When confronted with the Black Death in the middle ages, leading authorities resorted to analysis of the position of the planets —Jupiter’s hostility against Mars features prominently— to explain the plague. Today, authorities rely mainly on science to explain and manage the COVID-19 pandemic. The success of this is borne out in countries such as Germany and New Zealand, both of which have managed to control the pandemic. In particular, in New Zealand the virus is eradicated after causing 21 deaths altogether (4 fatalities per million people). But there is more to the story than science being a better reality-tracking device than astrology. In the United Kingdom, the number of deaths now exceeds 37,000 (544 fatalities per million), the second-highest toll in the world after the U.S., and considerably more than in Italy, Spain, and France, the three European countries that were hardest hit on the continent. The fact that the UK’s trajectory unfolded so differently from New Zealand presents a scientific conundrum. New Zealand and the U.K. are both island nations, which even in today’s connected world facilitates border control and quarantine measures. And just like in New Zealand, the U.K. government has been committed to “follow the science” in their policies. For example, on 16 March, when the toll stood at 34 deaths, British Transport Secretary Grant Shapps explained his government’s stance to reject a lockdown by declaring “we are just being entirely science-led, we’re not doing the things that are happening elsewhere just because it seems like a popularist [sic] thing to do“. On the basis of currently available information, it is therefore inappropriate to believe that the U.K. government deliberately ignored scientific advice. It did not. It was advised by leading scientists in a group called SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies), some of whom appeared at press conferences together with politicians. There are many aspects to what has happened at the interface between science and policy in the U.K., and only the Mother of All Inquiries that some commentators have anticipated will reveal the full answer. Here, I focus on one issue that has become increasingly visible and that may set aside the U.K. from other countries, namely that scientific knowledge was available early on that questioned “the science” being followed by the government.

A tale of two island nations: Lessons for crisis knowledge management

10.1136/bmj.m2102

England is abandoning lockdown and possibly hope of containing a second wave of covid-19. From 1 June schools will open to children other than those of key workers. Outdoor markets and car showrooms will reopen. In two weeks, it will be the turn of all non-essential retailers. This is meant to be a moment of optimism, a green recovery, centred on the health of people and the planet (doi:10.1136/bmj.m2077, doi:10.1136/bmj.m2076), backed by an effective system of testing and contact tracing and possibly informed by a public inquiry (doi:10.1136/bmj.m2052).

Covid-19: Questions of conscience and duty for scientific advisers

Argh it is so frustrating that these regulations don't get put to parliament at least for debate. It's madness. These are huge changes and they affect every single person in England, and there are loads of potentially unclear and difficult bits. Why so reluctant to engage debate?

Wait, believe it or not this could be correct! https://twitter.com/icecolbeveridge/status/1267103055293681664?s=20… But the people in the shop need to have gathered there in order to shop "with each other" so unless you all met up there deliberately, then you're safe

Ooh, cheeky little change in the pre-amble to add a proportionality test, was necessity, perhaps a response to the recent @HumanRightsCtte report... chuffed about that actually https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/5454/default/…

Also, the definition of "elite athlete" gets a lot of attention in these amendments. Long story short, I don't qualify. @holland_tom maybe you do?

A few more places that can open

Some more places which must shut (although they prob weren't open anyway). What is a "landmark"?

2 months after the regulations appeared we finally have a definition of a gathering "two or more people are present together in the same place in order to engage in any form of social interaction with each other, or to undertake any other activity with each other" @SeethingMead

Third big change - now illegal for there to be a gathering of 2 or more people in private places, which includes your own home, unless it falls within one of the (it seems exhaustive) list of reasonable excuses - can be people from same household (obvs) - for work etc

Second big change: Regulation 7 has been completely replaced - Gatherings of 6 people or less allowed outside in any formation (i.e. from any number of households) - Gatherings over 6 people prohibited without "reasonable excuse", there is an *exhuastive* list of excuses AND..

