🦠 COVID-19 | A momentous decision ahead| 🤕 2,541,693 | Deaths 176,404
I am a scientist by education, banker at JPMorgan for a few years, then mature PhD student in Chemical Biology at Oxford under the supervision of Christofer Schofield (FRS) and Peter Ratcliffe (Nobel laureate in medicine in 2019). Founder and tech investor focusing on media and education. I care about science, learning and Democracy which are good bedfellows.
📊 Daily Data Brief:
2,541,693 (+113,419) cumulative cases
Active cases: 1,679,063 (this is the number of currently infected patients)
Total Deaths: 176,404 (+10,278)
Serious/Critical Cases: 57,254 (+1,635)
Recovered: 686,226 (+49,503)
Source: Worldometers
Death curves (updated daily as ECDC releases). Major update with per country graphs now available (Link)
Two great reports on re-opening: one from The Edmund J Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and another one more UK-centric from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
Zeynep Tufekci tweets an interesting paper finding that misinformation during a pandemic kills. Sharing a detailed epidemiological paper on COVID19 in France from Institut Pasteur, whilst at the same time the New York Times reports on potentially under-counting of COVID19-related deaths outside China.
Doctors are learning every day and a new study shows that ventilators usage might not be recommended as frequently as initially thought. We are learning every day and that is positive news in containing the pandemic.
Finishing with two mental health related articles. This remains an under-reported topic on this pandemic (and in normal times as well). One team of epidemiologists wants to investigate whether allowing exclusive small clusters to allowing very young children to enjoy physical contact with their friends would pose only a marginal risk. We also publish a Medium post looking at why enthusiasm for Zoom dinner parties is waning.
Most of the articles today agree that a lock-down and second peak is coming. Whilst every government is either reopening or debating a reopening, the Corona Daily looks at the pre-conditions and the risks involved. As Angela Merkel previously said these re-openings will progress on thin ice and all of us do not want our present sacrifice to be wasted with the second peak becoming higher than the first one.
A momentous decision ahead.
Tweet of the day: Misinformation kills? Summary of a recent paper published by Bursztyn et al. on “Misinformation During a Pandemic”.
🏛 The long Read: The Edmund J Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University published “Roadmap to pandemic resilience” in a Free Society. (Link)
For the authors COVID19 is a profound threat to our Democracy similar in scale to the Great Depression or World War II. The authors summarise their recommendation with four components which the readers of the Corona Daily will be familiar with:
“This policy roadmap lays out how massive testing plus contact tracing plus social isolation with strong social supports, or TTSI, can rebuild trust in our personal safety and the safety of those we love.”
There is a nice graphic representation with their anticipated timeline:
The report recommends to have 5 million test per day capacity to re-open in June and be able to scale that up to 20 million test per day. The COVID tracking project has now tracked 4.16 million tests thus far as of today:
The report also supports contact tracing technology as long as it is built on key principles and within a pre-established legislative framework:
“Clear mechanisms and norms of governance and enforcement around the design and use of peer-to-peer warning apps, including maximal privacy protection, availability of open source code for independent and regulatory audit, and prohibitions on the use of any data from these apps for commercial purposes, ideally achieved through pre-emptive legislation”
A worthy read on what to expect and how to exit whilst protecting our Democracy.
🇬🇧 The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has produced a presentation “A sustainable exit strategy: Managing uncertainty, minimising harm” giving helpful and complementary data to the Harvard report above (Link)
🦠 Sharon Begley writes “New analysis recommends less reliance on ventilators to treat coronavirus patients” for STAT news. We learn everyday on COVID19. Not so long ago data suggested that we were running short on ventilators and that was a key area to build capacity to effectively care for patients. Begley reports on an analysis published Tuesday in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. It echoes a “Video of the day” from intensivists mainly from New York in a previous edition of the Corona Daily.
“Without effective drugs, surviving severe Covid-19 depends on supportive care, including breathing support where necessary. But recommendations for that care are largely based on guidelines for other viral pneumonias and sepsis. That explains the second reason ventilators aren’t helping more patients: Covid-19 affects the lungs differently than other causes of severe pneumonia or acute respiratory distress syndrome, the researchers point out, confirming what physicians around the world are starting to realize.”
