🦠 COVID-19 | Humanity is our biggest strength | 🤕 1,446,927 | Deaths 83,087
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:
1,446,927 cumulative cases (+97,050)
Active cases: 1,055,187 (+67,007) (this is the number of currently infected patients)
Total Deaths: 83,087 (+8,267)
Serious/Critical Cases: 47,867 47,409 (+458)
Recovered: 308,653 (+21,776) (NEW❗️)
Source: Worldometers
Death curves (updated daily as ECDC releases). Major update with per country graphs now available (Link)
Today, the Corona Daily wants to focus away from the grim numbers and the science, and take time to celebrate the human side of the pandemic. Starting by a wonderful 2017 long essay from Dan Wang celebrating optimism as human capital and looking how de-industrialization and digitalisation might have built fragilities in our societies. It is a prescient and positive essay on how to prepare for renewal, emerge from the crisis and prepare a better future
New York governor Andrew Cuomo shows compassion and exhorts New Yorkers not to lose their humanity as COVID19 brings grief, pain and heartbreak to his state. Masterful communication was one of the talent of Franklin Roosevelt which served Americans well during the last world war as narrated by Charles Edel in his “Wartime footing” article. The HuffPost looks at why African Americans are particularly vulnerable to COVID19 as the death toll amongst that community is uniquely high.
The tale and interplay of different opinions from the various advisory groups guiding the UK government in shaping its changing COVID19 policies is a fascinating yet inconclusive read. A great article from Kai Kupferschmidt on drug trials and a great article in the Financial Times on data surveillance in China during the pandemic. Timely and relevant as European and US governments shape their own red lines and policies around epidemic surveillance.
Finally, a great podcast on the challenges of antibody testing and some new forecast and visualisation resources in the data section.
More than ever what happens to the virus is up to us, whatever our initial failings. Let us not forget that humanity is our greatest strength.
💡Long essay of the day: “Definite optimism as human capital” by Dan Wang (August 2017). Thank you to Mike Chalfen for sharing it.
Dan Wang wrote a very relevant and prescient piece back in 2017. It somewhat echoes Emily Esfahani Smith’s article “The Benefits of Optimism Are Real” included in a previous Corona Daily. It looks as how the dominant socio-economic thinking has over-developed Girardian mimetism (the “Uber of everything” maybe exemplifying its latest failed embodiment), underestimating and under appreciating our innate enduring human capabilities. These are needed to re-build resilience in our society and prepare for a better future.
It echoes the arguments in a piece recently published by Deloitte Center for the Edge: “Skills change, but capabilities endure”. This though provoking article starts with:
“At some Toyota plants, new workers don’t learn how to operate or feed materials into a specific piece of machinery. Instead, they spend weeks, even months, learning to do by hand what machines do so much faster”
Our loss of industrial know-how and capacity have recently been exposed by our slowness (or even inability in some countries) to manufacture the necessary personal protective equipment, (PPE) or ventilators for our own healthcare workers and population. In his essay Wang writes back in 2017:
“I wonder if the so-called developed countries should be careful of their own premature deindustrialization. […]
we can’t be satisfied with innovation confined mostly to the digital world.”
Wang also criticises the way a majority of the financial and economic leadership direct money in advancing their goals as opposed to being patrons of culture:
Perhaps the mighty industrialists and financiers who steer so much money towards think tanks to promote their goals can consider culture more often.
In Wang eyes, it was only a matter of time until the hoarding of talent and resources around what has become a self-reinforcing and self-serving model would mis-allocate and devalue the most valuable resource:
He asks why the scarcest economic resources—entrepreneurial ability and technical talent—are going into automating an abundant resource: cheap labor. In the developed world, labor is expensive because of policy restrictions, and it is neither efficient nor equitable to use scarce technological talent to displace globally abundant workers.
It is a direct criticism of the digital platform models for human resources as opposed to material resources, the latter having more defensibility.
A great piece to celebrate our deep human capabilities and look more positively to the future.
(Link)
🎬 Video of the day: Governor Andrew Cuomo on “Remember our humanity” (Link)
🦠 Nina Misuraca Ignaczak and Michael Hobbes write “Black People Are Dying Of COVID-19 at Alarming Rates. Here's Why.” in the Huffington Post. The article looks at new data which emerges in Louisiana, Michigan and Milwaukee showing higher case rate and death rate amongst African Americans than other communities. The articles starts by partly explaining the difference pointing out higher relevant co-morbidities in this part of the American population:
“African Americans have twice the rate of heart disease, stroke and diabetes compared to Caucasians. They suffer from heart failure, asthma and hypertension at higher rates and earlier in their lives. Over decades, these disparities have compounded a life expectancy that is four years shorter for Black Americans than for whites.”
