DevNull127 writes: Good news — VA Public Health has certified my wife and me as no longer contagious with COVID19," tweeted 76-year-old Vint Cerf, one of the creators of the modern internet.

He added one word. "Recovering!"

It seemed especially appropriate that Cerf shared his news online — and that it drew positive responses from grateful people around the world, including several who use the internet in their daily lives. Cerf's tweet immediately drew positive responses from the Internet Society, as well as the chief operating officer of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, YouTube's director of public policy, and a senior director of communications and public affairs at Google. There were also congratulatory posts from a Georgetown professor of technology and law, from Associated Press reporter Frank Bajak, and the executive director of the Global Privacy and Security by Design Centre.

Cerf followed up his news with a re-tweet of Google's "Community Mobility Reports" charting our aggregate movement trends over time, and a tweet of a University of Pittsburgh press release about progress on a COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

Earlier in the week Cerf also re-tweeted a humorous compilation of clips from the TV show M*A*S*H that illustrated safe practices while social distancing.

Slashdot readers schwit1 and Futurepower(R) are sharing news about a potential coronavirus vaccine that has been found to produce antibodies capable of fighting off Covid-19. The Independent reports: The vaccine, which was tested on mice by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, generated the antibodies in quantities thought to be enough to "neutralize" the virus within two weeks of injection. The study's authors are now set to apply to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for investigational new drug approval ahead of phase one human clinical trials planned to start in the next few months. [T]he Pittsburgh research is the first study on a Covid-19 vaccine candidate to be published after review from fellow scientists at outside institutions. The scientists were able to act quickly because they had already laid the groundwork during earlier epidemics of coronaviruses: Sars in 2003 and Mers in 2014. What's also neat about this potential vaccine is that it can sit at room temperature until it is needed and be scaled up to produce the protein on an industrial scale.

The fingertip-sized patch of 400 tiny microneedles "inject the spike protein pieces into the skin, where the immune reaction is strongest," the report says. "The patch is stuck on like a plaster and the needles -- which are made entirely of sugar and the protein pieces -- simply dissolve into the skin." While long-term testing is still required, "the mice who were given the Pittsburgh researchers' Mers vaccine candidate developed enough antibodies to neutralize the virus for at least a year," reports The Independent. "The antibody levels of the rodents vaccinated against Covid-19 'seem to be following the same trend,' according to the researchers."

President Trump says the CDC now recommends using a cloth face covering to protect against coronavirus, but said he does not plan to do so himself. CNBC reports: Trump stressed that the recommendations were merely voluntary, not required. "I don't think I'm going to be doing it" he said as he announced the new guidance. The CDC's website explained that the recommendations were updated following new studies that some infected people can transmit the coronavirus even without displaying symptoms of the disease.
"In light of this new evidence, CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain," such as in grocery stores or pharmacies, "especially in areas of significant community-based transmission," the CDC says. Developing...

Freshly Exhumed shares a report from CBC.ca: "[Autoclaving] is like a pressure cooker -- basically you enclose items into a chamber, you lock down the chamber, you heat it up and actually increase the pressure inside the chamber," Dr. Anand Kumar, a professor of medicine at the University of Manitoba, said. The machines heat up to about 121 C for 15 minutes, killing bacteria and viruses. "It'll sterilize anything." The assumption has been that if you tried this on an N95 mask they would degrade rapidly. We thought we'd give it a try anyway," Kumar said. "And actually what we found is while it does degrade some [types of] masks, there's a certain group of masks that are made of kind of a fabric-type material, rather than being moulded closely to the face they're called pleated [masks]," he said. Kumar said the pleated fabric masks can be cycled through an autoclaving machine 10 times and come out as good as before.

"The reason this is really important is that autoclaves are available at literally every established hospital in the world. There is probably no hospital in the world that doesn't have an autoclave machine," Kumar said. "So everybody can use this for these particular types of masks and these particular types of masks are probably the most common type of N95 mask, so we're really pleased." Kumar said the technique could be put into use at any hospital at any time. "It's a technology that's available and ready to go right now."

The new coronavirus has now infected 1 million people across the world, a milestone reached just four months after it first surfaced in the Chinese city of Wuhan. More than 51,000 have died and 208,000 recovered in what has become the biggest global public health crisis of our time. Bloomberg reports: When the virus was first discovered, doctors likened it to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, the illness that sickened 8,000 people mostly in Asia in 2003. Highly contagious, and appearing with little or no symptoms in some cases, Covid-19 has rapidly eclipsed all recent outbreaks in scale and size. Fewer than 20 countries in the world remain free of infection. With some virus carriers presenting few outward signs of illness, and many countries unable or unwilling to conduct wider testing, the true number of global infections is likely higher -- some say far higher -- than 1 million.

