On 20th March, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) released the evidence behind the government response to Coronavirus disease (COVID-19). This series of short articles summarises these 32 documents. You can view all our reporting on this topic under COVID-19. This article goes over insights from behavioural science such as the risk of public disorder and adherence to household isolation.

A WHO tool for rapid, flexible and cost-effective monitoring of public knowledge, risk perceptions, behaviours and trust is now available to countries in the WHO European Region to make their COVID-19-related response relevant and actionable.

Among my academic colleagues and friends, I have observed a common response to the continuing Covid-19 crisis. They are fighting valiantly for a sense of normalcy — hustling to move courses online, maintaining strict writing schedules, creating Montessori schools at their kitchen tables. They hope to buckle down for a short stint until things get back to normal. I wish anyone who pursues that path the very best of luck and health. Yet as someone who has experience with crises around the world, what I see behind this scramble for productivity is a perilous assumption. The answer to the question everyone is asking — "When will this be over?" — is simple and obvious, yet terribly hard to accept. The answer is never.

Governments across the world are putting in place unprecedented measures to slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. These measures focus on social distancing—keeping people away from each other—including closing hospitality venues and shops, stopping mass gatherings, and in many cases requiring the population to stay at home except for essential journeys. The impact this is having on people’s lives, mental health, and livelihoods is substantial. Everything possible should be done to reduce the time over which such measures need to be in force, while still limiting the spread of the virus. Despite our best efforts, some inter-personal contact is inevitable during this time, such as between members of the same household, or by key workers with caring responsibilities. A behaviour that could make a substantial difference in these and other contexts, and costs nothing, is avoiding touching the mouth, nose and eyes —what has been called the T-Zone.1

The key to fighting a global crisis like a pandemic is gathering as much knowledge as possible in the shortest amount of time: knowledge about the virus itself, about effective therapies, as well as their social, economic, and legal impacts. The far-reaching effects of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak are currently turning the lives of billions of people upside down. The knowledge and methodological expertise of basic researchers are indispensable in the struggle against such crises and for coping with their consequences. New research projects in Austria are intended to enhance the existing potential, contribute to the rapid gain in knowledge, and thus prepare for future challenging situations.

No one knows how this ends. The uncertainty may be as unsettling as the virus itself. 

ThereisgrowinginterestfrompoliticiansandepidemiologistsaroundtheworldintechnologicalapproachestohelpindividualsandcountriesnavigatetheCOVID-19pandemic.OnesuggestedapproachhasbeentomakeuseofbluetoothsignalsonpersonalsmartphonestoprovideasystemthatinformsusersaboutencounterswithindividualswhohavesincetestedpositiveforCOVID-19,andprovidesdatatoepidemiologiststhatsupportstheireffortstomodelthespreadofthepandemic.However,theproposedinfrastructuresthatunderliesuch​proximitytracingsystemsvastlydifferintheirprivacyandsecurityproperties.Someproposalsmayfailtoprotecthighlysensitivedata,orcanbemisusedorextendedfarbeyondtheirinitialpurposeandlifetimeofthecrisis.Thisisallthemoreimportantgiventheglobalnatureofthischallengeandthefactthatthepandemicreachesacrossbordersandjurisdictionswithdifferentlevelsoffundamentalrightsguaranteesandintimeswheremanygovernments are functioning under rules of exception.

The Covid-19 epidemic has taken the world by surprise. Initially, it was seen as a Chinese, and later South-East Asian, problem. Decision-makers around the world apparently believed that the disease could be contained and controlled within the region, following a pattern that was evident in previous outbreaks, such as SARS. However, due to a combination of different factors of natural, political and regulatory character,1the epidemic has quickly spread to other parts of the world. The existing interconnectedness among countries obviously facilitated that process.

To address COVID-19, UKRI has been working hard and at pace to refocus its activity. Alongside NIHR we have delivered a rapid response call for research proposals on COVID-19 with up to £20 million available, with the first six projects announced on 23rd March. Later today we are launching a single web portal for streamlined shorter grant and innovation applications, including guidance for researchers currently holding UKRI standard grants that wish to repurpose their funds for COVID-19. Through Innovate UK we are working closely with the manufacturing industry to boost the production of ventilators and increase vaccine manufacturing infrastructure. We will continue to work across government to drive action on the sustainability of funding.

There’s been some dire headlines about the current outbreak , such as ‘Virus Panic’ from the Daily Mirror last week, featuring one woman wearing a face mask, and reports of hand gel selling out. As a main official recommendation is to wash hands, buying hand gel hardly seems a panic reaction.

Covid-19 is a public health crisis. At least, this is what the doctors, epidemiologists and clinicians who command the air waves are telling us. They’re right, of course. But it isn’t only that: it’s an economic and social crisis too – and yet social scientists have hardly been heard from. They don’t seem to be influencing policy that much either. When the UK government says its decisions are guided by the science, they appear to be referring only to the science of transmission of the virus and its direct consequences for health. And even health is narrowly defined here: as mortality risks in the next few months. The only graphs that typically appear at news conferences are those relating to the number of infections and deaths. As we enter the third week of a lockdown in the UK, the focus of addressing the death toll means suppression remains the only argument in town.

There have been questions from journalists regarding herd immunity.

Überlegungen eines besorgten Schweizer Bürgers

PrefaceOver the past decade, the use of networks has led to a new modelling paradigmcombining several branches of science, including physics, mathematics, biology andsocial sciences. The spread of infectious diseases between nodes in a network hasbeen a central topic of this growing field. The fundamental questions are easilystated, but answering them draws on observations and techniques of many fields.There is a long successful history of mathematical modelling informing policiesto mitigate the impact of infectious disease. Typically, models divide the popula-tion into compartments based on infection status and use simple assumptions aboutmixing and movements between these compartments. Over time, these models havegrown more sophisticated to more accuratelyincorporate the contact structure ofthe population and to take advantage of increased computational resources. For ex-ample, sexually transmitted diseases have been investigated using high-dimensionalcompartmental models separating individuals by contact rates, socio-economic sta-tus and many other factors. However, when we make the additional observation thatpartnerships may be long-lasting, a new paradigm is needed, leading naturally to anetwork representation of the population structure.

This technical report describes a dynamic causal model of the spread of coronavirus through a population. The model is based upon ensemble or population dynamics that generate outcomes, like new cases and deaths over time. The purpose of this model is to quantify the uncertainty that attends predictions of relevant outcomes. By assuming suitable conditional dependencies, one can model the effects of interventions (e.g., social distancing) and differences among populations (e.g., herd immunity) to predict what might happen in different circumstances. Technically, this model leverages state-of-the-art variational (Bayesian) model inversion and comparison procedures, originally developed to characterise the responses of neuronal ensembles to perturbations. Here, this modelling is applied to epidemiological populations to illustrate the kind of inferences that are supported and how the model per se can be optimised given timeseries data. Although the purpose of this paper is to describe a modelling protocol, the results illustrate some interesting perspectives on the current pandemic; for example, the nonlinear effects of herd immunity that speak to a self-organised mitigation process.

