Links on Rona #1
I have been reading a lot, and tweeting a bunch of links, but maybe it is time to go back to legit long form blogging. There has been so much to read, and also so much to extract, that I should not be trying to fit things into 280 characters.
- App-based contact tracing may help countries get out of lockdown – the Apple and Google partnership, and also how other countries have fared.
- “So far, however, this has been downloaded by only a sixth of the country’s population–barely a quarter of the 60% epidemiologists reckon is needed if it is to be effective in breaking the local epidemic. Perhaps the most used contact-tracing app in the world is that deployed by Iceland. Yet Rakning C-19 (“Rakning” is Icelandic for “tracking”) is used by only 40% of the country’s 364,000 people. If such a small, homogenous place cannot reach the required 60% download rate, what hope is there for large, diverse ones like America?”
- Covid-19: US and Europe paying high price for their freedoms, says Dr M – Dr. Mahathir is outdated here. Hong Kong can protest, South Korea has thrown their old premiere out, etc. so these people aren’t necessarily paying a high price for their freedoms.
- State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses – while science show this particular coronavirus seems to be naturally occurring, this revelation is an issue, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been there for sometime. Take the next link (that got ZeroHedge banned from Twitter) with a pinch of salt too: Smoking Gun? Chinese Scientist Finds “Killer Coronavirus Probably Originated From A Laboratory In Wuhan”
- Tech isn’t solution to COVID-19, says Singapore director of contact tracing app – apps have to work alongside human work, “The experience of Singapore’s contact tracers suggest that contact tracing should remain a human-fronted process”
- Coronavirus: the cost of China’s public health cover-up – The FT Big Read
- She Kept a Diary of China’s Epidemic. Now She Faces a Political Storm. – chronicle of life & death in Wuhan, Fang Fang was born in 1955, and the most interesting thing is where all this is stored? GitHub. Can’t censor that now, can you?
- Coronavirus and curbs on democratic freedoms – podcast, focused on “the threat to democracy as authoritarian leaders like Viktor Orban in Hungary exploit public willingness to have freedoms curtailed during the coronavirus crisis.” Applies elsewhere too.
- Hermès Store in China Made a Record $2.7 Million in Their First Day Open Post-Coronavirus – revenge buyers are out in force.
- Coronavirus: what’s behind Vietnam’s containment success? – 75,000 in quarantine/isolation, done more than 121,000 tests, from which only 260 cases were confirmed. However, on a tests per million metric, it is not as high as you would think, as evidenced here:Southeast Asia could be the next coronavirus hot spot – these charts show why.
- Asia struggles to find coronavirus exit strategies – important piece overall as there is no one exit strategy (and now let’s not forget, Singapore is under a Circuit Breaker).
- Mobility trend reports: Apple Mobility Trend Reports, Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports, and TomTom Traffic Index (not COVID-19 specific, but useful and has comparisons too)
- Open art galleries and let us feed our souls 2m apart
- “is the experience of shopping in a supermarket substantially safer than visiting an art exhibition in carefully controlled gallery circumstances? Would it not be possible to transpose the ground rules of safe shopping at a supermarket to safe queuing for an art exhibition, and then for visiting it?”
- Sex in the Time of Coronavirus – Stress and fear are big libido buzzkills. “A state of high threat, characterized by stress or anxiety, is not conducive to having sex,” says Justin Garcia
- Coronavirus modelling chief: Epidemic in retreat but only if we keep our distances – “Their research, due out this week, suggests the lockdown has reduced the reproduction number of the virus – meaning the number of new infections generated by each case – to below one, but only just. It means any significant relaxation could see infections soar, causing a surge in cases that could overwhelm the NHS.”
