🦠 COVID-19 | Are the food banks coming? | 🤕 1,710,172 | Deaths 103,506
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:
1,710,172 cumulative cases (+95,080)
Active cases: 1,224,617 (+68,858) (this is the number of currently infected patients)
Total Deaths: 103,506 (+14,091)
Serious/Critical Cases: 49,123 (+923)
Recovered: 382,049 (+19,507)
Source: Worldometers
Death curves (updated daily as ECDC releases). Major update with per country graphs now available (Link)
As we enter another day of lockdown, all of us want to know when and how it ends. Ezra Klein in his article featured yesterday (“I’ve read the plans to reopen the economy. They’re scary.”) in the Corona Daily wrote:
“What’s even scarier to consider is that the debate between these plans is far beyond the political debate we’re actually having. As of now, the White House has neither chosen nor begun executing on a plan of its own.”
Klein went on to say that in a Presidential election year it is hard to be forthright with the public about the reality of those plans. But what other choices do leaders have unless they wilfully want to further entrench the “Age of Distrust” further. Campaigning on not trusting the expert or the elite has served them well to get elected but now that they are in power they might be judged differently or go towards darker politics for re-elections. Others argue that telling progressively the expected length of the lockdown is necessary to manage the crowd. That if the public knew the truth they would not cope. It was therefore better not to tell them or tell them gradually. How can a healthy Democracy and leadership have dishonesty at its core particularly at a time when your population is asked to make unprecedented sacrifices whilst grieving for lost friend or relatives.
As a survey (also included yesterday) showed a majority of American only have one month worth of spending ahead of them. So it is probably fair to think that a great number of people will not have money to buy food in the US and elsewhere very shortly at the end of the month. And yet no one is talking about food banks. Actually if you do a search about food banks and Covid19 on Google it surfaces articles that a number of food banks had to close down because of the coronavirus or did not offer the same level of human experience (“My food bank used to offer human contact, but coronavirus has ended that”). It does not surface news about how we are preparing to feed the kids and family which will not have money to buy food. The existence of food banks pre-pandemic is a reminder that people need them in normal times.
Of course the government could do another round of stimulus to give another $1,200 per month per adults. However, some people are not able or willing to apply and will be left out of these aids. How will society take care of them? And while Klein asks about not seeing detailed plans about the exit, federal government are not even providing more details on how a large number of citizens will be assisted to endure the lockdown phase longer. There is therefore a more urgent and burgeoning problem not being talked at all by the media and the leadership. Meanwhile the stock market is still showing a somewhat optimistic view of the future... a great combination for social unrest.
So in parallel to addressing and preparing for the next phase, the media and governments should urgently focus on better communicating and preparing for the weeks of lockdown ahead and answer: “Are the food banks coming?”
🇩🇪 Map of the day: this is a public map showing beds, ICUs (low care and high care) and ECMO availability by county in Germany. This is how you gain trust from the population and how investing in health pays off in time of crisis. The surplus of means in normal times allow you to better prepare for the crisis when it comes. (Link)
🇺🇸 Tweet of the day: Craig Spencer, emergency physician in New York City, shares how New Yorker are not equal against the disease.
💊 Jonathan Grein et al. published “Compassionate Use of Remdesivir for Patients with Severe Covid-19” in the New England Journal of Medicine. In a previous Corona Daily on March 25 (“Expand Compassionate Use”) I had welcome the approval by the FDA of the use of convalescent plasma under compassionate use. It allows the use of an unapproved drug under strict (and often last resort) conditions.
Grein and his team report on the use of Remdesivir (an anti-viral) under compassionate use in an international study involving 61 patients. Data was missing for 8 of them. Below are the summary results:
“At baseline, 30 patients (57%) were receiving mechanical ventilation and 4 (8%) were receiving extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. During a median follow-up of 18 days, 36 patients (68%) had an improvement in oxygen-support class, including 17 of 30 patients (57%) receiving mechanical ventilation who were extubated. A total of 25 patients (47%) were discharged, and 7 patients (13%) died; mortality was 18% (6 of 34) among patients receiving invasive ventilation and 5% (1 of 19) among those not receiving invasive ventilation.”
This needs to be compared to studies in China:
“In case series and cohort studies, largely from China, mortality rates of 17 to 78% have been reported in severe cases, defined by the need for admission to an intensive care unit, invasive ventilation, or both. For example, among 201 patients hospitalized in Wuhan, China, mortality was 22% overall and 66% (44 of 67) among patients receiving invasive mechanical ventilation.
So mortality rates with Remdesivir in the current study for patients receiving mechanical ventilation was 18% compared to 22% in the study in Wuhan.
This article serves to show that compassionate use might save lives as well as provide data on potential therapeutics. It is by no means a substitute for randomised with a placebo-controlled trials of Remdesivir. (Link)
🧪 Apoorva Mandavilli and Katie Thomas write “Will an Antibody Test Allow Us to Go Back to School or Work?” in the New York Times. This is a very good explainer and update on antibody testing. It starts by explaining the different types of antibodies, what is a serology test, what test has the FDA allowed or approved (one such test has been approved as previously reported by the Corona Daily). The authors also explain why serological assays are important to further understand the epidemiology of COVID19 and the strength/length of immunity developed once infected. They also tackle whether immunity certificate are coming anytime soon.
Dr. Florian Krammer who has been at the forefront of antibody testing has a good summary at the end:
“The best way to find out is to follow people with and without the antibodies and see when they might become reinfected. Those are the studies that are now needed. They will take time.”
As with everything from RT-PCR based testing of COVID19, to drugs and vaccines production, scaling up serological testing (and any ensuing issuance of immunity certificate) will take time. At least we are making progress. (Link)
🦠 Madhukar Pai writes “Covidisation' of academic research: opportunities and risks” as a blog in Nature Microbiology Community. Pai has also written a summary in a Twitter thread. It basically looks at how abundance of funding on COVID19 might encourage researchers to drop their real passion and divert talented researchers from other needed research areas to instead focus on COVID19. It also highlights that this rush of capital will likely lead to duplication of efforts (and therefore a sub-optimal allocation of means globally). An important issue to monitor and address. (Link)
🇨🇳 Lisa Beilfus writes “The View From Space: China Hasn’t Started to Rebound” for Barron’s. Satellite images from a private company track infrared signals from 5,000 locations across the supply-chain in China and continues to show “deep ongoing contraction”. This is different from the official Purchasing Manager Index published in China. So it might be that China’s numbers are not only “imperfect” when it comes to a virus spread or the severity of the diseases it causes. (Link)
📱 Apple and Google have teamed up to enable “Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing”. It raises a number of questions beyond the proportionality and effectiveness of contact tracing. In the announcement the new partners wrote:
“Google and Apple are announcing a joint effort to enable the use of Bluetooth technology to help governments and health agencies reduce the spread of the virus, with user privacy and security central to the design.” (my emphasis)
Ezra Klein yesterday in his article on exiting the lockdown had extensively quoted a the section on privacy of tracing by the Center for American Progress within their “National and State Plan to End the Coronavirus” (see full report link in Reopening plans section below). I am quoting only the beginning of that section below:
“The entity that hosts the data must be a trusted, nonprofit organization—not private technology companies or the federal government. The app could be developed for a purely public health nonprofit entity such as the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO)—an organization that represents state health officials—which would host the data. Congress or foundations could provide funding to develop and operate the technology. States licensing the app could provide ongoing operational funding to ASTHO, provided states receive federal funding for this purpose.” (my emphasis)
There is obviously nothing in the Apple-Google release that says that the data collected by tracing apps launched on iOS and Android will not be hosted by a private company or a federal government. However, exclusively privileging availability of this Bluetooth technology to governments and health agencies might reduce the pressure on federal government to follow a recommendation like the one advocated by the CAP.
Shoshana Zuboff who wrote the book the “Age of Surveillance Capitalism” attacks the nexus between governments and big tech as being a root cause of increased digital and state surveillance. She even claims that the FTC (US Federal Trade Commission) was about to regulate the tech giants, but the war on terror prompted by the 9/11 attacks drained away any support for privacy campaigns in the US. And here we are again, in the middle of a pandemic where this marriage of convenience is resurrected.
It is obviously early days and maybe we should give them the benefit of the doubt. And while it is surprising (some would say disappointing) that Apple who has portrayed itself as a champion of privacy allies itself with Google, other will see that both teaming up will ensure that the Bluetooth technology provided is neutral non privacy. One could also see that given that contact tracing was inevitable, having two tech giants uniting to enable this technology, will potentially ensure that a minimum standard of security and privacy has been established.
The competition authorities around the world should also scrutinise this. Beyond its use for contact tracing, it is not only phones which are Bluetooth enabled but also a number of IoT sensors. Bluetooth technology has the ability to map and search the physical world. I am told that it is meant to be open, past the initial restriction for the contact tracing applications. However, one should not underestimate how Apple and Google as owners of iOS and Android respectively have the ability to shape this market, and maybe curtail innovation which does not suit them but could suit the public.
This space will require vigilance. Apple has definitely been a better actor when it comes to privacy and will claim that by being engaged in the initiative it will foster a better outcome. Let us hope, that unlike Dr Tedros’ engagement strategy with China and previous appeasement policies, it will not be a road to more surveillance.
Reopening plans (NEW❗️): The Corona Daily had previously featured the American Enterprise Institute reopening plan. You can find it below along with the there other cited by Ezra Klein article in Vox.
The left-leaning Center for American Progress wrote“A National and State Plan To End the Coronavirus Crisis” (Link)
Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics wrote “When can we go out?” (Link)
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer (Link)
The Conservative-leaningAmerican Enterprise Institute wrote the previously featured: “National coronavirus response: A road map to reopening” (Link)
🎬 Video of the day: a short video and thread from the WHO to help parents and children in lockdown
📊 A picture is worth a thousand words: Global (🌎) and local (with relevant flag) visualisation and forecasting tool
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NEW❗️MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis started to publish weekly death estimates for countries (Link)🇺🇸
NEW❗️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)🇺🇸/🌍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. It has now added countries in the European Economic Area (EEA). 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 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)
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)