• Sweden Escapes Economic Slump by Refusing to Impose Lockdown

    Sweden has reaped the benefits of keeping its economy out of lockdown after escaping the dramatic growth slumps suffered by European rivals. Russell Lynch writes in The Telegraph that the Scandinavian country has taken a far more relaxed approach to tackling the coronavirus than much of the West, keeping most schools, restaurants and businesses open and relying on a voluntary approach to social distancing. Official figures show the country’s economy shrank by just 0.3 percent in the first three months of 2020, a far smaller decline than most forecasters and its central bank expected. The Riksbank had penciled in a drop of between 0.8 percent and 1.8 percent. The smaller scale of the fall contrasts with record slumps seen elsewhere across the Eurozone over the quarter as governments imposed much more stringent measures. France’s economy tumbled 5.8 percent, Italy’s 4.7 percent and Spain’s by 5.2 percent, while the Eurozone’s output overall sank by 3.8 percent - the worst decline in its history. The figures are likely to be far worse in the second quarter as lockdowns grind on.

  • A Face-Recognition Tech that Works Even for Masked Faces

    In these corona days, face-recognition technologies — used for a variety of security purposes — are severely challenged by the fact that everyone’s wearing protective masks. The Israeli company Corsight says it has solved that problem with autonomous artificial intelligence.

  • Experts Warn COVID-19 Lockdowns Could Have Dire Impact on TB

    A new report from a tuberculosis (TB) research and advocacy group suggests the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns could have a devastating impact on the global TB burden in the coming years. Chris Dall writes in CIDRAP News that according to a modeling analysis commissioned by the Stop TB Partnership, a lockdown that disrupts TB diagnosis, treatment, and prevention services for 2 months, followed by the 2 months it would take to get normal TB services back up and running, could result in a rapidly growing pool of undetected and untreated TB patients. Over the next 5 years, that could produce an additional 1.8 million TB cases and 342,000 deaths globally. Under a worst-case scenario of a 3-month lockdown and 10-month restoration period, global cases would rise by 6.8 million, with 1.4 million excess deaths, the analysis found. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that 2018 saw an estimated 10 million TB cases and 1.5 million TB deaths.

  • Bats Bat “Super Immunity” May Explain How Bats Carry Coronaviruses

    A University of Saskatchewan (USask) research team has uncovered how bats can carry the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus without getting sick—research that could shed light on how coronaviruses make the jump to humans and other animals. University of Saskatchewan says that in research just published in Nature Scientific Reports, the team has demonstrated for the first time that cells from an insect-eating brown bat can be persistently infected with MERS coronavirus for months, due to important adaptations from both the bat and the virus working together.  

  • Coronavirus “News Fatigue” Starts to Bite for Australians in Lockdown

    During social isolation, Australians have been staying at home to stop the spread of COVID-19. This has resulted in an increase in news and media consumption. After weeks of restricted movement and social distancing, Australians are restless. Not only are they tired of being in lockdown, they are also feeling worn out by news about the coronavirus. Caroline Fisher and colleagues write in The Conversation that more than two-thirds of Australians (71%) say they are avoiding news about the coronavirus and this is largely driven by news fatigue. This figure is 9% higher than our usual rate of avoidance, according to the Digital News Report Australia 2019, which showed 62% of Australians avoid the news generally. News fatigue is driving avoidance. About half (52%) say they are tired of hearing about COVID-19, and 46% say they find the news coverage overwhelming. Women are more likely to avoid news about the coronavirus than men because they find it upsetting. Men are more likely to avoid it because they simply feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of news.

  • COVID-19 to Cost U.S. Hospitals $200 Billion Through June

    The American Hospital Association (AHA), in a new report, projected a loss of $202.6 billion from COVID-19 expenses and lost revenue for US hospitals and health systems from Mar 1 to Jun 30—about $50 billion in losses each month. Stephanie Soucheray writes in CIDRAP News that the report took into account the cost of COVID-19 treatments, as well as canceled services and increased personal protective equipment (PPE) costs. AHA did not include increases in drug or labor costs in their analysis.

  • Cities Will Endure, but Urban Design Must Adapt to Coronavirus Risks and Fears

    The long-term impacts of coronavirus on our cities are difficult to predict, but one thing is certain: cities won’t die. Diseases have been hugely influential in shaping our cities, history shows. Cities represent continuity regardless of crises – they endure, adapt and grow. Silvia Tavares and Nicholas Stevens write in The Conversation that urban designers and planners have a long-term role in ensuring urban life is healthy. To fight infectious diseases, cities need well-ventilated urban spaces with good access to sunlight. The design of these spaces, and public open spaces in particular, promotes different levels of sociability. Some spaces congregate community and are highly social. Others may act as urban retreats where people seek peace with their coffee and book. How urban spaces perform during disease outbreaks now also demands our close attention.

