Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Is the COVID-19 pandemic cure really worse than the disease? Here’s what our research found

July 7, 2020 8.14am EDT Updated July 9, 2020 5.27pm EDT

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

The big idea

The coronavirus pandemic catapulted the country into one of the deepest recessions in U.S. history, leaving millions of Americans without jobs or health insurance. There is a lot of evidence that economic hardship is associated with poor health and can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, mental health problems, cognitive dysfunction and early death.

All of that raises a question: Is the U.S. better off with the public health interventions being used to keep the coronavirus from spreading or without them?

In a new working paper, I and a team of health economists from U.S. universities set out to answer that question from a humanitarian perspective. To do that, we reviewed the latest data and scientific research about the virus to evaluate the number of lives saved if public health measures remain in place. We also reviewed economic studies looking at deaths caused by past restrictions of economic activity to assess the number of lives that could be lost if those measures trigger an extended economic recession.

We estimate that by the end of 2020, public health measures to mitigate COVID-19, including shelter-in-place orders, school and business closures, social distancing and face mask recommendations, would save between 900,000 and 2.7 million lives in the U.S. The economic downturn and loss of income from shelter-in-place measures and other restrictions on economic activity could contribute to between 50,400 and 323,000 deaths, based on an economic decline of 8%-14%.

Counting lives alone, we conclude that the public health measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 are justified and in the best interest of our society.
Why it matters

President Donald Trump likes to say that the cure must not be worse than the disease when it comes to coronavirus interventions that affect the economy. The public health approach works, but it can also hurt. Determining the “right dose” of a medicine always requires careful consideration of unintended consequences.

Several cost-benefit calculations of the COVID-19 economic shutdown measures have recently appeared in the popular press. They determined that saving the life of a COVID-19 patient could come at a price of up to US$6.7 million per year of life saved in terms of economic losses. These calculations stirred up a heated debate, with one side advocating for a save-lives-not-dollars approach and the other doubting its wisdom. The debate fell along party lines, further contributing to misinformation and even some willful resistance to public health recommendations.

By acknowledging and fully exploring the possible ramifications of the economic recession in lives saved or lost, our hope is that we will create a more “apples-to-apples” comparison. Most comparisons of the costs of interventions being discussed put a dollar figure on lives saved or lost. If an analysis finds, for example, that the U.S. pays $1.5 million for every life saved, that raises a value question: Is that a reasonable cost or not? The answer can lead people and policymakers to resist public health measures. Our analysis instead compares the number of lives likely to be saved to the number of lives likely to be lost, keeping judgments about the value of a human life out of the equation.

The results are clear – the public health measures save more lives than they may jeopardize in the long run.
What still isn’t known

The current economic downturn is unusual in that it wasn’t caused by a structural economic problem, like a war or a housing bubble, but rather by a pandemic – a severe but temporary external factor. Therefore, it is unclear how long it will take for the economy to recover. It is also unclear how the pandemic may change over time.

The June and July jobs reports showed higher-than-expected jobs growth following the easing of economic restrictions. This seeded much-needed optimism for a quick economic recovery and suggested that the impact on the economy might be not as severe as people expected. At the same time, a recent study shows that many COVID-19 survivors may lose immunity to the virus within a matter of months, adding to reinfection concerns, which means public health measures may actually be saving more lives than once thought. Many of these uncertainties can impact our calculations.

Our team is continuously tracking these developments and updating our analyses.
What other research is being done

An important question that we have not explored yet is how the benefits and the costs of COVID-19 measures are distributed. We know the virus disproportionately affects older people and people of color. We also know that lower-income people are most likely to suffer health consequences from loss of employment or income.

If policymakers have the information to better understand these effects, they can find ways to anticipate public sentiment during public health crises.

This article has been updated to reflect new calculations for the minimum number of lives saved. The change is described in an update to the working paper.

