New Coronavirus News from 29 Aug 2020a

COVID-19: Spain arrests pandemic-denier who wrote 'covidiots' deserved 'to die' [Euronews, 29 Aug 2020]

Spanish police have arrested a COVID-19 denier for inciting violence and hatred on social media.

The 38-year-old used fake social media accounts to claim health professionals and the media were behind a "COVID farce" and urged his followers to attack politicians, police said on Friday.

"All this would be solved with a shot to the back of (Spanish Prime Minister) Pedro Sanchez's head," he wrote on his accounts.

Police said he also posed as a public official in telephone calls to nursing homes, hospitals, football clubs and the media to spread false data about the pandemic in Spain.

His misinformation activity caused "serious dangers" to public health, Spanish authorities said.

He also allegedly threatened to burn down a local newspaper office and spread slander about the Military Emergencies Unit, a branch of Spain's armed forces.

Police managed to track him down after they found he "was connected to foreign servers, and using SIM cards from other countries, which he changed frequently".

The man was finally arrested after a police search that lasted weeks in Cuarte de Huerva, just outside the northeastern city Zaragoza.

He faces charges of "usurpation of public functions", "threats", incitement to hatred", and "slander against authorities and public officials".

Spain is one of Europe's hardest-hit countries by the pandemic with almost 440,000 COVID-19 cases and over 29,000 deaths.

Spanish authorities have recently stepped up confinement measures to halt a virus resurgence in the country.

More South Koreans Do 'Staycations' [VOA Learning English, 29 Aug 2020]

At this time last year, Yoon Seok-min, his wife Kim Hyo-jung and their two children traveled to the Philippines, Vietnam, and Guam. They were considering a trip to the Hawaiian Islands this year.

Since the coronavirus health crisis began, Yoon and Kim’s family, like other South Koreans, have turned to a new kind of vacation: a “staycation.”

“Staycation” is a term that suggests a vacation while staying at or near one’s home. Some people do “staycations” by changing their homes into their favorite holiday stops.

Kim and Yoon live in Yongin city, south of Seoul. Their five-bedroom apartment has small palm trees. The chairs and other furniture are made from rattan, a climbing palm grown in tropical countries.

Kim and Yoon have created the breezy feel of the tropics in each room. Their bedroom looks like something one might see at a resort hotel on the Indonesian island of Bali. The living room has things you might find in Hawaii.

“Since we can’t travel abroad for some time because of the coronavirus, we tried to bring those vacation spots to our home,” Kim said.

Yoon and Kim’s complex home improvement project cost them at least $67,000.

But they are not alone in investing in their home, as social distancing forces many people indoors.

Hanssem Corporation is the largest home furnishing company in South Korea. The company says the number of houses it has refurbished between April and June of 2020 tripled from a year earlier.

Camping at home

Another kind of “staycation” has also become popular in South Korea. It is “home-camping.”

Home-camping is a term that means that people set up camping equipment at home - just as they would in the woods or at the beach.

Che Min-hee and her husband changed their Seoul apartment into an indoor campsite after a rise in coronavirus cases and two months of heavy rain.

On a day not too long ago, Che and her husband, Lee Seung-yoon, sat on folding chairs and cooked food on a small stove. Behind them, the television was showing a campfire video. This is their second weekend home-camping trip.

“We were supposed to go on a week-long trip to New York this summer, which we cancelled due to the … coronavirus outbreak,” said Che. “Instead we spent that money on camping gear, which cost us” around $8,400.

South Koreans are normally among the top ten spenders on international travel, according to the World Bank. Because of the outbreak, some people are buying camping equipment to make up for missed vacations.

South Korea’s E-Mart Incorporated reports that sales of camping equipment from April to mid-July increased 51.6 percent compared to last year.

South Korean officials recently asked people to avoid leaving home and to cancel any unnecessary trips. The government is considering stronger social distancing rules.

Lee says he fears these moves mean home-camping is the safest summer vacation this year.

His 7-year-old son Lee Ji-sung is thinking about ways to be even more creative.

“My friends seem to be just playing games, but it’s really nice that our family is doing something special,” the boy said.

“I think it would also be good if we can draw trees on the wall.”

I'm John Russell.

In Japan, Shinzo Abe's Replacement Faces Daunting Challenges [The New York Times, 29 Aug 2020]

By Motoko Rich

Many Want to Be Japan’s New Leader. Do They Know What Awaits Them?

The coronavirus, a tanking economy, an aggressive China, a postponed Olympics, a U.S. election: That’s just the start. And any successor will confront those challenges without having the stature of Shinzo Abe.

TOKYO — The Japanese economy has taken a historic nosedive. The coronavirus could yet rage out of control and force a second postponement of the Olympics. Chinese military aggression is rising in the region just as America, Japan’s closest ally, is embroiled in a polarizing presidential election.

And those are just the immediate challenges for the politicians jockeying fiercely to replace Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is leaving office a year early with no obvious successor.

In the longer term, Japan’s next leader faces the unfinished business of Mr. Abe’s promises to advance women in politics and the workplace, and to improve working conditions so that men can help more at home.

The country is confronting labor shortages as it grapples with a shrinking population and a stubbornly low birthrate, as well as snags in bringing in foreign workers. With the highest proportion of elderly people in the world, Japan could soon struggle to meet pension obligations and provide health care to the aging public.

Not to mention natural disasters turbocharged by climate change, Japan’s energy vulnerabilities from its post-Fukushima nuclear shutdown, the threat of missile attacks by North Korea, and a low ebb in relations with South Korea.

“It makes me wonder why anybody would want to be prime minister,” said Jeffrey Hornung, an analyst at the RAND Corporation.

But there is no shortage of aspirants. Mr. Abe’s conservative party, the Liberal Democratic Party, will announce on Tuesday whether it will call an extraordinary election limited to its members of Parliament and a few prefectural representatives, or a vote that would involve all the party’s one million members. (For the opposition to field a prospective leader, there would need to be a general election.)

Those who have already announced their desire to stand for prime minister include Fumio Kishida, a former foreign minister; Toshimitsu Motegi, the current foreign minister; Taro Kono, the defense minister; Shigeru Ishiba, a former defense minister who once ran against Mr. Abe for party leader; Seiko Noda, a member of the lower house of Parliament; and Tomomi Inada, another former defense minister.

The eventual successor to Mr. Abe, who cited ill health in announcing his resignation on Friday, will confront the many challenges without having the stature he had built over a record-setting run of nearly eight years.

Fundamentally, Japan remains an orderly and prosperous nation. Still, its longer-term issues are so deeply entrenched that not even Mr. Abe’s long tenure was sufficient to remedy them. By his own reckoning, his biggest regrets were that he failed to revise Japan’s pacifist Constitution and so “normalize” its military, to secure the return of contested islands from Russia or to resolve the fates of Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korea decades ago.

For now, the most pressing priority for the next prime minister will be restoring the economy, battered by a worldwide pandemic-related downturn. Japan already has the biggest debt load in the developed world relative to the size of its economy and has spent heavily to stimulate economic activity.

“This is such a heavy lift even before you get to structural change and demographics or any of these larger Japan-specific problems,” said Sheila A. Smith, senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

Still, the pandemic could present an opportunity for the next leader to encourage social reforms that could address some deep-rooted problems, including obstacles that make it difficult for women to progress in careers while having families.

During a state of emergency this spring, the government urged companies to allow employees to work from home, but an analog, paper-based office culture hampered many people. Recent surveys show that only about one out of five employees have continued working from home.

Kathy Matsui, chief Japan equity strategist at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo, said she hoped the next prime minister would propose a rigorous digital strategy for the government and urge companies to adopt more advanced technology.

“Demographics are challenged, so how are you going to boost productivity without investing in a very clear IT transformation strategy?” Ms. Matsui said. “We absolutely need a productivity revolution in the not-so-distant future, so turning this pinch into a change for digital transformation” is crucially important.

Technology that enables more people to work from home could also help women, said Barbara G. Holthus, deputy director of the German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo. She said she wished that a new leader would remind companies and employees that teleworking could help not only to contain the coronavirus but also to empower working mothers in particular.

“To have people all of a sudden be able to work from home, when it’s always been said that it’s not possible — I thought, ‘OK, now, we’re finally going to have a trend which allows women to work from home and throw in a load of laundry while working in front of their computer,’” Ms. Holthus said. “If I were prime minister, I would have said, ‘We have to stay with this.’”

While two women, Ms. Noda and Ms. Inada, have thrown their hats in the ring, the possibility of a female prime minister remains remote. Just three of Mr. Abe’s 20 cabinet members are women, and Japan is 165th in a United Nations ranking of countries based on female representation in Parliament.

On the international stage, one of the largest concerns for Japan is whether any of the contenders for prime minister can hold on to power long enough to get beyond a short-term agenda. Both within Japan and internationally, the fear is that the country might return to the revolving-door political leadership that plagued it for years before Mr. Abe began his second stint in office in 2012.

