A call for a new generation of COVID-19 models

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog post by Alex Engler: “Existing models have been valuable, but they were not designed to support these types of critical decisions. A new generation of models that estimate the risk of COVID-19 spread for precise geographies—at the county or even more localized level—would be much more informative for these questions. Rather than produce long-term predictions of deaths or hospital utilization, these models could estimate near-term relative risk to inform local policymaking. Going forward, governors and mayors need local, current, and actionable numbers.

Broadly speaking, better models would substantially aid in the “adaptive response” approach to re-opening the economy. In this strategy, policymakers cyclically loosen and re-tighten restrictions, attempting to work back towards a healthy economy without moving so fast as to allow infections to take off again. In an ideal process, restrictions would be eased at such a pace that balances a swift return to normalcy with reducing total COVID-19 infections. Of course, this is impossible in practice, and thus some continued adjustments—the flipping of various controls off and on again—will be necessary. More precise models can help improve this process, providing another lens into when it will be safe to relax restrictions, thus making it easier to do without a disruptive back-and-forth. A more-or-less continuous easing of restrictions is especially valuable, since it is unlikely that second or third rounds of interventions (such as social distancing) would achieve the same high rates of compliance as the first round.

The proliferation of Covid19 Data

These models can incorporate cases, test-positive rates, hospitalization information, deaths, excess deaths, and other known COVID-19 data. While all these data sources are incomplete, an expanding body of research on COVID-19 is making the data more interpretable. This research will become progressively more valuable with more data on the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. rather than data from other countries or past pandemics.

Further, a broad range of non-COVID-19 data can also inform risk estimates: Population density, age distributions, poverty and uninsured rates, the number of essential frontline workers, and co-morbidity factors can also be included. Community mobility reports from Google and Unacast’s social distancing scorecard can identify how easing restrictions are changing behavior. Small area estimates also allow the models to account for the risk of spread from other nearby geographies. Geospatial statistics cannot account for infectious spread between two large neighboring states, but they would add value for adjacent zip codes. Lastly, many more data sources are in the works, like open patient data registries, the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) study of asymptomatic persons, self-reported symptoms data from Facebook, and (potentially) new randomized surveys. In fact, there are so many diverse and relevant data streams, that models can add value simply be consolidating daily information into just a few top-line numbers that are comparable across the nation.

FiveThirtyEight has effectively explained that making these models is tremendously difficult due to incomplete data, especially since the U.S. is not testing enough or in statistically valuable ways. These challenges are real, but decision-makers are currently using this same highly flawed data to make inferences and policy choices. Despite the many known problems, elected officials and public health services have no choice. Frequently, they are evaluating the data without the time and expertise to make reasoned statistical interpretations based on epidemiological research, leaving significant opportunity for modeling to help….(More)”.

National Academies, National Science Foundation Create Network to Connect Decision-Makers with Social Scientists on Pressing COVID-19 Questions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the National Science Foundation announced today the formation of a Societal Experts Action Network (SEAN) to connect social and behavioral science researchers with decision-makers who are leading the response to COVID-19. SEAN will respond to the most pressing social, behavioral, and economic questions that are being asked by federal, state, and local officials by working with appropriate experts to quickly provide actionable answers.

The new network’s activities will be overseen by an executive committee in coordination with the National Academies’ Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats, established earlier this year to provide rapid expert input on urgent questions facing the federal government on the COVID-19 pandemic. Standing committee members Robert Groves, executive vice president and provost at Georgetown University, and Mary T. Bassett, director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, will co-chair the executive committee to manage SEAN’s solicitation of questions and expert responses, anticipate leaders’ research needs, and guide the dissemination of network findings.

SEAN will include individual researchers from a broad range of disciplines as well as leading national social and behavioral science institutions. Responses to decision-maker requests may range from individual phone calls and presentations to written committee documents such as Rapid Expert Consultations.

“This pandemic has broadly impacted all aspects of life — not just our health, but our work, families, education, supply chains, and even the global environment,” said Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences. “Therefore, to address the myriad questions that are being raised by mayors, governors, local representatives, and other leaders, we must recruit the full range of scientific expertise from across the social, natural, and biomedical sciences.”   

“Our communities and our society at large are facing a range of complex issues on multiple fronts due to COVID-19,” said Arthur Lupia, head of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation. “These are human-centered issues affecting our daily lives — the education and well-being of our children, the strength of our economy, the health of our loved ones, neighbors, and so many more. Through SEAN, social and behavioral scientists will provide actionable, evidence-driven guidance to our leaders across the U.S. who are working to support our communities and speed their recovery.”…(More)”.

