After weeks with almost no new coronavirus infections, Beijing has
recorded dozens of new cases in recent days, all linked to a major
wholesale food market, raising concerns about a resurgence of the
disease.
There had been almost no new cases in the city for almost two months
until an infection was reported on June 12, and since then the total
number has climbed to 51, including eight more in the first seven hours
of Sunday.
According to the city’s health authority, contact tracing showed all
the infected people had either worked or shopped inside Xinfadi, said to
be the largest food market in Asia, or had been in contact with someone
who was there.
“Beijing has entered an extraordinary period,” city spokesman Xu Hejian told a news conference on Sunday.
The market was closed before dawn on Saturday and the district containing the market put itself on a “wartime” footing.
The Beijing outbreak has already spread to the neighbouring
northeastern province of Liaoning. According to the provincial health
authority, the two new cases confirmed in Liaoning on Sunday were both
people who had been in close contact with confirmed cases in Beijing.
At least 10 Chinese cities, including Harbin and Dalian, have urged
residents not to travel to the capital or to report to authorities if
they have done so recently.
Huaxiang, a neighbourhood in the same district as the food market and
which has one of China’s biggest used car centers, raised its epidemic
risk level to high on Sunday, becoming the only neighbourhood in the
country to be on high alert. This status means there can be no economic
activity until the outbreak is controlled.
As of 3 p.m. on Sunday, 10 neighbourhoods in Beijing, such as Financial Street, had raised their risk levels from low to medium.
“Beijing will not turn into a second Wuhan, spreading the virus to
many cities all over the country and needing a lockdown,” a government
epidemic expert told Health Times on Sunday, referring to the city where
the epidemic in China first emerged late last year.
Zeng Guang, former chief epidemiologist at Chinese Center for Disease
Control and Prevention and currently a senior expert with the National
Health Commission, predicted that the outbreak will likely be controlled
after the initial spike of a few days, according to the report by
Health Times, a paper run by state media People’s Daily.
Like other countries around the world, China is concerned to prevent a
second wave from emerging after easing lockdowns that hammered its
economy earlier this year.
MARKET UNDER SCRUTINY
An epidemiologist with the Beijing government said on Sunday that a
DNA sequencing of the virus showed the latest outbreak in the market
could have come from Europe.
“Our preliminary assessment is the virus came from overseas. We still
can’t determine how it got here. It might’ve been on contaminated
seafood or meat, or spread from the faeces of people inside the market,”
state media quoted Yang Peng as saying.
Officials said anyone who had been to or had contact with people who
had been to Xinfadi since May 30 will be required to report to their
work or residential units and get tested for coronavirus, the Beijing
Daily said on Saturday.
Long queues for tests formed outside a hospital near the market on Sunday, pictures in the People’s Daily showed
Beijing health authority spokesman Gao Xiaojun told the news
conference on Sunday that anyone in the city with a fever will be given
tests for the coronavirus, a blood test and a CT scan.
More than 1,500 tonnes of seafood, 18,000 tonnes of vegetables and
20,000 tonnes of fruit are traded at the market daily, according to its
website. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-cases/new-wave-of-covid-19-cases-from-beijing-market-spreads-to-liaoning-idUSKBN23L01I
Health officials in Washington are warning that the coronavirus is
spreading more widely throughout the state, an increase likely driven by
transmissions that took place over Memorial Day Weekend.
In a report issued Saturday, the state Department of Health pointed
to two distinct hotspots, both of which are showing worrying signs of
increased spreading.
Confirmed COVID-19 cases are rising fastest in four counties east of
the Cascade Mountains, mostly rural and agricultural areas that were
spared from the first substantial outbreak in Washington.
Both cases and the rate at which tests are coming back positive are
increasing in Yakima, Spokane, Franklin and Benton counties. Projections
in three of those counties show they are at risk of recording hundreds
of new cases a day by the end of the month; Yakima County is already
recording cases at that rapid rate.
The outbreaks east of the Cascades are now comparable to the worst
days of the coronavirus epidemic in King County, home to Seattle, in
mid-March. Though they are much more sparsely populated, there are as
many cases per capita now in the eastern counties as there were in
Seattle during the height of its outbreak.
