Coronavirus Media Coverage Plateaus; RavenPack Data Performs Just as Well in a Crisis; Analysis on a Country-to-Country Basis now Available on our Coronavirus News Monitor

What the Monitor Says, Key Takeaways

• Coronavirus media exposure falls to lowest in a month, and now close to 50% ‘make or break’ level
• News hysteria falls to 6-week low as panic ebbs
• Governor Brian Kemp and Gilead sciences top the exposure rankings

Go To Coronavirus News Monitor

Hype Declines

The general level of Covid-19 media hype continues to fall, reaching the lowest level for a month, at 53.52% of total news.

For us the 50% level is key level, with a break below potentially signaling a sea-change deceleration in both the reporting and intensity of the virus pandemic. Let’s hope that is where we are going.

Just Relax

The level of panic in the news continues to decline and has now reached a 6-week low of 3.92 after peaking on March 30 at 9.24. This may signal a continued decline in new cases given the indexes’s leading properties for actual cases.

Global news sentiment for coronavirus continues to base in a region between -70 and -60, out of a range of +100 (media-based optimism) to -100 (pessimism about the virus and its effects).

On April 17 sentiment fell sharply to -65 after the number of daily cases peaked again, before rebounding to -49 four days later as the daily case count once again began to slide. So far, though, it has not broken below the -70 lows established on March 31.

Who is Brian Kemp?

The list of politicians ranked on the Covid-19 news monitor’s media exposure table, shows someone called Brian Kemp in 3rd place, globally.

Brian is the governor of the state of Georgia, who has featured prominently in the news because of his decision to relax quarantine measures in an attempt to reopen the local economy.

Gilead Drug Trial Propels Conversation

The most talked-about pharma stock for most of the week has been Gilead Sciences Inc after trials of its remdesevir drug showed a significantly reduced mortality rate amongst severe sufferers of Covid-19.

The average mortality rate for the U.S. stands at 4.69%, whilst the mortality rate for the cohort trialing the new drug was 1.6%.

If given FDA approval the drug could become a major weapon in the fight against the coronavirus, with major profit implications for Gilean if it is manufactured in the millions and exported worldwide.

RavenPack Sentiment Data Outperforms During Crises

Far from underperforming during crises periods, stock portfolio investment strategies based on RavenPack news sentiment data actually perform better than a random pick portfolio, according to research produced by RavenPack data scientists .

There is only one thing worse than being talked about....

Media hype, by which we mean the percentage of news talking about something, is highly correlated and even sometimes precedes real-world events, and this is borne out by comparisons of the hype around Covid-19 and different countries.

If you look at media hype in Italy and Spain, for example, it first rose in Italy before Spain, reflecting the former’s higher number of cases earlier on in the crisis.

The two then stabilized at a similar level and finally, most recently, hype in Spain rose to slightly above that in Italy as Spanish cases surpassed those in Italy.

This clearly reflects the complex history of the pandemic in the two countries.

This is just one example of a comparison that can be done using the enhancements made to our Covid-19 news monitor.

Other upgrades include one day change metrics on the Geo-Exposure map tooltips and Media Exposure table, time series charts for the list of Related Topics and topics widened to include Inflation, Mental Health, and Crude Oil.