Tag Archives: COVID

At 18:30 South Africa time I’m part of a panel: “Ethics and Applicability of the Social Distancing Model in the Global South” organised by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law #epitwitter @ujphilosophy @ujmedia

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South Africa, W Europe 18:30 | UK 17:30 | USA East 12:30

To join the event, RSVP here

From the organisers:

“Having first emerged in high and upper-middle income countries (China, Europe, USA), the dominant response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been to try to ‘flatten the curve’ through social distancing, while buying time to develop vaccines and cures. Almost all affected countries in the global north have pursued this strategy, with only a few exceptions such as Sweden, which has refused to order social distancing. It is too early to tell if Sweden will pay a heavy price for its heterodox approach, just as it is too early to know the social and economic costs of social distancing edicts in the north. However, at a moment when the pandemic has begun to shift to the global south, it is appropriate to reflect on the trade-offs of the social distance-dominated mitigation model, as well as its applicability across all environments.”

Read more… | RSVP here to join the event

Panelists

Professor Alex Broadbent, Director of the Institute for the Future of Knowledge; and Professor of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg (South Africa)

Professor Margaret Gyapong (BSc, MSc, PhD), Director, Institute of Health Research, University of Health and Allied Sciences (Ghana)

Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi (MBChB, MSc, PhD), Executive Director at the African Population and Health Research Center (Kenya)

Professor Alicia Yamin, Senior Advisor on Human Rights at Partners in Health; Senior Fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School; and Advisor at the Centre on Law and Social Transformation and the Bergen Center on Ethics and Priority Setting (United States)

Moderator

Professor Jackie Dugard, Scholar in Residence at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, NYU School of Law; Associate Professor at the School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)

Read more… | RSVP here to join the event

‘Exclusive: Government scientist Neil Ferguson resigns after breaking lockdown rules to meet his married lover’ reports @Telegraph

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‪https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/05/exclusive-government-scientist-neil-ferguson-resigns-breaking/‬

What is fascinating for me is the regularity with which senior people are demonstrating how hard it is to keep lockdown. This instance is of course particularly satisfying because Ferguson is the global proponent of lockdown and because this particular embarrassment demonstrates how invasive these restrictions are.

Also it has a wonderfully British flavour about it… both the outrage and the immediate resignation

Boston Review: ‘COVID-19 has revealed a contest between two competing philosophies of scientific knowledge. To manage the crisis, we must draw on both’ says @JonathanJFuller #epitwitter

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http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/jonathan-fuller-models-v-evidence

‘How do the coronavirus models generating these hypothetical curves square with the evidence? What roles do models and evidence play in a pandemic? Answering these questions requires reconciling two competing philosophies in the science of COVID-19.’ Great piece which will still be interesting a week, month, year and decade from now, unusually at present.

Lockdown will lead to 29 times more lives lost than the harm it seeks to prevent from Covid-19 in SA, say SA actuaries in @FinancialMail – and that’s a conservative estimate

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‘EXCLUSIVE: Lockdown disaster dwarfs Covid-19, say SA actuaries’ https://www.businesslive.co.za/fm/features/2020-05-05-lockdown-disaster-dwarfs-covid-19-say-sa-actuaries/

It’s becoming hard to keep up with this stuff – there seem to be more and more voices suggesting that the costs of lockdown may exceed the costs of COVID-19, by some measure.

A lot depends what we compare lockdown to, and one bugbear of mine is the tendency to dichotomise the question: lockdown or bust. But the real comparison is between lockdown and some other measures, short of lockdown, but nonetheless somewhat effective. The cost/benefit ratio of these intermediate measures may be more favourable then lockdown for Low/Middle Income Countries, even if they are not in High Income Countries.

“…regardless of government interventions [, after] around a two week exponential growth of cases (and, subsequently, deaths) some kind of break kicks in, and growth starts slowing down. The curve quickly becomes “sub-exponential”.

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https://unherd.com/thepost/nobel-prize-winning-scientist-the-covid-19-epidemic-was-never-exponential/

Freddie Sayers of Unherd interviews Michael Levitt (a Nobel-prize-winning non-epidemiologist) on a purely statistical observations of the pattern of the epidemic. Given that the only way we have of measuring effectiveness of government interventions is statistical, that’s interesting. The fun stuff (epidemiological and statistical) comes in deciding whether the correlation is causal. But there’s been no progress with that, in my opinion; in fact for me it is here that the epidemiological profession has disappointed me – it is at if epidemiology has forgotten everything it ever taught itself about causal inference. Against that background, this is ought to give pause for thought.

