Iceland's Office COVID-19 Data Site Still Showing Poor Coordination In Different Languages

Iceland’s Office COVID-19 Data Site Still Showing Poor Coordination In Different Languages

Published August 6, 2020

Andie Sophia Fontaine
Photo by
Art Bicnick

The official site for pertinent data on the corona virus in Iceland, covid.is, is still showing marked inconsistency in accuracy of data across different languages.

In screenshots taken at about 11:00 this morning of the data page for the site, the Grapevine noted marked discrepancies between the information given in Icelandic, English and Polish, respectively:

As we have noted before, Icelandic is the most diligently updated, followed by English, and then other languages. At the time these screenshots were taken, the Polish data had not been updated since the weekend.

Actual data points are not the only things that the site is not updating quickly enough in other languages. As Sólveig Anna Jónsdóttir, the director of the labour union Efling, has pointed out, information regarding pertinent regulations and restrictions have also been slow to be updated in other languages, prompting the union to take it upon themselves to translate the new guidelines into Polish for their workers.

“It is unacceptable that people are encouraged to go to covid.is to find information, but the information is wrong in languages other than Icelandic,” she said in an open letter, RÚV reports. “The government has not taken care of what ought to be especially simple—ensuring that this information is updated in more languages.”

For this reason, we would advise readers to continue checking covid.is in their native language, but then compare what they see on that page to the same page in Icelandic for any difference in numbers—that, or enter the Icelandic language page into Google Translate—to ensure that the information they are getting is up to date. As always, Grapevine will continue to report based on Icelandic sources to keep you updated.

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