10.31234/osf.io/e8bhx

Philosophers and scientists have long debated the nature of human social interactions and the prevalence of mutual dependence, conflict of interests, and power asymmetry in social situations. Yet, there is surprisingly little empirical work documenting the patterns of interdependence that people experience in daily life. We use experience sampling to study how people think about three dimensions of interdependence in daily life and how these dimensions relate to cooperation. In Study 1, 139 romantic couples (n = 278) reported on situations experienced with their partner (k = 6,766); in Study 2, individuals (n = 284) reported on situations experienced with any other person (k = 7,248), over the course of one week. Across both samples, we found that most social interactions were perceived as containing moderate mutual dependence, equal power, and corresponding interests. When couples reported on the same situation (Study 1), they largely agreed on their experienced interdependence and cooperation, suggesting that their reports reflect an underlying shared reality. In daily interactions across both samples, higher mutual dependence and lower conflict of interests were associated with more cooperation, whereas relative power was not directly related to cooperation. These associations replicated in laboratory experiments (Study 2). In daily life, high mutual dependence and high relative power exacerbated the negative relation between conflict of interests and cooperation. Finally, prevalent patterns of interdependence and the experience of specific interdependent situations affected multiple relationship outcomes. Our findings stress the importance of studying a diverse array of interdependent situations—and especially situations with corresponding interests—to better understand cooperation in daily life

Interdependence and cooperation in daily life

10.1038/s41586-020-2488-1

On the 21st of February 2020 a resident of the municipality of Vo’, a small town near Padua, died of pneumonia due to SARS-CoV-2 infection1. This was the first COVID-19 death detected in Italy since the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in the Chinese city of Wuhan, Hubei province2. In response, the regional authorities imposed the lockdown of the whole municipality for 14 days3. We collected information on the demography, clinical presentation, hospitalization, contact network and presence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in nasopharyngeal swabs for 85.9% and 71.5% of the population of Vo’ at two consecutive time points. On the first survey, which was conducted around the time the town lockdown started, we found a prevalence of infection of 2.6% (95% confidence interval (CI) 2.1-3.3%). On the second survey, which was conducted at the end of the lockdown, we found a prevalence of 1.2% (95% Confidence Interval (CI) 0.8-1.8%). Notably, 42.5% (95% CI 31.5-54.6%) of the confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections detected across the two surveys were asymptomatic (i.e. did not have symptoms at the time of swab testing and did not develop symptoms afterwards). The mean serial interval was 7.2 days (95% CI 5.9-9.6). We found no statistically significant difference in the viral load of symptomatic versus asymptomatic infections (p-values 0.62 and 0.74 for E and RdRp genes, respectively, Exact Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test). This study sheds new light on the frequency of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, their infectivity (as measured by the viral load) and provides new insights into its transmission dynamics and the efficacy of the implemented control measures.

Suppression of a SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in the Italian municipality of Vo’

10.31234/osf.io/6dq3g

People possess psychological processes that help them avoid pathogens, which is particularly important when novel infectious diseases (e.g., COVID-19) spread through the population. Across two studies we examined whether trait pathogen avoidance (operationalized as perceived vulnerability to disease; PVD) was linked with responses to COVID-19 and preventative behaviors. In Study 1, PVD was positively associated with stronger reactions to the threat of COVID-19, including increased anxiety, perceptions that people should alter their typical behavior, as well as reported importance of engaging in proactive and social distancing behaviors. In Study 2, PVD was again associated with increased anxiety, as well as more vigilant behavior when grocery shopping, fewer trips to the store, and fewer face-to-face interactions. These associations remained significant when controlling for the Big-5 personality traits. Although the two subscales of PVD (germ aversion and perceived infectability) were often parallel predictors, several differences between the subscales emerged. Germ aversion may be more associated with behaviors whereas perceived infectability with vigilance.

