Category: Corona Virus

US President Donald Trump speaks following a tour of medical supply distributor Owens and Minor Inc. ... [+] in Allentown, Pennsylvania on May 14, 2020. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

In a speech on Thursday at Owens and Minor, a medical supply distributor located in Allentown, PA, President Donald Trump wondered whether testing for Covid-19 coronavirus is overrated. He then proceeded to say, And dont forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world. But why? Because we do more testing.

Next, he clarified: When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didnt do any testing, we would have very few cases.

Whoa, is that how it works? This changes everything. The sound that you are hearing may be that of minds blown around the country. Perhaps, its sort of like when you first heard that Santa Claus is not the one who delivered those presents to your living room. Although you knew that the chimney in your house led to the furnace, it took a little time for you to put two-and-two together.

Sure, there are those statistics that paint a grim picture of whats happening in the U.S. For example, as of today, over 85,000 people in the U.S. have already died from Covid-19, which is by far tops in the world. Its well above the next highest country tally, the 33,693 reported deaths that have occurred in the United Kingdom. Sure, many public health experts have pushed for much more widespread testing. Sure, there is really no other way besides testing to tell who actually has the virus and where it may be spreading. Sure not knowing this information can be like playing football without being able to see the field. But could testing actually be like sex on the beach or Englands mens football team: overrated?

Check out Trump explanation during his speech on this ABC News video:

More testing, more cases of Covid-19 coronavirus infections? Less testing, fewer cases? Well, thats a different way to look at things.

This revelation left various folks on social media wondering what else may be different and whether theyve been approaching many things in life the wrong way all this time. Certainly, ignoring some problems can make them go away. For example, if your friends keep telling you to bathe more, ignoring that nagging will likely make your friends go away. Problem solved.

But what about major health and public health problems? Is the opposite of the saying, "if you can see it, you can be it true? Maybe if you cant see it, you cant be it. Well, @DrRobDavidson got some answers after asking the following question:

Maybe @MarcSmithEsq is on to something. Could there be no obesity epidemic and instead, a scale epidemic? If so, those darn scales could be invading homes around the country and the world, leading to what can only be described as a large-scale problem.

If this were true, this could open up a "A Whole New World" for doctors. Physicians could then be saying ferget about it or just walk it off more often. Doctors, many of whom have been facing burn-out, could instead be left with a whole lot of free time:

Have you considered taking up golfing? Then theres the whole issue of contraception:

Thats not exactly what they teach in sex-ed class between the birds material and the bees material. However, @DebPearlstein pointed out that such an approach could be something that you already knew as a kid, you know before all that schooling stuff:

Imagine how much easier life could be if you didnt have know stuff or find out information. Ah, but along came some party-poopers, trying to burst everyones bubbles with all that silly fact-checking stuff:

There someone goes again, bringing up science. Sigh. Whatever happened to the saying, ignorance is bliss?

Well, heres the reality check. The U.S. has already tried the not-testing-enough strategy. How has this worked out for the U.S.? Not so great. Without enough testing, its been difficult to identify who exactly may be infected with the Covid-19 coronavirus or where the virus may be spreading. Without this info you cant really selectively shut down places or just try to contain the virus by identifying and isolating those who came into contact with an infected person. Without this info, the U.S. has had to rely on social distancing measures that were more drastic than those used in countries such as Taiwan and Singapore. This is not exactly winning.

Although Trump didnt say that he was being sarcastic in his speech, to be fair, you cant completely rule out that possibility. Recall what happened after he said on April 23 at a press conference, I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As Stephanie Sarkis described for Forbes, the very next day, when a reporter questioned Trump about that question, the President explained, I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen." Maybe members of the media dont quite understand this whole sarcasm thing.

Follow this link:

Trump: Without Doing Covid-19 Coronavirus Testing We Would Have Very Few Cases, Here Is The Reaction - Forbes

More than 82,000 people in the United States have died of COVID-19 as of Tuesday. How many more lives will be lost? Scientists have built dozens of computational models to answer that question. But the profusion of forecasts poses a challenge: The models use such a wide range of methodologies, formats and time frames that it's hard to get even a ballpark sense of what the future has in store.

Enter Nicholas Reich, a biostatistician at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Reich and his colleagues have developed a method to compare and ultimately to merge the diverse models of the disease's progression into one "ensemble" projection. The resulting forecast is sobering. By June 6, it projects, the cumulative death toll in the U.S. will reach 110,000.

Reich's approach builds on work he has done over the past four years for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pulling together the many forecasts that U.S. experts create annually to predict how that year's seasonal influenza will play out.

Reich's team has set up a similar system to compare coronavirus models. It's a sort of portal through which the scientists behind each COVID-19 model can communicate key details about their methodology and results so that, as Reich explains, "all of these forecasts can be represented in a single standardized way. And this makes it really easy to make apples-to-apples comparisons between these models."

The team unveiled the first version four weeks ago and ever since has been adding in more forecasts and updating the projections weekly. The latest update released Tuesday incorporates eight models, including some oft-cited ones, such as those built by the Imperial College London, the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Columbia University and Northeastern University. (The team also sends each week's release to the CDC, which publishes a version with a slight time lag.)

The projections vary substantially with the most pessimistic forecasting a total death toll of 120,000 by June 6 and the most optimistic forecasting 103,000 deaths by that date. But the models have been inching closer to each other. Over the past several weeks, the distance between the highest and lowest estimates has halved from a gap of 36,000 deaths two weeks ago to a gap of 17,000 deaths in the most recent update released Tuesday.

Still, says Reich, that remains a large difference. Also, he says, some of the models are gyrating fairly significantly from week to week.

"The most pessimistic model a few weeks ago was the model from Los Alamos National Laboratory," notes Reich. "Now Los Alamos is one of the most optimistic." Meanwhile, the models produced by IHME and University of Texas at Austin respectively have substantially increased their projected deaths tolls becoming among the most pessimistic.

There are a range of reasons for these changes. The scientists are getting new data; they are updating their methods as they calibrate their models against the reality to date; and Americans have stopped social distancing to the same degree as they had been in March and April requiring models that assumed a longer stay-at-home period to adjust their forecasts upward.

But how do we make sense of these COVID-19 projections if the models can see-saw so abruptly from week to week? That's where Reich's "ensemble" model may be helpful. It's a strategy that forecasters use regularly to model not just disease outbreaks, but other phenomena ranging from weather to electoral outcomes.

"Individual models are being changed every week. They're sensitive to the last observed data in different ways," says Reich. But with an ensemble "there's a certain consistency and robustness. You're not quite, sort of flapping in the wind."

Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, agrees. "We know from the experience of seasonal influenza that ensemble models tend to perform better than any single model," she says.

And the approach is particularly well-suited in this pandemic given how much is still unknown. "This ensemble approach really pulls together those different results and makes them, in some ways, greater than the sum of their parts," says Rivers.

Reich thinks he can still improve his ensemble model. For instance, at the moment Reich is giving equal weight to each of the forecasts that go into it. But soon he hopes to give more weight to those that are proving more accurate an approach that he uses in his ensemble models for flu.

"Model accuracy is one thing that we're tracking and we're hoping to release some information over the next few weeks," says Reich. "We've been sort of building the car as we're driving it at 90 miles an hour down the highway. And we're learning as we go."