The U.S. now has the most cases officially recorded globally with more than 234,000, according to Johns Hopkins University, which draws on a combination of data sources -- from governments to the World Health Organization and local media -- to feed its tallies. Next is Italy, with 115,000, the JHU data show. Italy has the highest death toll with almost 14,000 virus fatalities, followed by Spain. With world travel paralyzed and millions of people under some form of lockdown as a result of government efforts to contain the spread, the health crisis has also become an economic one: The global economy is expected to shrink 2% in the first half of 2020. Business activity has ground to a halt in many sectors, with predictions the U.S. jobless rate could reach 30% in the second quarter.

President Trump moved to use the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era national security mobilization law, to secure supplies companies need to make ventilators. From a report: "My order to the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Secretary of Homeland Security will help domestic manufacturers like General Electric, Hill-Rom, Medtronic, ResMed, Royal Philips, and Vyaire Medical secure the supplies they need to build ventilators needed to defeat the virus," Mr. Trump said in statement that accompanied his order. He praised the companies and other domestic manufacturers for ramping up production of the machines and said the order "will save lives by removing obstacles in the supply chain that threaten the rapid production of ventilators."

Amazon is no longer offering N95 masks to the general public, as it prioritizes the delivery of essential supplies to hospitals, government agencies and other groups amid the coronavirus outbreak. From a report: Earlier this week, the company rolled out a new section of its website dedicated to COVID-19 related supplies. There, any U.S.-accredited hospital or state or federal agency can fill out a form to access necessary items like N95 masks, surgical masks, facial shields, surgical gowns, surgical gloves and large-volume sanitizers. The site states it is not accepting requests from the general public, noting: "We are not accepting requests from individuals or non-qualified organizations at this time." Amazon also noted it will not make a profit from the orders.

In a sign of the times, doctors are effectively waging a two-pronged fight against coronavirus: one part takes place in overcrowded hospitals and the other takes place on noisy social media platforms as they work to combat what the World Health Organization has declared an infodemic with accurate, authoritative voices. From a report: All of that means doctors, some of whom were once reluctant to embrace social media, are wading deeper into platforms that are rife with fake news, unproven medical advice and mass panic. "Social media is the disease and the cure. It is responsible for the dissemination of misinformation as much as it needs to be a tool for repairing that," said Rick Pescatore, an emergency room physician and public health expert in the Philadelphia area, who is active on Twitter and Facebook and has treated Covid-19 patients. "It's incumbent upon physicians, who want to get real information out there, to meet these patients where they are -- and that's social media."

Perhaps nowhere is this shift more striking than on TikTok, a short-form video platform beloved by teens that is best known for lip syncing, dance routines and comedy skits. In one TikTok video viewed more than 416,000 times, a registered nurse named Miki Rai does a choreographed dance involving a lot of hand motions as facts about Covid-19 flash on the screen, such as how long the virus stays on different surfaces. In another TikTok video, set to soothing elevator music, Dr. Rose Marie Leslie demonstrates proper handwashing: Wet hands. Lather up. Start washing for 20 seconds. Scrub under your nails and between fingers. Rinse. Leslie, a resident physician specializing in family medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School, created a TikTok account about a year ago, with the aim of reaching a younger demographic with health education information. Soon after coronavirus cases started emerging, she began creating TikToks about the issue. Now, she works to debunk myths about the virus for her more than 500,000 followers.

The esteemed science fiction author, best known for movie "Arrival" that is based on his novel, on how we may never go "back to normal" -- and why that might be a good thing. From an interview on Electric Literature: EL: Do you see aspects of science fiction (your own work or others) in the coronavirus pandemic? In how it is being handled, or how it has spread?
TC: While there has been plenty of fiction written about pandemics, I think the biggest difference between those scenarios and our reality is how poorly our government has handled it. If your goal is to dramatize the threat posed by an unknown virus, there's no advantage in depicting the officials responding as incompetent, because that minimizes the threat; it leads the reader to conclude that the virus wouldn't be dangerous if competent people were on the job. A pandemic story like that would be similar to what's known as an "idiot plot," a plot that would be resolved very quickly if your protagonist weren't an idiot. What we're living through is only partly a disaster novel; it's also -- and perhaps mostly -- a grotesque political satire.