Behavioral immune system linked to responses to the threat of COVID-19

In this essay, I argue that the World Health Organization (WHO) has not been equipped with the necessary authority to adequately fulfill its mission. The WHO was built on the mistaken assumption that attaining adequate global health is a matter of high-level coordination. However, the challenge of global health governance is, crucially, also one of complex political cooperation. I distinguish between different types of cooperation problems faced by the WHO and explain why achieving global health calls for intrusive powers by a governing authority—powers that the WHO does not enjoy.

The WHO – Destined to Fail?: Political Cooperation and the COVID-19 Pandemic

2006.11913

Locating the source of an epidemic, or patient zero (P0), can provide critical insights into the infection's transmission course and allow efficient resource allocation. Existing methods use graph-theoretic centrality measures and expensive message-passing algorithms, requiring knowledge of the underlying dynamics and its parameters. In this paper, we revisit this problem using graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn P0. We establish a theoretical limit for the identification of P0 in a class of epidemic models. We evaluate our method against different epidemic models on both synthetic and a real-world contact network considering a disease with history and characteristics of COVID-19. % We observe that GNNs can identify P0 close to the theoretical bound on accuracy, without explicit input of dynamics or its parameters. In addition, GNN is over 100 times faster than classic methods for inference on arbitrary graph topologies. Our theoretical bound also shows that the epidemic is like a ticking clock, emphasizing the importance of early contact-tracing. We find a maximum time after which accurate recovery of the source becomes impossible, regardless of the algorithm used.

Finding Patient Zero: Learning Contagion Source with Graph Neural Networks

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented challenge to societies around the world, requiring rapid responses from educational, government and business institutions. Just as important, it has presented critical challenges to all of us, requiring each of us to understand and respond to this threat as it plays out in our daily lives. We invite manuscripts describing empirical research that investigates psychological responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Topics of interest for the special issue include risk perception, risk communication, and decision making.

Call for Papers: Risk Perception, Communication, and Decision Making in the Time of COVID-19

COVID-19: Relevant Calls for Papers from APA Journals

(1/n) A rule-based experiment of coupling a social decision-making model with an infectious disease model to explore mask wearing. A thread. (H/T @davidmanheim @vee3my) #epitwitter #MaskUp #COVID19

(8/n) You can run this model in the browser and experiment with different parameter regimes to get different behaviours and equilibria. It's a little CPU intensive, but it works.

(7/n) This is reminiscent of what we called "information cascades" where decisions are made based on a mix of public (copycat) and private (watching the news) information. This has a game theory flavour because m_xy encodes the altruism of wearing masks.

(6/n) But how does the first person decide to wear a mask and start the mask wearing cascade? Who will we copy?Perhaps those paying attention spontaneously wear and remove masks proportionally to the current danger, the number of infectious people.

(5/n) Following the crowd means, if I see people wearing masks, I'm likely to decide to wear a mask. This has much the same shape as an epidemic. An epidemic of masks. We can also do the same thing in the other direction: if people aren't wearing them, perhaps I won't either.

(4/n) How do we know who is wearing a mask? This is where it gets interesting. Suppose there are two mechanisms at play: following the crowd, and watching the news.

(3/n) If nobody wears a mask, all the virus gets through. Only the susceptible one does, helps a little. If the infectious one does, it helps a lot. If both do, it's much better. There aren't many empirical studies about "source control" so the numbers used are arbitrary.

(2/n) The infectious-disease part is what one might expect. Transmission is attenuated depending if either or both susceptible and infectious individuals are wearing a mask. Otherwise it's just your standard SEIR-style arrangement.

This is an example from our paper "Scaling up epidemiological modelling with rue-based models". Rule-based modelling turns out to be a very clear way to express models with rich interactions and simulate them efficiently. The pre-print is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.12077

10.1038/s41598-020-64800-z

In various types of structured communities newcomers choose their interaction partners by selecting a role-model and copying their social networks. Participants in these networks may be cooperators who contribute to the prosperity of the community, or cheaters who do not and simply exploit the cooperators. For newcomers it is beneficial to interact with cooperators but detrimental to interact with cheaters. However, cheaters and cooperators usually cannot be identified unambiguously and newcomers’ decisions are often based on a combination of private and public information. We use evolutionary game theory and dynamical networks to demonstrate how the specificity and sensitivity of those decisions can dramatically affect the resilience of cooperation in the community. We show that promiscuous decisions (high sensitivity, low specificity) are advantageous for cooperation when the strength of competition is weak; however, if competition is strong then the best decisions for cooperation are risk-adverse (low sensitivity, high specificity). Opportune decisions based on private and public information can still support cooperation but suffer of the presence of information cascades that damage cooperation, especially in the case of strong competition. Our research sheds light on the way the interplay of specificity and sensitivity in individual decision-making affects the resilience of cooperation in dynamical structured communities.

