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WUHAN, China The Chinese government scrambled to contain not only the coronavirus epidemic but also growing expressions of public fury over the management of the crisis as the death toll rose on Tuesday to at least 106.

Chinas National Immigration Administration on Tuesday encouraged Chinese citizens to reconsider the timing of overseas travel to curtail the spread of the coronavirus, it said on its WeChat account. That came as the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged American citizens to avoid nonessential travel to China.

Premier Li Keqiang, the prime minister of the Chinese government, flew on Monday into Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, to show support for medical workers and to pledge needed medical supplies only to be mocked online for leading workers in an encouraging cheer.

Mr. Lis visit, which featured prominently in state media, came as Wuhans mayor, Zhou Xianwang, acknowledged that the local authorities had moved too slowly in the first days of the crisis.

In an interview with CCTV, the main state television network, the mayor said that information about the coronavirus had not been shared with the public in a timely manner, and that he and the citys Communist Party secretary, Ma Guoqiang, were prepared to resign to appease public indignation.

Our names will live in infamy for shutting the door of the city, Mr. Zhou said. But we believe that as long as it helps to control the disease, helps keep peoples lives safe, Comrade Ma Guoqiang and I will shoulder any responsibility, Mr. Zhou said.

The offer to resign, which was not immediately acted on, suggested that Chinas harshly practical party hierarchy could settle on local officials like the mayor and the party secretary as sacrifices to ease public ire over a spiraling public health crisis that also threatens to take a large economic toll.

With the death toll rising to at least 106, and infections spreading to still more countries, the impacts reverberated globally. Stocks tumbled and oil prices fell on Monday as the viruss spread worried investors worldwide.

The S&P 500 fell 1.6 percent, its sharpest decline in nearly four months, with shares of airlines and companies dependent on tourism from China particularly hard hit.

Major stock benchmarks in Europe were down more than 2 percent. While many markets in Asia were closed for the holiday, Tokyos benchmark Nikkei 225 index sank 2 percent.

Chinas currency also fell, while investors moved into safe havens like gold.

In China, the government announced that it would extend for three days the weeklong holiday for the Lunar New Year, which had been scheduled to end on Thursday. The countrys economy, which is experiencing its worst slowdown in nearly three decades, is already hurting from the impact of the outbreak, and there are fears that consumer spending will fall as residents stay home over the extended holiday.

In Beijing, where 72 cases had been reported by Monday morning, officials warned that anyone who returned to the city from other parts of China must confine themselves to their homes for 14 days.

That could significantly reduce the citys work force even after the extended holiday ends. Hundreds of millions of people travel during the holiday, which began on Saturday, and would normally begin returning in the coming days.

In Shanghai, the countrys financial center, the authorities ordered businesses to stay closed until midnight on Feb. 9. In nearby Suzhou, a large manufacturing hub, businesses there were ordered to open no sooner than Feb. 8. Some companies, including the internet giant Tencent, also told their workers to stay home until Feb. 10.

The epidemic has already shuttered many major tourist attractions, including the Disney theme parks in Shanghai and Hong Kong, as well as the Forbidden City and sections of the Great Wall outside of Beijing.

Major film studios postponed the opening of movies at what would normally have been a peak viewing season, while several sporting events were canceled or postponed. Chinas professional basketball league, the C.B.A., announced that it would suspend its season indefinitely.

The crisis has emerged as an unexpected challenge for the Communist Party leadership, especially for President Xi Jinping, who said nothing in public about the matter until he convened an extraordinary meeting of the partys Politburo Standing Committee on Saturday.

Mr. Li, an economist who has been premier since 2013, has taken the formal lead of Chinas crisis management team for the epidemic. But the much more powerful Mr. Xi, who is also the Communist Party leader, has signaled that he is the real power in charge.

Only days earlier, Mr. Li had reflected less urgency about the viral outbreak when discussing it without wearing a medical mask while meeting medical workers in faraway Qinghai province.

On Monday, by contrast, he made several appearances around Wuhan, visiting a hospital, where he promised to deliver 20,000 surgical masks, and a supermarket, where now wearing a mask he led workers in a chant.

Wuhan, he said. Jia you, they responded in chorus, using a phrase that means add oil but is roughly translated as a rousing Go!

On Twitter, which is blocked in China, the gesture was mocked. Wuhan pneumonia is afraid of slogans, one user posted in Chinese.

Wuhans residents have largely hunkered down to quietly wait out the epidemic. They mostly stay inside their homes, venturing out for supplies and food, medical visits and occasional bursts of exercise.