“Even in Washington, you can hear ‘Oh my God, are we going back to one prime minister a year?’” Ms. Smith said.

Mr. Abe had the time to develop diplomatic relationships that had eluded the country during the period of high turnover. That ultimately allowed him to nudge Japan’s allies into trade deals and security partnerships.

“One of the assets he had was he wasn’t the new face in the summit photo op for presidents and prime ministers” at international gatherings, said Takako Hikotani, associate professor of political science at Columbia University. “That meant a lot.”

With the coming U.S. presidential election, a new Japanese leader will have to skillfully manage relations with a long-term ally that has lately been stepping back from its leadership role on the international stage.

Under Mr. Abe, Japan “filled some of the vacuum left by the United States in its reluctance to remain a considerable Pacific power,” said Shihoko Goto, a senior associate for Northeast Asia at the Wilson Center in Washington. She said she wasn’t sure if any of his likely successors would be able to assume the mantle of multilateral leadership in the region.

In recent years, Japan has sought to act as a counterbalance to the rising aggression of China, which has carried out provocative maritime activities in both the East and South China Seas and cracked down on Hong Kong.

But if Mr. Abe’s exit ushers in political instability, “China has shown that it takes advantage of situations and uncertainty,” Mr. Hornung, the RAND analyst, said.

“If you have somebody that they see as weak or green in the teeth or not very capable, we might see China step it up in a way that Japan hasn’t experienced for a while,” he added.

Analysts said they hoped that the next Japanese prime minister would take steps to resolve the strained relationship with South Korea, which stems from a fight over what Japan still owes its neighbor for abuses committed during its colonial occupation of the Korean Peninsula before and during World War II.

The longer the dispute goes on, with protracted court fights and trade battles, “the only winners are China and North Korea, who benefit from weakened alliances wit

The Mystery of Europe's Less Deadly Coronavirus Second Wave [The Daily Beast, 29 Aug 2020]

by Barbie Latza Nadeau

COVID-19 is back with a bang in Europe with many countries reporting case numbers that mimic the beginning of the pandemic. But so far, it doesn't seem as lethal.

ROME—France has just reported its highest number of COVID cases since the lockdown ended and Spain has reported its worst day since the pandemic began. Italy has seen its numbers creep up to levels not seen since the lockdown there ended in May, and Germany has reported its highest number of new cases since April. But despite being slammed by what looks a lot like a second wave of COVID-19, the hospitalizations and death rates are nowhere near the level they were the first time around.

Authorities across Europe say that’s because the first time COVID came to town, vulnerable elderly people living in closed communities were the hardest hit. This time, it’s young people who caught it on beaches and clubs on vacations and who are mostly asymptomatic. And because of aggressive testing–countries like Italy test all passengers coming in from holiday hot spots—they have been able to isolate cases and stop the spread. With the hospitals no longer overwhelmed, and the gift of history as a guide about how best to triage COVID patients, the second wave is—so far—manageable.

But no one is taking any chances and while full lockdowns are not on the cards, there are plenty of restrictions to try to mitigate the spread. In Paris, the City of Love, lovers will have to kiss through their face masks since they are mandatory in the entire city, with hefty fines for those who bare their faces. In Munich, Germany, beer-lovers will have to get their drinking in early since that city is banning beer sales and public drinking after 9 p.m. Italy now requires anyone in any social square to wear face masks outdoors from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. French officials are also fearful about the grape harvest for their famous Champagne as 100,000 seasonal workers living in confined accommodations could spell trouble.

Several new studies offer hopeful theories that the virus currently circulating around Europe and Asia, where new cases have also not led to a spike in deaths, is not as potent as the first wave.

One, by Britain’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine , looks at mortality rates in the U.K. where the strategy has been inconsistent from the beginning, but the case fatality rate there has fallen from 18 percent in April to around 1 percent in late August. Statistician Jason Oke said that the reason is not that treatment has been found, it’s that the virus isn’t the same.
“This doesn’t seem to be the same disease or as lethal as it was earlier on when we saw huge numbers of people dying,” he said.

French epidemiologist Laurent Toubiana told BFM-TV that he was baffled by this new wave. “The virus is circulating, but an epidemic without patients, I don’t understand what it is,” he said, noting there was no major uptick in hospitalizations despite France’s numbers soaring.
“For the moment, there is no major sign of crisis, for the moment there is no rebound.”
If that's the case, that’s good news as kids go back to school amid a COVID wave at least as bad as the one that shut down much of Europe last March.

In the coming weeks, Europeans will send children back to school, some, like in Italy, for the first time since March. And everyone will be watching to see if the European approach to back-to-school in times of COVID will be a guidepost or a warning about how not to do it.

In France, which was the first hard-hit European country to send kids back to school before the summer break, is not requiring social distancing when children go back to the classrooms
Sept. 1, but everyone over the age of 11 must wear face coverings.

In Italy, where students never went back to school after the lockdown was lifted, the schools will open Sept. 14 at staggered times and some classes will be held in churches, parks and theaters to ensure safe distancing. Tandem online learning will be offered for any secondary student who lives with a vulnerable family member. Large traditional tables have been abandoned for individual desks in some regions, some created with a saw to save time and money. The Italian education ministry has also suggested that Saturday schooling be offered to allow for schools in tight quarters to stagger days students attend. Students and teachers will be required to wear masks and teachers and other personnel who interact with children must also wear face shields.

German students will be going back to school in “cohorts”, or groups they hang out with during their free time to keep people in bubbles. Social distancing won't be required within the cohort, but will be in all other situations. Some schools have also removed banisters and other areas children often touch as an additional precaution.

Spain, which has been particularly hard hit during the second wave, will require children over the age of six to wear face coverings, and bathrooms and other common areas will be cleaned three times a day.

Even if the precautions work to mitigate the spread among school children who could then take it home to grandparents and vulnerable people, the fear is still that a small outbreak in an area with a weak health-care system could spark another emergency and that death rates could spike like they did in the spring.

Experts aren't yet ready to declare the second wave easier. Ignacio López-Goñi, professor of microbiology at Spain’s University of Navarra, wrote recently that it could be a matter of better record-keeping at the beginning of the pandemic. “Now there are incomprehensible data discrepancies between Spain’s autonomous communities and the federal ministry," he says. "It is thus proving very difficult to find updated data on the number of hospitalized cases and deaths, which are the most important figures we need to interpret the situation.”

Is India At Early Stages Of Second Wave Of Coronavirus? [NDTV, 29 Aug 2020]

Coronavirus: It is, of course, too soon to be sure that this worrying trend will continue - but it is important not to just sit back and hope things will improve - it is crucial that the authorities act decisively and act now

New Delhi:

The latest COVID-19 trends over the last 10 days are worrying. Not only at the all-India level, but 10 of the 20 bigger states in India are showing signs of a second surge. The graphs here show in a simple form the clear upward trend in daily new cases, the rising positivity rate (which is particularly worrying in the context of the increasing number of Rapid Antigen Tests being conducted. Antigen tests have a high false-negativity), and the worrying resurgence of the increase in R (the Reproduction Rate, which measures how infectious the virus is still).

There were some hopeful signs a fortnight ago with the "R" gradually coming down and the positivity rate falling too. Unfortunately, those encouraging signs did not last long and we may be seeing the early stages of a second wave. It is, of course, too soon to be sure that this worrying trend will continue - but it is important not to just sit back and hope things will improve - it is crucial that the authorities act decisively and act now.

A second wave of the coronavirus could devastate the recovering economy [Lincoln Journal Star, 29 Aug 2020]

By SARAH FOSTER

The U.S. economy is already on the mend nearly five months after nationwide lockdowns suffocated business activity in an attempt to save lives during the coronavirus outbreak.

But another threat could prove to be even more debilitating — eroding that recovery before it’s lifted off the ground and arriving with severe consequences for businesses and the job market: a second wave of coronavirus infections.

Economists are consumed by the fear that the virus could come back with a vengeance. A second wave is regarded as the biggest downside risk to the U.S. economy this year, according to the majority of economists in a June National Association for Business Economics survey.
Officials at the Federal Reserve are also calling the likelihood of another outbreak “substantial,” saying it would leave lasting scars on the financial system.

“Normally, humans are driven by FOMO — the fear of missing out,” says Constance Hunter, chief economist at KPMG. “But with the virus, they’re driven by FOGO — the fear of going out.
If we have a second wave, that could undermine confidence to the point that FOGO will rise, and then you’ll see these knock-on effects. The ability to create this firewall around the COVID-impacted economy will start to erode even further.”

A second wave

But the trickiest part about making outlook predictions is that economists have a clear blindspot: They’re not epidemiologists. And the financial system is tethered to an unpredictable virus.

Top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci says it’s too soon to judge whether a second wave could be around the corner, especially because the U.S. never totally beat the first wave of the virus that’s spread to nearly 5.7 million cases and killed around 175,000 in the U.S., according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker.

