🦠 COVID-19 | A tough week ahead | 🤕 1,278,492 | Deaths 69,756
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:
1,278,492 cumulative cases (+63,559)
Active cases: 942,039 (+46,422) (this is the number of currently infected patients)
Total Deaths: 69,756 (+4,130)
Serious/Critical Cases: 45,897 (+1,259)
Recovered: 266,697 (NEW❗️)
Source: Worldometers
Death curves (updated daily as ECDC releases). Major update with per country graphs now available (Link)
As Germany becomes the fourth country to report over 100,000 cases, the Corona Daily focuses on Bill Gates’ admirable move for vaccine production. A former FDA director urges to prepare for a potential second peak and opines on current drug candidates and their approval. A great piece on the pitfall of vaccine research and development.
Also looking at more human pieces reporting on the tragedy of diseases now in the city of New York through the diary of the NY Fire Chief and back in 1952 through the tragedy of the polio epidemic in Denmark and the ingenuity of Bjørn Ibsen.
Also included is an interview of the director of the Center for Disease Control and prevention (CDC), an agency which has been surprisingly operating rather silently and two articles about supply chain disruption, the eminent political nature of supply chain. It is rather telling that “chain” in “supply chain” is highlighting the inherent dependency in the way they operate. Going forward we need to rethink supply ore in terms of decentralised networks with suppliers residing in countries with shared values This will build resilience and better cooperation to better deal with future disruption shocks.
Finally looking at privacy again as contact tracing apps are coming in an app store near you very soon.
COVID19 is bringing the best from all parts of society to bring back a new normal. Nonetheless, it is going to be a tough week ahead.
Article of the day: “Bill Gates to Spend Billions on Coronavirus Vaccine Development”. This is a truly admirable move from Bill Gates.
In a previous edition of the Corona Daily, I featured an opinion piece of Gates in the Washington Post where he laid out what should be done now to make up for lost time in our response. In it and regarding vaccine, Gates wrote:
“But creating a vaccine is only half the battle. To protect Americans and people around the world, we’ll need to manufacture billions of doses. […]
“We can start now by building the facilities where these vaccines will be made. Because many of the top candidates are made using unique equipment, we’ll have to build facilities for each of them, knowing that some won’t get used. Private companies can’t take that kind of risk, but the federal government can. It’s a great sign that the administration made deals this week with at least two companies to prepare for vaccine manufacturing. I hope more deals will follow.”
It looks like the next deal to follow was from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It will work with the seven leading vaccine project to provide “early money” (billions of dollars) to kickstart building the required manufacturing facilities. Truly admirable. (Link)
🦠Tweet of the day: Scott Gottlieb (former FDA director under Trump) tweeted a very good thread echoing a previous Corona Daily (“Second peak is the deepest”)
The thread argues that the first round will be won “at an almost unbearable cost in treasure and in souls”, but that we need to prepare for the second one with massive surveillance testing and a drug. Some great reference in the thread which he authored as well and are included below. (Link)
🎬 Video of the day: Although a true democrat, Queen Elizabeth’s address to the UK is one which a number of other leaders should watch and emulate. It was the Queen’s fifth public address to the Nation and was pre-recorded.
💊 Scott Gottlieb (former FDA director) writes “Bet Big on Treatments for Coronavirus” commentary in the Wall Street Journal. A great summary of the most promising anti-virals, and other drug candidates, and how the U.S. Federal Drug Agency can step up its efforts and process to accelerate the discovery of a COVID19 treatment. (Link)
🦠 A great interview of the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Robert Redfield by Helen Branswell in STAT news (“An interview with the CDC director on coronavirus, masks, and an agency gone quiet”). Some hard hitting questions on why the CDC is not more publicly present in the debate and the apparent sidelining of Nancy Messonier (director of the CDC’s Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases). Messonier had publicly contradicted the White House in the early days of the COVID19 outbreak. (Link)
💉 Lynne Peeples writes “News Feature: Avoiding pitfalls in the pursuit of a COVID-19 vaccine” for PNAS scientific journal. As the truth sinks in that life will most probably not return to a new normal until we have a vaccine (in particular for the elderly), the article focuses on common pitfalls in vaccine development. In particular, Peeples focuses on the common problem of immune enhancement and in particular antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), a process in which a virus leverages exciting antibodies to aid the infection. This is a risk in vaccine where patients who have been exposed to a vaccine candidate previously might develop more severe or problematic immune response when naturally exposed to the virus. This was a phenomenon observed with a vaccine candidate for SARS (also caused by a coronavirus)
This is a very informative and balanced piece on the race and challenges to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. (Link)
💔 ProPublica publishes ““Dead on Arrival”: A N.Y. Fire Chief’s COVID Journal” highlighting the drama in New York through the eyes of N.Y. Fire Chief (also a 9/11 survivor).