Information Cascades and the Collapse of Cooperation

2006.12077

This paper gives an introduction to rule-based modelling applied to topics in infectious diseases. Rule-based models generalise reaction-based models with reagents that have internal state and may be bound together to form complexes, as in chemistry. Rule-based modelling is directly transferable from molecular biology to epidemiology and allows us to express a broad class of models for processes of interest in epidemiology that would not otherwise be feasible in compartmental models. This includes dynamics commonly found in compartmental models such as the spread of a virus from an infectious to a susceptible population, and more complex dynamics outside the typical scope of such models such as social behaviours and decision-making, testing capacity constraints, and tracing of people exposed to a virus but not yet symptomatic. We propose that such dynamics are well-captured with rule-based models, and that doing so combines intuitiveness and transparency of representation with scalability and compositionality. We demonstrate this feasibility of our approach using a suite of seven models to describe a spread of infectious diseases under different scenarios: wearing masks, infection via fomites and prevention by hand-washing, the concept of vector-borne diseases, testing and contact tracing interventions, disease propagation within motif-structured populations with shared environments such as schools, and superspreading events. The machine-readable description of these models corresponds closely to the mathematical description and also functions as a human-readable format so that one knows readily ``what is in the model''.

Scaling up epidemiological models with rule-based modelling

With researchers, journals, politicians, journalists and social media influencers all capable of espousing misleading or unverified scientific findings, it pays to be able to recognise the telltale signs of a study that might be poor. Here are seven potential warning flags

How to sniff out the good coronavirus studies from the bad

This is a governance failure, not an inevitability of the disease.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds says her signature on a COVID-19 immunity bill for businesses and health care facilities that fail to protect their staff and customers or patients represents a “balance.” Reynolds discussed the legislation Thursday in response to questions from reporters about the story first reported by Iowa Capital Dispatch about resident deaths at a Dubuque nursing home. State inspectors allege the facility kept three staff members working who had symptoms of the coronavirus. The staff members later tested positive. Inspectors said they observed staff members on the job without facemasks or other personal protective equipment. At a home that now has a total of just 48 residents, 43 have been infected with COVID-19. Eleven residents have died. How do you “balance” the lives of 11 Iowans with a corporation’s interest in not getting sued?

Reynolds says COVID-19 immunity strikes a ‘balance.’ It’s not even close.

Project Free Our Knowledge aims to increase the adoption of open research practices through collective action in academia. Researchers can sign onto the platform using ORCID and pledge to change their behaviour in line with various campaigns (e.g., publish/review exclusively in Open Access journals), but only act on their pledge when a predefined threshold of 'support' is met in their research field (see below). This strategy is designed to ‘kickstart’ support for new publishing models and initiatives, while mitigating risks to vulnerable academics (e.g., early-career researchers and under-represented minorities).

The term fake news is increasingly used to discredit information from reputable news organizations. We tested the possibility that fake-news claims are appealing because they satisfy the need to see the world as structured. Believing that news organizations are involved in an orchestrated disinformation campaign implies a more orderly world than believing that the news is prone to random errors. Across six studies (N > 2,800), individuals with dispositionally high or situationally increased need for structure were more likely to attribute contested news stories to intentional deception than to journalistic incompetence. The effect persisted for stories that were ideologically consistent and ideologically inconsistent and after analyses controlled for strength of political identification. Political orientation showed a moderating effect; specifically, the link between need for structure and belief in intentional deception was stronger for Republican participants than for Democratic participants. This work helps to identify when, why, and for whom fake-news claims are persuasive.

