Wikipedia Has a Special Project to Fight Coronavirus Fake News in India

The United States and Italy have been playing catch up in the mitigation of the coronavirus pandemic and were resistant to implementing social distancing, while other countries took more aggressive approaches. Now both countries are looking to China and South Korea to learn how sweeping actions and industrialized scaling of measures such as fever clinics, temperature check points, portable CAT scanning, and social isolation, have helped to contain the pandemic.

It wasn't until first cases of coronavirus were recorded in the United States that San Francisco and other U.S. cities took action to mitigate the spread, but in Chinatown, precautions started much earlier and the preparations seem to have worked. With only three recorded cases in Chinatown, the residents credit trust in authorities, community-driven communications, heightened hygiene practices, and the local Chinese Hospital, "which has strong ties to the community it serves."

Dance, karate, and music instructors in Staten Island, New York are adapting and shifting the ways they deliver lessons to work within the virtual landscape their students, and the rest of society are living in due to the pandemic. Some of the new ways these instructors have approached lesson delivery include using Google Classroom, developing a new music-specific learning platform, and incorporating new classes normally not offered.

Freed from prison after serving at least 15 years, often much longer, for crimes committed when they were teens, a group of men holds twice-monthly Zoom meetings to lend structure and peer support to their lives during a time when COVID-19 restrictions foreclose other face-to-face meetings. Under Washington, D.C.’s Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act, 42 men have been released. At least 22 of them meet regularly to share leads on possible jobs, discuss their frustrations, and encourage each other to stay focused on the positive.

During the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, early efforts at contact tracing by different states in the U.S. proved successful when they relied on people instead of applications or software, which showed high rates of failure since people didn't seem to want to participate or download the applications. New York state relied on human contact tracers, specifically those who lived in the neighborhoods they track. "The city’s initiative has shown early success: As of June 16, it had reached 94% of all new positive cases."

When news of COVID-19 arrived in the West African Village of Dirty Box Junction, community members and local government were ready to act due to lessons learned from mistakes made during the Ebola outbreak of years earlier. The village along with the rest of sub-Saharan Africa immediately enacted measures – state of emergencies, mandatory screenings, and contact tracing, to name a few – that have kept their case count low, while the U.S. continues to see cases and deaths increase.

In order to bridge the digital divide one school district in Virginia is putting Wi-Fi routers on its school buses. They call them Smart Buses. They buses drive out to neighborhoods where students don't have access to fast, reliable internet. “Four of the Smart Buses go out every day. Each can serve about 40 students, covering about three-quarters of the need in the district.”

Around 20% of high school students in rural Moulton Independent School District in Texas don't have the vital internet connection they need to complete their assignments. Students at Shiner Independent School District, also a rural area school, faced similar issues. Both districts teamed up with Guadalupe Valley Electric Cooperative, a non-profit utility company, which distributed 20 unlimited data hotspots to Moulton at a $40 monthly cost, as opposed to $200+ cost. Along with individual mobile hotspots, GVEC also turned the Shiner school parking lot into a larger hotspot.

Singapore's aggressive pandemic response in conjunction with strict university rules has helped keep campuses free of COVID-19 cases so far. As a country, free testing and medical care has ensured that positive cases can be isolated quickly, while at the university level, the use of technology, zoning rules, and penalties for those who do not comply have worked to safeguard public health.

In an effort to help get accurate information to the communities who are being disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, a program called Live Chair Health has started to train barbers "on chronic issues that disproportionately affect Black communities" and teach them "how to have conversations with their clients about the diseases." Aside from providing COVID-19 information, the initiative has helped patrons access primary care and address other medical issues such as high blood pressure.