BRUSSELS (AP) — Nearly 50,000 Russian men have died in the war in Ukraine, according to the first independent statistical analysis of Russia’s war dead.

Two independent Russian media outlets, Mediazona and Meduza, working with a data scientist from Germany’s Tübingen University, used Russian government data to shed light on one of Moscow’s closest-held secrets — the true human cost of its invasion of Ukraine.

To do so, they relied on a statistical concept popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic called excess mortality. Drawing on inheritance records and official mortality data, they estimated how many more men under age 50 died between February 2022 and May 2023 than normal.

Neither Moscow nor Kyiv gives timely data on military losses, and each is at pains to amplify the other side’s casualties. Russia has publicly acknowledged the deaths of just over 6,000 soldiers. Reports about military losses have been repressed in Russian media, activists and independent journalists say. Documenting the dead has become an act of defiance, and those who do so face harassment and potential criminal charges.

Despite such challenges, Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian Service, working with a network of volunteers, have used social media postings and photographs of cemeteries across Russia to build a database of confirmed war deaths. As of July 7, they had identified 27,423 dead Russian soldiers.

“These are only soldiers who we know by name, and their deaths in each case are verified by multiple sources,” said Dmitry Treshchanin, an editor at Mediazona who helped oversee the investigation. “The estimate we did with Meduza allows us to see the ‘hidden’ deaths, deaths the Russian government is so obsessively and unsuccessfully trying to hide.”

To come up with a more comprehensive tally, journalists from Mediazona and Meduza obtained records of inheritance cases filed with the Russian authorities. Their data from the National Probate Registry contained information about more than 11 million people who died between 2014 and May 2023.

According to their analysis, 25,000 more inheritance cases were opened in 2022 for males aged 15 to 49 than expected. By May 27, 2023, the number of excess cases had shot up to 47,000.

That surge is roughly in line with a May assessment by the White House that more than 20,000 Russians had been killed in Ukraine since December, though lower than U.S. and U.K. intelligence assessments of overall Russian deaths.

In February, the U.K. Ministry of Defense said approximately 40,000 to 60,000 Russians had likely been killed in the war. A leaked assessment from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency put the number of Russians killed in action in the first year of the war at 35,000 to 43,000.

“Their figures might be accurate, or they might not be,” Treshchanin, the Mediazona editor, said in an email. “Even if they have sources in the Russian Ministry of Defense, its own data could be incomplete. It’s extremely difficult to pull together all of the casualties from the army, Rosgvardia, Akhmat battalion, various private military companies, of which Wagner is the largest, but not the only one. Casualties among inmates, first recruited by Wagner and now by the MoD, are also a very hazy subject, with a lot of potential for manipulation. Statistics could actually give better results.”

Many Russian fatalities – as well as amputations – could have been prevented with better front-line first aid, the U.K. Ministry of Defense said in an intelligence assessment published Monday. Russia has suffered an average of around 400 casualties a day for 17 months, creating a “crisis” in combat medical care that is likely undermining medical services for civilians in border regions near Ukraine, the ministry said.

Independently, Dmitry Kobak, a data scientist from Germany’s Tübingen University who has published work on excess COVID-19 deaths in Russia, obtained mortality data broken down by age and sex for 2022 from Rosstat, Russia’s official statistics agency.

He found that 24,000 more men under age 50 died in 2022 than expected, a figure that aligns with the analysis of inheritance data.

The COVID-19 pandemic made it harder to figure out how many men would have died in Russia since February 2022 if there hadn’t been a war. Both analyses corrected for the lingering effects of COVID on mortality by indexing male death rates against female deaths.

Sergei Scherbov, a scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, cautioned that “differences in the number of deaths between males and females can vary significantly due to randomness alone.”

“I am not saying that there couldn’t be an excess number of male deaths, but rather that statistically speaking, this difference in deaths could be a mere outcome of chance,” he said.

Russians who are missing but not officially recognized as dead, as well as citizens of Ukraine fighting in units of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics, are not included in these counts.

