key: cord- - xfkse authors: bindenagel Šehović, annamarie title: human rights and state responsibilities date: - - journal: reimagining state and human security beyond borders doi: . / - - - - _ sha: doc_id: cord_uid: xfkse this chapter lays out an argument that citizens’ human rights are the responsibility of the corresponding state, meaning that citizens of a territorial state claim particular rights that state is obliged to deliver. in return, in an aspect which is often neglected in analyses of human security, citizens also owe allegiance to the state. citizens’ rights have been expanded to encompass not only physical protection within a territory but also a host of economic and welfare provisions. despite the increasingly international discourse on human security rights, their legal home remains with the national state vis-à-vis its citizens. the chapter argues that the rules of the state-based order are shifting, with no clear loci of responsibility and accountability for human security. the introduction sketched the origins and elements of human security. this chapter lays out one argument to make the case that citizens' human rights are the responsibility of the corresponding state, meaning that citizens of a territorial state claim particular rights that state is obliged to deliver. as outlined in the introduction, these rights have been expanded to encompass not only physical protection within a territory but also a host of economic and welfare provisions (hösle ; slaughter ; cescr ; icpcr ) . however, especially with regard to the latter, not all of these rights are equally or legally encoded into national law. thus despite the increasingly international discourse on human security rights, their legal home remains with the national state vis-à-vis its citizens. in return, in an aspect which is often neglected in analyses of human security, citizens also owe allegiance to the state. this includes submitting to civic codes such as police ordinances and taxation, as well as to the military draft when instituted : without such a reciprocal relationship between states and citizens, it might not be possible to guarantee territorial or other human security protections. of course, the necessary existence of such a relationship does not preclude its potential for abuse by either party (see also howell ) . this reciprocal relationship is based on a state-citizenship centric order, and that not only at the national level, but also internationally. in other words, citizenship here is dependent upon its conferral by a territorial state, which derives its contours from its citizenry. this chapter thus assumes that the current national/international governmentality order continues to be based upon this state-citizens relationship, with a twist. that is, while the national/international legal order rests upon the pillars of state-citizen reciprocity with regard to rights and obligations, this exchange does not reflect the more complicated reality. that is, the rules of the state-based order are shifting, with no clear loci of responsibility and accountability for human security. the hypothesis presented here argues that a bifurcated evolution wherein rights have ascended up the international agenda but not necessarily at the national level, and state or sovereign obligation has been diffused between state and nsas without clarifying where the locus of the final guarantee of protection lies, describes the current status. this has led to a diffusion of the guarantor status of the national state, with elements of power in governance-agency, scope, mechanisms, and normative context-diverging. this leads to two questions: first, if state a acts as a guarantor to the human security of citizens of a, the same holds for state b and citizens of b; but what happens to citizens of state a residing in state b, or vice versa? second, what are the consequences of human security provision to citizens of a or b by nsas, notably when nsas go bankrupt or depart? both of these questions point again to the need to clarify the relationship between citizens and states in order to conceive of suitable answers. as outlined in the introduction, the idea of human security as the remit of the state is inextricable from the notion of state sovereignty. sovereignty as a concept has been debated since its inception, and each idea of it has made various assumptions as to what it entails and what it excludes. the majority of scholars (krasner ) of westphalia-influenced definitions of sovereignty include requisites such as the state enjoying a monopoly of power capable of defending its territorial borders against external aggression; even these have rarely been absolute in practice (krasner , - , ) . in describing this 'compound' myth, anne-marie slaughter defines westphalian sovereignty as "the right to be left alone, to exclude, to be free from any external meddling or interference" (slaughter , ). yet the same sovereignty that offers the option to opt out is also the ticket to inclusion in the inter-national community of (equal) states. the westphalian definition also invokes "the right to be recognized as an autonomous agent in the international system, capable of interaction with other states and entering into international agreements" (slaughter , ) , the responsibility for whose implementation resides squarely with those signatory states. this reveals the schism between what robert keohane ( ) called formal and 'operational' sovereignty, and what i referred to as the divergent 'final guarantee' and 'functional' sovereignty with regard to the governance accountability problem (gap) (Šehović ). it acknowledges that westphalian sovereignty is not absolute, and rather that "it is now a platitude that the ability of governments to attain their objectives through individual action has been undermined by international political and economic interdependence" (keohane, quoted in slaughter , ) . the eu exemplifies political and economic interdependence, a model partially replicated to differing degrees by the african union (au), asean (association of southeast asian nations), and mercosur (the common market of select south american states) in a quest to confront threats and maximize opportunities. both in theory and in practice then, this means that, on the one hand, states increasingly cannot-and often do not want to-fully guard against external interference. on the other hand, states (should also) acknowledge that the sources of such interference include not only other states but also activities of nsas, from crime syndicates and cyber surveillance and mercenaries to human rights' campaigners, as well as cross-border challenges such as (infectious) disease spread and migration. these interdependencies and their potential both for cooperation and for conflict directly influence a state's ability not only to control its own territory (see krasner, interdependence sovereignty, pages - ) but also to the "security, economic stability and a measure of prosperity, clean air and water, and even minimum health standards" (slaughter , ) that are the hallmarks of hösle's expanded definition of sovereignty (hösle ) and the integral components of human security. human security's main argument places the emphasis of security on the human as opposed to the state. the central assumption underscoring human security is that "when a human faces a threat, so does international security" (burgess and gräns , ; kerr , ; undp ). yet the two are necessarily in dialogue with each other: first of all, states in the inter-national remain the arbiters of human security (hösle ; un declaration ; undp ) , regardless of whether the point of departure is human-or state-centric; and second, as members of the international community of (equal) states, these are themselves increasingly subjected to trial by their peers. "states can no longer assume that if they refrain from interfering in the affairs of other states they will remain free from interference themselves" (slaughter , ) . furthermore, governments increasingly understand that they often cannot afford to look the other way; that fundamental threats to their own security, whether from refugees, terrorists, the potential destabilization of an entire region, or a miasma of disease and crime, may well have their origins in conditions once thought to be within a state's exclusive domestic jurisdiction. (slaughter , ) as the post-cold war era has shown, both intra-and inter-state conflict have coincided with the spread of disease. this has been evident in the former yugoslavia, in rwanda and somalia, in iraq and syria (intrastate conflict by the numbers ; human security centre). these conflicts have seen the increase in cross-border spread of disease such as evd, h n , hiv, measles (notably in continental europe, and the us), mers-cov, and sars, to name a few examples. this incidence salience of the insight that: "states can only govern effectively by actively cooperating with other states and by collectively reserving the power to intervene in other states' affairs" (slaughter , ) . it has been backed up by the normative evolutions first from rights to responsibility, to the r p, to, arguably at this moment, the responsibility to respond. this captures the essence of a continual conversation between human security and sovereignty. therein, "internally, a government has a responsibility to respect the dignity and basic rights of its citizens," and "externally, it has a responsibility to respect the sovereignty of other states" (slaughter , ) , except when a state heeds the (r)evolution rewriting sovereignty as control to sovereignty as responsibility. daniel philpott describes this shift as part of an ongoing process. he attributes this revolution in sovereignty to "prior revolutions in ideas about justice and political authority" (philpott , ) . the post-cold war reordering of the world proffers a multitude of examples of this progress: from emergent multipolarity (flockhart ) to the rise of nongovernmental organizations (ngos) and nsas, from the human rights debates to gain access to hiv treatment to those to usher in the r p (iciss ), reconceptualizations of internal and external state responsibility have been pitted against each other. though the state remains legally dominant, theoretical and philosophical evidence underscored by empirics points to two key unresolved tensions: the locus of the responsibility for human security and the scope of human security, particularly in reaching non-citizens. on the theoretical side, foucault presciently identified emergent 'governmentality' (faubion and rabinow ), anticipating the collaborative governance that would emerge as states and nsas sparred and cooperated in response to ever more global challenges to human security. the s, amid the (western) euphoria of the 'end of history' (fukuyama ) , witnessed an initial acknowledgment that states alone could not meet the rising number of international and increasingly global challenges-from the multiplication of intra-state conflict and the proliferation of weapons to water management. rosenau introduced the idea of 'governance without government' (rosenau and czempiel ), maintaining that governance 'regimes' composed both of states and nsas would form to tackle specific issues in the international realm. nsas have long been engaged in shoring up or tearing down state sovereignty, with (hösle ) or without the consent of the state. while on the one hand a tension exists between theory and practice of state sovereign obligation with regard to human security, it also means that though threats to human security abound on the part of both state and nsas, precedents likewise exist for mitigating these to the benefit of human security. to a large extent, rosenau has been proven correct: if nsas are included, then a plethora of organizations exist dedicated to treating hiv/aids, providing water and sanitation, and even administering public transportation in municipalities around the world. however, these are not regimes in the sense that they have a central organizational structure, that their interventions are legally binding, or that any mechanisms are in place to ensure the continuation of their work if and when they opt out. this is not a central theme of risse's work, which focuses on 'areas of limited statehood' (risse ) . here nsas might perform functions theoretically if not in practice associated with state responsibility for human security. yet they are not bound to such actions, for instance, of service delivery and health care. critically, instead of shoring up states' lack of capacity, nsas have contributed to the fragmentation of their power-including their ability to guarantee traditional and human security: ngos' [nongovernmental organizations'] role and influence have exploded in the last half-decade. their financial resources and-often more importanttheir expertise, approximate and sometimes exceed those of smaller governments and of international organizations. "we have less money and fewer resources than amnesty international, and we are the arm of the u.n. for human rights," noted ibrahima fall, head of the u.n. centre for human rights, in . "this is clearly ridiculous." today ngos deliver more official development assistance than the entire u.n. system (excluding the world bank and the international monetary fund). in many countries they are delivering the services-in urban and rural community development, education, and health care-that faltering governments can no longer manage. (matthews ) nonetheless, risse assumes that nsas will continue their activities. that these nsas might be accountable not to the human beings they serve, but otherwise, or that they might be dependent upon funding sources whose priorities are prone to shift, remains under-analyzed. it leaves unanswered the questions of what happens to the state-citizen relationship when they do not. krasner attempts to corral some of these disparate responses to the sovereign redrafting by delineating four elements of sovereignty: westphalian, juridical, domestic, and interdependence (krasner ; czempiel and rosenau ) . none directly deal with the engagement between sovereignty and human security explicitly, yet they are critical in highlighting their exchange. whether the four 'sovereignties' can be meaningfully divorced from one another and applied in an empirical sense to state or human security remains unproven: while theory must conform to practice, so, too, must practice inform theory (see box . ). while keohane's divide between formal and functional sovereignty alludes to some of the problems with distilling sovereignties listed above, they are not thereby resolved (keohane ) . similarly, slaughter's network theory, taking nsas into account, revives some of the same solutions put forward by foucault and rosenau. likewise my gap thesis, while identifying the lack of accountability between state and nsas with regard to the guarantee of human security to citizens, it did not deal with the same responsibility to non-citizens. this points to a new stage in philpott's (r)evolutions in ideas: while each of the conversations between sovereignty and human security introduced above acknowledges the limits of westphalian absolutism, each fails to account for their (re)imagining beyond borders. on the philosophical side, scholars have wrangled with this conceptually in various terms. the human rights agenda, which both precedes and parallels that of human security, is itself an outgrowth of a historical trajectory of political theology. referring to "to the connections between religion (in the broadest sense, including philosophy as well) and legally structured power," political theology is of "special importance in the western world and influenced the development of juristic concepts, especially those concerned with public law" (hösle , ; schmitt ) . public law, inextricable from the relationship between states and subjects, then states and citizens, is vested with antecedents of values-with morals and their changing interactions with politics (hösle , ; carlson and owens ) . • what is the value of westphalian sovereignty where a state cannot control its territory? • what role does juridical sovereignty play when a state is only partially recognized by its peers? (see kosovo) • what does domestic sovereignty mean if (a) a portion of the citizenry is excluded from, for instance, health care? (b) non-citizens have no recourse to rights (to education, health, justice)? • what is interdependence sovereignty if borders are porous or surveillance systems are technologically or politically incompatible? christianity in the west, particularly after the treaties of westphalia largely ended internecine wars on the european continent, contributed immensely to the conversation and construction of sovereignty, as related to human rights and human security. hösle argues that christianity estranged citizens from their state and universalized their rights' claims. through the idea of all human beings as god's children, a broader as well as existentially deeper diffusion of the universalistic and individualistic ideas of hellenism-and thereby eliminated a possible identification with any state that does not include all human beings and is not constituted in accord with the principles of christianity. (hösle , ) christianity can arguably be made responsible for two things (hösle , ) : first, a politics free of religious and ritual considerations, taken further through the enlightenment; and second, an intensive moralization of the religious, demanding "an influence on politics that went far beyond what was conceivable for ancients" (hösle , ) . the latter finds its echo in the articulation and demand for individual human rights delivered by the state. thus although the notion of a christian theocracy likewise receded with the secularization of westphalia, the ideas of universal human rights and of a universal claim to human security have wound their way through various (r)evolutions in sovereignty right up to this present reimagining. returning to the core of the conversation between sovereignty and human security, theory and philosophy back up the urgent need to practically respond to the three main tenets of state and human security: ( ) ensuring the territorial and physical security of citizens; ( ) protecting lives and livelihoods through basic economic stability, health, and welfare; and ( ) bearing accountability internally and to the international community (hösle ; risse ) . assuming that states remain the final arbiter of such securities, articulating, delegating, and assuming respective state and human rights and responsibilities are key to reimagining and implementing human security beyond borders. states, sovereignty, human security-all are predicated upon a relationship of rights and responsibilities between citizens and states. the tension in this reciprocal relationship is not new. it can be divided into three broad shifts dating from westphalia through to the last major global reordering in the s, which ended the second wave of democratization (strand et al. ) and inaugurated the third wave of liberal, democratic capitalism based on state sovereignty. the first shift, demarcated but by no means consolidated with the treaties of westphalia in , ordered responsibility, for territorial and physical protection in the name of state sovereignty, at the level of the state. the second shift, from circa the s, occurred at the height of the second wave of democratization, and in the name of 'self-determination' (unpo ) . this meant on the one hand that especially newly minted states could cling in particular to the westphalian notions of 'nonintervention,' a stance reemphasized by both blocs at the height of the cold war. on the other hand, however, the existence of the post-world war ii un and its emerging norms and values spread the notion that state responsibility includes human rights discourse if not its translation into practice. this pre-exposure arguably paved the way for the s shift, which, in the words of the independent commission on human security, refers to the 'vital freedom,' explicitly tied state responsibility to "protecting people from severe and pervasive threats, both national and societal, and empowering individuals and community to develop the capabilities for making informed choices and acting on their own behalf" (ogata and cels , ) . what remained formally the same throughout these transitions, and became all the more pronounced as state subjects/constituents became citizens, is the onus placed on the state to assume responsibility for the security of those citizens. while a constituent refers to a voter within a particular area, a citizen is a (political) member of a state. this has two implications: first, a constituent must not be a citizen. indeed, a constituent might receive physical security within a territory in return for heeding the obligation to serve that same territorial state's security in the event of war. this leads to the second point: a citizen might have more privileges, such as the right to vote. yet the obligation to serve the state-by taxation and/or by (required) military service-remains. so, too, does the threat of the revocation of citizenship if an individual serves in the armed forces or swears allegiance to another state. as is quoted on the inside of every us passport: . loss of u.s. citizenship: under certain circumstances, you may lose your u.s. citizenship by performing, voluntarily and with the intention to relinquish u.s. citizenship, any of the following acts: ( ) being naturalized in a foreign state; ( ) taking an oath or making a declaration to a foreign state; ( ) serving in the armed forces of a foreign state; ( ) accepting employment with a foreign government; or ( ) formally renouncing u.s. citizenship before a u.s. consular officer overseas. (authors' passport) (generous) provisions do exist that allow dual citizenship. some states, the us among them, allow citizens to renounce their citizenship. others, such as iran, do not. while citizenship obligation has long been linked to a measure of state responsibility for protection, such as consular services overseas, it has not been synonymous with citizenship rights. by its very exclusivity, citizenship does not and cannot confer universal, inalienable rights. the concept and enactment of human security attempt to rebalance those obligations into an equation wherein state sovereign responsibilities meet individual human rights (bergman ; kerr ; nef ; undp ) . the revolution of human security and rights-based development lies in their universalism. states become the bastions not only of ultimate responsibility for the extent of the provision of rights for what is possible within their capacities but also, arguably, for the highest standard internationally. president franklin d. roosevelt's now-famous "four freedoms speech" of preceded the call for human security in the undp and again in the publication of the report "human security now" by the commission on human security (roosevelt ; ogata and cels ) . from the very beginning of the post-world war ii period, article of the un charter and article of the un universal declaration of human rights (udhr) encoded the principles of human security, including an emphasis on the right to health, which is central to the case studies presented in chaps. and : everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care … and the right to security in the event of … sickness, [and] disability … motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. (udhr ) the centrality of health among global policy priorities is reiterated in the constitution of the world health organization (who) in ; the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights (icescr); the undp; and the adoption of the ihr in and most recently updated in . the icescr-as well as the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (cedaw), the convention on the rights of the child, and the world trade organization's doha declaration on "trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights," which allows for the production of generic versions of essential medicines under certain conditions before patent protection runs outappears to provide an implicit obligation on the part of states to improve health and to establish and secure health as a human (security) right. however-and crucially-none of them prescribes an explicit obligation. similarly, the ihr emphasize the universal and expanding right of each individual citizen (of the world) to the highest standard of health. in fact, the ihr, having gone into effect in , require their signatory state parties to "develop public health capacities to detect and respond to public health emergencies of international concern (pheic), with states required to cooperate in building these capacities" (who ) . "however, the regulations do not provide incentives, sanction states for failing to cooperate, or allocate responsibility" (gostin and friedman , ) . no specific or enforceable obligation to ensure that individuals attain physical and mental health and no guidelines for how the state's obligations are to be discharged exist (davies ) . this situation obviously creates problems for the implementation of the right to health within the remit of a state's responsibility to provide (human) security. nonetheless, these agreements have transformed normative ideas into principles of action (icescr , article ). yet real implementation lags, lost in the opaque realm between theoretical and practical responsibility. the consequences are particularly obvious with regard to states' responses to threats to human security of, but not only of, health. in the narrow sense, human security is limited to physical protection and the creation of conditions conducive to human welfare, but stops short of full protection and provision. whether or not defending those values parallels interests that reach to the hindu kush (löfflmann and vaughan-williams ; maull ) , the assertion of which resulted in the then german defense minister struck ( struck ( - tendering his resignation, remains a point of contentious debate, not just in germany. kaldor et al. ( ) attempt to work this into an especially value-based foreign policy strategy for the eu that nonetheless takes state interests into account. this morphs into the broader conceptualization of human security, wherein an equal level of priority is given to any type of threat (thakur , ) . critics argue that such prioritization of all is equal to prioritization of none. liotta and owens present one attempt to differentiate between threats, risks, and vulnerabilities as part of this debate (liotta and owens ) . they arguably all converge and infringe upon human security which demands a response. a gap emerges between theory of protecting human security and its practice. it begs the questions: for whom? how far? by whom? the (inter)national system based on sovereign states continues to operate under the assumption that "governments have a responsibility for the health of their peoples which can be fulfilled only by the provision of adequate health and social measures" (who ) . critically, "while only states are parties to the covenant, and thus ultimately accountable for compliance with it, all members of society-individuals, including health professionals, families, local communities, intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations as well as the private business sectorhave responsibilities regarding the realisation of the right to health" (who, ihr ) . as lake notes with regard to judicial processes in the congo, "the de facto assumption of power by these diverse sets of actors has created opportunities through which non-state actors can enter and influence juridical processes by engaging in tasks normally reserved for representatives of the sovereign government. these activities would not be possible in contexts where the state had greater reach" (lake , ) . this exacerbates the problem of responsibility because merely counting the number of convictions of a prioritized crime or the number of people inquiring about health treatments and antiretroviral medications for hiv, for example, "tells us little about the dynamics of power" that determine the necessary response to the problem (including the problem definition) at hand (lake , ) . lake notes that "on a broader scale, it could also be argued that the involvement of international actors in micro-level governance activities in dr [democratic republic of] congo has served not to build capacity but in fact to further relieve the congolese state of its responsibilities to provide basic goods and services to its citizens." indeed, because a litany of "international and domestic organizations ready to engage in this work, there may be little incentive for the central government to re-invest its own time and resources into developing a functional state apparatus" (see also keohane ; lake , ) . such developments actively undermine state's sovereignty and capacity to exercise responsibility, leading to absurdities such as indonesia's claim to 'viral sovereignty'-the idea that viruses belong to the state in which they originate. it was invoked to prevent and delay sharing data and sam-ples of h n influenza also due to the anticipated costs of being branded a state of contagion amid exclusion from research and treatment benefits. indonesia's was an ill-fated attempt by the state to seize control over information pertaining to the outbreak, its domestic response, and its interdependence sovereignty-notably its ability to regulate any potential medical interventions and possible patents created externally and sold (back) to indonesia. these examples all iterate the theory and practical reality in the still state-centric international system that there are roles that only the state-at least among today's polities-can perform. states are the only nonvoluntary political unit, the one that can impose order and is invested with the power to tax…. moreover, it may be that only the nation-state can meet crucial social needs that markets do not value. providing a modicum of job security, avoiding higher unemployment, preserving a livable environment and a stable climate, and protecting consumer health and safety are but a few of the tasks that could be left dangling in a world of expanding markets and retreating states. (matthews ) assuming then the necessary vitality of a responsible sovereign state to the guarantee of access to rights, any reworking of state and human security must take states into account even while rising to the challenge of responding to and guaranteeing human security beyond states. placing the responsibility for human security beyond states requires flexible relocation of that responsibility itself. although state sovereignty continues to be the building block of local, national, and international relations and global governance, its real power to enact responsibilities and