To be clear - from tomorrow - he police can no longer get involved with why you are outside of the place you are living. - No more power to direct people back home - no more power to fine for leaving/being outside of home without reasonable excuse

The lockdown regulations have changed very significantly: - No more prohibition on leaving the place you are living or being outside of it without a "reasonable excuse" - Regulation 6 replaced by prohibition on staying over somewhere without a reasonable excuse

The Amendment Regulations are here - made today (!) and laid before Parliament tomorrow morning at 11:30am http://legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/558/pdfs/uksi_20200558_en.pdf

When Dominic Cummings made a public statement to explain why he drove 260 miles to stay with his parents during the coronavirus lockdown, the prime Minister’s chief adviser made an assertion that initially went largely unnoticed: For years, I have warned of the dangers of pandemics. Last year I wrote about the possible threat of coronaviruses and the urgent need for planning. It was, ultimately, beside the point but Cummings seemed to be reminding the public of his value. We are to believe that he is too vital a cog in the machine to be forced out of his job. However, unfortunately for Cummings, it didn’t take the internet nerds long to find out his claim is not exactly true. In fact, a quick search and check on the Wayback Machine shows only one mention of coronavirus on Cummings’ blog or any other media attached to his name. That mention is in a paragraph that was added to a blog post some time between April 11 and April 15 2020 – several months into the current crisis, when anyone could see coronaviruses were a problem, with or without an eye test. The post was originally released on March 4 2019.

Dominic Cummings: how the internet knows when you’ve updated your blog

Collections have been surprisingly strong through the pandemic, but there are troubling signs — for landlords and tenants alike.

Tenants Largely Stay Current on Rent, for Now

The goal of policymakers during the pandemic should not be to reactively restore the status quo. Instead, the goal should be to proactively restructure society, so we are all more resilient the next time disaster strikes.

We Have a Rare Opportunity to Create a Stronger, More Equitable Society

Risk would be halved if return to school delayed by a fortnight, 'Independent Sage' committee concludes

1 June 'too soon' to open schools, say top scientists

This despite signing up 90,000 new subscribers since March. The coverage has been much praised. Bradley says it’s to ensure longterm viability.

.@TheAtlantic to cut staff by 68 positions, or 17 percent, in response to current economy, per chairman David Bradley statement

.@TheAtlantic to cut staff by 68 positions, or 17 percent, in response to current economy, per chairman David Bradley statement

Early serology results based on antibody testing: 5% for UK, 17% for London. From Matt Hancock, Health Secretary in today's briefing. In line with what other countries have reported on their seroprevalence.

What kind of work is authentically essential? In the midst of a global pandemic, Americans have been introduced to new classifications of some work as essential. Almost as quickly as we adopted this new terminology to refer to the laborers who must leave their homes to care for others—the nurses, doctors, grocery store clerks, and janitorial staff —we began to publicly proclaim our support and gratitude for their essential work. Social media platforms in the USA and Europe have been an important part of this process, providing a place where millions of people have added hashtags like #thankyouhealthcareworkers and #stayhomesavelives to posts to encourage people to stay home so as to not overwhelm hospitals and healthcare workers. As professionals like hospital staff, postal workers, and gig economy laborers take on personal, bodily risks for the benefit of the social body, they are clearly and undeniably deserving of public gratitude and celebration.

Good Vibes: The Complex Work of Social Media Influencers in a Pandemic

The Commission has proposed today country-specific recommendations (CSRs) providing economic policy guidance to all EU Member States in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, focused on the most urgent challenges brought about by the pandemic and on relaunching sustainable growth. The recommendations are structured around two objectives: in the short-term, mitigating the coronavirus pandemic's severe negative socio-economic consequences; and in the short to medium-term, achieving sustainable and inclusive growth which facilitates the green transition and the digital transformation.

European Semester Spring Package: Recommendations for a coordinated response to the coronavirus pandemic

Researchers who examined the lungs of patients killed by covid-19 found evidence that it attacks the lining of blood vessels there, a critical difference from the lungs of people who died of the flu, according to a report published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

More evidence emerges on why covid-19 is so much worse than the flu

10.1016/j.jue.2020.103257

More than 100 natural disasters strike the United States every year, causing extensive fatalities and damages. We construct the universe of US federally designated natural disasters from 1920 to 2010. We find that severe disasters increase out-migration rates at the county level by 1.5 percentage points and lower housing prices/rents by 2.5–5.0 percent. The migration response to milder disasters is smaller but has been increasing over time. The economic response to disasters is most consistent with falling local productivity and labor demand. Disasters that convey more information about future disaster risk increase the pace of out-migration.