Kobak acknowledged that some uncertainties remain, especially for deaths of older men. Moreover, it’s hard to know how many missing Russian soldiers are actually dead. But he said neither factor is likely to have a huge impact.

“That uncertainty is in the thousands,” he said. “The results are plausible overall.”

The Russian Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meduza is an independent Russian media outlet that has been operating in exile for eight years, with headquarters in Riga, Latvia. In April 2021, Russian authorities designated Meduza a “foreign agent,” making it harder to generate advertising income, and in January 2023, the Kremlin banned Meduza as an illegal “undesirable organization.”

Moscow has also labeled independent outlet Mediazona as a “foreign agent” and blocked its website after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

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When I began my recent reporting project on the drug overdose deaths in San Francisco in October, the ongoing crisis was already being thoroughly covered and documented by other reporters. The devastation was difficult to ignore, and more than 1,300 people have fatally overdosed in San Francisco over the last two years. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times more potent than heroin, had saturated the city’s drug supply. But it seemed too easy to blame fentanyl when people in nearby counties were not dying at the same rates. 

“The risk didn’t just magically appear overnight as fentanyl descended on the city,” said Kristen Marshall, a former project manager with the DOPE Project, the largest single-city naloxone distribution program in the country. “It makes the villain of this drug. But the drug didn’t cause it right. The drug didn’t cause the overdose crisis.”

So, what had caused the overdose crisis? A group of mothers had organized to protest what they considered San Francisco’s lenient approach to drug dealing. Some public officials said the city was pushing harm reduction too far while harm reduction advocates worried about the return of a “war on drugs.” Those advocates said the drug overdose epidemic required immediate and long-term solutions to systemic issues like homelessness and racism. I thought data was needed to understand what factors were to blame. 

Within weeks I realized my question was too broad, and I struggled to know what data to ask for. In a group meeting, my reporting advisor said that we need to put in our data requests as soon as possible. The idea was that whatever data I received would turn into a piece. So, I asked for anything that might be helpful, hoping that would lead me somewhere. 

Getting the data 

But even data that seemed like it should be easy to obtain was difficult to get hold of. For example, several people I interviewed mentioned a dramatic decline in heroin overdose deaths from roughly 2000 to 2010. A few sources even sent me a graph made by a city employee describing this drop. But I was told the data did not exist. In other instances, I was told to wait for official city reports to publish or discuss publicly, or the data came with so many caveats that it was unusable. In one instance, I asked for data and the official said they didn’t want to alarm people. 

When other cities responded to my data requests within weeks, I wondered if focusing on San Francisco was the right approach when there’s so much less attention on other places to begin with. 

The San Francisco district attorney’s office and BART police sent me the most comprehensive and compelling data, but I struggled to write a story with only numbers and without individuals impacted. 

The history of harm reduction 

Slowly but surely, I landed on stories on several topics: the history of harm reduction in San Francisco, hotel workers who respond to overdoses regularly, and a new center opened in San Francisco to connect people to drug treatment or housing. 

My data for the history of harm reduction came from digging through reports published by the city since 2017 detailing the rise of overdose deaths. I also reached out to harm reduction groups, including the DOPE Project, who reported 81 overdose reversals in 2006, a figure that rose to 8,985 for 2021. I spoke with a physician who told me, “Nothing is going to reduce death to the extent that getting 10,000 doses of naloxone out there in San Francisco in the early 2000s will ever do.” 

But prescription drug overdose deaths were still high while heroin overdose deaths were declining. The data helped me understand that history and what led to the fentanyl overdose crisis ravaging San Francisco today. 

The Linkage Center 

In the midst of my project, San Francisco Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood. As part of the emergency declaration, the city opened a site called the Linkage Center to connect people to basic services like food and showers as well as drug treatment and housing. The city also published weekly reports on overdoses reversed as well as the number of people placed in housing or treatment. I reviewed each report, created a spreadsheet, and plugged in the numbers on referrals to drug treatment, completed linkages for drug treatment, completed linkages for temporary or transitional housing, and completed linkages for permanent supportive housing. In the end, the spreadsheet was boiled down to these two sentences: 

“Between Jan. 31 and March 27, the center had more than 20,100 visits from people seeking everything from drug treatment and housing placement to job and mental health counseling. Fewer than 15 of those visits resulted in ‘completed linkages’ for drug treatment services, in which placements were confirmed.” 

