Policymakers and health experts can help the public differentiate between lower-risk and higher-risk activities and environments and public health messages could convey a spectrum of risk to the public to support engagement in alternatives for safer interaction (26/n)

There are many things that could be done within families to decrease transmission. We need to provide clear instructions, and means of support to enable those with symptoms/positive test and their contacts to isolate. (25/n) https://abc.net.au/news/2020-09-15/coronavirus-swept-through-jos-house.-heres-how-he-dodged-it/12660218

Early viral load peak in the disease course indicates that preventing onward transmission requires immediate self-isolation with symptom onset (for a min of 5 days). Messages should prioritise isolation practices, and policies should include supported isolation. (24/n)

In summary: The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on households living in poverty, and the racial and ethnic disparities observed in many countries, emphasize the need to urgently update our definition of "vulnerable" populations for COVID-19 & address these inequities. (22/n)

A real overlap in the causes of mortality and deprivation can be seen here. The age-standardised rate of deaths involving COVID-19 in the most deprived quintile was more than double (2.3 times higher) than in the least deprived quintile in Scotland. (21/n) https://nrscotland.gov.uk/files/statistics/covid19/covid-deaths-report-week-19.pdf

Covid-19 could now be endemic in some parts of England that combine severe deprivation, poor housing and large BAME communities, national lockdown in these parts of the north of England had little effect in reducing the level of infections (20/n) (https://theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/05/covid-19-could-be-endemic-in-deprived-parts-of-england//…)

Previous research suggests that although social distancing during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic was effective in reducing infections, this was most pronounced in households w greater socioeconomic advantage. Similar findings are emerging for COVID-19. (19/n) (https://pnas.org/content/117/33/19658//…)

In Madrid, 37 neighbourhoods are seeing the highest incidence, 4 x the Spanish average. Common factors: these areas are poorer, denser and have a high proportion of immigrant population. (18/n) (https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020-09-19/como-son-las-zonas-restringidas-en-madrid-mas-densas-con-mas-inmigrantes-y-sobre-todo-mas-pobres.html…)

PHE surveillance report shows that while the number of infections is increasing mainly in 20-29, 30-39 ages in England, SARS-CoV-2 is spreading most in highly deprived areas - where people are in poorly paid work and can't afford to isolate. (17/n) https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/919676/Weekly_COVID19_Surveillance_Report_week_38_FINAL_UPDATED.pdf

Households in socioeconomically deprived areas are more likely to be overcrowded, increasing the risk of transmission within the household. These disparities also shape the strong geographic heterogeneities observed in the burden of cases and deaths. (16/n)

People in lower-paid occupations are often classified as essential workers who must work outside the home and may travel to work on public transport. These occupations often involve greater social mixing, exposure risk due to prolonged working hours and job insecurity. (15/n)

The largest clusters of cases observed in the USA have all been associated with prisons or jails. In the largest meat packing plant in Germany, while the common point of potential contact was workplace, risk was higher for a single shared apartment, bedroom and carpool. (13/n)

Much worryingly the largest outbreaks from across the world are reported in long term care facilities such as nursing homes, homeless shelters, prisons, and meat-packing plants where many people spend several hours working, living together, and share communal spaces. (12/n)

Prolonged indoor contact in a crowded and poorly ventilated environment increases the risk of transmission substantially. But decreasing occupancy and improving ventilation through opening windows/doors can lower the risk. (11/n)

Environment: Contact pattern also depends on the setting of the encounter. Contact tracing studies suggest an almost 20x higher risk of transmission indoors compared with outdoor environments. (10/n) (https://ft.com/content/2418ff87-1d41-41b5-b638-38f5164a2e94…)

Prolonged indoor contact in a crowded and poorly ventilated environment increases the risk of transmission substantially. But decreasing occupancy and improving ventilation through opening windows/doors can lower the risk. (11/n)

hen we look at the viral load dynamics & contact tracing studies, those who are infected are very infectious for a short window, likely 1-2 days before and 5 days following symptom onset. No transmission documented so far after the first week of symptom onset. (7/n)

Individual factors: Many ppl either do not infect anyone or infect a single person, and a large number of secondary cases are caused by a small # of infected ppl. Although this also is related to other factors, individual variation in infectiousness plays a major role.(6/n)

This encapsulates the problem nicely. Sure, there’s a paper. But actually read it & what do you find? p-values mostly juuuust under .05 (a red flag) and a sample size that’s FAR less than “25m”. If you think this is in any way compelling evidence, you’ve totally been sold a pup.

