Data produced by social networks may contain weak signals of possible epidemic outbreaks. In this paper, we focus on Twitter data during the waiting period before the appearance of COVID-19 first cases outside China. Among the huge flow of tweets that reflects a global growing concern in all countries, we propose to analyze such data with an adaptation of the TF-IDF measure. It allows the users to extract the discriminant vocabularies used across time and space. The results are then discussed to show how the specific spatio-temporal anchoring of the extracted terms make it possible to follow the crisis dynamics on different scales of time and space.