But to me, the data also showed how complicated measuring success is, because so few people were entering treatment programs through the center. Meanwhile, overdoses were being reversed every day, and the people running the site saw the high number of people showing up each day as a success. 

The Whitcomb Hotel 

I started reporting on overdose deaths at the Whitcomb Hotel after one interview where a former director of housing services at Five Keys described overdoses at the site at the start of the pandemic. After requesting data from the city’s medical examiner’s office, I learned at least 18 people fatally overdosed there from April 2020, when it opened, to April 2022. More people appeared to have died at Hotel Whitcomb than any other single, non-hospital site in San Francisco. 

But this also was not the full story; staff described skepticism that the number was accurate because they were reversing overdoses so regularly. I originally saw this as a story about the family members of people who died at the hotel. But in my reporting, I learned that staff at the hotel were also suffering. Some had overdosed, and many were dealing with addiction. 

City pivots as overdoses remain high

Fewer people died of drug overdoses in 2021 than in 2020, but the number of people overdosing and dying in San Francisco every month is still staggeringly high. The emergency declaration declared in the Tenderloin is over, and a state bill could soon clear the way for the city to open a supervised consumption site if passed and signed into law.

Meanwhile, San Francisco has a new district attorney who has pledged to hold serious drug dealers accountable and a serious staffing shortage in its jails. 

I still think data could help tell the story of what direction San Francisco should go in over the next few years, but that data is hard to get or know how to ask for. 

And there are other cities confronting the fentanyl overdose crisis worth turning to next. 

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Facebook’s corporate parent has reached a tentative settlement in a lawsuit alleging the world’s largest social network service allowed millions of its users’ personal information to be fed to Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump’s victorious presidential campaign in 2016.

Terms of the settlement reached by Meta Platforms, the holding company for Facebook and Instagram, weren’t disclosed in court documents filed late Friday. The filing in San Francisco federal court requested a 60-day stay of the action while lawyers finalize the settlement. That timeline suggested further details could be disclosed by late October.

The accord was reached just a few weeks before a Sept. 20 deadline for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his long-time chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, to submit to depositions during the final phases of pre-trial evidence gathering, according to court documents.

Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004 as a Harvard University student, could have been deposed for up to six hours. Sandberg, who is stepping down as chief operating officer after a 14-year stint, could have been questioned for up to five hours.

The case sprang from 2018 revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a firm with ties to Trump political strategist Stephen Bannon, had paid a Facebook app developer for access to the personal information of about 87 million Facebook users. That data was then used to target U.S. voters during the 2016 campaign that culminated in Trump’s election as the 45th president.

The ensuring uproar led to a contrite Zuckerberg being grilled by lawmakers during a high-profile congressional hearing and spurred calls for people to delete their Facebook accounts. Even though Facebook’s growth has stalled as more people connect and entertain themselves on rival services such as TikTok, the social network still boasts about 2 billion users worldwide, including nearly 200 million in the U.S. and Canada.

The lawsuit, which had been seeking to be certified as a class action representing Facebook users, had asserted the privacy breach proved Facebook is a “data broker and surveillance firm,” as well as a social network.

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HALELUYA HADERO | AP NEWS

From what you buy online to how you remember tasks, to when you monitor your doorstep, Amazon is seemingly everywhere.

And it appears the company doesn’t want to halt its reach anytime soon. In recent weeks, Amazon has said it will spend billions of dollars in two gigantic acquisitions that, if approved, will broaden its ever growing presence in the lives of consumers.

This time, the company is targeting two areas: health care, through its $3.9 billion buyout of the primary care company One Medical, and the “smart home,” where it plans to expand its already mighty presence through a $1.7 billion merger with iRobot, the maker of the popular robotic Roomba vacuum.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a company known for its vast collection of consumer information, both mergers have heightened enduring privacy concerns about how Amazon gathers data and what it does with it. The latest line of Roombas, for example, employ sensors that map and remember a home’s floor plan.

