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COVID-19 mentions
on the NYTimes front page

Number of mentions
0 mentions
between 0 - 10
between 10 - 20
between 20 - 30
more than 30 mentions
🔗 click on square to open PDF of NYTimes front page

About

I created this site to track coverage of COVID-19 and pinpoint when the pandemic stopped being frontpage news. Specifically, when would we have three consecutive days when COVID-19 was not mentioned on the frontpage? This site uses a script that downloads a PDF of the New York Times front page and looks for the following keywords: corona, covid, virus, pandemic, wuhan.

Conclusion

This project is complete. The data will not be updated after September 2022. According to this data, COVID-19-related news started appearing on the frontpage on January 21, 2020.

It took 353 days after the first mention for there to be no mention of COVID-19 on the front page. But the streak did not last for more than two days. On the first two-day break, the headlines that took precedence were:

  • January 7th 2021 - Trump Incites Mob
  • January 8th 2021 - Calls Grow To Remove Trump As U.S. Officials Head for Exit

After 833 days, we had 3 consecutive days. The headlines that took precedence were:

  • May 3, 2022 - Leaked Draft Shows Court Would Topple Roe v. Wade
  • May 4, 2022 - Draft Abortion Ruling Signals Seismic Political Shift
  • May 5, 2022 - Leak Intensifies View That Court Is Too Political

Key Dates

You can download a PDF of the frontpage by clicking on the tiles above. Disclaimer: Other than a cursory review, I did not manually validate the results. If you spot any problems, submit an issue on Github.

For orientation, I created a timeline of key events. Source

  • December 6, 2019 - The first documented COVID-19 hospital admission.1
  • January 9, 2020 - WHO reported that Chinese authorities determined that the outbreak is caused by a novel coronavirus.2
  • January 21, 2020— CDC Confirms First US Coronavirus Case.
  • March 19, 2020 — California Issues Statewide Stay-at-Home Order
  • July 22, 2020 — HHS, DOD Announce Vaccine Distribution Agreement With Pfizer and BioNTech
  • June 10, 2020 — US COVID-19 Cases Reach 2 Million
  • August 3, 2020 — New US Pandemic Phase; US to Pay Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline $2B for Vaccine
  • September 25, 2020 — Midwest States See Increase in COVID-19 Cases
  • September 28, 2020 — Global COVID-19 Deaths Surpass 1 Million
  • October 2, 2020 — Trump, First Lady Test Positive for COVID-19; Trump Enters Hospital
  • October 19, 2020 — Global Cases Top 40 Million
  • February 19, 2021 - Pfizer/BioNTech First Dose Effective in Real-World Data
  • February 26, 2021 - 50 Million COVID-19 Vaccine Doses Administered
  • March 1, 2021 - J&J Vaccine Rollout Begins
  • March 19, 2021 - United States Administers 100 Millionth Vaccine
  • August 3, 2021 - 70% of US Vaccinated
  • November 19, 2021 - FDA Approves COVID-19 Boosters for All Adults
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