Category: Corona Virus

Image caption Thirty of the 34 residents at Home Farm care home tested positive for Covid-19

A care home boss has insisted his firm has "nothing to hide" over a major outbreak on Skye that has cost the lives of three residents.

They were among 57 residents and staff at Home Farm care home in Portree, run by HC One, who tested positive for coronavirus.

Sir David Behan also revealed that 10 people died in an outbreak at another Scottish care home run by his firm.

They were all residents at Mugdock House in Bearsden, East Dunbartonshire.

Sir David, HC One's executive chairman, said nine patients were now self-isolating at the care home and three had recovered.

A spokeswoman for Mugdock House said they were supporting the families of those who died and "doing everything we can" to keep residents and staff safe "throughout these challenging times".

Speaking to BBC Radio Scotland's Drivetime with John Beattie, Sir David revealed that HC One, which operates 56 homes in Scotland, has had Covid-19 cases at two thirds of its sites in recent weeks.

He said: "This is a virus which disproportionately affects older people. I don't think the situation that we're finding is due to any questions about the quality of the staff."

The outbreak on Skye - the first confirmed cases on the island - was announced last week, and an Army mobile testing unit has now been sent.

Sir David said the firm - the UK's biggest care home operator - had taken steps to secure protective equipment and began restricting visitors to its premises on 13 March.

Sir David, a former chief executive of the Care Quality Commission in England, accepted that an inspection report in January had highlighted some problems with cleanliness and staffing at Home Farm.

But he insisted an action plan had been drawn up to address these problems and told John Beattie he was not looking "to hide anything here. This is a matter of public of interest".

However, he conceded it had been difficult to recruit permanent staff on Skye.

"In this particular home we have competition from tourism and other industries.

"We have increased salaries... to try to recruit but we've had a large dependency on agency staff because of the difficulty in recruiting staff," he said.

The firm has had to bring in staff from outside the island to staff the Home Farm site, from other homes that have been virus-free, as an increasing number of workers self-isolated.

He said guidance had been followed, but a major problem was that staff could have been asymptomatic and spreading the virus.

"The delay in rolling out comprehensive testing of both staff and residents will no doubt have contributed to the virus being present in care homes," he said.

The GMB union wants an inquiry into the scale of the outbreak at Home Farm - a call which was backed by Scottish Labour's Monica Lennon.

In the Scottish Parliament her fellow Labour MSP Rhoda Grant said one of her constituents had complained weeks ago that staff at Home Farm were not wearing personal protective equipment and staff were being brought in from elsewhere without a proper period of isolation.

Health Secretary Jeane Freeman said there was clear guidance in place on infection control, but not all private providers were complying and a more direct approach may be needed.

Asked about conditions for care workers, Sir David said he backed a wider reform of social care in future and much greater investment in staff, putting them more on a par with nurses.

"One of the issues this virus has exposed is the underfunding of adult social care throughout the UK," he said.

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Coronavirus: Care home boss 'nothing to hide' over Skye outbreak - BBC News

For countries battling the coronavirus pandemic, Sweden sets a seductive example. While the worlds biggest economies have shut down, one small, well-governed Scandinavian country has allowed most businesses to stay open. The strategy apparently relies on herd immunity, in which a critical mass of infection occurs in lower-risk populations that ultimately thwarts transmission.

But the reality is not so simple for Sweden. Government authorities there seem to be for this strategy, then against it, then for it again if the data look promising. And its dangerous to assume that even if the strategy works in Sweden, it will work elsewhere. Leaders are grasping for strategies in a time of great uncertainty but the Swedish model should be approached with caution.

In Sweden, business is not actually proceeding as usual. Most travel and mass gatherings are not allowed, and some schools have been closed. But restrictions from government are considerably less severe than many other countries. Restaurants and bars are still functioning, some of them only with minimal distancing taking place.

The results have been mixed. Sweden has the highest fatalities and case count per capita in Scandinavia, but is lower than some of its neighbors to the south. Economic disruption has been significant but not as debilitating as other countries. In the capital, Stockholm, the nations top infectious disease official recently estimated that approximately 25 percent of the population has developed antibodies.

It is too early to tell whether the approach has worked. Stockholm isnt all of Sweden. And 25 percent of its population with antibodies is not cause for an immunity celebration. We dont know if that percentage is accurate because the data isnt available, the antibody tests still appear to be of uncertain accuracy, and we dont even know what a positive antibody test means. There is some optimism that most people who are infected will have some temporary immunity. But if immunity is short-lived and only present in some individuals, that already uncertain 25 percent becomes even less compelling. We also still dont know what total population percentage would be necessary to reach the herd immunity goal. It could be as high as 80 percent of the population.

Even if we had perfect knowledge of the Swedish case, there are huge risks with copying the strategy in a country like the United States. The American people are far less healthy than Swedes. They have significantly higher rates of diabetes and hypertension, two of the most-risky underlying conditions. Four out of every 10 Americans are obese. A herd immunity strategy in America would mean that many of these people would be on some form of lockdown for many more weeks, most likely months.

Moreover, the Sweden example demonstrates that a targeted herd immunity strategy doesnt do much to protect at-risk populations either. Deaths among the elderly in Sweden have been painfully high. In a more densely populated country like the United States, and with a larger proportion of vulnerable people, the human toll of a herd immunity strategy could be devastating.

But what about the economy? The choice is not between indefinite shutdown and Russian roulette. A transition needs to occur that balances the risks at play. From that perspective, Sweden is the future. But not because of a herd immunity strategy. Because a more targeted approach to social distancing can be deployed when the timing calls for it, when old-fashioned public health methods can foster a gradual easing of restrictions in a way that can be tweaked as we learn more and develop new tools treatments, understanding of immunity, testing improvements, and epidemiological data.

