What is the Impact of Coronavirus on Humanitarian News Coverage?

The first case of the coronavirus (COVID-19) was reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) in December 2019, and the virus was subsequently declared a pandemic in March 2020. The pandemic has had an enormous impact on economies across the globe, as governments are shifting their efforts towards healthcare interventions for testing, hospitalization and vaccination development; reviving the economy and distributing stimulus packages for unemployed citizens etc.

To gain an understanding of how COVID-19 has impacted humanitarian discourse, we carry out an analysis of news texts from various broadcasters around the globe, particularly in:

  • Euro-Atlantic Countries: USA, UK, Germany, France
  • Gulf Donors: UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia
  • New Global Media Players: China, Russia, Iran and Turkey

Legend:     Euro-Atlantic Countries     Gulf Donors     New Global Media Players


Global Perspectives

Some common themes of discussion in humanitarian media discourse were:

  • The novel coronavirus and the rapid rise in cases
  • Public health efforts
  • Humanitarian efforts

Highlights

Vaccinations

Focus Terms: vaccine(s) vaccination(s) immunisation(s) immunity

Surprisingly in Dec 2019, the data shows a peak in the discussion of vaccinations and related terms (immunizations) by news media in Euro-Atlantic Countries - even before the severity of the virus was known (publicly). The frequency of mentions drops from February - June 2020, perhaps as various pharmaceutical companies worked on developing vaccinations, then rose again. Of course today there is much more coverage of various highly effective vaccines created by Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, and the University of Oxford in collaboration with AstraZeneca.

Medical Response

Focus Terms: hospitalisation emergency ventilator respirator mask sanitiser

Discourse around the medical response to the pandemic such as frontline workers, mask-wearing, PPE etc, is widely discussed in Gulf countries in January 2020, with a peak in March 2020 by both Euro-Atlantic and Gulf countries. The discourse around the medical response to the pandemic gradually stagnates in New Global Media players.

Humanitarian Aid & Efforts

Focus Terms: donation(s) donated aid support help

It is interesting to see the drop in discourse focused on humanitarian crises and efforts in January 2020 in Euro-Atlantic countries - perhaps the focus moved from various humanitarian crises to COVID-19. With time, the discussion began to move back to humanitarian crises and efforts from June to September 2020.

Lockdown

Focus Terms: self-isolation lockdown quarantine work from home remote stay home

The data shows various peaks and dips of news coverage on self-isolation and related terms at different times throughout 2020. This might be because different regions and countries took varying approaches to closing their economies to prevent the spread of the virus. This discussion is more prevalent in news coverage from Gulf-donors, with peaks in January and July 2020, and is barely discussed in New Global Media countries from June to September 2020. By that time China had a good handle on ‘flattening the curve’.

Common Expressions

This visualisation shows the most frequent co-occuring wordson a network graph. The connections between words represent how media discourse mentioned certain events during the coronavirus pandemic. Collocations are expressions of multiple words which commonly co-occur. Navigate between tabs to see visualisation for different groups of countries. Hover over words to highlight connected words.

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Humanitarian Aid

We analysed the corpus to get insights about the humanitarian aid during the coronavirus pandemic. The following map shows the direction of where the aid is moving around the globe. The arrows represent the direction of humanitarian aid and you can hover over the round markers to see the country names. You can also adjust the curve if the line is overlapping a country's marker.

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About the Dataset

We worked with a corpus of humanitarian news articles from Euro-Atlantic Countries, Gulf Donors and New Global Media Players from December 2019 - August 2020. We used Text Analytics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to process the data.

As expected, most of the articles were from March-April 2020, corresponding to the WHO declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic as well as the global economic effects of various levels of lockdowns or quarantines in the world’s efforts to prevent the rapid spread of the virus.

Most new coverage texts came from Euro-Atlantic followed by New Global Media Player broadcasters. This might have to do with the sheer amount of available broadcasting agencies in those countries.

Credits

This analysis was conducted for the Data Science in Design course project on News Articles.

Data Holders: Dr Kate Wright, Dr Anouk Lang, Dr Dani Madrid-Morales
Instructors: Dr Benjamin Bach, Dr Aba-Sah Dadzie, Dr Dave Murray-Rust
Tutor: Mashael AlKadi
Group 2: Tashfeen Ahmed, Tamara Lottering, Xiaohang Xu, Minjia Zhao, Jin Mu