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Got a minute? Here's how you can help slow the spread of Coronavirus COVID-19 in under 60 seconds. USA TODAY
COVID-19 patients may be most infectious in the days before they began showing symptoms, a new study from researchers in China found.
Researchersexamined "viral shedding" in 94 patients withCOVID-19admitted to Guangzhou Eighth Peoples Hospital, according to a small studypublished Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal "Nature."
Scientists took throat swabs from thepatientsand found that viral loads were highest when symptoms began andgradually decreased towards the detection limit at about day 21. This finding is consistent with other small studies done attwo hospitals in Hong Kong and withpatients inZhuhai in the Guangdong province ofChina.
The study also modeled COVID-19's infectiousness from a separate sample of 77 pairs of peoplein which one had infected the other with coronavirus.
Using pairs obtained from publicly available sources within and outside mainland China,researchers estimated that 44% of the transmissions occurred during the index patient's presymptomatic stage,"in settings with substantial household clustering, active case finding and quarantine outside the home."
They were then able to inferthat infectiousness started 2.3 days and peaked 0.7 daysbefore symptoms appeared. Infectiousness was estimated to decline quickly within a week.
"Our analysis suggests that viral shedding may begin 2 to 3 days before the appearance of the first symptoms," researchers wrote. "More inclusive criteria for contact tracing to capture potential transmission events 2 to 3 days before symptom onset should be urgently considered for effective control of the outbreak."
These findings align with previous guidance from the World Health Organization which found infected people can be contagious and test positive 1 to 3 days before they develop symptoms. Presymptomatic transmissionwas seen in several casesinSingapore.
Tara Smith, a professor of epidemiology at Kent State University who was not involved in the study, said the research confirms both previous findings ofpresymptomatic transmission and that infected people seem to have a high viral load right around the time they began showing symptoms.
"That seems to be when they are maximally infectious," Smith said.
Presymptomatic transmissionis also seen in viruses like influenza and measles, Smith said, but is not seen withother coronaviruses like SARS and MERS.
Smithsaid more testing needs to be done to determine the rolepresymptomatic and asymptomatic transmission is playing in the current pandemic. She said these findings emphasize how important it is to keep social distancing measures in place to prevent those kinds oftransmission.
"That's why its important to avoid people as much as possible, to wash your hands, to wear masks," she said."To prevent you from spreading the virus."
Follow N'dea Yancey-Bragg on Twitter: @NdeaYanceyBragg
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Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently said that a COVID-19 could take 12 to 18 months to develop, test and approve for public use. But new vaccines typically take years to earn approval can we really expect a coronavirus vaccine to be ready by summer 2021?
Experts told Live Science that, for any other vaccine, the timeline would be unrealistic. But given the current pressure to stave off the pandemic, a COVID-19 vaccine could be ready sooner, as long as scientists and regulatory agencies prove willing to take a few shortcuts.
Here's why it probably can't be developed any sooner than 12 to 18 months.
More than 60 candidate vaccines are now in development, worldwide, and several have entered early clinical trials in human volunteers, according to the World Health Organization.
Related: Treatments for COVID-19: Drugs being tested against the coronavirus
Some groups aim to provoke an immune response in vaccinated people by introducing a weakened or dead SARS-CoV-2 virus, or pieces of the virus, into their bodies. The vaccines for measles, influenza, hepatitis B and the vaccinia virus, which causes smallpox, use these approaches, according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Although tried-and-tested, using this approach to develop these conventional vaccines was labor-intensive, requiring scientists to isolate, culture and modify live viruses in the lab.
That initial process of just creating a vaccine can take 3 to 6 months, "if you have a good animal model to test your product," Raul Andino-Pavlovsky, a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco, told Live Science.
Given the current time crunch, some groups have opted for faster, if less conventional, approaches.
