New Coronavirus News from 27 Aug 2020a

How WeChat Censored the Coronavirus Pandemic [WIRED, 27 Aug 2020]

by LOUISE MATSAKIS

In China, the messaging platform blocked thousands of keywords related to the virus, a new report reveals.

WHEN THE NOVEL coronavirus was first discovered in China last winter, the country responded aggressively, placing tens of millions of people into strict lockdown. As Covid-19 spread from Wuhan to the rest of the world, the Chinese government was just as forceful in controlling how the health crisis was portrayed and discussed among its own people.

Politically sensitive material, like references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, have long been forbidden on China’s highly censored internet, but researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab say these efforts reached a new level during the pandemic. “The blunt range of censored content goes beyond what we expected, including general health information such as the fact [that] the virus spreads from human contact,” says Masashi Crete-Nishihata, the associate director of Citizen Lab, a research group that focuses on technology and human rights.

Citizen Lab's latest report, published earlier this week, finds that between January and May this year, more than 2,000 keywords related to the pandemic were suppressed on the Chinese messaging platform WeChat, which has more than 1 billion users in the country. Many of the censored terms referenced events and organizations in the United States.

Unlike in the US, internet platforms in China are responsible for carrying out the government’s censorship orders and can be held liable for what their users post. Tencent, which owns WeChat, did not comment in time for publication. WeChat blocks content via a remote server, meaning it’s not possible for research groups like Citizen Lab to study censorship on the app by looking at its code. “We can send messages through the server and see if they are received or not, but we can't see inside of it, so the exact censorship rules are a bit of a mystery,” Crete-Nishihata says.

For its latest report, Citizen Lab sent text copied from Chinese-language news articles to a group chat it created on WeChat with three dummy accounts, one registered to a mainland Chinese phone number and two registered to Canadian phone numbers. They used articles from a range of outlets, including some based in Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as Chinese state-controlled publications. If a message was blocked, the researchers performed further tests to identify which words triggered the censorship. Some of the blocked messages had originally been published by Chinese state media. In other words, while a person or topic may be freely discussed in the government-controlled press, it’s still banned on WeChat.

The Citizen Lab report demonstrates the extent to which the Chinese government tried to control the narrative from the beginning. As residents in Wuhan remained in lockdown, WeChat blocked phrases about Li Wenliang, a local doctor who warned colleagues about a new infectious disease before it was disclosed by the government, and who became a popular hero for free speech after he died of Covid-19 in February. WeChat also blocked its users from discussing an announcement by Chinese officials that they had informed the US government about the pandemic for the first time on January 3, almost three weeks before they said anything to their own citizens. And it censored mentions of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when the organization was coupled with the word “coronavirus.”

By March, Covid-19 had become a global pandemic, and WeChat began blocking some mentions of international groups like the World Health Organization and the Red Cross. It also censored references to outbreaks in other countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Citizen Lab found that the majority of blocked words related to international relations were about the United States, the subject of the third portion of the report.

Relations between the US and China were already strained at the start of the year, and the pandemic has become a major flashpoint between the two countries. In late February, some US officials began elevating a conspiracy theory that the novel coronavirus was a biological weapon manufactured by the Chinese government. The false claim was also circulated by right-wing figures like former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. WeChat promptly blocked mentions of “Bannon and Bio Lab,” and other related terms. In May, as relations between the US and China sank to their lowest point in decades, a group of Republican senators introduced a bill that would rename the street outside the Chinese embassy in Washington “Li Wenliang Plaza,” after the Wuhan doctor. WeChat quickly censored a number of key terms related to the legislation.

“This censorship shows the ongoing politicization of the pandemic and the importance of fact-based, open, and effective communications pertaining to public health,” Crete-Nishihata says.
WeChat isn’t the only platform that the Chinese government enlisted in its efforts. In an earlier report published in March, Citizen Lab examined blocked keywords related to the pandemic on the Chinese livestreaming platform YY. Unlike WeChat, YY conducts censorship on the client side, meaning within the code of the application itself. By reverse engineering the app, Citizen Lab was able to extract a list of censored keywords, including “Unknown Wuhan pneumonia” and “Wuhan seafood market,” which were both blocked in late December.

The researchers found that there was little similarity between the keywords that YY blocked and those that WeChat did. That’s not unusual: “Limited overlap in censorship between platforms in China is one of the most consistent results we have seen from doing research on this area for over a decade,” Crete-Nishihata says.

That indicates that there isn’t a centralized list of keywords that every app and website is required to block in China, Crete-Nishihata says. The system just isn’t that simple. The companies that make up the country’s complicated internet ecosystem may be beholden to different government authorities, or they may have some freedom to interpret the same rules in different ways. What’s clear is that from the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis, China has aggressively sought to control the narrative within its borders using the digital tools at its disposal.