assume accountability for the provision of the rights of its citizens has arguably waned-not uniformly but almost regardless of whether the state in question is considered consolidated, fragile, or failing/failed. consequently, the ostensibly sovereign state is ultimately responsible for the traditional, territorial security and physical security of the populace within its borders. in addition, it is accountable for both of these securitizations both internally and externally (i.e., within the international community of states). however, the same state is increasingly confronted with nsas that both demand its action and assume some of its functional responsibility-but not state(-citizen) accountability. as such, the statecentric international governance system faces the challenge of responding to both internal and external rights' demands and responsibility duties. the next chapter will further explore these conceptual challenges and analyze possible levels of such a reordering of human security responsibilities beyond borders. see also the cambridge dictionary entry for "citizenship: the status, rights and duties of a citizen, especially of a particular country on concepts and paradigms in mixed methods research human security the sacred and the sovereign global politics of health the coming multi-order world the end of history and the last man. the national interest (spring) morals and politics international commission on intervention and state sovereignty (iciss). . the responsibility to protect the international relations and security network intrastate conflict by the numbers human security: a new strategic narrative for europe hobbes's dilemma and institutional change in world politics: sovereignty in international society human security sovereignty: organized hypocrisy organizing hypocrisy: providing legal accountability for human rights violations in areas of limited statehood ebola: a crisis in global health leadership why human security? the whitehead journal of diplomacy and international relations winter/spring narrating identity, border security, and migration: critical focus groups and the everyday as problematic power shift germany's uncertain power: foreign policy of the berlin republic human security and mutual vulnerability: the global political economic of development and underdevelopment revolutions in sovereignty: how ideas shaped modern international relations paradoxien der souveränität: die konstituive norm, auf der die heutige staatenwelt gründet-dass nämlich staaten souverän sind-gilt uneingeschränkt nicht mehr. was heisst das? internationale politik state of the union address (the four freedoms) governance without government: order and change in world politics human security-protecting and empowering the people the concept of the political hiv/aids and the south african state: the responsibility to respond sovereignty and power in a networked world order democratic waves? global patterns of democratization international covenant on civil and political rights unrepresented nations and peoples organization (unpo) constitution of the world health organization world health organization key: cord- -cqtpj m authors: ramcharan, robin title: intellectual property and human security date: - - journal: international intellectual property law and human security doi: . / - - - - _ sha: doc_id: cord_uid: cqtpj m this chapter discusses the interrelatedness between intellectual property and human security. there are two sides of this interrelationship. in the first place, ip issues are closely related to the hard security of nations. in the second place, the application of the regime of international intellectual property laws can help promote economic and social development and, at the same time, can result in major hardships when it comes to protection of the right to life and realization of the rights to health, food, and education. in the pages that follow, different aspects of these issues are explored. this chapter takes an in-depth look at the relationship between iprs and human security. it examines the nature of security and the contemporary understanding of the term "security", which now encompasses "human security". whereas the term security had been applied to states traditionally it now encompasses the individual as an object of security. iprs are discussed in the framework of human security, which has placed emphasis on fundamental human rights and the right to development. this chapter discusses the interrelatedness between intellectual property and human security. there are two sides of this interrelationship. in the first place, ip issues are closely related to the hard security of nations. in the second place, the application of the regime of international intellectual property laws can help promote economic and social development and, at the same time, can result in major hardships when it comes to protection of the right to life and realization of the rights to health, food, and education. in the pages that follow, different aspects of these issues are explored. the term "security" is widely accepted as encompassing three levels: individual or human, national and international. the nature of threats have moved well beyond cold war era geo-political concerns of soviet-usa balance of power and see buzan and ramcharan . no longer can state security be limited to protecting borders, institutions, values, and people from external aggressive or adversarial designs. the spread of deadly infectious diseases, massive forced population movements, human rights violations, famine, political oppression and chronic conditions of deprivation threaten human security and, in turn, state security. a debate has been raging on the confines of the human security concept, since its popularization by the undp's human development report of , about the utility of an expansive definition of human security for theorizing about security. one the one hand, an expansive definition has seen the human security paradigm being applied to a wide range of contemporary problems affecting individuals, communities, states, and global society. these include environmental problems, humanitarian intervention, underdevelopment, small arms proliferation, and so on. on the other hand, theory-inclined scholars have questioned the utility of an expansive definition for the purposes of theorizing about security. some scholars have warned against "overstretch". from a policy perspective, taylor owen, has warned that this was corroding the impact of human security on the un landscape. three approaches to human security have emerged since : ( ) a rightsbased approach anchored in the rule of law and treaty-based solutions to human security, that believes that new human rights norms and convergent national standards can be developed by international institutions; ( ) a humanitarian conception of human security, according to which the safety of peoples is the paramount objective, and links human security to preventive and post-conflict peace building; and ( ) a sustainable human development conception, which draws on the undp's report. kaldor has distinguished between the canadian government's approach, namely "security of the individual as opposed to the states'" but with primary emphasis on security in the face of political violence and the undp approach. the latter has emphasized the importance of development as a security strategy. a japanese commission on human security (chs) initiated discussions on the "responsibility for development"-freedom from want and human security as development became a topic of the reform agendas at the un and in regional organizations (eu). owen has warned that there has been a failure to distinguish clearly between human development and human security and that there is a lack of distinction between human rights and human security, both of which are detrimental on the un landscape. sorpong peou has warned that we must not make the human security concept too elastic and amorphous. from a political science theory perspective, he has cautioned that scholars must not carelessly combine competing insights from different theoretical perspectives, rendering our arguments unintelligible. "there are limits to eclecticism or pluralism. if possible, clear theoretical statements should be made to allow us to test our theoretical insights against empirical evidence or to keep critically evaluating our normative commitment to human security." in order for human security to be more useful, mary kaldor has argued for a "global conversation" about human security, "the transformation of the social relations of warfare and the character of threats we face." the key to dealing with "new wars is the reconstruction of political legitimacy around the ideas about human rights and global civil society that were reinvented in the last decades of the cold war." kaldor noted that millions of people live in daily fear of violence and new wars were increasingly intertwined with global risks-disease, natural disasters, poverty, and homelessness. her work sought to develop new proposals to address gaps in understanding of "war", which is still influenced by the example of world war i and world war ii. for kaldor, human security is about the security of individuals and communities rather than the security of states, and it combines both human rights and human development. mcfarlane and khong agree with the notion that the individual's security is not subordinate to that of the state and that this pre-dates the undp report. indeed, they have shown that it is pervasive throughout the international human rights instruments that were drafted during the cold war. however, they limit their definition of human security to protection from violence. this reflects a concern among scholars and policymakers that human security remain relevant and useful for policy making, just as the concept of "national security" has been. "this concern is reflected in glasius and kaldor's attempt to reconcile internal and external security", now held to be inseparable. they sought to define a global security agenda for europe, nato, and the us. they drew upon amartya sen's work on development as freedom and focus on the "downside risks", that is "the insecurities that threaten human survival or the safety of daily life, or imperil the natural dignity of men and women, or expose human beings to the uncertainty disease and pestilence, or subject vulnerable people to abrupt penury." they have contrasted these to an expansive view of human security as human rights as owen , . peou , . kaldor macfarlane and khong , . glasius and kaldor , - . id., . suggested by bertrand ramcharan, who served as un high commissioner for human rights, and note that violations of the right to food, health and housing, even grave and massive ones, are not commonly recognized as belonging to the category of jus cogens norms like genocide, large-scale torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, disappearances, slavery, crimes against humanity, and war crimes as defined by icc. the moral case for europe's interest in human security outside its borders was founded simply on 'our common humanity', which posits that human beings have a right to live with dignity and security, and a concomitant obligation to help each other when that security is threatened. it was also founded on the legal consideration that articles and of the un charter enjoin states to promote universal respect for, and observance of human rights. the development and human rights perspectives were two sides of the same coin: both were rooted in the philosophical approach that privileges the search for substantive equality and justice. these stood at the heart of the human rights movement and the attendant international legal regime that guarantee such rights. the commission on human security, in , defined human security as the protection of the vital core of all human lives in ways that enhance human freedoms and human fulfillment. human security meant protecting fundamental freedoms-freedoms that were the essence of life. it meant protecting people from critical (severe) and pervasive (widespread) threats and situations. it meant using processes that build on people's strengths and aspirations. it meant creating political, social, environmental, economic, military and cultural systems that together give people the building blocks of survival, livelihood, and dignity. human security reinforced human dignity. human security complemented state security in four respects: its concern was the individual and the community rather than the state. menaces to people's security included threats and conditions that had not always been classified as threats to state security. the range of actors was expanded beyond the state alone. achieving human security included not just protecting people but also empowering people to fend for themselves. the commission on human security proposed a new framework-a human security framework-to address the conditions and threats people face at the start of the twenty-first century. human security was 'people-centred', focusing the attention of institutions on human beings and communities elsewhere. by placing people at the center, the human security approach called for enhancing and redirecting policies and institutions. human rights and human development had reoriented legal, economic and social actions to consider their objectives from the perspective of their effect of people. recognizing the interdependence and interlinkages among the world's people, the human security approach built on these efforts, seeking to forge alliances that could wield much greater force together than alone. ibid. commission on human security , . human security, the commission added, was also concerned with deprivation: from extreme impoverishment, pollution, ill health, illiteracy, and other maladies. catastrophic accident and illness ranked among the primary worries of the poorand understandably, because of their toll on human lives-causing more than million preventable deaths in . educational deprivations were particularly serious for human security. without education, men and especially women were disadvantaged as productive workers, as fathers and mothers, as citizens capable of social change. without social protection, personal injury or economic collapse could catapult families into penury and desperation. all such losses affected people's power to fend for themselves. each menace, terrible on its own, justified attention. yet to address this range of insecurities effectively demanded an integrated approach. human security, in the view of the commission, was deliberately protective. it recognized that people and communities are deeply threatened by events largely beyond their control: a financial crisis, a violent conflict, chronic destitution, a terrorist attack, hiv/aids, underinvestment in health care, water shortages, and pollution from a distant land. to protect people-the first key to human security-their basic rights and freedoms must be upheld. to do so, required concerted efforts to develop national and international norms, processes and institutions, which must address insecurities in ways that are systematic not makeshift, comprehensive not compartmentalized, and preventive not reactive. human security helped identify gaps in the infrastructure of protection as well as ways to strengthen or improve it. as many as million people in the developing world and at least million people in developed and transition countries lived without enough food. these people suffered daily hunger, malnutrition, and food insecurity even though most national food supplies are adequate. the problem was lack of entitlement to food and access to adequate food supply. food insecurity and hunger undermined a person's dignity and well-being. human security, the commission urged, should be mainstreamed in the agendas of international, regional, and national security organizations. the growing inequity between and within countries affected displacement patterns. as long as inequity and imbalances between labor demand and supply were growing among countries, people would continue to seek every opportunity to better their livelihoods. measures to ensure that there was adequate social protection for all, including the working poor and those not in paid work are critical. disease and poverty went hand in hand. so, too, do disease and conflict. good health was both essential and instrumental to achieving human security. it was essential id., . id., . id., . id., . id., . id., . id., . because the very heart of security was protecting human lives. health security was at the vital core of human security-and illness, disability and avoidable death are critical pervasive threats to human security. health included not just the absence of disease, but also a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being. health was both objective physical wellness and subjective psychosocial wellbeing and confidence about the future. one may ask: why 'securitise' intellectual property? this is a logical and natural consequence of the human security agenda of the international community that places individuals at the center of security. objections may come from academics who long for a concept of security that allows for the development of neat theories of national and international security. but the complexity of security studies no longer allows for this, a point made amply clear by the field of critical security studies. the term 'security' injects a sense of urgency into the inquiry and securitization may also perhaps serve as a guide to policy making and allocation of resources. jonathan ban has suggested two analytical tools for thinking about national (threats to the state, national interests, and state power), international (interconnectivity of states' security), and global security (social development, public health, environmental protection human rights, and other such global issues). first, threats can be characterized as either direct or indirect to determine the immediacy or tangential concern for security planners. second, a risk-based approach could provide a framework to characterize the degree to which problems like health concerns represent threats to security. securitization also serves to bring intellectual property into the mainstream of the field of international relations, which is increasingly characterized by feuds over knowledge. in an increasingly globalized world, spearheaded by revolutions in communications technology as exemplified by global internet communication, geo-economic competition between nation-states have become as important or perhaps even more important as trade relations between nations deepen. paradoxically, while freer trade between nations is touted as a means of ensuring that wars become a phenomenon of the past, the deepening of trade relations between nations often leads to ferocious competition between economies as each seeks to preserve its competitive advantage or to protect particular industries. moreover, in the so-called knowledge economy, where information is a prized asset, nations seek to maintain a stranglehold on information, which they perceive as vital to their economic well-being. the protection of intellectual property thus takes on a different dimension when viewed in this light, as it is not only an asset in and of itself, but the protection of state and privately owned intellectual property assets may provide significant competitive advantages to nations. where the well being of one id., . see peoples and vaughan-williams and baylis et al. for an overview of the field of security studies. ban , - . sorensen , bergsten nation depends on access to technology in another, ip is of vital importance. sadako and cels have noted the fact that many of the poorest countries and people are excluded from technological and knowledge-based advances. in order to meet "the challenges that the current intellectual property rights regime poses to health security requires new thinking about the ownership of knowledge, health as a human right, and effective market and institutional structures to protect incentives as well as lives." clearly, the concept of security has 'broadened' (to include non-military threats) and has 'deepened' (to include security of individuals and groups). the study of security, therefore, encompasses many aspects of human activity. the founding editors of the journal international security (is) noted in the first issue in that the view of international security taken then was one which embraced "all of those factors which have a direct bearing on the structure of the nation state system and the sovereignty of its members, with particular emphasis on the use, threat and control of force." steven miller, editor in chief of is, noted that he and his predecessors had aspired "to reflect the inherently multidisciplinary character of the field." what then, is the relationship between ip and the security of the individual, the state, and the international community? the concern with national and human security is apparent in some intellectual property treaties. article ( ) of the trips agreement stipulates that "patents shall be available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology, provided that they are new, involve an inventive step and are capable of industrial application." according to para : members may exclude from patentability inventions, the prevention within their territory of the commercial exploitation of which is necessary to protect ordre public or morality, including to protect human, animal or plant life or health or to avoid serious prejudice to the environment, provided that such exclusion is not made merely because the exploitation is prohibited by their law. carvalho has noted that the rationale for exclusion of patentability on grounds of ordre public or morality is often misunderstood to mean "that patentability should be excluded whenever the technology puts health at risk or offends public morality." following this logic, it would appear that there is a line beyond which research should not cross. the fallacy of this line of reasoning is exposed when one considers that "patents alone are not sufficient to promote technology". indeed, technology will evolve with our without patents. the term "order public or morality" was borrowed from article (a) of the european patent convention (epc). the european board of appeals has understood the term to mean "not whether certain living organisms are excluded [from patentability] as such but rather whether or not the publication or exploitation of an invention relating to a particular organism is to be considered contrary to "ordre public" or morality". rather, the board defined the concept of ordre public "as covering the protection of public security and integrity of individuals as part of society. it also encompassed the protection of the environment". accordingly inventions, that would likely seriously prejudice the environment were to be excluded from patentability as being contrary to ordre public. the latter term "is linked to a notion of security, both collective and individual". carvalho has noted that trips article , titled "security exceptions", has acknowledged the same concept of security in the light of which "exclusions from patentability do not require any sort of justification or objective test (such as the necessity to prevent the invention's commercial exploitation)". article states that nothing in the trips agreement shall be construed: (a) to require a member to furnish any information, the disclosure of which it considers contrary to its essential security interests; or (b) to prevent a member from taking any action which it considers necessary for the protection of its essential security interests; (i) relating to fissionable materials or the materials from which they are derived; (ii) relating to the traffic in arms, ammunition and implements of war and to such traffic in other goods and materials as is carried on directly or indirectly for the purpose of supplying a military establishment; (iii) taken in time of war or other emergency in international relations; or (c) to prevent a member from taking any action in pursuance of its obligations under the united nations charter for the maintenance of international peace and security. in the same context, a "security exception" is mentioned in article of the patent law treaty (plt) of june , which stipulates that "[n]othing in this treaty and the regulations shall limit the freedom of a contracting party to take any action it deems necessary for the preservation of essential security interests". in the context of the wider scope of national and international security concerns, article of the trips agreement is noteworthy in that it takes into account public health concerns. it stipulates that: . members may, in formulating or amending their laws and regulations, adopt measures necessary to protect public health and nutrition, and to promote the public interest in ibid. however, article ( ) calls for "appropriate measures" consistent with trips, to be taken to "prevent the abuse of intellectual property rights by right holders or the resort to practices which unreasonably restrain trade or adversely affect the international transfer of technology". a significant aspect of transfer of technology is the publication of technical details of an invention. article ( ) of the trips agreement set forth that: members shall require that an applicant for a patent shall disclose the invention in a manner sufficiently clear and complete for the invention to be carried out by a person skilled in the art and may require the applicant to indicate the best mode for carrying out the invention known to the inventor at the filing date or, where priority is claimed, at the priority date of the application. among the genuine and urgent security concerns in recent times is the threat of aids (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). persons afflicted by this and other deadly viruses cannot wait for compulsory licensing schemes or for contracts to be negotiated on favorable pricing schemes as their lives hang in the balance. the commission on human security recognized that the burden of hiv/aids is overwhelmingly concentrated among the poorest people in the poorest regions. hiv/aids decreases the ability of affected individuals to work and increases their health care costs, resulting in greater financial strain on their households. national disease surveillance and control systems should be strengthened and then networked into a global system. health empowerment and protection depend on reliable and up-to-date data and analysis and a capacity to act in response to information. central to health and human security, therefore, are systems to collect and deploy information for detecting disease threats, monitoring their changes, and guiding control efforts. all surveillance and control activities ultimately depend on people and local communities, but national and international systems are needed to empower people and communities. health and human security are central matters of human survival in the twentyfirst century. knowledge and technology can make a difference. the challenges are to make tools and knowledge accessible while promoting incentives and commission on human security , . id., . structures for the production of new knowledge. social action was needed to deploy that knowledge for health and human security. education and knowledge may enable groups to identify common problems and act in solidarity with others. four priorities for action are promoting a global commitment to basic education; protecting students' human security at and through school; equipping people for action and democratic engagement; teaching mutual respect. access to information and skills allowed people to learn how to address concerns that directly affect their security. knowledge, education, and democratic engagement were inseparable-and essential. free and diverse information media can provide individuals with the knowledge required to exercise their rights and to influence-or challenge-the policies of the state and other actors. there is an urgent need for institutional arrangements to make inexpensive and affordable generic drugs available to the developing countries that need them most. community-based health initiatives, community-based health care, and selfinsurance schemes are fundamental to this progress. the world urgently needs primary health services and national disease surveillance systems. it is important to develop an efficient and equitable system for patent rights. global flows of knowledge and technology are increasing under the wto. in november , the wto's doha ministerial declaration recognized the challenges facing developing countries. a number of important drugs do not have patent limitations. but for those that do, current international rules governing intellectual property leave many of the poorest people in the world unable to use the drugs. because so many lives were at stake there was an urgent need for institutional arrangements to make inexpensive and affordable generic drugs available to the developing countries that need them most. developing countries that currently export generic medicines-such as brazil, china, and india-were obliged to comply by january with the wto requirements that generic medicines be used domestically only. they cannot be exported, even to other countries with similar emergencies that may not be able to produce medicines on their own. if a country has insufficient manufacturing capacity to produce medicines domestically, it will have to rely on expensive patented medicines for health needs-unless the rules are changed. on the positive side, the wto has recognized public health emergencies as requiring special provisions. the doha round affirmed the rights of governments to grant 'compulsory licenses' allowing the domestic production of essential medicines, when they are covered by patent, and to purchase 'parallel imports' from legitimate international sources during national emergencies, including the hiv/ aids pandemic. further the ministers at doha agreed that the least developed countries would not be required to offer patent protection on pharmaceutical products id., . id., . id., . . balancing public and private rights: intellectual property and human security until . because many poor countries did not have sufficient manufacturing capacity, their exercise of compulsory licensing and parallel imports depends on international sources. if other developing countries cannot export essential emergency medicines and vaccines under the wto, the exercise of emergency measures will be nominal, not real. the doha round of trade talks is not yet completed years on. moreover, matthew kennedy noted the slow pace of acceptance of the protocol amending the trips agreement ( ) that would allow the doha agreements to come into effect. according to the commission