Reuters was ahead with a number of key news stories on coronavirus over the past week, from China ramping up spending to revive its economy to elite hackers targeting the WHO to university students on Spring Break in Florida.
A Reuters exclusive late last week reported that China was set to unleash trillions of yuan of fiscal stimulus to revive an economy expected to shrink for the first time in four decades amid the coronavirus pandemic, while a planned growth target is likely to be cut. According to Reuters sources, the ramped-up spending will aim to spur infrastructure investment, backed by as much as 2.8 trillion yuan of local government special bonds, and the national budget deficit ratio could rise to record levels. Beijing is also likely to have to lower its economic growth target for 2020 given the prolonged impact of the pandemic.
On Monday, Reuters exclusively reported that elite hackers tried to break into the World Health Organization earlier this month, part of what a senior agency official said was a more than two-fold increase in cyberattacks. WHO Chief Information Security Officer Flavio Aggio said the identity of the hackers was unclear, but the effort was unsuccessful. He warned that hacking attempts against the agency and its partners have soared as they battle to contain the coronavirus, which has killed more than 15,000 worldwide.
Last week, Reuters video coverage of young adults partying in Miami during Spring Break went viral, with more than 50 million times views across all of Reuters customers’ sites, more than a million views on Reuters.com and tens of millions of views across social media. Reuters journalists were originally sent to cover the presidential primaries in Florida, but the delay in primaries across the country sparked a new story on Spring Breakers.
Follow the latest on Reuters coverage of coronavirus here.
[Reuters PR Blog Post]
Media contact:
Heather Carpenter
heather.carpenter @thomsonreuters.com
