You are invited to complete this form and contribute to a project led and funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Mental Health Translational Research Collaboration (MH-TRC). The MH-TRC is a UK-wide network of 14 centres of excellence in mental health research that facilitates collaboration. It is led by chair Professor Matthew Hotopf and deputy chair Professor John Geddes. This website is hosting the survey on behalf of the MH-TRC. 

COVID-19 and Mental Health Studies Register 

10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30401-1

Global health scholars have criticised the Emergency Committee process as lacking transparency, using “irrelevant considerations, undue influence and political interference”,5Eccleston-Turner M Kamradt-Scott A Transparency in IHR emergency committee decision making: the case for reform.BMJ Glob Hlth. 2019; 4e001618PubMed Google Scholar and delaying declaration when International Health Regulations criteria have been met.

When does a major outbreak become a Public Health Emergency of International Concern?

Bei der epidemiologischen Abklärung geht es darum, darzustellen, wie sich ein Krankheitsausbruch innerhalb der Bevölkerung verbreitet: Dafür versucht man, Quellen der Infektion bzw. Übertragungsketten der Fälle durch persönliche Befragungen von erkrankten bzw. positiv getesteten Personen (= Fällen) zu identifizieren. Wenn man weiß, wie sich die Krankheit in der Bevölkerung verbreitet, können Maßnahmen gesetzt werden, die am wahrscheinlichsten dazu beitragen, die Verbreitung einzudämmen oder zu verlangsamen

Epidemiologische Abklärung am Beispiel COVID-19

To argue that predictions are “overrated” is simply bizarre

No, predictions are not overrated. On some scientists’ strange attitude toward philosophy

10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30428-X

When children are little, they like to pose dilemmas as “would you rather” questions that involve difficult trade-offs. Would you rather fight an elephant-sized duck or five human-sized rhinos? Would you rather have a runny nose for a month or dry eyes? The options are not only both undesirable, but also incomparable. These questions are how we might think of some of the dilemmas created by the COVID-19 pandemic, which presents us with difficult trade-offs in equity, economics, public health, and civil liberties.

COVID-19: when should quarantine be enforced?

The government’s disease-fighting agency is conflating viral and antibody tests, compromising a few crucial metrics that governors depend on to reopen their economies. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, and other states are doing the same.

‘How Could the CDC Make That Mistake?’

Researchers say that if the UK had imposed lockdown seven days earlier, its death toll would be on a par with 8,000 in Germany

Earlier lockdown could have prevented three-quarters of UK coronavirus deaths, modelling suggests

10.1002/9781119399926.ch13

In general, data visualization, especially advanced data visualization, has been viewed by practitioners from various disciplines as a powerful tool with the capacity to highlight the most important elements or key issues to improve understanding of the provided information. This chapter reviews the research on traditional static data visualization as well as advanced computer‐mediated interactive data visualization that has been conducted in the area of health and risk communication. Like traditional data visualizations, there are numerous types of interactive data visualization that have been adopted for presenting various types of health‐ and risk‐related information to the general public. The chapter discusses some of the theoretical frameworks that have been adopted in research on data visualization for health and risk communication. In health and risk communication research, a popular theoretical lens used to explain and predict the effectiveness and/or ineffectiveness of fear appeals is the extended parallel process model.

Data Visualization for Health and Risk Communication

“Human challenge trials” may be able to speed up vaccine testing and rollout — if we clear some hurdles to make them work.

How exposing healthy volunteers to Covid-19 for vaccine testing would work

The UK is trialling its smartphone app to assist with contact tracing. The government is full of enthusiasm and the Isle of Wight is the guinea pig. But for all the fanfare and faith in its potential, is the right kind of tracing being done? And are we missing the human touch?

Why we need the human touch in contact tracing for coronavirus

CMU Researchers Say Sophisticated, Orchestrated Bot Campaigns Aim To Sow Divide

Nearly Half Of The Twitter Accounts Discussing ‘Reopening America’ May Be Bots

The COVID-19 crisis has challenged all sectors of society, including science. The crisis demands an all-out scientific response if it is to be mastered with minimal damage. This means that we, as a community of scientists, need to think about how we can adapt to the moment in order to be maximally beneficial. How can we quickly and reliably deliver an evidence base for the many, diverse questions that behavioral science can inform?

From a tweet to Reddit and beyond: The road to a global behavioral science SWAT team

A Swedish study found that just 7.3 percent of Stockholmers developed COVID-19 antibodies by late April, which could fuel concern that a decision not to lock down Sweden against the pandemic may bring little herd immunity in the near future.