Still, several said they had heard about Mr. Lis visit and welcomed it as a sign that the central leadership was committed to supporting the city and surrounding areas, which have been locked down since last week.

This shows that theyre getting serious, said Shao Shigui, a retired steelworker from southwest China who was strolling on a promenade by the Yangtze River. He had come to Wuhan with his wife to help their daughter, who is pregnant, and said he was taking a break from the monotony of staying indoors.

In China, if a leader visits, that shows that all the resources of the government can be mobilized, he said.

The United States, Japan, France, Russia and other countries, meanwhile, scrambled to get citizens who were trapped in the city out, after the government shut down the major modes of transportation.

Since then the city of 11 million has descended into a surreal quiet except around the hospitals.

Most shops remained closed, but supermarkets, fresh produce stores and pharmacies opened, although many pharmacies have run out of protective masks, hand disinfectant and other supplies needed to protect against the virus.

Residents with fevers and coughs who worried that they may have contracted the coronavirus continued to line up at clinics and hospitals, but in fewer numbers than previous days. The streets were mostly free of cars, and many residents walked or rode bicycles to do their shopping.

Its possible to live, but its not a real New Year, said Qiu Dongjun, a 38-year-old construction worker from rural Hubei who was carrying a bag of groceries. Ive been eating so many containers of instant noodles that my mouth and nose are flaming raw.

He said Mr. Lis visit was a promising political gesture.

People in Wuhan have many practical problems, he said. How will our wages get paid? What if businesses go under? Who will ensure we get our unpaid wages? These are practical problems, he said, his voice partly muffled by his protective mask.

You cant expect all those problems to be solved in Beijing, he said before walking off.

The mayor of Wuhan, Mr. Zhou, defended his actions even as he accepted responsibility for falling short. He said he had been hampered from alerting the public sooner because of the reporting rules under the laws governing disease outbreaks. He suggested he had to wait for approval from higher-level officials.

One woman responded angrily in the comments page below the Peoples Dailys live stream of the mayors interview on Weibo, the popular Chinese social media platform. She noted that the government had informed the World Health Organization on Dec. 31, but not the public most directly affected until Jan. 20.

The Wuhan government will be condemned throughout the ages if it turns the map of China all red, she wrote, referring to maps depicting the spread of the virus.

After weeks of limited steps before the gravity of the epidemic was recognized, government agencies have galvanized to fight the crisis, setting aside other priorities for now.

The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission said in a notice dated Sunday that banks must not blindly call in loans, cut off lending or hold off on lending in response to the crisis.

On Monday, State Grid, the government-controlled electricity provider, said it would halt the shut-off of electricity to residents whose bills fall into arrears while authorities deal with the outbreak.

Chris Buckley reported from Wuhan and Steven Lee Myers from Beijing. Raymond Zhong, Alexandra Stevenson and Katie Robertson contributed reporting. Elsie Chen, Claire Fu, Zoe Mou and Elaine Yu contributed research.

Originally posted here:
Chinese Officials Race to Contain Anger Over Virus - The New York Times

A deadly novel coronavirus outbreak, which has infected more than 4,500 people and spread to 15 countries since emerging in China, has also spawned many false claims on social media.

Here's a selection of misinformation debunked by AFP's Fact Check service.

In Australia, multiple Facebook posts shared hundreds of times claimed to show a list of foods and locations in Sydney which have been contaminated by the new coronavirus strain first discovered in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late December.

One post, published on January 27, identified different types of rice, cookies and onion rings that allegedly contain traces of the virus. It also claimed that a "bureau of diseasology" had run tests and discovered the strain in several Sydney suburbs.

But the local health authority told AFP the locations listed posed no risk to visitors, and the foods named did not appear in the New South Wales food authority's list of recalls and advisories.

A video viewed more than 88,000 times on Facebook purported to show the market in Wuhan where the virus strain materialised. In reality, it was filmed at an Indonesian market.

The misleading post was published on an account in the Philippines on January 26, 2020. The footage showed bats, rats, snakes and an assortment of other animal meat products being sold at a bustling market.

However, a reverse image search using key frames extracted from the video led to another identical YouTube clip uploaded on July 20, 2019.

AFP was able to confirm the video was in fact captured at the Langowan market in Indonesia's North Sulawesi province.

In Sri Lanka, a Facebook post shared thousands of times claimed doctors were projecting that the entire population of Wuhan - a city of 11 million people - would likely die of the novel coronavirus.

This is false; Chinese authorities have made no such projection.

There is currently no vaccine for the new strain of coronavirus. But the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention stated that most people will recover on their own.

The post also claimed the virus could be caught by eating the meat of the Chinese cobra but this has not yet been established.

