• Bill Gates Makes More Coronavirus Predictions, Good and Bad News

    Bill Gates, now known best for warning the world five years ago about a coming pandemic, delivered more predictions on Wednesday about Covid-19, some bound to disappoint and others optimistic.
    Robert Delaney writes in the South China Morning Post that the bad news is that an effective Covid-19 vaccine is not likely until somewhere around September 2021, and the U.S. will not be able to ease up on social distancing measures that have shut broad swathes of its economy until the end of May this year without risking a resurgence in cases.
    The good news, according to Gates, is that the world will not likely face another pandemic after Covid-19 because lessons learned about testing and surveillance, and internationally financed medical solutions now under way to respond to the current crisis, will be able to contain future human pathogens before they reach the “global, tragic scale” of the current one.

  • Why It Is So Hard to Produce What’s Needed to Tackle Coronavirus

    Manufacturers are stepping up to meet the severe shortage of ventilators prompted by the current coronavirus pandemic – and not just companies in the medical industry. Numerous firms from the aerospace and defense sectors, and even Formula One, have offered their services. Peter Ogrodnik writes in The Conversation that in the UK, domestic appliance maker Dyson, defense contractor Babcock and the Ventilator Challenge U.K. consortium (including leading firms such as Airbus and Ford) have all received orders to make thousands of new ventilators to meet the government’s target of an extra 30,000. Rather than simply helping scale up production of existing products, these firms are working with designs that have never before been used or tested in real settings. While all efforts are welcome, there are likely to be some major challenges for manufacturers trying to enter the medical devices sector for the first time. Journalists reported with amazement that the first batch of devices from the Ventilator Challenge UK consortium would include just 30 units. But there are some good reasons why novel ventilators can’t simply be turned out in large amounts with just days’ notice.

  • The Best Hopes for a Coronavirus Drug

    If there is a way to stop COVID-19, it will be by blocking its proteins from hijacking, suppressing, and evading humans’ cellular machinery.
    Sarah Zhang writes in The Atlantic that the new coronavirus has, at most, twenty-nine proteins in its arsenal to attack human cells. That’s 29 proteins to go up against upwards of tens of thousands of proteins comprising the vastly more complex and sophisticated human body. Twenty-nine proteins that have taken over enough cells in enough bodies to kill more than 80,000 people and grind the world to a halt.
    If there is a way—a vaccine, therapy, or drug—to stop the coronavirus, it will be by blocking these proteins from hijacking, suppressing, and evading humans’ cellular machinery.

  • Collecting the Sounds of COVID-19

    As COVID-19 is a respiratory condition, the sounds made by people with the condition – including voice, breathing and cough sounds – are very specific. A new app, which will be used to collect data to develop machine learning algorithms that could automatically detect whether a person is suffering from COVID-19 based on the sound of their voice, their breathing and coughing, has been launched.

  • Rethinking Biosecurity Governance

    Perhaps the most important lesson we can learn from the current coronavirus pandemic is how to learn future lessons without having to experience a pandemic, whether natural in origin or made by humans. We must rethink and test assumptions about relationships between biological research, security, and society to plan for biosecurity threats.

  • Social Media: Accurately Forecasting Economic Impact of Natural Disasters, COVID-19 Pandemic

    Social media should be used to chart the economic impact and recovery of businesses in countries affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new research. Scientists describe a ‘real time’ method accurately trialed across three global natural disasters which could be used to reliably forecast the financial impact of the current global health crisis.

  • How Will The COVID-19 Pandemic Affect Global Food Supplies? Here's What We Know.

    That strawberry you’re eating while self-isolating from the coronavirus? Chances are it came from a farm. Or it may have come from a large agricultural operation many, many kilometers away from your home, harvested by hand, possibly by migrant workers brought in from other towns, cities, or even countries. But can that system continue to bring you strawberries as the global coronavirus pandemic continues? Or bread? Pasta? Cooking oil?

  • U.S. Intelligence Warned in November that Coronavirus Spreading in China Could Be “Cataclysmic Event”: Report

    President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that his administration could not have prepared for the pandemic because no government agency could have known that such an out-of-the-blue outbreak would happen. Justin Coleman writes that the president’s claims are false. The U.S. intelligence community began to warn about a global epidemic in November, saying that the outbreak in China could develop into a “cataclysmic event,” and policymakers, decisionmakers, and the National Security Council at the White House were repeatedly briefed on the issue. The coronavirus first appeared in the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) of intelligence matters — placed on the president’s desk every morning — in early January.

  • Coronavirus Social Distancing Presents Special Challenges to Spies

    While the COVID-19 public health crisis grabs the headlines and kills tens of thousands, state-actors and transnational terrorist groups continue to purloin data, spread disinformation  and plan terrorist attacks. Jason M. Blazakis writes that the U.S. national security community’s ability to detect threats may be less than optimal because Human intelligence (HUMINT) collection — a key tool to combat terrorism — is impaired during COVID-19.

