Articles

Turkey has been contact tracing for a century

from nationalgeographic

ISTANBUL - On a sticky summer morning, the air thick with haze, Seher Odabaşı starts her work day in her office with the windows open. She turns on her computer and studies the screen, which displays row after row of names. Today’s chart contains about 50 cases, nearly 10 times as many as there were a couple months ago.

For Odabaşı, the list fills her with anticipation and uncertainty about what the day will bring because she must track down these people who are scattered throughout their neighborhood. It’s her job to keep COVID-19 from spreading.

As she heads out into the thrumming streets in the city’s Kadıköy District, Odabaşı scans the names on her electronic tablet, the connections, and the addresses. Before each visit, she pulls a white protective suit over her cat-print scrubs, trades her thick-rimmed glasses for goggles, and grabs her medical kit with her gloved hand.

Tracing and policing

Turkey’s ability to manage the pandemic has its roots in American training initiatives and institutions, a small irony given the struggles in the United States. American expertise helped build the first School of Public Health in Turkey, which was funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation.

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The pandemic pushed cars out of this historic Scottish city

THERE’S SOMETHING MISSING from the usual scene at the 17th-century Holyrood Palace, once home to the tragic Mary, Queen of Scots: a snaking line of taxis and tourist buses parked out front.

Edinburgh’s city council recently voted to make Victoria and Cockburn streets—two of Old Town’s busiest, most picturesque byways—pedestrian-only zones. The move, aimed at promoting social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic and giving restaurants more space for outdoor dining, is emblematic of Edinburgh’s ambitious new “City Centre Transformation” plan, which hopes to bring miles of new tramlines, protected bike lanes, and walking routes by 2022.

from nationalgeographic

During the pandemic, multiple urban areas have repurposed roadways for pedestrians, from the “streeteries” that bring restaurant seating on to New York City boulevards to the pop-up bike lanes temporarily added to Paris’s already robust network of protected pistes cyclables.

Recognized, then overrun

Established by the United Nation’s cultural division in 1978, UNESCO World Heritage designations highlight and help protect historic neighborhoods, archaeological sites, and structures of “outstanding universal value” around the globe.

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Who will get the vaccine first? Here's where you might land in line

from nationalgeographic

WHENEVER A NEW vaccine gets approved, health officials have to tackle the difficult question of who should be first in line to receive it. Typically health-care workers are first, and in previous outbreaks, such as the H1N1 swine flu in 2009, people whose health was most vulnerable got priority, too.

On October 2, the National Academy of Medicine revealed its recommendations for COVID-19 vaccine distribution in an influential 237-page framework commissioned by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The report proposes distributing a vaccine in four phases as it becomes available. The first recipients are obvious picks: health-care workers, emergency responders, people with underlying conditions, and older adults living in group settings. This mirrors similar recommendations by the World Health Organization, and it is a foundational principle for the COVAX collaboration, a global effort to improve poorer countries’ access to a vaccine, which 171 nations have pledged to join. (The U.S. is not one of them, and a small group of scientists question the wisdom of putting some health-care workers at the top.)

What is fair?

Romero says that both the ACIP and the National Academy of Medicine are “aligned” in their mission to promote health equity, but that ACIP is waiting to learn which vaccines will be approved before issuing final guidelines.

“Our recommendations will probably change over time, as each version comes forward and we learn about its efficacy,” Romero says. “Maybe one doesn’t work as well in the elderly, so we would focus it on younger people.”

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