on human security, three challenging issues that needed to be resolved were the following: clarifying the definition of "insufficient manufacturing capacity"; allowing companies in one country to export inexpensive generic drugs still under patent to other countries; and deciding on the measures necessary to prevent the re-export of drugs manufactured under compulsory licenses back to the developed world. a major objective was to have intellectual property rights systems that advance human security through the efficient development of appropriate drugs and the facilitation of their extensive use. any resolution of the current impasse should involve favoring flexibility and overcoming import and export controls on the drugs and vaccines needed for emergencies. a balance was required in order to provide incentives for research and development for both profitable products and technologies to fight diseases of the poor. that balance should also provide equitable access to life saving essential drugs and vaccines for people unable to purchase technologies from the global marketplace. the balance should recognize the very large public investments in basic research that underlie product development by all manufacturers, including private ones. in the context of such concerns, it is not surprise that some developing countries have enacted laws to deal partly with such situations. in egypt, article of the patent law stipulates that the state may expropriate a patent for national security reasons and in cases of extreme urgency. in tunisia, its patent law of august has provided in article , para , that the state may avail itself of an ex-officio license for defense and national security reasons for the exploitation of an invention. such exploitation may be undertaken by a third party on behalf of the state. in morocco, a law on the protection of industrial property sets forth in article , that the state may be granted an ex-officio license for the exploitation of an invention for national defense and that third parties may undertake such exploitation for the state. given the expansive definition of human security that is found in the literature and recognition that national and human security are interconnected, one may take note of the direct or indirect linkages between intellectual property and national and global security, which have been explored by this author in an earlier work. for example, in an age when weapons of mass destruction and their potential use by non-state actors has become a major concern, we argued that careful attention must be paid to the patent regime and the information that is available through the same. information contained in a patent application enters the public domain once the patent is granted, and thus becomes an invaluable source of information on the state-of-the-art in any given field. these documents are easily searchable by any government, corporate entity, or individual and they constitute an important means/source of transfer of technology. transfer of technology is defined as a "matter of how items used in one area of activity or in one place, can be applied and used in others". such a transfer refers to products but also includes, according to molas-gallart, "a broader concept encompassing the social relations and the "mode of production" in which the development and production of artifacts occur". information can be retrieved through the international patent classification (ipc) system, which is based on the strasbourg agreement concerning the international patent classification, a wipo-administered international treaty concluded in , that entered into force in . the ipc is a hierarchical classification system covering all fields of technology that is indispensable for efficient retrieval of patent information. wipo has promoted the use of the ipc since: the amount of information contained in patent documents is immense. they contain practically everything that represents an advance in the knowledge of mankind in the field of technology. it is therefore extremely important that this information be accessible to anyone who needs it. such accessibility exists in theory because the patent documents are published, that is, are made available to any member of the public. in relation to trade secrets, it was argued that in light of concern over the national and international security implications of trade secrets (confidential information which is the object of economic espionage) a balance must be struck between the legitimate public concern for security and the legitimate rights of the inventor. this calls for an honest distinction between genuine security concerns and non-genuine security concerns. in a climate of concern for terrorism and the threat of wmd, excessive controls on the publication of information may inadvertently serve the cause of terrorists who seek to disrupt normal commercial, economic, social, and political intercourse in society. other global security vulnerabilities may be added to this discussion, including social development (poverty and its impact on state security), human rights and ramcharan . molas-gallart . wipo . environmental challenges, and transborder public health issues. these are addressed briefly in chap. and elsewhere in this work. climate change scientists have called attention to a fast-approaching point of no return that would herald catastrophic consequences for the earth's climate, and thus human life in the next - years. in terms of 'immediacy' one may highlight the global nature of the security challenges posed by health. the un secretary general's agenda for peace, which took stock of "new risks for stability", had explained that "drought and disease can decimate no less mercilessly than the weapons of war". jonathan ban has argued that the question is not whether some health challenges generate risks that have implications for security but, rather, to what degree do the various health challenges pose risks and have security implications. using the 'direct' versus 'indirect' categorization scheme, he has noted that direct security involves risks that relate more to traditional aspects of security, such as biological attacks, attacks on medical personnel facilities and supplies by combatants in a conflict, and threats to the health of military personnel, peacekeepers or deployed contingents because of infectious diseases. indirect threats, such as hiv/ aids and sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome, which led to international crisis response in and , may carry less risk than direct threats). they nevertheless "have the potential to impact national and international security and should not be excluded from traditional national security considerations". the un security council convened a meeting in january to discuss aids. the us national intelligence council produced a report on "the global infectious disease threat and its implications for the united states" in january . in april , the clinton administration announced that it formally recognized aids as a threat to us national security. this was later enshrined in the us national security strategy of . security is as much real as it is about perceived threats. the nature of the threats faced by individuals, nations and the international community, has changed dramatically. the end of the bipolar cold war superpower rivalry has seen greater economic interdependence as more parts of the world are effectively integrated into the world economy. in an increasingly technologically and economically interconnected world, interdependence causes occurrences in one part to impact directly upon individuals and nations in another, and sometimes the impact is immediate and devastating. the national security of a state exists symbiotically with its economic well-being. nations seek to protect scarce resources of which intellectual property assets are a key component. for technologically advanced states it is the specter of lost capital, jobs, and especially military advantage, which are worrisome. in the post-cold war era, the quest for technological and economic supremacy is raging among china, the eu, boutros-ghali . ban see national intelligence council, the next wave of hiv/aids: nigeria, ethiopia, russia, india and china. ica - d, september , footnote , ban india, japan, and the usa while russia was trying to regain its soviet-era grandeur. a larger strategic competition between big powers is evidenced, for example, in the close monitoring by the us of transfers of sensitive technologies. of special concern to the us is china. for the less technologically advanced states and especially the world's least developed countries the success of their quest to acquire knowledge and new technologies that they can absorb into their economies may make the difference between life and death. in this chapter, we have reviewed the literature on human security and noted instances in which there is a direct relationship with international intellectual property laws. we would conclude this chapter with a simple point: it must be right to argue that international intellectual property laws should seek to protect human security and advance human welfare across the globe. this is the basic thrust of this book that we take forward next by looking at the fundamentals of the international intellectual property law regime. national security and international affairs division. gao/t-nsiad- - us commercial technology transfers to the people's republic of china key: cord- - fnzww y authors: singh, bilveer title: the emergence of an asia-pacific diplomacy of counter-terrorism in tackling the islamic state threat date: - - journal: international security in the asia-pacific doi: . / - - - - _ sha: doc_id: cord_uid: fnzww y the militaries in the asia-pacific region have been largely established to respond to specific threats to national security. while most of the asean countries have been modernising their force structures for conventional conflict since the waning years of the cold war, many still retain doctrines and equipment geared for internal security needs. the advent of non-traditional security threats ranging from natural disasters to transnational terrorism may challenge this state of affairs. against this backdrop, how can one analyse and conceptualise the asia-pacific’s diplomacy of counter-terrorism in tackling the threat posed by the islamic state? this chapter will examine the counter-terrorism policies of asia-pacific states and analyse how non-traditional threats such as that posed by terrorism have been managed by the armed forces of the region. a short case study of indonesia will be included. war, china's military capability was mostly army-based with a weak air force and navy. this was mainly due to the concept of 'people's war' developed in response to the chinese communist party's struggle for power in china against the nationalist forces led by chiang kai-shek who was eventually defeated and driven to the off-shore island of taiwan. in the same vein, the experience of asean member-states was different from that of the usa and japan. somewhat more akin to china, most of the asean member-states were afflicted with internal security challenges of one kind or another. the philippines, malaya (later malaysia) and thailand were threatened by soviet and chinese-backed communist insurgencies. to overcome these threats, a largely army-based counterinsurgency mode of military structure was created, with a relatively weak air force and navy. similarly, due to various separatist threats from within, indonesia's military structure was largely army-based with a weak navy and air force. it was also a legacy of indonesia's war of nationalism based on guerrilla warfare against the dutch from to . in contrast, following its separation from malaysia in , singapore developed national conscription as the basis of its national defence and endeavoured to create a balanced force structure. this was mainly because of the urban character of singapore and where there was no jungle-based insurgency threat. the indochinese states, due to the continuous warfare since the end of the second world war developed a force structure that was largely armybased with a weak air force and navy. the most powerful military capability was that of vietnam with a relatively weaker force structure in cambodia and laos. vietnam's forte was guerrilla warfare, mainly army-based to win the war of attrition against the usa and its cold war allies. brunei developed a weak military capacity with the force structure dominated by the army. it is also assisted by a strong army-based gurkha force. like most of southeast asia, myanmar (formerly burma) developed a force structure that was loaded in favour of the army. this was mainly to deal with the armed struggle launched by the regional ethnic separatist forces since , something that still characterises myanmar today. it air force and navy are relatively weak. all in all, serious budget constraints also led to lesser investments being made for the air force and navy. against this backdrop, how can one analyse and conceptualise the asia-pacific's diplomacy of counter-terrorism in tackling the threat posed by the islamic state? this chapter will examine the counter-terrorism policies of asia-pacific states and analyse how non-traditional threats such as that posed by terrorism have been managed by the armed forces of the region. the rise of non-traditional security threats in the asia-pacific region while non-traditional security threats are not new, they came increasingly into focus in the post-cold war era. while the specific definition of what constitutes non-traditional security threats remain contested, generally it refers to challenges to a state's well-being and survival from non-military sources (caballero-anthony ) . according to one definition, this includes challenges stemming from 'climate change, resource scarcity, infectious diseases, natural disasters, irregular migration, food shortages, people smuggling, drug trafficking and transnational crime' (what are nts issues? ). these threats have become increasingly important in the post-cold war era in the context of rising globalisation, environmental degradation and international terrorism. advances in technology and communications have also facilitated this process. in turn, this has opened up new vistas and facets of security, and its conceptualisation. equally important, not only are these threats transnational in character but they also require comprehensive solutions involving political, economic, sociocultural and even psychological dimensions (caballero-anthony ). military force alone cannot resolve these threats, in turn, leading to the role expansion of the military with the rise of what has been referred to as the 'humanitarian' use of military power, be it in peacekeeping operations, and humanitarian and disaster relief. the rise in importance of military operations other than war (mootw) , which aims to deter war, resolve conflict, promote peace and support civilian authorities in response to domestic or post-crisis era, is part and parcel, of the changing role of the military and its deployment, both domestically and internationally (bonn and baker ) . what has led to the rise of non-traditional security threats is that military power alone might no longer guarantee a state of its existential security. many new threats are largely non-military in nature and where the use of military power can be counterproductive. these threats are also transnational in character. as was argued by v. r. raghavan, 'the existing statecentred approach to national security, confined to the defence of a country against territorial aggression, has been widened to the idea of security inclusive of a larger set of threats to the people of the state' (iqbal ) . hence, the widening of the concept of security and the broadening of what should constitute security studies. many elements characterise nontraditional security threats. these can arise suddenly from the government or non-government sectors. this makes the threats unpredictable and hence, difficult to address quickly. the transnational character of these threats also make it difficult to neutralise them quickly as was evident from the asian financial crisis of - , the severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars) outbreak , the h ni 'bird flu' virus outbreak in , the global financial crisis in , the outbreak of ebola in west africa ( ), the threat by the islamic state and its global affiliates since , the zika virus outbreak ( ) , and the recent refugee issue confronting western europe ( ). however, if there is one non-traditional security threat that has engulfed and preoccupied most states in asia, africa and europe today, it is the threat posed by islamist extremism and terrorism. there are many reasons for the rise of this non-traditional security threat, with many issues of the post-colonial order continuing to bedevil many communities in asia and africa as well as serious issues of governance at home and internationally. the lure of islamist extremism has been further strengthened by the ideological and doctrinal appeal of a supranational radical narrative that is able to link local grievances with global movements, and state and non-state actors that are blamed for the state of affairs in the muslim majority and minority states. as radical elements coalesce around radical supranational movements and actors such as al qaeda and the self-proclaimed islamic state to target states through wanton acts of violence, law and order forces, especially the police, military and even intelligence agencies are being reinvigorated to respond both within and without the state borders through various cooperative schemes. the rise and expansion of the islamic state or its arabic acronym da'esh was a function of struggles within various extremist groups and their affiliates, particularly, al qaeda as well as the role of regional states in the middle east and the external powers, mainly in the west led by the usa (cockburn ; weiss and hassan ; stern and berger ) . what is termed the islamic state today would probably not be in existence had the usa not invaded iraq in . the west and in particular the usa was complicit in the creation and rise of the islamic state on two grounds. first, by invading iraq to oust saddam hussein and his regime, it created the conditions for the rise of a sunni-based terrorist group that was both anti-west, especially american and anti-shia. second, later, as part of a strategy to undermine and oust bashir assad of syria, the usa, together with its close allies, both arabs and in the west, funded a then largely weak isis, boomeranging into what isis has become today, a frankenstein monster, in turn, leading to the flow of more than , foreign fighters from nearly countries, including from southeast asia, to join isis in iraq and syria. the brutalities and atrocities that the islamic states have perpetrated are unparalleled in recent history, aimed at provoking counteractions that will only benefit the isis to the detriment of the usa, the west and conservative-feudal arab states. isis began as an al qaeda outfit. what is the islamic state today went through a series of evolution before it metamorphosed into the megaterrorist outfit it is today in control of swathes of land and population. in response to the us-led invasion and occupation of iraq that toppled the saddam hussein's regime in march and where a shia-dominated regime was emplaced, a sunni-based jihadi-oriented insurgency surfaced. this provided the al qaeda with an opportunity to intervene in iraq. in early , abu musab al-zarqawi, a jordanian, established the organisation of monotheism and jihad (omj) that was affiliated with al qaeda. later, the omj morphed into the organization of jihad's base in the country of two rivers, commonly referred to as the al qaeda iraq (aqi). in january , the aqi 'iraqized' itself by renaming itself as mujahidin shura council (msc), also partly to distant itself from al qaeda. abu musab was killed by the americans on june (cockburn ; weiss and hassan ; stern and berger ) . in october , the msc joined forces with four insurgent groups to establish the islamic state of iraq (isi), led by abdullah al-rashid al-baghdadi and abu ayyub al-masri, both of whom were killed in april . the isi's leadership was taken over by abu bakr al-baghdadi aka abu duwa. with the outbreak of a civil war in syria, isi took advantage of the sunni-shia civil war by fighting against shia and assad forces in syria. on april , abu bakr declared the establishment of the islamic state of iraq and al-shaam. on june , the establishment of a new caliphate with abu bakr as the caliph was announced. isis also renamed itself as the islamic state or daulah islamiyyah. thus, even though isis originated from al qaeda, over time, it distanced itself from the premier terrorist organisation, especially its leader, ayman al-zawahiri, viewing al qaeda and its leadership as being irrelevant, ineffective and inferior in the context of the ongoing jihadi struggle in the islamic world, especially in the middle east. what helped the islamic state to emergence in such a speed was due to a number of factors. it was due to the pro-jewish, neo-conservative, bushinitiated invasion, of iraq that created the necessary and sufficient preconditions for radical groups such as isis to take root. the regime change imposed on iraq by the short-sighted invasion, which was more concerned with assisting israel's security concerns and grabbing the abundant iraqi oil, destroyed the baathist secular state and replaced it with a shiadominated political-religious-social order that discriminated and marginalised the sunnis. isis was the blowback and backlash to this new political-security order created by the americans and their clients in iraq. this led to the exponential growth of a sunni-driven insurgency that eventually evolved into isis. in this context, one can easily concur with garikai chengu ( ), a research scholar at harvard university that: there are essentially three wars being waged in syria: one between the government and the rebels, another between iran and saudi arabia, and yet another between america and russia. it is this third, neo-cold war battle that made u.s. foreign policy makers decide to take the risk of arming islamist rebels in syria, because syrian president, bashar al-assad, is a key russian ally. rather embarrassingly, many of these syrian rebels have now turned out to be isis thugs, who are openly brandishing american-made m assault rifles. one can venture to argue that even the second war, between iran and saudi arabia, if it is a war at all, is in part responsible for the rise of isis. this is because the backward-looking and archaic-oriented salafiyyah and wahhabiyyah orthodoxy of saudi arabia, which colours the conservative saudi regime, was highly responsible in supporting sunni groups that were anti-shia, anti-iran and anti-assad. this led to saudi arabia and a number of conservative pro-american regimes in the gulf states such as qatar, bahrain and kuwait to bankroll extremist and radical groups that eventually coalesced to form the islamic states. according to the washington post, kuwait, a designated non-nato ally of the usa, 'is the leading source of funding for al-qaeda linked terrorists [jabhat al-nusra] fighting in syria's civil war' (glaser ) . in fact, the us treasury undersecretary, david cohen, referred to kuwait as the 'epicentre of fundraising for terrorist groups in syria' (glaser ) . similarly qatar is believed to be funding extremist group such as al qaeda and its affiliate, jabhat al-nusra, and the islamic state. interestingly, jabhat al-nusra is on the us blacklist of terrorist organisations and yet, the us government is channelling weapons and money to it to hurt both assad and the islamic state. it was in this context that the syrian foreign minister, walid al-moallem called on the west, not just to undertake military strikes against the islamic state but also to cut off its sources of funding for these groups. otherwise, 'it will create a whirlpool of which the international community will not exit in decades' (alakbar english ). in the asia-pacific there are a number of ways in which the islamic state is threatening the asia-pacific region. the first threat is the isis fighters who are fighting as the core or main soldiers of the self-proclaimed islamic state. these soldiers, numbering more than , are from iraq and syria, the different parts of the middle east, north africa as well as from other continents, mainly from western and central europe (mainly russia), north america, africa, australia and asia. the isis core fighters have gain experience in fighting as organised combat units as well as become experts in the handling and deployment of modern weapon systems. the islamic state has already shown its propensity to launch attacks in iraq and syria, and it has the capacity to attack targets of asia-pacific region in the middle east, such as the beheadings of captured japanese and american civilians. these soldiers are also experts in terrorist attacks, making them doubly dangerous in terms of skills, experience and ideological motivations. asia-pacific's second security concern stems from the 'returnees'. while there are many fighters from the asia-pacific fighting for the islamic state in iraq and syria, little is known of exactly who these fighters are and the probability of their return is even less known. many may have returned due to disenchantment with the islamic state, or due to injuries or even being sent back as sleepers to be activated for attacks when ordered. the 'returnees' who are well trained in combat operations, including bomb making as well as fortified with extremist ideology, pose a serious threat to the region. the third category of threats to the region stems from those who are inspired by isis even though they may not have travelled to the middle east. unlike the al qaeda, isis' social media is very effective in radicalising individuals for recruitment, fund raising, gathering intelligence and even organising attacks. isis is also very adept in uploading manuals for bomb making, making of suicide vests and even on how to kill individuals 'silently' which can influence vulnerable youths in the region, including those seeking adventure in the war zone. against this backdrop, even though not all states in the asia-pacific are directly affected by the threat of the islamic state, most are. the main states that face what can be described as a serious threat from isis are china, japan, south korea, taiwan, india, pakistan, bangladesh, indonesia, malaysia, philippines, thailand, myanmar and singapore. citizens from these countries can be found as foreign fighters in iraq and syria, where all of them have sworn allegiance to the islamic state and its leader, abu bakr al-baghdadi. all of these states have also invoked various hard and soft measures, kinetic and non-kinetic to deal with the threat from the islamic state. the first major issue is to admit that the islamic state's threat exists and only then can appropriate measures be adopted to counter it. here, the national and international enabling factors must be addressed. according to a congressional report (blanchard and humud , pp. - ) , the islamic state's expansion has been facilitated by a number of factors. these include: . conflicts based on ethnic, sectarian and/or political disputes; . foreign fighter recruitment and travel networks related to such conflicts; . the weakness of state security forces and the availability of arms; . limited international counterterrorism and intelligence cooperation and . armed groups and individuals to whom the islamic state's specific ideology appeals or for whom affiliation with the islamic state offers potential material advantages. yet, despite the islamic state's determination to 'remain and expand', there are many factors that have constrained its growth. according to the congressional research service report (blanchard and humud , p. ) , these factors can be enumerated as follows: . targeting of civilians, including the use of violence against muslims and religious minorities; . its broad and uncompromising claims of religious/political authority; . opposition from local or foreign security forces, other non-state actors, and/or rival salafi jihadist groups; . improvements in international counterterrorism and intelligence cooperation and . the existence of competing identities, loyalties and agendas among potential recruits. while the islamic state's expansion beyond syria and iraq has been stalled, except for its ability to take advantage of the ongoing conflict in yemen and libya, territorially, it has also shrunk, losing many cities in iraq and syria to government forces. yet, due to its transnational character, its appeal to radical elements worldwide, and the role of 'returnees' and those being inspired by the islamic state's ideology, the threat from the islamic state has not diminished but may even become more serious in the near future. according to john brennan, the cia director (cited in blanchard and humud , p. ): to compensate for territorial losses, isil will probably rely more on guerrilla tactics, including high profile attacks outside the territory in syria and iraq that it currently holds…. unfortunately, despite all of our progress against isil on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach. the resources needed for terrorism are very modest, and the group would have to suffer even heavier losses on territory, manpower and money for its terrorist capacity to decline significantly. moreover, the group's foreign branches and global networks can help preserve its capacity for terrorism, regardless of events in iraq and syria. in fact, as the pressure mounts on isil, we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda…. we judge that isil is training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks. isil has large cadre of western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the west. and the group is probably exploring a variety of means for infiltrating operatives into the west, including in refugee flows, smuggling routes and legitimate methods of travel. furthermore, as we have seen in orlando, san bernardino and elsewhere, isil is attempting to inspire attacks by sympathisers who have no direct links to the group. the islamic state is also very adept in compelling governments, in the name of counter-terrorism, to take measures that may eventually backfire and benefit the islamic state in terms of support, recruitment, funding and further strengthen its propaganda claims. for instance, its ability to use the social media and various internet-enabled communications platform has led many governments to react in what can be seen as being undemocratic, abusing various freedoms, thereby weakening the legitimacy of these state. the same can be said of the various