How this tracker works.

TRP is an independent editorial tracker focused on the Irkutsk investigation. It is not an official public-health service or comprehensive global surveillance system.

What the categories mean

Confirmed and suspected cases are separate. Observation and quarantine describe precautionary measures, not diagnoses. A death of undetermined cause is not a confirmed plague death. Official statements retain attribution; media reports do not become independently verified findings.

Collection and review

Multilingual news discovery checks GDELT’s open headline index, including major and smaller indexed publishers. There is no claim to cover every outlet or story. Russian and Chinese headlines, and supported other languages, are automatically translated into English with the original retained. Translations may contain errors and do not verify a report. Full articles remain on the publisher’s website.

Automatic contextual images are retrieved from a licence-checked Wikimedia Commons catalogue and credited. They illustrate the subject and are not photographs of a reported case. Translation models: Helsinki-NLP OPUS-MT, converted for ONNX by Xenova.

A durable background worker checks permitted official pages and feeds at the intervals shown on Sources. GDELT supplies discovery metadata, not verification or republication rights. URL and title deduplication group related coverage without counting it as independent corroboration. Changed metadata enters the review queue.

Publication time, discovery time, last successful check and editorial publication time are separate. An active browser connection does not prove fresh reporting. Upstream delay, the collection interval and review all affect latency.

Metrics and maps

Every observation has evidence, authority, scope and an as-of date. Unknown stays unknown. Values from different scopes or dates are not added. Approximate locations are labelled; no patient addresses are mapped. Historical replay uses what had been published by the selected date and never generates alerts.

Corrections

Editors preserve the earlier observation and publish a versioned correction with a reason and audit record. Material corrections are labelled in the public feed and can notify affected subscribers. Report an error through the contact form with the original source and the proposed correction.

Coverage limits

Sources may be delayed, incomplete, inaccessible or contradictory. Failed checks retain the last good data and are displayed publicly. The Russia-related search does not cover every language or all global incidents. No current risk level is inferred from missing data.