“I thought that surviving Sept. 11, 2001, would be the part of history I would tell grandchildren, but COVID has clearly surmounted even that disastrous and heartbreaking day. The department lost 343; at least 50 of them were people I knew, including my chief, Dennis Cross.”
Heartbreaking. (Link)
🚚 Supply chain have been seriously challenged and their strong political component is again being made obvious during this epidemic. Back in January, Mr. Indyk (a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former U.S. special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian) penned “The Middle East Isn’t Worth It Anymore” for the Wall Street Journal. And Andy Blatchford now wrote “Trump's moves to hold medical supplies tip Trudeau to China” for Politico. The two are linked as the oil supply chain and personal protective equipment supply chain, both exhibit a strong political component.
Indyk argues that U.S. involvement (and in particular its military involvement) dates back to:
“1945, when President Franklin Roosevelt made a pact with King Abdul Aziz al-Saud to protect the kingdom’s oil”
and that the other reason for U.S. involvement is “Israel’s survival”. I wish to focus on the oil rationale as it is also the one which COVID19 put back in the news and links it to PPE and resilience. Indyk rightly points out:
“But the U.S. economy no longer relies on imported petroleum. Fracking has turned the U.S. into a net oil and natural-gas exporter. The countries that still depend on the oil flowing from the Gulf are in Europe and Asia.”
COVID19’s demand shock for oil (particularly with most of the world population in lockdown) combined with Russia and Saudi not agreeing to cooperate on oil supply with coordinated cuts has made oil price fall. It is now well below the break even production price of the US fracking industry putting pressure on the U.S. newly acquired energy independence and potentially drawing it back to Middle East involvement…
The PPE shortage (and the looming medical drug shortage) has been covered in the Corona Daily previously, but has a new development as Blatchford’s article highlights”
“Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Saturday that Canada is set to receive millions of masks from China within the next 48 hours after U.S.-based manufacturer 3M said it got direction Friday from the Trump administration to stop exporting N95 respirators to Canada and Latin America.”
However, as Blatchford writes further on in the article:
“Turning to China requires its own complicated political calculus for Canada: The two countries have faced severe bilateral tensions for more than a year, triggered by the December 2018 arrest of Huawei senior executive Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver on a U.S. extradition request. Chinese authorities detained Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor days later on allegations of endangering China’s national security.”
Both these articles highlight the highly political (including sometimes military involvement) nature of supply chain and the need going forward to think about supply network, reassess what is vital (and should not be offshored) as well as assessing whether the supply network partners share our values. Two great reads. (Link and Link)
🚔 Enrico Nardelli (Professor of Informatics, Univ. Roma 'Tor Vergata', President, Informatics Europe) writes “How PEPP-PT, a solution aiming at fighting COVID-19 through privacy-preserving proximity tracing, works (as far as I've understood)” for Link&Think. This is a well written article going deeper on the PEPP-PT consortium effort and scrutinising the privacy claim of its solution. Well worth a read as contact-tracing apps are coming. (Link)
📜 Hannah Wunsch writes “The outbreak that invented intensive care” for Nature. The Corona Daily reported last week on the campaign to eradicate polio needing to pause given the COVID19 epidemic. As Wunsch writes, making last week’s news even more sad:
It was the polio epidemic of August 1952, at Blegdam Hospital in Copenhagen. This little-known event marked the start of intensive-care medicine and the use of mechanical ventilation outside the operating theatre — the very care that is at the heart of abating the COVID-19 crisis.
The article is a celebration of Bjørn Ibsen who invented the ventilator in 1952 to help respiratory failure in polio patients, concurrently starting medical community benefit and the start of the ICU. It is very likely that this COVID19 epidemic will see the emergence of an Ibsen-like figure which will be reported in the history books or scientific journals in the future. (Link)
📊 A picture is worth a thousand words: Global (🌎) and local (with relevant flag) visualisation and forecasting tool
🌍 NEW❗️ 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)🇺🇸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)🇺🇸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)
🇸🇬/🌎 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)
📰 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)
Here is a blog post from Valerie Pegon at Cronycle: “Grow knowledge about Covid-19, not anxiety!” (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)