🦠 COVID-19 | After the lockdown | 🤕 799,710 | Deaths 38,720
📊 Daily Data Brief:
799,710 cumulative cases (+75,118)
Active cases: 591,014 (+52,515) (this is the number of currently infected patients)
Total Deaths: 38,720 (+4,703)
Serious/Critical Cases: 30,234 (+3,515)
Source: Worldometers
Death curves (updated daily as ECDC releases). Major update with per country graphs now available❗️(Link)
We should be in for some good news this week as the curves of Italy, France and Spain become the first ones out of Asia to show that the lockdown is having its desired effect. But bigger questions and challenges will need to be faced as a considerable number of people have and will lose their lives while the “curves flatten”. The human suffering of this pandemic is unlike any we have seen in most countries for a while (or lifetime for most of us).
The World Health Organisation has already started to warn the Asia Pacific region not to let its guard down. Everywhere, given the high vitality of COVID19, keeping your guard up has a high economic but also mental health cost. We have heard of the first suicides. The finance minister of the Hesse region has committed suicide after becoming "deeply worried" over how to cope with the economic fallout from COVID19. The human suffering resulting from the economic standstill while physical distancing is unprecedented.
As much as we can, we should take as much hope this early victory against the virus. We should trust that all the continued work around increasing testing, our admirable health care workers on the front line and the continued scientific progress will yield the success and ammunition we need to win the next phase against the pandemic. As I wrote yesterday, we are “in this for the long haul”. Increasing transparency and candour from government should help us take better decision and build resilience. The leadership which has adopted daily briefings to inform their public have already reaped the benefit in their approval ratings. They should nonetheless not take this early bounce in popularity as an encouragement to let their guard down or let political bias influence public health decisions.
What happens to the virus is more than ever up to us. The road travelled till now should soon be rewarded but the road after the lockdown is long and perilous.
🦠 Video of the day: Even now there are still people who circulate “it’s like the flu” narrative. Professor Montgomery did a short and powerful video last week. Even the interviewer is surprised by what exponential means. Thanks to my friend and reader of the Corona Daily, Tariq Krim for sending it across.
“If you are irresponsible enough to think that you don’t mind if you get the flu, remember it’s not about you - it’s about everybody else.”
😷 Article of the day: Ingrid Burrington writes “America needs N95 masks. These people are trying to get them to health care workers.” for VOX.
This is a cleverly constructed and well written article on an area we all have some familiarity with: shortage of N95 masks particularly for healthcare workers. Some of us might also be familiar with friends or friends of friends helping in sourcing and distributing these. Burrington does not dispute or demean these efforts:
“While the wherewithal, generosity, and determination of many of these efforts is incredibly inspiring, the fact that such a massive grassroots effort has to exist at all speaks to how weak medical supply chains already were before this crisis — and, unless they’re radically changed, how likely they are to break again in the future.”
However, Burrington also looks beyond this immediate crowdsourced effort and focuses on the fragility of the supply chain of medical supply in the US. One which should undoubtedly be fixed post the current crisis management mode:
“In theory, it’s not that different from the supply chain for any mass-manufactured consumer product. In practice, however, “the health care industry is one of the most fragile in terms of its supply chain,” says Michael Einhorn, CEO of the medical supplies company Dealmed, “and [prior to Covid-19] the health care supply chain was fundamentally unhealthy.”
Burrington then goes closer to the heart of the problem:
In a sense, the N95 gray market represents a metastasized version of crises that have come to define American health care.
The finale nails it, and looks at the limits of individualism in ensuring a sustained global security for our public health.
“But if ordinary people rising to the challenge of extraordinary times is only understood as a triumph of altruism and not a tragedy of capitalism, if companies have to put profit ahead of diversified sourcing or maintaining inventory, if governments refuse to treat health care as a basic human right, what we’re seeing right now will happen again.”
Well worth a read! (Link) (More Supply Chain x COVID-19 stories here)
🇨🇳 In another example of how fast news is moving and how the flow of information can make a difference. Liu Denghui wrote “Opinion: China Should Disclose Asymptomatic Covid-19 Cases” for Caixin Global yesterday. Denghui highlights the official Chinese policy not to disclose asymptomatic cases in the official COVID19 figure and the public health danger of doing so:
“Active disclosure isn’t the same as “revealing your dirty laundry.” In fact, it’s a science-backed policy decision for controlling the outbreak. At the moment, the country has clear disclosure requirements for the outbreak, with a requirement for honest and accurate reporting. It is imperative that data on asymptomatic infections gets published as soon as possible to meet the premier’s requirements to seek the truth from facts and respond to social concerns in a timely and public way.”