Author

Olga Yakusheva

Associate Professor in Nursing and Public Health, University of Michigan
Disclosure statement

Olga Yakusheva does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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Scientists unveil largest 3D map of the universe ever

The map includes more than 2 million galaxies and covers 11 billion years of the universe's history.

This map shows 11 billion years of the universe's history, with galaxies closest to Earth appearing in purple and blue, and distant galaxies in yellow and red.
(Image: © EPFL)

By Brandon Specktor - Senior Writer

After five years of peering into the deepest reaches of space, researchers have released what they call the "largest three-dimensional map of the universe" ever. No, you cannot see your house.

The mind-boggling map is the result of an ongoing project called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) — an ambitious, international quest to map the expansion of the observable universe, and hopefully solve a few cosmic conundrums in the process. With this newest update, the project has mapped and measured more than 2 million galaxies, stretching from our Milky Way to ancient objects more than 11 billion light-years away.

Related: 11 fascinating facts about our Milky Way

The detailed new map will help astronomers piece together a murky period of the universe's expansion known as "the gap."

"We know both the ancient history of the universe and its recent expansion history fairly well, but there's a troublesome gap in the middle 11 billion years," Kyle Dawson, a cosmologist at the University of Utah and lead researcher of the project, said in a statement. "For five years, we have worked to fill in that gap."

The gap begins a few billion years after the Big Bang. Scientists are able to measure the rate of the universe's expansion before this thanks to the cosmic microwave background — ancient radiation left over from the infancy of the universe that researchers can still detect; and they can calculate recent expansion by measuring how the distance between Earth and nearby galaxies increases over time. But expansion in the middle period has been little studied because the light of galaxies more than a few hundred million light-years away can be incredibly faint. To fill in the gap, a team of more than 100 scientists from around the world looked at not just distant galaxies, but also bright-burning quasars (extremely luminous objects powered by the hungriest black holes in the cosmos).

Key to this survey is a phenomenon called redshift — a process by which light from the most ancient, distant galaxies is literally stretched by the expansion of the universe, increasing its wavelength and shifting it toward the redder end of the spectrum. As a result of this cosmic color-change, distant light sources appear redder, while those nearer to Earth look bluer (you can see this phenomenon illustrated in the team's maps above).

To calculate the rate of cosmic expansion 11 billion years ago, the team measured the redshift of millions of distant objects along with their velocities — a measurement that shows how much a galaxy is being tugged by the gravity of other matter around it. The team's results, which are described in 23 new studies released on July 20, show that the universe began expanding at an increased rate about 6 billion years ago, following a period of deceleration.

Scientists attribute the universe's expansion to a mysterious force called dark energy, though no one is entirely sure what it is or where it exists. Surveys like this one help scientists better constrain the properties of dark energy, the researchers said, though it remains far from understood. The solution to that conundrum will have to wait for another day … hopefully one not too many billions of years away.

Originally published on Live Science.

Edited by James C. Zachos, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, and approved June 1, 2020 (received for review February 18, 2020)

Significance

The SADA is an annually-resolved hydroclimate atlas in South America that spans the continent south of 12°S from 1400 to 2000 CE. Based on 286 tree ring records and instrumentally-based estimates of soil moisture, the SADA complements six drought atlases worldwide filling a geographical gap in the Southern Hemisphere. Independently validated with historical records, SADA shows that the frequency of widespread severe droughts and extreme pluvials since the 1960s is unprecedented. Major hydroclimate events expressed in the SADA are associated with strong El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Southern Annular Mode (SAM) anomalies. Coupled ENSO-SAM anomalies together with subtropical low-level jet intensification due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions may cause more extreme droughts and pluvials in South America during the 21st century.

