Backwoods is a record of what is known, kept calm on purpose.

The three words

Confirmed means an official body said it on the record: a government, a ministry, a military, a UN agency, a regulator. Reported means a named outlet reported it and no official has confirmed it. Denied means an official said it is not so. All three stay on the page. A denial is part of the record, not a reason to drop the report it answers.

Where it touches home

Backwoods is kept from the Virginia backwoods. Each ledger carries a short section on where the story reaches a reader in the United States, in the words of the agencies that say so: a risk line from the CDC, a fuel price from the EIA, a travel advisory from the State Department. Never a guess.

The voice

• Calm, plain, present tense. No exclamation marks, no countdowns, no words chosen to frighten.
• The de-alarming facts are not spin, they are the record. If a disease is treatable, the page says so, with the authority page it rests on.
• Nobody is quoted from social media. Nobody is named for being frightened. The dead are named only as the wire services named them.
• Every line links to the document it rests on. A line that cannot be sourced does not go on the page.
• Every date is the document’s own, in UTC. The page never reads your clock.
• Every number on the page is counted from the record by the build, never typed.
• No JavaScript. Nothing on the page moves, tracks or asks.

States

• Active a sourced development in the last 72 hours.
• Settling the authority of record says the acute phase is over; questions stay open.
• Quiet no sourced development for a week.
• Closed the authority of record has closed it.

A state moves only when a document moves it. A signal on the watch earns a ledger when three different authorities have spoken on the record.

Domains

• Health: the plain facts come first from the health authorities.
• Conflict: the plain facts come first from the governments, militaries and agencies speaking on the record.
• Disaster: the plain facts come first from the weather and emergency services.
• Economy: the plain facts come first from the statistical and energy agencies.
• Diplomacy: the plain facts come first from the official readouts.
• Politics: the plain facts come first from the official statements and the courts.

How a ledger is kept

A desk rereads every record every six hours. It fetches and reads the documents, not a feed of them. It adds only what is new and sourced, moves a line between confirmed, reported and denied only when a document justifies it, and never deletes a beat. When nothing new and sourced has happened, nothing changes. Quiet is a valid result.

A record, not advice

Backwoods tells you what is known and who said it. For what to do, the authority pages linked on each ledger are the ones to read.

The ledgers have an Atom feed at https://backwoods.info/feed.xml: one entry for every reread that changed something.