• Can the Mad Cow Disease Outbreak Teach Us Anything about COVID-19?

    When so-called “mad cow disease” hit the headlines in 1996, I was in the final stages of finishing my medical degree. Information back then was harder to come by without social media, but it was probably more accurate and varied without the echo chambers that are now created. Even so, relative panic ensued and there are parallels to be drawn with the current Covid-19 crisis. Dr. Waqar Rashid writes in The Spectator that the thought of a terrifying illness which we would have no protection against has always been lurking in the recesses of the human condition as one of our greatest fears. Children are taught about the bubonic plague; the ‘black death’ no less. Smallpox and tuberculosis epidemics were not that long ago. As time has gone on though we have been protected by improved hygiene and diet, antibiotics and vaccination. In the western world especially, we felt very safe and had become complacent. Even TB, which will almost certainly kill far more people this year than Covid-19, is thought by many people in Britain to have been consigned to the past not so long ago. “This isn’t, of course, to discount the threat from COVID-19,” he writes. “Tens of thousands have died and each of these deaths brings with it grieving relatives mourning a life cut short. But it is vital that we see this illness in a wider context. And remembering how we reacted to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) helps in some way towards doing that.”

  • The Limits of COVID Death Statistics

    As is often said, choose your statistics carefully and you can use them make just about any point you want to. Ross Clark writes in The Spectator, however, that rarely does the Office for National Statistics put out two releases – the first one here (showing that overall deaths in England and Wales, while they have fallen, are still running at 5.9 percent above the average for the time of year); the second one here (showing that overall deaths in England and Wales are running at 5.9 percent below the average of the past five years [8,686 compared with 9,233]). The differences are the result of different counting methods, and the fact that the second release covers a slightly longer period – but even so, we can assume that one contributing factor to the decline of overall death is almost certainly that COVID-19 has been killing large numbers of people who were close to death anyway – it brought their deaths forward, hence the large spike in April that will now be followed by a long period of below-average deaths. “One of the perverse outcomes of COVID-19 is that it might briefly flatter the figures for circulatory diseases and lung cancer. People whose deaths would have been attributed to those conditions will instead have gone down as Covid-19 deaths,” Clark writes.

  • In France, Drones, Apps and Racial Profiling

    In the wake of the January 2015 terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, and the November 2015 terrorist attacks on several targets in Paris, France saw more and more troops patrolling the streets of major cities alongside the police, and the declaration of a state of emergency, which gave the state vast new powers to monitor citizens. Many in France fear this is happening again, under the umbrella of measures to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. Critics point to a raft of areas where they believe personal freedoms have been compromised under the health emergency, which saw France imposing one of Europe’s strictest lockdowns. Lisa Bryant writes for VOA that, to be sure, similar concerns are being echoed elsewhere around the globe as governments fight the pandemic. But in France – where authorities still promote the country’s revolution-era moniker as the “land of human rights” – activists say the new measures fit a years’-long pattern. 

  • Economics after the Virus

    This novel virus has created a novel economic predicament. In a country after country, the government-imposed lockdowns have resulted in a recession which is fundamentally different from more typical recessions, which are the result of the market-driven business cycle. Arnold Kling, writing in National Affairs about the United States, argues that instead of crafting a new strategy to respond to these unprecedented circumstances, policymakers have dusted off the playbook they used during the 2008 financial crisis. “It is far from clear that these were the right plays to call in 2008,” he writes. “It is even less clear they are the right plays to call now.” He adds: “What is clear, however, is that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the deterioration of the concepts that underpin contemporary macroeconomic-policy thinking in America. That deterioration consists of a growing disconnect between the ideas that ground macroeconomic policy and the realities of the modern economy. The time has come to jettison both the Keynesian and monetarist paradigms that macroeconomic policymakers employ and to pursue an alternative paradigm more suitable to the conditions prevailing in today’s economy. Such a paradigm might be best described in terms of patterns of sustainable specialization and trade, or PSST. This new model offers us a more accurate understanding of the forces at work in our economy — and a more constructive foundation for public policy — than either the Keynesian or the monetarist models do.”

  • The Death of the Open-Plan Office? Not Quite, but a Revolution is in the Air

    COVID-19 does not spell the end of the centralized office predicted by futurists since at least the 1970s. The organizational benefits of the “propinquity effect” – the tendency to develop deeper relationships with those we see most regularly – are well-established (one of the chapters in Ian Fleming’s Diamonds Are Forever is titled: “Nothing propinks like propinquity”). Andrew Wallace writes in The Conversation that the open-plan office will have to evolve, though, finding its true purpose as a collaborative work space augmented by remote work. “If we’re smart about it, necessity might turn out to be the mother of reinvention, giving us the best of both centralized and decentralized, collaborative and private working worlds,” Wallace writes.

