Fear of crowds in small spaces in the pandemic is spurring new norms and technological changes for the people-moving machines that make skyscrapers possible.

A month after easing lockdown restrictions, the state is still seeing a steady stream of unemployment claims, economic data shows.

Using Social Determinants of Health to Fight COVID-19 and Get the Economy Back on Its Feet

Streets for Pandemic Response & Recovery |05/21/20202Even 10 years ago, reclaiming streets from cars to create space for people to walk and to bike was considered a radical—almost revolutionary—act. Today, people-focused streets are a proven global best practice and the first-line response for transportation and transit agencies during the COVID-19 crisis, from Berlin to Brussels to Bogotá and from Minneapolis to Mexico City to Milan.

Streets for PandemicResponse & Recovery

As countries look to ease school and play restrictions, what evidence is there that children react differently?

SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans; SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 can cause severe disease, whereas HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E are associated with mild symptoms6. Here we review what can be deduced about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 from comparative analysis of genomic data. We offer a perspective on the notable features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss scenarios by which they could have arisen. Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.

This is a rejoinder of Dr. Ian Mitroff's perspective titled "Corona Virus: A Prime Example of A Wicked Mess". While I agree with Dr. Mitroff on the complexity of the COVID-19 outbreak and the urgency to address it, I disagree with him on points related to the role of wet market in this specific outbreak and whether China had acknowledged the existence of the outbreak. I also consider key highlights of the outbreak are the importance of collaboration across national and state borders and a balance between privacy and public health under such situations.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a seismically disruptive event. This commentary explores some of the key ways this seismic shift will interact with environmental law. It explores four types of change triggered by the pandemic: (1) behavioral changes (including of behaviors with environmental impacts); (2) demographic changes that affect levels of background risk against which laws (including environmental laws) operate; (3) changes in values (including regarding the environment); and (4) changing resources (including those that can be spent on environmental or other amenities). Each of these changes has potentially important implications for the assumptions built in to environmental law, for the ability of environmental law to effectively regulate the environment, and for the way that humans will interact with the environment in coming years and decades.

This study focuses on the embryonic stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, where most people affected opted to abide by the Chinese government’s national self-quarantine campaign. This resulted in major disruptions to one of the most common market processes in retail: food retailing. The research adopts the theory of planned behaviour to provide early empirical insights into changes in consumer behaviour related to food purchases during the initial stages of the COVID-19 outbreak in China. Data from the online survey carried out suggest that the outbreak triggered considerable levels of switching behaviours among customers, with farmers’ markets losing most of their customers, whilst local small independent retailers experienced the highest levels of resilience in terms of customer retention. This study suggests avenues for further scholarly research and policy making related to the impact this behaviour may be having around the world on society’s more vulnerable groups, particularly the elderly.

Background In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, we aimed to investigate behavioural change on exposure to live animals before and during the outbreak, and public support and confidence for governmental containment measures. Methods A population-based cross-sectional telephone survey via random dialing was conducted in Wuhan (the epicentre) and Shanghai (an affected city with imported cases) between 1 and 10 February, 2020. 510 residents in Wuhan and 501 residents in Shanghai were randomly sampled. Differences of outcome measures were compared before and during the outbreak, and between two cities. Findings Proportion of respondents visiting wet markets at usual was 23.3% (119/510) in Wuhan and 20.4% (102/501) in Shanghai. During the outbreak, it decreased to 3.1% (16) in Wuhan (p<0.001), and 4.4% (22) in Shanghai (p<0.001). Proportion of those consuming wild animal products declined from 10.2% (52) to 0.6% (3) in Wuhan (p<0.001), and from 5.2% (26) to 0.8% (4) in Shanghai (p<0.001). 79.0% (403) of respondents in Wuhan and 66.9% (335) of respondents in Shanghai supported permanent closure of wet markets (P<0.001). 95% and 92% of respondents supported banning wild animal trade and quarantining Wuhan, and 75% were confident towards containment measures. Females and the more educated were more supportive for the above containment measures. Interpretation The public responded quickly to the outbreak, and reduced exposure to live animals, especially in Wuhan. With high public support in containment measures, better regulation of wet markets and healthy diets should be promoted.

During the last weeks we have been putting our ideas on such a knowledge base into practice (see also www.scibeh.org). Now we’re, of course, stoked to showcase here an emerging and growing proof-of-concept of such an eclectic knowledge base on COVID-19 related research and information, focusing on the behavioral sciences, but also including other topics that seem pertinent to properly understand the issues at hand. The knowledge base exists as a collection of annotations created using hypothes.is (see the screenshot in Figure 1), a “new effort to implement an old idea: A conversation layer over the entire web that works everywhere, without needing implementation by any underlying site”(see here for the basics of annotating with hypothes.is). Please take a moment and visit the knowledge base and explore what’s there. You can click on the tags on the right side to filter annotations or use the search bar at the top; see here for more information on how to search on hypothes.is.

Distrust in scientific expertise1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14 is dangerous. Opposition to vaccination with a future vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the causal agent of COVID-19, for example, could amplify outbreaks2,3,4, as happened for measles in 20195,6. Homemade remedies7,8 and falsehoods are being shared widely on the Internet, as well as dismissals of expert advice9,10,11. There is a lack of understanding about how this distrust evolves at the system level13,14. Here we provide a map of the contention surrounding vaccines that has emerged from the global pool of around three billion Facebook users. Its core reveals a multi-sided landscape of unprecedented intricacy that involves nearly 100 million individuals partitioned into highly dynamic, interconnected clusters across cities, countries, continents and languages. Although smaller in overall size, anti-vaccination clusters manage to become highly entangled with undecided clusters in the main online network, whereas pro-vaccination clusters are more peripheral. Our theoretical framework reproduces the recent explosive growth in anti-vaccination views, and predicts that these views will dominate in a decade. Insights provided by this framework can inform new policies and approaches to interrupt this shift to negative views. Our results challenge the conventional thinking about undecided individuals in issues of contention surrounding health, shed light on other issues of contention such as climate change11, and highlight the key role of network cluster dynamics in multi-species ecologies15.

As the EU continues to face the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented transboundary crisis, its member states resort to measures within the boundaries of the nation state. This situation questions the capacity of the EU to deploy public health instruments to cope with pandemics. One such instrument, the European Centre for Disease Control (ECDC), seems to show a discreet involvement in this crisis, suggesting emerging isolationist behaviours of the member states.

Social networks continuously change as new ties are created and existing ones fade. It is widely acknowledged that our social embedding has a substantial impact on what information we receive and how we form beliefs and make decisions. However, most empirical studies on the role of social networks in collective intelligence have overlooked the dynamic nature of social networks and its role in fostering adaptive collective intelligence. Therefore, little is known about how groups of individuals dynamically modify their local connections and, accordingly, the topology of the network of interactions to respond to changing environmental conditions. In this paper, we address this question through a series of behavioral experiments and supporting simulations. Our results reveal that, in the presence of plasticity and feedback, social networks can adapt to biased and changing information environments and produce collective estimates that are more accurate than their best-performing member. To explain these results, we explore two mechanisms: 1) a global-adaptation mechanism where the structural connectivity of the network itself changes such that it amplifies the estimates of high-performing members within the group (i.e., the network “edges” encode the computation); and 2) a local-adaptation mechanism where accurate individuals are more resistant to social influence (i.e., adjustments to the attributes of the “node” in the network); therefore, their initial belief is disproportionately weighted in the collective estimate. Our findings substantiate the role of social-network plasticity and feedback as key adaptive mechanisms for refining individual and collective judgments.

About 20% of UK population vulnerable but not included in government’s shielding advice

COVID-19 presents humanity with one of the greatest health and economic crises of the 21st Century. Because COVID-19 has already begun to precipitate a huge increase in mental health problems, we believe that clinical science must also play a leadership role in guiding a national response to this secondary crisis. In this article, we explain why COVID-19 is a game-changer, as a unique, compounding, multi-dimensional stressor that will create a vast need for intervention, and necessitate new paradigms for mental health service delivery and training. We highlight the most urgent challenge areas for clinical science, including managing potential spikes in depression, anxiety, and suicide, and address the unique COVID-19-related needs across the lifespan and the challenges that COVID-19 places on families and relationships. Clinical science also will need to address the mental health of medical care workers, mitigate health disparities, and address stigma among the most vulnerable as the pandemic unfolds. For each challenge area, we suggest research directions, clinical approaches, and policy issues that need to be considered. We then discuss how to enable multi-level deployment of potential solutions and how clinical science must itself adapt to identify and deliver these solutions. We conclude by highlighting new areas for clinical science discovery and additional funding needs. Advances in clinical science implementation—propelled by COVID-19—will likely endure long beyond the pandemic.

