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In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, public spaces such as museums and art galleries are experiencing increased demands to offer virtual online access. While current solutions seek to replace or augment a real visit, online tours often suffer from being too passive and lack in-depth interactivity to keep virtual visitors meaningfully engaged with an exhibition. Museums and art galleries seeking to broaden and engage their audience more deeply should offer intriguing experiences that invite the visitor to explore, to be entertained, and to learn by interacting with the content. We propose a novel virtual museum experience that utilizes multiple visualizations to contextualize a gallery’s digitized artworks with related artworks from large image archives. We make use of the WikiArt dataset that includes more than 200,000 images and offers diverse metadata used for comparative visual exploration. In addition, we apply machine learning methods to extract multifaceted information about the objects detected in the images and to compute similarities across them. Visitors of our virtual museum can interactively explore the artworks using different search filters such as artist, style, or object classes detected within an image. The results are displayed through interactive visualizations offering different perspectives on artwork collections, leading to serendipitous discoveries and stimulating new insights. The utility of our concept was confirmed by an informal evaluation with virtual museum visitors.

Abstract The question of whether SARS-CoV-2 is mainly transmitted by droplets or aerosols has been highly controversial. We sought to explain this controversy through a historical analysis of transmission research in other diseases. For most of human history, the dominant paradigm was that many diseases were carried by the air, often over long distances and in a phantasmagorical way. This miasmatic paradigm was challenged in the mid to late 19th century with the rise of germ theory, and as diseases such as cholera, puerperal fever, and malaria were found to actually transmit in other ways. Motivated by his views on the importance of contact/droplet infection, and the resistance he encountered from the remaining influence of miasma theory, prominent public health official Charles Chapin in 1910 helped initiate a successful paradigm shift, deeming airborne transmission most unlikely. This new paradigm became dominant. However, the lack of understanding of aerosols led to systematic errors in the interpretation of research evidence on transmission pathways. For the next five decades, airborne transmission was considered of negligible or minor importance for all major respiratory diseases, until a demonstration of airborne transmission of tuberculosis (which had been mistakenly thought to be transmitted by droplets) in 1962. The contact/droplet paradigm remained dominant, and only a few diseases were widely accepted as airborne before COVID-19: those that were clearly transmitted to people not in the same room. The acceleration of interdisciplinary research inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that airborne transmission is a major mode of transmission for this disease, and is likely to be significant for many respiratory infectious diseases.

This paper describes the history of Couchsurfing, a platform matching free, peer-to-peer hospitality launched in 2004, as a series of four deaths and resurrections. The platform was first brought back to life by its members, in the spirit of open collaboration, then by its leaders, in an effort to legitimize the platform as a US-based charity, then by Silicon Valley investors, seeking to mold it into a profitable startup, and finally by private investors, only to find itself yet again in jeopardy as a result of Covid-19. The aim of the paper is to consider what the history of this niche platform tells us about the changing ecology of the Web as a whole. Through that lens, Couchsurfing’s struggles to respond to drastic changes in its environment are indicative of the growing specialization of the Web into a closed and monetized information ecosystem.

This article builds on fieldwork conducted in 2019 and 2020 and examines the implications of Covid-19 lockdown for the engagement of Danish Muslim women in Islamic educational activities. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari (2012) and Larkin (2008b), it displays how technological infrastructure influences religious practice and the constitution of religious space. For the women engaged in Islamic education, the forced use of digital-media technologies unmoored conditions for being at activities, reorganized time and space, and changed conditions for relating to communities. As home became the territory from where the women conducted all religious practices, including educational activities, classes and seminars were accessed on more individualized terms and became more easily integrated with other everyday activities. This made room for expanding engagement and accessing more diverse educational opportunities. At the same time, it withdrew the women from spaces of bodily and sensory togetherness, where feelings of community and connection would usually be nurtured.

