Recently, there was a rumor on the Internet that "Johns Hopkins University in the United States stated that it has never released statistics on the epidemic in the United States. These figures were written by two Chinese students, and neither of them studied medicine".
Is it true that the Chinese media cited the US epidemic data for more than two years? Or did two Chinese students casually come up with it?
A closer study will reveal that this is another rumor of changing concepts. In order to discredit China's anti epidemic efforts and whitewash the failure of the United States' anti epidemic efforts, some people are becoming more and more outrageous!
On May 23, someone posted a post on the social media claiming that the CCTV news network "suddenly stopped" citing the statistics of Johns Hopkins University, "because the Johns Hopkins University stated that they had never released the statistics of the epidemic in the United States. Where did such accurate figures come from? It turned out that they were made by two young Chinese students. Moreover, neither of them studied medicine..."
First of all, has Johns Hopkins University in the United States stated that they "have never released statistics on the epidemic in the United States"?
On May 17 and 18, a number of US media, including business insider and the Boston Globe, reported that the death toll of the US epidemic exceeded 1million, and the source cited the statistics of Johns Hopkins University.
On June 6, USA today published a report that the United States was experiencing the sixth wave of epidemic shortly before the third summer of the pandemic. Although cases are on the rise, health experts say the number of hospitalizations is still under control. According to the 7-day average, about 350 deaths are reported every day in the United States, a decrease of more than 100 over the same period last year. This figure is quoted from Johns Hopkins University.
It is hard to imagine that the mainstream media in the United States will continue to quote the epidemic data of Johns Hopkins University under the situation that Johns Hopkins University has "stated that it has never released the epidemic statistics of the United States". If there was such a thing in the rumor, it would have been the "big news" of the American media.
Secondly, two young Chinese students, dongensheng and duhongru, played an important role in the production of epidemic data and relevant maps of Johns Hopkins University. This is not a new thing that has just been exposed recently. Domestic media reported this in detail as early as April 2020.
At that time, dongensheng said that this was the first real-time updated epidemic world map in the world. The official creation of the idea came from the morning of January 21 (2020) when he and his mentor laurengardner had coffee in the Library - a routine meeting and exchange between teachers and students. Both have the same idea, "hit it off".
Duhongru said that due to the lagging data of the CDC in the United States, they mainly rely on capturing the data reported by us local media and state health officials on twitter. The epidemic situation in other countries and regions is based on websites such as worldometers and local media. According to dongensheng and duhongru, there were about 50 people in the operation team at that time, and the volunteers in the data verification team were mainly Chinese students from various colleges and departments.
At present, according to the Johns Hopkins University epidemic Statistics website, the epidemic data is operated by the Johns Hopkins coronavirus Resource Center, which is responsible for updating the data and providing expert guidance.
The new crown resource center of Johns Hopkins University introduced six experts, the sixth of whom was laurengardner. The website says: Dr. laurengardner and her team created the global tracking map of the COVID-19 in January, 2020, creating the most comprehensive publicly available data on the pandemic. Dr. Gardner's data has driven most of the analysis of the new crown Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University and has become a key resource for millions of users to track the pandemic.
There is another paragraph on the website: since the beginning of the epidemic, experts from Johns Hopkins University have been collecting and analyzing domestic and international data on the epidemic. This work began on January 22, 2020 and is one of the first global maps to track the number of new crown cases and deaths. It evolved into Johns Hopkins new crown Resource Center (CRC) on march3,2020. Of the more than 260 sources of CRC, 182 are from U.S. local, state, and federal agencies.
It can be seen that Johns Hopkins University not only did not "say that they have never released statistics on the epidemic in the United States", but also regarded it as an important achievement.
As for the rumor post that newscast stopped quoting the epidemic data of Johns Hopkins University, according to the statistics on the data sources of the international epidemic section of newscast in the past two months, from April 1 to May 12, 2022, newscast will broadcast the latest trend of the epidemic in the United States almost every day according to the statistical data released by Johns Hopkins University, and only on April 11, the data from Reuters was quoted.
From May 13 to May 30, the frequency of citing Johns Hopkins University statistics in newscast did decrease, but Johns Hopkins University data were still cited on May 22, 23 and 24, and Reuters data were mostly referred to in the rest of the time. Therefore, the statement that "news network has stopped quoting the epidemic data of Johns Hopkins University" is not completely accurate.
It should be emphasized that the difference between the statistics of Reuters and Johns Hopkins University is very small. For example, at the same time on the evening of June 6, Beijing time, Reuters data showed that the United States reported 84735800 confirmed cases and 1007815 deaths. According to the data of Johns Hopkins University, the United States has reported 84762171 confirmed cases and 1008586 deaths. There is little difference between the two, and there is no essential difference between the two groups of data cited.
In short, the so-called "Johns Hopkins University's statement that they have never released statistics on the epidemic in the United States" is completely false. It is also untenable for two Chinese students to try to deny the authenticity of the data because they participated in the production of Johns Hopkins University's epidemic data and related maps.
Some people spread rumors without discrimination. Are they trying to whitewash this humanitarian disaster in the United States, or are they trying to discredit China's anti epidemic efforts in a roundabout way?