In the meantime, says Rivers, it is at least useful to be able to see the range of forecasts that have been produced. "It tends to help the user to understand where the uncertainties are and the spectrum of possible futures," she says.

That said, Reich's setup compares projections through the next four weeks only since many of the models don't offer forecasts beyond that point. This is why the latest update his team released projects deaths up to June 6.

Still, in that first week of June about 7,000 people are projected to die. The clear implication, adds Reich: The cumulative death toll of 110,000 forecast through June 6 will unquestionably rise much higher in the weeks beyond.

Read the rest here:

How To Make Sense of All The COVID-19 Projections? A New Model Combines Them - NPR

Editors note: The Salt Lake Tribune is providing free access to critical stories about the coronavirus. Sign up for our Top Stories newsletter, sent to your inbox every weekday morning. To support journalism like this, please donate or become a subscriber.

Most of Utah will shift from a moderate orange risk level to a lower yellow status starting this weekend, after the governor declared that theres now a small enough risk of the coronavirus spreading here to relax many restrictions.

People can gather in groups of up to 50. All businesses can open across the state. And team sports can resume as long as participants are checked for symptoms first.

After a careful review of the data, weve determined the trend is good, Gov. Gary Herbert said during a video news conference announcing the decision Thursday. I like our numbers. Weve plateaued.

The change will begin early Saturday for most though two cities and three counties are exempt and will remain in the orange status for now. Those are Salt Lake City and West Valley City, as well as Summit, Wasatch and Grand counties.

Those areas have been hit harder by the virus, Herbert added, and are still seeing high daily caseloads, transmission rates, hospitalizations and deaths. Residents there will continue to be asked to stay at home as much as possible, at least for now, and limit groups to 20 or less.

But the governor said he hopes in a very short period of time that theyll also be able to shift to the lower risk level along with the rest of the state.

I know theyre desirous to get to yellow, he said, pointing to his silky yellow tie from behind the podium.

Not all towns and counties are on board with reopening, though. Chief among them is Salt Lake County, whose mayor spoke out against the move. And while there were no new deaths reported Thursday, the announcement came after five previous consecutive days with COVID-19 fatalities here, with the total now at 75.

Additionally, 129 more residents tested positive. There have now been 6,749 cases in Utah, according to the state Department of Health.

Salt Lake County accounts for more than half of those, with 3,604.

Mayor Jenny Wilson requested that the entire county remain in the orange category for another 10 days to ensure it was safe, but she said Thursday that was denied by the governors office.

Instead, within the county, only Salt Lake City and West Valley City were allowed to keep their more stringent restrictions. Shes encouraged because those are the two largest cities in the state and have had the most spread.

But we also understand that the virus doesnt recognize municipal boundaries and therefore, countywide caution and prudence will still be essential for success, she said in a statement.

Additionally, the town of Alta within the county also requested to stay in orange. That, too, was rejected, though the municipality will be able to put some lighter restrictions in place for its unique situation.

Jefferson Burton, who is leading day-to-day operations of the Utah Department of Health during the coronavirus pandemic, had mentioned during the governors news conference Thursday that one smaller area had asked not to move to yellow. He didnt specifically mention the location, but Alta Mayor Harris Sondak believes Burton was referring to his town.

Im worried, Sondak said later Thursday. Many people from many places comes to Alta. I could end up with dozens of people coming from all over the world and all over the country.

Fewer than 400 residents live in the ski town at the top of Little Cottonwood Canyon but even without snow, the number of people explodes during summer festivals and the upcoming hiking season. The mayor fears the virus will spread quickly then with everything opening up.

Already, hes had to close parking lots at trailheads even under the orange status because people keep driving there and having tailgate parties.

Sondak has gotten the OK from the state to put in place some extra safeguards for the hotels and condos to stay sanitized and to require all residents and visitors wear masks when outside. Were not trying to quash business for our property managers," the mayor added. "We just dont want to become a place where a lot of transmission happens.

But Alta will still have to move to yellow.

Burton, who is also co-chairman of the states Public Health and Economic Emergency Commission on reopening the state, said because there have been no positive cases of the virus there the orange restrictions were not warranted. Any areas wanting to stay in that stricter level must have authorization from the state and must be able to show the need with data.

Herbert insisted: This is a collaborative effort between state and local officials.

How was the decision made?

Herbert doesnt anticipate a surge in cases with the loosened restrictions, but said if there is one, the state is prepared.

Utah is at about 10% of hospital capacity, he noted, with coronavirus patients. According to the latest health department numbers, 99 people statewide are currently hospitalized with the virus. That means, essentially, another 900 people would have to be in an intensive care unit before the state would be at its maximum beds.

That calculation was a big driver in the decision to downgrade to yellow, the governor said. The point of putting the restrictions in place in the beginning was to make sure that the health care systems in the state werent overwhelmed. And because that hasnt happened, he said, he feels comfortable slowly opening back up.

The data, Herbert added, is being looked at in a very diligent way, including deaths and hotspots.

Each week, the state will continue to assess on an individual basis those areas remaining at the orange level.

Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall said she would like to see a consistent decline in cases for 14 days before making any changes. The zip codes of 84116 and 84104 on the west side of the city, in particular, have been ravaged by the virus and are lower-income areas.

The current data does not indicate Salt Lake City should yet be loosening our approach, she said in a statement.

West Valley City spokesman Sam Johnson said staying orange for now was also the right decision for the second largest city in the state, with more than 136,000 residents. There are challenges with that in terms of density, he noted.

Both Summit and Wasatch Counties in the northern part of the state will be exempt from moving to yellow this week, too, but not because of high populations. Instead, they have high rates of the virus per capita.

Summit, in particular, was inundated with coronavirus cases at the start of the outbreak, which coincided with the end of the ski season in Park City. As of Thursday, Summit had 393 cases and Wasatch 188. Both outpace the infections per residents of even Salt Lake County.

Our strategy for remaining at the moderate risk level is to fully understand the results of lifting the stay-at-home order and gather information that will guide our response as we move into the summer months, said Dr. Phil Bondurant, Summit County deputy health director.

The area is remote and the county, as a whole, has just 17 hospital beds for 10,000 residents. With the surge during summer months, the number of people who visit the popular tourist town of Moab over the course of a year reaches 4 million.

"These are numbers that require conservative measures to avoid both medical and public safety collapse and unnecessary deaths, said Christina Sloan, the attorney for Grand County.

I just think were more at risk than the average county, added Mary McGann, chairwoman of the Grand County Council.

The county sits in the Southeast Utah health district, which has seen just 13 cases.

Neighboring San Juan County, meanwhile, has 154 cases. But it will reopen, Burton said, because most of those are on the Navajo Nation, which is a sovereign entity, and the county outside of that has had only four cases.

The town of Bluff there had originally wanted to remain red due to worry about the spread. The mayor said Thursday that she doesnt know what theyll do now that the state wants it to be yellow.

What does yellow mean?

Under the low-risk status, most areas of Utah will be back open, including all businesses; previously those were restricted by type of service under orange.

Swimming pools will specifically be allowed to welcome guests with proper spacing. Restaurants can continue to offer dine-in service and can now open buffets. In-state travel is open and unrestricted. And the moratorium on evictions will be lifted.

Summer sports are allowed for clubs, but not school teams, Herbert clarified later in the day. And students can sign up for drivers education classes to take place in person.

With all of the changes, the governor is asking that individuals still maintain social distancing of 6 feet from others and that everyone wear masks though theyre advised, not required as the economy restarts.

We hope people use caution and commonsense and will be careful in their actions, Herbert said.

He said, too, that anyone who is older, immunocompromised or considered at high risk of contracting the virus should still take strict precautions even under yellow restrictions. Dr. Michael Good, CEO of University of Utah Healthcare, said during the news conference that 70% of the people in Utah who have died from the coronavirus were over age 65. And 90% were either over 65 or had underlying medical conditions, he said.

So those groups are still a concern. But if they stay in their home and we keep them away from kids, no matter how old or how many conditions they have, they, too, can stay well, Good said.

Overall, he noted, the numbers look good. Roughly 99% of those who contracted the virus in the state have or will recover.

The governor added that economic growth is not being put ahead of the health of residents and that if there needs to be a move backward on the scale back to orange or even red, that will happen.

Some areas, particularly in rural Utah, had a leg up, he added, and were ready to move to yellow because they had no cases or little transmission.

Washington, Iron and Kane counties had all requested to shift to lower restrictions late last month, but those were initially denied as being too early. Nephi City and the Bear River Health Department, which oversees Cache, Rich and Box Elder counties in northern Utah, also wanted to transition to yellow sooner.

With the low risks in those areas, the governor said its possible some parts of the state could see a full recovery by the end of the year.

Tribune reporters Sean Means and Norma Gonzalez contributed to this report.

Read more from the original source:

Most of Utah will move to 'yellow' risk level for coronavirus. Here's what that means. - Salt Lake Tribune

The condition, called pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome, has been reported in about 100 children in New York State, including three who died, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said this week. Cases have been reported in other states, including Louisiana, Mississippi and California, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said it will soon issue an alert asking doctors to report cases of children with symptoms of the syndrome.

In the new study, published on Wednesday in the journal Lancet, doctors in Italy compared a series of 10 cases of the illness with cases of a similar rare condition in children called Kawasaki disease.

The authors found that over the five years before the coronavirus pandemic January 2015 to mid-February 2020 19 children with Kawasaki disease were treated at the Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital, which has an advanced pediatric department, in the Bergamo province.

But during the two months from February 18 to April 20 alone, the hospital, which is at the epicenter of Italys coronavirus outbreak, treated 10 children with similar hyper-inflammatory symptoms.

Ten cases in two months about 30 times the rate of the Kawasaki disease cases, which occurred at a pace of about one every three months suggests a cluster that is driven by the coronavirus pandemic, especially since overall hospital admissions during this time were much lower than usual, the authors said.

Nevertheless, the authors noted that the number of cases was small, suggesting that the new syndrome was unlikely to be widespread among children, who have generally been less hard hit by the virus than adults.

None of the 10 children died, but their symptoms were more severe than those experienced by the children with Kawasaki disease. They were much more likely to have heart complications, and five of them exhibited shock, which did not occur in any of the Kawasaki disease cases. They had lower counts of platelets and a type of white blood cell, typical of Covid-19 patients defending against the infection. And more of the children with the new syndrome needed treatment with steroids in addition to the immunoglobulin treatment that both they and the Kawasaki patients received.

Like the cases in the United States and elsewhere, the 10 children were generally significantly older than the patients with Kawasaki disease, which tends to strike infants and preschoolers. The average age of the Kawasaki patients was 3. All but one of the children with the new syndrome were older than 5 and their average age was 7 .

Eight of the 10 children tested positive for coronavirus antibodies. The researchers suggested that negative test results for the other two children might reflect the fact that the tests were not perfectly accurate and that one of the children had just been treated with a large dose of immunoglobulin, which could have interfered with the tests ability to detect antibodies.

The presence of antibodies suggests that the Italian children, like many of the cases in the United States, were infected with the virus weeks earlier. Experts say the new inflammatory syndrome appears to be a delayed reaction driven by a childs immune system response to the infection, in contrast to the primary way that the virus affects patients by attacking the cells in their lungs.

Read more:

New Inflammatory Condition in Children Probably Linked to Coronavirus, Study Finds - The New York Times

Deforestation in the Brazilian rainforest increased by nearly 64% in April this year, compared to the same month last year, shows data from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE). Last month alone, more than 156 square miles (405.6 square kilometers) of rainforest were destroyed -- a vast swath roughly the size of California.

The first trimester of the 2020 had already seen a more than 50% increase in deforestation compared to last year, according to INPE data.

More than 3,000 soldiers from the Brazilian Armed Forces have been deployed to the Amazon, along with environmental officials, to help curb illegal logging and other criminal activities that could impact the rainforest, according to the Defense Ministry.

President Jair Bolsonaro has previously faced global criticism and condemnation for the deforestation occurring under his watch. The far-right and pro-business president has vowed to explore the rainforest's economic potential.

"We are well on track for another record year for deforestation and fires in the Amazon," Adriana Charoux, an Amazon campaigner for Greenpeace Brazil said in a recent press statement. "In the midst of the pandemic, Bolsonaro is doubling down on actions that would effectively disintegrate indigenous territories and lead to more deforestation for meat production.

One of the measures Bolsonaro is pushing for now is Provisional Measure 910 (MP 910), a law which could allow so-called "land grabbers" who illegally invaded public land from 2011 to 2018 to establish legal ownership. The measure was scheduled to be voted in Congress on Wednesday, but didn't have a quorum.

The hashtag #NoMP910 trended in Brazil Wednesday, with environmentalists and Brazilians in general protesting the vote. "It's our land, territory, place. Our environment is not a political-electoral bargaining chip," indigenous activist Mayal Txucarrame Tweeted on her personal account. "Stop the genocide and ecocide."

Bolsonaro has frequently criticized the amount of Amazon land officially demarcated as indigenous territory as excessive. During an event at Planalto presidential palace in Brasilia last February, Bolsonaro said it was "abusive" for such a large portion of territory to be occupied by the regional tribes leaving "its goods hidden forever."

Coronavirus deaths among Brazil's indigenous people

About 13% of Brazil is indigenous land, mostly in the Amazon. That land is officially reserved for the country's 900,000 indigenous people, which represents less than 0.5% of the country's population.

Activists worry that increasing commercial activity in the Amazon also carries a higher risk that outsiders will carry contagious diseases into indigenous communities -- including the coronavirus.

At least 277 cases and 19 deaths linked to the coronavirus have been confirmed so far among Brazil's indigenous tribes, according to SESAI, a specialized branch of the Brazilian Health Ministry that deals with health issues among indigenous populations. Many of these have been registered in the Alto Rio Solimes, in the state of Amazonas.

SESAI said it has sent hundreds of N95 masks, gloves and disposable goggle to dozens of tribes throughout the country. It has also launched a vaccination campaign against influenza and information campaign about Covid-19, according to a recent report.

But environmental groups like Survival International believe the only way to help the indigenous people -- especially uncontacted groups -- is to keep illegal loggers and miners out of their territory.

"If their lands are properly protected from outsiders, uncontacted tribes should be relatively safe from the coronavirus pandemic. But many of their territories are being invaded and stolen for logging, mining and agribusiness, with the encouragement of President Bolsonaro," Survival International's Uncontacted Tribes campaigner Sarah Shenker said in a recent press statement.

"Where invaders are present, coronavirus could wipe out whole peoples. It's a matter of life and death."

Read the original post:

Deforestation in the Amazon is accelerating despite coronavirus - CNN

Hassidic Jews Socially distancing on a Willamsburg street during Saturday morning shabbat prayers on May 2. David Dee Delgado/Gothamist/WNYC hide caption

Hassidic Jews Socially distancing on a Willamsburg street during Saturday morning shabbat prayers on May 2.

American Jews are finding themselves in a historically familiar position: Scapegoated for a plague.

Some of the first New Yorkers to contract the coronavirus were Jews in the Orthodox Jewish communities in and around New York City. In the weeks that followed, several Jewish weddings and funerals were held in violation of public health orders. Then came statements from public officials singling out Jews, and anti-Semitic threats on Facebook.

After New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio witnessed the NYPD break up a large funeral in Brooklyn for a prominent rabbi, the mayor tweeted: "My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed."

De Blasio was condemned by fellow Democrats and American Jews. There is no data indicating religious Jews are violating social distancing rules at a greater rate than other demographic groups. While there have been high-profile incidents of police disrupting Jewish gatherings, the NYPD has also made arrests of various sorts for failing to practice social distancing, like at a Brooklyn barbershop and at a Manhattan "marijuana party." And pictures of throngs hanging out at parks and closely congregating for the Navy Blue Angels and Air Force Thunderbirds flyovers indicated that not social distancing isn't a problem specific to a particular religious group.

De Blasio later said that he "spoke out of real distress that people's lives were in danger." He added: "I regret if the way I said it in any way gave people a feeling of being treated the wrong way, that was not my intention. It was said with love but it was tough love, it was anger and frustration."

By some accounts, religious Jews in certain neighborhoods of New York City have been stricken by the virus at high rates. At the same time, Jews who have recovered from the virus have donated plasma in extraordinary numbers in an effort to save others.

In early March, Yaacov Behrman, a community leader and Hasidic Jewish activist, rushed to get ahead of the virus by marrying his bride, Shevi Katzman, after an engagement of just a week-and-a-half. They had a socially distanced wedding across two Brooklyn backyards with a few siblings, no cousins, two witnesses and a rabbi, and 2,500 people watching on Facebook Live.

"I think that's what's so painful and upsetting about it, about the mayor's tweet, [is] the vast majority of Orthodox Jews have given up [something] I gave up a wedding," Behrman said. "What are you generalizing for, Mr. Mayor? It's like going to the park and saying, 'My message to the yuppies,' you know?"

Behrman said he does not believe the mayor is anti-Semitic, but Jews should not have been singled out.

"The organizers of the funeral [de Blasio tweeted about] were 100% wrong it was an embarrassment, it was an embarrassment to me as an Orthodox Jew, it was an embarrassment to me as a New Yorker," he said. "But I also want to make it clear, you look around New York, everyone is becoming lax unfortunately."

Yet there's a pattern of specifically highlighting Jewish offenders. In Lakewood, N.J., where early on in the pandemic police made arrests at large Jewish gatherings, a local news station reported that a school bus was carrying children to a Jewish school that was open, illegally. The reporter later acknowledged that the bus was just delivering food to homebound families.

In nearby Jackson Township, N.J., town council president Barry Calogero made a speech at a government meeting indicating that Judaism itself made Jews recalcitrant when it comes to following the rules.

"Unfortunately, there are groups of people who hide behind cultures or religious beliefs and put themselves, our first responders, and quite honestly all of Jackson and bordering towns at risk for their selfishness, irresponsibility and inability to follow the law put in place by President Trump and Governor Murphy," he said.

Calogero said he was not anti-Semitic. But after criticism he resigned days later, citing health reasons.

And in Rockland County, N.Y., where there are large communities of Orthodox Jews, the county executive's Facebook post about police breaking up a large Passover service was met by anti-Semitic comments.

Violations of health regulations by Orthodox Jews have been documented by public officials and media at a level of scrutiny that Jews say others don't face. Eli Steinberg, an Orthodox Jewish writer in Lakewood, N.J., says it's easier to generalize about those who wear traditional garb.

"We're, ya know, we're the guys dressed in black and white and we wear the hats, so it becomes a sort of more interesting story" when Jews violate health rules, he said. "But it's not it's a story about people....People do dumb stuff."

The problem, he said, is when it is made to seem as though the few who violate the rules are more widespread in a particular community.

"In a time of such uncertainty, which we're going through now, when you can effectively scapegoat somebody or scapegoat a group of people about the issue that people are scared of...that's a part of it that concerns me," Steinberg said. "This moment where there's the vehicle of Covid19 to use to spread hate, it just becomes that much more scary."

Hundreds of mourners gather in Brooklyn on April 28, to observe a funeral for Rabbi Chaim Mertz, a Hasidic Orthodox leader whose death was reportedly tied to the coronavirus. Mayor Bill de Blasio chastised "the Jewish community" following the breakup of the large funeral that flouted public health orders. Peter Gerber/AP hide caption

Hundreds of mourners gather in Brooklyn on April 28, to observe a funeral for Rabbi Chaim Mertz, a Hasidic Orthodox leader whose death was reportedly tied to the coronavirus. Mayor Bill de Blasio chastised "the Jewish community" following the breakup of the large funeral that flouted public health orders.

Bari Weiss, author of How To Fight Anti-Semitism and a New York Times opinion staff writer and editor, said given how anti-Semitism is at historic peeks in New York and around the country, public officials need to be "extremely specific" in criticizing large gatherings, instead of blaming "the Jewish community."

"I think that there is a double standard often when it comes to the way that the Jewish community and Jews are talked about, whether it's because we're not perceived as a minority, even though we are," she said. "It stands to reason that lots of people who already perhaps have animosity toward that community will be even more emboldened.

The Anti-Defamation League released a report this week showing that there were more anti-Semitic incidents in 2019 than at any year since it it began tracking in 1979.

"Anyone that's been paying attention, or anyone that knows people inside of these communities, knows already dozens of stories of people that have been spit on, assaulted, harassed, had their head coverings pulled off, had their face smashed with a paving stone," Weiss said.

Now, amid the coronavirus, the hate is more socially distanced happening largely online. Last month the ADL documented how community Facebook groups are loaded with comments blaming Jews for spreading the virus, and calling for them to be firehosed, tear-gassed and denied medical care.

Already a New Jersey man was arrested for using Facebook to threaten to assault Lakewood's Jews for spreading the virus. He was charged with making terrorist threats during a state of emergency. A county deputy fire marshall in New Jersey was investigated for similar Facebook comments. And in Queens, a couple was charged with hate crimes after attacking a group of Orthodox Jews ripping their masks off and punching them in the face for supposedly not social distancing.

"You Jews are all getting us sick," the couple allegedly yelled.

This is all too familiar to Jews, Weiss says. For centuries Jews have been massacred for supposedly spreading plagues. Rats brought the black death to the European continent in the 1300s, "but rats weren't blamed. Jews were blamed." Thousands were slaughtered; entire communities were eliminated.

Jews today do not believe that violence at such a scale is imminent. But they remember their history.

"I think Jewish memory is always a gift, but it's especially a gift in a moment of crisis because frankly, we Jews have lived through a tremendous amount in our centuries on this Earth," Weiss said. "And whenever we ask could it get worse, we know the answer is yes, because we've lived through worse, or at least our ancestors have. So I think Jewish memory can help us be grateful and keep things in perspective."

See the original post:

Jewish Americans Say They Are Scapegoated For The Coronavirus Spread - NPR

But that seclusion has come to an abrupt end. Over the past two weeks, fishing boat crews from Seattle and elsewhere have started arriving by the hundreds, positioning for the start of Alaskas summer seafood rush.

The fishing frenzy begins on Thursday with the season opening for the famed Copper River salmon, whose prized fillets can fetch up to $75 a pound at the market. Before the pandemic, Cordovas Copper River catch was flown fresh for swift delivery to some of the countrys highest-end restaurants.

But the town of about 2,000 people has been consumed in recent weeks by debates over whether to even allow a fishing season and how to handle an influx of fishing crews that usually doubles its population.

The conditions are ideal for propagation of the coronavirus: Most of the imported crews work in the close quarters of fishing boats or sleep in crowded bunkhouses next to processing facilities. Cordovas tiny hospital, which typically has no ventilators, could be quickly overwhelmed.

My worry is they are hoping for the best without having planned for the worst, said Sylvia Lange, who grew up in the fishing industry and now runs a popular restaurant and hotel in Cordova, on the shores of Alaskas magnificent Prince William Sound.

The threat of a disrupted fishing season comes as Alaska deals with a series of crippling blows to its economy.

Now, the states $5.6 billion seafood industry is at risk. Conditions at fish processing centers are often as crowded as those at the meat processing plants in the rest of the country that have proved to be magnets for coronavirus infection. And the workers there and on fishing boats typically fly in from all over the country, sometimes from all over the world.

In Cordova, the community has been polarized. On the one hand, fishing is its lifeblood. On the other, how many cases of the coronavirus can so small a town afford?

Mayor Clay Koplin tried last week to reassure the community: While the fishing season would proceed, he said in a radio briefing, the city was ready with a variety of strategies to quarantine newcomers, maintain social distancing and contain any cases that emerged.

He did not anticipate that the first case would arrive so soon just two days later.

Its pretty discouraging, Mr. Koplin said.

Health officials have rushed to contain that first case, a fish processing facility worker who had recently flown up from Seattle. They have traced and tested all who were in contact with that person and now believe the case is contained.

But with more than 50 crew members and other workers arriving each day, more infections may be coming.

With that in mind, the city has embarked on an all-stops-out effort to test, trace and isolate each and every case. Tests have been stockpiled to check anyone who develops symptoms. People found to have infections will be quarantined or removed from the city, and their contacts tracked down and tested.

It is essentially the strategy advocated by public health officials for communities across the country, once they bring their coronavirus outbreaks under control. Cordova provides a unique opportunity to see how effective such a protocol may be, using a community with very few cases, but a substantial continuing threat.

Nobody ever wants to be an experiment, said Dr. Hannah Sanders, medical director of the Cordova Community Medical Center. But, in some ways it is.

Alaska has its own history of devastating impacts from disease, including the influenza pandemic of 1918 that led to widespread deaths, especially among Alaska Natives. In some native communities, such as Nome and Wales, more than half of the residents died.

Ms. Lange, the hotel proprietor, said she and other Alaska Natives have talked a lot in recent days about the 1918 outbreak and the risks of another pandemic. She said that while fishing was at the core of her family and community, she also had concerns about the ability of the city and the industry to hold back an outbreak as virulent as the coronavirus.

Its not easy to be critical of an industry we all love and are dependent on, Ms. Lange said. People have said theyll never set foot again in our business.

The discussion is happening in fishing towns all over Alaska, including Dillingham, the center of the salmon fishing fleet in Bristol Bay.

Hospital leaders at the Bristol Bay Area Health Corporation have requested that the fishing season remain closed, arguing that the arrival of thousands of people from around the world puts the community at risk. So far, the request has gone unheeded. The fishing season there is set to commence in June.

In Cordova, Mark Roye was one of the people who argued for a Copper River fishing season with only locals to avoid the risk of importing coronavirus cases from outsiders. He said that while the season would be prolonged, the proceeds could be divided among all of the fisherys stakeholders, even those who could not participate.

That idea ultimately was rejected. Now Mr. Roye has taken his sailboat, stocked it with months of supplies and sailed 20 miles outside town, settling in for some long-term isolation on his boat. He said that he while the town had done a lot to prepare, he worried that it would not be enough.

If anything goes wrong, Mr. Roye said, the threat to the rest of the salmon fishery around the state is going to be enormous.

Cordovas strategy for keeping the virus at bay involves several strict protocols.

Workers arriving in town must be quarantined for 14 days either in a facility or on a ship, with a yellow-and-black quarantine flag raised. They cannot go inside grocery stores. They have to have their temperatures taken twice a day and report any symptoms. Hand-washing facilities are available around the docks.

People in town must wear masks and are required to follow social distancing rules.

Mr. Koplin, the mayor, said he had been pleased with the level of compliance among the newly arriving fishing crews.

The first coronavirus case surfaced not with someone on a fishing boat but among the large group of workers who process the fish that are not sold fresh.

The company involved, Ocean Beauty Seafoods, said the employee tested negative in Seattle but then tested positive after arriving in Cordova. It is unclear where the person got infected, Mr. Koplin said, but testing of all of the people the worker was in contact with in the area has not identified anyone else with the illness.

Rich Wheeler, who runs a neighboring processing facility, 60 North Seafoods, said he had told his workers that they must remain on the campus for the entirety of their working time in Alaska and would be fired if they leave.

The scene in Cordova is much different than in other years, with a slower pace and fewer people ahead of what is normally an energetic opening day for the Copper River season. Mr. Wheeler said companies did not want to be part of the problem, and would also face their own serious challenges if the virus were to start spreading in one of their plants.

It would be pretty catastrophic, he said.

Read the rest here:

Thousands Are Headed to Alaskas Fishing Towns. So Is the Coronavirus. - The New York Times

I was born in the Navajo Nation and raised half on and half off the reservation. Shuttling between my grandmothers ranch in Black Mesa, Ariz., and the small border town of Winslow, I took note from an early age of the vast inequities between those two places.

In Black Mesa, where the clay soil is blanketed with sagebrush and juniper, theres no electricity, running water or paved roads. A typical day began as early as 4 in the morning; we made a corn pollen offering to the holy people, drank some loose-leaf Lipton tea and let the sheep out to graze.

In Winslow, I lived on the north side of the I-40 freeway and appreciated the convenience of having running water, electricity and a school within walking distance. Winslow is a small railroad town where Navajo families do their weekly shopping and laundry, and there is a dormitory for Native American high school students.

Today the Navajo Nation is one of the worst hot spots in the country for Covid-19.

Hundreds of miles of roads are unpaved, so it can take up to three hours to get a sick person to help. Its difficult to self-isolate because families live in one-room homes called hogans. Up to 40 percent of Navajo households dont have running water, making it hard to wash hands. Cellphone service and Wi-Fi are limited, so its difficult to keep in touch and to get information about the epidemic.

It took six weeks after Congress allocated $8 billion for coronavirus relief for the Navajo Nation, along with 573 other recognized Native American tribes, to see any of the money. And so far, 102 people have died.

For Native Americans, the American dream has been a nightmare. I always cringe when I see those Established in signs at the entrances to towns and cities. They erase the history of Indigenous people who managed those lands for thousands of years, before it was stolen, their treaties broken, their families killed. Today you see the results of this trauma throughout Indigenous territories.

The Navajo Nation lies among the four sacred mountains between Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. We call ourselves Din, the people, in Navajo, and we pray to the mountains for protection and healing. When a Din baby is born, we bury her umbilical cord near her home so that she will always remember where she is from. We have a symbiotic relationship with the hills, mountains, water, plants and animals; they all have names, songs and prayers.

My grandmother is the matriarch of our family. She is from the Salt clan. The Din have clans that help us identify ourselves and our relations to others, a kinship system that we call K. It was through K and our ceremonies that my people survived the attempted genocide of the 350-mile Long Walk from Arizona to the concentration camp at Fort Sumner, N.M., where 8,000 of our people were held from 1864 to 1868 by the U.S. Army.

That year our leaders signed a treaty with the federal government that allowed us to return to our homelands under the condition that we give up any weapons, send our children to school and convert to Christianity. Basically, agree to assimilate.

My grandmother was the only one of her eight brothers and sisters who wasnt sent to a government-run boarding school. Her parents sent her into the mountains with the sheep for days at a time to hide her from the Indian agents who took Din children away from their families. They were healers and wanted one of their children to carry on the traditional ways.

And she has. She supported 10 children by raising sheep and cattle and weaving rugs. She taught her children and grandchildren to be mindful and not take anything for granted.

When I was growing up, to get water for the household, we had to drive an hour to the Peabody Coal Companys mine, where there was a public well. This naturally taught me to respect water and to consume it wisely.

The conditions I was raised in havent changed much. The lack of basic services on the reservation isnt due to our choosing to live this way. Its because treaties and federal policies dictate how we live and have created red tape that makes it hard to get things done.

How is it that the Navajo Nation borders 80 miles of the Colorado River and doesnt have access to one drop of water? How can it be that coal and water from Navajo lands helped create electricity for Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix, and yet 15,000 families on the reservation dont have power?

Our tribal government was formed in 1923 with the express purpose of completing a business transaction to sign oil lease agreements with Standard Oil. This was the beginning of a system in which corporations could make billions pillaging our homelands for uranium, coal, oil and gas deposits, leaving our groundwater contaminated and our people sickened with uranium radiation exposure, lung disease, asthma and cancer.

Today we dont need handouts from the U.S. government. We need investment in building a restorative economy that is aligned with our traditional values and our relationship with nature.

While interest rates are near zero, we should be investing billions in a Green New Deal for the Navajo Nation to support new infrastructure for clean energy, sustainable agriculture, broadband, education, housing and health care.

The coronavirus has exposed how fragile my home is, but it is also a reminder of what matters. Im grateful to my great-grandparents for their bold action to hide my grandmother. Her wisdom and knowledge of our ceremonies and language has kept us rooted to Mother Earth. She is 95 years old and is a national treasure. Thousands of elders like her are at high risk for this virus, and we are keeping her out of harms way by staying home and wearing masks when we have to go out for food.

Unlike some prominent Republicans who have suggested we could sacrifice our elders to help the economy, we honor our elders and believe all life is sacred.

Wahleah Johns is a founder of Native Renewables, a nonprofit that provides solar energy to tribal communities.

See original here:

The Coronavirus Is Just One Challenge the Navajo Nation Is Facing - The New York Times

NAIROBI, Kenya For the novelist Maaza Mengiste, the coronavirus lockdowns and stay-at-home measures that have taken hold around the world have brought back the sense of exile she felt when she and her family fled Ethiopia in the 1970s.

So it was a welcome reprieve when she was asked to participate in and help curate a virtual literary festival focused on connection specifically, between writers of African origin and readers throughout the continent and globe.

I jumped at the chance, she said in a phone interview from Zurich. Doing this online breaks a lot of boundaries that felt insurmountable.

Afrolit Sans Frontieres, a series of hourlong readings and question-and-answer sessions held entirely on Facebook and Instagram, kicked off on March 23 and returned for a second edition in April. A third is scheduled to begin on May 25, to coincide with Africa Day, and a fourth is already in the works. In the face of the pandemic, with countless numbers of book fairs, tours and other literary events canceled or postponed, Afrolit stands out as a gathering where readers for some sessions, hundreds have logged in can hear from authors and talk to them about sometimes difficult or taboo subjects.

The South African writer Zukiswa Wanner, who was inspired to create the festival after watching John Legends at-home concert on Instagram, is determined to use this moment to center the work of African writers. Its like a writing master class and a festival in one, Wanner, the award-winning author of nine books, said in a phone interview from Nairobi.

Writers have included Abubakar Adam Ibrahim of Nigeria, Hemley Boum of Cameroon, Bisi Adjapon of Ghana and Mohale Mashigo of South Africa. In the festivals first edition, novelists read sex scenes from their books, explored the place of intimacy in African cultures and discussed love amid war and displacement. During the second edition, writers reflected on what they wish they were asked, both about themselves and their work.

The Eritrean-Ethiopian novelist Sulaiman Addonia spoke about having an epiphany during a late-evening walk and running home to jot down the title of his most recent novel, Silence Is My Mother Tongue. The Egyptian writer Mona Eltahawy spoke about maintaining bravery and courage in the face of attacks, while the Ugandan novelist Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi talked about the different mind-sets she gets into when writing a short story versus a novel.

Ishmael Beah, the Sierra Leonean author of the best-selling war memoir A Long Way Gone, wished people would ask him questions about his writing career and less about being a former child soldier. And Mukoma wa Ngugi, the novelist and academic and son of the prominent Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiongo, topped it all by playing the guitar.

Mengiste, the author of Beneath the Lions Gaze and The Shadow King, sees Afrolit as both a homecoming and an example of what African literary festivals could be. What it has affirmed and reconfirmed for me, in a really wonderful way, she said, is what happens when African writers speak to an audience that doesnt require them to explain ethnographic or sociological questions before they get to talk about creativity.

The writers, she said, didnt have to explain their backgrounds or the colonial histories of their home countries before talking about their work. Rather, the conversations went straight to the topics at hand.

It was wonderful to have that experience, Mengiste said, and I have never had that in any other festival that I have been a part of.

Wanner also wanted to transcend language barriers by involving authors not only from Anglophone countries but also from French, Portuguese and Arabic-speaking parts of Africa. The readings and question-and-answer sessions may happen in any language, or more than one language. Even the festivals name, which combines English and French words, reflects that multilingual approach.

If there was a way I could have thrown Portuguese in the title as well, I would have done that, she said.

The Angolan writer Ondjaki (the pen name of Ndalu de Almeida) said the virtual festival allowed him to connect with writers in a very beautiful, accessible way, he said whom he might never have met except in European or American literary circles. As a writer in Portuguese a language officially spoken in just six out of Africas 55 countries Ondjaki said many Portuguese speakers dont get a chance to access books from other writers in the continent unless they are translated.

Afrolit also pushed him, he said, to start reading writers like Chike Frankie Edozien of Nigeria and Remy Ngamije of Namibia.

For Troy Onyango, a Kenyan writer who moderated some of the Afrolit sessions, the pandemic has meant meditating on the present by trying to understand the past. Part of that includes reading novels like Tsitsi Dangarembgas Nervous Conditions, which explores class, race and gender in pre-independence Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. It also has meant listening to more experienced writers about the insights to be gained from fiction and nonfiction.

