• Coronavirus “News Fatigue” Starts to Bite for Australians in Lockdown

    During social isolation, Australians have been staying at home to stop the spread of COVID-19. This has resulted in an increase in news and media consumption. After weeks of restricted movement and social distancing, Australians are restless. Not only are they tired of being in lockdown, they are also feeling worn out by news about the coronavirus. Caroline Fisher and colleagues write in The Conversation that more than two-thirds of Australians (71%) say they are avoiding news about the coronavirus and this is largely driven by news fatigue. This figure is 9% higher than our usual rate of avoidance, according to the Digital News Report Australia 2019, which showed 62% of Australians avoid the news generally. News fatigue is driving avoidance. About half (52%) say they are tired of hearing about COVID-19, and 46% say they find the news coverage overwhelming. Women are more likely to avoid news about the coronavirus than men because they find it upsetting. Men are more likely to avoid it because they simply feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of news.

  • COVID-19 to Cost U.S. Hospitals $200 Billion Through June

    The American Hospital Association (AHA), in a new report, projected a loss of $202.6 billion from COVID-19 expenses and lost revenue for US hospitals and health systems from Mar 1 to Jun 30—about $50 billion in losses each month. Stephanie Soucheray writes in CIDRAP News that the report took into account the cost of COVID-19 treatments, as well as canceled services and increased personal protective equipment (PPE) costs. AHA did not include increases in drug or labor costs in their analysis.

  • Cities Will Endure, but Urban Design Must Adapt to Coronavirus Risks and Fears

    The long-term impacts of coronavirus on our cities are difficult to predict, but one thing is certain: cities won’t die. Diseases have been hugely influential in shaping our cities, history shows. Cities represent continuity regardless of crises – they endure, adapt and grow. Silvia Tavares and Nicholas Stevens write in The Conversation that urban designers and planners have a long-term role in ensuring urban life is healthy. To fight infectious diseases, cities need well-ventilated urban spaces with good access to sunlight. The design of these spaces, and public open spaces in particular, promotes different levels of sociability. Some spaces congregate community and are highly social. Others may act as urban retreats where people seek peace with their coffee and book. How urban spaces perform during disease outbreaks now also demands our close attention.

  • Politicians in Central Europe, Balkans Exploited Epidemic to Weaken Democracy

    Freedom House’s latest edition of its Nations in Transit report finds that a growing number of leaders in Central and Eastern Europe have dropped even the pretense that they play by the rules of democracy. The report says that the coronavirus epidemic has created an inflection point for these regimes, offering them a pretext to tighten their authoritarian control even more. Three countries – Hungary, Serbia, and Montenegro – “have all left the category of democracies entirely,” the report says.

  • Bitter Partisan Divide Shapes California Opinions on COVID-19

    California voters are deeply divided about the COVID-19 pandemic, with supporters of President Donald Trump more worried about the economy and less concerned they will infect others, according to a new poll. While they generally agree on the importance of washing hands, supporters and opponents of the president are polarized about core strategies to slow the spread of the virus, including shelter-in-place orders and the economic lockdown.

  • A Majority of Vaccine Skeptics Plan to Refuse a COVID-19 Vaccine, a Study Suggests, and That Could Be a Big Problem

    By Kristin Lunz Trujillo and Matt Motta

    The availability of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus will likely play a key role in determining when Americans can return to life as usual. Whether a vaccine can end this pandemic successfully, however, depends on more than its effectiveness at providing immunity against the virus, or how quickly it can be produced in mass quantities. Americans also must choose to receive the vaccine. According to some estimates, 50 percent to 70 percent of Americans would need to develop immunity to COVID-19 – either naturally, or via a vaccine – in order to thwart the spread of the virus. Making matters more complicated is the possibility that people who hold skeptical views about vaccine safety – sometimes referred to as “anti-vaxxers” – will not opt to receive the coronavirus vaccine.

  • Researchers Release COVID-19 Symptom Tracker App

    A consortium of scientists with expertise in big data research and epidemiology recently developed a COVID Symptom Tracker app aimed at rapidly collecting information to aid in the response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As reported in the journal Science, early use of the app by more than 2.5 million people in the U.S. and the U.K has generated valuable data about COVID-19 for physicians, scientists and public officials to better fight the viral outbreak.

  • Monitoring COVID-19 from Hospital to Home: First Wearable Device Continuously Tracks Key Symptoms

    The more we learn about the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), the more unknowns seem to arise. These ever-emerging mysteries highlight the desperate need for more data to help researchers and physicians better understand — and treat — the extremely contagious and deadly disease. Northwestern University says that Researchers at Northwestern and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago have developed a novel wearable device and are creating a set of data algorithms specifically tailored to catch early signs and symptoms associated with COVID-19 and to monitor patients as the illness progresses. 