attempts to curb the spread of religious sermons in muslim and non-muslim countries. while this may be easily undertaken where the muslims are a minority, say in singapore, but in muslim majority states such as indonesia and malaysia, this can worsen the relations between the government and its populace who also forms the majority of its electorate. this may confirm the islamic state's claim that such governments are indeed 'anti-islam' and should be overthrown, thereby leading to a backlash even though the islamic state's vitriolic ideology needs to be curbed. counter-terrorism is mainly a law and order issue, giving the police powers to deal with the threat, which is often presupposed to be internally driven. this is practised in most states including in the asia-pacific. yet, due either to the increasing military power of terrorist groups and the danger they pose, the weakness of the police to deal with the terrorist threat or the fact that the military has always, or on an ad hoc basis, been given a counterterrorism role, there has been a concomitant increase in the military's role in counter-terrorism, including in the asia-pacific region. this is also due to the transnational character of terrorism, driven mainly from outside the territory of the targeted state, such as the mumbai (india) attacks in november , with the perpetrators coming from pakistan. hence, there are many cases where the militaries in the asia-pacific are prepared to tackle non-traditional security threats because their conventional military capabilities have already been technologically engineered for dual use or even more important, there has been a historical legacy where the military, rather than simply focusing on external threats, has also been involved in counter-terrorism operations. in southeast asia, for instance, there is a long history of the militaries in indonesia, malaysia, philippines and thailand being involved in counter-terrorism operations, be it against groups driven by secular ideologies such as the various communist movements or religiously oriented groups such as the al qaeda and the islamic state. whether the military's involvement in non-traditional security oper-ations has bolstered or undermined asean centrality within the regional security architecture is something worth exploring. how intensely a country's military is allowed to participate in counterterrorism operations depends on the approach a state adopts towards the threat of terrorism. the criminal justice and enhanced criminal justice models emphasises on law enforcement with the military playing a supporting role to the police. the war and counter-terror models views terrorism as an existential threat to the state, sanctioning the use of military force to terminate the threat. in the literature on the military's role in counter-terrorism, it can be seen as a force with both positive and negative attributes. on the positive side, it can be instrumental in combating terrorism. successful military strikes can neutralise key leaders of terrorist groups such as 'operation neptune spear' that killed osama bin laden in may . military operations can also disrupt terrorist operations. on the flip side, military operations can prove counterproductive. the death and injury caused by military strikes on innocent bystanders, mostly civilians and to infrastructure, can lead to anger being directed at the attackers. in turn, this can generate support and sympathy for the terrorists, as has happened with the frequent american drone attacks in pakistan and afghanistan. militaries are established by the state to fight a state adversary even though many militaries are now involved in peacekeeping operations and peace support missions. in the end, whether the military is permitted to participate in counter-terrorist operations also depend on how the threat is perceived. if it is viewed strictly from the law and order perspective, then the police are given the prerogative and priority to neutralise the threat based on laws of the state. however, if terrorism is viewed and based on a war model that views terrorism as something that threatens existential security of the state, then military intervention in counter-terrorism is seen as necessary and legitimate. according to geraint hughes, the military's role in counter-terrorism can be seen from different perspectives. the military can be called into action on grounds of aiding a civilian authority to restore law and order, or to provide disaster relief, including following a mass casualty attack. the military has also been used to deter terrorist attacks through its deployment in public places or to guard critical infrastructure. the military has also been used to interdict, both on air and the high seas, of terrorists or arms shipment. many militaries are also involved in training friendly foreign forces in counter-terrorism operations. the military, especially its specialised units, has undertaken hostage rescue. militaries are also involved in clandestine operation and intelligence gathering. more poignantly, militaries have been involved with various degrees of operations in pre-emptive intervention, targeted killing, retaliation and, in the final analysis, in undertaking regime change (hughes , pp. - ) . to what extent militaries in the asia-pacific are prepared to tackle nontraditional security threats, and whether the armed forces' involvement in non-traditional security, will or not undermine asean's centrality within the regional security architecture is best analysed by looking at indonesia's military response to the threat of terrorism. there are many sound reasons for choosing the indonesian case study to illuminate the nexus between the military and counter-terrorism. unlike many armed forces, the indonesian military has been involved in counter-terrorism operations from its very onset in the s, focusing more on internal rather than external threats. it is also adept in dealing with threats emanating from conflicts that are based on race and religion. unlike other security agencies such as the police, the indonesian military was always viewed as the 'senior partner' due to its historical role in helping to win national independence from the dutch in through an armed struggle that was led by the army. historically, this also meant that the other security agencies were disadvantaged from the perspective of experience in counter-terrorism, intelligence assets as well as a military structure that extended to the entire length and breadth of the indonesian archipelago. from this perspective, not only is the indonesian military the most experienced counter-terrorism specialist in the country, it is also the most experienced and with the longest history of involvement in dealing with this particular non-traditional security threat compared to other armies in the asia-pacific, especially china, india and vietnam which were more preoccupied with external threats. modern indonesia's nationhood coincided with the threat of terrorism posed by the darul islam, a radical islamist group bent of establishing an islamic state in indonesia ( - ) . in order to combat darul islam's low level insurgency and terrorism, the indonesian army established the kopassus or special forces command. the command was critical in putting down various rebellions, including acts of terrorism such as the hijacking of a garuda plane in march (singh ) . a people's power revolution brought down the -year regime of suharto in may . a major consequence of this power shift was the 'back to barracks' policy of a democratising indonesia. mainly for political rather than operational considerations, the indonesian military's counterterrorism role was terminated. the military was also accused of various human rights violations during the suharto era. the liberal narrative, that a country in transition to democracy should allow civilians to undertake tasks of maintaining law and order with the military concentrating on protecting the state from external threats, also took dominance. this gave the police the sole responsibility for counter-terrorism operations. this praxis became a reality when indonesia was threatened by the al qaeda-linked jemaah islamiyah terrorist group which claimed responsibility for five major bombings. this included the first bali bombings in (ramakrishna (ramakrishna , . as the police gained prominence in counter-terrorism, the indonesian military, despite much expertise and experience, watched from the side lines. following the first bali bombings, the indonesian government established various institutions and passed laws to deal with the threat. what developed was a police-led counter-terrorism regime that has remained in place. in , a coordinating desk of counter-terrorism in the coordinating ministry of politics and security was established. in june , special detachment , a specialised counter-terrorism unit from the indonesian national police, was tasked to neutralise the rising danger posed by islamist terrorism. in september , bnpt or the national counter-terrorism agency was established. generally, the policedominated counter-terrorism regime did good work in countering the threat of terrorism and, by , it had succeeded in killing and detaining more than and terrorists, respectively. despite this, mainly due to various shortcomings of the police and the rising legitimacy of the military, the latter has successfully reclaimed part of its counter-terrorism role. while the military argued that it was wellendowed to play a counter-terrorism role, political sentiment militated against such a role expansion. still, the military succeeded in justifying its role expansion on grounds of the need to assist the police in enhancing national security from the rising threat of terrorism. the first major breakthrough in this regard was the placement of a senior military officer in the bnpt in september . since then, there has been a steady induction of the military into the national counter-terrorism regime. in september , the army was allowed to assist in counter-terrorism by collecting information on terrorist activities domestically (yang hui while the police-led counter-terrorism policies were effective in countering the jemaah islamiyah, new threats called into question past policies, especially one predicated on a police-driven counter-terrorism approach. the approach failed to detect and anticipate the emergence of the islamic state's threat in indonesia. this failure played a key role in the reemergence of the military's role in counter-terrorism. the police have also been criticised for many failures, including the ability of leading terrorists such as abu dujana to return undetected from the philippines, the negative image that detachment acquired as a killing machine and the inability of the police to protect its own officers, where nearly of them have been gunned down by terrorists. the improving image of the military, in contrast to the police, which has been tainted with massive corruption scandals, also hurt the police-led counter-terrorism policy. the growth of home-grown terrorists and where the targets are indonesians rather than foreigners also propelled the military to the forefront of counter-terrorism in view of its strengths on the intelligence front. the military's territorial structure, right down to the remotest village, provides it with a resource, especially intelligence that no other agency has. the military's all-round strength in counter-terrorism in the past and its possession of well-trained combat units, supported by good intelligence, are strong factors that make it natural for it to be deployed for counter-terrorism duties. also, the next phase of counter-terrorism in indonesia is expected to be more demanding and dangerous with the islamic state and its supporters possessing well-trained combat units. this is evident from the establishment of the katibah nusantara in syria, a malay-based combat unit made up mainly of malaysians and indonesians. partly in anticipation of a more robust military attack from the terrorists, both home-grown self-radicalised and katibah units, the military' involvement in counter-terrorism is something to be welcomed. already, beginning in , under the leadership of a charismatic defence minister, ryamizard, the military launched a six-month military operation in sulawesi province in eastern indonesia. this was to terminate the threat posed by the eastern indonesian mujahidin led by santoso that is affiliated with the islamic state, and where the police had failed to dislodge the group since . once the indonesian military was involved, santoso's deputy, daeng koro, was killed in april and in july , santoso himself was gunned down by a joint military task force in the jungles of central sulawesi, bringing an end to the saga of a man described as the most dangerous terrorist in indonesia, with the indonesian military scoring a major operational success in counter-terrorism. despite various reservations, the military's increasing role in counterterrorism will enhance indonesia's counter-terrorism capacity. what is being undertaken is not the displacement of the police counter-terrorism tasks but supplementing it. this is all the more necessary as counterterrorism also involves many non-military tasks such as de-radicalisation and counter-radicalism in various segments of society and where the military does not have access, such as in mosques, schools, prisons and mass media. in view of this, a joint police-military approach to counter-terrorism will go a long way in ensuring that the threat posed by the islamic state would remain manageable. conclusion it is clearly evident that militaries in the asia-pacific region are increasingly prepared to tackle non-traditional security threats. this is necessitated by the increasing dangers countries in the region are facing from nonconventional threats and where the resources, including training of the military personnel, are extremely useful in mitigating such threats to the nation. while the military can play a critical role in alleviating a crisis from natural disasters such as the tsunami that affected indonesia or floods in china, militaries are also extremely helpful in assisting the civilian authorities in confronting threats short of war, such as diseases, piracy and even terrorism. in the case of southeast asia, there has never really been a historical dichotomy of the military being confined to the barracks and tasked only to undertake duties to defend a country from external threats. in fact, the militaries in indonesia, malaysia, thailand, philippines and burma/ myanmar have spent the bulk of their history in overcoming domestic threats, be it from insurgencies led by communists, regional separatists or islamists as in indonesia, thailand and the philippines even though it is only the indonesian military that was almost totally preoccupied with internal rather than external threats. the more effectively militaries are involved in successfully tackling nontraditional security threats in southeast asia, the more likely they will be able to enhance asean's centrality within the regional security architecture in the asia-pacific. a threat-free asean achieved from within will be able to serve as a more effective security organisation in performing tasks to enhance regional security at the asia-pacific level, especially in managing or mitigating rivalries and even conflicts among the great powers, for instance, the usa and china over the south china sea region. furthermore, this is not a novel idea or practice as almost every military in the asia-pacific is undertaking operations of one kind or another to tackle non-traditional security threats. to that extent, the more effectively asia-pacific militaries perform their tasks of tackling non-traditional security threats, at least as far as asean is concerned, the more its centrality within the regional security architecture in the asia-pacific will be enhanced and guaranteed. however, as far as the key issue of counter-terrorism is concerned, the one area of intra-regional asian diplomacy that can be enhanced and strengthened is in the area of counter-terrorism. generally, while military cooperation has been growing among asian states, there are still many areas that can be enhanced and improved. while there are many sensitivities involved in military-to-military cooperation, mainly due to past conflicts and unresolved territorial disputes, defence diplomacy in general and military cooperation in particular, especially in counter-terrorism, is a potential growth area. this is all the more urgent as there is a growing perception of the islamic state and its terrorism as the common threat to all asian states. some of the possible areas of cooperation would involve the special forces and counter-terrorism units of various militaries in the asia-pacific conducting bilateral and multilateral exercises. this can expand to sharing of best practices, intelligence and if need be, when the opportunities avail themselves, for joint operations, especially in the common border regions. through these endeavours, the importance and centrality of the asia-pacific militaries in tackling non-traditional security threats, especially terrorism the islamic state and u.s. policy guide to military operations other than war: tactics, techniques, and procedures for stability and support operations, domestic and international non-traditional security and multilateralism in asia: reshaping the contours of regional security architecture? policy analysis brief. iowa: the stanley foundation how the us helped create al qaeda and isis. counterpunch the rise of the islamic state: isis and the new sunni revolution how us supports regimes that support terrorism. anti-war blog the military role in counterterrorism -examples and implications for liberal democracies. carlisle: strategic studies institute contours of non-traditional security challenges: global, regional and national perspectives radical pathways: understanding muslim radicalization in indonesia indonesian military's role enlargement in counter-terrorism. idsa comment isis: the state of terror terrorist groups isis: inside the army of terror centre for non-traditional security studies (nts centre) counter-terrorism in indonesia: enter the tni's task force. rsis commentaries. singapore: s. rajaratnam school of international studies he is concurrently an adjunct senior fellow at the centre of excellence for national security, s. rajaratnam school of international studies key: cord- -yu mw authors: chen, pei; chen, ely; chen, luonan; zhou, xianghong jasmine; liu, rui title: detecting early‐warning signals of influenza outbreak based on dynamic network marker date: - - journal: j cell mol med doi: . /jcmm. sha: doc_id: cord_uid: yu mw the seasonal outbreaks of influenza infection cause globally respiratory illness, or even death in all age groups. given early‐warning signals preceding the influenza outbreak, timely intervention such as vaccination and isolation management effectively decrease the morbidity. however, it is usually a difficult task to achieve the real‐time prediction of influenza outbreak due to its complexity intertwining both biological systems and social systems. by exploring rich dynamical and high‐dimensional information, our dynamic network marker/biomarker (dnm/dnb) method opens a new way to identify the tipping point prior to the catastrophic transition into an influenza pandemics. in order to detect the early‐warning signals before the influenza outbreak by applying dnm method, the historical information of clinic hospitalization caused by influenza infection between years and were extracted and assembled from public records of tokyo and hokkaido, japan. the early‐warning signal, with an average of ‐week window lead prior to each seasonal outbreak of influenza, was provided by dnm‐based on the hospitalization records, providing an opportunity to apply proactive strategies to prevent or delay the onset of influenza outbreak. moreover, the study on the dynamical changes of hospitalization in local district networks unveils the influenza transmission dynamics or landscape in network level. despite current approaches to prevention and control, seasonal influenza remains a significant cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. being infected by influenza virus, people especially elderly and children are at a high-risk for further deterioration including circulatory diseases, severe respiratory illness, and other life threatening complications. , influenza pandemic also causes considerable economic burden including direct medical costs and indirect loss such as substantial workplace absenteeism. the estimated average direct medical costs of influenza in the united states reaches $ . billion each year, and the actual annual cost would be more. early detection and recognition of upcoming influenza outbreak, and timely public health prevention including vaccination schedule and control strategy, are critical in reducing the pandemic magnitude and distribution. , however, it is usually a challenging task to achieve the real-time prediction of influenza outbreak due to its complex dynamics involving both biological systems and social systems. in addition, surveillance capacity for such detection can be costly, and many countries lack the public health infrastructure to identify outbreaks at their earliest stages. furthermore, there may be economic incentives for countries to not fully disclose the nature and extent of an outbreak. , therefore, a new computational method is required to predict the outbreak of epidemic diseases only based on available data, thus simplifying information gathering and monitoring processes. the dynamic network marker/biomarker (dnm/dnb) is our recently proposed method. it is a generalized methodology to identify the tipping point or pre-transition state which is a critical state before the catastrophic event, , by mining the dynamical information from both horizontal high-dimensional data and longitudinal historical records. regarding the influenza outbreak as a tipping point at which the system undergoes a critical transition, then there is a common understanding that the dynamical process of the system can generally be expressed by three states ( figure b) , that is, a normal state with high resilience, a pre-outbreak state (the critical state) with low resilience, and an after-outbreak state with possible high resilience. the normal state is a steady stage, during which there are no many clinic visiting patients. the pre-outbreak state is defined as the limit of the normal state immediately before the tipping point. in this pre-outbreak stage, the process is usually reversible to the normal state if appropriately treated, implying the criticality of the preoutbreak state. unlike the traditional detection of the after-outbreak state, the dnm enables the identification of the pre-outbreak state or critical state that generally has no clear abnormalities but with future trending of deterioration or critical transition. this method has recently been successfully applied to a variety of biological progresses to detect the early-warning signals to an irreversible catastrophic stage, such as the cell differentiation process, the process of cell fate decision, the critical transition in the immune checkpoint blockade-responsive tumour, the multi-stage deteriorations of t d, acute lung injury, hcv induced liver cancer, cancer metastasis, and many others. [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] in this study, dnm method was employed to explore the dynamical information based on a combination of city network and the high-dimensional clinic hospitalization records, which are from over clinics distributed in wards in tokyo, japan, and clinics distributed in districts in hokkaido, japan. the results show that the dnm method successfully identified the critical state just before the outbreak of influenza as a realtime surveillance system. such a system may enable a rapid response for the preventive care or the implementation of interventions to a health epidemic. in addition, this work unveils the influenza transmission dynamics or landscape in a local district network level, based on the measured data. the advantage and effectiveness of the dnmbased system is also demonstrated by the comparison between dnm and other surveillance systems of flu pandemic. influenza viruses circulate around the world every year, causing financial losses, suffering, and death. the dynamical process of flu outbreak can be modeled by three states or stages ( figure ) similar to disease progression : the before-outbreak state, which is a stable state with high resilience or high robustness to perturbations; the pre-outbreak/critical state, which is the tipping point just before the catastrophic shift into the outbreak state and is thus characterized by low resilience or low robustness due to its critical dynamics, but is still reversible to the before-outbreak state with appropriate control management; and the outbreak state, which is another stable state with high resilience or high robustness. clearly, it is of great importance to identify the pre-outbreak state, which holds the key to apply effective control management to prevent the catastrophic flu outbreak. however, different from the outbreak state in which there are obvious signs including huge amount of outpatient visits, it is a difficult task to identify the pre-outbreak state because there are generally no significant signs or differences between the before-outbreak state and the pre-outbreak state. on the other hand, the dynamic network marker/biomarker (dnm/dnb) method was developed to quantitatively identify the tipping point or the critical state during the dynamic evolution of a complex system based on the observed data. theoretically, when a complex system is near the critical point, there exists a dominant group (a dominant group of variables or members) defined as the dnm features, which satisfy the following three necessary conditions based on the observed data : • the correlation (pcc in ) between any pair of members in the dnm group rapidly increases; • the correlation (pcc out ) between one member of the dnm group and any other non-dnm member rapidly decreases; • the standard deviation (sd in ) or coefficient of variation for any member in the dnm group drastically increases. in other words, the above conditions can be approximately stated as: the appearance of a strongly fluctuating and highly correlated group of features implies the imminent transition into the flu outbreak. then, these three conditions are adopted to quantify the tipping point as the early-warning signals of diseases, and further, the identified dominant group of features consists of dnm members. the -fold change threshold is usually applied to recognize the significant changes in dnm score and obtain the warning signal. the dnm theory has been applied to a number of analyses of disease progression and biological processes to predict the critical states as well as their driven factors. [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] in this work, by considering the flu outbreak process as a non-linear dynamics process, we further applied the dnm method to detect the tipping point or the earlywarning signal of flu outbreak. to quantify the critical state, the following criterion i dnm was used as the signal of the critical point by combining the above three statistical conditions: thus, from the observed data of a sample, whenever there is a group of features appearing with a high i dnm score, this group of features is the dnm group and the state of this sample is considered to be near the tipping point. therefore, from the hospitalization records of each sample, we can identify the dnm members and further quantify whether or not this sample is near the critical state using the i dnm score. to further reliably identify the critical state of flu outbreak, we developed a new method called the landscape dnm, which explores f i g u r e schematic illustration to detect early-warning signals of influenza outbreak based on the dnm method. a, the historical information of clinic hospitalization caused by influenza infection between january and december was extracted and assembled from public records of tokyo and hokkaido, japan. b, according to the dnm theory, the process of a time-dependent non-linear system is divided into three states, including a normal state, a pre-outbreak state and an after-outbreak state. the abrupt increase in the dnm score indicates the pre-outbreak state, ie, the tipping point just before the upcoming catastrophic influenza outbreak that results in a boost of clinic-visiting patients. c, based on the historical and current clinic records, and regional geographic characteristics of a city, the dnm score is able to provide the early-warning signals of the upcoming influenza outbreak as a real-time indicator monitoring both the local and global records as well as the network structure, and the detailed algorithm is provided below. given a network structure for the observed variables, an efficient method to detect dnm, called the landscape dynamic network marker (or landscape dynamic network biomarker), is proposed by employing the local-landscape method on the basis of the three dnm statistic properties. specifically, first we mapped the historic records of flu patients to the city network ( figure a) . second, the network was partitioned into many local networks. each local network contained a centre node/ward and all of its first-order neighbours based on the network structure. the local-network index iscore of a centre node at time point t for a local network with n members (ie, one centre node with n- first-order neighbouring nodes) was then calculated through the following definition: where jΔsd t ðinÞj ¼ ∑ n i¼ jsd t ðiÞ À sd tÀ ðiÞj n is the average differential standard deviation (in absolute value) of the nodes inside the local network; ;j¼ jpcc t ði; jÞ À pcc tÀ ði; jÞj n  n is the average differential pearson's correlation coefficient (in absolute value) inside the local network, i.e., both nodes i and j are in the same local network; jΔpcc t ðoutÞj ¼ ∑ n i¼ ;j¼ jpcc t ði; jÞ À pcc tÀ ði; jÞj n  n is the average differential pearson's correlation coefficient (in absolute value) between a member (node i) in the local network and that (node j) outside. theoretically, when the system approaches the tipping point, ie, t ∈critical state, and t- ∉ critical state, there are three cases for the local network of a centre node: • in the local network, all the nodes (or nodes) are dnm members; • in the local network, there are dnm and non-dnm members; • in the local network, all the nodes are non-dnm members. according to the three cases respectively, there are critical behaviours for a centre node shown as in table . thus, the network based index, i t , can quantitatively characterize the criticality of the state