Who writes HantaCount

Editorial standards

• Every count on the dashboard maps to a primary source — WHO Disease Outbreak News, ECDC threat assessments, or a national ministry of health communiqué. We do not aggregate from social media or other trackers.
• Numbers move only after human review. The cron worker stages changes; an editor approves them. Mistakes are corrected publicly with a dated correction note.
• Long-form explainers are written by journalists with healthcare or epidemiology backgrounds and reviewed by a licensed physician before publication. See our medical reviewer.
• We disclose any conflict of interest at the top of any article where one applies. Currently: none.
• We are independent. No funding from pharma, governments, or NGOs. No ads, no affiliate links, no paywalls — ever.

Source policy

We use a tiered source model:

1. Tier 1 — counted: WHO DON, ECDC CDTR, US CDC HAN, MoH official statements, hospital communiqués with named spokespersons. Anything in this tier moves the dashboard.
2. Tier 2 — referenced: ProMED, Reuters, AP, STAT News, peer-reviewed pre-prints. We quote and link, but we wait for Tier 1 confirmation before changing counts.
3. Tier 3 — context only: Tabloids, social media, anonymous sources. Never used as a count source; occasionally cited if a public figure speaks publicly and the statement is itself the news.

Authors