This call aims to strengthen the evidence base to better prevent and control coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemics and to increase research and response capacity. It's part of an existing partnership between Wellcome and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) through the Joint Initiative on Research in Epidemic Preparedness and Response to help low- and middle-income countries prepare for and tackle epidemics.

The Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA) is the largest consortium of research psychologists in the world. Behavioral scientists can play an important role in combating the growing COVID-19 pandemic if we quickly take action to collect high-quality data from large, global samples. The PSA wants to team up with researchers working on important questions related to this pandemic. 

Parliamentarians and their staff want to use evidence to support their decisions, but they can often feel ‘bombarded’ with the sheer amount of material that is sent their way. Drawing on the findings of a wide ranging study looking at the use of evidence by UK parliamentarians and their staff, Dr David Rose and Dr Chris Tyler provide seven insights for how academics can improve the chances of their evidence being used in the fast-paced, time-poor, information environment of the UK Parliament.

Background Exaggerated or simplistic news is often blamed for adversely influencing public health. However, recent findings suggested many exaggerations were already present in university press releases, which scientists approve. Surprisingly, these exaggerations were not associated with more news coverage. Here we test whether these two controversial results also arise in press releases from prominent science and medical journals. We then investigate the influence of mitigating caveats in press releases, to test assumptions that caveats harm news interest or are ignored. Methods and Findings Using quantitative content analysis, we analyzed press releases (N = 534) on biomedical and health-related science issued by leading peer-reviewed journals. We similarly analysed the associated peer-reviewed papers (N = 534) and news stories (N = 582). Main outcome measures were advice to readers and causal statements drawn from correlational research. Exaggerations in press releases predicted exaggerations in news (odds ratios 2.4 and 10.9, 95% CIs 1.3 to 4.5 and 3.9 to 30.1) but were not associated with increased news coverage, consistent with previous findings. Combining datasets from universities and journals (996 press releases, 1250 news), we found that when caveats appeared in press releases there was no reduction in journalistic uptake, but there was a clear increase in caveats in news (odds ratios 9.6 and 9.5 for caveats for advice and causal claims, CIs 4.1 to 24.3 and 6.0 to 15.2). The main study limitation is its retrospective correlational nature. Conclusions For health and science news directly inspired by press releases, the main source of both exaggerations and caveats appears to be the press release itself. However we find no evidence that exaggerations increase, or caveats decrease, the likelihood of news coverage. These findings should be encouraging for press officers and scientists who wish to minimise exaggeration and include caveats in their press releases.

The present crisis demands an all-out response if it is to be mastered with minimal damage. This means we, as the behavioural science community, need to think about how we can adapt to best support evidence-based policy in a rapidly changing, high-stakes environment. This piece is an attempt to initiate this process. The ‘recommendations’ made are first stabs that will hopefully be critiqued, debated and improved.

With the COVID-19 pandemic threatening millions of lives, changing our behaviors to prevent the spread of the disease is a moral imperative. Here, we investigated the persuasiveness of messages inspired by three major moral traditions. A sample of US participants representative for age, sex and race/ethnicity (N=1032) viewed messages from either a leader or citizen containing deontological, virtue-based, utilitarian, or non-moral justifications for adopting social distancing behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. We measured the messages’ effects on participants’ self-reported intentions to wash hands, avoid social gatherings, self-isolate, and share health messages, as well as their beliefs about others’ intentions, impressions of the messenger’s morality and trustworthiness, and beliefs about personal control and responsibility for preventing the spread of disease. Consistent with our pre-registered predictions, compared to non-moral control messages, deontological arguments had a modest effect on intentions to share the message. Message source (leader vs. citizen) did not moderate any of the observed effects of message type. A majority of participants predicted the utilitarian message would be most effective, but we found no evidence that the utilitarian message was effective in changing intentions or beliefs. We caution that our findings require confirmation in replication studies and are modest in size, likely due to ceiling effects on our measures of behavioral intentions and strong heterogeneity across all dependent measures along several demographic dimensions including age, self-identified gender, self-identified race, political conservatism, and religiosity. Although we found no evidence that the utilitarian message was effective in changing intentions and beliefs, exploratory analyses showed that individual differences in one key dimension of utilitarianism—impartial concern for the greater good—were strongly and positively associated with public health intentions and beliefs. Overall, our preliminary results suggest that public health messaging focused on duties and responsibilities toward family, friends and fellow citizens is a promising approach for future studies of interventions to slow the spread of COVID-19 in the US. Ongoing work is investigating the reproducibility and generalizability of our findings across different populations, what aspects of deontological messages may drive their persuasive effects, and how such messages can be most effectively delivered across global populations.

Since the emergence of the new coronavirus (COVID-19) in December 2019, we have adopted a policy of immediately sharing research findings on the developing pandemic. These pages provide all output from the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, including publicly published online reports, planning tools, scientific resources, publications and video updates.

At the time of this writing, the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic outbreak has already put tremendous strain on many countries' citizens, resources and economies around the world. Social distancing measures, travel bans, self-quarantines, and business closures are changing the very fabric of societies worldwide. With people forced out of public spaces, much conversation about these phenomena now occurs online, e.g., on social media platforms like Twitter. In this paper, we describe a multilingual coronavirus (COVID-19) Twitter dataset that we have been continuously collecting since January 22, 2020. We are making our dataset available to the research community (this https URL). It is our hope that our contribution will enable the study of online conversation dynamics in the context of a planetary-scale epidemic outbreak of unprecedented proportions and implications. This dataset could also help track scientific coronavirus misinformation and unverified rumors, or enable the understanding of fear and panic --- and undoubtedly more. Ultimately, this dataset may contribute towards enabling informed solutions and prescribing targeted policy interventions to fight this global crisis.

This week on the podcast we ask how we maintain our emotional and mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic. We also process the events of the week just gone, there’s top tips for staying healthy while working or studying at home, and we have a think about what universities and government should be doing to help. With John de Pury, Assistant Director of Policy at Universities UK and Fran Longstaff, Head of Psychology at Fika.

Some communication advice for political leaders in Australia

We are notexperts on epidemiology, virology, or economics. Our personal view is that we need to opt for “Endgame C” and pro-actively isolate non-essential workersand children. We base our opinion on the evidenceand modellingthat we find most compelling. Thisis our view, butweacknowledge this is a wicked problem and there are no easy decisions.

Scholars and researchers from Stanford and beyond will gather virtually for an April 1 conference open to all. The aim of the conference is to make interdisciplinary research on the novel coronavirus and artificial intelligence available to serve the public in a time of crisis.

