Handwashing Behavior Change Research and COVID-19

The comic explaining #DP3T Bluetooth contact tracing (also explains Apple-Google protocol) from @ncasenmare now available in 1) simplified one-pane v (img), 2) versions in French, German, Spanish, Thai & Finnish on the repo! Wanna translate it too?

Contacts in context: large-scale setting-specific social mixing matrices from the BBC Pandemic project

Social mixing patterns are crucial in driving transmission of infectious diseases and informing public health interventions to contain their spread. Age-specific social mixing is often inferred from surveys of self-recorded contacts which by design often have a very limited number of participants. In addition, such surveys are rare, so public health interventions are often evaluated by considering only one such study. Here we report detailed population contact patterns for United Kingdom based self-reported contact data from over 36,000 volunteers that participated in the massive citizen science project BBC Pandemic. The amount of data collected allows us generate fine-scale age-specific population contact matrices by context (home, work, school, other) and type (conversational or physical) of contact that took place. These matrices are highly relevant for informing prevention and control of new outbreaks, and evaluating strategies that reduce the amount of mixing in the population (such as school closures, social distancing, or working from home). In addition, they finally provide the possibility to use multiple sources of social mixing data to evaluate the uncertainty that stems from social mixing when designing public health interventions.

Automated contact tracing is not a coronavirus panacea

I think with all the excitement about using technology for contact tracing, as the product lead for TraceTogether, I feel compelled to call out the following section of the policy brief and white paper that we published to accompany the open-sourcing of the BlueTrace protocol and OpenTrace codebase.If you ask me whether any Bluetooth contact tracing system deployed or under development, anywhere in the world, is ready to replace manual contact tracing, I will say without qualification that the answer is, No. Not now and, even with the benefit of AI/ML and — God forbid — blockchain 😂 (throw whatever buzzword you want), not for the foreseeable future.There are critical factors (like ventilation — see below; update: or singing!) that a purely automated system will not have access to. You cannot “big data” your way out of a “no data” situation. Period.Any attempt to believe otherwise, is an exercise in hubris, and technology triumphalism. There are lives at stake. False positives and false negatives have real-life (and death) consequences. We use TraceTogether to supplement contact tracing — not replace it.

SOCRATES: An online tool leveraging a social contact data sharing initiative to assess mitigation strategies for COVID-19

Objective: Establishing a social contact data sharing initiative and an interactive tool to assess mitigation strategies for COVID-19. Results: We organized data sharing of published social contact surveys via online repositories and formatting guidelines. We analyzed this social contact data in terms of weighted social contact matrices, next generation matrices, relative incidence and R0. We incorporated location-specific isolation measures (e.g. school closure or telework) and capture their effect on transmission dynamics. All methods have been implemented in an online application based on R Shiny and applied to COVID-19 with age-specific susceptibility and infectiousness. Using our online tool with the available social contact data, we illustrate that social distancing could have a considerable impact on reducing transmission for COVID-19. The effect itself depends on assumptions made about disease-specific characteristics and the choice of intervention(s).

Virological assessment of hospitalized patients with COVID-2019

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an acute respiratory tract infection that emerged in late 20191,2. Initial outbreaks in China involved 13.8% cases with severe, and 6.1% with critical courses3. This severe presentation corresponds to the usage of a virus receptor that is expressed predominantly in the lung2,4. By causing an early onset of severe symptoms, this same receptor tropism is thought to have determined pathogenicity, but also aided the control, of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 20035. However, there are reports of COVID-19 cases with mild upper respiratory tract symptoms, suggesting the potential for pre- or oligosymptomatic transmission6–8. There is an urgent need for information on body site-specific virus replication, immunity, and infectivity. Here we provide a detailed virological analysis of nine cases, providing proof of active virus replication in upper respiratory tract tissues. Pharyngeal virus shedding was very high during the first week of symptoms (peak at 7.11 × 108 RNA copies per throat swab, day 4). Infectious virus was readily isolated from throat- and lung-derived samples, but not from stool samples, in spite of high virus RNA concentration. Blood and urine never yielded virus. Active replication in the throat was confirmed by viral replicative RNA intermediates in throat samples. Sequence-distinct virus populations were consistently detected in throat and lung samples from the same patient, proving independent replication. Shedding of viral RNA from sputum outlasted the end of symptoms. Seroconversion occurred after 7 days in 50% of patients (14 days in all), but was not followed by a rapid decline in viral load. COVID-19 can present as a mild upper respiratory tract illness. Active virus replication in the upper respiratory tract puts the prospects of COVID-19 containment in perspective.