King County has a population 2.25 million and has recorded 8,611
coronavirus cases, according to state Health Department figures, or a
little under four cases per 1,000 residents. Yakima County, population
250,000, has recorded 5,129 confirmed cases, a per capita ratio five
times higher than King County.
The state Health Department also said they were concerned about a
growing number of cases confirmed in Western Washington. Models
maintained by epidemiologists at the University of Washington show the
estimated reproductive threshold — the average number of people someone
infected with the virus infects — rising above the 1.0 threshold needed
to keep cases on the decline.
Washington, the state that suffered the first confirmed coronavirus
case back in January, is now beginning to reopen its economy. In a
statement Saturday, Gov. Jay Inslee (D) said the new report was cause for concern.
“The report estimates cases and deaths will soon increase
substantially if COVID-19 continues to spread at current levels,” Inslee
said. “This data will force us to look for some creative solutions and
strengthen our strong local – state partnerships to address the disease
activity.”
He asked Washingtonians to wear masks more vigilantly, and to maintain physical distancing practices.
“This is not the time to give up on efforts to protect ourselves, our
families and our communities. We are still in the middle of a pandemic
that is continuing to infect and kill Washingtonians,” Inslee said.
In a statement, Washington State health officer Kathy Lofy said the
increased number of cases was likely a result of Memorial Day Weekend
festivities about three weeks ago. That stretch of time would give
people a sufficient period of time in which to get sick, develop
symptoms and progress to a state in which they seek treatment for their
illness.
Lofy said the numbers of new cases are not indicative of any spread
at protests over the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who
was killed by police in Minneapolis. The protests that have been
especially large in Seattle, Tacoma and other Western Washington towns.
Any new cases among protestors probably have not had time to manifest
in substantial ways yet; any new cases spread during the protests
probably would not show up for at least another week.
After about a month at a stable plateau, the number of confirmed
coronavirus cases across the country has started to rise. More than
20,000 new cases have been identified on each of the last four days,
according to the COVID Tracking Project. Doctors confirmed nearly 24,000
cases on Thursday, and more than 26,000 cases on Friday.
States that raced to reopen their economies, like Texas, Florida,
Arizona and the Carolinas, are seeing substantial increases. But so too
are states like Washington, where restrictions have been lifted more
slowly.
More than 2,066,000 people in the United States have been diagnosed
with the coronavirus. More than 115,000 have died, by far the highest
total of any country in the world. https://thehill.com/homenews/coronavirus-report/502620-washington-state-sounds-alarm-over-rising-coronavirus-cases
Scientists stress that just because someone has recovered from Covid-19 and produced antibodies to the coronavirus does not mean they are protected from contracting it a second time. No one’s yet proven that.
That, then, leaves open the question: What does immunity look like?
Experts anticipate an initial coronavirus infection will lend people
some level of immunity for some amount of time. But they still don’t
know what potpourri of antibodies, cells, and other markers in a
person’s blood will signify that protection. And determining those
“correlates of protection” is crucial both so individuals can know if
they are again at risk, and so researchers can understand how well
potential vaccines work, how long they last, and how to accelerate their
development.
“What you would like is to have some blood measure that serves as a
correlate of that protective efficacy or immunity,” said Sarah Fortune,
the chair of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard’s T.H. Chan
School of Public Health. “Which sounds like it’s simple, but it’s much
more complicated than you’d think.”
Knowing the correlates of protection is different from knowing the
mechanism of protection. Immunity is a Rube Goldberg machine, a
choreography of different proteins and cells that results in the body
fending off a pathogen before it can gain a toehold. The scheme varies
from pathogen to pathogen.
Correlates of protection, rather, are signals that someone is
protected, the way glancing at a formidable offensive line makes clear
that it can hold off the pass rush. They could include the presence of —
as well as the levels of — certain types of antibodies, immune cells,
or proteins that act like messengers in the immune system.
Scientists don’t need to fully understand the correlates to make
progress on vaccines. Already, researchers have launched a number of
clinical trials for vaccine candidates to test whether they are safe and
effective against Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. But
scientists are relying on clues from how our bodies protect themselves
from other viruses, including the other disease-causing coronaviruses,
to guide what kind of immune response vaccines should aim to induce.
“We don’t formally need to know” the correlates of protection, said
John Mascola, the director of the National Institutes of Health’s
Vaccine Research Center. “One can make the vaccine somewhat empirically,
which means make it and test it, and in the old days that’s how all the
vaccines were made.”
