• Coronavirus: Five Ways Some States Have Used the Pandemic to Curtail Human Rights and Democracy

    In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, at least 95 countries declared a national emergency, empowering governments to act in ways they would not normally to protect citizens. Such exceptional periods pose major risks for democracy and human rights, providing opportunities for leaders and states to consolidate power.

  • In Responding to COVID, Nations Copy Policies of Regimes with Similar Political Ideology

    Public policy researchers found that nationalistic governments around the globe are more likely to copy other nationalistic governments in responding to the current pandemic. “While leaders often claim responses are based on the best available advice from scientists and public health experts, recent policy diffusion research suggests that countries are emulating the COVID-19 policies of their neighbors and political peers instead of responding to domestic conditions,” one researcher said.

  • L.A. Imposes Sweeping COVID Restrictions

    Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles has issued an order for residents to stay at home and minimize other contacts. The order, which supersedes one from June, prohibits public and private gatherings of people from more than one household and states that all businesses in the city which require people to work on location must stop operations. Walking, driving, travel on public transport, bikes, motorcycles and scooters are prohibited, other than for those undertaking essential activities.

  • WHO Trial Finds No Benefit of 4 Drugs for Hospital COVID Patients

    None of the four once-promising drugs evaluated for the treatment of COVID-19 in the ongoing World Health Organization (WHO) Solidarity Trial—remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir, or interferon-beta-1a—prevented in-hospital death, reduced the need for ventilation, or shortened the duration of hospitalization.

  • IBM Detects Hacking Ploy to Target COVID Vaccine Supply

    Researchers from technology giant IBM say hackers have tried to collect information on the global initiative for distributing coronavirus vaccine to developing countries. They said a nation state appeared to be involved.

  • CDC Panel Moves Health Workers, Nursing Home Residents to Front of COVID Vaccine Line

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine advisory group, in an emergency meeting Monday, approved an interim recommendation for who should receive the first COVID-19 vaccine doses once authorized, which puts healthcare workers and nursing home residents at the front of the line.

  • Britain Becomes First Nation to Approve Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine

    Britain has given emergency approval to a new COVID-19 vaccine developed by U.S.-based pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, becoming the world’s first western nation ready to begin mass inoculations against a disease that has sickened nearly 64 million people worldwide, including more than 1.4 million deaths.

  • Valuing “Natural Capital” Vital to Avoid Next Pandemic

    Pandemics will emerge more often, kill more people than COVID-19 and do even more damage to the world economy unless urgent steps are taken to address risk drivers such as deforestation, warns a major new report on biodiversity and pandemics.

  • New Cyberattack Tricks Scientists into Making Dangerous Toxins, Synthetic Viruses

    An end-to-end cyber-biological attack, in which unwitting biologists may be tricked into generating dangerous toxins in their labs, has been discovered by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev cyber-researchers. It is currently believed that a criminal needs to have physical contact with a dangerous substance to produce and deliver it. However, malware could easily replace a short sub-string of the DNA on a bioengineer’s computer so that they unintentionally create a toxin producing sequence.

  • Israeli locust slayers train Ethiopians to save crops

    The enemies are huge armies of desert locusts destroying farm and grazing lands across nine East African countries. In Ethiopia alone, the locusts have conquered three million acres since January. Experts from Israel bring equipment and knowhow enabling Ethiopian farmers to protect their fields from deadly desert locust swarms.

  • Here's How the Three COVID-19 Vaccines Compare

    With pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca’s announcement Monday that its vaccine successfully prevented coronavirus infection, three candidates appear to be promising vital tools to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic. However, scientists caution that all they know about these vaccines is what the companies have said in press releases. Like movie trailers, “They provide some exciting scenes but leave a lot unsaid. You have to go see the whole movie,” said Vanderbilt University infectious diseases professor William Schaffner.

  • Face Masks Cut Disease Spread in the Lab, but Have Less Impact in the Community. We Need to Know Why

    In controlled laboratory situations, face masks appear to do a good job of reducing the spread of coronavirus (at least in hamsters) and other respiratory viruses. However, evidence shows mask-wearing policies seem to have had much less impact on the community spread of COVID-19. Why this gap between the effectiveness in the lab and the effectiveness seen in the community? The real world is more complex than a controlled laboratory situation. The right people need to wear the right mask, in the right way, at the right times and places.

  • Deep Learning in the Emergency Department

    Using a deep-learning model designed for high-dimensional data, researchers have shown that it is possible to predict emergency department overcrowding from complex hospital records. This application of the “Variational AutoEncoder” deep-learning model is an example of how machine learning can be used to interpret and extract meaning from difficult data sets that are too voluminous or complex for humans to decipher.

  • Landmark Danish Study Shows Face Masks Have No Significant Effect

    Do face masks work? Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson write that a just-published study reports the results of a trial in Denmark – a study which hopes to answer that very question. “In the end, there was no statistically significant difference between those who wore masks and those who did not when it came to being infected by Covid-19,” they write.

  • Groundbreaking Research on Chlorine Spread

    Chlorine can kill in minutes if inhaled in high concentration. Since 2010, DHS S&T led a project, called Jack Rabbit, aiming to improve ways to detect and deal with chlorine spread. Recent events highlight the need for responders to be prepared with the best information possible for this type of hazard.