The first COVID-19 vaccine to enter clinical trials in the United States, for example, uses a genetic molecule called mRNA as its base. Scientists generate the mRNA in the lab and, rather than directly injecting SARS-CoV-2 into patients, instead introduce this mRNA. By design, the vaccine should prompt human cells to build proteins found on the virus' surface and thus trigger a protective immune response against the coronavirus. Other groups aim to use related genetic material, including RNA and DNA, to build similar vaccines that would interfere with an earlier step in the protein construction process.
Related: 10 deadly diseases that hopped across species
But there's one big hurdle for mRNA vaccines. We can't be sure they will work.
As of yet, no vaccine built from a germs' genetic material has ever earned approval, Bert Jacobs, a professor of virology at Arizona State University and member of the ASU Biodesign Institute's Center for Immunotherapy, Vaccines and Virotherapy, told Live Science. Despite the technology having existed for almost 30 years, RNA and DNA vaccines have not yet matched the protective power of existing vaccines, National Geographic reported.
Assuming these unconventional COVID-19 vaccines pass initial safety tests, "will there be efficacy?" Jacobs said. "The animal models suggest it, but we'll have to wait and see."
"Because of the emergency here, people are going to try many different solutions in parallel," Andino-Pavlovsky said. The key to trialing many vaccine candidates at once will be to share data openly between research groups, in order to identify promising products as soon as possible, he said.
Metrics used to measure efficacy whether a vaccine sparks an adequate response from a persons immune system in animal studies and early clinical trials will also need to be clearly defined, he added. In other words, researchers should be able to use these early studies to determine which vaccines to move forward with, which to modify and which to abandon. That whole process from lab dish to animal studies can take 3 to 6 months, Andino-Pavlovsky said.
Designing a vaccine that grants immunity and causes minimal side effects is no simple task. A coronavirus vaccine, in particular, poses its own unique challenges. Although scientists did create candidate vaccines for the coronaviruses SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, these did not exit clinical trials or enter public use, partly because of lack of resources, Live Science previously reported.
"One of the things you have to be careful of when you're dealing with a coronavirus is the possibility of enhancement," Fauci said in an interview with the journal JAMA on April 8. Some vaccines cause a dangerous phenomenon known as antibody dependent enhancement (AED), which paradoxically leaves the body more vulnerable to severe illness after inoculation.
Related: Could a 100-year-old vaccine protect against COVID-19?
Candidate vaccines for dengue virus, for example, have generated low levels of antibodies that guide the virus to vulnerable cells, rather than destroying the pathogen on sight, Stat News reported. Coronavirus vaccines for animal diseases and the human illness SARS triggered similar effects in animals, so there's some concern that a candidate vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 might do the same, according to an opinion piece published March 16 in the journal Nature. Scientists should watch for signs of AED in all upcoming COVID-19 vaccine trials, Fauci said. Determining whether enhancement is occurring could happen during initial animal studies, but "it is still unclear how we will look for AED," Jacobs said.
"Once there is a good animal model which gives symptoms after SARS-CoV-2 infection, we can ask if vaccination decreases or enhances pathogenesis," he said. "These may be longer term studies that could take several months." The AED studies could be done in parallel with other animal trials to save time, Andino-Pavlovsky added.
There's another challenge too.
A successful coronavirus vaccine will snuff the spread of SARS-CoV-2 by reducing the number of new people infected, Andino-Pavlovsky said. COVID-19 infections typically take hold in so-called mucosal tissues that line the upper respiratory tract, and to effectively prevent viral spread, "you need to have immunity at the site of infection, in the nose, in the upper respiratory tract," he said.
These initial hotspots of infection are easily permeated by infectious pathogens. A specialized fleet of immune cells, separate from those that patrol tissues throughout the body, are responsible for protecting these vulnerable tissues. The immune cells that protect mucosal tissue are generated by cells called lymphocytes that remain nearby, according to the textbook Immunobiology: The Immune System in Health and Disease (Garland Science, 2001).
"It's like your local police department," Andino-Pavlovsky told Live Science. But not all vaccines prompt a strong response from the mucosal immune system, he said. The seasonal influenza vaccine, for example, does not reliably trigger a mucosal immune response in all patients, which partly explains why some people still catch the respiratory disease after being vaccinated, he said.