10.1177/0956797620922785

The Psychological Appeal of Fake-News Attributions

10.31234/osf.io/bt6kr

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the lives of millions of people around the globe and some of the unprecedent emerged disruptions, are likely to have been particularly challenging for young children (e.g., school closures, social distancing measures, movement restrictions). Studying the impact of such extraordinary circumstances on their well-being is crucial to identify processes leading to risk and resilience. To better understand how Spanish children have adapted (or fail to) to the stressful disruptions resulting from the pandemic outbreak, we examined the effects of child coping and its interactions with contextual stressors (pandemic and family-related) on child adjustment, incorporating in our analysis a developmental perspective. Data was collected in April 2020, through parent-reports, during the acute phase of the pandemic and, temporarily coinciding with the mandatory national quarantine period imposed by the Spanish Government. A sample of 1,123 Spanish children (50% girls) aged three to 12 (Mage = 7.26; SD = 2.39) participated in the study. Results showed differences in the use of specific strategies by children in different age groups (i.e., 3-6, 7-9 and 10-12-year-olds). Despite the uncontrollable nature of the pandemic-related stressors, child disengagement coping was distinctively associated to negative outcomes (i.e., higher levels of behavioral and emotional difficulties), whereas engagement coping predicted psychosocial adjustment across all age groups. Moreover, interactively with child coping, parent fear of the future and parent dispositional resilience appear as relevant contextual factors to predict both negative and positive outcomes, but their effects seem to be age dependent, suggesting a higher contextual vulnerability for younger children. These findings might have implications for identifying individual and contextual risk and informing potential preventive interventions aimed to reduce the impact of future pandemic outbreaks on children of different ages.

Children Coping, Contextual Risk and their Interplay during the COVID-19 Pandemic: a Spanish Case

virtual MLSS 2020 (Opening Remarks)

Science denialism is not just a simple matter of logic or ignorance

Coronavirus Responses Highlight How Humans Have Evolved to Dismiss Facts That Don’t Fit Their Worldview

Current mood of infectious disease epidemiologists in the US? Stressed.

Postdoc researchers like me aren’t considered university employees, even though we’re essential to research. This must change

Insecure employment for postdoc researchers is leading to bad science

10.1038/d41586-019-03489-1

Anxiety and depression in graduate students is worsening. The health of the next generation of researchers needs systemic change to research cultures.

The mental health of PhD researchers demands urgent attention

10.31234/osf.io/2gnxb

The COVID-19 epidemic and the quarantine that children in many countries have had to undergo is a stressful situation about which little is known so far. The coping behaviors carried out by children and adolescents to face home confinement can be associated with their emotional welfare. The objectives of this study were: 1) to examine the coping strategies carried out by children and adolescents during the COVID-19 health crisis, 2) to analyze the differences in these behaviors in three countries, and 3) to examine the relationship between different modalities of coping and better adaptation. Participants were 1,480 parents of children aged 3-18 years from three European countries (n Spain = 431, n Italy = 712, and n Portugal = 355). The children’s mean age was 9.15 years (SD = 4.27). Parents completed an online survey providing information on symptoms and coping behaviors observed in their children. The most frequent coping strategies were accepting what is going on (58.9%), collaborating with quarantine social activities (e.g., drawings on the windows, supportive applauses) (35.9%), acting as if nothing is happening (35.5%), highlighting pros of being at home (35.1%), and not seeming worried about what is happening (30.1%). Compared to Italian and Spanish children, Portuguese children used a sense of humor more frequently when parents talked about the situation. Acting as if nothing happened, collaborating with social activities, and seeking comfort from others was more likely in Spanish children than in children from the other countries. Compared to Portuguese and Spanish children, those from Italy seem not worried about what was happening. Overall, an emotional-oriented coping style was directly correlated with a greater presence of anxious symptoms, as well as mood, sleep, behavioral, and cognitive alterations. Task-oriented and avoidance-oriented styles were related to better psychological adaptation, measured as the low presence of psychological symptoms. Results also show that unaffected children or children with a lower level of impact were more likely to use strategies based on a positive focus on the situation. This study provides interesting data on the strategies to be promoted by parents to cope with the COVID-19 health crisis in children.

