Jonathan Oppenheim Follow @postquantum

Twitter accounts to follow on Covid-19

There are suddenly a lot of COVID-19 experts on Twitter! And although it can be difficult to identify experts, finding out who the experts think are experts is easier. With Twitter analytics assistance from Kelly Truelove I've created a list of scientists, journalists and organisations with expertise relating to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic who are themselves highly followed by experts.

The results can be found in the table below. It includes epidemiologists, virologists, medical professionals, data scientists, journalists, organisations and even a few politicians. For many, it may be more helpful to follow journalists, or working scientists, so I've collected the top 15 journalists, top scientists, and top directors and organisations in this thread A twitter list of 100 experts who are themselves followed by large numbers of experts can be found under my twitter account here. These are experts who are highly followed by their peers The table below is ordered by how many twitter followers (N) an account has from that list of 100 experts. For comparison, the list from March 2020 is available here, and the list from May 8th 2020 is here.

Fineprint: These lists are only a rough guide to help people find reliable information about COVID-19. The ordering below, and the list of 100 COVID-19 experts should not be taken as any kind of definitive ranking. An account may be followed because it's influential, not necessarily because it's trusted. The number of peer followers a scientist has is likely to reflect how well, and how much they communicate on twitter, not only their scientific reputation. This list is merely one way to help discover reliable information, rather than a verified list of trusted sources. Using peer followers to find information can also result in finding echo-chambers of tightly knit communities, so using a diversity of methods for finding information is important. In this case, I've generally found this list to reflect the diversity of opinion among experts that I see elsewhere, but this may not always be the case. The list and it's ordering will also depend on the original raw list of 300+ COVID-19 accounts (found here). I tried to include a broad selection of experts from around the world, but no doubt there are likely groups of experts who are missing (I am no expert). We welcome input. Kelly ran a script on the raw list to find out which twitter accounts are the most followed by members of the raw list. We then used the top followed scientists on this list to create a new raw list of twitter experts, and iterated this a few times. Kelly and I hope you find the table and twitter list useful. We don't have the capacity to keep the list updated often, but we will work to improve it, so feel free to tweet or email your suggestions. We can then update the raw list, which then gets used to generate the list of 100 experts. The process is fairly robust against small changes.