An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Post: The World Health Organization lauded Sweden as a "model" for battling the coronavirus as countries lift lockdowns -- after the nation controversially refused restrictions. Dr. Mike Ryan, the WHO's top emergencies expert, said Wednesday there are "lessons to be learned" from the Scandinavian nation, which has largely relied on citizens to self-regulate. "I think there's a perception out that Sweden has not put in control measures and just has allowed the disease to spread," Ryan told reporters. "Nothing can be further from the truth."

Ryan noted that instead of lockdowns, the country has "put in place a very strong public policy around social distancing, around caring and protecting people in long-term care facilities." "What it has done differently is it has very much relied on its relationship with its citizenry and the ability and willingness of its citizens to implement self-distancing and self-regulate," Ryan said. "In that sense, they have implemented public policy through that partnership with the population." He said the country also ramped up testing and had adequate capacity in hospitals to handle any outbreaks. "I think if we are to reach a new normal, Sweden represents a model if we wish to get back to a society in which we don't have lockdowns," Ryan said. Last month, more than 2,300 Swedish researchers penned a letter demanding the government enact stricter regulations. "Until we get a better idea of the situation, I think it is a good idea to close schools, restaurants and entertainment venues," said Olle Kampe, an immunology researcher at the Karolinska Institute, in March.

"[Sweden], which has a population of 10.3 million, has seen more than 20,300 cases and 2,462 deaths as of Thursday afternoon -- far higher than its Nordic neighbors, which implemented stricter containment measures," the report adds.

UPDATE (5/22/2020): 19 days later, Covid-19 deaths in Sweden "were the highest in Europe per capita in a rolling seven-day average," reports the Guardian, citing data from the scientific online publication Ourworldindata.com. And Sweden's death rate per million (376) was "far in advance of Norway's (44), Denmark's (96) and Finland's (55) — countries with similar welfare systems and demographics, but which imposed strict lockdowns..."

"What are the implications if 'space-time' (as conceived of in the Einstein Theory of General Relativity) is quantized like all other aspects of matter and energy?" asks Slashdot reader sixoh1. Space.com reports of a new study that tried to find out: In order for the math of general relativity to work, this fabric of space-time has to be absolutely smooth at the tiniest of scales. No matter how far you zoom in, space-time will always be as wrinkle-free as a recently ironed shirt. No holes, no tears, no tangles. Just pure, clean smoothness. Without this smoothness, the mathematics of gravity simply break down. But general relativity isn't the only thing telling us about space-time. We also have quantum mechanics (and its successor, quantum field theory). In the quantum world, everything microscopic is ruled by random chance and probabilities. Particles can appear and disappear at a moment's notice (and usually even less time than that). Fields can wiggle and vibrate with a will all their own. And nothing can ever be known for certain. [...]

That's exactly what a team of astronomers did, submitting their results for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and also posting their work to the online preprint site arXiv. And in a perfect coincidence, they searched for the frothiness of space-time using ... espresso. No, not the drink. ESPRESSO, the Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations, an instrument based at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. As its name suggests, ESPRESSO was not designed to search for space-time frothiness, but it turned out to be the best tool for the job. And the astronomers pointed it at a perfect source: a run-of-the-mill gas cloud sitting over 18 billion light-years away. What makes this particular gas cloud especially useful is two facts. One, there is a bright source sitting just behind it, illuminating it. And two, there's iron in the cloud, which absorbs the background light at a very specific wavelength.

So from our vantage point on Earth, if space-time is perfectly smooth, that gap in the background light caused by the gas cloud should be just as narrow as if the cloud was sitting right next to us. But if space-time is frothy, then the light traveling over the billions of light-years will spread out, changing the width of the gap. The astronomers didn't find any hint of frothiness, which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist -- it just means that if space-time is frothy, we need more than 18 billion light-years to see it with our current technology. But the results were able to rule out some models of quantum gravity, sending them into the proverbial dustbin of physics history.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized for emergency use as outlined in the agency's COVID-19 guidelines a new ventilator designed by engineers working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The ventilator, which has an acronym because this is NASA we're talking about, is called "VITAL" (Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally), and its design is being offered for free, licensed use for the duration of the coronavirus crisis. The JPL-developed emergency use ventilator is an intubation ventilator, meaning that a patient has to be sedated, with a breathing tube inserted all the way down their airway to assist their breathing. It's reserved for COVID-19 patients exhibiting the most serious symptoms, and even then is really designed for use only to free up availability of existing, fully approved ventilator hardware in the case of extreme shortages.

