Data Reveals the True Impact of the Coronavirus Outbreak

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gian Volpicelli at Wired: “Something was wrong with Malaysia’s internet. It was March 13, and the more Simon Angus looked at the data, the more he suspected that the country might be in the midst of a coronavirus crisis.

Angus is an academic at Monash University and the cofounder of Kaspr Datahaus, a Melbourne-based company that analyses the quality of global internet connection to glean economic and social insights. The company monitors millions of internet-connected devices to gauge internet speed across the world. For them, a sudden deterioration in a country’s internet speed means that something is putting the network under strain. In recent weeks Kaspr’s theory is that the “something” is linked to the Covid-19 epidemics – as people who are working from home, or quarantining, or staying home as a precaution start using the internet more intensely than usual.

“For people who are in lockdown, or in panic mode, or in self-isolation, the internet has become a fundamentally important part of their information source, and of their consumption of entertainment,” Angus says.

To put it bluntly, when millions more turn on Netflix, scroll through TikTok, start a Zoom call, play Fortnite, or simply scroll idly through Twitter, that has repercussions on the quality of the country’s internet. (That is why EU commissioner Thierry Breton asked Netflix to restrict high-definition streaming until the emergency is over.)

Now, Angus’ scanning had detected that Malaysia’s internet had become over five percent slower in the March 12 to 13 timespan—worse even than in locked-down Italy. Officially, though, Malaysia had only 129 confirmed coronavirus cases—a relatively low number, although it had been inching up for a week.

What was happening, though, was that the population was cottoning on to the government’s sloppy handling of the pandemic. In late February, in what would turn out to be a monumental blunder, authorities had allowed a religious mass gathering to go ahead in Kuala Lumpur. Once Covid-19 cases linked to the event started to emerge, the government scrambled to find all the attendees, but got the numbers wrong—first saying that only 5,000 people at the gathering were Malaysia residents, then updating the figure to 10,000 and then 14,500. With the mess laid bare, many Malaysians seemed to have decided to stay at home out of sheer self-preservation…(More)”.

Now Is the Time for Open Access Policies—Here’s Why

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Victoria Heath and Brigitte Vézina at Creative Commons: “Over the weekend, news emerged that upset even the most ardent skeptics of open access. Under the headline, “Trump vs Berlin” the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported that President Trump offered $1 billion USD to the German biopharmaceutical company CureVac to secure their COVID-19 vaccine “only for the United States.”

In response, Jens Spahn, the German health minister said such a deal was completely “off the table” and Peter Altmaier, the German economic minister replied, “Germany is not for sale.” Open science advocates were especially infuriated. Professor Lorraine Leeson of Trinity College Dublin, for example, tweeted, “This is NOT the time for this kind of behavior—it flies in the face of the #OpenScience work that is helping us respond meaningfully right now. This is the time for solidarity, not exclusivity.” The White House and CureVac have since denied the report. 

Today, we find ourselves at a pivotal moment in history—we must cooperate effectively to respond to an unprecedented global health emergency. The mantra, “when we share, everyone wins” applies now more than ever. With this in mind, we felt it imperative to underscore the importance of open access, specifically open science, in times of crisis.

Why open access matters, especially during a global health emergency 

One of the most important components of maintaining global health, specifically in the face of urgent threats, is the creation and dissemination of reliable, up-to-date scientific information to the public, government officials, humanitarian and health workers, as well as scientists.

Several scientific research funders like the Gates Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust have long-standing open access policies and some have now called for increased efforts to share COVID-19 related research rapidly and openly to curb the outbreak. By licensing material under a CC BY-NC-SA license, the World Health Organization (WHO) is adopting a more conservative approach to open access that falls short of what the scientific community urgently needs in order to access and build upon critical information….(More)”.

Will This Year’s Census Be the Last?

