H5N1

A turning point in coverage of COVID data

Via the Columbia Journalism Review, a column by Jon Allsop: A turning point in coverage of COVID data. Click through for the full article and many links. Excerpt:

There's important information down the toilet—and no, I’m not talking about sensitive documents from the Trump White House. Early this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its online COVID data tracker to include wastewater analyses from hundreds of communities across the US, information that can serve as an early indicator of increased viral spread, or the circulation of a new variant, given that people shed the virus via their feces without having to take and report a test result. (Wastewater data is also collective, obviating privacy issues inherent to other forms of medical-data reporting.) 

Wastewater experts who spoke with Apoorva Mandavilli, a reporter at the New York Times, were “understanding” of the fact that it took the CDC so long to publicly share data that it was, in some cases, already collecting. Not everyone shared that assessment, though. Robinson Meyer, a journalist at The Atlantic who co-founded the COVID Tracking Project to fill the gap left by official data shortages early in the pandemic, called the delayed publication “a scandal.”  

It’s not just wastewater—as Mandavilli reported over the weekend, it turns out that the CDC “has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected” during the pandemic. The agency has tracked data breaking down hospitalization stats by age, race, and vaccination status for more than a year now but has mostly not published it; when officials shared data on the effectiveness of vaccine boosters recently, they left out the figures for a huge tranche of younger recipients until the Times inquired.  

CDC representatives told Mandavilli that the agency withholds data for a variety of reasons, from the numbers being “not yet ready for prime time” to the agency’s slow and cumbersome bureaucracy as well as a fear that the public might misinterpret certain trends, particularly where the hospitalization of vaccinated people is concerned.  

Jessica Malaty Rivera, who has also worked with the Tracking Project, slammed the latter rationale, in particular, noting that rather than reduce the risk of misinterpretation, “data vacuums” only heighten it. So, too, did Meyer, who called such attitudes not only “counterproductive” but “profoundly undemocratic.” The “approach has now persisted in the CDC across two presidents,” he noted. “It’s an issue with that agency—and with the overweeningly scholastic culture of public health in the US.” 

The availability of good, timely data has been a persistent challenge for the press throughout the pandemic, as I’ve explored many times in this newsletter. So, too, has knowing how best to relay the data that we do have to our audiences. The recent Omicron wave sharpened the challenge again by posing a different type of threat than prior variants: low for most individuals, especially the vaccinated, but sharp for many immunocompromised and unvaccinated people as well as at the collective level of US healthcare infrastructure, given the variant’s high transmissibility.

Even before Omicron, some health officials and experts had urged news outlets to emphasize hospitalization and death rates more than case counts in their coverage, as mass vaccination frayed the previously close link between those numbers; as Omicron further frayed the link, those calls intensified. If Omicron cast fresh doubt on the usefulness of case counts, it also cast fresh doubt on their accuracy, as testing—which was not adequate to make US case counts fully reliable to begin with—became harder to access and many people neglected to report at-home results. The Associated Press, among other outlets, told staffers to be more cautious around case counts, and not to hype supposed new records by writing whole stories about them.

Is this the messiest phase of the pandemic in America?

Via the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop writes: Is this the messiest phase of the pandemic in America? Excerpt:

Much COVID coverage has continued to underscore the divide between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. The focus on vaccine hesitancy has only grown in urgency. 

“It’s almost like we need two kinds of newscasts, or two versions of the weather report,” Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media correspondent, said on Sunday. “The forecast is pretty sunny for the vaccinated, but it’s quite bleak in some states for the unvaccinated.” As Stelter also noted, however, the pandemic is still a story of risk calculations, and “those nuances don’t always come through in the media coverage.” 

The vaccinated are inevitably affected by such calculations, especially when, as with mask mandates, they are collective. And, in recent weeks, there has increasingly been media chatter about “breakthrough infections” that have occurred in fully vaccinated people, especially when those people have been famous. 

A COVID outbreak among vaccinated New York Yankees players generated a welter of news stories, as did a case at the White House. Reporters peppered Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, with questions about the latter, and asked if she would commit to full transparency should there be more such cases in the future. 

As coverage of breakthrough infections has increased, some commentators have argued, with ample justification, that it ought to decrease again. Such infections are neither common nor unexpected, and they almost always involve mild or asymptomatic illness; by hyping isolated cases, the argument goes, the press risks inducing undue worry among the vaccinated and undue skepticism among the unvaccinated. 

