Today, March 11, 2022, marks two years since covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. We've had lockdowns, vaccines, and arguments about how to move forward and live with this virus. We've watched the pandemic through numbers and data and memorials to the many lives lost, officially now over six million. It is likely this figure is a vast undercount. A study published in The Lancet this week estimated that the true number may be three times higher, at 18.2 million.

How anti-science movements use the language of personal liberty and how we can address it. Looking back, the initial spread of COVID-19 in early 2020 illustrates that clinicians, epidemiologists and behavioral scientists around the world greatly underestimated the scope and intensity of resistance to mitigation measures that would follow. Many in the medical community have remained wedded to the view that direct observation of the soaring volume of death and morbidity associated with coronavirus infections will convert most people into adherents of mitigation measures. Hence, most public health communications on mask-wearing, social distancing, and vaccination stubbornly focus on and attempt to leverage efficacy data, patient testimonies, and the clout of clinicians, politicians, athletes and social media influencers, to increase public uptake.

Freedoms are most intimately and persistently felt as, and equated with, human rights. However, without strategic integration, freedom becomes an individualistic paradigm focused on personal gain, disengaged from collectivist public health efforts. The embrace of mitigation should be promoted as an expression of freedom and support of human rights, a communal paradigm focused on maintaining personal health and dignity.

Global democracy continued its precipitous decline in 2021, according to the latest edition of the Democracy Index. The annual survey, which rates the state of democracy across 167 countries on the basis of five measures—electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties—finds that more than a third of the world’s population live under authoritarian rule while just 6.4% enjoy a full democracy.

The traditional idea of going to the office five days a week or working 9 to 5 may be dying. Some companies are making room for more creative and flexible approaches to getting workers to do their jobs.

Pandemic ending is more of a question of lived experience, and thus is more of a sociological phenomenon than a biological one. And thus dashboards—which do not measure mental health, educational impact, and the denial of close social bonds—are not the tool that will tell us when the pandemic will end.

The stunning Covid vaccines manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna drew upon long-buried discoveries made in the hopes of ending past epidemics. Even as the Omicron variant fuels a new wave of the pandemic, the vaccines have proved remarkably resilient at defending against severe illness and death. And the manufacturers, Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna, say that mRNA technology will allow them to adapt the vaccines quickly, to fend off whatever dangerous new version of the virus that evolution brings next.

Why have the effects of COVID-19 been so unevenly geographically distributed in the United States? This paper investigates the role of social capital as a mediating factor for the spread of the virus. Because social capital is associated with greater trust and relationships within a community, it could endow individuals with a greater concern for others, thereby leading to more hygienic practices and social distancing.

China's Covid-19 health code system that strictly governs people's movements crashed in Xi'an this week, worsening conditions in the locked-down city where the country's worst outbreak since Wuhan has been unfolding. The crash has complicated efforts to weed out cases through mass testing, created hurdles for people seeking care at hospitals and led to the suspension of a top official, the latest among a slew of bureaucrats to be punished as Beijing fumes over the situation.

Early detection of infectious diseases is crucial for reducing transmission and facilitating early intervention. In this study, we built a real-time smartwatch-based alerting system that detects aberrant physiological and activity signals (heart rates and steps) associated with the onset of early infection and implemented this system in a prospective study.

Rights groups petitioned Israel's top court on Monday to repeal new COVID-19 measures that authorize the country's domestic intelligence service to use counter-terrorism phone tracking technology to contain the spread of the Omicron virus variant. Announcing the emergency measures on Saturday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said the phone tracking would be used to locate carriers of the new and potentially more contagious variant in order to curb its transmission to others. Israeli rights groups say the emergency measures violate previous Supreme Court rulings over such surveillance, used on-and-off by the country's Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency since March, 2020.

All healthcare workers are on the frontline during the covid pandemic. They face an overwhelming workload and risk their health and wellbeing every day. Moreover, doctors and nurses still have patients with other diseases and must take care of them on a high level nevertheless. So, healthcare providers are looking for the opportunity to turn from classical consultation treatment and look for new solutions. One of these solutions is a chatbot.