What makes VITAL most interesting is that it is made of "far fewer" parts than existing traditional ventilators, according to NASA, and it also can be assembled much more quickly, and maintained with less expertise and effort over time. The design provides for use for between three or four months, however, rather than years for traditional hardware, and is meant specifically for COVID-19 patient use, hence its simpler design versus models that are made to serve in a number of different medical situations. NASA's JPL is seeking commercial manufacturing partners for the hardware now that it has its authorization, however, in order to get it built in large numbers for distribution to hospitals in need.

Crashing waves emitting a flash of neon blue have lit up darkened stretches of Southern California's coastline this month, most recently making an appearance in the South Bay. From a report: The sporadic phenomenon -- sometimes called sea sparkle -- is something scientists have been studying for 120 years. It's associated with a red tide, or an algae bloom, made up of organisms called dinoflagellates. These tiny single-celled organisms are common members of the coastal plankton community that float on or near the ocean's surface and can emit bioluminescence, most commonly when they're grabbed by a predator. The light acts to startle their attacker, according to Michael Latz, a marine biologist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Occasionally, the organisms are found in high concentrations, resulting in red tides and known for giving the ocean water a deep red, brown or orange hue during the day. At night, they can put on a truly spectacular show when jostled by a crashing wave or the wake of a boat. Red tides are difficult to predict, and not all of them produce bioluminescence. Scientists still aren't sure about all the factors that lead to them, Latz said.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the breakup of Comet ATLAS, a.k.a. C/2019 Y4. "The telescope resolved roughly 30 fragments of the fragile comet on April 20 and 25 pieces on April 23," reports Phys.Org. From the report: The Hubble Space Telescope's new observations of the comet's breakup on April 20 and 23 reveal that the broken fragments are all enveloped in a sunlight-swept tail of cometary dust. These images provide further evidence that comet fragmentation is probably common and might even be the dominant mechanism by which the solid, icy nuclei of comets die. [...] Because comet fragmentation happens quickly and unpredictably, reliable observations are rare. Therefore, astronomers remain largely uncertain about the cause of fragmentation. One suggestion is that the original nucleus spins itself into pieces because of the jet action of outgassing from sublimating ices. As this venting is likely not evenly dispersed across the comet, it enhances the breakup. [...] Hubble's crisp images may yield new clues to the breakup. The telescope has distinguished pieces as small as the size of a house. Before the breakup, the entire nucleus may have been no more than the length of two football fields.

The disintegrating ATLAS comet is currently located inside the orbit of Mars, at a distance of approximately 145 million kilometres from Earth when the latest Hubble observations were taken. The comet will make its closest approach to Earth on 23 May at a distance of approximately 115 million kilometres, and eight days later it will skirt within 37 million kilometres of the Sun. You can view an animation of Hubble's observations on YouTube.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Emitting an eerie green glow, they look like foliage from a retro computer game, but in fact they are light-emitting plants produced in a laboratory. Researchers say the glowing greenery could not only add an unusual dimension to home decor but also open up a fresh way for scientists to explore the inner workings of plants. "In the future this technology can be used to visualize activities of different hormones inside the plants over the lifetime of the plant in different tissues, absolutely non-invasively. It can also be used to monitor plant responses to various stresses and changes in the environment, such as drought or wounding by herbivores," said Dr Karen Sarkisyan, the CEO of Planta, the startup that led the work, and a researcher at Imperial College London. "We really hope to bring this to the market in a few years from now, once we make them a bit brighter, once we make the ornamental plants with this new technology, and once of course they pass all the existing safety regulations," he added.

Writing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, Sarkisyan and a team of colleagues based in Russia and Austria report how they inserted four genes from a bioluminescent mushroom called Neonothopanus nambi into the DNA of tobacco plants. These genes relate to enzymes that convert caffeic acid, through a series of steps, into a luciferin that emits energy as light, before turning the resulting substance back into caffeic acid. The upshot is plants that glow with a greenish hue visible to the naked eye. "They glow both in the dark and in the daylight," said Sarkisyan, adding that the light appeared to be 10 times brighter than that produced by using bacterial genes. The team found the site of the luminescence changed as the plants grew, and luminescence generally decreased as leaves aged and increased where leaves became damaged. Flowers produced the most luminescence, the team report.

