Is Super-spreading the secret of viral success? Plus Paramedics by Jet-pack, Forgotten Americans, and Napoleon – nasty not nice.

Grüezi! I’m Adrian Monck and welcome to this World Economic Forum newsletter.

This week... Are super-spreaders the secret of viral success? If you’re in a medical emergency on a mountain, your paramedic may arrive by jet-pack. And listen to forgotten Americans? And how nasty was Napoleon?

Newsletters are for sharing – so please share this one!

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1?? COVID–19 hit America Hardest

A twentieth of the world’s people have a fifth of pandemic infections and deaths.

And in case you wondered, the pandemic isn’t interested in politics. America’s Democratic Northeast has fared as badly as its Republican South and Midwest.

Economists have crunched the numbers, and if the US had managed to keep to Europe’s infection levels 57,800 US citizens would still be alive.

They note:

1. The US had more time to prepare, and learn from experience;
2. US population is younger than Europe’s so should be more resilient;
3. Parts of the US, especially the Midwest and South, have low population density and urbanisation.

The findings contradict claims that Europe had a 33% higher rate of excess mortality than the US. But the exact reasons why the pandemic hit the US so hard? That will need more studying. 

Meanwhile, Danish scientists have discovered that social distancing beats travel bans when it comes to controlling the spread of infection.

? Find out more with our COVID–19 Transformation Map.

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2?? Super-spreaders

What makes a virus go viral?

Indian researchers think they have the answer:

• “[R]esearchers tracked down 78 people who had shared a bus or train with one of eight known infected people and sat within three rows of that person for more than six hours. Health workers visited these contacts at their homes to conduct follow-up screenings and determined that nearly 80% of them had contracted the coronavirus.
• By contrast, people who were known to be exposed to infected individuals in lower-risk environments — such as being in the same room but more than three feet away — became infected only 1.6% of the time.”

Here’s the original research.

? It's been a shecession: COVID-19 grew the gender gap too

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3?? Forgotten Americans

Get past the monotone voiceover and see life through the eyes of some of America’s poorest people.

You can read veteran reporter Tim Sullivan’s piece here.

• “[A]fter a history of outside exploitation by coal barons and later pharmaceutical companies selling opioids, Appalachian Ohio also still has some of the state’s poorest counties, with child poverty rates higher than 30%. I’d seen poverty in much poorer countries, and had reported on families from rural Pennsylvania to Texas who would have gone hungry without local food pantries. Even there, the child poverty rates were less than half what they are here.
• The poverty is visible in the houses near collapse, the trailer homes fixed with duct tape, the buildings consumed by vines. These not-quite ghost towns were once thriving coal communities, now slowly dying decade after decade, leaving behind streams that still run a putrid orange from the drainage of old mines.”

One person who made it out of forgotten America is Stewart Rhodes – a late-blossoming educational success story:

[Rhodes] went on to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where he graduated summa cum laude, and then to Yale Law School, where he won a prize for a paper arguing that the Bush administration’s enemy-combatant doctrine violated the Constitution.

Except that educational qualifications don’t factor in culture and opportunity. Rhodes now runs a far-right militia group that’s talking up civil war.

? How can governments protect society from the trauma of unemployment?

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4?? Justice and Race

How can we make justice systems work for everyone?

? COVID-19 increased the racial divide. A new business objective can help close it.

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5?? Napoleon Dynamite

Even worse than the bad-tempered bowler brought back by Bill and Ted.

Napoleon gets a soft pass from historians. But a picture of Napoleon as a heartless butcher emerges from a new biography of Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian diplomat who built the system that spared Europe a continent-wide conflict until 1914.

In a meeting in 1813 Metternich confronted Napoleon with the human toll of the French emperor’s battles, which had transformed war from small skirmishes by parade-ground professionals: ‘In ordinary times armies are formed of only a small part of the population. Today it is the whole people that you have called to arms.’

Napoleon replied: ‘You are no soldier...I was brought up in military camps, I know only the camps, and a man such as I am does not give a f*** about the lives of a million men.’

The same Napoleon “walked about on tiptoes because it made him look taller.”

Let the unglamorous Metternich have the last word:

‘I hate the war and all that it brings: the killing, the pain, the piggishness, the pillaging, the corpses, the amputations, the dead horses – not to forget the rape ... [War] contaminates everything, even the imagination ... That is why I work for peace.’

? How to end great power rivalry? Two top diplomats look for answers.

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6?? Factory-made Homes

Could your dream home be sitting on a production line?

? Find out more about people with innovative solutions to tough challenges at our Sustainable Development Impact Summit.

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7??  The Future of Mountain Rescue – Jet-Pack Paramedics

The next time you need help in the hills, it could arrive like Iron Man.

More here.

? World vs Virus doesn’t need a jet-pack. It’s powered by Robin and the team – also they have a new podcast series out – The Great Reset. Take a listen!

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Hope you’ve liked this week’s espresso-powered content, 

Adrian

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With thanks to all those folks without whose encouragement and critical feedback this newsletter would never get written.