Coping behaviors and psychological disturbances in youth affected by the COVID-19 health crisis

The phenomenon of an ‘infodemic’ has escalated to a level that requires a coordinated response. An infodemic is an overabundance of information – some accurate and some not – occurring during an epidemic. Like pathogens in epidemics, misinformation spreads further and faster and adds complexity to health emergency response. In the pre-conference experts engage with the public with 7 inspiring talks how the infodemic affects the world currently and reflections how it can be managed.

Pre conference - WHO first infodemiology conference

We really do need to know. The Johnson Government really need to tell us explicitly. Because the lives of nearly 50,000 people a year (based on current death rates) depend upon it.

Is it to accept the present stalled rate of infection and death? Is it herd immunity by default? Or is it (as it seems) a series of ad hoc measures driven by olitical experiency and whoever is pessing the Government hardest?

A very simple question to start the week. Scotland now has a clear strategy to drive towards elimination of the virus. But what is the strategy in England? We have a series of policy changes - open the pubs, end shielding - but we have no clear overall statement of strategy.

The effective reproduction number Re is now above 1 in #Switzerland: 1.28 (95% 1.06-1.53). We *urgently* need an in-depth understanding of transmission dynamics, the effectiveness of contact tracing etc. And #MaskUp

2006.14622

Resilience is meant as the capability of a networked infrastructure to provide its service even if some components fail: in this paper we focus on how resilience depends both on net-wide measures of connectivity and the role of a single component. This paper has two objectives: first to show how a set of global measures can be obtained using techniques from network theory, in particular how the spectral analysis of the adjacency and Laplacian matrices and a similarity measure based on Jensen-Shannon divergence allows us to obtain a characteriza-tion of global connectivity which is both mathematically sound and operational. Second, how a clustering method in the subspace spanned by the l smallest eigen-vectors of the Laplacian matrix allows us to identify the edges of the network whose failure breaks down the network. Even if most of the analysis can be applied to a generic networked infrastructure, specific references will be made to Water Distribution Networks (WDN).

Resilience in urban networked infrastructure: the case of Water Distribution Systems

8.8 In summary, are we still in control? Currently yes, but just. This whack-a-mole is dragging, and our concentration and arms are tiring. All are putting the effort, but I feel that holding on will depend on what we do individually. As they say, salvation lies within.

7.8 Meanwhile, the financial turmoil and civil unrest continue. When people are desperate or angry, they become undisciplined, risking their safety. Even stable societies are showing “virus fatigue”, and want their social life back. Balancing ‘normal’ and ‘safe’ is proving hard.

6.8 Nearly 2% of repatriated passengers tested +ve. This rate when applied to the expected 2000 daily travelers results in 40 new +ve cases daily. The actual number may be less. The situation with C-19 in the US, Gulf, Africa, and recently Europe, does not support this optimism.

5.8 The surge in clusters with large number of contacts is stretching our resources to trace and test. The locations are also difficult to isolate. This may lead to delays in containment, which may further lead to spread. This vicious cycle, seen elsewhere, has to be avoided.

4.8 New clusters were reported in Beirut, its suburbs, in a hospital, and in refugee camps. Densely populated locations allow more contacts per individual facilitating spread. Worryingly, several of theses clusters remain without a clear index case.

3.8 Some argue that since our capacity can absorb this expected rise in hospitalized cases, we should not be alarmed. The transfer of 3 cases this week to RHUH from #Covid19 ready hospitals due to lack of certain services raises a few questions regarding our preparedness.

2.8 The number of new +ve local cases has increased. The last 7 days have witnessed almost tripling in the number of cases as compared to the previous 7 days (from 47 to 143 cases). This surge usually results in an increase in hospitalizations, though it is too early to tell.

1.8 Is our #Covid19 situation in getting out of control? Several recent observations can help answer this question:

Coronavirus spikes in states reopening early and the financial fallout are discussed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman in conversation with Joy Reid.