In the shadow of a pandemic, Rohingya challenge our ideas about refugees [CNN, 27 Aug 2020]

by Khaled Hosseini

(CNN)Ask yourself: how would you survive in your home country if you had no proof of citizenship or even of your existence? How would your children grow up with minimal access to a school or even a hospital? What would you do if one day, after years of discrimination, your home village was attacked by gunmen? Your neighbors killed as their children looked on?

Homes burned to the ground? If you're Rohingya, you grab your children, take what possessions you can carry, and you run for your life.

Three years ago this week, that is exactly what hundreds of thousands of traumatized Rohingya had to do.

I remember watching with horror images of Rohingya families fleeing Myanmar, trudging barefoot through rice fields, their lives on their backs, leaving behind their homes, their livelihoods, their dead, the friends and loved ones too old, too weak, or too beaten, to follow.

They reached the border exhausted, injured, traumatized, and in need of urgent care.

Yet even as I write this, I'm aware that too many refugee stories focus on trauma and escape.

Too often in the public consciousness, a refugee is a vulnerable, helpless person fleeing violence and in desperate need of rescue. That is an incomplete telling of the story and further injustice to its protagonists. While refugees do in fact need protection, they are defined far less by their status as beneficiaries of care than by their unfathomable courage, resilience, and desire for self-reliance.

This is true of every refugee community I have visited, be it Syrians or Afghans or South Sudanese, and it is certainly true of the Rohingya. The Rohingya are a Muslim minority in Myanmar, who despite living in the country for generations, have not been afforded the same rights as its citizens and who have been forced to flee persecution numerous times over the years.

From the outset, Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh took critical leadership roles in the humanitarian response to their own suffering. With support from UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and NGO partners, they formed a community-based protection model, giving fellow refugees the opportunity to have a measure of control over their own lives and learn new skills.

The model gave agency to all members of the Rohingya community.

That was before the coronavirus pandemic struck. The outbreak of Covid-19 has seen an 80% reduction of humanitarian workers in the camps. The role of the Rohingya refugee community volunteers has therefore become even more essential. As a former physician, I am in awe of the refugee community health workers who have rolled up their sleeves and volunteered to meet the needs of their community. They have worked together to reduce the risk of viral transmission and, given the circumstances, it is nothing short of inspiring.

Take 19-year-old Salma, for instance. She is a community health volunteer in the overcrowded Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh. More than 600,000 people live in an area of just 13 square kilometers, five square miles; infrastructure and services are stretched to their limits.

Before the pandemic, she took part in a cross-generational volunteer program --half of which is comprised of girls and women- to provide health support, including pre- and post-natal care for women and infants in the camp. But in recent months, she has shifted her responsibilities to the Covid-19 response. Joined by more than 1,400 others, Salma now promotes hand washing and hygiene. She educates the community on how the virus spreads, how to recognize symptoms and seek care, as well as ensuring that those who show symptoms are tested.

Despite the challenges of living in a densely populated refugee camp, Salma and fellow volunteers have made a lifesaving difference in their community. By the end of July, there were fewer than 100 confirmed Covid-19 cases among the Rohingya refugee population of about 860,000. I find this very poignant, because it doesn't take much of a leap to see how Salma's work, halfway around the world, is in fact critical to the wellbeing and safety of my own family here in America. For one thing we have all learned in this pandemic is that nobody is safe from this virus until all of us are.

I am moved and inspired by the resilience of the Rohingya refugees. They are survivors. They escaped unspeakable horrors, made the long, painful journey to Bangladesh, and overcame the many hardships of life in the camps. They continue to show strength in maintaining hope and a commitment to going home again, against all odds. And now, each day, beneath the shadow of a pandemic, they are working, leading, healing, and challenging our idea of "who a refugee is."

FEMA braces for Hurricane Laura amid coronavirus response [CNN, 27 Aug 2020]

By Leyla Santiago and Priscilla Alvarez,

(CNN)Before Hurricane Laura made landfall, emergency management responders were already facing unprecedented demands as they juggled wildfires, hurricanes, and ongoing disaster and recovery efforts amid a nationwide pandemic.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, is among those assisting with the response on all fronts. It has taken the lead in operational coordination for the federal interagency response to the coronavirus pandemic. It's also responsible for the federal response for hurricane preparedness and recovery.

"Unfortunately, I believe that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is trying to do the best they can, but they're being stretched to the maximum levels," said former FEMA Administrator Brock Long. "I think all of the disaster activities, including Covid-19 as well, is going to cause us to rethink the business enterprise and emergency management in the future."

