Suchergebnisse

On March 12th, 2020, the WHO declared COVID-19 as a pandemic. The collective impact of environ-mental and ecosystem factors, as well as biodiversity, on the spread of COVID-19 and its mortalityevolution remain empirically unknown, particularly in regions with a wide ecosystem range. The aim ofour study is to assess how those factors impact on the COVID-19 spread and mortality by country. Thisstudy compiled a global database merging WHO daily case reports with other publicly available measuresfrom January 21st to May 18th, 2020. We applied spatio-temporal models to identify the influence ofbiodiversity, temperature, and precipitation andfitted generalized linear mixed models to identify theeffects of environmental variables. Additionally, we used count time series to characterize the associationbetween COVID-19 spread and air quality factors. All analyses were adjusted by social demographic,country-income level, and government policy intervention confounders, among 160 countries, globally.Our results reveal a statistically meaningful association between COVID-19 infection and several factorsof interest at country and city levels such as the national biodiversity index, air quality, and pollutantselements (PM10,PM2.5,and O3). Particularly, there is a significant relationship of loss of biodiversity, highlevel of air pollutants, and diminished air quality with COVID-19 infection spread and mortality. Ourfindings provide an empirical foundation for future studies on the relationship between air qualityvariables, a country's biodiversity, and COVID-19 transmission and mortality. The relationships measuredin this study can be valuable when governments plan environmental and health policies, as alternativestrategy to respond to new COVID-19 outbreaks and prevent future crises ; Daniel Fernández supported by grant 2017 SGR 622 (GRBIO) administrated by the Departament d'Economia i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya (Spain) ; Peer Reviewed ; Postprint (author's final draft)

Background: On January 21, 2020, the World Health Organization reported the first case of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, which rapidly evolved to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, the virus has also rapidly spread among Latin American, Caribbean, and African countries. Objective: The first aim of this study is to identify new emerging COVID-19 clusters over time and space (from January 21 to mid-May 2020) in Latin American, Caribbean, and African regions, using a prospective space–time scan measurement approach. The second aim is to assess the impact of real-time population mobility patterns between January 21 and May 18, 2020, under the implemented government interventions, measurements, and policy restrictions on COVID-19 spread among those regions and worldwide. Methods: We created a global COVID-19 database, of 218 countries and territories, merging the World Health Organization daily case reports with other measures such as population density and country income levels for January 21 to May 18, 2020. A score of government policy interventions was created for low, intermediate, high, and very high interventions. The population's mobility patterns at the country level were obtained from Google community mobility reports. The prospective space–time scan statistic method was applied in five time periods between January and May 2020, and a regression mixed model analysis was used. Results: We found that COVID-19 emerging clusters within these five periods of time increased from 7 emerging clusters to 28 by mid-May 2020. We also detected various increasing and decreasing relative risk estimates of COVID-19 spread among Latin American, Caribbean, and African countries within the period of analysis. Globally, population mobility to parks and similar leisure areas during at least a minimum of implemented intermediate-level control policies (when compared to low-level control policies) was related to accelerated COVID-19 spread. Results were almost consistent when regional stratified analysis was applied. In addition, worldwide population mobility due to working during high implemented control policies and very high implemented control policies, when compared to low-level control policies, was related to positive COVID-19 spread. Conclusions: The prospective space–time scan is an approach that low-income and middle-income countries could use to detect emerging clusters in a timely manner and implement specific control policies and interventions to slow down COVID-19 transmission. In addition, real-time population mobility obtained from crowdsourced digital data could be useful for current and future targeted public health and mitigation policies at a global and regional level. ; DF is a Serra Húnter Fellow and was supported by Marsden grant E2987-3648 administrated by the Royal Society of New Zealand, and by grant 2017 SGR 622 (GRBIO) administrated by the Departament d'Economia i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya (Spain) ; Peer Reviewed ; Postprint (published version)

This article focuses on the impact of COVID-19 in Africa, describes its effects for ongoing research, and asks how it may impact African studies. In Africa, as elsewhere in the world, the pandemic is changing the way people think about the future. The crisis gives rise to a feeling of uncertainty, while casting doubt on future orientations based on forecasts and planning. This scepticism does not concern the African continent alone, but it is here that the call to open a fresh perspective on the future is expressed most emphatically. COVID-19 reinvigorates the question of how African futures are imagined and shaped in relation to the world at large. Against this backdrop, this article suggests three areas where future-oriented African studies should be revised in response to the current crisis - namely, how to incorporate uncertainty, how to decolonise understandings of African futures, and how to translate these considerations into research practice.

The Science Barometer Switzerland analyzes through which media, in which form and how often the Swiss come in contact with scientific issues, and whether and how this affects their scientific knowledge as well as their opinions regarding science. The project surveys a representative sample of the language-assimilated resident population of Switzerland every three years (2016, 2019, 2022), interviewing ca. 1000 respondents aged 15 years and older in the German-, French-, and Italian-speaking regions of the country. It is planned to continue the project permanently after 2022.
On the one hand, the survey gathers information about the usage of different information sources, asking how often respondents encounter scientific issues in newspapers, radio and television, and how often they look for scientific issues on the internet and in social media. Furthermore, it asks how often the Swiss go to science museums, as well as how often they speak about scientific topics with family and friends. In addition, it assesses how credible, comprehensible and useful respondents judge these different sources of information.
On the other hand, the Science Barometer Switzerland measures the Swiss' scientific knowledge and their attitudes towards science. Based on these dimensions, it connects patterns of information behavior and public opinions about science in explanatory models.