A data sharing method in the open web environment: Data sharing in hydrology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jin Wang et al: “Data sharing plays a fundamental role in providing data resources for geographic modeling and simulation. Although there are many successful cases of data sharing through the web, current practices for sharing data mostly focus on data publication using metadata at the file level, which requires identifying, restructuring and synthesizing raw data files for further usage. In hydrology, because the same hydrological information is often stored in data files with different formats, modelers should identify the required information from multisource data sets and then customize data requirements for their applications. However, these data customization tasks are difficult to repeat, which leads to repetitive labor. This paper presents a data sharing method that provides a solution for data manipulation based on a structured data description model rather than raw data files. With the structured data description model, multisource hydrological data can be accessed and processed in a unified way and published as data services using a designed data server. This study also proposes a data configuration manager to customize data requirements through an interactive programming tool, which can help in using the data services. In addition, a component-based data viewer is developed for the visualization of multisource data in a sharable visualization scheme. A case study that involves sharing and applying hydrological data is designed to examine the applicability and feasibility of the proposed data sharing method….(More)”.

Public Service and Good Governance for the Twenty-First Century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by James L. Perry: “Two big ideas serve as the catalyst for the essays collected in this book. The first is the state of governance in the United States, which Americans variously perceive as broken, frustrating, and unresponsive. Editor James Perry observes in his Introduction that this perception is rooted in three simultaneous developments: government’s failure to perform basic tasks that once were taken for granted, an accelerating pace of change that quickly makes past standards of performance antiquated, and a dearth of intellectual capital that generate the capacity to bridge the gulf between expectations and performance. The second idea hearkens back to the Progressive era, when Americans revealed themselves to be committed to better administration of their government at all levels—federal, state, and local.

These two ideas—the diminishing capacity for effective governance and Americans’ expectations for reform—are veering in opposite directions. Contributors to Public Service and Good Governance for the Twenty-First Century explore these central ideas by addressing such questions as: what is the state of government today? Can future disruptions of governance and public service be anticipated? What forms of government will emerge from the past and what institutions and structures will be needed to meet future challenges? And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, what knowledge, skills, and abilities will need to be fostered for tomorrow’s civil servants to lead and execute effectively?

Public Service and Good Governance for the Twenty-First Century offers recommendations for bending the trajectories of governance capacity and reform expectations toward convergence, including reversing the trend of administrative disinvestment, developing talent for public leadership through higher education, creating a federal civil service to meet future needs, and rebuilding bipartisanship so that the sweeping changes needed to restore good government become possible….(More)”

Data Sharing in the Context of Health-Related Citizen Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mary A. Majumder and Amy L. McGuire: “As citizen science expands, questions arise regarding the applicability of norms and policies created in the context of conventional science. This article focuses on data sharing in the conduct of health-related citizen science, asking whether citizen scientists have obligations to share data and publish findings on par with the obligations of professional scientists. We conclude that there are good reasons for supporting citizen scientists in sharing data and publishing findings, and we applaud recent efforts to facilitate data sharing. At the same time, we believe it is problematic to treat data sharing and publication as ethical requirements for citizen scientists, especially where there is the potential for burden and harm without compensating benefit…(More)”.

Protecting Data Privacy and Rights During a Crisis are Key to Helping the Most Vulnerable in Our Community

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Amen Ra Mashariki: “Governments should protect the data and privacy rights of their communities even during emergencies. It is a false trade-off to require more data without protection. We can and should do both — collect the appropriate data and protect it. Establishing and protecting the data rights and privacy of our communities’ underserved, underrepresented, disabled, and vulnerable residents is the only way we can combat the negative impact of COVID-19 or any other crisis.

Building trust is critical. Governments can strengthen data privacy protocols, beef up transparency mechanisms, and protect the public’s data rights in the name of building trust — especially with the most vulnerable populations. Otherwise, residents will opt out of engaging with government, and without their information, leaders like first responders will be blind to their existence when making decisions and responding to emergencies, as we are seeing with COVID-19.

As Chief Analytics Officer of New York City, I often remembered the words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, especially with regards to using data during emergencies, that there are “known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, and we will always get hurt by the unknown unknowns.” Meaning the things we didn’t know — the data that we didn’t have — was always going to be what hurt us during times of emergencies….

There are three key steps that governments can do right now to use data most effectively to respond to emergencies — both for COVID-19 and in the future.

Seek Open Data First

In times of crisis and emergencies, many believe that government and private entities, either purposefully or inadvertently, are willing to trample on the data rights of the public in the name of appropriate crisis response. This should not be a trade-off. We can respond to crises while keeping data privacy and data rights in the forefront of our minds. Rather than dismissing data rights, governments can start using data that is already openly available. This seems like a simple step, but it does two very important things. First, it forces you to understand the data that is already available in your jurisdiction. Second, it grows your ability to fill the gaps with respect to what you know about the city by looking outside of city government. …(More)”.