A big part of the problem here is that data on breakthroughs is lacking, making it harder for reporters to properly contextualize anecdotal examples. The CDC once tracked all such infections, but in May, it narrowed its focus to breakthroughs that precede hospitalization or death—a move that the agency said would ​​“help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance,” but which has also, undoubtedly, exacerbated uncertainty as to the scope of the problem, depriving the public of a centralized data source and leaving reporters and experts to instead pick over leaked CDC estimates and local tallies that aren’t standardized. 

As Apoorva Mandavilli, a science reporter at the New York Times, pointed out yesterday on the paper’s Daily podcast, while most breakthrough infections are not individually serious, they can play a role in overall viral spread. Which brings the story right back ’round to the unvaccinated.

Breakthrough infections aren’t our only data blind spot at the moment. Recently, a number of states, including Nebraska and Florida, stopped reporting daily tallies of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, and moved to weekly reporting instead. (As the AP’s Josh Funk writes, Nebraska briefly stopped all of its data reporting after the governor declared an end to the state’s health emergency, only to backtrack.)

“Doing this weekly report just leaves you completely in the dark about what’s going on,” Cindy Prins, an epidemiologist at the University of Florida, told the Tampa Bay Times. “And then on Friday, all of a sudden, like, boom, you get this surprise number.”

Nationally, daily COVID testing rates—which were arguably never high enough to provide a truly accurate picture of the state of the pandemic in the US—have declined substantially from their peak. Data collection and reporting can be labor-intensive, and it’s legitimate, of course, to debate where stretched health bureaucracies should direct their resources for maximum benefit in this new phase of the pandemic—but as I’ve written before, from a journalist’s point of view, the more data we have, the more reliable the picture of the world that we can build.

Meanwhile, there’s still a lot we don’t fully understand about the science of the virus, with new variants, in particular, proving confounding. “It’s a bit maddening, because it felt like we got to a point where we got to know this virus a little bit,” Mandavilli said yesterday on The Daily. “Delta has really changed that entire calculation. There are just so many more questions than I think we expected to have at this point. And it feels a little bit like an inflection point—another one—where the country could go in either direction.”

I agree. In fact, I’d make the case that this stage of the pandemic is the most complicated and uncertain that America has yet faced—not the worst, by any means, but perhaps the hardest for people, and the media, to get their heads around. The problems that bedeviled our early coverage of the pandemic—a lack of scientific certainty and consensus; inadequate data flows—are still problems, in ways new and infuriatingly unchanged. And the mitigation measures we had to cover back then—while never the beneficiaries of political consensus—were relatively blunt compared to the more subjective and situational risk calculations of this moment, which still very much apply, even as cases rise again. The vaccines are magnificent, but we still don’t know everything about them.

The situation differs substantially by place, and it can be hard to easily compare them. And it’s arguably more urgent than ever that Americans look out on the world, large swathes of which are desperately struggling right now.

The AstraZeneca vaccine and our ongoing uncertainty problem

Via Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop writes: The AstraZeneca vaccine and our ongoing uncertainty problem. Excerpt:

On Sunday, Shabir Madhi, a vaccines expert in Johannesburg, went on South African TV and shared news from a study he had been working on: the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and researchers at Oxford University, he said, appears not to be very effective at preventing mild to moderate cases of the coronavirus variant that has become dominant in his country. 

The finding, which led the South African government to temporarily stop rolling out the AstraZeneca vaccine, echoed in grim headlines around the world. “A blow for vaccine touted as world’s best hope for defeating COVID-19,” CNN said. The New York Times led with “South Africa says AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine is not effective at stopping variant”; a push notification sent out by the Washington Post said that the study had found “‘minimal’ efficacy” against the variant; a headline in the New York Post, among other outlets, pinned the efficacy rate at “about 10%.” 

Under the shockingly ambiguous headline “Why you can’t get the AstraZeneca vaccine,” Politico referred to the South Africa news as a “scandal.” In the United Kingdom, which has been rapidly deploying the vaccine, Novara Media, a left-wing news site, welcomed viewers to a YouTube stream with the rubric: “The Oxford AstraZenaca Vaccine Nightmare.” (It later removed the misspelled proper noun and changed “nightmare” to “major setback.”) 

These headlines and many others like them elided some crucial caveats. The study in question had a small sample size, young average participant age, and wide confidence intervals—so much so that, as Stat’s Helen Branswell noted, “it’s hard to know what was found”—and there are questions, too, as to the relation between vaccine efficacy and the time between doses. 

