• COVID-19
• Publicationsclose
• Research softwareclose
• Other research productsclose
• Other ORP type close
• English close
• Mémoires en Sciences de l'Information et de la Communication close
• Hal-Diderot close
• COVID-19 close

contribution à un site web; Several countries in the Western Balkans have responded to the Covid-19 outbreak with draconian measures that entail a further erosion of democracy, writes Natasha Wunsch. She argues the pandemic is shining a spotlight on the impact of geopolitical competition in the Western Balkans, where authoritarian forces are undermining the EU’s democracy promotion efforts.

Hardy, Andrew, Melody Shum and Vũ Ngọc Quyên. “The ‘F-System’ of Targeted Isolation: A Key Method In Vietnam’s Suppression of Covid-19”. CRISEA European Policy Brief, December 2020. http://crisea.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/PB3-VN-containment-method-05.pdf

contribution à un site web; First lines: In the context of the COVID 19 crisis, the city-as-place approach gained new momentum as part of efforts to ensure safe distancing, accommodate demands for public space and reimagine the post-pandemic city.

OFCE Policy Brief 76; We simulate the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on corporate solvency using a sampleof around one million French nonfinancial companies, assuming they minimizetheir production costs in the context of a sharp drop in demand.We find that the lockdown triggers an unprecedented increase in the share ofilliquid and insolvent firms, with the former more than doubling relative to a No-Covid scenario (growing from 3.8% to more than 10%) and insolvencies increasingby 80% (from 1.8% to 3.2%).The crisis has a heterogeneous effect across sectors, firm size, and region. Sectorssuch as hotels and restaurants, household services, and construction are the mostvulnerable, while wholesale and retail trade, and manufacturing are more resilient.Micro-firms and large businesses are more likely to face solvency issues, whereasSMEs and medium-large firms display lower insolvency rates.The furlough scheme put forward by the government (activité partielle) has beenvery effective in limiting the number of insolvencies, reducing it by more than1 percentage point (approximately 12,000 firms in our sample).This crisis will also have an impact on the overall efficiency of the French economicsystem, as market selection appears to be less efficient during crisis periods relativeto “normal times”: in fact, the fraction of very productive firms that are insolventsignificantly increases in the aftermath of the lockdown. This provides a rationalefor policy interventions aimed at supporting efficient, viable, yet illiquid firmsweathering the storm. We evaluate the cost of such a scheme aimed at strengtheningfirms' financial health to around 8 billion euros.

All responses to an epidemic crisis are political. At the beginning of February 2020, at the heart of the coronavirus epidemic in Wuhan, the authoritarian Chinese regime massively broadcast the humanitarian song “Believe Love Will Win”. The stated aim of the song was to emotionally support those engaged in the fight against the Covid-19 epidemic, presenting them as heroes of the Chinese nation. However, the making and broadcasting of a humanitarian song means that politics has failed. What is the reason for this? Humanitarian songs have an important place in the depoliticization of responses to crises, constructing representations and shaping official narratives. The songs and the discourses that accompany them conceal the historical and geopolitical depth of humanitarian crises by transforming political issues into moral questions.

Mierzejewski, Dominik, and Mateusz Chatys. “China’s Covid-19 Diplomacy and the South China Sea Dispute”. CRISEA European Policy Brief, October 2020. http://crisea.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/20-10-15-policy-brief-CRISEA-Mierzejewski-Chatys-FINAL.pdf; At the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, China's diplomacy has been increasingly assertive in global politics and Southeast Asia in particular. In its policies toward ASEAN, Beijing has had to address situations in which small and medium powers involved in territorial disputes with China, placed the South China Sea (SCS) on the international agenda, were pressed by military reactions or moved to gain a possible extension of their continental shelf. China's responses have had two different faces. First, its multi-vector assertive policies, conflicting not only with ASEAN and the United States due to the militarization of the artificial islands in the South China Sea, but also with Taiwan, Hong Kong, India and Japan, have demonstrated the power of the Chinese Communist Party to a domestic audience. Second, China has attempted to portray itself as a positive, even benevolent force, as its ultimate goal is to limit negative reactions to China's South China Sea claims and manage the territorial issues bilaterally, an approach termed "mask diplomacy". Nevertheless, it is at the United Nations that major battles between the parties to the SCS dispute have continued during the first half of 2020.

