Back

News Coverage and Drug Shortages during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Catillon, M.; Majumder, M. S.; Manzi, S. F.; Mandl, K. D.

2020-10-14 health informatics
10.1101/2020.10.12.20211656 medRxiv
Show abstract

Several drugs repurposed as COVID-19 treatment are in short supply. We collect data from MediaCloud and Google Health Trends about eight drugs proposed for repurposing as COVID-19 treatments and reported to be in shortage by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from January 1, 2020 through June 30, 2020. We find that news media coverage could have contributed to shortages due to hoarding by individuals and stockpiling by institutions, and that search trends appear to accurately discriminate between individual hoarding and institutional stockpiling.

Matching journals

The top 10 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.