No Arabic abstract
From the moment the first COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out, there will need to be a large fraction of the global population ready in line. It is therefore crucial to start managing the growing global hesitancy to any such COVID-19 vaccine. The current approach of trying to convince the nos cannot work quickly enough, nor can the current policy of trying to find, remove and/or rebut all the individual pieces of COVID and vaccine misinformation. Instead, we show how this can be done in a simpler way by moving away from chasing misinformation content and focusing instead on managing the yes--no--not-sure hesitancy ecosystem.
Using the official data and aware of the uncertain source and insufficient number of samples, we present a first and (for the moment) unique attempt to study the first two months spread of COVID-19 in Madagascar. The approach has been tested by predicting the number of contaminated persons for the next week after fitting the inputs data collected within 7 or 15 days using standard least $chi^2$-fit method. Encouraged by this first test, we study systematically during 67 days , 1-2 weeks new data and predict the contaminated persons for the coming week. We find that the first month data are well described by a linear or quadratic polynomial with an increase of about (4-5) infected persons per day. Pursuing the analysis, one note that data until 46 days favour a cubic polynomial behaviour which signals an eventual near future stronger growth as confirmed by the new data on the 48th day. We complete the analysis until 67 days and find that the data until 77 days confirm the cubic polynomial behaviour which is a remarkable feature of the pandemic spread in Madagascar. We expect that these results will be useful for some new model buildings. A comparison with some other SI-like models predictions is done.These results may also be interpreted as the lowest values of the real case due to the insufficient number of samples (12907 for 27 million habitants on 05/06/20). The data analysis of the absolute number of cured persons until 67 days shows an approximate linear behaviour with about 3 cured persons per day. However, the number of percentage number of cured persons decreases above 42-46 days indicating the limits of the hospital equipment and care to face the 2nd phase of the pandemic for the 67th first days. Some comments on the social, economical and political impacts of COVID-19 and confinement for Madagascar and, in general, for Worldwide are shortly discussed.
We show that malicious COVID-19 content, including hate speech, disinformation, and misinformation, exploits the multiverse of online hate to spread quickly beyond the control of any individual social media platform. Machine learning topic analysis shows quantitatively how online hate communities are weaponizing COVID-19, with topics evolving rapidly and content becoming increasingly coherent. Our mathematical analysis provides a generalized form of the public health R0 predicting the tipping point for multiverse-wide viral spreading, which suggests new policy options to mitigate the global spread of malicious COVID-19 content without relying on future coordination between all online platforms.
Currently, the global situation of COVID-19 is aggravating, pressingly calling for efficient control and prevention measures. Understanding spreading pattern of COVID-19 has been widely recognized as a vital step for implementing non-pharmaceutical measures. Previous studies investigated such an issue in large-scale (e.g., inter-country or inter-state) scenarios while urban spreading pattern still remains an open issue. Here, we fill this gap by leveraging the trajectory data of 197,808 smartphone users (including 17,808 anonymous confirmed cases) in 9 cities in China. We find a universal spreading pattern in all cities: the spatial distribution of confirmed cases follows a power-law-like model and the spreading centroid is time-invariant. Moreover, we reveal that human mobility in a city drives the spatialtemporal spreading process: long average travelling distance results in a high growth rate of spreading radius and wide spatial diffusion of confirmed cases. With such insight, we adopt Kendall model to simulate urban spreading of COVID-19 that can well fit the real spreading process. Our results unveil the underlying mechanism behind the spatial-temporal urban evolution of COVID-19, and can be used to evaluate the performance of mobility restriction policies implemented by many governments and to estimate the evolving spreading situation of COVID-19.
Early analyses revealed that dark web marketplaces (DWMs) started offering COVID-19 related products (e.g., masks and COVID-19 tests) as soon as the current pandemic started, when these goods were in shortage in the traditional economy. Here, we broaden the scope and depth of previous investigations by analysing 194 DWMs until July 2021, including the crucial period in which vaccines became available, and by considering the wider impact of the pandemic on DWMs. First, we focus on vaccines. We find 250 listings offering approved vaccines, like Pfizer/BioNTech and AstraZeneca, as well as vendors offering fabricated proofs of vaccination and COVID-19 passports. Second, we consider COVID-19 related products. We reveal that, as the regular economy has become able to satisfy the demand of these goods, DWMs have decreased their offer. Third, we analyse the profile of vendors of COVID-19 related products and vaccines. We find that most of them are specialized in a single type of listings and are willing to ship worldwide. Finally, we consider a broader set of listings simply mentioning COVID-19. Among 10,330 such listings, we show that recreational drugs are the most affected among traditional DWMs product, with COVID-19 mentions steadily increasing since March 2020. We anticipate that our effort is of interest to researchers, practitioners, and law enforcement agencies focused on the study and safeguard of public health.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage the world, it is of critical significance to provide a timely risk prediction of the COVID-19 in multi-level. To implement it and evaluate the public health policies, we develop a framework with machine learning assisted to extract epidemic dynamics from the infection data, in which contains a county-level spatiotemporal epidemiological model that combines a spatial Cellular Automaton (CA) with a temporal Susceptible-Undiagnosed-Infected-Removed (SUIR) model. Compared with the existing time risk prediction models, the proposed CA-SUIR model shows the multi-level risk of the county to the government and coronavirus transmission patterns under different policies. This new toolbox is first utilized to the projection of the multi-level COVID-19 prevalence over 412 Landkreis (counties) in Germany, including t-day-ahead risk forecast and the risk assessment to the travel restriction policy. As a practical illustration, we predict the situation at Christmas where the worst fatalities are 34.5 thousand, effective policies could contain it to below 21 thousand. Such intervenable evaluation system could help decide on economic restarting and public health policies making in pandemic.