🦠 COVID-19 | Learning to fail, failing to learn | 🤕 1,529,360 | Deaths 89,415
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:
1,529,360 cumulative cases (+82,433)
Active cases: 1,102,784 (+47,597) (this is the number of currently infected patients)
Total Deaths: 89,415 (+6,328)
Serious/Critical Cases: 48,200 (+791)
Recovered: 337,161 (+28,508) (NEW❗️)
Source: Worldometers
Death curves (updated daily as ECDC releases). Major update with per country graphs now available (Link)
There was an article this morning in the New Statesman “The lockdown won’t end soon – but the UK government still isn’t levelling with the public”. The point made by Stephen Bush in this article applies worldwide starting from the brazen and wilful concealment from China to misleading communications till this day from a number of countries around the world.
This lack of candor and honesty will continue to fuel the distrust that people have of government and has been building up for decades. It is this distrust that contributes to populism being the best winning strategy. Nonetheless, political correctness can be equally as damaging when it is often deemed not appropriate or diplomatic to level criticism at a multilateral agency or, the persistent violation of patent law and abuse of trade regime by the same or different nations.
As I highlighted in one of the article in yesterday’s edition of the Corona Daily, Edel praised President Roosevelt communication during World War II:
“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”
“Masterful” as President means you can also inform your nation of “setbacks”. With rare exceptions, there is a currently a lack of candor and compassion in communicating with the public about the pandemic. Rather than acknowledging the radical uncertainty that we face and the imperfect knowledge in our hands for policy making, populists have a tendency to resort to lying or blame rather than acknowledging the inherent limitations. It should be easy to do so, as the knowledge gaps are expected with a new virus and it would be easy to frame policy decision as being based on “current knowledge”.
It would be a great service to science, and help build trust rather than distrust from the public. The policy on face mask is a case in point. It seems almost impossible for the WHO to even alter its policy on face masks, even though its previous policy was riddled with inconsistencies. So impossible that it cannot even call on the precautionary principle to communicate an update. Leaders communicating their decisions (or absence of decision) as based on “current knowledge” would probably better reflect reality, provide a risk management approaching needed adaptability in dealing with radical uncertainty. Instead they prefer to posture as God-like figures.
There was one White House briefing in the early days of the US administration taking the pandemic seriously, in which Trump kept repeating that the administration was “learning” a lot. It was encouraging as in the previous phase it seemed to have been rather hermetic to such learning and rather refer to the virus as a Democrating hoax. It is only when leaders put themselves in a learning stance that they are able to better face uncertainty and durably build resilience with their employees or public, In doing so the can better deal with the situation whilst strengthening their organisation or country. It requires both courage and humility.
It requires learning to fail and failing to learn.
🇨🇳 Long Read: Tracy Wen Liu writes “Witnessing Wuhan” for Project Syndicate
This is a first person account (whilst using different name to protect their identities) from Li (a heart specialist), Ms Wang (a nurse) and Jing (an anesthesiologist). It is a deeply human account of the crisis in Wuhan and the scars it has left behind for all three healthcare workers.
It is a tale of nurses crying in overwhelmed hospital doubting that they have the strength to carry on, but finding the resources to nonetheless run to a suffering patient. It recounts bodies lying on the floor and patients gasping for air, far away from the propaganda of the Chinese authorities projecting technological prowess and videos of hospitals being built in ten days:
“That morning, after passing through several stages of disinfection, Li had walked into the hospital’s contamination zone, where he immediately encountered a man sprawled on the floor, masked, covered in a quilt, with a yellow-green complexion. Two steps away, another person lay prone on a bench, seriously ill and hardly breathing. A young man sitting next to him was yelling into a phone, seeking help. And many other patients were lying on the ground in the clinic hallway, gasping for breath.”
