As the Omicron variant takes hold in the UK and Covid-19 threatens to ‘cancel Christmas’ for the second year running, it can feel like a difficult task to sift through all of the information (and misinformation) online.
Here are five data journalists making sense of it all.
1 John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch)
Burn-Murdoch is an award-winning data journalist at the Financial Times. In the last year and a half, his focus has turned almost exclusively to Covid-19. These days, his Twitter account is the go-to for definitive, thoughtful threads on the progress of the pandemic in the UK.
I think we may need to recalibrate our idea of typical case numbers as Omicron takes off.
Here’s what UK cases could look like *in the next week or two alone* if Omicron continues to double every 3 days (some actually estimate faster growth)
Story: https://t.co/mdY7GFiNsD pic.twitter.com/GbXpEFkR6n
— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) December 10, 2021
Burn-Murdoch was interviewed for Interhacktives back in 2015.
Tufekci is an academic and writer for the New York Times (amongst other places). She was an early and influential advocate for public mask-wearing in the US, and writes a regular substack newsletter, Insight, that takes a forensic, data-driven look at key issues relating to the pandemic.
3 James Fransham (@JamesFransham)
Fransham is a UK-based data journalist at The Economist, and has written about the pandemic extensively, as well as contributing to their global Covid-19 tracker. His team at The Economist have also produced a global normalcy tracker, which charts the world’s tentative moves towards (and away from) pre-pandemic life.
<Number crunching>
Boris Johnson has said every adult in England will be offered a booster jab before the end of the year if they got their 2nd shot over 3 months ago. If everyone came forward, how many people are eligible for vaccines in England? 29,984,016. Yes ~30m! (1/5)— James Fransham (@JamesFransham) December 12, 2021
Malan, the Editor-in-Chief of the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism, is a great source for data on the progression of the Omicron variant in South Africa, where it was first identified. Her reporting may provide some insights into where the UK Omicron wave is headed.
25. Summary:
1. Vaccination continues to provide significant protection @ falling seriously ill with #COVID (although reduced to 70%)
2. High nrs of breakthrough infections in vaccinated people (protection @ infections reduced from 80% to 33%)
3. Reinfection risk = increased pic.twitter.com/AgFfZzayKh— Mia Malan (@miamalan) December 14, 2021
Dattani is an academic and writer who works part-time at Our World in Data, a research team based at the University of Oxford that aims to use data to address global issues from poverty to the pandemic. Follow her on Twitter if you’re looking for more technical insights into the pandemic.
Have any other accounts to recommend for Omicron knowledge? Comment below!