• NIST Tool Could Help Hospitals Repurpose Rooms for Disinfecting N95 Masks

    In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals across the United States are disinfecting N95 masks by placing them in repurposed rooms or shipping containers injected with a disinfectant known as vaporized hydrogen peroxide, or VHP. A new tool from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) can help hospitals and medical professionals determine which rooms should be used to disinfect N95 masks. The tool estimates the amount of VHP masks would receive and suggests that larger rooms containing fewer objects, with less-reactive surfaces and slower ventilation, maintain VHP concentration the best.   

  • Brazil: Jair Bolsonaro’s Strategy of Chaos Hinders Coronavirus Response

    Brazil faces a tremendous uphill struggle in its response to COVID-19, the disease associated with the new coronavirus. Already eroded by years of budget cuts, the country’s public health system, the Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS), has been further undermined by the president, Jair Bolsonaro. Last week he participated in a demonstration during which opposition to lockdown measures was combined with calls for a military intervention to shut down Brazil’s congress and supreme court. Since coming to power in January 2019, Bolsonaro has led an attack on science and professional expertise – cutting research funds, substituting managers of research institutes with inexperienced political appointees, and publicly intimidating scientists. COVID-19 is a new phase of this ongoing war.

  • How South Korea Flattened the Coronavirus Curve with Technology

    As countries around the world consider how best to reopen their countries, it’s worth considering how South Korea has been able to “flatten the curve” and even hold parliamentary elections without resorting to lockdowns. Michael Ahn writes in The Conversation that after seeing an initial spike in COVID-19 infections in February, South Korea implemented several measures to bring the disease’s spread under control, a progression he has followed as a researcher on public policy. South Korea was able to lower the number of new infections from 851 on March 3 to 22 infections as of 17 April and the mortality rate from COVID-19 hovers around 2 percent. Several measures contribute to Korea’s success, but two measures were critical in the country’s ability to flatten the curve: extensive testing for the disease and a national system for promptly and effectively tracking people infected with COVID-19.

  • The Problem of Modeling

    The lessons starting to emerge from the coronavirus crisis are predominantly not epidemiological but highly general aspects of public policy, Paul Collier writes: the over-reliance on expert modelling and the mismanagement of public services. “The current epidemic is a classic application of what economists call ‘radical uncertainty’: in a world that has inevitably become too complex to be adequately captured in models, a world of both ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns,’ the most sensible response to the question ‘what should we do?’ is ‘I don’t know’,” he argues.

  • One Simple Number Can Solve Boris's Grimly Complex Lockdown Dilemma

    When Boris Johnson returns to work, he will have to grapple with a difficult decision. The British economy is on the brink, and must be revived, but the PM cannot risk the dreaded second coronavirus peak. Leaders of countries must make tough decisions in difficult situations, and Allister Heath writes that Boris’s decision ranks below the Cuban missile crisis matrix, of course, but above Tony Blair’s Iraq War calculations or Margaret Thatcher’s Falklands choices. “The Prime Minister faces a series of horrible moral and practical dilemmas best understood through elementary mathematics. The key concept is the R0 (pronounced R-nought): If the R0 is under 1, every victim infects fewer than one other person each, so the virus remains contained; if it is above 1, they each pass the virus to more than one other, contaminating swathes of the population quickly.”

  • Trump Signs Executive Order Restricting Immigration

    U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order restricting immigration for a period of 60 days because of the coronavirus pandemic. The measure does not apply to any nonimmigrant visas, including those allowing temporary workers into the country for seasonal jobs in agriculture. It also exempts health professionals and wealthy investors seeking to move to the country. It does halt permanent resident visas (known as green cards) for parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents, but not spouses. The order also excludes from suspension the cases of those who are in the country seeking to change their immigration status.

  • Extremists Publish 25,000 Email Addresses Allegedly Tied to COVID Fight

    Far-right extremists have published nearly 25,000 email addresses allegedly belonging to several major organizations fighting the coronavirus pandemic, including the World Health Organization, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the World Bank. The hackers posted the email addresses across far-right messaging and chat sites, as well as Twitter, this week.

  • Extremists Involved in Nationwide Protests Against Coronavirus Restrictions

    Americans’ response to the coronavirus pandemic now includes a spate of nationwide rallies decrying stay-at-home orders and calling for “reopening” the economy. While many of the protests calling for the reopening of the economy and the lifting of state-issued quarantine mandates have been organized by more mainstream conservative organizations, a number have been sponsored in whole or part by identified extremists and a range of rally participants have carried signs or flags affiliated with various right-wing extremist ideologies.

  • 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.