Now, vaccine research and determining the correlates of protection
often take place at the same time, Mascola said. And with the
coronavirus, vaccine developers “are taking advantage of the fact that
we think we know what kind of antibody response to generate, and that’s
what the designs are based on.”
After clinical trials confirm one vaccine’s effectiveness, other
immunizations that produce the same immune responses could be
accelerated into use, Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute
of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently told STAT.
“If one vaccine proves efficacy in a clinical trial and another
vaccine is behind it but it’s getting the same correlate of immunity,
you could bridge data and facilitate the approval of the second and the
third one based on the efficacy of the first one,” Fauci said.
Experts stress that it’s still key to test vaccines in large-scale
clinical trials, and not solely approve them based on correlates of
protection. Only clinical trials demonstrate whether a vaccine lowers
the risk of infection in people or makes them less likely to get
severely ill.
To study the correlates of protection, scientists are now peering
into the blood of people who have recovered from Covid-19 to map the
defenses the immune system put up when the virus attacked. In recent
weeks, they’ve described the type of antibodies produced, finding that
they can have powerful effects against one of the virus’ key proteins, and that almost all patients
who had the disease, even those who had mild infections, generated
antibodies. Those are positive signs, given that a type of antibody,
called a neutralizing antibody, is, in sufficient quantities, expected
to offer some amount of protection for at least some amount of time.
Scientists have also reported the rallying of immune cells, which can be involved in recognizing a virus and stopping it.
The thought is that the defenses the body mounted to vanquish the
virus the first time provide clues to what is required to fend off a
second attack.
To confirm that people who recover from Covid-19 are protected and to
determine how long that lasts, scientists have to track people and see
what happens to them if they encounter the virus again. That research
often focuses on health care workers who are more likely to be exposed
repeatedly. (Scientists can’t ethically expose people to the virus again
intentionally.)
But with animals, researchers can “challenge” those that are
vaccinated or have had an initial infection to see if they can ward the
virus off — which is what recent studies in monkeys demonstrated.
Scientists found that the animals generated neutralizing antibodies
after they first contracted the virus or when they were given
experimental vaccines, and that the higher the level of the antibodies
the monkeys had (the higher the “titer,” in scientific parlance), the
more protected they were against the pathogen when scientists sprayed a
second dose into their noses.
“That is a suggestion that neutralizing antibodies to the virus can
protect” against reinfection, said Dan Barouch, the director of Beth
Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Center for Virology and Vaccine
Research, who steered that research.
If that finding extends to people, “we will start to be able to use
that as a predictor of success,” Barouch said. That is, in experiments
with vaccine candidates, researchers can start to see what levels of
neutralizing antibodies they are producing, and prioritize those that
seem to generate more promising responses.
With some diseases, researchers also run “human challenge trials” of
vaccines — in which volunteers are given an experimental vaccine and
then exposed to the virus — in an attempt to speed up the process of
testing them. Scientists are divided
over the ethics of such trials for the coronavirus, but those who are
supportive say one benefit could be establishing the correlates of
protection, indicating which parts of the immune system need to be
active to insulate someone from the virus.
Scientists often home in on neutralizing antibodies as correlates,
but there can be other markers as well. They include other types of
antibodies, like binding antibodies; immune cells like T cells and B
cells; and cytokines — small proteins released by immune cells that
serve as messengers. In the monkey study, for example, Barouch and
colleagues also found an association between protection and the level of
another type of antibody, though it wasn’t as strong as the correlation
between protection and neutralizing antibodies.
“There are a whole bunch of other things that people look at for
correlates of protection,” said virologist Angela Rasmussen of Columbia
University.
One challenge is that people respond differently to infections; some
studies, for example, have found people who recovered from Covid-19
actually generated low levels of antibodies. But because the immune
system is so complex, having low levels of antibodies does not
necessarily mean that a person won’t be safeguarded. All that can make
it harder to define exactly what immunity looks like.
“Some people who’ve had this have not had high antibody titers or
have had low antibody titers,” said Anna Durbin, a vaccine researcher at
Johns Hopkins University. “We still don’t know what’s going to happen
to them if they’re re-exposed.”
