Five Steps in the Right Direction · Special Issue 1 — COVID-19: Unprecedented Challenges and Chances

HDSR — Harvard Data Science Review
David Leslie
Published on: Jun 05, 2020

Abstract

Innovations in data science and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) have a central role to play in supporting global efforts to combat COVID-19.

The versatility of AI/ML technologies enables scientists and technologists to address an impressively broad range of biomedical, epidemiological, and socioeconomic challenges.

This wide-reaching scientific capacity, however, also raises a diverse array of ethical challenges.

The need for researchers to act quickly and globally in tackling SARS-CoV-2 demands unprecedented practices of open research and responsible data sharing at a time when innovation ecosystems are hobbled by…

The Economist, June 5th 2021

HOSPITALS ARE full, favelas echo with gunfire and a record 14.7% of workers are unemployed. Incredibly, Brazil’s economy is smaller now than it was in 2011-and it will take a lot of strong quarters like the one reported on June 1st to repair its reputation. Brazil’s death toll from covid-19 is one of the worst in the world. The president, Jair Bolsonaro, jokes that vaccines might turn people into crocodiles.

Brazil’s decline was shockingly fast.

After the military dictatorship in 1964–85, the country got a new constitution that returned the army to barracks, a new…

From Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) to Strategic National Emergency Reserve (SNER).

Rethinking Industry’s Role in a National Emergency

The shortcomings of the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile must be remedied before the next large-scale public health emergency. Here’s how.

MIT Sloan Management Review, May 27, 2021
ManMohan S. Sodhi and Christopher S. Tang,

Photographs of doctors and nurses wearing garbage bags to protect themselves from infection are among the most indelible images of the COVID-19 pandemic. They also testify to the limitations of the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile (SNS).

By the end of March 2020, as the first surge of COVID-19 exceeded 20,000 new cases detected per day, it was woefully clear that the United States’ emergency stockpile of essential medical supplies could not meet the demand for personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, and other materials urgently needed to…

Scientists still debate whether millions of cheap, fast diagnostic kits will help control the pandemic. Here’s why.

Nature, 09 FEBRUARY 2021
Giorgia Guglielmi

As the number of UK coronavirus cases surged in early 2021, the government announced a potential game-changer in the fight against COVID-19: millions of cheap, rapid virus tests. On 10 January, it said it would roll these tests out across the country, to be taken by people even if they have no symptoms. Similar tests will play a crucial part in US President Joe Biden’s plans to tame the raging outbreak in the United States.

These speedy tests, which typically mix nasal or throat swabs with liquid on a paper strip to return results…

US can donate doses as early as June 2021 to help bolster COVAX supply or directly support global hot spots

BCG, May 25th 2021

Promising and amazing advances in vaccination, diagnostic tests, immune therapy and gene testing.

The Wall Street Journal
By Robin L. Smith
Updated May 24, 2021 5:49 pm ET

Fifty years have passed since President Nixon declared war on cancer in his 1971 State of the Union address: “The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that . . . took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease.” Today we are closer than ever to that goal.

Cancer killed 10 million people world-wide last year, and doctors diagnosed 19 million new cases.

Yet scientists have made startling progress in understanding, preventing and treating it…

Financial Times, May 22, 2021 8:03 am
by John Burn-Murdoch , Anna Gross and Sarah Neville in London

New UK government research suggests two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine are needed to provide strong protection against symptomatic infection from the coronavirus variant first identified in India, according to two people briefed on the preliminary data.

Two vaccine doses provided

• 81 per cent protection against the B.1.617.2 variant found in India,
• and 87 per cent against the B.1.1.7 strain first identified in Kent in south-east England, according to the Public Health England data that was presented to a meeting of the…

Fatigue, perceived cognitive impairment and mood disorders associated with post-COVID-19 syndrome (PCS)

Mayo Clinic, May 12, 2021
By Jay Furst

ROCHESTER, Minn. ­­­- Patients diagnosed with post-COVID-19 syndrome, also known as “PCS,” “COVID-19 long-haul syndrome” and “Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS COV-2,” experience symptoms such as mood disorders, fatigue and perceived cognitive impairment that can negatively affect returning to work and resuming normal activities, according to a Mayo Clinic study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

The study reports on the first 100 patients to participate in Mayo Clinic’s COVID-19 Activity Rehabilitation program (CARP), one of the first multidisciplinary programs established to evaluate and treat patients with post-COVID-19 syndrome.
The patients were evaluated and…