The bandwidth of the agency in the throes of hurricane season had previously been a point of concern for some government officials and disaster experts as FEMA worked to assist with the coronavirus response. While the agency is equipped to help with a range of disasters, Hurricane Laura is likely to present its own set of challenges.

From securing shelters and coordinating evacuations that allow for social distancing to ensuring an ample workforce for emergency response, the pandemic is presenting a unique set of complexities for emergency management.

The financial impact from Covid-19 could also drive more people to shelters, according to Long.

"A majority of Americans don't have three months' worth of savings that they can fall back onto and they can't necessarily get a hotel room or they can't afford the gasoline and the cost of traveling hundreds of miles out of town, or out of an evacuation zone," he added.

A FEMA spokesperson underscored agency preparedness when asked about the current demands. "Lifesaving and life sustaining operations will always be the priority, and we will move staff to address those operations in response to any disaster that arises," the spokesperson said.

Still, in Louisiana, emergency management officials agreed the pandemic had made evacuations more difficult as Hurricane Laura approached the coast.

"What's being done on a state level, instead of picking them up and taking them to state-operated shelters, they're being picked up and taken to hotel rooms because of Covid concerns. We're trying to avoid congregate sheltering," said Mike Steele, communications director at the Louisiana Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

As of Wednesday morning, the state had evacuated about 900 residents to hotels. Steele noted that was only a portion of evacuees, since the figure does not include evacuations handled by parishes or individuals who evacuated on their own.

In May, FEMA released operational guidance for the 2020 hurricane season, taking the pandemic into account. It outlined unique measures the agency recommended to respond to hurricanes while avoiding the spread of the coronavirus.

"Emergency managers should anticipate the added complexities of conducting response and recovery operations while taking preventative measures to protect the health and safety of disaster survivors and the disaster workforce," the guidance reads.

"Our fear is 2017 with Covid," a FEMA official told CNN, referring to the year when Hurricanes Irma, Harvey and Maria hit. "We hope it's not as busy and as big as 2017 was."

In 2017, the agency deployed responders for back-to-back disasters, from historic wildfires in California to Hurricane Harvey on the Gulf Coast to Hurricanes Irma and Maria in Puerto Rico.

According to FEMA, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria caused $265 billion in damage and widespread displacement of survivors.

Another FEMA official noted, however, that some of the hurricanes in 2017 hit noncontiguous territories, making logistics more challenging -- something that will not be the case with Laura.

"We have fully functioning interstates and things pre-staged," the official said. "Texas and Louisiana and Florida are the three states best equipped to handle any sort of massive hurricane. They're doing all the right things with evacuations."

"This is a pretty standard hurricane, even with Covid," the official said.

Responding to multiple, large-scale disasters is not new for FEMA, but the agency has also had to contend with staffing shortages, which could be compounded by people opting out of response efforts due to coronavirus concerns. According to a FEMA spokesperson, 48% of its total workforce is currently available for deployment.

FEMA already has nearly 4,000 responders deployed to sites that have been declared disasters or emergencies, including for Covid-19. Another 850 responders are deployed to ongoing recovery operations. Nearly 1,500 have also been deployed to respond to needs like damage assessment for past events, according to the spokesperson.

In more recent emergencies and disasters, FEMA has emphasized its support role approach. It has become common to hear FEMA Administrator Pete Gaynor reiterate that emergency response should be "locally executed, state managed and federally supported."

For Hurricane Laura, FEMA plans to continue its support role as responders monitor the storm.

Laura "is an incredibly dangerous hurricane," Long said. "This is going to be, for that area, one of the worst storms they've seen in history."

Thoughts On a New Coronavirus Test (And on Testing) [Science Magazine, 27 Aug 2020]

By Derek Lowe

Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.

Word came yesterday that Abbott received an Emergency Use Authorization for a new coronavirus test, one that is faster and cheaper than anything currently out there. The two types of tests that we see in use now are RT-PCR, the nasal-swab test that detects viral RNA, and various antibody tests, that tell you if you have raised an immune response due to past exposure to the virus. This one has features of both, but its main use is more like the RT-PCR test: it will tell you if you are actively infected. It does that by detecting a particular antigen, the nucleocapsid protein (Np) of the coronavirus. It’s a key part of its structure, and in an actively replicating infection you can be sure that there will be plenty of that one floating around.

