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What would be particularly useful right now is a commitment to routinely collect and publish data on the demographics of everyone impacted by the coronavirus so that we can understand and act on these concerns. At the moment, we know the age and sex of everyone who contracts and tragically dies from the coronavirus, but we still have little additional reliable information, including about their ethnicity. If the information was collected and published in real time, it would help bring the true scale of the problem to light and provide more evidence about how to protect communities from the virus. Promises to provide this data in the future is not good enough – we need it to be collected and published right now. There simply is no good reason to wait.

The government has already boasted that millions of citizens have shared this information with them at a time when most Iranians are completely in the dark about the threat from coronavirus. The government is being accused of covering up the real infection and death rates with experts claiming the real figures are exponentially higher. With confusion and fear gripping many parts of Iran, this app is looking to take advantage of that to boost Tehran's surveillance capabilities.

It is impossible to say how many of Iran’s citizens have downloaded the app, but according to this tweet from the ICT minister MJ Azari Jahromi, at least 3.5 million people have now shared their precise location and intimate details with the government.

“The regime’s attitude is evident during the coronavirus crisis,” Gobadi said. “Instead of being transparent and alerting the public regarding the real scope of the crisis, the regime has resorted to a massive campaign of deception and concealment particularly as it pertains to the number of victims and fatalities.”

One moment the prime minister, Boris Johnson, was asking people with symptoms to stay home for seven days; a few days later, he had ordered a lockdown. What changed was data from Italy’s experience of the pandemic, in which more people were critically ill than anticipated, and from the NHS about its inability to cope if the same should happen in the UK.

The coronavirus is killing black and Latino people in New York City at twice the rate that it is killing white people

In New York City, Latinos represent 34 percent of the people who have died of the coronavirus but make up 29 percent of the city’s population, according to preliminary data from the city’s Health Department. Black people represent 28 percent of deaths but make up 22 percent of the population.

In Chicago, for example, black people account for 72 percent of virus-related fatalities, even though they make up a little less than a third of the population.

The idea behind so-called digital “passports” is that they would allow people who have recovered from the coronavirus to signal their immunity and thus move around freely, enabling economies to open up. But there are fears such a system, which is at a preliminary stage of discussion with the developer, could lead to discrimination, create perverse incentives to get infected, and violate privacy.

The scheme also relies on reliable antibody testing and enough kits for large-scale testing — neither of which exist, yet. Not to mention that health experts don’t know whether immunity to the coronavirus even exists and, if it does, how long it lasts. In late April, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned against a passport scheme on the basis that “there is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from Covid-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.”

Onfido’s technology would work by first verifying someone’s identity — by comparing a picture or video of their face against a picture of their identity card — and then linking that to a coronavirus test result. People would then be able to bring up a QR code on an app or a browser signalling their immunity status just by taking a picture of their face.

A downturn stemming from an epidemic is an unusual one. And it might prove unusually difficult for policy makers to fight, in the United States and abroad.For one, the coronavirus epidemic has come with extraordinary, intense uncertainty. Officials are not sure how many cases there are and how deadly the virus is. Businesses and households are uncertain of how long the danger will last and what measures governments might take to counter it. People are afraid, as the market panic demonstrates, and it may take months for that fear to abate.

judiciously targeted bailouts are really the only way I can think of to keep businesses and people from going bankrupt given the absence of pandemic insurance.”

Harvard’s Jason Furman has suggested that Congress send every adult American $1,000 and every child $500

Everyone is cooking the data, one way or another. And yet, even though these inconsistencies are public and plain, people continue to rely on charts showing different numbers, with no indication that they are not all produced with the same rigor or vigor. This is bad.

The other problem is, now that the U.S. appears to be ramping up testing, the number of cases will grow quickly. Public-health officials are currently cautioning people not to worry as that happens, but it will be hard to disambiguate what proportion of the ballooning number of cases is the result of more testing and what proportion is from the actual spread of the virus.

