The results were startling. New Zealand, with one of the harshest approaches globally, at that stage had fared only slightly worse than Sweden, which adopted an almost laissez-faire approach to the pandemic. The stark so-called choice between health and wealth looked to be a furphy. Surging hospitalisations convinced the community that it was safer to stay home, effectively resulting in a self-imposed lockdown, something no-one had banked on.
Health versus wealth and the unexpected costs of Australia opening up early as Omicron wreaks havoc
I’ve been thinking a lot about Covid risk
Deaths: What the hell is happening in Israel? pic.twitter.com/rvDnd1jNf2
Preventing future pandemics would cost just 5% of the cost they inflict
Every year, the world loses about $500 billion in terms of lives lost and economic slowdowns due to emerging zoonotic diseases. The cost to take preventative actions: $20 billion.
Preventing future pandemics would cost just 5% of the cost they inflict
. . .
Coronavirus can destroy the placenta and lead to stillbirths Associated Press
‘Preliminary research’ on COVID has been surprisingly solid
PopSci: “Before the COVID pandemic, peer-review was the beating heart of scientific publishing. In order forstudies to enter the body of scientific knowledge, the expectation was that researchers would submit them to academic journals, which would send the papers out to other experts for edits and revisions before publishing. But it’s a process that wasn’t well-suited to the urgency of the COVID pandemic, when early research could save lives. Peer-review often takes months, and it asks for huge amounts of unpaid labor on the part of the scientists who scrutinize papers. In early 2020, growing numbers of scientists began to post research on open-access databases, called preprint servers, before those preprints had been formally reviewed. New research suggests that scientific norms are still operating on preprint servers. As physician and reporter Trisha Pasricha wrote in the Washington Postover the weekend, “when a group of authors puts any study in the public domain … they are placing their reputations on the line.” Preprints, which are often referred to as “preliminary research” in the news, had already been gaining popularity in early-adopting fields like genomics and neuroscience—but the time pressures of the pandemic gave them a new primacy. Over the first year of the pandemic, preprint servers hosted 7,000 COVID papers, while journals published about 12,500 formal papers. (There was some overlap.) Unlike many journals, preprint servers are free for anyone to access, and researchers don’t have to pay to post on. Many of those early papers do end up going through peer-review: The co-founder of two key preprint servers recently wrote on Twitter that half of all 2020 COVID-preprints have now been formally published. Regardless, preprints have become central to the science of COVID and how it’s covered in the media. That’s been a source of controversy. To critics of preprints, they’re a repository of questionable science. “The limitation is that any idiot can publish any idiotic stuff on a platform that doesn’t have pre-publication peer review,” as one former journal editor put it to a New York Times columnist last month. But according to two new analyses shared in the (peer-reviewed) journal PLOS Biology, preprints as a whole contain much of the same information and interpretations as peer-reviewed research…”
For the Federal Response to COVID-19, Significant Improvements Are Needed in Leadership and Oversight
GAO Blog: “As of November, the U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) spent nearly $38 billion of the almost $47 billion appropriated for Emergency Rental Assistance programs.
This funding was provided to help renter households whose income was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic with rent, utilities, and other housing expenses.The funds were disbursed as grants to state, local, and tribal governments—which then paid landlords and utility companies, on the renters’ behalf. If the grantees overpaid or paid ineligible people, Treasury did not have a process to find out or quickly get that money back. We are recommending that Treasury design and implement processes—such as post-payment reviews and recovery audits—that can help ensure timely identification and recovery of grantees’ overpayments.
We also recommend that the Office of Management and Budget—in consultation with Treasury—issue guidance on the rental assistance programs to help ensure that auditors of such federal financial assistance identify deficiencies in grantees’ compliance with program requirements…In our new report, we found that the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) doesn’t have a comprehensive strategy for how its nutrition assistance programs should respond during emergencies like COVID-19.
FNS administers several food assistance programs, including a new program—Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT)—that served low-income children who would have received school lunches or meals if they hadn’t been learning remotely because of COVID-19. But FNS’s pandemic plans are outdated, and its efforts to identify and incorporate lessons learned from the pandemic are incomplete…”
- See also GAO’s featured topic page about following the federal response to COVID-19.