International audience

The present document defines properties and usage of IoT and M2M technology in Contact Tracing.It introduces the method of Asynchronous Contact Tracing (ACT). ACT registers the presence of SARS-CoV-2 virus on IoT connected objects (waste water, or air conditioning filters, or dirty objects, or dirty cleaning tools, etc.) or connected locations (such as a shops, restaurants, corridors in a supermarket, sanitary facilities in a shopping mall, railway stations, airports terminals and gates, etc.) using Group Test (sometime called in the literature Pooling Test).ACT identifies contacts with IoT connected objects that have been contaminated by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and works in synergy with solutions designed for manual and digital contact tracing to identify and alert people who may have been infected by the virus. In case the object is suspected to host or have hosted the SARS-CoV-2 virus, ACT allows users that have been in contact with the object or visited the connected location to be informed.This shifts the paradigm from synchronously tracing the contacts of the people infected by COVID-19 to asynchronously tracing of contacts of materials (such as infected surfaces, waste-water, air-conditioning filters, etc.) that are hosting the SARS-CoV-2 virus.This enables people who have come into contact asynchronously with those particular materials to be alerted of a potential COVID-19 contagion, and, at the same time, it signals that one or more persons have been in contact with the material which is now spreading the SARS-CoV-2 virus.; Asynchronous Contact Tracing (ACT) traces the IoT connected object that may have been infected by the Covid-19 virus (or future pandemic viruses). This shifts the paradigm, from searching for a person in the process of infecting another to the tracing of both potential contamination and infections, and leveraging on the combination of the two information.The scope of this WI is to standardize the full support of Asynchronous Contact Tracing (ACT) by means of1) providing some examples of use and deployment of ACT by means of a few explanatory use cases.2) specifying the ACT method and its interaction with deployed contact tracing applications for human and systems. This includes the interaction with the different technologies used by non ACT contact tracing solutions.3) specifying the ACT system including application protocols and API.The new ACT method will require the use of existing ready-to-market IoT-based technology and well-established wireless network techniques, in particular the ones specified in the ETSI standards ecosystem. Moreover, it will preserve the user's privacy in accordance with GDPR and/or other regional requirements not requiring the transmission of any personal information by the user.

