By Rebecca Redelmeier / CPJ Audience Engagement Associate and Coral N.Negren Almodovar / CPJ Patti Birch Fellow for Data Journalism on July 14, 2020 16:44 EDT
How many other people in the world have become inflamed with coronavirus and how many have died because of it? Finding reliable data in the virus registry has been such a complicated task that it is almost to answer those basic questions, five experts from around the world told CPJ in May and June.
In some countries, informants claim that governments have intentionally protected public figures, while in others, lack of knowledge forces informants to go through multiple reports to locate trends. In response, hounds resorted to creativity, collaboration and hidden resources to reduce the effect of coronavirus, exposing governments in many cases for distorting some official reports along the way.
Since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China, Darren Long, artistic director of the South China Morning Post, an English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, has treated the Chinese government’s knowledge with skepticism, told the CPJ. He said knowledge of the continent was useful in illustrating general trends in how the virus has spread in the population. But he called the official figures “misleading” in general due to gaps in knowledge, some that his team knew and others that did not.
For example, his team knew that the government did not arrive with asymptomatic instances in the overall instance count until April 1, however, it did not know whether the government counted patients with underlying situations such as deaths through COVID-19 (like some other countries No). This challenge, without knowing what they didn’t know, was exacerbated by the hard-to-determine of Chinese internet censorship, Long said. As the CPJ has documented, the Chinese government has forced news organizations to remove articles and reports that contradict the state’s successful discourse on the fight against the virus.
To produce their deep, knowledge-rich work, Long’s team used social media platforms to be informed of what other people were saying in Wuhan and also cross-referenced municipal knowledge with the knowledge of central government. In addition, the team attempted to compare English translations with original Chinese reports to make sure they were accurate because, according to Long, the Chinese government discovers tactics to ensure that its English-language reports “better reflect” the country.
A Spokesman for the Chinese government responded to the CPJ’s request for comment by email.
By running with knowledge of coronavirus in Brazil, experts say they will have to navigate the government’s obvious attempts to intentionally misinform the public. Rodrigo Menegat, from the Sao Paulo State-based online news page, said the government of President Jair Bolsonaro had tried to “minimize” the severity of the pandemic strategically through the knowledge he published.
In early June, Brazil’s Ministry of Health stopped publishing old knowledge on the total number of deaths and instances of COVID-19 in the country, and only published knowledge of new deaths and instances in the last 24 hours. The country resumed publication of cumulative knowledge after a citizens’ protest and an order to do so through Brazil’s Supreme Court.
But even with the Supreme Court’s decision, Menegat struggled to access the data due to the Brazilian government’s restrictions on public records. In March, the government followed a move that temporarily suspends deadlines for the public government to respond to data requests. The measure was suspended three days later through the Supreme Court, as documented by the CPJ. However, Menegat and his team have not been able to access Brazilian knowledge of the tests, the demographics of others affected by the disease or adjustments in the country’s overall mortality rate from the pandemic.
“There is a lot of knowledge that we need to better assess the gravity of the scenario in Brazil, but we just don’t have it,” Menegat said.
In a message sent to the CPJ through the Brazilian Ministry of Communication and the Ministry of Health, the Brazilian government said that it had done “all the data, adding knowledge and figures” about COVID-19 in the country so that they would be available to the public, and that the government is running to expand access to this data through new platforms. He did not answer questions about erroneous data in COVID-19 knowledge or public record restrictions.
Denise Hassanzade Ajiri, an Iranian journalist living in the United States who reports coronavirus in Iran, also discovered that knowledge of the coronavirus leaving the country was unreliable and unavailable. “Usually, locating knowledge in Iran is a little complicated, but not impossible,” he said. “But when it comes to coronavirus-related stories, it’s all messy. The government does not provide knowledge.”
When Ajiri accedes to the virus’s knowledge of the country’s internal resources, she does not accept as true with it, saying that the government “deliberately disseminates erroneous information.” The CPJ has documented that Iran’s news writers have been ordered to announce only official knowledge of the virus, even after reports of mass graves have emerged, suggesting that the death toll was actually much higher than the official count.
An Iranian government spokesman responded to the CPJ’s email requesting comment.