How data science can ease the COVID-19 pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nigam Shah and Jacob Steinhardt at Brookings: “Social distancing and stay-at-home orders in the United States have slowed the infection rate of SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen that causes COVID-19. This has halted the immediate threat to the U.S. healthcare system, but consensus on a long-term plan or solution to the crisis remains unclear.  As the reality settles in that there are no quick fixes and that therapies and vaccines will take several months if not years to invent, validate, and mass produce, this is a good time to consider another question: How can data science and technology help us endure the pandemic while we develop therapies and vaccines?

Before policymakers reopen their economies, they must be sure that the resulting new COVID-19 cases will not force local healthcare systems to resort to crisis standards of care. Doing so requires not just prevention and suppression of the virus, but ongoing measurement of virus activity, assessment of the efficacy of suppression measures, and forecasting of near-term demand on local health systems. This demand is highly variable given community demographics, the prevalence of pre-existing conditions, and population density and socioeconomics.

Data science can already provide ongoing, accurate estimates of health system demand, which is a requirement in almost all reopening plans. We need to go beyond that to a dynamic approach of data collection, analysis, and forecasting to inform policy decisions in real time and iteratively optimize public health recommendations for re-opening. While most reopening plans propose extensive testing, contact tracing, and monitoring of population mobility, almost none consider setting up such a dynamic feedback loop. Having such feedback could determine what level of virus activity can be tolerated in an area, given regional health system capacity, and adjust population distancing accordingly.

We propose that by using existing technology and some nifty data science, it is possible to set up that feedback loop, which would maintain healthcare demand under the threshold of what is available in a region. Just as the maker community stepped up to cover for the failures of the government to provide adequate protective gear to health workers, this is an opportunity for the data and tech community to partner with healthcare experts and provide a measure of public health planning that governments are unable to do. Therefore, the question we invite the data science community to focus on is: How can data science help forecast regional health system resource needs given measurements of virus activity and suppression measures such as population distancing?…

Concretely, then, the crucial “data science” task is to learn the counterfactual function linking last week’s population mobility and today’s transmission rates to project hospital demand two weeks later. Imagine taking past measurements of mobility around April 10 in a region (such as the Santa Clara County’s report from COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports), the April 20 virus transmission rate estimate for the region (such as from http://rt.live), and the April 25 burden on the health system (such as from the Santa Clara County Hospitalization dashboard), to learn a function that uses today’s mobility and transmission rates to anticipate needed hospital resources two weeks later. It is unclear how many days of data of each proxy measurement we need to reliably learn such a function, what mathematical form this function might take, and how we do this correctly with the observational data on hand and avoid the trap of mere function-fitting. However, this is the data science problem that needs to be tackled as a priority. 

Adopting such technology and data science to keep anticipated healthcare needs under the threshold of availability in a region requires multiple privacy trade-offs, which will require thoughtful legislation so that the solutions invented for enduring the current pandemic do not lead to loss of privacy in perpetuity. However, given the immense economic as well as hidden medical toll of the shutdown, we urgently need to construct an early warning system that tells us to enhance suppression measures if the next COVID-19 outbreak peak might overwhelm our regional healthcare system. It is imperative that we focus our attention on using data science to anticipate, and manage, regional health system resource needs based on local measurements of virus activity and effects of population distancing….(More)”.

COVID-19 Highlights Need for Public Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Steven Aftergood: “Hobbled by secrecy and timidity, the U.S. intelligence community has been conspicuously absent from efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, the most serious national and global security challenge of our time.

The silence of intelligence today represents a departure from the straightforward approach of then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats who offered the clearest public warning of the risk of a pandemic at the annual threat hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2019:

“We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support,” DNI Coats testified.

But this year, for the first time in recent memory, the annual threat hearing was canceled, reportedly to avoid conflict between intelligence testimony and White House messaging. Though that seems humiliating to everyone involved, no satisfactory alternative explanation has been provided. The 2020 worldwide threat statement remains classified, according to an ODNI denial of a Freedom of Information Act request for a copy. And intelligence agencies have been reduced to recirculating reminders from the Centers for Disease Control to wash your hands and practice social distancing.

The US intelligence community evidently has nothing useful to say to the nation about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, its current spread or anticipated development, its likely impact on other security challenges, its effect on regional conflicts, or its long-term implications for global health.

These are all topics perfectly suited to open source intelligence collection and analysis. But the intelligence community disabled its open source portal last year. And the general public was barred even from that.