  • Islamic State Calls for Followers to Spread Coronavirus, Exploit Pandemic and Protests

    An Islamic State group online publication in India has called for its supporters to spread the coronavirus, saying “every brother and sister, even children, can contribute to Allah’s cause by becoming the carriers of this disease and striking the colonies of the disbelievers.” The group claims that devout Muslims will not be sickened, because “no disease can harm even a hair of a believer.” It is the latest in an effort by the Islamic State group and its followers to take advantage of the pandemic and general civic instability in the West. Brian Glyn Williams writes in The Conversation that Islamic State followers are excited at the prospect of a massive Western death toll from the coronavirus, which they defined as “God’s smallest soldier.” They also see the virus at work in U.S. military pullbacks related to the coronavirus – such as the March announcement from the Pentagon that it would stop sending troops to Iraq for at least two months. In addition, the U.S. pulled some troops out of Iraq, withdrew many more from six frontline operating bases and ordered the troops remaining in the country to stay on their bases – moves that ended most joint missions with local Iraqi and Kurdish troops.

  • Oxford Coronavirus Vaccine Will Be Rolled out in October under “Best Scenario”

    The Oxford vaccine against coronavirus will not be ready to be rolled out until October, researchers have said. Sarah Knapton writes in The Telegraph that there were hopes the vaccine could be in use by September if human trials continue to be successful, and drugs company AstraZeneca is ready to quickly produce 30 million vaccines. But Professor Adrian Hill, the director of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford, told a webinar of the Spanish Society of Rheumatology that the “best scenario” would see results from clinical trials in August and September and deliveries from October. 

  • Preventing Cyberbiosecurity Threats and Protecting Vulnerable Countries

    AI can automate the manipulation of medical datasets, expanding a cyberattack’s impact through health and biotech industries. Cyber- and biosecurity threats can erode trust in technology. Eroded trust in technology is dangerous at any time but especially during a global pandemic such as COVID-19.

  • Viruses and Violence: How COVID-19 Has Impacted Extremism

    In April 2020, the Tony Blair Institute acknowledged that “extremist groups are beginning to recognize the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic, seeing opportunities to exploit fears, exacerbate tensions and mobilize supporters while government are occupied with trying to address COVID-19.” Extremists across the ideological spectrum have incorporated the pandemic into their messaging and their operations, though groups have differed on just what COVID-19 means and how to best exploit the pandemic and its resultant unrest.

  • Gear Treated with “Forever Chemicals” Poses Risk to Firefighters

    Firefighters face occupational hazards on a daily basis. Now, new research shows they face additional risk just by gearing up. Fabric used for firefighter turnout gear tested positive for the presence of per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS), according to a new study.

  • French High Court: Most of New Hate Speech Bill Would Undermine Free Expression

    In what free-speech advocates hail as aa victory for the free speech rights of French citizens, France’s highest court last week struck down core provisions of a bill meant to curb hate speech, holding they would unconstitutionally sweep up legal speech.

  • Universal Flu Vaccine May Be More Challenging than Expected

    Some common strains of influenza have the potential to mutate to evade broad-acting antibodies that could be elicited by a universal flu vaccine, according to a study led by scientists at Scripps Research. The findings highlight the challenges involved in designing such a vaccine, and should be useful in guiding its development.

  • Coronavirus: A Wake-Up Call to Strengthen the Global Food System

    A new commentary in the journal One Earth highlights not only climate-related risks to the global food system, such as drought and floods, but also exposes the coronavirus pandemic as a shock to the system that has led to food crises in many parts of the world. To address the challenges of a globally interconnected food system, a systems approach is required.

  • Manufacturers to Rethink Global Operations in Face of COVID-19

    Manufacturers must redesign and reform their Global Supply Chains or Global Production Networks (GPN) if they want to survive and prosper in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new study argues. The virus’ impact demonstrates that global manufacturing concerns must switch from large production sites in a single location, such as China, to numerous smaller facilities around the world to reduce business risk. Stability, reliability, resilience and predictability are critical in the design of global production networks that balance risk versus reward and harmonize economic value with values related to reliability, resilience and location.

  • Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Pledges to Keep State Open, Downplays Rise in Coronavirus Cases

    Gov. Ron DeSantis, responding to criticism, is playing down the state’s increase in new cases in recent weeks, attributing it to more testing among low-risk individuals and saying he won’t roll back reopening efforts. Kennedy and Zac Anderson write in the Palm Beach Post that DeSantis noted that many of the new cases are younger people who are less at risk of becoming seriously ill. The governor noted that the median age of those infected has dropped significantly, and said identifying asymptomatic young people with the infection will help “stop the spread” because they will be isolated. The governor also noted that the number of COVID-19 patients in hospital intensive care unit beds and on ventilators has gone down significantly over the last 60 days. He said there are 6,400 ventilators “sitting idle.”