Multiple posts on Weibo, Twitter and Facebook shared in January claimed top Chinese respiratory expert Zhong Nanshan had told people to rinse their mouths with salt water solution to prevent infection from a new virus outbreak.

But the claim is bogus; the expert's team said saline would not "kill" the new virus and urged people not to believe or share medically-inaccurate online rumours.

The World Health Organization also told AFP there was no evidence that saline solution would protect against infection from the new coronavirus.

Multiple posts on Facebook and Twitter alleged that the novel coronavirus was created on purpose - with theories including that it was manufactured by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The posts included patents to buffer their claim. But these were in fact patents registered in an effort to combat different strains of coronavirus, for example by developing vaccines.

In France, several social media posts have circulated with claims that people had been contaminated with the novel coronavirus in the departments of Val d'Oise, Savoie, Lot-et-Garonne and Pyrenees-Orientales.

These false reports were accompanied by images made to look like they were screenshots from several French news sources - including AFP.

However, these images were digitally manipulated. No cases have been confirmed in these departments.

Agence France-Presse

Excerpt from:
These Lies And Conspiracies About The Wuhan Coronavirus Are Totally False - ScienceAlert

Data-Driven Thinking is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Todays column is written by Rishad Tobaccowala, chief growth officer at Publicis Groupe and author of Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data (Harper Collins, publishing on Jan. 28, 2020).

All leaders, and particularly those in marketing and media, face many challenges today, including organizational designs built for the past vs. the present, hierarchical command-and-control management styles that do not resonate with a new generation and employees who question their intent.

One key change that companies are making to address these issues is to ensure that they have a more diverse work force that will resonate with the marketplace and with their talent.

Ensuring diversity is not just the right thing to do, but is proven to be good for the bottom line as a representative workforce is a competitive advantage when talent is key, change is widespread and new ways of looking at things become critical.

However, ensuring a diversity of faces is a necessary but insufficient step. Not only do companies need different faces around the table, but they also need diversity in thinking. We need to ensure that every person in a firm and around the table has a voice.

Most importantly, it is critical to have voices that can speak truth to power, question the status quo, call out potential issues and be heard without the risk of being punished.

Today in the field of marketing and technology, there are huge issues that need to be discussed including a) the control major platforms have over marketers, who find themselves with limited data and customer relationships; b) how advertising technology built for engagement has become a society operating system that has created polarization and a breakdown in trust; and c) the long-term secular decline of advertising, which will be accelerated by cheap, ad-free streaming services.

There are voices that question and have suggestions on how to solve or mitigate these issues.

If such voices were listened to, many companies, such as Wells Fargo and possibly Boeing, would not have suffered their reputational and market valuation losses. There were people who knew there were issues, but they either kept quiet or were silenced or ignored.

For true diversity it is key that people can call out the turd on the table when everyone else is celebrating what looks like a delicious brownie.

This is very difficult since the issues being called out are challenging. Financial impropriety. Cutting corners to make deadlines, which hurts product or service quality. Loathsome behavior by management. Incompetence in adapting to change.

In addition to the difficulty of speaking out, there is the risk of job loss, increased workload to fix the problem, career blackballing and, of course, the possibility of being wrong.

But speaking ones mind is not just important in helping to avoid big problems or issues. It also creates an environment that helps day-to-day business.

Speaking up is difficult in all circumstances but particularly if management and the culture is not supportive.

Studying many companies and organizations, including firms as diverse as Pixar and the Navy Seals, has revealed some best practices that one can unleash to encourage diversity of voice.

Being sensitive to diversity of voices as much as to diversity of faces will ensure long-term success for companies.

Follow Rishad Tobaccowala (@rishad) and AdExchanger (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

Read the original:
Diverse Faces Are Not The Same As Diverse Voices - AdExchanger

Jaclyn Hills future looked promising when she launched her own beauty brand, Jaclyn Cosmetics, back in mid-2019. Her So Rich Lipsticks (a collection of nude lip colors) were extremely successful at first launch, and Hill sold out of all the products in mere minutes. Unfortunately, the success of the original launch was short-lived. Reports of contaminants within the lipsticks came in by the droves. Customers reported finding everything from animal hair to shards of glass and plastic in their products, making the lipstick a safety and health hazard.

The situation wasnt helped by Hills response. First, she denied that there was anything wrong with her cosmetics. Then she elected not to comment further until she had all the necessary information. Following that, she issued an excuse that didnt add up. Finally, she stopped production and promised each and every customer a full refund for their products before taking a social media hiatus for nearly a month. All the while, she refused to recall the lipsticks, maintaining that they were safe to use. Despite all the controversy, Jaclyn Cosmetics has re-launched since this snafu, and many of Hills fans seem open to giving her a second chance.

