• How Economists Are Trying to Answer Coronavirus Questions

    Epidemiologists, virologists and other health experts are throwing everything they have at understanding the new coronavirus, hoping to develop treatments, vaccines and strategies to slow its spread and limit its toll. Eduardo Porter writes in the New York Times that economists, too, have broken from other work to explore what they can add to understanding a world upended by disease.
    Every Monday, the National Bureau of Economic Research puts out a batch of “working papers,” offering an early view of research from the world’s top economists. The most recent list included a paper on how more intensive testing for the coronavirus would allow for less strict quarantines, a piece about how mobility restrictions reduced the spread of the disease in China, one on how to assess the costs and benefits of different policies to reduce the coronavirus transmission rate and another about strategies to ensure compliance with stay-at-home orders in Italy.
    One study just published looked at pandemics back to the 14th century, concluding that they inhibit investment and increase savings for decades, depressing an economy’s central interest rate. Another evaluated the short-term macroeconomic shock from the virus and assessed ways to respond.

  • How Governments Respond to Pandemics Like the Coronavirus

    Sir Richard J. Evans, the provost of Gresham College, in London, is one the preëminent scholars of the Third Reich and modern Germany. Best known for his trilogy about Hitler and the Second World War, Evans has also extended his scholarship to numerous other areas, including pandemics. In 1987, he published Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years (1830-1910). More recently, he gave a series of lectures at Gresham College titled “The Great Plagues: Epidemics in History from the Middle Ages to the Present Day.”
    Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker recently spoke by phone with Evans in the hope of bringing some historical perspective to the coronavirus pandemic—in particular, to understand how leaders throughout history, including those with authoritarian leanings, have reacted to health emergencies. During their conversation, they discussed how new technologies, from the railways to modern medicine, have shaped outbreaks, the different ways in which the United Kingdom and the United States have responded to the coronavirus, and why, even under different forms of government, “it’s the epidemic that’s calling the shots.”

  • Germany Outlines Plan for Scaling Back Coronavirus Lockdown

    Germany has drawn up a list of steps, including mandatory mask-wearing in public, limits on gatherings and the rapid tracing of infection chains, to help enable a phased return to normal life after its coronavirus lockdown is set to end on 19 April.
    France24 reports that a draft action plan compiled by the Interior Ministry and seen by Reuters on Monday, says the measures should be enough to keep the average number of people infected by one person below 1 even as public life is allowed gradually to resume.
    Germany has been under lockdown, with restaurants and most shops closed, since March 22. With the impact of lockdown all but certain to tip Europe’s largest country into recession this year, policymakers are anxious to see normal life resume.
    The document envisages a staged return to normality, backed by mechanisms that will make it possible to track more than 80 percent of people with whom an infected person had contact within 24 hours of diagnosis. Infected people and those they had contact with will be quarantined, either at home or in hotels.
    The document assumes the pandemic will last until 2021.

  • Scott Morrison Indicates “Eliminating” COVID-19 Would Come at Too High a Cost

    Scott Morrison has made clear his view that any attempt to eliminate COVID-19 entirely in Australia would carry too high an economic cost, while Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy says such an aim would require “very aggressive” long-term border control.
    Michelle Grattan writes in The Conversation that the national cabinet will soon receive advice from its medical experts on various scenarios for the way ahead, but the Prime Minister, speaking at a joint news conference with Murphy on Tuesday, effectively ruled out the most ambitious.
    New Zealand is trying for elimination, but has had to go into a stringent lockdown to pursue it. Elimination was the policy adopted in the source of the virus – Wuhan in China.

  • Coronavirus: Why the Nordics Are Our Best Bet for Comparing Strategies

    Comparing the effectiveness of policies different countries employ to combat coronavirus is made difficult, if not meaningless, when comparing how different countries as different as South Korea, China, Italy, and the U.K., because we may find that the impression of how different interventions work is obscured by many other factors. From a scientific perspective, and in the absence of better models, the Nordic countries of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland – which are culturally, economically, politically and geographically similar – may, serendipitously, represent a powerful intervention trial. Currently, 15 million people here have been assigned to a lockdown, while a further 10 million have been asked to simply act responsibly. While it is too early to have definite answers about what works best, interesting insights can already be gleaned.

  • Denmark to Reopen Schools and Kindergartens Next Week

    Denmark’s government has announced plans to reopen kindergartens and schools up until age 10-11, as it takes the first steps in a gradual lifting of the country’s coronavirus lockdown.
    The Local reports that Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said that the government was opening schools for students up until class five first, because the requirement to care for them represented a greater burden on society.
    The opening of schools and services for the youngest means that some parents will have peace to.work undisturbed. We need that, because many tasks are left undone,” she said during a press conference.
    “I understand that there will be both parents and teachers who will be concerned about becoming infected. That is why children and adults should be outside as much as possible. There should also be more distance between the children when inside. There needs to be more cleanliness. And if you are the least ill, then you have to stay home.”
    The government said that adults, who on March 12 were asked to work from home if at all possible, could now start to return to their workplaces more often if they took care to “follow the general guidelines on appropriate behavior.”

  • U.K. Peak in Coronavirus Deaths Expected within a Week, According to Latest Telegraph Modelling

    The U.K. is approaching its peak in coronavirus deaths, with the highest number of expected daily deaths expected within a week, according to analysis by The Telegraph.
    Asley Kirk writes in The Telegraph that the peak in deaths is expected to come between the 11 and 14 April, although between now and then, the number of deaths on any one day will stay relatively static between 700 and 900.
    After this point, while the number of deaths in any one day will still be in their hundreds, the number will begin to decrease as the lockdown-enforced social distancing begins to slow the virus’ spread.
    At this point in the pandemic, the UK has confirmed 6,159 coronavirus deaths - 786 of these being recorded yesterday.
    The country is said to be at least a week behind Spain and Italy, both of which have recorded over 10,000 deaths but are now seeing daily deaths decrease.

