Nature: “Why many countries failed at COVID contact-tracing — but some got it right”

The WHO’s benchmark for a successful COVID-19 contact-tracing operation is to trace and quarantine 80% of close contacts within 3 days of a case being confirmed — a goal few countries achieve.

But even that’s not quick enough, says Christophe Fraser, a mathematical biologist at the University of Oxford, UK. Transmission is too rapid and the virus can spread before symptoms emerge, he points out. Modelling by Fraser and his team suggests that even if all cases isolate and all contacts are found and quarantined within three days, the epidemic will continue to grow. He says that in a single day, 70% of cases need to isolate and 70% of contacts need to be traced and quarantined for the outbreak to slow (defined as each infected person passing the virus to fewer than one other, on average)⁶.

---

At the beginning of the pandemic, overstretched contact-tracers in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom faced the extra burden of antiquated health-care systems. In Australia, as well as in US states such as Hawaii and Washington, health departments are often notified of new cases by fax or phone. It’s somewhat embarrassing, says Plescia, but we never invested in the systems to allow them to do it differently. Entering names and other details into a database from faxed notifications causes big delays, he says, so that the window during which contact-tracing might make a difference vanishes.

Dyani Lewis

Interesting analysis that goes through several reasons for the low effectiveness of contact tracing in many countries. Paradoxically, while the lack of modern digital technology can hinder contact tracing efforts, advanced technological solutions, such as the decentralized contact tracing protocol introduced early in the pandemic by Apple and Google, have also failed to live up to expectations. Low adoption aside, a decentralized system relies on individual initiative by entering positive test results in the app and isolating – a high ask for many people, as we have all discovered – but even worse it withholds data from health authorities, who cannot make proper projections and estimations of the extent of infection.

The Verge: “The controversial science behind woolly mammoth de-extinction”

A flashy new biotech startup launched yesterday called Colossal is on a mission to make an elephant-woolly mammoth mashup — with the ultimate goal of promoting biodiversity and combating climate change, it says. The effort has gotten a lot of hype and big-name backers, but scientists who work in conservation are still pretty skeptical.

The science behind Colossal is in very early stages and is mired in ethical quandaries. The company won’t actually bring back a woolly mammoth, which hasn’t roamed the Earth in about 10,000 years. Instead, Colossal’s de-extinction effort aims to create a hybrid between a woolly mammoth and its distant relative (the two share a common ancestor): the Asian elephant, which itself is an endangered species.

---

Lamm believes Colossal’s work might benefit the elephants and draw more attention to other conservation efforts. We’re trying to make sure that we do this in the most transparent and ethical way as possible, Lamm tells The Verge. We feel very confident about what we can do to help the elephant lineage… For us it’s about giving the species additional tools to survive. An elephant with mammoth traits would be better able to survive in the Arctic’s cold temperatures, away from urbanization that threatens its species, he says.

But Asian elephants’ home is tropical South and Southeast Asia. They’re also highly intelligent and social animals that form tight-knit groups. They have a culture, Bennett says. All that raises “major” ethical questions for Bennett over whether a mammoth-elephant hybrid would be able to behaviorally manage being transplanted in a new home that’s vastly different from where elephant species currently live.

Justine Calma

A highly ambitious project that I would like to see succeed – but realistically I would give it about as much chance of materializing as Elon Musk’s random wild ideas.

The Wall Street Journal: “Xi Jinping aims to rein in Chinese Capitalism, hew to Mao’s Socialist Vision”

For most of the 40 years after Deng Xiaoping first unleashed economic reforms in China, Communist Party leaders gave market forces wider room to flourish. That opening helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and created trillions of dollars in wealth, but also led to rampant corruption and eroded the ideological basis for continued Communist rule.

In Mr. Xi’s opinion, private capital now has been allowed to run amok, menacing the party’s legitimacy, officials familiar with his priorities say. The Wall Street Journal examination shows he is trying forcefully to get China back to the vision of Mao Zedong, who saw capitalism as a transitory phase on the road to socialism.

Mr. Xi isn’t planning to eradicate market forces, the Journal examination indicates. But he appears to want a state in which the party does more to steer flows of money, sets tighter parameters for entrepreneurs and investors and their ability to make profits, and exercises even more control over the economy than now. In essence, this suggests that he aims to rewrite the rules of business in what could someday be the world’s biggest economy.

Lingling Wei

Not entirely surprising, considering recent trends and Mr. Xi’s increasing desire for top-down control and ideological purity. I doubt anyone would have foreseen at the turn of the century that the Cold War divide between capitalism and communism would reemerge, with the Unites States and China as primary actors this time around.

Coronavirus in Romania: tsunami warning

After a quiet summer, in early autumn the coronavirus has returned to Romania with a vengeance. In the first half of July, the case numbers had dropped under 50 daily, and the total for the entire month was just shy of 2400, the lowest case number since the beginning in March 2020. For a good portion of July, Romania was recording daily deaths caused by coronavirus in the lower single digits, and the monthly total was slightly under 500.

