Colin Charles Agenda

This was easily a late April 2020 roundup, stuck in BBEdit, which may still be vaguely relevant.

• What the Proponents of ‘Natural’ Herd Immunity Don’t Say – Vaccination levels need to stay about the transmissibility. Immunity has to last. Percentage of fatal infections are high, so a lot of potential deaths. And when herd immunity is achieved, only then do things start slowing down.
• Yotam Ottolenghi: We will reopen after coronavirus – and here’s how – Lovely food in London, he wants to ensure no losses in the supply chain, how will we handle communal dining, and the magic of eating out can’t diminish, amongst a handful of other points he makes. I agree with most of them.
• Coronavirus lockdown: set free healthy over‑70s, say doctors – longer lockdowns for the elderly, yet they want out.
• Coronavirus: obese people at greater risk of death and may stay infectious for longer – 37% higher death rate in overweight patients, 38% of those admitted in ICUs are obese, and a similar pattern is shown in America. Worries me, as half of Malaysian’s are overweight and obese.
• The science is becoming clear: lockdowns are no longer the right medicine – Covid-19 more common than we presume, due to asymptomatic nature or mild symptoms? Far less lethal than we feared, once corrections for large number of undetected cases? Given that the risk of dying from Covid-19 is low, politicians can assure the public that our worst fears are over. Another consequence is that a lockdown is no longer a proportionate response, particularly given its profound negative impact: massive unemployment and increases in domestic violence, mental health problems and child abuse, as well as deaths caused by delayed or cancelled medical treatment.
• Lockdown: I’m not sure existing through these benighted months counts as living. So are we saving lives?
• Rich People’s Problems: tales of domestic squalor in lockdown – no domestic help, “When this is all over, the amount of money we spend and where we spend it is likely to change.” Lockdown “haves” are those with gardens, a half decent wine cellar and a dog or two for on-demand social contact. Trappings such as sports cars, watches, black cards, bling, boats, private jets and club memberships are somewhat superfluous to our existence now. Many avenues for spending money are also closed off (as someone whose social life revolved around going out for lunch and dinner, it’s been tough).
• Contact tracing: Singapore Built a Coronavirus App, but It Hasn’t Worked So Far, UK snubs Apple-Google coronavirus app API, insists on British control of data, promises to protect privacy, Tech and Covid-19: open source needed for acceptance and success of contact tracing apps, Malaysiakini: Prominent journal urges for public consultation on contact tracing apps, Show evidence that apps for COVID-19 contact-tracing are secure and effective, Five things we need to do to make contact tracing really work (hire manual tracers, protect privacy, ensure wide coverage, accept that technology alone does not solve all, do it now), Bruce Schneier’s Me on COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps, Can We Track COVID-19 and Protect Privacy at the Same Time?,
• Half of world’s workers ‘at immediate risk of losing livelihood due to coronavirus’ – 1.6 billion people affected according to the International Labour Organization (ILO).
• The Case For Ending Lockdown
• Is it acceptable for government to be dishonest at a time like this? But the government needs to figure out a way of being open about the unpredictability of the current situation. Part of the dishonesty we’re witnessing seems to be a covering-up of the fact that nobody in government actually knows what the best way is to handle this pandemic – pretty understandable given that there are no very obvious answers yet and that even the scientists don’t fully know what’s going on. We can understand why leaders might feel admitting their own confusion is destabilising, and why they might want to boost morale and deliver straightforward messages. An indisputable tension lies between a government being open and candid about the fact that it is not sure what it is doing, and maintaining authority. But we think it would probably be better for the long-term health of society, rather than just the current crisis, if they could at least acknowledge some of the trade-offs they are grappling with, and let us into their thinking a little.
• Why New Restaurants Are Still, Somehow, Opening During the Pandemic
• A Coronavirus Chronicle – Twenty-four hours at the epicenter of the pandemic. – photojournalism at its best.

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.”