The key will be for countries not to let their guard down too soon. They must roll out a testing and contact-tracing infrastructure that will allow them to identify outbreaks early and isolate and quarantine as necessary. In the United States, this is a realistic goal if theres enough political willpower, fiscal firepower, and coordination. These things not Swedens experience should guide our next steps.

Ian Bremmer (@ianbremmer) is president, Cliff Kupchan is chairman, and Scott Rosenstein (@scottrosenstein) is special adviser on global health at Eurasia Group.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Coronavirus and the Sweden 'Herd Immunity' Myth - The New York Times

But, toward the end of his tenure with the C.D.C., as a high-level bureaucrat, he was responsible for orchestrating, not investigating; science was a small slice of the job. Now its almost all science, he said. Virology, epidemiology, ecology, and other aspects of disease science provide the substance of his mission, educating the next generation of public-health practitioners.

The eclectic dcor of his current office includes electron micrographs of various pathogens hung like portraits in a rogues gallery, two sculptures of mosquitoes as big as crows, a Star Wars clock, a Big Hero 6 toy robot, cards sent from children all over the world, mementos and gifts from his travelsa Congolese incense burner, the Saudi beheading swordand a whiteboard on which he records what he calls my metrics. His precious metrics: measures of progress toward academic goals for his school, scientific goals, philanthropic goals to support the work. Im evidence-based and evidence-driven, he said.

I asked Khan about COVID-19. What went so disastrously wrong? Where was the public-health preparedness that he had overseen at the C.D.C.? Why were most countriesand especially the U.S.so unready? Was it a lack of scientific information, or a lack of money?

This is about lack of imagination, he said.

There were warnings. One of them was Khans favorite disease, SARS. In late 2002, an atypical pneumonia of unknown origin began spreading in and near the city of Guangzhou, in southern Chinaone of the largest urban agglomerations on the planet. In January, 2003, in the body of a portly seafood merchant suffering a respiratory crisis, the virus reached a Guangzhou hospital. In that hospital, and then at a respiratory facility to which he was transferred, the man coughed, gasped, spewed, and sputtered during his intubation, infecting dozens of health-care workers. He became known among Guangzhou medical staff as the Poison King. In retrospect, disease scientists have applied a different label, calling him a super-spreader.

One infected physician, a nephrologist at the hospital, experienced flu-like symptoms but then, feeling better, took a three-hour bus ride to Hong Kong for his nephews wedding. Staying in Room911 of the Metropole Hotel, the doctor became sick again, spreading the disease along the ninth-floor corridor. In the days that followed, other guests on the ninth floor flew home to Singapore and Toronto, taking the disease with them. Several weeks later, the World Health Organization called it SARS. (The Metropole, having become notorious, was later renamed.) By March15th, the W.H.O. was reporting a hundred and fifty new SARS cases worldwide.

Two mysteries loomed, one urgent and one haunting: What was the causea new virus, and if so what kind?and from what sort of animal had it come? The first mystery was soon solved by a team led by Malik Peiris, a Sri Lankan doctor who got a degree in microbiology at Oxford before going to the University of Hong Kong. Peiris specialized in influenza, and he suspected that H5N1, a flu virus that is troublesome in birds and often lethal in people but not infectious person-to-person, might have evolved into a form transmissible among humans. His team managed to isolate a new virus from two patients. It was a coronavirus, not a flu bugthat is, it was from a different virus family, with different familial traits. But the mere presence of this new virus in two SARS patients did not mean that it was the cause of the disease. Then Peiriss team showed with antibody testing that it might indeed be the SARS agent, and further work proved that they were right. Although earlier tradition tended toward naming new viruses by geographical associationEbola was a river, Marburg a city in Germany, Nipah a Malaysian village, Hendra an Australian suburbgreater sensitivity about stigmatization prevailed. The pathogen became known as SARS-CoV. Recently, the name has been revised to SARS-CoV-1, so that the agent of COVID-19 can be called not Wuhan virus but SARS-CoV-2.

SARS reached Toronto on February23, 2003, carried by a seventy-eight-year-old woman, who, with her husband, had spent several nights of a two-week trip to Hong Kong on the ninth floor of the Metropole Hotel. The woman sickened, then died at home on March 5th, attended by family, including one of her sons, who soon showed symptoms himself. After a week of breathing difficulties, he went to an emergency room and there, without isolation, was given medication through a nebulizer, which turns liquid into mist, pushing it down a patients throat. It helps open up your airways, Khan told mea useful and safe tool to prevent,say, an asthma attack. But, with a highly infectious virus, unwise. When you breathe that back out, essentially youre taking all the virus in your lungs and youre breathing it back out into the airin the E.R. where youre being treated. Two other patients in the E.R. were infected, one of whom soon went to a coronary-care unit with a heart attack. There he eventually infected eight nurses, one doctor, three other patients, two clerks, his own wife, and two technicians, among others. You could call him a super-spreader. One E.R. visit led to a hundred and twenty-eight cases among people associated with the hospital. Seventeen of them died.

In Singapore, the first SARS case was a young woman who had also stayed at the Metropole, and had, on March 1st, sought help for fever, cough, and pneumonia at Tan Tock Seng Hospital, one of Singapores largest facilities. She had visitors, and, when several of them returned as patients, doctors suspected something contagious. Then four nurses from the young womans ward called in sick on one day, an abnormality noticed by Brenda Ang, a physician who was in charge of infection control at the hospital. That was the defining moment for me, Ang, a tiny, forthright woman, said, when I visited her at the hospital. Everything was accelerating. It was Thursday, March 12, 2003, the day that the W.H.O. issued a global alert about this atypical pneumonia.

