Who's making money from Covid-19?
The South African government has spent over 400 million dollars on PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) during the pandemic, according to the newspaper Mail & Guardian which is tracking covid-19 related procurements.
If you want to do this on an EU level, you can read through the list of CPV codes available here and then search for contracts in TED. CPV codes are a standardised system to categorise procurements developed by the European Union.
Unfortunately there is no single CPV code that relates to a pandemic. In fact a quick browse in the database shows that member states' usage of CPV codes are a bit all over the place, at least when it comes to the purchase of protective masks:
Slovenia has categorised it as Clothing, footwear, luggage articles and accessories (18000000)
France as Medical gas masks (33157100)
UK as Personal care products (33700000)
Facebook removes racial ad profiling, Bellingcat flies all over the world and Nate Silver talks about election forecasting
Facebook has been known to allow (and defend) discriminatory ads for years now - but earlier this month the company (quietly) announced that it had removed all target categories relating to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion. Julia Angwin at The Markup explains why in her latest newsletter.
Unless you never use social media you've probably seen a lot of clips and images from Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2020 lately. The Scottish comedian Limmy even made the news when he crashed his plane on Millport, an island west of Glasgow. The game is a massive undertaking as it uses satellite imagery and real-time weather data to simulate a to-scale replica of our planet (including topography!). In an interesting read, Bellingcat even suggests that journalists and researchers may be able to use some aspects of the game in investigations - but probably not.
You may already have seen that FiveThirtyEight's election forecast is now up and running (giving Joe Biden a 69 percent chance of winning at the moment). If you want to delve further into how this forecast comes about we recommend listening to the Model Talk where Nate Silver explains why he is more conservative about Biden's odds of winning than many others and how the uncertainty of the covid epidemic plays into the model: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/politics-podcast-the-2020-presidential-forecast-is-live/
At J++
We've updated our analysis and data on excess mortality in Europe. The short version: most regions back to normal with Czechia, Poland, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia, Portugal and UK as notable exceptions.
What we found: https://medium.com/newsworthy-se/most-european-regions-back-to-normal-death-rates-several-regions-in-sweden-still-above-9abcffabb31a and (pay-wall) https://www.svd.se/overdodligheten-minskar-langsammare-i-sverige-an-andra-lander
Updated data on excess deaths across regions in Europe: https://gitlab.com/newsworthy/jpp.2005.excess.deaths.data
Inspiration: Nordic Covid-19 dashboards
There are many different ways to keep readers up-to-date with the ongoing pandemic. Below are examples of how three major outlets in the Nordic countries have chosen to do it.
Helsingin Sanomat in Finland: https://www.hs.fi/kotimaa/art-2000006564428.html
VG in Norway: https://www.vg.no/spesial/2020/corona/
SVT in Sweden: https://www.svt.se/datajournalistik/har-sprider-sig-coronaviruset/