🦠 COVID-19 | Waiting for the vaccine | 🤕 1,615,092 | Deaths 96,791
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:
1,615,092 cumulative cases (+75,832)
Active cases: 1,155,759 (+52,975) (this is the number of currently infected patients)
Total Deaths: 96,791 89,415 (+7,376)
Serious/Critical Cases: 49,123 48,200 (+913)
Recovered: 362,542 (+25,381)
Source: Worldometers
Death curves (updated daily as ECDC releases). Major update with per country graphs now available (Link)
The Corona Daily looks at the post lock-down plans circulating in America, and how removed they are from the current political debate. It might simply be because most government have been caught unprepared and are still struggling to implement their first phase of containment. Looking at the current phase, a Data Progress survey looks at how severe is the economic impact of COVID19 on the American population and how inadequate are the current assistance programs.
The Guardian publishes a very critical and well documented article of the World Health Organisation. It can be done: a short article celebrating the success of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand.
Finishing with one article on drug discovery and two on vaccine development given how the latter is presented as the only one allowing the whole of society to return to a new normal.
It appears that we are all waiting for the vaccine however distant that is.
🇺🇸 Article of the Day: Ezra Klein writes“I’ve read the plans to reopen the economy. They’re scary” for VOX.
There are four post lock-down plans which have been published by different US organisations: one by the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, one by the left-leaning Center for American Progress, the other by Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, and finally one by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer.
Klein remarks that all of them broadly advocate the same measures, that all have uncertain but far from immediate timelines for their start dates, and that they present both civil liberties and feasibility challenges whilst lacking implementation details.
Klein provides a reality check on how quickly we will come back to a new normal, while wondering why we are not currently having any public debate on them let alone more details from the top of government. A great read with the link to the four plans in a new section below. (Link)
🇺🇸 Data Progress publishes “The staggering economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic”. It is a grim survey of Americans during COVID19. Some key statitistics:
41 percent of those who’ve lost a job already reporting having trouble covering basic costs.
Racial inequity in severity of the crisis with African Americans suffering the most
A $1,200 check for adults and $500 for children is inadequate to cover expenses for more than a month for most voters
The survey shows the inadequacy of the current measures to contain social unrest if as is likely the lockdown is extended past the end of April. Beyond the likely mental health issues arising from shelter-at-home orders around the US, the mounting loss of life combined with the financial insecurity of a majority could easily tilt the country in unchartered and chaotic territory. (Link)
🏥 Stephen Buranyi write the Long Read “The WHO v coronavirus: why it can't handle the pandemic” for the Guardian. We would still need this article to be written even if Trump had not been recently so critical of the WHO. Buranyi draws a realistic portrait of the WHO from its inception post World War II, through dealing with eradicating small pox, to successfully containing SARS and then describing how it dealt with H1N1, Ebola and now COVID19.
One of the most striking narrative of the article is how Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland then Director General of the WHO dealt with China at the time of SARS and how Dr Tedros the current Director General has dealt with China around COVID19 and since taking office in July 2017.
Talking about the WHO’s role in SARS Buranyi writes:
“The WHO’s response to Sars was considered a huge success. Fewer than 1,000 people worldwide died of the disease, despite it reaching a total of 26 countries”
With regards to dealing with China during the SARS epidemic and citing David Heymann, who was then executive director of the WHO’s communicable diseases cluster:
“Although the WHO had no formal powers to monitor and censure its members, Brundtland wasn’t shy about doing so anyway. In the ensuing months she would accuse China of withholding information, claiming that the outbreak might have been contained “if the WHO had been able to help at an earlier stage” and exhorting the Chinese to “let us come in as quickly as possible!” With remarkable speed, China fell in line and shared its data with the WHO. “After her statements to China, no other countries hesitated,” said Heymann.”
In comparison, and despite China having wilfully concealed (including censoring its own doctors) what it knew about COVID19 internally and to the WHO (and the outside world), Buranyi writes the following about Dr Tedros:
“I don’t think Tedros did anything previous director generals would not have done,” said Anthony Costello, the director of the UCL Institute for Global Health. “He needed a good relationship with China in order to get in.”