Abstract

South American (SA) societies are highly vulnerable to droughts and pluvials, but lack of long-term climate observations severely limits our understanding of the global processes driving climatic variability in the region. The number and quality of SA climate-sensitive tree ring chronologies have significantly increased in recent decades, now providing a robust network of 286 records for characterizing hydroclimate variability since 1400 CE. We combine this network with a self-calibrated Palmer Drought Severity Index (scPDSI) dataset to derive the South American Drought Atlas (SADA) over the continent south of 12°S. The gridded annual reconstruction of austral summer scPDSI is the most spatially complete estimate of SA hydroclimate to date, and well matches past historical dry/wet events. Relating the SADA to the Australia–New Zealand Drought Atlas, sea surface temperatures and atmospheric pressure fields, we determine that the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) are strongly associated with spatially extended droughts and pluvials over the SADA domain during the past several centuries. SADA also exhibits more extended severe droughts and extreme pluvials since the mid-20th century. Extensive droughts are consistent with the observed 20th-century trend toward positive SAM anomalies concomitant with the weakening of midlatitude Westerlies, while low-level moisture transport intensified by global warming has favored extreme rainfall across the subtropics. The SADA thus provides a long-term context for observed hydroclimatic changes and for 21st-century Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections that suggest SA will experience more frequent/severe droughts and rainfall events as a consequence of increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Teachers at risk from USA's DIY approach to reopenings

Experts need to guide school reopenings but, at present, across the US teachers and school officials are being left to make decisions themselves

Josh Benjamin

20th July 2020 16:00

Both of us are affected by complex problems with potentially serious consequences for our lives, but we possess little of the knowledge required to form valid opinions on the subject.

That is not to say, however, that the polar bear and I are without expertise.

If you want to teach a first-grader to read, ask me. If you want to pull an animal out of the Arctic Ocean and devour it raw, the polar bear is your creature.

But outside of our respective wheelhouses, you’ll need to find epidemiologists or atmospheric scientists who spend their careers studying pandemics and climate change for useful, insightful advice.

A DIY approach

Yet, as I write this in the middle of July, it appears – in the US at least – that educators are the ones being left to make the decisions on how they will reopen schools in September.

Los Angeles and San Diego both appear to be planning for remote learning through the fall.

New York City, Philadelphia and Honolulu are all implementing a hybrid model, with students splitting their week between in-school and remote learning.

No doubt others are hoping to reopen as normal without incident.

In short, confronted with the same virus and no vaccine, school districts across the country are taking different approaches that we can only assume will have different public health impacts on the communities they serve.

For teachers, this is a tough place to be – without expert-driven recommendations at the national level – and there are two key fears.

A failure of leadership

The first is my own government.

The world has long known that the Trump administration has an abusive relationship with science. Recently, our president tweeted that schools should reopen.

He may well be correct, but that would be the product of coincidence and not a scientific method.

It takes fairly earnest credulity to believe that someone with deep expertise on viruses, pandemics or children had any role in crafting that recommendation.

With a failure of leadership at the top of the federal government, reopening decisions devolve to individual states, whose governments further devolve decision-making to local municipalities.

Deferred responsibility

Oklahoma recently released a framework for reopening schools called Return to Learn.

In the introduction to that document, the state superintendent of public instruction essentially asks local school districts to make their own epidemiologically sound decisions for their students:

“It is not necessary to act on every consideration in this comprehensive framework. Rather, in keeping with the guidance we have received from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Oklahoma health officials, districts should take a layered approach to Covid-19 mitigation, adopting those policies and practices that are feasible, practical and acceptable within their school community.”

When our national and state governments disempower themselves, decision-making falls to the local level, with every recommendation merely an option that can be accepted or rejected by a school community with no experts in sight.

A lack of knowledge

My second fear, as I think about returning to school, is my own colleagues.

In the vacuum created by an absence of leadership, teachers and administrators, as well as parents and students, are participating in the process for determining when and how to reopen schools.

In Columbus, Ohio, a task force of school district staff members helped to craft reopening recommendations. Parents and students were also surveyed on how they would prefer to attend school in the fall.

On its face, that might seem reasonable: democratise the process by involving as many stakeholders as possible in this immeasurably impactful decision.

But it's an idea with clear shortcomings.