At about that time, Ali Khan arrived in Singapore, serving as a W.H.O. consultant (seconded from the C.D.C.) to help organize an investigation and a response. He met daily with Suok-Kai Chew, the chief epidemiologist at the Ministry of Health, and along with others they developed strategy and tactics, getting governmental coperation through a SARS task force. The public-health strategy was isolation and quarantine. Before this outbreak, quarantine and isolation were not often evoked for infectious-disease outbreaks, Khan told meat least, not in the recent past. During the medieval plagues in Europe, infected unfortunates were sometimes sent outside city walls, to die or recover; the Mediterranean seaport Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) established a trentino, a thirty-day quarantine for travellers arriving from plague zones. In late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America, during smallpox outbreaks, victims showing pox (especially if they were poor people or people of color) could be confined in quarantine camps, surrounded by high fences of barbed wire, or in nightmarish pesthousesnot so much to be treated but for the safety of the general populace. That was a concept that had sort of gone out of vogue, Khan told me dryly. He and Chew and their colleagues revived it in a more humane version.

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Why Weren't We Ready for the Coronavirus? - The New Yorker

Residents are creating local solutions to help curb the spread of the virus. In Nigeria, tailors are handmaking protective gear like face masks and medical overalls. And in Kenya, even though schools are closed, one woman is providing food for schoolchildren from poor families. Now, in Ghana, a software engineering company, Cognate Systems, is using technology to track coronavirus symptoms and hotspots in the West African country. Using a platform called Opine Health Assistant, the company is able to record and track the frequency of coronavirus symptoms like a cough and high temperature in different parts of the country.

The Opine Health Assistant platform, launched March 26, collects information from residents about their possible coronavirus symptoms and location through a USSD short code, says Kwabena Nuamah, co-founder of Cognate Systems.

When you dial a number that starts with * and ends with # to top up your phone credit or make a bank transfer, you are using USSD.

"To use the platform, they have to dial the short code *920*222# or *714*444# on their mobile phones and then follow the prompts to answer questions about symptoms and other risk factors," Nuamah told CNN.

"It is free to use and users can make use of it on any type of mobile device they have, even without credit," he added.

It also asks if they need essential supplies such as food and shelter in the wake of the pandemic.

"When people fill the form, with the information they give us, we can analyze and predict if the person is likely to be infected by the virus. We can also use the location of those who have symptoms to predict new regions that are likely to get hit by the virus," he said.

Data collected from USSD is built into Opine Health Assistant, and information provided by the public on coronavirus is visualized on maps and graphs to make it easier to understand, monitor, and share.

Where does the data go?

According to Nuamah, the data collected will be shared with public health experts, data scientists, relief providers, and disease surveillance teams who are better suited to understand the information and can use it to provide local solutions to coronavirus.

Nuamah ays Opine Health Assistant is helping the country predict the next possible high-risk areas for the virus, so that it is better prepared to handle the pandemic.

So far, 6,000 people have used it.

"We have seen some patterns over the past days that we launched. We have seen that the spread of the virus in Ghana has been mostly within the Greater Accra Region and the Ashanti region," he said.

"From the data we got, we were able to see certain patterns to suggest that the eastern region would have cases of the virus next before it was reported. And almost 24 hours after predicting the spread of the virus in that region, about 16 reported cases were reported there," he added.

With the tool, he said, experts and disease surveillance agencies in Ghana can start preparing to contain coronavirus before it hits a particular region.

Providing essential supplies

Opine Health Assistant also links the public with agencies and nonprofit organizations that provide essential supplies and relief materials.

Part of the data collected at the point of filling the form generated by the USSD code is information on where a person lives and if they need essentials like food and shelter.

"For people who might need food or shelter, within the series of questions, there is a part that asks for their location. We pass the locations to relief providers who are in our databases like churches and NGOs," Nuamah said.

"If a person says he is in Accra, for example, and needs food. We share this information with relief providers in Accra so they can identify people in that region and match them with supplies," he added.

Nuamah says the team has been in touch with the government of Ghana and one of their goals is to get the Ghanaian government to use their platform to identify coronavirus symptoms and hotspots.

After the coronavirus pandemic, Opine Health Assistant will be used to monitor different diseases in Ghana, according to Nuamah.

"We are already thinking outside of the current pandemic. We want to, in the future, be able to give heads-up as to what type of viruses are coming from different parts of the globe. We don't want to be chasing cases after they have occurred, we want to be able to predict cases coming for different diseases."

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This tech company is tracking coronavirus symptoms and hotspots in Ghana - CNN

Life during the coronavirus pandemic is full of questions.

And for many of those questions, people are turning to the internet and, by extension, to Google. Google is by far the worlds dominant search engine, fielding about 90 percent of the worlds online queries. So Google has more insight into our internet searches than any other company.

Fortunately for the data nerds among us, the company makes those search trends readily available with a website called Google Trends. This tool lets people compare how popular one search is over time or compared with another, offering insight into what people are curious about. Thats particularly helpful with the coronavirus, which has consistently dominated search queries in the past few months even beyond more quotidian standbys like weather, music, and video.

We spoke with Simon Rogers, data editor at Google, who has been putting out a fascinating daily newsletter and coronavirus page from Google Trends data about different trending searches and what they might mean.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

For those who arent familiar, can you explain what Google Trends is?

Google Trends is basically a public tool that anybody can use. It takes a sample of all search there are billions of searches every day, so it couldnt possibly measure every one and basically all of those searches go through this process where we try and work out what theyre really about, which topics theyre about. And then what we do is try and make that data easier for people to access.

So around something like coronavirus, say, thatll be where we would look at the top questions that somebody will be asking about the virus. Google Trends is, I would say, the worlds largest free-access, journalistic data set. And its ever-changing, and every day it gives you a sense of what people really care about.

What advantage does Google Trends have over other datasets?