The intention to share data after being diagnosed with COVID-19 is crucial for contact tracing apps to work! (Note for armchair epidemiologists: I always said "coronavirus" in the survey to avoid technical jargon https://twitter.com/markhumphries/status/1248214342618628096…) 7/16

This is not surprising, given that samples like this one tend to be more digitally literate than the general population (check @kmmunger's https://osf.io/3ncmk/). If we didn't get a high percentage, Bluetooth usability would be a big problem for contact tracing apps. 3/16

The last question was "Do you agree that healthcare authorities and phone companies must start sharing health, contact and location data to trace infections of Coronavirus?" The most frequent answer is "Neither agree nor disagree", with less than 20% disagreeing. 8/16

Are people willing to use contact tracing mobile phone apps for #COVID19 ? As a personal weekend project, I spent some money I got back from a canceled AirBnB booking in a quick and dirty survey. Results in my first Twitter thread ever. 1/16

For about 100 Euro I got 108 US respondents in SurveyMonkey. Not representative but at least roughly balanced in terms of gender and age. The first question was: "Are you able to turn on and off the Bluetooth connection of your smartphone?". 95% of the people say yes. 2/16

The second question was "Would you install an app on your smartphone to share your Bluetooth connection data to trace Coronavirus infections?" The majority of respondents said "definitely would" or "probably would", but still far from an ample majority. 4/16

The third question was the same but for GPS location data. Here the result is very similar to the case of Bluetooth connections asked before. This is somewhat surprising given that location data is more revealing than anonymized contacts through Bluetooth. 5/16

How bad would be a 50% penetration rate of contact tracing apps? From 50%, the app starts being effective to control an outbreak, but effective penetration should be above 60% to rely on contact tracing apps. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.10222 10/16

The fourth question was "If you were diagnosed with Coronavirus, would you allow your information to be shared with phone companies to search for people you might have infected?" For this, the intention is higher, with more than 60% saying that they would or probably would. 6/16

The second is the mandatory use of the app. If anonymity is guaranteed for app users (e.g. what https://pepp-pt.org aims at), this could be an option that does not threaten individual privacy rights. But it's important to have a long public discussion about this before! 13/16

This high frequency in the middle is surprising, given how polarizing this topic can be among experts. It also shows that a small minority of respondents are against the use of the data already owned by tech companies, something that @rcuevasrumin and @acrumin have proposed. 9/16

In any case, please take my armchair sociologist's survey with a big grain of salt. I hope this thread motivates sociologists to run a better-designed representative survey not just in the US (and also using another platform like MT or Qualtrics). 15/16

Note that the penetration in that plot is the effective rate. Not all phones would work, people forget to use the app, Bluetooth has errors, etc. If just the intention in a survey is about 50%, the effective rate would be insufficient given the simulations above. 11/16

I see two solutions to this problem. The first is a massive information and mobilization campaign to increase the adoption of the app. Scientific communication is critical for this. A good early example is this comic: https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/…. 12/16

For more content on the mandatory use idea, check @ccansu's article: https://medium.com/@cansucanca/why-mandatory-privacy-preserving-digital-contact-tracing-is-the-ethical-measure-against-covid-19-a0d143b7c3b6…. 14/16

To sum up, contact tracing is a promising technological approach to control outbreaks of #COVID19, but we need to keep its social component in mind if we want it to be effective! 16/16

Update on the thread! You should totally check this survey by @STWorg, it's exactly what I was talking about: https://stephanlewandowsky.github.io/UKsocialLicence/index.html… Take home message: Ask your colleagues before spending 100 bucks in a toy survey 17/16

Responding to Coronavirus: Resources and Support

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

Do you want to learn more about educational and child psychology? Our introductory Youtube playlist gives you a taster of the diverse nature of educational and child psychology.

BPS offers advice to schools, parents and carers to help children through the uncertainty of school closures

The British Psychological Society’s Division of Educational and Child Psychology (DECP) has published tips for schools, parents and carers dealing with the unprecedented school closures.

