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"We try with our limited capabilities to keep clean. All those sanitizers, cleaning materials that you are talking about, we can't get," Um Ali tells CNN.

She lives in one of the many camps that have cropped up in the fields, olive groves, and rolling hills of Syria's rebel-held Idlib province. Most of the children have runny noses from exposure to harsh living conditions.

The family has dodged death multiple times over the course of the ongoing nine-year conflict in Syria. They fled a regime assault in Hama province when the war began in 2011, moving from one town to the next as the fighting dragged on.

But they can't run away from the global pandemic. COVID-19 is heading toward the war-ravaged province like a "slow moving tsunami," the World Health Organization says, and could claim tens of thousands of lives.

Idlib's population of 3 million, already buckling under extreme shortages of medicine, is considered to be one of the world's most defenseless against the virus.

Medical facilities in Idlib have been decimated in targeted airstrikes over the years. Doctors are already overstretched and hospital beds are in short supply. A brutal Syrian government offensive - propped up by Russia and Iran - that was launched in December added more pressure on the flailing healthcare facilities. The latest string of attacks also displaced nearly 1 million people, cramming the growing influx of families into sprawling camps with no infrastructure and increasingly unsanitary conditions.

The humanitarian crisis could culminate in an unparalleled health crisis when COVID-19 reaches Syria's northwest, says Dr. Munther Khalil from the opposition-controlled Idlib Health Directorate (IHD).

"We don't know if we have the coronavirus yet, but we are expecting a tsunami with a high death toll because of the lack of medical infrastructure," he says.

Medics are raising awareness about hygiene requirements, but it's a hard sell for a population reeling from the effects of war. "They have been through bombs, freezing to death, chemical attacks, so they are already resigned to death," Khalil said.

Idlib has only 1.4 doctors per 10,000 people, according to the IHD. Hospitals are already running at over-capacity, with an average 150% occupancy rate, according to the IHD. There are only around 100 adult ventilators in opposition-held parts of Syria, which includes Idlib and sections of the countryside of nearby provinces, and fewer than 200 ICU beds.

When COVID-19 spreads through the rebel enclave, more than 100,000 people could die, according to Khalil.

The Early Warning and Alert Response Network (EWARN), the only disease surveillance group operating in this part of Syria, says that between 40 and 70% of the population could get infected, based on global transmission rates.

According to those estimates, at least 1.2 million people in Idlib could contract COVID19, explains Dr. Naser Mhawish, the surveillance coordinator of EWARN.

Testing for the coronavirus, another key component of the battle against the spread of the pandemic, has been slow to start.

In all of opposition-held Syria, only one doctor and one device can carry out tests for the virus. After weeks of waiting, 300 tests privately purchased by EWARN from a Turkish manufacturer arrived at the Idlib Central Hospital's laboratory on Wednesday. So far, they have tested four suspected cases - all turned out negative.

The World Health Organization has said that it will also deliver some testing kits to opposition-held Syria. So far, these have not arrived, according to medical professionals in the enclave.

The organization has come under criticism for its slow response to the possibility of the pandemic hitting opposition-held areas, while making a delivery of the tests to Damascus.

"Corona(virus) and after corona(virus) - the suffering in this area will continue and nobody will do what they have to do to stop this catastrophe," Khalil says. "In general we think that the WHO and some donors they don't care a lot about this area."

The country's ongoing civil war has complicated the emergency health response, according to WHO's acting Regional Emergency Director Rick Brennan.

"The delay in supplying test kits to northwest Syria does not imply any favoring of one side of the conflict over the other, as some may choose to interpret it," Brennan says.

"We are busting our guts to make sure everything is ready," he says.

Even in government-controlled parts of Syria, capacity for testing remains low. The country has reported only five confirmed cases, but experts expect a bigger spread.

Damascus has received 1,200 testing kits from the WHO. According to the organization's Damascus representative, Dr. Nima Saeed Abid, 300 of these were used.

All of Syria is considered by the WHO to be a very high risk country in the event of the pandemic's outbreak. It has the largest population of internally displaced people in the world and its war has dealt a major blow to its health sector.

The White Helmets rescue group, officially known as Syria Civil Defense, are once again on the frontlines. Accustomed to pulling people from rubble as airstrikes pummel towns, the rescuers are now trying on hazmat suits.

"This pandemic is making my mind busy all the time, our work has been changed now and this is something that we are not used to do," says Laith Abdullah, a White Helmets volunteer.

The group has been retraining its volunteers to combat a new, invisible assailant. White Helmets volunteers have been disinfecting schools, IDP shelters and camps as a preventative measure against the spread of the virus. They have also helped set up quarantine facilities with limited resources.

"I am worried and have anxiety now because of the possibility of our capacity being divided while we face the coronavirus and a possible Syrian regime operation at the same time," says Ahmad Abu al-Nour, another volunteer.

One key humanitarian effort in Idlib is to raise awareness about preventative measures to contain the spread of the virus. The Turkish aid organization IHH has been going from tent to tent explaining containment measures for coronavirus. Other local NGOs have also been doing similar work. But without basic infrastructure, there is little that leaflets touting the importance of hand washing can do.

Back at the makeshift camp, Fatima Um Ali walks out of her tent and points to an empty blue plastic barrel. It's her family's allotment of water. A water truck is meant to come to the camp once a day to distribute water. But today the water tanker hasn't arrived, and the barrel is empty.

"When someone has been through everything we have been through from being displaced to bombardments, do you think that a virus would make that much of a difference?" Um Ali says.

She is resigned to her fate and has decided to cling to her faith.

"I am afraid that we will get sick just like everyone else in the world," she says.

"But I am also not afraid because in God I trust."

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Rebel-held Syria braces for coronavirus 'tsunami' -- without soap, running water or the prospect of social distancing * The Syrian Observatory For Human Rights

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Everything Fatima Um Ali needs to protect herself and her family from the novel coronavirus is out of reach. There is no running water, soap is expensive and hand sanitizer is an unaffordable luxury. She cannot even imagine what social distancing for her family of 16 would look like in the three tents they share in a makeshift ...

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Evaluating Sources: CML a teaching resource for students

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Evaluating Sources: CML a teaching resource for students

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HW : Choose a section from ONE of the newspapers you’ve selected. Choose ONE article which shows us how life is being affected by Corona.

Clearly identify and state:

The name of the newspaper/ news website/ media group.

The section of the newspaper that you're researching.

The headline of the article

The writer's name

Date of publication

Upload the article in padlet.

Read this 6 page Critical media Literacy guide that gives you a framework of the Five Core Questions and the Five core Concepts of Critical Media Literacy and use this pdf to answer the questions for your chosen article.
Task: Write a non literary commentary on your chosen article (500-750 words.)

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Dollars vs. deaths is the sickening choice created by coronavirus

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Dollars vs. deaths is the sickening choice created by coronavirus

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News website: CNN
Section: Politics + economy
Writer: Zachary B. Wolf
Date of publication: March 23, 2020
Jihan

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what matters: dollars vs. deaths is the sickening choice created by coronavirus - cnnpolitics

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Dollars vs. deaths is the sickening choice created by coronavirus

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How many lives is the world economy worth? That's not a trite oversimplification. It is an open question being raised by President Donald Trump.

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Commentary on "Coronavirus: A visual guide to the economic impact"

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Commentary on "Coronavirus: A visual guide to the economic impact"

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Coronavirus: A visual guide to the economic impact

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Coronavirus: A visual guide to the economic impact

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Newspaper: BBC
Authors: Lora Jones, David Brown & Daniele Palumbo
Date of Publication: 28th March 2020
Section: Global economics

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Lora Jones, Daniele Palumbo & David Brown BBC News

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Coronavirus: How the pandemic has changed the world economy

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Key maps and charts explain how the virus has impacted markets and businesses around the world.

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"It is not possible to get rid of corona without asking God for forgiveness,"  Usmani said.

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"It is not possible to get rid of corona without asking God for forgiveness,"  Usmani said.

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Thursday Mar 26, 2020

Reuters

At the request of President Arif Alvi, the Grand Imam Sheikh of Egypt's Al Azhar University issued a Fatwa permitting the suspension of Friday prayers to control the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

Saudi Arabia, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Palestine, Turkey, Syria and various other Muslim majority countries have suspended collective prayers but the Ulema of Pakistan have been unable to unite in fighting this virus and are continuing collective prayers despite efforts by the government to stop them.

Earlier, the spread of coronavirus in Palestine was linked to the religious gathering in Raiwind, which is one of the largest ones in the world. Pakistan was named a "super-spreader" by international media outlets in the Muslim world after failing to take necessary precautions in controlling the spread in its mosques.

Despite the Fatwa by Al Azhar university - which is considered as the Islamic world's most prestigious one - Pakistani clerics continue offering collective prayers, ignoring the severe health risks they pose.

Mufti Taqi Usmani who is one of the most revered religious clerics of Pakistan announced on Wednesday that congregational prayers would continue with the exception of people older than 50, young kids and those that showed symptoms of the deadly coronavirus.

"It is not possible to get rid of corona without asking God for forgiveness," Usmani said.

Mufti Tariq Masood, another prominent religious cleric opposed Usmani's view and supported the government in advising a ban on congregational prayers. In an emotional message released on social media, Masood said: "We still don't understand the intensity of this virus. You can pray at home during this time and ask Allah for forgiveness and health."
Read more: President Alvi asks ulema to urge masses to pray at home
A few days earlier, Allama Zameer Akhtar Naqvi claimed to possess the antidote for coronavirus. This claim was highly criticised by Pakistanis who believed that this claim showed how non-serious Pakistani clerics were in dealing with this global health crisis.

While scientists and pharmaceutical companies are working to develop a vaccine that could cure the virus, experts believe that such a vaccine could take anywhere between 12-18 months before it reaches the average consumer.

The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Science and Technology, Senator Sajjad Mir also commented on the Pakistani clerics' position on dealing with the virus. He said, "Please do not introduce a narrow-minded interpretation of our religion. Use common sense when interpreting religious texts".

Various members of the civil society and the government are collectively trying to convince the Ulema of Pakistan to unanimously agree on temporarily halting congregational prayers but as of the filing of this report, no consensus has been reached.

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Pakistani clerics quarrel as Egypt's Al-Azhar University announces major fatwa

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Thursday Mar 26, 2020 At the request of President Arif Alvi, the Grand Imam Sheikh of Egypt's Al Azhar University issued a Fatwa permitting the suspension of Friday prayers to control the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

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'Coughing while Asian': living in fear as racism feeds off coronavirus panic 

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'Coughing while Asian': living in fear as racism feeds off coronavirus panic 

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News website: The Guardian
Section: News
Writer: Lauren Aratani
Date of Publication: Tue, 24th March, 2020
Zoya.F.K
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/24/coronavirus-us-asian-americans-racism

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Job-hunting in a pandemic: 'Take a breath because it's not going to be easy'

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Job-hunting in a pandemic: 'Take a breath because it's not going to be easy'

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Paper: CBC
Writer: Kyle Bakx
Date: March 24, 2020
Section: Business/Economy

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With each passing day the number of job losses across the country continues to climb.

Hard-hit industries like the airline sector are seeing more than half of the workforce slashed. For those still with a job, many are earning less as companies like Cineplex announce pay cuts across the board.

On Monday, Ontario and Quebec ordered non-essential businesses to close. The move will certainly cause increased economic pain, although business groups are applauding it in hopes of getting ahead of the health risk now to minimize the length of the disruption.

Many other stores across the country are either closed or operating with reduced hours.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week said the federal government has received 500,000 applications for Employment Insurance, compared to just 27,000 for the same week last year.

Professional recruitment firms are seeing openings dry up for all types of employment in just about every sector of the economy.

"Take a breath because it's not going to be easy to find work right away," said Sharlene Massie, founder of Calgary-based About Staffing.

In the last few weeks, half of the firm's job postings had been taken down and the majority of its temporary workers have been released as employers adapt to the spread of COVID-19.

"We don't know exactly what will happen this week, but we're expecting it to go down again substantially," Massie said.

For the most part, job creation and hiring was steady across the country up until the last few weeks, according to Jeff Aplin, CEO of the David Aplin Group

"In terms of the labour market in Canada, it's been an incredible collapse of job losses that I've certainly never seen in my decades in the business," he said.

The travel, tourism, retail, restaurant and convention industries are just some of the hardest hit, he said, and likely face the biggest challenge recovering after the virus risk abates.

There is job growth in some limited sectors right now.

For instance, Aplin expects job opportunities in technology and IT from the main telecom and internet corporations and from firms big and small which play a role in providing or supporting online services.

"A lot of businesses and organizations have been talking for a long time about the digital transformation. Well, it just happened last week. Everybody who can, is working from home. If you can't, you're probably not working," he said.

In addition, the healthcare, delivery and grocery sectors are undergoing a demand in services.

On Monday, online grocer Goodfood announced 500 new positions across the country. The company said it is too soon to quantify the rise in sales and subscribers it has experienced this month, but it's why the company is growing its workforce by about 25 per cent.

"There's definitely been an uptick in demand," said spokesperson Ross Aouameur.

The new jobs are in accounting, technology and warehouse operations. Many of the jobs will be in Montreal, where the company is based, but also at fulfilment centres in Vancouver and Calgary, and with logistics teams in Ottawa and Toronto,.

"We're really looking to build the operational team, but also the support team to make sure we continue to deliver our quality product from coast to coast," he said.

Walmart Canada, Save-On-Foods and Loblaw say they need more workers to keep up with demand as Canadians stock up on household staples to get through the pandemic. Walmart alone said it needs 10,000 more staff.

Several traditional grocers have increased wages for staff in recent weeks. Amazon has temporarily hiked wages and overtime pay for staff in Canada too.

Besides those few sectors, the job market is expected to see many more losses as the virus spreads.

That's why it's difficult for Andrew Ward, with Diversified Staffing Services, to find many bright spots right now.

Still, his advice for job-seekers is to be patient, be positive and keep applying.

"There are still a few corporations that might be looking to add," he said. "It might not be immediate, but they are still planning for the future and they still need assistance."

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Job-hunting in a pandemic: 'Take a breath because it's not going to be easy' | CBC News

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With each passing day the number of job losses across the country continues to climb. Hard-hit industries like the airline sector are seeing more than half of the workforce slashed. For those still with a job, many are earning less as companies like Cineplex announce pay cuts across the board.

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The letter, led by Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.), urges House Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) - whose panel is reviewing the possibility of remote voting - to allow for a temporary rule change at a time of national emergency.

"Congress should be no exception to adapting to this crisis," the letter reads. "The House must adopt remote voting both to protect public health and to allow us to be the voices of our constituents."

The letter includes senior Democrats like House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.), as well as several West Coast lawmakers, like Democratic Reps. Ro Khanna, Pete Aguilar and Barbara Lee, all of California.

The pressure is also growing in the Senate, which remains in session this week as negotiators from both parties attempt to reach a nearly $2 trillion deal that would expand the nation's ability to deal with the crisis, on both the public health and economic front.

Two GOP senators on Monday came out publicly in support of voting remotely, one day after one of their colleagues, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), announced that he was positive for the virus.

"I'm ready to support remote voting," Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) tweeted on Monday. "Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. It is time to bring the Senate into the 21st century."

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C) - who had previously been lukewarm on the idea of voting electronically - also changed his stance.

"We should make this change before the Senate leaves town," Graham tweeted on Monday.

For Republicans, the threat of the virus could also pose a numbers problem: As of Monday, five GOP senators are sidelined from voting on the Senate floor because Paul is battling the infection and four others are self-quarantining after possible exposure. That further narrows the margins for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, as he attempts to muscle a massive economic rescue package through the chamber in short order.

Anxiety has been mounting in the Capitol, particularly after Paul's diagnosis on Sunday. The Kentucky senator had been in the building, attending meetings, voting on the floor and even using the Senate gym as he awaited the results of his test. Paul said he had not been aware of specific exposure.

But House and Senate leaders have warned that allowing members to vote remotely would be one of the biggest procedural changes to Congress in history - not to mention a massive and complicated undertaking that would take time to develop.

Some members have also raised security concerns with the prospects of voting electronically, especially if the system is created on a tight timeline with room for error.

"There is definitely a debate going on, certainly among the freshman, about what's the right thing for us to do. Is it for us to get on airplanes and get on vehicles and get down to Washington and vote in person?" Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) said in an interview Monday."For me, while I think it's interesting think about remote voting later on, I'm concerned about the security."