Months later, Hill is reflecting on her 2019. On January 24, 2020, she penned a message to her fans sharing how difficult the past few months have been for her and her hopes for the future. 2019 was the hardest year of my life for many reasons. As you guys all witnessed last year, I launched my own cosmetic line, which has been a dream of mine for soooo long! And it was a total flop. Ive never felt that kind of humiliation, embarrassment & disappointment in myself before. I totally crumbled. I didnt know how to address it, I wanted to crawl into a hole & disappear. Im still ashamed of the way I handled it, but Im learning! I cant control the past, but I can be better in the future. Thank you to everyone who has stayed with me for the past year. You are incredible!!!! I cant wait for you to see whats in store for 2020! Hill shared to her Instagram page.

The video garnered over 200,000 likes and a whole host of comments. Many of the comments were positive and praised Hill for her continued persistence. You really are so strong. I have admired and looked up to you for so many years. We all love and believe in you no matter what. You never give up, you always keep fighting. I cant wait to watch you grow more and more you will always have my support. Much love, one fan wrote on Instagram.

However, not everyone was sympathetic to Hill. Some former fans and critics felt she was playing the victim once again. What the too little too late fresh hell is this? An ad? Exploiting your failure? Novel idea. Are we supposed to feel sorry for her? I get what shes trying to do, but its not working. nope-still dont feel bad. Still handled it POORLY, one user wrote on Twitter.

Others took offense to the way she handled the Jaclyn Cosmetics lipstick controversy. 1 main reason I cant with #jaclynhill is the ghosting during lipstickgate. When theres a crisis w a product, you dont shut down social media & take a 30-day breather. Wanna be a CEO? Deal with the issue like a grown woman. Your supporters deserve more than your victim role, a critic tweeted out. Even though Hill has plenty of critics, she seems to have enough fans who are willing to support her and are excited to see what Jaclyn Cosmetics comes out within the coming months.

More:
Jaclyn Hill Reflects on Launching Jaclyn Cosmetics; 'It Was a Total Flop' - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

One morning in her freshman year, Jasmine Sun got a text from her mom: Dont you have class right now? Why are you in your dorm?

Her mom, Joan Chen, lives in the Seattle area and had noticed that Jasmines location cursor on Life360, the location-sharing service where family members can keep tabs on each other, was still in her dorm room at Stanford. Like many college students, Jasmine had overslept and had skipped lecture that daysomething she didn't necessarily want her mom to know.

My mom liked Life360. Jasmine groans at the memory from her current dorm room at Oxford University, where shes spending the semester. But I didnt have options about what I wanted to share.

Now her family has a way of sharing what they want to when they want to. In November, ahead of her winter quarter at Oxford, Jasmine gently suggested that her mom and teen sister, who still lives at home, both download an app that had just announced its launch on Twitter: Cocoon, founded by two former Facebook employees, Alex Cornell and Sachin Monga.

On paper, Cocoon sounds a lot like Facebook: it wants to connect people in virtual space. The difference is that it only wants to connect family members in small, distinct groups. Imagine a feed of updates from family membersyour brother announcing that hed landed on his work trip, a video of your niece learning to walk, a location cursor on a cousin backpacking through Europeall attached to a messaging capability that threads conversations, and all restricted to the members of your group (12 is the current maximum).

Its not necessarily about broadcasting highlights or crafting my identity or gaining status, Monga says. You occupy this space with just these people. Theres no network.

Cocoon is one of a new wave of apps aiming to change the way we interact on social media. These new platforms dont encourage you to accumulate likes or followers, or require that you diligently craft an online persona. Instead they want you to connect with a small, curated group of people, and thats it.

Apps like Dex, founded by Kevin Sun, often make use of an old business standby, customer relationship management (CRM) software. CRMs are reliable and bland, akin to an Excel spreadsheet: theyre used to log the name of a contact alongside other relevant information, like birthdays, quirks, or passions.

I was one of those people that had a spreadsheet for my friends and personal relationships, says Sun, the founder of Dex, a personal CRM that its website claims gives you relationship superpowers.

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Theres also Monaru, founded by three Irish students who felt unmoored when they left college and came to the US. It employs a virtual concierge to help members remember birthdays, sending reminders to buy gifts or call a relative. Patrick Finlay, a cofounder, tinkered with Excel and set up reminders to call his loved ones but found that intertwining his personal and professional lives was weird. Instead, for a fee, Monaru pings you every so often if the app notices you havent called a close friend or loved one.