The test itself is one of Abbott’s “BinaxNOW” assays, and they have a whole line of these already as tests for malaria, RSV, various bacterial infections, and so on. It’s a lateral flow assay, which will be familiar to anyone who’s seen a pregnancy test, and I explained the general principles of those (as antibody tests) in this post. This new test is a sort of flipped version of what I described there, though. In this case, a nasal swab is taken, and several drops of solvent are used to put that sample onto the beginning of the absorbing strip inside the card. As it soaks up along the length of the strip, the sample will encounter a zone of antibodies that recognize the Np antigen, and these antibodies are also attached to nanoparticles of gold. This gold-antibody-Np complex is carried along in solution further along the strip until it runs into another antibody zone, one that’s immobilized on the solid support and which will bind the gold-antibody-Np complex molecules tightly. That stops them in their tracks and allows the gold nanoparticles to pile up enough to be visible as a pink or purple line. Along the way, the sample has also crossed a zone containing another soluble gold conjugate species as a control, which gets carried along until it runs into another separate zone of immobilized antibodies specific to it. The presence of a pink control line means that the test has been performed correctly; absence of such a control line means that the whole test has been messed up somehow and needs to be run again.

I had described earlier a test that looks for antibodies to the coronavirus by running them past gold-conjugated antigens on the test strip, but this one looks for antigens by running past gold-conjugated antibodies. Developing a test like this involves a lot of work to find the right antibodies, to make sure that they’re attached to the gold nanoparticles in ways that don’t impair their function, to find the right second immobilized set of antibodies that will develop that test line, and to make sure that the control line system is compatible with the test itself.
You’ll also need to work on the composition of the test strip and the solvent that’ll be used to take the patient’s sample into it: these need to allow as much of the antibody complex to flow down the strip in a controlled fashion as you can get, and to do so in the same way every time.
And finally, you need to validate the assay with a lot of coronavirus patients and controls, to see what your false positive and false negative rates are.

For this assay, those come out to a sensitivity of 97.1% (positive results detected when there should have been a positive) and a specificity of 98.5% (negative results when there should indeed have been a negative). Flipping those around, you’ll see that about 1.5 to 3% of the time, you will tell someone who’s infected that they’re not, or tell someone who’s not infected that they are. That’s about what you can expect for a test that sells for $5 and takes 15 minutes to read out with no special equipment, but such tests (if used properly) can be very valuable. Flipping that around, you can also infer that if used improperly, they can be sources of great confusion.

What’s proper? The FDA’s EUA is for testing people that show up with symptoms to see if they really do have SARS-CoV2. I think that’s appropriate, because you’re more likely to have a higher percentage of those folks who are really infected. If you tried to deploy this test across a large asymptomatic population with a very low true infection rate – everybody in New Zealand, for example – you would create turmoil. New Zealand’s real infection rate is vanishingly small, but Abbott’s quick $5 test would read out a false positive You Are Coronavirused for 1.5% of the whole country, never lower, which would be a completely misleading picture that would cause all sorts of needless trouble.

On the other hand, if you’re testing symptomatic people in a community where the virus is already known to be spreading, you can do a huge amount of good. Let’s imagine you test 1000 such coughing, worried patients under conditions where you expect that 10% of them really do have the coronavirus. In the course of testing all thousand, you’ll run those 100 positive folks through, and you’ll correctly tell 97 of them they they need to go isolate themselves immediately, which is a huge win for public health. Three of them, unfortunately, will be told that they’re negative and will go out and do what they do, but that’s surely far fewer than would be out and around without the test. You’ll also run the 900 other people through who actually have a cold or flu or something and not corona, and you’ll tell maybe 13 of them (900 x 0.015) that they’re positive for coronavirus and that they should isolate as well. That’s not great, either, but it’s worth it to get the 97 out of 100 real infectious coronavirus patients off the streets. And meanwhile you’ve correctly told the other 890 people in your original cohort that they do not have coronavirus, which is also a good outcome. But remember, with that 98.5% specificity you’re going to send 15 people out of every thousand you test home to quarantine even if no one really has it at all. If 1% of your sample of 1000 people is truly infected, you’ll probably catch all ten people who are really positive. . .but you’ll also tell 14 or 15 people who don’t have it that they do, crossing over to finding more false positives than there are real ones.

And let’s not forget the other really good aspects of this test: it’s cheaper than anything else out there but best of all, it’s fast. The delays in the RT-PCR testing have been killing its usefulness in too many cases – what good is knowing that you tested negative sometime last week, really? Far worse, what good is knowing that you tested positive last week if you didn’t isolate yourself because you weren’t sure if it was the coronavirus or not? But an answer in fifteen minutes, that’s actionable. As long as this test is deployed correctly, it can be very useful.