"Everyone's working at such a breakneck pace that anything we establish right now wouldn't go through the vetting to actually do a very historical thing," Slotkin said.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has said that the House would "adjust our voting procedures" to comply with guidance from federal health agencies, which have strongly warned against all gatherings of more than 50 people. Democrats have considered ideas like holding the vote open longer to limit the number of lawmakers on the floor at one point.

For the hidebound institution of Congress, that might be as far as lawmakers go, for now.

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Push for remote voting grows as lawmakers fear coronavirus poised to spread

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The letter, led by Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.), urges House Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) - whose panel is reviewing the possibility of remote voting - to allow for a temporary rule change at a time of national emergency. "Congress should be no exception to adapting to this crisis," the letter reads.

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"‘Social recession’: how isolation can affect physical and mental health"

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"‘Social recession’: how isolation can affect physical and mental health"

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Newspaper: The Guardian
Section I am researching: entire article
Headline:  "‘Social recession: how isolation can affect physical and mental health"
Writers name: Adam Gabbat
Date of Publication: 18th March 2020

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As the Covid-19 pandemic continues, millions of people in the US are coming to terms with being increasingly cut off from society.

Beyond the inconvenience of working from home, or not being able to go to bars, restaurants or cinemas, however, experts have found that social isolation can have a profound effect on people's physical, as well as mental health.

Long-term, isolation even increases the risk of premature death. It's being called a "social recession" to match any economic downturn also caused by the growing pandemic and it can have profound physical and psychological effects.

"People who are more socially connected show less inflammation, conversely people who are more isolated and lonely show increased chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation has been implicated in a variety of chronic diseases," said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University.

"We also have evidence that this is linked to cardiovascular function like blood pressure, heart rate, circulating stress hormones. It's been linked to even cellular ageing."

Bars and restaurants have been ordered closed in at least 11 states, including California, Illinois and New York, while more than 30 states have closed down schools. On Monday people in six counties in northern California were ordered to stay at home, one of the strictest measures yet in the US. France had imposed a lockdown which only allows people to make trips to supermarkets, pharmacies and their workplaces - should working from home not be an option, while Germany has closed places of worship, playgrounds and non-essential shops.

As countries across the globe hunker down, Holt-Lunstad's research presents a stark look at what social isolation over a period of years can do to the body. She examined data from across the globe to study the effects of people being socially isolated or lonely, or living alone.

Loneliness increases earlier death by 26%, social isolation by 29% and living alone by 32%

Julianne Holt-Lunstad

"Each of these significantly predict risk for premature death," Holt-Lunstad said.

"Loneliness increases earlier death by 26%, social isolation by 29% and living alone by 32%."

Holt-Lunstad didn't find that one cause of death was more prevalent than another. The risk of every cause of death - including heart disease, cancer, stroke, renal failure - increased from isolation.

A period of a few weeks in isolation should not lead to the inflammation and risk of cardiovascular trouble that Holt-Lunstad described. People could still see an impact on their health, however.

"We do have evidence that these [periods of shorter isolation] can have immediate and short-term kinds of effects on our physiology. But, for instance, if your blood pressure is elevated acutely, that's going to have a different kind of an effect than if your blood pressure's elevated chronically," Holt-Lunstad said.

"For those with underlying pre-existing conditions, those acute elevations might precipitate some sort of acute event. But for most of the rest of us, who may not have some kind of underlying condition, we hope that this would just be acute and wouldn't have these long-term effects."

One of the reasons people can suffer in social isolation is because personal relationships can help us cope with stress, Holt-Linstad said.

"For instance: the ongoing uncertainty of what's going on right now in the world, your body's response to that may differ. Depending on the extent to which you feel like you have the resources you need to cope with that. And that in large part may be dependent on whether or not you feel like you have others in your life you can rely on. That you've got someone who has your back or you can count on, or you can get through it together."

Dhruv Khullar, a physician and researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, said short periods of isolation can cause increase anxiety or depression "within days".

"We have evolved to be social creatures. For all the history of humanity, people have been in family structures, people have been in groups, we're evolved to kind of crave and rely on that interaction with other human beings," Khullar said.

"So when we don't have that it's a huge void in the way that we go about being human. This is something that has been kind of hard-wired into who we are as beings."

Khullar, who stressed the crackdown on social gatherings was necessary, said people do at least have a wealth of options to stay connected. Texting, video calling or even the phone could potentially help avert the sense of isolation or loneliness, Khullar said.

"Tech isn't a perfect substitute. Physical contact, being face to face with people, there's all sorts of subtle social cues that we pick up on that we rely on, that are ingrained in us over generations and millennia," he said.

"But I do think you can get part of the way there by engaging with others digitally. I think the richer the format, probably the better - so a phone call is better than a text, a video conference is probably better than a phone call."

Older people, who are more at risk of Covid-19, may be less technologically savvy, and may have fewer connections to begin with. They might not be able to video conference or even send a text message. Khullar said it was important to reassure them that help is at hand.

"Let's look out for the people that are most vulnerable," Khullar said.

"Make sure that you're reaching out to them to make sure that they're doing OK, that they understand that there are people still looking out for them that they're bonded with, that they're connected with."

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'Social recession': how isolation can affect physical and mental health

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As the Covid-19 pandemic continues, millions of people in the US are coming to terms with being increasingly cut off from society. Beyond the inconvenience of working from home, or not being able to go to bars, restaurants or cinemas, however, experts have found that social isolation can have a profound effect on people's physical, as well as mental health.

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Newspaper: CNN

Section of the newspaper: World

Headline of the article; Rebel-held Syria braces for coronavirus 'tsunami' -- without soap, running water or the prospect of social distancing

Writers’ names: Gul Tuysuz, Arwa Damon, Zaher Jaber and Eyad Kourdi, CNN

Date of Publication: March 26th 2020
Zoya

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rebel-held syria braces for coronavirus 'tsunami' -- without soap

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running water or the prospect of social distancing - cnn

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Gul Tuysuz, Arwa Damon, Zaher Jaber and Eyad Kourdi, CNN 

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Rebel-held Syria braces for coronavirus 'tsunami' -- without soap, running water or the prospect of social distancing

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Idlib's population of 3 million, already buckling under extreme shortages of medicine, is considered to be one of the world's most defenseless against the novel coronavirus.

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Corona and Sport / Culture
News Website : Al Jazeera
Date of publication  : 23 February 2020
Serie A suspended because of Coronavirus

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Inter Milan's game against Sampdoria was one of three matches called off [Stoyan Nenov/Reuters]

Italy's top football league has postponed three matches scheduled for Sunday in the northern regions of Lombardy and Veneto after the deaths of two people infected with the coronavirus.

On orders from the Italian government, the Serie A games between Inter Milan and Sampdoria, Atalanta and Sassuolo as well as Hellas Verona and Cagliari were called off.

More:

Three other matches in Genoa, Turin and Rome on Sunday were due to go ahead as scheduled.

A dozen towns in northern Italy effectively went into lockdown on Saturday after the deaths of two people infected with the coronavirus and a growing cluster of cases with no direct links to the origin of the outbreak abroad.

"The government is working on urgent measures to decisively confront and contain the cases of coronavirus contagion," read a letter from Sports Minister Vincenzo Spadafora to Italian Olympic Committee President Giovanni Malago shortly before midnight local time on Saturday.

"Following measures taken by the cabinet for protective reasons and maximum precaution, on orders of the government, I am asking you to suspend all sports events of every level and discipline planned for the Lombardy and Veneto regions on Sunday," the letter said.

Already on Saturday, the Ascoli-Cremonese game in Serie B was postponed, as well as Piacenza-Sambenedettese in Serie C. Four Serie C games scheduled for Sunday have also been postponed.

On Thursday, Inter is also slated to host Ludogrets in the second leg of the Europa League Round of 32.

"It's obvious that gatherings at sports events are among the events where the most difficulties could occur," Spadafora said earlier Saturday in Rome at the Six Nations rugby game between Italy and Scotland, which was attended by 55,000 fans.

Sports events across China and Asia have also been suspended amid fears that the Tokyo Olympics, due to open in five months, could also be affected.

Ghost towns

The secondary contagions prompted local authorities in the Lombardy and Veneto regions to close schools, businesses and restaurants and to cancel sporting events and Masses.

The mayor of Milan, Italy's business capital and the regional capital of Lombardy, shuttered public offices.

A 78-year-old man infected with the virus died in Veneto. A postmortem on a 77-year-old woman in Lombardy came back positive, though it was not clear if illness from the virus caused her death.

Hundreds of residents and workers who came into contact with 54 people who tested positive for the virus in Italy were put into isolation pending results of their tests. Civil protection crews set up a tent camp outside a closed hospital in Veneto to screen medical staff for the virus.

In the town of Codogno, where the first patient identified in the northern cluster was in critical condition, closed supermarkets, restaurants and shops made the main street practically a ghost town. The few people out wore face masks, coveted items that had sold out in pharmacies.

Lombardy government authorities said the region had 39 confirmed cases, all somehow traceable to the first one involving a man who had not travelled to China.

Ten towns in Lombardy received orders to suspend nonessential activities and services.

The Veneto region reported 12 people with the virus, including the 78-year-old man who died late Friday. Two of the region's confirmed infections were relatives of the man who died, Veneto regional president Luca Zaia said.

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Italy suspends Serie A football games over coronavirus fears

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Italy's top football league has postponed three matches scheduled for Sunday in the northern regions of Lombardy and Veneto after the deaths of two people infected with the coronavirus. On orders from the Italian government, the Serie A games between Inter Milan and Sampdoria, Atalanta and Sassuolo as well as Hellas Verona and Cagliari were called off.

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Trade Suspension Weighs Heavily On Balochistan

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Trade Suspension Weighs Heavily On Balochistan

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News Website: DAWN
Section: Business
Headline: (Title)
Writer: Muhammad Akbar Notezai
Date of Publication: March 30, 2020

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Balochistan, particularly its five bordering districts, is heavily dependent on the trade with Iran.

There has been a smooth flow of Iranian edibles into Balochistan through regular and irregular border points for years. One such point is in Panjgur, which is located in the Makran division.

The irregular border point through which Iranian edibles are imported is called Chedgi, near the Mashkel River in Panjgur. It generates handsome revenue for the customs department every year.

I recently had an opportunity to visit the said border point. I saw a number of Iranian edibles coming in. Zamyad vehicles are used to transport oil and diesel from Iran. The road between Chedgi and the Panjgur town is in bad shape. Hence, one prefers the dirt road to the main road.

The distance between the Panjgur town and Chedgi is around 95 kilometres. But it took us more than three hours to reach there, although we were in the deputy commissioner's Toyota Hilux Vigo. This raises the question: what challenges do traders usually face in reaching Chedgi?

I spoke to locals in the villages of Panjgur during my stay there. All of them said they went to the Chedgi border to earn a livelihood as coolies. But trade activities have now come to a halt following the outbreak of Covid-19.

The local Baloch who depend on the trade with Iran will soon be out of food even if they manage to escape Covid-19

With the exception of Zamyad vehicles loaded with oil and diesel coming from the Parom tehsil of Panjgur, formal trade has stopped altogether. According to one local named Rafique Chakar, the illegal trade is still going on, albeit at a slower-than-usual pace.

The situation is so bad that the local Baloch who depend on the trade with Iran may starve to death even if they manage to escape Covid-19. Unfortunately, the performance of provincial government officials as well as that of deputy and assistant commissioners is limited to photo shoots - a recent trend in the province that helps them conceal their inefficiency and apathy.

Like Panjgur, the other three bordering districts namely Turbat, Gwadar and Washuk also have irregular trade points with Iran. The situation there is more or less the same.

Chaghi, at the Taftan border point, is the sole official border point between Pakistan and Iran. Pakistan would import edibles through that point three days a week until recently. The customs would collect revenues of over Rs800 million in a month on the Taftan border. It is now closed owing to the Covid-19 threat.

In background interviews, officials in Taftan said they appreciated Iran's gesture of kindness as they let the export of edibles continue through Zero Point. As a result, residents of Taftan can get such items at throwaway prices.

But Quetta is hundreds of kilometres away from the Iranian border. This makes it too difficult to send imported edibles to Quetta. Owing to the Covid-19 threat, the economic situation has become even worse. The provincial government does not have a mechanism to cope with the situation.

Prime Minister Imran Khan has announced a stimulus package to minimise the adverse impact of the Covid-19 outbreak on the national economy. Balochistan-based businessmen and traders are dissatisfied as they don't expect to reap the benefits of the financial package. According to them, benefits of the package will go to the textile industry and other big businesses based in Karachi and Punjab that are involved in trade with other neighbouring and European countries.

Quetta Chamber of Commerce of Industry Senior Vice President Badruddin Kakar has got many reasons as to why he believes the trade with Iran has "officially and deliberately" been discouraged. He says he understands the trade on the whole is now suffering amidst Covid-19 and that the cross-border movement of goods via barter trade (owing to sanctions on Iran) has been affected.

"But no one is bothered. Trade is being affected because of not only Covid-19, but also mismanagement from the top. The provincial economy is collapsing," Mr Kakar says.

He says thousands of local people have become jobless in recent weeks. He also referred to a senior Balochistan High Court judge who asked the customs chief why he had not been to the places bordering Iran where locals suffered because of his department's mismanagement.

Federal and provincial officials, Mr Kakar points out, have not bothered to look into the issues the province is confronted with. Their focus is on Punjab, he says, because their vested interests lie there. "They do not care about public interest."

As the Covid-19 threat is not likely to fade away for months, it will leave long-lasting and irreversible effects on the trade with Iran and Afghanistan. At the same time, the government lacks proper planning and mechanism to tackle the issue by taking different stakeholders on board.

The Iranian government has written a letter hinting at the possibility of continued trade, said Mr Kakar. "Based on the Iranian letter, we have also written a letter to higher-ups, requesting that, as per the terms and conditions of the World Health Organisation, they should allow the trade through safe means."
Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, March 30th, 2020

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Trade suspension weighs heavily on Balochistan

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Balochistan, particularly its five bordering districts, is heavily dependent on the trade with Iran. There has been a smooth flow of Iranian edibles into Balochistan through regular and irregular border points for years. One such point is in Panjgur, which is located in the Makran division.

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Sitara -e -Shujaat, Nishan-e-Imtiaz

Pakistan is an under developed nation which has been suffering from crisis after crisis for the last many years and passing through political polarisation as well and with bad governance. While Pakistan's economy is already on ventilator, the coronavirus which is bringing the world economy to a standstill, can destroy our economy like it destroys human body's immune system and similarly this monster will hit adversely and make irreversible damage and all at once. Pakistan according to rough estimates may incur initial economic loss of Rs1.3tr due to coronavirus.

The Planning Commission estimated that the size of the country's GDP stood at Rs44 trillion and one/fourth stood at Rs11 trillion, so the disruption caused by coronavirus is expected to cause at least 10 percent losses in the last quarter (April-June) that would stand at Rs1.1 trillion at least.

This lethal pandemic that began in the depths of China's Hubei province spreading through the world has now besieged the whole nation and economy of Pakistan. There are now significant outbreaks in all territories and provinces of Pakistan and the first death reported was from Sindh while the rest of two from KPK province.

The economic fallout around the world due to the virus could include recessions in the US, euro-area and Japan, the slowest growth on record in China, and a total of $2.7 trillion in lost output-equivalent to the entire GDP of the UK. China will sustain because of its huge reserves.

While the developing economies are suffering from huge financial blows, the total external debt of Pakistan as of March 2019 is already $105 billion with additional burden of bonds, whereas our currency is depleting drastically against dollar.

By May 2019, the Pakistani rupee had undergone a year-on-year depreciation of 30% vis-a-vis the US dollar. The year 2019 along had added the debt of over $13 billion, which is over 40% of the total debt added in last 10 years. Most of our debt is from World Bank, IMF, Asian Development Bank, Paris Club, etc. There is only a small fraction of our debt which constitutes around 5% of the total liability which is due to CPEC. Taking these overt statistics of our economy into consideration, we would not be needing any further economic indicators to infer that we are doomed already if the outbreaks stay continued for few months.

Since 2017, Pakistan is on a consistent roller coaster of crisis, be it energy crisis, economic crisis, Kashmir crisis, security crisis, health crisis or media crisis and political crisis.

We have seen negative fallouts of the change of government and shift of power. Moreover, the factors making our economy even worse are the IMF programme, scrutiny by FATF, Indo-Pak relations, Kashmir crisis and inflation etc and now the potential damages caused by coronavirus can devastate the whole scenario.