  • How Economists Are Trying to Answer Coronavirus Questions

    Epidemiologists, virologists and other health experts are throwing everything they have at understanding the new coronavirus, hoping to develop treatments, vaccines and strategies to slow its spread and limit its toll. Eduardo Porter writes in the New York Times that economists, too, have broken from other work to explore what they can add to understanding a world upended by disease.
    Every Monday, the National Bureau of Economic Research puts out a batch of “working papers,” offering an early view of research from the world’s top economists. The most recent list included a paper on how more intensive testing for the coronavirus would allow for less strict quarantines, a piece about how mobility restrictions reduced the spread of the disease in China, one on how to assess the costs and benefits of different policies to reduce the coronavirus transmission rate and another about strategies to ensure compliance with stay-at-home orders in Italy.
    One study just published looked at pandemics back to the 14th century, concluding that they inhibit investment and increase savings for decades, depressing an economy’s central interest rate. Another evaluated the short-term macroeconomic shock from the virus and assessed ways to respond.

  • How Governments Respond to Pandemics Like the Coronavirus

    Sir Richard J. Evans, the provost of Gresham College, in London, is one the preëminent scholars of the Third Reich and modern Germany. Best known for his trilogy about Hitler and the Second World War, Evans has also extended his scholarship to numerous other areas, including pandemics. In 1987, he published Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years (1830-1910). More recently, he gave a series of lectures at Gresham College titled “The Great Plagues: Epidemics in History from the Middle Ages to the Present Day.”
    Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker recently spoke by phone with Evans in the hope of bringing some historical perspective to the coronavirus pandemic—in particular, to understand how leaders throughout history, including those with authoritarian leanings, have reacted to health emergencies. During their conversation, they discussed how new technologies, from the railways to modern medicine, have shaped outbreaks, the different ways in which the United Kingdom and the United States have responded to the coronavirus, and why, even under different forms of government, “it’s the epidemic that’s calling the shots.”

  • Germany Outlines Plan for Scaling Back Coronavirus Lockdown

    Germany has drawn up a list of steps, including mandatory mask-wearing in public, limits on gatherings and the rapid tracing of infection chains, to help enable a phased return to normal life after its coronavirus lockdown is set to end on 19 April.
    France24 reports that a draft action plan compiled by the Interior Ministry and seen by Reuters on Monday, says the measures should be enough to keep the average number of people infected by one person below 1 even as public life is allowed gradually to resume.
    Germany has been under lockdown, with restaurants and most shops closed, since March 22. With the impact of lockdown all but certain to tip Europe’s largest country into recession this year, policymakers are anxious to see normal life resume.
    The document envisages a staged return to normality, backed by mechanisms that will make it possible to track more than 80 percent of people with whom an infected person had contact within 24 hours of diagnosis. Infected people and those they had contact with will be quarantined, either at home or in hotels.
    The document assumes the pandemic will last until 2021.

  • Scott Morrison Indicates “Eliminating” COVID-19 Would Come at Too High a Cost

    Scott Morrison has made clear his view that any attempt to eliminate COVID-19 entirely in Australia would carry too high an economic cost, while Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy says such an aim would require “very aggressive” long-term border control.
    Michelle Grattan writes in The Conversation that the national cabinet will soon receive advice from its medical experts on various scenarios for the way ahead, but the Prime Minister, speaking at a joint news conference with Murphy on Tuesday, effectively ruled out the most ambitious.
    New Zealand is trying for elimination, but has had to go into a stringent lockdown to pursue it. Elimination was the policy adopted in the source of the virus – Wuhan in China.

  • Coronavirus: Why the Nordics Are Our Best Bet for Comparing Strategies

    Comparing the effectiveness of policies different countries employ to combat coronavirus is made difficult, if not meaningless, when comparing how different countries as different as South Korea, China, Italy, and the U.K., because we may find that the impression of how different interventions work is obscured by many other factors. From a scientific perspective, and in the absence of better models, the Nordic countries of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland – which are culturally, economically, politically and geographically similar – may, serendipitously, represent a powerful intervention trial. Currently, 15 million people here have been assigned to a lockdown, while a further 10 million have been asked to simply act responsibly. While it is too early to have definite answers about what works best, interesting insights can already be gleaned.

  • Denmark to Reopen Schools and Kindergartens Next Week

    Denmark’s government has announced plans to reopen kindergartens and schools up until age 10-11, as it takes the first steps in a gradual lifting of the country’s coronavirus lockdown.
    The Local reports that Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said that the government was opening schools for students up until class five first, because the requirement to care for them represented a greater burden on society.
    The opening of schools and services for the youngest means that some parents will have peace to.work undisturbed. We need that, because many tasks are left undone,” she said during a press conference.
    “I understand that there will be both parents and teachers who will be concerned about becoming infected. That is why children and adults should be outside as much as possible. There should also be more distance between the children when inside. There needs to be more cleanliness. And if you are the least ill, then you have to stay home.”
    The government said that adults, who on March 12 were asked to work from home if at all possible, could now start to return to their workplaces more often if they took care to “follow the general guidelines on appropriate behavior.”