More than any other startup, Clubhouse epitomizes the venture-capital-backed euphoria that swept the tech industry since lockdowns shut millions of people inside and pushed them online for connection, entertainment, and information. Marc Andreessen has called the app "the Athenian agora come to life," referring to the hub of democracy in ancient Greece. It has raised more than $100m from his firm and other top VCs, garnering a $4bn valuation. But with vaccinations rising and more people returning to normal life, Clubhouse has been hit particularly hard. Daily downloads of the app have plunged more than 90% since a peak in June, while daily average users are down almost 80% since February.

During an evolving outbreak or pandemic, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) including physical distancing, isolation, and mask use may flatten the peak in communities. However, these strategies rely on community understanding and motivation to engage to ensure appropriate compliance and impact.

A chronological analysis of crucial junctures and international obligations in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic: Understanding the spread of SARS-CoV-2, how and when evidence emerged, and the timing of local, national, regional, and global responses is essential to establish how an outbreak became a pandemic and to prepare for future health threats.

Uneven vaccine coverage and a relaxation of preventive measures have brought Europe to a "critical point" in the pandemic, the World Health Organization has said, with cases again at near-record levels and 500,000 more deaths forecast by February.

Researchers in Iceland conducted two trials of a shorter work week that involved about 2,500 workers. They found that the experiment was an "overwhelming success"— workers were able to work less, get paid the same, while maintaining productivity and improving personal well-being: Participants in the study reduced their hours by three to five hours per week without losing pay.

While the world still struggles against the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments and organisations are discussing how new technologies can be exploited to relieve its impacts and how future pandemics can be avoided or minimised. Among the envisioned solutions, the development of more efficient and widespread smart city initiatives can improve the way critical data is retrieved, processed, stored, and disseminated, potentially improving the detection and mitigation of outbreaks while reducing the execution time when taking critical actions.

Government use of face ID systems exploded during the pandemic—but tying it to critical services has left some people locked out at the moment they needed help the most.

A clearly defined question is an important starting point in claims-making for people’s right to data and an important step on the path to data empowerment.

In an interview with AlgorithmWatch, Prof. Susan Landau discusses why we need to resist fear in the face of pandemic uncertainty and the normalization of health surveillance technologies — and why the time to have a broad democratic discussion about their future uses is now.

They were bored. Or worried about layoffs. Or tired of working hard for a meager raise every year. They got another job offer. Now they have a secret. A small, dedicated group of white-collar workers, in industries from tech to banking to insurance, say they have found a way to double their pay: Work two full-time remote jobs, don't tell anyone and, for the most part, don't do too much work, either. Alone in their home offices, they toggle between two laptops. They play "Tetris" with their calendars, trying to dodge endless meetings. Sometimes they log on to two meetings at once. They use paid time off -- in some cases, unlimited -- to juggle the occasional big project or ramp up at a new gig. Many say they don't work more than 40 hours a week for both jobs combined. They don't apologize for taking advantage of a system they feel has taken advantage of them.

The World Health Organization (WHO) issued a Digital documentation of COVID-19 certificates, including:

• the list of attributes to be include in a vaccine certificate, linked with the FHIR resource still under construction
  
• guidelines with description on use cases and workflow.

In discussing the notorious Excel incident last year when the UK lost track of 16,000 Covid cases due to a .xls row limit, Tim Harford presents a history of the spreadsheet, dating all the way back to Francesco di Marco Datini and double-entry bookkeeping in 1396. A delightful piece of writing.

The government’s decision to allow only the fully vaccinated to enter restaurants, bars, trains and other spaces has caused a spike in inoculations.

Quebec will require its citizens to carry a “vaccine passport” as of Sept. 1 that would serve to exclude those who have not received two doses. Health Minister Christian Dubé stressed the passports would only be mandated in regions that experience outbreaks and would not be needed to access essential services.

Vibrations from cars and pedestrians create unique signals in cables. Now scientists have used the trick to show how Covid-19 brought life to a halt.

