Music: Tom Misch — ‘Cranes in the Sky’
‘We need an army’: Hiring of coronavirus contact tracers seen as key to curbing disease spread
STAT reports: K.J. Seung is surprised to be hiring and training new workers in Boston. His public health nonprofit, Partners in Health, specializes in helping the poorest people in developing nations — tracking down contacts of Ebola patients in Liberia and Sierra Leone; running child health and HIV clinics in Haiti; and operating tuberculosis control programs in Peru. But now it is advertising for 500 people to help do what’s known as contact tracing to try to control Covid-19 in…
East and West coast governors preempt move by Trump and form pacts to control reopening of economies
CNN reports: States on the country’s East and West coasts are forming their own regional pacts to work together on how to reopen from the stay-at-home orders each has issued to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus. The first such group to be announced came Monday on the East Coast. Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said his state, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island and Massachusetts each plan to name a public health and economic official to…
Bernie Sanders endorses Joe Biden, they announce ‘working groups’ on policy issues
ABC News reports: In a surprise appearance on a campaign livestream, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. “Today, I am asking all Americans, I’m asking every Democrat, I’m asking every Independent, I’m asking a lot of Republicans, to come together in this campaign to support your candidacy, which I endorse — to make certain that we defeat somebody who I believe — and I’m speaking just for myself now — is…
As more of grocery workers die, increasingly they fear showing up at work
The Washington Post reports: Doug Preszler wasn’t thinking about risk when he took a cashier job at a regional supermarket in eastern Iowa. But five months in, he has found himself at the forefront of a global crisis with little training or protection — save for the pocket-size bottle of hand sanitizer and Ziploc full of disposable gloves he brings from home each day. The 51-year-old has told himself not to live in fear yet concedes he increasingly is. Even…
Apple, Google debut major effort to help people track if they’ve come in contact with coronavirus
The Washington Post reports: Apple and Google unveiled an ambitious effort Friday to help combat the novel coronavirus, introducing new tools that could soon allow owners of smartphones to know if they have crossed paths with someone infected with the disease. The changes the two companies announced targeting iPhone and Android devices could inject valuable new technological support into contact tracing, a strategy public health officials say is essential to allowing people to return to work and normal life while…
The 60 Minutes pandemic story that Trump adviser, Peter Navarro, defiantly demanded to see
Five-step plan for reopening business is put to the test in China
The Washington Post reports: Employers and employees around the world are anxious to get back to work as soon as possible. A picture of how that will unfold is starting to emerge — and it’s far from straightforward. Businesses have long relied on a five-tier inverted pyramid called the “hierarchy of controls” to reduce workplace risks to employees, ranging from chemical exposure to physical injury. This framework will also be the basis for companies’ plans to get back to work,…
Music: Gilfema — ‘Têkê’
Coronavirus could attack immune system like HIV by targeting protective T cells, scientists warn
South China Morning Post reports: The coronavirus that causes Covid-19 could kill the powerful immune cells that are supposed to kill the virus instead, scientists have warned. The surprise discovery, made by a team of researchers from Shanghai and New York, coincided with frontline doctors’ observation that Covid-19 could attack the human immune system and cause damages similar to that found in HIV patients. Lu Lu, from Fudan University in Shanghai, and Jang Shibo, from the New York Blood Centre,…
How San Francisco flattened the coronavirus curve
The Atlantic reports: London Breed wasn’t going to wait around for COVID-19. San Francisco had yet to confirm a single case of the coronavirus when Breed, the city’s 45-year-old first-term mayor, declared a state of emergency in late February. Two weeks later, Breed’s decision to ban gatherings of more than 1,000 people forced the hand of the Bay Area’s beloved Golden State Warriors, who this year moved into San Francisco’s Chase Center after nearly a half century in Oakland. Her…
The first Americans to recover from Covid-19 test drive immunity
The New York Times reports: Christy Karras and her husband received a tantalizing text the other day from friends they had not seen since February, when all four were among the first people in the United States to be sickened by the new coronavirus. “Dinner at our place?” It had been a week and a half since any of them had experienced symptoms, past the point when Covid-19 patients are thought to be contagious. And, assuming conventional virology wisdom applies,…
America’s billionaires’ gifts to charity are mostly PR stunts
Robert Reich writes: As millions of jobless Americans line up for food or risk their lives delivering essential services, the nation’s billionaires are making conspicuous donations – $100m from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos for food banks, billions from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates for a coronavirus vaccine, thousands of ventilators and N95 masks from Elon Musk, $25m from the Walton family and its Walmart foundation. The list goes on. On Wednesday, Forbes released its annual billionaires list, happily noting that “the planet’s…
Bolsonaro dragging Brazil towards coronavirus calamity, experts fear
The Guardian reports: Medical experts have said they fear that Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, could be hastening the country’s march towards a devastating public health crisis like those to have hit northern Italy and New York by undermining social distancing measures. Bolsonaro is one of just four world leaders still downplaying the threat of coronavirus to public health, alongside the authoritarian presidents of Nicaragua, Belarus and Turkmenistan. Over Easter, Brazil’s far-right leader repeatedly sniffed at his own health ministry’s distancing…
Coronavirus conspiracy theorists infecting academia
The Times reports: Prominent British academics have been sharing conspiracy theories about the coronavirus online, The Times can disclose. They included suggestions from other social media users that Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) that meets in Davos may be involved in plots to exploit the illness and speculation that it was a biological weapon. The academics include Tim Hayward, a professor of environmental political theory at the University of Edinburgh, and Piers Robinson, co-founder…
The largest Arctic ozone hole ever measured is hovering over the North Pole
Science News reports: A curious confluence of atmospheric events has produced the largest ozone hole ever measured over the Arctic. A powerful polar vortex has trapped especially frigid air in the atmosphere above the North Pole, allowing high-altitude clouds to form in the stratosphere, where the ozone layer also sits. Within those clouds, chlorofluorocarbons and hydrochlorofluorocarbons already high in the atmosphere — gases used as refrigerants — react with ultraviolet rays from the sun to release chlorine and bromine atoms,…