Many experts—including Madhi—stressed that the study did not assess the AstraZeneca vaccine’s efficacy against hospitalization and severe disease, which are more important metrics than mild to moderate disease incidence, and expressed optimism that the vaccine will still offer protection against severe illness; in any case, the South Africa variant, while present in other countries (including the US), isn’t yet dominant elsewhere, and the vaccine’s makers are already at work on an updated formula, which isn’t expected to be too hard to develop. 

Richard Hatchett, who helps lead the global COVAX program focused on vaccination in poorer countries, told Reuters that “it is vastly too early to be dismissing this vaccine.” In the US—where the AstraZeneca vaccine is on order pending official authorization—Dr. Anthony Fauci said, during a briefing, that he hopes the virus will be brought “under much better control” generally before the South Africa variant, specifically, can pose a widespread threat. 

“The stories and the headlines around variant viruses and vaccines are a bit scary,” Jonathan Van-Tam, a top health official in the UK, said, also at a briefing yesterday. “I wish they weren’t.”

This is far from the first time that the AstraZeneca vaccine—and media reporting about it—has caused confusion. As I reported recently, the German newspaper Handelsblatt stoked something approaching a diplomatic incident after it reported that the vaccine was only 8-percent effective in older recipients—a figure quoted by anonymous political sources (who may have committed a basic misreading of the vaccine’s trial data) that has not subsequently been supported by any public data (though some European regulators did point to a general lack of data to justify cautious recommendations around use of the AstraZeneca vaccine in older people). 

Last week, a study published by researchers at Oxford fueled a more positive story, spread widely by news outlets worldwide, that the vaccine significantly reduces viral transmission—but, as Branswell and Matthew Herper wrote for Stat, “the paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, does not prove or even claim that”; its authors argued that fewer people carrying the virus necessarily means a drop in transmission, but outside experts called that “a big and unjustified leap.” There has also repeatedly been confusion about the vaccine’s dosage regimen, with its efficacy, counterintuitively, seeming to decrease after a second shot.

As Covid-19 death toll soars ever higher, Sweden wonders who to blame

Via The Guardian: As Covid death toll soars ever higher, Sweden wonders who to blame. Excerpt:

“Thanks for reminding me,” Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell replied deadpan when the Observer asked in late March how he handled the knowledge that he would be to blame if Sweden’s decision to forego a lockdown were to go badly wrong.  

“But seriously,” he continued, “I might look like a figurehead but agencies in Sweden are very much working as a whole. This isn’t something I decide alone in my office every morning.” 

The message was clear. He didn’t think he would be held responsible if the light-touch Covid-19 regime associated with his name failed.  

On Friday, as Sweden recorded 9,654 new cases and 100 deaths, the country’s prime minister, Stefan Löfven, suggested he might be right.  

“This number of casualties – of course we wanted to avoid that. It’s nothing that you want to see,” he said, announcing the end to Sweden’s long hold-out against recommending face masks. “But … the responsibility here is not so easy, to point at exactly one person [and say] ‘you are responsible’.” 

When Tegnell briefed Boris Johnson at the end of September, it still seemed possible that the high spread of infection in Sweden in the spring might grant enough immunity to make a second wave easier to control.  

Now those hopes have been dashed, with the level of new daily cases, hospitalisations and deaths once again far above that seen in the country’s Nordic neighbours, Dr Tegnell and his former boss Johan Giesecke are no longer granted near daily interviews from herd immunity advocates in the British and US media. 

But the shift in opinion within Sweden is even more marked. This is partly due to the failure of Tegnell’s Public Health Agency to anticipate the severity of the second wave, partly due to damning reports from the country’s health watchdog and coronavirus commission, and partly due to a more critical media.  

Even the country’s king, Carl XVI Gustaf, described the country’s handling of the pandemic as “a failure” in the royals’ Christmas review of the year. 

“Opinion in Sweden has really changed: there’s a broad criticism of the strategy and [a sense] that we have really failed,” said Jenny Madestam, an associate professor in politics at Stockholm’s Södertorn University. 

In March and April, the media tended to defend rather than criticise the authorities, with dissident researchers who raised the alarm at the start of April branded “corona scandal-mongers” and “a shame for Sweden”, in the debate pages.  