I dont think before Covid-19 we would have imagined a literary festival in our living rooms, Onyango said, and just being able to access whichever writer and being able to ask them questions from the serious ones to the mundane ones.

Last week, Wanner announced that Afrolits third edition will run under the title Future. Present. Past. The fourth, she said, will have the theme of Long Story Short and will exclusively feature poets and short story writers.

Afrolit is free, and Wanner isnt making money from it. She hopes to get funding so that shes able to pay the writers, especially the younger ones who might be working without the safety net of unemployment benefits or health insurance, she said. But if no funding comes through, she said, that doesnt mean she will stop.

This is something that we love and its important that people get to realize there is all this African literature, she said. Africa is writing. Africa is thriving.

Read more from the original source:

An African Literary Festival for the Age of Coronavirus - The New York Times

If you were a medical researcher studying infectious disease three months ago and you had an idea for a project, getting that project funded, off the ground, in the lab, and in a journal would have taken you many, many months. Chances are, youd see your work in a peer-reviewed publication not until this summer or even a year later.

The coronavirus pandemic has changed all that.

One of the more uplifting developments of the bleak past several weeks has been witnessing science rise to the occasion in the face of coronavirus. As the virus has spread across the globe, scientific research has sped up to keep pace with it. The urgency of coronavirus has jolted scientific research, normally a sclerotic process. Studies that once took months to execute and get to the public now take weeks, even days. In the process, weve been given a glimpse of what science might look like after the pandemic.

How is the new, faster science manifesting itself? Use of preprint servers where scientists post research that has not yet been peer reviewed has spiked dramatically. Views and downloads are both up more than a hundredfold on medRxiv, a preprint server for medical papers. The number of new papers uploaded is up at least fivefold as well.

Journals, too, are seeing an unprecedented surge in submissions. The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) sees 110-150 coronavirus submissions a day, a spokesperson told me, and on occasion has seen more than 200 submissions a day.

Many journals have revamped their process to get those papers peer reviewed and published at a vastly expedited pace. A process that can take weeks has been condensed to 48 hours or less in many cases, Jennifer Zeis, a director of communications and media relations at the NEJM told me. One preprint posted to the bioRxiv in April looked at 14 journals and found that turnaround times had been, on average, halved.

Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health and private actors have accelerated the grant-making process for coronavirus research, in an effort to get researchers the funding they need to study treatments, vaccines, hospital care, transmission, and testing.

All of this is great news. Acting faster on the coronavirus could save hundreds of thousands of lives. Faster turnaround means that scientists learn more quickly which projects are promising, policymakers get key updates faster, and patients can receive treatments that help them get well sooner.

There are, of course, complications. Quality control could end up being a casualty, for one. Preprint servers have long been part of the scientific process, but theyre getting vastly more use and vastly more media attention. The newer, faster pace could mean that badly flawed preprints get widely shared and covered in the media, fueling the spread of misinformation and forcing other scientists to waste valuable time by publicly debunking papers that would ordinarily be rejected in the peer-review process.

But those harms are more than possible to mitigate, and the benefits of a faster scientific process are enormous. Developing and rigorously evaluating medications and treatments faster doesnt just save lives during a pandemic it saves lives all the time. We ought to be thinking about which components of our new warp-speed scientific ecosystem we can keep for good.

To understand just how much the process of biomedical research has changed in the span of several weeks, its important to know how research worked in the Before Times.

Before the coronavirus crisis, it would take half a year to write a grant application and months more to see if you got the grant. Once you conducted your research, you would usually write it up into an article that you could submit to a journal.

You might submit a draft to a preprint server such as bioRxiv or medRxiv. But before the coronavirus crisis, many researchers preferred not to, and some journals (including a majority of biology journals, at least as of 2017) have policies prohibiting submissions of articles that have already been publicly posted elsewhere.

If you did submit your draft to the preprint server, it probably wouldnt be widely read (though that has been changing in recent years; as posting to a preprint server has become more common, some grant funders require it, and journals have increasingly accepted such submissions). But preprints do get ideas out faster, put them in front of paywalls, and allow for feedback and collaboration. Even before the coronavirus hit, they were a growing part of where science happens, and coverage of preprints in the media has been getting more common, too.

When you submit to a journal, your paper is evaluated to see if it has enough promise to kick off the peer-review process. Manuscripts rejected at this stage are insufficiently original, have serious conceptual and/or methodological flaws, have poor grammar or English language, or are outside the aims and scope of the journal, Social Science & Medicine explains on a guide for submission to their journal. Rejection at this stage is called a desk rejection.

Papers that pass that standard get sent out to several other scientists in the field for peer review. This process usually takes months. Social Science & Medicine says itll typically be within 80 days, and thats better than average one review of thousands of paper submissions found that the average first response time across many journals is 13 weeks.

Then, if the article is accepted, Social Science & Medicine states it currently takes 1 week to get a citable, uncorrected draft of the article online, another 4-5 weeks to get the final corrected article online, and a few weeks later this is compiled into an online volume and issue. The print copy follows 2-3 weeks later. Often, an article is not accepted as is but is sent back with suggested revisions, resetting the clock.

To give you a sense of how long that is, imagine that you submitted an article about the coronavirus to Social Science & Medicine in mid-January, when China acknowledged that there was person-to-person transmission of the virus, and it went through the normal peer-review process. Assuming that the article was accepted without revisions, youd probably hear that your article was accepted in early April. Thered be a citable, uncorrected draft online a week later, in mid-April. The final corrected article would be online four or five weeks later, so youd still be waiting now for that to happen! The print copy with your article would go out in July.

Even before the coronavirus, people were raising concerns about this process. In an era known for the great speed and availability of information where we could choose to blog our results rather than submit them to journals publishing papers seems slower and more painful than ever before, Vivian Siegel, the editor-in-chief of Cell, argued back in 2008.

The scientific peer-review process is one of the weakest links in the process of scientific knowledge production, researchers Janine Huisman and Jeroen Smits argued in Scientometrics in 2017. While the actual time it takes to write a referee report may vary between a few hours and a day, reviewers tend to take several weeks to several months to submit their reports.

That means that peer review takes months not because theres months of work to do theres about a day of work to do, and no one gets around to it for months. That should be unacceptable even outside an emergency.

The coronavirus crisis has pushed scientific research to change the way it does things.

To be clear, this isnt a first its standard for journals to work a bit differently in a crisis. The peer-review process being used for SARS-CoV-2 (the novel coronavirus) was also used when SARS and Ebola erupted in the last couple of decades, a spokesperson for the NEJM told me. Those experiences tell us that peer review doesnt need to take months it can happen faster just by virtue of having a list of peer reviewers willing to take an immediate look at the papers theyre sent.

From the journals perspective, its a shift that shouldnt compromise their standards. We keep our standards as high for breaking stories as we do for anything we publish, Zeis told me. That means that the research articles we publish are reviewed and go through our careful editing procedure. And yet everything is expedited tremendously faster review by editors, faster responses by peer reviewers, faster work by the manuscript editors, illustrators, proofreaders, and production staff.

This paper in Science, describing a key protein in the coronavirus that will be targeted in developing treatments and vaccines, was reportedly published nine days after it was submitted. Its the same process going extremely fast, Holden Thorp, the journals editor-in-chief, told the New York Times.

