H5N1

Russian state-sponsored hackers target Covid-19 vaccine researchers

Via The Guardian: Russian state-sponsored hackers target Covid-19 vaccine researchers. Excerpt:

Russian state-sponsored hackers are targeting UK, US and Canadian organisations involved in developing a coronavirus vaccine, according to British security officials. 

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said drug companies and research groups were being targeted by a group known as APT29, which was “almost certainly” part of the Kremlin’s intelligence services.  

British officials would not say if any of the attacks had been successful in their goal of stealing medical secrets. They stressed, however, that none of the vaccine research had been compromised as a result. 

Britain is at the forefront of research efforts to produce a coronavirus vaccine, with scientists at Oxford University and Imperial College London, among those leading global efforts to find the vital medicine.  

It is rare for the UK to explicitly state that it believes another country is behind a coordinated campaign of cyber-attacks, but British officials indicated it shared its assessment with the US and Canada, both of whom are expected to release their own updates shortly.  

The UK’s foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, said it was “completely unacceptable” for Russian intelligence services to target research on the Covid-19 pandemic.  

He said: “While others pursue their selfish interests with reckless behaviour, the UK and its allies are getting on with the hard work of finding a vaccine and protecting global health. The UK will continue to counter those conducting such cyber attacks, and work with our allies to hold perpetrators to account.” 

The APT29 group has been active for several years, and is also known in the hacker community as the Dukes or Cozy Bear. The same group has been linked to attacks on the US Democratic party in the run-up to 2016 elections. 

Cozy Bear came to prominence in 2015, when researchers at Kaspersky Lab pinned devastating hacks of the unclassified state department and White House networks on to the group. It has previously been alleged that this group is controlled by the Russian FSB spy agency.

Tennessee: Daily COVID-19 data report delay June 28, 2020

A statement on the website of the Tennessee Department of Health: TDH Daily COVID-19 Data Report Delay June 28, 2020. The statement and then a comment:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – The Tennessee Department of Health will not issue data on COVID-19 cases and tests on Sunday, June 28, 2020 due to an unplanned shutdown of the state surveillance system. TDH will resume daily provision of case counts and additional data once the system returns to full functionality and complete and accurate data can be provided.  

TDH uses the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System Base System, known as NBS, developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help local, state and territorial health departments manage reportable disease data and send it to CDC. This system houses data for all reportable diseases in Tennessee, including COVID-19, and is the system health department staff members use to perform public health case investigations.  

Due to an extremely high volume of both COVID-19 and other laboratory test results being reported, there have been recent intermittent backlogs of labs in queue to be imported into the NBS system. This issue is not unique to Tennessee, and is affecting all NBS jurisdictions. The TDH team has been working closely with the NBS vendor and Tennessee State Government information technology support to quickly implement fixes that have been identified. 

At approximately 2 a.m. CDT June 28, the element of NBS that imports laboratory results encountered an unplanned shutdown. This issue was corrected by TDH and state information technology teams, and laboratory imports to NBS were restarted by 11 a.m.  

Due to the ongoing backlog and this unplanned shutdown, a limited number of COVID-19 test results were imported into NBS in the last 24 hours. TDH will not release updated COVID-19 numbers today since our data are incomplete. This will also affect our metropolitan health department partners and their data updates tomorrow. 

These technical issues may cause a delay in local public health officials contacting people recently diagnosed with COVID-19. Please consult information online or contact your local health department if you were recently diagnosed with COVID-19 and have questions about next steps.

All we need now is for the Merry Pranksters of St. Petersburg to start hacking NBS. 

Rebekah Jones, Florida’s fired COVID-19 data scientist, publishes her own dashboard

Via The Washington Post: Rebekah Jones, Florida’s fired coronavirus data scientist, publishes her own dashboard. The dashboard is now on the COVID-19 Links list. Excerpt:

Tension built for days between Florida Department of Health supervisors and the department’s geographic information systems manager before officials showed her the door, she says, permanently pulling her off the coronavirus dashboard that she operated for weeks. 

Managers had wanted Rebekah Jones to make certain changes to the public-facing portal, she says. Jones had objected to — and sometimes refused to comply with — what she saw as unethical requests. She says the department offered to let her resign. Jones declined.  

Weeks after she was fired in mid-May, Jones has now found a way to present the state’s coronavirus data exactly the way she wants it: She created a dashboard of her own.  

“I wanted to build an application that delivered data and helped people get tested and helped them get resources that they need from their community,” Jones, 30, said of the site that launched Thursday. “And that’s what I ended up building with this new dashboard.”  

White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx praised Florida’s official coronavirus dashboard in April as a beacon of transparency. But Jones has asserted that the site undercounts the state’s infection total and overcounts the number of people tested — with the official numbers bolstering the decision to start loosening restrictions on the economy in early May, when the state had not met federal guidelines for reopening. 

The competing opinions about how to frame Florida’s data underscore the importance of access to accurate information about the virus’s spread as the state continues to lift restrictions on public life. Among other data-related controversies, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) came under heavy scrutiny after Jones first alleged publicly that the health department was manipulating statistics to support his desire to reopen.  

The Florida governor’s office and the health department did not respond Friday to an email seeking comment on Jones’s new dashboard. In a previous statement, a spokeswoman for the governor said Jones “exhibited a repeated course of insubordination during her time with the Department, including her unilateral decisions to modify the Department’s COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors.” 

Jones’s allegations about other managers’ requests are serious. She claimed they asked her to delete data showing that some residents tested positive for the coronavirus in January, even though DeSantis assured residents in March that there was no evidence of community spread. Jones also alleged that she was asked to manually change numbers to wrongly make counties appear to have met metrics for reopening. 

Despite the differences between the two dashboards, the site that Jones launched Thursday relies on the health department’s data. She said she wrote code that pulls information from various reports on the department’s website and presents the data in a way that she believes adds more context. Her dashboard also incorporates data from hospitals and from a volunteer organization that maps coronavirus testing sites. 

On Jones’s dashboard, the number of people tested is significantly lower than the official figure. She said the state’s number is actually a tally of the number of samples taken — not the number of people tested. Her dashboard said Florida had tested 895,947 people as of Friday evening, whereas the state dashboard listed the number of people tested as more than 1.3 million.

Brazil: In the trenches against the blackout of COVID-19 data

A Brazilian investigative news site, Pública, is an invaluable resource for data in a difficult country. A June 9 report: Na trincheira contra o apagão de dados da pandemia. This excerpt from the Google translation has links to several other Brazilian sites with good information:

Last Friday (6/6), the Ministry of Health (MS) portal with data on the coronavirus pandemic in the country was down. The site only returned to work the following day, showing only the cases registered on the day - the total number of deaths and contaminated by the disease and the history of the data were left out. On Monday, the agency announced that it will re-publish the information taken down, but will continue to highlight the figures for the past 24 hours. 

In response, civil society initiatives to disseminate data omitted by the government were intensified: data repository, bulletins and panels with the numbers of the disease. Even major media outlets have announced a partnership to release full numbers on the new coronavirus in Brazil. 

The Brazil IO , public data repository founded in 2018, offers a historic number of confirmed cases and deaths by municipality since the pandemic began in March. After the Ministry of Health stopped publishing the complete data, they also did - with a team of 40 volunteers - a daily bulletin of cases of the disease. Álvaro Justen, founder of the website, says that he realized in March that “I couldn't count on the Ministry of Health”. At the time, at the beginning of the pandemic, the agency's website was down for a week. 

“The Ministry of Health had aggregated information by state, but not by municipality. Furthermore, information by state was out of date in relation to the health departments of some states ”, complains journalist Marcelo Soares, founder of Lagom Data - a company that provides data collection and analysis services. That is why, still in March, he decided to set up a methodology for updating the number of coronavirus cases according to the data from the state departments. 

Another initiative is the Covid-19 Monitor, which concentrates in one portal news about the situation of the pandemic in the country, focusing on regional information. “I wanted to find in one place the most segmented and reliable information, which is from state governments and health departments”, says the founder, Fábio Rehm. “At the federal level, I don't see much happening with the pandemic. There is always something else deviating the focus,” he criticizes. 

Tatiana Portella, from Covid Observatory19 - an independent initiative by researchers - says that in addition to the incomplete data and the instability of the Ministry of Health website, the group finds “inconsistencies in the data from the national databases” that are being investigated. The project makes mathematical projections on the evolution of the pandemic based on data collected from the state health departments.

"We know that denying the facts and hiding the data is a modus operandi" 

For the experts, the changes now reveal more clearly the deliberate intention of the federal government to hide data. "All the evidence shows that the data was taken because someone did not want to put the complete data," argues Justen. 

He explains that the site has undergone changes only in the interface - that is, in the part that appears to the user - but and continues to collect the complete data. “It was clearly a way of getting the information out so that lay people cannot read it.” Become an ally of Pública How about participating in the fight against fake news about coronavirus? 

For Fernanda Campagnucci, director of Open Knowledge Brasil, an organization that promotes transparency and free knowledge, the federal government is hiding the data to avoid criticism. "It is a way to make up the situation even to make it look as if it is less serious than it is."

COVID-19 pandemic shows global consequences of China’s local censorship rules

Via the South China Morning Post: Coronavirus pandemic shows global consequences of China’s local censorship rules. Excerpt:

Cui Yongyuan may not be a household name in the West, but the former state media television host has almost 20 million social media followers in China, or about double those tracking the Twitter account of CNN’s Anderson Cooper in the US. 

Cui was one of the highest profile bloggers on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, where he was known for his social commentary and whistle-blowing. 

But last year his posting stopped and in May he found that posts containing his nickname “Xiaocui” had been blocked. 

That same month his account on WeChat, China’s biggest social media platform with 1 billion active users worldwide, was suspended citing fraud, according to screen shots he posted on Twitter. 

“My name is censored. Are you trying to force me to the other side?”, he wrote on Twitter on May 15, referring to him having to use Western social media. 

Cui, who teaches at the Communication University of China in Beijing, has also written about the Covid-19 disease outbreak and may be the latest victim of China’s censors to join the ranks of the “digital migrants” – a term for those who have been driven on to foreign social media platforms. 

A WeChat spokesperson declined to comment on the closing of user accounts and content censorship. Three emails to Weibo seeking comment were not answered and a phone call to the company was not picked up. 

Cui did not respond to a message on Twitter asking for further information.

Fu King-wa, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Hong Kong, said China’s censorship was no longer just a local issue, because the Covid-19 pandemic showed the international consequences of blocking information about such threats. 

“In China, that kind of restricted information can really have huge global implications,” said Fu, who has been running the Weiboscope project to track censorship on the platform since 2011. 

“In an authoritarian state like China, public conversation on many critical issues is restricted, media outlets are state-controlled and dissidents and independent journalists are routinely silenced,” he said, adding that raising early warnings in such a system was particularly challenging. 

Censorship not only curtailed the response of Chinese people to the outbreak, but it may have meant that the global media was slower to wake up to the crisis, according to a paper Fu published with his colleague Yuner Zhu in the Journal of Risk Research in April. 

China has the world’s highest number of internet users at over 854 million in 2019 according to the country’s Cyberspace Administration. 

However, its online world is confined within the so-called “Great Firewall”, and everything from criticism of the government to pornography is censored. 

Technology companies that run China’s social media platforms employ thousands of content moderators as censors and develop algorithms to prevent anything sensitive from being published or to quickly remove it, while foreign websites and social media platforms such Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are blocked.  

It is possible to circumvent the wall by using a virtual private network (VPN), a piece of software that masks the location a user is posting from, but their use is illegal without a licence and they are not legally available to Apple and Android users. 

Those caught selling VPNs can be jailed. A man was given a three-year sentence by a Shanghai court in 2018. 

The Weiboscope project turned its attention to the Covid-19 disease this year, sifting through over 1.2 million posts drawn from a bank of randomly selected users and high-profile accounts that contained at least one coronavirus-related keyword. 

About 2,100 posts – or 1.7 per thousand – were censored between December and February 27, according to Fu’s data. 

Although the number may not seem high, most social media posts are usually state media reports or entertainment content, creating a massive common denominator, he said.

Quantifying COVID-19 transmission suggests epidemic control with digital contact tracing

Via Science: Quantifying SARS-CoV-2 transmission suggests epidemic control with digital contact tracing. The abstract:

The newly emergent human virus SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus 2) is resulting in high fatality rates and incapacitated health systems. Preventing further transmission is a priority. We analyzed key parameters of epidemic spread to estimate the contribution of different transmission routes and determine requirements for case isolation and contact tracing needed to stop the epidemic. 

Although SARS-CoV-2 is spreading too fast to be contained by manual contact tracing, it could be controlled if this process were faster, more efficient, and happened at scale. A contact-tracing app that builds a memory of proximity contacts and immediately notifies contacts of positive cases can achieve epidemic control if used by enough people. 

By targeting recommendations to only those at risk, epidemics could be contained without resorting to mass quarantines (“lockdowns”) that are harmful to society. We discuss the ethical requirements for an intervention of this kind.

US: Out-of-state travelers flock to Georgia as businesses reopen, researchers say

Via The Washington Post: Out-of-state travelers flock to Georgia as businesses reopen, researchers say.

One week after Georgia allowed dine-in restaurants, hair salons and other businesses to reopen, an additional 62,440 visitors arrived there daily, most from surrounding states where such businesses remained shuttered, according to an analysis of smartphone location data.  

Researchers at the University of Maryland say the data provides some of the first hard evidence that reopening some state economies ahead of others could potentially worsen and prolong the spread of the novel coronavirus. Any impetus to travel, public health experts say, increases the number of people coming into contact with each other and raises the risk of transmission.  

“It's exactly the kind of effects we've been worried about,” said Meagan Fitzpatrick, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.  

“This is not an unpredictable outcome with businesses opening in one location and people going to seek services there,” said Fitzpatrick, who has reviewed the findings by the university's Maryland Transportation Institute. 

In the week after Georgia businesses reopened April 24, a total daily average of 546,159 people traveled there from other states. That included 62,440 more trips daily than in the week before the reopenings — a 13 percent increase, said Lei Zhang, the lead researcher and institute's director. The trips were measured using anonymized location data in smartphone apps. 

The vast majority — 92 percent — came from four adjacent states: Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee and Florida.

‘Every day is a new surprise.’ Inside the effort to produce the world’s most popular COVID-19 tracker

Via Science: ‘Every day is a new surprise.’ Inside the effort to produce the world’s most popular coronavirus tracker. Excerpt:

Many websites track the devastating spread of disease and death caused by the now-pandemic coronavirus, from the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) global map to The New York Times’s tally of U.S. cases at the county level. But one of the earliest, an online dashboard run by Johns Hopkins University, has become the go-to place for the latest data on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). 

With its black world map strewn with red circles and global, country, and state counts of cases, deaths, and recoveries, the Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases tracker sticks to the basics—no fancy graphs. Yet the site, which gets more than 1 billion hits a day, has become the most authoritative source for COVID-19 case data. It is used by news organizations and government agencies around the world. Its dashboard has been copied by states and countries. It has been spotted on a wall in a photo of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s coronavirus war room. 

Behind the site is Lauren Gardner, co-director of Hopkins’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering, whose previous work involved spatial modeling of epidemics of measles and the Zika virus. Gardner spoke with ScienceInsider on Friday, 3 April, the day COVID-19 cases surpassed 1 million worldwide, with more than 50,000 deaths. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.  

Q: There are a lot of sites tracking COVID-19 cases. How did yours come out on top? 

A: Probably because it’s been around the longest. We started this in January when the outbreak was pretty much just in China. My grad student Ensheng Dong, who is Chinese, was personally interested. In a few hours, we built the original dashboard. And the next day [22 January] I shared it on Twitter, and it immediately became popular. 

Q: The dashboard draws on hundreds of sources, from WHO data to sites that aggregate news stories and social media reports on COVID-19. How do you make sure it’s accurate and not double counting?  

A: There are millions of eyeballs on it all the time. So, if we’re off, people reach out and contact us very quickly. We get thousands of emails. We’ll get told, “Hey, there’s two new cases here that you don’t know about.” We also now have an anomaly detection system in place that alerts us to discrepancies in the case reports that we automatically collect.  \

We do have to worry about loops [where our own data are fed back to us as original cases]. There is a media aggregation site for the United States called 1point3Acres that we follow really closely. We take U.S. data from them, and they pull global data from us. We have to be really careful to only reference their national data. But the thing is, if there is a loop no one’s reports [of COVID-19 cases and deaths] would ever increase. So, we know that’s not happening. 

What I would like is for all the different local health authorities to keep improving their own reporting in a way that we can draw the data directly from them rather than from local media reports.

Uh-oh...where's Worldometer? (update: back where it belongs)

I just went to check some numbers on Worldometers.info/coronavirus. This is what I got:

It looks like an attack on the site, and not the first. On March 15, @Worldometers tweeted:

Update: Just checked again, and it's back—with ever higher numbers:

Open WHO: Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) for Novel Coronavirus

WHO has created a new, free open online course: Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) for Novel Coronavirus. The description:

This course provides information on what facilities should be doing to be prepared to respond to a case of an emerging respiratory virus such as the novel coronavirus, how to identify a case once it occurs, and how to properly implement IPC measures to ensure there is no further transmission to HCW or to other patients and others in the healthcare facility. 

This training is intended for healthcare workers and public health professionals, as it is focused on infection prevention and control.

Click or tap through to enroll in it.