Library Releases Growing Coronavirus Web Archive Collection
Collection Includes 450 Web Archives Documenting COVID-19 Pandemic – “After collecting a wide variety of web content documenting the COVID-19 pandemic over the past two years, the Library of Congress is now making its growing Coronavirus Web Archive available to the public. The collection, which now includes 450 web archives, aims to balance government, science, business and policy content with human stories that will give future historians a sense of how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the daily lives of individuals, families and communities. The Library has been capturing coronavirus web content in many of its existing web collections since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, well before establishing a formal collection plan in June 2020. Since the Library is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, Library staff also nominated sites for that effort. For the Coronavirus Web Archive, a core team of 10 recommending officers representing a variety of skills, perspectives and subject matter expertise from across the Library have worked together to build a well-rounded collection. Additionally, international collections librarians and overseas offices made contributions to ensure that the COVID-19 pandemic is represented in a truly global collection…
The Library began building web archive collections in 2000 to gather web-based information that focused on specific themes or events as they unfolded. Over the past two decades, the Library’s web archive collectionshave grown to hold over 2.8 petabytes of data in over 21 billion files. With so much content published on the web, curators still cannot capture everything, so the Library has refined its collections process with a multidisciplinary, team-driven approach. The Coronavirus Web Archive team continues to seek good examples of items that represent how Americans and people from across the globe are responding to the pandemic. The collection includes topics such as containment efforts, legal responses, human resource approaches, virtual education methods, unemployment trends, and artistic responses to the global challenge…”
A highly virulent variant of HIV-1 circulating in the Netherlands Science and New HIV strain found in the Netherlands: Highly infectious variant makes people ill twice as quick Daily Mail GM, based on the Science paper:
You will see that it [the variant] increased in frequency in the 1990s — the plot is weirdly done, but it looks like it was the dominant strain for a while, then went down in the 2010s
Of course after the 1990s you had much more powerful ART combinations, so everything has been suppressed and thus a bit distorted in terms of relative frequencies
The paper is notable because it is an example of a highly lethal virus (doesn’t get worse than 100%) becoming even worse.
- COVID-19 pandemic in Austria, COVID-19 vaccination in Austria
- Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellensigns a law that makes the country the first in the European Union to mandate that people over the age of 18 years receive the COVID-19 vaccineafter the Bundesrat voted 47-12 yesterday to approve the law. (The Guardian)
- COVID-19 pandemic in Russia
- Russia reports a record for the 15th consecutive day of 168,201 new COVID-19 cases, thereby bringing the nationwide total of confirmed cases to 12,452,765. (Interfax)
- COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey
- Turkey reports a record 111,157 new COVID-19cases in the past 24 hours. (Hurriyet Daily News)
‘Preliminary research’ on COVID has been surprisingly solid
PopSci: “Before the COVID pandemic, peer-review was the beating heart of scientific publishing. In order forstudies to enter the body of scientific knowledge, the expectation was that researchers would submit them to academic journals, which would send the papers out to other experts for edits and revisions before publishing. But it’s a process that wasn’t well-suited to the urgency of the COVID pandemic, when early research could save lives. Peer-review often takes months, and it asks for huge amounts of unpaid labor on the part of the scientists who scrutinize papers. In early 2020, growing numbers of scientists began to post research on open-access databases, called preprint servers, before those preprints had been formally reviewed.
New research suggests that scientific norms are still operating on preprint servers. As physician and reporter Trisha Pasricha wrote in the Washington Postover the weekend, “when a group of authors puts any study in the public domain … they are placing their reputations on the line.” Preprints, which are often referred to as “preliminary research” in the news, had already been gaining popularity in early-adopting fields like genomics and neuroscience—but the time pressures of the pandemic gave them a new primacy.
Over the first year of the pandemic, preprint servers hosted 7,000 COVID papers, while journals published about 12,500 formal papers. (There was some overlap.) Unlike many journals, preprint servers are free for anyone to access, and researchers don’t have to pay to post on. Many of those early papers do end up going through peer-review: The co-founder of two key preprint servers recently wrote on Twitter that half of all 2020 COVID-preprints have now been formally published. Regardless, preprints have become central to the science of COVID and how it’s covered in the media.
That’s been a source of controversy. To critics of preprints, they’re a repository of questionable science. “The limitation is that any idiot can publish any idiotic stuff on a platform that doesn’t have pre-publication peer review,” as one former journal editor put it to a New York Times columnist last month. But according to two new analyses shared in the (peer-reviewed) journal PLOS Biology, preprints as a whole contain much of the same information and interpretations as peer-reviewed research…”