Medical experts also don’t have a clear-cut definition for what exactly qualifies as a second wave, though they are aligned that what’s been happening across the South, West and Midwest doesn’t fall in that camp. State reopenings and delayed peaks are most likely behind the recent upturn in cases.

For the first wave to be over, Fauci has said that the number of new positive coronavirus infections would have to reach low single digits. That’s so far not been the case in the U.S.
Though cases have dropped off since late July, they still remain stubbornly high, according to a New York Times database. Daily new cases have averaged out to about 47,000 over the past seven days ending on August 21, a decrease of 16% from the prior two weeks’ average and down 22% from their peak of 60,000 in July.

It means a second wave could reappear with a new round of infections, or possibly with another strain. Complicating that view is experts’ uncertainty about how long immunity lasts after infection, as is asymptomatic transmission and circulation along with other respiratory diseases. The colder weather in the fall and winter might also mean more people congregate indoors.

Regardless of the uncertainties, the general public might already be bracing for one. The common cold and flu season similarly operates in waves, with new cases rising in the fall and peaking in the winter. And the 1918 influenza pandemic that infected 500 million people and killed an estimated 20-50 million individuals proved to be even deadlier after a second wave reappeared in the fall of 1918. Meanwhile, after a record 102-day streak of no new coronavirus cases, New Zealand confirmed four new novel coronavirus cases on August 11.

What this means

Epidemiologists say that an uptick in cases after holding in the low single digits doesn’t necessarily have to lead to a second outbreak. Key to stifling the spread could be contact tracing, rapid testing and isolation. Upside risks include vaccines and efficient treatments.

That might mean lockdowns will be more targeted if there’s a second wave, rather than the wide-scale shutdowns enacted nationwide throughout late March. It could also mean the economy has more of a fighting chance, given that the stay-at-home orders were what sapped the economy’s fuel.

More biz closures?

But at some point, cuts and closures for businesses are all but inevitable, even with this policy.

Reduced capacity would mean reduced spending, weighing on firms’ budgets.

“We’d be unlikely to see an outright contraction in the economy, but we would basically see a flat economy with no growth and a worsening in the job market,” says Gus Faucher, senior vice president and chief economist at PNC Financial Services. “There’s only so much where people can cut back. You would have some businesses that were expecting to reopen, but they’re going to decide to shut down permanently.”

That news would be devastating to the near 9 million Americans on temporary layoff. While permanent layoffs appeared to flatline from June to July, holding stable at around 2.9 million, that’s still about 1.5 million more than a year ago. That number would only rise with more closures.

A July 2020 Chamber of Commerce survey found that more than half of all small businesses — the job-growth engine for many communities — are worried about having to permanently close, while 7 in 10 are concerned about financial hardship due to pandemic-related closures.

A wave of commercial Chapter 11 bankruptcies has also erupted this year, up by about 30% from this time last year, according to Epiq AACER, a U.S. bankruptcy court data provider.

Twenty-six national retailers are also on that list, according to RetailDive.

“A second wave would really put a dent in the progress we’ve made,” Hunter says. If you own a restaurant, for example, “your margins are thin, and you’re not going to be able to operate for months on end at 50% capacity.”

Job losses would worsen

With a second wave, job creation would stagnate, if not outright contract, she says. And the longer these problems persist, “what you could see is this spilling over into a normal recession.

These areas that haven’t been impacted — the question is, do they start to get impacted?”

A phenomenon with the coronavirus pandemic has been that the hardest-hit industries are typically more immune from recessionary swings. Leisure and hospitality jobs have fallen by about 24% so far, compared with 3.5% during the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Retail trade, on the other hand, has collapsed by 11 percent, compared with 6.7% previously.

Other industries have found themselves relatively well-preserved. Jobs in the financial activities sector, which includes real estate, finance and insurance, fell by 5.6% in the prior recession, compared with 2.4% so far with this crisis. That’s because this sector was “the nexus of the problem” during the Great Recession, Hunter says, while those jobs today are often workable from home. But the ongoing pandemic has created several potholes that could prove to be a problem down the road, especially if there’s a second wave.

One such problem is child care. Nearly one-third of U.S. workers have a child under 18 at home, while Goldman Sachs estimates that about 15% of the labor force are single parents, individuals who can’t work remotely or a parent of a young child.

A lack of viable child care options risks keeping individuals out of work for longer. A Bankrate survey from August found that, if schools adopt remote learning, about 22% of workers would have to cut their hours and 15% wouldn’t be able to work at all.

Schools would likely be subject to widespread closures, given their “superspreader” nature.

Even among college campuses, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill moved all classes online Monday just a week after classes started, after 130 students tested positive for COVID-19.

Coronavirus: University return 'could spark Covid avalanche' [BBC News, 29 Aug 2020]

By Hannah Richardson

Universities in the UK are being urged to scrap plans for face-to-face teaching until Christmas in order to prevent a second wave of coronavirus.

Academics' union, UCU, said more than a million students moving around the country was "a recipe for disaster".

UCU leader Jo Grady said universities were not prepared and risked becoming the "care homes of the second wave".

But university bosses say they have worked hard to plan for a safe return to all aspects of student life.

When students return in September, they will be expected to abide by new policies on the use of face coverings and social distancing protocols.

Meanwhile there will be safety partitions to keep them apart, as well as more cleaning and ventilation and smaller class sizes where face-to-face teaching takes place.

When national lockdown measures were brought in at the end of March, universities cancelled lectures, tutorials and some exams.

Many continued their lessons and lectures online however, and even held final exams remotely.
• Universities facing 'crazy demand' from students
• Students back at uni - but with masks and no bars
• What if I still don't have the place I want? And other questions

Over the summer, universities have been preparing for the return of their students with most promising a mix of face-to-face and online learning - or "blended learning" - with students taught in extended "bubble" groups.

Larissa Kennedy, the president of the National Union of Students, told BBC Breakfast universities needed to "refrain from in-person teaching" unless it was absolutely necessary, for example, sessions in technical labs or studios.

"We need to ensure remote learning is as accessible as possible and I think we need to do that really quickly," she added.

Meanwhile few, if any, universities have taken the step of telling their students not to move into their accommodation.

Ms Grady said having tens of thousands of students heading into cities across the UK "risks doing untold damage to people's health and exacerbating the worst public health crisis of our lifetimes".

And she told Breakfast the mass migration of a million students could prompt a "silent avalanche of infections".

"There is far more of a risk than perhaps the general public has appreciated," she said.
She said she was particularly worried about the risk of the virus spreading in cities with big student populations and in areas with fewer cases at present.

Ms Grady told the BBC: "If we look at some key cities: Manchester has 100,000 students; Birmingham isn't far behind with 80,000; and Leicester has 40,000.

"These are all cities that have had some form of local lockdown and have come out of it or are about to go into one."

"We are really worried about young people congregating in halls of residence and just what this will mean in terms of transmission," she added.

The already difficult situation, with universities doing their best to bring in socially distanced ways of working, has been made worse by the higher than expected number of students this year, she said.

Prof Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, told Breakfast "right now it is as safe as it ever has been to go back" to university.

He suggested universities put back face-to-face teaching until the end of the academic year in spring or summer 2021, when the threat of the coronavirus may be reduced.

"Can we do something over the summer, can we put a summer school on?" he asked, adding:
"We need to maximise that experience."

'No regular testing'

The exams crisis over the summer meant many more students ultimately achieved the grades needed to get into university, after the government's last-minute change of mind on school-assessed grades.

Universities UK president Julia Buckingham said: "Many staff want to return to in-person teaching, research and other activities where it is safe and appropriate to do so."

They are also mindful of the benefits of in-person teaching and support for students' well-being and development, she said.

"The dedication shown throughout the lockdown and into recovery has been remarkable," she added.

A Department for Education spokesman said: "We are confident that universities are well prepared for the return of students by taking measures such as introducing social distancing on campus, limiting travel requirement for classes and staggering teaching across extended days to reduce numbers on site.

"Opening universities is a part of the Prime Minister's cautious roadmap, and it is important that we continue to open education settings wherever it is safe to do so.

"We support face to face teaching only where possible and if safety guidelines are followed, but know that high quality online teaching can also be delivered if necessary.

"We are keeping our guidance under constant review, and are currently updating our advice on reopening higher education buildings and campuses to reflect the latest public health advice, including on face coverings, local lockdowns and test and trace."

France records biggest daily rise in COVID-19 cases since March [New York Post, 29 Aug 2020]

By Dana Kennedy

France could face a possible second nationwide lockdown in the face of the biggest daily spike in COVID-19 infections since March, President Emmanuel Macron said Friday.

Another 7,379 cases were confirmed on Friday, bringing the country’s total to 267,077, the BBC reported Saturday.

It was the biggest increase since March 31, when 7,578 cases were reported.

But health officials had some good news: Young people who are less vulnerable to the disease make up most of the new cases and they are not being hospitalized nor are they dying.