It is an article which reminds us (if needed) why we should celebrate our healthcare workers around the world, as their experience and trauma will be no different in this pandemic than Li, Ms Wang and Jing. It should also be a call to action so that no healthcare workers has to live again through the scenes described in this article, and that decency should drive us to make the collective investment and sacrifice so that the healthcare workers do not have to live the horror that most of them are submitted to in overwhelmed hospitals. We have failed our healthcare workers but should learn not to fail the in the future. (Link)
Video of the day: Scott Gottlieb (Former FDA director) giving everyone a reality check on the expected drag on the economy for 2 years until we get a vaccine. Also praising Gates on funding increased manufacturing for vaccines and drugs. Asked also on why we should be or not more optimistic on a COVID19 vaccine when no vaccine for coronavirus has ever been made.
🦠Picture of the day: Lockdowns are working. A graph from Institute for Disease Modeling (Bellevue, WA) showing the correlation of reduced mobility (as measured by Facebook mobility index) and a reduction in the spread of COVID19 in King County, WA. A good encouragement that the physical distancing measures are working as most of us are entering another day of quarantine (whole thread form other labs around the world in the article section below).
🦠 Steven Sanche et al. published “High Contagiousness and Rapid Spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2” in Emerging Infectious Diseases journal. This paper looks at estimating anew COVID19 basic reproduction number (also known as R0) defined by Wikipedia as :
“In epidemiology, the basic reproduction number of an infection can be thought of as the expected number of cases directly generated by one case in a population where all individuals are susceptible to infection.”
It was previously believed that COVID19 R0 was between 2.2-2.7, but Sanche et al. now calculate the media R0 for COVID19 to be 5.7. As previously thought and advocated, the authors reiterate that active surveillance, contact tracing, quarantine, and early strong social distancing efforts are key to reducing transmission of this highly contagious coronavirus around the world. (Link)
🦠 The Guardian published “The cluster effect: how social gatherings were rocket fuel for coronavirus”. This is a great piece of journalism looking at 6 clusters of infections which were singled out in France (2,000-2,500 worshipper gathered for a pray-in), the US (Mardi Gras), Italy (Funeral), Australia (beach party), Germany (Carnival Party) and Vietnam (“jet setter/Instagram influencer accused of bringing the virus back on a plane from Europe”). The potency of these clusters have most probably informed specific social distancing guidelines around the world and might also durably change behaviour around the world post pandemic. Some have even argued that hand shaking will be a thing of the past. The U.K. will have a head start on this one. (Link)
🧮 Trevor Bedford (Scientist at Fred Hutch in Seattle) featured many times before in the Corona Daily, provides a helpful and great review Twitter thread looking at strong evidence that social distancing and shelter-at-home orders are working in reducing the spread of COVID19. It features studies in Europe from two epidemiology labs (here and here) finding a decrease in the effective reproduction number (Re) since lockdown began. The latter analysis has been in the data section (#12) from the first editions of the Corona Daily. Bedford also shares studies demonstrating the same efficacy of measures in Washington State from Institute for Disease Modeling in Bellevue, WA. Interestingly this latest study correlates Facebook mobility measure with decrease in Re. (here). Full Twitter Thread here: (Link)
😷 Trisha Greenhalgh and colleagues published “Face masks for the public during the covid-19 crisis” in the British Medical Journal. The highlight of the analysis is that the precautionary principle should be applied. The authors remind us at the beginning of the article what the precautionary principle is according to Wikipedia:
“a strategy for approaching issues of potential harm when extensive scientific knowledge on the matter is lacking.”
The paper substantiates that the knowledge on the issue in question is missing by providing an extensive review of published research on mask wearing. “On the grounds that we have little to lose and potentially something to gain from this measure”, and the authors argue that the precautionary principle should apply for recommending mask wearing for all. (Link)
🧪 Guy Chazan and Donato Paolo Mancini report “Germany to run Europe’s first large-scale antibody test programme” in the Financial Times. Germany has been at the forefront of scaling COVID19 diagnostic testing running up to 100,000 tests/day. It is planning on replicating their lead in RT-PCT testing in the field of antibody testing. This could unlock the use of immunity certificate, help us learn more about the proportion of asymptomatic cases (by identifying individuals with COVID19 antibodies in their blood who had previously not shown any symptom when infected) and also learn more about the strength of and the speed at which infected patients develop immunity against COVID19. (Link)
📊 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)🇺🇸 (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
💊“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)