• The Limits of the World Health Organization

    President Trump has characteristically tried to divert public attention from his botched response to the coronavirus pandemic by blaming others—Democrats, governors, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, China. Eric Posner writes that in the World Health Organization (WHO), however, he has found the ideal piñata. It is tempting to blame the WHO itself for its problems—its notoriously complex bureaucracy, its decentralized structure, its “culture” or the persons who run it. But, Posner writers, all of those things are a result of the political constraints it operates under, as many reform-minded critics have observed.

  • “A Crippling Blow to America’s Prestige”: The Government Struggles to Meet the Moment

    The global coronavirus crisis crashed into the United States in Washington state in January and quickly brought the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world to its knees. Ben White writes that, so far, the federal response has been too small in scope and short on creative solutions to meet the greatest challenge since the Second World War. “The United States was once known for its can-do culture. We built the Panama Canal and we put a man on the moon,” said historian Douglas Brinkley of Rice University. “And now we can’t get a swab or a face mask or a gown and we have no real chain of command. And we have two Americas, a Republican one and a Democratic one, and they won’t collaborate. We are not leading in the pandemic response, we are trailing other countries by a long shot. This is a crippling blow to America’s prestige around the world.”

  • Chinese Agents Helped Spread Messages That Sowed Virus Panic in U.S., Officials Say

    U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Chinese operatives have pushed false messages across social media platforms, aiming to amplify and exaggerate the actions of the U.S. government in order to sow panic, increase confusion, and deepen political polarization in the already-on-edge American public. The amplification techniques are alarming to U.S. officials because the disinformation showed up as texts on many Americans’ cellphones, a tactic that several of the officials said they had not seen before. American officials said the operatives had adopted some of the techniques mastered by Russia-backed trolls. That has spurred agencies to look at new ways in which China, Russia and other nations are using a range of platforms to spread disinformation during the pandemic. President Trump himself has shown little concern about China’s actions, dismissing worries over China’s use of disinformation when asked about it on Fox News. “They do it and we do it and we call them different things,” he said. “Every country does it.”

  • Antibody Tests for Coronavirus Can Miss the Mark

    Dozens of blood tests are rapidly coming on the market to identify people who have been exposed to the coronavirus by checking for antibodies against it. The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t set standards for these kinds of tests, but even those that meet the government’s informal standard may produce many false answers and provide false assurances. The imperfect results could be a big disappointment to people who are looking toward these tests to help them return to something resembling a normal life. First of all, it’s not clear whether someone who has antibodies to the coronavirus in their blood is actually immune. Your body produces these antibodies within about a week of infection. Another problem is that test results are wrong much more frequently than you might expect. While tests may truthfully say they are more than 90% accurate, in practical use they can often perform far below that level.

  • Cuomo Says COVID-19 Cases Have Peaked in New York

    Yesterday New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said new cases of COVID-19 have peaked in his state, which has been the epicenter of America’s battle with the global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus. The state now has 247,512 cases and 14,347 deaths. New York City has 132,467 cases, including 9,101 confirmed coronavirus deaths and 4,582 probable coronavirus deaths. There are 766,662 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States, and 40,931 deaths.

  • The New Coronavirus Was Not Man-Made, Study Shows

    New research finds that SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19, is the result of the natural process of evolution rather than a product of laboratory engineering. Ana Sandoiu writes in Medical News Today says thatin the new study, which appears in the journal Nature Medicine, Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., an associate professor of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, and colleagues set out to see what they could deduce about the origin of the new coronavirus from analyzing the genomic data available. As the authors mention in their paper, since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, researchers have been trying to grapple with the origins of the virus that caused it. The scientists found that the receptor-binding domain of the spike protein had evolved to target ACE2 so effectively that it could only have been the result of natural selection and not of genetic engineering.Furthermore, the molecular structure of the backbone of SARS-CoV-2 supported this finding. If scientists had engineered the new coronavirus purposely as a pathogen, explain the researchers, the starting point would likely have been the backbone of another virus in the coronavirus family.

  • Coronavirus: Could the Pandemic Be Controlled Using Existing Vaccines Like MMR or BCG?

    The race is on to develop a vaccine that can protect us from the COVID-19 pandemic. An impressive 115 vaccine candidates are currently being investigated, but it is still many months before a vaccine might be approved. Sarah L Caddy writes in The Conversation that we already have hundreds of licensed vaccines for over 25 different viruses and bacteria that infect humans. We can protect ourselves against infections ranging from cholera to rabies. The common aim of all vaccines is to induce an immune response that prevents future disease. Is it possible that one of these existing vaccines could also induce protection against SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19? Repurposing drugs is a popular strategy for treating COVID-19, as exemplified by the many trials using the Ebola drug remdesivir, or the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine. If an already-approved vaccine could reduce the severity of COVID-19, this would be really good news. The BCG vaccine has received recent attention for being a widely used vaccine that may help control COVID-19. A handful of studies identified an interesting association between the severity of COVID-19 in a country and how many of the population were vaccinated with BCG. The BCG vaccine apparently reduces the damage caused by COVID-19.

