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In the Covid-19 pandemic, it seems that African countries have been largely spared from the devastating effects observed elsewhere. Working and living in Guinea-Bissau, one of the poorest and most fragile countries in the world located in West Africa, we wonder: How can the world know that there are only few Covid-19 cases in a country where the health system is weak and access to Covid-19 tests very limited? How can the world know that there is a low Covid-19 mortality in a country without a reliable civil registration and vital statistic system? In this article, we explore the (too) many unknowns of Covid-19 in Guinea-Bissau. The article was chosen as the 1st place winner of the 2020 Eye on Global Health Writing Competition.

We are writing this openly-published letter to express deep concerns regarding the paper recently published in JAMA Network Open: Estimation of US Children’s Educational Attainment and Years of Life Lost Associated With Primary School Closures During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.28786The paper by Christakis, Van Cleve, and Zimmerman(2020,abbrev. CVZ) is built upon multiple critically flawed assumptions, obvious misuse of the standard analytical tools, and clear mistakes in study design. Additionally, the analysis presented contains crucial mathematical and statistical errors that completely revert the main results, sufficient that if the estimates had been calculated according to the declared methodology, the results would completely contradict the stated conclusions and policy recommendations. These are not idle criticisms. This study has received enormous public attention, and its results immediately appeared in discussions of public health policies around schools worldwide. The central question is resolving an evidence base for the inevitable tradeoff between (a) the very real harms of missed education provoked by policies that decrease viral spread vs. (b) the resumption of education as a social good which increases viral spread. This is an incredibly important public health question, and it demands careful cost-benefit analysis. To that end, this paper adds no usable evidence whatsoever.

Aim: Use of tele-health programs and wearable sensors that allow patients to monitor their own vital signs have been expanded in response to COVID-19. We aimed to explore the utility of patient-held data during presentation as medical emergencies. Methods: We undertook a systematic scoping review of two groups of studies: studies using non-invasive vital sign monitoring in patients with chronic diseases aimed at preventing unscheduled reviews in primary care, hospitalization or emergency department visits and studies using vital sign measurements from wearable sensors for decision making by clinicians on presentation of these patients as emergencies. Only studies that described a comparator or control group were included. Studies limited to inpatient use of devices were excluded. Results: The initial search resulted in 896 references for screening, nine more studies were identified through searches of references. 26 studies fulfilled inclusion and exclusion criteria and were further analyzed. The majority of studies were from telehealth programs of patients with congestive heart failure or Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. There was limited evidence that patient held data is currently used to risk-stratify the admission or discharge process for medical emergencies. Studies that showed impact on mortality or hospital admission rates measured vital signs at least daily. We identified no interventional study using commercially available sensors in watches or smart phones. Conclusions: Further research is needed to determine utility of patient held monitoring devices to guide management of acute medical emergencies at the patients' home, on presentation to hospital and after discharge back to the community.

A mysterious virus, classified by WHO (World Health Organization) as COVID-19, wrecks global health and potentially endangers the global social, political and economic order[i]. In countering the risks and protecting their populations, nations across the world adopt drastic national restrictions. Authorities temporarily suspend national as well as transnational encounters and connections. The virus, as well as how authorities and societies respond to, might have greater long-term impact. However, If the virus spreads transnationally, why then nation-states favour national protectionism instead of exploring common multilateral solutions? Could the application of national tools solve a seemingly transnational pandemic?Almost worldwide reverberations of state-decrees take effect- unleashing cancellations of public and private gatherings and events. So far, most of the alert and ensuing explanations and justifications mainly concentrate on the affluent world. In parts of the developing world, the ruling elites often ignore pre-consultations. Millions (already suffering from traditional curable malaises and inequalities) confront additional virus-related existential threats. Among the most disadvantaged include the internally and externally displaced refugees in the world. Many of them live in derelict encampments scattered across the Middle East and Africa.

Compilations of video clips of Italian mayors berating citizens breaking quarantine to walk dogs, jog, or play ping pong have become something of a ‘viral’ sensation both in Italy and globally. The clips are often amusing, featuring politicians accusing their constituents of vanity, incontinence, and other assorted sins. As anthropologists interested in the politics of accusation , these small-scale disputes allow us to think through the sorts of political horizons that the novel coronavirus is bringing into being. As the virus spreads, we seek to track the sorts of accusations that spread with it as they provoke what we call virological witch hunts. Unlike the episodes of public blaming and shaming some political figures have promoted through national media, virological witch hunts are small-scale, bottom-up, intimate, and usually amplified through local social networks. We link them to the phenomenon of the untori in XVI- XVII century Lombardy, another bottom-up surge of accusations against those believed to be spreading disease that authorities had to deal with. Relying on social media, we have been reaching out to quarantined residents of the province of Bergamo, in the Lombardy region who have been publicly shamed for perceived transgressions in the midst of the quarantine. The responses offer insight into how the pandemic has precipitated what Massimo, one of our interlocutors, has termed a “collective, hysterical version of preexisting individual patterns of blaming and shaming”.

The population-level case-fatality rate (CFR) associated with COVID-19 varies substantially, both across countries time and within countries over time. We analyze the contribution of two key determinants of the variation in the observed CFR: the age-structure of diagnosed infection cases and age-specific case-fatality rates. We use data on diagnosed COVID-19 cases and death counts attributable to COVID-19 by age for China, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Spain, the United States, and New York City. We calculate the CFR for each population at the latest data point and also for Italy over time. We use demographic decomposition to break the difference between CFRs into unique contributions arising from the age-structure of confirmed cases and the age-specific case-fatality. In late April 2020, CFRs varied from 2.2% in South Korea to 13.0% in Italy. The age-structure of detected cases often explains more than two thirds of cross-country variation in the CFR. In Italy, the CFR increased from 4.2% to 13.0% between March 9 and April 22, 2020, and more than 90% of the change was due to increasing age-specific case-fatality rates. The importance of the age-structure of confirmed cases likely reflects several factors, including different testing regimes and differences in transmission trajectories; while increasing age-specific case-fatality rates in Italy could indicate other factors, such as the worsening health outcomes of those infected with COVID-19. Our findings lend support to recommendations for data to be disaggregated by age, and potentially other variables, to facilitate a better understanding of population-level differences in CFRs. They also show the need for well designed seroprevalence studies to ascertain the extent to which differences in testing regimes drive differences in the age-structure of detected cases.

This report describes the participation of two Danish universities, University of Copenhagen and Aalborg University, in the international search engine competition on COVID-19 (the 2020 TREC-COVID Challenge) organised by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its Text RetrievalConference (TREC) division. The aim of the competition was to find the best search engine strategy for retrieving precise biomedical scientific information on COVID-19 from the largest, at that point in time, dataset of curated scientific literature on COVID-19—the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19).CORD-19 was the result of a call to action to the tech community by the U.S. White House in March 2020, and was shortly thereafter posted on Kaggle as an AI competition by the Allen Institute for AI, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Microsoft, and the National Library of Medicine at the US National Institutes of Health. CORD-19 contained over 200,000 scholarly articles (of which more than 100,000 were with full text) about COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, and related coronaviruses, gathered from curated biomedical sources. The TRECCOVID challenge asked for the best way to (a) retrieve accurate and precise scientific information, in response to some queries formulated by biomedical experts, and (b) rank this information decreasingly by its relevance to the query. In this document, we describe the TREC-COVID competition setup, our participation to it, and our resulting reflections and lessons learned about the state-of-art technology when faced with the acute task of retrieving precise scientific information from a rapidly growing corpus of literature, in response to highly specialised queries, in the middle of a pandemic.