Ever since the Covid pandemic started in 2020, various groups have seen verifiable credentials as a means for providing a secure, privacy-respecting system for health and travel data sharing. This post explores the ecosystem of ecosystems that is emerging as hundreds of organizations around the world rise to the challenge of implementing a globally interoperable system that also respects individual choice and privacy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed work life profoundly and concerns regarding the mental well-being of employees’ have arisen. Organizations have made rapid digital advancements and have started to use new collaborative tools such as social media platforms overnight. Our study aimed to investigate how professional social media communication has affected work engagement before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and the role of perceived social support, task resources, and psychological distress as predictors and moderators of work engagement.

All viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, change over time. Most changes have little to no impact on the virus’ properties. However, some changes may affect the virus’s properties, such as how easily it spreads, the associated disease severity, or the performance of vaccines, therapeutic medicines, diagnostic tools, or other public health and social measures.

On December 30, 2019, BlueDot, a Toronto-based startup that uses a platform built around artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data to track and predict the outbreak and spread of infectious diseases, alerted its private sector and government clients about a cluster of “unusual pneumonia” cases happening around a market in Wuhan, China.

Disease surveillance schemes to catch the next rising virus already exist—they’re just not communicating with each other.

Today, the EU Digital COVID Certificate has reached another important milestone with the go-live of the technical system at EU level, which allows to verify certificates in a secure and privacy-friendly way. The EU certificate was proposed by the Commission to resume safe travelling this summer. It will be free of charge, secure and accessible to all. Available in digital format or on paper, it will be a proof that a person has been vaccinated against COVID-19, tested negative, or recovered from an infection.

Public and private organizations rapidly set up data ecosystems to help fight COVID-19. McKinsey describes how companies can fast-track their ecosystem development.

Vaccine passports are being considered by some governments and businesses as a means of allowing a return to something more closely resembling normal life. Canada’s Privacy Commissioners have decided to make a statement at this time in an effort to ensure that privacy is considered at the earliest opportunity as part of any discussions about vaccine passport development.

The NHS app launched on Monday May 17th will be used to demonstrate COVID-19 vaccination status. However, guidance on the UK government website says: “There are not many countries that currently accept proof of vaccination. So for the time being, most people will still need to follow other rules when travelling abroad – like getting a negative pre-departure test.”

Since September 2020, the Independent Panel has systematically, rigorously and comprehensively examined why COVID-19 became a global health and socio-economic crisis. Now it presented its findings and recommendations for action to curb the COVID-19 pandemic and to ensure that any future infectious disease outbreak does not become another catastrophic pandemic.

A federal lawsuit has been filed against Pennsylvania and a vendor contracted by the state's Department of Health (DOH) over a data breach that exposed the personal health information (PHI) of thousands of Pennsylvanians.

This blog post describes ten separable concerns for COVID-19 vaccine credentials, and responsive design strategies.

Recording from a webinar on April 28 with contact tracing experts, customers, policy makers and entrepreneurs that discussed how physical COVID-19 contact tracing tokens can be used in targeted use cases to quickly react to local outbreaks.

Full title: SARS-CoV-2 infection rates of antibody-positive compared with antibody-negative health-care workers in England: a large, multicentre, prospective cohort study. in short: If you had COVID, less chances to get infected again in most individuals - but does not tell anything about vaccinated people.

Andy Slavitt (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) said during a White House COVID-19 briefing: "[...] the government here is not viewing its role as the place to create a passport, nor a place to hold the data of citizens. We view this as something that the private sector is doing and will do. What's important to us, and we're leading an interagency process right now to go through these details, are that some important criteria be met with these credentials."

More corona news discussed on Slack:

• World leaders call for international pandemic treaty
  
• Indigenous Peoples' Data During COVID-19: From External to Internal
  
• New York rolls out COVID-19 passports based on IBM blockchain technology

Too many groups put digital business ahead of public health: Axios hosted a virtual event on what COVID-19 testing will look like in a post-vaccine world, featuring conversations with Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health Dr. Michael Mina, Johns Hopkins senior scholar Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, and Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota Dr. Michael Osterholm.

Covid-19 has shaken the world, with more than 2.5 million deaths and 115 million cases confirmed. This article collects the best examples of strategies for combating the virus.