  • Gulf States Use Coronavirus Threat to Tighten Authoritarian Controls and Surveillance

    Governments across the Middle East have moved to upgrade their surveillance capabilities under the banner of combatting COVID-19, the disease linked to the new coronavirus. Matthew Hedges writes in The Conversation that overtly repressive policies have been commonplace across the Middle East for years, notably in Egypt, Iraq and Syria, where violent measures have been taken to control populations. As a result of technological advances, an increase in political engagement and changes of leadership, the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – have also upgraded their form of authoritarianism in recent years. This has seen policies of partial economic liberalization and market-based reforms used to obscure an increase in repression and surveillance, for example by containing the work of civil society groups. Following the pattern in which authoritarian states tend to exploit common threats, some of the GCC states are now manipulating the current pandemic to enhance their social power and control.

  • The Secret to Germany’s COVID-19 Success: Angela Merkel Is a Scientist

    The spread of the coronavirus has been accompanied by an exponential growth of misinformation disseminated on social media. Saskia Miller writes that as misinformation proliferates and lines between fact and fiction are routinely and nonchalantly crossed, world leaders must, now more than ever, illuminate a thoughtful path forward, one reliant on science and evidence-based reasoning. Indeed, many have. “One leader goes further still. Trusted by her people to navigate this outbreak’s murky waters, without inciting or succumbing to a pandemic of the mind, one politician is less a commander in chief and more a scientist in chief: Angela Merkel.”

  • U.K. Announces 449 More Coronavirus Deaths - the Fewest for a Fortnight as Leading Expert Argues Britain's Crisis Peaked Before Lockdown and Claims Fatality Rate Could Be as Low as 0.1%

    The U.K. has today announced 449 more coronavirus deaths - the fewest for a fortnight - taking Britain’s total death toll to 16,509. Connor Boyd, Sa, Blanchard, and Stephen Matthews write in the Daily Mail that England declared 429 deaths and a further 20 were confirmed across Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. And 4,676 more people have tested positive for the virus, taking the total number of patients to 124,743. Professor Carl Heneghan, a leading expert at the University of Oxford, has argued the peak was actually about a month ago, a week before lockdown started on March 23, and that the draconian measures people are now living with were unnecessary. He said data shows infection rates halved after the government launched a public information campaign on 16 March urging people to wash their hands and keep two meters (6’6”) away from others. He said ministers “lost sight” of the evidence and rushed into a nationwide quarantine six days later after being instructed by scientific advisers who he claims have been ‘consistently wrong’ during the crisis.

  • It’s Time to Admit Our COVID-19 “Exit Strategy” Might Just Look Like a More Flexible Version of Lockdown

    As the COVID-19 curve starts to flatten in Australia and New Zealand, people are rightly wondering how we will roll back current lockdown policies. Australia’s federal health minister Greg Hunt says Australia is looking to South Korea, Japan and Singapore to inform our exit strategy. New Zealand is relaxing some measures from next week.Toby Phillips writes in The Conversation that a long-term solution – a vaccine – is many months, probably years, away. In the meantime, we must rely on social distancing policies to contain the epidemic – and begin to accept the idea that an “exit strategy” may really look more like a more flexible version of lockdown.

  • Fumbling for the Exit Strategy

    Suddenly everyone has a plan. Ideas for exiting the COVID-19 lockdown are spreading faster than the virus ever did. Spain has let builders return to work, Italy has opened stationers and bookshops, Denmark is allowing children back into nurseries and primary schools. South Africa’s opposition is calling for a relaxed “smart lockdown”. In America President Donald Trump has been sparring with state governors over who should decide what reopens when. The Economist writes that every country is different, but already two things are clear. First, governments need to explain to their people that the world is not about to return to normal. Without a vaccine or a therapy, life will be constrained and economies will remain depressed. Second, testing and contact-tracing are vital to keeping the virus at bay. Countries that failed to invest enough in them when the disease first emerged in China risk repeating the mistake.

  • This Isn’t the First Global Pandemic, and It Won’t Be the Last. Here’s What We’ve Learned from 4 Others Throughout History

    The course of human history has been shaped by infectious diseases, and the current crisis certainly won’t be the last time. However, we can capitalize on the knowledge gained from past experiences, and reflect on how we’re better off this time around. We must be ever prepared for the emergence of another pandemic, and learn the lessons of history to navigate the next threat.

  • The Next Pandemic Might Not Be Natural

    Germs have killed more people than all the wars in history, and people have been trying to make use of them throughout all those wars. In the U.S., we have seen small-scale bioterrorist attacks – the Rajneeshee poisoning of restaurants in 1986 and the Amerithrax letters that were mailed in 2001. Still, the years running up to this current coronavirus pandemic not only saw the gutting of U.S. national health institutions but also a cultural groundswell of science denial in the anti-vaccination movement. Today the United States in particular is paying for that denial in livelihoods and lives. The warnings were clear. If 9/11 was a “failure of imagination,” then history will no doubt judge the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19 as a failure of courage, compassion, and, most of all, competence.

  • International Air Travel as an Indicator of COVID-19 Economic Recovery

    It seems likely that routine international air travel may not resume until the end of June at the earliest. Paul Rozenzweig writes that that, more than President Trump’s wishful thinking, is a true indicator of what economic recovery will look like. As any good student of law and economics would say, the best indicator of commercial expectations can be found in commercial enterprises—the market signals that indicate what businesses truly anticipate. And if any enterprise is likely to be a leading indicator of economic expectations, it seems that the airline industry is a good candidate.