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Jill Lepore at The New Yorker: “People have been counting people for thousands of years. Count everyone, beginning with babies who have teeth, decreed census-takers in China in the first millennium B.C.E., under the Zhou dynasty. “Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, after their families, by the house of their fathers, with the number of their names, every male by their polls,” God commands Moses in the Book of Numbers, describing a census, taken around 1500 B.C.E., that counted only men “twenty years old and upward, all that are able to go forth to war in Israel”—that is, potential conscripts.

Ancient rulers took censuses to measure and gather their strength: to muster armies and levy taxes. Who got counted depended on the purpose of the census. In the United States, which counts “the whole number of persons in each state,” the chief purpose of the census is to apportion representation in Congress. In 2018, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross sought to add a question to the 2020 U.S. census that would have read, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” Ross is a banker who specialized in bankruptcy before joining the Trump Administration; earlier, he had handled cases involving the insolvency of Donald Trump’s casinos. The Census Bureau objected to the question Ross proposed. Eighteen states, the District of Columbia, fifteen cities and counties, the United Conference of Mayors, and a coalition of non-governmental organizations filed a lawsuit, alleging that the question violated the Constitution.

Last year, United States District Court Judge Jesse Furman, in an opinion for the Southern District, found Ross’s attempt to add the citizenship question to be not only unlawful, and quite possibly unconstitutional, but also, given the way Ross went about trying to get it added to the census, an abuse of power. Furman wrote, “To conclude otherwise and let Secretary Ross’s decision stand would undermine the proposition—central to the rule of law—that ours is a ‘government of laws, and not of men.’ ” There is, therefore, no citizenship question on the 2020 census.

All this, though, may be by the bye, because the census, like most other institutions of democratic government, is under threat. Google and Facebook, after all, know a lot more about you, and about the population of the United States, or any other state, than does the U.S. Census Bureau or any national census agency. This year may be the last time that a census is taken door by door, form by form, or even click by click….

In the ancient world, rulers counted and collected information about people in order to make use of them, to extract their labor or their property. Facebook works the same way. “It was the great achievement of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century census-takers to break that nexus and persuade people—the public on one side and their colleagues in government on the other—that states could collect data on their citizens without using it against them,” Whitby writes. It is among the tragedies of the past century that this trust has been betrayed. But it will be the error of the next if people agree to be counted by unregulated corporations, rather than by democratic governments….(More)”.

How scientists are crowdsourcing a coronavirus treatment

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Article by Evan Nicole Brown: “… There’s currently no cure for COVID-19, but scientists are working on drugs that could help slow its spread. Fortunately, citizens can get involved in the process.

Foldit is an online video game that challenges players to fold various proteins into shapes where they are stable. Generally, folding proteins allows scientists (and citizens) to design new proteins from scratch, but in the case of coronavirus, Foldit players are trying to design the drugs to combat it. “Coronavirus has a ‘spike’ protein that it uses to recognize human cells,” says Brian Koepnick, a biochemist and researcher with the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design who has been using Foldit for protein research for six years. “Foldit players are designing new protein drugs that can bind to the COVID spike and block this recognition, [which could] potentially stop the virus from infecting more cells in an individual who has already been exposed to the virus.”

“In Foldit, you change the shape of a protein model to optimize your score. This score is actually a sophisticated calculation of the fold’s potential energy,” says Koepnick, adding that professional researchers use an identical score function in their work. “The coronavirus puzzles are set up such that high-scoring models have a better chance of actually binding to the target spike protein.” Ultimately, high-scoring solutions are analyzed by researchers and considered for real-world use….(More)”.

Like Zika, The Public Is Heading To Wikipedia During The COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Farah Qaiser at Forbes: “A new study out in the PLOS Computational Biology journal shows that public attention in the midst of the Zika virus epidemic was largely driven by media coverage, rather than the epidemic’s magnitude or extent, highlighting the importance of mass media coverage when it comes to public health. This is reflected in the ongoing COVID-19 situation, where to date, the main 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic Wikipedia page has over ten million page views.

