Coronavirus News (194)

Did China miscalculate the rise of India? Beijing has been preoccupied with tensions with Washington, but a deadly brawl on the Himalayan border last month raised the possibility of wars on two fronts Decades of talks have failed to bridge trust deficits and misperceptions, observers say

US PANDEMIC ADVISOR SAYS THE COUNTRY NEEDS TO SHUT DOWN AGAIN "THE US RESPONSE HAS BEEN EXTRAORDINARILY DISAPPOINTING AND WRONGHEADED. WHENEVER THERE'S BEEN AN OPPORTUNITY TO DO THE RIGHT THING, WE SEEM TO HAVE DONE THE WRONG THING"

Kazakhstan health ministry rejects Chinese claim of ‘unknown, deadlier pneumonia’ Ministry says Chinese embassy misunderstood official count, which includes unspecified cases WHO says it not aware of new emerging disease circulating in the Central Asian nation

US-China competition in Indo-Pacific a ‘marathon, not a sprint’, acting assistant secretary of defence says Head of Washington’s regional strategy David Helvey calls on ‘like-minded partners’ to defend international order Conflict ‘not inevitable’ but countries cannot sit ‘idly by’ while Beijing bends and disregards rules

After border clash with India, has China made a strategic miscalculation? China seems to have decided it can bear the cost of its territorial assertion at the disputed border and has warned India against strategic miscalculation However, the current gain might cloud the big picture for Beijing in the long term

Google Loon Is Now Beaming WiFi Down to Earth From Giant Balloons  Four years ago, three big tech companies had plans in the works to beam internet down to Earth from the sky, and each scenario sounded wilder than the next. SpaceX requested permission to launch 4,425 satellites into orbit to create a global internet hotspot. Facebook wanted to use solar-powered drones and laser-based tech to shoot wifi to antennas. And Google’s Loon was building giant balloons to house solar-powered electronics that would transmit connectivity down from the stratosphere. As incredible as it all sounds, two of these schemes have started to come to fruition. Loon balloons made their (non-emergency) debut in Kenya this week, with 35 balloons transmitting a 4G signal to 31,000 square miles of central and western Kenya. And SpaceX is in the process of signing up beta testers for its internet-via-satellite, with over 500 satellites currently in orbit. Facebook, however, stopped work on its internet drones in mid-2018. 

Why We Need Mass Automation to Pandemic-Proof the Supply Chain the global supply chain, works so well that it’s effectively invisible most of the time. .........  The pandemic has thrown a floodlight on the inner workings of this modern wonder—and it’s exposed massive vulnerabilities. .......  While there are some notable instances of advanced automation, the overwhelming majority of work is still manual, resembling a sort of human-powered bucket brigade, with people wandering around warehouses or standing alongside conveyor belts. Each package of diapers or bottle of detergent ordered by an online customer might be touched dozens of times by warehouse workers before finding its way into a box delivered to a home. .............  To make the global supply chain more resilient to shocks like Covid-19, we must look to technology. ............  the Global Supply Chain: The Massive ‘Matter Router’ ...........   today’s companies, big and small, are looking to automation, robotics, and AI to meet the pandemic head on. These technologies are crucial to scaling the infrastructure that will fulfill most of the world’s e-commerce and food distribution needs. ........... You can think of this new infrastructure as a rapidly evolving “matter router” that will employ increasingly complex robotic systems to move products more freely and efficiently. ..........  The good news? We can accomplish this with technologies we have today.

Worst economic drop on record through June - we need cash relief now. #EmergencyMoneyforthePeople #WeAreTheEconomy https://t.co/TlUcb9bjmq

— Andrew Yang🧢🇺🇸 (@AndrewYang) July 30, 2020

US economy posts its worst drop on record  The US economy contracted at a 32.9% annual rate from April through June, its worst drop on record ..........  wiping out five years of economic gains in just a few months. ........ Between January and March, GDP declined by an annualized rate of 5%.  