Even Lawrence Gostin, who has been a prominent critic of Tedros in the past, told me that “his high praise for China is understandable. He is seeking to coax China into cooperation.” He went on to note, though, that this strategy “does risk the credibility of WHO as an objective agency.”
It is striking how in less than 20 years the narrative on how to best handle China’s withholding of information has changed. It must be a combination of the superior power status which China enjoys on the world stage combined with the appeasement tactics of Dr Tedros to engage with it.
And however justified the critic of the WHO under the leadership of Dr Tedros is, we need to urgently rethink the status that we allow China to have on the world scene when its default position in SARS and COVID19 was to withhold information. (Link)
🇳🇿 Justine Coleman “New Zealand's coronavirus lockdown has resulted in only one death” for The Hill. An often under reported success, but New Zealand under the helm of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has shown the rest of the world how it is done. Some people have pointed out that another country which has been successful in dealing with COVID19, is Germany which is also led by a woman. You can add Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland who successfully dealt with China during SARS as reported above. (Link)
🦠 Kate Sheridan writes “The coronavirus sneaks into cells through a key receptor. Could targeting it lead to a treatment?” for STAT News. Sheridan focuses on ACE2, or angiotensin converting enzyme-2, which has been identified as a key human protein which helps COVID19 get into cells, and reports on three drug companies targeting this pathway to find a treatment. Two of the treatments rely on RNA interference which is a relatively novel type of therapeutic and the other one is a resurrected program with a different company from a compound whose programme had been abandoned last year by the pharmaceutical company GSK. An interesting look at drug discovery decision-making and how wide-ranging are the techniques investigated to urgently find a treatment until we find a vaccine. (Link)
💉 Tung Tanh Le et al. published “The COVID-19 vaccine development landscape” in Nature reviews Drug Discovery. A great landscape review of the 115 vaccine candidates for COVID19 detailing the seven varieties of more or less matures technology platforms on top of which they are being built. Tanh Le notes the speed at which such great number of vaccine candidates has emerged and the need to get production facilities built in parallel to speed broad availability to the general public when one gets approved. The article provides a good comparative check on vaccine developments for other pathogens:
“there is an indication that vaccine could be available under emergency use or similar protocols by early 2021. This would represent a fundamental step change from the traditional vaccine development pathway, which takes on average over 10 years, even compared with the accelerated 5-year timescale for development of the first Ebola vaccine, and will necessitate novel vaccine development paradigms involving parallel and adaptive development phases, innovative regulatory processes and scaling manufacturing capacity.”
A great overview with good references if you want to investigate further. (Link)
💉 Roxanne Khamsi published “If a coronavirus vaccine arrives, can the world make enough?” in Nature. Khamsi goes more in depth on the manufacturing ramp up needed accross seven different platforms now even though none might succeed. Gates has pledged money to kickstart the process as reported previously in the Corona Daily. Another potential problem highlighted by Khamsi is national hoarding of vaccines. As we all hope for a vaccines, a good and comprehensive article on vaccine production capacity. (Link)
Reopening plans (NEW❗️): The Corona Daily had previously featured the American Enterprise Institute reopening plan. You can find it below along with the there other cited by Ezra Klein article in Vox.
The left-leaning Center for American Progress wrote“A National and State Plan To End the Coronavirus Crisis” (Link)
Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics wrote “When can we go out?” (Link)
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer (Link)
The Conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute wrote the previously featured: “National coronavirus response: A road map to reopening” (Link)
🎬 Video of the day: Yuval Hariri on Channel 4 News: “Irresponsible politician have undermined the trust of the public in science”.
Yuval Hariri is a great story teller. He has spoken and written a lot since the beginning of the crisis. In this interview he warns about the risks of this pandemic normalising surveillance and distrust. Distrust of science as in the title, but also distrust in the governing class and the media and distrust between nation. That distrust is matched by government not trusting their citizen and preferring control and totalitarianism to better education. As a humanist, Hariri hopes and puts advocated the need for solidarity and cooperation for humankind to go through this crisis and future ones. (11 min 8 sec) (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)🇺🇸/🌍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)