Eva Burman, chief editor for the regional Eskilstuna-Kuriren newspaper, remembers how its shocking revelations in May about how elderly people in care homes were being denied hospital treatment were ignored.  

“That story never got published in the other papers: I think that maybe it was such a big story that they couldn’t take it in. They thought it might not be true,” she said. “I don’t know why the Swedish media have been so slow in asking critical questions.”  

But, according to Marina Ghersetti, an associate professor of journalism at Gothenburg University, this is typical of how the Swedish media operates in a crisis. 

“This is a pattern we’ve seen before. In the beginning, when everything is uncertain and chaotic, the focus is … on transmitting the information that public authorities give to media, without really questioning that information very much,” she said. 

“A possible explanation for this is that even those in the media share the big confidence we have in public authorities.”

How China censored Covid-19

Via The New York Times: How China Censored Covid-19. Excerpt:

In the early hours of Feb. 7, China’s powerful internet censors experienced an unfamiliar and deeply unsettling sensation. They felt they were losing control.  

The news was spreading quickly that Li Wenliang, a doctor who had warned about a strange new viral outbreak only to be threatened by the police and accused of peddling rumors, had died of Covid-19. Grief and fury coursed through social media. To people at home and abroad, Dr. Li’s death showed the terrible cost of the Chinese government’s instinct to suppress inconvenient information. 

Yet China’s censors decided to double down. Warning of the “unprecedented challenge” Dr. Li’s passing had posed and the “butterfly effect” it may have set off, officials got to work suppressing the inconvenient news and reclaiming the narrative, according to confidential directives sent to local propaganda workers and news outlets.  

They ordered news websites not to issue push notifications alerting readers to his death. They told social platforms to gradually remove his name from trending topics pages. And they activated legions of fake online commenters to flood social sites with distracting chatter, stressing the need for discretion: “As commenters fight to guide public opinion, they must conceal their identity, avoid crude patriotism and sarcastic praise, and be sleek and silent in achieving results.”   

The orders were among thousands of secret government directives and other documents that were reviewed by The New York Times and ProPublica. They lay bare in extraordinary detail the systems that helped the Chinese authorities shape online opinion during the pandemic.  

At a time when digital media is deepening social divides in Western democracies, China is manipulating online discourse to enforce the Communist Party’s consensus. To stage-manage what appeared on the Chinese internet early this year, the authorities issued strict commands on the content and tone of news coverage, directed paid trolls to inundate social media with party-line blather and deployed security forces to muzzle unsanctioned voices.  

Though China makes no secret of its belief in rigid internet controls, the documents convey just how much behind-the-scenes effort is involved in maintaining a tight grip. It takes an enormous bureaucracy, armies of people, specialized technology made by private contractors, the constant monitoring of digital news outlets and social media platforms — and, presumably, lots of money.

Should we ‘publish less’ on the pandemic?

This may help to explain this may help to explain this blog's falling traffic numbers. Via the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop writes: Should we ‘publish less’ on the pandemic? Excerpt:

Yesterday, Neal Rothschild and Sara Fisher of Axios, shared some troubling data from NewsWhip, a social-media analytics firm. “New coronavirus cases in the US have never been higher,” they wrote in summary, but “online interest in the pandemic has never been lower.” 

In the last two weeks, news stories about covid-19 saw their lowest level of engagement on social media (likes, shares, and so forth) since early March, when interest in the pandemic was on an upward trajectory. 

That’s not because there’s less covid journalism to engage with: the number of stories appearing now is comparable to the summer months, Rothschild and Fischer report, and cable-news mentions of the pandemic have persisted at a high level. (Surprise! Trump’s claim that mainstream outlets would stop covering “covid, covid, covid… covid, covid, covid” once the election was over was wrong.) Rather, they conclude, “lower interest—not less media coverage—is responsible for the lower engagement.” 

Engagement, of course, is not the only way of measuring news consumption and interest, both of which elude easy quantification. Still, as the pandemic has progressed, other data points have driven at a similar conclusion. In March, news sites benefited from a pronounced covid traffic bump, but it quickly dissipated. As spring turned to summer turned to fall, other big stories—the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests; the election—frequently overtook the pandemic in terms of interest and media attention. 

According to surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center, the percentage of respondents who said they were following covid news “very closely” declined from nearly sixty percent in March to thirty-five percent in September, with the latter figure further declining to twenty-six percent among people who support or lean toward supporting the Republican Party—a partisan attention gap that has widened considerably over time. 

