), welfare (12,848), and confirmed cases (10,661). Third, eight topics related to COVID-19 for the disabled were selected by reflecting the perplexity and coherence values. We were able to confirm that the issues in the field of disabilities due to the spread of COVID-19 were as follows: ‘Spread of COVID-19 in facilities for the severely disabled’, ‘Prevention of infectious diseases in facilities for the disabled’, ‘Management of infectious diseases for the disabled’, ‘Donation of masks to the disabled’, ‘Economic difficulties for the disabled’, ‘Demand for measures to address discrimination against the human rights of the disabled’, ‘Cancellation of events for the disabled due to COVID-19’, and ‘Inconvenience in the lives of the hearing impaired due to COVID-19’. Conclusion: During the COVID-19 period, there were positive effects such as government support for the disabled, such as masks and hand sanitizers, and infectious disease management, but there were still negative effects such as the disabled being vulnerable to infectious diseases, economic difficulties of the disabled, and discrimination. This suggests that the disabled need to be given priority in health education response measures and health policies suitable for infectious disease disaster situations such as COVID-19.