Even if a COVID-19 vaccine can jumpstart the necessary immune response, researchers arent sure how long that immunity might last, Jacobs added. While research suggests that the coronavirus doesn't mutate quickly, "we have seasonal coronaviruses that come, year in [and] year out, and they don't change much year to year," he said. Despite hardly changing form, the four coronaviruses that cause the common cold keep infecting people so why haven't we built up immunity?
Perhaps, theres something odd about the virus itself, specifically in its antigens, viral proteins that can be recognized by the immune system, and that causes immunity to wear off. Alternatively, coronaviruses may somehow fiddle with the immune system itself, and that could explain the drop-off in immunity over time, Andino-Pavlovsky said. To ensure a vaccine can grant long-term immunity against SARS-CoV-2, scientists will have to address these questions. In the short term, they'll have to design experiments to challenge the immune system after vaccination and test its resilience through time, Jacobs said.
In a mouse model, such studies could take "at least a couple of months," he said. Scientists cannot conduct an equivalent experiment in humans, but can instead compare natural infection rates in vaccinated people to those of unvaccinated people in a long-term study.
"When you have the luxury, you look at this for five years, 10 years to see what happens," Andino-Pavlovsky added.
Unlike an antiviral treatment for COVID-19 that can be given to patients already infected with the virus, a vaccine must be tested in diverse populations of healthy people.
"Because you give it to healthy people, there's an enormous pressure to make sure it's absolutely safe," Andino-Pavlovsky said. What's more, the vaccine must work well for people of many ages, including the elderly, whose weakened immune systems place them at heightened risk of serious COVID-19 infection.
"Initially, safety studies will be done in small numbers of people," likely fewer than 100, Jacobs said. A vaccine may be approved based on these small studies, which can take place over a few months, and then continually monitored as larger populations become vaccinated, he added. "That's just my guess."
Related: COVID-19 is now the leading cause of death in the United States
A future vaccine may require an additional ingredient, called an adjuvant, that rallies the aged immune system into action, like that found in the shingles vaccine, Jacobs said.
While some existing drugs, whose safety risks doctors understand, may be repurposed as COVID-19 treatments, equivalent data does not exist for a vaccine because no coronavirus vaccine has ever entered widespread use. Jacobs said he and his team aim to exploit a potential loophole to develop a powerful vaccine, fast. "We use surrogate live attenuated vaccines, where we put parts of SARS-CoV-2 into vaccinia virus [which guards against smallpox], and this can be done initially within a month," Jacobs said. In general, many vaccine developers are starting from scratch.
Despite the many challenges ahead, certain shortcuts could allow scientists to bring a COVID-19 vaccine faster than anticipated.
First, partnering with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory bodies can help scientists leap the logistical hurdles associated with clinical trials, such as recruiting healthy volunteers, Andino-Pavlovsky said. "It can save six months, doing that," he said.
Any potential vaccine will need to pass a safety trial, known as a Phase 1 trial, which also helps determine the needed dose. The next step is a larger trial in 100 to 300 people, called a Phase 2, which looks for some biological activity, but can't say for sure if the drug is effective.
If a vaccine candidate prompts a promising immune response in Phase 2 clinical trials, after passing safety tests in Phase 1, it's possible that the FDA could approve such a vaccine for emergency use "before the 18-month period that I said," Fauci said in the JAMA interview.
"If you get neutralizing antibodies," which latch onto specific structures on the virus and neutralize it, "I think you can keep moving forward on it," Jacobs said. Normally, a vaccine would then enter Phase 3 clinical trials, which include hundreds to thousands of people.
So adding up these steps, each of which will likely take 3 to 6 months, it's very unlikely we would be able to find a vaccine that is safe and effective in less than 12 months even if many of these steps could be done in parallel.
Then comes the issue of manufacturing billions and billions of doses of a new vaccine whose ingredients we don't yet know. Bill Gates has said that the Gates Foundation will fund the construction of factories for seven coronavirus vaccine candidates, equipping the sites to produce a wide variety of vaccine types, Business Insider reported.