Durbin also noted that what’s happening with immune cells and
antibodies in someone’s blood may not mean the cells in the upper airway
— which the coronavirus targets — are similarly defended. Certain
antibodies in the blood might stave off severe illness, but they won’t
necessarily be able to fully prevent the virus from reinfecting cells in
the nose and throat.
Because of the difficulties of stopping upper respiratory infections, scientists are already anticipating that Covid-19 vaccines may not provide complete protection — called sterilizing immunity — but will rather reduce the risk of contracting the virus and of getting critically sick.
“I am not convinced we’re going to have a singular, absolute correlate of protection,” Durbin said.
With Covid-19, immunity — whether from an infection or a vaccine — is
expected to wane over perhaps a few years; that is what happens with
the four human coronaviruses that cause colds. If that pattern extends
to this virus, people will gradually become more susceptible to the
virus after some amount of time (though they may be less likely to get a
severe case). Tracking the levels of the different correlates could
provide clues to how long immunity lasts, and when a person becomes
vulnerable again. It could also indicate when people might need another
dose of the vaccine.
“When we’re trying to evaluate an immune response, we don’t only want
to see we engage the proper immune responses for protection,” said
Scott Hale, a University of Utah immunologist. “We also want to make
sure there’s some form of long-lasting immunity in case you’re exposed
to the pathogen in a year or five years or 10 years.”
A California judge on Friday sided with Republican legislators who
said Gov. Gavin Newsom overstepped his powers with dozens of emergency
orders during the coronavirus crisis that changed everything from how
public meetings are conducted to when tenants can be evicted.
Sutter County Superior Court Judge Perry Parker only halted one of
the orders, involving the November election, but ordered Newsom to
refrain from new orders that might be interpreted as usurping the
Legislature’s responsibilities.
The judge appeared to adopt without changes a proposed order
submitted to him by GOP Assemblymen James Gallagher and Kevin Kiley, who
challenged the election order.
Parker barred Newsom “from further exercising any legislative powers
in violation of the California Constitution and applicable statute,
specifically from unilaterally amending, altering, or changing existing
statutory law or making new statutory law.” He scheduled a hearing for
June 26 to consider issuing a preliminary injunction.
“This is a victory for separation of powers,” the lawmakers said in a
joint statement. “The governor has continued to brazenly legislate by
fiat without public input and without the deliberative process provided
by the Legislature. Today the judicial branch finally gave him the check
that was needed and that the Constitution requires.”
The state attorney general’s office referred questions to the governor’s office because he is their client in the case.
Newsom spokesman Jesse Melgar said in a statement that, “We are
disappointed in this initial ruling and look forward to the opportunity
to brief the Court on the issues.”
Newsom broadly and repeatedly used his executive and emergency
authority during the first weeks of the pandemic to virtually shut down
the state and its economy. He’s had the backing of federal and state
courts that have blocked previous challenges to his efforts to slow the
spread of the coronavirus.
Richard Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the
University of California, Irvine, said Parker’s order appears to block
executive orders “that would suspend or alter statutory law or further
exercise ‘legislative powers.’”
“There can of course be disagreements about what that means in the context of particular executive orders,” he said.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of
California, Berkeley, said the judge’s order “says only that the
governor cannot issue orders that violate the law.”
“The paragraph in the order is vague, but I think it clearly does not
forbid all executive orders, just those that are unconstitutional or
violate statutes,” he said.
Lawmakers of both political parties have criticized Newsom, a
Democrat, for not sufficiently including them in his sweeping
declarations and budget decisions since the pandemic began. The governor
has issued more than 40 executive orders, according to a court filing
by Gallagher.
They include halting evictions, delaying late fees for paying taxes
or renewing drivers licenses, allowing grocery stores to once again hand
out single-use bags for free — even allowing couples to be married by
video or teleconference, with marriage licenses and certificates
digitally signed and sent by email.
They are in a 28-page list submitted by Kiley of Newsom’s orders that alter existing state laws.
They also include allowing local and state governments to hold public
telephone meetings instead of meeting in person; extending deadlines
for various businesses to pay fees, file reports or renew licenses;
suspending rules intended to protect patients’ medical privacy;
suspending deadlines and instructional requirements for local school
districts; and suspending election deadlines and procedures.
