COVID-19 Topic Page
When the World Health Organization pronounced COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11 2020, there were more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries, and 4,291 people had lost their lives.
At time of writing, those numbers had topped 1,350,000 cases in 184 countries, with almost 75,000 deaths. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which manages ReliefWeb, launched the Global Humanitarian Response Plan on 23 March 2020, together with humanitarian partners.
Recognising that timely and reliable information is key in the battle to overcome the pandemic, and to help our humanitarian audience at this crucial time, ReliefWeb has created a Topic page dedicated solely to all the relevant UN, INGO, NGO and government appeals, reports, maps, infographics, and news surrounding the coronavirus. We are also adding useful links dedicated to COVID-19 information by our partners as they come on-line, and hope to make navigating an array of important information as easy as possible in coming days. We look forward to your feedback.
Latest improvements to the new responsive ReliefWeb site
At the same time, we have been taking note of your feedback on the new, responsive site, which we launched as the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with the intention of making continuous improvements with user feedback.
Most notable is the Home Page, which, in light of the severity of the COVID-19 crisis, now features a banner and link to the new Topic page at the top. Links to New Disasters and Alerts, the Blog section and Most Read reports have also been moved up, which has resulted in a slight reshuffle of the Headlines on the left-hand-side of the page. They have not been downgraded in importance, however, and our editors take great care to highlight the most newsworthy and relevant articles in this section every day.
In addition, in answer to some confusion over whether content was listed according to the original publication date or the posting date, we are now displaying both dates when content was posted to ReliefWeb and originally published by the authoring organization. The content is listed in order of the date posted to ReliefWeb. The content (node) page itself now displays “posted” and “originally published” dates bundled together.
We have also switched the default listing of countries back to list all countries and territories that ReliefWeb covers, given the global nature of the COVID-19 emergency, so that responders can find relevant information more easily.
As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions so please do contact us.