Theres ubiquity in search. It takes you beyond that echo chamber of social media. Because youre not presenting yourself in a certain way, youre being honest. Youre never as honest as you are with your search engine. You get a sense of what people genuinely care about and genuinely want to know and not just how theyre presenting themselves to the rest of the world. And its immediate. As soon as something happens, it shows up in search.

Ive been paying attention to Google Trends a lot more during coronavirus. Thats because, as were spending more time at home and computers mediate our lives with the outside world even more, it seems like were getting a better window into what peoples thoughts and questions and fears are during the pandemic. Do you think thats the case?

I think partly its because suddenly youve got this giant shared experience, something were all going through, and its very easy in that environment to feel isolated. Whats happened to you isnt happening to anybody else. But you can get a real sense of how thats reflected in the way that we search. Looking at the searches, right now, I think they almost split into two different categories.

On one side, there are people searching for the big issues around the virus: Is there a vaccine yet? or Why does one drug work? or What are the symptoms? those kinds of big questions. And then the other side is the fallout from the virus, which are searches around things like loneliness and big emotional issues. And then there are also things like: How do I cut my own hair? or How do I bake bread? or How do I keep the kids entertained? things were all going through.

Those latter trends have been some of the most interesting to me. I saw the bread, obviously, banana bread I figure people are just buying way too many bananas and have to figure out how to deal with it how to cut your own hair. One of the things that really blew me away was that all of a sudden everyone and their mother was Googling how to make coffee and must have never had to figure that out before. What do you make of that?

Its funny, isnt it? Its all those things that we do during the day, not at home often. I think its partly because people want to expand their knowledge of something. So probably people know how to make instant coffee by now, right? But people will search for how to make Dalgona coffee, which is this kind of whipped thing with sugar in it that my daughters been doing tons of in the last five weeks. Its things like that which are out of the ordinary, so theyre not necessarily things you would do if you didnt have time at home and you werent thinking of how to just change things up a little bit.

What are some of the more surprising searches youve seen trending?

The fact that there were things Ive been thinking of personally to see them show up in search is always interesting. Like we have a 3D printer, and I was thinking, I wonder if other people search for how to 3D print face masks to donate to hospitals, which is a very specific thing. Searches for 3D printing are higher than ever before in history. And theres some things which are kind of reassuring, like searches for how to help, food donation, helping the community, how to volunteer all of those things are higher than ever before.

Its good to think that were thinking of others at this moment. But theres big spikes in searches around very specific DIY that goes across both search data and YouTube data. And theres a lot of big spikes in search for things that are homemade, weird stuff that I wouldnt even think about, like homemade eyebrow wax, that makes sense but also scares me a little bit.

I could use some homemade eyebrow wax right about now.

Ha! Then, theres more the how-to thing, like how to make a face mask at home or how to ripen avocados, how to divide fractions. We saw searches for shredded were spiking and we thought, Oh, this is people talking about weightlifting or bodybuilding, and actually its people searching for shredded chicken.

What about the weirdest search?

Theres things that would have seemed weird like six weeks ago that dont seem weird now. Drive-by birthday party spiked 5,000 percent, and thats not something I or anybody had ever heard of before six weeks ago. And if youd asked me this in March, Id say well, this is a weird thing, but now it just feels normal.

Its the new normal. What about concerning Google searches? For example, this morning I saw that one of the highest-trending US coronavirus questions was, Who created coronavirus? which is this conspiracy theory that keeps popping up and has no basis in fact.

There are things that are concerning for society like the spike in searches for loneliness, people searching for having trouble sleeping, depression. All of those things are concerning to me, and I worry for people that dont have people with them or are feeling it. Then the other misinformation thing is really interesting, because normally around any political thing, you always see spikes and searches where people are trying to find out if a misinfo story is true.

But now, I do get the sense that the highest spikes are things around searches for reliable information, like people searching for cdc.gov or wherever are really high at the moment. So I wonder whether thats because were looking for things we know are true. Occasionally, misinfo things do show up. But if you have politicians saying, Coronavirus was created somewhere, then people are going to search for that. And thats just a side effect of where we are right now. I think the fact that people are looking for it is actually a good thing because it means we want to know if its true or not. Theyre not necessarily just going to accept it.

Is there any real-world stuff that you could do with Google Trends, especially as it relates to public health. Like, could you see where there are new coronavirus hot spots or something like that?

The country-level datasets, which we update every day, shows the top 100 places searching for coronavirus as well as the top related queries, which are what people type in when they search for the virus. Governments have noticed different stages for different things that are popping up in search and then change their official information to reflect that. I think were really at the beginning of how useful this is.

One of the things weve been thinking about are these kind of patterns of search around the virus. What you see is when people dont really have many cases, lots of searches are very informational like, What is coronavirus? And then when cases start happening then there are things like, What are the symptoms of coronavirus? And then it gets to more sophisticated questions when youre living in lockdown.

Like in New York, for instance, youll see questions around things like, How long does coronavirus live on surfaces? or Whens the lockdown going to end? or How do I get my stimulus check? So you can really see how things change over time. I think you could probably build a really interesting model around that. This is a real-time reaction to the situation around people.

Are there any regional or country-specific differences in coronavirus that have stuck out to you?

There are some differences. For instance, in France right now they have these zones of infection, so people search for the red zone, and before that was people searching for a pass to leave Paris and things like that. You see these kinds of country differences, but really the way that the search evolves is common across countries.

So if you were to look at the searches in, say, Milan seven weeks ago, they are very similar to searches were seeing in New York now. Its almost like the big questions are common across all of us. Were all trying to find the same things. It comes out of the uncertainty of knowing there isnt a cure, there isnt a vaccine right now. That uncertainty leads to a lot of similar questions in different places.