EL: This pandemic isn't science fiction, but it does feel like a dystopia. How can we understand the coronavirus as a cautionary tale? How can we combat our own personal inclinations toward the good/evil narrative, and the subsequent expectation that everything will return to normal?
TC: We need to be specific about what we mean when we talk about things returning to normal. We all want not to be quarantined, to be able to go to work and socialize and travel. But we don't want everything to go back to business as usual, because business as usual is what led us to this crisis. COVID-19 has demonstrated how much we need federally mandated paid sick leave and universal health care, so we don't want to return to a status quo that lacks those things. The current administration's response ought to serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of electing demagogues instead of real leaders, although there's no guarantee that voters will heed it. We're at a point where things could go in some very different ways, depending on what we learn from this experience.

China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it's suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials. From a report: The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret and declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China's public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China's numbers are fake. The report was received by the White House last week, one of the officials said. The outbreak began in China's Hubei province in late 2019, but the country has publicly reported only about 82,000 cases and 3,300 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That compares to more than 189,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths in the U.S., which has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In March, a laid-off customer-service representative for one of the airline companies attended an Amazon.com employee orientation in Dallas. He found himself packed into a room with about 70 other applicants, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder to watch a PowerPoint presentation about what it's like to work for the online retailer. The man, who provided a smartphone photo to document his experience, said the event was exactly like one he attended last year for a seasonal holiday job with Amazon. In other words, there were no special precautions to keep attendees safe from the coronavirus. When the man raised concerns about the crowded conditions, he said an Amazon manager mocked him and a fellow recruit sneered.

"They made jokes and told me to leave if I was unhappy," he said, adding that one manager said Amazon's operations were exempt from the rules because the company is considered an essential service. "They didn't care one tiny bit." The former customer rep took the job but still worries about getting sick. Amazon also ignored official social-distancing guidelines at hiring events near Portland, Oregon, and in Kenosha, Wisconsin, according to two applicants. A fourth person who attended an Amazon job fair in West Jefferson, Ohio, said she was sent home and asked to return another day because the gathering was too crowded, suggesting precautionary measures are in place at least at some events or Amazon is changing its practices.

BeerFartMoron writes: Recently there has been a proliferation of modeling work which has been used to make the point that if we can stay inside, practice extreme social distancing, and generally lock down nonessential parts of society for several months, then many deaths from COVID-19 can be prevented. But what happens after the lockdown? In an article studying the possible effects of heterogeneous measures, academics presented examples of epidemic trajectories for COVID-19 assuming no mitigations at all, or assuming extreme mitigations which are gradually lifted at 6 months, to resume normal levels at 1 year.

"Unfortunately, extreme mitigation efforts which end (even gradually) reduce the number of deaths only by 1% or so; as the mitigation efforts let up, we still see a full-scale epidemic, since almost none of the population has developed immunity to the virus," writes Wesley Pegden, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. "There is a simple truth behind the problems with these modeling conclusions. The duration of containment efforts does not matter, if transmission rates return to normal when they end, and mortality rates have not improved. This is simply because as long as a large majority of the population remains uninfected, lifting containment measures will lead to an epidemic almost as large as would happen without having mitigations in place at all." "This is not to say that there are not good reasons to use mitigations as a delay tactic," Pegden adds. "For example, we may hope to use the months we buy with containment measures to improve hospital capacity, in the hopes of achieving a reduction in the mortality rate. We might even wish to use these months just to consider our options as a society and formulate a strategy."

"But mitigations themselves are not saving lives in these scenarios; instead, it is what we do with the time that gives us an opportunity to improve the outcome of the epidemic."

Widespread use of nonmedical masks could reduce community transmission. But recommending their broad use could also cause a run on the kind of masks that health care workers desperately need. From a report: Should healthy people be wearing masks when they're outside to protect themselves and others? Both the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have repeatedly said that ordinary citizens do not need to wear masks unless they are sick and coughing. And as health care workers around the world face shortages of N95 masks and protective gear, public health officials have warned people not to hoard masks. But those official guidelines may be shifting.

On Monday during the coronavirus task force briefing, President Trump was asked whether Americans should wear nonmedical masks. "That's certainly something we could discuss," he said. "It could be something like that for a limited period of time." Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the C.D.C., confirmed in an interview with National Public Radio on Monday that the agency was reviewing its guidelines on who should wear masks. Citing new data that shows high rates of transmission from people who are infected but show no symptoms, he said the guidance on mask wearing was "being critically re-reviewed, to see if there's potential additional value for individuals that are infected or individuals that may be asymptomatically infected." The coronavirus is probably three times as infectious as the flu, Dr. Redfield said.

