Friday, May 22, 2020

Coronavirus News (109)

STUDY: COVID PATIENTS SUFFERING ACUTE KIDNEY DAMAGE over a third of COVID-19 patients experienced acute kidney injury ........ “We found in the first 5,449 patients admitted, 36.6% developed acute kidney injury” ........ Doctors have also found links between COVID-19 and a variety of other conditions, including vitamin deficiency, blood clots, and it’s also known to have devastating effects on the lungs, intestines, and the heart. All told,

a picture is starting to emerge of a ferocious, unpredictable illness that can attack organ systems across the body

. ......... 14.3 percent of patients required dialysis, the process of removing excess water and toxins from the blood when the kidney can no longer take care of the process. ....... There was also a strong association between COVID-19 patients ending up on a ventilator and developing acute kidney failure. Among more than 1,000 patients on ventilators, 90 percent developed the serious condition.

Why contact tracing may be a mess in America High caseloads, low testing, and American attitudes toward government authority could pose serious challenges for successful efforts to track and contain coronavirus cases. ....... Stubbornly high new infection levels in some areas, the continued shortage of tests, and American attitudes toward privacy could all hamstring the effectiveness of such programs. ........

The chief challenge with this coronavirus is its potential to spread exponentially

: absent containment measures, every infected person on average will infect two or three others, according to most estimates (although some studies find it could be higher). ........ If they successfully detected 90% of symptomatic cases and reached 90% of their contacts—and tested all of them regardless of whether they had symptoms—it could reduce transmissions by more than 45% .........

as regions relax social distancing measures, the average number of contacts for infected patients could rise to closer to 20.

...... US tracing efforts will require 30 professionals for every 100,000 people (or more than 98,000 people nationwide). ........ They called on Congress to set up a 180,000-person contact tracing workforce that would cost the federal government some $12 billion. .......

Move fast and test things

........ people are most infectious before and within five days of the onset of symptoms ......

people with minimal or no warning signs like fevers and coughs are a major vector of the disease

............ Successful contact tracing efforts also require people to accept calls and heed advice from complete strangers...... Unfortunately, years of robocalls and telemarketing have conditioned many Americans to ignore calls from numbers they don’t recognize. ........ San Francisco’s contact tracers are finding that about 40% of potentially exposed contacts are Spanish-only speakers, many of them in crowded living situations. .......... Americans have already defied the orders of health officials in several prominent incidents, including assaults on store workers who asked people to wear masks, armed demonstrators protesting stay-at-home restrictions, and businesses that have reopened before their local government gave the go-ahead.


5 summer books and other things to do at home

The Post-COVID-19 World Will Be Less Global and Less Urban The COVID-19 pandemic will reverse the trends of globalization and urbanization, increasing the distance between countries and among people. These changes will make for a safer and more resilient world, but one that is also less prosperous, stable and fulfilling ......... In retrospect, we will come to view the years right before the 2008 financial crisis as “peak globalization.” ......... What was a growing “anti-globalization” consensus is poised to crystalize into a “de-globalization” reality. .......... After coronavirus, people will be more fearful of crowded trains and buses, cafes and restaurants, theaters and stadiums, supermarkets and offices. Crowded spaces are the lifeblood of cities. But now crowds are seen as major health risks. ....... De-urbanization would harm economic growth because cities generate enormous scale economies and have proved to be remarkably effective incubators of creativity and innovation. ........

In addition to being more productive, cities also tend to be more environmentally sustainable.

.... Globalization and urbanization generate challenges we must confront, all the more so in a post-coronavirus world. The solution is to manage them, not to reverse them.


The Pandemic Is Turbo-charging Government Innovation: Will It Stick? The trick for making these solutions stick, they say, is transitioning from a focus on modernization to

a culture of continuous innovation

. .......... persistent challenges like cybersecurity, healthcare, and the one we are all most concerned about right now: the COVID-19 pandemic and its many troubling repercussions ......... Challenges like these really bring into focus the many critical roles that government agencies play in our lives. The current environment underscores how important it is that our government operate with the latest innovations and capabilities in hand. Government leaders need data-derived insights at their disposal and advanced technology tools that allow them to move rapidly and collaboratively as their mission-focused workloads require. .......... The massive $2 trillion coronavirus aid package passed by Congress in March includes

$340 billion in new government appropriations, much of which will go toward government telework, telehealth, cybersecurity, and network bandwidth initiatives

. .......... The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a congressionally chartered, independent commission, is urging Congress to double federal research and development spending on artificial intelligence in fiscal 2021 and then double it again the following year. .........

Innovations that are ubiquitous today, including the Internet, GPS, touchscreen display, smart phones, and voice-activated personal assistants, all stem from government investments.

........ the outdated technology and archaic business processes that are still embedded across the government. ......... Until recently, government agencies have been relatively slow in adopting emerging technologies and commercial best practices — cloud computing, artificial intelligence, robotic process automation (RPA), human-centered design, and customer experience, to name a few — that have been powering positive disruptions in the commercial sector for years. ......... They have tried to adapt commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software to rigid, complex, decades-old internal business processes that are often rooted in law and shaped by highly prescriptive compliance regulations. ...... ......Emerging capabilities such as software-defined everything, virtualization, containerization, open source software, API connectivity, advanced encryption, advanced data visualization, robotic process automation (RPA), and machine learning have evolved in recent years to the point where commercial technologies today are exceedingly more adaptable to government needs and use cases. ........

federal agencies throughout that period have been busy overhauling their outdated bureaucratic approaches

....... federal agencies correctly view cloud adoption as pivotal in their ability to leap-frog from being technology laggards to technology leaders. ........ today’s emerging and complex challenges, such as multi-domain operations in defense, public health, cybersecurity, and the transitioning economy. ....... Health and Human Services plans to employ AI, intelligent automation, blockchain, micro-services, machine learning, natural language processing, and RPA to support services like medication adherence, decentralized clinical trials, evidence management, outcomes-based pricing, and pharmaceutical supply chain visibility. ....... Technologies will constantly advance, so agencies need a different mindset that views innovation as a non-stop journey of continuous evolution and adaptation


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