Happy 4/20! The official day of cause célèbre for stoners everywhere. If weed isn’t your thing, perhaps you’re celebrating the fact that this Wednesday marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. What a lovely way to start the week — celebrating nature in all its glorious design. Sadly, we can’t leave it at that, because there’s stuff to report that isn’t so much fun. But today is all about balance, so for every tidbit of bad news included, we’ve added an upper.
Today’s Coronavirus Briefing is 1,118 words and will take you five minutes to read.
Top news
- Some countries are seeing coronavirus outbreaks explode, as others look to restart their economies.
- A high-security biosafety laboratory in Wuhan is under U.S. investigation for its alleged role as the potential cradle of the pandemic.
- New York governor Andrew Cuomo says New York may be “past the plateau” as hospitalizations drop, but he makes masks mandatory where social distancing is not possible.
- #FloridaMorons trends after people crowd a reopened beach in Jacksonville the same day Florida announced its highest number of deaths since the pandemic began.
The Takeaway:
We told you we could do it: Good/bad. Bad. Good. Dumb.
The landscape of our minds
A peek at what’s going on inside our heads.
- Dr. Judith Simmons, managing director of healthcare at digital innovation network Gather, and founder and principal of healthcare consultancy Lion Head Advisors, led a virtual roundtable addressing the challenges of being an empathetic communicator during the COVID-19 crisis. Larry Dobrow for Medical Marketing & Media reports.
- John Harrington for PRWeek U.K. writes about a short film narrated by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, encouraging people to take care of their mental wellbeing. The film is part of Public Health England’s Every Mind Matters campaign, and was made in response to data showing that coronavirus has affected adults’ welfare.
- Despite South Korea recording a spike of COVID-19 cases in February, the country of 50 million dramatically reduced the number of new cases throughout March. Surekha Ragavan of PRWeek Asia talks to Margaret Key, APAC CEO of PR firm MSL, about South Korea’s secret sauce for handling an infectious disease — one part physical preparedness, one part mental: “Communications during a crisis isn’t just a matter of relaying health information; it’s also about managing panic and fear.”
- Hera Khan, digital project manager at digital agency Dare, tells her digibride” story to Conference & Incentive Travel. “We’re certainly all being pushed to the limits of what’s possible today,” said Khan. “Most of all, I hope we all do something to reconnect with our loved ones during this time — even if that does mean sitting behind screens.”
The Takeaway:
We’re all struggling to figure out how to live in a world beset with uncertainty. But the more we recognize the good that’s happening — medical innovations, the way we’re selflessly taking care of each other — the better we can manage our minds.
Medical rounds
There’s a reason coronavirus is called “novel” — it’s never been seen before. Because of that, best practices for doctors, patients and unaffected citizens are constantly changing.
- Emily Pond of Infectious Disease Advisor takes a look at a perspective article published in the New England Journal of Medicine describing the challenge of emergency department employees. As the core of outbreak response programs, healthcare workers are at a substantially elevated risk of developing COVID-19. The stressful situation is believed to weaken immune responses and increase the risk of developing infection further, endangering not only the workers but also the family members they return home to daily.
- Clinical Pain Advisor excerpted a letter from the Annals of Internal Medicine that found, for patients infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), neither surgical nor cotton masks effectively filter during coughs, supporting the importance of hand hygiene after touching the outer surface of masks.
- Lawmakers are pushing congressional leaders to include cannabis businesses in the next coronavirus relief bill. “Like other businesses with continued operations, cannabis businesses have met the moment by preserving access to treatment for patients with chronic conditions, donating protective clothing, and manufacturing equipment for medical use,” the lawmakers wrote.
- Public-facing scientists such as Sir Patrick Vallance, the U.K.’s chief scientific adviser, and his U.S. counterpart, Dr. Anthony Fauci, say we won’t have a COVID-19 vaccine before 12 to 18 months. But others, including some of those in the race to create a vaccine themselves, have suggested it could be as early as June this year.
The Takeaway:
We’re basically living in an experiment.
Earth, wind and fire
Around the globe, air pollution has fallen as a result of reduced travel during the pandemic. Here’s a look at some of the challenges we face keeping emissions down as everyone starts “getting back to work.”
- ENDS Report has everything you need to know about how the U.K.’s environmental regulators are handling their duties during the coronavirus outbreak.
- As countries look to give their economies a much-needed jolt in the wake of COVID-19, governments and companies have two choices: They can lock in decades of inefficient, high-carbon, unsustainable development, or use this as an opportunity to accelerate a shift to low-carbon and affordable energy and transport systems, which can help combat the growing climate emergency.
- Barring members of Congress getting serious about climate change, maybe they can take a cue from Bogotá, where, since 1996, every Sunday starting at 7am, vast stretches of the city’s roadway are turned over to non-motorized activities. Ciclovía, or Bicycle Way, is a respite for the city’s inhabitants and the environment, which is otherwise clogged with “1,600,000 suicidal private cars, 50,000 homicidal taxis, 9,000 gasping buses, and some half a million demented motorcycles that otherwise pack into the buzzing capital of Colombia.”
- This mind-bending read sounds like something out of a Phillip K. Dick novel, but is apparently real. A Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector, aka, a golden chamber the size of a 15-story building, is buried under a mountain in Japan that is filled with 50,000 tons of ultra-pure water that may help us understand how the universe evolved.
- In certain parts of the world, wild animals are taking over the streets.
The Takeaway:
It’d be great if the few positive aspects of this pandemic could be leveraged for a healthier, more environmentally friendly future.
Music and poetry
And now, music videos that celebrate our real environments, our surreal environments, and the ennui of empty mansions.
- Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, Phenom
- Fatboy Slim, Weapon of Choice
- Drake, Tootsie Slide
- “Photo-finish” by John Kinsella and Thurston Moore
Have a lovely Monday. Try to think of a good thing for every bad.
