Reuters' chronology of the early days of the US Government's response to Covid-19 includes this fascinating detail: "The [NSC] was first notified of the outbreak on the morning of Dec. 31, according to one of the government officials involved, when an NSC official was forwarded an email from a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) attache in Beijing that had been sent to senior HHS officials the night before. The “pop-a-flare” notice, as it is known, described strange cases of pneumonia that could not be definitively traced to seasonal flu, said the government official, who saw the message. The email said the Chinese would soon be notifying the World Health Organization, the official said."

The NSC thus became aware of the outbreak on December 31st, which interestingly, is the same date BlueDot Global sent out their first global alert based on their models' analyses of GDELT's data streams.

In short, using GDELT's data, BlueDot sent out an alert the same day the NSC became aware of the outbreak. That's a pretty incredible early warning story stand stands testament to GDELT's global realtime monitoring and translation infrastructure that came out of the 2014 Ebola outbreak.