Single empirical tests are always ambiguous in their implications for the theory under investigation, because non-corroborative evidence leaves us underdetermined in our decision as to whether the main theoretical hypothesis or one or more auxiliary hypotheses should bear the burden of falsification. Popperian methodological falsificationism tries to solve this problem by relegating certain kinds of auxiliary hypotheses to “unproblematic background knowledge” and disallowing others. Auxiliary hypotheses regarding operational definitions of theoretical terms are not only permissible but indispensable to increase the falsifiability of theories. However, decisions to accept such auxiliaries as unproblematic are seldom conclusively justified. This uncertainty is amplified in the social sciences, where operationalizations play a very central role, but are much less theory-driven and independently testable. This situation has direct consequences for the assessment of the outcomes of replication attempts. Neither close nor conceptual replications can mitigate underdetermination when they are conducted in isolation. To circumvent this problem, we propose Systematic Replications Framework (SRF) that organizes subsequent tests into a pre-planned series of logically interlinked close and conceptual replications. SRF aims to decrease underdetermination by disentangling the implications of non-corroborative findings for the main theoretical hypothesis and the operationalization-related auxiliary hypotheses. SRF can also strengthen hypothesis testing through systematically organized and pre-registered self-replications. We also discuss how applying this framework can scaffold judgments regarding the permissibility of ad hoc hypothesizing in reference to the Lakatosian notions of progressive and degenerative research programs.

Hospital staff are carrying COVID-19 without realising they’re infected, a new study by researchers at the University of Cambridge has shown...

France has been heavily affected by the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic and went into lockdown on the 17 March 2020. Using models applied to hospital and death data, we estimate the impact of the lockdown and current population immunity. We find 3.6% of infected individuals are hospitalized and 0.7% die, ranging from 0.001% in those <20 years of age (ya) to 10.1% in those >80ya. Across all ages, men are more likely to be hospitalized, enter intensive care, and die than women. The lockdown reduced the reproductive number from 2.90 to 0.67 (77% reduction). By 11 May 2020, when interventions are scheduled to be eased, we project 2.8 million (range: 1.8–4.7) people, or 4.4% (range: 2.8–7.2) of the population, will have been infected. Population immunity appears insufficient to avoid a second wave if all control measures are released at the end of the lockdown.

Every day, our volunteers compile the latest numbers on tests, confirmed cases, hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every US state and territory.

What is already known about this topic? Superspreading events involving SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, have been reported. What is added by this report? Following a 2.5-hour choir practice attended by 61 persons, including a symptomatic index patient, 32 confirmed and 20 probable secondary COVID-19 cases occurred (attack rate = 53.3% to 86.7%); three patients were hospitalized, and two died. Transmission was likely facilitated by close proximity (within 6 feet) during practice and augmented by the act of singing. What are the implications for public health practice? The potential for superspreader events underscores the importance of physical distancing, including avoiding gathering in large groups, to control spread of COVID-19. Enhancing community awareness can encourage symptomatic persons and contacts of ill persons to isolate or self-quarantine to prevent ongoing transmission.

Many aspects of human and animal interaction, such as the frequency of contacts of an individual, the number of interaction partners, and the time between the contacts of two individuals, are characterized by heavy-tailed distributions. These distributions affect the spreading of, e.g., infectious diseases or rumors, often because of impacts of the right tail of the distributions (i.e., the large values). In this paper we show that when it comes to inter-event time distributions, it is not the tail but the small values that control spreading dynamics. We investigate this effect both analytically and numerically for different versions of the susceptible-infected-recovered model on different types of networks.

The integration of social science with computer science and engineering fields has produced a new area of study: computational social science. This field applies computational methods to novel sources of digital data such as social media, administrative records, and historical archives to develop theories of human behavior. We review the evolution of this field within sociology via bibliometric analysis and in-depth analysis of the following subfields where this new work is appearing most rapidly: (a) social network analysis and group formation; (b) collective behavior and political sociology; (c) the sociology of knowledge; (d) cultural sociology, social psychology, and emotions; (e) the production of culture; ( f ) economic sociology and organizations; and (g) demography and population studies. Our review reveals that sociologists are not only at the center of cutting-edge research that addresses longstanding questions about human behavior but also developing new lines of inquiry about digital spaces as well. We conclude by discussing challenging new obstacles in the field, calling for increased attention to sociological theory, and identifying new areas where computational social science might be further integrated into mainstream sociology.

This video was written by John Cook (George Mason University), Stephan Lewandowsky (University of Bristol), Ullrich Ecker (University of Western Australia), and Sander van Der Linden (Cambridge University).

Chemist David King is no stranger to politics or epidemics. From 2000 to 2007, King was chief scientific adviser to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, U.K. prime ministers from the Labour Party. During that time, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease led to the culling of millions of sheep and cattle. Meanwhile, in humans, the severe acute respiratory syndrome virus spread from China to two dozen countries, including the United Kingdom, before the epidemic was contained. In the current pandemic of SARS-CoV-2, King has criticized the way scientific advice has been handled by the Conservative U.K. government. He has charged, for instance, that the membership of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) should be made public—along with its advice. King has assembled a dozen scientists into an unofficial panel that he calls an independent SAGE. Last week, it conducted its first meeting, which was livestreamed on YouTube.

DEBATT. Flera datamodeller som har presenterats för att förutse smittspridning av covid-19 har varit väldigt komplexa – trots brist på validerat underlag. Det bör man vara varsam med, skriver 15 forskare.

The Internet has evolved into a ubiquitous digital environment in which people communicate, seek information, and make decisions. Online environments are replete with smart, highly adaptive choice architectures designed primarily to maximize commercial interests, capture and sustain users’ attention, monetize user data, and predict and influence future behavior. This online landscape holds multiple negative consequences for society, such as a decline in human autonomy, rising incivility in online conversation, the facilitation of political extremism, and the spread of disinformation. Benevolent choice architects working with regulators may curb the worst excesses of manipulative choice architectures, yet the strategic advantages, resources, and data remain with commercial players. One way to address this imbalance is with interventions that empower Internet users to gain some control over their digital environments, in part by boosting their information literacy and their cognitive resistance to manipulation. Our goal is to present a conceptual map of interventions that are based on insights from psychological science. We begin by systematically outlining how online and offline environments differ despite being increasingly inextricable. We then identify four major types of challenges that users encounter in online environments: persuasive and manipulative choice architectures, AI-assisted information architectures, distractive environments, and false and misleading information. Next, we turn to how psychological science can inform interventions to counteract these challenges of the digital world. After distinguishing between three types of behavioral and cognitive interventions—nudges, technocognition, and boosts—we focus in on boosts, of which we identify two main groups: (1) those aimed at enhancing people’s agency in their digital environments (e.g., self-nudging, deliberate ignorance) and (2) those aimed at boosting competences of reasoning and resilience to manipulation (e.g., simple decision aids, inoculation). These cognitive tools are designed to foster the civility of online discourse and protect reason and human autonomy against manipulative choice architectures, attention-grabbing techniques, and the spread of false information.

Cognitive scientists have ramped up online testing in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Although research conducted online solves the problem of data collection, a lack of internet access among low-income and minority communities may reduce the diversity of study samples and, thus, impact the generalizability of scientific findings.

Never has there been a rallying point for science advice at a global scale as we are now experiencing with the COVID-19 pandemic.  With it come the hallmarks of advising in a time of crisis:  the evidence is uncertain, the science is fast-moving, the stakes are high and, in some public discussions at least, values are in dispute. Our goal is to mobilise the INGSA network to help keep track of  HOW policy interventions are being made by various national and sub-national (state, province, etc.) governments across the world. We are interested in the advice, evidence or other justifications that underpin governments’ decisions as the crisis unfolds.

It seems many people are breathing some relief, and I’m not sure why. An epidemic curve has a relatively predictable upslope and once the peak is reached, the back slope can also be predicted. We have robust data from the outbreaks in China and Italy, that shows the backside of the mortality curve declines slowly, with deaths persisting for months. Assuming we have just crested in deaths at 70k, it is possible that we lose another 70,000 people over the next 6 weeks as we come off that peak. That's what's going to happen with a lockdown. As states reopen, and we give the virus more fuel, all bets are off. I understand the reasons for reopening the economy, but I've said before, if you don't solve the biology, the economy won't recover.

To guard against rushed and sloppy science, build pressure testing into your research.

Link prediction algorithms can help to understand the structure and dynamics of scientific collaborations and the evolution of Science. However, available algorithms based on similarity between nodes of collaboration networks are bounded by the limited amount of links present in these networks. In this work, we reduce the latter intrinsic limitation by generalizing the Adamic-Adar method to multiplex networks composed by an arbitrary number of layers, that encode diverse forms of scientific interactions. We show that the new metric outperforms other single-layered, similarity-based scores and that scientific credit, represented by citations, and common interests, measured by the usage of common keywords, can be predictive of new collaborations. Our work paves the way for a deeper understanding of the dynamics driving scientific collaborations, and provides a new algorithm for link prediction in multiplex networks that can be applied to a plethora of systems.

COVID-19 has dramatically changed our lives and affected how we move, shop, work, and interact with each other. In this dashboard we provide a set of indicators that summarize how people's behaviors adapted in response to the ongoing outbreak.

How do we know " R "? We don't know for sure, but we can make educated guesses based on various data. We list our sources here

Many social issues are complex and science is important when designing policies to address them. Yet scientific evidence is sometimes uncertain and this makes decision-making challenging. This opinion provides guidelines to Commission policy makers on the characteristics of good scientific advice under these conditions of complexity and uncertainty. Among others, the process must be transparent, advisors' impartial, advice based on comprehensive evidence, and developed in dialogue with policy makers.