  • COVID-19 Deaths Deemed Likely to Climb Even as States Reopen

    Over the weekend and through yesterday, dozens of states reopened parts of their economy, many with extensive social distancing measures in place. But new leaked documents from the White House show that the U.S. daily death toll from COVID-19 will likely climb throughout the month of May, reaching 3,000 deaths per day by 1 June. Yesterday the model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, which has been widely cited by the White House, revised the total number of projected U.S. deaths from 72,433 by Aug 1 to 134,000, according to CNN. The increased death toll is because of increased mobility in states still experiencing rising case counts.

  • Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist: The COVID-19 Epidemic Was Never Exponential

    Professor Michael Levitt is not an epidemiologist. He’s Professor of Structural Biology at the Stanford School of Medicine, and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.” With a purely statistical perspective, he has been playing close attention to the Covid-19 pandemic since January. Freddie Sayers writes in Unherd that Levitt’s observation is a simple one: that in outbreak after outbreak of this disease, a similar mathematical pattern is observable regardless of government interventions. After around a two week exponential growth of cases (and, subsequently, deaths) some kind of break kicks in, and growth starts slowing down. The curve quickly becomes “sub-exponential.” This may seem like a technical distinction, but its implications are profound. The famous model from Imperial College — with a consistent R number of significantly above 1 and a consistent death rate – persuaded governments to take drastic action. But Professor Levitt’s point is that that hasn’t actually happened anywhere, even in countries that have been relatively lax in their responses.

  • All Disease Models Are “Wrong,” but Scientists Are Working to Fix That

    An international team of researchers has developed a new mathematical tool that could help scientists to deliver more accurate predictions of how diseases, including COVID-19, spread through towns and cities around the world. Rebecca Morrison, an assistant professor of computer science at CU Boulder, led the research. CU says that for years, she has run a repair shop of sorts for mathematical models—those strings of equations and assumptions that scientists use to better understand the world around them, from the trajectory of climate change to how chemicals burn up in an explosion.  As Morrison put it, “My work starts when models start to fail.”

  • Scientists Create Antibody That Defeats Coronavirus in Lab

    Scientists created a monoclonal antibody that can defeat the new coronavirus in the lab, an early but promising step in efforts to find treatments and curb the pandemic’s spread. Tim Loh writes in Bloomberg that the experimental antibody has neutralized the virus in cell cultures. While that’s early in the drug development process — before animal research and human trials — the antibody may help prevent or treat Covid-19 and related diseases in the future, either alone or in a drug combination, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Communications. More research is needed to see whether the findings are confirmed in a clinical setting and how precisely the antibody defeats the virus, Berend-Jan Bosch of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and colleagues wrote in the paper.

  • Boris Johnson Must End the Absurd, Dystopian and Tyrannical Lockdown

    Only on 3 May did the stay-at-home restrictions promulgated by the British government on 23 and 26 March, rules enforcing the most draconian restrictions in British history, come before the Commons for retrospective endorsement with just two hours debate and no division. Steve Baker writes in The Telegraph that “We have lived under house arrest for weeks by ministerial decree – a statutory instrument that parliament had no foresight of and no opportunity to scrutinize or approve before it changed life in this country as we know it. The situation is appalling.” He argues that governments do have to take decisive action to protect public health, “But this suspension of freedom comes with a cost too. Millions of people in our country have been plunged into idleness at public expense and unemployment, facing financial and psychological hardship on a scale never seen before.” He emphasizes: “These extraordinary measures require not only legal authority but democratic consent. There is a real possibility that they have had neither,” adding: “The world just changed but British values have not.”

  • U.K. Coronavirus Lockdown May Be Eased Using “Traffic Light” System, Say Government Scientists

    A “traffic light” system advising the public about the risks of different activities could be used to ease lockdown, the Government’s scientific advisors have said. Laura Donnelly writes in The Telegraph that the proposals, drawn up last month, suggest lockdown restrictions should be eased “very gradually” and warn against relaxing the rules for workers without allowing social activities to resume. The paper was drawn up by the scientific pandemic influenza group on behavior (SPI-B), and considered by the scientific advisory group for emergencies (Sage) at its 2 April meeting. It warns that the abrupt lifting of restrictions and any subsequent increase in infections could undermine public trust in health policy, and mean people are less likely to comply with future demands. The documents are among 17 papers submitted to Sage in recent weeks, for consideration by the scientists who advise Government. 

  • Recent Coronavirus Protest Rallies Draw Extremists and Non-Extremists Alike

    Starting with the 30 April 2020 protest in Lansing, Michigan, a wave of protests against coronavirus restrictions has swept across the country over the past week, with attendees calling for stay-at-home orders to be lifted and state economies to be reopened. While the earliest protests in March were largely organized by extremists, the latest rounds of rallies have been planned primarily by conservative activists, and have drawn extremists and non-extremists alike.