Addendum: I’m well aware that the CDC seems (controversially) to be changing its testing recommendations in general. This “only test if there are symptoms” guidance seems to apply to RT-PCR testing as well – and turnaround problems aside, that test still has far higher selectivity and specificity than this new 15-minute one and is far more appropriate for use in a broader, largely asymptomatic population. We need to be addressing the delay problems in RT-PCR, because we need to be doing a lot of those tests – not closing our eyes and whistling a happy tune instead. This appears to me, and to many others, to be political interference from above. What else is one to think when administration officials have suddenly started referring to the pandemic in the past tense? So here’s something I never pictured myself saying: it is my hope that this CDC guidance will be ignored. It’s a hell of a situation to get to, isn’t it? Update: I am very happy to report that the CDC appears this morning to be walking this one back. Good.

WNY has a long road back from the coronavirus [Investigative Post, 27 Aug 2020]

By Jim Heaney

Revitalizing WNY's battered economy requires bold leadership. Good luck with that.

These are tough times, as tough times go. And they’re not going away anytime soon.

The COVID-19 pandemic remains a dual threat, to both public health and economic well being of the county, Buffalo and Western New York included.

While the coronavirus is under control locally, at least compared with much of the rest of the country, it’s going to be a fact of life for quite some time. Yes, there’s talk of a vaccine, perhaps by the end of the year. But vaccines typically take five to 10 years to develop and test before they’re safe for widespread public use. Anything sooner would be a bonus.

There are, of course, semi-effective means of controlling – not eliminating – the virus. Wearing masks, maintaining social distance, etc. Unfortunately, those efforts have been undermined by Donald Trump and numerous Republican governors, whose actions are exacerbating the crisis and causing needless deaths.

Then there’s the economic cost of the pandemic, which is comparable to the Depression of the 1930s. Buffalo and WNY have been hit especially hard – this spring unemployment hovered at around 25 percent and while the numbers have improved somewhat since then, the structural problems of the regional economy make recovery an especially challenging proposition, and that assumes the pandemic itself recedes.

Yes, I know, we were in the midst of an economic renaissance, or so Governor Cuomo told us. But we weren’t, not really, as our growth lagged behind most of the country. And much of that growth was in junk jobs. Investigative Post reported in 2017 that three-quarters of the jobs added to the WNY economy since Cuomo took office in 2010 were in the low-wage sector.
Restaurants and bars were the biggest job creators.

It’s going to take time for businesses to recover from the pandemic, and many won’t survive, including a lot of the aforementioned bars and restaurants. Our weak economic foundation is going to impede the recovery, and our economic development policies aren’t geared for the task at hand. (Handouts to politically connected developers and vanity projects like Tesla weren’t a good strategy to begin with.)

All this is going to continue to impact life as we know it. Prospects are dim for everything from downtown office space to suburban shopping malls to attending a Bills or Sabres game.
Education will change, and there’s a good chance you’re going to see some private colleges start to close.

There is a change to look forward to, which should help the situation.

Trump faces re-election this November and signs increasingly point to a victory by Joe Biden.
That would put the federal government back in the hands of people who value expertise and believe in science, and give America a fighting chance of dealing intelligently with the pandemic – and a host of other problems that Trump and his Republican enablers have foisted on the country. Call it addition by subtraction.

There’s a lot of talk about how deeply divided we are as a nation, and there’s truth to that. But when you consider demographic trends, the present era might represent the beginning of the end of Trump style politics. Not that it will go away, but its prospects at the ballot box will dim.
The population is becoming increasingly diversified and social mores are becoming more and more tolerant. Angry white men don’t like it, but that’s a fact.

While the political situation could improve nationally, the same can’t be said locally. We need smart, bold leadership from our local elected officials and those are not traits commonly found
in our political class. More like, go along to get along.

Much like the aftermath of the closing of Bethlehem Steel and other manufacturers in the early 1980s, we need to re-invent our local economy. What’s more, we need to address social justice issues that have been laid bare in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.

Where’s the public sector leadership, where’s the private sector leadership, to tackle these issues? I don’t see it, not in any great abundance, anyway. Not here, and certainly not in Albany.

Face it, our governance, locally and across New York, amounts to a failed state. The 105 cities, towns, villages and school districts that populate Erie and Niagara counties largely function as a jobs program for the political class. Key public institutions, starting with the Buffalo Board of Education, are captive to special interests who care little for the well being of those they’re supposed to serve.

We need an overhaul, folks, and I’m not at all confident we’re going to do much more than muddle along.

US and UK are bottom of the pile in rankings of governments' handling of coronavirus pandemic [CNN, 27 Aug 2020]

By Richard Allen Greene

(CNN)Americans rank dead last -- by a long way -- among citizens of more than a dozen countries who were asked whether their nation is more united now than it was before the coronavirus pandemic, according to a survey released Thursday.

And they come in a statistical joint last place with the British on whether their country has handled the pandemic well, the poll finds.