What dont we see in Google Trends data?

We cant tell demographics. I dont know who somebody is. The data is anonymized so you dont get individual data. So, I cant tell you how different age groups search or anything like that. Also, unless youre extrapolating something from the data, what you can tell is what people care about, but you cant tell what their opinions are about it.

What should people not be Googling?

I wouldnt tell anybody not to Google anything, because thats such a personal thing. I think people need to think about information with the same care they think about any aspect of their lives. If youre consuming information, you want it to be reliable. Just thinking of information as this valuable resource that matters is really important.

I think Id rather have people Googling everything, searching for everything, rather than accepting something without searching for it. Id much rather you looked up stuff yourself than just believe things on face value, wherever theyre coming from.

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Google Trends: What searches tell us about our coronavirus thoughts and fears - Vox.com

Amid the steady stream of stories on the lives lost to coronavirus are cases that stand out as remarkable. In the past month, at least two pairs of twins have died in Britain and two pairs of brothers, all within hours or days of each other. But do the deaths point to genetic factors that make some more likely than others to succumb to the disease?

Most scientists believe that genes play a role in how people respond to infections. A persons genetic makeup may influence the receptors that the coronavirus uses to invade human cells. How resilient the person is to the infection, their general health, and how the immune system reacts will also have some genetic component.

A team led by Prof Tim Spector, head of twin research and genetic epidemiology at Kings College London, has reported that Covid-19 symptoms appear to be 50% genetic. But Spector said more work is needed to understand which genes are involved and what difference they make to the course of the disease. We dont know if there are genes linked to the receptors or genes linked to how the infection presents, he said.

Identical twins Katy and Emma Davis, aged 37, died at Southampton general hospital last month. The sisters, who lived together, had underlying health problems and had been ill for some time before they contracted the virus. Another pair of twins, Eleanor Andrews and her sister Eileen, aged 66, died earlier this month. They too lived together and had underlying health conditions.

Two brothers from Newport, Ghulam Abbas, 59, and Raza Abbas, 54, died within hours of each other at Royal Gwent hospital. Another pair of brothers from Luton, Olume Ivowi, 46, and Isi Ivowi, 38, died within days of each other.

These deaths alert people to the fact that this could be genetic, but when people live together they share an environment as well, Spector said. The upshot is that twins who live together are more likely to have similar lifestyles and behaviours, from diet and exercise habits to how quickly they seek medical care. Twins are not generally less healthy than the wider population.

Twin deaths made headlines long before the coronavirus struck. When Julian and Adrian Riester died on the same day in Florida in 2011, a cousin of the twin Franciscan monks said it was confirmation that God favoured them. But Spector sees the hand of cold statistics at work. When you look formally at this, you see that twins rarely die at the same time, he said. There are billions of people on the planet. One in 70 is a twin and one in 200 is an identical twin.

Marcus Munafo, professor of biological psychiatry at Bristol University, said reports of twin deaths must be interpreted with caution. Twin deaths are unusual, which makes them newsworthy, but coverage can distort our perceptions. Salience bias refers to the fact that we tend to focus on information that stands out more, even if its not particularly relevant. So we need to be careful not to read too much into events that might stand out for reasons that are not actually related to the issue were interested in, he said.

When twins or siblings tragically die with Covid-19 that captures our attention, but that doesnt mean theres any particular reason to think twins or siblings are at greater risk.

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Genetics in focus after coronavirus deaths of siblings and twins - The Guardian

Singapore is seeing a spike in coronavirus cases among its hundreds of thousands of migrant workers. Above, a volunteer from a nonprofit group talks to migrant workers now confined to a factory that was converted to a dormitory as part of the effort to contain the spread of COVID-19. Ore Huiying/Getty Images hide caption

Singapore is seeing a spike in coronavirus cases among its hundreds of thousands of migrant workers. Above, a volunteer from a nonprofit group talks to migrant workers now confined to a factory that was converted to a dormitory as part of the effort to contain the spread of COVID-19.

Early on in the coronavirus pandemic, Singapore was praised as a shining example of how to handle the new virus. The World Health Organization pointed out that Singapore's aggressive contact tracing allowed the city-state to quickly identify and isolate any new cases. It quickly shut down clusters of cases and kept most of its economy and its schools open. Through the beginning of April, Singapore had recorded fewer than 600 cases.

By the end of April, however, the case count exceeded 17,000. And not only is all of Singapore now under a strict lockdown, but it has the most coronavirus cases in Southeast Asia.

The vast majority of these cases are in the overcrowded dormitories that house more than 300,000 of Singapore's roughly 1 million foreign workers and the number of cases is expected to continue to rise in the coming weeks.

"We have started our testing with the dormitories where there were a high number of cases detected," Singapore's health minister, Gan Kim Yong, said in a virtual press briefing this week.

Singapore ordered a lockdown on April 7 in response to an uptick in cases in the general population and then began to find a significant number of cases in the dorms.

Gan says Singapore is now testing more than 3,000 migrant workers a day but hopes to expand that number. The virus is spreading so rapidly in the dormitories, however, that the Health Ministry hasn't been able to test all of the suspected cases.

"For dormitories where the assessed risk of infection is extremely high, our efforts are focused on isolating those who are symptomatic even without a confirmed COVID-19 test," Gan says. "This allows us to quickly provide medical care to these patients."

Singapore is a small city-state with a population of just under 6 million inhabitants. On a per capita basis, it's the second-richest country in Asia.

But its economy relies heavily on young men from Bangladesh, India and other countries who work jobs in construction and manufacturing. Singapore has no minimum wage for foreign or domestic employees. The foreign workers' salaries can be as low as US$250 per month, but a typical salary is $500 to $600 a month.