Will this be temporary or will we see a lasting shift toward a less global, less urban and less prosperous world? asks Rune Dahl Fitjar

Explore how scientists model the spread of pandemics, and what this tells us about the policy options for managing COVID-19.

Phil Anderson’s article “More Is Different” describes how different levels of complexity require new ways of thinking. And as the virus multiplies and spreads, that’s just what the human race desperately needs

The Expert Groups of the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force address urgent issues regarding the COVID-19 crisis in Policy Briefs, which are discussed and approved by the Advisory Panel and published on our website. They reflect the thinking of the Taskforce on this topic at that time. If required, the policy briefs are updated in the light of new studies or other data.

Researchers call on government to do more to explain need for physical distancing

After facing the existential threat of testing positive for Covid-19, these Australians describe the reactions of their communities

Employers face a logistical nightmare as staff return

During the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare workers work under high workload with resource constraints and virus exposure, and hence the support to healthcare workers is crucial to lower anxiety. Based on a recently published 8-point framework of COVID-19 specific organization support, we deducted a measure of COVID-19 Organizational Support (COVID-OS) of healthcare workers. We tested the new measure with 712 healthcare workers in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru from April 10th to May 2nd, 2020. Our studies suggest the new measure of COVID-19 Organizational Support (COVID-OS) formed 3 factors to predict healthcare workers’ anxiety and life satisfaction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Personal support and work support each predicted anxiety at different levels. Risk support did not play a significant role in our sample. We call further studies testing the COVID-OS in other countries and settings.

Judgment, decision making, and risk researchers have learned a great deal over the years about how people prepare for and react to global risks. In recent years, risk scholars have increasingly focused their energies on climate change, and as pandemic coronavirus has swept the globe many of these scholars are comparing the coronavirus pandemic with climate change to inform risk management. Risk communication research and the best practices developed from it are predicated on findings from the 1970’s to the present showing that there are structural similarities in how people think about widely divergent risks. Consequently, these lessons from risk communication of climate change (and from the canon of best practices) apply to the coronavirus pandemic. In the empirical comparison of student perceptions reported here, we replicate these structural similarity findings, but also find that moral concerns in particular deserve attention as a potentially distinct dimension of risk perception, on which different risks may also differ, as pandemic risks appear to evoke less moral concern than climate change. The need for communications to be timely, honest, credible, empathetic, and informative for useful individual actions is fundamental and essential for communicating effectively about the coronavirus epidemic. Some countries have heeded risk sciences, and are coping more successfully with pandemic coronavirus. Others have failed to implement these old lessons, which our data suggest still apply. While these failures may reinforce cynicism about political and public enthusiasm for accepting science, comparisons between the coronavirus pandemic and climate change may also foster greater aspirations for collective action.

R0 is just an average: the transmission rate varies widely, and outbreaks can be suprisingly large even when the epidemic is subcritical.

Dynamical processes, such as the diffusion of knowledge, opinions, pathogens, “fake news,” innovation, and others, are highly dependent on the structure of the social network in which they occur. However, questions on why most social networks present some particular structural features, namely, high levels of transitivity and degree assortativity, when compared to other types of networks remain open. First, we argue that every one-mode network can be regarded as a projection of a bipartite network, and we show that this is the case using two simple examples solved with the generating functions formalism. Second, using synthetic and empirical data, we reveal how the combination of the degree distribution of both sets of nodes of the bipartite network—together with the presence of cycles of lengths four and six—explain the observed values of transitivity and degree assortativity coefficients in the one-mode projected network. Bipartite networks with top node degrees that display a more right-skewed distribution than the bottom nodes result in highly transitive and degree assortative projections, especially if a large number of small cycles are present in the bipartite structure.

The most widely used techniques for community detection in networks, including methods based on modularity, statistical inference, and information theoretic arguments, all work by optimizing objective functions that measure the quality of network partitions. There is a good case to be made, however, that one should not look solely at the single optimal community structure under such an objective function but rather at a selection of high-scoring structures. If one does this, one typically finds that the resulting structures show considerable variation, which could be taken as evidence that these community detection methods are unreliable, since they do not appear to give consistent answers. Here we argue that, upon closer inspection, the structures found are in fact consistent in a certain way. Specifically, we show that they can all be assembled from a set of underlying “building blocks,” groups of network nodes that are usually found together in the same community. Different community structures correspond to different arrangements of blocks, but the blocks themselves are largely invariant. We propose an information theoretic method for discovering the building blocks in specific networks and demonstrate it with several example applications. We conclude that traditional community detection does in fact give a significant amount of insight into network structure.

Maria Laura Ruiu is lecturer at Northumbria University (Newcastle upon Tyne). She has recently completed her second PhD in Social Sciences (Northumbria University). She also acted as post-doctoral researcher at the Desertification Research Centre (University of Sassari, Italy) investigating the adaptive capacity of some communities to climate change impact. This paper analyses the first phases of the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak management in Italy by exploring the combination of political, scientific, media and public responses. A lack of coordination between political and scientific levels, and between institutional claim-makers and the media, suggests a mismanagement of the crisis during the first phases of the outbreak. The outbreak management suffered from the five communication weaknesses identified by Reynolds, related to i) mixed messages from multiple messengers; ii) delay in releasing information; iii) paternalistic attitudes; iv) lack of immediate reaction to rumours; and v) political confusion. This supports that the communication of uncertainty around an unknown threat should be accompanied by both political and scientific cohesion. However, both political and scientific dysfunctions caused the failure of several government efforts to contain the outbreak. This paper contributes towards informing policymakers on some lessons learned from the management of the Covid-19 in one of the most affected countries in the world. The Italian case study offers the opportunity for other countries to improve the management of the outbreak by limiting the spread of both chaos and panic.

Fast, cheap, good – you can pick two… The UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) is a peer-led consortium that aims to ensure the UK retains its place as a centre for world-leading research. The UKRN grew from activity across the UK seeking to understand the factors that contribute to poor research reproducibility and replicability. We aim to develop approaches to counter these problems, and thereby improve the quality of the research we produce. The COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented in recent history, and has demonstrated the strength of the global scientific community. Resources have been rapidly diverted towards understanding the virus, modelling strategies to reduce its impact, developing vaccines and treatments, and more. Collaborations – both national and international – have emerged almost overnight, and preprint servers have experienced a surge of submissions. However, given the importance and the immediacy of the challenge, rigorous and high-quality research is more important than ever. There is an urgent need for data and knowledge, but it is critically important that data are of high quality and that knowledge truly advances: false information is worse than no information. Open research can serve as a quality-control process, protecting against bias, minimising errors in the research process, and providing greater scope for errors to be detected by the wider community. To promote the uptake of open research practices, we have produced a series of primers – on pre-registration, data sharing, open code and software, open access, and preprints. There are also challenges for research users in assimilating and critically appraising the findings of the large number of scientific publications and preprints, so that these might be deployed for the public good. We therefore welcome the collaborative engagement of the global systematic review community, and encourage them to further strengthen these collaborations to enhance the efficiency and timeliness of their work. In any human endeavour errors will occur – scientists are not infallible. And this will be particularly true when working fast or under time pressure. The fundamentals of good design, careful conduct and thoughtful interpretation apply even when there is a pressing need to understand a new phenomenon rapidly. But in addition to this, transparency is a vital – to ensure that work can be scrutinised and trusted.

The new coronavirus has already claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Different countries are taking different measures in the fight against this new threat. Many people are staying at home. But is it worth it? That’s what we wanted to find out.We created a computer model that helps us assess the effect of different measures against COVID-19. We checked for the impact on people’s health and the state of the healthcare systems in two countries: the UK and the US. We found that social distancing of the whole population, not just the elderly, would have the most beneficial effect. The combination of this measure with others would be even better.

Imperial researchers have analysed the likely impact of easing lockdown measures in Italy and the impact on transmission of coronavirus.

The urge to reopen society far outpaces scientific discovery. Ten scientists offer a plan to close the gap.

Our goal is to help accelerate scientific research, with tools to visualize the emerging literature network around COVID-19. Use our exploratory search tools to find out what groups are working on what directions, see how biomedical concepts interact and evolve over time, and discover new connections.

To help accelerate scientific discovery with visualization, last month we launched SciSight, a framework of exploratory search and visualization tools for the COVID-19 literature. The first version of SciSight supported exploring associations between biomedical concepts appearing in the literature. In preliminary user interviews, the tool was found helpful in discovery-oriented search. We now release two important updates of SciSight.