One amazing way to do this would be to control the pandemic; Venmo me.

Amidst many college outbreaks are a slew of very successful schools. My employer, @Yale, is among them: I hope they stay that way. Congrats to the students, faculty, staff, & our community for working together to achieve ZERO positive results in last 7 days. (9,425 tests).

doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.19217

Confirmed coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases have increased in the United States following the relaxation of strong lockdown measures.1 Contact tracing, which entails identifying and monitoring people who have been in close contact with individuals with confirmed diagnoses and encouraging them to self-isolate and quarantine, is recommended as a key component of COVID-19 control strategies.2-4 We used a mathematical model to examine the potential for contact tracing to reduce the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in the context of relaxed physical distancing, under different assumptions for case detection, tracing, and quarantine efficacy.

Modeling Contact Tracing Strategies for COVID-19 in the Context of Relaxed Physical Distancing Measures

https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000123

Human behavioral risk-seeking tendencies differ across content domains. How can such behavioral differences be reliably produced by the cognitive system? This article presents an explorative analysis of the reasons for and cognitive mechanisms underlying different risk propensities across 10 evolutionary domains. We investigate three cognitive process models: Tally, Take The First, and Most Relevant. Tally assumes decision-makers use majority rules. Take The First assumes decision makers rely on the first piece of information that comes to mind. Most Relevant assumes decision makers rely on information that is important in their environment. A survey with a total of N = 120 individuals in the United States gathered 1,598 self-reported memory-based attributes of risky situations in 10 evolutionary content domains. The explorative analysis of the cognitive processes underlying the domain differences suggest that the Most Relevant strategy is most closely related to the shifts in risk seeking across content domains, and that Take The First is also related, but the Tally process is not related to domain differences in risk propensities. This means that a cognitive process that relies on the first or frequent pieces of information from the environment may be underlying domain differences in risk taking. (APA PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)

Into the black box: Tracing information about risks related to 10 evolutionary problems.

The pandemic proves we all should know ‘psychological first aid.’ Here are the basics. /lifestyle/wellness/pandemic-psychological-first-aid-anxiety/2020/09/21/7c68d746-fc23-11ea-9ceb-061d646d9c67_story.html?tid=ss_tw

For those who might think this issue isn't settled yet, the piece include below has further graphs indicating just how much "protecting the economy" is associated with "keeping the virus under control"

We checked in with Yale SOM’s Dr. Howard Forman about herd immunity, vaccines, and that case of reinfection in Hong Kong.

Three Questions about COVID-19 Infection and Immunity

I cannot attest to the accuracy of the underlying science/model but the idea of the tool is very cool and seems extremely useful!

https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-8587(20)30315-6

Patients with diabetes have been in the spotlight since the early stages of the pandemic, as growing epidemiological data have revealed they are at higher risk of severe clinical outcomes of COVID-19.In light of these findings, several diabetes federations around the world have issued statements and provided resources to help patients with diabetes to better understand their risk of COVID-19 and how to more efficiently manage their condition. In May, 2020, with the understanding that the evidence base was still a moving target but that guidance for clinicians was urgently needed, an international panel of experts in the field of diabetes and endocrinology published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology practical recommendations for the management of diabetes during the pandemic.• View related content for this articleHowever, epidemiological data and guidance on COVID-19 and diabetes have focused almost exclusively on type 2 diabetes. In this issue of The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, we publish research assessing the absolute and relative risks of COVID-19 related mortality by type of diabetes in more than 61 000 000 individuals in England. After adjusting for key confounders, such as age, sex, ethnicity, index of multiple deprivation, and geographical region, the odds for in-hospital deaths with COVID-19 were 3·51 (95% CI 3·16–3·90) for people with type 1 diabetes and 2·03 (1·97–2·09) for people with type 2 diabetes compared with people without diabetes. Understanding which risk factors might have a role in the increased severity of COVID-19 in patients with diabetes is a priority for clinical practice and public health. A companion paper published in the same issue used a national dataset linked to national civil death registrations covering 98% of general practices in England to investigate the associations between various risk factors and COVID-19-related mortality in people with both types of diabetes. The authors confirmed the independent associations of several risk factors, such as age, sex, ethnicity, and socioeconomic deprivation, with COVID-19-related death. Importantly, the study also shows that the risk of COVID-19-related mortality is significantly and independently related to hyperglycaemia in people with either type of diabetes.