Parker’s broad language forbidding future orders was at the end of a
five-paragraph ruling specifically halting a June 3 executive order
requiring county election officials to establish hundreds of locations
around the state where voters can cast ballots in person in the November
election.
Parker temporarily blocked that order, calling it “an impermissible
use of legislative powers in violation of the California Constitution
and the laws of the State of California.”
Newsom previously had ordered officials to send every registered
voter a mail-in ballot for the election as one of many responses to the
coronavirus pandemic. Republicans from President Donald Trump on down
have criticized that move as allowing for potential voter fraud, but
Parker’s ruling did not address that earlier order.
Separately, however, the conservative group Judicial Watch said it
has filed a motion in its own federal lawsuit seeking a preliminary
injunction against Newom’s order that ballots be sent to every voter.
State lawmakers, meanwhile, are advancing their own bills that would
direct counties to send mail-in ballots to every registered voter. The
Assemblymen’s lawsuit notes that they have been back in session since
May 4, including when Newsom issued the elections order, despite having
suspended the legislative session at the start of the pandemic.
Researchers from Airlangga University, Government’s Covid-19 Task
Force, and State Intelligence Agency (BIN) have claimed to have found
combinations of medicine that effectively reduce the number
of Sars-Cov-2, the coronavirus that causees Covid-19 disease, in the
human body.
The researchers have submitted the result to several scientific journals for peer review.
“We have been conducting research on medicine combination regiment
and two kinds of stem cells that quite good for eliminating the virus.
We use the Sars-Cov-2 virus from Indonesia,” Purwati, the head of
Airlangga University’s Stem Cell Research and Development Center, said
on Friday.
Purwati said the first medicine combination comprises of Lopinavir,
Ritonavir, and Azithromycin. The second combination includes of
Lopinavir, Ritonavir, and Doxycycline. The third combination includes of
Lopinavir, Ritonavir, and Clarithromycin. The fourth combination
comprises of Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin. Meanwhile, the fifth
combination comprises of Hydroxychloroquine and Doxycycline
“We have observed those combinations gradually from 24 hours, 48
hours, and 72 hours and it showed that the number of viruses lowered
from hundreds of thousands to undetected,” she said in a virtual press
conference.
Purwati said the researchers examined 14 medicine regiments in total,
but only found that were effective against the novel coronavirus.
She also explained the researchers decided to use a combination
regiment because it has better potency and effectiveness than the single
regiment.
“The combination regiment also requires less dosage, one-fifth to
one-third of the normal dosage, thus decrease the medicine toxicity in a
healthy body,” Purwati added.
Purwati said the medicines used in the combinations are the ones that
already in the market. The medication, she said, has been through
various testing of National Drug and Food Control Agency (BPOM) such as
in-vitro testing, animal testing, and post-marketing drug testing and
obtained circulation permit.
She said the researchers had ensured the medicine compound safety through several steps.
“First, we ensure whether the medicine contained toxic or not.
Second, we observe the medicine’s capability to kill the virus. Third,
we check the medicine’s effectiveness and how long the effects could
last. We also check the medicine’s inflammatory and anti-inflammatory
factors,” Purwati said.
Aside from that, Airlangga University, Government’s Covid-19 Task
Force and State Intelligence Agency have run research on two kinds of
stem cells, natural-killer cell and hematopoietic cell.
“Based on the observation, the natural-killer cell and the
hematopoietic cell can inactivate 80 percent to 90 percent of the virus
within 48 hours to 72 hours,” Purwati said.
She said the cells had been taken from the patient’s blood with a
breeding time of 3 to 4 days for hematopoietic cell and 7 to 14 days for
the natural-killer cell. Purwanti said, for preventive settings, the
natural-killer cell can last for approximately four months.
“We hope what we have been doing with the Covid-19 Task Force and BIN
can be useful for Indonesia and the world. We have also disseminated
this research by submitting seven journals about this research,” Purwati
said. https://jakartaglobe.id/news/indonesia-claims-five-drug-combinations-effectively-reduce-novel-coronavirus
Silicone molecules from breast implants can
initiate processes in human cells that lead to cell death. Researchers
from Radboud University have demonstrated this in a new study that will
be published on 12 June in Scientific Reports. “However, there
are still many questions about what this could mean for the health
effects of silicone breast implants. More research is therefore urgently
needed,” says Ger Pruijn, professor of Biomolecular Chemistry at
Radboud University.