Macron said he could not rule out a second lockdown but said he’s trying not to wreck the country’s fragile economic recovery. France began easing its eight-week-long lockdown in May although Paris has been more tightly controlled. Masks were made mandatory in Paris on Friday.

“Containment is the crudest of measures to fight against a virus,” said Macron, urging people to be “collectively very rigorous.”

Spain and Germany have also reported record numbers of new cases in recent days and the World Health Organization (WHO) is warning of an overall resurgence of COVID-19 in Europe.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned Friday that things would become “even more difficult” in the colder months.

Coronavirus: Children's role in spread puzzles scientists [BBC News, 29 Aug 2020]

By Rachel Schraer

Children can carry coronavirus in their noses for up to three weeks, according to a study from South Korea.

Earlier studies have found the vast majority of children with the virus have mild or no symptoms.

But these findings shed light on the unresolved question of how likely children are to spread the virus to others.

The study emphasises the continuing role of social distancing and good hygiene as children go back to school.

The president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, Prof Russell Viner explains there are three separate, but linked questions about children and Covid-19:
• Do children get the virus?
• How severely do they get the virus?
• Do they pass it on to others?

While we know for sure that children can catch the virus, Prof Viner says data from antibody blood tests suggest they may be less susceptible to catching it than adults - particularly children under the age of 12.

And scientists are very confident that children are less likely to become ill than adults even if they do catch it, with many not showing any symptoms at all. That's what the British study, published on Friday, confirms.

The third question is the one we know least about, and it's this the South Korean study attempts to address.

What does the South Korean study say?

The study, based on 91 children, found that even among those with few or no symptoms, virus could be found in their swabs as much as three weeks later.

The fact they had detectable virus in their noses, the authors concluded, suggested they were capable of passing it on.

Because of the way South Korea tested, traced and isolated cases, even those without symptoms, it is uniquely placed to look at this group.

Once they had identified and isolated cases, the patients were repeatedly tested until the virus had cleared.

The study was therefore able to give us some new information about children as carriers of the virus, and their potential capacity to be spreading it onwards.

Like other studies, though, it still leaves a missing piece of the puzzle.

Just because virus is found in a child's nose does not definitively prove they are transmitting it at the same rate as adults.

Dr Roberta DeBiasi, chief of the paediatric diseases division at the Children's National Hospital in Washington DC, said it would be "illogical to think children have no role in transmission" given they do carry the virus.

But professor of child health at the University of Liverpool, Prof Calum Semple said: "The presence of the virus genetic material in swabs in the respiratory tract need not equate with transmission, particularly in people who do not have important symptoms such as cough and sneeze."

So can we draw a conclusion?

Logic dictates that in both children and adults, people with no or few symptoms - who aren't coughing and projecting the virus into the air - are likely to be less infectious, and children generally get milder cases of the disease.

But significant numbers of asymptomatic people could still have a noticeable effect on the infection rate.

And, as Prof Viner points out, keeping schools closed is not neutral either but poses its own set of risks - to children's development, education and mental health.

While the exact risk children pose remains an open question for the moment, answering it will be vital to controlling future outbreaks.

Dr DeBiasi believes that while the "vast majority of infected children have mild or unrecognised disease," they may play an "important" role in enabling the spread of infection through communities.

A case of coronavirus reinfection shows the complexities of the pandemic [The Verge, 29 Aug 2020]

By Nicole Wetsman

Antivirus: A weekly digest of the latest COVID-19 research

The scary thing finally happened: someone caught the coronavirus twice and got sicker the second time around. A 25-year-old man in Nevada got COVID-19 in March, got better in April, and got sick again in May. He had worse symptoms on the second bout, bad enough that he had to be hospitalized.

Three other cases of confirmed reinfection were also reported this week: one in Hong Kong (the first documented case) and two in Europe. These don’t necessarily make me any more worried about our vaccine prospects, though, and they don’t mean the pandemic will go on forever. We have four documented cases of reinfection. But that’s out of the 24 million cases of this disease so far, and rare shit happens. Most experts expected that we’d see at least a few.

For months, there have been occasional, anecdotal reports of people testing positive for COVID-19 twice. None of those were proven to be reinfections. For most of those people, the second test probably picked up residual, dead virus that was still floating around in people’s noses and throats after their first infection.

In these reinfection cases, though, researchers actually analyzed the virus from the first time the people got sick and compared it to the virus from the second time they got sick. In each case, the two viruses had slightly different genetic sequences, showing that the second positive tests weren’t just leftover virus.

Here’s the other important thing: in the Hong Kong case, the second infection caused no symptoms at all. That means his immune system probably recognized the virus from the first infection and kept it in check. We don’t know why that didn’t happen for the man in Nevada.

He wasn’t tested for antibodies the first time he got sick, so it’s possible that he just didn’t make any. That’s the more encouraging option. The other possibility is that he had antibodies, but they made the infection worse (it happens with other viruses, like dengue).

Case studies only answer one question: can you catch COVID-19 twice? But that’s about all they do. Mostly, they raise questions rather than answer them. How common is reinfection?
How infectious are people if they get sick a second time? Are people who don’t generate many antibodies the first time they contract the virus the only people who can catch it again?

The pandemic feels like it’s gone on for 1 million years, but in a more real way, the coronavirus has only existed in the human population for about nine months. Scientists have learned so much, so fast, but there’s still a long way to go. The human immune system is weird and confusing, and it’s squaring off against a new, never-before-seen virus. It’s going to take time to understand what’s happening.

Oh, and the other thing — this is a reminder that even if you’ve already had COVID-19, you still need to be careful.

Here’s what else happened this week.

RESEARCH

In February, before we knew the extent of COVID-19 in the US, 175 biotech executives gathered for a conference in Boston. At that meeting, the virus spread from attendee to attendee — and the outbreak eventually led to tens of thousands of cases all around the world, according to one analysis. The study shows that even a small gathering can have wide-ranging, devastating ripple effects on the course of the pandemic. (Jonathan Saltzman / The Boston Globe)

Months into the pandemic, scientists still aren’t sure what happens to our immune systems after we recover from COVID-19. Most researchers think people will have some protection against the virus, but they still don’t know what that protection will look like. Stat News broke down some of the possibilities. (Helen Branswell / Stat News)

DEVELOPMENT

The Food and Drug Administration authorized a $5, 15-minute COVID-19 test that works like a pregnancy test: a nasal swab gets inserted into the bottom of a test card and a colored line appears if the sample is positive for the coronavirus. It’s a big step forward, experts say. (Nicole Wetsman / The Verge)

The drug company ran a small study testing their COVID-19 vaccine candidate in people over the age of 56, and it found they produced the same types of immune response that younger people did. This doesn’t mean that they’re protected from infection with the coronavirus — we still need data from much bigger trials to prove that. But it is a promising sign: older peoples’ immune systems are weaker than younger peoples’, and vaccines sometimes don’t work as well for them. (Peter Loftus / The Wall Street Journal)

While companies like Moderna and Pfizer are racing to collect data on their COVID-19 vaccine candidates by the end of the year, dozens of other companies are moving at a slower pace.

They’re building their vaccines using different types of technology than the ones at the head of the pack, and some researchers think they may have more staying power. “The first vaccines may not be the most effective,” Ted Ross, the director of the Center for Vaccines and Immunology at the University of Georgia, told The New York Times. (Carl Zimmer / The New York Times)

PERSPECTIVES

Reporter Katie Engelhart investigated the deadly COVID-19 outbreak at the Life Care Center of Kirkland, Washington, the first virus hotspot in the United States. Something clearly went wrong — but who was to blame?

Later, the story of the Life Care outbreak would be flattened by the ubiquitous metaphors of pandemic. People would say that COVID-19 hit like a bomb, or an earthquake, or a tidal wave. They would say it spread like wildfire. But inside the facility, it felt more like a spectral haunting. A nurse named Chelsey Earnest said that fighting COVID was like “chasing the devil.”
(Katie Engelhart / California Sunday)

On college campuses around the country, student journalists are tirelessly documenting reopening plans and COVID-19 outbreaks. It takes a toll. “We are scared because not only is this news that we’re writing about for other people to hear, we’re also hearing about it ourselves for the first time usually when we’re writing about it,” Brandon Standley, managing editor at UNC’s The Daily Tar Heel, told NPR.
(Elissa Nadworny and Lauren Migaki / NPR)

More than numbers

To the more than 24,775,245 people worldwide who have tested positive, may your road to recovery be smooth.

To the families and friends of the 837,908 people who have died worldwide — 181,779 of those in the US — your loved ones are not forgotten.

Stay safe, everyone.

Sweden embraced herd immunity, while the U.K. abandoned the idea — so why do they BOTH have high COVID-19 fatality rates? [MarketWatch, 29 Aug 2020]

By Quentin Fottrell

‘Sweden’s prized herd immunity is nowhere in sight,’ according to an analysis in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine

Herd immunity — the notion that once a high proportion of a population has contracted or been vaccinated against an infectious disease, the likelihood of others in the population being infected is drastically reduced — is a coveted yet intangible goal in a world without a COVID-19 vaccine.