In the United States, fewer than two in 10 people (18%) said the country is more united now.
That's a full 21 percentage points below the next lowest-ranking countries, Germany and France, where just under four in 10 (39%) respondents expressed that opinion. Denmark had the highest percentage saying their country was more united now, with more than seven in 10 (72%) giving that answer.

As with so many questions these hyper-partisan days, there's a gigantic gap between Republican and Democratic views of whether the Trump administration has handled the pandemic well.

Three quarters (76%) of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said the government has done a good job. Only one quarter (25%) of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents agree.

The findings come from a Pew Research Center survey of 14 advanced economies in North America, Europe and Asia. The Washington, DC-based think tank interviewed 14,276 adults by telephone from June 10 to August 3.

Role of politics
A clear majority of people across the 14 countries said their own nation had handled Covid-19 well: 73% agreed, while 27% disagreed.

But in the United Kingdom and the United States, the figures were much lower: 46% and 47% respectively. They're the only two countries where a minority of people said the government had done well. In every other country polled, most people said their government had done well, from Japan with 55% up to Denmark with 95%.

The United States is not the only country where support for the government's coronavirus response broke along partisan lines -- the Pew survey detected the same pattern in the UK and in Spain.

Those results show it's not a matter of whether you're on the left or the right of the political spectrum that predicts whether you think your government has done well. The US and UK have right-leaning governments, while Spain has a left-leaning one. In each country, people with the same political bent as the government tend to say it's done well in the crisis.

John Curtice, one of Britain's leading polling experts, said that phenomenon is well understood by social scientists.

"Generally speaking, it doesn't matter what you're asking: the government in power is more likely to be seen well by people who voted for it than people who didn't," said Curtice, a professor at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.

But he pointed out that the findings do make it possible to compare how well each government is doing among its own supporters.

In Spain and the United States, about three-quarters of government supporters say their country has handled the coronavirus well -- but in the UK, the figure is just over half.

Pew Research Center research associate Kat Devlin pointed out that not all countries polled had a political divide over views of the government response, "especially in countries with high levels of overall satisfaction with how their nation has dealt with the COVID-19 outbreak."

"In Denmark, currently led by the center-left Social Democrats, and in Australia, whose leader Scott Morrison belongs to the center-right Liberal Party of Australia, at least nine-in-ten adults on both the political left and political right believe their country has done well against the coronavirus," Devlin, one of the report authors, told CNN by email.

Economic confidence is also linked to the belief the government is doing well. In all 14 countries in the survey, people who said the current economic situation is good were more likely to say the government was doing a good job on coronavirus.

Again, the US is the most extreme example of the trend: There's a 44-point gap between those who say the current economic situation is bad but the government is handling the crisis well (34%) and those who say the economic situation is good and the government is handling the crisis well (78%).

Life changes
One possibly surprising area where the United States falls smack in the middle of the pack is on the question of whether more international cooperation would have reduced the number of coronavirus cases in their country. Across the whole 14-country survey, 59% of people said it would, while 36% said it would not. In the United States, 58% said more cooperation between countries would have helped and 37% said it would not.

Among other findings in the survey, women in every country are more likely than men to say their lives have changed because of the crisis, with a gap as high as 15 points in the United States, France and Sweden.

And perhaps most surprising of all, in Sweden -- which famously put almost no restrictions in place to stop the spread of the virus -- more than seven out of 10 people (71%) said their lives had changed a great deal as a result of the outbreak. That's the second highest percentage of any country in the survey, behind South Korea (81%), which put sweeping restrictions in place.

The Pew Research Center conducted nationally representative telephone surveys of adults in the United States, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the UK, Australia, Japan and South Korea.

The study was conducted only in countries where nationally representative telephone surveys are feasible.

"Due to the coronavirus outbreak, face-to-face interviewing is not currently possible in many parts of the world that we have previously included in our research," report co-author Devlin said. "We have surveyed in 12 of these nations virtually every year since 2016, and they represent some of the world's largest economies and traditional allies of the US."

How Italy's 'father of the swabs' fought the coronavirus [Science Magazine, 27 Aug 2020]

By Douglas Starr

Andrea Crisanti was on a 30-hour flight from Italy to Australia for a conference on 22 February when some disturbing news appeared on his phone. Italy had just had its first COVID-19 death, and more cases were accumulating fast. He asked conference organizers to move his talk to the first day, and made the grueling trip back home after that. “It’s something I do not recommend,” he says.

Crisanti, head of the microbiology department at the University of Padua, already knew trouble was coming and had geared up his lab to do large-scale testing for the new coronavirus. As it began to devastate his nation, Crisanti put his university and region at the forefront of the fight with an all-out campaign of testing and quarantine, even when that meant defying conventional wisdom.

A soft-spoken 65-year-old with graying hair and soft brown eyes, Crisanti has a matter-of-fact way of stating his opinions—even when he opines that something is “bullshit.” “He’s an innovative person who knows his own worth and has confidence in his judgments,” says Jules Hoffmann, a Nobel Prize winner and professor of integrative biology at the University of Strasbourg. His decisiveness helped rein in his region’s outbreak and show the rest of Italy how to tame the virus, which hit the country early and hard.

Crisanti, who trained in immunology and biotechnology in Rome before spending 25 years at Imperial College London, was used to fighting another scourge: malaria. Last fall, the University of Padua recruited him to continue his research on genetic strategies to block mosquito reproduction. But when news about the coronavirus began to emerge from China, Crisanti immediately shifted his focus.

In late January, when Chinese scientists published the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus, Crisanti began to test university students returning from China, symptomatic or not. He had conducted a few hundred tests when the regional health department told him to stop. Guidelines from the World Health Organization and Italy’s National Institute of Health said to test only patients with symptoms, he was told. Crisanti says the restriction made no sense: “I know very few infectious diseases where asymptomatic people do not play a major role.”

That’s where things stood when he got word of the first Italian COVID-19 fatality. The patient was from Vo, a prosperous village in the region of Veneto, about 50 kilometers west of Venice. The region’s governor ordered a 2-week quarantine of the town and testing of almost all 3300 residents. Anyone who tested positive was put on lockdown.

At the time, anecdotal reports were emerging from China about asymptomatic transmission, but no one had produced definitive evidence. Crisanti saw Vo as an ideal place to conduct an epidemiological experiment: a small population, universally tested, whose progress could be monitored closely. He got approval to retest everyone in the village 9 days after the first round of testing.

The numbers confirmed his thinking about asymptomatic transmission. In the first round of testing, 73 residents were positive for the virus. More than 40% of them had no symptoms yet had levels of the virus similar to those who were visibly ill. The Vo study also confirmed that isolating people helps stem transmission. Everyone who had tested positive was confined to their home, regardless of whether they had symptoms. By the second round of testing, a week and a half later, the number of positives had dropped to 29; they, too, were isolated. A third round of tests 2 months after the second found no positive cases.

“If you want to eliminate a cluster you have to lock down the village [or neighborhood], test everybody, and isolate the positives,” Crisanti says. “It really works.”
Crisanti persuaded the regional government of Veneto to test anyone with even the mildest of
symptoms, and to trace and test their contacts as well. The effort targeted medical personnel and essential workers, such as supermarket cashiers. It helped that Veneto has a long tradition of taking strong public health measures, dating back to the invention of the quarantine during the 14th century plagues. (The word “quarantine” is derived from the word for “40 days” in an old Venetian dialect—the period for which incoming ships had to anchor in the harbor to avoid bringing in plague.) The region’s infrastructure was ready for a pandemic, with a health care policy that emphasizes decentralized primary care. In this case,that meant sending well-equipped nurses to test people at home or admitting them to small local hospitals with dedicated COVID-19 units.

In contrast, neighboring Lombardy, the prosperous region in which Milan is located, has emphasized large, urban hospitals offering first-rate surgical and specialty care. That system backfired in the pandemic, funneling sick people into the hospitals, which in turn became sources of infection. Lombardy became the worst affected region of Italy, with 2.5 times the number of cases and four times the number of deaths per capita as Veneto.

From the beginning, Crisanti was prescient. In late January he ordered enough reagent to process half a million swabs; then had his lab analyze the reagents and begin to produce its own. Thus, when other regions were running short, Veneto had a surplus of reagents. Later he ordered a piece of equipment that could process tests at high speed, tracking down a demo machine in London when he couldn’t procure one through the usual means because of heightened demand from the pandemic. “We got the only one in Italy,” he says. The machine quadrupled his laboratory’s throughput to more than 6000 swabs per day. Along the way, Veneto became an example of the value of extensive testing, tracing, and isolation—and ensuring the means to do it.

Newspapers hailed Crisanti as the “father of the swabs,” and the “rebel scientist,” for his defiance of official policy in the early days of the pandemic. He received the Lion of Veneto award for his service to the region, the seal of the city of Padua, and was honored by a special concert in Vo. Yet it hasn’t all been smooth. As the outbreak began to abate, the region’s governor, Luca Zaia, downplayed Crisanti’s contribution in comments to the press and claimed that he and his government deserved credit for taming the virus. Eager to reopen Veneto for tourism, Zaia became irritated by Crisanti’s insistence to go slow and turned to other scientists for advice. The freeze-out became so severe that in July, Crisanti said he would resign from the region’s advisory board, only to be talked out of it by colleagues and admirers.

Now, there’s a truce between the scientist and the politician. “It may have been a joint effort,” says Antonio Cassone, professor emeritus of medical microbiology at the University of Perugia. “But Andrea proved essential.”

Moving forward, Crisanti is analyzing the genetic and blood samples his team collected during the Veneto outbreak to learn more about individual susceptibility and antibody response. He remains undaunted by his encounter with politics. “The most important thing is to convey simple, clear, and honest messages,” he says. “And if you don’t know something just say it openly. People need to know the truth.”

Hurricanes and wildfires are colliding with the COVID-19 pandemic – and compounding the risks [The Conversation US, 27 Aug 2020]

With a major hurricane hitting Louisiana and Texas and wildfires menacing the western U.S., millions of Americans are facing the complex risks of a natural disaster striking in the middle of a pandemic.

The steps people normally take to prepare for a severe storm or to evacuate can contradict the public health recommendations for protecting themselves and others from COVID-19.
That’s what millions of people were facing as Hurricane Laura intensified to a dangerous Category 4 storm. More than half a million were under evacuation orders, including the cities Galveston, Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas.

My urban resilience lab at Texas A&M University has been examining interactions between urban infrastructure, systems and people in disasters. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we launched a study into the effect of the pandemic on urban systems during a natural disaster, applying similar methods we used during extensive research on Hurricane Harvey, which flooded Houston in August 2017.

Our research shows that compound disasters have complex ramifications. At the intersection of a natural hazard and a pandemic is a decision process fraught with contradictions.

Storm prep and evacuations raise the risks

During the three days before Hurricane Harvey hit, the number of grocery store and gas station visits in the Houston area increased by 50% to 100%. People didn’t think twice about running to the store.

As Hurricane Laura headed for the Louisiana and Texas coasts, residents were in very a different situation. The rise of COVID-19 illnesses and deaths across the South during the summer meant people were encouraged to self-quarantine and limit their social contact to prevent transmitting the coronavirus. They could still wear masks in stores, but keeping the recommended six feet apart gets harder when stores get crowded. It means spending more time waiting with others in lines and jostling in the aisles. Research shows that both the amount of virus and the amount of time a person is exposed to it have an impact on whether they get infected and how severely.

An even more onerous complication – for both authorities and residents – is evacuation.

The decision to evacuate in the face of even a single hazard, whether a wildfire or a hurricane, is difficult. Sheltering in place can mean prolonged power outages and disrupted access to critical facilities. Evacuating means leaving behind one’s house and possibly animals to an uncertain fate.

That’s complicated further when an emergency shelter is the best choice but staying there means a higher risk of being exposed to someone infected with the coronavirus.

Which areas are most vulnerable?

Authorities assess many variables when deciding between mandatory and voluntary evacuations.

In the face of a pandemic, they now also have to think about disease transmission – and not just in individual emergency shelters but also on a larger scale. When a large population moves from an area with a high rate of disease spread to a less affected area, it can put the local population at higher risk.

Using data on social vulnerability, pandemic risk and hazard probability, my lab created an interactive map that pinpoints sources of vulnerability. The goal is to enable disaster response managers and decision makers to recognize the compound risks posed by the confluence of the pandemic and any natural hazard.

The compound hazard risk index takes into consideration the social, physical and pandemic risks at the local level, enabling each county or community to make informed decisions. It also raises warnings about vulnerable groups, such as the elderly and low-income communities, which may suffer a disproportionate risk of infection.

We found several counties with significantly high levels of compound risks.

For example, Harris County, Texas, home to Houston, has a large number of COVID-19 cases and is also vulnerable to the impacts of hurricanes. When a hurricane like Laura heads for the region, the index can help raise red flags, particularly for local health officials and hospitals, about the risks of exacerbating the pandemic there and in counties where people may go in an evacuation.

Conversely, a county with low hurricane and flooding risks might normally be seen as a suitable location for evacuation, but if it has a high rate of COVID-19, that raises the risk for evacuees who would need to spend time in hotels, restaurants and stores.

Getting health care can also become harder during a natural disaster. Hospitals may see an influx of injuries, and wildfires and flooding can block access to critical health care facilities, damage the buildings, cut power to homes and care facilities and shut down pandemic testing locations.

In a separate study of evacuation patterns and COVID-19 cases in Florida, researchers at the Union of Concerned Scientists estimated that if a Category 3 hurricane hit Southeast Florida, the difference in that region between evacuations to communities with low coronavirus transmission rates and those with high rates could be as high as 50,000 new COVID-19 cases.

As those estimates and our research show, preparing for and responding to the compound disaster of a natural hazard in the midst of a pandemic is an undertaking more complicated than the sum of its parts.