Overall, more people—and many more Republicans than Democrats—think the pandemic has been overhyped than think it has been minimized or treated with an appropriate level of attention.The US isn’t alone here: research published over the summer by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found a sharp rise in “news avoidance” in the UK, with most avoiders saying that covid news put them in a bad mood.  

More immediately, the NewsWhip data chimes with a broader sentiment that has been much covered recently: covid fatigue. Clearly, our collective engagement—in the broader, non-social-media-specific sense of the term—with the pandemic story has not risen and fallen with the severity of the scientific facts on the ground; rather, it has responded to a complex mix of social, political, and, simply put, very human factors. 

As Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton wrote in April, addressing the decline of the initial covid traffic bump, “Sustained attention is hard to maintain over time, no matter how objectively important a topic might be. The lives of nearly every American (and, of course, billions elsewhere) are now starkly different than they were a couple months ago—but their interest in news has rapidly regressed toward the mean.” 

While coverage has continued at a high level—and some of it has been excellent—much of it has become routine, settling into familiar, circular grooves. Of course, living and working in the permanent state of high-pitched, anguished fury and grief that the facts here demand is hardly sustainable. The covid story is many things at once: persistently tragic, but also deeply uncertain and, sometimes, boring, all of which complicates the production of journalism. We shouldn’t be in the business of sugar-coating and false hope, nor of contriving excitement.

Why the COVID-19 and election stories will be hard to untangle

Via the Columbia Journalism Review: Why the coronavirus and election stories will be hard to untangle. Excerpt:

Last week, the pandemic continued not to respect editors’ and politicians’ priorities. The day after Election Day, the US recorded more than 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19—the first time any country had surpassed that daily rate. The same day, Mark Meadows, President Trump’s chief of staff, tested positive for the disease; he tried to keep his diagnosis under wraps, but the public found out about it on Friday via Bloomberg, which has become a preeminent source on the White House petri-dish beat. 

The day before Meadows’s positive test, he visited Trump’s campaign HQ and then attended a White House election party; according to Yamiche Alcindor, of PBS, aides feared the election party would be a COVID superspreader, but felt pressured to show up. The Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who also attended the party, has now tested positive for COVID; so, too, has David Bossie, who is spearheading Trump’s post-election legal fight. 

Back on the macro level, the US beat its own daily record for confirmed cases on Thursday, then again on Friday, then again on Saturday. By Sunday, the country had recorded its ten-millionth confirmed case. 

Records aside, this was all grimly repetitive; for months now, the COVID story has been a ceaseless cycle of infection, death, and administration fecklessness. Yesterday, however, felt like a possible inflection point, as two developments gave news consumers possible glimpses of light at the end of the tunnel. 

First, Joe Biden, the president-elect, unveiled a thirteen-member COVID task force that will help guide his pandemic response. Several of its members will be familiar to news junkies—Atul Gawande is a staff writer at the New Yorker, while Vivek Murthy, Michael Osterholm, Ezekiel Emanuel, and Celine Gounder all appear regularly on TV—but not in the “Trump-Fox-feedback-loop” sense to which we’ve all become accustomed. (A Biden-New Yorker feedback loop would be an interesting thought experiment, but still not a good way to run an administration.) 

The Washington Post covered the task force under a headline—“Biden announces coronavirus task force made up of physicians and health experts”—that, as the journalist and CJR contributor Gabriel Snyder noted, was overwhelming in its normality, “like reading ‘Dog Bites Man’ after a long spell cowering in fear about a crazy man who was going around biting everyone’s dogs.” 

Biden also held a press briefing and called on all Americans to wear masks, a presidential invocation of science that CNN’s Sanjay Gupta called “surreal.” Presidential invocations of bleach—which are actually surreal—will soon be a thing of the past.  

Also yesterday, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer made a big announcement: according to an early analysis, a vaccine that the company has been developing with BioNTech, a German drugmaker, was more than ninety-percent effective among trial volunteers, with no serious safety concerns observed. 

Sarah Zhang—a science writer at The Atlantic who warned recently that it can be hard to tell what’s significant and what isn’t amid an unprecedented, dizzying flood of vaccine news—called the Pfizer announcement a “*big deal*”; around the world, medical experts debated the announcement, and reporters, as CNN’s Brian Stelter put it, “zigzagged between optimism and caution.” 

