• Coronavirus Models Aren't Crystal Balls. So What Are They Good For?

    Epidemiologists and data scientists have become unlikely heroes during the coronavirus pandemic. Wave-shaped COVID-19 models that present “best” and “worst-case” scenarios for the virus trajectory are now commonplace in news stories and on screens behind governors during press conferences. “Flatten the curve” is scribbled on signs that hang in neighbors’ windows. Local governments are using algorithms to make decisions about stay-at-home orders and supplies. The University of Pennsylvanianotes that during a time of unprecedented uncertainty, it makes sense that we would put stock in these models. We are hoping they will be able to forecast the future and offer a glimmer of sunshine. But math cannot account for the unpredictability of human behavior, and epidemiologists are not in the business of fortune-telling, Levy cautions. “A model isn’t a crystal ball to make predictions,”says Michael Z. Levy, PhD,an associate professor of Epidemiology in the Perelman School of Medicine at Penn. “It’s more like a pensieve — you take what you already have in your brain, you pull it out, and you swirl it around, so that you can better understand the ramifications of your assumptions. That’s all these models are for — to get our head around what’s already going on and what we can do about it.”

     

  • Rutgers Engineer’s Mathematical Model Can Predict Cumulative Deaths in U.S.

    A Rutgers engineer has created a mathematical model that accurately estimates the death toll linked to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and could be used around the world. “Based on data available on April 28, the model showed that the COVID-19 pandemic might be over in the United States, meaning no more American deaths, by around late June 2020,” said Hoang Pham, a distinguished professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. “But if testing and contact tracing strategies, social-distancing policies, reopening of community strategies or stay-at-home policies change significantly in the coming days and weeks, the predicted death toll will also change.”

  • UN: COVID-19 Deaths for People over 80 Are 5 Times Average

    U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Friday that the COVID-19 pandemic is causing “untold fear and suffering” for older people around the world who are dying at a higher rate, and especially for those over age 80, whose fatality rate is five times the global average. Edith M. Lederer writes for AP that the U.N. chief said that beyond the health risks, “the pandemic is putting older people at greater risk of poverty,” with an especially devastating impact on the elderly in developing countries. Guterres issued a 16-page policy briefing on the impact of COVID-19 on older people with several key messages, most importantly that “no person, young or old, is expendable” and “older people have the same rights to life and health as everyone else.”

  • Ways to Address Life Under COVID-19

    An international team of researchers has outlined ways to manage different facets of life under the spread of the COVID-19 virus, ranging from how we can combat racially driven bias and fake news to how we can increase cooperation and better manage stress. “The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive, global health crisis,” observes Jay Van Bavel, an associate professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology, who led the project with Stanford’s Robb Willer. “Because the crisis requires large-scale behavior change and poses significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioral sciences are likely going to be very helpful for optimizing pandemic response.”

  • The Data Is in — Stop the Panic and End the Total Isolation

    “Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections,” Dr. Scott W. Atlas writes. The policymakers should “combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore the country to function.” He say that the appropriate policy, based on fundamental biology and the evidence already in hand, is to institute a more focused strategy like some outlined in the first place: Strictly protect the known vulnerable, self-isolate the mildly sick and open most workplaces and small businesses with some prudent large-group precautions.

  • Cyber Operations against Medical Facilities During Peacetime

    In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, governments around the world have tried to compensate for insufficient hospital beds and intensive care units by nationalizing private medical facilities and relying on military ships and improvised evac hospitals. Adina Ponta writes that at a time when overcrowded medical and testing facilities struggle with shortages in supplies and a huge influx of patients, hacker groups have exploited their inattention to cybersecurity.

  • COVID-19 and America’s Counter-Terrorism Response

    Since the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. foreign policy, national security, and law enforcement have been dominated by counter-terrorism considerations, even while a number of counter-terrorism experts have cautioned against overemphasizing the terrorist threat. Lydia Khalil writes that, at the same time, for various reasons, U.S. law enforcement has found it more challenging to deal with the more serious threat of terrorism the United States is facing – far-right domestic terrorism – a threat which now eclipses the threat posed by foreign Islamist jihadists, and which is only going to grow. If anything could ever shake the United States out of its counter-terrorism fixation it would be a crisis of even greater magnitude than 9/11. It seemed like that moment finally came with the COVID-19 pandemic, “[y]et what we have seen so far is the opposite. Instead of reorienting toward other paradigms and reexamining its strategic priorities, the United States continues to reflexively overextend its counter-terrorism tools to deal with some of the more problematic aspects of the virus’ spread,” she writes.

