Editor's note: Andrew Korybko is a Moscow-based American political analyst. The article reflects the author's views and not necessarily those of CGTN.

The CGTN Think Tank published a report on May 24 titled "Public Opinion Evaluation on National Pandemic Prevention and Control Efforts."

The authors wrote, "This report looks into public opinion on pandemic prevention and control efforts worldwide by selecting 18 countries from six continents on the basis of equal geographical representation, with a view to better understand global perception on pandemic prevention and control. A total of 22,419 comments made on pandemic-themed posts of the official Twitter accounts of 18 national health authorities were scrapped from June 29 to July 15."

The countries whose national health authorities' official Twitter accounts were analyzed during that approximately two-week time frame were Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The report includes many insightful charts showing the percentage of positive, neutral, and negative comments by country, high-frequency word list, frequency of keywords by continent, and word frequency analysis by continents and countries.

The 13-page report identified a few findings that really stand out. The chart about the percentage of positive, neutral, and negative comments showed that "Egyptian and Brazilian health authorities received more than a quintile of positive comments."

By contrast, the researchers found that there were no positive comments (literally 0.0 percent) made under the American health authorities' posts during that same time. Instead, 85.7 percent of those comments were negative while only 14.3 percent were neutral. This suggests that the study's sample of Americans was very unhappy with the general COVID-19-related situation in their country.

The second chart about high-frequency keywords showed that vaccine, vaccination, and coronavirus were the most popular ones used in comments under the 18 countries' health officials' Twitter posts.

The report found that "The word vaccine had 3,732 mentions, ranking the highest in terms of frequency in Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, Egypt and Australia. It was used most frequently by Brazilians with 840 times. The word vaccination had 2,392 mentions, ranking the highest in Canada, Argentina and Germany. Mexico, the United Kingdom and Indonesia contributed most to the mention of the word coronavirus, which totaled 2,347 times."

The third chart showed that "The word frequency list by continents from June 29 to July 15, 2021, showed nine countries from North America, South America and Europe share the top 10 most-discussed words, with hundreds of mentions of vaccines, vaccination, government and health."

Meanwhile, "In Asia, Indians' concern with government (533 times) were significantly higher than other subjects. Indonesians were most concerned about vaccines (579 times). South Africans had a general interest in vaccine, vaccination and coronavirus, all of which were mentioned more than 150 times."

The fourth category of charts is more specific and should be skimmed by interested readers to learn more about the exact data.
Some highlights are that "Canadians had a higher degree of participation in commenting, with 195 and 92 times of mention on quarantine and travel in the hope of reopening the border and rebooting their trade and tourism" while "Americans showed a low participation whilst revealed an interest in vaccination, vaccine and coronavirus." It was also interesting that the French were more focused on government and health, whereas the South Africans discussed death a lot more than others.

The data obtained from the think tank's study confirms its conclusion. The authors wrote that "The United States topped Bloomberg's recent COVID Resilience Ranking. But this report did show the dissatisfaction of the American people on their government's pandemic prevention efforts, and they are mostly concerned with vaccine and vaccination like the rest of the world as opposed to the reopening progress in the ranking."

This evidence-based takeaway deserves to be pondered more at length. It throws into question the credibility of Bloomberg's recent ranking. Readers are left wondering why Bloomberg reached the conclusion that it did.

Americans of all sorts are discussing COVID-19-related topics on social media. Granted, only a fraction of them commented under their health officials' Twitter posts during the study's time frame, but those individuals were presumably among the most passionate.

CGTN Think Tank's study captured their sentiments, which weren't reflected in Bloomberg's ranking but might reflect wider discontent among American society about their country's overall handling of the pandemic. Therefore, further research should be commenced, but it must be of an independent nature to arrive at apolitical conclusions, unlike Bloomberg's arguably politicized ones.

The case can now be made that that outlet's study was incomplete because it ignored public opinion; however imperfectly, it can be captured (which is always a challenge for social scientists). Bloomberg's conclusion that America tops its global COVID-19 resilience ranking doesn't take into consideration how average Americans feel about the pace with which everything is supposedly opening back up.

Quite clearly, as proven by CGTN Think Tank's study, many of them are still unhappy. This means that the U.S. ranking at the top of Bloomberg's list is misleading since an undetermined percentage of Americans may not be embracing the alleged reopening.

Building upon this hypothesis that was inspired by the CGTN Think Tank's study, observers should question why Bloomberg neglected to include public opinion into its study. The answer can't be known for sure, but it might be that it didn't want to embarrass the Biden Administration by highlighting how unhappy an undetermined percentage of Americans still are.

Some might not feel comfortable with the pace at which everything is supposedly reopening while others remain vehemently opposed to the government's vaccination policies that are driving that trend. More research should be conducted in order to find out why Americans remain unhappy.

(If you want to contribute and have specific expertise, please contact us at opinions@cgtn.com.)