It’s safety in numbers, in other words. But unless and until there’s a widely available vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, physicians say the reality is far more complex.

Patrick Vallance, the U.K.’s chief scientific adviser, said last March that herd immunity was an option the Boris Johnson government was exploring as COVID-19 began taking a toll on the country. His apparent aim, regarded by his critics as idealistic and foolhardy even early on, was to quickly build up herd immunity among those believed to be least likely to suffer tragic consequences and thereby slow the rate of transmission to populations most at risk of death.

The U.K. abandoned the idea. Later blaming poor messaging, U.K. Health Secretary Matt Hancock stated, “Herd immunity is not our goal or policy,” while other experts said it would be a side effect of the government’s overall coronavirus action plan.

A key tenet of the herd-immunity concept is the separation of those at a lower risk of dying from the higher-risk group — namely, people over 70 and those with pre-existing conditions.
As the lower-risk group contracts the virus, immunity spreads in the so-called herd, ultimately lowering the risk for those in the higher-risk group of coming into contact with a currently contagious person and becoming infected.

Don’t miss: No, the summer surge in coronavirus cases in some states isn’t part of a ‘second wave’

While it was deemed too difficult to achieve in the U.K., a country with a population that hovers near 66.4 million, Sweden stayed on that track. Its gamble: With a population of just over 10 million, it could achieve herd immunity without experiencing too many fatalities.

Sweden’s prime minister, Stefan Löfven, advocated voluntary social-distancing rules and not closing schools but banning gatherings of more than 50 people. He has steadfastly insisted that his country has taken the right approach, despite criticisms from health advocates.

“Now there are quite a few people who think we were right,” Löfven said this week. “The strategy that we adopted, I believe is right — to protect individuals, limit the spread of the infection.” Critically, however, the country did not ban visits to nursing homes until the end of March.

The logic: In an ideal world, where people do not come into contact with those who are vulnerable, a country could manage the spread of the virus without overwhelming hospitals with sick people, while also mitigating the full economic impact of closing businesses and introducing travel bans.

Poor results

How did it turn out? It’s still early, given that most Western countries are still grappling with the first wave of coronavirus (and many experts express doubt that the wave metaphor is suited to this virus), but results have been poor relative to other countries.

Sweden has the ninth highest number of COVID-related deaths per capita in the world, at 57.09 per 100,000 people. The U.K. has the fifth highest, at 62.47.

What’s more, the U.K. has a fatality rate of 12.6%, second only to Italy’s 13.6%. Sweden has a fatality rate of 6.7%. To put those figures in context, the U.S. has had 54.55 COVID-related deaths per 100,000 people and a fatality rate of 3.1%, less than half the rate of Sweden.

So what happened? Sweden resisted a lockdown, while the U.K. took its time to introduce its own shelter-in-place orders and travel ban. The U.K. introduced lockdown measures on March 23, and on March 25, the same day that Britain’s Prince Charles tested positive for the coronavirus, the U.K. government said police would be given the power to use “reasonable force” to enforce shelter-in-place rules.

Boris Johnson, the prime minister who himself was hospitalized with coronavirus and ultimately recovered, was late to issue those orders and introduce a travel ban. One study released in June estimated that 34% of detected U.K. transmissions arrived from Spain, France, Italy and elsewhere abroad.

That same study concluded that one-third of cases in the U.K. occurred in March, while others said the U.K., along with other countries, underestimated the number of asymptomatic people who were spreading the virus without realizing it.

What’s more, like the U.S., the U.K. did not introduce an early large-scale testing and contact-tracing strategy. All of these factors led to the U.K. placing among the global top ranks, alongside Sweden, for coronavirus-related deaths per capita.

Sweden, meanwhile, failed to protect its elderly population, who make up the majority of those who died from COVID-19 there. This was a major misstep in its herd-immunity strategy, which speaks to the difficulty of applying an idealistic, laboratory model of separating the infected from the most vulnerable to the real world: Sweden only banned care-home visits at the end of March.

It kept most of its schools open, despite children being among the most likely to contract the virus and transmit without displaying symptoms. The country reported its highest death tally in 150 years in the first half of this year.

Despite these efforts, and its relatively small size compared to the U.K. and the U.S., the country is not even close to achieving herd immunity. In an interview with the Observer newspaper in London this month, Anders Tegnell, an epidemiologist involved in managing Sweden’s pandemic response, claimed that up to 30% of the country’s population could be immune.

But others say that even accounting for those who are asymptomatic, that is a wildly optimistic estimate, and, as Tegnell himself acknowledged, “it’s very difficult to draw a good sample from the population, because, obviously, the level of immunity differs enormously between different age groups between different parts of Stockholm and so on.”

It’s likely even that 30% level is a long way off from achieving the goal. This month, the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine published a paper titled “Sweden’s prized herd immunity is nowhere in sight.” Epidemiologists estimate that at least 70% of the population attaining immunity is necessary to achieve herd immunity.

Vaccine and immunity

And would a vaccine help a country like Sweden that appears to be slouching toward the goal of herd immunity? Not necessarily. A study published last month suggested a vaccine would have to be at least 80% effective to achieve a complete “return to normal.” The study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, said a vaccine does necessarily permit a return to normal life.

“If 75% of the population gets vaccinated, the vaccine has to have an efficacy of at least 70% to prevent an epidemic and at least 80% to extinguish an ongoing epidemic,” the researchers said. If only 60% of the population gets vaccinated, the thresholds are even higher.

“What matters is not just that a product is available, but also how effective it is,” said lead investigator Bruce Lee, a professor of health policy and management at the City University of New York.

One not insignificant caveat: A recent survey by Yahoo News and YouGov found that the public embrace of a potential vaccine has hit a new low. Only 42% of Americans said they planned to get vaccinated if and when a vaccine becomes available, which is down from 55% in late May, and 46% in early July.

And combining the percentage of those who would not get vaccinated with those who are unsure? That alone adds up to more than 75%. There was a correlation between education level and income with a willingness to get a coronavirus vaccine: 78% of those who had obtained at least bachelor’s degree said they planned to get vaccinated, compared to 58% of those who didn’t finish high school.

While 67% of Caucasians, 71% of Hispanics and 77% of Asian Americans said they were likely to get the future vaccine, barely half of Black respondents (52%) agreed.

A plethora of companies are currently working on coronavirus vaccines. Among them are AstraZeneca AZN, -0.74% ; BioNTech SE BNTX, -2.42% and its partner, Pfizer PFE, +0.13% ; GlaxoSmithKline GSK, -0.37% ; Johnson & Johnson JNJ, +0.43% ; Merck & Co. MERK, ; Moderna MRNA, -0.79% ; and Sanofi SAN, +4.03%.

In the meantime, asymptomatic transmission remains “the Achilles’ heel of COVID-19 pandemic control through the public-health strategies we have currently deployed,” according to a May 28 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Symptom-based case detection and subsequent testing to determine isolation and quarantine procedures were justified by the many similarities between SARS-CoV-1 (the virus that caused SARS) and SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), they wrote.

“Despite the deployment of similar control interventions, the trajectories of the two epidemics have veered in dramatically different directions,” they added. “Within eight months, SARS was controlled after SARS-CoV-1 had infected approximately 8,100 persons in limited geographic areas.”

Public-health officials have advised people to keep a distance of six feet from one another and wear face coverings in public settings. Face masks are designed to prevent the wearer, who may be infected with COVID-19 but have mild or no symptoms, from spreading invisible droplets to another person and thereby infecting them, too.

Sweden, for its part, chose not to impose a strict face-mask wearing strategy.

Ultimately, that “Achilles’ hell” in COVID-19 of asymptomatic spreading also complicates any herd-immunity strategy where infected people are kept separate from the more vulnerable.

The latter group, in reality, cannot remain house bound and without contact with anyone who is not considered vulnerable for months — possibly years — or however long it takes to reach the critical herd-immunity level.

The World Health Organization currently estimates that 16% of people with COVID-19 are asymptomatic and can transmit the coronavirus, while other data show that 40% of coronavirus transmission is due to carriers not displaying symptoms of the illness.

Distant hope

As of Saturday, more than five months after the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, more than 24 million people had been infected with the virus worldwide, and at least 837,879 had died.

In the U.K., there have been 333,806 confirmed cases and 41,573 deaths due to COVID-19. In Sweden, there have been at least 83,958 confirmed cases and 5,821 deaths. These numbers, for the most part, do not include asymptomatic carriers.

Herd immunity remains a distant hope. “The success is premised on the ability to keep those two groups separated, but I don’t know if you can,” Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the John Hopkins Center for Health Security and a spokesman for the Infectious Diseases Society of America, told MarketWatch.

“It’s a challenging approach,” Adalja added. “It’s going to be daunting. It’s not as if those two demographics never interact. None of these intervention options is cost-free.”