  • Oxford Scientists Take Early Lead in Race to Create Vaccine

    Scientists at Oxford University are racing to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus well ahead of the standard medical timeline. VOA News reports that the scientists have expressed confidence in their ability to do it quickly, raising hopes around the world that a vaccine will not have to wait until next year. The first injections of the vaccine being developed by the university’s Jenner Institute in Britain took place last week. Scientists are planning to massively scale up their testing in a little over a month, a time frame that is currently faster than other vaccine development efforts. The New York Times reported Monday that the scientists plan to test their vaccine on more than 6,000 people by the end of May. 

  • DNA May Hold the Key to Protecting Populations from COVID-19

    Scientists from The University of Western Australia’s Faculty of Science are part of a global team that is developing a new DNA test for COVID-19, which can provide faster and more detailed results than other tests. UWA says that this test can be used to understand how COVID-19 is mutating, aid vaccine development and understand its journey across populations globally – for instance, how it adapts to a new host. It is currently being used for COVID-19 research, but once approved by the US Food and Drug administration it can be used for both the diagnostic testing of patients and to enable a better understanding of the virus. The test is based on technology developed through the DNA Zoo project, a global initiative that analyses DNA from different species to help researchers, leaders and policy-makers better understand species through their DNA as well as threats to their survival.

  • NERVe: A “Stopgap” Ventilator Developed for COVID-19 Use during Medical Supply Shortage

    While hospitals across the U.S. faced a possible shortage of mechanical ventilators due to COVID-19, a self-assembled “skunk works” team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) worked tirelessly to prototype a simple ventilator design for quick and easy assembly from available parts. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory says that the design, dubbed the “Novel Emergency Response Ventilator” (NERVe), is derived from proven concepts and contains parts that are not being used by commercial ventilator manufacturers, to avoid disrupting already thin supply chains. It is designed to meet the functional requirements of COVID-19 patients requiring mechanical ventilation, including a simple user interface, air flow circuits for inhalation and exhalation, and alarms to notify physicians if air pressures get too low. It can operate in a continuous ventilation mode — common for late-stage COVID-19 patients — but can adapt to patients who spontaneously breathe on their own.

  • Antibodies from Llamas Could Help in Fight against COVID-19

    The hunt for an effective treatment for COVID-19 has led one team of researchers to find an improbable ally for their work: a llama named Winter. The team — from The University of Texas at Austin, the National Institutes of Health and Ghent University in Belgium — reports their findings about a potential avenue for a coronavirus treatment involving llamas on May 5 in the journal Cell. The paper is currently available online as a “pre-proof,” meaning it is peer-reviewed but undergoing final formatting. UT News reports that the researchers linked two copies of a special kind of antibody produced by llamas to create a new antibody that binds tightly to a key protein on the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. This protein, called the spike protein, allows the virus to break into host cells. Initial tests indicate that the antibody blocks viruses that display this spike protein from infecting cells in culture.

  • Federal COVID-19 Physical Distancing Measures Expire, More States Reopen

    Today the White House’s national physical (social) distancing guidelines—”15 days and 30 days to slow the spread”—expired, leaving the opening of states now in the hands of governors who are attempting to balance public health guidelines, the realities of testing, and mounting economic pressure to reopen communities. The U.S. now has 1,057,800 COVID-19 cases, and 61,700 deaths.

  • Coronavirus “Not Man-Made”: U.S. Intelligence Community

    The U.S. intelligence community, in a rare public statement on Thursday, said that evidence shows that the virus was not engineered in a Chinese laboratory. The U.S. intelligence community “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said. Talk that the COVID-19 virus was created in a Chinese lab, or escaped from a lab, has persisted for weeks, as have other theories, many of which have been discredited as conspiracy theories or as part of disinformation campaigns.

  • The COVIDSafe App Was Just One Contact Tracing Option. These Alternatives Guarantee More Privacy

    Since its release on Sunday, experts and members of the public alike have raised privacy concerns with the Australian federal government’s COVIDSafe mobile app. Many Australians have said that they worried about “the security of personal information collected” by the app. In its coronavirus response, the government has a golden opportunity to build public trust. There are other ways to build a digital contact tracing system, some of which would arguably raise fewer doubts about data security than the app.

  • Controlling an Influenza Outbreak without a Specific Vaccine

    A group of pandemic modelling experts have published new research that simulated viral influenza outbreaks to examine the efficacy of pandemic interventions in the absence of a tailored vaccine. The general use of low-efficacy vaccines, coupled with a targeted application of antiviral medications, may be effective at countering the spread of influenza pandemics, new research has found.