COVID-19 and diabetes: a co-conspiracy?

Here you go, debunking debunked - though I'm not wasting any more of my time on this twaddle!

10.1038/d41586-020-02599-5

Some people who become ill with the coronavirus develop neurological symptoms. Scientists are struggling to understand why.

How COVID-19 can damage the brain

https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30725-8

Understanding factors that affect the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is crucial for mitigating the impacts of COVID-19. Hamada Badr and colleagues1Badr HS Du H Marshall M Dong E Squire MM Gardner LM Association between mobility patterns and COVID-19 transmission in the USA: a mathematical modelling study.Lancet Infect Dis. 2020; (https://doi.org.10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30553-3 published online July 1.)Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar found a strong correlation between phone mobility data and decreased COVID-19 case growth rates, making the explicit assumption that phone mobility data serves as a proxy for social distancing. Thus, if true, concomitant increases in mobility will be correlated with an increased number of cases. We did a similar analysis using three social distancing metrics created from phone mobility data provided by the Unacast Social Distancing Scorecard.2UnacastSocial Distancing Scoreboard.https://www.unacast.com/covid19/social-distancing-scoreboardDate accessed: August 8, 2020Google Scholar The first metric—the daily distance difference—is analogous to the mobility ratio metric calculated by Badr and colleagues. The mobility ratio metric quantifies changes in behaviour relative to a baseline period before widespread transmission of COVID-19. The other two Unacast metrics measure changes in visits to non-essential places and encounter density, which were noted as limitations in the study by Badr and colleagues.Using the daily distance difference metric, we identified a strong correlation between decreased mobility and reduced COVID-19 case growth between March 27 and April 20, 2020 (appendix). The other two metrics showed similarly strong correlations (data not shown). However, when we extended the analysis to later time periods (April 21 to May 24, 2020, and May 25 to July 22, 2020) only a weak correlation between daily distance difference and COVID-19 case growth was identified (appendix). In the first time period, when each metric was decreasing, the correlation across all counties was around 0·6. However, as the metrics increased in later time periods, consistent with reductions in social distancing, the correlation decreased to 0·11 or less for all three metrics.

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RT @KFF: .@DrewAltman discusses two fundamental policy decisions made by the Trump administration that set the U.S. on the controversial an…

Vulnerable children will 'slip out of view', commissioner warns

Vulnerable children who require urgent support will "slip out of view" because of the impact of coronavirus, England's children's commissioner has warned.

Vulnerable children will 'slip out of view', commissioner warns

10.31235/osf.io/gwkzx

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically affected employment, particularly for mothers. Many believe that the loss of childcare and homeschooling requirements are key in explaining this trend, but previous work has been unable to test these hypotheses due to data limitations. This study uses novel data from 989 partnered, US parents to empirically examine whether the loss of childcare and homeschooling are associated with employment outcomes during the pandemic. We also consider whether the division of domestic labor prior to the pandemic is associated with parents’ employment outcomes. Results show the loss of full-time childcare was associated with a greater likelihood that mothers, but not fathers, lost their job during the pandemic. Additionally, participation in homeschooling was negatively associated with parents’ employment outcomes, and mothers’ employment in particular. We also find that mothers are less likely to experience disruptions in employment when fathers take on a greater share of childcare duties.tudy uses novel data from 989 partnered, US parents to empirically

A Gendered Pandemic: Childcare, Homeschooling, and Parents’ Employment During COVID-19

Like any other biological entity, SARS-CoV-2 has a family tree. It isn’t a very old one – the virus has only been recognised since December – but it still has tales to tell.

Coronavirus family tree reveals the virus is hardly mutating

The agency said it wanted to keep renters out of shelters. Apple and Google are making it easier for states to adopt contact tracing apps. Australia’s economy fell into recession.