The inflation rate in Pakistan has gone up to 12.93 which is highly alarming and it is big indicator that there is going to be more price hike but the income slab of almost all lower middle class people and the poor will remain static. Pakistan is an agro-based country and is capable to feed many neighbouring countries too but the increase in prices of regular items like wheat and sugar which have also recently gone short in supply is the main reason of inflation.

We have been crippled because of FATF & IMF and this burden of economy and destabilisation is only due to the fact that we always bow before IMF which is successfully ensuring to add more burden on common people of our country with non-stop price hike and consecutive increase in prices of petroleum products. We like our obedient mode and avoid being aggressive so we keep adding burden on to ourselves.

On the other hand, the August 5th illegal and aggressive move by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK) followed by complete lockdown till date have escalated tension between India and Pakistan further adding potential threat to the world peace. The Indian aggression against innocent people of Kashmir whose basic human rights are being violated on daily basis is another major crisis Pakistan is going through as government has failed to take action against it to bring justice to the Kashmiris as the successive govt continued to play at Indian pitch set by India on Kashmir. The East & West borders are costing us huge funds.

Another crisis behind the destabilisation of our economy is the investment crisis as most of the industries are closed due to government policies creating unemployment and nobody is willing to invest in Pakistan fearing the potential losses and being in FATF's grey list, we are suffering further.

All of the factors contributing to damaging our economy are not something that comes out of the blue, however, the deadly virus which has confiscated the whole world putting everything under lockdown situation can destroy our economy for good as even the developed countries are failing to deal with it. Our economy is collapsing, the systems are shut, businesses shut, death scare everywhere, capital flight, burden of virus causalities on the fragile economy, diplomatic crisis and isolation and no support as no one will come to our rescue.

In the wake of these crisis, Pakistan's initial economic losses incurred in different sectors of the country's economy have been estimated at Rs1.3 trillion, on account of drop in the GDP growth because of reduction in services sector including airline business, hotel business, retail businesses, hoardings, FBR's revenue loss, massive decline in imports, exports, reduction in remittances, disruption in food, mask and sanitizer's supplies etc.

Keeping in view the rise in Italy's death toll, the health indicators around the world are emphasizing on total lockdown around the state whereas we cannot afford to practice such lockouts given that we can face massive revenue shortfall as our resources are limited and economy is collapsing. The FBR estimates show that the lockdown of Karachi is going to cause major revenue losses which if persisted till June 2020, then the tax losses would go up to Rs380 billion.

Apart from this, people around the country have been directed to stay at homes and practice social distancing leaving and avoiding all the social gatherings and sports events which is also causing financial damages to the individuals as well as the economy on state level. As an initial step towards social distancing, the govt had to get the PSL sports event cancelled because of which, all the PSL franchises as well as the PCB has suffered massive losses due to incomplete league. Also the federal secretary commerce says that the exports might face loss in the range of $2 to $4 billion as export orders had got cancelled. Pakistan's textile export sector relies on China for the bulk of its capital goods inputs, so there will be an impact if there is a protracted closedown of the Chinese economy.

The imports would be reduced in the shape of declined POL prices as well as in quantity. Pakistan imported 80 billion barrels of POL products and keeping in view the lowest-ever prices in international market in the last two decades, the import bill would shrink having negative impact for the FBR's collection and petroleum levy might also be reduced if the consumption decreased because of possible lockdown in different parts of the country.

The worst effects that would have to be borne by the daily wagers as 47 percent workforce in service sector such as marriage halls, hotel industry and others belonged to this sector.

The United Nations (UN) estimates have shown that the international tourism will drop 3% due to virus resulting a loss up to $50 billion globally, is another bad news for the government which is committed to increase tourism exports.

On the other hand, despite not having a lockdown yet, the sealing off markets, restaurants as well as the automobile and petroleum ventures will cause loss of at least Rs40 billion to local businesses. This is only the beginning of losses as we are yet to meet the safety challenges of our citizens and we have no means and supplies for the treatment of corona positive people.

We will have to allocate extra funds which will be an additional burden on the exchequer. If the situation continues this way and civilian lockdown fails than govt will have choice to call in the army to control corona crisis. I am of the strong views that the anti-coronavirus operation should be handed over to the army without further loss of time.

These are writer's own views and do not necessarily represent the views of his party.

The writer is former interior minister of Pakistan, Chairman Senate Standing Committee on Interior and Chairman of Think Tank "Global Eye". He can be reached at: [email protected] and Twitter @Senrehmanmalik

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Pak economy under dark shadow of coronavirus vs deep chronic economic crisis

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Sitara -e -Shujaat, Nishan-e-Imtiaz Pakistan is an under developed nation which has been suffering from crisis after crisis for the last many years and passing through political polarisation as well and with bad governance.

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trump strikes friendly tone on china with trade in mind

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as his top officials point fingers over pandemic - cnnpolitics

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Trump strikes friendly tone on China with trade in mind, as his top officials point fingers over pandemic

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As coronavirus cases in the US surge, President Donald Trump isn't focused just on those statistics, administration officials say, but is also watching another set of numbers: exports to China.

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china is closing itself off as coronavirus cases spike worldwide  - cnn

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As coronavirus cases spike worldwide, China is closing itself off

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China is closing its border to most foreigners amid fears of imorted novel coronavirus cases causing a second outbreak in the country where the infection was first detected.

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Within a fragile and deceptively undulating 'democratic' landscape, politics and politicians in Pakistan have consistently maintained a rather adversarial character. In fact, at any given point in the erratic democratic history of the country, all leading national political parties have shown their tenacious adherence to adversarial politics. Perhaps, this is the only kind of mainstream politicking that party leaders are capable of doing in Pakistan. What unraveled in the wake of COVID-19 crisis was no different, a severely adamant inability of the country's political leadership to conduct consensual politics.
Spain or Senegal, no matter how rich or poor the economy, presently each virus afflicted country has regarded the pandemic as a national or public health emergency, a situation that demands coordination and consensus among leading political institutions and personnel. Akin to national warfare, a state in an emergency subjugates its internal strife and gears all its resources against the enemy. This is the iron law of politics during outbreaks, a law that the centre in Islamabad is unable to abide by. Given the proliferation of positive cases at a breakneck speed, currently the centre has no enemy but the virus itself - a fact best recognised and actualised by the Pakistan Peoples Party ( PPP). At this stage, besides a timely development of a medical infrastructure, what warrants recognition is PPP's unwavering insistence on national and political unity.

Lately, the crowning feature of party chairperson, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari's politics has been the suspension of politics itself. From helming a "together we can" hashtag on his tweets to visiting his old political nemesis at Kot Lakhpat Jail, a gesture also well-lauded by Maryam Nawaz, the 31-year-old has successfully taken the lead in eliminating antagonism from the country's political edifice, an approach praised by most Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) notables, such as Mushahidullah Khan. Unity of action amongst the country's numerous political leaderships is not solely PPP's normative philosophy, it is also a leading strategy and organisational tool to fight coronavirus in Pakistan. The holy grail of the PPP-PML-N block presents a unanimous policy against COVID-19 that should be implemented by concerned authorities within their individual constituencies. What then is hindering or perhaps provoking the consensual politics of the 'opposition?'

Firstly, the PPP and PML-N political front should not be treated as the opposition. In case of an outbreak emergency, where the traditional parliamentary understanding of an opposition becomes slightly less relevant, an opposition is then the political group speaking against a popular intervention strategy. In the case of Pakistan, the majority, autonomous governments of Sindh and Punjab, as well as the PML-N, have ruled in favour of a lock-down. It is the incumbent government, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), that has now become a rock-ribbed opposition to the popular idea of a lockdown. This reflects the centre's resolute subscription to the traditional politics of conflict.

Secondly, for any progress on a lockdown strategy, the prime minister's concerns do become key spoilers. Prime Minister Imran Khan and PTI officials have chosen to speak for the 25% of the population that lives below the poverty line. This is the primary consideration, a rather narrow spotlight, that impedes a political consensus on a complete lockdown. While the parliamentarian 'Robin Hoods' continue to oppose prompt, radical measures, correspondingly, the contagion virus continues to steepen the country's alarmingly combustible trajectory. The question of the nation's poor, as well as the economic costs of shutting down the country is an important one. It is also a question that has been answered repeatedly by numerous PPP and PML-N leaders and has fallen on either deaf ears or none at all - as seen in case of the Imran Khan's questionable exit from a critical session with opposition leaders.

Convened by Asad Qaiser, Speaker of the National Assembly, the online parliamentary session was less of a 'session' and more of a one-sided address, best suited for an introspective echo chamber rather than a conversation on a national emergency. The prime minister made his exit right after communicating his concerns and stance against a total lockdown. Shahbaz Sharif, leader of the opposition and Bilawal Bhutto, walked out in protest. The implication of such an antagonistic political climate is disastrously consequential. PML-N politician Khawaja Saad Rafique aptly warned against such petty politics and mainstream politicking amidst a crisis, calling it an immoral, inhuman act. His recommendation to the incumbent opposition - to continue striving for consensus - is an important one. Considering that the natural condition of Pakistani politics is to fall in the deathtrap of the politics of antagonism, it is of critical importance that the PPP-PML-N block successfully furnaces cohesion out of chaos.

Sindh Minister for Education and Labour Saeed Ghani, did address the prime minister's concerns, arguing that Pakistan will also have to bear a hefty but necessary economic cost to avoid a greater economic catastrophe. He highlighted the global economic condition that has taken a sharp downturn. How will the local economy thrive during a recession? This is an important question because unlike PTI's politics, the national economy does not operate in a vacuum.

Daily wage labourers, who constitute a large chunk of the country's labour force, would be hit hard in a lockdown situation. Also, as estimated by the Asian Development Bank, Pakistan may incur a minimum loss of $5 billion due to the coronavirus. Although the prime minister's rationale for opposing a lockdown is well-founded, it does seemingly spectate the crisis through a monochromatic, narrow vision.

Lately, Imran Khan's office and party notables have been communicating his call for political unity, but it seems to be a poor example of following a political fad - after all when in Rome, one does as the Romans do. At large, in keeping with his popular image, the premier's recent conduct has revealed an unrelenting, unyielding attitude and Pakistan, at a critical junction of its COVID-19 trajectory, cannot afford this. Communication and flexibility are crucial to consensus politics.

The writer is a final year student of BSc (Honours) in Political Science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS).

The views expressed by the writer and the reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of The Express Tribune.

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Pakistan can't afford a political crisis during a pandemic

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Within a fragile and deceptively undulating 'democratic' landscape, politics and politicians in Pakistan have consistently maintained a rather adversarial character. In fact, at any given point in the erratic democratic history of the country, all leading national political parties have shown their tenacious adherence to adversarial politics.

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Corona virus has plunged the world into a recession, according to S&P

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Corona virus has plunged the world into a recession, according to S&P

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Coronavirus has plunged the world into a recession, according to S&P

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The coronavirus outbreak has plunged the world's economy into a global recession, according to S&P Global.

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Newspaper: DAWN
Category: Culture, food
Head line: Karachi restaurants are closing down dine-in to encourage social distancing
written/updated: March 18th, 2020

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Social distancing is the name of the game.

Experts agree that in order for us to contain the pandemic that is coronavirus, we need to maintain social distance, wash our hands frequently and avoid touching our face (eyes, nose and mouth). In an effort to encourage that, restaurants in Karachi are ceasing dine-in services.

The first to make the announcement was Testkitchen by Okra.

Others soon followed.

They're still doing delivery so there's that

Might just be the right thing to do. While we shouldn't panic, it's clear that we need some help with self-discipline. If this is what it takes for a little while to social distance then we think we can weather it.

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Karachi restaurants are closing down dine-in to encourage social distancing

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Social distancing is the name of the game. Experts agree that in order for us to contain the pandemic that is coronavirus, we need to maintain social distance, wash our hands frequently and avoid touching our face (eyes, nose and mouth). In an effort to encourage that, restaurants in Karachi are ceasing dine-in services.

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Newspaper: Dawn
Category: Tech
Headline: Deadly misinformation': Why the novel coronavirus became a social media nightmare?
Written/ updated: March 29, 2020

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The biggest reputational risk Facebook and other social media companies had expected in 2020 was fake news surrounding the US presidential election. Be it foreign or domestic in origin, the misinformation threat seemed familiar, perhaps even manageable.

The novel coronavirus, however, has opened up an entirely different problem: the life-endangering consequences of supposed cures, misleading claims, snake-oil sales pitches and conspiracy theories about the outbreak.
Read: Internet giants fight spread of coronavirus untruths
So far, AFP has debunked almost 200 rumours and myths about the virus, but experts say stronger action from tech companies is needed to stop misinformation and the scale at which it can be spread online.

"There's still a disconnect between what people think is true and what people are willing to share," Professor David Rand, a specialist in brain and cognitive sciences at the MIT Sloan School of Management, told AFP, explaining how a user's bias toward content he or she thinks will be liked or shared typically dominates decision-making when online.

Part of the reason is that social media algorithms are geared to appeal to someone's habits and interests: the emphasis is on likability, not accuracy. Changing that would require Facebook, Twitter and other such companies to alter what people see on screen.

Prompts urging users to consider the accuracy of content they are spreading on social networks are needed, said Rand, co-author of a study on Covid-19 misinformation that was published earlier this month.

Deadly consequences

Using controlled tests with more than 1,600 participants, the study found that false claims were shared in part simply because people failed to think about whether the content was reliable.

In a second test, when people were reminded to consider the accuracy of what they are going to share, their level of truth awareness more than doubled.

That approach - known as "accuracy nudge intervention" - from social media companies could limit the spread of misinformation, the report concluded.

"These are the kind of things that make the concept of accuracy top of the minds of people," said Rand, noting that news feeds are instead filled by users' own content and commercial advertisements.

"There probably is a concern from social networking companies about accuracy warnings degrading the user experience, because you're exposing users to content that they didn't want to see. But I hope by talking about this more we'll get them to take this seriously and try it."

What is undoubted is that misinformation about the novel coronavirus has been deadly. Although US, French and other scientists are working to expedite effective treatments, false reports have appeared in numerous countries.

In Iran, a fake remedy of ingesting methanol has reportedly led to 300 deaths, and left many more sick.

Dr Jason McKnight, assistant clinical professor in the Department of Primary Care and Population Health at Texas A&M University, said the sharing of false information has an impact beyond the immediate risk of the virus itself.

"I have seen posts related to 'treatments' that are not proven, techniques to prevent exposure and infection that are either not proven and/or filled with a lot of misleading information, and instruction for individuals to stock up on supplies and food," he said.

McKnight highlighted two types of danger posed by inaccurate information on the virus: that it "could incite fear or panic," and "the potential for individuals to do harmful things in hope of 'curing the illness' or 'preventing' the illness'".

Immediate positive impact

Facebook took a hammering over Russia's interference in the 2016 US election. Having been accused on Capitol Hill of ignoring the allegations, Facebook conceded the following year that up to 10 million Americans had seen advertisements purchased by a shadowy Russian agency. As evidence mounted about how Russia had used Facebook to sow division, company CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologised.

Facebook has placed authoritative coronavirus information at the top of news feeds and intensified its efforts to remove harmful content, including through the use of third-party fact checkers.

Zuckerberg also said earlier this month that a public health crisis is an easier arena than politics to set policies and to take a harder line on questionable content.
Read: Tech battle against coronavirus clashes with Europe's privacy culture
AFP and other media companies, including Reuters and the Associated Press, work with Facebook's fact checking program, under which content rated false is downgraded in news feeds so that fewer people see it. If someone tries to share such a post, he or she is presented with an article explaining why the information is not accurate.

However, a Facebook spokeswoman declined to comment on the potential for adding accuracy prompts to its platform.

A Twitter spokesman, in a statement to AFP, also did not address whether the company might consider using prompts.

"Our goal has been to make certain everyone on our service has access to credible, authoritative health information," he said.

"We've shifted our focus and priorities, working extensively with organisations like the WHO, ministries of health in a number of countries, and a breadth of public health officials."

The Covid-19 misinformation study mirrored past tests for political fake news, notably in that reminders about accuracy would be a simple way to improve choices about what people share.

"Accuracy nudges are straightforward for social media platforms to implement on top of the other approaches they are currently employing, and could have an immediate positive impact on stemming the tide of misinformation about the Covid-19 outbreak," the authors concluded.

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'Deadly misinformation': Why the novel coronavirus became a social media nightmare

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The biggest reputational risk Facebook and other social media companies had expected in 2020 was fake news surrounding the US presidential election. Be it foreign or domestic in origin, the misinformation threat seemed familiar, perhaps even manageable.