The possible side effects of silicone breast implants have been
debated for decades. There are known cases where the implants have led
to severe fatigue, fever, muscle and joint aches, and concentration
disturbance. However, there is as yet no scientific study demonstrating
the effect silicone molecules can have on human cells that could explain
these side effects. Silicone in the body
It is a known fact that breast implants ‘bleed’, i.e. silicone
molecules from the implant pass through the shell and enter the body.
Earlier research, in 2016, by Dr Rita Kappel, plastic surgeon, and
Radboud university medical center, found that silicone molecules can
then migrate through the body via the bloodstream or lymphatic system.
The biochemists at Radboud University next asked themselves the
follow-up question: what effect might silicone molecules have on cells
exposed to it? Cultured cells
Experiments with cultured cells showed that silicones appeared to
initiate molecular processes that lead to cell death. “We observed
similarities with molecular processes related to programmed cell death, a
natural process called apoptosis that has an important function in
clearing cells in our body. This effect appeared to depend on the dose
of silicone and the size of the silicone molecules. The smaller the
molecule, the stronger the effect,” according to Pruijn.
To investigate the effect of silicones on human cells, the
researchers have added small silicone molecules — which also occur in
silicone breast implants — to three different types of cultured human
cells. “One cell was more sensitive to the effect of silicones than the
other two cell types. This suggests that the sensitivity of human cells
to silicones varies.” Open questions
The effects the researchers have found lead to many new questions.
“We observed that silicones induce molecular changes in cells, but we
don’t know yet whether these changes could, for example, lead to an
autoimmune response, which could in part explain the negative side
effects of implants,” says Pruijn.
“Caution is advised with drawing conclusions based on these findings
because we used cultured cells in our research, not specific human cells
such as brain cells or muscle cells. Further research is required to
get more clarity.”
Carla Onnekink, Rita M. Kappel, Wilbert C. Boelens, Ger J. M. Pruijn. Low molecular weight silicones induce cell death in cultured cells. Scientific Reports, 2020; 10 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-66666-7
Banks and bookstores. Gyms and juice bars.
Dental offices and department stores. The Covid-19 crisis has shuttered
some kinds of businesses, while others have stayed open. But which
places represent the best and worst tradeoffs, in terms of the economic
benefits and health risks?
A new study by MIT researchers uses a variety of data on consumer and
business activity to tackle that question, measuring 26 types of
businesses by both their usefulness and risk. Vital forms of commerce
that are relatively uncrowded fare the best in the study; less
significant types of businesses that generate crowds perform worse. The
results can help inform the policy decisions of government officials
during the ongoing pandemic.
As it happens, banks perform the best in the study, being economically significant and relatively uncrowded.
“Banks have an outsize economic impact and tend to be bigger spaces
that people visit only once in a while,” says Seth G. Benzell, a postdoc
at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and co-author of a
paper published Wednesday that outlines the study. Indeed, in the study,
banks rank first in economic importance, out of the 26 business types,
but just 14th in risk.
By contrast, other business types create much more crowding while
having far less economic importance. These include liquor and tobacco
stores; sporting goods stores; cafes, juice bars, and dessert parlors;
and gyms. All of those are in the bottom half of the study’s rankings of
economic importance. At the same time, cafes, juice bars, and dessert
parlors, taken together, rank third-highest out of the 26 business types
in risk, while gyms are the fifth-riskiest according to the study’s
metrics — which include cellphone location data revealing how crowded
U.S. businesses get.
“Policymakers have not been making clear explanations about how they
are coming to their decisions,” says Avinash Collis PhD ’20, an
MIT-trained economist and co-author of the new paper. “That’s why we
wanted to provide a more data-driven policy guide.”
And if the Covid-19 pandemic worsens again, the research can apply to shuttering businesses again.
“This is not only about which locations should reopen first,” says
Christos Nicolaides PhD ’14, a digital fellow at IDE and study
co-author. “You can also look at it from the perspective of which
locations should close first, in another future wave of Covid-19.”