Coronavirus News (193)

‘That’s Ridiculous.’ How America’s Coronavirus Response Looks Abroad. From lockdowns to testing, we showed people around the world the facts and figures on how the U.S. has handled the pandemic. ......... The United States leads the world in Covid-19 deaths, nearing 150,000 lost lives. The unemployment figures brought on by the pandemic are mind-boggling. The Trump administration’s slow and haphazard response has been widely criticized. ..............  Many advanced economies, from Germany to Singapore, directly supplemented salaries to save jobs. Other nations with fewer resources started mass testing at the first sign of an outbreak. Many countries mandated universal lockdowns — and successfully flattened the curve. In some parts of Europe, you could be fined for straying too far from your home. And Vietnam, a nation of 95 million people, has not seen a single Covid-19 death.    

 

China and America Are Heading Toward Divorce For 40 years the two countries had an unconscious economic coupling. .......   They know that as long as you’re president, America will be in turmoil. For Xi, that means we’re a less formidable economic rival, and for Vlad, that means we’re a less attractive democratic model for his people. They also both know that as long as you’re president the U.S. will never be able to galvanize a global coalition of allies against them, which is what China fears most on trade, human rights and Covid-19 and Russia on Ukraine and Syria. .........  “If Biden is elected, I think this could be more dangerous for China, because he will work with allies to target China, whereas Trump is destroying U.S. alliances.” ........ after 40 years of being one couple, two systems, because China badly overreached and America badly underperformed. .........  the U.S.-China partnership forged between 1979 and 2019 delivered a lot of prosperity to a lot of people and a lot of relative peace to the world — and, baby, we will miss it when it’s gone. ............  as Trump himself put it in a tweet last week, the U.S. has the option “of a complete decoupling from China.” ..........  China has become more aggressive in projecting its power into the South China Sea .......  it is imposing a new national security law to curtail longstanding freedoms in Hong Kong; it’s stepped up its bullying of Taiwan, taken a very aggressive approach toward India and intensified its internment of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang .........  it takes about 22 hours on Amtrak to go from New York to Chicago, while it takes 4.5 hours to take the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai, slightly farther apart ...........  It’s that we have reduced investments in the true sources of our strength — infrastructure, education, government-funded scientific research, immigration and the right rules to incentivize productive investment and prevent excessive risk-taking. And we have stopped leveraging our greatest advantage over China — that we have allies who share our values and China only has customers who fear its wrath. .............   “I don’t know if the Chinese are taking America seriously anymore. They are happy to just let us keep damaging ourselves. ........ China respects one thing only: leverage. Today, we have too little and China has too much.

The Death of Engagement The policy of "engagement" has defined U.S.-China relations for almost a half century. It didn't have to end this way. ........  In 1967, as race riots spread across the United States and as the Vietnam War raged on, an astounding 70 percent of Americans agreed on one thing: the greatest threat to U.S. security was the People’s Republic of China. At the time, China was in the throes of one of the most violent, anti-democratic upheavals of the century, The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and Americans feared that the contagion of Mao’s “people’s war” would spread from Indochina around the world.  So, it was surprising when, against this backdrop, then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon issued a call for amity in the pages of Foreign Affairs. 

Churchill The Failure: The Paradoxical Truth About The Best And Worst Leaders  Churchill, in his own words, “hated” Indians, describing them as “a beastly people with a beastly religion.” .........  He alienated the Conservative leadership and marginalized himself so far on the extreme right that he was accused of attempting to become “an English Mussolini.” ....... Churchill’s attitude towards India did not change when he became Prime Minister. He presided over – and actively prevented any efforts to alleviate – the catastrophic 1943 Bengal famine, which killed 3 million Indians. When Churchill’s India Secretary and childhood friend Leo Amery asked him to do something, Churchill laughed about the prospect of shrinking a population that bred “like rabbits.” A horrorstruck Amery wrote that when it came to India, there wasn’t “much difference between [Churchill’s] outlook and Hitler’s.” ....... only Churchill would have kept fighting in May 1940. In the right circumstances, there is no one you’d rather be led by than Winston Churchill. In the wrong ones, you’d rather have anyone else.   

Coronavirus-Linked Hunger Tied To 10,000 Child Deaths Each Month The side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are pushing hungry communities around the world over the edge.