"Even though we'll end up picking at most two of them, we're going to fund factories for all seven, just so that we don't waste time in serially saying, 'OK, which vaccine works?' and then building the factory," Gates said.
Even if a fairly promising vaccine surfaces by 2021, and can be mass-produced, the search won't end there. "Especially with trying to get something out this quickly, we may not get the best vaccine out there right away," Jacobs said. Ideally, an initial vaccine will grant immunity for at least one to two years, but should that immunity wane, a longer lasting vaccine may have to be deployed. Historically, so-called live attenuated vaccines that contain a weakened virus tend to perform most reliably over extended periods of time, Andino-Pavlovsky said.
"That may be what we need in the long run," he said. And research into coronavirus immunity should continue, regardless, "not only for COVID-19, but for the next coronavirus that comes."
Originally published on Live Science.
Mary Agyeiwaa Agyapong, who worked at Luton and Dunstable University Hospital, northwest of London, was admitted to the hospital on April 7 after testing positive for the virus two days earlier.
The 28-year-old died on Sunday, Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust confirmed in a statement on Wednesday. She had worked for the hospital system for five years.
More than 13,700 people have died of coronavirus in the UK and more than 100,000 have tested positive, according to the UK government.
David Carter, CEO of Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, confirmed Agyapong's death "with great sadness."
"Mary worked here for five years and was a highly valued and loved member of our team, a fantastic nurse and a great example of what we stand for in this Trust," Carter said in a statement on Wednesday.
"She tested positive for Covid-19 after being tested on 5th of April and was admitted to the hospital on the 7th April. Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with Mary's family and friends at this sad time. We ask that the family's privacy is respected at this time," he added.
More than 117,000 (about $146,000) has been donated to a GoFundMe page, which was set up to support Agyapong's husband and baby, just 24 hours after the page was published with an original goal of raising 2,000 (about $2,500).
Agyapong -- also known as Mary Mo -- was a "blessing to everyone she came across and her love, care and sincerity will be irreplaceable," a statement on the fundraising website reads.
Catherine Clewes, who donated, said "I couldn't have wished for a better mentor in my sign-off placement. You helped shape the nurse I have become."
Describing the nurse as "such a lovely person," another contributor wrote "it broke our heart when we got the news," adding "thank you Mary for your smile, your strength."
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (KCRG) - The Iowa Department of Public Health on Friday announced 191 new cases of COVID-19 in Iowa as well as four new deaths.
That brings the totals in Iowa to 2,332 confirmed cases and 64 deaths. These most recent deaths were in Black Hawk, Scott, Washington and Tama Counties.
21,792 people have been tested in the state and 1,007 confirmed cases have recovered.
On Thursday Gov. Reynolds announced that the Regional Medical Coordination Center (RMCC), which divides Iowa into six regions and shows how hospitals are keeping up during the outbreak, classifies Region 6 is now a 10 out of 10.
Region 6 includes Allamakee, Benton, Black Hawk, Bremer, Buchanan, Clayton, Delaware, Dubuque, Fayette, Grundy, Howard, Jones, Linn, and Winneshiek counties.
In response to this, Gov. Reynolds on Thursday said she was banning all gatherings for social, community, recreational and leisure purposes in the region.
For a more detailed breakdown of the numbers visit: coronavirus.iowa.gov.
A coalition of EU scientists and technologists thats developing whats billed as a privacy-preserving standard for Bluetooth-based proximity tracking, as a proxy for COVID-19 infection risk, wants Apple and Google to make changes to an API theyre developing for the same overarching purpose.
The Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) uncloaked on April 1, calling for developers of contact tracing apps to get behind a standardized approach to processing smartphone users data to coordinate digital interventions across borders and shrink the risk of overly intrusive location-tracking tools gaining momentum as a result of the pandemic.
PEPP-PT said today it has seven governments signed up to apply its approach to national apps, with a claimed pipeline of a further 40 in discussions about joining.
