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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).

microsoft bing coronavirus tracker

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?

 

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

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