Coronavirus News (192)

Elon Musk, interviewed by Maureen Dowd https://t.co/8zxSHaJxBZ

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 25, 2020

Elon Musk, Blasting Off in Domestic Bliss The billionaire space oddity on life with Grimes and Baby X, Trump, Tesla, tunnels, short shorts, stock surges, Facebook fumbles and everything else under the sun. .............. Grimes, the singer and artist, and Elon Musk, the rocket man and Tesla magnate, have an otherworldly romance. Which works out well since Mr. Musk wants to occupy Mars, in case malevolent robots or an engineered virus threaten Earth, and then die on Mars, just not on impact......... the prince of the internet, with memes about how he cries in old-school A.O.L. dial-up tones, X begins crying. ..........  His personal life has been as vertiginous as his professional life: married three times, twice to the same woman, Talulah Riley, an actress who played a lethal sexbot on “Westworld.” He has six children. ..........  A fan on her Reddit page described her as a hybrid of a fairy, a witch and a cyborg — pretty much Mr. Musk’s dream girl — and she has talked about going through a Wiccan phase in seventh grade. ..........  “She’s one of the most unusual people I’ve ever met.” I wonder how it works with two such exotic birds. “We’ve had this debate of ‘Are you more crazy than me or am I more crazy than you?’” Mr. Musk said. ..................  “If I’m not in love, if I’m not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy.” .........  he hates “being in a big empty house, and the footsteps echoing through the hallway ........  Grimes and Mr. Musk made their public debut at the Met Gala in 2018 ..........  Two famous people who thought they were crazy when they were little because there were so many off-the-wall ideas bursting out of their heads somehow found each other. .............  Intending to make a pun about Rococo Basilisk, he was Googling for an image of a basilisk with a rococo flair when he came across a 2015 music video for “Flesh Without Blood,” in which Grimes dresses as a rococo basilisk. .................  Grimes, who supported Bernie Sanders, had an influence on his recent decision to disencumber himself of his houses ............  in some ways, possessions weigh you down ...............   In the Bay Area, for example from 2002 to 2017, I never owned a house and I was there half the week so I would either sleep at the factory or in a friend’s spare bedroom or on a couch or in a hotel. I did that for 15 years.” ..............  He had thought about designing his own “aspirational masterpiece of a house,” but decided that it would take bandwidth away from his work “getting people to Mars and environmental sustainability and accelerating stable energy.” ...........  there was a period from end of 2017 to about, I guess, the middle of last year, that was excruciating.” ............  Mr. Musk is so transparent that he seems heedless at times, in ways that make his investors nervous and his fan boys thrilled. .............   “The people who love him and the people who hate him are equally irrational,” said Ashlee Vance, Mr. Musk’s biographer. “It reminds me of Steve Jobs. It’s way beyond business or celebrity. It strikes me as religious, more than anything. His fans are acolytes.” ........  Mr. Musk is also like Mr. Jobs in his obsession with sleek design ...........  “I’m going to take over the world. That’s going to be a super-crazy process. And therefore, if the roller coaster ride isn’t incredibly scary, I’m doing something wrong.” And after Mr. Jobs, boards learned their lesson about pushing out visionaries in favor of gray-haired corporate suits. ............  Mr. Musk is the first person in almost a century to come out of nowhere and create a car company with that much volume, showing other plodding car companies how electric cars can be cool, sexy and incredibly efficient. .............  a dark time when even masks and ventilators seemed beyond our manufacturing reach and when our government appears so incapable of getting coronavirus under control that the European Union has banned Americans from coming in. ..........  “The rate of progress is too slow and the amount of years he has left is not enough, but I’m still glad he’s doing what he’s doing with Blue Origin," Mr. Musk said. ..........  “I’m, like, not pro-Facebook. I don’t have a Facebook page. SpaceX and Tesla deleted their Facebook pages. SpaceX and Tesla do have an Instagram but I think it’s relatively harmless. So I think Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg still have a lot of work to do to restore public trust in Facebook itself.” ..................  