H5N1

CIDRAP's Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Resource Center

After such a bad day, I'm happy to report that CIDRAP has started a Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Resource Center:

CIDRAP is tracking and analyzing the rapidly evolving worldwide outbreak of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) disease that originated in China. The CIDRAP COVID-19 Resource Center provides a deep well of information for public health experts, business preparedness leaders, government officials, and the public.

It's already on my COVID-19 Links, and I expect to be consulting it daily if not hourly.

COVID-19: Online classes get mixed reactions from students, teachers

Via Sixth Tone: Online Classes Get Mixed Reactions From Students, Teachers. Excerpt:

Millions of Chinese students are starting a new school term not in their classrooms, but in front of their computers. 

Weeks after schools delayed the spring semester due to the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic, China’s education ministry in late January ordered institutions to continue administering coursework online. Daily activities including flag-raising ceremonies, roll calls, and lectures are now conducted virtually.  

Wang Lufeng, an associate professor of food science at Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan, the central Chinese city at the heart of the epidemic, told Sixth Tone that he has been livestreaming lessons to his 62 students. To get a better signal in his rural hometown in the eastern Shandong province, the professor said he has to lecture from his roof. 

“It’s normal,” Wang said. “A majority of teachers in our school have started to give online courses.”  

But an increase in demand for livestreaming and other online education services is causing app crashes and other internet disruptions, with several related hashtags including “Tencent Classroom crashed” trending on microblogging platform Weibo.  

“I wait from 8 a.m. until noon, feeling like a century has passed,” a college student complained on Weibo, referring to frequent disruptions during live lectures. 

Many online education platforms including Rain Classroom, Superstar Study System, and China University MOOC apologized for poor service on Monday, naming the surge in users as the chief cause.  

“The number of concurrent online users on the platform is about 10 times higher than usual, resulting in system overloads and platform instability,” China University MOOC wrote on Weibo. The education platform recommended that students log in during non-peak hours when possible.  

With distance learning on the rise, education experts are questioning whether online courses are necessary for everyone, from primary schoolers to university undergrads. 

“Students require autonomous learning abilities for online education,” said Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, a Beijing think tank. “Meanwhile, spending too much time online could affect students’ eyesight, and is not conducive to the cultivation of their learning habits.” 

For many students, access to computers and the internet has also posed challenges for continuing online classes. 

A student surnamed You at Anhui Agricultural University told Sixth Tone that she hasn’t been able to take classes regularly due to a spotty internet connection at her home in rural Fujian province, and because using cellular data is “extremely expensive.”  

“It’s hard to take online classes in a rural village,” You said. “Broadband connections aren’t common here. Not every family has a smartphone.”

The lessons of flu blogging

Infectious Diseases Hub has published my article The lessons of flu blogging. Excerpt:

In the spring of 2005, I started a blog about H5N1 avian influenza – not because I knew anything about it, but because I didn’t. Surfing the web for news about it would, I thought, teach me something. 

That it did – and much more. I soon realized that I’d stumbled into a worldwide online community that I learned to call Flublogia: a growing number of bystanders, journalists and health experts who were beginning to share information on outbreaks and a growing number of public health issues. We didn’t have to teach ourselves; we could teach one another. 

Since then Flublogia has evolved into a volunteer epidemic-intelligence service, which is sometimes useful to the professionals and sometimes a nuisance. We’re useful in part because we work for free, usually every day of the week. We get wind of public-health problems and relay them via blog posts, tweets and other social media. When the professionals come to work on Monday morning, they may find next week’s agenda waiting in their Twitter feed. 

And as outsiders, we’re not obliged to be politically tactful; we can blast this or that government or health agency or NGO without fear of reprisal. I suspect the professionals, sworn to silence, tolerate us as conveniently annoying to their political masters.

Coronavirus: Ministry of Education plans to open national network cloud classroom on February 17

It's striking to see how quickly the Chinese are going online to cope with the outbreak. Via Sina News, a Beijing News report: Ministry of Education plans to open national network cloud classroom on February 17. Excerpt:

Beijing News (Reporter Feng Qi) On January 29, the Ministry of Education announced that it would open the "National Network Cloud Classroom" (www.eduyun.cn) on February 17. As a basis, web-on-demand courses are provided for the first grade of elementary school to the third grade of high school. 

In order to stop the epidemic from spreading to the campus, the Ministry of Education issued a notice recently requesting that the spring semester of 2020 be postponed. Students do not go out, do not party, do not hold and participate in concentrated activities at home. Various training institutions also canceled various offline courses as required. 

What will happen to my child's study after the extension? “We can’t teach in class, we will build a cloud class so that children can learn at home.” According to the relevant person in charge of the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Education is coordinating and integrating the relevant teaching resources of the country, relevant places and schools to provide rich and diverse, Select and cover high-quality online teaching resources everywhere. 

The reporter learned that the Ministry of Education plans to open the National Cyber ​​Cloud Class on February 17th, where most of the regions originally planned to start normal school. It is based on the curriculum resources that won the ministerial award based on the "one teacher, one excellent class, one teacher per class" project. Other high-quality online course teaching resources for schools to organize students to conduct online learning.  

