Shane Hastings

@COVID19DataIE in the media

It's been a little over three months since I started the @COVID19DataIE Twitter account, a bot which automatically posts the latest testing and vaccination data straight from the Government's GeoHive Dashboard.  The original intention of this account was to supplement my other COVID-19 page here, as I figured that turning on alerts for a Twitter feed was a much easier way to go about implementing notification alerts rather than using browser based notifications (which are annoying anyway).

 

The infamous ‘backlog’ following the Christmas period catipulted the page's following into the fore as for a few short days the only reliable data on the evolving situation was through the laboratory testing figures. Fairly convenient timing setting up an easily sharable alert on a widely used social media platform, eh?

 

Anyway, to date the account has ~33K followers with a fairly interactive base engaging on most tweets.  Over the period 01/01/2021 to 01/04/2021 the account's tweets have had 23.8 million impressions on Twitter - which is fairly incredible. 

 

In mid-February I added daily vaccination updates to the feed once the GeoHive dashboard began providing the data on a regular basis. This prompted another wave of followers to the account and more attention from politicians and journalists. 

 

On this page I will be attempting to keep a record of where the account's tweets are shared, mentioned, embedded or otherwise by news outlets and politicians. Not for any reason in particular, but admittedly is is pretty cool to see something I made get shared in so many places!

 

 

thejournal.ie

April 29th	LIVE: HSE says up to 240k doses to be administered next week as Cabinet to finalise roadmap out of lockdown (10:41am)
April 5th	Ireland hits new daily vaccine high while number of people in hospital with Covid-19 inches up
April 5th	Ireland administers record number of vaccines for second day in a row
March 29th	Positivity rate running at 3% as 7,500 people attend walk-in Covid-19 test centres.

RTÉ News

March 28th	Dept of Health notified of 13 deaths, 604 new cases
February 23rd	As it happened: Level 5 restrictions here until April 5th
January 6th	As it happened: Cabinet announced tighter restrictions

JOE.ie

April 5th

Ireland administered a record number of Covid-19 vaccines last Friday

Spin Southwest / Spin1038

March 25th	Ireland To Receive 1million Doses Of Vaccine Before May
March 29th	Covid-19: One Additional Death And 539 New Cases
March 30th	Covid-19: 14 Additional Deaths And 368 New Cases
March 31st	Covid-19: 6 Additional Deaths And 411 New Cases

LMFM

February 27th	Coronavirus UPDATE: 738 new cases of COVID confirmed and 13 additional deaths reports
February 20th	Coronavirus UPDATE: A further 26 deaths and 988 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed

Sky News

March 15th

COVID-19: Oxford vaccine chief assures AstraZeneca jab is safe - as more nations suspend use over clotting concerns

Roscommon Herald

April 8th

COVID SEVEN-DAY POSITIVITY FALLS BELOW 3 PER CENT FOR FIRST TIME THIS YEAR

Buzz.ie

April 9th

Extra walk-in COVID-19 testing sites to open this weekend

Newstalk

April 10th

'Light shining a little brighter' as COVID-19 hospitalisations continue to fall

Twitter

Due to the nature of Twitter, it's fairly hard to go back and find these so this is far from an exhaustive list. You get the idea, though.

Account	Date	Link
@LeoVaradkar	April 8th	Source
	April 5th	Source
	March 30th	Source
	March 27th	Source
	February 19th	Source
@SimonHarrisTD	April 5th	Source
	April 4th	Source
	March 30th	Source
	March 6th	RT - Source
	March 2nd	RT - Source
	February 25th	RT - Source
	February 23rd	RT - Source
@simoncoveney	March 30th	Source

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Posted on Monday, April 5th 2021 by @ShaneHastingsIE

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