🦠 COVID-19 | The reluctance to politicise| 🤕 2,428,274 | Deaths 166,126
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:
2,428,274 (+106,241) cumulative cases
Active cases: 1,625,425 (this is the number of currently infected patients)
Total Deaths: 166,126 (+6,467)
Serious/Critical Cases: 55,619 (+401)
Recovered: 636,723 (+41,633)
Source: Worldometers
Death curves (updated daily as ECDC releases). Major update with per country graphs now available (Link)
In an open letter to Margaret Atwood (below in Tracing Section), Privacy International talks about our current “reluctance to politicise” during this pandemic. And yet as a poem going viral in India highlights: “we are not in the same boat” even though we are in the same storm. From our past policy choices, to the present and future ones whether about who to protect, who gets tax funded aid to reshaping our supply networks and what society we want for the new normal, politics will be core. It is our democratic duty to critically think and scrutinise in these times of acute emergency politics. If policy formation in normal times is error prone, it is even more so in times of urgency.
The Corona Daily starts by looking at the case surge Singapore is experiencing now, by giving us a reality check on the vaccine from the head of the Wellcome Trust. Later on it looks at the likelyhood in the US that States will re-open even though testing capacity will be inadequate (video section below).
The article section starts by praising communication style, policy actions and leadership in two women-led and successful countries. Helen Branswell takes us to what experts outside China were saying in January and February while the virus was spreading exponentially. Another explainer on serological testing and a great thread on assessing adequate levels of testing. Looking at the UK aid package for startup including an earlier critique on this being a priority by one of its pre-eminent investor.
A rich contact tracing section with both pro and cons articles.
Tweet of the day: A warning from Singapore about exiting lockdown prematurely (even though in their case, they entered lockdown after what appeared to be an effective testing-tracing-isolate strategy).
Video of the day: Jeremy Farrar (Director of the Wellcome Trust): “It’s not a given that we get a vaccine” (Link)
Highlighting two countries who have done extremely well in their initial containment of COVID19 and happen to be led by women: New Zealand and Denmark.
🇳🇿 Uri Friedman writes “New Zealand’s Prime Minister May Be the Most Effective Leader on the Planet” for The Atlantic. The article is also kind on another woman leader (Angela Merkel) who “embraces science”. It is less kind to President Trump or Prime Minister Modi. Friedman particularly praises Jacinda Ardern’s empathy and her talent as a communicator. She also cleverly mixes informal Facebook live chats and more formal addresses in her communication to her nation. Friedman nonetheless concludes by highligting the great team around her as being an integral part of New Zealand success. But great leaders also recruit great people and get the best of the existing team. Refreshing. (Link)
🇩🇰 Morten Buttler writes “Denmark extends business aid to increase spending by $15 billion” for Bloomberg. While the article title focuses on the business aid extension, there is one part of the article worth highlighting:
“The government also said that companies which pay out dividends, buy back own shares or are registered in tax havens won’t be eligible for any of the aid programs, which now amount to a total of 400 billion kroner, when including loans and guarantees.”
I cannot see a country not adopting the same policy for their aid money without risking a backlash. Let’s see. (Link)
🇺🇸🇨🇳 Helen Branswell writes “The months of magical thinking: As the coronavirus swept over China, some experts were in denial” for STAT news. Branswell tells us of months of magical thinking until the virus showed its exponential potential in Italy and Iran, and then it was too late:
It wasn’t that the virus was behaving differently; we simply hadn’t yet seen what it was doing as it moved beyond China. When large outbreaks exploded in Iran and then Northern Italy in late February, the reality became abundantly evident. And then it was too late.
Branswell then take us through her notes and interviews of leading figures who did not raise the alarm level early on. The first alert at a high level was put to Branswell in an interview on January 24:
“Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, may have been among the first top U.S. health experts to publicly acknowledge the new coronavirus might cause a pandemic.”
Messonier almost disappeared from the public eye since then… Branswell takes us trough the month of February until the end of the month when the pin dropped for everyone. A fascinating chronology. (Link)
🧪 Scott Gottlieb (former FDA director) wrote a very helpful thread on assessing whether testing level (not serological testing) is adequate in the US relative to the level of testing performed on seasonal flu, tuberculosis and HIV. Tweet 11 of the thread is where the US stands:
Some States are looking to re-open early May when actually Gottlieb believes that adequate testing capacity will only be reached in September. Danger zone.
