Epi News Briefs - March 2020
Florida Recruits
100 Epidemiologists From Its Universities Over One Weekend
A Tampa Bay newspaper
reports that disease experts working around the clock doing contact
tracing of coronavirus cases needed help. In an unprecedented action,
the state recruited 100 professors and students from five universities
over a single weekend. They are working part time to interview people
by phone about their illness and contact patterns. They will join
Florida’s 264 infectious disease epidemiologists already on the job. ““To
gather the need for this many epidemiologists, I don’t know if there’s
ever been a situation like this,” said Janice Zgibor, a professor and
associate dean for academic affairs at the University of South
Florida’s College of Public Health. “I haven’t heard of it in my
lifetime.”
LINK:
http://bit.ly/2wm8sUw
Harvard Epidemiologist
Called “One Of The First Corona Influencers”
A
fascinating article about how coronavirus information is being
transmitted and exchanged during this pandemic reveals the existence
of what BuzzFeed calls the Coronavirus Influencers. It turns out the
frequently used sources of information are not just the traditional
expert ones you would expect like the CDC and the NIH, and not just
the traditional vehicles such as press releases and journal reports.
Instead, it appears that much information, good and bad, is being
transmitted quickly through Twitter and other platforms. “As online
social platforms have become up-to-the-second hubs of information
about the pandemic, a new class of corona influencers has risen up,”
according to Buzz Feed. One of these is Eric Feigl-Ding, an
epidemiologist and economist at the Harvard School of Public Health.
His twitter account has grown from 2,000 followers at the start of the
pandemic to 120,000 now. He told BuzzFeed that “in a public health
crisis, fast information with possible inaccuracies is better than
waiting. He also said it makes sense that Twitter has become the
central place for following the outbreak. “The information on Twitter
is about half a day or two days faster than newspapers,” he said. One
non- public health expert to obtain massive influence is Tomas
Pueyo whose recent article on Medium has garnered over 37 million
views, been translated into two dozen languages, and been retweeted by
famous people. It was called the defining piece of the outbreak with
its multiple charts and graphs.
To read about corona influencers, visit:
http://bit.ly/3djWtaT and http://bit.ly/2IWWALv
To see how
freewheeling the information on Twitter is, visit the site and search
on “not an epidemiologist but”
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