Scientists have created a dashboard showing the spread of the Chinese coronavirus around the world in real time. Data is entered from verified sources to help combat misinformation. At the onset of the epidemic, local authorities appeared to believe that the situation could be easily brought under control, and were keen to prevent rumors from spreading about the disease. Several arrests have been reported on charges of “posting or sending false information online without verification,” and journalists have reported threats and detentions following reports of the virus.
As is often the case, the opposite is true. Due to the lack of intelligible information, people tend to panic and saturate the information vacuum on their own. False data can spread quickly: horror stories about "infected bananas" are already in full swing on the Web. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University used data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization to map the spread of the disease. As a result, they got a dynamic map that can be used to track the distribution of 2019-nCov around the world.
As reports become available, the map is updated to track the total number of confirmed cases, deaths, and patients recovered. Each red dot is a disease focus, the size of which corresponds to the relative size of the outbreak. If you click on it, you can see information for the corresponding region. According to the latest data, more than 100 people have died from pneumonia caused by 2019-nCov (the latest official number is 107), about a thousand patients remain in hospitals, more than 4.5 thousand people have been infected in China, and more than 40 people in others. countries. So far, the disease has not been reported in South America, as well as in Greenland and New Zealand.
Author: Polina Gershberg