But if Dex and Monaru are trying to redefine the CRM, Cocoon wants to redefine social networksand thats a much bigger task.

Unwanted overlapping

The current social-media model isnt quite right for family sharing. Different generations tend to congregate in different places: Facebook is Boomer paradise, Instagram appeals to Millennials, TikTok is GenZ central. (WhatsApp has helped bridge the generational divide, but its focus on messaging is limiting.)

Updating family about a vacation across platformsvia Instagram stories or on Facebook, for examplemight not always be appropriate. Do you really want your cubicle pal, your acquaintance from book club, and your high school frenemy to be looped in as well?

Social media treats everyonea friend, a family member, an acquaintancethe same, says Courtney Walsh, a lecturer in human development and family sciences at the University of Texas who consulted for Cocoon. I would argue that what we are doing is impersonal on social media.

Cocoon aims to change the way we share. It launched on Thanksgiving, with more than 10,000 users signing up from 163 countries that week, according to Monga. Everything you post stays within the group. The app is its own small world: a feed is the home screen, greeting users with updates since they last signed on; messaging capabilities include threads to help corral conversations. Photos, videos, and links are shared in a vault that all members can access.

We dont track time spent, which is a pretty common goal to optimize for, Cornell said. We dont care about that. The whole point is that you should be able to check in and want to connect with it. I want them [users] to have the warm fuzzy feeling, versus the crippling anxiety of logging on to Twitter.

Conor Muirhead, a software developer based in Washington state, first heard about Cocoon through a group chat at his workplace, and it piqued his interest. He is morally opposed to using Facebook products because of its data practices (although he begrudgingly uses WhatsApp as a way to keep in touch with his family, which includes his dad Jim, who lives in Canada). He and his wife also recently took in a foster daughter and wanted a safe place to share pictures with the wider family. We wouldnt share photos and videos [otherwise], he says. We totally want our family to see the cute things shes doing.

He was hesitant to download yet another app but was intrigued by Cocoons promise that it wouldnt sell his private information to a third party. While it is free for now, Monga and Cornell say they eventually intend to monetize the app by selling subscriptions, not ads.

They seemed to be making the pitch that they wanted this to be a private, protected, secure place, says Muirhead.

That privacy is what Jasmine and Joan were able to negotiate when she was at Stanford and now at Oxford. With the app, Jasmine is able to share her location by city instead of GPS coordinates.

I think it brings us closer together [to not share exact location], Jasmine says. It feels more equal.

Kate Eichhorn, an associate professor of culture and media at the New School and author of The End of Forgetting: Growing Up With Social Media, has a name for this second wave of post-Facebook social media: micro-networks.

To Eichhorn, its only natural that the past decades data missteps have created a desire for smaller, better-defined networks. In fact, young people already create their own version of this using current social-media apps.

Tweens and teens are very aware of reputation management, she says. They already are creating micro-communities on Facebook and Instagram. Theyre looking for other places to do that.

How the subscription-supported business structure is received could be key to the success of apps like Cocoon. Eichhorn said shed be interested to see how that plays out after almost two decades of free social media accessible to anyone willing to hand over personal data. People arent used to paying.

Are people concerned enough about privacy to actually let go of the idea that these platforms should be free? she says. Will they subscribe to gain their privacy back?

The other big question is: Does it work? Does using an app actually make you feel closer to your family?

Anecdotally, both families I spoke to have noticed that the type of content posted on the app is more open and honest than the stuff posted to Instagram or Facebook.

Jasmine, for example, noted that she could post a hasty, even not-so-clear shot and feel fine about uploading it in a way she wouldnt with Instagram. There are norms [on Instagram], she tells me, saying she uses a finsta (a fake Instagram account) sometimes for closer friends.

Trust breeds authenticity, says Miriam Kirmayer, a clinical psychologist and friendship expert. Its much easier to share the less curated parts of our lives when we feel accepted for who we really are and are less fearful of perceived judgment or rejection.

Cocoon is a new app with a fairly small set of users, and that means bugs. The messaging isnt always smooth, either: chat defaults to photos over text, which made it annoying to use for the Muirhead family during dad Jims recent medical emergency. The family got so frustrated and annoyed by the double-tapping that they just switched over to WhatsApp.

Still, such micro-networks and the control they offer might redefine how we think about and use social media in the next decade, whether it is Cocoon or another app that follows in its wake.

In the tech world, people crash and burn quickly, but the idea of these controlled micro-communities is something that will persist, Eichhorn says.

Excerpt from:
Why private micro-networks could be the future of how we connect - MIT Technology Review