An introduction to Open Science for Health Psychology

Registration deadline: 12pm on 12th May The BPS Division of Health Psychology is delighted to facilitate a webinar providing an ‘Introduction to Open Science in Health Psychology’.The webinar will be co-facilitated by three world leading experts in the field of Open Science, and aims to provide an introduction to open science and its uses and implications for research.It focuses on providing an opportunity for attendees to increase their understanding of the applications of Open Science, particularly in relation to the fields of Psychology and Health Psychology.Where possible Webinars will be recorded to allow attendees access after the live session has taken place.Please note that there is no guarantee every event will be recorded, therefore we strongly advise those registered for the event to attend the live session.ObjectivesProvide an accessible opportunity for CPD, with a particular focus on people working in Health Psychology at all stages of their careersIncrease understanding of what Open Science is and its application for research, particularly in Health PsychologyIncrease understanding of the opportunities and challenges of Open Science for qualitative methodsLearning OutcomeAt this end of this webinar, you should have increased understanding of:What Open Science is and why it is important for research.The importance of Open Science for the profession of psychology, particularly Health Psychology.The opportunities and challenges of Open Science for research using qualitative methods

The Division of Clinical Psychology’s Faculty for Children, Young People and their Families (CYPF) has published tips for talking to children about illness, in light of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Advice on talking to children about illness

Opinion dynamics have attracted the interest of researchers from different fields. Local interactions among individuals create interesting dynamics for the system as a whole. Such dynamics are important from a variety of perspectives. Group decision making, successful marketing and constructing networks (in which consensus can be reached or prevented) are a few examples of existing or potential applications. The invention of the Internet has made the opinion fusion faster, unilateral, and at a whole different scale. Spread of fake news, propaganda, and election interferences have made it clear there is an essential need to know more about these dynamics. The emergence of new ideas in the field has accelerated over the last few years. In the first quarter of 2020, at least 50 research papers have emerged, either peer-reviewed and published or on pre-print outlets such as arXiv. In this paper, we summarize these ground-breaking ideas and their fascinating extensions, and introduce newly developed concepts.

Recent advances in opinion propagation dynamics: A 2020 Survey

2004.05286

Ever wondered about the "impact" of research on programming languages and software engineering? Political decisions affecting hundreds of millions are being taken based on thousands of lines of 13+ years old C code that allegedly nobody understands anymore. #COVID19 #cs

Association of Public Health Interventions With the Epidemiology of the COVID-19 Outbreak in Wuhan, China

Question  Was there an association of public health interventions with improved control of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China?Findings  In this cohort study that included 32 583 patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in Wuhan from December 8, 2019, through March 8, 2020, the institution of interventions including cordons sanitaire, traffic restriction, social distancing, home quarantine, centralized quarantine, and universal symptom survey was temporally associated with reduced effective reproduction number of SARS-CoV-2 (secondary transmission) and the number of confirmed cases per day across age groups, sex, and geographic regions.Meaning  A series of multifaceted public health interventions was temporally associated with improved control of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan and may inform public health policy in other countries and regions.

The Mental Health Consequences of COVID-19 and Physical Distancing: The Need for Prevention and Early Intervention

Since the first case of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was diagnosed in December 2019, it has swept across the world and galvanized global action. This has brought unprecedented efforts to institute the practice of physical distancing (called in most cases “social distancing”) in countries all over the world, resulting in changes in national behavioral patterns and shutdowns of usual day-to-day functioning. While these steps may be critical to mitigate the spread of this disease, they will undoubtedly have consequences for mental health and well-being in both the short and long term. These consequences are of sufficient importance that immediate efforts focused on prevention and direct intervention are needed to address the impact of the outbreak on individual and population level mental health.

The spread of COVID-19 is posing an unprecedented threat to health systems worldwide[1]. The fast propagation of the disease combined with the existence of covert contagions by asymptomatic individuals make the controlling of this disease particularly challenging. The key parameter to track the progression of the epidemics is the effective reproduction number R, defined as the number of secondary infections generated by an infected individual[2]. The suppression of the epidemics is directly related to this value, and is attained when R<1.Here, we find an analytical expression for R as a function of mobility restrictions and confinement measures, using an epidemic model tailored for COVID-19. This expression for R is an extremely useful tool to design containment policies that are able to suppress the epidemics. We applied our epidemic model for the case of Spain, successfully forecasting both the observed incidence in each region and the overload of the health system. The expression for R allowed us to determine the precise reduction of mobility kappa_0 needed to bend the curve of epidemic incidence, which turned out to be kappa_0 ≈ 0.7. This value, for the case of Spain, translates to a total lockdown with the exception of the mobility associated to essential services, a policy that was finally enforced on March 28.