Motivation: Most current plans to fight COVID-19 rely on the assumption that treatments and/or vaccines will be available in a few months. Delays in these treatments will have enormous consequences, both in terms of economic impact and human lives. Aim: Put the wider scientific community at the service of COVID-19 research. Context: There is now a huge pool of highly skilled scientists, willing to volunteer their time and expertise for this cause. This goes from virologists who don't have the resources to get directly involved with COVID-19 to researchers in other disciplines (bioinformatics, image analysis, AI…). This is a huge resource, the "bottleneck" being coordination. Our proposal: This is a service for COVID-19 researchers. They only need to state a wish or a task, which can go from a simple time-intensive task to be performed (e.g. transcribe data, manually annotate images), to answering a technical question which is beyond their expertise, or to setting up a collaboration. They only need to explain their request in a few lines. Then, another scientist makes the effort of understanding that request and making it reality. Of course, everything is for free. This platform works thanks to scientists who donate their time and skill in these times of emergency.

In 2008, psychologists proposed that when humans are shown an unfamiliar face, they judge it on two main dimensions: trustworthiness and physical strength. These form the basis of first impressions, which may help people make important social decisions, from whom to vote for to how long a prison sentence should be.

Dear Colleague,In light of the emergence and spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in theUnited States and abroad, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is accepting proposals toconduct non-medical, non-clinical-care research that can be used immediately to explore howto model and understand the spread of COVID-19, to inform and educate about the scienceof virus transmission and prevention, and to encourage the development of processes andactions to address this global challenge.

The ongoing situation regarding coronavirus has significantly impacted the research and innovation community. The nature of these impacts is evolving.  Wherever we can we are taking quick decisions, identifying new issues as they emerge and providing answers and support wherever possible. This page contains the latest information for our supported researchers and innovators and is updated on a regular basis.

As scientific meetings are cancelled worldwide, researchers are rethinking how they network — a move that some say is long overdue.

Teamwork is an essential component of science. It affords the exchange of ideas and the execution of research that can entail high levels of complexity and scope. Collaborative science also leads to higher-impact publications relative to single-authored research projects (1). Published articles are a key product of scientific work, bearing considerable impact on researchers' academic stances and scientific reputations (2). As such, determination of the relative contribution of each coauthor to the collaborative work is of much significance, and is often reflected in the order of the authorship byline or in comments describing the differential contribution of each of the coauthors to the article (3).

EU boosts efforts to adjust R&D programmes to virus crisis

The European Commission’s R&D toolbox in the COVID-19 outbreak includes extended deadlines in Horizon 2020, additional funding opportunities for viral research - and less red tape

The effects of the current SARS-CoV-2 outbreak have shown that epidemics and pandemics cannot be managed on a solely national level; instead, the global framework needs to be taken into account. To be better prepared for the diverse aspects of global waves of infection, it is essential to support wide-ranging research across different disciplines. In addition to investigating the current pandemic, it is important to identify fundamental research questions that produce generalizable scientific findings.

Novartis COVID-19 Response Fund will provide grants of up to USD 1 million to support communities around the world most impacted by the Coronavirus outbreak   Novartis to join collaborative R&D efforts with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard -supported COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator and a partnership with the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI)  Commitments build on Sandoz pledge to maintain price stability of essential medicines and strong support of patients and healthcare systems   Company continues to maintain strong focus on protecting employee health, ensuring supply of medicines for patients and smooth clinical trial operations

The ANR is launching a call for projects with an accelerated process of evaluation and selection on COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) responsible for an epidemic which started at the end of 2019 and caused by the pathogenic agent coronavirus SAR-CoV-2. With an initial budget of € 3 million and targeted on four priorities identified by the WHO, this Flash call aims to rapidly support the scientific communities mobilized on COVID-19.

What role can the Wikimedia community play in strengthening credibility and reliability in the information ecosystem?

Only a small minority of people panic under threat, research shows. Far more don’t take the threat seriously enough.

Social scientists have an important role during a pandemic. We can do this much better through cooperation. This international list tracks new research about COVID 19, including published findings, pre-prints, projects underway, and projects at least at proposal stage.

Over the past few weeks, we have seen a surge in need for access to research expertise as Parliament engages with the COVID-19 outbreak. In this rapidly evolving situation, Parliament needs quick access to researchers who can provide expert insights relating to both Coronavirus and the wider situation. Parliament and Parliamentarians use these insights to help carry out their function effectively; that is to say, to represent the people, scrutinise the Government, debate important and pressing issues and pass legislation. To speed up the process of Parliament accessing relevant research expertise, we are creating a COVID-19 Outbreak Expert Database. (For more information on this Database, including FAQs, please see: https://www.parliament.uk/get-involved/research-impact-at-the-uk-parliament/knowledge-exchange-at-uk-parliament/covid-19-outbreak-expert-database/) If you have any expertise relating to COVID-19 or its impacts (for example, on welfare, employment, education and other key areas), and if you would be prepared to provide expert insights to Parliament (for example, providing insights to contribute to a Library briefing, briefing a Member of Parliament, helping respond to an enquiry), we would be extremely grateful if you would sign up to our database. Many thanks, Sarah, Naomi and Laura

A global challenge like the current COVID-19 pandemic can only be defeated when research results are rapidly and openly shared and all stakeholders work together – scientists, health workers, publishers, funders, policymakers, and government officials.

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) represents a significant and urgent threat to global health. We call on researchers, journals and funders to ensure that research findings and data relevant to this outbreak are shared rapidly and openly to inform the public health response and help save lives. We affirm the commitment to the principles set out in the 2016 Statement on data sharing in public health emergencies, and will seek to ensure that the World Health Organization (WHO) has rapid access to emerging findings that could aid the global response.

The mitigation measures enacted as part of the response to the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic are unprecedented in their breadth and societal burden. A major challenge in this situation is to quantitatively assess the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions like mobility restrictions and social distancing, to better understand the ensuing reduction of mobility flows, individual mobility changes, and impact on contact patterns. Here, we report preliminary results on tackling the above challenges by using de-identified, large-scale data from a location intelligence company, Cuebiq, that has instrumented smartphone apps with high-accuracy location-data collection software. We focus our analysis on Italy, where the COVID-19 epidemic has already triggered an unprecedented and escalating series of restrictions on travel and individual mobility of citizens.

Short-term survival and an exuberant plunge into building our future are generating a new kind of unintended consequence -- hidden fragility. This is a direct effect of the sophistication and structural complexity of the socio-technical systems humans create. It is inevitable. And so the challenge is, How much can we understand and predict about these systems and about the social dynamics that lead to their construction?