Ford Motor and GE Healthcare plan to produce 50,000 ventilators within the next 100 days at a facility in Michigan to assist with the coronavirus pandemic. CNBC reports: Production of the critical care devices is expected to begin with 500 United Auto Workers union members the week of April 20, according to executives at both companies. Ford's Rawsonville Components Plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan will be able to produce 30,000 ventilators a month after early-July, officials said. The companies expect to produce 1,500 by the end of April, 12,000 by the end of May and 50,000 by July 4, officials said.

The design of the ventilator is being licensed by GE Healthcare from Florida-based Airon Corp., a small, privately held company specializing in high-tech pneumatic life support products. The devices are simpler, less complex than GE ventilators Ford previously said it would assist the company in producing at other facilities .

New submitter NoMoreACs shares a report from Gizmodo: Tech pioneer Vint Cerf, one of the co-creators of the modern internet, has tested positive for covid-19, according to a tweet Cerf sent out Monday morning. The 76-year-old tweeted out a clip from HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about the U.S. response to the global pandemic. "I tested positive for COVID-19 and am recovering," Cerf tweeted. "Listen to what John Oliver has to say about our national response so far."

Cerf helped create the modern internet in the 1970s while working at UCLA with other pioneers like Bob Kahn and Leonard Kleinrock. Cerf worked on packet switching for the APRANET under Kleinrock and TCP/IP protocols with ARPA (now DARPA), the plumbing that makes the internet function. DARPA tweeted its support of Cerf, telling him to get well soon.

Scott Kelly, writing for The New York Times: Being stuck at home can be challenging. When I lived on the International Space Station for nearly a year, it wasn't easy. When I went to sleep, I was at work. When I woke up, I was still at work. Flying in space is probably the only job you absolutely cannot quit. But I learned some things during my time up there that I'd like to share -- because they are about to come in handy again, as we all confine ourselves at home to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. Here are a few tips on living in isolation, from someone who has been there.

Follow a schedule: On the space station, my time was scheduled tightly, from the moment I woke up to when I went to sleep. Sometimes this involved a spacewalk that could last up to eight hours; other times, it involved a five-minute task, like checking on the experimental flowers I was growing in space. You will find maintaining a plan will help you and your family adjust to a different work and home life environment. When I returned to Earth, I missed the structure it provided and found it hard to live without.

But pace yourself: When you are living and working in the same place for days on end, work can have a way of taking over everything if you let it. Living in space, I deliberately paced myself because I knew I was in it for the long haul -- just like we all are today. Take time for fun activities: I met up with crewmates for movie nights, complete with snacks, and binge-watched all of "Game of Thrones" -- twice.

Earlier this month Slashdot covered the Imperial College in London forecast of "what happens if the U.S. does absolutely nothing to combat COVID-19," which predicted 2.2 million deaths just in the U.S. and another 510,000 in Great Britain. The paper was co-written by Neil Ferguson, one of the world's leading epidemiologists, and "launched leaders in both countries into action," according to the Washington Post.

Earlier this month Ferguson posted on Twitter that Microsoft and GitHub are working to "document, refactor and extend" the thousands of lines of C code written over 13 years ago to run pandemic simulations, "to allow others to use [it] without the multiple days training it would currently require (and which we don't have time to give)."

But the Washington Post's national health correspondent and senior political reporter look at a new twist this week: In recent days, a growing contingent of Trump supporters have pushed the narrative that health experts are part of a deep-state plot to hurt Trump's reelection efforts by damaging the economy and keeping the United States shut down as long as possible. Trump himself pushed this idea in the early days of the outbreak... After Ferguson gave new testimony to British officials Wednesday...Fox News host Laura Ingraham wrongly stated that in his testimony Ferguson's projection had been "corrected." The chyron on her show Thursday night stated, "Faulty models may be skewing COVID-19 data...."

But in fact, Ferguson had not revised his projections in his testimony, which he made clear in interviews and Twitter. His earlier study had made clear the estimate of 500,000 deaths in Britain and 2.2 million in the United States projected what could happen if both took absolutely no action against the coronavirus. The new estimate of 20,000 deaths in Britain was a projected result now that Britain had implemented strict restrictions, which this week came to include a full lockdown...