People trust data. Numbers seem real. Charts have charismatic power. People believe what can be quantified. But data do not always accurately reflect the state of the world. Or as one scholar put it in a book title: “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron.

More than 370,000 people in the UK have symptomatic COVID-19, according to an app tracking the virus "in real time".

The figures from the app are more than double the 148,377 who have tested positive, according to the Department of Health's official numbers.

A YouGov poll has found eight out of 10 people would prefer the government to prioritise health and wellbeing over economic growth during the coronavirus crisis, and six in 10 would still want the government to pursue health and wellbeing ahead of growth after the pandemic has subsided, though nearly a third would prioritise the economy instead at that point.

The focus on GDP means economic growth can take place at the expense of the environment, and people’s quality of life, without any of the resulting damages ever being taken into account, the report argues. That in turn encourages ministers and officials to seek ways of raising the GDP figures, even if rising nominal growth is accompanied by environmental degradation, worsening health, poor educational attainment and increasing poverty.

Potential Coronavirus (COVID-19) symptoms reported through NHS Pathways and 111 online

Summary Data published on potential COVID-19 symptoms reported through NHS Pathways and 111 online Dashboard shows the total number of NHS Pathways triages through 111 and 999, and online assessments in 111 online which have received a potential COVID-19 final disposition. This data is based on potential COVID-19 symptoms reported by members of the public to NHS Pathways through NHS 111 or 999 and 111 online,  and is not based on the outcomes of tests for coronavirus. This is not a count of people.

In Germany, where schools and restaurants are closing and people have been told to work at home if they can, the data donated by Deutsche Telekom offer insights into whether people are complying, health czar Lothar Wieler said.

In Italy, mobile carriers Telecom Italia, Vodafone and WindTre have offered authorities aggregated data to monitor people’s movements.

Movements exceeding 300-500 meters (yards) are down by around 60% since Feb. 21, when the first case was discovered in the Codogno area, the data show.

Local public health officials and medics have complained that the government has not supplied sufficiently detailed information on local infections, the lack of which they say hampers attempts to quash new outbreaks.

Councils have been promised postcode-level data for weeks from Public Health England and the newly created Joint Biosecurity Centre. But some public health directors are concerned the centre has not been sharing data about potential clusters of infections with councils, which could enforce school or workplace closures that could suppress an outbreak at an early stage.

“If the only data you’re getting is ‘in this population of 90,000 people there are 40 positives’ it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. If Leicester had got the data sooner they could have had a fighting chance of managing it,” said one public health director, who asked not to be named.

As South Korean media pored over their movements, citizens looked on with a mixture of horror and fascination as their private lives were laid bare, leading to speculation that they were having an affair and that the secretary had undergone plastic surgery.

Self-employed people in the North and Midlands are more likely to be in insecure, lower-paid roles at high risk from economic shocks

Cities in the Greater South East are more likely to be able to shift to working from home

The jobs that could be more easily done from home – such as consultants or finance – are concentrated in cities in the Greater South East (see the figure below). Assuming some sectors could completely shift to home working if necessary, up to one in two workers in London could shift to working from home. Meanwhile in Reading, Aldershot and Edinburgh over 40 per cent of workers could too.

Starting on Tuesday, more than 300 Amazon employees have pledged to stay home from work, according to worker rights group United for Respect, as frustrations mount over protections and support for Amazon employees. Workers claim the company has failed to provide enough face masks for workers, did not implement regular temperature checks it promised at warehouses, and has refused to give workers paid sick leave.

The model, based on 13-year-old code for a long-feared influenza pandemic, assumed that the demand for intensive care units would be the same for both infections. Data from China soon showed this to be dangerously wrong, but the model was only updated when more data poured out of Italy, where intensive care was swiftly overwhelmed and deaths shot up.

It did not consider the impact of widespread rapid testing, contact tracing and isolation, which can be used in the early stages of an epidemic or in lockdown conditions to keep infections down to such an extent that when restrictions are lifted the virus should not rebound.