Derivation of the effective reproduction number R for COVID-19 in relation to mobility restrictions and confinement

Hurry, Don’t Rush

Make no mistake: we need science right now. There’s a global problem whose solution lies squarely in the domain of building empirical knowledge about the natural world. This comes with something of a gold rush, both for money and for profile.But the historical precedent for bad scientific work wasting millions of dollars and hours is strong. The specific precedents for work that met an immediate need and looked cool, but ended up being revealed as desperately overhyped, are also substantial. And right now, instead of bad science just slowing down progress, it can fly straight to the heart of global policymaking on the run. This makes it not some milquetoast term we’d normally use, like “problematic”, but rather dangerous.I hope this doesn’t happen, but it already happens when the world is spinning on its normal axis. Right now, twisting out of control, it has the potential to both happen more and stack bodies.

The aim of this tutorial is to provide an introduction to data manipulation in R, primarily using tools from the tidyverse. Given that lots of people are currently moving their data collection procedures online, we will use an output file from Gorilla as an example. However, the tools should readily apply regardless of your data collection software.1 In this first part of the tutorial, we will cover the basics of extracting the relevant data from your output files. In Part 2, we will cover some extra tips and tricks for monitoring sample size during online data collection, scaling up the tools to more complex datasets, and re-organising your data flexibly.

Tutorial Home

Multilevel Correlations: A New Method for Common Problems

n this tutorial, we will introduce multilevel correlations (or hierarchical / random-effects correlations) and how to compute them using the new correlations package from the easystats suite.

Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing

DP^3T

The CoMuNe Lab's infodemic data set (250+ millions tweets) used to feed the COVID-19 Infodemic Observatory (https://covid19obs.fbk.eu/) is quickly growing on a daily basis. Raw tweets cannot be shared, by Twitter policy, and our list of tweet IDs would require a huge computing efforts in terms of hydration (about 32 days required, to date) and storage (about 2 Terabytes, to date), clearly not affordable by all researchers worldwide that may lack the adequate computational infrastructure. However, to favor the fight against #COVID19 infodemic, we decided to call for collaborations: we will collect your proposals and accurately evaluate them, to select up to 10 projects to join with our processed data or with data to be processed ad hoc for your requirements. Note that this is not a hackathon.Please, submit wisely and provide us with all the materials you think will support your application. We will accept request on a rolling basis, until the 10 projects will be selected. Selection criteria: 1) soundness, 2) effectiveness, 3) readiness (i.e., priority will be given to projects already started and proposing to be finalized by integrating our data within the next 3-6 months). Larger teams are not necessarily favored, but single-proponent projects are discouraged.

Proposal for collaboration

2004.05222

Give more data, awareness and control to individual citizens, and they will help COVID-19 containment

The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the phase 2 of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by the app are all sent to a nation-wide server, raises concerns about citizens' privacy and needlessly strong digital surveillance, thus alerting us to the need to minimize personal data collection and avoiding location tracking. We advocate the conceptual advantage of a decentralized approach, where both contact and location data are collected exclusively in individual citizens' "personal data stores", to be shared separately and selectively, voluntarily, only when the citizen has tested positive for COVID-19, and with a privacy preserving level of granularity. This approach better protects the personal sphere of citizens and affords multiple benefits: it allows for detailed information gathering for infected people in a privacy-preserving fashion; and, in turn this enables both contact tracing, and, the early detection of outbreak hotspots on more finely-granulated geographic scale. Our recommendation is two-fold. First to extend existing decentralized architectures with a light touch, in order to manage the collection of location data locally on the device, and allow the user to share spatio-temporal aggregates - if and when they want, for specific aims - with health authorities, for instance. Second, we favour a longer-term pursuit of realizing a Personal Data Store vision, giving users the opportunity to contribute to collective good in the measure they want, enhancing self-awareness, and cultivating collective efforts for rebuilding society.