We now have a lot of governments interacting, said PEPP-PTs Hans-Christian Boos, speaking during a webinar for journalists. Some governments are publicly declaring that their local applications will be built on top of the principles of PEPP-PT and also the various protocols supplied inside this initiative.
We know of seven countries that have already committed to do this and were currently in conversation with 40 countries that are in various states of onboarding.
Boos said a list of the governments would be shared with journalists, though at the time of writing we havent seen it. But weve asked PEPP-PTs PR firm for the info and will update this report when we get it.
The pan-European approach has worked, he added. Governments have decided at a speed previously unknown. But with 40 more countries in the queue of onboarding we definitely have outgrown just the European focus and to us this shows that privacy as a model and as a discussion point is a statement and it is something that we can export because were credible on it.
Paolo de Rosa, the CTO at the Ministry of Innovation Technology and Digital Transformation for the Italian government, was also on the webinar and confirmed its national app will be built on top of PEPP-PT.
We will have an app soon and obviously it will be based on this model, he said, offering no further details.
PEPP-PTs core privacy-preserving claim rests on the use of system architectures that do not require location data to be collected. Rather devices that come near each other would share pseudonymized IDs which could later be used to send notifications to an individual if the system calculates an infection risk has occurred. An infected individuals contacts would be uploaded at the point of diagnosis allowing notifications to be sent to other devices with which had come into contact.
Boos, a spokesman for and coordinator of PEPP-PT, told TechCrunch earlier this monththe project will support both centralized and decentralized approaches. The former meaning IDs are uploaded to a trusted server, such as one controlled by a health authority; the latter meaning IDs are held locally on devices, where the infection risk is also calculated a backend server is only in the loop to relay info to devices.
Its just such a decentralized contacts tracing system that Apple and Google are collaborating on supporting fast-following PEPP-PT last week by announcing a plan for cross-platform COVID-19 contacts tracing via a forthcoming API and then a system-wide (opt-in) for Bluetooth-based proximity tracking.
That intervention, by the only two smartphone platforms that matter when the ambition is mainstream adoption, is a major development putting momentum behind decentralized contacts tracing for responding digitally to the coronavirus crisis in the Western world, certainly at the platform level.
In a resolution passed today the European parliament also called for a decentralized approach to COVID-19 proximity tracking.
MEPs are pushing for the Commission and Member States to be fully transparent on the functioning of contact tracing apps, so that people can verify both the underlying protocol for security and privacy and check the code itself to see whether the application functions as the authorities are claiming. (The Commission has previously signaled a preference for decentralization too.)
However, backers of PEPP-PT, which include at least seven governments (and the claim of many more), arent giving up on the option of a privacy-preserving centralized option which some in their camp are dubbing pseudo-decentralized with Boos claiming today that discussions are ongoing with Apple and Google about making changes to their approach.
As it stands, contacts tracing apps that dont use a decentralized infrastructure wont be able to carry out Bluetooth tracking in the background on Android or iOS as the platforms limit how general apps can access Bluetooth. This means users of such apps would have to have the app open and active all the time for proximity tracking to function, with associated (negative) impacts on battery life and device usability.
There are also (intentional) restrictions on how contacts tracing data could be centralized, as a result of the relay server model being deployed in the joint Apple-Google model.
We very much appreciate that Google and Apple are stepping up to making the operating system layer available or putting what should be the OS actually there, which is the Bluetooth measurement and the handling of crypto and the background running of such tasks which have to keep running resiliently all the time if you look at their protocols and if you look at whom they are provided by, the two dominant players in the mobile ecosystem, then I think that from a government perspective especially, or from lots of government perspectives, there are many open points to discuss, said Boos today.
From a PEPP-PT perspective there are a few points to discuss because we want choice and implementing choice in terms of model decentralized or centralized on top of their protocol creates actually the worst of both worlds so there are many points to discuss. But contrary to the behavior that many of us who work with tech companies are used to Google and Apple are very open in these discussions and theres no point in getting up in arms yet because these discussions are ongoing and it looks like agreement can be reached with them.