🧪 Andrew Joseph writes “Everything we know about coronavirus immunity and antibodies — and plenty we still don’t” for STAT news. This is an important area which the Corona Daily has covered previously (including an exhaustive pre-print review in yesterday’s edition). Joseph covers the following
What are antibody tests? How widely available are they? And how accurate?
What can be gleaned from serological results?
What else can antibody tests show?
What have data from serosurveys shown thus far about antibody generation?
I’ve heard reports of reinfection or “reactivated” virus. What’s going on there?
A great updated explainer. (Link)
🇬🇧 Michael Stothard writes “UK government pledges £1bn to support startups” for Sifted. Stothard details the UK government launch of its support package for the tech sector:
“On Monday, the government said that it was committing £250m towards a new £500m fund that would invest in high-growth private companies that needed money. The government also promised £750m worth of grants and loans to small and medium-sized businesses focusing on research and development.”
The government published the indicative termsheet for the Future Fund (here). Stothard also cites an article published a week ago from a seasoned and well-known UK tech investor: “Robin Klein: Don’t bail out the startups”. In it Klein is quoted as saying:
“Please use scarce taxpayers money in the sectors that really need it — hospitality, transport, recreation, arts and charities. Offering startups debt packages or handouts is not the way to go.”
Both are great reads. (Link)
🚔 The Tracing Corner:
📃 The Ada Lovelace institute published “Exit through the App Store? Should the UK Government use technology to transition from the COVID-19 global public health crisis”. A great report on assessing whether the UK government use of technology will “be safe, fair and equitable” and key recommendations for it to be the case. The report focuses on contact tracing and immunity certificates. Carly Kind (Director of the Ada Lovelace Institute) writes:
“Bad uses of data and technology can do more harm than good. They can obscure accurate analyses, hide abuses of power and exacerbate the position of people already suffering from digital exclusion, who – evidence is beginning to show – are the same people who are most vulnerable to COVID-19. Premature deployment of a digital contact tracing app, which will ultimately rely on widespread public uptake to be effective, risks tarnishing public trust and confidence in technologies that could assist a transition out of the crisis.”
On contact tracing, the review is in line with the scientific paper from Oxford which advanced the importance of trust in making successful use of such technology. The Ada Lovelace Institute report provides a good template for organising a democratic debate on these two sensitive technological tools. (Link)
🧪 Adam Kucharski (leading epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has written a helpful thread to address the “more and more suggestions that contact tracing and/or physical distancing isn't needed and we could solve COVID-19 with widespread testing alone”. Kucharski finishes the thread quoting Trevor Bedford (scientist at Fred Hutch in Seattle) and arguing that speed and scale of contact-tracing with adequate testing capacity can help control the spread:
🏛 Privacy International wrote “An open letter to Margaret Atwood about a future Covid-19 dystopia”. This is the one I quoted in my introduction and is a reply to Atwood comment on a BBC interview:
“people may be making arrangements that aren’t too pleasant, but it’s not a deliberate totalitarianism”
Privacy international thought it merited an answer at a time “where reluctance to 'politicise' the crisis means there is inadequate scrutiny on governments when we need it more than ever”.
While not disagreeing on government’s initial intent, Privacy international warns that “we may find ourselves in a dystopia by accident rather than design.” (Link)
🎥 Karen Hao writes “Machine learning could check if you’re social distancing properly at work” for the MIT Technology Review. An article on video surveillance in the workplace. Can there be informed consent if this was to become widespread?(Link)
🎬 Video: Scott Gottlieb (former FDA director) on Today for NBC talking about US State reopening, testing capacity and the likely slow reopening even though testing capacity is not where it should be for re-opening to happen. (Link)
📊 A picture is worth a thousand words: Global (🌎) and local (with relevant flag) visualisation and forecasting tool
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(NEW❗️)The John Hopkins University resource center was the first one I used back in January they have now made available in their latest iteration a county by county dashboard in the US including information about health capacity, insurance coverage, ethnicity and age breakdown of the population (New York example below) (Link)
💊 The "Map of Hope" provides a geographical overview of planned, ongoing and completed clinical trials. It is put together with data from WHO Clinical Trials Search Portal by the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation technology. (Link)
🌍 MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis started to publish weekly death estimates for countries (Link)
🇺🇸 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)🇺🇸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)
🏛 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)
NEW❗️Human Rights 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)