It didn’t — and doesn’t — have to be that way.

In 1993, the Federation of American Scientists created an international email network called ProMED — Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases — which was intended to help discover and provide early warning about new infectious diseases.

Run on a shoestring budget and led by Stephen S. Morse, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, Jack Woodall and Dorothy Preslar, ProMED was based on the notion that “public intelligence” is not an oxymoron. That is to say, physicians, scientists, researchers, and other members of the public — not just governments — have the need for current threat assessments that can be readily shared, consumed and analyzed. The initiative quickly proved its worth….(More)”.

Transparency Deserts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Christina Koningisor: “Few contest the importance of a robust transparency regime in a democratic system of government. In the United States, the “crown jewel” of this regime is the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Yet despite widespread agreement about the importance of transparency in government, few are satisfied with FOIA. Since its enactment, the statute has engendered criticism from transparency advocates and critics alike for insufficiently serving the needs of both the public and the government. Legal scholars have widely documented these flaws in the federal public records law.

In contrast, scholars have paid comparatively little attention to transparency laws at the state and local level. This is surprising. The role of state and local government in the everyday lives of citizens has increased in recent decades, and many critical government functions are fulfilled by state and local entities today. Moreover, crucial sectors of the public namely, media and advocacy organizations—rely as heavily on state public records laws as they do on FOIA to hold the government to account. Yet these state laws and their effects remain largely overlooked, creating gaps in both local government law and transparency law scholarship.

This Article attempts to fill these gaps by surveying the state and local transparency regime, focusing on public records laws in particular. Drawing on hundreds of public records datasets, along with qualitative interviews, the Article demonstrates that in contrast with federal law, state transparency law introduces comparatively greater barriers to disclosure and comparatively higher burdens upon government. Further, the Article highlights the existence of “transparency deserts,” or localities in which a combination of poorly drafted transparency laws, hostile government actors, and weak local media and civil society impedes effective public oversight of government.

The Article serves as a corrective to the scholarship’s current, myopic focus on federal transparency law…(More)”.

Transformative placemaking amid COVID-19: Early stories from the field

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hanna Love at Brookings: “As COVID-19 leaves no place immune – threatening to destabilize urban communities, as well as rural and suburban areas with limited resources and infrastructure to weather the outbreak— the connectivity of people and places matters more than ever. Local responses to the pandemic are revealing that even amid unprecedented distancing, the economic, physical, social, and civic structures of connected communities are laying the groundwork for resilience and recovery.

In this moment of uncertainty, communities are increasingly seeking solutions from the community-based organizations, networks, and coalitions they know and trust in ordinary times. We at the Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking decided to look to there too, revisiting past entries from our Placemaking Postcards series to uncover how these organizations are responding to the COVID-19 crisis….

Across the country, hyperlocal governance organizations are being called upon to play an expanded role in supporting small businesses. This rang true for each organization we spoke with, as place governance entities in urban and rural areas alike modified their work to include compiling COVID-19 resources for small businesses, redirecting existing funding streams, creating new resources for relief, and offering promotions for customers to purchase local goods and services. Some are even stepping in to manufacture health materials for first responders.

For instance, Philadelphia’s University City District—which we highlighted last year for their efforts to measure inclusion in public spaces—is partnering with the University of Pennsylvania to launch a relief fund for local, independently owned retailers and restaurants. Simultaneously, they are working to bring revenue to local businesses through a matching gift cards program, and are sponsoring local restaurants to prepare meals for families with ill children at the Ronald McDonald House.

Rural place-based organizations are engaging in similar efforts. Appalshop, a Kentucky nonprofit we covered last month for their solar energy project, has raised more than $10,000 for local businesses, nonprofits, and first responders. The community development organization Downtown Wytheville in Virginia (whose rural entrepreneurship competition we wrote about this summer), is helping businesses apply for SBA disaster relief funding and running a “Support Local Safely” campaign to publicize open businesses. In Wyoming, Rawlins DDA/Main Street (whose entrepreneurship center we wrote about last fall), is engaging the public about business needs and offering similar promotions. While seemingly small in scale, all of these efforts are critical supports needed to keep businesses open and will lay the groundwork for recovery in the months to come.

Other place-based organizations are adapting their business models to respond to the crisis. In ordinary times, makerspaces and other innovation spaces provide places to collaborate, support entrepreneurship, and challenge economic and social divides. In the midst of COVID-19, makerspaces are abandoning those routines to support frontline responders. Open Works—a Baltimore makerspace we covered for their efforts to build trust between residents, businesses, and institutions—has partnered with Innovation Works and We the Builders to launch a collaborative emergency response effort to manufacture face shields for health care workers….(More)”.