According to the Ministry of Education, the National Cyber ​​Cloud Classroom (www.eduyun.cn) is based on textbooks compiled by the ministry and versions of textbooks that are widely used in various places, covering all grades from the first grade of elementary school to the third grade of ordinary high school. A unified schedule for teaching schedules, providing on-demand courses on the web.

Links to nCoV2019 resources

Well, we have a situation here, with coronavirus news coming in faster than we can handle but still not fast enough. I've created a new list of Novel Coronavirus Links, over in the far right column: a mishmash of health agencies, media, and Twitter links, very likely to expand. Its purpose is mostly to save myself some time in finding news stories, but its yours as well. And if you find other reliable sources of coronavirus news, let me know and I'll add them to the list.

DRC Congo: Who's minding the Ministry of Health?

While trying to learn more about the undiagnosed outbreak in Mai-Ndombe this morning, I checked the DRC Ministry of Health website for the first time in months. It was a discouraging experience.

The site seems abandoned. Major stories are a year old, or older. Dr. Oly Ilunga Kalenga is still listed as minister of health in a May 2018 post about the start of the Equateur Ebola outbreak, but the post is just one sentence long.

Meanwhile the ministry's Twitter account hasn't been updated since last September.

This seems to be the unwelcome result of the ouster of the former health minister, Dr. Oly Ilunga Kalunga. He objected to the government's decision to go ahead with a second Ebola vaccine, and the result was a whole new Ebola agency, CMRE, led by Dr. Jean-Jacques Mutembe Tamfum. Ilunga soon found himself being interrogated by the police over charges of misusing Ebola response funds, but I haven't seen anything about him in months. He too has vanished from Twitter.

The new minister of health, whose name I can't recall, does turn up in occasional news reports about Ebola, always as second fiddle to Dr. Mutembe. Meanwhile, the DRC has also been battling the worst measles outbreak in the world, cholera, and a host of other ills. Not a word of these outbreaks on the ministry website.

The MoH hasn't disappeared; it's certainly engaged on the measles response and other health campaigns. But it's alarming when the ministry of health of a very large country effectively vanishes from online communication with the rest of the world.

Thoughts on trolls, bots, and anti-vaxxers

This afternoon I found myself embroiled in a good old 1990s-style flame war on Twitter, in which Jason Kindrachuk and I contended with an anti-vaxxer. Its nostalgia value was limited, and I soon realized that the anti-vaxxer's intent was not to persuade us, or even discredit us, but to waste our time and the time of anyone else following the exchange.

So I pulled out and blocked the anti-vaxxer. Considering the length of time I've been blogging and tweeting about the politics of public health, it's remarkable how rarely I've run into this kind of nuisance. But as Jason observed, the public-health twittersphere is increasingly infested with annoying tweets. Dr. Peter Hotez has been a major target of the anti-vaxxers, but they're attacking plenty of other folks these days.

The attacks put us at an immediate disadvantage, because we were educated to provide evidence for our assertions and actions. But 75 years ago, Jean-Paul Sartre explained in his essay Anti-Semite and Jew that our adversaries are under no such constraint:

Never believe that anti‐Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.

That third person is presumably someone as ignorant and bigoted as themselves, and as resentful of know-it-all experts. If we engage with the trolls and bots and anti-vaxxers in hopes of winning that third person over to our side, we're probably deceiving ourselves and wasting our time.

Better to reach those third persons on our own initiative, with good-news stories about the successes of public health: vaccination, sanitation, good nutrition. If we must deal with bad news (and we must), let it be accounts of murderous half-wits like the Mai-Mai and ADF—not the dime-a-dozen bots running on Russian algorithms. 

If those trolls and bots show up in our timelines, follow the sage advice of my esteemed colleague Harry Turtledove and block them. Don't answer them—you might as well try to debate with a mosquito about whether malaria is a real disease.

But don't forget to take the initiative: get into the hashtags like #SamoaMeasles and #Measles with positive good-news tweets, not counter-attacks on the trolls. When your tweets attract mosquitos, block them and get more good news into the hashtags. Don't forget that a key goal of the trolls and bots is to make people uncertain of the truth, or even whether something like truth exists.

But don't answer the trolls directly. Just block them, block the clones that follow them, and use the time you save to do some good.

Samoa measles: Ministry of Health website (and others)

I'm very happy to find that Samoa does indeed have a Ministry of Health website. It's a bit sketchy, and its most recent measles press release is dated October 30. Still, it's better than nothing, and Samoan online news sources are few. The sole newspaper, the Samoan Observer, requires a sign-in after 3 articles. WSamoa appears to be dead, and Loop has a lot of news reports but won't let me blog them. The Observer and Talamua are the best of them.

See also Samoa Global News and the hashtag #SamoaMeasles.

