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The COVID-19 pandemic is having a significant impact on tourism, and emotion projection is one way to understand the extent of destination image resiliency during the crisis. Therefore, this research captured emotions expressed in social media during a peak pandemic month to compare to the prior year period. Toronto and New York were selected due to their tourism importance within their countries but to also compare the effects of different policy approaches used during the pandemic. This study found resiliency of the destination images although there was a significant increase in projections of fear for both cities. Additionally, there was a significant divergence observed for the two cities with a decrease in joy and an increase in sadness projections for New York versus Toronto. This implies that tourism destination marketers have a stable basis of emotions to use in communications, but there are weaknesses to address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]