Allison McCann, a reporter and graphic editor for the New York Times abroad and contributor to the Times’ COVID-19 open knowledge base, a public repository of knowledge about the coronavirus that The Times uses in her reports, said she and her team discovered that some countries seem to “obscure” COVID-19’s knowledge of it by choosing not to verify the virus or publish incomplete knowledge. The matrix showing Turkey and Russia as two examples.
But it’s not just in infrequently known countries for their lack of access to data, where hounds have to look for resources and verify official figures, McCann said. In the United States, collecting and verifying knowledge about viruses is difficult because at the local level, there are several government agencies reporting on other knowledge sets; for example, municipalities and counties infrequently have their own reporting formulas. “Most countries in the world have a central formula for fitness care or a centralized fitness agency, so it’s much less difficult to track cases and deaths,” he said.
In Spain, the government infrequently publishes knowledge about the number of other people who tested positive for viral tests, while on other occasions it also includes the number that tested positive for antibodies, Mariano Zafra, editor-in-chief of storytelling and graphics, told the Spanish newspaper El País. Other reports involve other numbers, such as the number of asymptomatic cases. Constant adjustments “prevent research and smart projections,” he said. To further complicate the issues, national and local knowledge sets are not loaded, as the national government reports far fewer deaths from the virus than the total number reported through local government, Zafra said.
A spokesperson for Spain’s Ministry of Health, Consumer Affairs and Social Welfare responded to CPJ’s request for comments by email.
However, amid the challenges, hounds have been artistic in telling readers. Journalists from other specialties percentage their experience in El País. Zafra recently published an article with scientific journalist Javier Salas on how the virus spreads indoors through the illustration of a clinical article. And in The Times, McCann and his team found that documenting the fact that there are now more deaths than general ones, a measure known as “excess mortality,” can help illustrate the effect of the virus.
Journalists also rely on knowledge experts to supplement their reports. At the beginning of the pandemic, Johns Hopkins University in the United States developed a COVID-19 knowledge base and a tracker as a foreign tool to track the spread of the pandemic at a time close to the genuine one. The knowledge base, which consolidates global knowledge about coronavirus, is widely cited by journalists, adding McCann and Long. But Long said that while the tracker is “excellent,” it remains information that can be “very misleading” given that countries covered the range of the knowledge base in terms of case confirmation, ability to test and transparency.
A spokesman for Johns Hopkins told CPJ that the knowledge base team is constantly verifying knowledge to provide the maximum and accurate data reported through public fitness agencies. However, his efforts to track knowledge “cannot be as smart as public fitness agency data,” the spokesman said. In places where the Times has reporters on the ground, McCann said his team was running to “verify, verify and improve” Johns Hopkins’ knowledge.
Journalists around the world have also built teams that hope they will make COVID-19 knowledge more reliable, available, and accurate for everyone. In Greece, the non-profit journalistic organization iMEdD, which supports a giant network of independent media professionals, has created an open source knowledge base with the coVID-19 knowledge damaged in the Greek regions. And Code for Africa, a network of civic generation and knowledge journalism in Africa, is running to create a knowledge base.
Turning disorderly, incomplete and unreliable knowledge into credible journalism is exhausting work, according to journalists interviewed through CPJ. In some places, hounds continue to fight with their governments to access all knowledge. As frustrating as it may seem, hounds are heavily involved in how a lack of reliable knowledge can be life-threatening. They explained that without understanding that the truth has an effect on the virus, the public cannot make informed decisions during the pandemic, decisions that have the possibility of differentiating between disease and health.
“I don’t see anything in my life as a journalist when we were looking to gather knowledge like this for the world at the same time,” McCann told the Times. “And now what’s at stake is much higher.”
[REACTION NOTE: The ninth paragraph has been corrected to imply how long the Brazilian government’s measure postponed public authorities’ reaction times to existing data requests.]
Rebecca Redelmeier is a public participation partner at CPJ. Previously, she developed reports and reports on how she interacts online with NewsWhip content and worked as a reporter for Daily Maverick in South Africa.
CPJ member Patti Birch, a CPJ member for knowledge journalism, covered the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico for Univision News and a knowledge reporter for the West Island and La Perla del Sur news sites. A journalist specializing in knowledge, he delights in hyperlocal reports, knowledge analysis, coding and data design. He graduated from the Lede 24 program at the University of Puerto Rico and the Columbia School of Journalism.