Research has shown that we touch our faces far more often than we may realize and this creates a major path for the spread of the disease.  Behavioral scientists have made recommendations based on empirical evidence on how to reduce the number of times you touch your face. More information about this project is here and here. We have created an infographic with these tips. And with help from our many friends and colleagues around the world (see below), we are working on translating the information to as many languages as possible. Behavioral changes are critically needed to reduce the spread of coronavirus. This is a start so please share the information!

Reduce face touching

Please join our upcoming webinar!

Right now, all eyes are on an urgent science issue and its effects on our society. While everyone has a role to play in reducing the spread of the virus, scientists have unique opportunities to respond to the crisis in impactful ways. For example, some scientists might volunteer their lab or data analysis skills. Regardless of discipline, researchers may find opportunities to pivot their research agenda to address timely and relevant questions. And others might serve as voices for science to amplify evidence, reduce the spread of misinformation, and advocate for science-informed approaches to managing the pandemic. This online panel discussion will include researchers from different disciplines who will share ideas for scientists looking to respond in the current moment.

Managing COVID-19 concerns for people with OCD

Five strategies for helping patients during the COVID-19 public health crisis.

COVID-19 Free Articles from APA Journals

APA Publishing is grateful for your leadership and is committed to providing you with the resources you need to carry out your work. This free collection includes relevant psychological research published across the APA Journals portfolio. We will update this collection on an ongoing basis.

A regular workout was shown to ease depression and lift moods.

Feeling Down? Anxious? Hostile? A 4-Day-a-Week Exercise Regimen May Help

The Science of Helping Out

During a crisis, the people who cope best are those who help others.

The sudden, short-lived feeling of anxiety, shortness of breath and disabling fear can be confused with symptoms of coronavirus. Here’s what to do about it.

How to Manage Panic Attacks

Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course Using R and Stan

Mental health effects of school closures during COVID-19

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic—and the social distancing measures that many countries have implemented—have caused disruptions to daily routines. As of April 8, 2020, schools have been suspended nationwide in 188 countries, according to UNESCO. Over 90% of enrolled learners (1·5 million young people) worldwide are now out of education. The UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay warned that “the global scale and speed of the current educational disruption is unparalleled”.For children and adolescents with mental health needs, such closures mean a lack of access to the resources they usually have through schools. In a survey by the mental health charity YoungMinds, which included 2111 participants up to age 25 years with a mental illness history in the UK, 83% said the pandemic had made their conditions worse. 26% said they were unable to access mental health support; peer support groups and face-to-face services have been cancelled, and support by phone or online can be challenging for some young people.

It is urgent to understand the future of severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission. We used estimates of seasonality, immunity, and cross-immunity for betacoronaviruses OC43 and HKU1 from time series data from the USA to inform a model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. We projected that recurrent wintertime outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 will probably occur after the initial, most severe pandemic wave. Absent other interventions, a key metric for the success of social distancing is whether critical care capacities are exceeded. To avoid this, prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary into 2022. Additional interventions, including expanded critical care capacity and an effective therapeutic, would improve the success of intermittent distancing and hasten the acquisition of herd immunity. Longitudinal serological studies are urgently needed to determine the extent and duration of immunity to SARS-CoV-2. Even in the event of apparent elimination, SARS-CoV-2 surveillance should be maintained since a resurgence in contagion could be possible as late as 2024.

Projecting the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 through the postpandemic period

COVID-19: health literacy is an underestimated problem

Rapid development of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) into a pandemic has called for people to acquire and apply health information, and adapt their behaviour at a fast pace.1Zarocostas J How to fight an infodemic.Lancet. 2020; 395: 676Google Scholar Health communication intended to educate people about the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and how to avoid getting or spreading the infection has become widely available. Most valuable information is created in an easy-to-understand manner that offers simple and practical solutions, such as washing hands, maintaining physical distance2Prem K Liu Y Russell TW et al.The effect of control strategies to reduce social mixing on outcomes of the COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan, China: a modelling study.Lancet Public Health. 2020; (published online March 25.)https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(20)30073-6Google Scholar, and where to find information about the latest recommendations, and advice. Unfortunately, there is also complex, contradictory, and false information.1Zarocostas J How to fight an infodemic.Lancet. 2020; 395: 676Google Scholar Similarly, individuals are considered able to acquire, understand, and use this information in a sound and ethical manner—ie, to be health literate.