As the vaccination roll-out accelerates around the world, many countries are starting to think about how they can enable vaccinated citizens to travel and visit public places such as restaurants and sports stadiums. The EU has unveiled its proposed digital vaccine passport in time for the summer tourism season.
Other Vaccine Passport articles this week were:

• The “vaccine passport” zemblanity
  
• EU's proposal for "Digital green certificates"
  

How did so many rich countries get it so wrong? How did others get it so right?

As COVID-19 cases resulting from infection with SARS-CoV-2 variants accumulate in the US and around the world, one question looms large: How well do the COVID-19 vaccines developed so far protect against these novel coronavirus spinoffs?

Global.health enables open access to more than 5 million anonymized Covid-19 records from 160 countries. Each record can contain dozens of data points about the case, including demographics, travel history, testing dates, and outcomes.

Global.health enables open access to more than 5 million anonymized Covid-19 records from 160 countries. Each record can contain dozens of data points about the case, including demographics, travel history, testing dates, and outcomes.

In a year of scientific breakthroughs — and political failures — what can we learn for the future?

In a year of scientific breakthroughs — and political failures — what can we learn for the future?

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Monday said the EU executive would propose a digital vaccination passport later this month. Members states will then decide whether to press ahead with the scheme to allow each other to recognize citizens' proof of vaccination.

From Ben Evans: "Covid brought shock and a lot of broken habits to tech, but mostly, it accelerates everything that was already changing. For that and lots of other reasons, tech is becoming a regulated industry, but if we step over the slogans, what does that actually mean? Tech is entering its second 50 years."

As governments roll-out mass COVID-19 vaccination programmes, debate has grown on the issue of vaccine passports and status apps.

I sat down with Kaliya Young and Lucy Yang, directors of CCI, an open community, which brings together more than 300 technologists, academics and healthcare professionals from more than 100 organizations. CCI recently joined Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) to make a difference in a space that demands technological innovation and efficacy.

A Nature survey shows many scientists expect the virus that causes COVID-19 to become endemic, but it could pose less danger over time.

The B117 variant will probably take over between February and March in most developed countries. That’s without taking into account the Brazilian and South African variants. In the race between the variants and the vaccines, the variants are the hare and the vaccines are the tortoise.

As many countries continue to struggle with a third wave of COVID-19 all governments and public health authorities will need to remain open to new ideas for controlling the pandemic.

Israel is considered a world leader in medical data, which is partly why it has received priority access to the COVID-19 vaccines. Experts agree that the Pfizer deal offers reasonable protection of citizens’ personal data - but some parts of the deal prompt questions that need answering.

Singapore has admitted data from its Covid contact tracing programme can also be accessed by police, reversing earlier privacy assurances. Such an approach will erode public trust in future health responses and therefore impede their efficacy.

On Thursday, December 10, 2020, the GovLab hosted a panel discussion on “Data Collaboration in the Age of COVID-19” at the MyData Conference 2020. Facilitated by Stefaan Verhulst (Co-Founder and Chief R&D at The GovLab), panelists Kelly Jin (City of New York), Claudia Juench (Cloudera Foundation), Dave Greene (Microsoft), and JoAnn Stonier (Mastercard) discussed ways the COVID-19 response could inform efforts to foster cross-sector data reuse in a responsible, systematic, and sustainable way.

Dr Nicholas Christakis writes that after this pandemic people will seek extensive social interactions and predicts a second “roaring 20s”. Will privacy concerns and willingness to share data also change after the current pandemic is over?

IBM Digital Health Pass and Salesforce Work.com to help businesses, schools and governments as they strive to reopen safely in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet another health pass with organisation centric analytics.

Walgreens and CVS staff will soon begin vaccinations at tens of thousands of long-term care facilities. Some staff and residents are wary, and there are thorny issues of consent.

Estonian Prime Minister Jüri Ratas, WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced yesterday an international partnership to build a trusted COVID-19 Vaccination Certification Infrastructure, accelerating recovery from the global pandemic.

MOSIP, an open-source platform developed in India, will be central to many of those efforts

The Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine has passed safety and efficacy tests — but scientists still have many questions about how this and other vaccines will perform as they’re rolled out to millions of people.