Thats one way that science is happening faster. But its not the only way. In addition to getting responses for journals faster, more and more scientists are using preprint servers to share their research before it is peer reviewed. Preprint servers already existed before the pandemic, but they have been used much more lately, and theres a feedback loop: Scientists are now more likely to expect useful feedback and engagement, so they are more likely to post on these servers and to engage with other articles.

On the funding side, too, there has been an effort to speed up the pace at which science happens. Grant-writing, just like scientific publishing, is full of frustrating delays and wasted time. It takes months to prepare a grant request, and can take months for the grants to be reviewed and approved or rejected.

Nonprofit programs like Fast Grants, which Ive written about, are trying to fix this by offering a one-hour application process and a 48-hour turnaround. It was very much rigorous peer review, it was just accelerated, Stanford biochemistry professor Silvana Konermann, who led the grant review process, told me.

This sort of approach giving out lots of money, very fast, with a very streamlined process for understanding what makes a grant opportunity valuable is called rapid-response grant making. It can be a great way to put money in the hands of those who need it fast and without bureaucracy.

Skeptics of rapid-response grant making argue that cutting down the approval process typically means that reviewers are forced to rely on vague signals of research quality instead of deeply digging into the relevant medicine and evaluating projects on their merits. They might, for example, approve all applications from prestigious researchers or universities, excluding important research done by a less-established researcher.

Theres some merit to this criticism, but it misses an important point: Standard grant making also has this problem, despite the months-long delays in the process at various points. In fact, studies show that above some threshold of grant quality, there is virtually no agreement among reviewers about which projects are the best ones.

Theres also almost no correlation between how projects scored and how often the research that resulted from the projects was cited (an imperfect measure of how influential the research was, but still an indicator that grant evaluators cant predict which research will ultimately advance science most). That suggests that lots of review time is effectively wasted.

That all said, the grant process has so far been slower than the publication process to adapt to the crisis. Fast Grants is not the norm. Many researchers who are doing critical coronavirus research are still waiting on funds. We gain the most from fast science if every step of the process grants, approvals to conduct the research, peer review, and publication is sped up, and while there are changes happening on all of those fronts, we are not yet at the point of systematically supporting researchers in getting their work done and results published as quickly as possible.

To be clear, making science go faster wont be a perfect process. Some journal articles are wrong, even during periods when theres less scientific uncertainty and no rush. Being wrong is a normal and healthy part of the scientific process. But right now, journals are under more pressure than ever to get things right. We have a responsibility to publish reliable information quickly for a public health emergency of this magnitude, Zeis told me.

We feel very much that we are publishing research that is literally day by day guiding the national and global response to this virus. And that is both daunting and full of considerable responsibility, because if we make a mistake in judgment about what we publish, that could have a dangerous impact on the course of the pandemic, Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the British medical journal The Lancet, told the New York Times. With the stakes higher than ever, making sure peer-reviewed papers are right while moving the process along at warp speed is hugely challenging.

The challenges are even bigger with preprints. Many peer-reviewed papers turn out to be wrong the peer-review process doesnt catch all errors, and it sometimes misses big and serious ones. The fact a paper has been published doesnt make it definitely reliable. But preprints are even likelier to have serious flaws, including ones that would have been fixed during peer review or would have caused the paper to be rejected. The majority of preprints do become papers, often with no or minimal changes, but a substantial percentage (between half and 25 percent, depending on the preprint archive and the time window studied) dont, often because of serious issues.

Take an early February paper that argued that the similarities between the genome of the novel coronavirus and the genome of HIV suggested that the virus had been genetically engineered. Researchers quickly debunked it, but not before the conspiracy theories had already taken off.

Or take an April serology study in Santa Clara County, California, that claimed to determine that 2.5 percent or more of the population had already been infected and the infection fatality rate was much, much lower than claimed. The preprint was widely covered in the media. Many researchers raised methodological concerns and some pointed out math errors, but the initial statistics had already spread widely. The media coverage might have spurred the peer corrections, but lots of people got misapprehensions about widespread immunity in the meantime.

The same team that published the Santa Clara serology study also conducted a study in Los Angeles. From the Los Angeles study, they initially published less than a preprint just a press release about their results. That, too, was widely covered, often in a fashion that obscured that no study had yet been published.

Just last week, researchers condemned an LA Times article based on a preprint about how the coronavirus had mutated to become more transmissible, arguing that the mutation is actually fairly likely to be nonfunctional (as nearly all mutations are) and that the paper ignored better hypotheses about the spread of the variant virus.

The problem in all these cases wasnt necessarily that the study turned out wrong or that they were published in preprint form. Flawed papers were being published before the pandemic, as were preprints. The difference this time is that because of the circumstances, preprints with eye-grabbing results about the coronavirus end up being amplified when in an earlier time they would have been ignored or discussed only by scientists.

Preprint servers are scrambling to have more of a review process to avoid these events, but of course any kind of review process complicates their mission to let scientists share a first draft without onerous review.

Theres a potential fix here: The media should be very thoughtful about how to cover preprints. Journalism is an essential piece of the scientific process, but science communications should be made cautiously.

One piece of advice that scientists have given reporters is to be sure, when writing about a preprint, to talk to several unaffiliated scientists about their impression of the research, effectively getting an unofficial peer review of the research.

Other critics advise a much stronger measure for researchers themselves: Dont put speculative conclusions in your preprints. Sharing data is almost always valuable to other researchers, while conclusions are more likely to be widely spread and misinterpreted, and should arguably wait until theres been consultation with other researchers in the field.

For that reason, preprint servers like bioRxiv have started screening out papers that make claims based on computational models (rather than experiments in the real world). If we went down that route, preprints would be commonplace for some kinds of research while others that are too speculative would have to wait for peer review.

Certainly, theres a lot of room for improvement as researchers, media outlets, and individuals figure out how to engage with a new, faster-paced science that relies more on preprints. But the fact theres room for improvement shouldnt obscure how much good a faster scientific process is doing.

Faster publication of virus genomes has allowed researchers to build on each others work. Faster publication of clinical trial results has helped us better understand how to treat the disease. Research has been used to inform public health recommendations, like allowing states to reopen outdoor facilities first in light of evidence that outdoor transmission is rare, and encouraging face masks in light of evidence of asymptomatic transmission.

Making science happen faster has saved a lot of lives. And even when the crisis is over, making science happen faster will save lives by speeding up research into cancer treatments, air pollution, climate change, malaria vaccines, and more. The crisis has brought to the forefront the critical role that scientists play in making our world a better place, but that role is by no means unique to the crisis.

Which should leave us asking: How much of this faster scientific process can we keep after the crisis? Can some grants continue to be made available with a short application process and extremely fast approval process? Can researchers stay in the habit of posting and engaging with preprints? Can papers stick with streamlined processes so that it doesnt take months to get a paper published?

The answer is almost certainly that we can. Itll be challenging itll require changing how papers work and doing more to combat misinformation as more and more research bypasses traditional peer-review channels. New publishing models (like preregistration of studies and pre-acceptance by journals based on those preregistrations, or overlay journals built based on open peer review on preprint servers) will likely be part of the solution.

But now that scientific researchers have seen what theyre capable of, we shouldnt just accept returning to a normal that was slowing down essential progress.

Support Voxs explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Voxs work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

See original here:

How the coronavirus is changing science: Research is moving fast with medRxiv and other tools - Vox.com