There's no denying the fact we're living through a worrying moment in history.
Many of us are understandably feeling pretty anxious about the new coronavirus (COVID-19), as the world battles a global health challenge with little idea of what lies ahead.
When words fail us, emoji often do the job just as well. Emojipedia — a website dedicated to keeping you up to date on all the latest emoji news and updates — analysed a set of 12 health-related emoji to see which one was most commonly associated with discussions of coronavirus.
The two most popular emoji used in discussions were 😷 (known as "Face with Medical Mask") and 🦠(known as the Microbe).
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Keith Broni — a behavioural scientist who's just been appointed Deputy Emoji Officer at Emojipedia – told Mashable that he and his colleague Jeremy Burge (Chief Emoji Officer) spotted a pattern among Emojipedia users, and were curious to see if it was also playing out across Twitter. They decided to conduct a data analysis to investigate further.
"Specifically, Jeremy had noted that the Microbe emoji and the Face With Medical Mask emoji were experiencing a significant increase in page views following the widespread coverage of the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus," Broni said. "We found a significant proportion of tweets featuring the Microbe and the Face With Medical Mask were indeed related to the coronavirus – 42 percent and 36 percent respectively."
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Broni noticed that all the other medical emojis only explicitly referenced COVID-19 in five percent or less of the tweets they selected, which indicated that the microbe and medical-mask-face emoji are "by far and away the two emojis being most commonly used in reference to the disease."
SEE ALSO: Inside the red zone: Photos show dramatic impact of Italy's coronavirus lockdownSo what other emoji, outside of the health-related set, are being used in discussions around coronavirus?
"In terms of what people are attempting to express with emojis when discussing COVID-19, there is definitely a significant sense of concern mixed in with the usual irreverence of the internet," said Broni.
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"The latter can be see by the fact that the Crying Laughing Face was the #1 emoji in our 'COVID-19' tweet sample, reflecting people expressing amusement or perhaps awkward laughter in reaction to the spread of the disease (like with all major news stories, there've been quite a few Coronavirus memes doing the rounds)."
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Finally, there is also some evidence to suggest people are using emoji as a means of warning others.
"The relative increase of lesser used 'warning' emojis such as the 🔴Red Circle, 🚨Police Car Light and ⚠️ Warning indicates that people are attempting to alert or warn one another regarding the spread of coronavirus and quite likely circulate the behaviours we all need to adopt to slow down its spread," Broni said.
COVID-19 has now infected over 115,000 people worldwide. 4,200 people have been killed.