Czechia's Smart Quarantine accused of plagiarism

An infographic released by the Smart Quarantine team appears to be a copy of a two-month old chart by the Texas Medical Association.

Both infographics compare different activities based on the risk of contracting Covid-19. The authors of the Czech version only omitted some activities that are popular in the US but not in Czechia - for example, attending a baseball game or a big religious service. They also added dog walking and watching TV to the list.

You can see the Czech version here and the original here. The criticism that both graphics are remarkably similar appeared on the Internet almost immediately.

At first, the Smart Quarantine team did not admit that they took inspiration from the TMA chart - on the contrary, they wrote: "We have analyzed thousands of data in order to compile an overview of activities according to the degree of risk of coronavirus infection."

The Ministry of Health later said that the graphic was created by comparing data from the Smart Quarantine with the data from the Texas Medical Association and that they overlap in many ways.

However, this has already been questioned by, among others, the epidemiologist and Government Commissioner for Science and Research Roman Prymula. According to him, it is not possible to compile such a graphic from Czech data. He also disagrees with including dog walking on the list: "After all, nobody could get infected while walking the dog. Only if they shook hands with someone, but that would fall into a completely different category."