Music: Tom Misch & Yussef Dayes — ‘Tidal Wave’
In race for a coronavirus vaccine, an Oxford University lab leaps ahead
The New York Times reports: In the worldwide race for a vaccine to stop the coronavirus, the laboratory sprinting fastest is at Oxford University. Most other teams have had to start with small clinical trials of a few hundred participants to demonstrate safety. But scientists at the university’s Jenner Institute had a head start on a vaccine, having proved in previous trials that similar inoculations — including one last year against an earlier coronavirus — were harmless to humans. That…
Trump’s intelligence briefing book repeatedly cited virus threat in January and February
The Washington Post reports: U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials. The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments…
The more we learn about the coronavirus, the harder it is to understand
David Wallace-Wells writes: We are now almost six months into this pandemic, which began in November in Wuhan, with 50,000 Americans dead and 200,000 more around the world. If each of those deaths is a data point, together they represent a quite large body of evidence from which to form a clear picture of the pandemic threat. Early in the epidemic, the coronavirus was seen as a variant of a familiar family of disease, not a mysterious ailment, however infectious…
Halt destruction of nature or suffer even worse pandemics, say world’s top scientists
The Guardian reports: The coronavirus pandemic is likely to be followed by even more deadly and destructive disease outbreaks unless their root cause – the rampant destruction of the natural world – is rapidly halted, the world’s leading biodiversity experts have warned. “There is a single species responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic – us,” they said. “Recent pandemics are a direct consequence of human activity, particularly our global financial and economic systems that prize economic growth at any cost. We…
In rural Georgia: ‘For black folks, it’s like a setup: Are you trying to kill us?’
The Washington Post reports: Sheryl Means already has lost so much to the invisible virus burning through her hometown. Her mother and her aunt died within days of each other. Her sister has been on a ventilator for weeks in a hospital miles away, and there are no visitors allowed in the covid-19 isolation unit. She has this tightness in her chest, and she’s scared she might be next. But Means can’t get a test. Even now, six weeks into…
Trump bet on Kim Jong Un. Now he’s disappeared
Politico reports: North Korea’s dictator has vanished from sight, and in doing so, he’s exposed a potentially major weakness of President Donald Trump’s negotiating tactics. Trump made a bold bet: that by breaking precedent and engaging directly with Kim Jong Un, he could convince the brutal young autocrat to give up his nuclear arsenal in exchange for future economic gains. But the approach, which has included three face-to-face meetings, has resulted in no such breakthrough while arguably disempowering top aides…
How the rich reacted to the bubonic plague has eerie similarities to today’s pandemic
Franz Xavier Winterhalter’s ‘The Decameron’ (1837). Heritage Images via Getty Images By Kathryn McKinley, University of Maryland, Baltimore County The coronavirus can infect anyone, but recent reporting has shown your socioeconomic status can play a big role, with a combination of job security, access to health care and mobility widening the gap in infection and mortality rates between rich and poor. The wealthy work remotely and flee to resorts or pastoral second homes, while the urban poor are packed into…
Music: Tom Misch & Yussef Dayes — ‘Last 100’
Unlike New York, Seattle’s approach to Covid-19 mirrored Epidemic Intelligence Service’s guidelines
Charles Duhigg writes: The first diagnosis of the coronavirus in the United States occurred in mid-January, in a Seattle suburb not far from the hospital where Dr. Francis Riedo, an infectious-disease specialist, works. When he heard the patient’s details—a thirty-five-year-old man had walked into an urgent-care clinic with a cough and a slight fever, and told doctors that he’d just returned from Wuhan, China—Riedo said to himself, “It’s begun.” For more than a week, Riedo had been e-mailing with a…
Global Covid-19 death toll could be 60% higher than reported
Financial Times reports: The death toll from coronavirus may be almost 60 per cent higher than reported in official counts, according to an FT analysis of overall fatalities during the pandemic in 14 countries. Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across these locations, considerably higher than the 77,000 official Covid-19 deaths reported for the same places and time periods. If the same level of underreporting observed in these countries was happening worldwide, the global Covid-19 death…
A Japanese island shows what happens when a coronavirus lockdown is lifted too soon
Time reports: Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido offers a grim lesson in the next phase of the battle against COVID-19. It acted quickly and contained an early outbreak of the coronavirus with a 3-week lockdown. But, when the governor lifted restrictions, a second wave of infections hit even harder. Twenty-six days later, the island was forced back into lockdown. A doctor who helped coordinate the government response says he wishes they’d done things differently. “Now I regret it, we should…
Prof. Neil Ferguson defends UK Coronavirus lockdown strategy
Swedish epideomiologist Johan Giesecke has claimed that the UK was wrong to implement its lockdown measures, and singled out Professor Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College study for being too pessimistic in its worst-case prediction of 500,000 corona deaths. In an interview for LockdownTV, Freddie Sayers speaks to Prof Ferguson to get his response to Giesecke’s critique.
SARS-CoV-2 acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen
Science reports: In Brescia, Italy, a 53-year-old woman walked into the emergency room of her local hospital with all the classic symptoms of a heart attack, including telltale signs in her electrocardiogram and high levels of a blood marker suggesting damaged cardiac muscles. Further tests showed cardiac swelling and scarring, and a left ventricle—normally the powerhouse chamber of the heart—so weak that it could only pump one-third its normal amount of blood. But when doctors injected dye in the coronary…
Threats to humanity more dangerous than Covid-19
Andrew Anthony writes: According to [moral philosopher Toby] Ord, the period we inhabit is a critical moment in the history of humanity. Not only are there the potentially disastrous effects of global heating but in the nuclear age we also possess the power to destroy ourselves in a flash – or to at least leave the question of civilisation’s survival in the balance. Thus Ord believes the next century will be a dangerously precarious one. If we make the right…
Private gain mustn’t be allowed to elbow out the public good
By Dirk Philipsen Adam Smith had an elegant idea when addressing the notorious difficulty that humans face in trying to be smart, efficient and moral. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), he maintained that the baker bakes bread not out of benevolence, but out of self-interest. No doubt, public benefits can result when people pursue what comes easiest: self-interest. And yet: the logic of private interest – the notion that we should just ‘let the market handle it’ – has…