On March 18, the Association for Psychological Science convened a virtual roundtable of four APS members who discussed the psychological dimensions of COVID-19 and how it is affecting both society and individuals. The online gathering produced intriguing insights on the pandemic and the research-based actions we can take to minimize its impact.  Panelists included Bethany Teachman (University of Virginia), Katie McLaughlin (Harvard University), Valerie Reyna (Cornell University), and Andreas Olsson (Karolinska Institutet).

tl;tr: To foster the decentralized consolidation of behavioral science knowledge on COVID-19, I propose to augment the emerging online ecosystem, which already creates and consolidates extant knowledge (using tools, such as, e.g., GoogleDocs, GitHub), with further tools that boost the efficiency and timeliness of the ongoing and future consolidation efforts. Below I describe five suggestions:Subreddit BehSciResearch: Coordinate and discuss consolidation effortsSubreddit BehSciAsk: Enable researchers, policy makers, and journalists to ask the behavioral science community a question on research relevant to the COVID–19 pandemicWrite short policy briefs for policy makers: Preprints or a “policy wiki”?Subreddit BehSciMeta: Discuss how we as a behavioral science community should adapt how we do science for an effective COVID–19 responseCollectively annotate the web to create a behavioral-science–COVID–19 knowledge base using hypothes.is

It’s a tough time for junior researchers. If you’re one and you ever tried to convince your advisor that this study you’re working on really will take much longer than they’d like, your COVID-19-alerted colleagues are currently putting you out of arguments. In Europe and North America (where most of the English-language literature in psychology is produced), the COVID-19 pandemic started having substantial effects on everyday life — mostly in the form of social distancing — no more than two weeks ago, but psych researchers haven’t been messing about. In this short time, the Psychological Science Accelerator put out a call for “rapid and impactful study proposals on COVID-19”, received 66(!!)[1]Legend: ! = hovering on the brink of significance; !! = decisively significant; !!! = globally significant jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); proposals in four(!!!) days, sifted through them, decided to run three of them and started preparing the data collection. Chris Chambers called researchers to sign up as reviewers for rapid-review Registered Reports on COVID-19 at Royal Society Open Science, got over 530(!!) responses within 48(!) hours, and moved the first RR to in-principle acceptance in just 6(!!) days which saw 2(!!!) rounds of review.

I suggest to gather here a list of the resource collections already there, an aggregation of aggregators, so to speak.If you have a listplease check that it's not already posted as a comment below, thenpost it as a comment: please only one list per comment and use some formattingThanks!

A preprint was recently published called, “The effectiveness of moral mes-sages on public health behavioral intentions during the COVID-19 pandemic” (Everett et al., 2020). The preprint presents a study purportedly showing that COVID-19 public health messages framed as deontological had a modest effect effect for increasing people's behavioural intentions for sharing the message on social media. In my review of the preprint, I find that if there were corrections for multiple comparisons then the results testing the preregistered hypotheses would become statistically nonsignificant. I discuss these and other issues in detail.

The Society for Health Psychology’s Health Policy Council complied a list of helpful evidence-based resources from APA, CDC, WHO and other nationally accredited groups We will continue to update these resources in an effort to provide support during this time

When people are forced to be isolated from one another, do they crave social interactions in the same way a hungry person craves food? To address this question, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure neural responses in participants (n=40) evoked by food and social cues after ten hours of mandated fasting or total social isolation. After isolation, people felt lonely and craved social interaction. Midbrain regions showed increased activation to food cues after fasting and to social cues after isolation; these responses were correlated with self-reported craving. Neural patterns in response to food cues when participants were hungry generalized to social cues after isolation. Our results support the intuitive idea that acute isolation causes social craving, similar to hunger.

Structured surveys were conducted with 19 medical experts, and 17 non-medical expertsin related fields, attending a meeting about pandemic influenza. Respondents gavequantitative judgments for key variables potentially affecting the extent of a possibleH5N1 pandemic. The medical experts saw about a 15% (median) chance of efficienthuman-to-human transmission, in the next 3 years. Should it occur, they saw almost nochance of there being adequate vaccines or antiviral responses. They saw varying chancesof six other mitigation strategies reducing the threat, expressing the greatest faith inimproved surveillance. Compared to the medical experts, the non-medical experts sawmuch higher chances of both human-to-human transmission and of effective vaccine andantiviral responses being available. The medical experts and the non-medical experts hadsimilar, dire predictions for the extent of casualties, should transmission occur in the next3 years. Their responses to open-ended questions revealed some of the theoriesunderlying these beliefs.

Narrative approaches to analyzing risks seek to identify the variables critical tocreating and controlling a risk, then to instantiate them in terms of coherent themes (e.g.,organizational failure, strategic surprise). Computational approaches to analyzing risks seekto identify the same critical variables, then to instantiate them in terms of their probability.Disaster risk analysis faces complex, novel processes that strain the capabilities of bothapproaches. We propose an approach that integrates elements of each, relying on what wecallstructured scenariosandcomputable models. It is illustrated by framing the analysis ofplans for a possible avian flu pandemic.

The human tendency to impose a single interpretation in ambiguous situations carries huge dangers in addressing COVID-19. We need to search actively for multiple interpretations, and governments need to choose policies that are robust if their preferred theory turns out to be wrong, argues Nick Chater.

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behavior with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and also highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months.

Universities, research institutes, clinical trials and big science machines are shut down, as scientists are redeployed into critical research areas and medically-trained academic staff freed up to care for patients

The current epidemic spread of a new corona virus (2019-nCoV) highlights the threat to the world of new infectious diseases. The current epidemic is not an isolated event. During the last decades, we have seen several incidences of the spread of new, deadly viruses, e.g. SARS, MERS and Ebola.  These events are worsened by lack of communication both within and between countries, insufficient national preparedness, lack of efficient treatments and vaccines, monodisciplinary approaches, urbanization, and the high global mobility of humans. Due to the rapid spread of new viruses across the world, it is of vital importance that all countries are prepared for a possible occurrence of infections by a new virus. This require a well-coordinated national response by the health authorities. The purpose of this thematic call is to give excellent researchers the possibility, in a collaborative effort, to perform in-depth research addressing the interdisciplinary theme “Societal Responses to and Preparedness for Emerging Viral Infections”, including: Surveillance and early detection of disease. Rapid diagnostics of novel viruses. New technologies to prevent or combat epidemic viral infections. Infectious epidemiology, including methods for epidemic modelling, to predict and understand spread of disease. IT based methods for early detection of epidemics. National preparedness to deal with emerging viral infections, including drafting of policies in advance, procedures for rapid testing and approval of new treatments, technologies, and vaccines. The proposed research must be in-depth, but the subject can be cross-disciplinary, and should not be considered limited to any particular research methodology or discipline.

To build on previousfindings, it helps to know exactly what was done. Thisnot onlyfacilitatesunderstanding the previous study’s results and themethodology, but alsoit isimportant for confirmation of itsfindings.Computationalreproducibilityisthe ability to take the raw data from a study and re-analyzeit to reproduce the final results, including the statistics.Empiricalreproducibilityis demonstrated when, if the study is done again by another team, the critical results reported by the original are found again.

Human behavior plays a large role in the spread of coronavirus. Behavioral scientists are therefore a unique resource for changing human behavior in ways that can reduce the spread, including social distancing, handwashing, and face touching. 

There’s much talk about no longer doing “business as usual.” As scientists who have the potential to contribute to reducing the spread of COVID-19, how do we change our ways of doing “science as usual” to rapidly, and responsibly, disseminate information to policymakers and the public?

Lorentz-eScience Competition Every year the eScience Center and the Lorentz Center invite researchers to join the Lorentz-eScience competition. This competition aims to host a leading-edge workshop on digitally enhanced research (efficient utilization of data, software and e-infrastructure). The workshop should bring together researchers from the academic community and the public/private sector.

