Lunchtime pandemic reading.
Standard disclaimer: this is a roundup of informative pieces I've read that interest me on the severity of the crisis and how to manage it. I am not a qualified medical expert in ANY sense; at best I am reasonably well-read laity. ALWAYS prioritize advice from qualified healthcare experts over some person on Facebook.
This is also available as an email newsletter at https://lunchtimepandemic.substack.com if you prefer the update in your inbox.
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From today's WHO briefing: ""More than 100,000 cases of #Covid19 have been reported to WHO for each of the past 5 days”, says @drtedros. "We are especially worried about Central and South America, where many countries are witnessing accelerating epidemic.”"
Source:
Stopping COVID-19 and reopening the world means putting out the fires wherever we can, locally, nationally, and internationally. Until that happens, expect things like international travel and trade to continue being severely impacted.
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Women scientists are more adversely affected by the pandemic. "Quarantined with a six-year-old child underfoot, Megan Frederickson wondered how academics were managing to write papers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns implemented to stem coronavirus spread meant that, overnight, many households worldwide had become an intersection of work, school and home life. Conversations on Twitter seemed to confirm Frederickson’s suspicions about the consequences: female academics, taking up increased childcare responsibilities, were falling behind their male peers at work.
But Frederickson, an ecologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, wanted to see what the data said. So, she looked at preprint servers to investigate whether women were posting fewer studies than they were before lockdowns began. The analysis — and several others — suggests that, across disciplines, women’s publishing rate has fallen relative to men’s amid the pandemic.
The results are consistent with the literature on the division of childcare between men and women, says Molly King, a sociologist at Santa Clara University in California. Evidence suggests that male academics are more likely to have a partner who does not work outside the home; their female colleagues, especially those in the natural sciences, are more likely to have a partner who is also an academic. Even in those dual-academic households, the evidence shows that women perform more household labour than men do, she says. King suspects the same holds true for childcare."
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01294-9
Awareness of bias and disparity is the first step in mitigating and eliminating it. Knowing that some researchers are more heavily burdened should be a consideration for things like tenure once the pandemic has passed. As we've clearly seen during this pandemic, we need every pair of hands on deck, regardless of gender or background, and we need a pipeline of fresh talent to continue research. If women are discouraged from pursuing careers in research, that harms everyone.
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Mexico is peaking. "In some ways, López-Gatell is Mexico’s Dr. Fauci. The Mexican epidemiologist has serious academic chops — a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins — and years of experience battling pandemics. But he has staked out a radically different path from many of his peers. Mexico hasn’t imposed a curfew or used police to keep people home. It’s not attempting mass testing for the novel coronavirus.
Early on, Mexican officials were optimistic their strategy was working — and by some measures, it appeared to be. Mexico City recorded its first coronavirus case a day before similarly sized New York City. While New York has suffered more than 16,000 confirmed deaths, Mexico’s capital has reported about 3,000.
But now, as Mexico City hits what officials say is the peak of its outbreak, it’s facing an onslaught of cases with an understaffed and undersupplied hospital system. There is concern that the country’s death toll is far higher than the official figures.
The government originally projected 6,000 to 15,000 deaths nationwide, with a small chance they could rise to double that upper limit. By Monday, authorities had confirmed 10,167 deaths. López-Gatell has acknowledged that the catastrophic scenario of 30,000 fatalities is no longer remote."
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/mexico-coronavirus-hospital-peak-covid-19/2020/06/01/a2513110-99e0-11ea-ad79-eef7cd734641_story.html
No lockdowns yield the anticipated results - widespread disease. For those advocating to return to normal as soon as possible, that still needs to be a consideration.
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Still no herd immunity. "Overall exposure to Covid in populations remains low. These are results from seroprevalence studies that are starting to come in, where researchers attempted to screen a representative sample of populations in cities and countries for Covid antibodies, to gauge level of exposure."
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In the most hard-hit areas of the US - namely New York City - herd immunity is far below the 60-70% needed. This disease still has plenty of victims to attack.
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From JAMA, an urgent call to reopen schools. "More than 20 million children rely on school breakfast or lunch; surveys now indicate that 1 in 5 mothers with children younger than 12 years old report that their children are going hungry. Millions of children have lost access to health services through school-based health centers. There are major divides by race/ethnicity, geography, and economic class in access to home computers and high-speed internet. When prolonged school closures are combined with summer break, some children may to fall behind normal academic growth by as much as a year in mathematics.
The “COVID slide” will likely be greatest among those students who are already at educational and social risk. Children with significant learning disabilities may regress without in-person instruction. In addition, school officials typically make about 1 in 5 reports regarding child abuse and neglect5; without involvement of school-based counselors and social workers, these concerns may not be investigated. Reopening schools this fall is an urgent national priority."