It wasnt clear what specific changes PEPP-PT wants from Apple and Google we asked for more detail during the webinar but didnt get a response. But the group and its government backers may be hoping to dilute the tech giants stance to make it easier to create centralized graphs of Bluetooth contacts to feed national coronavirus responses.
As it stands, Apple and Googles API is designed to block contact matching on a server though there might still be ways for governments (and others) to partially work around the restrictions and centralize some data.
We reached out to Apple and Google with questions about the claimed discussions with PEPP-PT. At the time of writing, neither had responded.
As well as Italy, the German and French governments are among those that have indicated theyre backing PEPP-PT for national apps which suggests powerful EU Member States could be squaring up for a fight with the tech giants, along the lines of Apple versus the FBI, if pressure to tweak the API fails.
Another key strand to this story is that PEPP-PT continues to face strident criticism from privacy and security experts in its own backyard including after it removed a reference to a decentralized protocol for COVID-19 contacts tracing thats being developed by another European coalition, comprised of privacy and security experts, called DP-3T.
Coindesk reported on the silent edit to PEPP-PTs website yesterday.
Backers of DP-3T have also repeatedly queried why PEPP-PT hasnt published code or protocols for review to-date and even gone so far as to dub the effort a trojan horse.
ETH Zrichs Dr. Kenneth Paterson, who is both a part of the PEPP-PT effort and a designer of DP-3T, couldnt shed any light on the exact changes the coalition is hoping to extract from Gapple when we asked.
Theyve still not said exactly how their system would work, so I cant say what they would need [in terms of changes to Apple and Googles system], he told us in an email exchange.
Today Boos couched the removal of the reference to DP-3T on PEPP-PTs website as a mistake which he blamed on bad communication. He also claimed the coalition is still interested in including the formers decentralized protocol within its bundle of standardized technologies. So the already sometimes fuzzy lines between the camps continue to be redrawn. (Its also interesting to note that press emails to Boos are now being triaged by Hering Schuppener, a communications firm that sells publicity services, including crisis PR.)
Were really sorry for that, Boos said of the DP-3T excision. Actually we just wanted to put the various options on the same level that are out there. There are still all these options and we very much appreciate the work that colleagues and others are doing.
You know there is a hot discussion in the crypto community about this and we actually encourage this discussion because its always good to improve on protocols. What we must not lose sight of is that were not talking about crypto here, were talking about pandemic management and as long as an underlying transport layer can ensure privacy thats good enough because governments can choose whatever they want.
Boos also said PEPP-PT would finally be publishing some technical documents this afternoon opting to release information some three weeks after its public unveiling and on a Friday evening (a seven-page high level overview has since been put on their GitHub here [this link has since been deleted Ed.] but still a far cry from code for review) while making a simultaneous plea for journalists to focus on the bigger picture of fighting the coronavirus rather than keep obsessing over technical details.
During todays webinar some of the scientists backing PEPP-PT talked about how theyre testing the efficacy of Bluetooth as a proxy for tracking infection risk.
The algorithm that weve been working on looks at the cumulative amount of time that individuals spend in proximity with each other, said Christophe Fraser, professor at the Nuffield Department of Medicine and Senior Group Leader in Pathogen Dynamics at the Big Data Institute, University of Oxford, offering a general primer on using Bluetooth proximity data for tracking viral transmission.
The aim is to predict the probability of transmission from the phone proximity data. So the ideal system reduces the requested quarantine to those who are the most at risk of being infected and doesnt give the notification even though some proximity event was recorded to those people whore not at risk of being infected.
Obviously thats going to be an imperfect process, he went on. But the key point is that in this innovative approach that we should be able to audit the extent to which that information and those notifications are correct so we need to actually be seeing, of the people who have been sent the notification how many of them actually were infected. And of those people who were identified as contacts, how many werent.
Auditing can be done in many different ways for each system but that step is crucial.