There were grounds for both: the ninety-percent finding was surprising and hopeful, but it’s not yet clear how long immunity from the vaccine lasts, and Pfizer has yet to show its work. (It made its announcement in a press release, not a peer-reviewed journal.) Even if all is well scientifically, we’re left with the thorny questions of production, distribution, and uptake. 

Still, appropriately nuanced coverage is always grounds for optimism; science, after all, is naturally zigzaggy. There’s reason to hope that Biden, as president, will drive fewer—and less anguished—COVID headlines than Trump has done, leaving more space in our collective attention span for the scientific method to play out in public.

Women are excluded from global COVID-19 coverage, experts say

This baffles me, because I rely so heavily on women who are health experts. Via The Washington Post: Women are excluded from global coronavirus coverage, experts say. Excerpt:

On a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program earlier this month, a debate between two physicians over coronavirus-related restrictions turned into a brief clash over the role of gender in mainstream discourse. “

You’re just shouting; you’re not actually speaking,” infectious-disease expert Neil Rau told his female colleague, interrupting.  

“Do not be sexist,” family doctor and medical anthropologist Nili Kaplan-Myrth responded, not missing a beat. “I’m speaking in an assertive voice.”  

“NEVER tell a woman (professional or otherwise) that she cannot speak with authority,” she wrote later on Twitter. “NEVER tell us we aren’t educated enough, experts enough, or good enough. We have every bit as much authority to speak.”  

The exchange underscored a broader concern over the lack of female voices in media coverage of and policy debates on the coronavirus pandemic. 

In coverage of the coronavirus, female scientists and doctors are cited far less frequently than their male counterparts, according to multiple multicountry studies. And when women are vocal, as with other policy debates and key areas of coverage, they often face online harassment and second-guessing of their expertise, several female scientists told The Washington Post. 

The consequences are far-reaching. The marginalization of female experience and expertise colors the information available to policymakers forming coronavirus responses — which means interests and issues important to women may get underprioritized. This dynamic has, according to a recent study commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, perpetuated a “war framing” around the virus, reinforcing the gendered stereotype that men are more reliable in emergencies and as decision-makers.  

Marginalized voices 

Since reports of the novel coronavirus began circulating in January, the world has been inundated with news and perspectives. Male scientists and physicians have played an outsize role in global efforts to make sense of the virus. 

“The pandemic exacerbated the lack of women’s voices,” said Muge Cevik, who works on infectious diseases and medical virology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “It just reinforced the prevailing gender norm in which men continue to be allocated to leadership roles, speaking to media.” 

Last month’s Gates Foundation report, written by audience researcher Luba Kassova, analyzed coronavirus coverage published in mainstream publications online in the United Kingdom, the United States, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and India. The study focused on articles identified by Google’s news search engine as highly ranked between March 1 and April 15. It found that women are “worryingly marginalized.” On average, every female voice in a coronavirus story was “drowned out” by at least three male interviewees, the study concluded. 

“Women were four times less likely to feature as experts and commentators” in stories on the coronavirus, the study found. When cited, “women are more likely to be used as sources sharing subjective views than experts sharing authoritative expertise,” according to the report. Women constituted 19 percent of experts quoted overall and were less likely to feature as protagonists in coronavirus stories.  

The trend has been documented elsewhere. A report published last month by the French Ministry of Culture and the ministry responsible for gender equality found that during the country’s coronavirus lockdown this spring, “newspapers devote[d] a predominant place to male personalities in their content.” More than 83 percent of the people pictured on the front page of major newspapers during this period were men, who also wrote a majority of opinion pieces. 

A recent University of Zurich study calculated that women made up two of the 30 scientists most frequently cited by the Swiss media in coronavirus coverage during the first half of the year. 

The experiences of female scientists and medical experts echo across sectors. Statistically, few women are part of national-level decision-making processes on the coronavirus, although 69 percent of health professionals around the globe are women. For working mothers and women from minority and marginalized communities, many disparities are growing even deeper amid school and economic disruptions.  

“There are lots of women who are working really hard [on coronaviruses-related research] and they don’t make it into the media or policy advisories,” said Emma Hodcroft, one of the two female scientists among the group most widely cited in Switzerland, who studies and tracks viruses at the University of Basel.

