Questions arise on scope of Johns Hopkins pandemic dashboard

Washington Post: “…Since launching in January, the university’s Coronavirus Resource Center has exploded in scope and popularity, garnering millions of page views and popping up in news coverage and daily conversation. Through numbers, the tracker has told the story of what the virus is doing while the story is still unfolding, offering a nearly real-time picture of its silent march across the globe. But even as data has jumped to the forefront of international discussions about the virus, the Johns Hopkins team wrestles with doubts about whether the numbers can truly capture the scope of the pandemic, and whether the public and policymakers are failing to absorb the big picture

Flu Virus With ‘Pandemic Potential’ Found in China BBC

Qasem Soleimani: Iran seeks Trump’s arrest over killing of general BBC

Novartis pays close to $1 billion to settle suit over doctors' bribes

ZDNet – With access to tens of thousands of virus samples, COVID-19 researchers are constructing family trees that show the virus’s rapid spread, an unprecedented view of disease…”Scientists Eric Dumonteil and Claudia Herrera of the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University this month described their attempts to build such a family tree using 18,247 samples of the viral RNA, what they refer to as “a global analysis of viral diversity across the world.” Their paper, “Polymorphism and selection pressure of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine and diagnostic antigens: implications for immune evasion and serologic diagnostic performance,” was posted June 18th on the bioRxiv pre-print server. The work has not been reviewed yet by peer researchers, and so its findings have to be taken with great caution. The samples of COVID-19 RNA can be downloaded as files from GISAID, a database hosted by Germany that is drawn upon by scientists all over the world. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has been a technical partner supporting the database since its creation in 2006.  To see how those thousands of samples relate to one another, Dumonteil and Herrera turned to a software package called FastTree, developed by Morgan N. Price and colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2009…The kinds of viral surveillance going on may yield a scientific picture of infection around the world that is unlike any picture of disease humanity has ever constructed before…” 

EY prepares for backlash over Wirecard scandal FT

Safety Unknowns Await Returning Medical and Dental Workers Capital & Main

Coronavirus: Why US is expecting an ‘avalanche’ of evictions BBC

One of America’s Wealthiest States Might Pass Up an Opportunity to Tackle Housing Segregation ProPublica

Washington Post public editor: Jeff Bezos could solve pay equality tomorrow. He makes token gestures instead. Columbia Journalism Review. A couple of weeks old, but still germane.

The Supreme Court Is Still Repeatedly Ruling in Favor of the Ultra-WealthyJacobin. David Sirota.

The True Cost of Dollar Stores New Yorker