The HIV pandemic provides lessons for the response to the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic: no vaccine is available for either and there are no licensed pharmaceuticals for COVID-19, just as there was not for HIV infection in the early years. Population behaviour will determine the pandemic trajectory of COVID-19,1Anderson RM Heesterbeek H Klinkenberg D Hollingsworth TD How will country-based mitigation measures influence the course of the COVID-19 epidemic?.Lancet. 2020; 395: 931-934Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (3) Google Scholar just as it did for HIV.

Three lessons for the COVID-19 response from pandemic HIV

COVID-19: Navigating Uncertainties Together

The COVID-19 outbreak, caused by the newly described viral pathogen SARS-CoV-2, is having a devastating effect on the scientific community. China has been battling the virus for months and provides a bellwether for the impact we are starting to experience on global research. Throughout that country, experimental facilities were essentially shut down. With travel restrictions imposed to prevent further spread of the coronavirus, laboratory members were unable to leave their hometowns. While students and postdocs from some areas are now gradually returning to their research projects, personnel maximums have been put in place restricting the number of people who can work simultaneously in any one location. Those returning undergo mandatory two-week quarantines in a contracted hotel before rejoining their laboratories. The slow-down in productivity is impacting not only the rate, but also the reporting of science. Editorially, at Cell we have seen delays in timelines for manuscript submissions and resubmissions.

COVID-19 is far more than just a data science issue—it’s a massive public health problem that has resulted in many deaths and is throwing a harsh light onto how we structure our society when it comes to important things like the availability and affordability of healthcare, worker’s rights, and even freedom of movement.But as a data scientist, I do think it’s important to look at the situation through a data science perspective. We’ve all seen curves on Twitter—exponential, flattened, and otherwise—plotted in Excel and been reassured by them or scared by them or wondered whether we could trust them. That’s a data science question, and there are many similar ones that I want to address here, in the hopes that what I write will inspire others to think about the data and feel more empowered about what to do in this situation.

COVID-19 Is a Data Science Issue

Keeping the Wheels of the Scientific Endeavor Turning during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Accordingly, Cell Systems is responding to the world around us and changing our editorial practice during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are committed to keeping the wheels of the scientific endeavor turning. Experimental labs may lie quiet, but that doesn’t mean that the thinking, analysis, and writing that are critical to discovery and understanding can’t go on. Even more importantly, we are committed to supporting public health measures designed to keep people home unless their work is vital to society or immediately important to coordinated efforts to fight COVID-19.

Over the past few weeks, we have seen a surge in need for access to research expertise as the UK Parliament engages with the COVID-19 outbreak.  In this rapidly evolving situation, Parliament needs quick access to researchers who can provide expert insights relating to both Coronavirus and the wider situation.

COVID-19 Outbreak Expert Database

Evolution of the interpersonal conflict paradigm

Using Brunswik’s (1952) lens model framework, Hammond (1965) proposed interpersonal conflict theory to explainthe nature, source, and resolution of disagreement or “cognitive conflict” between parties performing judgment tasks. Anearly review by Brehmer (1976) highlighted the potential of this approach in, for example, understanding the structureof cognitive conflicts, and the effect of task and person variables on judgment policy change and conflict resolution.However, our bibliographic and content reviews from 1976 to the present day demonstrate that research on cognitiveconflict using the lens model has declined sharply, while research on “task conflict” has grown dramatically. Therehas also been a shift to less theoretical precision and methodological rigor. We discuss possible reasons for thesedevelopments, and suggest ways in which lens model research on cognitive conflict can be revitalized by borrowingfrom recent theoretical and methodological advances in the field of judgment and decision making.

COVID-19: Does the British public condone cell phone data being used to monitor social distancing?

Countries that have managed to “flatten the curve” without rigorous stay-at-home policies (e.g., Singapore), have employed tracking via smartphone apps to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. Tracking allows government agencies to observe who you have been in contact with and when this contact occurred, thereby rapidly implementing appropriate measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19. The effectiveness of collocation tracking relies on the willingness of the population to support such measures. Gaining the social license – broad community acceptance beyond formal legal requirements – for collocation tracking requires the perceived public health benefits to outweigh concerns of personal privacy, security, and any potential risk of harm.

Using a delay-adjusted case fatality ratio to estimate under-reporting

Aim To estimate the percentage of symptomatic COVID-19 cases reported in different countries using case fatality ratio estimates based on data from the ECDC, correcting for delays between confirmation-and-death.