Wall Street Journal: ‘Do Lockdowns Save Many Lives? In Most Places, the Data Say No’

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-lockdowns-save-many-lives-is-most-places-the-data-say-no-11587930911

I can’t vouch for the methodology here; I’m sharing for interest. To be honest I’m sceptical about evidence about effectiveness of lockdown in general – it’s going to be tough to figure out and may require a lengthy progress. Anyway, I do predict we will see more of these kinds of claims, and even if they are flimsy, so, to be frank, are many of the claims made about locking down. Perhaps the most interesting thing going on right now is that there a change in what seems obvious. Things that formerly spoke for themselves no longer do. From the perspective of someone who thinks about science, that is fascinating. It’s part of what Kuhn called paradigm shift.

Guide to re-opening schools released today – UNICEF, UNESCO, World Bank, WFP

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https://www.unicef.org/documents/framework-reopening-schools

I’ve also put the PDF here: UNICEF etc Framework-for-reopening-schools-2020

And I’m copy-pasting the press release below (original here):

NEW YORK/PARIS/ROME, 30 April 2020 – UNESCO, UNICEF, WFP and World Bank today issued new guidelines on the safe reopening of schools amidst ongoing closures affecting nearly 1.3 billion students worldwide.

The agencies also warned that the widespread closures of educational facilities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic present an unprecedented risk to children’s education and wellbeing, particularly for the most marginalized children who rely on school for their education, health, safety and nutrition. The guidelines offer practical advice for national and local authorities on how to keep children safe when they return to school.

“Rising inequality, poor health outcomes, violence, child labour and child marriage are just some of the long-term threats for children who miss out on school,” said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF Executive Director. “We know the longer children stay out of school, the less likely they are to ever return. Unless we prioritize the reopening of schools – when it is safe to do so – we will likely see a devastating reversal in education gains.”

The new guidelines note that while there is not yet enough evidence to measure the impact of school closures on disease transmission rates, the adverse effects of school closures on children’s safety and learning are well documented. Gains made in increasing access to children’s education in recent decades risk being lost and, in the worse cases, reversed completely.

“In the poorest countries, children often rely on schools for their only meal of the day. But with many schools now closed because of COVID, 370 million children are missing out on these nutritious meals which are a lifeline for poor families. They are also being denied the health support they normally get through school. This could do lasting damage, so when schools reopen it is critical that these meal programmes and health services are restored, which can also help to draw the most vulnerable children back to school,” said David Beasley, WFP Executive Director.

The best interests of children and overall public health considerations – based on an assessment of the associated benefits and risks to education, public health and socio-economic factors – must be central to national and local authorities’ decisions to reopen schools, the guidelines say.

Schools must look at how they can reopen better – with improved learning and more comprehensive support for children at the school including health, nutrition, psychosocial support and water, sanitation and hygiene facilities.

As countries grapple with when to reopen schools, UNESCO, UNICEF, WFP and World Bank – as part of the Global Education Coalition – urge governments to assess the benefits of classroom-based instruction compared to remote learning, and the risk factors related to reopening of schools, noting the inconclusive evidence around the infection risks related to school attendance.

“While many students are falling behind in their learning journey because of prolonged school closures, the decision of when and how to reopen schools, while far from straightforward, should be a priority. Once there is a green light on the health front, a whole set of measures will need to be in place to ensure that no student is left behind. These guidelines provide all-round guidance for governments and partners to facilitate the reopening of schools for students, teachers and families. We share one goal: to protect and advance the right to education for every learner,” said UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay.

The guidelines include:

  • Policy reform: Policy implications address all dimensions of the guidelines, including clear policies for school opening and closure during public health emergencies, reforms needed to expand equitable access for marginalised and out of school children as well as strengthen and standardize remote learning practices.
  • Financing requirements: Address the impact of COVID-19 on education and invest in strengthening education systems for recovery and resilience.
  • Safe operations: Ensure conditions that reduce disease transmission, safeguard essential services and supplies and promote healthy behaviour. This includes access to soap and clean water for safe handwashing, procedures on when staff or students feel unwell, protocols on social distancing and good hygiene practices.
  • Compensating learning: Focus on practices that compensate for lost instructional time, strengthen pedagogy and build on hybrid learning models such as integrating approaches in remote and distance education. This must include knowledge on disease transmission and prevention.
  • Wellness and protection: Expand the focus on students’ well-being and reinforce the protection of children through enhanced referral mechanisms and the provision of essential school-based services including healthcare and school feeding.
  • Reaching the most marginalised: Adapt school opening policies and practices to expand access to marginalised groups such as previously out-of-school children, displaced and migrant children and minorities. Diversify critical communications and outreach by making them available in relevant languages and in accessible formats.

“Once schools begin to reopen, the priority becomes reintegrating students into school settings safely and in ways that allow learning to pick up again, especially for those who suffered the biggest learning losses. This is a critical moment as it is the launching pad for a new normal that should be more effective and equitable. To manage reopenings, schools will need to be logistically prepared with the teaching workforce ready. And they will need to have plans specifically for supporting learning recovery of the most disadvantaged students. The guidelines offer a framework for moving forward that the major UN agencies are aligned around,” said Jaime Saavedra, World Bank Global Director for Education.

ENDS