In his spare time, Mr. Musk is working on tunnels that would alleviate urban traffic jams, an idea he dreamed up while stuck in L.A. traffic; spaceports that could catapult you from New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes; a hyperloop that would let you scoot between D.C. and New York in half an hour; a neural net that would be sewn or lasered into brains to fuse us with computers, which would potentially allow us to compete with superintelligent rogue A.I. and could also restore the ability to walk, hear, speak or see; and solar initiatives and lightweight lithium batteries to make mitigating climate change cheaper and more accessible...........  insists he is an engineer, not a businessman or investor. “I tend to bite off more than I can chew and then just sit there with chipmunk cheeks.” ............  “I love going to a restaurant that’s doing something special with food,” Mr. Musk said, “and I think really if you are not appreciating this, then you are not appreciating one of the finest things about living.” ..........  the lords of the cloud who were supposed to improve our lives were carelessly harvesting our data and allowing themselves to be disinformation factories. .........  Mr. Musk was painted as a Luddite, “hysterical” in the estimation of Mr. Zuckerberg, for what his friends called “Elon’s crusade,” his proselytizing that we should figure out safety features for A.I. before it gets smarter than us. .............. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” .........  “My assessment about why A.I. is overlooked by very smart people is that very smart people do not think a computer can ever be as smart as they are,” he told me. “And this is hubris and obviously false.” ..............  we’re headed toward a situation where A.I. is vastly smarter than humans and I think that time frame is less than five years from now. But that doesn’t mean that everything goes to hell in five years. It just means that things get unstable or weird.” ...........  He said his “top concern” is DeepMind, the secretive London A.I. lab run by Demis Hassabis and owned by Google. “Just the nature of the A.I. that they’re building is one that crushes all humans at all games,” he said. “I mean, it’s basically the plotline in ‘War Games.’” ...........  objectively, things will be weird when the computers are way smarter than humans ..........  lives out loud on Twitter with 37 million followers ............  it’s good anyway to take a few breaks from Twitter and not be on there 24 hours a day. Twitter can mess with your mind ..........  He said he rounded that number up from $419 in part to amuse Grimes — 4/20 is the stoner’s holiday. ..........  Musk said he’s not a big pot smoker because it makes you too logy. ..............  The herculean nature of turning Tesla into a well-oiled machine, he said, has not been “well appreciated.” ...........  “The logistics are mind-boggling, trying to deliver 7,000 cars per week in 40 different countries" ...........  “I think the reality of Covid is that it is dangerous if you’re elderly and have pre-existing conditions,” he said, adding: “It absolutely makes sense to have a lockdown if you’re vulnerable, but I do not think it makes sense to have a lockdown if you’re not vulnerable.” He said he may have had Covid in January and he wears a mask on the factory floor. ...............  The Tesla-loving liberals were horrified again by a May tweet, “Take the red pill," an allusion to the pill Keanu Reeves takes in “The Matrix” that lets him see the truth. ..........  The red-pill image has become linked with the fringe right and men’s rights activism. It blew up when Ivanka Trump retweeted it and said “Taken!” and when Lilly Wachowski, a creator of “The Matrix,” then cursed out both Mr. Musk and Ms. Trump. (Even Grimes’s mother, a Canadian journalist, tweeted her dissatisfaction.) .............  The president has called Mr. Musk “one of our great geniuses,” likening him to Thomas Edison. .............. I would say the amount of thought that the general public puts into politics is quite low. They’re mostly thinking about their day and their direct relationships and their work.” ..................  He notes that he was such a fervent Obama supporter that he once waited in line for six hours to shake Obama’s hand when he was running, adding, “the poor guy was so tired at the end of the night.” ............. Despite the fact that he wants someone in the White House who has his stuff together, he encouraged Kanye West’s bid for the presidency. .......  while they see each other about once every six months, they text “fairly often.” ....... “I’ve done my best to convince him that 2024 would be better than 2020” ..........  a bizarre Twitter thread in which he contended that his life was like the horror movie “Get Out,” Kim Kardashian put out a statement talking about her husband’s struggles with bipolar disorder.   

