Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor of Chicago and White House chief of staff for President Obama, called on the federal government in a Wall Street Journal op-ed to create a Cabinet-level executive department to coordinate the nation’s response to future pandemics.
Why it matters: Emanuel suggested that the agency, which he called the Department of Public Health and Emergency Care, should be modeled on the Department of Homeland Security created by President George W. Bush after 9/11.
[David] Ho was just setting up his lab at its new home, at Columbia University. He is friendly with Jack Ma, the founder of the e-commerce giant Alibaba, who asked how he could help. In February, Columbia announced that Ma’s foundation had awarded a $2.1-million grant to Ho and several Columbia colleagues to develop antiviral drugs. This project was prompted by the COVID-19 crisis, but the mission goes beyond it; the researchers are thinking not only about the current pandemic but about future ones as well.
MIT Sloan School of Management, Sloan Managemet Review, Thomas Davenport
from
I’ve been thinking of all the decision biases that have come into play with regard to COVID-19. Among some of our (U.S.) political leaders, and the citizens of this country as well, decision biases of multiple types seem to be in evidence. Perhaps seeing these pointed out will improve decision processes for all of us — including politicians who make large-scale decisions affecting millions, business leaders who make decisions affecting their organizations and many stakeholders, and those who make decisions for themselves and their families.
Zhang Ning will soon be reunited with her husband. He left the couple’s hometown of Wuhan to visit relatives in late January, and just days later the central Chinese city suddenly went into lockdown, leaving him unable to return for over two months. But China is now easing travel restrictions as its COVID-19 epidemic subsides, allowing him to finally come home.
New research from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands and KU Leuven in Belgium suggests that the reader may have a point: when you’re breathing hard and moving fast, droplets linger in the air over a longer distance, meaning that anyone directly behind you should leave a generous gap.
The research team was led by Bert Blocken, who is cross-appointed at both universities and studies urban physics, wind engineering, and sports aerodynamics. He and his colleagues used computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to model the movement of droplets of various size, building on earlier work by researchers in Asia after the SARS epidemic.
Every question about when the country reopens is actually a question of when testing will be good enough to allow it to reopen. Every question about the virus itself — how lethal it is, how many people have it without knowing they have it — can only be answered by more testing. In mid-March, when DeRisi got started, the entire state of California was generating test results for only about 2,000 people a day — with tens of thousands of tests backed up in commercial labs. DeRisi knows he can help close this gap, doubling or even tripling his lab’s capacity to 6,000 a day from 2,500. In a sane world, the Biohub would be doing just that. Instead, it is receiving only about 200 tests each day.
Two things interfere with DeRisi’s ability to solve the nation’s biggest problem. The first is that U.S. hospitals are either contractually obliged or habitually inclined to send tests to the for-profit labs, and the for-profit labs aren’t moving fast enough. The tests that arrive each morning and evening at the Biohub’s nonprofit lab come from the UCSF hospital down the street or public health clinics in surrounding counties. These clinics are places of last resort for people without health insurance, but they now offer the fastest and most reliable coronavirus tests.
But the bigger problem is the scarcity of testing kits, for both rich and poor. Actually that’s not quite right. If you roll into a hospital parking lot with a dry cough and a fever and ask to be tested and they say, “Sorry, we have no testing kits,” what they likely mean is “We have no nasal swabs.”
Online learning startup Coursera today debuted CourseMatch, an AI tool that matches classes in schools’ on-campus course catalogs to relevant offerings in Coursera’s catalog. It’s a part of the startup’s Coronavirus Response Initiative that launched in early March, and Coursera says it’s intended to enable universities to facilitate learning as governments mandate the shutdown of non-essential institutions in response to COVID-19.
University of Cambridge, Light Blue Touchpaper blog, Ross Anderson
from
But contact tracing in the real world is not quite as many of the academic and industry proposals assume.
First, it isn’t anonymous. Covid-19 is a notifiable disease so a doctor who diagnoses you must inform the public health authorities, and if they have the bandwidth they call you and ask who you’ve been in contact with. They then call your contacts in turn. It’s not about consent or anonymity, so much as being persuasive and having a good bedside manner.
I’m relaxed about doing all this under emergency public-health powers, since this will make it harder for intrusive systems to persist after the pandemic than if they have some privacy theater that can be used to argue that the whizzy new medi-panopticon is legal enough to be kept running.
Second, contact tracers have access to all sorts of other data such as public transport ticketing and credit-card records. This is how a contact tracer in Singapore is able to phone you and tell you that the taxi driver who took you yesterday from Orchard Road to Raffles has reported sick, so please put on a mask right now and go straight home. This must be controlled; Taiwan lets public-health staff access such material in emergencies only.
A team of scientists led by a Michigan State University astronomer has found that a new process of evaluating proposed scientific research projects is as effective – if not more so – than the traditional peer-review method.
Normally, when a researcher submits a proposal, the funding agency then asks a number of researchers in that particular field to evaluate and make funding recommendations. A system that can sometimes be a bit bulky and slow – not quite an exact science.