I have never been to Columbus, but I will assume that few, if any, of the educators and administrators there are epidemiologists, which means they lack the background needed to make valid recommendations on what is, at its core, a public health issue.

When the wrong people try to do the right things, it can be pretty scary.

Why we need answers

It’s understandable there is this desire to find a solution, though, as being back in school would clearly be best for everyone – if it can be done safely.

It's clear online learning can only get us so far: In a recent remote lesson, I showed the students a picture of a square as part of a unit on geometry. “What shape is this?” I asked.

One responded, “It’s a trapezoid!” Surprised, I asked if she could see what I was showing her. “Nope,” she confirmed enthusiastically. Her internet connection was too slow to stream video.

As a teacher, I know that remote learning is a grotesque approximation of real school and desperately want to turn the lights back on in my classroom.

But as a non-epidemiologist, I am like a polar bear discussing carbon emissions.

I have no informed opinion to contribute on whether returning to school this fall is a good idea: I just wish someone would tell me.

The DIY approach helps no one.

Josh Benjamin teaches first grade (Year 2) in Boston, Massachusetts

JULIAN ASSANGE

Pro-Transparency Group Leaks New Files on the Case Between the U.S. Government and Julian Assange

By Sarah Basford on 15 Jul 2020 at 3:30AM

The pro-transparency group, DDoSecrets, has published sensitive documents and communications relating to the case between Julian Assange and the U.S. Government on a site called AssangeLeaks.

The documents were published on AssangeLeaks, at 3am AEST on July 15 and contain 26 PDFs as well as a video file and a folder of previous leaked documents. Prior to publishing the group had a countdown timer running on the site.

The subject of the release contains a number of chat logs between Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks. The documents included on the site include chat logs and letters dating back to 2010 between Assange, sources and hackers. They relate to Chelsea Manning and upcoming leaks the organisation had planned at the time.

The site said it was not taking a side by releasing the information, rather that the release of documents was in the interest of transparency.

“With the [U.S.] Justice Department’s superseding indictment against Assange, public access to the evidence becomes critical. The documents in this file illuminate that case and illustrate how WikiLeaks operates behind closed doors,” the site reads.

“AssangeLeaks is not for or against Julian Assange or WikiLeaks, and is only interested in the evidence.”

The documents’ publication hasn’t been without criticism. An Italian investigative reporter and pro-Assange advocate, Stefania Maurizi stated that private communications between journalists should not be the target of document releases unless there is criminal wrongdoing.

Saying it fails to do something it explicitly isn't meant to do is confusing, honestly.

I'm surprised @SMaurizi is expressing disappointment in and disdain for #AssangeLeaks instead of highlighting the docs that prove part of the indictment against #Assange is built on a lie.

— Emma Best 🏳️‍🌈🏴 (Mx. Yzptlk) (@NatSecGeek) July 14, 2020

Assange is currently serving a 50-week sentence in London’s HM Prison Belmarsh for “failing to surrender to the court”. He was previously granted asylum by London’s Ecuadorean embassy and had lived there since 2012 until his arrest in April 2019.

In May 2019, 17 new charges were filed by the U.S. government against Assange, accusing him and WikiLeaks of violating the U.S.’s Espionage Act.

This is madness. It is the end of national security journalism and the first amendment. https://t.co/wlhsmsenFw

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 23, 2019

“To obtain information to release on the WikiLeaks website, Assange encouraged sources to circumvent legal safeguards on information; provide that protected information to WikiLeaks for public dissemination; and continue the pattern of illegally procuring and providing protected information to WikiLeaksfor distribution to the public,” the charges read.

“He predicated his and WikiLeaks’s success in part upon encouraging sources with access to such information to violate legal obligations and provide that information for WikiLeaks to disclose.”

Earlier this month, the Justice Department filed a superseding indictment — a new set of charges that supersedes the previous ones — broadening the charges against Assange.