C.D.C. Halts Evictions, Citing Covid-19 Risks

Iowa COVID numbers are spiking. Jodi Ernst says she doesn't believe them, suggests doctors may be inflating figures to get higher reimbursement.

10.31234/osf.io/9uebc

Despite the discontent, cruelty, and warfare that fill the daily news, people show tremendous capacities to help and cooperate with others. Prosocial behavior is used as an umbrella term capturing the diversity of selfless acts. As such, researchers have developed a variety of tasks and it is crucial to verify that they measure the same underlying construct of prosocial behavior. Previous studies have focused on comparing anonymous, one-shot economic games providing evidence for behavioral consistency across games. The current study extends these findings by (i) comparing both repeated economic and naturalistic interactive games in a within-subject design, and (ii) letting participants play in face-to-face dyadic settings. In total, 74 participants completed six tasks: three variants of a social dilemma game, an Egg Hunt game measuring helping behavior, a group decision-making paradigm requiring communication skills, and a Tangram game where participants solved puzzles together. A Principal Component Analysis revealed that two components best describe the behavior in these tasks. The three social dilemma games loaded on the first component, termed “social dilemma games”. These games were distinct from the interactive games and the helping and decision-making tasks loaded on the second component, termed “naturalistic games”. The Tangram game was unrelated to all other games. These findings suggest that the behavioral consistency observed in economic games has its limits to generalize to other types of tasks and emphasizes the importance of choosing the appropriate (combination of) paradigms to measure prosocial behavior. Theoretical and methodological differences between tasks are discussed to explain these findings.

Under the Umbrella of Prosocial Behavior – A Critical Comparison of Paradigms

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.102.020301

We consider an epidemic process on adaptive activity-driven temporal networks, with adaptive behavior modeled 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 susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) and susceptible-infected-recovered (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 strong social distancing, 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 nonquarantining 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 the 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 the SIR model a late adoption of measures requires inactive quarantine to reach containment.

Active and inactive quarantine in epidemic spreading on adaptive activity-driven networks

Professional Planners Anticipate Post-Pandemic Active Commuting

Many planners say they want to try out active commutes when in-office work becomes possible. How will a fresh look at their local streets influence planning professionals and planning practice?

Professional Planners Anticipate Post-Pandemic Active Commuting

Characteristics Associated with Hospitalization Among Patients with COVID-19 — Metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia, March–April 2020

What is already known about this topic? Hospitalized COVID-19 patients are more commonly older, male, of black race, and have underlying conditions. Less is known about factors increasing risk for hospitalization. What is added by this report? Data for 220 hospitalized and 311 nonhospitalized COVID-19 patients from six metropolitan Atlanta hospitals and associated outpatient clinics found that older age, black race, diabetes, lack of insurance, male sex, smoking, and obesity were independently associated with hospitalization. What are the implications for public health practice? To reduce severe outcomes from COVID-19, measures to prevent infection with SARS-COV-2 should be emphasized for persons at highest risk for hospitalization with COVID-19. Potential barriers to the ability to adhere to these measures need to be addressed.

Characteristics Associated with Hospitalization Among Patients with COVID-19 — Metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia, March–April 2020

Women produce a more powerful immune response than do men, a new study finds.

Why Does the Coronavirus Hit Men Harder? A New Clue

10.31234/osf.io/5xwbs

Background: By the end of March 2020, more than a fifth of the world’s population was in various degrees of ‘lockdown’ in order to slow the spread of Covid-19. This enforced confinement led some to liken lockdown to imprisonment. We directly compared individual’s experiences of lockdown with prisoners’ experiences of imprisonment in order to determine whether psychological parallels can be drawn between these two forms of confinement. Method: Online surveys of adults in lockdown in the UK (N = 300) and California (N = 450) were conducted four and five weeks into lockdown in each region, respectively. The UK data was then compared to Souza and Dhami’s (2010) sample of 267 medium security prisoners in England, and the Californian data was compared to Dhami et al.’s (2007) sample of 307 medium security Federal prisoners in California. We measured the effects of Group (Lockdown v. Prison) on five categories of dependent variables (i.e., activity, social contact, thoughts, feelings, and rule-breaking), controlling for demographic differences between the groups. Results: In both regions, people in lockdown thought significantly less often about missing their freedom, as well as missing their family and friends living elsewhere than did first-time prisoners. However, people in lockdown in both regions were also significantly less engaged in a range of daily activities than were first-time prisoners. Additionally, in both regions, people in lockdown reported feeling more hopeless than first-time prisoners. Conclusions: Although Governments introducing lockdown policies do not intend to punish their citizens as courts do when sending convicted offenders to prison, such policies can have unintended adverse consequences. Psychological parallels can be drawn between the two forms of confinement, and ordinary citizens in lockdown have, to some extent, sensed the ‘pains of imprisonment.’