Background: There is substantial disagreement about the level of asymptomatic severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection in a population. The disagreement results, in part, from the interpretation of studies that report a proportion of asymptomatic people with SARS-CoV-2 detected at a single point. Review questions: 1. Amongst people who become infected with SARS-CoV-2, what proportion does not experience symptoms at all during their infection? 2. Amongst people with SARS-CoV-2 infection who are asymptomatic when diagnosed, what proportion will develop symptoms later? 3. What proportion of SARS-CoV-2 transmission is accounted for by people who are either asymptomatic throughout infection, or pre-symptomatic? Methods: Rapid living systematic review (protocol https://osf.io/9ewys/). We searched Pubmed, Embase, bioRxiv and medRxiv using a living evidence database of SARS-CoV-2 literature on 25.03.2020. We included studies of people with SARS-CoV-2 diagnosed by reverse transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR) that documented follow-up and symptom status at the beginning and end of follow-up and modelling studies. Study selection, data extraction and bias assessment were done by one reviewer and verified by a second, with disagreement resolved by discussion or a third reviewer. We used a common-effect model to synthesise proportions from comparable studies. Results: We screened 89 studies and included 11. We estimated an upper bound for the proportion of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections of 29% (95% confidence interval 23 to 37%) in eight studies. Selection bias and likely publication bias affected the family case investigation studies. One statistical modelling study estimated the true proportion of asymptomatic infections at 18% (95% credibility interval 16 to 20%). Estimates of the proportions of pre-symptomatic individual in four studies were too heterogeneous to combine. In modelling studies, 40-60% of all SARS-CoV-2 infections are the result of transmission from pre-symptomatic individuals, with a smaller contribution from asymptomatic individuals. Conclusions: An intermediate contribution of pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic infections to overall SARS-CoV-2 transmission means that combination prevention, with enhanced hand and respiratory hygiene, testing tracing and isolation strategies and social distancing, will continue to be needed. The findings of this systematic review of publications early in the pandemic suggests that most SARS-CoV-2 infections are not asymptomatic throughout the course of infection.

The COVID-19 pandemic is straining public health systems worldwide and major non-pharmaceutical interventions have been implemented to slow its spread. During the initial phase of the outbreak the spread was primarily determined by human mobility. Yet empirical evidence on the effect of key geographic factors on local epidemic spread is lacking. We analyse highly-resolved spatial variables for cities in China together with case count data in order to investigate the role of climate, urbanization, and variation in interventions across China. Here we show that the epidemic intensity of COVID-19 is strongly shaped by crowding, such that epidemics in dense cities are more spread out through time, and denser cities have larger total incidence. Observed differences in epidemic intensity are well captured by a metapopulation model of COVID-19 that explicitly accounts for spatial hierarchies. Densely-populated cities worldwide may experience more prolonged epidemics. Whilst stringent interventions can shorten the time length of these local epidemics, although these may be difficult to implement in many affected settings.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection can spread rapidly within skilled nursing facilities. After identification of a case of Covid-19 in a skilled nursing facility, we assessed transmission and evaluated the adequacy of symptom-based screening to identify infections in residents. MethodsWe conducted two serial point-prevalence surveys, 1 week apart, in which assenting residents of the facility underwent nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal testing for SARS-CoV-2, including real-time reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR), viral culture, and sequencing. Symptoms that had been present during the preceding 14 days were recorded. Asymptomatic residents who tested positive were reassessed 7 days later. Residents with SARS-CoV-2 infection were categorized as symptomatic with typical symptoms (fever, cough, or shortness of breath), symptomatic with only atypical symptoms, presymptomatic, or asymptomatic. ResultsTwenty-three days after the first positive test result in a resident at this skilled nursing facility, 57 of 89 residents (64%) tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Among 76 residents who participated in point-prevalence surveys, 48 (63%) tested positive. Of these 48 residents, 27 (56%) were asymptomatic at the time of testing; 24 subsequently developed symptoms (median time to onset, 4 days). Samples from these 24 presymptomatic residents had a median rRT-PCR cycle threshold value of 23.1, and viable virus was recovered from 17 residents. As of April 3, of the 57 residents with SARS-CoV-2 infection, 11 had been hospitalized (3 in the intensive care unit) and 15 had died (mortality, 26%). Of the 34 residents whose specimens were sequenced, 27 (79%) had sequences that fit into two clusters with a difference of one nucleotide. ConclusionsRapid and widespread transmission of SARS-CoV-2 was demonstrated in this skilled nursing facility. More than half of residents with positive test results were asymptomatic at the time of testing and most likely contributed to transmission. Infection-control strategies focused solely on symptomatic residents were not sufficient to prevent transmission after SARS-CoV-2 introduction into this facility.

In the United States, 567 715 people were homeless on a single night in January 2019.1 The congregate nature and hygienic challenges of shelter life create the potential for rapid transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in this vulnerable population. On March 13, 2020, the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program (BHCHP), in partnership with city and state public health agencies and community partners, rolled out a coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) response strategy that included respiratory symptom screening at shelter front doors, expedited referrals for SARS-CoV-2 testing and isolation for those with respiratory symptoms, dedicated treatment settings for individuals with positive test results, and contact tracing of confirmed COVID-19 cases. Between March 28, 2020, and April 1, 2020, BHCHP identified an increasing number of COVID-19 cases from a single large homeless shelter in Boston, prompting SARS-CoV-2 testing of all remaining shelter residents. We describe the results of this investigation.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), has spread rapidly around the world since it was first recognized in late 2019. Most early reports of person-to-person SARS-CoV-2 transmission have been among household contacts, where the secondary attack rate has been estimated to exceed 10% (1), in health care facilities (2), and in congregate settings (3). However, widespread community transmission, as is currently being observed in the United States, requires more expansive transmission events between nonhousehold contacts. In February and March 2020, the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) investigated a large, multifamily cluster of COVID-19. Patients with confirmed COVID-19 and their close contacts were interviewed to better understand nonhousehold, community transmission of SARS-CoV-2. This report describes the cluster of 16 cases of confirmed or probable COVID-19, including three deaths, likely resulting from transmission of SARS-CoV-2 at two family gatherings (a funeral and a birthday party). These data support current CDC social distancing recommendations intended to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission. U.S residents should follow stay-at-home orders when required by state or local authorities.

Background Elucidation of the chain of disease transmission and identification of the source of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infections are crucial for effective disease containment. We describe an epidemiological investigation that, with use of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) serological assays, established links between three clusters of COVID-19.Methods In Singapore, active case-finding and contact tracing were undertaken for all COVID-19 cases. Diagnosis for acute disease was confirmed with RT-PCR testing. When epidemiological information suggested that people might have been nodes of disease transmission but had recovered from illness, SARS-CoV-2 IgG serology testing was used to establish past infection.Findings Three clusters of COVID-19, comprising 28 locally transmitted cases, were identified in Singapore; these clusters were from two churches (Church A and Church B) and a family gathering. The clusters in Church A and Church B were linked by an individual from Church A (A2), who transmitted SARS-CoV-2 infection to the primary case from Church B (F1) at a family gathering they both attended on Jan 25, 2020. All cases were confirmed by RT-PCR testing because they had active disease, except for A2, who at the time of testing had recovered from their illness and tested negative. This individual was eventually diagnosed with past infection by serological testing. ELISA assays showed an optical density of more than 1·4 for SARS-CoV-2 nucleoprotein and receptor binding domain antigens in titres up to 1/400, and viral neutralisation was noted in titres up to 1/320.Interpretation Development and application of a serological assay has helped to establish connections between COVID-19 clusters in Singapore. Serological testing can have a crucial role in identifying convalescent cases or people with milder disease who might have been missed by other surveillance methods.

During the current worldwide pandemic, coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) was first diagnosed in Iceland at the end of February. However, data are limited on how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, enters and spreads in a population. MethodsWe targeted testing to persons living in Iceland who were at high risk for infection (mainly those who were symptomatic, had recently traveled to high-risk countries, or had contact with infected persons). We also carried out population screening using two strategies: issuing an open invitation to 10,797 persons and sending random invitations to 2283 persons. We sequenced SARS-CoV-2 from 643 samples. ResultsAs of April 4, a total of 1221 of 9199 persons (13.3%) who were recruited for targeted testing had positive results for infection with SARS-CoV-2. Of those tested in the general population, 87 (0.8%) in the open-invitation screening and 13 (0.6%) in the random-population screening tested positive for the virus. In total, 6% of the population was screened. Most persons in the targeted-testing group who received positive tests early in the study had recently traveled internationally, in contrast to those who tested positive later in the study. Children under 10 years of age were less likely to receive a positive result than were persons 10 years of age or older, with percentages of 6.7% and 13.7%, respectively, for targeted testing; in the population screening, no child under 10 years of age had a positive result, as compared with 0.8% of those 10 years of age or older. Fewer females than males received positive results both in targeted testing (11.0% vs. 16.7%) and in population screening (0.6% vs. 0.9%). The haplotypes of the sequenced SARS-CoV-2 viruses were diverse and changed over time. The percentage of infected participants that was determined through population screening remained stable for the 20-day duration of screening. ConclusionsIn a population-based study in Iceland, children under 10 years of age and females had a lower incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection than adolescents or adults and males. The proportion of infected persons identified through population screening did not change substantially during the screening period, which was consistent with a beneficial effect of containment efforts. (Funded by deCODE Genetics–Amgen.)