Since then, the situation has changed drastically. Beginning with the second week of July, cases have climbed at a remarkably steady pace, on average 57% each week – except for last week, when the percent increase from the previous week was even higher, almost 90% – bringing us back to a daily count of 7000 cases. Compared to the earlier stages of the pandemic, this growth rate is unprecedented, likely attributable to the more contagious Delta variant, coupled with the lack of restrictions over the summer and the low vaccination rate. Between people returning from holidays, from countries like Greece with higher infections rates, recent large festivals with high attendance, and children returning to school in person last week, the outlook for the next months (even weeks!) is grim.

The Verge: “Why the global chip shortage is making it so hard to buy a PS5”

I had somebody from deep within Washington call me up and ask me how much money it would take to catch up with TSMC. I had just been to the GlobalFoundries fab in Malta, New York, and they had spent $15 billion to get 30,000 wafer starts per month at 14 nanometers — so it’s not even leading edge, but it’s a nice fab. They’ve done a good job there. TSMC Fab 12 has a capacity of 250,000 wafer starts per month. TSMC Fab 14 has about 250,000. TSMC Fab 15 has about 250,000. TSMC Fab 18, they’re targeting the same capacity. So I told this person, Oh, I don’t know. You’d probably have to spend 10 times what GlobalFoundries spent up in Malta, New York. I could hear him fall out of his chair.

And when he got back up, he said, What did you say? And I said, I don’t know, 10 times that, $150 billion. Maybe it’s not $150 billion. Maybe it’s $130 or $140 billion. But you have to realize that TSMC is going to spend over $30 billion this year, and that’s one company. And they spent $20-plus billion last year, and they’ve been spending $10 to $20 billion a year for the last decade. And they’d been spending like $5 to $10 billion a year for the decade before that. So they’ve been pouring money into this for 35 years. So $52 billion — and by the way, all the lobbyists are in there trying to make sure that their company gets their share of it. By the time it gets peanut-buttered around, the worry will be, how much difference is it actually going to make?

Dr. Willy Shih

Nice overview of the complexities of chip manufacturing and how the supply was affected by the pandemic. It helps to remember the numerous steps and precision required to produce chips, and why efforts to create domestic production from US companies and the European Union will take a long time and huge investments to materialize.

The Ezra Klein Show: “The Foreign Policy Conversation Washington doesn’t want to have”

ROBERT WRIGHT: Right. We helped train some of the people who became leaders of the Taliban to expel foreign occupying forces, and it turns out they did that twice. They just did it to us. Now, I don’t want to suggest that we are exactly comparable to the Soviet Union by any means, or that the nature of our occupation was, but we do tend to take it for granted that countries around the world see things the way we do.

Like most people, we assume that we’re good people. We see our intentions as good, and that’s not always the widely shared perception. We are not always perceived as liberators, and the people in the countries that come into play in our contests with great powers do not always share the aspirations that we attribute to them. And I think, if there’s one thing I would propose is a miracle cure for the ills of US foreign policy, it would be for Americans to get much better at trying to see the world from the perspective of other people around the world.

---

EZRA KLEIN: And when you have this much bipartisan support for something, like, say, a Cold War with China or the war on terror, it becomes hard in a two-party system to find space for critique of it, to have people who see their political interests bound up in criticizing it, and they will try to make the American people aware of the failures in logic or the failures in execution. And I think, broadly speaking, in a bunch of these foreign policy debates, a problem is here that they are actually pretty bipartisan. And when things are too bipartisan, you actually get a suppression of contrary viewpoints, which I think has been true.

Ezra Klein

Interesting conversation, and very timely in this context. The remarks about how Americans should get better at recognizing and understanding the perspectives of other people (basically become more empathetic), apply perfectly to recent international events, from the Afghanistan withdrawal, when President Biden failed to acknowledge the Afghan soldiers who fought and died during these two decades, to the recent Indo-Pacific pact with Australia, who angered France. The reactions from the Anglo-American side were mostly dismissive of the French responses, ranging from entertaining and inconsequential to theatrical – not the best way to calm the situation if you ask me.

Corporal Frisk: “A RAUKUS in the Pacific”

The American decision, which leads to the exclusion of a European ally and partner like France from a crucial partnership with Australia at a time when we are facing unprecedented challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, be it over our values or respect for a multilateralism based on the rule of law, signals a lack of consistency which France can only notice and regret.

As the quote above shows, while there is understandably some anger directed towards Australia for breaking the contract (and doing so a mere two weeks after Both sides committed to deepen defence industry cooperation and enhance their capability edge in the region. Ministers underlined the importance of the Future Submarine program during a joint 2+2 ministerial meeting between French and Australian foreign and defence ministers), the main villain in the French eyes seem to be the US who not only outmanoeuvred the French, but brought along the British and left the French out in the cold. Crucially, there seems to have been little to no warning given to the French, who even if they must have known that the Shortfin Barracuda was in trouble, most likely did not anticipate the US and UK unilaterally deciding to trash the long-held non-proliferation convention to not export reactor technology for use aboard SSNs. Interestingly, it does seem that the initiative – as well as the decision to keep the French in the dark – came from the Australians, making the French framing of this being a US diplomatic backstabbing of the higher order seem somewhat misplaced.

Robin Häggblom

The strategic partnership between US, UK, and Australia, announced last week out of the blue, became the controversy of the week on Twitter – and an opportunity to learn more than I expected to know about nuclear-powered submarines. But unlike most Twitter scandals this has the potential for long-lasting and wide-ranging consequences.