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Category: Lifestyle
Headline:

PM to announce roadmap for battle against coronavirus

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-Punjab CM says 4,000 to be provided to 250,000 families; KP CM assures support to 1,900,000 families -Firdous calls for national unity during crisis, says PM's relief package will be extended to all provinces
ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan on Sunday vowed to take the nation into confidence on Monday and to announce a roadmap developed by the federal government to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

Addressing the participants of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Core Committee's meeting, the prime minister said that he has decided to employ all resources of the state to fight the pandemic. He said that one major concern for him was the provision of food and employment opportunities to the lower-middle class and poor segments of the society who have suffered a major hit in their income due to the lockdown situation.

Taking cognisance of the price hike amid lockdown, PM Imran said that there was no shortage of food items in the country but some profiteers were trying to create artificial shortage by hoarding commodities.

"I politely warn the hoarders and profiteers to shun this practice. If not, the government would take stern action as a last resort," he said, adding that punitive actions may prove disastrous for the hoarders. He said that law enforcement agencies were ready to assist the state authorities.

The premier said that he does not take hasty decisions as such decisions backfire. He said that that difficult times and challenges test the mettle of the political leadership and he was taking all decisions after doing his homework.

He also said that he would take the people on board over the strategy and measures taken by the federal and provincial governments to counter the pandemic.

Minister for Revenue Hammad Azhar and Minister for Planning Asad Umar also gave detailed briefings about the economic situation in the country. Assistant to Prime Minister on Health Dr Zafar Mirza also briefed the participants about the government's response to the pandemic.

The core committee also discussed the formation of "Corona Relief Tigers Force" with an idea to provide relief and food items to the people at their doorsteps. It was decided that PTI lawmakers, cabinet members, party's central, provincial and district leaders would be included in the Corona Relief Tigers Force.

Punjab Chief Minister Usman Buzdar also briefed the party leadership about the measures taken to counter the outbreak. He told the meeting that Punjab government had issued ordinance under which those violating the quarantine period would be subjected to jail for two months and anyone found doing it for a second time would be jailed for 18 months. Buzdar informed the meeting that his government has allocated Rs10 billion to provide Rs4,000 financial assistance every month to 250,000 deserving people in the province and those getting financial support from Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) would not be included in this list. The CM also informed the meeting that eight medical laboratories in the province would conduct coronavirus tests of 3,200 persons daily and recruitment process of 10,000 doctors and paramedical staff has been started in the province. He also informed that in case any doctor or paramedic dies during performance of his duties, he would be given the same package given to martyrs

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Chief Minister Mehmood Khan informed the committee members that his government has announced Rs11.40 billion package for providing financial support to 1,900,000 deserving families in the province. He told the meeting that province has allocated Rs32 billion to control spread of the pandemic and is also giving Rs5 billion relaxation on taxes and duties to various sectors. He further said that KP would provide additional Rs2,000 to each of ten lakh families getting financial support under Ehsaas Programme.

Minister for Science and Technology Fawad Chaudhry told that his ministry was working on developing ventilators that cost $2500. He said that currently Pakistan was facing a shortage of ventilators as there were only 2,700 ventilators out of which only 1,500 were operational.

He said that the Ministry of Science and Technology was also working on developing its own kits for coronavirus testing and soon the country would have the capability to develop domestic kits.

Dr Babar Awan briefed the meeting about the legal measures being adopted to counter the violations of lockdown and quarantine period by suspected coronavirus patients.
'NO DIVISION BETWEEN PROVINCES':
Later, addressing the media, Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Information and Broadcasting Dr Firdous Ashiq Awan said that the prime minister also made it clear that the packages announced by the federal government would also be extended to all provinces, even where PTI is not in power.

She said that the prime minister has renewed his pledge of ensuring delivery of ration and food supplies to deserving poor families across the country at their doorsteps. She also said that the premier trusts the country's youngsters and wants to use the potential youth force volunteers to ensure the supply of food items to deserving people.

She further said that PM Imran informed the committee that the country was passing through a difficult time and there was need of unity among the masses to overcome the challenge posed by this pandemic. "PM Imran urged the party leadership to stand by the people in testing times and play a proactive role in resolution of their problems," she added.

Dr Firdous said that due to ongoing lock down to prevent spread of coronavirus, national economy was being affected and chain of daily use items was slowed down. She said that the prime minister had advised Minister for National Food Security Khusro Bakhtiar to ensure the availability of food items, including wheat flour, so that there should be no shortage of such items. The SAPM also highlighted that there was no shortage of edible items in the country and the committee expressed the resolve to treat hoarders and profiteers with an iron hand.

She also said that that one-month salary as bonus will be given to doctors and paramedics, who will serve as frontline soldiers against coronavirus pandemic in the province. Personal protection equipment has been provided to doctors and paramedical staff attending coronavirus patients in Islamabad, AJK and GB and the same would be provided to other provinces as soon as possible, she added.

She further said that in National Coordination Committee (NCC) meeting on Monday, steps would be discussed to open supply of goods needed for opening industrial units and construction sector to save the poor labour class from starvation. She added that counter-strategy was needed to save labour class from unemployment.

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PM to announce roadmap for battle against coronavirus

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Punjab CM says 4,000 to be provided to 250,000 families; KP CM assures support to 1,900,000 families -Firdous calls for national unity during crisis, says PM's relief package will be extended to all provinces ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan on Sunday vowed to take the nation into confidence on Monday and to announce a roadmap developed by the federal government to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

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Category: World news
Headline: Corona virus vaccine: when will it be ready
Uploaded: March 31st 2020

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Even at their most effective - and draconian - containment strategies have only slowed the spread of the respiratory disease Covid-19. With the World Health Organization finally declaring a pandemic, all eyes have turned to the prospect of a vaccine, because only a vaccine can prevent people from getting sick.

About 35 companies and academic institutions are racing to create such a vaccine, at least four of which already have candidates they have been testing in animals. The first of these - produced by Boston-based biotech firm Moderna - will enter human trials imminently.

This unprecedented speed is thanks in large part to early Chinese efforts to sequence the genetic material of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. China shared that sequence in early January, allowing research groups around the world to grow the live virus and study how it invades human cells and makes people sick.

But there is another reason for the head start. Though nobody could have predicted that the next infectious disease to threaten the globe would be caused by a coronavirus - flu is generally considered to pose the greatest pandemic risk - vaccinologists had hedged their bets by working on "prototype" pathogens. "The speed with which we have [produced these candidates] builds very much on the investment in understanding how to develop vaccines for other coronaviruses," says Richard Hatchett, CEO of the Oslo-based nonprofit the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi), which is leading efforts to finance and coordinate Covid-19 vaccine development.

Coronaviruses have caused two other recent epidemics - severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) in China in 2002-04, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), which started in Saudi Arabia in 2012. In both cases, work began on vaccines that were later shelved when the outbreaks were contained. One company, Maryland-based Novavax, has now repurposed those vaccines for Sars-CoV-2, and says it has several candidates ready to enter human trials this spring. Moderna, meanwhile, built on earlier work on the Mers virus conducted at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland.

Sars-CoV-2 shares between 80% and 90% of its genetic material with the virus that caused Sars - hence its name. Both consist of a strip of ribonucleic acid (RNA) inside a spherical protein capsule that is covered in spikes. The spikes lock on to receptors on the surface of cells lining the human lung - the same type of receptor in both cases - allowing the virus to break into the cell. Once inside, it hijacks the cell's reproductive machinery to produce more copies of itself, before breaking out of the cell again and killing it in the process.

All vaccines work according to the same basic principle. They present part or all of the pathogen to the human immune system, usually in the form of an injection and at a low dose, to prompt the system to produce antibodies to the pathogen. Antibodies are a kind of immune memory which, having been elicited once, can be quickly mobilised again if the person is exposed to the virus in its natural form.

Traditionally, immunisation has been achieved using live, weakened forms of the virus, or part or whole of the virus once it has been inactivated by heat or chemicals. These methods have drawbacks. The live form can continue to evolve in the host, for example, potentially recapturing some of its virulence and making the recipient sick, while higher or repeat doses of the inactivated virus are required to achieve the necessary degree of protection. Some of the Covid-19 vaccine projects are using these tried-and-tested approaches, but others are using newer technology. One more recent strategy - the one that Novavax is using, for example - constructs a "recombinant" vaccine. This involves extracting the genetic code for the protein spike on the surface of Sars-CoV-2, which is the part of the virus most likely to provoke an immune reaction in humans, and pasting it into the genome of a bacterium or yeast - forcing these microorganisms to churn out large quantities of the protein. Other approaches, even newer, bypass the protein and build vaccines from the genetic instruction itself. This is the case for Moderna and another company, CureVac, both of which are building Covid-19 vaccines out of messenger RNA.

Cepi's original portfolio of four funded Covid-19 vaccine projects was heavily skewed towards these more innovative technologies, and last week it announced $4.4m (£3.4m) of partnership funding with Novavax and with a University of Oxford vectored vaccine project. "Our experience with vaccine development is that you can't anticipate where you're going to stumble," says Hatchett, meaning that diversity is key. And the stage where any approach is most likely to stumble is clinical or human trials, which, for some of the candidates, are about to get under way.

Clinical trials, an essential precursor to regulatory approval, usually take place in three phases. The first, involving a few dozen healthy volunteers, tests the vaccine for safety, monitoring for adverse effects. The second, involving several hundred people, usually in a part of the world affected by the disease, looks at how effective the vaccine is, and the third does the same in several thousand people. But there's a high level of attrition as experimental vaccines pass through these phases. "Not all horses that leave the starting gate will finish the race," says Bruce Gellin, who runs the global immunisation programme for the Washington DC-based nonprofit, the Sabin Vaccine Institute.

There are good reasons for that. Either the candidates are unsafe, or they're ineffective, or both. Screening out duds is essential, which is why clinical trials can't be skipped or hurried. Approval can be accelerated if regulators have approved similar products before. The annual flu vaccine, for example, is the product of a well-honed assembly line in which only one or a few modules have to be updated each year. In contrast, Sars-CoV-2 is a novel pathogen in humans, and many of the technologies being used to build vaccines are relatively untested too. No vaccine made from genetic material - RNA or DNA - has been approved to date, for example. So the Covid-19 vaccine candidates have to be treated as brand new vaccines, and as Gellin says: "While there is a push to do things as fast as possible, it's really important not to take shortcuts."

An illustration of that is a vaccine that was produced in the 1960s against respiratory syncytial virus, a common virus that causes cold-like symptoms in children. In clinical trials, this vaccine was found to aggravate those symptoms in infants who went on to catch the virus. A similar effect was observed in animals given an early experimental Sars vaccine. It was later modified to eliminate that problem but, now that it has been repurposed for Sars-CoV-2, it will need to be put through especially stringent safety testing to rule out the risk of enhanced disease.

It's for these reasons that taking a vaccine candidate all the way to regulatory approval typically takes a decade or more, and why President Trump sowed confusion when, at a meeting at the White House on 2 March, he pressed for a vaccine to be ready by the US elections in November - an impossible deadline. "Like most vaccinologists, I don't think this vaccine will be ready before 18 months," says Annelies Wilder-Smith, professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. That's already extremely fast, and it assumes there will be no hitches.

In the meantime, there is another potential problem. As soon as a vaccine is approved, it's going to be needed in vast quantities - and many of the organisations in the Covid-19 vaccine race simply don't have the necessary production capacity. Vaccine development is already a risky affair, in business terms, because so few candidates get anywhere near the clinic. Production facilities tend to be tailored to specific vaccines, and scaling these up when you don't yet know if your product will succeed is not commercially feasible. Cepi and similar organisations exist to shoulder some of the risk, keeping companies incentivised to develop much-needed vaccines. Cepi plans to invest in developing a Covid-19 vaccine and boosting manufacturing capacity in parallel, and earlier this month it put out a call for $2bn to allow it to do so.

Once a Covid-19 vaccine has been approved, a further set of challenges will present itself. "Getting a vaccine that's proven to be safe and effective in humans takes one at best about a third of the way to what's needed for a global immunisation programme," says global health expert Jonathan Quick of Duke University in North Carolina, author of The End of Epidemics (2018). "Virus biology and vaccines technology could be the limiting factors, but politics and economics are far more likely to be the barrier to immunisation."

The problem is making sure the vaccine gets to all those who need it. This is a challenge even within countries, and some have worked out guidelines. In the scenario of a flu pandemic, for example, the UK would prioritise vaccinating healthcare and social care workers, along with those considered at highest medical risk - including children and pregnant women - with the overall goal of keeping sickness and death ra tes as low as possible. But in a pandemic, countries also have to compete with each other for medicines.

Because pandemics tend to hit hardest those countries that have the most fragile and underfunded healthcare systems, there is an inherent imbalance between need and purchasing power when it comes to vaccines. During the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, for example, vaccine supplies were snapped up by nations that could afford them, leaving poorer ones short. But you could also imagine a scenario where, say, India - a major supplier of vaccines to the developing world - not unreasonably decides to use its vaccine production to protect its own 1.3 billion-strong population first, before exporting any.

Outside of pandemics, the WHO brings governments, charitable foundations and vaccine-makers together to agree an equitable global distribution strategy, and organisations like Gavi, the vaccine alliance, have come up with innovative funding mechanisms to raise money on the markets for ensuring supply to poorer countries. But each pandemic is different, and no country is bound by any arrangement the WHO proposes - leaving many unknowns. As Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, points out: "The question is, what will happen in a situation where you've got national emergencies going on?"

This is being debated, but it will be a while before we see how it plays out. The pandemic, says Wilder-Smith, "will probably have peaked and declined before a vaccine is available". A vaccine could still save many lives, especially if the virus becomes endemic or perennially circulating - like flu - and there are further, possibly seasonal, outbreaks. But until then, our best hope is to contain the disease as far as possible. To repeat the sage advice: wash your hands.

* This article was amended on 19 March 2020. An earlier version incorrectly stated that the Sabin Vaccine Institute was collaborating with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi) on a Covid-19 vaccine. It was further amended on 30 March to remove an incorrect reference to CureVac being a "Boston company"; its world headquarters are in Tübingen, Germany.
Topics

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Coronavirus vaccine: when will it be ready?

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Even at their most effective - and draconian - containment strategies have only slowed the spread of the respiratory disease Covid-19. With the World Health Organization finally declaring a pandemic, all eyes have turned to the prospect of a vaccine, because only a vaccine can prevent people from getting sick.

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Fear can spread from person to person faster than the coronavirus – but there are ways to slow it down

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Fear can spread from person to person faster than the coronavirus – but there are ways to slow it down

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News website: The Conversation
Author: Jacek Debiec
Date of publication: March 16, 2020

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As cases of COVID-19 proliferate, there's a pandemic of fear unfolding alongside the pandemic of the coronavirus.

Media announce mass cancellations of public events " over coronavirus fears." TV stations show images of " coronavirus panic shopping." Magazines discuss attacks against Asians sparked by " racist coronavirus fears."

Due to the global reach and instantaneous nature of modern media, fear contagion spreads faster than the dangerous yet invisible virus. Watching or hearing someone else who's scared causes you to be frightened, too, without necessarily even knowing what caused the other person's fear.

As a psychiatrist and researcher studying the brain mechanisms of social regulation of emotions, I frequently see in clinical and experimental settings how powerful fear contagion can be.

Responding with fear in face of danger

Fear contagion is an evolutionarily old phenomenon that researchers observe in many animal species. It can serve a valuable survival function.

Imagine a herd of antelopes pasturing in the sunny African savanna. Suddenly, one senses a stalking lion. The antelope momentarily freezes. Then it quickly sets off an alarm call and runs away from the predator. In the blink of an eye, other antelopes follow.

Brains are hardwired to respond to threats in the environment. Sight, smell or sound cues that signal the presence of the predator automatically triggered the first antelope's survival responses: first immobility, then escape.

janulla/iStock/Getty Images Plus

The amygdala, a structure buried deep within the side of the head in the brain's temporal lobe, is key for responding to threats. It receives sensory information and quickly detects stimuli associated with danger.

Then the amygdala forwards the signal to other brain areas, including the hypothalamus and brain stem areas, to further coordinate specific defense responses.

These outcomes are commonly known as fright, freeze, flight or fight. We human beings share these automatic, unconscious behaviors with other animal species.

Responding with fear, one step removed

That explains the direct fear the antelope felt when sniffing or spotting a lion nearby. But fear contagion goes one step further.

