This week produced many valuable reads; here is a sample:
Stay at Home
How can you shelter-in-place if you do not have shelter?
by Ana Cecilia Alvarez, n+1, April 13, 2020
Read here.
What People Power Looks Like in a Pandemic Democracy
by Corey Robin, The New York Review of Books, April 13, 2020
Read here.
What are African journalists, scholars and activists saying about Covid-19?
by Duncan Green, From Poverty to Power, April 16, 2020
Read here.
More Covid analysis by African authors, and a first instalment from India
by Duncan Green, From Poverty to Power, April 17, 2020
Read here.
Coronavirus response: why Cuba is such an interesting case
by Emily Morris, The Conversation, April 15, 2020
Read here.
Cuba: Pandemic Journal
by Reed Lindsay, The New York Review of Books, April 17, 2020
Read here. [note: the page presents a series of international ‘journals’ so you will have to scroll down to get to Reed Lindsay’s from Havana.
The chemical blob that changed humanity
by Dr. John Ross, Halifax Chronicle Herald, April 18, 2020
Read here.
Why Canadians should wish Sweden well in its no-lockdown approach to COVID-19
by Chris Selley, Ottawa Citizen, 18 April 2020
Read here.
Sweden Says Controversial Virus Strategy Proving Effective
by Niclas Rolander, Bloomburg, April 19, 2020
Read here.
Vietnam has reported no coronavirus deaths – how?
by Robyn Klingler-Vidra & Ba-Linh Tran, The Conversation, April 21, 2020
Read here.
The Promise and Peril of Antibody Testing for COVID-19
by Jennifer Abbasi, JAMA Network, Published online April 17, 2020: doi:10.1001/jama.2020.6170
Read here.
As the coronavirus swept over China, experts were in denial
by Helen Branswell, STAT, April 20, 2020
Read here.
The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2
by Andersen, K.G.; Rambaut, A., Lipkin, W.I.; et al., Nature Medicine, March 17, 2020: volume 26, pp 450-452 (2020)
Read here or here.
Covid-19 genome expert scoffs at lab leak theory
by Alan Boyd, Asia Times, April 17, 2020
Read here.
Virus Researchers Cast Doubt On Theory Of Coronavirus Lab Accident
by Emily Kwong, NPR, April 23, 2020
Read here.
Why US outsourced bat virus research to Wuhan
US-funded $3.7 million project approved by Trump’s Covid-19 guru Dr Anthony Fauci in 2015 after US ban imposed on ‘monster-germ’ research
by Christina Lin, Asia Times, April 22, 2020
Read here.
Pollution Kills Nine Million People a Year. How Is That Okay?
Recent studies put the vast human and economic toll of global pollution into sharp relief. Will lawmakers respond?
by Pranav Reddy, Undark, April 16, 2020
Read here.
Carbon Policy Is Not Climate Policy
Toward A Refreshed Agenda For Climate Activism?
Produced by The Corner House, 13 April 2020
PDF available here.
Netanyahu aims for West Bank annexations by July
The Israeli prime minister plans to realize a US-backed blueprint before the end of Trump’s first term
by Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, Asia Times, April 21, 2020
Read here.
Stuck: Israel and American Jews
by Ethan Bronner, The New York Review of Books, Issue dated April 9, 2020
Review and discussion of:
We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel, by Daniel Gordis; and Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance, by Amy Kaplan
Read here.
Covid-19 will pass. Will we be able to say the same about the racism it has illuminated?
Morgan Medlock, STAT, April 23, 2020
Read here.
And finally this link, prefaced with some editorial comment …
This article from Science is a very useful status-of-conjecture report: lots of observations, lots of questions (the writers are non-declarative and questioning, which is refreshing), and some emerging conclusions and anomalies, as well as some hints about treatments that themselves could be factors in the progress of the disease for some. Noting that the piece is already dated—ten days old as I write this—in what is a rapidly-moving investigation, I want to touch on two impressions that I took from the article: First, that the actual course of the disease is quite individual…that there is no ‘C-19 classic’, but rather a complex set of potential complications experienced by patients (nicely categorised in the Science article), with some critical forks-in-the-road that seem common to all; and Second, that the course that the disease takes, right from the point of ‘infection’ (or not), is quite varied and highly-related to pre-conditions in each individual’s personal health status and pre-existing vulnerabilities, and so also tied intricately to pre-existing socio-economic determinants of health and physical security (although this paper does not allude directly to this element). Here is the link:
How does coronavirus kill? Clinicians trace a ferocious rampage through the body from brain to toes
By Meredith Wadman; Jennifer Cousin-Frankel; Jocelyn Kaiser; and Catherine Matacic, Science|AAAS, April 17, 2020 (updated April 20, 2020 with one correction.)
Read here.