“As in all human endeavors, this one has it flaws,” said Wolfgang Kerzendorf, an assistant professor in MSU’s departments of Physics and Astronomy, and Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering.
Cuomo has long been known for his “bulldozer personality” and his tendency toward micromanagement, as evidenced in the notoriously exhaustive PowerPoints that have accompanied nearly all of his major speeches as governor. His briefings, delivered from the current epicenter of the viral crisis, now offer at least a simulacrum of competent leadership. At the same time, his presentations “capture an everyman’s emotional unease,” according to the New York Times. In another article, the paper’s media columnist called him “the control freak we need right now”—one who knows his way around the government and can translate public health and public policy into intelligible terms, yet also, like us, fears for his family’s safety and laments the inefficiencies of political process. Marshaling PowerPoint, that ubiquitous platform for urgent didactic and persuasive communication, his performance-lectures—“part briefing, part sermon, part inspirational talk,” per the Washington Post—are our primer, pep talk, and placation.
Computational and Spatial Analysis Core of The Pennsylvania State University
from
The data presented come from the geotagged tweets that we have been collecting since January 15, 2020. A geotagged tweet is one that is denoted with the latitude and longitude of the location where it was sent. The presented data include all geotagged tweets with keywords or hashtags related to the COVID-19, in major languages including English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and others.
“Technology is not a silver bullet, but one way to get information,” said Anne Liu, a global health public health expert at Columbia University who worked on efforts to digitize information collected from patients during the Ebola epidemic. With that caveat, Liu went on to say of the new public health technologies we’re seeing in East Asian countries, “I do think some of this can be especially promising for something that’s moving at the speed that Covid-19 is moving.”
Take Singapore. The country attracted praise early in the pandemic for its initial success at curbing the spread of the virus. In March, the country released TraceTogether, an app that uses Bluetooth technology to help public health officials do contact tracing. Much like the Apple-Google tool, Singapore’s app automated the process of tracking down every person a given person came into contact within a two-week period. It works by allowing users to log in the app if they test positive for Covid-19 and the tool then anonymously notifies everyone they’ve recently seen.
Everyone knows that one of the main presenting symptoms of COVID-19 is a cough. But what kind of cough, exactly?
There’s a smartphone app under development and about to start clinical testing that is meant to answer that question. The idea behind it is that “coughs aren’t all the same,” says Dr. Daniel Karlin, a physician and CEO of HealthMode, a health-tech startup that is looking to enroll participants in a test of its CoughMode software.
Users who install the app — whose website urges users to “Donate your cough to science!” — can start it when they begin to cough and upload the sound to HealthMode, which will analyze it for characteristics such as volume, duration and frequency.
At the end of March, I wrote about a preliminary studyOpens in a new window conducted by Stanford emergency physician Ian Brown, MD, that indicated that a significant number of people diagnosed with COVID-19 are also simultaneously co-infected with other respiratory viruses, including influenza or rhinovirus.
Online May 15, starting at 8 a.m. PDT. “This virtual event will bring together Games User Researchers at all levels to connect, present and view talks, network, socialize, and learn from one another. This is an informal online “unconference,” where anyone can grab a timeslot and lead a presentation, discussion, social activity, or other concept related to games user research. Anyone can participate!” [free, registration required]
“While we all felt levels of ‘March Sadness’ we’ve worked closely with our data team to introduce the first-ever Sportlogiq Data Royale. An NHL themed bracket built using one of our original metrics, Puck Battle Win Percentage.
“This special issue welcomes theoretical, analytical, and empirical contributions using any kind of research method, including experiments, primary data from social media logs, case studies, simulations, surveys, and so on. Submissions are encouraged to examine the nature of both harmful and social good intentional behaviors on social media towards understanding, detecting, and monitoring good communication while countering harmful communication, by employing computational social media analytics techniques.” Deadline for submissions is May 15.
“With input from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor and Human Trafficking, the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently published a new solicitation on Disrupting Operations of Illicit Supply Networks (D-ISN) ‘to support the research needed to inform the economy, security, and resilience of the Nation and the world in responding to the global threat posed by illicit supply networks.'” Deadline for submissions is July 1.
Work from home (2)With the COVID-19 epidemic shutting down in-person activities, mathematicians are scrambling to find ways to continue to meet and collaborate. Below is a summary of (albeit brief but quite successful) experiences IPAM had with organizing on-line seminars and events. We feel that sharing the document may provide useful ideas to other mathematicians and scientists exploring on-line tools. We do not claim that what we are doing at IPAM is the best or most efficient way of doing things; however, we feel that given the urgent need in the community, an imperfect guide may be better than no guide at all. Naturally, we appreciate any comments or suggestions!
Today at lab meeting, I wanted to brainstorm about how to give good online talks, because I’m giving a few remote talks in the next month. Tracy suggested that perhaps I should demonstrate a bad talk first, just to get everyone on the same page. [video, 4:46]
