November 06, 2020
In this update, we focus on how our Coronavirus monitor is reflecting the hype around the U.S. Presidential Election, we revisit our lockdown indicator to see how well it would have forecasted the new lockdown in the UK, and we highlight some noteworthy academic studies from the rising tide of research making use of our Coronavirus data.
Go To Coronavirus News Monitor
With the election dominating the headlines we focus on the U.S. version of the Coronavirus monitor.
Unsurprisingly, “Elections” is at the top of the list of trending topics in the U.S. with 32.64% of all the news about COVID-19 related to the U.S. presidential election.
The overall share of the news about COVID-19 has fallen, probably as a result of displacement by election news.
The chart below shows the Media Hype Index for the U.S. which measures the percentage of news about COVID-19 as a percentage of total news; it is showing the index has fallen to its lowest level for a month.
The U.S. stands fairly isolated in that respect as other major countries’ Media Hype Indexes did not exhibit a similar dip. In fact, when we compare Media Hype in the U.S. with Russia, the latter is actually rising. The same divergence exists for India, Brazil, France, and Spain.
At the start of the summer, we developed a news-based lockdown indicator .
The recent reimposition of a lockdown in the UK made it interesting to see how well our indicator would have worked at foreseeing it.
The indicator uses the RavenPack platform to count articles with the words “Highest”, “Cases” and “Weeks” in the title, as these have been found to potentially forewarn of the reintroduction of lockdowns by governments.
A peak in the article count normally precedes the reintroduction of measures by about a month to six weeks.
The chart below shows the UK version of the indicator. The first peak in headline counts occurred in late May and provided an early warning of the reintroduction of measures in the UK, starting with the city of Leicester, at the end of June.
The second spike in the article count at the end of September and early October similarly seems to have forewarned of the onset of the most recent lockdown in the UK this November.
Not surprisingly, the reimposition of lockdown measures does not seem to have helped the UK’s news sentiment score as measured by our Covid monitor; the UK Country Sentiment Index which has plummeted to a new 3-month low.
Also noteworthy is the recent sharp spike in the UK Fake News Index in late October.
RavenPack news sentiment data has been used in myriad academic studies worldwide, but since developing the COVID-19 monitor we have seen a further surge in request for our monitor data from academics analyzing the impact of the pandemic, particularly on financial markets.
Below we have highlighted some recent research papers using our Coronavirus data which we consider particularly interesting or noteworthy.
A negative correlation exists between stock market returns in 6 countries and the RavenPack Fake News, Media Coverage Index, and Infodemic Index dependent on market conditions, according to this study .
Evidence that major currencies tend to react in a fairly uniform way during crises such as COVID-19 suggests the practice of cross-currency hedging may not be very useful as a method for lowering risk during those periods, says this white paper .
What is the interrelationship between the softs, grain, and livestock commodity markets, and COVID-19 news? The RavenPack Coronavirus Media Coverage Index (MCI) is the dominant driver in terms of price volatility, says this research paper .
The extent to which the RavenPack Panic Index can explain changes in the Bucharest Stock Exchange is the premise of another study that used our data.
The Panic Index is the focus of this study which analyses the relationship between different industry groups and the COVID pandemic, as measured by our monitor.
We analyze the impact of Pfizer’s recent vaccine announcement, Lilly’s antibody treatment’s FDA authorization, and the accelerating surge of cases worldwide.
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Have a great day, and we’ll be back soon with more updates
Best Regards - Team RavenPack
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