[O]ne factor many modelers failed to predict was how politicized their work would become in the era of President Trump, and how that in turn could affect their models.

USA Today reports: Ohio Governor Mike DeWine Sunday afternoon said federal officials have promised to ease restrictions on a technology to clean and reuse the masks deemed the safest for healthcare workers and first responders in the coronavirus outbreak....

Officials are scrambling for the N95 masks and other protective equipment for health care workers as the number of COVID-19 cases is expected to spike over the coming months. On Saturday, DeWine publicly pleaded with the FDA to approve an emergency-use permit for [Columbus-based research firm] Battelle's technology amid a shortage of personal protective equipment, including masks.... The U.S. death total has doubled in two days, climbing above 2,300 Sunday. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been a leading voice in the effort to curb the outbreak, said 100,000 to 200,000 Americans could die before the crisis is over.

DeWine said those numbers make it urgent for the FDA to clean as many masks as it can... The Battelle process uses "vapor phase hydrogen peroxide" to sanitize the N95 masks, allowing them to be reused up to 20 times, the company said in a statement. Each of the company's Critical Care Decontamination Systems can sterilize 80,000 masks per day, Battelle said... DeWine on Sunday said the FDA authorized Battelle to sterilize just 10,000 surgical masks a day. "They're only approved a fraction of what we can do," DeWine said during the press conference.
But DeWine said in his afternoon press conference that an FDA commissioner told him "this would be cleared up today."

An anonymous reader quotes the Wall Street Journal: Government officials across the U.S. are using location data from millions of cellphones in a bid to better understand the movements of Americans during the coronavirus pandemic and how they may be affecting the spread of the disease...

The data comes from the mobile advertising industry rather than cellphone carriers. The aim is to create a portal for federal, state and local officials that contains geolocation data in what could be as many as 500 cities across the U.S., one of the people said, to help plan the epidemic response... It shows which retail establishments, parks and other public spaces are still drawing crowds that could risk accelerating the transmission of the virus, according to people familiar with the matter... The data can also reveal general levels of compliance with stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders, according to experts inside and outside government, and help measure the pandemic's economic impact by revealing the drop-off in retail customers at stores, decreases in automobile miles driven and other economic metrics.

The CDC has started to get analyses based on location data through through an ad hoc coalition of tech companies and data providers — all working in conjunction with the White House and others in government, people said.

The CDC and the White House didn't respond to requests for comment.
It's the cellphone carriers turning over pandemic-fighting data in Germany, Austria, Spain, Belgium, the U.K., according to the article, while Israel mapped infections using its intelligence agencies' antiterrorism phone-tracking. But so far in the U.S., "the data being used has largely been drawn from the advertising industry.

"The mobile marketing industry has billions of geographic data points on hundreds of millions of U.S. cell mobile devices..."

The New York Times interviewed over 50 current and former U.S. health officials, senior scientists, company executives, and administration officials to investigate America's "lost month" without widespread coronavirus testing, "when the world's richest country — armed with some of the most highly trained scientists and infectious disease specialists — squandered its best chance of containing the virus's spread." With capacity so limited, the Center for Disease Control's criteria for who was tested remained extremely narrow for weeks to come: only people who had recently traveled to China or had been in contact with someone who had the virus. The lack of tests in the states also meant local public health officials could not use another essential epidemiological tool: surveillance testing. To see where the virus might be hiding, nasal swab samples from people screened for the common flu would also be checked for the coronavirus...

Even though researchers around the country quickly began creating tests that could diagnose Covid-19, many said they were hindered by the Food and Drug Administration's approval process. The new tests sat unused at labs around the country. Stanford was one of them. Researchers at the world-renowned university had a working test by February, based on protocols published by the World Health Organization.... By early March, after federal officials finally announced changes to expand testing, it was too late. With the early lapses, containment was no longer an option. The tool kit of epidemiology would shift — lockdowns, social disruption, intensive medical treatment — in hopes of mitigating the harm.

Now, the United States has more than 100,000 coronavirus cases, the most of any country in the world... And still, many Americans sickened by the virus cannot get tested... In tacit acknowledgment of the shortage, Mr. Trump asked South Korea's president on Monday to send as many test kits as possible from the 100,000 produced there daily, more than the country needs. Public health experts reacted positively to the increased capacity. But having the ability to diagnose the disease three months after it was first disclosed by China does little to address why the United States was unable to do so sooner, when it might have helped reduce the toll of the pandemic.