Are people experiencing the ‘pains of imprisonment’ during the Covid-19 lockdown?

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-020-06067-8

Although the benefit of population-level public facial masking to protect others during the COVID-19 pandemic has received a great deal of attention, we discuss for one of the first times the hypothesis that universal masking reduces the “inoculum” or dose of the virus for the mask-wearer, leading to more mild and asymptomatic infection manifestations. Masks, depending on type, filter out the majority of viral particles, but not all. We first discuss the near-century-old literature around the viral inoculum and severity of disease (conceptualized as the LD50 or lethal dose of the virus). We include examples of rising rates of asymptomatic infection with population-level masking, including in closed settings (e.g., cruise ships) with and without universal masking. Asymptomatic infections may be harmful for spread but could actually be beneficial if they lead to higher rates of exposure. Exposing society to SARS-CoV-2 without the unacceptable consequences of severe illness with public masking could lead to greater community-level immunity and slower spread as we await a vaccine. This theory of viral inoculum and mild or asymptomatic disease with SARS-CoV-2 in light of population-level masking has received little attention so this is one of the first perspectives to discuss the evidence supporting this theory.

Masks Do More Than Protect Others During COVID-19: Reducing the Inoculum of SARS-CoV-2 to Protect the Wearer

Conspiracy theories - The link to COVID-19

Physical distancing is an important part of measures to control covid-19, but exactly how far away and for how long contact is safe in different contexts is unclear. Rules that stipulate a single specific physical distance (1 or 2 metres) between individuals to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing covid-19, are based on an outdated, dichotomous notion of respiratory droplet size. This overlooks the physics of respiratory emissions, where droplets of all sizes are trapped and moved by the exhaled moist and hot turbulent gas cloud that keeps them concentrated as it carries them over metres in a few seconds.12 After the cloud slows sufficiently, ventilation, specific patterns of airflow, and type of activity become important. Viral load of the emitter, duration of exposure, and susceptibility of an individual to infection are also important.Instead of single, fixed physical distance rules, we propose graded recommendations that better reflect the multiple factors that combine to determine risk. This would provide greater protection in the highest risk settings but also greater freedom in lower risk settings, potentially enabling a return towards normality in some aspects of social and economic life.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m3223

this kind of piece behavioural scientists need to reject! A shallow understanding of the bias literature in an even shallower application to the pandemic- the idea that believing lockdowns brought down infection rates is an example of the "post hoc fallacy" is bizarre 1/3

Population-scale longitudinal mapping of COVID-19 symptoms, behaviour and testing

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-00944-2

Despite the widespread implementation of public health measures, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to spread in the United States. To facilitate an agile response to the pandemic, we developed How We Feel, a web and mobile application that collects longitudinal self-reported survey responses on health, behaviour and demographics. Here, we report results from over 500,000 users in the United States from 2 April 2020 to 12 May 2020. We show that self-reported surveys can be used to build predictive models to identify likely COVID-19-positive individuals. We find evidence among our users for asymptomatic or presymptomatic presentation; show a variety of exposure, occupational and demographic risk factors for COVID-19 beyond symptoms; reveal factors for which users have been SARS-CoV-2 PCR tested; and highlight the temporal dynamics of symptoms and self-isolation behaviour. These results highlight the utility of collecting a diverse set of symptomatic, demographic, exposure and behavioural self-reported data to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

Population-scale longitudinal mapping of COVID-19 symptoms, behaviour and testing