 

Great job by @elonmusk in agreeing to build, in TEXAS, what is expected to be the largest auto plant anywhere in the world. He kept his word to me. Texas & @Tesla are big winners. MADE IN THE USA!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2020

If you succeed within a system it’s hard to see how fucked up it is.

— Andrew Yang🧢🇺🇸 (@AndrewYang) July 25, 2020

Siouxsie Wiles: What the Victoria outbreak means for New Zealand 

Syria Has Come To America

Cartoon via Mike Luckovich

Posted by Robert Reich on Saturday, July 25, 2020

Coronavirus News (191)

Curtis Waters, TikTok king: 'There are no gatekeepers to the industry anymore'  TikTok is fast becoming the new grassroots centre of the music industry, the YouTube generation a relic of the past.  

Uganda - where security forces may be more deadly than coronavirus In Uganda, at least 12 people have allegedly been killed by security officers enforcing measures to restrict the spread of coronavirus, while the country has only just confirmed its first death from Covid-19. .............    The 30-year-old headteacher was one of those allegedly killed by security forces enforcing a coronavirus lockdown. ........  Critics say the force puts guns in the hands of young, poorly trained people who are unable to reduce the tension in a confrontation. .......... "We've found that security forces have been using Covid-19 and the measures put in place to prevent its spread as an excuse to violate human rights"   

Coronavirus in South Africa: Inside Port Elizabeth's 'hospitals of horrors'  exhausted doctors and nurses are overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients and a health service near collapse. ..........  With key staff on strike or sick with coronavirus in the Eastern Cape province, nurses are forced to act as cleaners, surgeons are washing their own hospital laundry and there are alarming reports of unborn babies dying in overcrowded and understaffed maternity wards. .............. South Africa - which held the coronavirus back for months with an early, tough, and economically devastating lockdown - now sees infection rates soar nationwide, prompting President Cyril Ramaphosa to warn that "the storm is upon us". ...........  raises fundamental questions about how those extra months were used, or wasted, by officials. .............   Covid has opened up all the chronic cracks in the system. It's creating a lot of conflict ...............  has seen departments turning on each other, and using Covid-19 as an "opportunity to air every grievance that ever happened" ................. "We have seen unions shut down hospital after hospital. Each time one staff member or patient tests positive, all staff down tools. While all these union demands are being met, nothing happens… for up to two weeks," one doctor complained. ................. Health services were circling the drain for 10 years. Now they've collapsed ..............  staff were "anxious, fearful… and overwhelmed." ............ the provincial health department was generally seen as so inept and dysfunctional that private donors, businesses and charitable funds anxious to help in the fight against Covid-19 were refusing to deal directly with it. ...........  One doctor cited a "culture of not wanting to discomfort your superiors which means people don't often tell it like it really is. ........  a desire by government "to be seen to be doing the right thing", rather than making tough decisions, citing the recent decision to resume community testing for Covid-19, despite the fact that it immediately pushed the entire testing system - including, crucially at hospitals - into a week-long backlog that rendered it almost useless. ...............  But the clearest lesson from Port Elizabeth may well prove to be about human nature, and how we respond under extreme pressure. ................  And then there is a third group. "The plain obstructive - a huge element, passive or overtly aggressive," said another source. For them, any sense "of altruism, or duty, has gone. It went a long time ago".

Why US-China relations are at their lowest point in decades  The message is that China is responsible for the Covid mess in the country, not him. ............  China has added to the recent run-up in tensions with its harsh national security law in Hong Kong and its repression of Muslim minority Uighurs, which triggered several rounds of US sanctions. ............  a speech about China delivered by Mr Pompeo this week. In rhetoric reminiscent of the Cold War, he accused Chinese leaders of being tyrants on a quest for global domination, and framed America's competition with Beijing as an existential struggle between freedom and oppression. ..............  The Chinese do not appear to be looking for escalation, and analysts agree that President Trump does not want a serious confrontation, certainly not a military one ............... unintended conflict. "The buffer that has historically insulated the US-China relationship, the presumption that the goal is to de-escalate and solve problems… has been stripped away" ..................   William Cohen, a Republican politician who served as defence secretary under the Democratic President Bill Clinton, thinks it's dangerous that China is being seen as an adversary across the political spectrum.

Coronavirus: South Africans divided over second alcohol ban  When it comes to coronavirus, South Africa is the hardest-hit country in Africa with more than 275,000 cases. ........... President Ramaphosa also announced a night-time curfew and said the wearing of masks outdoors was now compulsory. 