  • Politicians in Central Europe, Balkans Exploited Epidemic to Weaken Democracy

    Freedom House’s latest edition of its Nations in Transit report finds that a growing number of leaders in Central and Eastern Europe have dropped even the pretense that they play by the rules of democracy. The report says that the coronavirus epidemic has created an inflection point for these regimes, offering them a pretext to tighten their authoritarian control even more. Three countries – Hungary, Serbia, and Montenegro – “have all left the category of democracies entirely,” the report says.

  • Bitter Partisan Divide Shapes California Opinions on COVID-19

    California voters are deeply divided about the COVID-19 pandemic, with supporters of President Donald Trump more worried about the economy and less concerned they will infect others, according to a new poll. While they generally agree on the importance of washing hands, supporters and opponents of the president are polarized about core strategies to slow the spread of the virus, including shelter-in-place orders and the economic lockdown.

  • A Majority of Vaccine Skeptics Plan to Refuse a COVID-19 Vaccine, a Study Suggests, and That Could Be a Big Problem

    The availability of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus will likely play a key role in determining when Americans can return to life as usual. Whether a vaccine can end this pandemic successfully, however, depends on more than its effectiveness at providing immunity against the virus, or how quickly it can be produced in mass quantities. Americans also must choose to receive the vaccine. According to some estimates, 50 percent to 70 percent of Americans would need to develop immunity to COVID-19 – either naturally, or via a vaccine – in order to thwart the spread of the virus. Making matters more complicated is the possibility that people who hold skeptical views about vaccine safety – sometimes referred to as “anti-vaxxers” – will not opt to receive the coronavirus vaccine.

  • Climate Change Increases Risk of Fisheries Conflict

    A team of fisheries scientists and marine policy experts examined how climate change is affecting the ocean environment and found that the changing conditions will likely result in increased fisheries-related conflicts and create new challenges in the management of global fisheries.

  • Researchers Release COVID-19 Symptom Tracker App

    A consortium of scientists with expertise in big data research and epidemiology recently developed a COVID Symptom Tracker app aimed at rapidly collecting information to aid in the response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As reported in the journal Science, early use of the app by more than 2.5 million people in the U.S. and the U.K has generated valuable data about COVID-19 for physicians, scientists and public officials to better fight the viral outbreak.

  • Monitoring COVID-19 from Hospital to Home: First Wearable Device Continuously Tracks Key Symptoms

    The more we learn about the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), the more unknowns seem to arise. These ever-emerging mysteries highlight the desperate need for more data to help researchers and physicians better understand — and treat — the extremely contagious and deadly disease. Northwestern University says that Researchers at Northwestern and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago have developed a novel wearable device and are creating a set of data algorithms specifically tailored to catch early signs and symptoms associated with COVID-19 and to monitor patients as the illness progresses. 

  • COVID-19 Deaths Deemed Likely to Climb Even as States Reopen

    Over the weekend and through yesterday, dozens of states reopened parts of their economy, many with extensive social distancing measures in place. But new leaked documents from the White House show that the U.S. daily death toll from COVID-19 will likely climb throughout the month of May, reaching 3,000 deaths per day by 1 June. Yesterday the model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, which has been widely cited by the White House, revised the total number of projected U.S. deaths from 72,433 by Aug 1 to 134,000, according to CNN. The increased death toll is because of increased mobility in states still experiencing rising case counts.

  • Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist: The COVID-19 Epidemic Was Never Exponential

    Professor Michael Levitt is not an epidemiologist. He’s Professor of Structural Biology at the Stanford School of Medicine, and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.” With a purely statistical perspective, he has been playing close attention to the Covid-19 pandemic since January. Freddie Sayers writes in Unherd that Levitt’s observation is a simple one: that in outbreak after outbreak of this disease, a similar mathematical pattern is observable regardless of government interventions. After around a two week exponential growth of cases (and, subsequently, deaths) some kind of break kicks in, and growth starts slowing down. The curve quickly becomes “sub-exponential.” This may seem like a technical distinction, but its implications are profound. The famous model from Imperial College — with a consistent R number of significantly above 1 and a consistent death rate – persuaded governments to take drastic action. But Professor Levitt’s point is that that hasn’t actually happened anywhere, even in countries that have been relatively lax in their responses.