BACKGROUND: Since its identification on the 7th of January 2020, SARS-CoV-2 has spread to more than 180 countries worldwide, causing >11,000 deaths. At present, viral disease and transmission amongst children is incompletely understood. Specifically, there is concern that children could be an important source of SARS-CoV-2 in household transmission clusters. METHODS: We performed an observational study analysing literature published between December 2019 and March 2020 of the clinical features of SARS-CoV-2 in children and descriptions of household transmission clusters of SARS-CoV-2. In these studies the index case of each cluster defined as the individual in the household cluster who first developed symptoms. FINDINGS: Drawing on studies from China, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Iran a broad range of clinical symptoms were observed in children. These ranged from asymptomatic to severe disease. Of the 31 household transmission clusters that were identified, 9.7% (3/31) were identified as having a paediatric index case. This is in contrast other zoonotic infections (namely H5N1 influenza virus) where 54% (30/56) of transmission clusters identified children as the index case. INTERPRETATION: Whilst SARS-CoV-2 can cause mild disease in children, the data available to date suggests that children have not played a substantive role in the intra-household transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

On 07/02/2020, French Health authorities were informed of a confirmed case of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in an Englishman infected in Singapore who had recently stayed in a chalet in the French Alps. We conducted an investigation to identify secondary cases and interrupt transmission.MethodsWe defined as a confirmed case a person linked to the chalet with a positive RT-PCR sample for SARS-CoV-2.ResultsThe index case stayed 4 days in the chalet with 10 English tourists and a family of 5 French residents; SARS-CoV-2 was detected in 5 individuals in France, 6 in England (including the index case), and 1 in Spain (overall attack rate in the chalet: 75%). One pediatric case, with picornavirus and influenza A coinfection, visited 3 different schools while symptomatic. One case was asymptomatic, with similar viral load as that of a symptomatic case. Seven days after the first cases were diagnosed, one tertiary case was detected in a symptomatic patient with a positive endotracheal aspirate; all previous and concurrent nasopharyngeal specimens were negative. Additionally, 172 contacts were monitored, including 73 tested negative for SARS-CoV-2.ConclusionsThe occurrence in this cluster of one asymptomatic case with similar viral load as a symptomatic patient, suggests transmission potential of asymptomatic individuals. The fact that an infected child did not transmit the disease despite close interactions within schools suggests potential different transmission dynamics in children. Finally, the dissociation between upper and lower respiratory tract results underscores the need for close monitoring of the clinical evolution of suspect Covid-19 cases.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), first detected in China in December, 2019. In January, 2020, state, local, and federal public health agencies investigated the first case of COVID-19 in Illinois, USA.MethodsPatients with confirmed COVID-19 were defined as those with a positive SARS-CoV-2 test. Contacts were people with exposure to a patient with COVID-19 on or after the patient's symptom onset date. Contacts underwent active symptom monitoring for 14 days following their last exposure. Contacts who developed fever, cough, or shortness of breath became persons under investigation and were tested for SARS-CoV-2. A convenience sample of 32 asymptomatic health-care personnel contacts were also tested.FindingsPatient 1—a woman in her 60s—returned from China in mid-January, 2020. One week later, she was hospitalised with pneumonia and tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Her husband (Patient 2) did not travel but had frequent close contact with his wife. He was admitted 8 days later and tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Overall, 372 contacts of both cases were identified; 347 underwent active symptom monitoring, including 152 community contacts and 195 health-care personnel. Of monitored contacts, 43 became persons under investigation, in addition to Patient 2. These 43 persons under investigation and all 32 asymptomatic health-care personnel tested negative for SARS-CoV-2.InterpretationPerson-to-person transmission of SARS-CoV-2 occurred between two people with prolonged, unprotected exposure while Patient 1 was symptomatic. Despite active symptom monitoring and testing of symptomatic and some asymptomatic contacts, no further transmission was detected.

Since December 2019, SARS-CoV-2 virus has extended to most parts of China with more than 80 thousand cases and to at least 100 countries with more than 60 thousand international cases by March 15, 2020. Here we applied household cohort study to determine the features of household transmission of COVID-19.MethodsTotal 105 index patients and 392 household contacts were enrolled. Both index patients and household members were inspected by SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR. The information of all recruited people was extracted from medical records and confirmed or supplemented by telephone interviews. The baseline characteristics of index cases and contact patients were described. Secondary attack rates of SARS-CoV-2 to the contact members were computed and the risk factors for transmission within household were estimated.ResultsSecondary transmission of SARS-CoV-2 developed in 64 of 392 household contacts (16.3%). The secondary attack rate to children was 4% comparing with 17.1% to adults. The secondary attack rate to the contacts within the households with index patients quarantined by themselves since onset of symptoms was 0% comparing with 16.9% to the contacts without index patients quarantined. The secondary attack rate to contacts who were spouses of index cases was 27.8% comparing with 17.3% to other adult members in the households.ConclusionThe secondary attack rate of SARS-CoV-2 in household is 16.3%. Ages of household contacts and spouse relationship with index case are risk factors for transmission of SARS-CoV-2 within household. Quarantine of index patients at home since onset of symptom is useful to prevent the transmission of SARS-Co-2 within household.

Background: As of April 2, 2020, the global reported number of COVID-19 cases has crossed over 1 million with more than 55,000 deaths. The household transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2, the causative pathogen, remains elusive. Methods: Based on a comprehensive contact-tracing dataset from Guangzhou, we estimated both the population-level effective reproductive number and individual-level secondary attack rate (SAR) in the household setting. We assessed age effects on transmissibility and the infectivity of COVID-19 cases during their incubation period. Results: A total of 195 unrelated clusters with 212 primary cases, 137 nonprimary (secondary or tertiary) cases and 1938 uninfected close contacts were traced. We estimated the household SAR to be 13.8% (95% CI: 11.1-17.0%) if household contacts are defined as all close relatives and 19.3% (95% CI: 15.5-23.9%) if household contacts only include those at the same residential address as the cases, assuming a mean incubation period of 4 days and a maximum infectious period of 13 days. The odds of infection among children (<20 years old) was only 0.26 (95% CI: 0.13-0.54) times of that among the elderly (≥60 years old). There was no gender difference in the risk of infection. COVID-19 cases were at least as infectious during their incubation period as during their illness. On average, a COVID-19 case infected 0.48 (95% CI: 0.39-0.58) close contacts. Had isolation not been implemented, this number increases to 0.62 (95% CI: 0.51-0.75). The effective reproductive number in Guangzhou dropped from above 1 to below 0.5 in about 1 week. Conclusion: SARS-CoV-2 is more transmissible in households than SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, and the elderly ≥60 years old are the most vulnerable to household transmission. Case finding and isolation alone may be inadequate to contain the pandemic and need to be used in conjunction with heightened restriction of human movement as implemented in Guangzhou.

Rapid spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in Wuhan, China, prompted heightened surveillance in Shenzhen, China. The resulting data provide a rare opportunity to measure key metrics of disease course, transmission, and the impact of control measures.MethodsFrom Jan 14 to Feb 12, 2020, the Shenzhen Center for Disease Control and Prevention identified 391 SARS-CoV-2 cases and 1286 close contacts. We compared cases identified through symptomatic surveillance and contact tracing, and estimated the time from symptom onset to confirmation, isolation, and admission to hospital. We estimated metrics of disease transmission and analysed factors influencing transmission risk.FindingsCases were older than the general population (mean age 45 years) and balanced between males (n=187) and females (n=204). 356 (91%) of 391 cases had mild or moderate clinical severity at initial assessment. As of Feb 22, 2020, three cases had died and 225 had recovered (median time to recovery 21 days; 95% CI 20–22). Cases were isolated on average 4·6 days (95% CI 4·1–5·0) after developing symptoms; contact tracing reduced this by 1·9 days (95% CI 1·1–2·7). Household contacts and those travelling with a case were at higher risk of infection (odds ratio 6·27 [95% CI 1·49–26·33] for household contacts and 7·06 [1·43–34·91] for those travelling with a case) than other close contacts. The household secondary attack rate was 11·2% (95% CI 9·1–13·8), and children were as likely to be infected as adults (infection rate 7·4% in children <10 years vs population average of 6·6%). The observed reproductive number (R) was 0·4 (95% CI 0·3–0·5), with a mean serial interval of 6·3 days (95% CI 5·2–7·6).InterpretationOur data on cases as well as their infected and uninfected close contacts provide key insights into the epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2. This analysis shows that isolation and contact tracing reduce the time during which cases are infectious in the community, thereby reducing the R. The overall impact of isolation and contact tracing, however, is uncertain and highly dependent on the number of asymptomatic cases. Moreover, children are at a similar risk of infection to the general population, although less likely to have severe symptoms; hence they should be considered in analyses of transmission and control.FundingEmergency Response Program of Harbin Institute of Technology, Emergency Response Program of Peng Cheng Laboratory, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In December 2019, an outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, began in Wuhan, China (1). The disease spread widely in China, and, as of February 26, 2020, COVID-19 cases had been identified in 36 other countries and territories, including the United States. Person-to-person transmission has been widely documented, and a limited number of countries have reported sustained person-to-person spread.* On January 20, state and local health departments in the United States, in collaboration with teams deployed from CDC, began identifying and monitoring all persons considered to have had close contact† with patients with confirmed COVID-19 (2). The aims of these efforts were to ensure rapid evaluation and care of patients, limit further transmission, and better understand risk factors for transmission.

