COVID-19 media surveillance - 30 July 2020

This media surveillance collects articles reported through publicly available web sites.

It is created with the Europe Media Monitor (EMM).

The selection and placement of stories are determined automatically by a computer program.

Headlines

• US surpasses 150,000 deaths far eclipsing projections
• Brazil: President Bolsonaro insists on lifting restrictions even as cases hit more than 2.5 million with about 90,000 deaths
• Spain records 1,153 daily cases, the highest figure since May 1
• Italy extends state of emergency into October
• France's reported new cases hit one-month peak
• Germany: number of new cases is rising in Germany with 902 confirmed cases in one day
• Belgium: similar measures as in Antwerp, including a curfew, are not ruled out in the Brussels Region if the coronavirus figures continue to rise
• Luxembourg: 83 new cases reported in Thursday update
• Russia claims it's on track to approve Covid-19 vaccine by mid-August
• Poland reported its highest daily rise in cases since the start of the pandemic with 615 new infections and a further 15 deaths
• UK: Sanofi and GSK said they had reached an agreement to supply the UK with up to 60 million doses of a potential vaccine
• Israel records over 2,000 new cases
• South Africa braces for more deaths as cases surge
• India: worst single-day jump of 52,123 cases in India
• Australia: state of Victoria reported its worst death toll and case rise prompting fears that a six-week lockdown of Melbourne is not working
• North Korea on alert over first suspected coronavirus case reported on 26 July
• China: more than 18,000 people quarantined in China amid a spike in cases across the country
• Japan: Tokyo’s governor hinted that the capital may declare a state of emergency after a record new 367 cases

Twitter

The following news were found among the most mentioned/retweeted items:

• "Twitter penalizes Donald Trump Jr. for posting hydroxychloroquine misinformation amid coronavirus pandemic" (washingtonpost)
• "Google to keep employees home until summer 2021 amid coronavirus pandemic. search-engine giant pushes back return to normalcy" (wsj)
• "One question still dogs Trump: Why not try harder to solve the coronavirus crisis?" (washingtonpost)
• "Social media giants remove viral video with false coronavirus claims that Trump retweeted" (cnn)
• "Three-Quarters of recovered coronavirus patients have heart damage months later, study finds" (people)
• "Louie Gohmert, who refused to wear a mask, tests positive for coronavirus. The Texas Republican received the diagnosis during a pre-screening procedure at the White House on Wednesday morning." (politico)
• "Brazil's Bolsonaro accused of 'crimes against humanity' over coronavirus" (newsweek)

The most mentioned English sources were the Washington Post, CNN, the New York Times and Politico.

CNN (Spanish Version), El Diario, Infobae, RT (Spanish Version) and El Confiedencial, and Le Monde and Le Parisien were among the most mentioned Spanish and French sources, respectively.

Extracted Quotes

Tedros Adhanom (WHO, Director-General):

"When I declared a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January... there were less than 100 cases outside of China, and no deaths"; "Covid-19 has changed our world. It has brought people, communities and nations together, and driven them apart".

Fact Check

Fact checked: health claims

• Fact checkers debunk a viral video claiming that masks are ineffective in mitigating transmission of COVID-19 (factcheck.org).
• Fact checkers debunk claims that nasal swab testing is dangerous because it might damage the blood-brain barrier (afpnapravoumiru).
• Fact checkers debunk Donald Trump’s claims that students "don’t catch [the coronavirus] easily; they don’t bring it home easily", reporting that while the youngest students seem to face a lower risk to themselves and of passing the virus to others, several studies find that high schoolers catch and spread the virus much like adults (politifact).

Fact checked: anti-vax claims

• Fact checkers debunk claims that Bill Gates admitted that thousands of people will die from the new COVID-19 vaccine, reporting that Gates actually talked about the number of people who could experience complications from the vaccine, which, according to his predictions, would be one in 10,000 (afpfactual).
• Fact checkers debunk claims that the COVID-19 vaccine will change recipients’ DNA and “hook us all up to an artificial intelligence interface” (bbcrealitycheck).

Fact checked: conspiracy theories

• Fact checkers debunk German physician and politician Wolfgang Wodarg’s claims that the pandemic is the result of systemic corruption in the scientific community and the media, that the coronavirus is not new and not more dangerous than the flu, and that the COVID-19 vaccine is dangerous and will cause genetic mutation (stopfake).

• Fact checkers debunk claims that the pandemic was planned by the Rockefeller Foundation (faktograf).

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Contact

Mail to JRC-EMM-SUPPORTec [dot] europa [dot] eu (subject: COVID-19%20media%20surveillance) (JRC-EMM-SUPPORT[at]ec[dot]europa[dot]eu)

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