🦠 COVID-19 | A time to act, a time to learn | 🤕 672,086 | Deaths 31,191
📊 Daily Data Brief:
672,086 cumulative cases (+58,013)
Active cases: 497,025 (+48,461) (this is the number of currently infected patients)
Total Deaths: 31,191 (+2,953)
Serious/Critical Cases: 25,377 (+1,380)
Source: Worldometers
Death curves (updated daily as ECDC releases). Major update with per country graphs now available❗️(Link)
One exceptional read, a set of four articles on policy and politics, four Sunday evening reads on grief, history and disinformation, and a video balancing medical risk and economic pain.
🔒 Long read and article of the day: Tom Clark, editor at Prospect writes: “Locking down too much or too little? Why our leaders will end up damned whatever they do”
This is a fantastic read. Clark looks at the lasting scars of the crisis beyond the “repugnant” choices which front-line healthcare workers will have to make as the healthcare capacities around the world are overwhelmed, to the long-lasting psychological effect and inequality which unemployment and school closures will bring despite the massive stimulus package voted around the world.
The only point worth debating is the “inevitability of the inquiry” which will follow in most countries. How many inquiries have been helpful in healing scars or preparing for a better future. We should maybe think about the cost of these inquiries and whether this taxpayer money could not be spent in a more beneficial way. (Link)
🇺🇸 A friend exclaimed “Finally, this is being said!!” when I posted the “China Is Not a Coronavirus Role Model” article published in the Wall Street Journal. JohnWalters (Chief operating officer of the Hudson Institute) wants “free nations of the world” to not linger on “The Communists’ coverup [which] helped create this mess” and instead use “their superior capacities for scientific innovation” and “their capacities for renewal and growth, [...] to win the fight against the coronavirus and drive the recovery”. An optimistic view. (Link)
🚔 Noam Chomsky writes “We Can’t Let COVID-19 Drive Us Into Authoritarianism” for TruthOut. While being obviously partisan and advocating the need for universal healthcare it warns that “societies facing the toll of the virus may collapse into authoritarianism.”
In two quite ominous passages, Chomsky writes:
“And any serious discussion of the future of humanity must begin by recognizing a critical fact, that the human species is now facing a question that has never before arisen in human history, a question that has to be answered quickly: Will human society survive for long?
[…]
We also face other threats, which are incomparably more severe, even if not as disruptive to daily life — today. One is the threat of virtually total destruction by nuclear war, which is ominous and increasing. Another is the threat of environmental catastrophe, which is imminent and devastating.”
Chomsky does not offer a solution but rather a critique of the current system. It is nonetheless a worthwhile read. (Link)
🇹🇼 Taiwan is the unsung success story in the the fight against COVID19. As of today and in spite of its proximity to China, it has recorded 298 cases and 2 deaths for a population of 23.8 million. It has made extensive use of testing and tracing technology and has also been fast to respond to COVID19. It should be undeniably praised and serve as a role model for a non authoritarian and tech driven successful response.
There are troubling reasons for which it has not been praised and ones which should not exist in time of pandemic.
In an article published at the end of February, Stanley Kao wrote “Taiwan Wants to Help Fight the Coronavirus. WHO Won’t Let It.” for Foreign Policy. It argues that the WHO should not let China plays its political games and prevent useful cooperation and information sharing. The National Review followed up last week with “Taiwan Accuses WHO of Failing to Heed Warning of Coronavirus Human-to-Human Transmission”.
We should really question the politics of China and the WHO in due course. (Link)
💰 The American Enterprise Institute has published “National coronavirus response: A road map to reopening”. This is much needed in helping us see beyond the current suppression/lock-down phase, getting the economy back to work as well as looking to better prepare for future pandemic. A must read. (Link)
The Sunday Evening Corner:
😰 Stephanie O’Neill write “Coronavirus Has Upended Our World. It's OK To Grieve” for NPR. O’Neill writes about the loss that COVID19 has brought in our lives for an extended period of time. She categorises our losses in 5 distinct areas:
Social connections
Habits and habitat
Assumptions and security.