There’s an advantage to coming down with a virus that has been around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, such as the flu. COVID-19 is new, and scientists are still learning about the virus’s ability to mutate and affect the cardiovascular system as well as the respiratory system.

Coronavirus immunity differs from that to other diseases. Immunizations against smallpox, measles or Hepatitis B should last a lifetime, doctors say, but coronaviruses, first identified in the 1960s, interact with our immune system in unique and different ways, Adalja added.

How do other coronaviruses compare to SARS-CoV-2? People infected by SARS-CoV, an outbreak that centered in southern China and Hong Kong from 2002 to 2004, had immunity for roughly two years; studies suggest the antibodies disappear six years after the infection.

For MERS-CoV, a coronavirus first identified in 2012 that has infected hundreds in the Middle East, research indicates people retain immunity for approximately 18 months — although the long-term response to being exposed may depend on the severity of the original infection.

There are no vaccines for MERS-CoV or SARS-CoV.

Herd immunity is not a preventative measure, says Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist working in chronic disease in Sydney, Australia.

“If 70% of your population is infected with a disease, it is by definition not prevention. How can it be? Most of the people in your country are sick! And the hopeful nonsense that you can reach that 70% by just infecting young people is simply absurd. If only young people are immune, you’d have clusters of older people with no immunity at all, making it incredibly risky for anyone over a certain age to leave their house lest they get infected, forever,” he wrote in ScienceAlert.

“It’s also worth thinking about the repercussions of this disastrous scenario — the best estimates put COVID-19 infection fatality rate at around 0.5-1%,” Meyerowitz-Katz added. “If 70% of an entire population gets sick, that means that between 0.35% to 0.7% of everyone in a country could die, which is a catastrophic outcome.”

“With something like 10% of all infections needing to be hospitalized, you’d also see an enormous number of people very sick, which has huge implications for the country as well,” he said. “The sad fact is that herd immunity just isn’t a solution to our pandemic woes.”

The alternative: After a slow start where people were allowed to travel and news of the original outbreak was quashed, telling people to stay home and keep their distance from each other appeared to work for China, as did the travel ban and locking down more than a dozen cities to help lower the rate of new cases and slow the spread of the virus, experts say.

“It is the good part of what China did,” Adalja said.

The true picture: Has Sweden emerged as paragon or pariah in the corona sweepstakes? [The Times of India Blog, 29 Aug 2020]

by Ramesh Thakur

With the world on pause with coronavirus, Sweden’s unique approach has drawn intense global scrutiny, not all of it complimentary. It refused to impose tough lockdown, kept primary schools and core economic activities functioning, issued clear guidelines and relied on voluntary social distancing plus personal hygiene practices to manage the crisis. Chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell explained that lockdowns have no “historical scientific basis”. “Each country has to reach ‘herd immunity’ in one way or another, and we are going to reach it in a different way.”
He told the BBC Sweden will be better placed than most European countries to face a second wave of the outbreak. In the past fortnight infections rose again across much of Europe, they stayed low in Sweden but the real test will be this coming winter.

The US media was harshly critical of Sweden’s approach: the New York Times (including a distortion-filled hit piece), Newsweek, USA Today, CBS News. Unlike bemused-cum-resigned Indians, Swedes are more used to being the cynosure of American attention than the object of censure. The media focussed on comparing Sweden’s Covid mortality rate to its better-performing Scandinavian neighbours, ignoring how Sweden was in the middle of the overall European pack. They refused to look at US states, including, in the case of the NYT, its home state/ city. As of Friday, Sweden’s death per million people was 576, compared to 557 for the US overall, with 14 states exceeding the Swedish rate including New Jersey 1,804, New York 1,696 (NY City 2,840), Massachusetts 1,296, Connecticut 1,252, Louisiana 1,048, and DC 857.
Most of the mainstream media has been equally reticent about highlighting that 8 of the 10 US states with the highest mortality have Democratic governments.

For harsh lockdowns to be justified elsewhere, Sweden had to be discredited. Yet after six months without lockdowns, school closures and other tough-love measures widely imposed across the Western world, Sweden’s daily Covid deaths have stayed below 10 since July 19 and revived the debate over its herd immunity strategy. Its economy too has suffered, but less.
In the first quarter, Sweden’s economy was the only one to grow, albeit by a modest 0.1%. In the second quarter, it contracted by 8%, against the EU-27 average of 12%. Meanwhile the US economy contracted by one-third on an annualised basis and the UK economy contracted by 20.4% in the second quarter, the biggest such drop ever recorded. Allister Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, acknowledged that Sweden “has pulled off a remarkable triple whammy: Far fewer deaths per capita than Britain, a maintenance of basic freedoms and opportunities, including schooling, and, most strikingly, a recession less than half as severe as our own”.

According to Oxford University professor of epidemiology Sunetra Gupta, “There is no way lockdown can eliminate the virus … once you lift lockdown in areas it will flare up again.” That’s what we saw in Melbourne recently. Her views are supported by Harvard Medical School’s Martin Kulldorff: “The question is not whether to aim for herd immunity as a strategy, because we will all eventually get there. The question is how to minimise casualties until we get there.”

In June Tegnell acknowledged that in retrospect, they should have taken better precautions to protect the care homes with more than half of Sweden’s virus deaths. This “was spun pretty hard” in the international media as a mea culpa. It wasn’t. Knowledge about coronavirus is much better now and would be useful for improved mitigation, but “the fundamental strategy has worked well”.

The Swedish example teaches us three important lessons. First, be open and transparent, not dogmatic and totalitarian. Second, provide clear guidance to the people, including the limits of scientific certainty and the “known unknowns”, as then US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it in 2009. Finally, transfer the responsibility for risk assessment and management back to the people: They are the ones best placed to make informed choices that directly affect their lives and livelihoods today and in the future.

Rejoinder by Dipankar Gupta

Professor Ramesh Thakur has written an interesting piece that adds perspective to the Swedish handling of Covid 19. However, I seek a few factual corrections regarding his remarks on how matters stand in USA. This comparative picture is analytically significant.

In my view, he should revise his position on New York because the lockdown has been stunningly effective there and has brought down the incidence of Covid 19 to unbelievably low levels. At one point, New York presented a dreadful scenario, a hellish red zone, but today it has become a near Covid 19 free oasis.

It is true, and here I agree with him, that this tragic pandemic has been weaponised for political purposes. However, Professor Thakur’s article probably needs a few factual corrections.

Today, South Carolina has the highest positivity rate (at 22 percent), followed by Texas, Nevada, and Idaho (at 16 percent). Of these, only Nevada has a Democratic Governor; the rest have Republican Governors. In terms of numbers, California, Texas, Florida, and Georgia lead, but again, three out of these four states have Republican Governors.

I agree that eventually herd immunity is the answer but no democratic country wants to be seen as a passive spectator and the lockdowns were imposed as a reasonable way of gradually inching to herd immunity with as low a mortality rate as possible.

Sweden has banked on citizen participation and it, in retrospect, presents an interesting experiment. However, in USA where citizens have been lax and where the administration in several states has been lockdown reticent, things have not been good at all.

Through all this, New York stands out as a sterling example of an effective lockdown. I hope Professor Thakur will agree.

Asia Today: Cases still rise in S.Korea, Malaysia stays shut [Minneapolis Star Tribune, 29 Aug 2020]

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea has reported 323 new cases of the coronavirus as health officials prepare to tighten distancing restrictions in the greater capital area.

The 16th consecutive day of triple-digit jumps brought the national caseload to 19,400. Fatalities reached 321 after five more deaths overnight.

The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Saturday that 249 of the new cases came from the densely populated Seoul metropolitan area, where about half of the country's 51 million people live. Health workers have struggled to track infections linked to churches, restaurants, schools and apartment buildings.

The country has added 4,630 cases over the last 16 days, raising fears about overwhelming hospitals.

Kwon Jun-wook, director of South Korea's National Health Institute, said the death toll could rise in the coming weeks as many of those who tested positive this month were 60 years or older, an age group that's more likely to experience serious health complications caused by the virus.

He said 64 of the country's active patients are in critical condition, compared to 14 on Aug. 14, when the country began the current streak of triple-digit daily increases.

"While young people may think that COVID-19 is an illness they could recover from after a certain period, it could become a life and death matter for the parents and grandparents they love and also people with existing medical conditions," Kwon said during a virus briefing, pleading for vigilance in social distancing. "Each and every one of us ... is at war with COVID-19.
In war, we need to maintain unity to protect the safety of ourselves and our neighbors and prevent the collapse of all our social systems."

More than 1,000 infections have been linked to a northern Seoul church led by a conservative pastor who opposes the country's president. The spread worsened after thousands of anti-government protesters, including members of the Sarang Jeil Church and its pastor, Jun Kwang-hun, marched in downtown Seoul on Aug. 15. More than 300, including Jun, have tested positive.

For eight days starting Sunday, restaurants in the Seoul metropolitan area will provide only deliveries and takeouts after 9 p.m. Franchised coffee shops like Starbucks will sell only takeout drinks and food while gyms and after-school academies will be shut to slow the viral spread in the region.