“It’s acquiring this vast set of data that Roomba collects about people’s homes,” said Ron Knox, an Amazon critic who works for the anti-monopoly group Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “Its obvious intent, through all the other products that it sells to consumers, is to be in your home. (And) along with the privacy issues come the antitrust issues, because it’s buying market share.”

Amazon’s reach goes well beyond that. Some estimates show the retail giant controls roughly 38% of the U.S. e-commerce market, allowing it to gather granular data about the shopping preferences of millions of Americans and more worldwide. Meanwhile, its Echo devices, which house the voice assistant Alexa, have dominated the U.S. smart speaker market, accounting for roughly 70% of sales, according to estimates by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Ring, which Amazon purchased in 2018 for $1 billion, monitors doorsteps and helps police track down crime — even when users might not be aware. And at select Amazon stores and Whole Foods, the company is testing a palm-scanning technology that allows customers to pay for items by storing biometric data in the cloud, sparking concerns about risks of a data breach, which Amazon has attempted to assuage.

“We treat your palm signature just like other highly sensitive personal data and keep it safe using best-in-class technical and physical security controls,” the company said on a website that provides information about the technology.

Even consumers who actively avoid Amazon are still likely to have little say about how their employers power their computer networks, which Amazon — along with Google — has long dominated through its cloud-computing service AWS.

“It’s hard to think of another organization that has as many touch points as Amazon does to an individual,” said Ian Greenblatt, who heads up tech research at the consumer research and data analytics firm J.D. Power. “It’s almost overwhelming, and it’s hard to put a finger on it.”

And Amazon — like any company — aims to grow. In the past few years, the company has purchased the Wi-Fi startup Eero and partnered with the construction company Lennar to offer tech-powered houses. With iRobot, it would gain one more building block for the ultimate smart home — and, of course, more data.

Customers can opt out of having iRobot devices store a layout of their homes, according to the vacuum maker. But data privacy advocates worry the merger is another way Amazon could suck up information to integrate into its other devices or use to target consumers with ads.

In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Lisa Levandowski denied that’s what the company wants to do.

“We do not use home maps for targeted advertising and have no plans to do so,” Levandowski said.

Whether that will relieve concerns is another matter, especially in light of research about Amazon’s other devices. Earlier this year, a group of university researchers released a report that found voice data from Amazon’s Echo devices are used to target ads to consumers — something the company had denied in the past.

Umar Iqbal, a postdoc at the University of Washington who led the research, said he and his colleagues found Echo devices running third-party Skills, which are like apps for Alexa, that communicate with advertisers.

Levandowski said consumers can opt out of receiving “interest-based” ads by adjusting their preferences on Amazon’s advertising preferences page. She also said Amazon doesn’t share Alexa requests with advertising networks.

Skills that collect personal information are required to post their privacy policies on a detail page in Amazon’s store, according to the company. Researchers, however, found only 2% of Skills are clear about their data collection practices, and the vast majority don’t mention Alexa or Amazon at all.

For companies like Amazon, data collection is for more than just data’s sake, noted Kristen Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame.

“You can almost see them just trying to paint a broader picture of an individual,” Martin said. “It’s about the inferences that they’re able to draw about you specifically, and then you compared to other people.”

Amazon’s One Medical deal, for instance, has sparked questions about how the company would handle personal health data that would fall into its lap.

Should the deal close, Levandowski said customers’ health information will be handled separately from all other Amazon businesses. She also added Amazon wouldn’t share personal health information outside of One Medical for “advertising or marketing purposes of other Amazon products and services without clear permission from the customer.”

But Lucia Savage, a chief privacy officer at the chronic care provider Omada Health, said that doesn’t mean One Medical wouldn’t be able to get data from other arms of Amazon’s business that could help it better profile its patients. The information just has to flow one way, she said.