Trust in our systems
Sympathetic loss for others
Awareness of our sense of loss it the first part in healing. O’Neill offers some practical coping mechanisms. Some of us might find it helpful while others sigh want to go deeper and less behavioural in dealing with our grief. (Link)
😰 Roge Karma writes “Coronavirus, anxiety, and the profound failure of rugged individualism” for VOX. This is a great follow on read to the NPR piece above as well as the article from The Week in my newsletter yesterday (“The need for hope”) on the psychological cost of COVID19.
Kara interviews Johann Hari author of Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope (audiobook). The interview talks about the financial precarity which the pandemic has put huge swathe of the population in and how financial relief acts as a powerful anti-depressant in those circumstances. The most interesting passage of the interview is Hari discussing a study on succeeding in making yourself happy in an individualist or collectivist society:
“They studied this in four countries: the United States, Russia, Taiwan, and Japan. They found that in the United States, those who consciously tried to make themselves happier didn’t become happier on average. But in the other countries, those who tried to make themselves happier did become happier.”
As I wrote many times before what happens to the virus is up to us. The work each of us will do for his/her community can both help us win and feel better. (Link)
🤕 Author Leslie Jamison writes a beautiful first person account of being infected and living with COVID19 for the New York Review of Books: “Since I became symptomatic”. Beats most LinkedIn posts of business connections recounting the same. (Link)
🧴 Liesl Schillinger writes “Meet the Unacknowledged Hero Who Discovered That Handwashing Saves Lives”. Schillinger beautifully tells the story of Ignaz Semmelweis, an Austrian doctor who made the death rate in his maternity ward drop from 18.3% to 1.2% by simply urging his fellow doctors to wash their hand in chlorinated lime before attending patients. For Schillinger, Semmelweis is the unsung hero of the benefits of “hand washing” which we are all following, but he should also be celebrated beyond. Schillinger writes at the end:
“Today and going forward, the best way to honor Ignaz Semmelweis and to preserve your fellow citizens and yourselves is to do what he did. Question received wisdom. Seek and respect sound information. And above all: wash your hands.”
A nice and needed Sunday evening read. (Link)
🎬 Video of the day: “2 views on balancing medical risk and economic pain”.
Paul Solman speaks with True Health Initiative’s Dr. David Katz, and William Brangham talks to Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard University epidemiologist who we featured previously on this newsletter.
David Katz makes the more utilitarian view of the pandemic and says that the main worry of his 80-year old dad is the “loss of his life savings and his legacy”. He advocates for a policy which isolates the most vulnerable while allowing the others to get the economy moving again.
Marc Lipsitch highlights the high virality and fatality rate of COVID19 as well as the high intensity needed to care for the patients who will survive. Lipsitch emphasise the overwhelming of healthcare capacity, and know on effect of patients needing care (such as cancer patients), as the key drivers of the current “flattening the curve” policy however painful is its economic consequence.
(13 min 17 sec) (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)
And I have added a new feed below
5. Supply Chain 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)
NEW❗️Here is a blog post from Valerie Pegon at Cronycle: “Grow knowledge about Covid-19, not anxiety!” (Link)
📊 A picture is worth a thousand words: Global (🌎) and local (with relevant flag) visualisation and forecasting tool
🌎NEW❗️The FT 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)🇺🇸The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is an independent global health research center at the University of Washington (UW). It has put out a simulation for the US (overall and by state) of what is the expected shortfall in health capacity (bed, ICU, ventilators) and when is the expected peak of the epidemic for each state. A valuable resource. (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”). It is a very extensive dashboard with 28 pages. 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)
🇸🇬/🌎 Singapore remains the gold standard of dashboard. Here is an article with the Best and Worst of all dashboard in the world, with Pros and Cons prepared by Neel V. Patel for MIT Technology (Article)
🏛 Notable collaborative projects
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)
Tariq Krim has started a COVID19 website tracking data about each government policy response to the pandemic (Link)
🎬 The Grant Sanderson permanent video corner:
Exponential growth and epidemics
This is an excellent video explaining “exponential growth” and epidemics. Although we are all familiar with the phrase, its authors rightly says that “yet human intuition has a hard time recognising what it means”. This is a ❗️MUST WATCH❗️to understand fully what is upon us but also how early behavioural changes at scale can have a massive impact on the level of exponential growth of COVID19 (Link)
“Simulating an Epidemic”
This is the second video by Grant Sanderson looking at simulating an epidemic under different physical distancing measures. (Link)