🦠 COVID-19 | US braced for 100-240k deaths | 🤕 860,926 | Deaths 42,360
📊 Daily Data Brief:
860,926 cumulative cases (+61,216)
Active cases: 640,026 (+49,012) (this is the number of currently infected patients)
Total Deaths: 42,360 (+3,640)
Serious/Critical Cases: 33,092 (+2,858)
Source: Worldometers
Death curves (updated daily as ECDC releases). Major update with per country graphs now available❗️(Link)
Yesterday, the White House announced that the US was going to have a tough two weeks to come. The tone of the daily briefing was quite somber. The White House decided to make public estimate for the severity of the COVID19 in the US. They estimate that the number of deaths will range between 100,000 and 240,000. A sobering figure for most Americans.
A lot of the education resources in my daily focus today as well as reporting on the contact tracing apps which government are looking to launch following the strict lockdown phase most countries are now in.
As I reported before, the month of April is going to be dreadful. The only good news will be continued advances on the testing and scientific front, combined with the first positive results of the lock-down measures in curbing the spread of COVID19.
These are unprecedented times.
🦠 Video of the day: Scott Gottlieb commenting on the 100,000-240,000 American deaths estimate which the White House decided to share during its daily briefing yesterday. Gottlieb does not discount at all the high end of the epidemiologist modelling still dependant on what large states like Texas and Florida implement in terms of physical distancing measures.
😷 Article of the day: “Researchers: show world leaders how to behave in a crisis” (Link)
Since the beginning of the crisis the level of cooperation and data sharing between scientific researchers has been phenomenal. This editorial in Nature suggests that world leaders should follow suit and show the same level of cooperation to combat COVID19. The Op-ed finds it surprising that we are not seeing the same level of cooperation to stem contagion as world leaders showed to contain financial contagion back in 2008:
“They have no choice, because there’s little point in extinguishing the virus in one country when it’s exploding elsewhere. A genuinely global response is needed — and world leaders must follow the fine example being set by researchers.”
🦠 Luca Ferretti et al. have just published “Quantifying SARS-CoV-2 transmission suggests epidemic control with digital contact tracing” in Science.
This provides the scientific underpinning for implementing contact tracing apps which governments around the world have or are about to implement. As the abstract highlights it will be a critical tool in moving beyond the current lockdown phase:
“A contact-tracing App which builds a memory of proximity contacts and immediately notifies contacts of positive cases can achieve epidemic control if used by enough people. By targeting recommendations to only those at risk, epidemics could be contained without need for mass quarantines (‘lock-downs’) that are harmful to society. We discuss the ethical requirements for an intervention of this kind.”
(Link)
🇬🇧 Hannah Devlin writes “NHS developing app to trace close contacts of coronavirus carriers” for The Guardian. NHSX, the digital transformation arm of the NHS is planning to develop such an app in the UK.
As Devlin writes, echoing the Science paper referred above regarding ethics of such an app:
“There would need to be oversight of the app’s deployment, clear “stop rules” about what happens to data after the pandemic is brought under control and careful attention paid to ensure those without smartphones would not be disadvantaged.”
Such a project could help re-define, even for a critical public health mission, privacy rules and henceforth help the public push for changes in less critical social media apps which have baffled their privacy rights till now. It could go the other way and be a further entrenchment of the surveillance capitalism paradigm which a number of privacy advocate have warned the public about. A space to watch closely. (Link)
🇺🇸 The US has a similar contact tracing project underway, or at least on the science side for now, headed by the brilliant Trevor Bedford at FredHutch in Seattle. He is leading NextTrace.org. NextTrace aims to coordinate test results and contact tracing to enable public health decisions similar to the NHSX project. Bedford has written a well referenced Twitter thread to detail the project and its aim (Twitter thread)
🦠 The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has published “Preliminary Estimates of the Prevalence of Selected Underlying Health Conditions Among Patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 — United States, February 12–March 28, 2020”. There are a number of caveats in their study but the data is interesting:
As of March 28, 2020, U.S. states and territories have reported 122,653 U.S. COVID-19 cases to CDC, including 7,162 (5.8%) for whom data on underlying health conditions and other known risk factors for severe outcomes from respiratory infections were reported.