But the authors also look at social disparities, higher use of public transportation, multi-generational household and lower access to health to further compound the co-morbidity prevalence. As with other diseases and comparative mortality rate, COVID19 highlights again the unique vulnerability of African Americans. (Link)
🦠 Kai Kupferschmidt writes “Trials of drugs to prevent coronavirus infection begin in health care workers”.
This is a great article looking at large scale pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) trials and post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) trials currently underway involving the at-risk population of healthcare workers. A prophylaxis treatment is given to prevent the disease and hence the case for doing these pre- or post- exposure trial for healthcare workers. One of the PrEP trial involves the now infamous chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine and is hopes to start this month. The PEP trial already started in Spain:
“In the Spanish trial, people with symptoms who test positive for COVID-19 are treated with the HIV combination drug darunavir/cobicistat plus hydroxychloroquine. Anyone known to have spent more than 15 minutes with them in the previous 5 days is treated with hydroxychloroquine for 4 days. Patients in a control group and their contacts receive no drug—there was no time to prepare an appropriate placebo”
PrEP and PEP trials were conducted successfully for HIV. However, the knowledge on COVID19 to start those is much less then it was for HIV when similar trials were started. It is a sign of the urgency in which we find ourselves, or some would argue a proportionate relaxation of trial approval for drug discovery given the explosive nature of the current pandemic. (Link)
🏛 🇬🇧 Reuters publishes “Special Report: Johnson listened to his scientists about coronavirus - but they were slow to sound the alarm”. This is a very interesting report of the interplay between different UK government advisory group (SAGE, NERVTAG, and SPI-M) and how they came to shape the various government strategies from herd immunity to the current lockdown. Intriguing. ((Link)
📜 Charles Edel writes “A wartime footing” for The American Interest. A very good article looking at the challenges we face with COVID19 and the lessons we can learn from Franklin Roosevelt in particular post World War II. Edel draws interesting parallels around food rationing, price control, and converting manufacturing for war time needs:
“To spur the manufacture of necessary wartime goods, Franklin Roosevelt established the War Production Board, which was charged with converting industries from peacetime manufacturing to war production, prioritizing the distribution of materials and services, halting nonessential production, and allocating materials.”
Edel is also right to emphasise the importance of communication in mobilising the public in times of crisis and how this was a key quality of President Roosevelt:
“Roosevelt was a masterful communicator and ensured that the public was kept up to date on the war’s progress, informed of setbacks, and readied for the enormity of the sacrifices and efforts to come”
Keen to emphasise the limits of the the parallel between World War II and the fight against COVID-19, Adel turns to Eleanor Roosevelt:
We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appears, discovering that we have the strength to stare it down.”
Again looking at a deep human quality. (Link)
🚔 “China, coronavirus and surveillance: the messy reality of personal data” published in the Financial Times. This is a well researched article about how data from private companies have been requisitioned from Chinese authorities to complement their own data set. It also looks at how the competition between different government entities and the technical limitations of some of the gathered data (such as from cell tower), is not the panacea which is advocated when China wants to project to the outside world its technical prowess.
Privacy advocates in China worry about the pandemic squandering the advances they had recently made for consumers and citizens. As the authors write:
“For all the professed reticence of the companies, the government has used the coronavirus crisis to push for greater sharing of data from private and public sources. Indeed, some in China fear that some of the gains for consumer privacy in the past two years could be lost.”
The Chinese example plays out some of the worst fears of civil liberties and privacy advocates in Europe and the US. Europe has been at the forefront and a reference on the privacy front, and absolutely wants to preserve its hard gained status not only during the pandemic but even more so afterwards.
Cooperation between governments and privacy experts should be seen as an opportunity for both to set a new and innovative data paradigm. It is not a case of security versus privacy as often government or big tech like to put it. The opportunity is here to progress. Let’s not squander it or even worse go back in time to even darker surveillance regimes. (Link)
🎬 Podcast: London Review of Books “In the lab”with Thomas Jones.
“Rupert Beale talks again to Thomas Jones about his work at the Francis Crick Institute, where he’s helping to set up a testing lab for Covid-19. He talks about the challenges of creating a scalable process, explains why a successful antibody test could be hard to achieve, and finds some reasons to be hopeful.”
(Link)
📊 A picture is worth a thousand words: Global (🌎) and local (with relevant flag) visualisation and forecasting tool
🌍
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)🇺🇸 (NEW❗️🌍)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
💊NEW❗️“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)