Swedish antibody study shows long road to immunity as COVID-19 toll mounts

Let’s again start with the WHY: we are developing a Corona-Warn-App to minimize time from a person being tested positive (index case) to being informed about a positive test result. That way, the person tested positive is hopefully not infecting anyone anymore. We do that by digitalizing the process from doctor to lab and back to the patient minimize time to inform citizens who were close to the index case for a certain amount time maximize the reach of the notification to citizens an index case was close to (e.g. on the train, in a restaurant, or similar) but does not personally know

COVID-19: What the Technical Foundation of the Corona-Warn-App in Germany looks like

What I do want to do: cast this episode as just one entry in an increasingly long ledger of high-profile and dramatically undercooked scientific papers (and it really is dealer’s choice for which one you pick at this point) that have made a good few people question the role of preprints in scientific life — a position which, as someone who wrote an article literally called Why I Love Preprints, I find totally understandable and justified.Because this is now a serious problem.

Preprints Aren’t The Problem — WE Are The Problem

More than 1,200 California pastors say they will resume in-person services this month in defiance of Governor Gavin Newsom’s stay-at-home order to slow the spread of coronavirus.

California: 1,200 pastors say they will defy state order and resume services

I find a gulf in perceptions between experts and nonexperts. Many Americans believe that we are now emerging from the pandemic and that, as President Trump says, we can see light at the end of the tunnel. Yet many epidemiologists, while acknowledging how little they know, are deeply apprehensive about a big second wave this fall, more brutal than anything we’ve endured so far.That mix of humility and apprehensiveness seems the best guide as we devise policy to survive a plague. Hope for the best while preparing for the worst.

Let’s Remember That the Coronavirus Is Still a Mystery

10.1108/SHR-03-2016-0024

Purpose: This paper aims to 1) identify strategies used by successful teleworkers to create and maintain boundaries between work and home, and 2) determine how these strategies relate to employee preferences for segmentation or integration of work and home. Design/methodology/approach: Forty in-depth, face-to-face interviews were conducted with employees working from home either occasionally (occasional teleworkers), between 20-50% of the workweek (partial teleworkers), or the majority of the time (full teleworkers). Findings: Teleworkers use physical, temporal, behavioural and communicative strategies to recreate boundaries similar to those found in office environments. While teleworkers can generally develop strategies that align boundaries to their preferences for segmentation or integration, employees with greater job autonomy and control are better able to do so. Research limitations: A limitation of this research is its potential lack of generalizability to teleworkers in organizations with “always-on” cultures, who may experience greater pressure to allow work to permeate the home boundary. Practical implications: These findings can encourage organizations to proactively assess employee preferences for boundary permeability before entering a teleworking arrangement. The boundary management tactics identified can be used to provide teleworkers struggling to establish comfortable boundaries with tangible ideas to regulate interactions between home and work. Originality/value: This research makes a significant contribution to practitioner literature by applying a boundary management framework to the practice of teleworking, which is being adopted by organizations with increasing frequency.

Strategies for successful telework: how effective employees manage work/home boundaries

The era of peak globalisation is over. For those of us not on the front line, clearing the mind and thinking how to live in an altered world is the task at hand.

Why this crisis is a turning point in history

As the NHS and HSE can’t deliver our Stress Control classes in the community just now, Dr Jim White will, instead, live-stream the classes, free-of-charge, starting on Monday 11th May. You can watch the sessions either in the afternoon or evening. Click here to get all the dates. To find out more about Stress Control click here All you need to successfully complete this class is to watch each of the six sessions, read the booklets and use the relaxation and mindfulness. You can find the sessions on YouTube. Click the button below or search for ‘Stress Control 2020’ to access our YouTube channel where the classes will be available to view only at the scheduled times. If you click the Subscribe button on our YouTube page, you should be kept up to date with the latest videos when logged in to YouTube

Stress Control class

Google, Apple and researchers partner to build more secure and effective tools, but poor adoption could blunt efficacy.

Coronavirus contact-tracing apps: can they slow the spread of COVID-19?

Led by the Silicon Valley tech giants, more and more companies are extending their timelines for remote work — and some are weighing letting employees work from home forever.

Companies weigh the potential of permanent work-from-home

RT @monicarhor: This makes me deeply sad. Is this what we want to send our kids back to?

