The Coronavirus Pandemic: All of WPR’s Coverage Archive

As authorities around the world seek out new tools to fight COVID-19, they are increasingly turning to contact-tracing apps and other technological tools that carry worrying implications for online privacy and digital rights. Meanwhile, a recent report from the watchdog group Freedom House warns that many authoritarian governments are seizing on the pandemic to expand their surveillance powers and crack down on online dissent, while imposing new restrictions on the flow of information across national borders. On the Trend Lines podcast this week, Freedom House’s Adrian Shahbaz, one of the report’s co-authors, joined WPR’s Elliot Waldman to talk about how […]

MEDELLIN, Colombia—As 21-year-old Jarvis Sanchez fled Venezuela—walking hours through dangerous informal border crossings, packing into hotel rooms with 20 other people and clinging to the backs of speeding trucks—he could barely even think about the global pandemic playing out around him. “There were things way scarier than COVID,” Sanchez said. “When you’re constantly under threat, when you’re on a truck driving at such fast speeds, and so many other things, you almost forget about it.” Sanchez is part of a new wave of migrants and refugees leaving Venezuela, as nearby countries gradually reopen their economies after months of COVID-19 lockdowns. […]

Many aspects of our response to the coronavirus pandemic have relied on digital technology. Schools and workplaces are moving online, holding classes and meetings using virtual tools. Public health experts are using data analytics and contact tracing apps to slow the contagion. And in some cases, authoritarian governments are using the pandemic as an excuse to impose sweeping restrictions on their citizens that limit their scope for protests and other forms of criticism. According to researchers at the watchdog group Freedom House, the implications of the pandemic for digital rights worldwide are bleak. The organization released a new report last […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has made everyone much better versed in basic epidemiological modeling than they were eight months ago. We have all familiarized ourselves with exhaustive data collection and the analysis of epidemic curves based on prior crises, the reproduction rates of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the daily influx of new cases. Yet, even for professional epidemiologists, the question of when this pandemic will end has no simple answer. Certainty is a luxury rarely afforded to scientists, and this is particularly true in the world of public health. However, we do know that pandemics do not attack indiscriminately. While we […]