Questions without answers in Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis

In the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop writes: Questions without answers in Trump’s COVID diagnosis. Excerpt:

At 7:30 yesterday evening, a pre-taped message from President Trump was played at the Al Smith (virtual) charity dinner. “The end of the pandemic is in sight,” he said, “and next year will be one of the greatest years in the history of our country.” By the time the tape rolled, White House officials knew that Hope Hicks, a senior adviser to the president, had tested positive for COVID-19. It was only after 8pm, when Jennifer Jacobs, a White House reporter for Bloomberg, reported the news, that the administration made it public. 

In the 9pm hour, Trump called into Fox; after some blathering about the debate and Joe Biden, Sean Hannity asked about Hicks’s diagnosis. Trump replied that he and his wife, Melania, had just been tested. “Whether we quarantine or whether we have it, I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll see what happens.” 

What happened was that Trump, a few hours later, tweeted that he and Melania had both tested positive. In a tweet of her own, Melania said that they were both “feeling good.” 

Cable news—typically sleepy in the early-morning hours—kicked into overdrive. We heard reporting on Trump’s announcement and recent movements—he visited New Jersey yesterday afternoon for a fundraiser, even though aides reportedly already knew of Hicks’s positive test, and she’d been in close proximity to the president—but the tone of the coverage was mostly speculative. What is Trump’s risk factor? Did Hicks infect Trump or vice versa? How will he work and campaign from isolation? What are the national-security implications? What happens if Trump needs to step back and Mike Pence has to replace him temporarily as president? What if Pence has to replace Trump on the Republican ticket? What if Joe Biden was exposed at this week’s debate? Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, was at the White House this week—what if she was exposed to the virus, and if so, what would that mean for her already-tight confirmation timetable in the Senate?     

CNN and MSNBC brought on medical experts, who didn’t have much to add beyond common sense and further questions. The internet lit up with Trump-COVID stories; by 5am, the New York Times had already posted seven articles atop its homepage. In one of them, Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker suggested that “the symbolism of an infected American president could rattle allies,” and that Trump’s positive test “could prove devastating to his political fortunes given his months of playing down the enormity of the pandemic.”  

What Trump’s diagnosis means for his election prospects is, of course, already a hot topic of conversation in political media—even though the answer, at this point, depends on a tangle of unknown variables. Some pundits imagined that a personal brush with COVID might awaken Trump—and, by extension, his base—to the severity of the disease. That felt credulous; given what we know of Trump, it seems more likely—especially if his symptoms turn out not to be serious—that he might use his experience to bolster his “See, it’s not so bad!” message, which has the potential to become a misinformation nightmare. 

For now, we simply don’t know how Trump’s diagnosis will play out. Whatever his condition, the press should resist the temptation to paint him as a COVID everyman. Trump’s experience will be his own—and unlike most Americans, he’ll have access to the highest level of medical care. 

Not that journalists should expect clear, honest information about Trump’s condition from the administration. This White House has never been reliable; it was a reporter, not an official, after all, who broke the Hicks news. It shouldn’t be a surprise if, as we learn more about Trump’s condition, the details come from journalists and their unnamed sources, rather than official statements or Kayleigh McEnany, the press secretary, who hasn’t worn a mask at briefings, even after Hicks tested positive.  

For now, let’s wait for that reporting. As I wrote in April, after Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, was hospitalized with COVID, the urge to speculate is understandable when journalists are unable to trust those in power. But anxiously throwing out possible scenarios isn’t helpful. 

There’s plenty to be said about Trump’s diagnosis that we know for sure: that he knowingly played down the threat of the virus for months; that he repeatedly blocked public-health measures; that Trump and those in his orbit have much better access to testing than most Americans; that more than 200,000 Americans have died in part because of government inaction; that the administration has not done enough to help those whose livelihoods the virus has destroyed; that escaping these dire straits is central to an election that Trump has threatened openly and repeatedly to subvert. 

Most people with COVID don’t get a national news cycle dedicated to their plight. Many of those who die from the disease won’t be publicly remembered at all.

The messaging mess among Trump’s top health officials

Via the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop writes: The messaging mess among Trump’s top health officials. Excerpt:

Deathmilestones always feel arbitrary and inadequate; when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, they’re also hard to measure. So it is with the latest grim statistic: the US has—or is about to, depending on your source—hit 200,000 confirmed deaths from COVID-19. Time magazine unveiled a black-bordered cover marking the 200,000 figure nearly two weeks ago; as of this morning, the Johns Hopkins dashboard, a trusted source for many news outlets, still listed 199,865 deaths; in any case, we’ve known for a while that the true, if unconfirmed, total count is likely way higher that official estimates allow. (The New York Times was confident enough to report that the 200,000 marker had been surpassed all the way back on August 12.) We clutch at numbers of apparent shared significance, but they’ve already gone by. And the deaths go on. 

