The spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. passed an inflection point in the last 2 weeks. The number of articles published about the global pandemic went from hundreds a day to a weekday average of roughly 1,400 articles. Spending endless hours reading COVID-19 updates quickly loses its marginal utility and can drive our underlying levels of anxiety, so knowing where to go for the best coverage is essential. Early on in the crisis, we looked at which outlets had the most credible stories; this week, we wanted to see which specific journalists you can rely on for credible, timely information—real updates on the global pandemic that actually matter.

The majority of the highly-rated authors that make this content are experts in health and science and have demonstrated histories of covering such topics. They have the credentials to match, including PhDs, decades of experience writing about communicable diseases, and a finger on the pulse of many interrelated health and science issues. These are the people from whom you should get your COVID-19 updates.

How It Works Our analysis scored 31,000 articles from January 1 to March 21 related to COVID-19 from over 400 U.S. outlets and over 6,000 authors to identify the most credible journalism based on a few simple metrics: the author’s topical expertise, the publishing site’s historical reputation, evidence cited in the article, and the writing tone. See our How It Works page for more information on how we grade article credibility. For this dataset, we only included individuals who published at least 5 articles. We did not include articles with multiple authors since that would complicate attribution, and it should be noted that the algorithm cannot always assess certain pages. This information can be seen firsthand using our browser extension, which instantly assesses the above metrics. This data is what feeds this analysis, as well as The Factual’s daily newsletter.

Our Top 10

For Your Twitter Feed

These individuals don’t just produce top journalism, some of them share great articles on Twitter as well. For those of you who like up-to-the-minute news on COVID-19 and are on Twitter, we rated the credibility of articles in each reporter's Twitter feed and found the following 5 to consistently have highly-rated articles: Jessica MacDonald (@jjmcdona), Julia Belluz (@juliaoftoronto), Beth Mole (@BethMarieMole), Megan Molteni (@MeganMolteni), and Antonio Regalado (@antonioregalado). For ease of use, we’ve also created a Twitter list to follow these great journalists in one place.