site web; Contagion is a podcast series on circulation and pandemic threats throughout history jointly promoted by Cromohs and the Cost Action CA18140 ‘People in Motion: Entangled Histories of Displacement across the Mediterranean (1492’1923)’, or PIMoThe Covid-19 pandemic crisis forced all of us to re-organize our scientific activity. It impacts our social and academic life. It also invited historians and social scientists to share their work, to publicize their multiple insights on the current crisis, and to look at it into the light of different historical experiences. Contagion askes how individuals, groups, societies and states reacted to pandemics. Doing so it explores the economic, social, political, and cultural dimensions of pandemics as well as their impact on the evolution of societies. It is equally a matter of better understanding how the pandemic risk has been assessed, managed, and anticipated in ordinary times by communities and public actors.Pandemics must be seen as an integral part of global history. Viruses are proteins; they do not circulate per se but are carried by living beings, both humans and animals. The spread of a virus can be considered a risk associated with all forms of circulation. It is up to each society to be aware of this and to assess this risk according to its own expectations. The history of a pandemic is therefore linked to the history of trade, navigation, colonization and travel, but also to the history of science and the constitution and dissemination of knowledge. In the 16th century, the introduction of smallpox in the Caribbean and then in the Americas by European sailors, soldiers and missionaries led to the extinction of 90% of the native populations; they had not developed antibodies to a disease they had never encountered. The crew of Christopher Columbus, on the other hand, brought syphilis back to the Mediterranean, and the wars in Italy then spread it throughout Europe.Epidemics and pandemics can indeed be the result of wars. The virus can still be a biological weapon. In 1346, the Mongols of the Golden Horde catapulted contaminated bodies over the walls of the Genoese colony of Caffà, whose merchants brought the ‘Black Death’ to Europe. A virus spread all the more easily as the organisms were weakened. 17th-century European Catholic societies associated the plague with famine and war in their prayers. The first Sino-Japanese war of 1894 increased the risk of the spread of the plague first contained in China, which very quickly affected the entire Asian Pacific coast as well as India. And the ‘Spanish flu’ of 1918 could be considered intrinsically linked to war because of the weakened societies and the circulation of soldiers, in and through which it was spread. The spread of ebola in the province of North Kivu in 2019 was another obvious evidence of the close and complex link between an infectious disease and a war that has been going on since 2004.Societies could respond to pandemics in radically different ways, generate a variety of emotions. In the 16th-century Aztec Empire as in the 17th-century the Holy Roman Empire, an eschatology developed with the effects of diseases that significantly amplified respectively the deaths of the Spanish conquest and the Thirty Years War. The diary of Sam Pepys is an exceptional source on the perception of the effects of the ‘Great Plague’ in 1665 London. Pepys, like the rest of the gentry, perceived the plague as an urban threat. As the first districts were quarantined, he described the departure of London’s elite to the countryside, spreading the disease even further. He himself sent his mother and wife to Woolwich but stayed in town to ensure the supply of London. He staged his indifference in front of the bodies piling up in the streets and a sort of acceptance of the banality of death. The summer heatwave seemed to him heavier than the plague. Medicine and society could also clash in the interpretation of the necessary measures to be taken during a time of crisis. While during the ‘Black death’ in Granada, Ibn Katima introduced a first typology of plagues, explained how they spread, and recommended social distancing, in Florence Giovanni Boccaccio denounced the selfishness of his contemporaries who turned away from the sick and left them to die alone, rather than accompanying them if not trying to cure them. Pandemics can indeed generate stigmatization and social marginalization of infected people and, like the AIDS epidemics of the 1980s and 1990s, this stigmatization can be more devastating than the disease itself.Despite their global dimension, pandemics were also part of the history of states and state-building. ‘Exclusion’ and ‘surveillance’ were according to Michel Foucault the two pillars of biopolitics. It is certainly no coincidence that Thomas Hobbes, the theorist of the social contract in England, was also the translator of Thucydides’ The Plague in Athens. The biological protection of the social body becomes an imperative for the State, whose legitimacy rested on the existence of this body. Bad policy led in Athens to the death of the state itself, embodied here by that of Pericles and the numerous religious desecrations. Then epidemics and pandemics were occasions for the development of the institutions through which the State informed itself and imposed social control over the governed populations. Closing borders, restricting freedom of movement and expression, distrust of foreigners and the temporary or permanent exclusion from society of certain groups identified as vulnerable, are measures specific to biopolitics. In this sense, infectious diseases also constitute a risk for today democracies.It is all of these themes that Contagion proposes to tackle with the participation of historians from different periods and disciplines working throughout the world.

contribution à un site web; Throughout the development of the Covid-19 crisis, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has worked strenuously to frame the story from its perspective – this wouldn’t be a replay of the SARS story in 2013. Not content with simply asserting that its system allowed it to successfully bring the coronavirus epidemic under control, China is seeking to be seen as the saviour by exporting personal protective equipment (PPE) around the world. The country is also using the crisis to promote its authoritarian model while discrediting the actions and systems of the European Union (EU) – Brussels and national capitals – in reacting to the pandemic.