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Medicine Social Networks

Tinder Has Become A News Service About Coronavirus (buzzfeed.com) 36

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
As COVID-19 spreads rapidly around the world, people are eager to keep up with developments at its epicentre in Wuhan, China. But government censorship, partisan media and misinformation have led many to feel the public isn't seeing a full picture of life in a city on lockdown. So some have developed a creative solution to bypass the gatekeepers and go straight to the source: Tinder. From a report: Most Tinder users use the app to match with people nearby, for obvious reasons. But the world's most used dating app has a premium feature, Passport, that allows a user with Tinder Plus or Tinder Gold memberships to choose to swipe in any location -- like, say, Wuhan -- no matter where they are. And despite Tinder being banned in China, users say they're having luck setting their location to Wuhan, allowing them to match with and chat to residents to hear their perspective on the global story. US-based Twitter user @drethelin tweeted "Setting my tinder to Wuhan so I can get the real scoop on what's going on" on Jan. 28 -- just before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 was a public health emergency.
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Tinder Has Become A News Service About Coronavirus More

Tinder Has Become A News Service About Coronavirus

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  • [U]sers say they're having luck setting their location to Wuhan, allowing them to match with and chat to residents to hear their perspective on the global story.

    Sounds like some western Tinder users are going to get catfished by a bunch of Wuhan sob stories.

  • until it was reported on Slashdot and Buzzfeed that it could be used to bypass censors.

  • In a situation involving a communicable disease I'd avoid anyone paying for Tinder Gold or Tinder Plus like the proverbial plague.

    Just sayin'.

  • I'm just trying to spread some better info about the hyped up virus. Deathrate isn't 3 or 4%. It is probably .01% or .02% as evidenced by Germany's numbers.

    https://news.yahoo.com/experts... [yahoo.com]

    "Germany has confirmed more than 1,100 cases of the new coronavirus but â" so far â" just two deaths, far fewer than other European countries with a similar number of reported infections.

    Experts said Monday that rapid testing as the outbreak unfolded meant Germany has probably diagnosed a much larger proportion

    • Damn it... so math fail. Where's the edit button when you need one:
      2/1100 =0.0018 translates to 0.18%. SORRY!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Zocalo ( 252965 )
        Further mail fail: you don't calculate mortality rate from cases vs. deaths. A better approach is to calculate it from those who recover vs. those who die since those who are actively suffering from the disease could still go either way. It's actually a bit more complex than that though, let alone if if you start including demographics as that requires much larger sample sizes to narrow the error margins. e.g. Italy's mortality rate is likely to be so high because of the heavy skew towards an older - and

        • But I want a simple number to make all my decisions.
          Just like how computers have not had a speed increase in nearly 20 years as they all seem to be around 2ghz clock speed.

           

    • It also means that they're diagnosing it earlier, before bad outcomes. Even at 0.18%, it still has the potential to be way more deadly than the flu in the US this season. Assuming almost literally everyone will probably get it - the infection rate is astronomically higher than flu.

      However, the no country has perfectly even distribution. In the US, it's working it's way through one nursing home in Washington state. Cruise ships trend older too. It's possible that Germany has a higher percentage of childr

    • So what happens when you add the rest of the countries in instead of just cherry picking the one with the lowest number?

    • Out of the 1281 cases Germany has identified at last check, it has 20 it considers resolved - either by restored to health or by death. That's a 10 percent death rate. The actual death rate will be somewhere between .15 percent (2/1281) and 10 percent (2/20) in all likelihood. But the reality is that you can only compute a true fatality rate out of case resolutions. Picking countries that are not quick to post recoveries (as there seems to be some remission risk) to conclude there is a low death rate is wro

  • A news service that only works for good looking people.
  • I'm still not clear on whether, once infected, people have immunity in the near term. Maybe tinder will enable people who cannot be re-infected to date, or at least link hands between respirators.
  • Companies like Google, MS, Apple, Facebook, Tinder, etc have enough tracking data to know who has been in contact with whomever, where they travelled, etc to know if you've been exposed to the virus...but giving up this data would be a crazy violation of our privacy, so would it be worth it?

    • If Google, MS, Apple, FB, Tinger all have tthe information already, you've already "given up privacy" and submitted to a "crazy violation of our privacy".

  • SWM seeking... (Score:3)

    by LatencyKills ( 1213908 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @11:05AM (#59815086)
    COVID-19 negative F for long online conversations until the lockdown is lifted. Daddy issues, herpes positive OK.

  • So what you're saying is... (Score:3)

    by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @11:24AM (#59815126) Journal

    ... we now have an entirely new way to get f#&%ed on Tinder?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      One of the disadvantages of an authoritarian regime's ability to shape the news is that it itself doesn't hear the news. The lack of need to respond to information outside the normal channels probably delayed China's response to this by a month, requiring harsh and drastic action when they were finally forced to confront this.

      Crowd sourced information is a double edged sword. It is unreliable, but any single source of information is unreliable.

    • This might be interesting to hear what a single person has to say, but do not call it news. It is at most opinions.

      Fox News made it work.

  • A person might be sick of something else and imagine they have the virus. or they might blame their five pack a day dad's death on the virus. This is pooling ignorance, China is reporting their cases and deaths, and they lead both categories in the cases / million populace

    • This is pooling ignorance, China is reporting their cases and deaths, and they lead both categories in the cases / million populace

      Speaking of ignorance. At the time of posting Italy, South Korea, Iran, Bahrain and Switzerland [worldometers.info] all have more cases per million than China.
      Norway, Denmark, Spain and Sweden likely will soon as well.

      • oh, so the scores changed in last few days. that's nice.

        Doesn't change what I said about peoples' personal views being a mere pooling of ignorance

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      China is reporting some random numbers that they think will make the government look better.

      No official numbers about anything in China can be trusted. That's unfortunate, but that's the reality of fascist dictatorships.

  • Slashdot Has Become A News Service About Coronavirus.

  • I thought Tinder was how you got the actual virus...

  • Or you could just install a GPS-spoofing app (for development purposes...) and skip the premium fees.

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