COVID-19 and America’s Counter-Terrorism Response

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. foreign policy, national security, and law enforcement have been dominated by counter-terrorism considerations, even while a number of counter-terrorism experts have cautioned against overemphasizing the terrorist threat. Lydia Khalil writes that, at the same time, for various reasons, U.S. law enforcement has found it more challenging to deal with the more serious threat of terrorism the United States is facing – far-right domestic terrorism – a threat which now eclipses the threat posed by foreign Islamist jihadists, and which is only going to grow. If anything could ever shake the United States out of its counter-terrorism fixation it would be a crisis of even greater magnitude than 9/11. It seemed like that moment finally came with the COVID-19 pandemic, “[y]et what we have seen so far is the opposite. Instead of reorienting toward other paradigms and reexamining its strategic priorities, the United States continues to reflexively overextend its counter-terrorism tools to deal with some of the more problematic aspects of the virus’ spread,” she writes.

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DNA May Hold the Key to Protecting Populations from COVID-19

Scientists from The University of Western Australia’s Faculty of Science are part of a global team that is developing a new DNA test for COVID-19, which can provide faster and more detailed results than other tests. UWA says that this test can be used to understand how COVID-19 is mutating, aid vaccine development and understand its journey across populations globally – for instance, how it adapts to a new host. It is currently being used for COVID-19 research, but once approved by the US Food and Drug administration it can be used for both the diagnostic testing of patients and to enable a better understanding of the virus. The test is based on technology developed through the DNA Zoo project, a global initiative that analyses DNA from different species to help researchers, leaders and policy-makers better understand species through their DNA as well as threats to their survival.

Antibodies from Llamas Could Help in Fight against COVID-19

The hunt for an effective treatment for COVID-19 has led one team of researchers to find an improbable ally for their work: a llama named Winter. The team — from The University of Texas at Austin, the National Institutes of Health and Ghent University in Belgium — reports their findings about a potential avenue for a coronavirus treatment involving llamas on May 5 in the journal Cell. The paper is currently available online as a “pre-proof,” meaning it is peer-reviewed but undergoing final formatting. UT News reports that the researchers linked two copies of a special kind of antibody produced by llamas to create a new antibody that binds tightly to a key protein on the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. This protein, called the spike protein, allows the virus to break into host cells. Initial tests indicate that the antibody blocks viruses that display this spike protein from infecting cells in culture.

Life after Lockdowns

In many things 90 percent is just fine; in an economy it is miserable. The 90 percent economy. It is better than a severe lockdown, but it is far from normal. The missing bits include large chunks of everyday life. Rides on the metro and on domestic flights are down by a third. Discretionary consumer spending, on such things as restaurants, has fallen by 40 percent and hotel stays are a third of normal. People are weighed down by financial hardship and the fear of a second wave of covid-19. Bankruptcies are rising and unemployment, one broker has said, is three times the official level, at around 20 percent. The Economist writes that if the post-lockdown rich world suffers its own brand of the 90 percent economy, life will be hard—at least until a vaccine or a treatment is found. A plunge in GDP in America of anything like 10 percent would be the largest since the second world war. The more suffering COVID-19 causes, the more profound and enduring its economic, social and political effects are likely to be. “How lockdowns ease will itself affect the scale of economic damage,” the Economist notes. “For instance, the cost-benefit calculus points towards opening schools first (see article). But, however sensibly restrictions are eased, powerful forces will hold economies back.”

The COVIDSafe App Was Just One Contact Tracing Option. These Alternatives Guarantee More Privacy

Since its release on Sunday, experts and members of the public alike have raised privacy concerns with the Australian federal government’s COVIDSafe mobile app. Many Australians have said that they worried about “the security of personal information collected” by the app. In its coronavirus response, the government has a golden opportunity to build public trust. There are other ways to build a digital contact tracing system, some of which would arguably raise fewer doubts about data security than the app.

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Millions of U.S. Workers at Risk of Infections on the Job, Researchers Calculate, Emphasizing Need to Protect Against COVID-19

A University of Washington researcher calculates that 14.4 million workers face exposure to infection once a week and 26.7 million at least once a month in the workplace, pointing to an important population needing protection as the novel coronavirus disease, COVID-19, continues to break out across the U.S. Jake Ellison writes for UW News that Marissa Baker, an assistant professor in the UW School of Public Health, based her calculations on research she published in 2018 in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine. In that paper, Baker and co-authors calculated that about 8 percent of workers in Federal Region X — comprised of Alaska, Washington, Oregon and Idaho — work in jobs where exposure to infection or disease occurs at least once a week at work. Those risks include flu-like illnesses, MRSA and other respiratory illnesses, like COVID-19, as well as wound infections.

Virologists Show that Sample Pooling Can Massively Increase Coronavirus Testing Capacity

A new procedure will help to meet the high demand for testing in mass coronavirus screening programs needed in the early identification and isolation of asymptomatic individuals. The pooling of samples before testing is a safe and well-established procedure in blood banking. The team from the Institute of Virology has adapted and tested this method for use in coronavirus diagnostics. Saarland University says that samples from several individuals are pooled and tested together in a single tube using sensitive molecular biological detection methods. Only if the pool result is positive do the samples need to be tested individually. When the infection rate is low and only a few people are infected, pool testing can significantly expand the testing capacity of the existing laboratory infrastructure. The team has been using the new procedure at Saarland University Hospital in Homburg since mid-March to protect vulnerable patients from infection by asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carriers. The success of the pool testing procedure has now led to its use in screening residents and staff at nursing and residential care homes in Saarland.