for each dnm member or node. clearly, each node has an i t value, and hence those i t scores for all of nodes with the time evolution construct a landscape as shown in figure . when the system approaches the critical state, i t of each dnm node increases drastically based on the three statistic conditions of dnm, while i t of other non-dnm node may have no significant change. obviously, during the critical transition, the dnm group has an abil- for each ward or district, the raw data were averaged in terms of the total number of clinics within the ward/district. this normalization process is directly related to the population of each ward/district, since the population is roughly proportional to the number of clinics. the raw data were processed through window shift where window breadth is set as , that is, both the standard deviation and correlation coefficient are calculated based on the data within every weeks. the flu transmission dynamics before sudden outbreak is usually too complicated to be fully expressed mathematically in high-dimensional spaces involving both biological systems and social systems. the drastic or a qualitative transition in a local system or network, from a normal state to an after-outbreak state, corresponds to a so-called bifurcation point in dynamical systems theory. , if the system is approaching a bifurcation point, it will eventually be constrained to a one-or two-dimensional space (ie, the centre manifold in a generic sense), in which a dynamical system can be expressed in a very simple form. this is the theoretical basis for developing a general indicator that can detect the critical state of flu outbreak only based on the observed data. as shown in figure n→ notation: the system is near a tipping point, ie, it moves from time point t- to t, with t ∈ critical state, and t- ∉ critical state. . "↗" represents the increase of the index; "↘" represents the decrease of the index; "→" represents that there is no significant change in the index. . "d" stands for the dnm members, or the pcc with dnm members; "n" stands for the non-dnm nodes, or the pcc with non-dnm members. . sd t is the average standard deviation at time t; pcc t (in) is the average pearson's correlation coefficient between two nodes inside the local network; pcc t (out) is the average pearson's correlation coefficient between a node inside the local network and a node outside. (table s ). the dynamical evolution of network shows that the dnm-based system uncovers the epidemic situation and transmission trends, which better present the transmission dynamics at a system network level. as another dnm application to the influenza outbreak, we also applied the dnm to detect the early-warning signals against flu outbreak in hokkaido region, which is shown in figures s -s . it is seen from figure s figures s and s ). figure s shows the dynamics of the region network of year in terms of local dnm scores. the performances of dnm score is compared to other systems using machine learning algorithm ( figure ). specifically, a popular surveillance system of flu pandemic is based on logistic regression. [ ] [ ] [ ] it is clear from figure that given only hospitalization records, the dnm-based system performs better than a system based on logistic regression. actually, the dnm method has natural advantage comparing with traditional machine learning algorithm in the following aspects. f i g u r e the performance of dnmbased and machine-learning-based methods. it is seen that using only the hospitalization records, the dnm-based surveillance system performs better than the logistic regression. the auc of dnm is . while that of logistic regression is . . the performance comparison is carried out based on the data of tokyo. note that the dnm-based method generally has no overfitting problem due to the three statistic conditions of dnm without the training data, in contrast to the machine-learning-based methods that depend on the training data influenza-related mortality trends in japanese and american seniors: evidence for the indirect mortality benefits of vaccinating schoolchildren 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analysis of the spatial and temporal patterns of highly pathogenic avian influenza occurrence in vietnam using national surveillance data predicting influenza infections during epidemics with use of a clinical case definition environmental factors contributing to the spread of h n avian influenza in mainland china additional supporting information may be found online in the supporting information section at the end of the article. how to cite this article the work was supported by the national key r&d program of the authors declare that they have no competing interests. rl and ec conceived the project; rl, lc, and xz supervised the project. ec, pc, and rl performed computational and analysis. all authors wrote the manuscript. all authors read and approved the final manuscript. key: cord- - eawrjt authors: ogbondah, chris wolumati; agbese, pita ogaba title: terrorists and social media messages: a critical analysis of boko haram’s messages and messaging techniques date: - - journal: the palgrave handbook of media and communication research in africa doi: . / - - - - _ sha: doc_id: cord_uid: eawrjt post-colonial nigeria has been plagued with violent conflicts. a bloody civil war in which an estimated million people were killed ravaged the country from to . interethnic and intra-communal conflicts have also shaken the foundations of the nation since when colonial rule ended. other violent conflicts that have plagued the country are religious conflicts in kano, bauchi, kaduna, kafanchan, zaria, jos, maiduguri, and many other places. blood-letting in the name of religion in these and other places in nigeria has left thousands dead and wounded. destruction of property in the course of religious violence in nigeria has also wreaked economic calamity on the country. for instance, wanton destruction of property during the maitatsene religious uprising in kano from to resulted in the loss of lives and of millions of dollars. clashes between members of the militant shi’ite religious sect and the nigerian army in led to the demolition of an entire neighborhood in zaria city nigeria’s latest bout of violence emanates from a deadly terrorist group, boko haram. since , it has killed over , people, displaced more than one million people, and contributed to the devastation of nigeria’s northeast region. initially, boko haram could not be contained by nigerian security forces. it captured and held on to local government districts and it constantly churned out online propaganda about its invisibility and its certainty that it would impose a radical islamic government over the entire country. this chapter provides a critical analysis of boko haram’s propaganda. it examines the group’s core messages and the stylistic techniques used in delivering them. the chapter notes that boko haram deliberately used crude, unvanished imagery to reinforce the brutality of its actions in suicide bombings, drive-by shootings, and direct attacks against military barracks, markets, mosques, and churches. we contend that the effectiveness of boko haram’s propaganda began to decline as it suffered military defeats by nigerian forces. post-colonial nigeria has been plagued with various types of violent conflicts. a bloody civil war in which an estimated million people were killed ravaged the country from to . accounts of the war, both real and in fictional forms, have been provided by several writers, including amadi ( ) , achuzia ( ) , shillington ( ) , st jorre ( ) , madiebo ( ) , forsyth ( ) , kirk-greene ( ) , iroh ( ) , ademoyega ( ) , adichie ( ) , and johnson ( ) . interethnic and intra-communal conflicts have also shaken the foundations of the nation since when colonial rule ended. other violent conflicts that have plagued the country are religious conflicts in kano, bauchi, kaduna, kafanchan, zaria, jos, maiduguri, and many other places. blood-letting in the name of religion in these and other places in nigeria has left thousands dead and wounded. destruction of property in the course of religious violence in nigeria has also wreaked economic calamity on the country. for instance, wanton destruction of property during the maitatsene religious uprising in kano from to resulted in the loss of lives and of by the government that the group is a spent force. its success in the attack also shows that the jihadist group has continued to acquire enough resources to attack what it may consider as targets of high value in the country. boko haram rejects the secularism of the nigerian state and wishes to foist its own brand of islamic ideology on the country. it views itself as being at war with the nigerian state. boko haram also denies the legitimacy of the nigerian government and constitution, and opposes secular western-style education. the terrorist group opposes democracy and rejects christianity in nigeria, and it seeks to convert christians and other non-muslims to islam. other things that have incurred the ire of the group have included the consumption of alcohol and participation in civic activities such as voting and running for elective posts. the terrorist group, operating in the name of islam, rejects any ideology and teachings of the faith that differs from its own. it sees itself as part of a global movement for the restoration of the glories of islam. boko haram shot its way into the global limelight in when it abducted students from a girls' boarding high school and threatened to sell them into slavery or forcefully marry them off to its members. that successful operation, and its bombing of the united nations' offices in abuja in august , as well as its pledge of allegiance to the islamic state(is) in march , further beamed an international searchlight on its military capabilities and prowess. the nigerian government, its armed forces and scholars have concentrated their analysis of boko haram based on its military exploits. in contrast, this chapter examines the terrorist organization through the lens of its social media presentations and messaging. it provides a critical analysis of boko haram's media strategy and shows that its social media messaging is part of its overall military and ideological strategies. the authors examine boko haram's attempts to wage a battle for the hearts and minds of nigerians through a deliberate use of social media to disseminate its messages. focusing on statements and video appearances by its leader, abubakar shekau, boko haram's overt and subtle messages to nigerians and the world at large are outlined. using content-analytic methodology, the chapter examines the thrust of the messages to decipher their major themes, intents and target audiences. the authors contend that boko haram's messages reveal what the group thinks of itself, the nigerian government and the nigerian security establishment. we contend that boko haram deliberately uses crude and unsophisticated messaging techniques to convey its brutality, military invisibility and total disdain for the nigerian government and its armed forces. we contend that boko haram uses its social media messaging to assert the righteousness of its interpretation of islam, arguing that boko haram uses islamic religious imageries and rhetoric to justify its atrocities. we have analyzed boko haram's media strategy within the theoretical framework of propaganda and conclude that unlike is, al qaeda and other terrorist organizations that use social media messaging as a recruitment tool, boko haram uses its messaging to instill fear and to convince its viewers of its inevitable victory over the nigerian government. our analysis reveals that not only does boko haram use its messaging to claim that the nigerian government is anti-islamic but also that it utilizes it to define good or proper muslims. as noted earlier, boko haram's reign of violence has been the biggest national security threat that nigeria has faced since when the country returned to civil rule. it has also been the biggest blood-letting since the end of the civil war in . from august until february when combined military operations by nigeria and its neighbors-cameroon, chad, and niger-reversed boko haram's territorial gains, the jihadist group controlled a good portion of nigeria. during that period, it controlled fourteen local governments areas, several major towns and many villages-swathes of nigerian territories that amounted to over , square miles, about the size of belgium, and six times more land than is in iraq and syria controlled at about the same time. all of the territories amounted to about % of nigeria, according to a new york times report. according to a november , report in the new york times, boko haram was responsible for deaths in , overtaking is, which killed in the same year as the world's most number one terrorist organization. like is in iraq and syria, it decapitates some of its enemies by slitting their throats. in fact, it openly pledged allegiance to is in march . like is, it intends to create an islamic caliphate. unlike is, however, what boko haram opposes is more certain than what it intends to do with power. since its violent phase began in , the insurgency has led to the death of over , nigerians, according to adaramola (february , ) . according to the report, kashim shettima, the governor of borno state, noted that . million people had been displaced, and property worth $ billion destroyed by boko haram as at december . in addition, shettima said that , private houses, representing % of the number of houses in borno state, were destroyed across the twenty-seven local government areas of the state. in a single attack on the city of baga in january , for example, boko haram killed over people. churches, banks, schools, markets, car parks, farms, government offices, police stations and military barracks have been the principal targets of boko haram's attacks. suicide bombings, motorcycle ride-by shootings, detonation of improvised explosive devices (ieds) and invasions by a large contingent of its fighters are the main instruments of the terrorists' destructive strategies. in addition to creating millions of internally displaced persons (idps), boko haram has forced over , nigerians to seek refuge in neighboring countries. an editorial in the guardian (nigerian) newspaper of november , stated that "there were in cameroun alone, , nigerians that fled gwoza, a town in borno state…." although boko haram began its terrorist activities in nigeria, it has become a regional menace in west africa as it has spread its attacks to niger, cameroon, and chad. boko haram's terrorist activities, in addition to causing thousands of deaths in nigeria, have virtually brought all economic activities in the northeastern zone of the country to a halt. apart from the humanitarian crisis created by the jihadist organization, the economic costs of the violence have been enormous. by september , boko haram had destroyed infrastructure that would cost more than $ billion to rebuild in borno state alone (ibukun and olukayode, ) . shehu ( ) has argued that violent attacks by boko haram paralyzed businesses, banking, tourism, transportation and investments in the affected region. the group has seriously disrupted agricultural production, the mainstay of the economy in the area. drastic reduction in agricultural production has created a specter of famine for millions of people in the violence-ravaged areas. in , the nigerian government budgeted billion naira to feed people in internally displaced persons' camps. the government earmarked billion naira in the budget for that purpose. according to the presidential committee on north-east initiatives (pcni), this was grossly inadequate as the figure to feed the idps at the displaced camps should have been billion naira. quoting a united nations estimate, the economist magazine in its september , issue reported that " , children in borno are suffering from severe acute malnutrition-the deadliest category of it. more than persons will die each day without assistance. across the wider north-east part of nigeria, a population equivalent to new zealand's, is in need of food aid." searcey and santora (november , ) , noted how boko haram's violence has caused food shortages in cameroon. according to their report in the new york times: "farmers have fled, leaving behind fallow fields. herdsmen have rerouted cattle drives to avoid the violence. throughout the region, entire villages have emptied, leaving a string of ghost towns with few people for boko haram to dominate-and little for the group to plunder." boko haram's attacks on baga and other fishing communities in the lake chad area have drastically reduced the quantity of fish harvested in the area. attacks by boko haram have also curtailed tourism in the north-western part of cameroon as well as various parts of north-eastern nigeria. in addition, the nigerian government has expended billions of dollars in extra defense in response to boko haram. boko haram's bloody attacks have naturally led analysts to focus on its military strategies and capabilities, but the group recognizes the potency of propaganda, and hence it devotes time and resources to the dissemination of its messages through statements and video appearances. we contend that a comprehensive understanding of what boko haram stands for and the implications of its attacks can be understood by adding succinct analyses of its media strategy to what is already known about its military strategy. boko haram uses its media strategy to advance its military goals as it frequently utilizes video appearances by its leader, abubakar shekau, to threaten military attacks. we also seek to demonstrate, using boko haram for illustrative purposes, that social media make it relatively easy for extremist groups such as al shabaab, is, al qaeda, and other jihadist groups to articulate and disseminate their messages to a worldwide audience, a global reach that would not have been possible without the commitment of enormous and resources. a group such as boko haram may be particularly successful in articulating its messages when it is not confronted with counter-narratives by governments and other entities, or when the counter-narratives appear less persuasive than the propaganda that the group is churning out. an examination of boko haram's attempts to win the battle for the hearts and minds of nigerians through a deliberate use of video propaganda as well as a critical analysis of the statements by its leader, shekau, will provide governmental and institutional policymakers in nigeria a deeper understanding of the nature and operations of boko haram. in particular, this chapter will provide government policymakers in north africa, middle east, and europe with a further understanding of major terrorist organizations in these parts of the world. an understanding of the nature and operations of one terrorist organization-whether al qaeda, is, boko haram, or al-shabaab-can help shape the formulation of governmental policies on how to counter the efforts of such organizations to radicalize potential recruits. therefore, this chapter is significant in the sense that its conclusions can be useful in the formulation of policies on global terrorism. terrorists have discovered that social media can be important tools for recruitment of fighters and supporters and for the dissemination of their world views. is has been very deft in using twitter and its english language magazine, dabiq, for its propaganda. according to koerner ( ) , tashfeen malik who, with her husband syed farook, shot and killed fourteen people in san bernardino, california, in december , used facebook to pledge allegiance to is leader abu bakr al-baghdadi a few minutes after the killings began. berger ( ) acknowledged the indispensability of social media to terrorism. as he noted, "jihadists have figured out how to use social media to make an impact, even though their numbers are minuscule in comparison to the overall user base … its highly organized social media campaign uses deceptive tactics and shows a sophisticated understanding of how such networks operate" (p. ). blaker ( ) , examining is' use of social media, asserted that: isis has made great use of the internet and online social media sites to spread its message and encourage others, particularly young people, to support the organization, to travel to the middle east to engage in combat-fighting sideby-side with other jihadists, or to join the group by playing a supporting rolewhich is often the role carved out for young women who are persuaded to join isis. (p. ) this chapter is also significant because by analyzing the speeches made by boko haram's leader in the social media and in particular youtube videos and major acts of terrorism carried out by the group, nigerian and west african leaders and leaders elsewhere in the world might further understand how the minds of the leaders of terrorist organizations work. the more they are understood, the more the world will be able to know what motivates them to commit such heinous, atrocious and acrimonious crimes. understanding the mindset(s) of these groups and how they operate is critical for the governments of nigeria and other west african countries, so that policymakers can predict major acts of terrorism in the region and nip them in the bud. if government policymakers had been able to predict the abduction of secondary school girls in chibok, and heinous massacres in baga and elsewhere, they would have been able to stave off the colossal loss of innocent lives and billions of dollars in property in those acts of terrorism. this is why this chapter, which has highlights the motivations and operations of a terrorist group such as boko haram is unquestionably significant and potentially enormously valuable. as a concomitant outcome, the chapter will enrich the literature on the nature of global terrorism, and the terrorism that is now on the rise in sub-saharan africa. as the number of studies like this increases, scholars and experts on global terrorism will be able to analyze the media coverage of terrorism more holistically. they will be able to compare, for example, acts of terrorism committed by boko haram and those committed by other terrorist organizations. boko haram was formed in maiduguri, borno state, in by a young muslim cleric, mohammed yusuf. after his expulsion from two mosques for preaching a radical brand of islam, he set up his own mosque and was able to attract a large following among the city's young men. the group became better known in when it clashed with the police, attacking police stations and other public institutions in maiduguri. when the police could not contain the group, the federal government deployed the armed forces. the military fought pitched battles with boko haram fighters, and its mosque and headquarters were destroyed. yusuf was apprehended by the military and handed over to the police; he was subsequently shot to death while being held in police custody. according to mu'azu ( ) , the police stated that he died during gunfire exchanges with their officers. yusuf 's father-in-law and about eight hundred members of boko haram were killed during the fighting in . some of the group's survivors fled to the neighboring countries of chad and niger. boko haram was able to recover from its losses, and, as subsequent events clearly demonstrated, it became even more deadly. it is now led by another young cleric, abubakar shekau. however, one abu musab al-barnawi claims that he leads another faction of the group. boko haram views its members as warriors in a holy war between islam and the rest of nigeria. in a statement rejecting calls for it to cease hostilities, the leader of the insurgency spelled out its mission: we want to reiterate that we are warriors who are carrying out jihad in nigeria and our struggle is based on the traditions of the holy prophet. we will never accept any system of government apart from the one stipulated by islam because that is the only way that muslims can be liberated. we do not believe in any system of government, be it traditional or orthodox except the islamic system and that is why we will keep on fighting against democracy, capitalism, socialism and whatever. we will not allow the nigerian constitution to replace the laws that have been enshrined in the holy qur'an, we will not allow adulterated conventional education to replace islamic teachings. we will not respect the nigerian government because it is illegal. we will continue to fight its military and the police because they are not protecting islam. we do not believe in the nigerian judicial system and we will fight anyone who assists the government in perpetrating illegalities. the sophistication of boko haram's bombing operations and its simultaneous and co-ordinated attacks on multiple targets indicate its ability to tap into external resources in the form of weapons, training, logistics and financing. evidence of the group's military capability is the use of rocket-propelled grenades and anti-aircraft guns in its may attacks on bama and its september , downing of a nigeria air force jet plane. while its immediate grievances are directed against the federal government of nigeria, boko haram operates under a global brand of islamic fundamentalism. it is thus a grievous error to view the group solely through the prism of the internal dynamics of nigerian politics. its ability to attract fighters from niger and chad as well as its pledge of allegiance to is in march and the acknowledgement that some of its fighters are trained in somalia and mali are clear pointers to its global dimensions. even though some of its complaints are wrapped around nigeria-specific issues, boko haram is motivated by a global islamic radicalism. as was the case with al-shabab in somalia and al dine in mali, boko haram has struck with a deadly force in nigeria because the country's poor governance made it a target of opportunity. the group merely capitalized on the weakness of the nigerian state, and exploited existing ethnoreligious tensions to launch its insurgency against the country. the external dimensions of boko haram are also signposted by the similarities between its tactics and those adopted by islamic insurgents in iraq, afghanistan and north africa. this is not a mere coincidence. boko haram's suicide-bombing, co-ordinated simultaneous attacks on multiple targets, the use of ieds and the utilization of motorcycle ride-by assassinations are precisely the methods that have recently been used by islamic terrorists in other parts of the world. the ruthlessness and brutality of boko haram, such as slitting the throats of schoolchildren, their teachers and other victims also mirror those in iraq and afghanistan. its opposition to secular education recalls the ideology of the taliban in afghanistan. it is therefore fallacious to argue that boko haram is a political tool of northern nigerian elites who were unhappy with the president goodluck jonathan administration. the clashes between boko haram and security forces that marked the group as a serious threat to nigerian security pre-dated the jonathan administration. it was a northerner, umaru yar'adua, who was president of the country at that time. moreover, given the opportunity, boko haram will go after the elites as ferociously as it has gone after ordinary nigerians. its january attempt to assassinate the former emir of kano, ado bayero, during which the emir's driver and some of his loyal bodyguards were killed, is a testament to its loathing and disdain of the elites. this was also attested to when the group warned the elites in sokoto to avert the replication of the kano attack by releasing its members who had been detained in that state. in a january letter, its leader, shekau, said: this is an open letter to the emir of sokoto (sultan of sokoto) alhaji muhammad sa'ad abubakar , the speaker of the house of representatives, alhaji aminu tambuwal and the acting governor of sokoto state. before we visited kano, we wrote open letter [sic] to senior citizens on the imperative of releasing our members but nobody cares [sic] to talk. indeed, we sent three warnings to kano before strike" [sic] . what happened in kano will be inevitable in sokoto unless you (sultan and others) intervene and ensure the immediate and unconditional release of our members who were specifically arrested in the city of sokoto… former president goodluck jonathan belatedly recognized the dangers that boko haram poses not just to security in nigeria but also to the territorial integrity of the country. he vowed in march that the insurgency would be defeated by june that year, but this did not happen. by august , boko haram was operating with impunity, seizing many towns and villages. it intensified its attacks, and it increased the frequency of such attacks. its ability to strike well beyond the geography of its home base was expanded with its attacks on kano, kaduna, abuja and other cities several hundred miles from its home base. by the end of , its ability to strike terror into the hearts of many nigerians and its ability to seize swathes of territories at will made the north-eastern region and several other parts of northern nigeria virtually ungovernable. as the group's mayhem intensified in , a nigerian national daily newspaper, the nation, in its editorial commentary on january , aptly noted that: the scourge of boko haram has inflicted dislocations on our country on a number of levels. some point to its psychological damage, others to the physical and geographical fissures and a few others to the decimation of families. we experience these instances almost daily, showing that the nigerian government is grasping with futile energy to curb this modern day spasms of savagery. although, boko haram claims that it was motivated to take up arms against nigeria because it was incensed by corruption, moral decadence and immorality, it has waged much of its war against ordinary and innocent nigerians who themselves are victims of the corruption and misgovernance that characterizes the country. moreover, its tactics of kidnapping schoolchildren, bombing churches, public buildings and schools, and cutting the throats of children and their teachers cannot build a better society than the one that boko haram is purportedly seeking to replace. its latest strategy of abducting women and children and holding them hostage as well as forcefully taking women, even under-age girls as wives for its members is as repulsive as its other dastardly acts. there is also much arrogance in boko haram's utterances and ultimate objectives. for instance, it aims to cleanse the north-eastern region of nigeria, if not the entire country, of christians and christianity. it wants southern nigerians living in the north to leave the region. even if boko haram was truly fighting for islam, it should embrace the southerners who are themselves