Coronavirus spikes in states reopening early discussed by Krugman

Countries within the European Union have agreed on a framework to allow COVID-19 tracing apps to work across national borders. These apps will be able to monitor the spread of the virus. The system will involve a Federation Gateway Service that will receive and pass on “relevant information” from national contact tracing apps and servers. But there’s a way to go before any digital contacts tracing works smoothly.

EU states agree a tech spec for national coronavirus apps to work across borders

Increasingly, researchers are attempting to replicate published original studies by using large, multisite replication projects, at least 134 of which have been completed or are on going. These designs are promising to assess whether the original study is statistically consistent with the replications and to reassess the strength of evidence for the scientific effect of interest. However, existing analyses generally focus on single replications; when applied to multisite designs, they provide an incomplete view of aggregate evidence and can lead to misleading conclusions about replication success. We propose new statistical metrics representing firstly the probability that the original study's point estimate would be at least as extreme as it actually was, if in fact the original study were statistically consistent with the replications, and secondly the estimated proportion of population effects agreeing in direction with the original study. Generalized versions of the second metric enable consideration of only meaningfully strong population effects that agree in direction, or alternatively that disagree in direction, with the original study. These metrics apply when there are at least 10 replications (unless the heterogeneity estimate 𝜏̂ =0τ^=0<math altimg="urn:x-wiley:09641998:media:rssa12572:rssa12572-math-0001" location="graphic/rssa12572-math-0001.png"> <mrow> <mover accent="true"> <mi>τ</mi> <mo stretchy="false">^</mo> </mover> <mo>=</mo> <mn>0</mn> </mrow> </math>, in which case the metrics apply regardless of the number of replications). The first metric assumes normal population effects but appears robust to violations in simulations; the second is distribution free. We provide R packages (Replicate and MetaUtility)

10.1111/rssa.12572

New statistical metrics for multisite replication projects

SciBeh now has a video describing our initative! watch, retweet....

It would be nice to be able to say otherwise, but the UK’s approach to testing in this covid-19 pandemic continues to be chaotic, centralised, commercialised, and driven by numerical targets rather than clear strategy. Allan Wilson, president of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences, has called this reactive and random approach the “wild west of testing.”1 Writing for BMJ Opinion this week, Chris Ham agrees. The system is far from “world beating,” and ministers must be prepared to acknowledge and learn from mistakes, he says.2

10.1136/bmj.m2518

Covid 19: Where’s the strategy for testing?

Sean Hannity on May 20: "Florida got it right, Texas got it right ... the mob and the media, by the way, you own Governor DeSantis a huge apology"

RT @ScottGottliebMD: See how quickly you can find Sweden on this map....

In the current COVID-19 pandemic a key unsolved question is the duration of acquired immunity in recovered individuals. The recent emergence of SARS-CoV-2 precludes a direct study on this virus, but the four seasonal human coronaviruses may reveal common characteristics applicable to all human coronaviruses. We monitored healthy subjects over a time span of 35 years (1985-2020), providing a total of 2473 follow up person-months, and determined a) the time to reinfection by the same seasonal coronavirus and b) the dynamics of coronavirus antibody depletion post-infection. An alarmingly short duration of protective immunity to coronaviruses was found. Reinfections occurred frequently at 12 months post-infection and there was for each virus a substantial reduction in antibody levels as soon as 6 months post-infection.

10.1101/2020.05.11.20086439

Coronavirus protective immunity is short-lasting

I hear a lot from our readers and stakeholders about how to solve this problem of science denial. Most of them suggest that Science and science “need to do a better job at telling its stories.” I don't buy it. For more than a century, this journal has been delivering insightful and reliable scientific information; today, our articles have the highest readership ever. Sure, we can do a better job of simplifying messages and making them accessible to more people. There is always room for improvement. But is this really the crux of this dangerous problem?The scientific community is up against a sophisticated, data-driven machine that is devoted to making sure that science doesn't fully succeed

10.1126/science.abd4085

Persuasive words are not enough