Covid-19 in Africa: Fighting fake news about coronavirus  what the WHO has called an "infodemic" around Covid-19  

India coronavirus: Online classes expose extent of digital divide  

Trials of a vaccine and new drug raise hope of beating covid-19

Coronavirus News (190)

AOC's best speech to date @AOC @justicedems @JoeBiden @KamalaHarris @ewarren @BernieSanders https://t.co/IE8FF41UpO #AOC

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) July 23, 2020

 

What if nuclear power had taken off in the 1970s? How would the world look today if more countries had adopted nuclear power after the 1973 oil crisis? A look back on an alternative history from a rather different 2020 The World If Jul 4th 2020 edition Jul 4th 2020 Editor’s note: This scenario is set in a different 2020 from the one we now inhabit, on a timeline that diverged in 1974  ............  March 6th 1974 may have been a turning-point in human history. ..........   Messmer’s announcement was a plan to construct 80 nuclear-power plants over the following decade, and 170 by the turn of the century. ..........  Even two degrees would be enough to bring heatwaves and droughts and to melt polar ice, raising sea levels. Six degrees would turn much of Earth’s surface into a desert.

Coronavirus: Oxford vaccine triggers immune response  A coronavirus vaccine developed by the University of Oxford appears safe and triggers an immune response. Trials involving 1,077 people showed the injection led to them making antibodies and T-cells that can fight coronavirus. ......... The UK has already ordered 100 million doses of the vaccine.  .......  The vaccine - called ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 - is being developed at unprecedented speed. .........  Nearly all effective vaccines induce both an antibody and a T-cell response. ...........  Levels of T-cells peaked 14 days after vaccination and antibody levels peaked after 28 days. The study has not run for long enough to understand how long they may last ........  The study showed 90% of people developed neutralising antibodies after one dose. Only ten people were given two doses and all of them produced neutralising antibodies. ............   but there are side-effects. ........ There were no dangerous side-effects from taking the vaccine, however, 70% of people on the trial developed either fever or headache. ....... More than 10,000 people will take part in the next stage of the trials in the UK. .. There will be a large trial involving 30,000 people in the US as well 2,000 in South Africa and 5,000 in Brazil. ........... It is possible a coronavirus vaccine will be proven effective before the end of the year, however, it will not be widely available. Health and care workers will be prioritised as will people who are deemed at high risk from Covid-19 due to their age or medical conditions.   

Coronavirus News (189)

Navigating a Crisis: Why Company Culture Is Key  the present times call for leadership with “love and humility” and “a growth mindset” .........  “I’ve personally been on a journey to lead with love and humility instead of pride and fear” ..........  In Thailand, everything is about the heart. The Thais have a word for it called jai, and it’s all jai. And since then I’ve personally been on a journey to lead with love and humility instead of pride and fear. ..........  As I came into Amway, I was very clear that my first 100 days were all about “listen and learn.” ........  The biggest challenge we have faced in addition to keeping all our colleagues safe has been essentially around supply chain. ............  online is the new offline .........  management has become democratized through this process. Every person on a Microsoft Teams [meeting] or a Zoom call has an equal voice. ..........  We have three cultural principles: Live to serve, love to learn, and lead from the heart. .........  long-term strategy is the best short-term strategy 