Source: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2766822?guestAccessKey=2d2db50d-c403-49a3-859c-23866ba19fc6
To the extent possible, consider donating to your local food bank or other child service providers to help bridge the gap until we're out of the pandemic. Impoverished, disadvantaged children benefit no one. If the humanitarian, compassionate perspective doesn't move you, the tax costs and societal damage should; the faster poverty is eliminated, the safer our society becomes. The faster our population achieves security and then prosperity, the more prosperous everyone becomes. Prosperous citizens spend more money, invest in more businesses, buy more of our stuff. We want that prosperity for everyone, regardless of background or demographics.
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Sweden has provided data for a "no restrictions" strategy. "Sweden’s top epidemiologist has admitted his strategy to fight COVID-19 resulted in too many deaths, after persuading his country to avoid a strict lockdown.
“If we were to encounter the same illness with the same knowledge that we have today, I think our response would land somewhere in between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world has done,” Anders Tegnell said in an interview with Swedish Radio. The laxer approach to containing the virus has drawn both praise and condemnation from across the globe. What is beyond debate, however, is the effect the strategy has had on the country’s death toll.
At 43 deaths per 100,000, Sweden’s mortality rate is among the highest globally and far exceeds that of neighbouring Denmark and Norway, which imposed much tougher lockdowns at the onset of the pandemic. But with many other European Union countries now rolling back their lockdowns after appearing to bring COVID-19 under control, there are signs that Sweden may be left behind. That includes the freedom of movement of its citizens, as some EU countries restrict access to people coming from what are deemed high-risk COVID zones."
Source: https://nationalpost.com/news/world/top-epidemiologist-admits-he-got-swedens-covid-19-strategy-wrong
While it would have been completely unethical and immoral to mandate that a nation choose to forego the restrictions that help prevent disease, we didn't have to. Sweden chose that voluntarily, and we now have rock solid empirical data that lockdowns do work to stem the impact of disease.
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South Korea mandates QR code use for contact tracing. "South Korea is testing a new quick response (QR) code system this week to log visitors at high-risk entertainment facilities, restaurants and churches in a bid to track coronavirus cases and prevent further spread of the disease.
The decision to mandate QR codes to register visitors’ identities came after authorities struggled to trace people who had visited a number of nightclubs and bars at the centre of a virus outbreak last month after much of the information on handwritten visitor logs was found to be false or incomplete.
Starting June 10, visitors to nightclubs, bars, karaoke clubs, daytime discos, indoor gyms that hold group exercises, and indoor standing concert halls, will be required to use any of a number of commercially available apps to generate a one-time, personalized QR code that can be scanned at the door.
Local governments may also designate other high-risk facilities such as libraries, hospitals, restaurants or churches.
The person’s information will be logged in a database kept by the Social Security Information Service for four weeks, before it is automatically deleted, according to South Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare."
Source: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-southkorea-qr-code/south-korea-mandates-qr-codes-to-log-customers-after-nightclub-coronavirus-outbreak-idUKKBN239075
Expect to see more of this in the future until the vaccine is available and distributed in the global population. I appreciate the clear disclosures as well with what happens to the data - after four weeks, it's destroyed. Such disclosures are essential if we want people to trust public health measures in the long term.
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A reminder of the simple daily habits we should all be taking.
1. Wash/sanitize your hands every time you are in or out of your home for any reason. Consider also spraying the bottoms of your shoes with a general disinfectant (alcohol/bleach/peroxide) when you return home. Remember that cleaners are never to be ingested.
2. Wear gloves and a mask when out of your home. Consider wearing a face shield.
3. Stay home as much as possible. Minimize your contact with others and maintain physical distance of at LEAST 6 feet / 2 meters. Avoid indoor places as much as you can.
4. Get your personal finances in order now. Cut all unnecessary costs.
5. Donate any PPE you can. https://getusppe.org/give/
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Common misinformation debunked!
There is no genomic evidence at all that COVID-19 arrived before 2020 in the United States and therefore no hidden herd immunity:
Source:
There is no evidence SARS-CoV-2 was engineered, nor that it escaped a lab somewhere.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/01/29/experts-debunk-fringe-theory-linking-chinas-coronavirus-weapons-research/
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/05/anthony-fauci-no-scientific-evidence-the-coronavirus-was-made-in-a-chinese-lab-cvd/
There is no evidence a flu shot increases your COVID-19 risk.
Source: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/no-evidence-that-flu-shot-increases-risk-of-covid-19/
Source: https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa626/5842161
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A common request I'm asked is who I follow. Here's a public Twitter list of many of the sources I read.
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1260956929205112834
This list is biased by design. It is limited to authors who predominantly post in the English language. It is heavily biased towards individual researchers and away from institutions. It is biased towards those who publish or share research, data, papers, etc. I have made an attempt to follow researchers from different countries, and also to make the list reasonably gender balanced, because multiple, diverse perspectives on research data are essential.