Essential facts about face masks

How to stop your glasses steaming up – and 19 other essential facts about face masks: How often should you wash a cloth mask? And how effective are the disposable ones? The expert guide to choosing, wearing and caring for your face covering

Can fiction help us imagine new ways of existing together in times of uncertainty?

How Fiction Can Help Us Navigate the Pandemic: During the Black Plague, Boccaccio’s Decameron provided readers ways to laugh through the pandemic. A few centuries later, a new kind of pandemic strikes: with Covid-19, the world as we knew it seems forever changed. Can fiction help us imagine new ways of existing together in times of uncertainty?

TomTom Traffic Index

TomTom Traffic Index – Live congestion statistics and historical data: Created to help you analyze traffic – as a driver, city planner, automaker or policy maker – the TomTom Traffic Index provides detailed insights on live and historic road congestion levels in cities around the world

Online liars want to make you mad at politicians

A jet ski vacation during the coronavirus lockdown? Online liars want to make you mad at politicians: Since March, as part of a Princeton University-run project, we’ve tracked the COVID-19-related misinformation narratives that have been spreading in countries around the world. At this point, we’ve documented almost 370 narratives that have clear political motives or implications. In some cases, these narratives can bolster or discredit specific political or cultural figures. Other times they appear to undermine specific institutions and groups in society.

Pandemic Has Tested Behavioral Science

How the Pandemic Has Tested Behavioral Science: In March the United Kingdom curiously declined to impose significant social distancing measures in response to the global pandemic. The government was taking advice from the so-called “Nudge Unit,” a private company called Behavioral Insights Team, which uses behavioral science to advise U.K. policymakers, among others, on how to “nudge” people toward certain actions. The company, led by experimental psychologist David Halpern, told policymakers to be wary of “behavioral fatigue,” the idea that the public’s commitment to the measures would fade over time. The lax measures sparked fierce backlash not just from epidemiologists concerned about the virus’ spread, but also from a group of 600 behavioral scientists—psychologists, sociologists, economists, political scientists, and more. They signed an open letter doubting the quality of the evidence that led to the government’s decision.

How Israel’s COVID-19 mass surveillance operation works: But the reliance on the Shin Bet technology does not seem to have reduced citizens’ confidence in the government. Israelis tend to trust the military and other security agencies, and this may explain the relative equanimity with which they accepted the decision to conduct widespread tracking. The Israeli experience shows that the road to mass surveillance by intelligence services is not a long one, even where meaningful checks and balances exist.

School openings across globe suggest ways to keep coronavirus at bay, despite outbreaks: When Science looked at reopening strategies from South Africa to Finland to Israel, some encouraging patterns emerged. Together, they suggest a combination of keeping student groups small and requiring masks and some social distancing helps keep schools and communities safe, and that younger children rarely spread the virus to one another or bring it home. But opening safely, experts agree, isn’t just about the adjustments a school makes. It’s also about how much virus is circulating in the community, which affects the likelihood that students and staff will bring COVID-19 into their classrooms.

How Trump's push to reopen schools could backfire: “They’re sort of asking schools to do the undoable — ‘just make it work, get all the kids back, and get them in five days a week, and keep their distance and do all the hygiene…but if you can’t do it, that’s not our fault, that’s up to the locals,’” said Anita Cicero, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.