• The Government’s One‑Size‑Fits‑R Lockdown Is Bad Health Policy and Bad Economics Too

    “It was when Matt Hancock used the term ‘reproduction number’ for the 15th time in his latest press conference that I stopped counting. R, as this concept is also known, has become the government’s new totem, the driver of policy, the means of calibrating our response to the dangers of COVID-19….  As a concept, it is certainly seductive. R, as everyone now knows, refers to the average number of people that one infected person will transmit the virus to,” Matthew Sayed writes in The Times. But “R is, after all, an average for the entire UK. As a single point estimate, it doesn’t take into account the marked regional differences in transmission. It takes no account of the variance between different settings, such as care homes and factories. It takes no account of the fact that the spread of the virus isn’t the same for each person but is shaped to a significant degree by superspreading events. Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist and the author of The Rules of Contagion, estimates that 80% of transmission occurs via as little as 10% of the population.In other words, the R number for the majority of us is, in fact, zero.”

  • Which Interventions Work Best in a Pandemic?

    The only approaches currently available to reduce transmission of the novel coronavirus severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) are behavioral: handwashing, cough and sneeze etiquette, and above all, social distancing. Johannes Haushofer and C. Jessica E. Metcalf write in Science that policy-makers have a variety of tools to enable these “nonpharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs), ranging from simple encouragement and recommendations to full-on regulation and sanctions. However, these interventions are often used without rigorous empirical evidence: They make sense in theory, and mathematical models can be used to predict their likely impact, but with different policies being tried in different places—often in complicated combinations and without systematic, built-in evaluation—we cannot confidently attribute any given reduction in transmission to a specific policy.

  • How Sweden Wasted a “Rare Opportunity” to Study Coronavirus in Schools

    During this pandemic, does that harm to student’s learning, and the isolation-induced mental harm, outweigh the risk—to children, school staff, families, and the community at large—of keeping schools open and giving the coronavirus more chances to spread? Gretchen Vogel writes in Science that the one country that could have definitively answered that question has apparently failed to collect any data. Bucking a global trend, Sweden has kept day care centers and schools through ninth grade open since COVID-19 emerged, without any major adjustments to class size, lunch policies, or recess rules. That made the country a perfect natural experiment about schools’ role in viral spread that many others could have learned from as they reopen schools or ponder when to do so. Yet Swedish officials have not tracked infections among school children—even when large outbreaks led to the closure of individual schools or staff members died of the disease.

  • Trust in Medical Scientists Has Grown in the U.S., but Mainly among Democrats

    Americans’ confidence in medical scientists has grown since the coronavirus outbreak first began to upend life in the United States, as have perceptions that medical doctors hold very high ethical standards. And in their own estimation, most U.S. adults think the outbreak raises the importance of scientific developments. Cary Funk, Brian Kennedy, and Courtney Johnson write for Pew Research Center, however, that public confidence has turned upward with Democrats, not Republicans. Among Democrats and those leaning to the Democratic Party, 53% have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the public interest, up from 37% in January 2019. But among Republicans and those who lean Republican, 31% express a great deal of confidence in medical scientists, roughly the same as in 2019 (32%). As a result, there is now a 22 percentage point difference between partisan groups when it comes to trust in medical scientists.

  • Trump’s Mockery of Wearing Masks Divides Republicans

    A growing chorus of Republicans are pushing back against President Trump’s suggestion that wearing cloth masks to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus is a sign of personal weakness or political correctness. Michael Scherer writes in the Washington Post that they include governors seeking to prevent a rebound in coronavirus cases and federal lawmakers who face tough reelection fights this fall, as national polling shows lopsided support for wearing masks in public. Pointed comments by leading Republicans in support of wearing masks – from Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine; Majority Leader Mitch McConnel; North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum; Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan; Sen. John Cornyn, and many others — come as Trump continues to treat face masks as something to mock, refusing to wear one in public and joining his staff and family in ridiculing his Democratic rival Joe Biden for doing otherwise.

  • Conspiracy Beliefs Reduce the Following of Government Coronavirus Guidance

    A new study from the University of Oxford shows that people who hold coronavirus conspiracy beliefs are less likely to comply with social distancing guidelines or take-up future vaccines. Oxford University says that The research, led by clinical psychologists at the University of Oxford and published today in the journal Psychological Medicine, indicates that a disconcertingly high number of adults in England do not agree with the scientific and governmental consensus on the coronavirus pandemic.

  • Is America Too Libertarian to Deal with the Coronavirus?

    America’s public health experts are working hard to map out a plan to combat the coronavirus in America. And there are indeed many proposals — from academic centers, from think tanks, and from the government. Sean Illing writes in Vox that while the plans differ, nearly all of them rely on some combination of surveillance, mass testing, isolation, and contact tracing. Many of them point to countries like Singapore, South Korea, and Germany as examples of how to intelligently respond to the pandemic. But what if the successful strategies in those countries just won’t work in America? This question was posed by Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University professor who works on addiction and public health policy, in a viral Twitter thread last week. Humphreys argued that a lot of his public health colleagues weren’t thinking seriously enough about the cultural obstacles that might undercut the country’s efforts to test, trace, and isolate Americans. He later penned a Washington Post column drawing out his arguments in a little more detail.

  • The Coronavirus Crisis Is Leading to an Immunization Crisis

    Across the United States, there’s been a huge drop-off in vaccinations as coronavirus social distancing measures make people reluctant to leave the house and visit the doctor. Around the world, critical public health and vaccination programs have been canceled amid the pandemic. Kelsey Piper writes in Vox that That sets us up for a potential public health disaster down the road. As the immunized share of the population drops, contagious and deadly childhood diseases — many of them already experiencing a resurgence because of anti-vaxxers — could come right back, killing children and adults alike. We’ve lived a long time free from the fear of deadly infectious diseases, and vaccination is a big part of the reason why. But the coronavirus has derailed that progress, and even if a treatment or vaccine for the coronavirus itself is eventually developed, it may take a long time to undo all the complex damage it has done.

  • Game Theory and the COVID-19 Outbreak: Coordinating Our Interests at Individual to National Levels

    Shedding light on how officials at different levels of government can work together to maximize COVID-safe behavior is a new goal of a multi-scale game theory project funded with $6.5 million from the Department of Defense. The University of Michigan notes that when human behavior is competitive, we don’t use resources in the way that is most efficient for the community—as seen in behaviors like mask, sanitizer and toilet paper hoarding. But most of our decisions about how to behave aren’t entirely individualistic. We make them as part of a community. We are swayed both by leadership—and the incentives and disincentives that they can offer—as well as altruism. Most of the literature in game theory examines individual behavior, but Liu and her colleagues are exploring what happens when decisions are made at multiple scales. 

  • How the Coronavirus Increases Terrorism Threats in the Developing World

    As the coronavirus reaches developing countries in Africa and Asia, the pandemic will have effects beyond public health and economic activity. As the disease wreaks its havoc in areas poorly equipped to handle its spread, terrorism likely will increase there as well.

  • As Crime Dips Worldwide, Agile Syndicates Adapt to Pandemic

    Countries around the world are reporting a dip in criminal activity. Due to stay-at-home orders and fewer opportunities for crime, there has been a noticeable decline in burglary, assault, murder, robbery and grand larceny. But law enforcement officials and analysts say a second look reveals a more complicated and disturbing picture. Cybercrime has exploded, with mounting reports of an increase in ransomware attacks. Headline crime may have dropped, and the statistics may have improved, but analysts say that as the pandemic reorders geopolitics and economics, it is doing the same in the world of crime.

  • Oilfield Water Can Safely Be Reused for Irrigation in California

    Reusing low-saline oilfield water mixed with surface water to irrigate farms in the Cawelo Water District of California does not pose major health risks, as some opponents of the practice have feared, a new study finds.

  • How Conspiracy Theories Hurt Vaccination Numbers

    Near the end of 2018, data released by the CDC showed that a small, but growing, number of children in the United States were not getting recommended vaccinations. One in 77 infants born in 2017 did not receive any vaccination. Michael Stein and Sandro Galea write this is more than four times as many unvaccinated children as the United States had at the turn of the century. “Some of this may be due to lack of access to vaccines; populations without insurance, and those living in rural areas have greater rates of nonvaccination,” they write. “But part of it is also likely due to the rise of conspiracy theories and the willful dismissal of scientific evidence when it comes to vaccines.”

  • America’s Never-Ending Battle Against Flesh-Eating Worms

    Screwworms once killed millions of dollars’ worth of cattle a year in the southern U.S. Their range extended from Florida to California, and they infected any living, warm-blooded animal: not only cattle but deer, squirrels, pets, and even the occasional human. Sarah Zhang writes that to get the screwworms out, the USDA to this day maintains an international screwworm barrier along the Panama-Colombia border. The barrier is an invisible one, and it is kept in place by constant human effort. “The insect is relentless in its search for hosts. Those who fight it must be relentless too.”

  • CDC Test Counting Error Leaves Epidemiologists “Really Baffled”

    As it tracks the coronavirus’s spread, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is combining tests that detect active infection with those that detect recovery from Covid-19 — a system that muddies the picture of the pandemic but raises the percentage of Americans tested as President Trump boasts about testing. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Sheila Kaplan and Sarah Mervosh write in the New York Times that now that serology tests, which look for antibodies in the blood of people who have recovered, are more widespread, C.D.C. officials said Friday they would work to separate them from the results of diagnostic tests, which detect active infection. One of the agency’s data tracker websites has been lumping them together.