• 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.”

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • U.S. Designates Russia-Based White Supremacist Group, Leaders as Terrorists

    The United States has designated the ultranationalist Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) along with three of its leaders as terrorists, marking the first time the classification has been applied to a white supremacist group. The decision comes after Trump signed an executive order in September 2019 that expanded sanctions for combating terrorism by allowing the terrorist designation to be applied to groups that provide training to terrorists.

  • New Report Outlines Tactics of Modern White-Supremacist Terrorism

    On Monday, as the U.S. Department of State, for the first time ever, designate a white supremacist group as a terrorist organization, a new report on white supremacist terrorism was released, analyzing the evolution of the threat presented by violent white supremacists. The report notes that, until Monday’s announcement of the Department of State’s decision, none of the 69 organizations designated by the U.S. Department of State as Foreign Terrorist Organizations is a white supremacist organization, despite the dramatic uptick in that threat.

  • Huawei and the Third Offset

    In order to effectively mitigate the security risks posed by Huawei, the U.S. Department of Defense needs to fund and integrate cutting-edge technologies from the private sector. Offset strategies are intended to counterbalance an adversary’s military advantages by developing asymmetric technological strengths.

  • 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.”

  • Not All Privacy Apps Are Created Equal

    New privacy laws like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have spawned a new industry of companies and platforms advertising that they can anonymize your data and be compliant with the law. But MIT researcher Aloni Cohen says that he has his doubts about these claims, and his team’s latest work shows that there’s reason to be skeptical.