Study: Sickest Cities In America, Pittsburgh Comes In 9th

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- Feeling a bit under the weather?

According to Bay Alarm Medical, Pittsburgh is one of the sickest cities in the nation.

Researchers looked at 500,000 geotagged tweets to see who which areas were talking about sickness the most and what kind of illness they are talking about. They also collected data from the Centers for Disease Control to "get a big-picture view of specific diseases and infections across the country."

Based on the data, New Orleans came out as the sickest state, and Pittsburgh landed in 9th sickest.

1. New Orleans, LA
2. Miami, FL
3. Atlanta, GA
4. Lubbock, TX
5. Buffalo, NY
6. Boston, MA
7. Baton Rouge, LA
8. Greensboro, NC
9. Pittsburgh, PA
10. Arlington, VA

The report states that Pittsburgh sees about 266 sickness-related tweets per 100,000 residents, and that the city ranks third for chickenpox prevalence.

Across the country, data shows that the simple "I'm sick" tops the list of illness-related tweet terms/phrases. A few others include "fever," "flu," "stomach bug," "sick baby" and "malaria." Researchers excluded phrases such as "I'm sick of."

As may be expected, more sickness-related tweets were found in winter months than summer. 50,000 related tweets were found in December, as compared to just 31,000 in June.

They also found that Tuesday is the sickest day of the week, with about 83,000 tweets.

For more detailed information, take a look at the full results here.

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