Evaluating the effectiveness of the digital interventions will be vital, per Fraser whose presentation could have been interpreted as making a case for public health authorities to have fuller access to contacts graphs. But its important to note that DP-3Ts decentralized protocol makes clear provision for app users to opt-in to voluntarily share data with epidemiologists and research groups to enable them to reconstruct the interaction graph among infected and at risk users (aka to get access to a proximity graph).
Its really important that if youre going to do an intervention that is going to affect millions of people in terms of these requests to [quarantine] that that information be the best possible science or the best possible representation of the evidence at the point at which you give the notification, added Fraser. And therefore as we progress forwards that evidence our understanding of the transmission of the virus is going to improve. And in fact auditing of the app can allow that to improve, and therefore it seems essential that that information be fed back.
None of the PEPP-PT-aligned apps that are currently being used for testing or reference are interfacing with national health authority systems, per Boos though he cited a test in Italy thats been plugged into a companys health system to run tests.
We have supplied the application builders with the backend, we have supplied them with sample code, we have supplied them with protocols, we have supplied them with the science of measurement, and so on and so forth. We have a working application that simply has no integration into a countrys health system on Android and on iOS, he noted.
On its website PEPP-PT lists a number of corporate members as backing the effort including the likes of Vodafone alongside several research institutions including Germanys Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute for telecoms (HHI) which has been reported as leading the effort.
The HHIs executive director, Thomas Wiegand, was also on todays call. Notably, his name initially appeared on the authorship list for the DP-3Ts white paper. However, on April 10 he was removed from the README and authorship list, per its GitHub document history. No explanation for the change was given.
During todays press conference Wiegand made an intervention that seems unlikely to endear him to the wider crypto and digital rights community describing the debate around which cryptography system to use for COVID-19 contacts tracing as a side show and expressing concern that what he called Europes open public discussion might destroy our ability to get ourselves as Europeans out of this.
I just wanted to make everyone aware of the difficulty of this problem, he also said. Cryptography is only one of 12 building blocks in the system. So I really would like to have everybody go back and reconsider what problem we are in here. We have to win against this virus or we have another lockdown or we have a lot of big problems. I would like to have everybody to consider that and to think about it because we have a chance if we get our act together and really win against the virus.
The press conference had an even more inauspicious start after the Zoom call was disrupted by racist spam in the chat field. Right before that Boos had kicked off the call saying he had heard from some more technically savvy people that we should not be using Zoom because its insecure and for an initiative that wants security and privacy its the wrong tool.
Unfortunately we found out that many of our international colleagues only had this on their corporate PCs so over time either Zoom has to improve or we need to get better installations out there. Its certainly not our intention to leak the data on this Zoom, he added.
A wave of planned anti-lockdown demonstrations that have broken out around the country to protest against the efforts of state governments to combat the coronavirus pandemic with business closures and stay-at-home orders have included far-right groups as well as more mainstream Republicans.
While protesters in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and other states claim to speak for ordinary citizens, many are also supported by street-fighting rightwing groups like the Proud Boys, conservative armed militia groups, religious fundamentalists, anti-vaccination groups and other elements of the radical right.
On Wednesday in Lansing, Michigan, a protest put together by two Republican-connected not-for-profits was explicitly devised to cause gridlock in the city, and for a time blocked the entrance to a local hospital.
It was organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition, which Michigan state corporate filings show has also operated under the name of Michigan Trump Republicans. It was also heavily promoted by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a group linked to the Trump cabinet member Betsy DeVos.
But the protest also attracted far-right protest groups who have been present at pro-Trump and gun rights rallies in Michigan throughout the Trump presidency.
Placards identified the Michigan Proud Boys as participants in the vehicle convoy. Near the state house, local radio interviewed a man who identified himself as Phil Odinson.
In fact the man is Phil Robinson, the prime mover in a group called the Michigan Liberty Militia, whose Facebook page features pictures of firearms, warnings of civil war, celebrations of Norse paganism and memes ultimately sourced from white nationalist groups like Patriot Front.