To be sure, privacy concerns are not limited to Amazon. In the aftermath of Roe v Wade being overturned, for instance, Google said it would automatically get rid of information about users who visit abortion clinics amid pressure from Democratic lawmakers. Meanwhile, Meta, which owns Facebook, settled a class action lawsuit in February over its use of “cookies” about a decade ago that tracked users after they logged off Facebook.

But unlike Meta and Google, whose focus is mainly on selling ads, Amazon might benefit more from collecting data because its primary goal is to sell products, said Alex Harman, director of competition policy at the anti-monopoly group Economic Security Project.

“For them, data is all about getting you to buy more and be locked into their stuff,” Harman said.

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From what you buy online, to how you remember tasks, to when you monitor your doorstep, Amazon is seemingly everywhere.

And it appears the company doesn’t want to halt its reach anytime soon. In recent weeks, Amazon has said it will spend billions of dollars in two gigantic acquisitions that, if approved, will broaden its ever growing presence in the lives of consumers.

This time, the company is targeting two areas: health care, through its $3.9 billion buyout of the primary care company One Medical, and the “smart home,” where it plans to expand its already mighty presence through a $1.7 billion merger with iRobot, the maker of the popular robotic Roomba vacuum.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a company known for its vast collection of consumer information, both mergers have heightened enduring privacy concerns about how Amazon gathers data and what it does with it. The latest line of Roombas, for example, employ sensors that map and remember a home’s floor plan.

“It’s acquiring this vast set of data that Roomba collects about people’s homes,” said Ron Knox, an Amazon critic who works for the anti-monopoly group Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “Its obvious intent, through all the other products that it sells to consumers, is to be in your home. (And) along with the privacy issues come the antitrust issues, because it’s buying market share.”

Amazon’s reach goes well beyond that. Some estimates show the retail giant controls roughly 38% of the U.S. e-commerce market, allowing it to gather granular data about the shopping preferences of millions of Americans and more worldwide. Meanwhile, its Echo devices, which house the voice assistant Alexa, have dominated the U.S. smart speaker market, accounting for roughly 70% of sales, according to estimates by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Ring, which Amazon purchased in 2018 for $1 billion, monitors doorsteps and helps police track down crime — even when users might not be aware. And at select Amazon stores and Whole Foods, the company is testing a palm-scanning technology that allows customers to pay for items by storing biometric data in the cloud, sparking concerns about risks of a data breach, which Amazon has attempted to assuage.

“We treat your palm signature just like other highly sensitive personal data and keep it safe using best-in-class technical and physical security controls,” the company said on a website that provides information about the technology.

Even consumers who actively avoid Amazon are still likely to have little say about how their employers power their computer networks, which Amazon — along with Google — has long dominated through its cloud-computing service AWS.

“It’s hard to think of another organization that has as many touch points as Amazon does to an individual,” said Ian Greenblatt, who heads up tech research at the consumer research and data analytics firm J.D. Power. “It’s almost overwhelming, and it’s hard to put a finger on it.”

And Amazon — like any company — aims to grow. In the past few years, the company has purchased the Wi-Fi startup Eero and partnered with the construction company Lennar to offer tech-powered houses. With iRobot, it would gain one more building block for the ultimate smart home — and, of course, more data.

Customers can opt out of having iRobot devices store a layout of their homes, according to the vacuum maker. But data privacy advocates worry the merger is another way Amazon could suck up information to integrate into its other devices or use to target consumers with ads.

In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Lisa Levandowski denied that’s what the company wants to do.

“We do not use home maps for targeted advertising and have no plans to do so,” Levandowski said.

Whether that will relieve concerns is another matter, especially in light of research about Amazon’s other devices. Earlier this year, a group of university researchers released a report that found voice data from Amazon’s Echo devices are used to target ads to consumers — something the company had denied in the past.

Umar Iqbal, a postdoc at the University of Washington who led the research, said he and his colleagues found Echo devices running third-party Skills, which are like apps for Alexa, that communicate with advertisers.

Levandowski said consumers can opt out of receiving “interest-based” ads by adjusting their preferences on Amazon’s advertising preferences page. She also said Amazon doesn’t share Alexa requests with advertising networks.