10.1038/s41558-020-0797-x

Government policies during the COVID-19 pandemic have drastically altered patterns of energy demand around the world. Many international borders were closed and populations were confined to their homes, which reduced transport and changed consumption patterns. Here we compile government policies and activity data to estimate the decrease in CO2 emissions during forced confinements. Daily global CO2 emissions decreased by –17% (–11 to –25% for ±1σ) by early April 2020 compared with the mean 2019 levels, just under half from changes in surface transport. At their peak, emissions in individual countries decreased by –26% on average. The impact on 2020 annual emissions depends on the duration of the confinement, with a low estimate of –4% (–2 to –7%) if prepandemic conditions return by mid-June, and a high estimate of –7% (–3 to –13%) if some restrictions remain worldwide until the end of 2020. Government actions and economic incentives postcrisis will likely influence the global CO2 emissions path for decades.

Temporary reduction in daily global CO2 emissions during the COVID-19 forced confinement

Simulators that can rapidly test trillions of options would accelerate the slow and costly process of human clinical trials.

AI-Powered Biotech Can Help Deploy a Vaccine In Record Time

10.1186/1471-2288-9-85

BackgroundIn biometric practice, researchers often apply a large number of different methods in a "trial-and-error" strategy to get as much as possible out of their data and, due to publication pressure or pressure from the consulting customer, present only the most favorable results. This strategy may induce a substantial optimistic bias in prediction error estimation, which is quantitatively assessed in the present manuscript. The focus of our work is on class prediction based on high-dimensional data (e.g. microarray data), since such analyses are particularly exposed to this kind of bias.MethodsIn our study we consider a total of 124 variants of classifiers (possibly including variable selection or tuning steps) within a cross-validation evaluation scheme. The classifiers are applied to original and modified real microarray data sets, some of which are obtained by randomly permuting the class labels to mimic non-informative predictors while preserving their correlation structure.ResultsWe assess the minimal misclassification rate over the different variants of classifiers in order to quantify the bias arising when the optimal classifier is selected a posteriori in a data-driven manner. The bias resulting from the parameter tuning (including gene selection parameters as a special case) and the bias resulting from the choice of the classification method are examined both separately and jointly.ConclusionsThe median minimal error rate over the investigated classifiers was as low as 31% and 41% based on permuted uninformative predictors from studies on colon cancer and prostate cancer, respectively. We conclude that the strategy to present only the optimal result is not acceptable because it yields a substantial bias in error rate estimation, and suggest alternative approaches for properly reporting classification accuracy.

Optimal classifier selection and negative bias in error rate estimation: an empirical study on high-dimensional prediction

Sweden’s highly contested response to Covid-19 left much of the economy open. Even so, the country is now headed for its worst recession since World War II.

Sweden in ‘Very Deep Economic Crisis’ Despite Soft Lockdown

Great paper by @nataliexdean et al., which models #reopening and the #secondwave. They show that moderate #ContactTracing which identifies just 50% of symptomatic infections and 40% of their contacts is enough to keep the second wave down, though not to quickly eradicate disease.

Maybe it's time for a 'worst COVID-19 study' competition. p > 0.05 = no effect fallacy difference between significant and non-significant is itself not significant unbelievably large effect sizes small n correlational study with huge confounds 0.04 < p < 0.06

I accept individuals have different views and opinions on schools reopening. Both sides should watch this. I might just help.

UK researchers believe blood markers may help them identify those most at risk

Doctors raise hopes of blood test for children with coronavirus-linked syndrome

Main points Within this bulletin, we refer to the number of coronavirus (COVID-19) infections within the community population; community in this instance refers to private households, and it excludes those in hospitals, care homes or other institutional settings. At any given time between 27 April and 10 May 2020, it is estimated that an average of 0.27% of the community population had COVID-19 (95% confidence interval: 0.17% to 0.41%). It is estimated that an average of 148,000 people in England had COVID-19 during this time (95% confidence interval: 94,000 to 222,000). For individuals working in patient-facing healthcare or resident-facing social care roles, 1.33% tested positive for COVID-19 (95% confidence interval: 0.39% to 3.28%); of those reporting not working in these roles, 0.22% tested positive for COVID-19 (95% confidence interval: 0.13% to 0.35%) There is no evidence of differences in the proportions testing positive between the age categories 2 to 19, 20 to 49, 50 to 69 and 70 years and over.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey pilot: England, 14 May 2020

Data on viral load, as estimated by real-time RT-PCR threshold cycle values from 3,712COVID-19 patients were analysed to examine the relationship between patient age andSARS-CoV-2 viral load. Analysis of variance of viral loads in patients of different age categoriesfound no significant difference between any pair of age categories including children. Inparticular, these data indicate that viral loads in the very young do not differ significantly fromthose of adults. Based on these results, we have to caution against an unlimited re-opening ofschools and kindergartens in the present situation. Children may be as infectious as adults.