IATA announced that it is in the final development phase of the IATA Travel Pass, a digital health pass that will support the safe reopening of borders.

How Any Country Can Learn to Dance and Stop the Coronavirus.

‘Data about children’s lives in the pandemic’ looks at the impact of the pandemic on children’s lives, and the wellbeing of parents and teachers, through the lens of new data made available to the ODI, as well as various open data sources and in-depth qualitative research.

The European Medicines Agency and national regulators will monitor data from a wide range of sources.

This Special Publication outlines a number of potentially valuable policy changes and actions that will help drive toward effective, efficient, and ethical data sharing, including more compelling and widespread communication efforts to improve awareness, understanding, and participation in data sharing.

A boom in contact tracing devices could herald a new era of worker surveillance.

National apps whose backends are now linked through the gateway service are Germany’s Corona-Warn-App, the Republic of Ireland’s COVID tracker, and Italy’s Immuni app.

The rapid rollout of digital health approaches in the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has neglected to prioritize data privacy and is a missed opportunity for building users’ trust in these technologies for future outbreaks and quotidian healthcare.

And here another paper: "Patient trust must come at the top of researchers’ priority list"

An algorithm built in the US correctly identified people with Covid-19 by the sound of their coughs.

To exploit the full potential of contact tracing and warning apps to break the chain of coronavirus infections across borders and save lives, the Commission, at the invitation by EU Member States, has set up an EU-wide system to ensure interoperability – a so-called ‘gateway'. After a successful pilot phase, the system goes live today with the first wave of national apps now linked through this service: Germany's Corona-Warn-App, Ireland's COVID tracker, and Italy's immuni. Together, these apps have been downloaded by around 30 million people, which corresponds to two-thirds of all app downloads in the EU.

Companies collecting data for pubs and restaurants to help them fulfil their contact-tracing duties are harvesting confidential customer information to sell.

How to do backward contact tracing is now the question… The key is in the venue-based tracking, which offers quicker and easier returns

This paper describes results of a Covid-19 contact tracing app measurement study carried out on a standard design of European commuter tram. The measurements indicate that in the tram there is little correlation between Bluetooth received signal strength and distance between handsets. The paper applies the detection rules used by the Italian, Swiss and German apps to measurement data and also characterised the impact on performance of changes in the parameters used in these detection rules.

Google will deploy a function that can display color-coded overlays of the concentraiton of COVID-19 positive cases. Such data are mainly open data from Johns Hopkins, the New York times, and Wikipedia.

Proximity tracing apps have been proposed as an aide in dealing with the COVID-19 crisis. Some of those apps leverage attenuation of Bluetooth beacons from mobile devices to build a record of proximate encounters between a pair of device owners. The underlying protocols are known to suffer from false positive and re-identification attacks. We present evidence that the attacker's difficulty in mounting such attacks has been overestimated.

Finland's prime minister will work remotely until further notice, officials announced on Thursday, after the country's new coronavirus app warned that she may have been exposed. Finland launched its app on September 1 and it has since been downloaded approximately 1.8 million times, equal to one-third of Finland's 5.5 million population.

McKinsey's perspectives on the coronavirus outbreak, the twin threats to lives and livelihoods, and how organizations can prepare for the next normal.

A global collection of COVID19 policy trackers and data. It covers a diversity of areas like non-pharamaceutical interventions, economic and social policy responses, public attitudes, politics and media coverage.

A quantitative study of differences in COVID-19–related internet uses and outcomes among the general population.

Las Vegas casinos, open for months now, are a likely hotbed for the spread of COVID-19. For many reasons, contact tracing has proved next to impossible as tourists return to homes across the U.S.

Spikes in coronavirus across the world are once again impacting the tourism industry. But one start-up has a possible solution – an app which acts as a health passport to prove travellers are virus-free.

COVID risk score introduced by Apple (iOS 13.6) might be illegal in Switzerland because national apps' safteguards are circumvented.

One way to compare the higher education policies of countries under pandemic conditions is to consider what would happen in higher education if values aligned to the ‘common good’.