US: Robocalls are overwhelming hospitals and patients, threatening a new kind of health crisis

Via The Washington Post, some really worrying news: Robocalls are overwhelming hospitals and patients, threatening a new kind of health crisis. I get these calls on my phone all the time, but don't think much about them. For hospitals, they're another story altogether. Excerpt:

In the heart of Boston, Tufts Medical Center treats scores of health conditions, administering measles vaccines for children and pioneering next-generation tools that can eradicate the rarest of cancers.  

But doctors, administrators and other hospital staff struggled to contain a much different kind of epidemic one April morning last year: a wave of thousands of robocalls that spread like a virus from one phone line to the next, disrupting communications for hours.  

For most Americans, such robocalls represent an unavoidable digital-age nuisance, resulting in seemingly constant interruptions targeting their phones. For hospitals, though, the spam calls amount to a literal life-or-death challenge, one that increasingly is threatening doctors and patients in a setting where every second can count.  

At Tufts Medical Center, administrators registered more than 4,500 calls between about 9:30 and 11:30 a.m. on April 30, 2018, said Taylor Lehmann, the center’s chief information security officer. Many of the messages seemed to be the same: Speaking in Mandarin, an unknown voice threatened deportation unless the person who picked up the phone provided their personal information.  

Such calls are common, widely documented scams that seek to swindle vulnerable foreigners, who may surrender their private data out of fear their families and homes are at risk. But it proved especially troubling at Tufts, which is situated amid Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood, Lehmann said. Officials there couldn’t block the calls through their telecom carrier, Windstream, which provides phone and Web services to consumers and businesses. “There’s nothing we could do,” Lehmann said Windstream told them. 

Administrators at other hospitals, cancer centers and medical research organizations around the country share Tufts’s robocall concerns. They fret that such a seemingly obvious tech malady has worsened in recent months and that government regulators and phone companies have been too slow to help. And they fear that robocallers could eventually outmatch their best efforts to keep hospital phone lines free during emergencies, creating the conditions for a potential health crisis. 

"Imagine a scenario when our phone system doesn't keep up," Lehmann said.  

This May alone, robocallers rang Americans’ smartphones an estimated 4.7 billion times, according to YouMail, a company that makes an app that helps users block suspected spam calls. That’s nearly double the amount from two years ago, reflecting the extent to which fraudsters have outwitted carriers such as AT&T and Verizon, lawmakers on Capitol Hill and the government’s chief robocall cops, including the Federal Communications Commission. 

Top telecom providers say they are working to implement new technologies that would label a call that’s likely to be spam, but widespread implementation is many months away. At the same time, the FCC recently has stepped up efforts to find and fine scammers, while helping consumers access tools that can block suspected spam numbers. But the agency has stopped short of fully rewriting the nation’s anti-robocall rules, something experts say would be necessary to truly stop the scourge.  

“These calls to health-care institutions and patients are extremely dangerous to the public health and patient privacy,” said Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (N.J.), the Democratic chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who has put forward legislation to try to clamp down on robocalls. “The FCC and Justice Department need to go after these criminals with the seriousness and urgency this issue deserves.”

DR Congo: In the aftermath of elections, access to internet and social networks cut

Via mediacongo.net, an AFP report: In the aftermath of elections, access to internet and social networks cut! The Google translation and then a comment:

Access to the internet and social networks was cut "on instruction of the government" in the Democratic Republic of Congo Monday, December 31 after the general elections, said operators to AFP. 

"Dear client, at the instruction of the government, our Internet services are suspended for an indefinite period," said the Global Provider in an SMS received by AFP.  

"It is the government that cut," said a representative of the mobile phone operator Vodacom AFP who was surprised by problems of Internet access in Kinshasa. 

Access to data on the Airtel and Vodacom networks is cut off, the AFP team in Goma and Beni, in North Kivu (East), also found 2,000 km from the capital. 

Access to the Whatsapp network was also impossible in Lubumbashi (south) on Vodacom.  

At the beginning of the morning already, disturbances and intermittent cuts were observed by the users of several networks before the complete cut occurred around noon in particular in Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC. 

Vodacom and Airtel are the main mobile networks in the DRC with Frenchman Orange.  

"I'm sorry to learn just before entering the room that we cut the Internet," the secretary general of the Bishops' Conference (Cenco) told the press, reporting on the results of the meeting. the electoral observation mission of the Catholic Church. 

In his initial statement, Father Donatien Nshole congratulated "the government for ensuring the smooth operation of the internet and SMS" on Sunday during the voting day. 

The SMS exchanges were still working on Monday morning, AFP reported in Kinshasa on the Airtel and Vodacom networks. 

"We will start the filtering of internet access", had told AFP early this morning a source who does not want to be quoted, stating that it was "to block the images and videos on the networks social." 

The cut came as polling station results were broadcast on, among others, Twitter and WhatsApp. The CENI plans to publish the provisional results of the elections on Sunday January 6th.

This is a very discouraging development, and it seems likely to result in yet more civil violence in many parts of the DRC. That in turn will disrupt the response to Ebola and push some people in the hot zone either into remote villages under Mai-Mai or ADF control, or right across the border into Uganda or Rwanda or South Sudan.

If I were the minister of health in any of those countries, I would order the redoubling of training and preparation for the appearance of Ebola.