Before life can safely return to normalcy, we'll need an enormous increase in our ability to perform contact tracing -- identifying and contacting everyone who's been in contact with a person infected with COVID-19 so that they in turn can hunker down in quarantine and avoid infecting others. But, as Ars Technica reports, there are two huge problems with the massive contact-tracing platform that Google and Apple are working on. "First, billions of phones won't be able to use the tech," reports Ars. "And second: even among those who could, a solid half of Americans would refuse to because they don't trust insurers or tech companies with their health data." From the report: The 82 percent of US adults who have smartphones are exactly split on the issue, according to poll data released today by The Washington Post and University of Maryland. Half of the poll respondents said they probably or definitely would use a contact-tracing app, and the remaining half said they probably or definitely would not. While a majority of respondents (57 percent) expressed a reasonable amount of trust in public health agencies, less than half (47 percent) said they trust health insurance firms, and only 43 percent said they trust tech firms such as Google or Apple. Overall, the poll indicates that only 41 percent of American adults have both the technological capacity and the will to use a contact-tracing app. That's a problem, as research suggests that digital tracing would have to reach about 60 percent of the population to be most effective.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Some districts are giving up on remote learning and ending the academic year early, after concluding that it was too cumbersome for teachers, students and parents. Washington, D.C., as well as parts of Georgia, Texas and elsewhere plan to end a week to several weeks early. Schools have struggled to launch remote learning for more than 50 million children across the country during the coronavirus pandemic in the largest experiment in remote learning ever. Among the issues they've encountered, not all students have internet access or have parents available to help, causing concerns about inequity. As a result, many districts haven't required schoolwork be completed or graded. Student participation, when schools are even able to measure it, has often been below regular attendance level. When schools do eventually reopen, they'll look vastly different than they did before. There may be more scheduled days home, more online learning, and lots of hand-washing.

In parts of China, where life is slowly returning to normalcy, an elementary school in Yangzheng had students design hats that measure 1 meter (3.2 feet) across as a lesson in coronavirus safety practices. "We're advocating students to wear a one-meter hat and maintain one meter's distance," the Zhejiang Daily newspaper quoted Hong Feng, the school's principal, as saying as the kids returned to school this week for the first time in several months.

"Along with teaching the students about social distancing, the headgear is giving the kids a history lesson: The hats resemble those worn during the Song Dynasty, which ruled China between 960 and 1279," adds CNET. "The long horizontal plumes on Song Dynasty toppers were supposedly to prevent officials from conspiring sotto voce with one another while at court -- so social distancing was in fact their original function," Eileen Chengyin Chow, a Duke University professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies, explained on Twitter.

A government-run study of Gilead's remdesivir, perhaps the most closely watched experimental drug to treat the novel coronavirus, showed that the medicine is effective against Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. From a report: Gilead made the announcement in a statement Wednesday, stating: "We understand that the trial has met its primary endpoint." The company said that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is conducting the study, will provide data at an upcoming briefing. The finding -- although difficult to fully characterize without any data for the study -- would represent the first treatment shown to improve outcomes in patients infected with the virus that put the global economy in a standstill and killed at least 218,000 people worldwide.

During an appearance alongside President Trump in the Oval Office, Anthony Fauci, the director of NIAID, said the data are a "very important proof of concept" and that there was reason for optimism, but cautioned the data were not a "knockout." Over the past few weeks, there have been conflicting reports about the potential benefit of remdesivir, a drug that was previously tried in Ebola. As previously reported by STAT, an early peek at Gilead's study in severe Covid-19 patients, based on data from a trial at a Chicago hospital, suggested patients were doing better than expected on remdesivir. Days later, a summary of results from a study in China showed that patients on the drug did not improve more than those in a control group.

Chinese scientists say the novel coronavirus will not be eradicated, adding to a growing consensus around the world that the pathogen will likely return in waves like the flu. From a report: It's unlikely the new virus will disappear the way its close cousin SARS did 17 years ago, as it infects some people without causing obvious symptoms like fever. This group of so-called asymptomatic carriers makes it hard to fully contain transmission as they can spread the virus undetected, a group of Chinese viral and medical researchers told reporters in Beijing at a briefing Monday. With SARS, those infected became seriously ill. Once they were quarantined from others, the virus stopped spreading. In contrast, China is still finding dozens of asymptomatic cases of the coronavirus every day despite bringing its epidemic under control. "This is very likely to be an epidemic that co-exists with humans for a long time, becomes seasonal and is sustained within human bodies," said Jin Qi, director of the Institute of Pathogen Biology at China's top.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Reel-to-reel tapes are experiencing a resurgence of interest among audio buffs, but they are prone to degradation, which has been a topic of active research for many years. It's well known that applying heat can often reverse the damage sufficiently to enable playback, usually by baking the tapes in an oven. Now scientists at the US Library of Congress have determined precisely why this method seems to work, presenting their findings earlier this month on the American Chemical Society's SciMeetings online platform.

The primary culprit for the degradation is known as "sticky shed syndrome," in which the binders used in a magnetic tape to hold the iron oxide casing to the plastic carrier deteriorate. They form a sticky residue that can damage both the tape and playback equipment. [...] [E]xperiments showed that when a degraded reel-to-reel tape is heated, the sticky residues melt back onto the bulk polymer layer, rendering the tape playable once again. That's why 130F is the sweet spot for baking degraded tapes; it's the melting point for the residues. "If you go any lower than that, nothing is going to happen," said project leader Andrew Davis, a polymer chemist who works in the LOC's preservation research and testing division. However, he also found that there is no single component that accounts for tape degradation, and the sticky residues don't just form on the binder layer.

"This research also confirmed what we heard from audio technicians, that thermally treated tapes that were wound on reels reverted to a visibly deteriorated condition within a few weeks," said Davis. "Surprisingly, we found that when our small unwound test samples of tape were thermally treated, they appeared to be optically fine even after weeks. Clearly being wound has some effect on the tapes." That is the next stage of research, and Davis actually set up a range of samples with different treatments that he was monitoring right up until shelter-at-home policies went into effect in the Washington, DC, area. He hasn't been able to return to his lab to check on them but is hopeful that, once the lockdowns lift, there will some intriguing experimental results on that score. Beyond that, Davis hopes to extend his experiments to enclosed magnetic media, such as cassette and VHS tapes.

More than 150 investors and entrepreneurs in India are funding dozens of projects in a bid to help millions better combat the COVID-19 epidemic and help the nation's booming startup ecosystem withstand the economic devastation the pandemic has caused. From a report: The investors said they have contributed 1 billion Indian rupees -- or $13 million -- of their own money to the ACT Grants initiative, which was unveiled late last month. The group -- which includes several prominent industry figures, including Nandan Nilekani, Paytm's Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Flipkart's Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Oyo's Ritesh Agarwal, Udaan's Sujeet Kumar, Freshworks' Girish Mathrubootham, CRED's Kunal Shah and Times Internet's Miten Sampat -- has funded 32 projects to date. These projects span six themes, including solutions that could help curtail the spread of the COVID-19 disease, development of testing and detection kits, building medical equipment such as ventilators and taking care of mental health. The group came together last month when India had just begun to see cases of the coronavirus disease. [...] There have been 29,435 known cases of coronavirus in India, according to the Ministry of Health and Welfare. As of Tuesday evening, at least 886 people had died.

hackingbear writes: According to The Washington Post, U.S. deaths soared in the early weeks of the pandemic, surpassing the number of COVID-19 related deaths, as well as the number normally expected for the time period. An estimated 15,400 excess deaths occurred from March 1 to April 4, nearly double the 8,128 deaths attributed to COVID-19 during that time. The excess deaths estimate was calculated by subtracting the expected seasonal baseline from all deaths but may be attributed to causes other than COVID-19 directly, such as patients afraid of visiting hospitals. On April 15, the New York City revised its COVID-19 death toll upward by 3,778 to account for people who were not tested but presumed to have died from the virus. On April 17, the city of Wuhan, the original epicenter of COVID-19, similarly raised death toll by 1,290 to account for omission due to overwhelmed hospitals in the early days of the epidemic in the city, but the change was viewed as an "evidence" of prior cover-up in the West. The excess deaths "could include people who died because of the epidemic but not from the disease, such as those who were afraid to seek medical treatment for unrelated illnesses, as well as some number of deaths that are part of the ordinary variation in the death rate," notes The Washington Post. "The count is also affected by increases or decreases in other categories of deaths, such as suicides, homicides and motor vehicle accidents."

"But in any pandemic, higher-than-normal mortality is a starting point for scientists seeking to understand the full impact of the disease."

schwit1 shares a report from Engadget: The USGS (with help from NASA and the Lunar Planetary Institute) has released the first complete geologic map of the Moon, providing a truly comprehensive look at our nearest cosmic neighbor. The 1:5,000,000 scale map is color-coded to help you quickly identify geological features, including multiple crater types, plains and other features. The team created the map using a mix of Apollo-era maps and data from recent satellite missions, including the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Japans SELENE. Scientists redrew the historical maps to help them line up with the present-day sets while preserving valuable notes. They also established consistent descriptions of features to prevent the confusion that could happen with past maps.

The Starship SN4, a prototype of a SpaceX ship meant to one day take humans to the moon and Mars, has remained intact during pressure testing. ExtremeTech reports: Last year, SpaceX successfully tested the "Starhopper" prototype with one of the company's new Raptor engines. However, the full-scale prototypes haven't fared well in pressure testing. SN1 blew its top in February, and both SN2 and SN3 suffered similar fates during the "cryo" testing phase, which simulates a full-pressure tank in the vacuum of space. SN4 is the first version of the rocket to survive that test.

The success of the SN4 prototype is a big step forward for the Starship program. The next step is to set up a static fire test with a single Raptor engine on the SN4. That could happen as soon as next week. Assuming it's still in one piece, SpaceX will then conduct a brief flight up to 500 feet (150 meters) before setting down. Elon Musk says that the next variant (predictably called SN5) will feature the full-scale tank and a trio of Raptor engines. The final design calls for six Raptor engines on the Starship and a further 37 of them on the Super Heavy stage.

In the worldwide race for a vaccine to stop the coronavirus, the laboratory sprinting fastest is at Oxford University. From a report: Most other teams have had to start with small clinical trials of a few hundred participants to demonstrate safety. But scientists at the university's Jenner Institute had a running start on a vaccine, having proved in previous trials that similar inoculations -- including one last year against an earlier coronavirus -- were harmless to humans. That has enabled them to leap ahead and schedule tests of their new coronavirus vaccine involving more than 6,000 people by the end of next month, hoping to show not only that it is safe, but also that it works. The Oxford scientists now say that with an emergency approval from regulators, the first few million doses of their vaccine could be available by September -- at least several months ahead of any of the other announced efforts -- if it proves to be effective.

Now, they have received promising news suggesting that it might. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health's Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana last month inoculated six rhesus macaque monkeys with single doses of the Oxford vaccine. The animals were then exposed to heavy quantities of the virus that is causing the pandemic -- exposure that had consistently sickened other monkeys in the lab. But more than 28 days later all six were healthy, said Vincent Munster, the researcher who conducted the test. "The rhesus macaque is pretty much the closest thing we have to humans," Dr. Munster said, noting that scientists were still analyzing the result. He said he expected to share it with other scientists next week and then submit it to a peer-reviewed journal.

The UK's coronavirus contact-tracing app is set to use a different model to the one proposed by Apple and Google, despite concerns raised about privacy and performance. From a report: The NHS says it has a way to make the software work "sufficiently well" on iPhones without users having to keep it active and on-screen. That limitation has posed problems for similar apps in other countries. Experts from GCHQ's National Cyber Security Centre have aided the effort. NCSC indicated that its involvement has been limited to an advisory role. "Engineers have met several core challenges for the app to meet public health needs and support detection of contact events sufficiently well, including when the app is in the background, without excessively affecting battery life," said a spokeswoman for NHSX, the health service's digital innovation unit.

Long-time Slashdot reader Charlotte Web writes: "Virus researchers say there is virtually no chance that the new coronavirus was released as result of a laboratory accident in China or anywhere else," writes NPR, citing "10 leading scientists who collect samples of viruses from animals in the wild, study virus genomes and understand how lab accidents can happen."
NPR reports: "All of the evidence points to this not being a laboratory accident," says Jonna Mazet, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Davis and director of a global project to watch for emerging viruses called PREDICT. Rather, the experts interviewed by NPR all believe that the virus was transmitted between animals and humans in nature, as has happened in previous outbreaks — from Ebola to the Marburg virus — and with other known coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS...