muslims. propaganda, which we define in this chapter as communication used by individuals, groups, institutions or organizations to inform, persuade or scare others to adopt their beliefs, ideas and creed or to mobilize attitudes in order to win minds or to convert them to a cause, is as old as human history. as gambrill and reiman ( ) have noted, propaganda aims to promote ideas and actions that would serve the interests and benefits of those promoting the ideas and actions. the word, propaganda, was derived from sacra congregatio de propaganda fide (congregation for the propagation of the faith), a vatican organization, created in rome on june , by pope gregory xv (bernays, ; jackall, ; pratkanis & aronson, ) . the organization's duty was to spread the faith and to regulate church affairs in heathen lands. therefore, the roman catholic church used the term first (black, ) . combs and nimmo ( ) pointed out that this early form of propaganda was considered as "a moral endeavor by the church" (p. ), but interest in the subject today has expanded owing to its importance in international politics (chapman, ) . according to lasswell ( a lasswell ( , b , propaganda refers solely to the control of opinion by using pictures and other forms of social communication; it is concerned with the "management of opinions and attitudes." qualter ( ) argues that propaganda is the deliberate attempt by an individual or group of persons to form, control or alter attitudes of other individuals or groups. he suggests that propaganda is any form of persuasion aimed to change attitudes. jowett and o'donnell ( ) point out that "propaganda is a form of communication that attempts to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist" (p. ). they argue that the use of the terms propaganda and persuasion interchangeably is inappropriate-hence they propose that, in as much as propaganda makes use of persuasive strategies, it differs from persuasion in its purpose. thus, they categorize propaganda as a specific class of communication that is a "subcategory of persuasion, as well as information" (pp. [ ] [ ] . british historian and scholar, taylor ( ) , identifies three main reasons why propaganda gained prominence in international relations. these are: (i) a general increase in the level of popular interest and involvement in political and foreign affairs as a direct consequence of world war i (ii) technological developments in the field of mass communication which provided the basis for a rapid growth in propaganda as well as contributing towards the increased level of popular involvement in politics, and (iii) the ideological context of the inter-war period, sometimes known as the 'european civil war' in which an increased employment of international propaganda could profitably flourish. (pp. [ ] [ ] taylor strongly suggests that an increase in the use of propaganda to influence opinions is due to advances in mass communication technologies. this is to say that media play a vital role in propaganda. analyzing the use of propaganda to manipulate opinions or attitudes, ellul ( ellul ( , argues that propaganda is the inevitable result of the various components of the technological society, and plays so central a role in the life of that society that no economic or political development can take place without its influence. this suggests that a society, organization or group that seeks development or change of any sort uses propaganda to achieve its goals. baines and o'shaughnessy ( ) argue that political leaders manipulate myth, symbolism and rhetoric in influencing opinions and ideologies. ogden and wilson ( ) describe what they termed "propaganda techniques" as: • name calling: this involves giving an idea a label, either good or bad, to encourage the public to accept and praise or reject and condemn the idea without examining evidence. • glittering generality: this technique associates something with a "virtue word" designed to encourage the public to accept and approve the idea without examining the evidence. • plain folks: transferring the aura of authority and prestige of a celebrity or opinion leader to a product, person or idea in order to persuade the public to accept or reject it. • testimonial: a technique used to endorse a product by a celebrity or opinion leader who uses the product. • plain folks: this is a technique used to convince the public that a speaker's (often politician's) ideas are good because s(he) is "of the people" or "one of us." • card stacking: selective use of facts to tell only one side of the story, often obscuring the other side(s). • bandwagon: this is an appeal to line up with the opinion of the majority on an issue-a method that tries to persuade by encouraging people to join their friends and neighbors because "everybody's doing it." • emotional stereotypes: evoking an emotional image such as the "ugly american." • illicit silence: withholding information that would verify a situation or correct a false impression or assumption. • subversive rhetoric: as a strategy used in political campaigns, this appeal involves attacking the spokesperson rather than an idea. propagandists employ all these techniques to achieve their goals. propaganda goals generally aim to shape public opinion in the particular direction that is desired by the propagandist. adolf hitler was one of the best-known persons to use propaganda, with his shaping of public opinion in germany during the second world war having been documented by many scholars, including welch ( welch ( , , george ( ) , steinert ( ) and kershaw ( ) . published material on boko haram has examined various aspects about the group and its reign of terror. they include the following: ( ) the origins and objectives of the insurgency; ( ) boko haram's tactics and strategies; ( ) nigerian military campaigns against boko haram; ( ) threats that boko haram poses to nigeria's unity and stability; and ( ) the place of boko haram within the context of ethnic and religious violence in nigeria. other published materials on the group further examined the following: ( ) the character of boko haram as a terrorist group; ( ) the nigerian government's response to the insurgency; ( ) links between boko haram and other islamic terrorist groups; ( ) boko haram as a reflection of the weaknesses and failure of the state in nigeria; and ( ) the impact of the insurgency on civil-military relations, including human rights violations committed by nigerian security forces as they countered boko haram attacks. some studies have attempted to situate boko haram within the overall ambit of other security issues, such as kidnapping for ransom, armed robbery and militancy in the oil-producing niger delta region. one of the best-known books about boko haram is boko haram: islamism, politics, security and the state in nigeria, an edited volume by marc-antoine perouse de montclos. kyari mohammed's chapter in the book examines boko haram's message and the methods used by the group for disseminating it. another notable chapter, written by manuel reinert and lou garcon, chronicles the islamic sect. it highlights boko haram's evolution from a relatively peaceful and little-known group to its manifestation as a violent and dreaded organization. in this same volume, rafael serrano and zacharias pieri analyze how the nigerian government has responded to the insurgency. the chapter highlights the inadequacy of the government's responses and notes how the successes recorded by boko haram in its military attacks against nigerian security forces are largely a reflection of the weaknesses and failures of governmental responses. a myth about boko haram that seems to endure is that nigeria's muslim population has not vigorously condemned the group, and that they tacitly support its insurgency. johannes harnischfeger in an analysis of this claim clearly shows that boko haram has many muslim critics. his chapter in montclos' ( ) volume draws on criticisms of boko haram from islamic clerics in yobe state. in the same volume, henry gyang mang examines how christians in nigeria view the insurgency, providing a detailed examination of nigerian christians' attitudes towards and perceptions of boko haram. mang maintains that nigerian christians consider boko haram as islamic radical fanatics who are intent on imposing islam on the entire country. another collection of analyses appears in boko haram ioannes mantzikos' edited volume boko haram: anatomy of a crisis. in his chapter jideofor adibe examines what is actually known of boko haram. he deftly separates facts from fiction and mythologies. the volume also contains a chapter by osumah oarhe that analyzes the challenges that the boko haram insurgency has posed to the nigerian military and security establishments. it details the growing inability of the nigerian military services, including its intelligence services, to suppress the insurgency. while oarhe's chapter specifically looks at the responses of the nigerian defense and intelligence establishment to boko haram, hakeem onapajo's chapter in the same volume provides a general overview on the failure of nigeria to defeat the insurgents. focusing specifically on the handling of the insurgency by nigerian security forces, a. abolurin highlights the challenges that boko haram poses for the nigerian armed forces. boko haram's choice of targets for its attacks has been a major source of debate in the media. focusing specifically on the targeting of telecommunications infrastructure by boko haram, freedom onuoha outlines the motivations behind boko haram's choice of targets. onuoha argues that by targeting telecommunications infrastructure, boko haram seeks to isolate the geographical areas of its attacks from the rest of the country. he also contends that the choice of telecommunications infrastructure as a target is to frustrate the ability of nigerian security forces to monitor the movement of its members. the response of the rest of the world, particularly the united states, to boko haram, has equally been a subject of scholarly analyses. caitlin c. poling, for instance, has examined how the us congress has reacted to boko haram. poling argues that us responses to terrorism in the aftermath of / are framed within the context of those attacks. she posits that the american congress, alarmed by boko haram, views the group as a dangerous islamic terrorist organization in the tradition and mold of al qaeda. other publications have analyzed boko haram within the context of islamic terrorism in other parts of the world. freedom onuoha, for instance, has examined boko haram in light of the ideology of an islamic sect, the salafists. onuoha contends that the salafists' jihadist ideology provides an important window for understanding the threat that boko haram poses to nigerian security. sean m. gourley has shown that the ideology, rhetoric and strategies of boko haram are similar to those of al qaeda. he cautions that this should raise serious concerns by those pursuing the war on terrorism. shannon connell has also explored the linkage between boko haram and other islamic terrorist groups. similarly, ely karmon has explored the international dimensions of boko haram. karmon notes that boko haram's attack on the united nations offices in abuja, nigeria, in marked its transformation from a purely nigerian and localized terrorist outfit to an international one. pinpointing connections between boko haram and other islamic terrorist groups is also the subject of machael tanebam's long piece in the israel journal of foreign affairs. tanebam sees a direct link between boko haram and al qaeda, and argues that islamic terrorism in both mali and nigeria represents the expansion of al qaeda to africa. the role of primordial identities such as religion, ethnicity and regionalism in framing the discourse on boko haram is the subject of hussein solomon's chapter "boko haram, identity and the limits of counter-terrorism." solomon examines how ethnic, religious and regional identities have shaped the nigerian war against boko haram. he notes that those identities have made the struggle more challenging. for abimbola adesoji, islamic revivalism in nigeria provides the best prism for analyzing and understanding boko haram. to some nigerian scholars, the biggest challenge posed by boko haram is its potential to disrupt the country's delicate ethnic and religious balance. some even fear that the insurgency could lead to the break-up of nigeria. daniel egiegba agbiboa has analyzed boko haram from the perspective of religious identities in nigeria. he also uses the relative deprivation theory to examine boko haram's origins. jideofor adibe, in his book nigeria without nigerians? boko haram and the crisis in nigeria's nation-building, warns that an inability to suppress the insurgency could lead to the demise of nigeria as a single political entity. he views boko haram as a frontal challenge to the desire of many nigerians for a strong, viable and united country. boko haram's threat to national unity is also the subject of another volume by two nigerians, adeyemi ademowo and matthew olusola. ademowo and olusola analyze boko haram against the backdrop of nigeria's fragile national unity. similarly, oluwaseun bamidele has examined boko haram against the backdrop of the threats that it poses to nigeria's peace and stability. he cautions that failure to rein in the insurgency could threaten peace, security and economic development in nigeria. boko haram has made several propaganda videos that it has distributed through youtube, twitter, news wire services, etc. the group uses its propaganda videos to scare nigerians as well as to, radicalize and persuade potential recruits, many of them young boys and under-age girls, to adopt its creed and ideas, and to enlist as suicide bombers and fighters and believe in the group's mission to carve out an islamic caliphate in nigeria. in our analysis of the messages embedded in boko haram's propaganda videos we found that they contained the following themes: unlike is, which uses deftly produced videos and magazines as part of its social media messaging to inspire disaffected muslim youths in europe and north america to join its cause, boko haram's videos are crude and poorly produced. however, the crudity of the production is itself part of its messaging technique: the rawness is intended to instill fear and dread of the terrorist organization in the nigerian viewers. boko haram's social media messaging is not directed specifically at potential recruits. in fact, members of the nigerian armed forces are the target audience, the aim being to convince them of the futility of fighting against a superior force. boko haram's leader also frequently speaks in these videos directly to nigerian, cameroonian, and nigerien leaders, warning them or calling them liars. boko haram does not use its social media messaging to galvanize populist support for its ideology but rather to discredit the nigerian state by demonstrating that it could not offer security to its citizens. the jihadist group presents itself as a fearful and marauding force that cannot be stopped by the incompetent, corrupt and visionless nigerian state. its leader, shekau, in his propaganda videos intends to contrast the weak, inept and vacillating persona of then president goodluck jonathan with his bold and vigorous persona. boko haram recognizes the barbarity of its actions but uses social media to justify such actions in the name of islam. it tries to convey the notion of the righteousness of its interpretations of islam, and hence the legitimacy in the eyes of islam of any of its atrocities. in one of his propaganda videos, shekau displays boko haram's formidable stock of sophisticated weapons as a way to persuade his followers to believe that the sect is militarily well equipped-in fact, so richly equipped that it is stronger than the nigerian government. in the video, he states that boko haram began its insurgency with sticks and knives but has grown strong with its acquisition of armored personnel carriers, multi-purpose vans, ak and pump action riffles, heavy machine guns (hmgs), mortars, artillery shells, anti-aircraft guns, heat-seeking missiles, bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, hundreds of motorbikes, pick-up trucks and so on. as an evidence of boko haram's military strength, shekau displays the groups's sophisticated assault weapons in some of his propaganda videos. the aim is to illustrate the sect's strength as well as persuade his followers to believe that boko haram is rich and wealthy-hence it can afford to purchase all these weapons. ironically, boko haram leaders claim that the group does not condone western civilization, but they make use of western technological gadgets such as cellular phones and video recorders to disseminate their propaganda (maiangwa, ). an added dramatic effect when they display these sophisticated weapons is the fact that some of them were seized from fleeing nigerian soldiers. at the height of its power in january , boko haram had taken over swathes of nigerian territories amounting to over , square milesabout the size of belgium, and six times more land than is at the time; about % of nigerian territory (schmitt, december , ) . nigerian territories under boko haram's control by january included michika, konduga, munguno, gambaru, mafa, mallam fatori, abadam, and marte. the group made videos of its control of those territories, an indication to its members that boko haram was militarily stronger than the nigerian state. in one of his propaganda videos, shekau prominently shows boko haram's black and white islamic caliphate flag flying over the above-mentioned nigerian territories. the video, with an islamic caliphate song in the background, shows boko haram fighters confidently roaming around the seized territories without any challenges from nigerian soldiers. the aim is to persuade and convince his audiences that boko haram has grown so strong and powerful that it was able to capture these territories from the "weak" nigerian government. shekau also used the video to inform his followers that boko haram's successes in capturing those swathes of territories was an unquestionable demonstration of the superiority of the sect's military might and strength. the video's purpose was to portray the weakness of the nigerian government as well as the cowardice of its fleeing soldiers. in one thirty-six-minute youtube video that the authors accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgdkblgzggq, shekau boasts that the avalanche of weapons that boko haram captured from fleeing nigerian soldiers including those seized during its attack on baga in borno state would be enough for the jihadists to successfully prosecute the entire war. an account of boko haram's military invasion of baga town was provided in a bbc news report on january , . the report can be accessed at http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa- . shekau appears in the video, standing in front of three patrol jeeps mounted with an anti-aircraft gun, dressed in his usual expensive-looking military khaki with an ak hanging from his shoulder across his chest. in the video, he warns that boko haram will bring nigeria to its knees following which he will unleash a punitive attack on the neighboring countries of cameroon, chad, and niger. the boko haram leader ends his speech in that video by burning the nigerian flag, part of his propaganda to show the group's contempt for the nigerian nation. the video showing shekau and boko haram officers wearing expensivelooking military khaki and three-color desert camouflage pattern of dark brown, mint green and beige desert fatigue uniforms was used to send a direct message to the group's members. it was used to subliminally persuade his audience to believe that boko haram is a rich and wealthy professional military organization and not a rag-tag army of poor criminals in search of relevance. yet in another video, posted on youtube on april , (https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=el-o tnim ), shekau shows off boko haram's assorted military weapons, including those that it claimed to have seized during its raids on nigerian military barracks, one of them, the munguno barracks. this is another propaganda video that shekau used to persuade his followers to believe that the organization and its fighters were stronger than the nigerian nation and its soldiers. shekau appeared in several other propaganda videos that were made after a series of the group's successful attacks in various parts of north-eastern nigeria. the subliminal message in those videos was that boko haram had the capability to successfully attack government facilities time and again. one of these attacks was carried out at the united nations headquarters in abuja on august , . according to a bbc news report of the incident, eighteen people were killed in that attack (http://www.bbc.com/news/worldafrica- ). another attack was on the composite group air force base at the maiduguri international airport on december , . in the video of this, shekau shows how boko haram fighters set five nigerian air force aircraft ablaze as well as the sect's destruction of the airport. a bbc report of the attack said that "the large-scale, coordinated attack was a big setback for the nigerian military" (http://www.bbc.com/news/worldafrica- ). the airport remained closed to civilian aviation from december , until june , . the objective of the video was to convince boko haram fighters and its followers that the sect is stronger than the nigerian state, and that the islamic sect was so strong that it would prevail over nigeria in the long run. earlier, on november , , boko haram suicide bombers penetrated the armed forces command and staff college (afcsc) at jaji, a security hub of the nigerian military. it successfully attacked st andrew's military protestant church inside the college. on november , , members of the sect attacked the special anti-robbery squad (sars) police headquarters in abuja, where they killed several nigerian police officers before freeing scores of suspected criminals, including their own members who were detained in the facility. a bbc report of the incident titled "nigeria gunmen attack abuja sars police hq" may be found at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa- . then, on december , , boko haram fighters attacked and burned down the divisional police station, the prison, customs area office and the presidential lodge in maiha, adamawa state. they killed dozens of people in the attack, and freed scores of prison inmates. the vanguard newspaper, one of the nigerian dailies, reported the attack in its edition of december , . on january , , boko haram fighters attacked and sacked the police station in banki, borno state. in january alone, the jihadist group sacked thirty-seven communities in kwaljiri, kaya, ngawo fate, limanti, njaba, yahuri, mude, wala, and alau, among others in damboa, konduga and gwoza council areas in the north-eastern part of nigeria. in those attacks, members of the group killed thousands of people and many more were forced to take refuge in neighboring villages in the republic of cameroon and other nigerian towns. an editorial in the november , issue of the guardian, one of nigeria's leading newspapers, pointed out that "there were in cameroun alone, , nigerians that fled gwoza, a town in borno state…." in january , the jihadist group attacked baga and killed hundreds of its residents. amnesty international has published aerial photographs of baga town before and after the attack to illustrate the mayhem boko haram unleashed on the town. the "before" images taken on january , were part of its report on the atrocities, while the aftermath was documented in pictures taken on january . the aerial photos may be found at http://www.dw.de/ amnesty-publishes-before-and-after-satellite-images-of-boko-haram-nigeriaattacks/a- . boko haram made a propaganda video of these violent attacks. its leader intended to use this on one hand to scare nigerians and on the other to convince its own members that the islamist group is strong, that nigerian soldiers were cowards and that the establishment of a caliphate rule in nigeria was a matter of when rather than whether. in the video, shekau said: "we killed the people of baga. we indeed killed them, as our lord instructed us in his book … we will not stop. this is not much. you'll see" . another video it utilized to scare nigerians was made in november , following its successful attack and destruction of vintim, hometown of the then chief of defence staff, of the nigerian military, air vice marshal alex badeh. the insurgent group burned down badeh's country home as an illustration of its contempt for the chief of defence staff and the nigerian military that he represented. the video also showed the group's successful attack on mubi, the commercial nerve center of adamawa state and in particular its destruction of the army battalion of the nigerian army that had been based in the city. as lasswell ( a lasswell ( , b noted, propaganda refers to the control of opinion by using picture and other forms of social control. this was indeed what shekau intended to achieve with these videos. boko haram produced another propaganda video after its brazen abduction of female students from the government girls' secondary school, chibok, borno state on november , . the group intended to use this video to serve two purposes. first, it aimed to persuade his audiences to believe that the jihadist sect was stronger than the nigerian government. secondly, the video aimed to show that the nigerian government was untruthful and could not be trusted. when boko haram abducted the girls, the nigerian government at first denied that the group had successfully done so. the wife of the president at the time, patience jonathan, as well as some government supporters, denied boko haram's claim that it had abducted the girls. mrs jonathan said that members of the opposition political party had fabricated the abduction story as a smear campaign against her husband, who was getting ready to run in the presidential election. kema chikwe, a prominent leader of the then ruling people's democratic party (pdp), added her voice to president jonathan's wife's denial. as chikwe contended that boko haram did not abduct any girls in the school, on april , she challenged the authorities of the school to release the names and pictures of the girls as a proof of the abduction. chikwe's comments were published in the may , issue of national leadership, one of nigeria's dailies. according to the paper, chikwe said: "there are many questions to be asked and many more to be answered. how did it happen? who saw it happen? who did not see it happen?" another supporter of the then president, also the founder of the militant niger delta peoples volunteer force, asari dokubo, described boko haram's claim of the abduction of the chibok girls as fake news. according to a report of the daily post of may , , in a terse message posted on his facebook page after the abduction of the girls, dokubo urged his friends to help disseminate the message that no girls at the school were abducted (ameh, may , ) . following all these denials by the federal government and its supporters, shekau then posted propaganda videos of the girls on youtube as proof to his audiences that his group had successfully abducted them, and that the nigerian government was not telling the truth about the abduction. to prove the veracity of his group's successful abduction of the chibok girls, he released a video showing the girls squatting on the ground, wearing black veils over their heads and reciting the quran. in the video, shekau spoke in hausa, arabic and english. for the first fourteen minutes of the fifty-seven-minute video, he took a swipe at the concept of democracy, western education and efforts by muslims and christians to live in peace. to persuade his audiences that boko haram was strong and that nigerian government lied about the abduction, he said: "i abducted a girl at a western education school and you are disturbed. i said western education should end. western education should end. girls, you should go and get married." shekau further said: "i will repeat this: western education should fold up. i abducted your girls. i will sell them in the market by allah. i will marry off a woman at the age of twelve. i will marry off a girl at the age of nine." the video can be viewed at http://www. theguardian.com/world/video/ /may/ /boko-haram-sell-girls-marketvideo. another video in which shekau boasted that he had the girls can be seen at http://search.tb.ask.com/search/video.jhtml?searchfor=video+of+bok o+haram+leader+warning+obama+and+western+leaders&cb=ux&p =% eux% exdm % eyya% eus&n= bb a &qid=c d b ba d f bce e c bfd&ptb=ea e - - abe- a -c e c & ct=ss&si= &pg=ggmain&pn= &ss=sub&st=tab&tpr=tabsbsug&vi dord= &vidid=umkj suzck. boko haram further utilized a video of its downing of a nigerian air force jet on september , to instill fear into nigerian air force pilots and persuade its members and the public to believe that the nigerian government was untruthful, whereas boko haram was sincere and truthful in its claims. the nigerian government at first claimed that it never lost any air force jet planes. the former director of defence information of the army at the time, major-general chris olukolade, said: "we are definitely searching for the jet, it is too early to either talk of a crash or attack by the insurgents." (alli, march , ) . following the government's denial, shekau released a video that showed the wreckage of the jet plane and the captured pilot. in the video, he shows the pilot's own confession in the english language. the video also shows burned parts of a nigerian air force plane in the bush, with the pilot in a camouflage vest kneeling on the ground, as well as a member of the islamist sect hovering over him with an axe. boko haram later claimed that it would behead the pilot. in the video, the pilot identifies himself as a wing commander in the nigerian air force, and says he was undertaking a mission in the kauri area of borno state on september , when his plane was shot down by boko haram fighters. he says: "we were shot down and our aircraft crashed. to this day i don't know the whereabouts of my second pilot." shekau used the video of the downed plane to persuade his followers and audiences to believe that the nigerian government was being untruthful. the government of nigeria betrayed its soldiers by not rescuing the pilot, whose name was chimda hedima. notably enough, the nigerian government has remained silent about his whereabouts. it did not take any known action to seek how the pilot could be rescued or brought back alive. this was utterly in contrast to the jordanian government's reaction when is downed and captured a jordanian pilot, lieutenant moaz al-kasasbeh, in december during a mission to support the us-led anti-is military