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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.

Background: One strategy for reducing the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is to contain the infection with broad screening, isolate infected individuals, and subsequently, trace any contacts. This strategy requires widely available, reliable testing for SARS-CoV-2. To increase testing, rapid antigen detection tests (RADTs) were developed for self-sampling, self-testing, and self-interpretation. The present study aimed to examine diagnostic performance, user acceptability, and safety of nasal self-RADTs, compared to standard PCR testing. Methods: In this manufacturer-independent prospective study, we evaluated two different COVID-19 RADTs, made in Denmark and China, for use as unsupervised self-tests. Participants were recruited from an ambulatory public COVID-19 test center in Aarhus, Denmark. Self-RADT kits, including instructions, were distributed at the test center or delivered to participants. Participants reported test results and test preferences. During enrollment, participants reported the occurrence and duration of symptoms that were consistent with COVID-19. The sensitivity and specificity of each RADT, relative to PCR testing, were calculated. Findings: Among 827 participants, 102 showed positive PCR test results. The sensitivities of the self-RADTs were 65·7% (95% CI: 49·2–79·2; Danish) and 62·1% (95% CI: 50·1–72·9; Chinese), and the specificities were 100% (95% CI: 99·0–100; Danish) and 100% (95% CI: 98·9–100; Chinese). The sensitivities of both self-RADTs were higher in symptomatic participants than in asymptomatic participants. Two out of every three participants preferred the self-RADT over the PCR test. Interpretation: Self-performed RADTs were reliable, user acceptable, and safe among lay people as an alternative to professionally collected oropharyngeal PCR testing. Funding: None to declare. Declaration of Interest: None to declare. Ethical Approval: The regional Scientific Ethics Committee of the Central Denmark Region concluded that this quality assurance study did not require scientific ethical approval (reference number 1-10-72-1-20). The Danish Medicines Agency concluded that the study did not require approval from them.

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.

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.

We are living in a world which is severely crisis-ridden and faces some major challenges. The fact that we are currently facing a genuine global pandemic (COVID-19) brings about even more uncertainty. The social and political institutions, which emerged and consolidated during the 20th century, and which created stability, have become fragile. The young generation born in the 1990s and onwards have experienced 9/11 and the ‘war against terrorism’, the financial crisis of 2008, changes to climate, environmental degradation, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. The generation born between 1960 and 1990 have had the same experiences along with severe economic crises in the 1970s and 1980s and the Cold War. Some of these challenges are in different ways intertwined with capitalism and its crises, while others are linked to the rapid development of new technologies, in particular innovations within communication and information technologies. This introduction lists the most important grand challenges facing the world as they have emerged more recently. The five articles following this introduction address some of these challenges, with particular attention to the problems of capitalism and democracy and the relation between these two areas. Most authors agree that climate change and the destruction of the environment are the biggest and most pertinent problems to address, but it is their stance that we can only meet these challenges if democracy is functioning well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Thesis Eleven is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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.

The Lancet Countdown is an international collaboration that independently monitors the health consequences of a changing climate. Publishing updated, new, and improved indicators each year, the Lancet Countdown represents the consensus of leading researchers from 43 academic institutions and UN agencies. The 44 indicators of this report expose an unabated rise in the health impacts of climate change and the current health consequences of the delayed and inconsistent response of countries around the globe—providing a clear imperative for accelerated action that puts the health of people and planet above all else.\ud \ud The 2021 report coincides with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26), at which countries are facing pressure to realise the ambition of the Paris Agreement to keep the global average temperature rise to 1·5°C and to mobilise the financial resources required for all countries to have an effective climate response. These negotiations unfold in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic—a global health crisis that has claimed millions of lives, affected livelihoods and communities around the globe, and exposed deep fissures and inequities in the world's capacity to cope with, and respond to, health emergencies. Yet, in its response to both crises, the world is faced with an unprecedented opportunity to ensure a healthy future for all.

State actions impact the lives of citizens in general and government benefit recipients in particular. However, little is known about whether experiences of psychological costs among benefit recipients can be relieved by reducing compliance demands in interactions with the state. Across three studies, we provide evidence that reducing demands causes relief. In a survey experiment, we show that psychological costs experienced by Danish unemployment insurance recipients change in response to information about actual reduced compliance demands. In two field studies, we exploit survey data collected around a sudden, exogenous shock (the COVID-19 lockdown of the Danish society in March 2020), which led to immediate reductions in compliance demands in Denmark's active labor market policies. We test whether two groups of benefit recipients experienced reduced psychological costs in response to these sudden reductions in compliance demands imposed by the state. Across all studies, we find that the reduction of compliance demands is associated with an increased sense of autonomy, and in two of the three studies, it is associated with reduced stress. Overall, our findings suggest that psychological costs experienced by benefit recipients are indeed affected by state actions in the form of compliance demands. © 2021 The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Public Management Research Association.

The COVID-19 crisis, which hit the world with full force in 2020, represents one of the greatest health and economic crises in recent history. The pandemic paralysed the world economy, forcing many countries around the globe to take emergency measures. Countries’ emergency responses to the crisis uncovered a tension between the continuous phenomenon of global economic interdependence and the tendency for nation-state governance during the crisis. Although this dichotomy was quite acute in the European Union (EU) at the onset of the pandemic – reflected overall by Member States’ preferences for national solutions over common multilateral solutions – governments eventually converged towards similar responses to the spread of the virus. These responses to the crisis included partial or total isolation of populations, travel bans, and the temporary closure of non-essential businesses. This so-called phenomenon of ‘copycat coronavirus policies’ was the result of regulatory emulation, which occurred spontaneously, with limited direct impetus from the EU. Our paper investigates whether insolvency and restructuring laws, policies, and measures followed a similar pattern. The study focuses on six selected European countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (UK). From a methodological perspective, our contribution relies on a case study approach. Building on the findings of this case study, our paper, then, draws more general conclusions on the process of harmonisation across the EU. While the harmonisation of insolvency law in the European Union (EU) has been a top priority on the European institutions' agenda in the last decade, it is well known that this endeavour has been slow and has often met resistance from the Member States. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that top-down harmonisation of insolvency (i.e., introduced at EU level) has been temporarily halted. The urgency to control or mitigate the economically and financially destructive effects of the pandemic has, nevertheless, forced European governments to adopt domestic strategies and laws in the area of insolvency. Interestingly, however, such measures show that insolvency and restructuring law responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, albeit largely uncoordinated, reflect a phenomenon of bottom-up harmonisation (i.e., introduced by Member States) indicating a convergence towards common approaches. This paper interrogates the insolvency law responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in six European countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom). It uncovers the inadequacy of the EU's harmonisation language, and the limits of harmonisation strategies in insolvency and restructuring law. Finally, it promotes the formulation of a wider-encompassing definition of “legal harmonisation”.