Rebecca Katz, Kate Toole, Hailey Robertson, Alaina Case, Justin Kerr, Siobhan Robinson-Marshall, Jordan Schermerhorn, Sarah Orsborn, Michael Van Maele, Ryan Zimmerman, Tess Stevens, COVID AMP Coding Team, Alexandra Phelan, Colin Carlson & Ellie Graeden
Scientific Data volume 10, Article number: 491 (2023)

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in the spring of 2020, governments around the world began to implement policies to mitigate and manage the outbreak. Significant research efforts were deployed to track and analyse these policies in real-time to better inform the response. While much of the policy analysis focused narrowly on social distancing measures designed to slow the spread of disease, here, we present a dataset focused on capturing the breadth of policy types implemented by jurisdictions globally across the whole-of-government. COVID Analysis and Mapping of Policies (COVID AMP) includes nearly 50,000 policy measures from 150 countries, 124 intermediate areas, and 235 local areas between January 2020 and June 2022. With up to 40 structured and unstructured characteristics encoded per policy, as well as the original source and policy text, this dataset provides a uniquely broad capture of the governance strategies for pandemic response, serving as a critical data source for future work in legal epidemiology and political science.

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JOSEPH L.-H. TSUI, et al.

SCIENCE 20 Jul 2023 Vol 381, Issue 6655 pp. 336-343

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants of concern (VOCs) now arise in the context of heterogeneous human connectivity and population immunity. Through a large-scale phylodynamic analysis of 115,622 Omicron BA.1 genomes, we identified >6,000 introductions of the antigenically distinct VOC into England and analyzed their local transmission and dispersal history. We find that six of the eight largest English Omicron lineages were already transmitting when Omicron was first reported in southern Africa (22 November 2021). Multiple datasets show that importation of Omicron continued despite subsequent restrictions on travel from southern Africa as a result of export from well-connected secondary locations. Initiation and dispersal of Omicron transmission lineages in England was a two-stage process that can be explained by models of the country’s human geography and hierarchical travel network. Our results enable a comparison of the processes that drive the invasion of Omicron and other VOCs across multiple spatial scales.

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For over a century, biologists have had to contend with a complicated picture of genetics, which they’ve only recently begun to understand.

Read the full article at: www.quantamagazine.org

The proof establishes new conditions that cause connected oscillators to sway in sync.

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A. Reina, T. Bose, V. Srivastava, J.A.R. Marshall

Royal Society Open Science 10: 230175, 2023.

It is usually assumed that information cascades are most likely to occur when an early but incorrect opinion spreads through the group. Here, we analyse models of confidence-sharing in groups and reveal the opposite result: simple but plausible models of naive-Bayesian decision-making exhibit information cascades when group decisions are synchronous; however, when group decisions are asynchronous, the early decisions reached by Bayesian decision-makers tend to be correct and dominate the group consensus dynamics. Thus early decisions actually rescue the group from making errors, rather than contribute to it. We explore the likely realism of our assumed decision-making rule with reference to the evolution of mechanisms for aggregating social information, and known psychological and neuroscientific mechanisms.

Read the full article at: royalsocietypublishing.org