Authorities have already banned larger gatherings, shut down nightspots and churches, and shifted most schools back to remote learning nationwide. But they have so far resisted elevating restrictions to the highest level. Such a move would possibly include a ban on all gatherings of more than 10 people, shutting down a broader range of businesses and having private company employees work from home.

In other developments in the Asia-Pacific region:

— India has recorded 76,472 new coronavirus cases in the past 24 hours, raising its tally to over 3.4 million. A country of 1.4 billion people, India now has the fastest-growing caseload in the world. The Health Ministry on Saturday also reported 1,021 deaths for a total of 62,550.

India is reporting around 1,000 COVID-19 deaths every day. There has been a spurt of new cases over the last few weeks. One of the reasons is testing: India now conducts more than 900,000 tests every day, compared with just 200,000 two months ago. Even as western Maharashtra and the three southern states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka remain the worst-hit regions with nearly 64% of fatalities and 55% of active cases, the virus is spreading fast in the country's vast hinterlands. Earlier this week, members of a small tribe in the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands tested positive with experts saying the virus has now entered the widespread transmission stage.

— Malaysia has extended its pandemic movement restrictions including banning foreign tourists until the end of the year. Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said in a televised address late Friday that global cases have been rising and the country has seen sporadic virus clusters even though the situation was under control. Malaysia has recorded more than 9,000 cases with 125 deaths. Muhyiddin said the extension of restrictions will not disrupt daily activities as most businesses and schools have resumed. Only nightclubs and entertainment centers remain shut and international sporting events prohibited. Borders will stay closed and those entering the country will be quarantined.

— The Australian state of Victoria has reported 18 more COVID-19 deaths and 94 new cases -- the first time in almost two months that new infections have dropped below 100. The deaths take the state toll to 514 and the Australian COVID-19 death total to 601. Since Monday there have been no more than 150 new daily cases in Victoria, adding to speculation about an easing of lockdown restrictions across Melbourne, which include a daily 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew. But state Premier Daniel Andrews says it is too soon to dramatically relax the rules. "It will have to be gradual and steady because we've all got to be really careful to make sure nothing we do makes it more likely that we find ourselves back here at exactly this place," Andrews said. "We want to defeat the second wave ... that means we can avoid a third wave."

— About one-third of students returned to school in the Chinese capital on Saturday in a staggered start to the new school year because of the coronavirus. The first batch of 590,000 students in Beijing included all three years of high school, the first and third years of middle school and the first grade of primary school. Another 400,000 students are to start school on Tuesday, and the final 520,000 on Sept. 7. Both students and teachers are required to wear masks. China reported nine new coronavirus cases in the latest 24-hour period, bringing its official total to 85,022. All the new cases were overseas arrivals. The country's death toll remained at 4,634.

Surge in South Korea coronavirus cases sparks hospital bed shortage concerns [Reuters, 29 Aug 2020]

by Hyonhee Shin

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea recorded its 16th consecutive day of triple digit rises in new coronavirus cases on Saturday, extending a second wave of infections that is fanning concerns about a shortage of hospital beds in Seoul.

The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) posted 308 new cases as of midnight Friday, the majority of them in the capital and surrounding areas.

Outbreaks have continued to erupt at churches, offices, nursing homes and medical facilities, even after officials tightened social-distancing rules.

The spike in cases has depleted hospital facilities, with the health ministry reporting that just 4.5% of beds in greater Seoul were available for critical cases as of Friday, down from 22% a week earlier.

“Only about 15 beds are immediately available in the greater Seoul area for patients in critical condition as there were numerous patients who were in a serious condition and needed to be hospitalised,” Yoon Tae-ho, director general for public health policy at the health ministry, said on Saturday.

“But we should have a little more room shortly because more people are being released,” he told a news briefing.

The KCDC said that more than 1,000 cases have been traced to the Sarang Jeil Church in Seoul, which is at the centre of the new wave of infections. Its head, Rev. Jun Kwang-hoon, is an outspoken government critic who was also confirmed to have contracted the virus.

The church outbreak led to at least 25 new clusters, and more than 300 people who joined an anti-government protest this month together with church members have tested positive so far, according to the KCDC.

The resurgence in cases has brought the country’s total reported COVID-19 cases to 19,400, including 321 deaths.

DOCTOR STRIKE

Dealing with the second wave of infections has been complicated by an ongoing strike of almost 16,000 intern and resident doctors. The medics walked out on Aug. 21, in a dispute over the government’s plans to boost the number of doctors to better deal with health crises like the coronavirus.

The Health Ministry earlier this week filed a police complaint against at least 10 doctors and extended a back-to-work order for the doctors, who are the backbone of healthcare services in emergency rooms and intensive care units.

The striking doctors have volunteered at temporary testing centres to help with the outbreak, but major hospitals have reported delays and disruptions since their walkout.

“Doctors should be by the side of patients as we face the possibility of a nationwide transmission of COVID-19,” Yoon said on Saturday.

“We are standing on the last line of defence to calm the spread in the Seoul metropolitan area, and if we fail at it, the only option we have left is to step up distancing rules to the highest level.”

The government took the unprecedented step on Friday of restricting the operation of eateries in the capital area.

For a week starting on Sunday, onsite dining at restaurants, pubs and bakeries in the Seoul area will be banned after 9 p.m., while coffee shops, some of which have been identified as hotspots, are restricted to takeout and delivery.

Churches, nightclubs, gyms and most schools in the area are already closed, and masks are mandatory in public places.

Hurricane Laura Victims Struggle to Find Housing During Global Pandemic [Voice of America, 29 Aug 2020]

By Matt Haines

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA - As first responders continue a second day of search, rescue and support efforts in southwest Louisiana, a clearer picture of the damage caused by Hurricane Laura is emerging.

The state breathed a sigh of relief that the loss of life was not more severe -- the death toll is now 11 -- but the damage to population centers such as Lake Charles, a city with a population of 80,000, is devastating. Downtown buildings have been demolished, entire neighborhoods left in ruins and almost 900,000 homes and businesses are without power.

Residents are trickling in to assess the loss of personal property, but it may be days, weeks or months until many Louisianians can return home for good.

Finding temporary housing after a disaster is never easy, but some victims of the storm are saying the coronavirus pandemic has made the situation even more difficult.

“My husband and I are both in our 60s,” said Mary Gutowski, a retiree who moved to Lake Charles from Austin, Texas, less than a month ago. “I’ve been in the hospital three times in the last year, and we’re both very worried about being out in crowds and getting the virus. But we couldn’t stay home with a Category 4 hurricane coming at us. What are we supposed to do?” she asked.

Gutowski and her husband packed a bag with a few days’ worth of clothes and their face masks and decided to drive north in hopes of sidestepping the worst of the storm. They were able to avoid the most damaging wind and flooding but evacuating their home during a global pandemic has also produced challenges they did not anticipate.

Getting out

“It’s been a lot of worrying and a lot of crying,” Gutowski told VOA as she fought to hold back tears.

She said that when they left their home the day before the storm, they had no place to go.

Gutowski and her husband began driving and immediately noticed many gas stations had been shuttered due to coronavirus, as well as a lot of rest stops where they could normally buy supplies or food.

“We were lucky to have a full tank of gas before we left or we might not have made it very far,” she said.

Typically, during natural disasters, cities set up emergency shelters. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, however, there are fears the virus would spread in such close quarters.

Instead, state governments attempted to set aside thousands of hotel rooms across Texas and Louisiana for evacuees. Individuals, however, have reported having a difficult time finding available hotel rooms.

“I needed to stay somewhat close for work,” said Ashley Watkins, whose job is related to natural disasters, “and I still ended up hundreds of miles away in Alabama at the nearest pet-friendly hotel.”

Watkins said she sent her 6-year-old son to a slightly closer hotel in Texas with her parents and her other siblings.

To make matters worse -- in what’s become an all-too-common ritual for southwestern Louisianians over the last two days -- she received photos from friends confirming she no longer had a home to go back to.

“The house is destroyed down to the frame,” Watkins said. “Most of it ended up in some trees.”
Staying safe

“Costs are already adding up. I can’t keep paying for lodging like this,” Watkins said.
Gutowski and her husband agreed. They said they were finally able to find a hotel attached to a casino in Shreveport, Louisiana, for a few nights.

“If I didn’t have a discount from a player’s card, there’s no way I could have afforded this. I’m retired,” Gutowski said.

When the Gutowskis arrived at their hotel, they said it was filled to capacity -- something unheard of due to coronavirus protocols.

Many evacuees said they were afraid to risk their health with so many people around, so they have holed up in their hotel rooms for three straight days.

“The only room they could give us was up on the 21st floor and we can’t walk up and down those stairs,” Gutowski said. “You’re only supposed to have four people in the elevator at a time because of the virus, but people don’t follow the rules and they’re putting the rest of us at risk. So we just stay in our room. It’s suffocating.”

