Effective vaccines for COVID-19 raise the potential of disease eradication (elimination at the global level). Adapt Research contributed to a recent blog that considers the advantages and the challenges of eradication. Progressive expansion of “green zones” provide the best chance of eradicating COVID-19 and achieving the associated medium and long-term benefits. Full blog hosted externally, click here to continue reading.
Key Points The World Health Organization (WHO) needs a more proactive and transparent Emergency Committee to raise the alarm in health crisesPotentially catastrophic disease outbreaks must trigger a fire alarm, because humans resist action unless a piercing alarm is soundingNew international structures for rapid high-level propagation of the alarm are needed to ensure hasty responsesIt will be necessary to have false alarms to
Birth of the International Health Regulations After the world failed to contain the 2003 SARS outbreak and it became a pandemic, the 2005 international health regulations (IHR) were born. The IHR included a mandate to report any cases of certain diseases (including SARS) to the World Health Organization (WHO) within 24 hours.
Social media is killing us with COVID-19 In December 2017, six months after writing a paper about how islands like New Zealand should use complete border closure as a rational pandemic response, I was giving a talk about artificial intelligence as a threat to democracy and free will to a room full of philosophers in Dunedin, New Zealand.
The Victoria University of Wellington policy journal Policy Quarterly has just published a theme issue examining COVID-19 and the New Zealand context. Articles cover: government, law, globalisation, health, lockdown, the economy and much more.
Matt Boyd, Nick Wilson “Governments routinely ignore seemingly far-out risks. Rocked by a global pandemic, they need to up their game” ( The Economist , 27 June 2020). It is not clear whether risks that threaten human extinction have received appropriate attention at the level of international governance. We systematically searched the documents of the UN Digital Library and concluded that they have not.
A new paper explains how the GHSI can be used to guide preparations in New Zealand and the Pacific New Zealand has done well to date in managing and eliminating (for now) COVID-19 disease. However, there have been sensible calls for an inquiry into New Zealand’s response. An inquiry could help determine what worked and what didn’t, what went well, and how we could do better next time.
Following a recent post on the University of Otago’s Public Health Expert blog, Matt from Adapt Research discusses COVID-19 with Radio New Zealand’s ‘The Panel’ Read the Blog here: https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/pubhealthexpert/2020/04/12/changes-in-mobility-in-response-to-the-covid-19-pandemic-nz-vs-other-countries-and-the-stories-it-suggests/ Listen to the discussion here (6min):
The only way to contain coronavirus cases in NZ is to go to Alert Level 4 for a brief period.
New Zealand has just shut its borders to foreign visitors for the first time in history in an attempt to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. In what follows, I outline the case for border closure, the conditions under which it is rational, and then note that this is merely one measure against one catastrophe. Moving forward, we should get used to analysing and preparing responses to such large-scale risks.
I’ve just spent the last three days reading Stuart Russell’s new book on AI safety, ‘Human Compatible’. To be fair I didn’t read continuously for three days, this is because the book rewards thoughtful pauses to walk or drink coffee, because it nurtures reflection about what really matters.
