ODI Covid-19 Project

Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to make labour markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.

The national media has lamented the lag in timely mortality figures due to the different ways care homes record such data. Data sharing between national and local government on medically shielded individuals and lists of volunteers has been a major talking point in cross-departmental discussions. And individual local authorities are acutely aware that they can’t afford to wait six months to be able to share data on factors affecting vulnerability between them — a typical length of time for signing a multi-organisation Information Sharing Agreement.

Perhaps the largest difference between the UK and France has been in the quality of data that is being provided to the public, to the media, and (I suspect) to the politicians making decisions about what to do. National, regional, sub-regional, and demographic breakdowns of deaths, hospital admissions, intensive care capacity and occupancy, excess deaths, and much more are provided regularly by French government bodies. The data.gouv.fr site hosts discussions where data is improved, improvements are requested, and analysis is shared. While The Financial Times has undoubtedly provided the best data analysis to the world, no UK paper has access to the data that would let it provide as good analysis to the country as the French press and French society have been able to provide to the French public and its politicians.

What would be particularly useful right now is a commitment to routinely collect and publish data on the demographics of everyone impacted by the coronavirus so that we can understand and act on these concerns. At the moment, we know the age and sex of everyone who contracts and tragically dies from the coronavirus, but we still have little additional reliable information, including about their ethnicity. If the information was collected and published in real time, it would help bring the true scale of the problem to light and provide more evidence about how to protect communities from the virus. Promises to provide this data in the future is not good enough – we need it to be collected and published right now. There simply is no good reason to wait.

“Either you keep this anonymous and potentially somewhat exploitable, or you just go full Black Mirror and tie it to people and identities,” said Samy Kamkar, a security researcher who is cofounder and chief security officer of access control company Openpath, in an interview with The Markup.

Renowned University of Cambridge security researcher Ross Anderson captures the threat perfectly in his critique of the proposal: The performance art people will tie a phone to a dog and let it run around the park; the Russians will use the app to run service-denial attacks and spread panic; and little Johnny will self-report symptoms to get the whole school sent home.

A US study suggests Covid-19 death rates rise by about 15% in areas with even a small increase in fine-particle pollution levels in the years before the pandemic."Patterns in Covid-19 death rates generally mimic patterns in both high population density and high [particulate matter] PM2.5 exposure areas," the Harvard University report says.

Starting on Tuesday, more than 300 Amazon employees have pledged to stay home from work, according to worker rights group United for Respect, as frustrations mount over protections and support for Amazon employees. Workers claim the company has failed to provide enough face masks for workers, did not implement regular temperature checks it promised at warehouses, and has refused to give workers paid sick leave.

“In a perfect world we would have data at a regional, or even more granular level, and cover not just broad-brush numbers of positive and negative tests and deaths. It would have more-localised data, breakdowns by gender and age bands. It would cover numbers of ITU patients, numbers of people recovered, the number of test kits we have, staffing, ventilators etc,” Watt says.