Richard Whitt describes the need to shift from a paradigm of SEAM (surveil, extract, analyse, manipulate) to one of the HAACS (Human autonomy/agency via computer system)

• Part 1
  
• Part 2

Germany and Switzerland are not sure how well their apps are working as the data is out of bounds.

Immunity Passports have become a much hyped tool to cope with this pandemic and the economic crisis. Essentially, with immunity passports those who are 'immune' to the virus would have some kind of certified document - whether physical or digital.

COVID-19 underscores how urgently we need a new approach to organizing and sharing personal data writes Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

With extraordinary speed, the coronavirus has torn through nearly every corner of the economy. Workers across nine industries reflect in this article on paying the bills, filling their days, and facing an economy dramatically changed.

You may have lost interest in the pandemic. It has not lost interest in you.

Member States, with the support of the Commission, have agreed on a set of technical specifications to ensure a safe exchange of information between national contact tracing apps based on a decentralised architecture. This concerns the vast majority of tracing apps that were already – or are about to be – launched in the EU. Once the technical solution is deployed, such national apps will work seamlessly when users travel to another EU country which also follows the decentralised approach. This means an important additional step towards interoperability of mobile apps for tracing coronavirus infections, as Member States begin to lift travel restrictions across borders in time for summer vacation.

The Fleming that advises the European Commission on research into the novel coronavirus Professor Peter Piot has told VRT News of how a possible second wave of novel coronavirus infections should be tackled.

Paul-Olivier wrote a paper outlining the privacy and security risks associated to the Google/Apple Exposure Notification API. This is very Swiss centric but applicable to many different countries of course.

The Apple-Google design has been promoted as being more privacy-centric.

Covid-19 has shown how companies can work together to solve problems.

Minnesota officials say they’re using contact tracing to better understand who the protestors are and where they’re coming from.

When world leaders came together in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, they laid the foundation for a model of global governance that would last for more than 70 years. To manage the far-reaching implications of digital technology and hyper-globalization, we must now pick up where they left off.

There is a good chance that people will over-trust an app to keep them safe, which could inadvertently increase social contact. This is a well-documented psychological effect called “automation bias”.

Now is your chance to help tackle coronavirus! #EUvsVirus

European Commission and the High Representative have set out plans for a robust and targeted EU response to support partner countries' efforts in tackling the coronavirus pandemic.

VICE co-founder Shane Smith interviews famed whistleblower Edward Snowden.

This is a brilliant resource for business owners to help with COVID planning and impact minimisation.

Without fundamental legal rights underpinning the relationship between those who control data and those subject to it, data ownership will erode the control of those who need it most.

This is a list of upcoming funding opportunities:

• a curated list of open calls, funding opportunities, useful tools, collaborative actions and many more initiatives to help fight the Coronavirus situation by Martel Innovate
  
• Mozilla announced the creation of a COVID-19 Solutions Fund as part of the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS)
  
• NGI: DAPSI (deadline: April 22nd, webinar) and TRUST (3rd call, deadline: May 4th)

In the wake of the Corona crisis, many governments and non-governmental institutions consider the usage of infection tracking systems to fight the pandemic. They float different ideas how these systems shall look like. While reviewing some of those ideas, noyb (European Center for Digital Rights) has prepared this ad hoc paper on legal requirements for virus trackingsystems.

The GDPRhub maintains a page to collect different approaches by government and private projects to use personal data to combat SARS-CoV-2.

A blog post on MyData vs COVID-19 describing who we are, what we do and why people should join the efforts now!

Covid-19 is a game changer. Thinking about the EDPS’ strategy for the next five years, we have to look again at our text.

What is your personal connection with your healthcare service & the professionals that work within it?

Toward building the data infrastructure and ecosystem we need to tackle pandemics and other dynamic societal and environmental threats.

The European Commission is calling for startups and SMEs to apply urgently to the next round of funding from the European Innovation Council

Smartphone tracking of the pandemic - a help or a threat to privacy?

Some thoughts here about how bottom up, human-centric 'MyData' would vastly improve how global pandemics can be managed for all parties. Clearly we won't get to build much for this time around, albeit my prototype only took 20 minutes; but one has to assume there will be a Covid 20 and beyond.