The 2015-2016 Zika virus epidemic began in Northeastern Brazil, and spread across South and North America. The Zika virus was largely spread by infected Aedes mosquitoes, where symptoms included a fever, headache, itching, and muscle pain. It could also be transmitted between pregnant women and their fetuses, causing microcephaly, where a baby’s head was much smaller than expected.

Similar to the ongoing COVID-19 situation, the media coverage around the Zika virus epidemic shaped public opinion and awareness.

“We knew that it was relevant, and very important, for public health to understand how the media and news shapes the attention of [the] public during epidemic outbreaks,” says Michele Tizzoni, a principal investigator based at the Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) Foundation. …

Today, the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic Wikipedia page has around ten million page views. As per Toby Negrin, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Chief Product Officer, this page has been edited over 12K times by nearly 1,900 different editors. The page is currently semi-protected – a common practice for Wikipedia pages that are relevant to current news stories.

In an email, Negrin shared that “the day after the World Health Organization classified COVID-19 as a pandemic on March 11th, the main English Wikipedia article about the pandemic had nearly 1.1 million views, an increase of nearly 30% from the day before the WHO’s announcement (on March 10th, it had just over 809,000 views).” This is similar to the peaks in Wikipedia attention observed when official announcements took place during the Zika virus epidemic.

In addition, initial data from Tizzoni’s research group shows that the lockdown in Italy has resulted in a 50% or more decrease in movement between provinces. Similarly, Negrin notes that since the national lockdown in Italy, “total pageviews from Italy to all Wikimedia projects increased by nearly 30% over where they were at the same time last year.”

With increased public awareness during epidemics, tackling misinformation is critical. This remains important at Wikipedia.

“When it comes to documenting current events on Wikipedia, volunteers take even greater care to get the facts right,” stated Negrin, and pointed out that there is a page dedicated to misinformation during this pandemic, which has received over half a million views….(More)”.

Like a moth to a flame, we’re drawn to metaphors to explain ourselves

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kenan Malik at The Guardian: “The selfish gene. The Big Bang. The greenhouse effect. Metaphors are at the heart of scientific thinking. They provide the means for both scientists and non-scientists to understand, think through and talk about abstract ideas in terms of more familiar objects or phenomena.

But if metaphors can illuminate, they can also constrain. In his new book, The Idea of the Brain, zoologist and historian Matthew Cobb tells the story of how scientists and philosophers have tried to understand the brain and how it works. In every age, Cobb shows, people have thought about the brain largely in terms of metaphors, drawn usually from the most exciting technology of the day, whether clocks or telephone exchanges or the contemporary obsession with computers. The brain, Cobb observes, “is more like a computer than like a clock”, but “even the simplest animal brain is not a computer like anything we have built, nor one we can yet envisage”.

Metaphors allow “insight and discovery” but are “inevitably partial” and “there will come a point when the understanding they allow will be outweighed by the limits they impose”. We may, Cobb suggests, be at that point in picturing the brain as a computer.

The paradox of neuroscience today is that we possess an unprecedented amount of data about the brain but barely a glimmer of a theory to explain how it works. Indeed, as the French neuroscientist Yves Frégnac has put it, making ample use of metaphor, it can feel as if “we are drowning in a flood of information” and that “all sense of global understanding [of brain function] is in acute danger of being washed away”.

It’s not just in science that metaphors are significant in shaping the ways in which we think. In 1980, the linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson set off the modern debate on this issue with their seminal work, Metaphors We Live By. Metaphors, they argued, are not linguistic flourishes but the fundamental building blocks of thought. We don’t simply talk or write with metaphors, we also think with them….(More)”

Why no one is reading your coronavirus emails

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Opinion by Todd Rogers: “…As a behavioral scientist, I study how people make decisions and process information, and I develop communications to change behavior for the better. And if there’s one lesson all the coronavirus email writers should take, it’s this: Messages should be as easy to understand as possible. This is difficult in normal times — and is no doubt much more so with facts on the ground changing as rapidly as they are….