The paper, “Rationing Social Contact During the COVID-19 Pandemic:
Transmission Risk and Social Benefits of U.S. Location,” appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science,
with Benzell, Collis, and Nicolaides as the authors. Benzell is about
to start a new position as an assistant professor at Chapman University;
in July, Collis will become an assistant professor at the University of
Texas at Austin; Nicolaides is also a faculty member at the University
of Cyprus. Cumulative risk
To conduct the study, the team examined anonymized location data from
47 million cellphones, from January 2019 through March 2020. The data
included visits to 6 million distinct business venues in the U.S. The 26
types of businesses in the study accounted for 57 percent of those
visits, meaning the study covers a broad swath of the economy.
By examining the location data over an extended time period, the
scholars were able to determine what the typical crowding level is for
all business types in the study.
The study also used payroll, revenue, and employment data from U.S.
Census Bureau to rate the centrality of different industries to the
economy. Businesses in the study represented 1.43 million firms, 32
million employees, $1.1 trillion in payroll, and $5.6 trillion in
revenues. The researchers also added a survey of 1,099 people people to
gauge public preferences about different types of business.
A key to the researchers’ approach is recognizing that during the
pandemic, many consumers are trying to limit trips that generate
interaction with strangers, while still needing to get essential and
useful transactions done.
As Benzell notes, “The idea was, how can we think about rationing
social contacts in a way that gives us the most bang for our buck, in
terms of meetings, while keeping the risk of Covid transmission as low
as possible?”
The study also rates risk on the basis of aggregate public exposure,
per business type. On an individual basis, spending a couple of hours in
a movie theater with strangers might seem quite risky. But in February
2020, movie theaters had about 17.6 million consumer visits in the U.S.,
whereas sit-down restaurants had almost 900 million visits in the same
month. As a business category, sit-down restaurants would likely
generate much more total transmission of Covid-19.
“It’s not danger per visit, but it’s a cumulative danger,” Nicolaides
explains. “If you look at movie theaters, they seem dangerous, but not
that many people go to the movies every day … and restaurants are a good
counter-example.” Outlier: Liquor stores staying open
In many cases, the researchers say, policymakers have made reasonable
decisions about which types of businesses should be open and closed.
But there are exceptions to this. Take liquor stores, which have been
deemed an “essential” business in many U.S. states.
“What really jumps out at us is liquor and tobacco stores,” Benzell
says. “Most states have allowed liquor stores to remain open. This is a
bit of a bad call from our perspective, because liquor stores don’t
create a lot of social value. If you ask people which stores they want
to be open, liquor stores are near the bottom of that list. They don’t
have that many receipts or employees, and they tend to be these small,
crowded places where people are up against each other trying to
navigate.”
In the study, liquor stores rate 20th out of the 26 business types in economic importance, but 12th highest in risk.
By contrast, the researchers are more bullish about the public health
dynamics of college and universities, which they rank 8th out of the 26
business types in economic importance, but just 17th in terms of risk.
If campus living arrangements could be made more safe, the researchers
think, the other parts of university life could offer relatively
reasonable conditions.
“Colleges and universities actually have the potential to offer
pretty good social contact tradeoffs,” Benzell says. “They tend to be
places with big campuses, they tend to be [composed of] consistently the
same group of young people, visiting the same places. When people are
worried about colleges and universities, they’re mostly worried about
dormitories and parties, people getting infected that way, and that’s
fair enough. But [for] research and teaching, these are big spaces, with
pretty modest groups of people that produce a lot of economic and
social value.”
The scholars note that the study contains national ratings, and
acknowledge that there might be some regional variation in effect as
well.
“If a local government would like to apply this paper [to their
policies], it may be a better idea to put in their own data to make
decisions,” says Nicolaides. That said, the study did not indicate
significantly different results for urban and rural settings, something
the researchers evaluated.
To be sure, some businesses are adapting to the pandemic by using new
protocols or safety measures, such as limited customers in hair salons
or safety partitions at supermarket checkout counters. Studying business
venues with such safety measures in place would also be valuable, the
scholars note.
“Moving forward, an interesting exercise would be to see how
dangerous these locations are once you implement these mitigation
strategies.” Collis says. “Those are all interesting open questions,
seeing which business adapt. And some of these adaptations will probably
be temporary changes, but other business practices may stick in the
Covid age.”
Research support was provided by MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy.
Seth G. Benzell, Avinash Collis, Christos Nicolaides. Rationing social contact during the COVID-19 pandemic: Transmission risk and social benefits of US locations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020; 202008025 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2008025117