Speaking to the media, Gan credited extensive screening in the dorms with finding many workers who are infected with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, but who didn't appear sick.

"So far, the majority of the cases here have had relatively mild disease or no symptoms. And they do not require extensive medical intervention," Gan said. "About 30% require closer medical observation due to the underlying health conditions or because of old age."

As of this week, only a handful of the migrant workers fewer than two dozen were in intensive care units.

The city-state is setting up thousands of what it calls "community care beds" in convention centers and other public buildings to isolate and treat coronavirus patients. The hope is that most of the cases can be managed by medical staff in these temporary wards, rather than in hospitals. So far the city has 10,000 community care beds and plans to expand to 20,000 by mid-June.

It's no surprise that the migrant workers are now being infected, says Mohan Dutta, a professor at Massey University in New Zealand who has done research on these migrant laborers. He says conditions in the dorms put the workers at significant risk of catching a respiratory disease like COVID-19. There are 12 to 20 bunk beds per room.

And even though some of the workers are deemed "essential," most are no longer allowed to leave the dormitories. "There is little room to move around. They have little room to store their things, which really contributes to this sense of the rooms being unhygienic," says Dutta.

Dutta, who founded CARE, the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation, at the National University of Singapore in 2012, with a focus on marginalized communities, has just published a paper on migrant workers in Singapore during this pandemic.

He says many of them told him they are concerned about whether they'll get paid during the lockdown (Singapore's Ministry of Manpower insists they will) and about the overcrowding and lack of sanitation facilities in the dormitories.

Dutta says that in many dormitories, 100 workers share a block of five toilets and five shower stalls.

Migrant workers in Singapore congregate on the balcony of a workers dormitory now being used as an isolation facility that houses a cluster of coronavirus cases. Edgar Su/Reuters hide caption

"There is this sense of panic and fear, and part of that is related to this sense of not being able to move outside of the room," he says. "Everyone is pretty much stuck in the room at such close proximity."

Singapore's Health Ministry has moved aggressively to try to address the coronavirus outbreaks in the housing blocks. The government is trying to find alternative accommodations for people in the hardest-hit dorms, but Dutta says it's impossible to come up with safe, short-term lodging for more than 300,000 workers.

But he does believe there could be long-term changes that would help the workers. And Dutta hopes this outbreak will force Singapore to examine how it treats this often overlooked population, bringing major changes in how foreign workers are housed and treated.

Meanwhile, the explosion of cases in Singapore over the last three weeks has remained primarily among foreign workers. For example, on May 1 there were 11 new cases reported among Singapore's permanent residents and 905 new infections among the workers residing in the dorms.

Michael Merson, the head of the SingHealth Duke-NUS Global Health Institute in Singapore, says it's unlikely the outbreaks in the dormitories will spill over to the rest of the city.

"There's very little mixing between the foreign workers and the rest of the population," Merson says. He's confident that Singapore's health officials will be able to isolate the infected workers and give them, in his words, "the best medical care possible."

Nonetheless, the Singaporean government has extended the lockdown for the entire city-state until at least June 1.

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Singapore Was Praised For Controlling Coronavirus. Now It Has The Most Cases In Southeast Asia : Goats and Soda - NPR

While boredom has driven some people to cut their own bangs or maybe dye their hair that one color their mom begged them not to, one man has taken it to an entirely different level.

Chris Woodhead, a 33-year-old from East London, has been tattooing himself every day he's been in quarantine. As of Monday, the artist is on his 49th day of tattooing, and he has no intention of stopping.

"The idea of tattooing myself every day through the isolation came about in a way quite naturally," Woodhead told CNN. "I thought it would be a good way of implementing some structure into my day, now that I can't tattoo from the studio."

Woodhead is not unfamiliar with the process of tattooing his own body. The artist -- who works at a studio in London -- learned the art by giving himself 100 tattoos before ever tattooing another person.

Before his decision to turn his passion into a distraction, Woodhead's body was already covered in nearly 1,000 tattoos. While an additional 100 or so tattoos "won't make a difference," Woodhead said he plans to keep going until he is able to return to his studio, regardless of how long it takes.

After all, he has only so much skin

However, Woodhead has about one month before he runs out of easily available space on his body. When that happens, the artist plans to draw designs that fit in the tiny spaces that may overlap with existing pieces.

So far, Woodhead tattoos his body by contorting himself without even needing a mirror. While some spots were easier to tattoo than others, the back of his legs and elbows were the most difficult.

Coming up with ideas for new tattoos everyday has not been a challenge for Woodhead, who is constantly drawing and trying out new ideas. Some of his isolation tattoos included a virus, butterfly, tiger, clown and a mermaid -- and the ideas just keep flowing.

"It's definitely helped me get through the endless day-to-day. It's really boring being stuck at home, and without that creative process I would be pretty lost," Woodhead said. "Also, I've been able to play with different techniques that I would potentially not be able to try on other people, so I am progressing my skill, which is really nice."

Along with practicing how to tattoo tiny designs, which are more difficult, the artist is also learning more about the healing process. Woodhead said that he does not encourage anyone who is not a professional tattoo artist to try this at home on themselves.

While tattooing himself has helped him stay grounded as the pandemic upends life around him, Woodhead said the process is much more than a mere distraction.

"Tattooing isn't a hobby to me or any other tattoo artist. It's a huge part of me. The human body is an incredible canvas to play around with, and there is endless space."