Skills that collect personal information are required to post their privacy policies on a detail page in Amazon’s store, according to the company. Researchers, however, found only 2% of Skills are clear about their data collection practices, and the vast majority don’t mention Alexa or Amazon at all.

For companies like Amazon, data collection is for more than just data’s sake, noted Kristen Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame.

“You can almost see them just trying to paint a broader picture of an individual,” Martin said. “It’s about the inferences that they’re able to draw about you specifically, and then you compared to other people.”

Amazon’s One Medical deal, for instance, has sparked questions about how the company would handle personal health data that would fall into its lap.

Should the deal close, Levandowski said customers’ health information will be handled separately from all other Amazon businesses. She also added Amazon wouldn’t share personal health information outside of One Medical for “advertising or marketing purposes of other Amazon products and services without clear permission from the customer.”

But Lucia Savage, a chief privacy officer at the chronic care provider Omada Health, said that doesn’t mean One Medical wouldn’t be able to get data from other arms of Amazon’s business that could help it better profile its patients. The information just has to flow one way, she said.

To be sure, privacy concerns are not limited to Amazon. In the aftermath of Roe v Wade being overturned, for instance, Google said it would automatically get rid of information about users who visit abortion clinics amid pressure from Democratic lawmakers. Meanwhile, Meta, which owns Facebook, settled a class action lawsuit in February over its use of “cookies” about a decade ago that tracked users after they logged off Facebook.

But unlike Meta and Google, whose focus is mainly on selling ads, Amazon might benefit more from collecting data because its primary goal is to sell products, said Alex Harman, director of competition policy at the anti-monopoly group Economic Security Project.

“For them, data is all about getting you to buy more and be locked into their stuff,” Harman said.

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Sixteen new COVID-19 cases were reported Friday, Dec. 31 in Riverside County, a “severely under-reported” figure stemming from technical problems attributed to technical issues with the state data-collection system. “We are working to correct the issue, and the correct figures will be reported as soon as the issue is resolved,” said Jose Arballo, a spokesman for the Riverside University Health System.

Additional information about the nature of the error was not provided, but some other counties, including Orange, have reported similar issues with data from the state. The total number of COVID-19 cases recorded in the county since the pandemic began in early March reached 180,553, compared with 180,537 on Wednesday, according to the Riverside University Health System. The number of deaths stemming from virus-related complications jumped up by 34 on Thursday, bringing the total to 1,985.

The death figures are trailing indicators because of delays processing death certificates, according to officials. COVID-positive hospitalizations countywide decreased by 20 on Thursday, down to 1,464, according to RUHS. That includes 296 intensive care unit patients, one fewer than the day before.

According to Emergency Management Department Director Bruce Barton, the hospital figures are confirmed daily. On Tuesday, officials from Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Riverside, along with Riverside Community Hospital, urged residents to take precautions to limit exposure risks to reduce the chances of hospital visits, thereby increasing demands on already scarce space and overburdened staff.

Barton said ICU beds are the greatest concern, with the county’s general and acute care facilities technically at maximum occupancy. At RCH, a shuttered cafeteria was converted to a patient care unit, officials said. Barton said hospitals have resorted to “surge capacity” plans to expand critical care space wherever possible. There are now 118,836 recovered patients. The number of known active virus cases countywide is 59,732, a decrease of 4,374.

The figure is in all likelihood inaccurate due to the reporting error affecting case totals. The active count is derived by subtracting deaths and recoveries from the current total — 180,553 — according to the County Executive Office. The county’s overall COVID-19 testing positivity rate is 22.6%, compared to 21.3% a week ago, based on state-adjusted figures. The 11-county Southern California region’s available ICU capacity is officially at 0%. The regional ICU bed metric is a key benchmark under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s regional stay-at-home order, which went into effect on Dec. 6 and has been extended indefinitely.

The order was triggered when ICU bed availability across Southern California fell below 15%. The mandate is expected to remain in effect until bed capacities recover. The current stay-at-home order impacts bars, theaters, museums, hair salons, indoor recreational facilities, amusement parks and wineries — all of which are supposed to remain closed. Restaurants are confined to takeout and delivery, with capacity limitations on retail outlets.