coalition. the jordanian government sought the release of its pilot, perhaps in return for the release of is prisoners. when is burned the jordanian pilot alive, the government decided to fly military missions into syria to punish jihadists. in september , the nigerian government claimed that it had killed shekau during its offensive against boko karam in konduga. the nigerian press published photographs of the severed head of a person whom the government claimed was shekau. for example, the vanguard reported in its september , - to the jubilation of nigerians-that: nigeria and cameroon were, yesterday, locked in an argument over who killed boko haram leader abubakar shekau and where he was killed. in a rare public show by the cameroonian army (armée camerounaise), photos of shekau were made public alongside a statement claiming he was killed during a cross-border raid deep inside nigeria by its military. a cameroon military source, according to cameroon concord, said on sunday night that shekau was killed following an aerial bombardment of his hideout inside nigeria. (daniel et al. september , ) the vanguard further reported: "the nigerian army said its soldiers might have killed shekau in konduga, a town some kilometres away from maiduguri, the borno state capital" (ibid). many nigerians took to the streets in jubilation of the news. the euphoria that greeted the government's claim had hardly died down when shekau appeared in a two-minute video which was released to the french news agency (afp), debunking the government's claim as false. in the video shekau assures his audiences that he is alive and that only the allah (god almighty) could take his life, not the nigerian government. in the video, he says: "i am alive. i will only die the day allah takes my breath." the video can be seen at (http://search.tb.ask.com/search/video.jhtml?searchfor= boko+haram+in+camouflage+outfits&p =% eux% exdm % eyya % eus&n= bb a &ss=sub&st=tab&ptb=ea e - - abe- a -c e c &si= &tpr=sbt). shekau also used this propaganda video to subliminally persuade his followers and audiences that he is invincible and unpredictable. in the video, he lashes out at the then nigerian president goodluck jonathan and other world leaders, including barack obama, françois hollande, benjamin nethanyahu, angela merkel and david cameron. these authors accessed the video at http://search.tb.ask. com/search/video.jhtml?searchfor=boko+haram+in+camouflage+outfits&p =% eux% exdm % eyya% eus&n= bb a &ss=sub&st=tab&p tb=ea e - - abe- a -c e c &si= &tpr=sbt. in a different video, shekau warns western leaders that the jihadist group will "enslave" all supporters of hollande and obama: "whoever supports hollande and obama, as they supported bush and clinton before, and supported the state of jewish israel, he is an enemy and a target to us and we will enslave him and sell him in the markets." he says that boko haram will unleash deadly attacks on those who believe in the democratic system of government. the video can be accessed at http://universalfreepress.com/ boko-haram-leader-threatens-enslave-supporters-obama/. baines and o'shaughnessy ( ) , qualter ( ) , ellul ( ellul ( , , taylor ( ) , jowett and o'donnell ( ) and others have pointed out that propaganda is a form of communication that attempts to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist. this is what shekau intended to achieve with his propaganda videos. he distributed them to the powerful european news wire services as well as via different social media platforms, so they would receive maximum global attention. boko haram utilized social media to disseminate its messages. unlike other terrorist organizations, boko haram did not use social media as a primary tool to recruit followers but primarily to convey a message about its ruthlessness vicuousness and its total disdain for the nigerian government. it utilized its messaging to showcase its military prowess and the invincibility and nine lives of its leader, shekau. boko haram employed social media to excoriate the nigerian government for its ineptness, corruption, deceitfulness and incompetency. so long as boko haram achieved military successes against the nigerian armed forces, its ability to use the social media to its advantage was immense. each spectacular military victory enhanced boko haram's social media messaging of brutality and military efficiency. however, as the tide of the war turned against it, and shekau was on the run, it became less effective in using social media to advance its cause. moreover, while its astute use of brutality achieved its aim of scaring soldiers and civilians, it undercut its larger message that it was fighting on behalf of islam, since the vast majority of the victims of its brutality were muslims. shekau is able to turn his lack of fluency in english to his advantage by seemingly speaking a smattering of english in a disdainful manner in order to signal boko haram's rejection of western-style education. he frequently speaks in hausa and arabic and tries to convey an air of expertise, but he is not able to pull this off as his rambling speaking style betrays his shallow understanding of islam. ironically, the urge to convince his viewers and listeners of his brutality undercuts the air of intellectualism that he seeks to portray. boko haram initially succeeded in utilizing social media to its advantage because of a poor response by the nigerian government. claiming to have killed shekau so many times provided fodder for boko haram's claim that the nigerian government lied to its citizens. moreover, the inability of the armed forces to crush boko haram under deadlines imposed by the government itself ended up reinforcing boko haram's claim that it could not be defeated. boko haram's ability to infiltrate the army, and the enormous corruption involving the purchase of arms to fight the terrorist group, all aided boko haram's success in depicting the nigerian government as an inept and clueless entity. boko haram's social media messaging lived by the sword and is apparently dying by the sword. the jihadist's fundamental message of its sheer brutality and invisibility was credible so long as nigerian soldiers were fleeing in disarray from the terrorist group. however, as new military commanders, including lieutenant-general yusuf buratai, the chief of army staff, took over and began to take the fight to boko haram, the tables were turned against it. for over a year, shekau was not heard from. he has begun to speak again but his threats now sound hollow. although boko haram continues to launch deadly attacks, it has been uprooted from all the towns and villages which it had captured from nigerian forces. in addition, it has been driven out of sambisa forest, which for many years served as its operational base for attacks. shekau is now on the run and even his leadership of the group has been threatened from within. boko haram's serious military setbacks have not totally silenced its social media propaganda but its loud and boastful braggadocio has been reduced to an occasional whimper. as has been the case of is, military defeats blunt the allure of terrorist propaganda. they demystify terrorists and their seeming ruthless efficiency and invisibility. initially, nigeria did not have a credible means to counter boko haram's social media messaging but militarily routing of boko haram has proven to be the most effective response to the group's reign of terror both on the battlefield and on social media. in june , the largest social media platforms, facebook, youtube, microsoft, and twitter, agreed to set up a common database to identify terrorist propaganda in order to check the distribution of extremist ideology. this step was a recognition of the increasing use of social media by terrorist organizations and the dangers inherent in such usage. terrorism cannot be curbed unless terrorists and their organizations are well understood. social media messaging by extremist groups provide an important avenue for understanding terrorist groups' world views, goals and objectives. we have utilized the analysis of boko haram's social media messaging to demonstrate how this vicious and ruthless terrorist group has used social media to illuminate itself and what it stands for. for an understanding of scholarly analyses of the maitatsene riots see, for example the maitatsene riots in kano, : an assessment for accounts of nigerian newspapers report on the conflict see, for example, the vanguard for an understanding of some of the violent attacks of members of the niger delta avengers on nigeria's oil and gas infrastructure see, for example, the report of al jazeera report of with schoolgirls taken by boko haram still missing amnesty publishes before and after satellite images of boko haram nigeria attacks boko haram ahead of isis for deadliest terror group see also agbese, p.o. internal military deployment and civil-military relations: the boko haram insurgency in nigeria for an understanding of media reports of boko haram's downing of an alpha jet (naf ) belonging to the nigerian air force that was involved in a counter-insurgency operation against the extremist islamic sect see, for example, a premium times news report titled boko haram: islamism, politics, security and the state in the message and methods of boko haram boko haram crisis: a chronology by the numbers: the nigeria state's efforts to counter boko haram boko haram and its muslim critics: observations from yobe state christian perceptions of islam and society in relation to boko haram and recent events in jos and northern nigeria boko haram: anatomy of a crisis, bristol, e-international relations what do we really know about boko haram? responses of the nigerian defense and intelligence establishments to the challenge of boko hara why nigeria is not winning the anti-boko haram war an assessment of roles of security agencies in checkmating insurgent movements in nigeria understanding boko haram's attacks on telecommunications infrastructure anatomy of a crisis haram and the evolving salafi jihadist threat in nigeria linkages between boko haram and al qaeda: a potential deadly synergy to be or not to be: is boko haram a foreign terrorist organization? boko haram's international reach al-qa'ida's west africa advance: nigeria's boko haram, mali's touareg, and the spread of salafi jihadism boko haram, identity and the limits of terrorism the boko haram uprising and islamic revivalism in nigeria the nigerian burden: religious identity, conflict and the current terrorism of boko haram, conflict, security and development why boko haram exists: the relative deprivation perspective nigeria without nigerians? boko haram and the crisis in nigeria's nation-building boko haram: peace culture and the quest for a united nations boko haram catastrophic terrorism: an albatross to national peace, security and sustainable development in nigeria an assessment of roles of security agencies in checkmating insurgent movements in nigeria requiem biafra killed, . m displaced by b/haram-shettima. daily trust boko haram: peace culture and the quest for a united nations why we struck: the story of the first nigerian coup nigeria without nigerians? boko haram and the crisis in nigeria's nation-building half of a yellow sun the nigerian burden: religious identity, conflict and the current terrorism of boko haram. conflict, security and development why boko haram exists: the relative deprivation perspective boko haram: military jet missing in adamawa. thisday sunset in biafra no girls are missing, chibok abduction is a scam boko haram claims baga attack in new video political marketing and propaganda: uses, abuses, misuses boko haram catastrophic terrorism: an albatross to national peace, security and sustainable development in nigeria the evolution of terrorist propaganda: the paris attack and social media semantics and ethics of propaganda the islamic state's use of online social media the power of propaganda the new propaganda: the dictatorship of palaver in contemporary politics boko haram: islamism, politics, security and the state in nigeria propaganda: the formation of men's attitudes the ethics of propaganda: propaganda, innocence and morality. communication the biafra story: the making of an african legend a propaganda index for reviewing problem framing in articles and manuscripts: an exploratory study propaganda analysis: a study of inferences made from nazi propaganda in world war linkages between boko haram and al qaeda: a potential deadly synergy boko haram's cost to nigeria's borno: s billion and rising propaganda: main trends of the modern world across the gulf propaganda and persuasion boko haram's international reach how effective was nazi propaganda? crisis and conflict in nigeria: a documentary sourcebook why is isis winning the social media war? wired propaganda technique in the world the nigerian revolution and the biafra war killing in the name of god? explaining the boko haram phenomenon in nigeria boko haram: anatomy of a crisis understanding the emerging trend of terrorism in nigeria: a case study of boko haram responses of the nigerian defense and intelligence establishments to the challenge of boko hara strategic communications planning for public relations and marketing why nigeria is not winning the anti-boko haram war understanding boko haram's attacks on telecommunication infrastructure boko haram and the evolving salafi jihadist threat in nigeria u.s. congress and boko haram ipskamp drukkers age of propaganda: the everyday use and abuse of persuasion propaganda and psychological warfare boko haram crisis: a chronology with schoolgirls taken by boko haram still missing, u.s.-nigeria ties falter by the numbers: the nigeria state's efforts to counter boko haram the impact of boko haram on nigerian national development encyclopedia of african history boko haram, identity and the limits of terrorism the brothers' war: biafra & nigeria hitler's war and the germans al-qa'ida's west africa advance: nigeria's boko haram, mali's touareg, and the spread of salafi jihadism film propaganda: soviet russia and nazi germany nazi propaganda: the power and limitations the third reich: politics and propaganda key: cord- - zceop authors: li, xiao; houshmand, farzin; lesani, mohsen title: hampa: solver-aided recency-aware replication date: - - journal: computer aided verification doi: . / - - - - _ sha: doc_id: cord_uid: zceop replication is a common technique to build reliable and scalable systems. traditional strong consistency maintains the same total order of operations across replicas. this total order is the source of multiple desirable consistency properties: integrity, convergence and recency. however, maintaining the total order has proven to inhibit availability and performance. weaker notions exhibit responsiveness and scalability; however, they forfeit the total order and hence its favorable properties. this project revives these properties with as little coordination as possible. it presents a tool called [formula: see text] that given a sequential object with the declaration of its integrity and recency requirements, automatically synthesizes a correct-by-construction replicated object that simultaneously guarantees the three properties. it features a relational object specification language and a syntax-directed analysis that infers optimum staleness bounds. further, it defines coordination-avoidance conditions and the operational semantics of replicated systems that provably guarantees the three properties. it characterizes the computational power and presents a protocol for recency-aware objects. [formula: see text] uses automatic solvers statically and embeds them in the runtime to dynamically decide the validity of coordination-avoidance conditions. the experiments show that recency-aware objects reduce coordination and response time. replicated objects [ , , , , ] are pervasively used for fault-tolerance, availability, responsiveness and scalability. they are used in diverse application areas [ , [ ] [ ] [ ] , , , , ] including embedded controllers, online services and game engines. however, coordinating the replicas has proven to be challenging. strongly consistent replication, provided by consensus protocols such as viewstamp [ ] , paxos [ ] and raft [ ] , guarantees the same total order of operations across replicas. the total order simultaneously provides a hoard of favorable properties: integrity, convergence and recency. replicas converge to the same state as the result of the same sequence of operations. further, a propagated operation executes in the same state as the originating replica. therefore, if an operation preserves the integrity properties [ ] at the originating replica, it this project was supported by the nsf grant # . will certainly preserve them in the other replicas as well. in addition, the lockstep execution keeps the replicas recent: an operations executes in all replicas before the next. thus, replicas can be stale by at most one operation. however, strong consistency may not be available and responsive during network failures or offline use. further, its scalability is limited. the tradeoff between strong consistency of replicated objects, and their availability and responsiveness is a famous dilemma [ , , [ ] [ ] [ ] . therefore, system designers opted for weaker notions of consistency such as eventual [ , , , , , , , ] and causal [ , , ] consistency that can provide availability, responsiveness and scalability but lose the same total order of operations. several projects [ , , ] provide programming interfaces for weak consistency notions. unfortunately, the large collection of subtle weak consistency notions is unintuitive to users. if the chosen notion is too weak, it can affect correctness, and if it is too strong, it may degrade scalability. therefore, researchers have recently provided high-level abstractions to shield the user from low-level complexities of weak consistency. these projects seem to be the steps towards reviving the same three pillars of consistency, i.e. integrity, convergence and recency, with as little coordination [ , , ] as possible. crdts [ ] revived convergence. if an object satisfies a few algebraic properties, its replication can enjoy convergence even on top of eventual consistency. however, the replicas can experience states that violate the integrity properties. therefore, follow-up projects revived the integrity property. cise [ ] and soteria [ ] present proof techniques to verify the integrity properties of a replicated object. sieve [ ] , indigo [ ] and hamsaz [ ] translate the given high-level integrity properties to hybrid models. however, they are oblivious to state recency. the operations are eventually delivered to all replicas, however, they may be arbitrarily delayed. some updates may be delivered too late and expose the clients to stale data. on the other hand, at the expense of more communication, some updates may be immediately sent and delivered. however, applications may prefer to obtain more scalability and energy efficiency in return for bounded staleness. in fact, many applications such as ticketing, distributed sensors and network accounting can work with fairly recent data. previous work such as tact [ ] , trapp [ ] , fract [ ] , and pbs [ ] considered staleness but did not address integrity and communication minimization. further, they did not provide automatic analysis, decision and synthesis. in addition to convergence and integrity, this project, hampa, revives recency. given a sequential object with the declaration of its integrity properties and recency requirements for its methods, it automatically synthesizes a correct-by-construction replicated object that guarantees integrity, convergence and recency while avoiding unnecessary coordination. to capture object specifications from the user, we present a relational language and its denotational semantics. the language provides a complete set of relational operators to define the object methods and integrity properties, and allows the user to declare recency requirements for the return value of each method. given a principled object specification, we present a syntax-directed analysis that infers optimum staleness bounds for each element of the state. we present the conditions required to simultaneously preserve the three properties: convergence, integrity and recency. these conditions are used to define a novel operational semantics of replicated objects that provably preserve convergence, integrity and the inferred staleness bound. we observe that recencyawareness not only guarantees a limit on the staleness, but also allows buffering of calls and reduces the coordination required to preserve integrity. we characterize the computational power of recency-aware replicated objects. we show that recency-aware objects have the same power as the perfect failure detector. we present a novel protocol for recency-aware replicated objects that implements the semantics. we use off-the-shelve smt solvers both statically and embed them at runtime to decide the validity of coordination-avoidance conditions. we present a tool called hampa that given an object definition, analyzes the object and instantiates the protocol to synthesize replicated objects. our experiments with the synthesized objects show that the staleness bound has an inverse relationship with the coordination and response time. in summary, this paper presents the following contributions: ( ) a relational object specification language that captures integrity and recency declarations, and its denotational semantics (sect. ). ( ) the coordination conditions and the operational semantics of replicated systems that simultaneously preserve convergence, integrity and recency (sects. and ). ( ) a syntax-directed analysis that infers optimum staleness bounds for each element of the state (sect. ). ( ) the characterization of the computational power and a protocol for recency-aware replicated objects, (sect. ). ( ) the hampa replicated object synthesis tool and its experimental results (sect. ). all the proofs are available in the appendix [ ] . language. figure shows our core relational language for object specification. an object is a record Σ, i, m that includes a state type Σ, an invariant i on the state, and a set of methods m. the state can be a tuple of natural number nat and relation rel types. the invariant i is a boolean function on the state. a method m is a function from the parameter x and the pre-state x , .., x n to a record of e g , e u , e r . the guard e g is a boolean expression that captures the semantic preconditions of m such as conditions on the arguments. the expressions e u and e r are for the post-state and the return value. we use guard, update and retv as functions that extract elements of this record. for each method, the user declares an integer as the staleness bound for its return value. a method call c is a method applied to its argument i.e. it is a function from the current state to a record of e g , e u , e r . an expression e is either a value v (that can be either a number n or a relation r), a variable denoted by x, an application of the operators {+, −, =, <, &, !} to operand expressions where & is the conjunction and and ! is the negation operator, a selection σ λ x .e (e ) that binds the attributes of each element of the relation e to the variables x and returns the elements that satisfy the condition e, a projection Π λ x . e (e ) that for each element of the relation e , binds its attributes to the variables x and calculates a tuple of elements e and returns the set of resulting tuples, a union e ∪ e that results in a relation with elements of both of the relations e and e , a difference e \ e that results in a relation with the elements in the relation e that are not in the relation e , and the cartesian product e × e that results in a relation with pair elements where the first and second elements are in the relations e and e respectively. the language supports a complete set of relational operators: any relational algebra expression can be expressed by a combination of them. selection (σ), projection (π), union (∪), difference (\), product (×) and renaming (ρ) are a complete set of operators. we note that since the language uses functions with argument names, a renaming operator is unnecessary. the update and join operations are defined as a syntactic sugar. the update operation u λ x . e, e e returns a relation that updates each element of e that satisfies the condition e to the tuple e . the join e λ x ,x . e e results in pairs of elements of e and e that satisfy the condition e. figure presents a denotational semantics for expressions. the semantics for values, variables, and binary and unary operations is standard. the semantics of the selection expression σ λ x .e (e) is the set of tuples t in the semantics of e such that substitution of the attributes x in e with their corresponding values in t evaluates to true. the semantics of the projection expression Π λ x . e (e ) is a set of tuples, one per each tuple t in the semantics of e : a tuple resulted from substituting x with t in the expressions e and evaluating them. the semantics of union, difference and product are standard from the set theory. we define the difference Δ between two values as follows: the difference between two natural numbers is the absolute value of their subtraction i.e. Δ(n, n ) = |n − n |; the difference of two relations is the size of their symmetric difference i.e. Δ(r, r ) = |r \ r | + |r \ r|. we use delta δ to represents the staleness of a value that is the difference between the value and its target value. the delta for a completely recent (or exact) value is zero. for a call c, the weight weight(c) is a bound on the difference that the execution of c can make on the state of the object. in other words, for every call c, we have ∀σ. let , σ , := c(σ) in Δ(σ , σ) < weight(c). running use-case. figure shows the movie booking use-case. the state of the object is the two relations reservation rs and movie ms. the reservation relation rs stores the movies that the users have booked; it is the pairs of users u and movies m. the movie relation ms stores the number of available spaces for each movie; it is the pairs of movies m and spaces a. the integrity property i is a conjunction of three conditions: ( ) the movie in ms should be unique. ( ) the referential integrity requires that every movie in rs exists in ms. ( ) the number of available spaces for every movie should be non-negative. the object provides five update methods and three query methods. given a user u and a movie m, the method book adds the pair to rs and decrements the available spaces for m in ms. similarly, the method cancelbook removes a reservation and increments available spaces. given a movie m, the method offscreen removes the corresponding tuple from ms. given a movie m and a number n, the method specialreserve subtracts n from the available spaces for m in ms. the dual method increasespace adds n to the spaces for m. given a movie m, the method queryspace returns the number of available spaces for m. the method queryreservations returns the set of movies that the given user has booked. given a user u, the method queryspaces returns the pairs of movies and their available spaces for the movies that u has booked. the staleness bound for the update methods is specified as . the returned none constant ⊥ is always exact. the bound values , and of the query methods represent the number of tuples that are different between the current state and the pending stable state of the result relation. to reduce communication, certain calls can be executed locally and buffered, and the buffer can be communicated to other replicas later. as an example, in fig. (a) , the first two calls to the method increasespace do not exceed the staleness bound for ms and can be buffered. however, the third call exceeds the bound and cannot be added to the buffer. therefore, the buffer is flushed to other replicas and the third call is blocked until an acknowledgement for the delivery of the buffer is received. all the calls of the buffer can be sent in a single message and the acknowledgement for them can be sent in a single message as well. let us now consider the interaction of buffering with coordination. we will see that buffering (staleness) interestingly reduces the coordination required for the conflicts. (we will define conflicting calls that should be synchronized later in sect. .) fig. (b) and (c) show the same execution without and with buffering respectively. in fig. (b) , the first replica rep executes the sequence of calls increasespace, specialreserve and increasespace. the method increasespace does not conflict with any other method; therefore, calls to it are simply broadcast. the method specialreserve conflicts with itself and the method book; therefore, the call to it goes through synchronization. the second replica rep calls book that conflicts with four other methods. hence, it should synchronize. (the synchronization reaches to other replicas, blocks calling the four methods, and propagates previous calls to those methods.) in this example, the conflicting specialreserve call in rep should be propagated to rep before the book call can be executed. in fig. (c), the recency bound allows the three calls of rep to be buffered. replicas use smt solvers at runtime to check the validity of three properties for the buffers: all-s-commutativity, invariant-sufficiency and let-p-rcommutativity that we will formally define in sect. . in this example, the buffer is invariant-sufficient if the number of spaces that the call specialreserve decrements is less than the number that the increasespace calls increment. therefore, the buffer can be sent to other replicas without any additional synchronization; the invariant in the pre-state is sufficient for the invariant in its post-state. we note that the call specialreserve that previously went through synchronization does not need any synchronization inside the buffer. further, the let-p-rcommutativity property of the buffer guarantees that the book call will preserve the integrity after the buffer. thus, the synchronization of the book call that previously waited for the specialreserve call does not need to wait anymore. in this section, we present the coordination conditions for replicated objects that preserve the three properties: convergence, integrity and recency. the state of the given sequential object is replicated across replicas. clients can request method calls at every replica, and replicas coordinate the calls. convergence is the safety property that when all pending updates are processed, the replicas converge to the same state. integrity is the safety property that every method call is executed only on a state where the guard of the method and the invariant are satisfied. recency is the safety property that bounds the difference between the state of a replica and its impending state after the pending calls are applied. the state of each replica is initialized to the same state σ that satisfies the invariant i. the replica that accepts the request for a call from the user is called the originating replica of the call. we uniquely identify requests by identifiers r. we use the two maps call and orig that map request identifiers to the method call and originating replica respectively. the execution history of a replica is modeled as a permutation of a set of request identifiers. an execution x of a set of requests r is a bijective from positions [ ..