RT @BrianNosek: Preprint "conversations about reproducibility have a clear underlying structure, despite the broad scope..of the crisis. ..…

arXiv:2008.10745

Regional quarantine policies, in which a portion of a population surrounding infections are locked down, are an important tool to contain disease. However, jurisdictional governments - such as cities, counties, states, and countries - act with minimal coordination across borders. We show that a regional quarantine policy's effectiveness depends upon whether (i) the network of interactions satisfies a balanced-growth condition, (ii) infections have a short delay in detection, and (iii) the government has control over and knowledge of the necessary parts of the network (no leakage of behaviors). As these conditions generally fail to be satisfied, especially when interactions cross borders, we show that substantial improvements are possible if governments are proactive: triggering quarantines in reaction to neighbors' infection rates, in some cases even before infections are detected internally. We also show that even a few lax governments - those that wait for nontrivial internal infection rates before quarantining - impose substantial costs on the whole system. Our results illustrate the importance of understanding contagion across policy borders and offer a starting point in designing proactive policies for decentralized jurisdictions.

Interacting Regional Policies in Containing a Disease

10.31234/osf.io/483zv

Social distancing measures following the outbreak of COVID-19 have led to a rapid shift to virtual and telephone care. Social workers and mental health providers in VA home-based primary care (HBPC) teams face challenges providing psychosocial support to their homebound, medically complex, socially isolated patient population who are high risk for poor health outcomes related to COVID-19. We developed and disseminated an 8-week telephone or virtual group intervention for front-line HBPC social workers and mental health providers to use with socially isolated, medically complex older adults. The intervention draws on skills from evidence-based psychotherapies for older adults including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, and Problem-Solving Therapy. The manual was disseminated to VA HBPC clinicians and geriatrics providers across the United States in March 2020 for expeditious implementation. Eighteen HBPC teams and three VA Primary Care teams reported immediate delivery of a local virtual or telephone group using the manual. In this paper we describe the manual’s development and clinical recommendations for its application across geriatric care settings. Future evaluation will identify ways to meet longer-term social isolation and evolving mental health needs for this patient population as the pandemic continues.

Addressing COVID-19 Worry and Social Isolation in Home-Based Primary Care

10.31234/osf.io/yfkdx

Numerous anecdotal reports suggest that domestic violence has increased globally since the COVID-19 pandemic, but rarely are there cross-country empirical support for this claim. Using two unique datasets which comprises official domestic violence data from Southern China (N = 152 daily data points from January 1st to May 31st, 2020) and Google Trends data across four English-speaking countries (i.e., Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States; N = 728 daily data points from January 1st to June 30th, 2020), we test the association between daily confirmed cases of COVID-19 and daily reports of domestic violence. We find that daily new cases are positively associated with domestic violence in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, but not in China. However, one nuance of our findings in China is that this association is lagged. We speculate that it is because that China is the first to experience the pandemic during which many people were not acutely aware of or affected by COVID-19. These findings suggest that the COVID-19 health toll is beyond its direct costs on its infectees and provide insights into social policies on public health crises. Governments need to balance their COVID-19 responses with corresponding assistance toward women and children who might be at risk of domestic violence in this difficult time.

The Increase in COVID-19 Cases is Associated with Domestic Violence

Blue J Launches Free Tools to Help Determine COVID-19 Relief Eligibility

Blue J, the leading provider of AI-backed legal predictions, announced today the launch of its COVID-19 relief programs and credits guided analysis tools for the United States and Canada. Read More: DataRooms.com Embeds the dtSearch Engine to Enable Instant Searching across Terabytes of Virtual Data Room Content The COVID-19 tools help individuals and organizations identify the available relief programs and credits for which they may be eligible. Frequently updated to help users make relevant and timely decisions, the tools provide direct links outlining contact information, eligibility criteria and application process.

Blue J Launches Free Tools to Help Determine COVID-19 Relief Eligibility

Here’s how #CDNtech companies are pitching in during COVID-19

As the COVID-19 pandemic escalates in Canada and around the world, businesses are taking steps to help flatten the curve and support customers through new products, services, and free offerings. This list will outline what Canadian tech companies are offering during the outbreak. The list will be updated each Friday as more information comes in. Reach out via email so BetaKit can add to the list.

