Protect yourself and you protect others

PANDEMICS: WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW

Selected messages from a descriptive and useful and concise book by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, 1996 :

• Our capacity to deal with and live through pandemic situations is continually improving. We should not be fearful, but we should be aware, watchful and prepared. 
• There are steps that we can take to protect ourselves, our families, and our communities, but these need to be thought through ahead of time. Fostering sound personal habits related to cough etiquette, hand/face contact, and hand sanitation is a good place to start.
• As with any form of defense, it takes political will and financial resources (both public and private) to maintain the integrity of national borders (quarantine), support the professionals who serve in the public health field services and laboratories, and fund the research that leads to greater diagnostic

Safeguarding our lives and our livelihoods

Covid-19 Briefing Materials

Great report by McKinsey, for the files. A must read

ePandemic

Digital Health And The Fight Against The COVID-19 Pandemic

Pandemic storytelling

Pandemics, Publics, and Narrative

How people interpret messages to guide action during a pandemic. This is the topic of this book. The effects of storytelling in health communication are crucial and the book starts with the presumed contagion of swine flu by David Cameron.

Our analysis placed engagements with pandemic storytelling across public life in dialogue with the narratives on the enactment of expert advice. This dual approach helped to establish perspectives on how narratives influence publics to take action, or not. We took the view that narrative does not simply mediate pandemic knowledge and advice by helping to structure it intelligibly and meaningfully. We also questioned the idea that narratives persuade in and of themselves in ways that are not very far removed from now discredited notions of linear, hypodermic communications on matters
of health. We adopted the view that media are thoroughly entangled with experience and that pandemic narratives found there help to constitute subjects and the relationships they have with the expert knowledge systems that underpin public health efforts to manage microbial threats

 Unlike states of illness, which depend on determinate biomedical diagnosis and the related transformation of identity and relationality, pandemic experience was most often indeterminate due to the infrequency with which influenza infection is diagnosed in a laboratory and the great variation in influenza symptoms between people, between influenza outbreaks, and even over the course of a particular influenza pandemic.

 Pandemic narratives are placeholders for rich metaphors of life under threat. The metaphorical properties of contagion and immunity give pandemic narratives biopolitical resonance, connecting as they do: political imperatives to do with the production of life; the self defined and protected against the other; the milieu interieur scene for commune with microbial invaders and friends; the tensions implied in proximity and distance; and the coconstruction of narrative and knowledge.

Somebody will have to write a book about current covid-19 pandemic and the title could be: "We are all soldiers against covid". Nothing to add.

Unprepared for a pandemic

Unprepared. Global health in a time of emergency

A book that we forgot to read, but it may help (at least for the next time).

This book tells the story of how the fragile and still-uncertain machinery of global health security was cobbled together over a two-decade period, beginning in the early 1990s. It is neither a heroic  account of visionary planning by enlightened health authorities, nor a sinister story of the securitization of disease by an ever-expansive governmental  apparatus. Rather, it is a story of the assemblage of disparate elements— adapted from fields such as civil defense, emergency management, and international public health—by well-meaning experts and officials and of response failures that have typically led, in turn, to reforms that seek to strengthen or refocus the apparatus.9 The analysis centers on the ways that authorities—whether public health officials, national security experts, life scientists, or other privileged observers—conceptualize and act on an encroaching future of disease emergence. This uncertain future can be taken up and made into an object of present intervention according to multiple rationalities: as an object of probabilistic calculation, as a specter that must be avoided through precautionary intervention, or as a potential catastrophe that cannot be evaded but can only be prepared for.10 In the chapters that follow, we see how these various logics come into tension or combine in response to actual and anticipated disease emergencies.

And the key message

The widely acknowledged failure of global health security to adequately manage the Ebola outbreak led to multiple inquiries, commission reports, and recommendations for reform, but it did not put in question the strategic logic underlying the framework. Rather, reformers raised the question of how to better meet the demand for preparedness in time for the next global health emergency. As an internal World Health Organization (WHO) report warned, the frequency and magnitude of such events was increasing but “the world is not adequately prepared to respond to the full range of emergencies with public health implications”—whether disease outbreaks, natural disasters or violent conflict. The report concluded that WHO’s response to Ebola and other recent emergencies “lacked the speed, coordination, clear lines of decision making and dedicated funding to optimize implementation, reduce suffering and save lives.” Given the scale and complexity of anticipated future emergencies, it advised, “WHO must substantially strengthen and modernize its emergency management capacity.”

So what? We have to confront right now the emergency and WHO reform is still pending...

To test or not to test (for coronavirus) (3)

Current situation on test results

Daily report 30/3/2020

Available models

Latest data

Covid-19 Incidence: 212 per 100.000 inhabitants

Spreading rate: 0,6

This is good news!

Psychology of pandemics

The Psychology of Pandemics: Preparing for the Next Global Outbreak of Infectious Disease

The patterns of psychological reactions to pandemics are complex. Whereas some people are resilient to stress, other individuals become highly distressed when confronted with threatening events such as pandemic infection. Thus, people vary widely in their reactions to threatened or actual pandemics. Some react with indifference or resignation while others become highly fearful or anxious, and some develop emotional disorders such as PTSD. Some people recover from these emotional problems once the pandemic threat passes, while other people have enduring emotional reactions. Social disruptive behaviors such as rioting can also occur under particular circumstances, although prosocial behaviors appear to be more common during times of pandemic. Immune reactions may explain some of the emotional responses in infected people but these fail to account for widespread fear and social disruption in people who have not yet been infected. To better understand the reasons behind these diverse psychological reactions it is important to understand their motivational roots and vulnerability factors.

This book is devoted precisely to this issue, to understand psychological reactions and its roots.