COVID-19 media surveillance - 6 August 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: drop in new cases is muddied by reporting and testing snags
• Brazil’s death toll nears 100,000 while number of cases is approaching 3 million
• Spain’s Basque region admits to second wave of Covid-19; town of Aranda de Duero re-entered lockdown
• Italy: R value above 1 in 12 regions with infections still rising
• France: 19 clusters and almost 1700 new cases in 24 hours
• Germany has registered more than 1,000 confirmed cases for the first time in three months
• Belgium: an average of 533 people per day tested positive during the past week
• Luxembourg reported 66 new cases and 1 death
• Russia recorded 5,267 coronavirus cases in 24 hours
• Poland imposes virus restrictions as case growth sets record
• UK: travellers arriving from Andorra, Belgium and the Bahamas will have to quarantine for two weeks effective from Saturday
• Israel’s Health Ministry records 10 more deaths and 1,518 new cases in 24 hours
• South Africa reported 529,877 confirmed cases with 414 new deaths
• India becomes third country to pass two million cases
• Australia: Melbourne is becoming a case study in handling a second wave of infections
• South Korea reports 43 new cases
• North Korea's escalating coronavirus response raises fears of outbreak
• China reported 37 new cases in the mainland for August 5, including seven imported cases
• Japan: Tokyo records 360 new cases on August 6

Twitter

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

• "How the pandemic defeated America" (theatlantic)
• "One death every 80 seconds: The grim new toll of COVID-19 in America" (nbcnews)
• "Jonathan Swan reveals the simple secret to exposing Trump's lies: basic follow-up questions" (cnn)
• "The 9 wildest answers in Trump’s interview with Jonathan Swan" (nymag)
• "Voices from the pandemic. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s a fantasy’ Jeff Gregorich, superintendent, on trying to reopen his schools safely" (washingtonpost)
• "There is no magic solution and perhaps there never will be one, WHO says" (lanacion)
• "Twitter suspends Trump account due to misinformation about coronavirus" (elfinanceiro)

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

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

Extracted Quotes

Tedros Adhanom (WHO, Director-General):

"Sharing vaccines or sharing other tools actually helps the world to recover together. The economic recovery can be faster and the damage from Covid-19 could be less"; "Vaccine nationalism is not good, it will not help us".

Fact Check

Fact checked: health-related claims

• Fact checkers debunk claims that masks do not protect against the coronavirus (afpfactuel).
• Fact checkers debunk claims that citrus fruit peels contain the same basic ingredients as chloroquine and ivermectin, adding that chloroquine has been shown to be ineffective at treating COVID-19 and that while ivermectin has shown some promise in early studies to treat COVID-19, it has not been properly vetted and approved to treat the disease (agencialupa).

Fact checked: anti-vax claims

• Fact checkers debunk claims that the BBC published a travel piece stating that there will be microchips in the Gates-funded COVID-19 vaccine, reporting that the BBC article in question does not mention microchips being used in vaccines (misbar).
• Fact checkers debunk claims that after the COVID-19 vaccine, the world population will go down to 1 billion people (stopfake).
• Fact checkers debunk claims that a vaccine is not needed because there is already a cure for COVID-19, that is, asthma medicine budesonide, reporting that the asthma medicine has not been proven as a COVID-19 cure (factcheck.org).

Fact checked: conspiracy theories

• Fact checkers debunk claims from a paper linking 5G technology to the coronavirus, reporting that the journal that published the paper has now removed it from their website (fullfact).

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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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