As as been widely reported, the patients with one or more co-morbidity (such as diabetes mellitus, chronic lung disease, and cardiovascular disease) represented a larger percentage of the patients requiring ICU admission (78%) or hospitalisation without ICU admission (71%). More precisely:
The percentage of COVID-19 patients with at least one underlying health condition or risk factor was higher among those requiring intensive care unit (ICU) admission (358 of 457, 78%) and those requiring hospitalization without ICU admission (732 of 1,037, 71%) than that among those who were not hospitalized (1,388 of 5,143, 27%).
(Link)
🌍 Maysoon Dahab et al. at LSHTM published “COVID-19 control in low-income settings and displaced populations: what can realistically be done?” It looks at what are the best course of actions in fragile populations such as refugees in low-income settings. While it could be that younger age distributions and potentially higher temperature (though nothing has been proven yet in this area), could provide a natural shield, it is equally though that the physical distancing measure will be ore difficult to implement in place where the public health setting is weaker. It offers a targeted approach to help this communities. Interesting read for anyone doing refugee work. (Link)
🧮 FiveThirtyEight who has done some stellar reporting since the beginning of the pandemic have published “Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model”. A great explainer on these epidemiology models informing policy decisions. (Link)
(New❗️) The testing corner: testing, testing, testing. So much reporting on failures, success and importance of a complex and fast developing area
🧪🇬🇧 Jack Dickens writes “Why is Germany able to test for coronavirus so much more than the UK?” for Reaction magazine. The UK government is increasingly coming under fire for its limited testing ability. The Robert Koch Institute now believe that Germany can produce up to 500,000 tests per week. In comparison, the “UK government announced on 11 March that it hoped to increase testing to a total of 10,000 PCR tests daily in the week beginning 23 March”.
A very well researched and referenced article, which highlight that being late in the game is doubly penalising as you end up scrambling for reagent supply for the kits as you start scaling your efforts. The article writes about a number of factors from faster awareness/assessment of the potential risk COVID19 could pose in Germany versus the UK, to structural underfunding of public health in the UK post the 2008 financial crisis. A great article. (Link)
🧪 Clive Cookson and Camilla Hodgson writ the explainer: “What coronavirus tests does the world need to track the pandemic?” for the Financial Times. This explainer is above the Financial Times paywall which is very welcome. All you ever wanted to know about testing (RT-PCR based and serological). Very well done and explained (Link)
🧪 Arjun K. Manrai and Kenneth Mandl write “Covid-19 testing: overcoming challenges in the next phase of the epidemic” for STAT. It is a rather long article looking at a number of important factors in testing beyond availability and types of testing. It looks at the variability of sensitivity and specificity of the different tests approved, and the resulting variability of results.
This makes country to country comparison difficult given the incidence of the regulatory approval as to the overall false positive or false negative included in national case numbers and its incidence on the Case Fatality Rate which remains elusive to estimate for now. A good article to read in conjunction with the FT article above. (Link)
🧪 Marisa Fernandes writes “FDA authorizes two-minute antibody testing kit to detect coronavirus” for Axios. Another example of the FDA being proactive and authorising a test to speed up detection and potentially helping set up these drive-in testing facilities in the US. (Link)
🧪 This is a very good interview of Florian Krammer whose group has been the first one to report on a serological assay in the US for COVID19 and subsequently made its reagent available for other labs to scale up the capacity in the US. A great explainer on serological testing and its importance for surveillance testing, understanding characteristic of immunity developed by infected patient and for setting up immunity certificate to allow citizens to fully participate in their community and the economy. A good Q&A if you missed previous links I included in my previous newsletter. (Link)
🇺🇸/🌎: The American Enterprise Institute has published “National coronavirus response: A road map to reopening”. It is excellent and is a roadmap for all nations. It provides hope as it is outlines in details what are the steps necessary to reopen. A must read. (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)
📊 A picture is worth a thousand words: Global (🌎) and local (with relevant flag) visualisation and forecasting tool
🌎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”). It is a very extensive dashboard with 28 pages. 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 collaborative projects
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)
Tariq Krim has started a COVID19 website tracking data about each government policy response to the pandemic (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)