This is a guest post from Gabriel Cardona-Fox who lives in Bologna, Italy with his wife Patricia and two daughters. He is an Associate Fellow at the Bologna Institute for Policy Research at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) – Europe. He received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from Johns Hopkins SAIS and a BA from Princeton University. His research revolves around internal forced...
This is a guest post from Renu Singh, PhD Candidate at Georgetown University in political science, researching public health policy, global health security, and European politics. After weeks of the spiraling transmission of COVID-19, the outbreak has spread from its source in Wuhan, China to nearly 70 locations worldwide. To date, the number of people with confirmed infections of coronavirus has surpassed 100,000, where more than 3,000 have...
With the coronavirus taking hold, conferences being cancelled (I'm looking at you ISA), and college campuses like Harvard shuttering or going online, the coronavirus outbreak has gone global and upended countries and markets around the world. The worst may be yet to come. We will be posting some new guest posts, and we welcome additional submissions. I'll try to do a new post in the coming days, but here is my threaded Twitter rant on what the...
In an attempt to distract myself from the thought that today my small university town will be overrun by 900 frat boys who went to Northern Italy on a skiing vacation despite the Dutch government’s warning, let’s discuss something that might have gone under the radar – future changes to the Russian Constitution. Amid a global pandemic what could be better than voting in a Referendum? Only voting for a President, amirite? But let’s start...
This is a guest post from Dr. Joshua R. Moon is a Research Fellow at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex, researching biomedical research global health security policy. Research & Twitter The coronavirus epidemic that is ongoing at the moment is not the first to spark global panic and it certainly won’t be the last. Looking to the future, even as we strive to end transmission and bring the epidemic to a close, we...
This is a guest post by Summer Marion, a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Northeastern University, where she is a PhD candidate in Political Science. Her research examines international cooperation and crisis politics, with a specific focus on philanthrocapitalism in global health emergencies. On February 5, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus asked the international...
A quick update to my series from last week. The coronavirus has not been contained to China, and there are now nearly 1000 cases in South Korea, 270 in Italy, and 60 in Iran. Health experts and writers (see for example Ian MacKay, Devi Sridhar, James Hamblin, Helen Branswell, Michael Osterholm) now think it will eventually spread globally, meaning that containment strategies of travel restrictions will become increasingly ineffective. We are...
On the same day that the World Health Organization said that there were now only 889 new cases of the coronavirus in China (down from 1749 on Wednesday), there were also reports of new outbreaks in two Chinese prisons. We also witnessed the deaths of two people in Iran (apparently from COVID-19) and an outbreak in Korea--now up to more than 150 cases--fueled by a superspreader associated with a strange cult and no known connection to China....
In the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak, the stories on China's quarantine and population control measures seem downright crazy, with people needing hall passes to go out of their apartments, buildings turning away residents who had been out of town, periodic temperature checks on residents, drones being deployed to disinfect villages or to shame people to go indoors or put on a mask, and health workers deployed in train stations checking phone...
This is a guest post by Philipp Schulz, who is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) at the University of Bremen. Philipp’s research focuses on the gender dynamics of armed conflicts, with a particular focus on masculinities and wartime sexual violence. His book ‘Male Survivors of Wartime Sexual Violence – Perspectives from northern Uganda’ is forthcoming with University of...
If you've been following the coronavirus outbreak, you've probably heard about the Princess Cruises ship, quarantined in Japan with thousands of passengers on board. It sounds like the veritable cruise ship from hell. Of the 1219 passengers screened for the virus, some 355 passengers tested positive for COVID-19, including some 44 Americans. The Americans were finally being evacuated today after having been quarantined on the ship since...
In my first post on the coronavirus outbreak, I reviewed the nature of the disease. Here, I want to ask and answer the first of four questions I posed about whether a global public health emergency should have been declared earlier. In the next post, I'll tackle the appropriateness of China's quarantine measures, the adequacy of its overall response, and what should be done going forward.The response to the COVID-19 coronavirus has been...