As an illustration of how potent simplifying messaging can be, Carly Robinson at Harvard, Jessica Lasky-Fink of the University of California, Berkeley, Hedy Chang of Attendance Works and I conducted an experiment with a large school district, in which we rewrote a state-required notification about attendance.All schools in California are required to send a truancy notification to families after a student is late or absent three times. The state legislature offered recommended language for the notice that was written at a college-reading level and contained 342 words in seven-point font. We rewrote the letter at a 5th grade reading level, in 14-point font and with half as many words. We then randomly assigned 131,312 families to either receive the state-recommended language or a version of our simplified letter.The best version of our simplified letters was an estimated 40% more effective at reducing absences during the subsequent 30 days than the state-recommended language. Writing with an understanding of how humans work turns out to be more effective than writing with the sole goal of complying with the delivery of mandatory written information.So, what can be done to make coronavirus messages, so critical to the functioning of our country right now, easier to understand — and more likely to be read?

  • Write in the most accessible way possible. Use the Flesch-Kincaid readability test (built into Microsoft Word and Google Docs) to test the reading-level complexity of your writing.
  • Use as few words as possible. Shorter messages are more likely to be read (see the long email in your inbox from three months ago that you still have not read).
  • Write in a larger font. This makes long messages look ridiculous and makes it easier to read for recipients with eyesight issues. It also reduces the chance of the accidental — but way too common — occurrence of emails appearing in inboxes with absurdly small font.
  • Eliminate gratuitous borders and images. These can often distract from the message you are trying to send.
  • Use a clear structure. People skim, so help them. As opposed to a multi-paragraph email written in normal prose, consider categorizing information under headings like, “What we want you to know” (or just “KNOW”) and “what we would like you to do” (or, concisely, “DO”). Consider putting content within each category in bullet points….(More)”

Coronavirus, Ray Dalio and forecasting in an age of uncertainty

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gillian Tett at the Financial Times: “Predictive models only get you so far. We also need to maintain our peripheral vision…

What is interesting to ponder is what this episode reveals about the nature of forecasting — and our modern attitudes towards time. As anthropologists often point out, the way we think about time is a defining feature of the post-enlightenment world. During much of human history, the future was viewed as a vague and terrifyingly unknowable blur marked by constant bargaining with deities (to ward off disaster) or cyclical seasonal rhythms (of the sort that underscore Buddhist cognitive maps).

In modern, post-enlightenment western cultures, however, a linear vision of time emerged that presumes the past can be extrapolated into the future, with a sense of progression, not just cyclicality.

In the 20th century, this gave birth to the risk management and finance professions, as Peter Bernstein wrote two decades ago in his brilliant book Against the Gods: the Remarkable Story of Risk.

By the turn of the century, innovations such as computing and the internet were turbocharging the forecasting business to an extraordinary degree, as Margaret Heffernan notes in her excellent (and very timely) new book Uncharted. “Human discomfort with uncertainty . . . has fuelled an industry that enriches itself by terrorising us with uncertainty and taunting us with certainty,” she writes.

However, as Heffernan stresses, while the forecasting business has made its “experts” very rich, it is also based on a fallacy: the idea that the future can be neatly extrapolated from the past.

Moreover, the apparent success of some pundits in predicting events (such as the 2008 crash) makes them so overconfident that they get locked into particularly rigid models. “The harder economists try to identify sure-fire methods of predicting markets, the more such insight eludes them,” she writes. Is there a solution? Heffernan’s answer is to embrace uncertainty, build resilience, use “narrative” (or qualitative) analyses instead of rigid models and to respect the wisdom of diverse views to avoid tunnel vision….(More)”.