LIVE now: Independent SAGE's weekly briefing. Please join us for latest analysis & questions from the press & public. All welcome!

How can you safely take off your mask? Simply follow these four easy steps to prevent catching the virus!

Muscaria@conazole·19 AugReplying to @firefoxx66 and @zorinaqThat's probably what we're currently beginning to see in France (+ an increase in hospital and ICU admissions as well in the last few days)... https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rozierguillaume/covid-19/master/images/charts/france/heatmap_cas.jpeg…111markfoodyburton@markfoodyburton·20 AugSince we in France love recipes - maybe this one will appeal. Take population of 67M, Infect in some areas. Now mix for a month- ideally in bars and cafes. When well mixed, redistribute and re-mix all young people together, also turn the temperature down. Yum ...11FakeGregA@GregAlexander8·19 AugReplying to @firefoxx66this tweet is 4 hours old and this data is a month old :(1Beͫvͣaͬnͨd@zorinaq·19 AugMy latest heatmaps are updated on a weekly basis here:mbevand/florida-covid19-line-list-dataAnalyzes line list data for all of Florida's COVID-19 cases - mbevand/florida-covid19-line-list-datagithub.com1131 more replyLaurent Cimasoni@LCimasoni·19 AugReplying to @firefoxx66 and @zorinaqThe updated version is a bit less scary though11markfoodyburton@markfoodyburton·21 AugReplying to @firefoxx66 and @zorinaqI put a little (only) work into generating something similar from the French data set (as we are seemingly hurtling towards the outcome @firefoxx66 is suggesting).2markfoodyburton@markfoodyburton·21 AugLess data than would be nice. 'Middle age' group beginning to expand (as predicted).Tamara Silveira@tammarp·24 AugReplying to @firefoxx66 and @zorinaq@giiventre aqui migs

it's definitely worth considering a broad range of ideas...but does this not run into the same difficulties that plagued "shielding"?Quote TweetMiguel Hernán@_MiguelHernan · 22 Aug1/ Five months ago I asked about a #stratifiedlockdown to handle #COVID19. The idea was to restrict lockdowns to people over age 50 or with preexisting conditions while the rest of society lives a relatively normal life. Time to revisit this approach. https://twitter.com/_MiguelHernan/status/1239227279512829953?s=20

1What's so wrong with 'behavioural fatigue'? .t3_i88yi5 ._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #edeeef; } Close1Posted byu/hamilton_ian13 days ago

Wouldn't usually share such a big news item without verifying carefully. But @KarenGrepin is a close colleague & top Prof in Hong Kong, and extremely reliable in her tweets.Quote TweetKaren Grepin@KarenGrepin · 24 AugBig news out of Hong Kong: Colleagues at @hkumed claim to have documented first case of COVID-19 re-infection. twitter.com/cwylilian/stat…

UK: far/top right. #COVID19

Missing documentation and obsolete environments force participants in the Ten Years Reproducibility Challenge to get creative.

Challenge to scientists: does your ten-year-old code still run?

Convalescent plasma has shown to be beneficial for 35% of patients. This risk reduction figure - shown in chart below - is from @MayoClinic data from expanded access program that was analyzed by FDAA for the emergency use authorization announced today.

How can we navigate daily life during the pandemic? #Publichealth expert & epidemiologist @EpiEllie will be on @reddit_AMA this Thursday (8/27) at 12pm ET to answer all of your #COVID19-related questions. She'll discuss how to safely see friends and family, travel & more. @BUSPH

The world is in the middle of a global educational emergency. One billion children are out of school because of the Covid-19 crisis; of those, roughly 400 million have lost access to free school meals. Many young people are behind on learning and have lost the structure of a routine. For those living in abusive households, school was a safe space where they could access supportive adults. As countries learn to live with the reality of coronavirus, reopening schools is one of the largest challenges they face. Parents should be kept largely off-site, and teachers should be cautious around one another In the UK, the hardest part of this isn’t opening schools, but ensuring they stay open in the foreseeable future. As the experiences of Israel and several states in the US have shown, if cases jump quickly and community transmission is high, it becomes difficult to keep schools open. Continual outbreaks and cases of Covid-19 within schools can also dent the confidence of parents and teachers, and spur a move towards online learning: in the US, for example, only one in seven parents says their children are returning to school full-time.