The pattern of rightwing not-for-profits promoting public protests while still more radical groups use lockdown resistance as a platform for extreme rightwing causes looks set to continue in events advertised in other states over coming days.
In Idaho on Friday, protesters plan to gather at the capitol building in Boise to protest anti-virus restrictions put in place by the Republican governor, Brad Little.
The protest has been heavily promoted by the Idaho Freedom Foundation (IFF), which counts among its donors dark money funds linked to the Koch brothers such as Donors Capital Fund, and Castle Rock, a foundation seeded with part of the fortune of Adolph Coors, the rightwing beer magnate.
IFF have added their slogan for the event, Disobey Idaho, to stickers which they plan to distribute among the crowd.
The event is also being promoted on a website dedicated to attacking Little for his response to Covid-19. That website was set up by the Idaho businessman, pastor and one-time Republican state senate candidate, Diego Rodriguez.
Rodriguez launched the website at an Easter service held in defiance of the governors orders on Easter Sunday, which was also addressed by Ammon Bundy, the leader of the militia occupation of the Malheur national wildlife refuge in 2016 that become a rallying point for the anti-government right in the US.
Bundy has been holding similar gatherings for weeks in Emmett, Idaho, where he now lives. On Sunday, he repeated his opposition to the Idaho orders, writing on Facebook: We all have a duty to defend what is right and to make sure, that what God has given, man does not take away. Especially that great gift of agency, YES freedom!
Ada county, Idaho, where the capital, Boise, is located, has so far suffered 541 cases of Covid-19 and nine deaths, in a state which has a far worse outbreak than neighboring Oregon, which is 2.4 times more populous.
Nevertheless, the ad for the rally on Rodriguezs website advises, We feel that wearing face masks and gloves is counterproductive to the movement, and should be avoided.
In Washington state, meanwhile, which for now has brought one of the worst outbreaks in the country under a measure of control, a Republican state committeeman, Tyler Miller, has organized a protest at the state capitol on Saturday.
Miller, who is active in the Kitsap county Republican party, was involved in passing a resolution in January in support of representative Matt Shea, who was excluded from the state houses GOP caucus after a report commissioned by house found that he had participated in domestic terrorism.
Hundreds of Facebook users have indicated that they will be attending his Hazardous Liberty rally, and a parallel event in Richland, Washington.
Included in that number are members of the 3% of Washington, a group which has held a series of open-carry rallies in Seattle, featuring speeches from the far-right protest leader, Joey Gibson.
As for Shea, he is speaking on Saturday at an online Saving America conference which will discuss an alleged erosion of rights thats been ramped up in unprecedented ways during this Covid-19 crisis.
He is scheduled to appear alongside the likes of close ally Pastor Ken Peters, who has been holding monthly services outside Spokanes planned parenthood clinic; the actor, Maga personality and congressional candidate Mindy Robinson; and the New Zealand-based anti-communist speaker and author Trevor Loudon.
Other similar events have been advertised for Saturday by an anti-vaccination activist in Oregon, and for Friday by a Boston group with alt-right connections.
Games Done Quick (GDQ), an organization that raises money for charity with speedrunning events, is hosting an online-only speedrunning marathon all weekend in support of COVID-19 relief. The event, titled Corona Relief Done Quick (CRDQ), is scheduled to run through Sunday. You can watch the event on Twitch.
CRDQ will be raising money for Direct Relief, a humanitarian aid organization. Direct Reliefs COVID-19 efforts include getting personal protective equipment to health care workers, providing chronic disease medications to community clinics and health centers across the US, and more.
You can see the full schedule and lineup of games right here. Im most looking forward to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time randomizer co-op run later today, the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 any-percent run on Saturday, and the Super Metroid 100 percent run on Sunday, which will be the penultimate run of the show.
When GDQ announced CRDQ in March, the organization also said that its usual summer speedrunning marathon, Summer Games Done Quick, was postponed from June until August 16th23rd. The summer event will raise money for Doctors Without Borders.