This is why New York did not use all the ventilators it initially requested. We are learning every day about this new disease. The cooperation between doctors and scientists has been extraordinary and will continue to help us build and plan better for what our needs are going forward. (Link)
🇫🇷 Henrik Salje et al. published “Estimating the burden of SARS-CoV-2 in France” on HAL (pre-print server). This a fantastically rich statistics paper on the COVID19 epidemic in France. On the positive side, it estimates that the reproductive number of the virus decreased from 3.3 to 0.5 with the lockdown measures. In other words the lockdowns are working. It confirms that mortality rate is age-dependant “ranging from 0.001% in those <20y to 8.3% in those >80y”. It also gives what to expect when lockdown exit start as announced recently by President Macron:
“By 11 May, when interventions are scheduled to be eased, we project 3.7 million (range: 2.3-6.7) people, 5.7% of the population, will have been infected. Population immunity appears insufficient to avoid a second wave if all control measures are released at the end of the lockdown.”
It is a reminder of the momentous choice that governments have to make on the timing of the lock-down end, assessing both the epidemics level and whether the level of preparedness to face the inevitable second wave is adequate. (Link)
🤔 Jin Wu and Allison McCann write “28,000 Missing Deaths:
Tracking the True Toll of the Coronavirus Crisis” in the New York Times. This is a grim headline, and looking at the “excess death” compared with previous years in a number of countries and noting that this number cannot only be accounted by the officially reported COVID19 related deaths.
The discrepancies are significant and could be explained in countries like France and the UK for example, by not counting COVID19 related deaths which occurred outside hospital. Both countries have recently started to remedy this method. It is key for the public trust to get more transparency on this. When people are asked to make such heavy sacrifice, it is important that they trust the authorities ordering shelter-at-home. Trust in statistics is one area to build support. (Link)
👨👩👦👦 Stefan Flasche (Associate Professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) writes “Of hairclips and coronavirus - how contact clustering may allow a partial lockdown exit for young kids”.
Flasche whose daughter is 4 years old and is London-based, outlines the problem early on:
“We are doing the best we can to keep her entertained at home and during the once-a-day outdoor exercise sessions, but extending our current “no contact beyond the household” lifestyle to include one or two of Isabella's closest friends would tremendously help her mental health and social development.”
It is something that most parents with young kids in lockdown must have asked themselves. It is obvious that at such an early developmental stage lockdowns will have a significant effect on young children. Flasche and his team are announcing that they will model the change in effective transmission rate of COVID19 if policy allows small and importantly exclusive clustering of young families with children. This would allow kids to continue the only social life they can have which is based on physical interactions.
If the risk is marginal, such clustering exemption could be considered for young families first and other vulnerable groups later to mitigate the mental health cost of extended lockdown. Looking forward to reporting on this. (Link)
🙁 Evan Selinger (Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology) writes “The Problem Isn’t Zoom Fatigue — It’s Mourning Life as We Knew It” for OneZero on Medium. This is a sad as well as a hopeful article. Selinger writes about people skipping more and more the Zoom sessions that group or friends rushed to organise to still have a semblance of social life while we physical distance. Some people have labelled it “Zoom Fatigue”. Selinger challenges this label, and writes instead:
“Every video call to someone you wish you could see in person but can’t is a memento mori of a world that’s been shattered and can’t be revived — a symbol of tragic deaths and shattered hopes and dreams”.
I subscribe to Selinger’s emphasis on the dip in enthusiasm for group video chats. It is also hopeful, because for all the futurists who predict that COVID19 will sustainably digitise our interactions going forward, Selinger reminds us of our deeply ingrained need for physical contact.
