Microsoft launches its Bing Coronavirus Tracker
Keeping track of Coranavirus news can be quite the time-consuming process and a burden as well considering that you need to find reliable information.
Microsoft just launched its Coronavirus tracker on Bing. COVID-19 Tracker provides statistics and information about the spread of the virus in the world.
The startpage lists the total confirmed cases, cases by country, and each of these divided into active, recovered and fatal cases. There is also a map which highlights how individual regions are impacted by the virus.
Microsoft is pulling data from several sources including CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), WHO (World Health Organization), and ECDC (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control).
A click on a country lists active, recovered and fatal cases for that country. More interesting is the news section that provides a chronological list of news bits for the selected region.
If you select Italy, one of the countries hit the hardest by the virus at the time of writing, you find a list of news pieces that you may find useful. The news section is powered by Bing News; I saw German and English news articles listed by Bing and the filtering seemed to work fairly well. Chance is that you may get different languages based on the language settings of your computer.
There is also a video section below the news part, powered by Bing Video, with videos about the virus and the selected country.
One thing that is missing is an option to receive updates. The Coronavirus tracker site does not provide options to receive news updates, e.g. by email, RSS, or messaging service. What you can do, however, is use the Bing News or Bing Video RSS option.
All you need to do is append &format=rss to the URL, e.g. turn https://www.bing.com/news/search?q=coronavirus%20Italy to https://www.bing.com/news/search?q=coronavirus%20Italy&format=rss to get a RSS feed of the filtered news. You may then subscribe to the news in a RSS feed reader, e.g. QuiteRSS or the browser extension Smart RSS Reader, or any other program, extension or service, to receive updates as they become available.
Now You: how do you keep track of the virus and news?
Martin, I would appreciate that you do not censor this post, as it’s informative writing.
Onur, there is a misleading statement “[…] GIFs are animated images …”. No, obviously you don’t seem to have take much notice of what you were told back in March regarding; Graphics Interchange Format (GIF).
For example, https://www.ghacks.net/2023/03/31/whats-gif-explanation-and-how-to-use-it/#comment-4562919 (if you had read my replies within that thread, you might have learnt something useful). I even mentioned, “GIF intrinsically supports animated images (GIF89a)”.
You linked to said article, [Related: …] within this article, but have somehow failed to take onboard what support you were given by several more knowledgeable people.
If you used AI to help write this article, it has failed miserably.
AI is stupid, and it will not get any better if we really know how this all works. Prove me wrong.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IYl1sTIOHI
Martin, [#comment-4569908] is only meant to be in: [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/07/09/how-to-send-gifs-on-iphone-two-different-ways/]. Whereas it appears duplicated in several recent random low-quality non relevant articles.
Obviously it [#comment-4569908] was posted: 9 July 2023. Long before this thread even existed… your database is falling over. Those comments are supposed to have unique ID values. It shouldn’t be possible to duplicate the post ID, if the database had referential integrity.
Don’t tell me!
Ghacks wants the state to step in for STATE-MANDATED associations to save jobs!!!
Bring in the dictatorship!!!
And screw Rreedom of Association – too radical for Ghacks maybe
GateKeeper ?
That’s called “appointing” businesses to do the state’s dirty work!!!!!
But the article says itself that those appointed were not happy – implying they had not choice!!!!!!
@The Dark Lady,
@KeZa,
@Database failure,
@Howard Pearce,
@Howard Allan Pearce,
Note: I replaced the quoted URI scheme: https:// with “>>” and posted.
The current ghacks.net is owned by “Softonic International S.A.” (sold by Martin in October 2019), and due to the fate of M&A, ghacks.net has changed in quality.
>> ghacks.net/2023/09/02/microsoft-is-removing-wordpad-from-windows/#comment-4573130
Many Authors of bloggers and advertisers certified by Softonic have joined the site, and the site is full of articles aimed at advertising and clickbait.
>> ghacks.net/2023/08/31/in-windows-11-the-line-between-legitimate-and-adware-becomes-increasingly-blurred/#comment-4573117
As it stands, except for articles by Martin Brinkmann, Mike Turcotte, and Ashwin, they are low quality, unhelpful, and even vicious. It is better not to read those articles.
How to display only articles by a specific author:
Added line to My filters in uBlock Origin: ghacks.net##.hentry,.home-posts,.home-category-post:not(:has-text(/Martin Brinkmann|Mike Turcotte|Ashwin/))
>> ghacks.net/2023/09/01/windows-11-development-overview-of-the-august-2023-changes/#comment-4573033
By the way, if you use an RSS reader, you can track exactly where your comments are (I’m an iPad user, so I use “Feedly Classic”, but for Windows I prefer the desktop app “RSS Guard”).
RSS Guard: Feed reader which supports RSS/ATOM/JSON and many web-based feed services.
>> github.com/martinrotter/rssguard#readme
We all live in digital surveillance glass houses under scrutiny of evil people because of people like Musk. It’s only fair that he takes his turn.
“Operating systems will be required to let the user choose the browser, virtual assistant and search engine of their choice. Microsoft cannot force users to use Bing or Edge. Apple will have to open up its iOS operating system to allow third-party app stores, aka allow sideloading of apps. Google, on the other hand, will need to provide users with the ability to uninstall preloaded apps (bloatware) from Android devices. Online services will need to allow users to unsubscribe from their platform easily. Gatekeepers need to provide interoperability with third-parties that offer similar services.”
Wonderful ! Let’s hope they’ll comply with that law more than they are doing with the GDPR.