Communities around the nation are learning a new rule for the fall semester: when college students return to campus, Covid-19 cases surge.

The case increases in counties where students have returned to campus are highly concerning but not yet driving increased deaths or symptoms based on a review of press reports, public data, and Google Trends symptom searches.

Cases

Below in four charts from Covid Act Now, correlations exist between increases in new cases and infection rate and the dates when students return to the campuses of The Ohio State University, Penn State University, Cornell University and Texas A&M University.

Chart 1: Penn State University is in Centre County, PA. Students began arriving back on campus on August 17th, a week before new cases surged.

Chart 2: Cornell University and Ithaca College are in Tompkins County, NY. Cornell residence halls re-opened on August 23rd, when infection rate spiked.

Arguments against taking action on climate change were far more likely to get coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or USA Today based on new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Rachel Wetts, the paper’s author and an assistant professor at Brown University, asked a crucial question:

Whose voices are most likely to receive news coverage in the US debate about climate change?

To find an answer, she performed an analysis of 1,768 press releases and resultant coverage in the nation’s three largest newspapers by circulation, the aforementioned Wall Street Journal, USA…

Nationally, Google Search interest in the 2020 Democratic candidates remained mostly similar to last week, while the candidates begin grappling with a changed primary calendar and a growing field of candidates.

Beto: A Diminishing Lead Remains

Over the last 7 days, O’Rourke had substantially more interest than the field — but that interest quickly diminished over the course of the week. This is the same trend other Democrats have experienced in the weeks following their campaign announcements.

Surprising nobody who reads the news, over the last week, former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s campaign announcement drove intense Google search interest.

That said, Beto’s announcement was not the only big shake-up this week in the Top 5 candidates in the Google Primary: two candidates you may not have even hard of joined the top tier this week.

Over the long term, it remains to be seen which candidates are able to grow and sustain interest in their candidacies in the face of Trump’s ongoing spectacle. …

Whether you look at the last 12 months or the last 7 days, Senator Bernie Sanders is drawing more search interest in Iowa than the other top 3 announced Democratic presidential primary contenders.

However, when you zero-in on the last 90 days of data, there is much greater party between Harris, Sanders and Warren in Iowa’s search traffic.

For this article, we are looking only at Google Trends in Iowa with those three candidates plus former Vice-President Joe Biden and former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke.

Taking a big picture view, Sanders advantage seems to be growing in the freshest data…

A couple weeks ago, I looked at search interest in each Democrat’s announcement as compared to the same day’s interest in Donald Trump.

This morning, I pulled the last seven days of data and again used interest in Trump as a baseline, comparing it to interest in Sanders, Harris, Warren, and Booker.

Bernie Broke Through Twice

In his CNN Town Hall (Feb 25) and formal announcement speech (Mar 2), Sanders broke through Trump’s index line, while no other Democrat broke through at all.

This continues Sanders run of overall search interest strength versus the rest of the Democratic field.

The…

Over the last seven days, Senator Bernie Sanders drove more Google search interest than his competitors for the Democratic nomination for President.

Sanders’ competitors in the Top 5 group of announced candidates are Senators Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker along with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. This Top 5 group of announced candidates were selected by campaign announcement moment interest.

In addition to the Top 5 analysis here, I’ve also gone through Google Trends on unannounced candidates in the past week, which show growing interest in Joe Biden and Beto O’Rourke’s candidacies.

Top 5: Sanders is clearly ahead (#BernieThanksCNN)

As…

This is the 4th post in a series of analyses of Google Trends data from the early part of the 2020 Democratic primary campaign. Find previous pieces here: Part 1 Part 2 and Part 3.

Looking at Google Trends from the last month alongside U.S. Census estimates on percentage of white, non-hispanic population shows a correlation between diversity of a state and the relative interest in the two early frontrunners for the Democratic nomination: Senators Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders.

The chart below shows this correlation and is sorted to show states where interest in Harris is relatively higher at…