The Coronavirus Crisis Is Showing Us How to Live Online

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kevin Roose at The New York Times:”…There is no use sugarcoating the virus, which has already had devastating consequences for people all over the world, and may get much worse in the months ahead. There will be more lives lost, businesses closed and communities thrown into financial hardship. Nobody is arguing that what is coming will be fun, easy or anything remotely approaching normal for a very long time.

But if there is a silver lining in this crisis, it may be that the virus is forcing us to use the internet as it was always meant to be used — to connect with one another, share information and resources, and come up with collective solutions to urgent problems. It’s the healthy, humane version of digital culture we usually see only in schmaltzy TV commercials, where everyone is constantly using a smartphone to visit far-flung grandparents and read bedtime stories to kids.

Already, social media seems to have improved, with more reliable information than might have been expected from a global pandemic. And while the ways we’re substituting for in-person interaction aren’t perfect — over the next few months in America, there may be no phrase uttered more than “Can someone mute?” — we are seeing an explosion of creativity as people try to use technology as a bridge across physical distances.

Just look at what’s happening in Italy, where homebound adults are posting mini-manifestos on Facebook, while restless kids flock to multiplayer online games like Fortnite. Or see what’s happening in China, where would-be partyers have invented “cloud clubbing,” a new kind of virtual party in which D.J.s perform live sets on apps like TikTok and Douyin while audience members react in real time on their phones. Or observe how we’re coping in the United States, where groups are experimenting with new kinds of socially distanced gatherings: virtual yoga classes, virtual church services, virtual dinner parties.

These are the kinds of creative digital experiments we need, and they are coming at a time when we need them more than ever….(More)”

Personal privacy matters during a pandemic — but less than it might at other times

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Nicole Wetsman at the Verge: “…The balance between protecting individual privacy and collecting information that is critical to the public good changes over the course of a disease’s spread. The amount of data public health officials need to collect and disclose changes as well. Right now, the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating, and there is still a lot doctors and scientists don’t know about the disease. Collecting detailed health information is, therefore, more useful and important. That could change as the outbreak progresses, Lee says.

For example, as the virus starts to circulate in the community, it might not be as important to know exactly where a sick person has been. If the virus is everywhere already, that information won’t have as much additional benefit to the community. “It depends a lot on the maturity of an epidemic,” she says.

Digital tracking information is ubiquitous today, and that can make data collection easier. In Singapore, where there’s extensive surveillance, publicly available data details where people with confirmed cases of COVID-19 are and have been. The Iranian government built an app for people to check their symptoms that also included a geo-tracking feature. When deciding to use those types of tools, Lee says, the same public health principles should still apply.

“Should a public health official know where a person has gone, should that be public information — it’s not different. It’s a lot easier to do that now, but it doesn’t make it any more right or less right,” she says. “Tracking where people go and who they interact with is something public health officials have been doing for centuries. It’s just easier with digital information.”

In addition, just because personal information about a person and their health is important to a public health official, it doesn’t mean that information is important for the general public. It’s why, despite questioning from reporters, public health officials only gave out a limited amount of information on the people who had the first few cases of COVID-19 in the US…

Health officials worry about the stigmatization of individuals or communities affected by diseases, which is why they aim to disclose only necessary information to the public. Anti-Asian racism in the US and other countries around the world spiked with the outbreak because the novel coronavirus originated in China. People who were on cruise ships with positive cases reported fielding angry phone calls from strangers when they returned home, and residents of New Rochelle, New York, which is the first containment zone in the US, said that they’re worried about their hometown being forever associated with the virus.

“This kind of group-level harm is concerning,” Lee says. “That’s why we worry about group identity privacy, as well. I’m nervous and sad to see that starting to poke its head out.”

People can’t expect the same level of personal health privacy during public health emergencies involving infectious diseases as they can in other elements of their health. But the actions public health officials can take, like collecting information, aren’t designed to limit privacy, Fairchild says. “It’s to protect the broader population. The principle we embrace is the principle of reciprocity. We recognize that our liberty is limited, but we are doing that for others.”…(More)”.