Abstract: Objective To estimate the infection rate of close contacts of COVID-19 cases, and to evaluate the risk of COVID-19 under different exposure conditions. Methods A prospective study was used to conduct continuous quarantine medical observations of close contacts of people infected with COVID-19, collect epidemiological, clinical manifestations, and laboratory test data to estimate the infection rate of close contacts under different exposures. Results The epidemiological curve of COVID-19 in Ningbo showed persistent human-to-human characteristics. A total of 2 147 close contacts were tracked and investigated. The total infection rate was 6.15%. The infection rates of confirmed cases and positive contacts were 6.30% and 4.11%, respectively. The difference was not statistically significant (P>0.05). Among close contacts of different relationships, friends/pilgrims (22.31%), family members (18.01%), and relatives (4.73%) have a higher infection rate, and close contacts of medical staff were not infected. Differences in infection rates among the close contacts were statistically significant (P < 0.005). Living with the case (13.26%), taking the same transportation (11.91%), and dining together (7.18%) are high risk factors for infection. Cross-infection in the hospital should not be ignored (1.94%). The median of incubation period is 5 days. Conclusion The infection rate of close contacts of COVID-19 cases is high, and isolation medical observation measures should be implemented in strict accordance with the close contact management plan.

In thinking about how to respond to the crisis a few months back, colleagues and I entertained the idea of "Open Think Tanks" - the idea that we might create transparent digitally mediated, fora that seek to replicate with a wider community key features of the policy advice process in order to provide additional input and support to the high-stakes decisions governments all over the world must now make.

To inform the ongoing response to the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically, to inform the development of public health guidance to prevent the spread of COVID-19, we have created a database of COVID-19 public health guidance produced by international organisations. This database is primarily for the use of relevant stakeholders in the Health Protection Surveillance Centre, the National Public Health Emergency Team, the Department of Health, and Health Service Executive.

Contact tracing is an effective public health measure for the control of COVID-19. The prompt identification and management of the contacts of COVID-19 cases makes it possible to rapidly identify secondary cases that may arise after transmission from the primary cases. This will enable the interruption of further onward transmission. Contact tracing, in conjunction with robust testing and surveillance systems, is central to control strategies during de-escalation. Contact tracing has been a key part of the response in several Asian countries that have successfully reduced case numbers. It is possible to scale up contact tracing by adapting traditional contact tracing approaches to available local resources and by using a number of resource-saving measures. This document outlines a number of resource measures including the use of well-trained non-public-health staff and volunteers; repurposing existing resources such as call centres; reducing the intensity of contact follow-up and using new technologies such as contact management software and mobile apps.

This information sheet includes: influenza vaccination will everyone entering residential aged care facilities need to be vaccinated?  what happens if staff are not able to be vaccinated due to cultural, religious or health reasons? do residential aged care providers still need to provide free influenza vaccinations to staff and volunteers? what should residential aged care workers do if they experience symptoms after getting the flu vaccine? what are aged care providers’ obligations regarding persons entering the service? how will aged care providers know whether persons seeking to enter a service on an ad hoc basis (eg tradesmen) have been vaccinated? will aged care providers need to prove that a visitor has been vaccinated and keep records? how will compliance with these requirements be assessed? will residents still have the right to refuse vaccination? who can administer an influenza vaccination?

The Pandemic Health Intelligence Plan provides a framework for collecting the information required to support decision making about COVID-19.

This paper provides an overview of the Ministry of Health’s approach to testing for COVID-19 throughout Alert Level 3 and into Alert Level 2. The four objectives of this testing approach are:1.Quickly identifying all cases of COVID-19, in order isolate them and trace and quarantine their contacts, including as part of managing cluster outbreaks.2.Ensuring that access to testing is equitable –for Māori and Pacific people and other priority groups, as well as across the country. 3.Identifying any undetected community spread in New Zealand4.Monitoring for anyCOVID-19 in people at higher riskof exposure to help ensure the safety systems in place are working.In order to achieve the objectives above, District Health Boards (DHBs) will beasked to:•Ensure that any people fitting the case definition are tested. •Ensure all cases and contacts in high-risk settings (for example aged residential care (ARC)) are tested and isolated or quarantined to prevent further spread.•Test all contacts where the source of infection is unknown regardless of symptoms•Undertaketargeted testing of asymptomatic people at high-risk of exposureDHBs are asked to develop and submit plans on how they will carry out the above actions, with a particular focus on ensuring equity. Plans for testing during Alert Level 3 should be submitted by Thursday 30 April. For Alert Level 2, the Ministry of Healthwill ensure that any sampling frameworks for targeted testing of asymptomatic people are statistically robust. This testing approach is part of the broader surveillance plan for COVID-19 thatthe Ministry of Health, DHBs and the All-Of-Government group are implementing to both address and monitor our progress in eliminating COVID-19.

Physical distancing reduces transmission risks and slows the spread of COVID-19. Local and regional governments in the United States have issued shelter-in-place policies to mandate physical distancing. Yet compliance with these policies is uneven and may be influenced by beliefs about science and topics of scientific consensus. We theorize that individuals skeptical about the human causes of climate change are less likely to comply with physical distancing orders. Using county-day measures of physical distancing derived from cellphone location data, we demonstrate that the proportion of people who stay at home after lockdown policies go into effect is significantly lower in counties with a high concentration of climate change skeptics. These results are consistent when we study how belief in science influences physical distancing across as well as within Democratic and Republican counties. Our findings suggest public health interventions and messaging about risks associated with COVID-19 that take into account local attitudes towards science may be more effective.

The dangerous spread of disinformation about COVID-19 must be tackled alongside the virus itself. New research from the National University of Singapore reveals the most successful strategies used to do so by three Asian countries. What makes the current pandemic more dangerous than any before is that the spread of rumours and false information on the internet is even faster than that of the coronavirus itself. Sylvie Briand, director of the WHO's Infectious Hazard Management department, could not have better emphasized the need for governments to battle this parallel yet more vicious outbreak – that of the "infodemic", or information epidemic.

This daily paper brings together news articles with a focus on eLeadership research in the UK and world-wide. __________________________________________________ There's also room for interesting articles on other issues on the Twitterstream. Enjoy reading and welcome!

District leaders have a lot to think about when it comes to implementing and navigating remote learning during school closures. But they must not forget about how crucial it is to have cybersecurity measures in place before rolling out their e-learning plans.

Isolation, anxiety, and doubt are part of the daily lives of communities that humanitarian organizations support. Now these emotions describe the biggest challenge for business leaders managing displaced teams working from home for an extended period, amidst the fear and uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic. While many companies have been adept at rapidly establishing the tools and processes required for remote work, discovering ways to build and strengthen high performing teams during this period of open-ended high-stress will take longer. One approach is to adapt some of the same practices used by humanitarian organizations to empower people displaced by tragedies to guide your team through the pandemic’s exceptional circumstances:

Virologist Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, fell ill with COVID-19 in mid-March. He spent a week in a hospital and has been recovering at his home in London since. Climbing a flight of stairs still leaves him breathless. Piot, who grew up in Belgium, was one of the discoverers of the Ebola virus in 1976 and spent his career fighting infectious diseases. He headed the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS between 1995 and 2008 and is currently a coronavirus adviser to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. But his personal confrontation with the new coronavirus was a life-changing experience, Piot says. This interview took place on 2 May. Piot’s answers have been edited and translated from Dutch: 

Fake news, deliberately inaccurate and often biased information that is presented as accurate reporting, is perceived as a serious threat. Recent research on fake news has documented a high general susceptibility to the phenomenon and has focused on investigating potential explanatory factors. The present study examined how features of news headlines affected their perceived accuracy. Across four experiments (total N = 659), we examined the effects of pictures, perceptual clarity, and repeated exposure on the perceived accuracy of news headlines. In all experiments, participants received a set of true and false news headlines and rated their accuracy. The presence of pictures and repeated exposure increased perceived accuracy, whereas manipulations of perceptual clarity did not show the predicted effects. The effects of pictures and repeated exposure were similar for true and false headlines. These results demonstrate that accompanying pictures and repeated exposure can affect evaluations of truth of news headlines.

The Schengen Area consists of 26 countries that have agreed to remove regular checks at their internal borders in order to facilitate the free and unrestricted movement of people. The countries include 22 EU Member States (Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Hungary, Malta, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Finland and Sweden) and 4 associated countries (Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. The Schengen Code lays down the common rules governing the management of internal and external EU borders, including rules and procedures concerning the exceptional introduction of border checks at internal borders. According to the Code, Member States can introduce temporary border checks at their internal borders in cases of a foreseeable threat (e.g. a special event), an immediate threat or in the situation of persistent serious deficiencies relating to external borders.

Income inequality has been shown to have a detrimental impact on a wide range of psychological, economic, and social outcomes. In this study, we focus on the role of income inequality in reducing civic honesty. Study 1 reanalyzed data of a “lost wallet” experiment conducted by Cohn, Maréchal, Tannenbaum, and Zünd (2019) in 355 cities spread across 40 countries. Multi-level analyses indicated that citizens in countries with higher income inequality were less likely to return a lost wallet. Study 2 examined the causal effects of income inequality by utilizing an experimental design. We found that income inequality reduced one’s personal desire to return a lost wallet. Convergent findings from two studies indicate the crucial role played by income inequality in reducing civic honesty.