Amid all the tragedy is a lot of farce. That word could reasonably be applied to almost any aspect of America’s official pandemic response, but it feels especially applicable to the bungled, contradictory, often-dishonest coronavirus messaging coming out of President Trump and his allies, via the news media and the federal health bureaucracy itself. 

Nearly two weeks ago, we learned, via Bob Woodward’s new book, that Trump knew the virus would be bad back in February, but downplayed it publicly anyway. Since then, a series of stories—which, individually, excited less enraged media coverage than the Woodward revelation—have shown, collectively, that duplicitous messaging remains a central problem today.

Two days after the Woodward story dropped, Politico’s Dan Diamond was first to report that Trump appointees within the Department of Health and Human Services—including Michael Caputo, a Trump campaign official turned departmental spokesperson, and Paul Alexander, an adviser to Caputo—routinely sought to meddle with weekly scientific reports that are issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and are not typically subject to political review. The meddling, Diamond wrote, had been interpreted by agency officials as an effort “to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals,” with the end goal of boosting Trump’s optimistic coronavirus narrative. 

CDC officials pushed back on the interference, but “increasingly agreed to allow the political officials to review the reports and, in a few cases, compromised on the wording,” Diamond added.  

Two days later, things got weird. Caputo went on his Facebook page, started live-streaming, and unleashed a barrage of unhinged claims. He accused CDC officials of “sedition” and of belonging to an anti-Trump “resistance unit” that meets at coffee shops (them again) to discuss how to undermine the president. (“To allow people to die so that you can replace the president [is a] grievous sin. And these people are all going to hell.”) 

He spoke of a supposed threat from leftist “hit squads” should Trump win the election—“You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going”—and advised those watching to stock up on ammunition. He also said that he was struggling with his mental health, in part because he has been “waking up every morning and talking about dead Americans.” He insisted that he was planning to stay in his job as HHS spokesperson, but three days later, he announced that he would be taking a leave of absence, citing medical grounds and violent threats against his family. At the same time, Alexander, Caputo’s adviser, quit the department. 

That was last Wednesday. The same day, Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC, testified before Congress; among other things, he said that even if a COVID vaccine were forthcoming, most Americans wouldn’t have access to it until next year, and that masks are “more guaranteed” than a vaccine to protect against the disease. 

Soon after, Trump, who thinks a quick vaccine would be good for his election prospects, publicly rebuked Redfield who, Trump said, had likely misunderstood the question he was being asked. Later in the day, a spokesperson for Redfield put out a statement conceding Trump’s point and walking back Redfield’s earlier comment—but the spokesperson then tried to retract that concession. Tweets by Redfield himself sowed further confusion.

The CDC wasn’t done for the week. On Friday, the agency took two seemingly positive steps. It reversed its advice—issued last month, reportedly by political appointees rather than scientists—that people who have been in close contact with a known COVID carrier needn’t bother getting a test unless they have symptoms. And it added language to its website acknowledging that the virus can be transmitted by small airborne droplets. Outside experts praised both developments as good science—but then, yesterday, the CDC did another U-turn, deleting the new language on droplets. Observers were incredulous. (“HOLY HELL,” Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist, tweeted.) Critics of the CDC’s recent performance smelled fresh political meddling—but an agency scientist told Lena H. Sun, of the Washington Post, that on this occasion, CDC staff “shot our own foot.” A CDC spokesperson said that draft language had been posted “in error.”

Then, later yesterday, things got so weird that they made the Caputo video look routine. Lachlan Markay, of the Daily Beast, reported that William B. Crews, a communications staffer at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also blogs for RedState—a right-wing website where, under the pen name “streiff,” he has routinely disparaged his boss, Dr. Anthony Fauci, as an “attention-grubbing and media-whoring” “mask Nazi,” and spread ludicrous misinformation about the pandemic. (“It is safe to say that the entire Wuhan virus scare was nothing more or less than a massive fraud perpetrated upon the American people by ‘experts,’” Crews/streiff wrote in June. “If there were justice, we’d send [a] few dozen of these fascists to the gallows and gibbet their tarred bodies in chains until they fall apart.”) After Markay brought streiff’s true identity to the attention of NIAID officials, Crews abruptly “retired.”