Digital Contact Tracing for Pandemic Response - Ethics and Governance Guidance

European government officials call for tech companies to loosen grip on contact-tracing technology: The governments were joined this week by a group of 27 doctors and researchers who published a report, led by Johns Hopkins University, that suggested technology companies should not “control the terms, conditions or capabilities” of digital contact tracing. Public health officials have also urged Apple and Google to allow more access to smartphone operating systems for the purposes of contact tracing.

So Where Did the Virus Come From? So what did happen? At present, the evidence is pointing tentatively to a chain of person-to-person infections occurring somewhere outside a city before somebody brought the virus to Wuhan, where the market acted as an amplifier. The first case could have been a rural farmer or possibly a bat researcher collecting samples for virologists. Or it is possible that another animal was involved in some way, with the virus bouncing between a farmer and his animals, or a wildlife smuggler and his poor pangolins.

There are more coronaviruses out there. If the evidence is pointing away from wildlife markets, and if the Chinese authorities are confident it wasn’t a laboratory leak, they should be eager to help the world find out what did actually happen.

K number: what is the coronavirus metric that could be crucial as lockdown eases?
R is the average rate of transmission, whereas K sheds light on the variation behind R. “Some [infectious] people might generate a lot of secondary cases because of the event they attend, for example, and other people may not generate many secondary cases at all,” said Dr Adam Kucharski, an expert in the dynamics of infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“K is the statistical value that tells us how much variation there is in that distribution.”

But unlike R, K numbers are not intuitive. “The general rule is that the smaller the K value is, the more transmission comes from a smaller number of infectious people,” said Kucharski.

“Once K is above about five or 10 it tells you most people are generating pretty similar numbers [of secondary cases], you are not getting these super-spreading events. Once K is below one, you have got the potential for super-spreading.”

How COVID-19 is changing the world: a statistical perspective (UN Committee for the Coordination of Statistical Activities)

Iran’s coronavirus response: A lesson in what not to do

The Council of Europe continues working to enhance international co-operation against terrorism, including bioterrorism: The Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated the vulnerability of modern societies to viral infections and their potential for disruption. The intentional use of a pathogen or other biological agent for the purpose of terrorism may prove highly effective and cause damage – both human and economic – on a far grander scale than “traditional” terrorist attacks, paralyzing societies for prolonged periods, spreading fear and sowing distrust far beyond those communities immediately affected.