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INVESTIGATING HEALTH

As every state now has reopened some element of society after full lockdowns became the norm in recent months, scientists and reporters are watching for a COVID-19 resurgence.

But how will we know?

There are several confounding factors to consider as you watch for and report on renewed spread of the disease.

The first thing you should do is remind your audience that the coronavirus is not dead. It may be obvious to you if you are reporting on the virus every day or tracking case counts, but some people appear to believe the virus will soon burn itself out. Some of that confusion has been created by — or at least amplified by — the media. So it’s worth noting that there are nearly 9 million confirmed cases of people infected with the virus worldwide — more than 2.3 million in the U.S. alone —and likely many more who have never been diagnosed. Unlike smallpox, which was wiped off the face of the earth with an intense eradication effort, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is till very much alive and will be until we develop and then distribute a vaccine. That means as states reopen, people who are carrying the virus are now going to be in more regular contact with other people and infection numbers will go up.

Making matters worse, people are spreading the virus without showing symptoms of the disease themselves. This is one of the most challenging aspects of this disease and one that cannot be underestimated as we gradually reopen stores, factories, and offices. You can be carrying the disease, spreading the disease, and yet feeling no effects from it yourself. This makes it very different from many other infectious diseases, where people who are sick can isolate themselves but the healthy can go about their lives. If you have a cough, stay at home. Not so with COVID-19. “The substantial asymptomatic proportion for COVID-19 is quite alarming,” Dr. Gerardo Chowell, an epidemiologist at Georgia State University, told the New York Times. Asymptomatic spreaders are one reason wearing masks can help — it lessens the spread of respiratory droplets from those who don’t know they’re carrying the virus.

We know more now than we did two months ago, and there’s still a lot we don’t know. This is the most complex problem and the one that keeps tripping up reporters. We know, for example, that even to date, relatively few people have been tested for the virus. People who had symptoms of the disease when the health care system was at its most stressed were never tested because tests were unavailable, or hospitals were forced to triage, or people feared venturing out. Thousands were never tested. Now tests are increasingly available. (Tests are a complicated topic, too. Read Kellie Schmitt’s useful piece about testing as a great starting point.)

We also know that people who don’t have symptoms can spread the virus. Now people who need to be tested because they are sick are getting tests and people who need to be tested because they are returning to work are also being tested. That testing information is going to greatly improve our understanding of how the disease is spreading. And as we learn more about how the virus works, it causes government agencies and academics to reevaluate the evidence. That will change past case counts, death counts, and other measures related to the disease. We have already seen some of this happen throughout the pandemic with the big corrections in case and death counts coming in large population centers in New York and Italy. We’ve also seen corrections in states that were lumping diagnostic tests and antibody tests into one number. Learning more in the present changes our understanding of the past and our projections for the future. So when you start to see case counts go up in a state that has reopened, ask the question, How much was really known about case counts or death counts in that state to begin with? How much of the rise is due to better testing? How much is due to better surveys in the population?

The last thing to recall is that permanent lockdown is not an option. Maybe there is some (shudder) future where we all live in our own personal bubbles and do our jobs without talking to each other face to face and socialize only virtually. But that future is not sustainable right now. A massive number of people are out of work or barely working. They have bills to pay and families to feed. One of the reasons some people are so angry about the government response to COVID-19 is because they are under extreme financial pressure. More than 40 million Americans have applied for unemployment benefits since the crisis began. If you had a choice between keeping a roof over your head or risking the chances of getting — or spreading — a disease that may or may not actually impact you personally, which would you choose? If you’re enjoying continuous employment, it might be hard for you to get yourself into that mindset, but it’s worth trying.

As a reporter, you can help society transition back to a world that is working again but doing so in a way that lessens — but cannot quite eliminate — the possibilities for disease transmission. As you watch for a resurgence in the disease, keep these confounding factors top of mind. This virus requires a new level of sophistication to get the reporting right.

-William Heisel

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