🦠 COVID-19 | Get Well Boris Johnson | 🤕 1,349,877 | Deaths 74,820
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:
1,349,877 cumulative cases (+71,385)
Active cases: 988,180 (+46,141) (this is the number of currently infected patients)
Total Deaths: 74,820 (+5,064)
Serious/Critical Cases: 47,409 (+1,512)
Recovered: 286,877 (+20,180) (NEW❗️)
Source: Worldometers
Death curves (updated daily as ECDC releases). Major update with per country graphs now available (Link)
Boris Johnson has been admitted to intensive care last night. I wish him well.
As we see confirmed cases rise accelerating, I share an article on making more sense and being more critical on case counts data. These numbers occupy the headline and the Corona Daily has chosen to report its headline graph on fatality rather than death because of the issues discussed in the “Long read of the day” piece.
A chilling but must see video on how COVID19 attacks patients lungs. A great thread on the situation in SF and how the city has done well in this first phase of its response partly drawing from its experience with HIV. Three reality-test articles on testing.
A policy article, a deeper look at viral shedding, a proposal for a pan European contact tracing app and how pre-print servers might play a greater role in academic research going forward.
I have added a treatment and vaccine tracker as well as a weekly surveillance report from the CDC in the resource section.
Get well Boris Johnson
Long read of the day: Nate Silver (Founder of FiveThirtyEight and American Statistician) writes “Coronavirus Case Counts Are Meaningless”
Nate Silver does a superb job at explaining the problem characterised at the beginning of the article:
“COVID-19 statistics, especially the number of reported cases, are not at all like that. The data, at best, is highly incomplete, and often the tip of the iceberg for much larger problems.”
The articles looks at four different scenarios and offers the model and assumption to analyse and visualise the potential lag/misrepresentation of detected/published case counts versus actual cases in a given population.
The 4 scenarios are:
Robust testing (Germany-like)
Sudden, one-time increase in testing (United States-like)
High test floor, low test ceiling (UK-like)
A testing decrease (the countries which could be falling in this category are cited in the article)
If you want to read it fast look at the charts for the visualising the four scenarios. If you have time and/or curiosity, I strongly recommend reading the full article. If you are even more interested play with the model. (Link)
🎬 Video of the day: “How coronavirus attacks the body?” by the New York Times (Link)
This is a chilling but very well done and informative video including a virtual reality visualisation of COVID19 damage to the lungs of a patient. Beyond the explainer nature of the video there are two quotes which stand out:
NY Governor Cuomo: “The longer you are on the ventilator the less likely you will come off of it”
Dr Keith Mortman (Director of Thoracic Surgery, George Washington University Hospital): “Everybody has a role to play and if you’re not in the healthcare field right now your role is to stay home”
👌 This is such a great Twitter thread by Bob Wachter (Chair, UCSF Dept of Medicine). It looks at so many current and relevant topics with great references that it could be a Corona Daily in itself. It starts by looking on how well San Francisco is doing in its first phase of fighting COVID19. Wachter also references a great article by Ryan Kost in the SF Chronicle (“How SF battle with HIV/AIDS shaped today’s coronavirus response”). He then cites great references given that Boris Johnson has been admitted to ICU including a JAMA paper pointing to better prognosis for patients admitted to ICU in Italy (“Baseline Characteristics and Outcomes of 1591 Patients Infected With SARS-CoV-2 Admitted to ICUs of the Lombardy Region, Italy”):
“In 1581 patients admitted to ICUs, mortality rate=26%, though 58% of [patients] still in ICU at close of study, so true mortality rate likely to be [significantly] higher”
Wachter obviously wishes Boris Johnson well but also writes that the outcome will shape the narrative on COVID19 going forward in a way which is hard to foretell. Get well Boris Johnson. (Link)
🧪 John Bell (Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University and Life Sciences advisor to the UK government writes: “Trouble in testing land”. Professor Bell looks at the challenges and realistic timeline for advancing serological testing and a home test kit version. There has been a lot of speculation in the media. This is what Professor Bell has to say towards the end:
“What next? We will of course continue to look for a test that meets the criteria of an acceptable test. There is a point in evaluating these first-generation tests where we need to stop and consider our options. […]
This will take at least a month.”
Well worth a read. (Link)
🧪 On the same topic, but moving to the US, Zachary Binney (Epidemiologist; Incoming Assistant Professor of Quantitative Theory & Methods, Emory Oxford - the one in the state of Georgia) writes an informative Twitter thread following the FDA approval of the first antibody test from Cellex. It echoes a lot of the concerns and challenges highlighted by Professor Bell article. Binney references his own presentation “Quick Intro to Sensitivity, Specificity, PPV, and NPV” to “nerd out this thing further”. Presentation and Thread well worth reading. (Link)
🦠 Somewhat related to testing , Helen Branswell writes “CDC launches studies to get more precise count of undetected Covid-19 cases” for STAT news. Branswell reports on the CDC plan to start sero-surveys. The CDC will start in the summer with no timeline for completing the work. The article has the merit of managing timeline expectations on when serological testing will provide meaningful contribution to surveillance efforts as well as the potential appearance of immunity certificates now considered and talked about by most policy makers. (Link)
🦠 The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine published “SARS-CoV-2 viral load and the severity of COVID-19” on its website. It is a good review on the state of research looking at how viral load (how much of the virus you get infected with) links with severity of the disease. It is an important area of research particularly for healthcare workers whose exposure to the virus if not well protected is significantly higher than most of us (particularly if we respect shelter at home orders). (Link)
🏛 Jodie L Guest et al. writes “The Three Steps Needed to End the COVID-19 Pandemic: Bold Public Health Leadership, Rapid Innovations, and Courageous Political Will” for the JMIR Public Health and Surveillance. A good summary of the needed response. (Link)
🚔 Vincent Manancourt writes “EU data regulator calls for pan-European COVID-19 app” for Politico. I hope that the EU data regulator succeeds given the EU has a pan-European data protection law and also free movement in the Schengen Zone. It would solve the inter-operability problem which would arise from multiple national tracing app. (Link)
📃 Corey S. Powell writes “Pursuing COVID-19 at Internet Speed” for Nautilus. The scientific community has been an example to follow in terms of cooperation for accelerated learning when dealing with a fast moving and deadly virus. The article looks at the pre-print servers BioRxiv and medRxiv which have been two core pillars of this phenomenal data sharing. These archives have been created by John Inglis and Richard Sever at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The article is an interview of Richard Sever by Powell. Sever provided an interesting data point on SARS and why medRxiv provides value to the community for COVID19:
“There was an article a while ago in the journal PLOS Medicine pointing out that when the first SARS outbreak happened in 2002-2003, 93% of the papers about SARS came out after the epidemic was over. When you got to the Zika epidemic [in 2015], we were seeing papers on bioRxiv in the midst of the epidemic. But bioRxiv was still fairly young, medRxiv didn't exist, and the practice of posting preprints in biology was not familiar to that many people.”
This is a problem dear to my heart as I was an investor and on the Board of Mendeley which had created a reference sharing and metadata platform for peer reviewed articles.
An interesting read of potentially what the future of research publishing could look like in a networked world. We should make sure to build the right architecture not to bring "disinformation” to academic research. (Link)
🎬 Video: “Inside a Covid-19 intensive care unit”. This is a video on how South Korean nurses are protected in an ICU. It would be good for the UK and other countries to show how nurses are protected in their country. (Link)
📊 A picture is worth a thousand words: Global (🌎) and local (with relevant flag) visualisation and forecasting tool
🇺🇸 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. 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
💊NEW❗️“COVID-19 treatment and vaccine tracker”. This tracker contains an aggregation of publicly-available information from validated sources by 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)