An open-science advocate sees lessons for how science and policy should interact, if we want to recover from and prevent future health disasters

There is an obvious concern globally regarding the fact about the emerging coronavirus 2019 novel coronavirus (2019‐nCoV) as a worldwide public health threat. As the outbreak of COVID‐19 causes by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) progresses within China and beyond, rapidly available epidemiological data are needed to guide strategies for situational awareness and intervention. The recent outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan, China, caused by the SARS‐CoV‐2 emphasizes the importance of analyzing the epidemiological data of this novel virus and predicting their risks of infecting people all around the globe. In this study, we present an effort to compile and analyze epidemiological outbreak information on COVID‐19 based on the several open datasets on 2019‐nCoV provided by the Johns Hopkins University, World Health Organization, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, National Health Commission, and DXY. An exploratory data analysis with visualizations has been made to understand the number of different cases reported (confirmed, death, and recovered) in different provinces of China and outside of China. Overall, at the outset of an outbreak like this, it is highly important to readily provide information to begin the evaluation necessary to understand the risks and begin containment activities.

There is broad consensus on the need for research to focus on actions that can save lives nowand to facilitate action so that those affected are promptly diagnosed and receive optimal care; while integrating innovation fully within each research area.Moreover, there is an imperative tosupport research priorities in a way that leads to the development of sustainable global research platforms pre-prepared for the next disease X epidemic; thus, allowing for accelerated research,innovative solutionsandR&D ofdiagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines,as well astheir timely and equitable accessforthose at highest risk.

In the Department of Communication at UCLA, the Co-Mind Lab has rerouted some of its “big data” projects to create an informational resource about the coronavirus crisis. This resource offers members of the UCLA community and wider public a bird’s-eye view of news media coverage of the crisis, including a Los Angeles “dashboard” that maps positive cases in the county. https://co-mind.org/cogmedia/browse/covid.php Dr. Rick Dale, professor in the Department of Communication, who leads the Co-Mind Lab, further discusses this important and timely research in the following piece: As social scientists, we ask questions that are of fundamental importance to the situation: How is the media covering the crisis? What are changing themes or trends in wider news coverage? How can we quantify and explore the public’s conception of the health crisis? It is now well established that public discourse and behavior—social and cognitive issues—are also of great importance to public health.

There is an incredibly useful paper on "what makes an academic paper useful for (health) policy. Below is the abstract and a summary of the main points. I can only encourage everybody to read this paper in full.Whitty, C.J.M. What makes an academic paper useful for health policy?. BMC Med 13, 301 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-015-0544-8

In confronting the global spread of the coronavirus disease COVID-19 pandemic we must have coordinated medical, operational, and political responses. In all efforts, data is crucial. Fundamentally, and in the possible absence of a vaccine for 12 to 18 months, we need universal, well-documented testing for both the presence of the disease as well as confirmed recovery through serological tests for antibodies, and we need to track major socioeconomic indices. But we also need auxiliary data of all kinds, including data related to how populations are talking about the unfolding pandemic through news and stories. To in part help on the social media side, we curate a set of 1000 day-scale time series of 1-grams across 24 languages on Twitter that are most `important' for March 2020 with respect to March 2019. We determine importance through our allotaxonometric instrument, rank-turbulence divergence. We make some basic observations about some of the time series, including a comparison to numbers of confirmed deaths due to COVID-19 over time. We broadly observe across all languages a peak for the language-specific word for `virus' in January followed by a decline through February and a recent surge through March. The world's collective attention dropped away while the virus spread out from China. We host the time series on Gitlab, updating them on a daily basis while relevant. Our main intent is for other researchers to use these time series to enhance whatever analyses that may be of use during the pandemic as well as for retrospective investigations.

About 10 years ago, before I got into science (for background, start with the Twitter handle that is the same as my Reddit one), I was running a big office computer network. We would sometimes have people call the help desk who were worried that their PC had "a virus" (...) on it. I noticed (!) that they seemed to be more distressed --- I won't use the word "anxious" as I'm not much of a psychologist and certainly know nothing about clinical aspects --- when they didn't know if their PC was "infected" than either when we told them that it was, or that it wasn't, even if the "infection" required a lot of cleanup.

Data from the 1918 pandemic in America suggest that places with the tightest restrictions fared best

"Live" update of analysis of 2K UK respondents and their views on privacy-encroaching tracking policies: stephanlewandowsky.github.io/UKsocialLicenc… This page will change as more analyses are added. Links to project description and preregistration and data at the same link. 1/n

How many times did you hit the snooze button this morning? We all crave sleep, but too many nights we fall short of the seven or eight hours we need to thrive. An estimated 50 to 70 million Americans suffer from a chronic sleep disorder, according to the Institute of Medicine. In today's overscheduled society, sleep may feel like a luxury when, in fact it's a necessity. Sleep is vital to our health, safety and overall well-being. Sleep recharges the brain, allowing it to learn and make memories. Insufficient sleep has been linked to car crashes, poor work performance and problems with mood and relationships. Sleep deprivation also raises the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, depression and stroke.

COVID-19 will change the world forever. But how will it change? What will the post-COVID world look like? More important, what do we want it to look like?

Thank you for agreeing to contribute tothe annotation of studies related to the novel coronavirus COVID-19.This guide should help you in understanding how to annotate studies on this project. We strongly recommend you read this before starting theproject.

In recent days we've seen an influx in papers on the arxiv modeling the spread of COVID-19. Many of these are relatively simple papers clearly written by physicists using simple SIR models, some basic curve fitting, and even Ising models to model the spread of COVID-19.

Meetings of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) differ from most professional society meetings. At SIPS, there is very little sitting around listening to people talk about their research. Instead, most of the time is spent working collaboratively on projects aimed at improving psychological science. We actually get things done. SIPS meetings also include a number of hands-on workshops (e.g., learning R, Bayesian stats, meta-analytic techniques).

APS is calling on you to support its mission to deploy the power of Wikipedia to represent psychological science as fully as possible. When the general public searches for information about psychology, the top search results are often Wikipedia articles. As psychological scientists, it’s your responsibility to ensure the psychology information on Wikipedia is reliable. Join the thousands of psychological scientists and their students who have already made an impact by creating and editing Wikipedia articles.

In times of the global corona crisis, science is highly active: It helps to develop diagnostic tests, therapies and vaccinations, to make prognoses about the future course of the pandemic, and how to deal with the societal consequences. In order to be able to react quickly to the challenges of the crisis and to collect research-relevant data in a timely manner, within one week WWTF launched the "COVID-19 Rapid Response Funding", endowed with funds from the private non-profit WWTF and two private sponsors, including the MEGA Bildungsstiftung.

The COVID-19 pandemic threatens millions of lives, and an effective response will require individuals to take costly and difficult measures to slow the rate of transmission. Yet it is unclear how to best motivate preventative actions, which can be conceptualized as either self-interested or cooperative efforts. Should public health messaging focus on the benefits of prevention to individuals, society, or both? We shed light on this question across two studies conducted online via Amazon Mechanical Turk (total n = 2176 Americans) during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic reaching the United States. We investigated the effects of three treatments, consisting of a written appeal and a flier, on intentions to engage in coronavirus prevention behaviors. We presented identical information across treatments, but varied our framing to emphasize the personal, public, or both personal and public benefits of prevention behaviors. We found evidence for the power of prosocial framing: the Public treatment was more effective than the Personal treatment, and the Personal+Public treatment was no more effective than the pure Public treatment. Our results thus suggest that emphasizing the public benefits of prevention efforts may be an effective pandemic response strategy.

2ThereisgrowingpoliticalandepidemiologicalinterestindeployingtechnologicalapproachestohelpindividualsandcountriesnavigatetheCOVID-19pandemic.Oneapproachhasbeentomakeuseoflow-poweredBluetoothsensorsonsmartphonestoinformuserswhentheyhavebeenincontactwithindividualswhohavesincetestedpositive,andtosupportepidemiologistswithmodellingefforts.However,someinfrastructuresthatcanenableproportionateproximitytracingmayfailtoprotectdata,orbemisusedorextendedfarbeyondtheirinitialpurposeandbeyondthelifetimeofthecrisis.Thisisallthemoreimportantgiventhetrulyglobalnatureofthischallengeandthefactthatthepandemiccrossesacrossbordersandjurisdictionswithdifferentlevelsoffundamentalrightsguarantees or in times where many governments are functioning under rules of exception.Designswithcentralizedcomponents,whereasingleactor,suchasaserverorastate,canlearnagreatdealaboutindividualsandcommunities,needspecificattentionbecauseiftheyareattacked,compromisedorrepurposed,theycancreategreaterharm.Inordertoaddresstheseissues,weinsteadrealisethesametaskusingadecentralizeddesignthatdoesnotrequirethecentralizedcollectionandprocessingofinformationonusers.​Suchadesignbuildsonstrong,mathematicallyprovablesupportforprivacyanddataprotectiongoals,minimisesthedatarequiredtowhatisnecessaryforthetasksenvisaged,andpreventsfunctioncreep,forexampleforlawenforcementorintelligencepurposes,bystrictly limiting how the system can be repurposed with cryptographic methods.

I've been developing a study into inoculating people against climate misinformation with my colleagues Emily Vraga and Sojung Kim. At the 11th hour before fielding the experiment, we've changed it to test inoculation against COVID-19 misinformation.

This is a new online peer-reviewed Review to disseminate emerging scholarly work on the Covid-19 epidemic. Very quickly after the onset of the epidemic a large number of policy papers have been written by economic scholars, many of which have appeared on VoxEU. This has been enormously helpful to improve our understanding of policy options. The next step requires more formal investigations, based on explicit theory and/or empirical evidence. This is what Covid Economics: Vetted and Real-Time Papers aims to provide.

To complement hackathons taking place at global and member state level, the European Commission - in close collaboration with EU member states – will host a pan-European hackathon to connect civil society, innovators, partners and buyers across Europe to develop innovative solutions to coronavirus. The #EUvsVirus Hackathon will take place on 24, 25 and 26 April and address approximately 20 imminent coronavirus challenges (e.g. fast production of equipment, scaling up production capabilities, knowledge and solutions transfer from one country to another), to be quickly developed and deployed across the EU Single Market. Challenges to be hacked, and the opening of registration to hack the challenges, will be announced soon.

Understanding and Exploring Network Epidemiology in the Time of Coronavirus (#Net_COVID) is a special online workshop series presented by the University of Maryland’s COMBINE program in network biology in partnership with Vermont’s Complex Systems Center. 

A Study Using Cellphone Data Streams

Les informations contenues dans le présent règlement sont conformes auxtermesgénérauxdu document de référence de l’ANRS intitulé "Modalités d’organisation administrative, scientifique et financière de l’ANRS" (MOASF), portant règlement financier des aides à la recherche allouées par l'ANRS, auquel vous pouvez vous référer sur le site internet de l’ANRS ou dans la rubrique "Documents de référence" de la plateforme de gestion des appels à projets

We provide advocacy, campaigning and financial support to global institutions, businesses, communities and individual changemakers seeking greater action on global mental health.

Much of the discourse on COVID-19 has been about older people being at high risk. The Lancet Voice speaks to Professor Thomas Scharf, president of The British Society of Gerontology about how COVID-19 is affecting age discrimination and loneliness.

By using clean disposable tissue we could prevent our bare hands from touching our eyes, nose and mouth.

As I write this post, the coronavirus continues to spread across the world. In response, governments have put in place recommendations to self-isolate, create social (physical) distancing, or imposed flat-out lockdowns. One obvious implication for psychological researchers is that we can no longer conduct experiments face-to-face in our labs. Many of us have therefore been migrating our experiments online.

The social distancing projections assume that "stay-at-home" orders and mitigation policies are extended for the entire period of time considered here.

Feelings of loneliness can have a negative impact on mental and physical health.

Public engagement plays a necessary and central role in addressing the ethical dimensions of emergency preparedness and response in public health practice, hereafter referred to simply as emergency preparedness. Public health officials, as government authorities and as health professionals, have the responsibility to actively seek and provide opportunities for public engagement in emergency preparedness policy-making and practices (Stern & Fineberg, 1966). Public engagement should take place in at least two ways: deliberation about the societal values and ethical tensions underlying emergency preparedness and consultation about the ethical aspects of specific emergency preparedness programs and activities. The primary role for public engagement in emergency preparedness is grounded in a number of ethical principles, such as fairness, utility, and respect for individual interests. These principles animate the practice of public health and are enumerated in the Principles of the Ethical Practice of Public Health (also referred to as the Public Health Code of Ethics, or the Code) (Public Health Leadership Society, 2002). Engaging all stakeholders in the community, including vulnerable populations at risk of bearing disproportionate burdens during an emergency, for example, is an expression of government’s commitment to fairness that lays the (p. 156) foundation for the trust and collective action needed in emergency preparedness.

Research that has explored public enthusiasm for cancer screening has suggested that the public may be overly enthusiastic about being screened with certain tests, and this has been attributed, in part, to lack of knowledge about the risks and benefits. In this article the authors considered the possibility that some people may be enthusiastic about screening even when they are informed and also accept that the test unquestionably does not save lives. Two studies were conducted, one that involved a nationally representative U.S. sample and another that involved an online convenience sample. All participants were asked whether they would want to receive a hypothetical screening test for breast (women) or prostate (men) cancer that does not reduce the chance of cancer death or extend the length of life. Over half of participants wanted to receive the described screening test. Many people did not believe that cancer screening might not save lives, yet screening preferences were not due to disbelief alone. Results further suggested that cancer worry, reassurance, and a desire for health information explained variance in preferences for unbeneficial screening, adjusting for beliefs about screening benefits, perceptions of screening risks, family history, perceptions of cancer risk, and demographics.

What emerging research on and resources about COVID-19 misinformation is out there?

As the virus continues to sweep across the world, we have put together essential resources for those interested in tackling the coronavirus infodemic. On this page, you can find information on what the online platforms are doing to combat coronavirus mis— and disinformation. You can find content on the narratives, trends, and strategies defining the infodemic, whether that’s via our weekly Disinfo Updates or research. Moreover, we have dedicated sections on free tools to use, commentary on the infodemic, as well as its impact on our societies. 

Corona-Infizierte und deren Kontaktpersonen rasch aufzuspüren, gilt als zentrale Maßnahme zur Eindämmung des Virus. Die Hälfte der Deutschen würde dafür Handy-Ortung dulden. Ein Konzept gibt es schon.

Inoculation Against Misinformation A crisis on the scale of the coronavirus pandemic brings with it an unprecedented deluge of falsehoods, unfounded rumor and speculation, and snake oil profiteering. There is, as yet, no vaccine for the coronavirus, but we can inoculate ourselves from misinformation. The Center for Inquiry, drawing upon our unique expertise from our Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, is ready to do what we do best: confront and expose pseudoscience and misinformation.  This is our effort to collect, curate, and communicate the most relevant and useful science and reality-based resources for information regarding the coronavirus disease, COVID-19, from CFI’s own platforms and all around the web, focusing on material that separates fact from fiction and scientific theory from conspiracy theory.  Please, take advantage of these resources and share them with family and friends so we can slow the spread of misinformation just like we’re trying to slow the spread of the virus. No matter your belief system or political affiliation, we are all in this together.  Your help in advancing reason, science, and humanist compassion is more important than it has ever been. We can’t do this kind of work without your support. Donate now, and be a part of the solution. 

On this page, we present the 6-day forecasts of COVID-19 case counts by country based on a novel epidemiological model that integrates the effect of population behavior changes due to government measures and social distancing.

Infotagion seeks to fight the disinformation contagion about COVID-19. Disinformation about this deadly virus can spread just as far and fast as the real thing – harming you and those you love. So we’re fighting back, giving everyone the opportunity to flag false and misleading content, while highlighting trustworthy and sourced information.

At Equally Ours, we as a network are committed to working together with compassion to tackle the increasing challenges to equality and human rights. With the global outbreak of Covid-19, the novel coronavirus, those challenges have become yet more serious and complex. Together with our policy and research networks and the wider voluntary sector, we are working to highlight the equality and human rights impacts of the coronavirus. We can provide essential intelligence about the issues and problems that people and communities are facing due to the virus, and help to find compassionate solutions.

The flurry of figures, graphs and projections surrounding the pandemic is confusing. Two experts guide us through the maze

Number of deaths registered each month in England and Wales, including deaths involving the coronavirus (COVID-19), by age, sex and region.

We consider an epidemic process on adaptive activity-driven temporal networks, with adaptive behaviour modelled as a change in activity and attractiveness due to infection. By using a mean-field approach, we derive an analytical estimate of the epidemic threshold for SIS and SIR epidemic models for a general adaptive strategy, which strongly depends on the correlations between activity and attractiveness in the susceptible and infected states. We focus on a strong adaptive behaviour, implementing two types of quarantine inspired by recent real case studies: an active quarantine, in which the population compensates the loss of links rewiring the ineffective connections towards non-quarantining nodes, and an inactive quarantine, in which the links with quarantined nodes are not rewired. Both strategies feature the same epidemic threshold but they strongly differ in the dynamics of active phase. We show that the active quarantine is extremely less effective in reducing the impact of the epidemic in the active phase compared to the inactive one, and that in SIR model a late adoption of measures requires inactive quarantine to reach containment.

The mitigation measures enacted as part of the response to the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic are unprecedented in their breadth and societal burden. A major challenge in this situation is to quantitatively assess the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions like mobility restrictions and social distancing, to better understand the ensuing reduction of mobility flows, individual mobility changes, and impact on contact patterns. Here, we report preliminary results on tackling the above challenges by using de-identified, large-scale data from a location intelligence company, Cuebiq, that has instrumented smartphone apps with high-accuracy location-data collection software.

ObjectiveWith the current SARS-CoV2 outbreak, countless tests need to be performed on potential symptomatic individuals, contacts and travellers. The gold standard is a quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR)–based system taking several hours to confirm positivity. For effective public health containment measures, this time span is too long. We therefore evaluated a rapid test in a high-prevalence community setting.Study designThirty-nine randomly selected individuals at a COVID-19 screening centre were simultaneously tested via qPCR and a rapid test. Ten previously diagnosed individuals with known SARS-CoV-2 infection were also analysed.MethodsThe evaluated rapid test is an IgG/IgM–based test for SARS-CoV-2 with a time to result of 20 min. Two drops of blood are needed for the test performance.ResultsOf 49 individuals, 22 tested positive by repeated qPCR. In contrast, the rapid test detected only eight of those positive correctly (sensitivity: 36.4%). Of the 27 qPCR-negative individuals, 24 were detected correctly (specificity: 88.9%).ConclusionGiven the low sensitivity, we recommend not to rely on an antibody-based rapid test for public health measures such as community screenings.

Crisis Knowledge Management: Establishing an augmented online eco-system to foster the decentralized consolidation of behavioral science knowledge on COVID–19

At a time when we are all thinking about how best to respond to the present global crisis, it seems timely to think also about how we, as the Cognitive Science community, can be most effective. What kind of science can we do, and how should we go about doing it? Our team set out to create the infrastructure necessary for crisis knowledge management.

COVID-19: how you can help COVID-19 research is moving at a rapid pace and we’re calling on everyone in Publons' reviewer community to help. Your review of one or more of these papers will help researchers understand the work that can be trusted and built on.The table below contains papers and pre-prints we've identified as being on the frontier of COVID-19 research. While still under development, this table enables researchers to quickly find, review and screen papers depending on their area of expertise.Add your review using our special guidelines (this is important to ensure COVID-19 researchers can rapidly assess your review) or score a paper today. Click on a paper's title to find links to the full text and to Publons' post-publication review form.For information about who can comment and how we screen and curate COVID-19 reviews, click here to read our guide.

Why it matters even more in times of crisis.

Background: To mitigate and slow the spread of COVID-19, many countries have adopted unprecedented physical distancing policies, including the UK. We evaluate whether these measures might be sufficient to control the epidemic by estimating their impact on the reproduction number (R0, the average number of secondary cases generated per case). Methods: We asked a representative sample of UK adults about their contact patterns on the previous day. The questionnaire documents the age and location of contacts and as well as a measure of their intimacy (whether physical contact was made or not). In addition, we asked about adherence to different physical distancing measures. The first surveys were sent on Tuesday 24th March, one day after a “lockdown” was implemented across the UK. We compared measured contact patterns during the lockdown to patterns of social contact made during a non-epidemic period. By comparing these, we estimated the change in reproduction number as a consequence of the physical distancing measures imposed. We used a meta-analysis of published estimates to inform our estimates of the reproduction number before interventions were put in place. Findings: We found a 73% reduction in the average daily number of contacts observed per participant (from 10.2 to 2.9). This would be sufficient to reduce R0 from 2.6 prior to lockdown to 0.62 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.37 - 0.89) after the lockdown, based on all types of contact and 0.37 (95% CI = 0.22 - 0.53) for physical contacts only. Interpretation: The physical distancing measures adopted by the UK public have substantially reduced contact levels and will likely lead to a substantial impact and a decline in cases in the coming weeks. However, this projected decline in incidence will not occur immediately as there are significant delays between infection, the onset of symptomatic disease and hospitalisation, as well as further delays to these events being reported. Tracking behavioural change can give a more rapid assessment of the impact of physical distancing measures than routine epidemiological surveillance.