Metaphors pervade discussions of abstract concepts and complex issues: ideas are ‘light bulbs’, crime is a ‘virus’, and cancer is an ‘enemy’ in a ‘war’.At a process level, metaphors, like analogies, involve structure mapping, in which relational structure from the source domain is leveraged for thinking about the target domain.Metaphors influence how people think about the topics they describe by shaping how people attend to, remember, and process information.The effects of metaphor on reasoning are not simply the result of lexical priming.Metaphors can covertly influence how people think. That is, people are not always aware that they have been influenced by a metaphor.

How Linguistic Metaphor Scaffolds Reasoning

Visuocortical tuning to a threat-related feature persists after extinction and consolidation of conditioned fear

Neurons in the visual cortex sharpen their orientation tuning as humans learn aversive contingencies. A stimulus orientation (CS+) that reliably predicts an aversive noise (unconditioned stimulus: US) is selectively enhanced in lower-tier visual cortex, while similar unpaired orientations (CS−) are inhibited. Here, we examine in male volunteers how sharpened visual processing is affected by fear extinction learning (where no US is presented), and how fear and extinction memory undergo consolidation one day after the original learning episode. Using steady-state visually evoked potentials from electroencephalography in a fear generalization task, we found that extinction learning prompted rapid changes in orientation tuning: Both conditioned visuocortical and skin conductance responses to the CS+ were strongly reduced. Next-day re-testing (delayed recall) revealed a brief but precise return-of-tuning to the CS+ in visual cortex accompanied by a brief, more generalized return-of-fear in skin conductance. Explorative analyses also showed persistent tuning to the threat cue in higher visual areas, 24 h after successful extinction, outlasting peripheral responding. Together, experience-based changes in the sensitivity of visual neurons show response patterns consistent with memory consolidation and spontaneous recovery, the hallmarks of long-term neural plasticity.

In the United States, interventions that cost less than $100,000 per [quality-adjusted life year] gained are often considered “cost effective,” although the precise number is somewhat controversial. . . . The Italian National Health Institute pegged the median age of death from COVID-19 in Italy at 80.5. This is consistent with early data from the United States. . . . The average 80-year old in the United States has a life expectancy of about 9 years, suggesting that on average, a death averted will “buy” 9 extra years of life. In QALY-estimations, this number needs to be adjusted for the “quality of the years”. In Italy, 99% of deaths had an underlying pathology that needs to be incorporated in QALY adjustments. If we use diabetes as a reasonable proxy for the many chronic diseases, we would adjust the 9 years down to 7.8 years or QALYs. In other words: the average loss per person of quality-adjusted life years is 7.8. . . . According to a CDC scenario analysis, the expected range of deaths is from 200,000 to 1.7 million people. This implies the pandemic, if unchecked, will lead to a loss of between 1.56 million and 13.26 million QALYs.

Another COVID Cost-Benefit Analysis

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may develop when mechanisms for making accurate distinctions about threat relevance have gone awry. Generalization across conceptually related objects has been hypothesized based on clinical observation in PTSD, but the neural mechanisms remain unexplored. Recent trauma-exposed military veterans (n = 46) were grouped into PTSD (n = 23) and non-PTSD (n = 23). Participants learned to generalize fear across conceptual categories (animals or tools) of semantically related items that were partially reinforced by shock during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Conditioned fear learning was quantified by shock expectancy and skin conductance response (SCR). Relative to veteran controls, PTSD subjects exhibited a stronger neural response associated with fear generalization to the reinforced object category in the striatum, anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala, occipitotemporal cortex, and insula (Z > 2.3; p < 0.05; whole-brain corrected). Based on SCR, both groups generalized the shock contingency to the reinforced conceptual category, but learning was not significantly different between groups. We found that PTSD was associated with an enhanced neural response in fronto-limbic, midline, and occipitotemporal regions to a learned representation of threat that is based on previously established conceptual knowledge of the relationship between basic-level exemplars within a semantic category. Behaviorally, veterans with PTSD were somewhat slower to differentiate threat and safety categories as compared with trauma-exposed veteran controls owing in part to an initial overgeneralized behavioral response to the safe category. These results have implications for understanding how fear spreads across semantically related concepts in PTSD.