COVID-19 on Campus: How Should Schools Be Redesigned?  Redesigning academic institutions so that they can re-open and function safely in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic is a challenging problem. Part of the value from a traditional education in an elite institution is socialization as a member of the future elites in finance, business more broadly, law, government, and industry. You meet and become friendly with people who will work with you for decades to come, whose trust you likewise will need for decades. ............  We can already see that improper design, even suboptimal design, can be catastrophic. ...........  We need to determine to what extent we can deliver services adequately through virtual online alternatives. We need to determine to what extent we can deliver traditional services effectively through safe redesign, which manages public risks and to convince the public that risks have indeed been managed. And we need to find the optimal balance. ..........  In some industries there is no redesign that saves it from total economic collapse. Movie theaters represent the most extreme example. ...........   The vast majority of movie theaters will never reopen. ........  Retailing will be transformed but that industry already is adapting. ........  Redesigning elite academic institutions provides a concrete example of the most difficult design problem. ........  Military academies understand that their missions are complex, and they must include discipline and trust in your future cohort of peer officers as much as they include tactics, strategy, and military history. ...............  a significant portion of the value of attending an elite institution is the informal time spent with faculty and with other students, and much of this value can be destroyed by improper redesign of the campus before reopening .............   We can also assume that state, local, and federal governments will still be dealing with the massive debt created by the virus over the past several months. Further, we can assume that many families are still dealing with the financial hardship created by the lockdown. ..............  three age groups, corresponding to Students, most Faculty and Staff, and the Oldest faculty and staff. ..........  We assume that essentially all non-academic activities, from sports to drama and music, will have been canceled. .........  We model the transition of individuals from the Healthy population, into Exposed, Infectious Asymptomatic, Infectious Sick, Recovered Immune, or Deceased. ............   First is full PPE or other protection for faculty and staff. Second is mandatory social distancing for students in the classroom. Third is mandatory social distancing for students in dining and student housing. Fourth is social contact tracing without testing. Fifth is social contact tracing with frequent and regular testing. These interventions can be combined to yield various strategies for reopening a campus. ............    Reopen and change nothing is not a viable strategy. .........  Protecting only the senior staff and hoping for herd immunity among the rest of the organization is not a viable strategy. ...........  Unfortunately, there are very few industries where mixing virtualization and traditional labor is effective. ..........  It is difficult to double the spacing between employees in a meat processing facility without doubling the size of the building or reducing output by half. ..............  The combination of protecting senior staff and blending virtualization with traditional service delivery is possible in some industries but not others. Moreover, it is not sufficient in settings where employees or students also live together in close quarters after work, like a university or an aircraft carrier. ............ Strategy 4: Protect the Vulnerable and Slow the Spread of the Virus through Virtual Instruction and Redesigned Dormitory Experience ............  Strategy 5: Protect the Vulnerable, Slow the Spread of the Virus through Social Distancing in the Classroom and Dorms, and Remove the Contagious through Test and Trace ...........   Even in the presence of all forms of intervention described above, testing will need to be constant and universal, with effective contact tracing after the identification of infected individuals. Daily testing across campus will not be possible. And when a significant portion of infected individuals are asymptomatic, hot spots are likely to have grown quite large before they are detected. .............    take samples from entire living groups of maybe 100 or 200 students. ..............  aggressive programs of testing and contact tracing will also be required. ..........  If a university does choose to open in the Fall, it will need to adopt the following practices, all of which are contained in Strategy 5. ...........  Frequent testing and rapid social tracing will be essential to slow outbreaks of the virus, which inevitably will occur. ........   Students are not going to see the risk of COVID-19 as severe for them. They will not be certain that violating a social distancing norm will expose them, or that exposure will lead to illness, or that illness would be severe for them. They are not going to give up seeing friends or lovers. Redesign of living on-campus units will be the most ineffective part of the transformation, and campus living will be the most vulnerable part of the redesigned campus. And students will — quite reasonably — resist tracking through their phones. Where they sleep, and who they sleep with, and how late they are up drinking, and who they drink with, are all data they will not wish to share with their universities or with anyone else. .............. Every student would have a unique RFD token. Without the token they would not be admitted to any classroom building. ............   Super-spreader events should be banned; there probably will not be giant on-campus parties in the foreseeable future. ...........  Contact tracing will be essential and contact tracing must be automatic, secure, and private. ........  Testing must be frequent. Students who have contracted the virus, whether they are symptomatic or not, must be quarantined, and quarantine must be without stigma. Ideally, quarantine of students who reside in dormitories would be in facilities nicer than existing dormitory facilities. Students who live off campus will be expected to quarantine at home. Students who are quarantined will have their RFD tags noted and will automatically be denied access to classroom buildings and dormitories. ...........  Contact tracing must be immediate, compassionate, and anonymous. Students who have been exposed must be notified. They must be told as gently as possible. And they must not be told the name of the individual who may have exposed them. ..........  The entire process must be transparent. Students must know the reason for each measure that has been imposed. And they must be able to know the state of the disease on campus at any time