In November 2020, a special Science Barometer survey on COVID-19 was conducted in the form of an online representative survey of Swiss residents aged 15 or older. It was financed by the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences.

Les sciences sociales analysent les défis que pose le COVID-19 en les insérant dans les dynamiques de nos sociétés. Avec le recul qui les caractérise, ces sciences sont particulièrement adaptées pour comprendre les dynamiques sociales, écono- miques et politiques d'une maladie qui, pour certain·es, a les traits du diable, et pour d'autres, ceux d'une banale grippe. Ce livre décrypte comment les individus, les organisations et les communautés font face, souffrent et réagissent au COVID-19. 27 chercheur·ses s'y penchent et proposent un ensemble d'éclairages inédits.

With the onslaught of new legislation related to the COVID-19 pandemic, employers may need to be reminded that they don't want to lose sight of traditional employment laws. The Fair Labor Standards Act, Family and Medical Leave Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act continue in full force during these trying times. In fact, now more than ever, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) may arise as a particularly challenging issue for employers.

This paper seeks to better understand the pandemic by looking at the long term (longue
durée). It is first recalled that the progressive construction of a horizon of eradication of infectious diseases led the population of rich countries to consider that the great epidemics no longer represented a real danger. A sanitary disarmament of our societies followed. However, the scientific response, its strength and speed, which made it possible to propose a vaccine in less than a year, constituted a real breakthrough, making it possible to envisage a control of the epidemic in these northern countries within a short time. In the
face of this breakthrough, however, we can observe a strong permanence of the reactions of populations and societies (incredulity, construction of rumours, instrumentalization by all social and political actors). Finally, after about a century and a half of existence, the parenthesis of freedom of movement during epidemics has closed in the face of COVID-19. The article insists on the importance of the quality of alerts in the control of epidemics since the 14th century and questions the effectiveness of the WHO in this field if a large
country does not respect the obligation of immediate declaration. It also questions the entry of humanity in a new pandemic era as a consequence of the demographic growth and the unprecedented scale of exchanges.

The COVID-19 pandemic is revealing its severe implications not just for health systems worldwide. One striking political consequence has been renewed power concentration in the executive. There are signs of a global increase in this executive personalisation having occurred over the last 12 months. Personalisation of executive political power is a process in which the chief executive's discretionary power over political decisions increases at the expense of other political actors. Increased personalisation may undermine the provision of public goods including healthcare, increase corruption, and threaten regime stability. Even before the pandemic, there was a trend across world regions towards the expansion of executive political power, manifesting itself in the erosion of vertical and diagonal constraints on governmental power. These trends were particularly pronounced in Latin America, and in the Middle East and North Africa. In Brazil and Mexico, presidents have used their already extensive authority to centralise decision-making and thus imprint their views on the pandemic's handling. In Egypt's military-dominated electoral autocracy, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has fortified his personal grip on power during the course of COVID-19's spread. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - under indictment for bribery and fraud - has managed to stay in power and to delay conviction partly due to the pandemic.
Executive personalisation has taken new twists and turns under the COVID-19 pandemic that may have detrimental political effects in the medium- to long-term, with or without major regime transformation. European and German policymakers should update their existing monitoring instruments to react to these potential political effects of the pandemic.

Gesellschaften stehen vor der Herausforderung zunehmender multipler Krisensituationen, wie etwa den Folgen des globalen Klimawandels, kriegerischen Konflikten oder Pandemien. Die Politik ist gefordert, angemessene Antworten auf Fragen nach dem Umgang mit zukünftigen Bedrohungen zu finden. Im Zuge der COVID‑19‑Pandemie konnten zahlreiche Erfahrungen mit in diesem Zusammenhang eingesetzten Frühwarnsystemen gesammelt werden. Auf der Grundlage dieser Erfahrungen wird im vorliegenden Artikel diskutiert, wie Krisenwarnung im politischen Raum zukünftig verbessert werden kann.

COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which has spread all over the world leading to a global pandemic. The fast progression of COVID-19 has been mainly related to the high contagion rate of the virus and the worldwide mobility of humans. In the absence of pharmacological therapies, governments from different countries have introduced several non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce human mobility and social contact. Several studies based on Anonymized Mobile Phone Data have been published analysing the relationship between human mobility and the spread of coronavirus. However, to our knowledge, none of these data-sets integrates cross-referenced geo-localised data on human mobility and COVID-19 cases into one all-inclusive open resource. Herein we present COVID-19 Flow-Maps, a cross-referenced Geographic Information System that integrates regularly updated time-series accounting for population mobility and daily reports of COVID-19 cases in Spain at different scales of time spatial resolution. This integrated and up-to-date data-set can be used to analyse the human dynamics to guide and support the design of more effective non-pharmaceutical interventions. ; This work was supported by the Generalitat de Catalunya through the project PDAD14/20/00001, and by the H2020 programme under Grant Agreement 825070 (INFORE) and the INB Grant (PT17/0009/0001 - ISCIII-SGEFI/ERDF). ; Peer Reviewed ; Postprint (published version)