Mitigating risk in the wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic

ObjectivesThe January 2020 outbreak of coronavirus has once again thrown the vexed issue of quarantine into the spotlight, with many countries asking their citizens to ‘self-isolate’ if they have potentially come into contact with the infection. However, adhering to quarantine is difficult. Decisions on how to apply quarantine should be based on the best available evidence to increase the likelihood of people adhering to protocols. We conducted a rapid review to identify factors associated with adherence to quarantine during infectious disease outbreaks.Study designRapid evidence review.MethodsWe searched Medline, PsycINFO and Web of Science for published literature on the reasons for and factors associated with adherence to quarantine during an infectious disease outbreak.ResultsWe found 3163 papers and included 14 in the review. Adherence to quarantine ranged from as little as 0 up to 92.8%. The main factors which influenced or were associated with adherence decisions were the knowledge people had about the disease and quarantine procedure, social norms, perceived benefits of quarantine and perceived risk of the disease, as well as practical issues such as running out of supplies or the financial consequences of being out of work.ConclusionsPeople vary in their adherence to quarantine during infectious disease outbreaks. To improve this, public health officials should provide a timely, clear rationale for quarantine and information about protocols; emphasise social norms to encourage this altruistic behaviour; increase the perceived benefit that engaging in quarantine will have on public health; and ensure that sufficient supplies of food, medication and other essentials are provided.

How can communities around the world prepare for, detect, and respond to emerging pandemics and health security threats?

Scientists, economists and political advisers discuss problems with tests, how to use contact-tracing apps, and finding a convincing role for the EU to play as lockdown measures are lifted

Underlying Principles and Value of Projections

BackgroundA range of public health measures have been implemented to suppress local transmission of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Hong Kong. We examined the effect of these interventions and behavioural changes of the public on the incidence of COVID-19, as well as on influenza virus infections, which might share some aspects of transmission dynamics with COVID-19.MethodsWe analysed data on laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases, influenza surveillance data in outpatients of all ages, and influenza hospitalisations in children. We estimated the daily effective reproduction number (Rt) for COVID-19 and influenza A H1N1 to estimate changes in transmissibility over time. Attitudes towards COVID-19 and changes in population behaviours were reviewed through three telephone surveys done on Jan 20–23, Feb 11–14, and March 10–13, 2020.FindingsCOVID-19 transmissibility measured by Rt has remained at approximately 1 for 8 weeks in Hong Kong. Influenza transmission declined substantially after the implementation of social distancing measures and changes in population behaviours in late January, with a 44% (95% CI 34–53%) reduction in transmissibility in the community, from an estimated Rt of 1·28 (95% CI 1·26–1·30) before the start of the school closures to 0·72 (0·70–0·74) during the closure weeks. Similarly, a 33% (24–43%) reduction in transmissibility was seen based on paediatric hospitalisation rates, from an Rt of 1·10 (1·06–1·12) before the start of the school closures to 0·73 (0·68–0·77) after school closures. Among respondents to the surveys, 74·5%, 97·5%, and 98·8% reported wearing masks when going out, and 61·3%, 90·2%, and 85·1% reported avoiding crowded places in surveys 1 (n=1008), 2 (n=1000), and 3 (n=1005), respectively.InterpretationOur study shows that non-pharmaceutical interventions (including border restrictions, quarantine and isolation, distancing, and changes in population behaviour) were associated with reduced transmission of COVID-19 in Hong Kong, and are also likely to have substantially reduced influenza transmission in early February, 2020.FundingHealth and Medical Research Fund, Hong Kong.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents an unprecedented challenge to humanity. Yet there seems to be substantial variation across individuals in knowledge and concern about COVID-19, as well as in the willingness to change behaviors in the face of the pandemic. Here, we investigated the roles of political ideology and cognitive sophistication in explaining these differences across the U.S.A. (N = 689), the U.K. (N = 642), and Canada (N = 644) using preregistered surveys conducted in late March, 2020. We found evidence that political polarization around COVID-19 risk perceptions, behavior change intentions, and misperceptions was greater in the U.S. than in the U.K.. However, Canada and the U.S. did not strongly differ in their level of polarization. Furthermore, in all three countries, cognitive sophistication (indexed by analytic thinking, numeracy, basic science knowledge, and bullshit skepticism) was a negative predictor of COVID-19 misperceptions – and in fact was a stronger predictor of misperceptions than political ideology (despite being unrelated to risk perceptions or behavior change intentions). Finally, we found no evidence that cognitive sophistication was associated with increased polarization for any of our COVID-19 measures. Thus, although there is some evidence for political polarization of COVID-19 in the U.S. and Canada (but not the U.K.), accurate beliefs about COVID-19 (albeit not intentions to act) are broadly associated with the quality of one’s reasoning skill regardless of political ideology or background polarization.

In the past few months, the scientific community has ramped up research in response to the SARS‑CoV‑2 pandemic; dozens of peer-reviewed articles and preprints on this topic are being added to the literature every day (Figure 1). This rapidly expanding effort has created challenges for scientists and the medical community who need to analyze thousands of scholarly articles for insights on the virus.

With over 30,000 confirmed cases -as of April 16th- Brazil is currently the country most affected by COVID-19 in Latin America, and ranked 12th worldwide. Despite all evidence, a strong rhetoric undermining risks associated to COVID-19 has been endorsed at the highest levels of the Brazilian government, making President Jair Bolsonaro the leader of the “coronavirus-denial movement”. To support this strategy, different forms of misinformation and disinformation have been leveraged to lead a dangerous crusade against scientific and evidence-based recommendations. 

If pandemic lockdowns have people feeling a bit like lab rats stuck in cages, in some ways that’s exactly what they are. As the coronavirus touches on virtually every part of life around the globe, social scientists are rushing to suck up real-time data on how people are responding to the unfolding pandemic. Economists are gathering data about supply chains. Political scientists are scrutinizing how government responses track with ideology. Psychologists are monitoring children in after-school programs. Behavioral scientists are surveying thousands of people to see how they respond to information in a crisis.

Researchers can expect to wait days, rather than months, for the initial peer review.

We thank dr. Ludvigsson (1) on his effort to improve knowledge on SARS‐CoV‐2 infection in children. In trying to understand the spread of the disease, one of the most notable features is that only a small number of severe SARS‐CoV‐2 infections have involved children. The huge age disparity in disease severity might be one of the most stringent fundamental knowledge gaps.