Public transport is a critical service in Copenhagen, Denmark, because many residents do not own a car, and in any event, car travel is not practical in the city center due to narrow roads and lack of parking. In response to COVID-19, Danish public health authorities have established a minimum 1-m social distancing policy in public spaces. This study simulates passenger pedestrian flow in three representative stations of the Copenhagen metro to determine if these goals can be attained and if any physical changes should be made. The study is conducted with a microsimulation in commercially available software of the passenger flow in three representative stations, with small, medium, and large traffic flows. The simulation is agent-based, and the individual objective function is minimum cost according to walking distance, comfort, and frustration. The results show that for the majority of stations, the physical infrastructure and the expected traffic flow are compatible with the social distancing goals. However, for a few of the highest demand stations, particularly those that serve as intermodal hubs, there are great difficulties in achieving the desired social distancing measures. In particular, the intermodal hub station of Nørreport does not possess corridors and escalators that are distributed correctly according to the pedestrian flow. This station is underground, and it is unfortunately not easy to change this infrastructure.

Applying historical data from the USD LIBOR transition period, we estimate a joint model for SOFR, Fed Funds, and Eurodollar futures rates as well as spot USD LIBOR and term repo rates. The framework endogenously models basis spreads between each of the benchmark rates and allows for the decomposition of spreads. Modelling the LIBOR-OIS spread as credit and funding-liquidity roll-over risk, we find that the spike in the LIBOR-OIS spread during the onset of COVID-19 was mainly due to credit risk, while on average credit and funding-liquidity risk contribute equally to the spread.

The world has seen numerous infectious disease outbreaks in the past decade. In many cases these outbreaks have had considerable perinatal health consequences including increased risk of preterm delivery (e.g., influenza, measles, and COVID-19), and the delivery of low birth weight or small for gestational age babies (e.g., influenza, COVID-19). Furthermore, severe perinatal outcomes including perinatal and infant death are a known consequence of multiple infectious diseases (e.g., Ebola virus disease, Zika virus disease, pertussis, and measles). In addition to vaccination during pregnancy (where possible), pregnant women, are provided some level of protection from the adverse effects of infection through community-level application of evidence-based transmission-control methods. This review demonstrates that it takes almost 2 years for the perinatal impacts of an infectious disease outbreak to be reported. However, many infectious disease outbreaks between 2010 and 2020 have no associated pregnancy data reported in the scientific literature, or pregnancy data is reported in the form of case-studies only. This lack of systematic data collection and reporting has a negative impact on our understanding of these diseases and the implications they may have for pregnant women and their unborn infants. Monitoring perinatal health is an essential aspect of national and global healthcare strategies as perinatal life has a critical impact on early life mortality as well as possible effects on later life health. The unpredictable nature of emerging infections and the potential for adverse perinatal outcomes necessitate that we thoroughly assess pregnancy and perinatal health implications of disease outbreaks and their public health interventions in tandem with outbreak response efforts. Disease surveillance programs should incorporate perinatal health monitoring and health systems around the world should endeavor to continuously collect perinatal health data in order to quickly update pregnancy care protocols as needed.

In times of crisis, humans have a tendency to turn to religion for comfort and explanation. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. Using daily and weekly data on Google searches for 107 countries, this research demonstrates that the COVID-19 crisis resulted in a massive rise in the intensity of prayer. During the early months of the pandemic, Google searches for prayer relative to all Google searches rose by 30%, reaching the highest level ever recorded. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that by April 1, 2020, more than half of the world population had prayed to end the coronavirus. Prayer searches remained 10% higher than previously throughout 2020, particularly so in Europe and the Americas. Prayer searches rose more among the more religious, rose on all continents, at all levels of income, inequality, and insecurity, and for all types of religion, except Buddhism. The increase is not merely a substitute for services in the physical churches that closed down to limit the spread of the virus. Instead, the rise is due to an intensified demand for religion: People pray to cope with adversity. The results thus reveal that religiosity has risen globally due to the pandemic with potential direct long-term consequences for various socio-economic outcomes.

The years 2020 and 2021 will be remembered as a time profoundly marked by the COVID-19 pandemic. We have all had to come to grips with the effects of this invisible global menace, which has left any number of visible traces behind in its wake, not only individually but also as members of the communities, whatever contours and foundations they may have, to which we belong. Religious communities in particular have attempted to adapt to, or in some cases resist, the strictures imposed by various forms of lockdown which have lasted for varying stretches of time, have created rituals intended to address the needs and concerns of their members, and have formulated explanations for the emergence of the pandemic in terms of their doctrinal systems. The first five articles in this issue of Approaching Religion explore such community-based ways of interpreting and dealing with the impact of the COVID-19 crisis.