  • Botswana President Wants to Extend COVID-19 State of Emergency to Six Months

    Botswana’s president has proposed extending a state of emergency in the southern African country to last six months. President Mokgweetsi Masisi says the measure is needed because people are not complying with restrictions on movement to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Critics worry the plan, if initiated, would put too much power in the hands of the president.
    Mqondisi Dube writes for VOA that Botswana’s parliament will convene on Wednesday to deliberate on Masisi’s proposal.
    The president wants the state of emergency, declared last week in reaction to the outbreak of the coronavirus, to last six months.
    Initially, Masisi had announced a 28-day lockdown period after the southern African country recorded its first six coronavirus cases, including one death, last week.

  • How Will the Coronavirus Reshape Democracy and Governance Globally?

    The new coronavirus pandemic is not only wreaking destruction on public health and the global economy but disrupting democracy and governance worldwide. It has hit at a time when democracy was already under threat in many places, and it risks exacerbating democratic backsliding and authoritarian consolidation. Already, some governments have used the pandemic to expand executive power and restrict individual rights. Yet such actions are just the tip of the iceberg.
    Frances Z. Brown, Saskia Brechenmacher, and Thomas Carothers write for the Carnegie Endowment that the coronavirus will likely transform other pillars of democratic governance—such as electoral processes, civilian control of militaries, and civic mobilization—and potentially reset the terms of the global debate on the merits of authoritarianism versus democracy. The pandemic will almost certainly usher in broader effects on governance by overburdening countries’ basic governance functions, taxing their sociopolitical cohesion, exacerbating corruption, unsettling relations between national and local governments, and transforming the role of nonstate actors.

  • Authoritarian Regimes Seek to Take Advantage of the Coronavirus Pandemic

    The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating efforts among authoritarian governments as regimes tighten their grip at home while seizing the opportunity to advance their agenda abroad. Over the past several years, autocratic governments have become increasingly assertive in nature. James Lamond writes for the Center for American Progress that an illiberal and undemocratic model of governing—championed primarily by Russia and China—has appeared to gain currency, particularly as the United States and other democracies turn inward to deal with domestic challenges. As former NATO Secretary General Anders Rasmussen testified before the U.S. House of Representatives in February 2019, “Tyranny is once again awakening from its slumber.” This assertiveness does not stop at national borders; just last year, the U.S. Intelligence Community warned that “Russia and China seek to shape the international system and regional security dynamics and exert influence.”
    Beyond the serious implications for the citizens of each respective country, if this trend continues, it could lead to a dangerous new level of competition among world powers at exactly the time when they need to be working together to combat a global pandemic and other emerging threats.
    There are three clear trends of how authoritarian states have responded to COVID-19 in ways that could have ramifications that will last far beyond the pandemic response: consolidating power at home; seeking geopolitical advantage amid the crisis; and trying to weaken democracies from within.

  • Global COVID-19 Deaths Pass 70,000; More Nations Emerge as Hot Spots

    As the pace of new illnesses and deaths showed more signs of easing in European hot spots such as Italy and Spain, United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson was admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) yesterday following his hospitalization yesterday. Led mainly by ongoing heavy activity in the United States and Europe, the global total climbed to 1,341,907 yesterday from 184 countries, including 74,169 deaths.The latest country to report its first case is South Sudan, which has a population of 11 million.

  • Coronavirus: There’s No One Perfect Model of the Disease

    The world is gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the spread of a virus called SARS-CoV-2. Since the emergence of this new virus, mathematical modelling has been at the forefront of policy decision-making around the disease. Different models depict different scenarios. Do these seemingly differing findings mean that one model is more accurate than the other? And if so, which one is correct? In truth, credible models developed by respectable research teams are mathematically sound and elegantly answer their posed questions using appropriate data. So more importantly than answering the question “which one is correct?” — we need to understand the differences between the different models and discuss why they come to seemingly different conclusions.

  • How to Protect Privacy When Aggregating Location Data to Fight COVID-19

    As governments, the private sector, NGOs, and others mobilize to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen calls to use location information—typically drawn from GPS and cell tower data—to inform public health efforts. Compared to using individualized location data for contact tracing—as many governments around the world are already doing—deriving public health insights from aggregated location data poses far fewer privacy and other civil liberties risks such as restrictions on freedom of expression and association. However, even “aggregated” location data comes with potential pitfalls.

  • Why China's Coronavirus Lies Don't Matter If It Plays the Long Information Game

    The world will never be the same after COVID-19 –but Mark Payumo writes that this will not be because people sheltered in place and reacquainted themselves with traditional family bonding, but because China opened a new front in information warfare. “This front is global in scale and one that Beijing has laid the groundwork for a decade prior to the pandemic,” he writes. “As it unravels, it underscores one fact that we already know: that the world, especially truly-functioning West democracies, continues to fail in responding to Chinese global statecraft that may threaten civil liberties as we know it.”

  • Solving the Ventilator Shortage with Windshield Wiper Parts

    Hospitals across Texas had an estimated 3,730 ventilators in 2009 during the H1N1 pandemic, according to research published in 2017. That supply is enough to handle patient needs during mild to moderate pandemic scenarios. However, during a more severe scenario, statewide projected demand would top 10,000 ventilators, the research found, far exceeding 2009 resources. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are building a new type of ventilator made of cheap, widely available materials to help fill the demand created by the spread of COVID-19 for these critical devices that help patients breathe.