The antelopes' run for their lives that followed one frightened group member was also automatic. Their escape, however, was not directly initiated by the lion's attack but by the behavior of their terrified group member: momentarily freezing, sounding the alarm and running away. The group as a whole picked up on the terror of the individual and acted accordingly.

Like other animals, people are also sensitive to panic or fear expressed by our kin. Human beings are exquisitely tuned to detect other people's survival reactions.

Experimental studies have identified a brain structure called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) as vital for this ability. It surrounds the bundle of fibers that connect the left and right hemisphere of the brain. When you watch another person express fear, your ACC lights up. Studies in animals confirmed that the message about another's fear travels from the ACC to the amygdala, where the defense responses are set off.

It makes sense why an automatic, unconscious fear contagion would have evolved in social animals. It can help prevent the demise of an entire group bound by kinship, protecting all their shared genes so they can be passed on to future generations.

Indeed, studies show that social transmission of fear is more robust between animals, including humans, that are related or belong to the same group as compared to between strangers.

Nevertheless, fear contagion is an effective way of transmitting defense responses not only between members of the same group or species but also across species. Many animals, through evolution, acquired an ability to recognize alarm calls of other species. For example, bird squawks are known to trigger defense responses in many mammals.

Transmitting fear in 2020

Fear contagion happens automatically and unconsciously, making it hard to really control.

This phenomenon explains mass panic attacks that can occur during music concerts, sports events or other public gatherings. Once fear is triggered in the crowd - maybe someone thought they heard a gunshot - there is no time or opportunity to verify the sources of terror. People must rely on each other, just like antelopes do. The fear travels from one to the next, infecting each individual as it goes. Everyone starts running for their lives. Too often, these mass panics end up with tragedies.

seb_ra/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Fear contagion does not require direct physical contact with others. Media distributing terrifying images and information can very effectively spread fear.

Moreover, while antelopes on the savanna stop running once they're a safe distance from a predator, scary images on the news can keep you fearful. The feeling of immediate danger never subsides. Fear contagion didn't evolve under the always-on conditions of Facebook, Twitter and 24-hour news.

Tempering fear others transmit to you

There's no way to prevent fear contagion from kicking into gear - it's automatic and unconscious, after all - but you can do something to mitigate it. Since it's a social phenomenon, many rules that govern social behaviors apply.

In addition to information about fear, information about safety can be socially transferred too. Studies have found that being in the presence of a calm and confident person may help overcome fear acquired through observation of others. For instance, a child terrified by a strange animal will calm down if a calm adult is present. This kind of safety modeling is especially effective when you have your eyes on someone close to you, or someone you depend on, such as a caretaker or an authority figure.

Also, actions matter more than words, and words and actions must match. For example, explaining to people that there's no need for a healthy person to wear a protective face mask and at the same time showing images of presumably healthy COVID-19 screening personnel wearing hazmat suits is counterproductive. People will go and buy face masks because they see authority figures wearing them when confronting invisible danger.

But words do still matter. Information about danger and safety must be provided clearly with straightforward instructions on what to do. When you are under significant stress, it is harder to process details and nuances. Withholding important facts or lying increases uncertainty, and uncertainty augments fears and anxiety.

Evolution hardwired human beings to share threats and fears with others. But it also equipped us with the ability to cope with these threats together.

[ Get facts about coronavirus and the latest research. Sign up for our newsletter.]

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Fear can spread from person to person faster than the coronavirus - but there are ways to slow it down

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As cases of COVID-19 proliferate, there's a pandemic of fear unfolding alongside the pandemic of the coronavirus. Media announce mass cancellations of public events " over coronavirus fears." TV stations show images of " coronavirus panic shopping." Magazines discuss attacks against Asians sparked by " racist coronavirus fears."

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Category- Pakistan
Head-line- UN warns Pakistan could be hardest-hit by pandemic
Uploaded-  March 31st, 2020

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GENEVA: The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) on Monday bracketed Pakistan among the countries which would be the hardest-hit by the global pandemic of coronavirus, demanding a raft of measures for their relief.

UNCTAD said in a new report that the developing countries - which according to a UN body's tally number 170 - would need a $2.5 trillion support package this year to face the economic crisis caused by the pandemic.

Their economies will take "enormous hit" from high capital outflows, lost export earnings due to falling commodity prices and currency depreciations, with an overall impact likely worse than the 2008 crisis, the report said.

According to the report titled 'The Covid-19 Shock to Developing Countries', the required measures included a $1 trillion liquidity injection and a $1 trillion debt relief package, another $500 million for emergency health services and related programmes on top of capital controls.

"Sub-Saharan African countries will be among the hardest hit alongside others, including Pakistan and Argentina," said Richard Kozul-Wright, director of globalisation and development strategies at UNCTAD, who oversaw the report.

Referring to a "frightening combination" of factors, including mounting debts, a potential deflationary spiral and a major health crisis, Kozul-Wright said that according to conservative estimates, the coronavirus would cause a $2-$3 trillion financing deficit over this year and next.

"The international institutions have to take these sorts of proposals very, very seriously as it's the only way that we can see to prevent the damage already taking place and which will get worse," the UNCTAD director stressed.

Leaders of the Group of 20 major economies pledged on Thursday to inject more than $5 trillion into the global economy to limit job and income losses from the coronavirus and "do whatever it takes to overcome the pandemic".

"If G20 leaders are to stick to their commitment of 'a global response in the spirit of solidarity,' there must be commensurate action for the six billion people living outside the core G20 economies," Kozul-Wright said.

Immediate debt relief

The report comes as British charity Oxfam called for a package of nearly $160 billion in immediate debt cancellation and aid to fund a Global Public Health Plan and Emergency Response to help prevent millions of coronavirus deaths in poorer countries.

The charity set out a five-point plan - investment in prevention, 10 million new health workers, free healthcare, government requisition of all private facilities and availability of vaccines and treatments - to enable poor countries to take action to prevent the spread of the disease.

"We know from Oxfam's experience of fighting Ebola that with rapid action, this disease [coronavirus] can be stalled and its catastrophic impact stopped. But we must act now and on a scale never seen before," Jose Maria Vera, Oxfam International Interim Executive Director said in a statement.

The statement quoted a study from the Imperial College, which said that coronavirus could cause 40 million deaths in the coming year in the absence of interventions. "Without urgent, ambitious and historic action, we could easily see the biggest humanitarian crisis since World War II," Vera warned.

According to Oxfam estimates, doubling the health spending of the 85 poorest countries, home to nearly half the world's population, would cost $159.5 billion - less than 10% of the US fiscal stimulus to fight coronavirus.

Elaborating the five-point plan, the charity calls for public health promotion, community engagement, access for humanitarian workers and provision of clean water and sanitation, especially handwashing and creation of 10 million new paid and protected jobs of health workers.

It said all fees for health should be removed and free testing and treatment should be delivered.

"Governments must requisition all healthcare capacity in their countries and ensure that all the facilities, private and public are directed towards fighting coronavirus and meeting essential healthcare needs.

The statement emphasised that a global agreement must be reached that vaccines and treatments, when ready, would be made rapidly available to everyone, who needs it free of charge, saying that the profits of pharmaceutical corporations could not be put ahead of the future of humanity.

"It's understandable that national leaders are focused on helping their own citizens, but G20 leaders must also find the space for supporting poor nations too. We can only beat this pandemic if we act in solidarity with every country and for every person. No one is safe until we are all safe."

Read full story

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UN warns Pakistan could be hardest-hit by economic fallout of pandemic | The Express Tribune

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GENEVA: The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) on Monday bracketed Pakistan among the countries which would be the hardest-hit by the global pandemic of coronavirus, demanding a raft of measures for their relief.

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Highlights

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Ivermectin is an inhibitor of the COVID-19 causative virus (SARS-CoV-2) in vitro.

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A single treatment able to effect ~5000-fold reduction in virus at 48 h in cell culture.

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Ivermectin is FDA-approved for parasitic infections, and therefore has a potential for repurposing.

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Ivermectin is widely available, due to its inclusion on the WHO model list of essential medicines.

Abstract

Although several clinical trials are now underway to test possible therapies, the worldwide response to the COVID-19 outbreak has been largely limited to monitoring/containment. We report here that Ivermectin, an FDA-approved anti-parasitic previously shown to have broad-spectrum anti-viral activity in vitro, is an inhibitor of the causative virus (SARS-CoV-2), with a single addition to Vero-hSLAM cells 2 h post infection with SARS-CoV-2 able to effect ~5000-fold reduction in viral RNA at 48 h. Ivermectin therefore warrants further investigation for possible benefits in humans.

View Abstract

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The FDA-approved drug ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro

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Ivermectin is an inhibitor of the COVID-19 causative virus (SARS-CoV-2) in vitro. * A single treatment able to effect ~5000-fold reduction in virus at 48 h in cell culture. * Ivermectin is FDA-approved for parasitic infections, and therefore has a potential for repurposing.

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Annotating the news article  Wolf's Dollars vs Deaths 30.3.2020 (1)

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Paper 1 Guided textual analysis Rubric HL and SL 

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Paper 1 Guided textual analysis Rubric HL and SL 

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Paper 1-Guided Textual Analysis - Assessment Criteria and Rubric  HL - SL

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The Editorial Page -  Opinion mining is a problem.

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my homework article on trumps lack of empathy

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my homework article on trumps lack of empathy

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Mustafa Mir's solo commentary on the article above

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Mustafa Mir's solo commentary on the article above

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Chinese police ‘shooting down’ coronavirus patients? Manufactured clip viral

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Chinese police ‘shooting down’ coronavirus patients? Manufactured clip viral

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A video clip is massively viral on social media. It shows a group of men who seem to be wielding guns near a police vehicle subsequently moving inside a residential lane. Later in the video, one can sport an unconscious person lying on the road.

On February 11, Rangoli Chandel, Bollywood actor Kangana Ranaut's sister, tweeted the video and claimed, "Meanwhile over 25,000 killed they have started shooting down all the people with the virus in China," Her tweet has amassed close to 2,100 retweets.

Meanwhile over 25,000 killed they have started shooting down all the people with the virus in China... this is so sad 🥺🥺🥺 pic.twitter.com/IfVWMUuSw6

- Rangoli Chandel (@Rangoli_A) February 13, 2020

Fact-check

A closer look at the video reveals that it is a combination of at least four different sequences which have been merged into one video. In the course of this article, we will fact-check the four sequences individually.

1. Three individuals standing next to a police car allegedly loading their guns. (0:00 to 0:15)

2. The same individuals walking inside an apartment complex, their weapons visible on the side. (0:16 to 0:21)

3. Medical workers seemingly attending patients, and multiple individuals walking past them. (0:22 to 0:35)

4. Two individuals on the sidewalk, one seemingly dead, with medical workers and other people in the vicinity. (0:36 to 0:57)

Observation: No one is wearing protective masks

Authorities in China had appealed to other countries to help with supplies of protective face mask, according to a report published on February 6, 2020. "Medical advice in China is to change face masks regularly, as often as four times a day for medical teams, which would require two million masks each day. This is the procedure being followed in one of the main hospitals in Wuhan, the largest city in Hubei province," stated the report, adding that there is widespread use of face masks among the ordinary population, whether or not they've been instructed to do so by the authorities.

Posted below is a video report by The New York Times titled, "How Residents in Wuhan Are Coping With Coronavirus." It shows multiple shots of almost every resident in Wuhan wearing a mask. Thus, it is unlikely that people in Hubei province's Wuhan city would be seen without a mask given the mass panic triggered by the outbreak of coronavirus.

In the third sequence, one can easily spot people who aren't wearing masks standing near the person being attended by medical workers.

Same with the fourth sequence - multiple people can be spotted without a protective mask.

Below, we analyse the sequences individually.

Sequence 1 and 2

In the first and second sequences, three people with identical clothing can be spotted. In the screenshots posted below, one can read 'police'and the Chinese police emblem inscribed on the car.

The first two sequences only show gun-wielding men moving into a lane surrounded by apartments.

The second sequence is also viral with a separate claim that "three unknown people" wielding guns and wearing protective gear were walking somewhere in Wuhan. It has been circulating since February 1, 2020.

We found a tweet in Chinese which said that this video was shot after two people were bitten by "crazy dogs". The men in the clip are apparently hunting for the dogs in a street in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province in 2018. "It can be verified that the language in the video is Yiwu dialect," reads the tweet posted on February 2, 2020.

China Global Television Network (CGTN) tweeted the screenshots of the same video and informed that police in Yiwu, Zhejiang district called-out social media posts falsely alleging that the police was "shooting people sick with #coronavirus that refuse to be evacuated." According to the police, the armed officers were only dealing with a rabid dog. Police said that the video has been maliciously edited with separate scenes.

Police in Yiwu, Zhejiang said online video alleging them "shooting people sick with #coronavirus that refuse to be evacuated" is fake

The police said the video was "maliciously" manipulated with separate scenes since the armed officers were only dealing with a rabid dog pic.twitter.com/10NLLX7B1I

- CGTN (@CGTNOfficial) February 13, 2020

Yiwu city falls under the Jinhua jurisdiction of Zhejiang province. The license number on the police vehicle is 'G1796' where 'G' stands for Jinhua. We corroborated this with an image of a different police vehicle available online.

Sequence 3

In this sequence as well, one can hear sounds in the background which come across as gunshots. However, it is important to note that all that the viewers can spot are men, possibly medical professionals with protective gear, attending those lying on the ground. While there are sounds of gunshots in the background, no visuals of actual firing can be seen.

Moreover, passers-by go on about as usual though it is being suggested patients are being shot dead. It is unlikely that gunshots would not arouse panic. There is also no bloodshed in the video.

With a Chinese keyword search on Twitter, we found a clearer, extended version of the same video posted on January 26, 2020. The tweet claimed that the visuals depict people in rural areas around Wuhan region unable to visit a hospital and that the noise in the background is of fireworks lighted to celebrate the new year.

武汉周圍很多農村人，被感染后进不了医院，只有醫护上门，也無法確診，最終死在家里！這些死亡病例肯定是不会統計进官方肺炎死亡人数的！背景中是欢庆新年的烟花爆空，而他們死得绝望無辜！歷史也許永遠不会有真相！ pic.twitter.com/bw5co9vuk3

- 财经冷眼 (@charles984681) January 26, 2020

In the replies, a user argued that the dialect is not from Hubei province, let alone Wuhan. We were unable to independently locate the video.

Sequence 4

France 24 Observers investigated the video and found that the clip has nothing to do with CoV outbreak. It is related to an accident in the small town of Wuzu, located about 200 km east of Wuhan. The media outlet spoke to a local who confirmed that the video pertains to a motorcycle accident that took place in front of the Siyuan school on January 29, 2020. He also sent France 24 Observers a version of the same video.

"At the end of a version of this same video sent by Zhang W, we see an additional image for a fraction of seconds. Pausing, we can see on the sidewalk, a few meters from the person on the ground, a two-wheeled vehicle lying on its side. Earlier in the video, at 0'04, we also notice that a piece of concrete ledge surrounding one of the trees visibly received a shock," reads the report.

Moreover, we found a tweet in Chinese calling out misinformation and informing that two minors were involved in an accident. While one died on the spot, the other was hospitalised with serious injuries.

地点：湖北省黄梅县五祖镇思源学校对面
事件：两个未成年的骑摩托车太快。撞上路沿石失控。骑摩托车的死了坐摩托车重伤的送医院。
完全是驾驶人自己的过失。
造谣人称暴力执法将驾驶员打死，望各位理智。 pic.twitter.com/wGcppBTVEz

- wenhao.hong (@RyPllPIchQEmrP1) February 1, 2020

Audio superimposed

The same sound of fireworks heard in the third sequence is audible in the fourth as well. Below is a 21-second video of this sequence posted by a Twitter user on February 4, 2020, where no gunshots can be heard.

At Wuzu Town, Huangmei County in #Hubei , a woman was said to have shot dead after she attempted to break the blockade set up to contain #coronavirus . 湖北省黄梅县五祖镇 , 据说这名妇女因强闯 #武汉肺炎 封锁线被警察打死。#CoronavirusOutbreak
何不 #全民自救 #全民互救 ？ pic.twitter.com/HqEvzSknz2

- 曾錚 Jennifer Zeng (@jenniferatntd) February 4, 2020

Therefore, it can be said that the audio of fireworks in the third sequence was also superimposed here.

Unsubstantiated claim of 25,000 killed in China

While the message posted along with the video alleges that over 25,000 people affected with CoV have been killed in China, no media reports corroborate the claim. According to the tracker set up by CGTN, 59,882 cases were reported in China at the time of writing this report. The death toll has now passed over 1,300 in the country, including one in Hong Kong.

Alt News had earlier debunked a junk news story which falsely claimed that China sought the court's approval to kill 20,000 coronavirus patients.

Here is what we know so far: A dubious video was manufactured by combining multiple visuals. Audio of fireworks was superimposed to claim that 25,000 coronavirus patients were killed in China. Alt News found that one of the clips pertains to an accident that took place in China's Wuzu town. We were able to verify that the gun-toting police personnel walking in Zhejiang province's Yiwu city were there to kill a rabid dog. Moreover, the absence of protective masks also suggests that the clips are unrelated to coronavirus.

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Chinese police 'shooting down' coronavirus patients? Manufactured clip viral - Alt News

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A video clip is massively viral on social media. It shows a group of men who seem to be wielding guns near a police vehicle subsequently moving inside a residential lane. Later in the video, one can sport an unconscious person lying on the road. On February 11, Rangoli Chandel, Bollywood actor ...

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Photo: VCG

Some Western media outlets, including the Voice of America, have claimed the Communist Party of China (CPC) has forced party members to donate money with no regard for their well-being. This allegation is utter nonsense and demonstrates some Western people's deep and ridiculous prejudice against China's governance system. The fact is, the CPC is the true mainstay of the country and is the core of China's governance system. It has played a core and pivotal role in handling the coronavirus outbreak and demonstrated its superior organizing ability amid the crisis.

As of March 26, more than 79 million CPC members across China had voluntarily donated 8.26 billion yuan ($1.2 billion) to help with the coronavirus outbreak. That is the equivalent of 105 yuan ($15) per member. If Westerners were told the clear facts, would they really think $15 is an exorbitant donation or blackmail, at a time of national crisis?

When disasters strike, Chinese people, be they CPC members or not, are genuinely willing to do their bit to help the country out. As a CPC member, I voluntarily donated 100 yuan; my mother and grandma each made a donation of 200 yuan. And many friends of mine who are not CPC members also contributed money through various channels. This is a manifestation of the patriotism and solidarity that Chinese citizens feel for their nation, and CPC members play an exemplary role.

In addition to donating money, numerous CPC members hurried to the frontline of the epidemic without regard to their own safety. Some 42,000 medical staff, many of whom voluntarily, went to Hubei Province from all parts of the country to join the tough fight against the virus, a large number of them are CPC members.

Hundreds of thousands community workers throughout China have tirelessly delivered daily necessities to residents in quarantine and helped them through all kinds of difficulties. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese have been working tirelessly to produce medical supplies, and many are CPC members.

It is precisely because of the party's decisive measures, strong leadership and the dedication of all CPC members that the Chinese people have achieved such remarkable anti-epidemic outcomes.

The Voice of America praised the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill of the US, while accusing the Chinese government of not helping people in difficulty. This propaganda tool of the US government should stop making up stories. The CPC-led Chinese government is paying for all the treatment costs of COVID-19 patients in China. The average cost of treating a patient is 17,000 yuan, and for those in critical condition, the cost can be many times more. This policy alone has saved many families from economic disasters. We can read daily that the high cost of seeking medical treatment for COVID-19 in the US, which is preventing people from seeking the care they need and which is in turn helping the spread of the deadly disease.

In China, enterprises that have been impacted by the epidemic are receiving tax exemptions and financial subsidies that are aimed at helping them overcome their losses.

Some in the West have always seen China with their inherent and unenlightened prejudices. They are eager to link almost everything bad happened as a failure of China's political system and smear the country with some whimsical "evidence." Their words and acts are absurd in the face of the truth.

If the US government sincerely hopes to benefit its people, it should focus more on its own urgent and vital issues, such as how to curb the rapid spread of coronavirus, or how to fix the severe shortage of medical supplies, or how to stabilize its shaky economy. This would be a much better use of its time than manufacturing propaganda to attack China.

The author is a commentator with the Global Times. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn

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Prejudice blinds West's understanding of CPC's role in COVID-19 successes

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If the US government sincerely hopes to benefit its people, it should focus more on its own urgent and vital issues, such as how to curb the rapid spread of coronavirus, or how to fix the severe shortage of medical supplies, or how to stabilize its shaky economy.

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AllSides Headline Roundups™ bring you top news stories from the left, center and right of the political spectrum - side-by-side so you can see the full picture.

We rotate the order of headlines to avoid biasing our coverage in favor of the left, which otherwise would always be listed first.

Learn how AllSides provides balanced news

MSNBC (Left bias) announced it's canceling opinion commentator Mehdi Hasan's Sunday night show on Thursday, drawing opinions from journalists and media outlets. For Context: Hasan is known...

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AllSides | Balanced news via media bias ratings for an unbiased news perspective

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We use media bias ratings to provide balanced news, perspectives and issues across the political spectrum. Unbiased news coverage doesn't exist - there is no such thing as unbiased news or t

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PRIME MINISTER Imran Khan is to be commended for keeping his word and releasing the findings of two investigations into the recent sugar and wheat flour shortages that led to an increase in the price of these items. The reports were made public without delay or alterations, even though they incriminate people close to the prime minister - something unheard of in previous dispensations.

And yet, the ensuing shakeup in government ranks has raised several questions. For instance, a number of ministers, advisers and bureaucrats linked with the damning probe have been given other portfolios - was this reshuffle essentially a face-saving exercise? Indeed, any action at this stage is a little premature.

The reports expectedly spawned demands from the opposition for immediate action against those believed to have benefited from the shortages and price hikes. In response, the premier rightly advised them to wait for the completion of the forensic audit of the scams.

In a series of tweets on Sunday, he said he was waiting for a detailed forensic report on the matter before taking action against anyone. A high-powered commission is expected to finalise the audit by April 25. He also said that "after these reports come out no powerful lobby would be able to profiteer at the expense of our public".

A careful reading of the two inquiries underlines the need for patience as these reports - especially the one on the steep increase in the price of domestic sugar prices last year - while pointing to certain beneficiaries of government policies and decisions, do not fix responsibility. All this has only added to the mystery of the reshuffle.

On their own, the two reports do not contain anything new or startling. Most of the information contained in them has been extensively reported by the print and electronic media over the past few months. But what the reports do confirm is the deep connection between politics and the sugar and wheat trade as a whole.

The investigators appear reluctant to pin direct blame on the politicians and officials linked to the ruling party for fear of influencing the federal and provincial policies on sugar and wheat. And yet it is hard to dispute that those in the political corridors of powers have benefited from these policies.

A look at the report shows that it is not only sugar mill owners linked to the government who are beneficiaries of the billions doled out in the name of export subsidies, but also those associated with the PML-N and other parties. Governments need to break this nexus between politics and the sugar and wheat trade through extensive policy reforms if such crises are to be prevented in the future. That will mean a substantial reduction in the government's own role in the sugar and wheat trade and greater reliance on market forces.
Published in Dawn, April 7th, 2020

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PRIME MINISTER Imran Khan is to be commended for keeping his word and releasing the findings of two investigations into the recent sugar and wheat flour shortages that led to an increase in the price of these items. The reports were made public without delay or alterations, even though they incriminate people close to the prime minister - something unheard of in previous dispensations.

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Corona--our debt to Darwin
Updated on 4th April,2020
Newspaper: Dawn News

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CHARLES Darwin is a name Pakistanis are taught to hate. School teachers and university professors tasked with teaching his evolutionary theory usually skip the subject or, if they go ahead, first soften it with a ton of scorn. A commonly used biology school textbook rubbishes the theory, claiming that evolution of species is tantamount to assuming that "a motor car is evolved" when two rickshaws collide. Imran Khan, in his 2002 article, blamed the West's follies upon, "Philosophers like Darwin, who with his half-baked theory of evolution had supposedly disproved the creation of men and hence religion, were read and revered".

With the corona apocalypse looming ahead, it doesn't matter that Darwin was a naturalist, biologist and geologist rather than philosopher. It also doesn't matter that Darwin gets lashed regularly by Christian, Jewish and Hindu fundamentalists as well. Yet every hope for dealing with today's rogue virus rests squarely upon Darwin's 200-year-old discovery of the principle of natural selection.

In a nutshell: natural selection says that life on Earth didn't come pre-purposed and pre-formed, as tradition insists. Instead, it holds that, whether for man or microbe, only those forms of life best adapted to a specific environment survive while all others die away. Most crucially, evolution maintains that new kinds of life and new molecules randomly appear. A few - like coronavirus - will chance upon some suitable animal or human cell and thrive.

Hopes for dealing scientifically with the virus rest upon Darwin's discovery of the principle of natural selection.

Not convinced? Then get yourself some slides and a powerful microscope - actually, a million-dollar electron microscope would work best. Then wait and watch as cells reproduce. You will soon see some that are imperfect copies. While most bad ones die away, a few survive and then proliferate.

This, for example, is how cancerous cells form. Experiments at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre show exactly how certain common species of bacteria respond when their environment is changed. This led distinguished molecular biologist, Harmit Malik, to remark that natural evolution is "the world's definitive game of cat and mouse. Viruses evolve, the host adapts, proteins change, viruses evade them. It never ends".

Darwinian selection is as fundamental to biology as Newton's Law is to physics. Denying the theory of gravity will not cause gravity to disappear. However, it will certainly destroy our ability to do physics. Similarly, not teaching evolutionary theory won't stop brand new forms of viruses from emerging. But then forget about any scientific approach to diseases and epidemics.

Without Darwinian selection one can't even begin to understand microbial-host interaction, the evolution of pathogens, or start developing drug and vaccines. So go ahead and blame Darwin for inventing the notion that only the fittest survive. But then also punish Newton because apples insist on falling downward rather than rising upward.

Now the good news: most educated people are beginning to understand why scientific approaches work and unscientific ones don't. Better still, even ultra-conservative and science-rejecting world leaders are now begging scientists to speed up the rescue work. For all their talks about faith and calls to bang utensils or clap from balconies, they end up pleading for anti-coronavirus vaccines and drugs. Bluff, bluster and bombast have limits.

Take Narendra Modi and his claims of ancient India's vast medical expertise. For years he and his Hindutva crew have dwelt upon the therapeutic powers of gomutra (cow urine) while also extolling ayurveda and yoga. But India is not calling for emergency dispatches of 'Cow-ka-Cola' and dung to India's most affected areas.

On our side of the border we have yet to order a shipload of Ajwa-Khajoor (dates from Ajwa in Saudi Arabia) touted as cure for all diseases by Maulana Tariq Jameel, Pakistan's most popular preacher and a staunch Imran Khan ally. Nor is the government arranging sacrifices of a million kala bakras or mass importing olive oil and kalonji.

Instead, the mood is sober and reflective in all power centres. Last Saturday, Pope Francis held a dramatic, solitary prayer service at the Vatican. Speaking to an eerily empty square, he urged the world to see the Covid-19 pandemic as a test of solidarity. Three hundred years ago, the Church finally gave up attributing plagues and natural catastrophes to divine punishment.

Iran has learned a bitter lesson as well. Last month, its religious authorities recognised they had made a colossal blunder by initially allowing pilgrims to visit shrines in Qom and Mashhad. This permission was later rescinded but Iran has reported over 3,000 dead and the disease has spilled over into Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The shocker, however, was Saudi Arabia's suspension of umrah, followed by an announcement that a decision on Haj will be taken soon. This is very wise. Getting millions together - who would subsequently spread the virus in their home countries - could be just as serious as dropping an atomic bomb on each Muslim capital. Consider, for example, that in the middle of the 14th century more than half the population of England died, and that 25m perished in various parts of Europe.

What if this year's Haj was under Imran Khan rather than Mohammad bin Salman? Would he have waffled there as indeed he has in Pakistan? The PTI government has seriously downplayed the seriousness of the situation. Although Tableeghi Jamaat congregations have finally been banned, the damage has already been done. Shrine visits still continue.

Fortunately, the Sindh and Balochistan governments have shown more resolve. Moreover, the military seems to be taking orders from somewhere other than the government and is forcibly shutting down possible infection hotspots. Checkpoints now dot cities across Pakistan, somewhat inhibiting the free flow of people and the viruses they carry. Whether this will suffice remains to be seen.

Thanks to biological science - the foundation of which was laid by Charles Darwin - the coronavirus will eventually turn out to be a deadly but controllable affair. Its final worldwide death toll may run into many tens, or perhaps hundreds, of thousands. Still, compared to the toll exacted by pre-scientific era plagues, this will be small. Your life may well be saved by some yet to be invented drug or vaccine. All beneficiaries of modern medicine should surely forgive Darwin for his supposed transgressions.
The writer teaches physics in Lahore and Islamabad. Published in Dawn, April 4th, 2020

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CHARLES Darwin is a name Pakistanis are taught to hate. School teachers and university professors tasked with teaching his evolutionary theory usually skip the subject or, if they go ahead, first soften it with a ton of scorn.

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DAWN
https://www.dawn.com/news/1547092/reopening-business

Editorial
April 07, 2020

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IN a move that portends danger and has far-reaching consequences, the Punjab government has decided to reopen some businesses which had been shut as part of precautionary measures to curb the spread of Covid-19. The provincial government through three notifications has given the green signal to businesses - which include pharmaceutical and surgical goods, as well as textile, leather, sports equipment, laundry and money exchange services - to resume operations subject to the "implementation of precautionary measures". The industries have been asked to restrict staff to a minimum and ensure measures against the spread of the coronavirus. However, the orders fail to say how these restrictions will be enforced. The death toll in Punjab stands at 15 and there have been more than 1,800 confirmed coronavirus cases there, with a spike in recent days that has been greater than in the other provinces. The provincial government's decision to reopen these businesses and go back to 'normal life' could not be more ill-timed. Given the rise in cases in Punjab and the global reality of Covid-19's devastating effects, the rush to go back to routine life is perplexing. What is more alarming is that the decision has come at a time when a team of Chinese doctors in Lahore has advised exactly the opposite. The experts from China have suggested a 28-day extension of the lockdown, and invalidated theories that the coronavirus would fade in the summer. Furthermore, they said that social-distancing measures play an important role in containing the infection. Punjab's chief minister and health minister both met the visiting delegation and said the province would undertake all necessary measures to ensure the successful implementation of the Chinese model. Yet, businesses have been allowed to reopen without any clarity on the enforcement of precautionary measures.

While the negative impact of a lockdown on the economy is a valid concern and reopening pharma and surgical companies reflect the government's healthcare concerns, allowing other businesses to start functioning at this point betrays a lack of wisdom. Punjab must reconsider this decision and heed the advice of Chinese doctors who are all too familiar with the virus's spread. The province must also take note of the remarks of PTI leader Asad Umar, who has acknowledged that while the economy has taken a hit, a lockdown is effective in slowing the number of coronavirus cases. The country's healthcare system simply cannot cope with an escalation, which is likely if precautions are not strictly enforced.
Published in Dawn, April 7th, 2020

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IN a move that portends danger and has far-reaching consequences, the Punjab government has decided to reopen some businesses which had been shut as part of precautionary measures to curb the spread of Covid-19.

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Opinion Ed. This Is What Happens When a Narcissist Runs a Crisis. 

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Opinion Ed. This Is What Happens When a Narcissist Runs a Crisis. 

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Trump's catastrophic performance has as much to do with psychology as ideology.

President Trump last year at the White House. His mental health has been questioned since the early days of his administration. Credit... Damon Winter/The New York Times

Since the early days of the Trump administration, an impassioned group of mental health professionals have warned the public about the president's cramped and disordered mind, a darkened attic of fluttering bats. Their assessments have been controversial. The American Psychiatric Association's code of ethics expressly forbids its members from diagnosing a public figure from afar.

Enough is enough. As I've argued before, an in-person analysis of Donald J. Trump would not reveal any hidden depths - his internal sonar could barely fathom the bottom of a sink - and these are exceptional, urgent times. Back in October, George T. Conway III, the conservative lawyer and husband of Kellyanne, wrote a long, devastating essay for The Atlantic, noting that Trump has all the hallmarks of narcissistic personality disorder. That disorder was dangerous enough during times of prosperity, jeopardizing the moral and institutional foundations of our country.

But now we're in the midst of a global pandemic. The president's pathology is endangering not just institutions, but lives.

Let's start with the basics. First: Narcissistic personalities like Trump harbor skyscraping delusions about their own capabilities. They exaggerate their accomplishments, focus obsessively on projecting power, and wish desperately to win.

What that means, during this pandemic: Trump says we've got plenty of tests available, when we don't. He declares that Google is building a comprehensive drive-thru testing website, when it isn't. He sends a Navy hospital ship to New York and it proves little more than an excuse for a campaign commercial, arriving and sitting almost empty in the Hudson. A New York hospital executive calls it a joke.

Second: The grandiosity of narcissist personalities belies an extreme fragility, their egos as delicate as foam. They live in terror of being upstaged. They're too thin skinned to be told they're wrong.

What that means, during this pandemic: Narcissistic leaders never have, as Trump likes to say, the best people. They have galleries of sycophants. With the exceptions of Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, Trump has surrounded himself with a Z-team of dangerously inexperienced toadies and flunkies - the bargain-bin rejects from Filene's Basement - at a time when we require the brightest and most imaginative minds in the country.

Faced with a historic public health crisis, Trump could have assembled a first-rate company of disaster preparedness experts. Instead he gave the job to his son-in-law, a man-child of breathtaking vapidity. Faced with a historic economic crisis, Trump could have assembled a team of Nobel-prize winning economists or previous treasury secretaries. Instead he talks to Larry Kudlow, a former CNBC host.

Meanwhile, Fauci and Birx measure every word they say like old-time apothecaries, hoping not to humiliate the narcissist - never humiliate a narcissist - while discreetly correcting his false hopes and falsehoods. They are desperately attempting to create a safe space for our president, when the president should be creating a safer nation for all of us.

Third: Narcissistic personalities love nothing more than engineering conflict and sowing division. It destabilizes everyone, keeps them in control.

What that means, during this pandemic: Trump is pitting state against state for precious resources, rather than coordinating a national response. ("It's like being on eBay," complained Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York last week.) His White House is a petty palace of competing power centers. He picks fights with Democratic officials and members of the press, when all the public craves is comfort.

Narcissistic personalities don't do comfort. They cannot fathom the needs of other hearts.

Fourth: Narcissistic personalities are vindictive. On a clear day, you can see their grudges forever.

What that means, during this pandemic: Trump is playing favorites with governors who praise him and punishing those who fail to give him the respect he believes he deserves. "If they don't treat you right, don't call," he told Vice President Mike Pence.

His grudge match with New York is now especially lethal. When asked on Friday whether New York will have enough ventilators, Trump bluntly answered "No," and then blamed the state.

And most relevant, as far as history is concerned: Narcissistic personalities are weak.

What that means, during this pandemic: Trump is genuinely afraid to lead. He can't bring himself to make robust use of the Defense Production Act, because the buck would stop with him. (To this day, he insists states should be acquiring their own ventilators.) When asked about delays in testing, he said, "I don't take responsibility at all." During Friday's news conference, he added the tests "we inherited were "broken, were obsolete," when this form of coronavirus didn't even exist under his predecessor.

This sounds an awful lot like one of the three sentences that Homer Simpson swears will get you through life: " It was like that when I got here."

Most people, even the most hotheaded and difficult ones, have enough space in their souls to set aside their anger in times of crisis. Think of Rudolph Giuliani during Sept. 11. Think of Andrew Cuomo now.

But every aspect of Trump's crisis management has been annexed by his psychopathology. As Americans die, he boasts about his television ratings. As Americans die, he crows that he's No. 1 on Facebook, which isn't close to true.

But it is true that all eyes are on him. He's got a captive audience, an attention-addict's dream come to life. It's just that he, like all narcissistic personalities, has no clue how disgracefully - how shamefully, how deplorably - he'll be enshrined in memory.

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Opinion | This Is What Happens When a Narcissist Runs a Crisis

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Trump's catastrophic performance has as much to do with psychology as ideology. Since the early days of the Trump administration, an impassioned group of mental health professionals have warned the public about the president's cramped and disordered mind, a darkened attic of fluttering bats. Their assessments have been controversial.

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Op - Ed 1  - Annotated in Breakout Room 1 

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Op - Ed 1  - Annotated in Breakout Room 1 

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Annotating - Has anyone found Trump's soul_ Anyone_ Opinion    - Breakout Room 1

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Annotating Op-ed - Corona - our debt to Darwin - Breakout Room 2

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Evaluating Sources: Reading a website on Media Bias 

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Evaluating Sources: Reading a website on Media Bias 

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Journalism is tied to a set of ethical standards and values, including truth and accuracy, fairness and impartiality, and accountability. However, journalism today often strays from objective fact, resulting in biased news and endless examples of media bias.

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Evaluating sources: Reading a journal article published in a reputable journal 

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Evaluating sources: Reading a journal article published in a reputable journal 

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Social learning and confirmation bias

We consider a model of a social network described by a graph \(G=(V,E)\) consisting of a set of agents \(V\) (where \(| V| \) = \(n\)), and the edges between them \(E\). Each agent seeks to learn the unobservable ground truth about a binary statement \(X\) such as, e.g., "global warming is/is not happening" or "gun control does/does not reduce crime". The value \(X=+\,1\) represents the statement's true value, whose negation is \(X=-\,1\).

Following standard social learning frameworks, at the beginning of time (\(t=0\)), each agent \(i\) (\(i=\,1,\ldots ,n\)) independently receives an initial signal \({s}_{i}=\pm \,1\), which is informative of the underlying state, i.e. \(p={\rm{Prob}}({s}_{i}=+\,1| X=+\,1)=\,1-{\rm{Prob}}({s}_{i}=-\,1| X=+\,1) > \)1/2. Signals can be thought of as news, stories, quotations, etc., that support or detract from the ground truth. The model evolves in discrete time steps, and at each time step \(t > 0\) all agents synchronously share with their neighbors the full set of signals they have accrued up to that point. For example, the time \(t=\,1\) information set of an agent \(i\) with two neighbors \(j\) and \(\ell \) will be \({s}_{i}(t=\,1)=\{{s}_{i},{s}_{j},{s}_{\ell }\}\), their time \(t=2\) set will be \({s}_{i}(t=2)=\{{s}_{i},{s}_{i},{s}_{i},{s}_{j},{s}_{j},{s}_{\ell },{s}_{\ell },{s}_{d=2}\}\), where \({s}_{d=2}\) denotes the set of all signals incoming from nodes at distance \(d=2\) (i.e., \(j\)'s and \(\ell \)'s neighbors), and so on. Furthermore, we define the following:

where \({N}_{i}^{+}(t)\) and \({N}_{i}^{-}(t)\) denote, respectively, the number of positive and negative signals accrued by \(i\) up to time \(t\). We refer to this quantity as an agent's signal mix, and we straightforwardly generalize it to any set of agents \(C\subseteq V\), i.e., we indicate the fraction of positive signals in their pooled information sets at time \(t\) as \({x}_{C}(t)\). The list of all agents' signal mixes at time \(t\) is vectorised as \(x(t)\).

Each agent forms a posterior belief of the likelihood of the ground truth given their information sets using Bayes' rule. This is done under a bounded rationality assumption, as the agents fail to accurately model the statistical dependence between the signals they receive, substituting it with a naive updating rule that assumes all signals in their information sets to be independent (\({\rm{Prob}}(X| {s}_{i}(t))={\rm{Prob}}({s}_{i}(t)| X){\rm{Prob}}(X)\)/\({\rm{P}}{\rm{r}}{\rm{o}}{\rm{b}}({s}_{i}(t))\), where \({\rm{Prob}}({s}_{i}(t)| X)\) is computed as a factorization over probabilities associated to individual signals, i.e. \({\rm{Prob}}({s}_{i}(t)| X)={\prod }_{c}{\rm{Prob}}\left({s}_{i}^{(c)}(t)| X\right)\), where \({s}_{i}^{(c)}(t)\) denotes the c th component of the vector), which is a standard assumption of social learning models. Under such a framework (and uniform priors), the best guess an agent can make at any time over the statement \(X\) given their information set is precisely equal to their orientation \({y}_{i}(t)\), where \({y}_{i}(t)=+\,1\) for \({x}_{i}(t) > \)1/2 and \({y}_{i}(t)=-\,1\) for \({x}_{i}(t) < \)1/2 (without loss of generality, in the following we shall choose network structures that rule out the possibility of \({x}_{i}(t)=\)1/2 taking place). The orientations of all \(n\) agents at time \(t\) are vectorized as \(y(t)\); the fraction of positively oriented agents in a group of nodes \(C\subseteq V\) is denoted as \({y}_{C}(t)\).

The polarization \({z}_{C}(t)=\min ({y}_{C}(t),1\,-{y}_{C}(t))\) of the group \(C\) is then defined as the fraction of agents in that group that have the minority orientation. Note that polarization equals zero when there is full consensus and all agents are either positively or negatively oriented. It is maximized when there are exactly half the group in each orientation.

It is useful to think of \(x(t)\), \(y(t)\) and \({z}_{V}(t)\) as respectively representing the pool of available signals, the conclusions agents draw on the basis of the available signals, and a summary measure of the heterogeneity of agents' conclusions. In the context of news diffusion, for example, they would represent the availability of news of each type across agents, the resulting agents' opinions on some topic, and the extent to which those opinions have converged to a consensus.

We distinguish between two kinds of agents in the model: unbiased agents and biased agents. Both agents share signals and update their posterior beliefs through Bayes' rule, as described in the previous section. However, they differ in how they acquire incoming signals. Unbiased agents accept the set of signals provided by their neighbors without any distortion. On the other hand, biased agents exercise a model of confirmation bias, and are able to distort the information sets they accrue. We denote the two sets of agents as \({\mathscr{U}}\) and \({\mathscr{B}}\), respectively.

To describe the behaviour of these biased agents we use a slight variation of the confirmation bias model introduced by Rabin and Shrag. We refer to an incoming signal \(s\) as congruent to \(i\) if it is aligned with \(i\)'s current orientation, i.e. if \(s={y}_{i}(t)\), and incongruent if \(s=-\,{y}_{i}(t)\). When biased agents are presented with incongruent signals, they reject them with a fixed probability \(q\) and replace them with a congruent signal, which they add to their information set and propagate to their neighbors. We refer to \(q\) as the confirmation bias parameter. Denote the set of positively (negatively) oriented biased agents at time \(t\) as \({{\mathscr{B}}}^{+}(t)\) (\({{\mathscr{B}}}^{-}(t)\)), and the corresponding fraction as \({y}_{{\mathscr{B}}}^{+}(t)=| {{\mathscr{B}}}^{+}(t)| \)/\(| {\mathscr{B}}| \). Note that this is an important departure from "stubborn agent" models, as such biased agents do have a non-zero influence from their neighbors, and they can change their beliefs over time as they aggregate information.

An intuitive interpretation of what this mechanism is intended to model is as follows: biased agents are empowered to reject incoming signals they disagree with, and instead refer to preferred sources of information to find signals that are congruent with their existing viewpoint (see Fig. 1). This mechanism models both active behaviour, where agents deliberately choose to ignore or contort information that contradicts their beliefs (mirroring the "backfire effect" evidenced both in psychological experiments and in online social network behaviour), and passive behaviour, where personalized news algorithms filter out incongruent information and select other information which coheres with the agents' beliefs.

In the following, we shall denote the fraction of biased agents in a network as \(f\). We shall refer to networks where \(f=0\) as unbiased networks, and to networks where \(f > 0\) as biased networks.

For the bulk of the analytic results in the paper, we assume that the social network \(G\) is an undirected \(k\)-regular network. The motivation for this is two-fold. Firstly, empirical research suggests that for online social networks such as Facebook (where social connections are symmetric), heterogenous network features such as hubs do not play a disproportionately significant role in the diffusion of information. Intuitively, while social networks themselves might be highly heterogenous, the network of information transmission is a lot more restricted, as individuals tend to discuss topics with a small group such as immediate friends and family. Secondly, utilizing a simple \(k\)-regular network allows for considerable analytical tractability. However, one can show that our main results can be easily extended to hold under a variety of network topologies characterized by degree heterogeneity.

The assumption of regular network structure (coupled with the aforementioned synchronous belief update dynamics) allows the information sets of all agents to grow at the same rate, and as a result the evolution of the signal mix \(x(t)\) can be mapped to a DeGroot averaging process for unbiased networks: \(x(t)=A\,x(t-\,1)\), where \(A\) is an \(n\times n\) matrix with entries \({a}_{ij}=\,1\)/\((k+\,1)\) for each pair \((i,j)\) of connected nodes.

For biased networks, one can demonstrate (see Section S1 of the Supplementary Materials) that the above confirmation bias mechanics can be reproduced by introducing a positive and negative "ghost" node which maintain respective signal mixes of \(1\) and \(0\). Biased agents sample each signal from their orientation-aligned ghost node with probability \(q\), and from their neighborhood with probability \((1-q)\).

Furthermore, while the process is stochastic, we also show that it converges to a deterministic process with a simple update matrix described as follows. In Section S3 of the Supplementary Materials we discuss in detail the correspondence and convergence between the stochastic and deterministic processes. Biased agents down-weight their connections to neighbors by a factor \((1-q)\) and place the remaining fraction \(kq\)/\((k+\,1)\) of their outgoing weight on the corresponding ghost node. With these positions the updating process now simply reads \(\widehat{x}(t)={{\hat{\rm A}}}(t)\widehat{x}(t-\,1)\), where \({{\hat{\rm A}}}(t)\) is an \((n+2)\times (n+2)\) asymmetric matrix whose entries in its \(n\times n\) upper-left block are as those in \(A\), except \({{ {\hat{a}} }}_{ij}=(1-q)\)/\((k+\,1)\) when \(i\in {\mathscr{B}}={{\mathscr{B}}}^{+}\cup {{\mathscr{B}}}^{-}\). The positive (negative) ghost node corresponds to node \(n+\,1\) (\(n+2\)) of the augmented matrix \({{\hat{\rm A}}}(t)\), and we shall label it as \(+\) (\(-\)) for convenience, i.e., we shall have \({{ {\hat{a}} }}_{i+}=kq\)/\((k+\,1)\) (\({{ {\hat{a}} }}_{i-}=kq\)/\((k+\,1)\)) for \(i\in {{\mathscr{B}}}^{+}\) (\(i\in {{\mathscr{B}}}^{-}\)) and \({{ {\hat{a}} }}_{++}={{ {\hat{a}} }}_{--}=\,1\). Similarly, \(\widehat{x}(t)\) denotes an augmented signal mix vector where \({\widehat{x}}_{+}(t)={\widehat{x}}_{n+1}(t)=\,1\), and \({\widehat{x}}_{-}(t)={\widehat{x}}_{n+2}(t)=0\).

The time dependence of the matrix \({{\hat{\rm A}}}(t)\) is due to the fact that whenever a biased agent switches orientation its links to the ghost nodes change. This happens whenever the agent's signal mix \({x}_{i}(t)\) (see Eq. ( 1)) goes from below to above 1/2 or vice versa, due to an overwhelming amount of incongruent incoming signals from its neighbors. For example, when switching from being positively to negatively oriented, a biased agent \(i\) will change its links as follows: \({{ {\hat{a}} }}_{i+}=kq\)/\((k+\,1)\to {{ {\hat{a}} }}_{i+}=0\), and \({{ {\hat{a}} }}_{i-}=0\to {{ {\hat{a}} }}_{i-}=kq\)/\((k+\,1)\). In the following, all quantities pertaining to biased networks will be denoted with aˆ symbol.

We provide a sketch of the above mapping in Fig. 1 (for the sake of simplicity we present an arbitrary small network instead of a strictly \(k\)-regular one). There is an appealing intuition to this interpretation: biased agents have a "preferred" information source they sample from in lieu of incongruent information provided from their peers. If their beliefs change, their preferred information source can change.

Our main focus will be on the long-run properties of the dynamics introduced above. In this respect, it is important to establish whether the agents actually reach an equilibrium over their signal mixes and orientations, or whether they continue to oscillate. It is straightforward to demonstrate that unbiased networks always converge to a limiting steady state for their signal mixes and orientations, which follows directly from the correspondence between such networks and DeGroot models. The convergence of biased networks is much less trivial to prove due to the non-linear dynamics introduced by the confirmation bias mechanics. It can be shown however that convergence holds under fairly general conditions, and in Section S2 of the Supplementary Materials we demonstrate such convergence under a number of network topologies.

Building on this, we are able to establish the following results on \(k\)-regular networks of any size (in the following, and throughout the rest of the paper, we shall denote the steady state value of a variable \(v\) as \({v}^{\ast }\)).

For biased \(k\)-regular networks, denote \({t}^{\ast }\) as the time after which biased agents cease switching their orientation. Define \({{\hat{Y}}}_{{\mathscr{B}}}^{\ast }\) as the steady state fraction of positively oriented biased agents. Then the following holds (see Section S3 of the Supplementary Materials).

1. (1)
The signal mix vector \(\widehat{x}(t)\) converges to some \({\widehat{x}}^{\ast }={{{\hat{\rm A}}}}^{\ast }\widehat{x}(0)\) for both biased and unbiased networks, where \({{{\hat{\rm A}}}}^{\ast }\) is a steady-state matrix of influence weights which can be computed explicitly (see Section S3 of the Supplementary Materials).

2. (2)
Unbiased networks achieve consensus, and converge to influence weights of \({a}_{ij}^{\ast }=\,1\)/\(n\) for all pairs \((i,j)\). This ensures that, for all \(i\in V\), \({x}_{i}^{\ast }={x}_{V}^{\ast }=\bar{x}(0)\), where \(\bar{x}(0)={n}^{-1}{\sum }_{i=\,1}^{n}{s}_{i}\) is the intial average signal mix.

3. (3)
Biased networks where \({{\hat{Y}}}_{{\mathscr{B}}}^{\ast }=0,1\) achieve consensus, and converge to influence weights \({{ {\hat{a}} }}_{ij}^{\ast }=0\) for all pairs \((i,j)\in V\), \({{ {\hat{a}} }}_{i+}^{\ast }={{\hat{Y}}}_{{\mathscr{B}}}^{\ast }\) and \({{ {\hat{a}} }}_{i-}^{\ast }=\,1-{{\hat{Y}}}_{{\mathscr{B}}}^{\ast }\) for all \(i\in V\).

4. (4)
Biased networks where \(0 < {{\hat{Y}}}_{{\mathscr{B}}}^{\ast } < 1\) do not achieve consensus, and converge to influence weights \({{ {\hat{a}} }}_{ij}^{\ast }=0\) for all \((i,j)\in V\), and \({{ {\hat{a}} }}_{i+}^{\ast }+{{ {\hat{a}} }}_{i-}^{\ast }=\,1\) for all \(i\in V\).

From the above, we can conclude that while unbiased networks efficiently aggregate the information available to them at \(t=0\), the outcome of the information aggregation process in biased networks ends up being entirely determined by the long-run orientations of biased agents. We shall devote the following sections to examine the consequences of the model in greater detail through mean field approximations coupled with numerical verifications on finite networks.

Cascades and consensus

We begin by studying the signal mix of unbiased agents in biased networks (\({\widehat{x}}_{{\mathscr{U}}}^{\ast }\)) to provide a like for like comparison with the fully unbiased networks. In the context of the diffusion of news, the global signal mix can be thought of as a model of the long term balance of news of different types that survive following the diffusion dynamics.

For unbiased networks, it is demonstrated in that \({\widehat{x}}_{{\mathscr{U}}}^{\ast }=\bar{x}(0)\). That is, the steady state signal mix in unbiased networks precisely reflects the original, unbiased informative signals injected into the network. Determining the steady state signal mix of biased networks entails considering the interactions between three subpopulations - the unbiased agents \({\mathscr{U}}\), positively biased agents \({{\mathscr{B}}}^{+}\), and negatively biased agents \({{\mathscr{B}}}^{-}\). One can show (see Section S4 of the Supplementary Materials) that this can be approximated as:

Let us now consider the situation under which \({t}^{\ast }=0\), i.e. where the initial orientation of each biased agent does not change, and is therefore equal to the initial signal it receives. Intuitively, this will occur for large \(q\) which allows for biased agents to reject the majority of incongruent signals they receive (shortly we demonstrate in fact this generally occurs for \(q\, > \,1\)/\(2\)). Given Eq. ( 2), we can therefore calculate the steady state signal mix of any subset of agents based on our knowledge of the distribution of the initial signals.

In this scenario, the average signal mix \({\widehat{x}}_{{\mathscr{U}}}^{\ast }\) of unbiased agents is determined by the initial proportion of positively oriented biased agents \({y}_{{{\mathscr{B}}}^{+}}(0)\), which is the mean of \(fn\) i.i.d. Bernoulli variables with probability \(p\) (which, we recall, denotes the probability of an initially assigned signal being informative). One can compare this to unbiased networks (\(f=0\)), where the long run average signal mix is \({x}_{V}^{\ast }=\bar{x}(0)\), and is hence the mean of \(n\) i.i.d. Bernoulli variables with probability \(p\). Applying the central limit theorem we see that injecting a fraction \(f\) of biased agents therefore amplifies the variance of the long run global signal mix by a factor of \({f}^{-1}\) with respect to the unbiased case:

This means that the "wisdom of unbiased crowds" is effectively undone by small biased populations, and the unbiased network's variability is recovered for \(f\to 1\), and not for \(f\to {0}^{+}\), as one might intuitively expect.

Consider now the general case where biased agents can, in principle, switch orientation a few times before settling on their steady state orientation. Using mean-field methods one can determine the general conditions under which a cascade in these orientation changes can be expected (see Section S4 of the Supplementary Materials) but here we only provide some intuition. As \(q\) is lower, it is easier for an initial majority camp of biased agents to convert the minority camp of biased agents. As the conversion of the minority camp begins, this triggers a domino effect as newly converted biased agents add to the critical mass of the majority camp and are able to overwhelm the minority orientation.

This mechanism allows us to derive analytic curves in the parameter space to approximate the steady state outcome of the unbiased agent population's average signal mix based on the orientations of the biased agents at time \(0\):

The above result is sketched in Fig. 2, and we have verified that it matches numerical simulations even for heterogenous networks. For 1/2 \( < q\le 1\) biased agents can convert at least half of the incongruent signals they receive to their preferred type, meaning that biased agents of either orientation cannot be eradicated from the network, which preserves signals of both types in the steady state. For sufficiently small values of \(q\), on the other hand, small variations in the initial biased population translate to completely opposite consensus, and only by increasing the confirmation bias \(q\), paradoxically, the model tends back to a balance of signals that resembles the initially available information.

Putting the above results together, we note that biased networks with small \(f\) and \(q\) are, surprisingly, the most unstable. Indeed, such networks sit on a knife-edge between two extremes where one signal type flourishes and the other is totally censored. In this context, the model indicates that confirmation bias helps preserve a degree of information heterogeneity, which, in turn, ensures that alternative viewpoints and information are not eradicated. In subsequent sections we consider a normative interpretation of this effect in the context of accuracy and learning.

Polarization, echo chambers and the bias-connectivity trade-off

So far we have derived the statistical properties of the average steady state signal mix across all unbiased agents. We now aim to establish how these signals are distributed across individual agents. Throughout the following, assume the global steady state signal mix \({\widehat{x}}_{{\mathscr{U}}}^{\ast }\) has been determined.

In the limit of large \(n\) and \(k\), \({x}_{i}^{\ast }\) for \(i\in {\mathscr{U}}\) is normally distributed with mean \({\widehat{x}}_{{\mathscr{U}}}^{\ast }\) and variance \({\sigma }^{2}({\widehat{x}}_{{\mathscr{U}}}^{\ast })\) that can be approximated as follows (see Section S4 of the Supplementary Materials):

and this result is quite accurate even when compared with simulations for small \(n\) and \(k\), as demonstrated in Fig. 3.

Distribution of individual unbiased agents' steady state signal mixes (points) vs analytic predictions (dashed lines). As discussed in the main text, the model predicts such distribution to be a Gaussian (for both large \(n\) and \(k\)) with mean equal to \({\widehat{x}}_{{\mathscr{U}}}^{\ast }\) and variance given by Eq. ( 5). \({\widehat{x}}_{{\mathscr{U}}}^{\ast }\) is kept fixed to demonstrate the effect of varying \(f\) and \(k\). As shown in the case for \(k/f=120\), \(f\) and \(k\) trade off, and scaling both by the same constant results in the same distribution. The parameters used in the simulations were \(n=\,1{0}^{4}\), \({\widehat{x}}_{{\mathscr{U}}}^{\ast }=0.55\), \(q=0.6\).

This result further shows that the presence of biased agents is effectively responsible for the polarization of unbiased agents in the steady state. Indeed, both a larger biased population and higher confirmation bias - i.e. higher \(f\) or \(q\), respectively - result in an increased variance and steady state polarization \({ {\hat{z}} }_{{\mathscr{U}}}^{\ast }\), since a larger variance \({\sigma }^{2}({x}_{{\mathscr{U}}}^{\ast })\) implies larger numbers of agents displaying the minority orientation. This is illustrated in the top left panel of Fig. 4.

On the other hand, a larger degree \(k\) contrasts this effect by creating more paths to transport unbiased information. It is worth pointing out that the variance in Eq. ( 5) does not decay with \(n\), showing that steady state polarization persists even in the large \(n\) limit. We refer to this as the bias-connectivity trade-off, and the intuition behind this result is illustrated in Fig. 5.

Further intuition for this result can be found at the mesoscopic level of agent clusters, where we see the emergence of natural "echo chambers" in the model. We define an echo chamber \(C\) as a subset of unbiased agents such that: \(C=\{i\in {\mathscr{U}}:{\partial }_{i}\in {\mathscr{B}}\cup C\,\wedge {\partial }_{i}\cap C\ne {\rm{\varnothing }}\}\), where \({\partial }_{i}\) denotes the neighborhood of agent \(i\). In other words, an echo chamber is a set of connected unbiased agents such that all nodes are either connected to other nodes in the echo chamber or to biased agents. Therefore, biased agents form the echo chamber's boundary, which we refer to as \({\partial }_{C}\). Echo chambers in our model represent groups of unbiased agents that are completely surrounded by biased agents who effectively modulate the information that can flow in and out of these groups.

Echo chambers allow us to examine the qualitative effect of confirmation bias (\(f,q\)) and connectivity \(k\). Let us label the fraction of unbiased agents enclosed in an echo chamber as \({\eta }_{C}\). Leveraging some simple results from percolation theory we can show that \({\eta }_{C}\) increases with \(f\) and decreases with \(k\), as the creation of more pathways that bypass biased agents effectively breaks up echo chambers. Furthermore, the equilibrium signal mix of unbiased agents inside echo chambers is well approximated by a weighted average between the signal mix of the biased agents surrounding them (\({x}_{{\partial }_{C}}^{\ast }\)) and the signal mix \({x}_{{\mathscr{U}}}^{\ast }\) of the whole population: \({x}_{C}^{\ast }=q\,{x}_{\partial C}^{\ast }+(1-q){x}_{{\mathscr{U}}}^{\ast }\). The confirmation bias parameter \(q\) therefore determines the "permeability" of echo chambers to the information flow from the broader network. Hence, unbiased agents enclosed in echo chambers are likely to be exceedingly affected by the views of the small set of biased agents surrounding them, and, as such, to hold information sets that are unrepresentative of the information available to the broader network. In doing so, we can envision these echo chambers as effective "building blocks" of the overall polarization observed in the network.

Accuracy, efficiency and learning

Up until now, we have not attempted to make any normative interpretations of the ground truth \(X=+\,1\). In the following, we shall refer to unbiased agents whose steady state orientation is positive (negative) as accurate (inaccurate) agents, and we shall define the overall accuracy \({\mathscr{A}}(G)\) of a network \(G\) as the expected fraction of accurate agents in the steady state. This allows us to investigate how biased and unbiased networks respond to changes in the reliability of the available information, which ultimately depends on the prevalence of positive or negative signals (modulated by the parameter \(p={\rm{Prob}}(s=+\,1| X=+\,1)\)), which, loosely speaking, can be interpreted as "real" and "fake" news.

The accuracy of unbiased networks obtains a neat closed form that can be approximated as \({\mathscr{A}}(G| f=0)\approx {\rm{erfc}}((1-2p)\sqrt{n/2})\)/2 (see). For \(f > 0\), we compute the expected accuracy as the expected fraction of accurate agents with respect to a certain global signal mix. This reads:

where \(P({x}_{{\mathscr{U}}}^{\ast })\) is the distribution of the average signal mix across unbiased agents (see Eq. ( 3)) (we take the simplifying case of \(q\, > \,1/2\), but this can easily be extended to the case for \(q\,\le \,1/2\) using Eq. ( 4)), and where we have used the previously mentioned Gaussian approximation for the distribution of individual signal mixes (whose variance \({\sigma }_{{x}_{{\mathscr{U}}}^{\ast }}^{2}\) is given by Eq. ( 5)).

The top right panel in Fig. 4 contrasts biased and unbiased networks, and shows how the former remain very inefficient in aggregating information compared to the latter, even as the reliability of the signals (\(p\)) improve. However, accuracy in biased networks is non-monotonic with respect to \(f\). As shown in the bottom left panel in Fig. 4, accuracy reaches a maximum in correspondence of an optimal value \({f}^{\ast }\) (see Section S5 of the Supplementary Materials for a comparison with numerical simulations). Intuitively, this is because for small values of \(f\), as already discussed, the model can converge to the very inaccurate views of a small set of biased agents. As \(f\) grows, the views of the two biased camps tend to cancel each other out, and the signal set will match more closely the balance of the original distribution of signals (Eq. ( 3)). However, in doing so large values of \(f\) lead to increased polarization (Eq. ( 5)), where accurate and inaccurate agents coexist. The trade-off between balance and polarization is optimised at \({f}^{\ast }\).

It is also interesting to note that, as shown in the bottom right panel of Fig. 4, the optimal fraction of biased agents \({f}^{\ast }\) and the corresponding maximum accuracy \({\mathscr{A}}(G| f={f}^{\ast })\) both increase monotonically with the degree. This indicates that as networks are better connected, they can absorb a greater degree of confirmation bias without affecting accuracy.

Internet access, confirmation bias, and social learning

We now seek to test some of the model's predictions against real world data. Clearly, a full validation of the model will require an experimental setup, but a simple test case on existing data can demonstrate the utility of the framework in disambiguating the competing effects of bias and connectivity. We employ the model to investigate the effect of online media in the process of opinion formation using survey data. Empirical literature on this phenomenon has been mixed, with different analyses reaching completely opposite conclusions, e.g., showing that Internet access increases, decreases and has no effect on opinion polarization. In Section S6 of the Supplementary Materials we briefly review how our model can help better understand some of the inconsistencies between these results.

Our position is that the effect of Internet access can be split into the effect it has on social connectivity and social discussion (\(k\)) and the residual effect it has on enabling active and passive confirmation bias behaviours (\(f\)). As per Eq. ( 5), assuming the majority of the population accurately learns the ground truth (\({x}_{{\mathscr{U}}}^{\ast } > \)1/2), increases in social discussion should improve consensus around the truth and reduce the fraction of inaccurate agents. However, when controlling for the improvement in social connectivity, we should expect an increase in Internet access to have the opposite effect.

We utilise data from the Yale Programme on Climate Change Communication, which provides state and county level survey data on opinions on global warming, as well as information about the propensity to discuss climate change with friends and family, which proxies connectivity \(k\). We combine this with FCC reports on county level broadband internet penetration, which proxies for \(f\) after controlling for the considerable effect this has on social connectivity. We also account for a range of covariates (income, age, education, etc) and make use of an instrumental variable approach to account for simultaneous causality. We then attempt to predict the fraction of each county's population that correctly learns that "global warming is happening" (see Section S6 of the Supplementary Materials for details on assumptions and results).

As predicted by our model, we find the accurate fraction of the population to have statistically significant positive relationships with \(k\), and a negative relationship with \(f\). We find our model accounts for \(65 \% \) of the variance in the data. This indicates that, after controlling for the improvements on social connectivity, Internet access does indeed increase polarization and reduces a population's ability to accurately learn. While simple, this analysis illustrates the value of our model: by explicitly accounting for the separate effects of large-scale online communication (confirmation bias and connectivity), it can shed light on the mixed empirical results currently available in the literature. In Section S6 of the Supplementary Materials we explore this further by reviewing some of these empirical results and showing how our model provides useful further interpretations of available findings.

It should be emphasized that this result is merely an initial exploration of how our model can provide some testable predictions to empirical data, as opposed to a detailed effort to understand the effect of Internet access on global warming beliefs. Having said that, the initial results are encouraging, and we hope the clarity of the analytic results of our model pave the way for testing variations of the idea of biased information aggregation in a range of outcomes and settings.

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A minimalistic model of bias, polarization and misinformation in social networks

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Online social networks provide users with unprecedented opportunities to engage with diverse opinions. At the same time, they enable confirmation bias on large scales by empowering individuals to self-select narratives they want to be exposed to. A precise understanding of such tradeoffs is still largely missing.

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-Zoya F Khan

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Final Prep for Paper 1