1. A very detailed survey of the literature around the impact of temperature and humidity on the rate of infection of the novel coronavirus. The conclusion - higher temperatures and humidity may slowdown the infection rate, but cannot be a basis for any complacency since controlling the outbreak requires all of the other measures.
2. Martin Wolf has a graphic below which strikingly captures the difference in the brute effectiveness of state capacity in China and US.
3. Ed Long in the Atlantic about how America got it horribly wrong.
4. Covid 19 has drawn attention to the unseen and under-appreciated foot-soldiers of the modern economy - the workers in grocery super markets, restaurants, warehouses, care homes, and delivery drivers - whose work today forms the life-blood for everyone. They are some of the worst paid and most insecure jobs and work at great personal risk,
Official data suggests that more than 40 per cent of childcare workers aged 25 and over, who should be covered by the minimum wage, are paid below it. Almost 60 per cent of those who provide care for people in their own homes in England are on so-called “zero-hour contracts”, which do not guarantee regular hours or incomes. Workers in fields and food factories often have to accept temporary employment contracts with fewer rights and no security. Many delivery drivers are classed as self-employed, so they are paid per “drop” and receive no sick or holiday pay... Coronavirus has forced us to rethink who we value and how. Some of the workers we have left to languish in low-paid and insecure jobs are the very ones we cannot live without.
5. FT primer on antigen and antibody tests for the virus. Another one here. Another article here about the challenge with innovating and manufacturing ventilators.
This describes how the immune system responds to the virus and how co-morbidities become a problem.
Paolo Surico and Andrea Galeotti have a very good Covid 19 resource microsite. This is a Dashboard of research papers on Covid 19.
6. NYT points to how Germany's aggressive tracing, testing, and isolating strategy has worked in keeping deaths disproportionately low compared to neighbours. Vietnam is another standout, having been the earliest to shut the country off and also initiate internal lockdowns. See this and this. A common factor in both cases appear to be the high level of trust in government.
7. Washington Post lists out 16 ideas to mitigate the impact of the pandemic.
8. WSJ has a day-by-day chronicle of corporate America in March 2020 as the Covid 19 pandemic unfolded.
9. Some historic parallels by Angus Deaton,
Perhaps coronavirus today is like smallpox or the bubonic plague in Europe before those diseases were well understood and treatable. This virus is new, no one has immunity, and apart from self-isolation, we are about as helpless today as the Italian city of Pistoia was in 1630-31, when it locked the gates against the encroaching plague and expelled foreigners. Of course, its moneyed merchants still insisted on a temporary opening to all comers to facilitate the export of its wine. Some businesses executives are pressing hard for an early end to social distancing.
10. On the wildlife origins of the Covid 19 pandemic. The article highlights two concerns - the widespread consumption of wildlife meat in places like China (with associated, often wet, wildlife markets) and the use of these wildlife for a variety of other purposes, including as pets.
11. This is a good description of how Vietnam, despite bordering China, has managed to escape the pandemic.
12. Finally, Ezra Klein in Vox summarises the various exit plans for the US and the Hobson's challenge facing policy makers in the US.
There’s one from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Center for American Progress, Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer... In different ways, all these plans say the same thing: Even if you can imagine the herculean political, social, and economic changes necessary to manage our way through this crisis effectively, there is no normal for the foreseeable future. Until there’s a vaccine, the US either needs economically ruinous levels of social distancing, a digital surveillance state of shocking size and scope, or a mass testing apparatus of even more shocking size and intrusiveness... The AEI, CAP, and Harvard plans aren’t identical, but they’re similar. All of them feature a period of national lockdown — in which extreme social distancing is deployed to “flatten the curve” and health and testing capacity is surged to “raise the line.” That’s phase one. Phase two triggers after a set period (45 days for CAP, three months for Harvard) or, in the AEI plan, after 14 days of falling cases and a series of health supply markers. All of them then imagine a phase two, which relaxes — but does not end — social distancing while implementing testing and surveillance on a mass scale. This is where you must begin imagining the almost unimaginable... The alternative to mass surveillance is mass testing. Romer’s proposal is to deploy testing on a scale no one else is contemplating — 22 million tests per day — so that the entire country is being tested every 14 days, and anyone who tests positive can be quickly quarantined... But it is hard to imagine a testing effort of this scale.
This is the sort of debates that we ought to be having for developing countries. And the answers will be very different from that for the US.
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