We examined whether the extent of perceived variability (i.e., consensus) among group members’ shared leadership ratings polarize group performances. Through using data from 39 classes in school settings, we explored the relationship between students’ shared leadership behavior and group performance as moderated by the extent of variability among group members’ shared leadership ratings. Study results, based on hierarchical multiple regression analyses, were consistent with the hypothesized conceptual scheme of moderation in that the slope of the relationship between shared leadership and group performance was stronger (and positive) for classes with high consensus than ones with low consensus. This indicates consensus among group members’ shared leadership ratings polarizing group performance.

The mental health consequences of COVID-19 are predicted to have a disproportionate impact on certain groups. We aimed to develop a brief measure, the Pandemic Anxiety Scale, to capture the specific aspects of the pandemic that are provoking anxiety, and explore how these vary by health and demographic factors. Design Data were from a convenience sample of parents (N=4,793) and adolescents (N=698) recruited in the first 6 weeks of lockdown. Methods Factor analytic and IRT methods were used to validate the new measure in both parent and adolescent samples. Associations between scores on the new measure and age, gender, household income, and physical health status were explored using structural equation modelling (SEM). Results Two factors were identified in both samples: disease-anxiety (e.g. catching, transmitting the virus) and consequence anxiety (e.g. impact on economic prospects), and unique associations with health and demographic factors were observed. Conclusions Anxieties due to the COVID-19 are multifaceted, and the PAS is a short, reliable and valid measure of these concerns. These anxieties are differentially associated with demographic, social and health factors, which should be considered when developing strategies to mitigate the mental health impact of the pandemic.

The field of behavioural design, combining design led approaches with insights which are deeply rooted in human behaviour, has emerged as an influential playground for innovations through the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the core behavioural science frameworks proposes that if you want to change behaviour, you need to make a service or action more attractive. Making something more attractive is about getting the right attention and making it more appealing. Think about all the instances that you go to purchase something from the supermarket and end up with several items that you did not plan to buy. ‍In this article, we highlight the insights underpinning five innovative behavioural designs for making physical distancing more attractive in public spaces.

Whowe areWe are a collaborative of health psychology professionalsand each of us isvolunteeringto assist the health, public health and social care systems in theirresponse to COVID-19.We have a variety of backgrounds and roles: some are academics employed by Universities, some are HCPC registered practitioner psychologists working for the NHS and some are both; we span early, mid and senior career stages.

Face masks could offer an important tool for contributing to the management of community transmission of Covid-19 within the general population, according to Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics (DELVE). The multi-disciplinary group convened by the Royal Society supports a data-driven approach to learning from the different approaches countries are taking to managing the pandemic.

We’ve put together some useful tips, advice and links to articles that you might find helpful in dealing with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

From literature to manufacturing, crisis and creativity have often gone hand-in-hand.

The European Commission, led by the European Innovation Council and in close collaboration with the EU member states, will host a follow-up matchathon to help the finalists and winners of the EUvsVirus Hackathon connect with corporates, investors, accelerators, venture capitalists, etc. around the world to put their innovative solutions into production and save lives.

We want to gather in one place all initiatives/ information related to the cultural and creative sectors in the EU in response to the COVID crisis

The idea that government advisers can separate science and politics is bogus, says Melanie Smallman

Government must state whether aim is to suppress or manage infections, say experts convened by Sir David King

‘We are following the ​science’ is the message the British public have been hearing from government since COVID-19 mitigating measures began. It says it is following the advice of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). But the activities of the committee have been kept secret and excluded from scrutiny by the public or wider scientific community. In response, on Monday May 4, the Independent SAGE convened as a group of preeminent experts from the UK and around the world. The aim of the Independent SAGE was and is to provide robust, independent advice to HM Government with the purpose of helping the UK navigate COVID-19 whilst minimising fatalities. The Independent SAGE is chaired by former HM Government Chief Scientific Advisor Sir David King and draws on a range of international and British experts.

There has been a growing interest on the negative influence that the environment of higher education institutions has on the mental health of academics, and there is evidence to suggest that the university environment is jeopardising academics’ physical and psychological health. This study sought to review the international literature with a view to ascertaining what the most commonly used measures are to investigate this topic, including the main stressors and coping strategies reported/used by academics and their lived experiences. A thorough review of the literature was conducted, and 28 studies were identified and critically analysed. The review concludes that there is compelling evidence that the university environment is triggering high levels of stress and burnout and low levels of wellbeing for academics. There is extremely limited research on the perceptions and lived experiences of academic staff. It is virtually unknown, what coping strategies academics use to face job demands, and our knowledge about burnout, seems to be limited by the use of one particular measure without cultural adaptations.

Welcome to the our research page, seeking to contribute to urgent public debates and policy practice on the UK’s phased response to COVID-19, drawing on political behaviour, crisis management theory, international relations and political psychology. Through the analysis of original survey data, our main aims are to analyse what drives public support for and compliance with social distancing measures, how the pandemic disproportionately affects different social groups, and what are the public preferences on balancing public health with economic considerations and security with freedom.

Should people be forced to wear face masks in public? That’s the question facing governments as more countries unwind their lockdowns. Over 30 countries have made masks compulsory in public, including Germany, Austria and Poland. This is despite the science saying masks do little to protect wearers, and only might prevent them from infecting other people. Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, has nonetheless announced new guidelines advising Scots to wear masks for shopping or on public transport, while the UK government is expected to announce a new stance shortly. Meanwhile, US vice president Mike Pence has controversially refused to mask up. This all has echoes of the great influenza pandemic, aka the Spanish flu, which killed some 50 million people in 1918-20. It’s a great case study in how people will put up with very tough restrictions, so long as they think they have merit.

For many of us, grocery shopping is when we will come into contact with the highest number of people during the pandemic. The more people we encounter, the higher the risk of virus transmission. So, how do we keep safe when going to the shops?

Although different countries around the world have taken largely similar approaches to facing the coronavirus pandemic by aiming to reduce human contact, it has become clear that their decisions have different consequences for different groups of people. For many of us, it simply means adapting to working from home, reducing travel and reorienting our social lives to digital platforms. But for others, the COVID-19 global crisis has overlapped with pre-existing conditions of displacement to make what was already an uncomfortable life even less bearable. This is the case for thousands of asylum seekers who have been deported and held back on EU borders.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, there was much attention on the plight of cruise tourists. Governments around the world closed their ports to cruise ships and refused to allow passengers to disembark. While all cruise passengers are now ashore, those who work on cruise ships are not, with an estimated 100,000 cruise ship workers currently stranded. The same is true of workers on cargo ships. There are an estimated 1.6 million seafarers working onboard various types of ships. These men and women are responsible for transporting 90% of the world’s trade. From the food that we eat to the clothes that we wear, pretty much everything we own was transported by a seafarer. These workers live and work onboard for months at a time, driving the ship, maintaining its machinery and loading and discharging cargo at ports around the world. With an average crew size of just 23 people, seafarers are used to social isolation. On the surface, all seems well: goods are still flowing. But the men and women who are transporting these goods are struggling. In a normal month, approximately 100,000 seafarers leave their ships and are replaced by others, but these crew changes have been cancelled. Over a month ago, Maersk, the world’s largest container line, suspended all crew changes and then recently announced an further extension to the crew change suspension. Other shipping lines have also suspended crew changes. It is estimated that 150,000 seafarers are currently waiting to go home.

We are experiencing the biggest remote work experiment in history – but many are beginning to imagine life after lockdown. Amid unprecedented global job losses, concerns about transport infrastructure and the continuing need for workplace social distancing, governments are launching back-to-work plans. Meanwhile, the latest US research reveals that 74% of businesses want some workers to permanently work remotely and business leaders are actively shedding leased office space – hinting that not everyone will go back to the office. Here are five key trends that will shape the future of how we work.

It has been less than two months since the world scrambled to go into the “Great Lockdown” to slow the spread of COVID-19. Now, many countries are considering their exit strategies. Some have already eased up. The push is largely economic. There is a lot scientists don’t yet understand about the novel coronavirus, and there is no known cure or vaccine. Many countries are still experiencing a rise in infections. But the lockdowns have played havoc with people’s livelihoods. Entire economies are in meltdown: The International Monetary Fund predicts the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Just as each nation chose a different route into lockdown, each is likely to choose its own exit path. I have launched a research initiative, “Imagining a Digital Economy for All 2030,” with a focus on the post-pandemic global economy. We have been studying the characteristics of 40 countries that help explain how governments and citizens have acted to contain the COVID-19 outbreak and their preparedness to take an economy online. Our analysis offers ways to gauge which countries are best prepared for a safe exit.