Lowering the odds further still, when researchers begin to work in the lab to see what they've collected, the samples they handle aren't actually infectious. Mazet says they are "inactivated," a chemical process that breaks apart the virus itself while preserving its genetic material for study... These protocols are used by scientists all over the world, including in China. Mazet says that the staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where much of the suspicion has been focused, has been trained by U.S. scientists as part of the PREDICT program. Scientists working there follow the rules, Mazet says.

Mazet says researchers at the Wuhan institute were so good, they actually helped to shape the protocols. "They were not only completing all of those trainings, but they were also weighing in and helping us to make those trainings very strong from a safety perspective," she says.
U.S. intelligence officials have now also joined additional scientists saying there's zero evidence that the virus escaped from a lab. And NPR also interviewed Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance researching the origins of pandemics, who points out that nearly 3% of the population in China's rural farming regions near wild animals already had antibodies to coronaviruses similar to SARS. "We're finding 1 to 7 million people exposed to these viruses every year in Southeast Asia; that's the pathway. It's just so obvious to all of us working in the field..."

"We have a bat virus in my neighborhood in New York killing people. Let's get real about this."

America and India "have run an internationally recognized joint vaccine development program for more than three decades," writes long-time Slashdot reader retroworks. And today the BBC reported the two countries are now working together on vaccines against the new coronavirus: India is among the largest manufacturer of generic drugs and vaccines in the world. It is home to half a dozen major vaccine makers and a host of smaller ones, making doses against polio, meningitis, pneumonia, rotavirus, BCG, measles, mumps and rubella, among other diseases. Now half a dozen Indian firms are developing vaccines against the virus that causes Covid-19.

One of them is Serum Institute of India, the world's largest vaccine maker by number of doses produced and sold globally... Now the firm has stitched up collaboration with Codagenix, an American biotech company, to develop a "live attenuated" vaccine, among the more than 80 reportedly in development all over the world... "We are planning a set of animal trials [on mice and primates] of this vaccine in April. By September, we should be able to begin human trials," Adar Poonawalla, chief executive officer of Serum Institute of India, told me over the phone. Mr Poonawalla's firm has also partnered to mass produce a vaccine being developed by the University of Oxford and backed by the UK government...

"It's pretty clear the world is going to need hundreds of millions of doses, ideally by the end of this year, to end this pandemic, to lead us out of lockdown," Prof Adrian Hill, who runs the Jenner Institute at Oxford, told the BBC's Health and Science correspondent James Gallagher. This is where Indian vaccine makers have a head start over others. Mr Poonawalla's firm alone has an extra capacity of 400 to 500 million doses. "We have lots of capacity as we have invested in it," he says.

There's more. Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech had announced a partnership with the University of Wisconsin Madison and US-based firm FluGen to make almost 300 million doses of a vaccine for global distribution. Zydus Cadilla is working on two vaccines, while Biological E, Indian Immunologicals, and Mynvax are developing a vaccine each. Another four or five home-grown vaccines are in early stages of development.
In the article the World Health Organization's chief scientist also applauds "the entrepreneurs and pharmaceutical companies who invested in quality manufacturing and in processes that made it possible to produce in bulk.

"The owners of these companies have also had the goal of doing good for the world, while also running a successful business and this model is a win-win for all."

"What Australia and New Zealand have already accomplished is a remarkable cause for hope," reports the New York Times, in an inspiring article shared by Slashdot reader tflf (also republished here and here): The results are undeniable: Australia and New Zealand have squashed the curve. Australia, a nation of 25 million people that had been on track for 153,000 cases by Easter, has recorded a total of 6,670 infections and 78 deaths. It has a daily growth rate of less than 1 percent, with per capita testing among the highest in the world. New Zealand's own daily growth rate, after soaring in March, is also below 1 percent, with 1,456 confirmed cases and 17 deaths. It has just 361 active cases in a country of five million...

It all started with scientists. In Australia, as soon as China released the genetic code for the coronavirus in early January, pathologists in public health laboratories started sharing plans for tests. In every state and territory, they jumped ahead of politicians. "It meant we could have a test up and running quickly that was reasonably comparable everywhere," Dr. Collignon said. The government then opened the budgetary floodgates to support suffering workersâ¦

Both nations are now reporting just a handful of new infections each day, down from hundreds in March, and they are converging toward an extraordinary goal: completely eliminating the virus from their island nations.