The best way to keep schools open? Stop coronavirus entering them in the first place

The University reported a 31.3 percent positivity rate of COVID-19 tests last week — more than double the 13.6 percent positivity rate from the first week of class. 

UNC reports a 31 percent COVID-19 positivity rate for last week

Getting children back into school is a “moral duty”, Boris Johnson has declared, despite the open question of how well prepared UK schools are to prevent the spread of Covid-19 – especially with the chief medical officer for England warning that “we have probably reached near the limit or the limits of what we can do in terms of opening up society”. Yet much less is being said about the return of university students to face-to-face teaching this autumn. Many of the 2.5 million students in higher education, most of them undergraduates, will shortly be flooding into towns and cities far from home, more than half a million of them for the first time. They will come into contact with untold millions of local residents, but most closely with nearly half a million university employees, especially those whose job it is to teach them.

UK universities' promise of face-to-face teaching is risking academics' health

doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008136

Management strategies for control of vector-borne diseases, for example Zika or dengue, include using larvicide and/or adulticide, either through large-scale application by truck or plane or through door-to-door efforts that require obtaining permission to access private property and spray yards. The efficacy of the latter strategy is highly dependent on the compliance of local residents. Here we develop a model for vector-borne disease transmission between mosquitoes and humans in a neighborhood setting, considering a network of houses connected via nearest-neighbor mosquito movement. We incorporate large-scale application of adulticide via aerial spraying through a uniform increase in vector death rates in all sites, and door-to-door application of larval source reduction and adulticide through a decrease in vector emergence rates and an increase in vector death rates in compliant sites only, where control efficacies are directly connected to real-world experimentally measurable control parameters, application frequencies, and control costs. To develop mechanistic insight into the influence of vector motion and compliance clustering on disease controllability, we determine the the basic reproduction number R0 for the system, provide analytic results for the extreme cases of no mosquito movement, infinite hopping rates, and utilize degenerate perturbation theory for the case of slow but non-zero hopping rates. We then determine the application frequencies required for each strategy (alone and combined) in order to reduce R0 to unity, along with the associated costs. Cost-optimal strategies are found to depend strongly on mosquito hopping rates, levels of door-to-door compliance, and spatial clustering of compliant houses, and can include aerial spray alone, door-to-door treatment alone, or a combination of both. The optimization scheme developed here provides a flexible tool for disease management planners which translates modeling results into actionable control advice adaptable to system-specific details.

Managing disease outbreaks: The importance of vector mobility and spatially heterogeneous control

doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000737

For knowledge to benefit research and society, it must be trustworthy. Trustworthy research is robust, rigorous, and transparent at all stages of design, execution, and reporting. Assessment of researchers still rarely includes considerations related to trustworthiness, rigor, and transparency. We have developed the Hong Kong Principles (HKPs) as part of the 6th World Conference on Research Integrity with a specific focus on the need to drive research improvement through ensuring that researchers are explicitly recognized and rewarded for behaviors that strengthen research integrity. We present five principles: responsible research practices; transparent reporting; open science (open research); valuing a diversity of types of research; and recognizing all contributions to research and scholarly activity. For each principle, we provide a rationale for its inclusion and provide examples where these principles are already being adopted.

The Hong Kong Principles for assessing researchers: Fostering research integrity

Peer review is a cornerstone of modern scientific endeavor. However, there is grow-ing consensus that several limitations of the current peer review system, from lack ofincentives to reviewers to lack of transparency, risks to undermine its benefits. Here,we introduce the PRINCIPIAabframework for peer-review of scientific outputs (e.g.,papers, grant proposals or patents). The framework allows key players of the scientificecosystem – including existing publishing groups – to create and manage peer-reviewedjournals, by building a free market for reviews and publications. PRINCIPIA’s refereesare transparently rewarded according to their efforts and the quality of their reviews.PRINCIPIA also naturally allows to recognize the prestige of users and journals, withan intrinsic reputation system that does not depend on third-parties. PRINCIPIA re-balances the power between researchers and publishers, stimulates valuable assessmentsfrom referees, favors a fair competition between journals, and reduces the costs to accessresearch output and to publish