We are maybe now questioning the true value of our immaterial life based on social media and digital interactions. It is maybe this lack of materiality (mirrored in ur offshoring in manufacturing) which progressively built the fragility of our society before the pandemic. As the French say “Sometimes only one person is missing and the whole world seems depopulated”. (Link)
📊 A picture is worth a thousand words: Global (🌎) and local (with relevant flag) visualisation and forecasting tool
🇺🇸 The John Hopkins University resource center was the first one I used back in January they have now made available in their latest iteration a county by county dashboard in the US including information about health capacity, insurance coverage, ethnicity and age breakdown of the population (New York example below) (Link)
💊 The "Map of Hope" provides a geographical overview of planned, ongoing and completed clinical trials. It is put together with data from WHO Clinical Trials Search Portal by the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation technology. (Link)
🌍 MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis started to publish weekly death estimates for countries (Link)
🇺🇸 The US Center for Disease Control and Surveillance (CDC) publishes “A Weekly Surveillance Summary of U.S. COVID-19 Activity” (Link)
Google has published a new website to “See how your community is moving around differently due to COVID-19”. They have a lot of data to do so… (Link)
🌎The Financial Times has a data tracking page which is in front of the paywall, looking at cases and fatality curves for selective countries and metropolitan areas/region. It is not as extensive as the Madlag link below, where you can see static as well as animated images for a greater number of individual countries. (Link)🇺🇸Another valuable resource by Unacast ( a data company providing human mobility insights). Their “Social distancing scoreboard looks and compares (State by State and County by County), the change in mobility to prior to COVID19 (Link)
🌎 Country by Country Curves: This is a GitHub made by my friend Francois Lagunas. He has written a script to scrape deaths and number of cases in order to visualise the rate of growth on a logarithmic scale. Great resource (Link)
CityMapper has started to produce City Mobility Index to show how much a City is moving. This is a very good indicator of how well lockdowns are respected around the world: Barcelona (4% of city moving) at one end and St Petersburg at the other end (68% of city moving) for yesterday (Link)
🌎A great resource put together by Ben Kuhn and Yuri Vishnevsky. At a time when we need solidarity and cooperation, I prefer their subtitle “We need stronger measures, much faster” than their title. It’s a simulator on what case growth looks like depending on your community’s measures. Fantastic resource to stir communities and governments to action (Link)
🇩🇪 The COVID19 dashboard for Germany is one of the best around. (Link)
🌎A helpful guide by VOX of the “9 coronavirus pandemic charts everyone should see” (Link)
🌎Data and chart regularly updated by the Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. It maps the effective reproduction number (also known as R0) of COVID19. You want to get it below 1 as fast as possible to contain an epidemic. (Link to see charts and more data about your country)
🌎This is a great COVID19 Dashboard prepared by Andrzej Leszkiewicz. Andrzej has also written an introductory and explanatory blog for it (“Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) fatality rate: WHO and media vs logic and mathematics”). I particularly like the country comparison tab, which allows you to track and benchmark the curve of the epidemic (number of cases and deaths) in your country with that of another. Very well done and informative. (Link)
“Going Critical” by Kevin Simler is a detailed interacting essay talking about complex systems, the importance of understanding networks, modelling and how this applies to: memes, infectious diseases, herd immunity, wildfire, neutrons and culture. Must read (Link)
🏛 Notable tracking projects
💊“COVID-19 treatment and vaccine tracker”. This tracker contains an aggregation of publicly-available information from validated sourcesby the Milken Institute (Link)🏛Tariq Krim has started a COVID19 website tracking data about each government policy response to the pandemic (Link)
🏛Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) was launched yesterday. Data is collected from public sources by a team of dozens of Oxford University students and staff from every part of the world. It also looks at stringency of the measures and plots stringency with case curves. A great initiative and resource (Link)
👩💻Mike Butcher (Editor at Large Techcrunch and founder of TechforUK), had refocused TechforUK on the fight against COVID19. It is a very effective hands-on team of volunteer. Do reach out to them. He has also teamed up with We are now working closely with the volunteers behind the “Coronavirus Tech Handbook”. (They are ‘cousins’ of ours who originally created the Electiontechhandbook). Volunteer collaboration at its best! (Link)
📰 Cronycle resource:
Cronycle has made available a number of open-access feeds on its website which I extensively use for the Corona Daily. The four first feeds are:
1. COVID-19 General (Link)
2. COVID-19 x Resilience (Link)
3. COVID-19 x HCQ/CQ (Link) (HydroxyChloroquine and Chloroquine)
4. Gig Economy x COVID-19 (Link)
5. Supply Chain x COVID-19 (Link)
Human Rights x COVID-19 (Link)
I will write more in the future on how you can leverage Cronycle for keeping up to date in between two editions of this newsletter. (Link)
Here is a blog post from Valerie Pegon at Cronycle: “Grow knowledge about Covid-19, not anxiety!” (Link)