The Effect of Natural Disasters on Economic Activity in US Counties: A Century of Data

2005.11283

Most models of epidemic spread, including many designed specifically for COVID-19, implicitly assume that social networks are undirected, i.e., that the infection is equally likely to spread in either direction whenever a contact occurs. In particular, this assumption implies that the individuals most likely to spread the disease are also the most likely to receive it from others. Here, we review results from the theory of random directed graphs which show that many important quantities, including the reproductive number and the epidemic size, depend sensitively on the joint distribution of in- and out-degrees ("risk" and "spread"), including their heterogeneity and the correlation between them. By considering joint distributions of various kinds we elucidate why some types of heterogeneity cause a deviation from the standard Kermack-McKendrick analysis of SIR models, i.e., so called mass-action models where contacts are homogeneous and random, and some do not. We also show that some structured SIR models informed by complex contact patterns among types of individuals (age or activity) are simply mixtures of Poisson processes and tend not to deviate significantly from the simplest mass-action model. Finally, we point out some possible policy implications of this directed structure, both for contact tracing strategy and for interventions designed to prevent super spreading events. In particular, directed networks have a forward and backward version of the classic "friendship paradox" -- forward links tend to lead to individuals with high risk, while backward links lead to individuals with high spread -- such that a combination of both forward and backward contact tracing is necessary to find superspreading events and prevent future cascades of infection.

The role of directionality, heterogeneity and correlations in epidemic risk and spread

10.1038/s41562-020-0881-2

Prosocial behaviours are encountered in the donation game, the prisoner’s dilemma, relaxed social dilemmas and public goods games. Many studies assume that the population structure is homogeneous, meaning that all individuals have the same number of interaction partners or that the social good is of one particular type. Here, we explore general evolutionary dynamics for arbitrary spatial structures and social goods. We find that heterogeneous networks, in which some individuals have many more interaction partners than others, can enhance the evolution of prosocial behaviours. However, they often accumulate most of the benefits in the hands of a few highly connected individuals, while many others receive low or negative payoff. Surprisingly, selection can favour producers of social goods even if the total costs exceed the total benefits. In summary, heterogeneous structures have the ability to strongly promote the emergence of prosocial behaviours, but they also create the possibility of generating large inequality.

Social goods dilemmas in heterogeneous societies

2005.11358

The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly disrupted the scientific enterprise, but we lack empirical evidence on the nature and magnitude of these disruptions. Here we report the results of a survey of approximately 4,500 Principal Investigators (PIs) at U.S.- and Europe-based research institutions. Distributed in mid-April 2020, the survey solicited information about how scientists' work changed from the onset of the pandemic, how their research output might be affected in the near future, and a wide range of individuals' characteristics. Scientists report a sharp decline in time spent on research on average, but there is substantial heterogeneity with a significant share reporting no change or even increases. Some of this heterogeneity is due to field-specific differences, with laboratory-based fields being the most negatively affected, and some is due to gender, with female scientists reporting larger declines. However, among the individuals' characteristics examined, the largest disruptions are connected to a usually unobserved dimension: childcare. Reporting a young dependent is associated with declines similar in magnitude to those reported by the laboratory-based fields and can account for a significant fraction of gender differences. Amidst scarce evidence about the role of parenting in scientists' work, these results highlight the fundamental and heterogeneous ways this pandemic is affecting the scientific workforce, and may have broad relevance for shaping responses to the pandemic's effect on science and beyond.