Read more:

A man has been tattooing himself every day since going into isolation because of the coronavirus - CNN

Hi, Poonam. Hi. Nice to meet you. My contractions are about 15 minutes apart. And Im about to get pulled into an O.R. at Cornell to have a C-section. Like any minute now, theyre going to come pull me through that door. And Im gloved-up and masked-up. And my husbands all suited-up. Hes literally in a hazmat suit. Doctor: Dad, do you want to grab those shoes and throw them? Theyre pulling me in. I have to go. Thank you. My name is Poonam Sharma Mathis. My husband is Kris Mathis. We have a 4-year-old, Pierce Mathis. I need some Monday motivation, Pierce. My first birth was pretty uneventful. The baby came out, we made eye contact and then I closed my eyes, and I woke up in the recovery room. Everybody was kissing him and hugging him. And I felt like the community and the village that hes so blessed to be a part of was there. I grew up with a lot of extended family and a lot of love. Wed been wanting a girl in this generation so badly. So when we found out we were having a girl, we were just grateful. I was 37 weeks pregnant when they started to issue stay-at-home orders. OK, so I am officially scared. Im having contractions this morning. I am not a hypochondriac. Im not somebody whos really prone to general mass hysteria. But we are Im breathless. We are dealing with something we dont understand. Kris: Only a couple of days prior to our birth, they had been saying no partners, no spouses. I was probably one of the first spouses that was allowed into the hospital. I was walking, and it was like, do not touch anything. Make sure your mask is on. Put the booties over your shoes. My husband could catch it right now. Right? He could bring it home, and give it to my son whos 4 and a half. And theres a thought about going home with my daughter, and then just immediately quarantining myself and my daughter. Doctor: All right, Mom, are you ready? Do you want to open your eyes for me? No? Her name is Asha: 7 pounds, 11 ounces. They put her skin on my chest. But I had a mask on, so I wasnt breathing on her. Daddy is cuddling with her. Its weird. She opened her eyes right when she was born really wide. And then I havent seen her eyes since. She didnt like what she saw or something. Our expectations were that I probably wasnt going to be there anyway. So just being there for the delivery and seeing the baby, meeting the baby, it was a really exciting thing for me. You realize you have to do a father-daughter dance, and give her away one day? But then immediately after the birth, I had to say goodbye. Say, good night. Sweet dreams. Its 11:30 at night. Im in my room. I just breastfed. [Asha crying] I wore a mask, and I threw up. The only good news is they let her stay in my room because babies are not being kept in the nursery right now. Theyre being kept with the mom. The next step is that we are waiting for news of my coronavirus status. Based on that result, theyll decide how much interaction Ill be having with her, for her own safety. So now we wait. I just want to kiss her. It was really exciting to find out that we tested negative, because that meant I could kiss her head. But its definitely different delivering and recovering in a hospital during coronavirus, and it hit me yesterday. Yesterday was the worst day of physical pain in my life. I genuinely thought I might die. This is one of the most intense surgeries you can have, is a C-section. But if you have any air bubbles that go into your stomach when they cut you open, which is normal, those air bubbles dont come out right away. Then they float around your body, I guess, and they feel like knives stabbing you from the inside until they come out. And they dont want to come out. It is so traumatic being here without somebody to advocate for you when things go wrong, because theres too much going on. They are overwhelmed. Im pushing the call button to get care, and they dont come right away. And last time I gave birth here, four and a half years ago, they did everything right away because they were able to. I was in so much pain for so long, and waiting for my medication for so long, that I was throwing up. I threw up eight times from pain. It feels like I was in a horror movie where they chopped somebody up, but then the person escapes and is running to safety. And thats a ridiculous thing to say. We have the best health care. Were in the best city. But thats how it feels. I just want to get her home as soon as possible. And hopefully then Im able to walk and stand, and do something to help my husband take care of these kids. Thursday at around 1:30, my husband and son came and picked us up. She was so excited to meet you she didnt know what to do. Asha. I havent left the upstairs from Thursday till now. Its Monday morning. Theres so much family thats just waiting, itching to rush in and be with us. And who knows if that will happen before shes 3 months old. One toe is kind of curving. Yeah. Will she wrap her finger around your finger if you put it in there? Poonam: Shes like a little animal, huh? Youre going to be such a good big brother. Poonam: Mm-hmm. Im just grateful that shes healthy. Im grateful that so far, my husband and myself and my son are healthy. I look at her eyes, and I do believe that the eyes show something even from birth. Whenever she does open her eyes, she just looks and shes just laser-focused. And its not a curious focus. Its like like she knows she needs to be calm right now or something. I had a great aunt who always said that if she could come back, shed come back as my daughter. So maybe thats her, I hope. If so, nothings going to keep her down.

See the rest here:

Giving Birth in the Middle of the Coronavirus Pandemic - The New York Times

Javier Saade serves on several boards, is venture partner at Fenway Summer and is a senior advisor at FS Vector, Fenway Summers advisory affiliate. Previously, he was associate administrator and chief of investment and innovation at SBA.

The last two decades have ushered in significant change and transformation. I believe the 2020s will be dispositive in redefining the pillars of our economy, and COVID-19 magnifies this greatly. As of this writing there are 3,611,394 confirmed cases, and the U.S. accounts for 33% of those. We are now dealing with a 4.8% Q1 GDP contraction and expectations for Q2s shrinking runs into the 25% range, more than 30 million unemployed and a $7 trillion federal intervention in a span of six weeks.

Eric Schmidt recently predicted that the coronavirus pandemic is strengthening big tech. It is hard to disagree with him; it almost feels obvious. Big tech and other digital companies are net beneficiaries of new habits and behaviors. Some of this shift will be permanent, and well-capitalized tech companies are likely to expand their power by grabbing talent and buying companies for their IP then dissolving them.

With power comes political backlash and public wariness. One flavor of that counter pressure is already in full effect. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have proposed new legislation that seeks to curtail acquisition activity via the Pandemic Anti-Monopoly Act. Ill reserve judgment on their effort, but the theme is familiar: the strong get stronger and the weak get weaker, which further widens gaps and calcifies disparity.