Next steps

However, Gustowski said, her biggest worry is what they’ll do next.

Their reservation ends Saturday, and as of Friday afternoon, they didn’t know where they would go. She said they cannot go back to Lake Charles. Fallen trees and other debris have made it impossible for friends to reach their neighborhood and check on the status of the Gutowski home. Every hotel she has called said they are full.

“I’ve spent hours trying to get in touch with anyone who can help,” she said. The Federal Emergency Management Agency “said they can’t do anything yet, and I couldn’t get through to the United Way or Red Cross,” she said, “So we’re on our own and we don’t know what to do.”

Some affected Louisianians will find family nearby they can stay with until they can go home or rebuild.

Watkins said she is hopeful this will be the case for her and her son. First, however, she said she plans to return to Lake Charles this weekend to see the damage to her home herself.

Those who can’t afford a hotel and don’t have family to stay with will either remain in their homes -- many damaged, and even more without electricity and water -- or will head to large emergency shelters that some fear will become coronavirus breeding grounds.

Officials hope large-scale screenings will ensure that isn’t the case.

“For everything that’s happened to us over the last few days, I still know there are people much worse off than we are,” Gustowski said. “I can’t imagine having to do this with young children or having to try to wait it out in your home without electricity.”

Friday evening, the Gustowkis got a little luckier. A hotel in Biloxi, Mississippi, called and said they had a room available for them for at least a couple of weeks.

“So that’s where we’ll head tomorrow, then,” she said. “It’s not close and we’d rather not stay in a hotel during a pandemic, but at least we have a place to stay. Relieved is an understatement.”

Bangladesh's COVID-19 testing criticised [The Lancet, 29 Aug 2020]

Experts say that the government's approach to testing and surveillance, including charging patients a fee, is hampering the response. Sophie Cousins reports.

Public health experts in Bangladesh have expressed concern about the government's decision to charge people for COVID-19 tests amid a sharp decline in the number of tests being done.
In late June, the government decided to charge 200 taka (£1·80) for testing done at government facilities and 500 taka (£4·50) for samples collected from home to “avoid unnecessary tests”. The private sector charges 3500 taka (£32) per test. Almost one in four Bangladeshis live below the national poverty line.

Since the decision, testing rates have fallen to around 0·8 tests per 1000 people per day, with a low of just 0·06 tests per 1000 people in August. Bangladesh is administering on average between 12 000 and 15 000 tests per day for a population of 168 million, and has recorded almost 275 000 confirmed cases and more than 3600 deaths.

Shamim Talukder, head of Eminence, a Bangladeshi public health research organisation, told The Lancet that the pandemic had exposed the country's ”unethical” health-care system. “From the beginning of the pandemic, the government wanted to control the COVID-19 testing system”, he said. “At the beginning it didn't allow the private sector to do the tests and now they've applied a charge for testing in the public sector, which just means that the poor are excluded.”

Talukder told The Lancet that he had visited multiple graveyards across Dhaka, where graveyard managers had told him the death rate from COVID-19 was ”four times higher” than the recorded figure was. Many people, he said, had died of COVID-19 but had not been tested, or had died before they had received their test results.

Former Director of Bangladesh's Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research, Mahmudur Rahman, condemned the government's decision. “Charging people for tests is really creating problems; it is creating barriers, especially for the poor”, he said. “During the pandemic, people do not have work, they do not have money, they're at a huge disadvantage...Governments should not charge anyone for testing.”

Other barriers to testing, Rahman said, include the low trust people had in the health-care system. “We've had testing scams here. There is a lack of confidence in the health-care system, so people don't want to get tested because they don't want to get a result they don't trust”, he said. “Another problem is the delay in getting the results—sometimes it takes a week, other times it just doesn't come. If someone needs a result immediately, why bother? They just stay at home instead.”

In mid-July a Bangladesh hospital owner was arrested over allegations he issued thousands of fake negative COVID-19 test results, further shining a light on the country's unregulated private sector. Rahman called for the country to urgently set up a sentinel surveillance system, as in 2009 in response to the H1N1 influenza pandemic, which would enable a better understanding of the virus at the community level to see where the infection was moving and to plan accordingly. “This sort of surveillance is crucial. If people are not coming for testing, then there has to be a mechanism in place so we can understand the situation of our country.”

A doctor in Dhaka, who spoke to The Lancet on the condition of anonymity, feared what was coming. “In a country of more than 165 million, that is performing a maximum of 15 000 tests per day, it is nothing and largely those tests are just being done in Dhaka itself”, he said. “This plague will stay for quite a long time. What I'm afraid of is when the Bangladeshi winter arrives. People are afraid.”

Talukder said that the pandemic had further exposed the country's failing health-care system, which spends just 0·69% of the country's gross domestic product on health, making Bangladesh one of the lowest spenders on health globally. Moreover, two-thirds of health expenditure is out of pocket and borne by households, many of whom are propelled into poverty by catastrophic health-care costs.

Talukder called for a complete restructuring of the health-care system, which would include banning doctors who work in the public sector from supplementing their income with private practice, which has led to the neglect of patients in public facilities, among other interventions.
“Most people do not like to go to the hospital due to the poor quality of services and they do not want to go to the private sector because of the high price”, he said.

With Bangladesh in the grip of the monsoon season and the dengue season approaching, all three experts expressed concern about COVID-19 continuing to spread unchecked throughout the country. They feared that the worst was yet to come. “The government's priority is the economy, [but] COVID-19 will continue to spread into rural areas and more people will die”, Talukder said.

The ministry of health did not respond to The Lancet's request for comment.

Research and higher education in the time of COVID-19 [The Lancet, 29 Aug 2020]

The COVID-19 pandemic has propelled the research and higher education sectors to the forefront of public attention. Laboratory capacity has been crucial for diagnostic testing; experts in infectious diseases, epidemiology, public health, mathematical modelling, and economics are central to national policy making and media coverage; clinical research has been vital to improving COVID-19 management; and our collective global future relies heavily on the development of an effective vaccine against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Meanwhile, the pandemic is undermining the ability of researchers to do their jobs and of universities to provide a high-quality and safe educational experience for students.
As the northern hemisphere looks forward to the beginning of a new academic year, the troubling effects of the pandemic on research and higher education are coming into sharp focus. Immediate challenges such as campus safety, university admissions processes, and online learning arrangements are dominating the discussion. But the pandemic will have complex, unexpected, and long-term implications for research that must be anticipated now.

Health research systems, like care systems, comprise several multidimensional and interacting pillars. First, a workforce with the skills, training, experience, relationships, and networks needed for research excellence. Second, the necessary resources, including funding, infrastructure, workplace conditions and rights, management, incentive structures, research cultures, and academic freedom. Third, multidisciplinary perspectives that are supported by science beyond medicine, public health, and policy, including social and behavioural sciences, such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, and media and communication studies. Together with basic and translational sciences, such multidisciplinary research is fundamental to the development and uptake of treatments, vaccines, and diagnostics.

Each of these pillars is under threat, and the impacts might be felt for years to come. The research workforce is contending with the need to develop new online learning resources for teaching, increased domestic responsibilities associated with closures of schools and child-care facilities, and challenges such as decreased access to laboratory space, problems procuring equipment and reagents, difficulties recruiting study participants, and the pausing or permanent closure of clinical trials. It is unclear how funders will account for decreased research output when assessing future grant applications, including consideration of the gendered dimensions of this problem. The training of the next generation of scientists and doctors hangs in the balance as universities grapple with ensuring physical distancing, decisions about in-person teaching, and how to deliver quality and accessible education online.
Spending on education and research is imperilled by economic downturns with university budgets squeezed by COVID-19, jeopardising jobs and research funding. Recovering shattered research and educational programmes after funding and expertise are lost will be an enormous task.

Considering health research and education as a system, rather than focusing on individual components, can help build a more complete picture of the challenges and opportunities ahead. Many of the effects of COVID-19 on health research are likely to be difficult to predict and could produce a combination of desirable and detrimental outcomes. Online learning, for example, could make education more accessible for some students, while disadvantaging others if an equitable approach that takes a system-wide view is not implemented. Likewise, travel restrictions might make international collaboration more difficult for researchers, but they might also prompt the development of more environmentally sustainable and inclusive research practices. Understanding health research as a system also stimulates consideration of power relations between actors, and it is crucial to ask how the pandemic could influence inequality, including around career stage, gender, race, wealth, and geography. Finally, the boundaries of health research systems are blurred, and appreciating contextual features, such as history, politics, and economics, will be key to understanding how COVID-19 might destabilise and reshape these systems.

Protecting and strengthening research in the midst of COVID-19 will require thoughtful and concerted efforts on the part of governments, funders, universities, and academic communities to collaboratively develop, implement, and fund long-term plans that elevate the voices of students and researchers in national policy decisions. Sustainable research systems are vital, not just to the success of pandemic responses but also to the health of all societies the world over.

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