It alleges Assange had worked with hacking groups, like Anonymous and LulzSec, to target classified government information. It alleges it was has this information after revealing a member of LulzSec, referenced as “Sabu”, was an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Assange’s extradition hearing in London is expected to occur in September after a delay pushed its original May date back.

Correction (July 17, 2020): An earlier version of this article referred to DDoSecrets as a group of hacktivists. This is incorrect and the article has been updated to reflect this. Gizmodo regrets this error.

Online documentary exposes the psychological torture of Julian Assange
By Oscar Grenfell
15 July 2020

Last night, the “Don’t Extradite Assange” group held an online premiere of “Not in our name,” a short documentary reviewing the medical consequences of the decade-long persecution of Julian Assange and its implications for democratic rights globally.

The event was part of the ongoing campaign against the imprisonment of the WikiLeaks founder in Britain’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison, where he continues to be imperilled by the coronavirus pandemic. It was held in the lead-up to scheduled September hearings for Assange’s extradition to the US, where he faces life imprisonment for exposing American war crimes.

The documentary, directed by John Furse, makes able use of archival footage and original interviews to present a concise and irrefutable summation of the abuses Assange has suffered at the hands of multiple governments, and the basic issues at stake, including press freedom and the struggle against imperialist war.

Unlike many treatments of the Assange case in the corporate media, “Not in our name” places the WikiLeaks founder’s plight firmly in the context of the publications for which Assange faces charges in the US.

It begins with a brief review of the media organisation’s 2010 releases, which revealed mass civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan and other violations of international law.

Footage from the time demonstrates the hysterical response of the US military-intelligence and political establishment.

Kenneth Weinstein, president of the Hudson Institute, a neo-conservative think-tank, is shown declaring that it was “very important for our government” to display “no patience for the kind of so-called whistleblowing activities of traitors.”

At a 2010 media appearance, Assange reveals that the US government had demanded that WikiLeaks “destroy our archives relating to the Pentagon and stop dealing with US military whistleblowers,” or “be coerced.”

Emails between leading personnel at Stratfor, a security company with close ties to the CIA, had outlined a plan to “Move him [Assange] from country to country to face various charges for the next 25 years,” culminating in his imprisonment alongside terrorists in a super-max US facility.

Very rapidly, Assange was embroiled in the British legal system on the basis of bogus Swedish allegations of sexual misconduct, which were intended as a backdoor to dispatch him to the US. This compelled the WikiLeaks founder to seek political asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy in 2012.

The bulk of the documentary is an elaboration of UN Special Rapporteur Nils Melzer’s finding that Assange displays medically-verifiable symptoms of psychological torture as a result of his protracted persecution. This assessment is based on a consultation Melzer and two medical experts held with Assange at Belmarsh Prison in May, 2019, and on the UN official’s extensive study of the legal abuses inflicted on the WikiLeaks founder.

The film outlines several features of the UN’s definition of psychological torture, as they have been displayed in Assange’s treatment:

* Constant fear and anxiety: Assange has faced the prospect of being sent to the US, where he could potentially be subjected to the death penalty, for ten years. Over that period he has been arbitrarily-detained, brutally arrested and held in a maximum-security prison, while senior US government figures have called for his murder.

Australian clinical psychologist Doctor Lissa Johnson told viewers: “Often it is the anticipation of the danger you’re frightened of that is experienced as more traumatic and tormenting than the actual materialisation of that threat.”

* Public vilification: In his initial findings, Melzer stated that Assange had been the victim of an unprecedented campaign of “public mobbing,” involving innumerable slanders from governments and corporate media outlets.

Doctor Derek Summerfield, a leading retired psychologist, explained that this served to “isolate a person further from their sense of who they are and what they’re all about, and to smear their name in such a way as to make it easier to do what the state wishes to do with this person.”

Lissa Longstaff, of Women Against Rape, outlined the manner in which the Swedish allegations were the subject of “state manipulation.” They had served, not only as a pretext for the abrogation of Assange’s rights, but also as the foundation of a systematic smear campaign.