Quantifying the Immediate Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Scientists

The outbreak came early to British Columbia, in January, and public health officials braced for the worst. Now the Canadian province has one of the lowest death rates in North America. {"contentId":"Q9Z4Y8T0G1KX01","position":"outstream","dimensions":{"large_desktop":[[1,8]],"small_desktop":[[1,8]],"tablet":[[1,8]]},"strategy":"always","type":"Outstream Video Native Ad","targeting":{"position":"outstream","url":"/news/articles/2020-05-16/a-virus-epicenter-that-wasn-t-how-one-region-stemmed-the-deaths"},"containerId":"outstream-video-1-Q9Z4Y8T0G1KX01"} {"contentId":"Q9Z4Y8T0G1KX01","position":"outstream","dimensions":{"mobile":[[1,8]]},"strategy":"always","type":"Outstream Video Native Ad","targeting":{"position":"outstream","url":"/news/articles/2020-05-16/a-virus-epicenter-that-wasn-t-how-one-region-stemmed-the-deaths"},"containerId":"outstream-video-2-Q9Z4Y8T0G1KX01"} “I thought we were going to be dealing with something unprecedented in that region specifically, but then it didn’t happen,” said Jason Kindrachuk, a virologist at the University of Manitoba. {"contentId":"Q9Z4Y8T0G1KX01","position":"box","dimensions":{"mobile":[[300,250],[3,3],[1,1],"fluid"]},"type":"Mobile Body Box Ad","positionIncrement":1,"targeting":{"position":"box1","positionIncrement":1,"url":"/news/articles/2020-05-16/a-virus-epicenter-that-wasn-t-how-one-region-stemmed-the-deaths"},"containerId":"box-y3hyzay"} British Columbia’s success story shows how tried-and-true methods -- when paired with strong public health agencies -- can have sweeping impact, according to Kindrachuk and other scientists

Behind North America’s Lowest Death Rate: A Doctor Who Fought Ebola

The very first vaccine candidate entered human trials—and Neal Browning’s arm—on March 16. Behind the scenes at Moderna and the beginning of an unprecedented global sprint.

The First Shot: Inside the Covid Vaccine Fast Track

10.1177/0963721420915872

Misinformation causes serious harm, from sowing doubt in modern medicine to inciting violence. Older adults are especially susceptible—they shared the most fake news during the 2016 U.S. election. The most intuitive explanation for this pattern lays the blame on cognitive deficits. Although older adults forget where they learned information, fluency remains intact, and knowledge accumulated across decades helps them evaluate claims. Thus, cognitive declines cannot fully explain older adults’ engagement with fake news. Late adulthood also involves social changes, including greater trust, difficulty detecting lies, and less emphasis on accuracy when communicating. In addition, older adults are relative newcomers to social media and may struggle to spot sponsored content or manipulated images. In a post-truth world, interventions should account for older adults’ shifting social goals and gaps in their digital literacy.

Aging in an Era of Fake News

The figure of the decision maker is often invoked as a key conduit for academic research to be transformed into social impact. Drawing on work undertaken for their recently published book chapter (with Dr Megan Evans), David Rose and Rebecca Jarvis distill findings from a review of how academics have engaged with decision makers in the field of conservation science to present 10 practical points of advice for researchers seeking to engage with decision makers.

10 Ways scientists can better engage with decision makers

Ten million have helped in their community – most plan to continue after lockdown ends

UK volunteering soars during coronavirus crisis

OpenReview aims to promote openness in scientific communication, particularly the peer review process, by providing a flexible cloud-based web interface and underlying database API enabling the following

About OpenReview

South Korea really bringing the hammer down on quarantine violations. 27-year-old man who twice left mandatory self quarantine, with *two days* to go until the end of his 14-day isolation, has been sentenced to four months in prison. First covid-19 sentencing, per @YonhapNews

I keep thinking about this cover from @bmj_latest . We have not even begun to see the consequences of #COVID19. This government repeatedly proves it is incapable of understanding or managing this crisis.

7 emerging themes in digital government

10.12688/f1000research.13704.1

Background. The Zika virus (ZIKV) outbreak in the Americas has caused international concern due to neurological sequelae linked to the infection, such as microcephaly and Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS). The World Health Organization stated that there is “sufficient evidence to conclude that Zika virus is a cause of congenital abnormalities and is a trigger of GBS”. This conclusion was based on a systematic review of the evidence published until 30.05.2016. Since then, the body of evidence has grown substantially, leading to this update of that systematic review with new evidence published from 30.05.2016 – 18.01.2017, update 1. Methods. We review evidence on the causal link between ZIKV infection and adverse congenital outcomes and the causal link between ZIKV infection and GBS or immune-mediated thrombocytopaenia purpura. We also describe the transition of the review into a living systematic review, a review that is continually updated. Results. Between 30.05.2016 and 18.01.2017, we identified 2413 publications, of which 101 publications were included. The evidence added in this update confirms the conclusion of a causal association between ZIKV and adverse congenital outcomes. New findings expand the evidence base in the dimensions of biological plausibility, strength of association, animal experiments and specificity. For GBS, the body of evidence has grown during the search period for update 1, but only for dimensions that were already populated in the previous version. There is still a limited understanding of the biological pathways that potentially cause the occurrence of autoimmune disease following ZIKV infection. Conclusions. This systematic review confirms previous conclusions that ZIKV is a cause of congenital abnormalities, including microcephaly, and is a trigger of GBS. The transition to living systematic review techniques and methodology provides a proof of concept for the use of these methods to synthesise evidence about an emerging pathogen such as ZIKV

Zika virus infection as a cause of congenital brain abnormalities and Guillain-Barré syndrome: From systematic review to living systematic review [version 1; peer review: 2 approved, 1 approved with reservations]

Then ease measures while testing widely & w/ good data systems that alert public whether it is red/amber/green in their area. Need clusters of cases identified rapidly & broken up before tips over into sustained community transmission. If it tips, hard to avoid another lockdown.

My suggestion: bring down daily new cases to a low level, get test/trace/isolate in place and core infrastructure build up, get regular testing going for essential workers/teachers/students, monitor borders for imported cases, & move to mandatory masks in shops/public transport.

Looking at the estimates for daily new cases in England (8K/day), the openings of shops/schools on Monday, watching carefully what's happening in East Asia & combining this with what we know so far about this virus --> feels like mistakes are being repeated from early March.

This is because we can be confident that if our analysis isn't the right analysis, it's at least extremely close to the right analysis in all the ways that impact the conclusion. Interrogating findings from different angles is the best defense against bugs in the analysis. 6/6

Statisticians like to do various checks of the results. Doing checks allows us to confirm that our analysis has certain properties which we think are properties of a good analysis. I think this makes it less necessary that our analysis contain zero bugs. 5/6

As statistical analyses become more complex, we might want to ensure that our statistical analyses satisfy certain properties instead of worrying about small mistakes in implementation. I believe statisticians already intuitively do this. 4/6

The way I understand unit tests in coding is that instead of repeatedly reading over the code to ensure logical correctness, we use empirical tests of the code to constrain its possible behaviors. I think this would be a good idea to import into statistical analyses. 3/6

I firmly believe that 100% bug free code is impossible to achieve for any sufficiently complex code and statistics isn't any different. The right goal isn't bug free code, it's minimizing the impact of bugs on the scientific conclusions. 2/6

I want to talk about bugs in statistical analyses. I think many data analysts worry unnecessarily about this. I do think it's important to put a good faith effort into avoiding bugs, but I know data analysts that live in terror of hearing there's a bug in published work. 1/6

10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30443-6

We are grateful for Simon Wood and colleagues' comments on our study,1Verity R Okell LC Dorigatti I et al.Estimates of the severity of coronavirus disease 2019: a model-based analysis.Lancet Infect Dis. 2020; (published online March 30.)https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30243-7Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Google Scholar which explore some important sensitivities in the data that were available early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Wood and colleagues' re-analysis puts more weight on the Diamond Princess outbreak data, arriving at an infection fatality ratio (IFR) in the range 0·23–0·65%, whereas our analysis used data from repatriation flights out of Wuhan, leading to an IFR in the range 0·39–1·33%

10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30437-0

Knowing the infection fatality ratio (IFR) is crucial for epidemic management: for immediate planning, for balancing the life-years saved against those lost to the consequences of management, and for considering the ethics of paying substantially more to save a life-year from the epidemic than from other diseases. Impressively, Robert Verity and colleagues1Verity R Okell LC Dorigatti I et al.Estimates of the severity of coronavirus disease 2019: a model-based analysis.Lancet Infect Dis. 2020; (published online March 30.)https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30243-7Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Google Scholar rapidly assembled case data and used statistical modelling to infer the IFR for COVID-19. We have attempted an in-depth statistical review of their paper, eschewing statistical nit-picking, but attempting to identify the extent to which the (necessarily compromised) data are more informative about the IFR than are the modelling assumptions.

COVID-19 and the difficulty of inferring epidemiological parameters from clinical data

10.1145/3313831.3376213

In recent years, social media services have been leveraged to spread fake news stories. Helping people spot fake stories by marking them with credibility indicators could dissuade them from sharing such stories, thus reducing their amplification. We carried out an online study (N = 1,512) to explore the impact of four types of credibility indicators on people's intent to share news headlines with their friends on social media. We confirmed that credibility indicators can indeed decrease the propensity to share fake news. However, the impact of the indicators varied, with fact checking services being the most effective. We further found notable differences in responses to the indicators based on demographic and personal characteristics and social media usage frequency. Our findings have important implications for curbing the spread of misinformation via social media platforms.

Effects of Credibility Indicators on Social Media News Sharing Intent

The COVID-19 symptom surveys are designed to help researchers better monitor and forecast the spread of COVID-19. In partnership with University of Maryland and Carnegie Mellon University, Facebook users are invited to take surveys conducted by these two partner universities to self-report COVID-19-related symptoms. The surveys may be used to generate new insights on how to respond to the crisis, including heat maps of self-reported symptoms. This information may help health systems plan where resources are needed and potentially when, where, and how to reopen parts of society. 

COVID-19 Symptom Survey – Request for Data Access

This report includes findings from a survey of 2,254 UK residents aged 16-75 by King’s College Londonin partnership with Ipsos MORI, conducted on 20-22 May. These results are compared with a similar survey conducted 1-3 April.It finds the public were losing faith in the UK government’s response to coronavirus, even before the Prime Minister’s adviser Dominic Cummings was widely reported to have travelled to Durham during the lockdown.

Coronavirus: growing divisions over the UK government’s response

2005.14023

We analyse the darkweb and find its structure is unusual. For example, ∼87% \sim 87 \% of darkweb sites \emph{never} link to another site. To call the darkweb a "web" is thus a misnomer -- it's better described as a set of largely isolated dark silos. As we show through a detailed comparison to the World Wide Web (www), this siloed structure is highly dissimilar to other social networks and indicates the social behavior of darkweb users is much different to that of www users. We show a generalized preferential attachment model can partially explain the strange topology of the darkweb, but an understanding of the anomalous behavior of its users remains out of reach. Our results are relevant to network scientists, social scientists, and other researchers interested in the social interactions of large numbers of agents.

The darkweb: a social network anomaly

2005.13977

Community detection methods attempt to divide a network into groups of nodes that share similar properties, thus revealing its large-scale structure. A major challenge when employing such methods is that they are often degenerate, typically yielding a complex landscape of competing answers. As an attempt to extract understanding from a population of alternative solutions, many methods exist to establish a consensus among them in the form of a single partition "point estimate" that summarizes the whole distribution. Here we show that it is in general not possible to obtain a consistent answer from such point estimates when the underlying distribution is too heterogeneous. As an alternative, we provide a comprehensive set of methods designed to characterize and summarize complex populations of partitions in a manner that captures not only the existing consensus, but also the dissensus between elements of the population. Our approach is able to model mixed populations of partitions where multiple consensuses can coexist, representing different competing hypotheses for the network structure. We also show how our methods can be used to compare pairs of partitions, how they can be generalized to hierarchical divisions, and be used to perform statistical model selection between competing hypotheses.

Revealing consensus and dissensus between network partitions

If delivered on, Facebook’s plan to allow employees to work outside of expensive, superstar cities really does seem like a watershed moment. Widespread remote work, especially in the tech sector, might very well prompt a degree of geographic healing that would counter decades of economic divergence which have left so many American places and people behind.

Could Big Tech’s move to permanent remote work save the American heartland?

After conducting interviews with 30 urbanists, architects, educators, and theorists since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Miami-based designer offers considerations for the profession moving forward.

Carie Penabad: Architecture and the Great Confinement

A 2009 novel predicted the Chinese people would forget a traumatic crisis. The puzzle, says its author, is how it happened so fast.

Amnesia Nation: Why China Has Forgotten Its Coronavirus Outbreak