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Links for 2020-04-01

  • EC regulations regarding cancelled flights

    ‘REGULATION (EC) No 261/2004 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 11 February 2004, establishing common rules on compensation and assistance to passengers in the event of denied boarding and of cancellation or long delay of flights, and repealing Regulation (EEC) No 295/91’ This may be handy in the coming months I suspect.

    (tags: aviation flights holidays cancellation consumer-rights consumer ec eu)

  • How they flattened the curve during the 1918 Spanish Flu

    How some cities ‘flattened the curve’ during the 1918 flu pandemic Social distancing isn’t a new idea—it saved thousands of American lives during the last great pandemic. Here’s how it worked.
    (via Vipul Ved Prakash)

    (tags: via:vipul covid-19 history coronavirus pandemics flu 1918 social-distancing)

  • COVID-19 and the NHS—“a national scandal” – The Lancet

    Bloody hell, the UK is heading for a disaster. ‘The NHS has been wholly unprepared for this pandemic. It’s impossible to understand why. Based on their modelling of the Wuhan outbreak of COVID-19, Joseph Wu and his colleagues wrote in The Lancet on Jan 31, 2020: “On the present trajectory, 2019-nCoV could be about to become a global epidemic…for health protection within China and internationally…preparedness plans should be readied for deployment at short notice, including securing supply chains of pharmaceuticals, personal protective equipment, hospital supplies, and the necessary human resources to deal with the consequences of a global outbreak of this magnitude.” This warning wasn’t made lightly. It should have been read by the Chief Medical Officer, the Chief Executive Officer of the NHS in England, and the Chief Scientific Adviser. They had a duty to immediately put the NHS and British public on high alert. February should have been used to expand coronavirus testing capacity, ensure the distribution of WHO-approved PPE, and establish training programmes and guidelines to protect NHS staff. They didn’t take any of those actions. The result has been chaos and panic across the NHS. Patients will die unnecessarily. NHS staff will die unnecessarily. It is, indeed, as one health worker wrote last week, “a national scandal”. The gravity of that scandal has yet to be understood.’

    (tags: covid-19 government uk disasters nhs the-lancet pandemics ppe scandals)

  • ‘Guidance on cocooning to protect people over 70 years and those extremely medically vulnerable from COVID-19’

    Official HSE guidance doc

    (tags: hse cocooning social-distancing lockdown quarantine covid-19)

  • PEPP-PT

    Yet another privacy-preserving contact tracing app system, this time from a pan-European consortium:

    Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) makes it possible to interrupt new chains of SARS-CoV-2 transmission rapidly and effectively by informing potentially exposed people. We are a large and inclusive European team. We provide standards, technology, and services to countries and developers. We embrace a fully privacy-preserving approach. We build on well-tested, fully implemented proximity measurement and scalable backend service. We enable tracing of infection chains across national borders. 
    (via Cory)

    (tags: coronavirus tracing gdpr covid-19 privacy contact-tracing apps europe via:doctorow)

  • Proprietary reagents are blocking COVID-19 testing worldwide

    Workers Solidarity on Twitter: “HSE briefing last night revealed the limit on number of #cornoravirus tests that can be carried out is due to companies keeping the manufacturing process for a key reagent secret” — top twitter thread. Proprietary IP rights over COVID-19 reagents are liable to kill thousands, if not millions. It’s time to put these into the commons for the public good.

    (tags: wsm twitter threads hse covid-19 reagents testing chemicals)

  • Jonas Nart’s COVID19 dashboard

    Fantastic dataviz built using Tableau

    (tags: tableau dataviz graphs covid-19 dashboards pandemics)