This morning in Bloomberg, “China Reveals 1,541 Symptom-Free Virus Cases Under Pressure”. A reminder to all of us that a healthy public sphere and quality media matters. (Link)
🌏 Countries in Asia Pacific have often been praised for their early success. However, the World Health Organisation has warned today about the region not letting its guard down as the fight is far from over. I hope that European countries which are likely to see a curbing of the spread of COVID19 in the coming days following the strict lockdown also heed this message going forward. (Link)
❗️As we are potentially in for some good news this week showing that strict lockdowns are having their intended effect, Helen Branswell writes “As coronavirus spreads, doctors in the ER warn ‘the worst of it has not hit us yet’”. Branswell has spoken to three frontline health workers across n U.S. hospitals in the hardest hit regions: “Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Lifespan Health Systems in Providence, R.I.; Lakshman Swamy, an intensive care doctor at Boston University Medical Center and the VA Boston; and Craig Spencer, an ER physician and director of global health in emergency medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center”.
A somber and worthwhile read (Link)
🦠 A great thread by Adam Kucharski (epidemiologist at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) talking about epidemiology modelling and its involvement in early reported insights (here is one from 18 January 2020). What did our government do then with these insights? The epidemiologists have been heavily scrutinised given the strict lockdown response which has been informed by their modelling. Kucharski rightly outlines:
“It's important to have rigorous critiques and reviews of modelling studies, but equally critics should be careful about making sweeping statements about disease models, when the modelling contribution to the evidence base has been wider and more nuanced than many realise.”
A great thread (Link)
💉 James Paton writes “A Coronavirus Vaccine in 18 Months? Experts Urge Reality Check” for Bloomberg. One of the expert quoted in the article is Michael Kinch (associate vice chancellor at Washington University in St. Louis), who stopped working on a HIV vaccine 30 years ago:
“But dozens of well-funded labs were attacking the problem, a solution seemed easily within reach, and Kinch moved on.”
Every pathogen is different, and COVID19 does not seem to mutate as quickly as HIV and there are therefore grounds for optimism. Paton highlights nonetheless the danger of overpromising and underdelivering in the public eye and how it could affect the role and funding of science past the pandemic. (Link)
📱 Professor Julie Leask (expert in risk communication with the Susan Wakil School of Nursing) writes “Leaders can still build our trust to fight the virus - here's how” for the Sydney Morning Herald.
Even though the article focuses throughout on Australia, the recommendations applies to leaders around the world on how to better communicate with the public. It is clear that the holding of daily press briefings by both Trump and Johnson has boosted their respective popularity as reported in the Financial Times today. At beginning of the crisis there was a lack of transparency with the public, this has now changed in most countries. This should continue to improve during this crisis and for the ones to come. More specifically Leask writes:
“Our leaders need to take the public into their confidence in a way that will feel uncomfortable and new for some. They will need to constantly communicate the uncertainty and limitations of the knowledge behind decisions. People dislike uncertainty but a perception of obfuscation is worse because it diminishes trust.”
A great read to help us assess our respective leaders in their communication. (Link)
🚴🏼 Charlotte Gee writes “Gig workers are set to strike today demanding better protection from coronavirus” for the MIT Technology Review. (Link)
🚔 Department of Privacy
Anthony Fleury writes “Lockdown, Houseparty, and your personal data: Nightmares ahead !” in Medium. It is always the same story when it comes to digital social tools. It might be that the newcomers like the social video service HouseParty are worse than what we already know about Facebook and the bigger tech platforms.
The recommendation from Fleury couldn’t be clearer:
What to do now:
Uninstall it asap.
Read why in the post (Link)
🎬 Videos of the day:
In this short explainer video (“Coronavirus trajectory tracker explained”), the FT's senior data-visualisation journalist John Burn-Murdoch explains the COVID19 trajectory tracker and the visualisations and choices made behind his visualisation choices. The FT trajectory as well as Francois Lagunas have made the same choices are are in the data link list below at positions 1 and 4. (Link)
My friend Matt Pattison (CEO and Founder TEN, ) is in conversation with epidemiologists Dr David Neasham (Amgen) and Dr Shikta Das (UCL) talking about the science and factors underpinning Covid-19. (38 min) (Link)
🇺🇸/🌎: The American Enterprise Institute has published “National coronavirus response: A road map to reopening”. It is excellent and is a roadmap for all nations. It provides hope as it is outlines in details what are the steps necessary to reopen. A must read. (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)
📊 A picture is worth a thousand words: Global (🌎) and local (with relevant flag) visualisation and forecasting tool
🌎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”). 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)