COVID-19 fake news on Twitter

COVID-19 fake news on Twitter | Shorenstein Center: In this report, the team specifically examined the tweets of 1.6 million registered American voters to ask: who is sharing COVID-19 fake news and what are they sharing? Results from the survey found that older people and Republicans are more likely to share URLs from fake news web domains. In addition, the survey results showed that the most shared fake news web domain is The Gateway Pundit, which received far more shares than even the second most popular fake news domain. 

It is interesting to contrast this with previous survey findings from the COVID-19 Consortium which showed that younger people, regardless of political orientation, are more likely to believe one of eleven pieces of COVID-19 misinformation when compared to older people.

CDC rewrites definition for coronavirus 'close contact'

CDC rewrites definition for coronavirus 'close contact': Under the old definition, “close contact” was defined as being within 6ft of an infected person over a solid block of 15 minutes or more. That has now been amended to cover a cumulative 15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period.

COVID‐19 Pandemic Imperils Weather Forecast

COVID‐19 Pandemic Imperils Weather Forecast: Weather forecasts play essential parts in economic activity. Assimilation of meteorological observations from aircraft improves forecasts greatly. However, global lockdown during the COVID‐19 pandemic (March to May 2020) has eliminated 50‐75% aircraft observations and imperiled weather forecasting. Here, we verify global forecasts against reanalysis to quantify the impact of the pandemic. We find a large deterioration in forecasts of surface meteorology over regions with busy air flights, such as North America, southeast China, and Australia. Forecasts over remote regions are also substantially worse during March to May 2020 than 2017–2019, and the deterioration increases for longer‐term forecasts. This could handicap early warning of extreme weather and cause additional economic damage on the top of that from the pandemic. The impact over Western Europe is buffered by the high density of conventional observations, suggesting that introduction of new observations in data‐sparse regions would be needed to minimize the impact of global emergencies on weather forecasts.

Palantir to Help U.S. Track Covid-19 Vaccines

Palantir to Help U.S. Track Covid-19 Vaccines: Data-mining company Palantir Technologies is helping the federal government set up a system that will track the manufacture, distribution and administration of Covid-19 vaccines, state and local health officials briefed on the effort said.

Palantir has been developing software that federal health officials would use to manage the various vaccine data and identify any issues that could prevent Americans from getting the shots, according to the health officials and materials reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The system, Tiberius, marks an attempt to use cutting-edge data science to help the federal government manage the work of protecting Americans against Covid-19.

Facebook labels 2+2=4 “misinformation”

Facebook labels 2+2=4 “misinformation”: Social media giant’s “fact-checkers” are selling falsehoods and re-writing history

On the 5th of October, the WHO’s Dr Michale Ryan claimed “about 10%” of the global population had been infected with Sars-Cov-2. With an alleged death toll of roughly 1 million, that puts the infection-fatality ratio at roughly 0.14%.

He said it, we reported it. The maths is not disputable. And yet Facebook has flagged it as “misinformation”

The Strange Advent of Lockdown Denialism

The Strange Advent of Lockdown Denialism: Are lockdowns a thing of the past, invoked only to scare an unsuspecting public away from more limited (yet, curiously, seldom-elaborated) Covid-19 mitigation policies? Several journalists and pundits have been claiming as much recently.