RavenPack COVID-19 Update | June 04, 2020
In this issue, COVID-19 and the George Floyd protests, fears of a second wave decline, and how fake news is hitting record lows.
Go To Coronavirus News Monitor
Protests over police brutality following the death of George Floyd have dominated the news this week, pushing the coronavirus pandemic into the background.
COVID-19 has only really been mentioned as a background effect, contributing to the anger and frustration of protesters, as exemplified in the quote below from a story on News18.com picked up by our news monitor:
George Floyd's death has reignited simmering racial tensions in a politically divided country that has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.
16.8% of all the news about coronavirus now co-mentions ‘Protests’, which is the topic that now sits at the top of the leaderboard in the Related Topics table of the monitor, taking over from ‘Social Distancing’.
Co-mentions of ‘Racism’ are currently peaking at 7.09% of all coronavirus news, which is way above the 1.0-2.0% range it was in previously.
‘Anger’ is another subject which surged following the mass protests over Floyd’s death, reaching a peak of 10.90% on June 1.
You can follow more of the stories around the protests in America and the wider world as well as the news analytics on our news monitor by clicking on the button below.
Once quite acute concerns about a second wave of coronavirus cases have defused after comments from several authorities on the disease.
Dr. Alberto Zangrillo, head of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, said the coronavirus has lost potency, in a news story on IPPmedia.com sourced by the RavenPack COVID monitor.
“In reality the virus no longer exists in Italy,” said Zangrillo. “The swabs that were performed over the last 10 days show a viral load that was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out a month or two months ago.”
Some experts were too alarmist about the risk of a second wave, according to the Doctor, and politicians, when devising policy responses, should take into account that the situation had changed from earlier in the year.
Zangrillo is not the only medical expert voice optimism, France’s leading disease expert Didier Raoult publicly disagreed with the WHO ’s second wave warnings.
“Didier Raoult said in a video posted on his YouTube channel that the coronavirus is coming to an end, ruling out the emergence of a second wave of the pandemic that has killed more than 300,000 people around the world,” said euroweeklynews.com via the RavenPack coronavirus news monitor.
This is backed up by aggregate news analysis from the RavenPack COVID monitor, which shows how the percentage of co-mentions of ‘Second Wave’ in the Related Topics table peaked earlier in May but have since fallen back down again.
To access more information or news analytics regarding second wave fears you can access our monitor by clicking on the button below.
Our COVID monitor insights engine has been highlighting news analytics records set on the RavenPack monitor for several weeks now, with the most recent insights below.
According to our News Sentiment Indexes, sentiment made record intraday 3-month highs in Mexico, Turkey, Singapore, Belarus and Bosnia-Herzegovina to name only the largest countries. Sentiment also peaked worldwide.
In Turkey sentiment rose to 6.31 at the time of writing, after the news that a further 984 patients were discharged from hospital bringing the total number of recovered patients to 130,000, which is higher than the number of daily new cases of 786, suggesting a turn in the tide.
The level of fake news talked about in the media also seems to have hit a low in many countries, with record 3-month intraday lows made in the U.S, China, South Africa, Australia and Taiwan.
News website SFGate.com carried an interesting story about the reloaded theme of ‘propaganda’ in which it cited how Chinese politicians were exploiting the U.S. President Donald Trump’s heavy-handed response to George Floyd protests to slam the U.S. for hypocrisy in its support of anti-government protesters in Hong Kong.
The editor-in-chief of China’s Global Times Hu Xijin gleefully tweeted, “I want to ask Speaker Pelosi and Secretary Pompeo: should Beijing support protests in the U.S., like you glorified rioters in Hong Kong?” Reported SFGate.com via the RavenPack COVID monitor.
The Panic Index, which measures levels of mass hysteria in the news, also hit 3-month intraday lows in many countries, including China, India, Austria, Serbia and Thailand.
There is strong evidence levels of panic precede changes in levels of cases, suggesting case counts could also be falling in the aforementioned countries.
In China, for example, the level of news talking about Panic has fallen to an intraday low of 3.87%.
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