* Loss of autonomy: This was particularly evident when the new Ecuadorian government turned against Assange as it established closer relations with the US in 2017. Assange, despite being a political refugee, was constantly spied upon by a private security firm acting on instructions from the CIA, faced the threat of being evicted from the embassy at any moment, and had his communications cut off, thereby further isolating him.

* Helplessness and hopelessness: Johnson noted that the multiple legal abuses inflicted on Assange, including the illegal revocation of his political asylum and his knowledge that he faced biased political and judicial authorities in Britain, had created a situation in which “anything can happen. It’s deeply destabilising. You don’t know how you can defend yourself, you don’t know what to expect next.”

This had been intensified since Assange’s arrest in April, 2019. He had been denied adequate medical care in Belmarsh Prison, prevented from participating in his own defence and subjected to a series of British hearings that had the character of show-trials.

* Isolation and sensory deprivation: Through most of his imprisonment by Britain, Assange has been detained in solitary confinement. This has continued, even as he has been held on remand solely to facilitate the US extradition request.

Lissa Johnson speaking in defence of Assange earlier this year (Credit: WSWS)

In summing up the consequences, Johnson noted: “We’re designed for short bursts of stress, but when it is constant and relentless, it causes very serious problems with immunity. Immune cells can self-destruct, your body stops producing them, communication in the immune system breaks down. That can render people susceptible to cancer, to atypical infections and renders them very vulnerable to coronavirus.

“These techniques are essentially designed to break someone down so much they don’t want to live, they can’t function.”

Assange’s friend Vaughan Smith recalled that when the WikiLeaks founder called him last Christmas Eve, he had warned that he was “slowly dying” in Belmarsh Prison.

After the screening, Rebecca Vincent, London director of Reporters Sans Frontiéres, hosted a discussion with Melzer and filmmaker John Furse.

Melzer again rejected any suggestion that psychological torture was “torture lite.” He noted that in physical torture, the infliction of violence is a means, not an end in itself. Like psychological torture, its purpose is to “affect and break a person’s mind. You break their body in order to reach their mind.

“The actual target of any act of torture is the mind. It’s always psychological… You can achieve that through physical pain or non-physical pain and suffering. So isolation, combined with humiliation, combined with intimidation, combined with a profound arbitrariness, targets very specifically innate needs of stability, security, orientation and identity... These are confirmed psychological needs that are much closer to our identity than even our body.”

Melzer stated that the vilification of Assange had been aimed at deflecting attention from the state crimes revealed by WikiLeaks. Referring to slanders directed against Assange, he said: “We’re discussing cats and skateboards, but we are not discussing things which have been documented as war crimes.”

Asked about the response to his findings, Melzer said that while governments “grudgingly tolerated” him for now, despite their blithe dismissal of his judgements, he had been told that there would be a “political price to pay” for his exposures.

The UN official noted the way in which international legal norms had been eroded over the previous years: “We have been privatising public service for 40 years, and now we have almost been privatising governments. We have privatised prisons, armies, police, so it’s no wonder governments think they are private.”

Furse also stated that the Assange case had revealed the power of major financial interests, and their undermining of democratic rights.

Nils Melzer addressing a public meeting in London last January

Explaining the broader significance of Assange’s persecution, Melzer declared: “The real purpose of torture, most of the time, is intimidation. And it is not necessarily intimidation of the victim. It’s intimidation of everybody else. That’s why people are tortured in public places, women are raped in the village square in armed conflicts and people are being executed publicly.

“That is what is happening to Julian Assange. It’s not about punishing him [or] interrogating him and finding the truth. It’s about intimidating all other journalists and publishers and making sure that no-one does what he has done, because that’s what states are afraid of.”

Melzer warned “this purpose has already been achieved,” which meant that “this fight is really to re-establish press freedom, rather than just protecting it.”

The event can be viewed in full at Consortium News here.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment