• Growing Evidence that Minority Ethnic Groups in England May Be at Higher Risk of COVID-19

    Evidence available to date suggests that minority ethnic groups in England, particularly black and south Asian people, may be at increased risk of testing positive for Covid-19, compared to people from white British backgrounds, according to a study published in the open access journal BMC Medicine. Biomed Central reports that previous pandemics have often disproportionately impacted ethnic minorities and socioeconomically disadvantaged populations. While early evidence suggests that the same may be occurring in the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, research into the subject remains limited.

  • Pandemic and Responses to It Could Drive Violent Extremist Recruitment, Radicalization

    A new report from Reliefweb provides evidence on the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and response on violent extremist recruitment and radicalization. There are many drivers of drivers radicalization, and these drivers operate differently across individuals and communities — and may intersect. The COVID-19 pandemic and responses to it may amplify some of these drivers, acting as an additive factor.

  • Tracing Trouble Raises Fears of Second Coronavirus Peak

    In a blow to hopes for a more normal social life in the U.K. in the coming months, the modelers of  SAGE scientific group, which advises the British government, concluded that many things had better not go back to where they were. Chris Smyth and Billy Kember write in The Times quotes a SAGR report to say: “Even with contact tracing in place, there will need to be sustained, deep reductions in contacts outside work and schools to keep the reproduction number below 1.”

  • U.K. NHS Contact Tracing Undermined by Hackers Sending Fraudulent Warnings to Public

    The new NHS test and trace programme is being undermined by hackers sending out phishing scams falsely warning the public they may have Covid-19. Tom Morgan writes in The Telegraph that several public health directors have called for all forms of communication from contact tracers to involve two-step verification to eradicate the risk of scammers gaining confidential information.

  • It’s Not Whether You Were Exposed to the Virus. It’s How Much.

    When experts recommend wearing masks, staying at least six feet away from others, washing your hands frequently and avoiding crowded spaces, what they’re really saying is: Try to minimize the amount of virus you encounter. Apoorva Mandavilli writes in the New York Times that a few viral particles cannot make you sick — the immune system would vanquish the intruders before they could. But how much virus is needed for an infection to take root? What is the minimum effective dose? A precise answer is impossible, because it’s difficult to capture the moment of infection.

  • Is Herd Immunity Working in Sweden? The Reality of No Lockdown

    virus to spread through healthy populations while protecting vulnerable people. Louise Callaghan writes in The Times that it has not worked out quite that way, but that polls show that the majority of Swedes believe that the public health ministry is doing the right thing.

  • Norway Wonders If It Should Have Been More Like Sweden

    On Wednesday night, Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg went on Norwegian television to make a startling admission: she had panicked.Some, even most, of the tough measures imposed in Norway’s lockdown now looked like steps too far. “Was it necessary to close schools?” she mused. “Perhaps not.” Richard Orange writes in The Telegraph that no one doubts Norway’s success in bringing the pandemic under control. But this success has come at a prohibitive social and economic cost.

  • How Vietnam Managed to Keep Its Coronavirus Death Toll at Zero

    When the world looked to Asia for successful examples in handling the novel coronavirus outbreak, much attention and plaudits were paid to South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.Nectar Gan writes for CNN that there’s one overlooked success story — Vietnam. The country of 97 million people has not reported a single coronavirus-related death and on Saturday had just 328 confirmed cases, despite its long border with China and the millions of Chinese visitors it receives each year. This is all the more remarkable considering Vietnam is a low-middle income country with a much less-advanced healthcare system than others in the region. It only has 8 doctors for every 10,000 people, a third of the ratio in South Korea.

  • Testing Is Key to Beating Coronavirus, Right? Japan Has Other Ideas

    As the world tries to get a handle on the coronavirus and emerge from paralyzing lockdowns, public health officials have repeated a mantra: “test, test, test.” Ben Dooley and Makiko Inoue write in the New York Times that Japan, however, went its own way, limiting tests to only the most severe cases as other countries raced to screen as many people as possible. Medical experts worried that the approach would blind the country to the spread of infection, allowing cases to explode and swamping hospitals. It hasn’t happened.

  • Coronavirus Crisis Accelerates March Towards Cashless Society

    The march towards a cashless society has gathered pace during the lockdown with analysts more confident than ever that the end is nigh for notes and coins, Harry Shukman writes in The Times.

  • U.S. Missed Early Chance to Slow Coronavirus, Genetic Study Indicates

    The United States missed out on an early chance to catch imported cases of coronavirus earlier this year, genetics experts say in a new report, Maggie Fox writes in CNN. “Our analyses reveal an extended period of missed opportunity when intensive testing and contact tracing could have prevented SARS-CoV-2 from becoming established in the US and Europe,” they wrote in a report, not yet peer-reviewed and published on the preprint server bioRxiv.

  • COVID Slows Central America-U.S. Migration

    From March to April, when the U.S. began to lock down, total apprehensions along its southern border dropped by 50 percent, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. Apprehensions and expulsions have plummeted, going from 109,415 in April 2019 to just 16,789 in April 2020.

  • U.S.-Funded Website Spreading COVID Misinformation in Armenia

    U.S. taxpayer money has funded a controversial health news website in Armenia that is spreading “incredibly dangerous” COVID-19 misinformation. Public health experts in the U.S. and Armenia denounced this content – which includes claims that vaccines currently being developed are actually “biological weapons.”

  • As States Reopen, Tensions Flare Between the Rule Followers and Rule Breakers

    As countries reopen their economies, tensions escalate between those who believe it is safe now to resume normal business activity – and even ignore social distancing and the need to wear face masks – and those who prefer a more cautious, slower path toward something resembling pre-coronavirus life. These differences aren’t just random personality types; they reflect our primal social mindsets – what I call “tight” and “loose” mindsets. And unless these differences are better understood, it will be that much more difficult to navigate life under COVID-19.

  • Norway Health Chief: Lockdown Was Not Needed to Tame COVID

    Norway is assembling a picture of what happened before lockdown and its latest discovery is pretty significant. It is using observed data – hospital figures, infection numbers and so on – to construct a picture of what was happening in March. At the time, no one really knew. Fraser Nelson writes in The Spectator that it was feared that virus was rampant with each person infecting two or three others – and only lockdown could get this exponential growth rate (the so-called R number) down to a safe level of 1. This was the hypothesis advanced in various graphs by Imperial College London for Britain, Norway and several European countries.
    But the Norwegian public health authority has published a report with a striking conclusion: the virus was never spreading as fast as had been feared and was already on the way out when lockdown was ordered. ‘It looks as if the effective reproduction rate had already dropped to around 1.1 when the most comprehensive measures were implemented on 12 March, and that there would not be much to push it down below 1… We have seen in retrospect that the infection was on its way down.’ 
    This raises an awkward question: was lockdown necessary? What did it achieve that could not have been achieved by voluntary social distancing?