The COVID-19 shock is highlighting a chasm that has evolved over decades. The digital divide, lack of capital access, sporadic paths to education and microscopic levels of wealth accumulation in communities of color and the implicit/explicit bias against non-coastal elites are some contributing factors.

During the 2008 crisis, the combined value of the five biggest companies ExxonMobil, General Electric, Microsoft, AT&T and Procter & Gamble was $1.6 trillion. Microsoft is worth almost that today all by itself. No need to talk about FAANG, because since the pandemics economic halt, Peloton downloads went up five-fold in a month, Zoom grew to 200 million users from 10 million in December and Instacart users grew six times in that period.

Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital was recently quoted as saying, Like the killing off of the dinosaurs, this reorders who gets to survive in the new era. It is the shock that accelerates the future that Silicon Valley has been building. It is hard to argue with his views.

To be clear, I am a beneficiary of and a big believer in technology. Throughout my career I have managed it, invested in it and made policy on it. For example, one of the multi-billion-dollar programs I oversaw, the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, has invested more than $50 billion in tens of thousands of startups, which have collectively issued 70,000 patents and raised hundreds of billions of capital and 700 of them have gone public, including tech titans such as Qualcomm, Biogen and Symantec.

My point: I think about technology a lot, and, lately, about its repercussions. There is a massive shift afoot where more power and influence will be consolidated by these remarkable companies and their technology. Besides the economic consequences of the strong crushing the weak, there are serious ethical issues to consider as a society. Chamath Palihapitiya has been pretty vocal about the moral hazard of what is essentially a massive transfer of wealth and income. On one side you have mismanaged and/or myopic corporations and on the other, the counterparty is the American people and the money we need to print to bankroll the lifeline. I am not talking about Main Street here, by the way.

It is not hard to imagine a world in which tech alone reigns supreme. The ethical dilemmas of this are vast. A recent documentary, Do You Trust this Computer, put a spotlight on a frantic Elon Musk ringing the alarm bell on machines potential to destroy humanity. Stephen Hawking argued that while artificial intelligence could provide society with outsized benefits, it also has the potential to spiral out of control and end the human race. Bill Gates has been less fatalistic, but is also in the camp of those concerned with synthetic intelligence. In an interesting parallel, Bill has for years been very vocal on the risks pandemics pose and our lack of preparedness for them indeed.

These three men have had a big impact on the world with and because of technology. Their deep concern is rooted in the fact that once the genie is out of the bottle, it will make and grant wishes to itself without regard to humanity. But, is this doomsday thinking? I dont know. What I do know is that I am not alone thinking about this. With COVID-19 as a backdrop, many people are.

Algorithmic sophistication and computer horsepower continue to evolve by leaps and bounds, and serious capital continues to be invested on these fronts. The number of transistors per chip has increased from thousands in the 1950s to over four billion today. A one-atom transistor is the physical boundary of Moores Law. Increasing the amount of information conveyed per unit, say with quantum computing, is the most realistic possibility of extending Moores Law, and with it the march toward intelligent machines and a tech first world. The march has been accelerated, even if peripherally, by the pandemic.

While the promise of technology-driven progress is massive, there are some serious societal costs to exponential discovery and unleashed capability acceleration. Dartmouths Dr. James Moor, a notable thinker at the intersection of ethics and technology, believes that the use and development of technologies are most important when technologies have transformative effects on societies. He stipulates that as the impact of technology grows, the volume and complexity of ethical issues surrounding it increases. This is not only because more people are touched by these innovations, they are. It is because transformative technology increases pathways of action that outstrip governance systems and ethical constructs to tame it.

So what? The twists and turns of technology application lead to consequences, sometimes unknowable and for that reason we should be increasingly vigilant. Did Zuckerberg ever imagine that his invention would have been so central to the outcome of the 2016 election? Unknowable consequences, exhibit one. Interconnected systems touch every aspect of society, from digital terrorism to bioengineering to brain hacking and neural cryonics to swarm warfare, digital assets, intelligent weapons, trillions of IoT connected devices the list goes on.

As a society, we should be open to innovation and the benefits it ushers in. At the same time, we must also remain committed to sustainable tech development and a deployment mechanism that does not fail to shine a light on human dignity, economic inequality and broad inclusiveness. These seem like esoteric issues, but they are not, and they are being put to the test by COVID-19.

A fresh example of this thematic happened recently: Tim Bray, a VP and engineer at Amazons AWS, resigned because of the companys treatment of employees, and was quoted as saying, in part, Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only thats not just Amazon, its how 21st-century capitalism is done If we dont like certain things Amazon is doing, we need to put legal guardrails in place to stop those things.

Eliminating human agency has been at the core of innovation during the last four decades. Less human intervention in a call center, a hedge fund trading desk, a factory, a checkout line or a motor vehicle seems fine but in cases of greater importance, humans should remain more active or we will, at best, make ourselves irrelevant. In the past, labor displacement has been temporary, but it seems to me that the next wave is likely to be different in terms of the permanence of labor allocation, and big tech getting bigger will likely hasten this.

Innovative capability has been at the center of progress and living standard improvements since we harnessed fire. The worlds technology portfolio is an exciting one, but potentially terrifying to those who could be more hampered by it, such as the front-line workers on Main Street shouldering the health and economic brunt of the coronavirus.

Years ago, Peter Drucker pointed out that technology has transformed from servant to master throughout our history. Regarding the assembly line, he noted that it does not use the strengths of the human being but, instead, subordinated human strengths to the requirements of the machine.

In my opinion, Druckers quote is at the very core of our point in time, happening on a scale and speed that is hard to fathom and changing the digital divide amongst us into a digital canyon between us and technology.

The rest is here:

Technology and ethics in the coronavirus economy - TechCrunch