An analysis of SARS-CoV-2 viral load by patient age

Danish transition out of lockdown has become the model for Boris Johnson’s government as it tries to convince teachers to return

Split classes, outdoor lessons: what Denmark can teach England about reopening schools after Covid-19

10.1126/science.abb8001

Intense non-pharmaceutical interventions were put in place in China to stop transmission of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19). As transmission intensifies in other countries, the interplay between age, contact patterns, social distancing, susceptibility to infection, and COVID-19 dynamics remains unclear. To answer these questions, we analyze contact surveys data for Wuhan and Shanghai before and during the outbreak and contact tracing information from Hunan Province. Daily contacts were reduced 7-8-fold during the COVID-19 social distancing period, with most interactions restricted to the household. We find that children 0-14 years are less susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection than adults 15-64 years of age (odds ratio 0.34, 95%CI 0.24-0.49), while in contrast, individuals over 65 years are more susceptible to infection (odds ratio 1.47, 95%CI: 1.12-1.92). Based on these data, we build a transmission model to study the impact of social distancing and school closure on transmission. We find that social distancing alone, as implemented in China during the outbreak, is sufficient to control COVID-19. While proactive school closures cannot interrupt transmission on their own, they can reduce peak incidence by 40-60% and delay the epidemic.

Changes in contact patterns shape the dynamics of the COVID-19 outbreak in China

Some studies show pupils are less likely to become ill if infected, while others show they are as infectious as adults

Scientists divided over coronavirus risk to children if schools reopen

Doctors say teachers in England ‘absolutely right’ to prioritise testing over 1 June return

BMA backs teaching unions' opposition to schools reopening

Michael Gove has insisted England's schools are safe to reopen, but acknowledged that "you can never eliminate risk".

Coronavirus: Schools safe to reopen, Michael Gove insists

In this report, we present initial evidence on how children are spending their time during the lockdown, with a focus on home learning activities and the home learning resources available in different families. This evidence is based on a new survey, specially designed by researchers at IFS and the Institute of Education (IoE). The survey was completed online by over 4,000 parents of children aged 4–15 between Wednesday 29 April and Tuesday 12 May 2020.

Learning during the lockdown: real-time data on children’s experiences during home learning

UK could have reduced R much further by implementing contact tracing during lockdown & brought the total number of cases right down, making it much safer for schools to go back. But we haven't, and still have by far the highest number of cases and deaths per day in Europe... 31/

This comes onto a broader point. It is 18 weeks since @WHO declared a #PublicHealthEmergency & 7 weeks into #lockdown. And yet there is still no community #ContactTracing. This paper shows how even moderate contact tracing brings case numbers down. https://twitter.com/ScienceShared/status/1262320191872131073?s=20… 30/

We can't draw conclusions by comparing UK w/ Denmark as the situations are so different (100-1000 fold difference in #COVID19 pop prevalence). @TheBMA and teaching unions are right to say "Until we have got case numbers much lower we shouldn't consider re-opening schools." 29/

... (likely closer to 20,000 true cases) a day & hundreds of deaths a day. The massive difference in the prevalence of #COVID19 between the UK & Denmark means the risk of infection to children (and their contacts) in Denmark is much lower when compared to the risk in the UK. 28/

What should the UK do? The UK gov seems to be using Denmark as evidence that opening schools is safe. However the situation there is very different from the UK. They have <100 cases a day & recently reported 0 COVID deaths in a day, whilst UK has ~3500 confirmed cases... 27/

@NYGovCuomo: "We are still learning so much about #COVID19 & the more we learn the worse it seems to get. Whilst the disease is so prevalent in the pop (NY/UK) we shouldn't be risking our children when we know so little."

With such little consensus, this now turns into risk assessment and ultimately a political decision, in which the individual risk to children & teachers (& parents) is weighed up against the value of children being in school (and ofc many other things but these are main 2). 25/

And this is what it basically comes down to. There is no consensus view amongst experts. There is little strong evidence for either side, and much of it is contrasting. Can the UK afford to risk it? 24/

... normally healthy children being in ICU/dying and can have long-term cardiac complications. The disease shows ~4 weeks after initial infection & so likely to see cases increase. We are finding more out about this every day, but more studies (time) are needed.