UNITED NATIONS — U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Friday the coronavirus pandemic keeps unleashing “a tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scare-mongering” and appealed for “an all-out effort to end hate speech globally."The U.N. chief said “anti-foreigner sentiment has surged online and in the streets, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have spread, and COVID-19-related anti-Muslim attacks have occurred.”Guterres said migrants and refugees “have been vilified as a source of the virus — and then denied access to medical treatment.”“With older persons among the most vulnerable, contemptible memes have emerged suggesting they are also the most expendable,” he said. “And journalists, whistleblowers, health professionals, aid workers and human rights defenders are being targeted simply for doing their jobs.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyGuterres called on political leaders to show solidarity with all people, on educational institutions to focus on “digital literacy” at a time when “extremists are seeking to prey on captive and potentially despairing audiences.”

Exclusive: report criticising government lockdown proposals heavily redacted before release

This daily paper brings together news articles with a focus on #Leadership  and Management Research UK and world-wide. There's also room for interesting articles on other issues on the Twitterstream. Enjoy reading and welcome!

The CHDH has been leading international research looking at public perceptions of governmental tracking technologies as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have just completed wave three of our survey which focuses specifically on the Australian public’s perception and uptake of the COVIDSafe app. You can see the entire preliminary analysis here, but we reproduce a few highlights below:

New research conducted by the Complex Human Data Hub suggests that support for the Australian Government introducing immunity passports in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is decreasing. In our survey conducted 7th May 2020, 61% of Australians showed little to no support for the introduction of immunity passports once they have considered the implications of such a policy, compared to 54.5% on 15th April 2020.

Report warns that thousands of scientists will also have to abandon research projects.

Wet markets, a ‘traditional’ form of food retail, have maintained their popularity in urban China despite the rapid expansion of ‘modern’ supermarket chains. Their continued popularity rests in the freshness of their food. Chinese consumers regard freshness as the most important aspect of food they buy, but what constitutes ‘freshness’ in produce is not simply a given. Freshness is actively produced by a range of actors including wholesalers, vendors as well as consumers. The paper examines what fresh food means to consumers in the Chinese market. It argues that wet markets create a sense of freshness that resonates with this culinary culture through their sensoria, atmosphere, and trust between food vendors and consumers. Together these respond to desires for and reproduce criteria used to evaluate freshness. Within a fragmented food trade system, wet market vendors have an advantage in offering ‘freshness’ through their ability to connect various wholesalers, agencies, and middlemen, and shorten supply chains. The paper is based on participatory observation, a consumer survey and in-depth interviews of various stakeholders in southern China, especially Sanya in Hainan and Guangzhou in Guangdong. This study suggests that this cultural construction of freshness creates a niche for small-scale players and ‘traditional’ markets in an increasingly concentrated global food system.

We tell the story of how the debate about social media and well-being has evolved. To get involved or find more insights and interviews, check out our website: https://www.psychoftech.org/ Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/psych_of_tech

How easy it is to order a book on an online shop’s website, how intuitive maps or navigation services are to use in everyday life, or how laborious it is to set up a customer account for a car-sharing service, these features and ‘user flows’ have become incredibly important to the every customer. Today, the “user friendliness” of a digital platform or service can therefore have a significant influence on how well a product sells or what market share it gains. Therefore, not only operators of large online platforms, but also companies in more traditional sectors of the economy are increasing investments into designing websites, apps or software in such a way that they can be used easily, intuitively and as time-saving as possible. 

We conducted a preregistered exploratory survey to assess whether patterns of individual differences in political orientation, social dominance orientation, traditionalism, conspiracy ideation, or attitudes about science predict willingness to share different kinds of misinformation regarding the COVID-19 pandemic online. Analyses revealed two orthogonal models of individual differences predicting the willingness to share misinformation over social media platforms. Both models suggest a sizable role of different aspects of political belief, particularly social dominance orientation, as predicting tendencies to share different kinds of misinformation, predominantly conspiracy theories. Though exploratory, results from this study can contribute to the formulation of a socio-cognitive profile of individuals who act as vectors for the spread of scientific misinformation online, and can be useful for computationally modeling misinformation diffusion.

How do people behave when disasters strike? Popular media accounts depict panic and cruelty, but in fact, individuals often cooperate with and care for one another during crises. I summarize evidence for such “catastrophe compassion,” discuss its roots, and consider how it might be cultivated in more mundane times.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Dutch government has introduced an “intelligent lockdown” with stay at home and social distancing measures. The Dutch approach to mitigate the virus focuses less on repression and more on moral appeals and self-discipline. This study assessed how compliance with the measures have worked out in practice and what factors might affect whether Dutch people comply with the measures. We analyzed data from an online survey, conducted between April 7-14, among 568 participants. The overall results showed reported compliance was high. This suggests that the Dutch approach has to some extent worked as hoped in practice. Repression did not play a significant role in compliance, while intrinsic (moral and social) motivations did produce better compliance. Yet appeals on self-discipline did not work for everyone, and people with lower impulse control were more likely to violate the rules. In addition, compliance was lower for people who lacked the practical capacity to follow the measures and for those who have the opportunity to break the measures. Sustained compliance, therefore, relies on support to aid people to maintain social distancing and restrictions to reduce opportunities for unsafe gatherings. These findings suggest several important practical recommendations for combating the COVID-19 pandemic.

The current study had two aims. First, we tested three norm-based interventions to increase social distancing practices. Second, we examined five potential concerns related to COVID-19 infection as prospective predictors of social distancing practices over the next two weeks.

Along with the Coronavirus pandemic, another crisis has manifested itself in the form of mass fear and panic phenomena, fuelled by incomplete and often inaccurate information. There is therefore a tremendous need to address and better understand COVID-19's informational crisis and gauge public sentiment, so that appropriate messaging and policy decisions can be implemented. In this research article, we identify public sentiment associated with the pandemic using Coronavirus specific Tweets and R statistical software, along with its sentiment analysis packages. We demonstrate insights into the progress of fear-sentiment over time as COVID-19 approached peak levels in the United States, using descriptive textual analytics supported by necessary textual data visualizations. Furthermore, we provide a methodological overview of two essential machine learning classification methods, in the context of textual analytics, and compare their effectiveness in classifying Coronavirus Tweets of varying lengths. We observe a strong classification accuracy of 91% for short Tweets, with the Naive Bayes method. We also observe that the logistic regression classification method provides a reasonable accuracy of 74% with shorter Tweets, and both methods showed relatively weaker performance for longer Tweets. This research provides insights into Coronavirus fear sentiment progression, and outlines associated methods, implications, limitations and opportunities.

“Is the government's objective to suppress infection or to manage the infection?”, asked Sir David King at the first press conference of a newly formed independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), held last week. The UK now has two SAGEs. The officially constituted SAGE has seen its reputation collapse during the past 3 months. Partly, this loss of credibility arose out of the group's unwillingness to be transparent about its membership and its proceedings. At a moment of national emergency, SAGE's secrecy simply became unacceptable. The public had a right to know the evidence on which advice was being made to government—advice that was not only protecting lives but also destroying livelihoods. But the official SAGE luxuriated in elite insouciance. It displayed a very British characteristic: the arrogance of exceptionalism. Rarely has a publicly constituted body been so out of touch with the public mood for accountability.

After decades of debate on the feasibility of open access (OA) to scientific publications, we may be nearing a tipping point. A number of recent developments, such as Plan S, suggest that OA upon publication could become the default in the sciences within the next several years. Despite uncertainty about the long-term sustainability of OA models, many publishers who had been reluctant to abandon the subscription business model are showing openness to OA (1). Although more OA can mean more immediate, global access to scholarship, there remains a need for practical, sustainable models, for careful analysis of the consequences of business model choices, and for “caution in responding to passionate calls for a ‘default to open’” (2). Of particular concern for the academic community, as subscription revenues decline in the transition to OA and some publishers prioritize other sources of revenue, is the growing ownership of data analytics, hosting, and portal services by large scholarly publishers. This may enhance publishers' ability to lock in institutional customers through combined offerings that condition open access to journals upon purchase of other services. Even if such “bundled” arrangements have a near-term benefit of increasing openly licensed scholarship, they may run counter to long-term interests of the academic community by reducing competition and the diversity of service offerings. The healthy functioning of the academic community, including fair terms and conditions from commercial partners, requires that the global marketplace for data analytics and knowledge infrastructure be kept open to real competition

We examine framing effects in nudging honesty, in the spirit of the growing norm-nudge literature, by utilizing a high-powered and pre-registered study. Across four treatments, participants received one random truthful norm-nudge that emphasized ‘moral suasion based on either what other participants previously did (empirical message) or approved of doing (normative message) and varied in the framing (positive or negative) in which it was presented. Subsequently, participants repeatedly played the ‘mind game’ in which they were first asked to think of a number, then rolled a digital die, and then reported whether the two numbers coincide, in which case a bonus was paid. Hence, whether or not the report was truthful remained unobservable to the experimenters. We find compelling null effects with tight confidence intervals showing that none of the norm-nudge interventions worked. A follow-up experiment reveals the reason for these convincing null-effects: the information norm-nudges did not actually change norms. Notably, our secondary results suggest that a substantial portion of individuals misremembered norm-nudges such that they conveniently supported deviant behavior. This subset of participants indeed displayed significantly higher deviance levels, a behavior pattern in line with literature on motivated misremembering and belief distortion. We discuss the importance of this high-powered null finding for the flourishing norm-nudge literature and derive policy implications.