|r| − ] to r. we denote the range of x as r(x). an execution x of r defines the total order ≺ x on r: a request r precedes another request r in an execution x written as r ≺ x r iff x − (r) < x − (r ). a replicated execution xs is a function from replicas n to executions. the post-state of each call at a replica is the result of applying the call to its pre-state. we first revisit the coordination conditions for convergence and integrity [ ] , and then present coordination conditions for recency and their impact on the prior conditions. a replicated execution is convergent if the state of the replicas is the same after all the calls are propagated. out of order delivery of method calls at different replicas can lead to divergence of their states. method calls such as special reservation specialreserve and increasing space increasespace result in the same state if their order of execution is swapped. however, the resulting state of the two method calls book and cancelbook is dependent on their execution order. therefore, they should synchronize. integrity. the body of each method relies on the invariant in the pre-state. further, methods have explicit guards that declare their pre-conditions. we say that a method call enjoys integrity at a state if the invariant and the guard of the method hold in that state. method calls should be executed only in states that they have integrity in. the integrity condition is simply lifted to executions and replicated executions: an execution enjoys integrity iff every request in it enjoys integrity. in contrast to integrity that requires the invariant to hold in the pre-state, permissibility requires it to hold in the post-state. the post-state of a call is the pre-state of the next call in a replica. further, the initial state is assumed to satisfy the invariant. therefore, if every call is permissible in its pre-state, then every call enjoys integrity. by induction, permissibility leads to integrity. to execute a method call, we check that it is permissible at its originating replica. thus, we say that each method call is locally permissible. otherwise, the call is aborted or delayed. still, if the call is simply broadcast, it is not necessarily permissible when it arrives at other replicas. some calls need coordination. there are calls such as increasespace that are always permissible as far as they are applied to a state that satisfies the invariant. increasing the space cannot result in a missing or duplicate movie or a negative number for available spaces. thus, if it is broadcast and executed on another replica, it is sufficient that the pre-state satisfies the invariant to preserve it in the post-state. however, not all calls are invariant-sufficient. for example, a book call may be permissible in a replica but may become impermissible in another when it is executed after an already executed offscreen call for the same movie. these two calls should synchronize to preserve integrity. nonetheless, some pairs of calls such as offscreen and specialreserve do not affect each other's permissibility. (in the running example, specialreserve has no guards. after an offscreen call, it remains permissible as it doesn't find the movie and leaves the relation unchanged). the call c p-rcommutes with the call c written as if a call c is invariant-sufficient or p-r-commutes another call c , then the call c will stay permissible when it is propagated and applied to another replica even if c is executed before it in that replica. the call offscreen p-concurs with the call specialreserve; however, the call book p-conflicts with the call offscreen. we say that two calls concur iff they both s-commute and p-concur with each other. otherwise, we say they conflict and need synchronization. a pair of calls c and c concur iff they s-commute and p-concur with each other. otherwise, they conflict c c . dependency. as we saw above, invariant-sufficient method calls can always preserve the invariant. however, there are calls whose preservation of the invariant is dependent on the calls that have executed before them at that replica. for example, taking the movie off-screen offscreen is dependent on cancelling the last booking cancelbook. if offscreen is moved left before cancelbook, it can become impermissible. nonetheless, taking a movie off-screen offscreen is independent of the previous special reservations specialreserve. a call c p-l-commutes a call c , written as c ← p c iff for every σ, if p(update(c )(σ), c ) then p(σ, c ). a call can avoid tracking dependencies to another call if the former is invariant-sufficient or p-l-commutes with the latter. if c is executed before c in the originating replica of c and c is dependent on c , then c should be applied to other replicas only if c is already applied. recency. calls executed at a replica may be delayed in the network before they are executed in other replicas. further, they may be buffered at the originating replica to reduce communication. the pending calls for a replica are the calls that have executed in other replicas but not at that replica yet. the staleness of a replica is the difference of its current state and its state after applying its pending calls. given a bound , a replica is sufficiently recent if its staleness is less than . the calls that have originated in the current replica n but have not been received yet by another replica n make the state of n stale. to bound the staleness of n by , the staleness imposed to n by the calls originated by each of the other |n | − replicas should be bounded by /(|n | − ). the difference that these calls can make is bounded by the sum of their weights (defined in sect. ). the staleness bound can be evenly divided between the replicas. however, in general it can be distributed unevenly and even dynamically. in particular, replicas that tend to issue updates more often can get a larger share. given a recency bound, a buffering quota can be calculated for each replica and the recency bound can be preserved when calls are buffered. buffering calls can reduce communication; however, it can affect the convergence and integrity properties. to preserve these properties a buffer should have three properties: allstate-commutativity, invariant-sufficiency and let-p-r-commutativity. we consider each condition in turn. the calls of the buffer are executed locally and are not synchronized with other replicas. therefore, if the buffer is not all-s-commutative, concurrent execution of s-conflicting calls in other replicas can lead to divergence. similarly, if the buffer is not invariant-sufficient, concurrent execution of p-conflicting calls in other replicas can lead to impermissibility of the buffer when it is propagated and executed in other replicas. the buffer in fig. (c) is all-s-commutative: it includes increasespace and specialreserve calls that result in increasing or decreasing the space for movies; the result is s-commutative with respect to all method calls. further, it is invariant-sufficient if the net result of its calls is a non-negative addition to the space of each movie. for example, if the increasespace calls add s spaces and the specialreserve calls subtract s spaces from the same movie where s ≤ s, then the net effect is adding spaces and the buffer is invariant-sufficient. calls in other replicas are checked to be permissible with no knowledge of the buffered calls in the current replica. let-p-r-commutativity of the buffer of the current replica guarantees that the calls in other replicas will continue to be permissible once they are propagated and executed after the buffer in the current replica. the buffer in fig. (c) is let-p-r-commutative; it may only increase the number of spaces that cannot make any call impermissible. in this section, we define the operational semantics of replicated objects where ( ) the integrity property i on the state of each replica is always preserved, ( ) replicas converge to the same state once all the calls are propagated, and ( ) the staleness of each replica is always bounded by . the semantics declares the conditions for execution and propagation of method calls on the replicated object to guarantee the three properties. in particular, it represents the conditions for local buffering of method calls to avoid communication while preserving the recency of the other replicas. in sect. , we will see a static analysis that infers staleness bounds for the state. in this section, the semantics preserves the inferred staleness bound for the state σ of the object. (for objects with multiple pieces of state, the staleness of each piece can be tracked separately.) the semantics strives to concisely define the conditions; we will present the protocols that implement these conditions in sect. . fig. shows, the global state of the replicated system is represented as a world w that is a tuple of h, t, xs, orig, call . the hosts h is a mapping from replica identifiers n to the local state of replicas. each call is assigned a unique request identifier r at the originating replica. the two maps call and orig keep a mapping from request identifiers to the call and the originating replica of the request respectively. the state of each replica is a statement s ∈ s, the state of the object σ ∈ Σ, and the identifier r ∈ r of the current buffer. a statement s is either x ← c; s that is the sequence of a call c and another statement s , or the terminal statement skip. a call c is the application of a method m to an argument expression e. a call can also be the identity call id that leaves the state unchanged. (it is assumed that client statements do not make id calls.) the network t is the set of packets that are sent but not yet delivered. a packet p contains the identifier of the destination replica n and the request identifier r of the call. if a packet is transmitting a buffered call, it is decorated with an asterisk * . the history xs is a mapping from replica identifiers n to the list of request identifiers of the calls that are previously applied to that replica. the initial value of the world state is w where each replica n hold its initial statement s n , the initial state σ of the object that satisfies the integrity property i, and an empty buffer. empty buffers are represented by mapping the buffer identifier r n of each replica n to the identity call id. figure presents the operational semantics. the rule call executes a method call c at a replica n. the call c can be executed if the following conditions hold. ( ) to preserve integrity, the call c should be locally permissible p(σ, c) in the current state σ. ( ) to preserve convergence and integrity, any pair of conflicting calls should have the same order across the replicas, a property that we call conflict-synchronization. thus, to execute a new request r, the rule call requires the condition conflictsyncinit: any call r that is already executed in another replica n and conflicts with the current call r should have been already executed in the current replica n. otherwise, once the calls r and r are propagated and executed on the other replicas, they will have different orders in the two replicas n and n . ( ) to preserve recency, this rule requires the condition inbound: the difference that the pending calls from the current replica n can make to the state of every other replica n should be bounded by / (|n | − ) . if the conditions above hold, a fresh identifier r is created for the call, the history xs and the maps orig and call are updated to reflect the new call, a packet is sent in the network t to every other replica, and the variable x is substituted with the returned value v of the call in the continuation statement s of the current replica. the rule deliver delivers a call that has been sent to the current replica. it requires two conditions: conflict-synchronization and dependency-preservation. ( ) similar to the rule call, conflict-synchronization requires conflictsync: if a conflicting call r is executed before the received call r in another replica n , then r should have been already executed before r in n as well. ( ) to preserve integrity, the dependencies of calls should be preserved. thus, the dependencypreservation condition deppres requires that a call r originated from a replica n is executed in the current replica n only if the calls r that have been executed before r in n and r is dependent on r should have been already executed in n. recency-aware replication can be applied to any object, but it can improve performance when there are method calls that can be buffered. the rule cal-llocal executes a call but locally buffers it. similar to the rule call, it first checks the local permissibility of the call c. since a buffered call is not immediately coordinated with calls in other replicas, it should satisfy the three properties (that saw in sect. ) to make it concur with any call: ( ) all-statecommutativity allscomm, ( ) invariant-sufficiency invsuff, and ( ) let-p-rightcommutativity letprcomm. the identifier of the current buffer is r; the current → (s, σ , r ) ], t, xs , orig, call) call c is composed with the current buffered call call(r) to result in a composed call c for the updated buffer. the composition · of calls simply cascades their updates to the state. the all-state-commutativity condition is stated for single calls c (that implies the same condition for the composed call c as well). this condition is required for the call c because there might be other calls delivered between the last buffered call and the currently buffered call c. the call c should state-commute past the calls in between. further, as explained for the rule call, the condition inbound requires that the added staleness remains within bound. if the above conditions hold, the map call is updated with the new buffer call c , and the identifier r of the buffered call is added to the history xs, if the buffer was empty and the current call c is the first buffered call. the rule sendbuffer sends the buffer to every other replica and resets the buffer. packets transmitting buffers are decorated with an asterisk. the rule deliverbuffer receives a packet containing a buffer. as we saw in the rule calllocal, buffers are checked to be invariant-sufficient in the originating replica. therefore, on receiving a packet containing a buffer, in contrast to the rule deliver, the rule deliverbuffer does not checks the dependency-preservationdeppres and the conflict-synchronization conflictsync conditions. the following lemmas state the three properties of the semantics. the following lemma states that once the buffers are flushed call(r) = call(r ) = id and the messages are delivered t = ∅, the replicas converge to the same state. for all h, n, n , σ, σ , r and r the following lemma states that every call enjoys the integrity property. for all h, n, r, c, w and σ , σ, then integrity(σ, c) . the staleness of a replica is the difference of its current state and its state after applying its pending calls from others (buffered calls and in transit calls). the following lemma states that the stateless of every replica is bounded by . in sect. , we presented an operational semantics that preserves a given staleness bound for the state. the users declare the recency that they expect from the return value of each method of the object. the specified bounds for the methods can be used to infer the bounds for the elements of the state. in this section, given an object specification that includes recency declarations for the methods, we present a static analysis that infers optimum staleness bounds for each element of the state. we present a syntax-directed analysis that derives recency constraints between bound variables for the state elements. a solution to the constraints assigns a bound value to each state element such that if every state element keeps its staleness bound then the result of every method call respects the recency declaration of the method. the optimum solution maximizes the (weighted) sum of the bounds to increase buffered calls and hence decrease communication. fig. . bound constraint derivation figure presents the constraint inference rules for the object language that we saw in fig. . a delta bound δ is either a natural number n, a delta variable dx, or addition or multiplication of two deltas. a constraint c is equality or comparison of two deltas, or conjunction of two constraints. a delta environment Γ is a mapping from variables to delta variables or values. the judgements are of the following forms: the judgement o c states the bounding constraint c for the object o, the judgement m c states the constraint c for the method m, and the judgement Γ e δ, c states that under the delta environment Γ, the staleness of the expression e is bounded by δ when the constraints c are satisfied. the rule cobj states that the constraint for an object is the conjunction of the constraints for its methods. (we assume that the state variables passed to all the methods are renamed to the same variables σ , .., σ n .) the rule cmet infers the constraints for a method by first, inferring the constraints for its return expression under a delta environment where the argument is mapped to the delta value of zero (exactly recent) and the state variables σ i are mapped to delta variables dσ i to be inferred, and second, bounding the return value. the rule cval assigns the delta value zero to values with no constraints. (values are exact.) the rule cvar retrieves the bindings for delta variables from the environment. the rule cop states that the delta for the result of the operators {+, −, ∪, \} is the sum of the delta of its operands. on the other hand, the rule cbop requires the operands of the boolean operators {=, <, &} to be exact and states that the result is exact as well. we elide the similar rule for the unary negation operator !. the rule csel requires the selection condition to be exact and states that the delta of the resulting relation is the same as the input relation. in other words, the resulting relation is stale by the same number of elements as the input relation. similarly, the rule cproj states that the delta of the resulting relation is the same as the input relation. on the other hand, the rule cprod states that the delta for the resulting relation is the multiplication of the deltas for the input relations. in our running example, let us associate the bound variables drs and dms to rs and ms respectively. the constraint inferred for queryspace is dms ≤ , for queryreservations is drs ≤ , and for queryspace that involves the join operator (product and selection) is drs × dms ≤ . more detailed explanation for these derivation is available in the appendix [ ] . we now define the notion of sufficiently-recent states. intuitively, a state is sufficiently-recent with respect to the target state if the difference of the return value of every method call on that state versus the target state is within the declared bound of the method. a state v , .., v n is a sufficiently-recent state with respect to the target state v * , .., v * n for an object o iff for every method def m(x)( σ , .., σ n ) e g , e u , e r of o, and every argu- the following lemma states that the bound inference presented in fig. is sound. in other words, if the inference derives the constraints c for an object, for any solution s of c, if the staleness of each state element σ i of the object remains within the bound s(dσ i ), then the state remains sufficiently-recent. there may be many solutions for the derived constraints, and hence, many sound state bounds that preserve the user-specified bounds for the object. however, solutions that allow more staleness (albeit appropriately bounded) are more favorable since they allow more buffered calls and require less communication. thus, a candidate objective function to maximize is dσ + .. + dσ n . in other words, what are the largest delta bounds for the state elements that still preserve the recency specifications of the methods? this function gives the same weight to all the state elements; however, some may be updated more frequently. let f i be the relative update frequency of the state element σ i . frequencies can be obtained from historical logs or profiling. the objective function is defined as the following weighted sum dσ /f + .. + dσ n /f n . more frequently updated state elements are given proportionally larger bounds. in our running example, let = , = , and = . if the update frequency of rs is twice as ms, the optimum solution is drs = and dms = . it is obvious that the objective function can be easily translated to a linear function by multiplying the least common denominator of the frequencies. now, we show that recency-aware objects are stronger than the perfect failure detector abstraction [ ] and present a protocol that implements recency-aware objects using perfect failure detectors. these two results show that recency-aware objects have the same computational power as the perfect failure detector. the perfect failure detector abstraction p notifies processes about the crash of the other processes in a synchronous network. it has the following properties: liveness: every crashed process is eventually detected by all correct processes. safety: no correct process is ever suspected by other processes. the recencyaware object r has the following liveness and safety properties. liveness: if the user makes a request to a correct replica, it eventually responds. safety: executed calls that are yet pending for each correct replica is bounded. the following lemma states that p is reducible to r and also its opposite, r is reducible to p. return false return true indication (rb, deliver(n, buff(buff ))) if (self = n) exec(buff ) issue request (pl, send(n, ack(buff ))) indication (pl, deliver(n, ack(c))) issue request (pl, send(orig(c), ack(c))) issue indication ret(c, v) fig. . recency-aware protocol for the proof of the first conjunct, consider two replicas rep and rep . we show by contradiction that rep will eventually know whether rep has crashed. we assume the opposite. consider an execution where rep has already executed a set of requests r and receives another request r from the user, such that the pending set r ∪ {r} makes a difference in the state of rep that pushes it outof-bound. by the contradiction assumption, rep is never informed when rep crashes. therefore, if rep does not hear from rep , the following two scenarios are indistinguishable to rep . (s ) the replica rep has crashed. (s ) the replica rep is too slow. the replica rep has the following two choices: (c ) the replica rep waits to hear from rep about receiving a request in r before processing and responding to r. (c ) the replica rep processes and responds to r. if the protocol makes the choice c , it might be the scenario s and then the liveness property is violated. if the protocol makes the choice c , it might be the scenario s and then the recency bound for rep is violated. the second conjunct, directly follows from the protocol. we briefly describe the protocol in fig. that implements a recency-aware replicated object. the full description of the protocol is available in the appendix [ ] . given an object definition, the protocol benefits from both static and dynamic coordination analysis to guarantee convergence, integrity and recency. to reduce communication, replicas try to execute the calls locally while maintaining the staleness bound . each replica keeps its locally executed calls in a buffer buff before they are broadcast. replicas send an acknowledgement ack to the originating replica once they receive and execute a call or a buffer of calls. each replica rep keeps a map called pending p from each replica rep to the set of pending calls sent from rep to rep . when a replica originates a call c, it adds c to its local pending set for each of the other replicas; once it receives an acknowledgement for c from a replica rep , it removes c from the set of pending calls for rep . each replica keeps the set of correct replicas up, and removes a replica from the set if the prefect failure detector pfd issues a crash event for that replica. a requested call can be executed only if it does not push the pending set for any correct replica out of the bound. otherwise, it cannot be immediately executed and is kept in a waiting queue wq to be retried later, and further, the buffer is sent to the other replicas and is reset to accelerate the shrinking of the pending set. to decide whether a call can be executed locally, the conditions of the rule calllocal of the operational semantics (sect. ) are checked. the set of state-conflicting methods sconf that is statically calculated is consulted to check if the call is allstate-commutative. the validity of the two conditions invariant-sufficiency and let-p-r-commutativity of the buffer (after the new call is added) are dynamically decided by a solver at run-time. if the conditions do not hold, the call is coordinated with other replicas using the basic blocking coordination protocol bro [ ] that guarantees integrity and convergence but not recency. we have implemented the analysis and protocol as a synthesis tool called hampa. we applied it to two use-cases: the bank account use-case (with the withdraw, deposit and balance methods and the integrity property of non-negative balance) and the movie booking use-case (fig. ) . the experiments show that as the staleness bound increases, the coordination overhead and response time of recency-aware objects is decreased. further, recency-aware objects are twice as responsive as sequentially consistent counterparts. we measure two comparison criteria: coordination load and response time. at the lower layers, the protocol reduces to three communication primitives: total-order-broadcast (tob), reliable-broadcast (rb) and point-topoint links (p p). to measure the coordination overhead, we separately count the number of different types of messages that replicas send during the execution of their requests. the response time for a call is the duration between the time that the client requests the call and the time that the user receives the return value. we performed three experiments. in the first experiment, we study the effect of increasing the staleness bound on the coordination load. we report the ratio of the number of messages that the protocol sends for the bound under test over the number of messages that it sends for the base-line bound. (the base-line recency bound is the maximum weight of the calls. the baseline allows every single call to be buffered.) in the second experiment, we study the effect of increasing the staleness bound on the response time of each method. finally, in the last experiment, we compare the response time of our protocol with the baseline recency, with the sequential consistency (sc). sc uses total-order broadcast for all the methods. figure (a) and (c) show the effect of increasing the staleness bound on the coordination load for the two use-cases. as the staleness bound is increased, the ratio of the messages sent by rb, tob and p p decreases. figure (a) (bank account), shows % decrease in the number of messages sent to rb when the bound is increased from to . likewise, the tob and p p ratios decrease by % and %, respectively. in fig. (c) (movie booking), buffering helps to reduce tob calls by % across the experiments. this decrease, however, unlike the bank account use-case, is steady over different bounds. this is because it is more difficult to "buffer" in the movie booking use-case. there are no s-conflicts in the bank account use-case and hence two out of two update methods can be buffered. however, s-conflicts in the movie use-case allow only out of update methods to be buffered: increasespace and specialreserve. also, we observe that the number of rb and p p messages decrease by at most %. (d) shows the effect of increasing the staleness bound on the response time for the two usecases. in fig. (b) (bank account), the response time of withdraw and deposit methods decrease by % and %, respectively when the staleness bound is increased from to . the withdraw method is the least responsive method. the reason is that it has a self-conflict and requires synchronization if it cannot be buffered. in fig. (d) (movie booking), we observe slight increase in response time for the book method while increasing the bound from to . this is because the book operation cannot be buffered due to the s-conflict with other methods and has to be synchronized. on the other hand, the response time of the specialreserve method decreases by % when the bound is increased from to . the reason is that it has a selfconflict and if it cannot be buffered, it should be synchronized by the tob and tob incurs a high coordination overhead. therefore, as buffered calls increase and the use of tob decreases, the response time is significantly improved. the response time of the increasespace method also benefits from recency awareness; it decreases by %. the methods book and cancelbook have conflicts. in the blocking protocol that hampa uses, the method book handles synchronization; therefore, the method cancelbook just broadcasts the request. as the recency bound is increased, the network is less crowded and therefore, the response time of cancelbook is decreased. figure compares the response time of recency-aware objects with the baseline bound with the sequentially consistent objects. the sc protocol synchronizes all the calls and orders them with respect to each other. however, hampa minimizes coordination while preserving convergence, integrity and recency. we observe that the response time speedup is in average as high as × and . × for the bank account and movie use-cases respectively. more experiments are available in the appendix [ ] . in particular, they show that the runtime cost of smt solving is only . % to % of the average response time. epsilon serializability [ ] allows concurrent execution of updates with queries and bounds the difference of the inconsistent values that are observed in these executions and the consistent values that would be observed in a serializable execution. in contrast, hampa preserves the integrity of the state, bounds staleness, allows different orders in different replicas, and formally defines the difference for relational operators. in tact [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] , operations return tentative values; they might be eventually reordered to preserve strong consistency. tact bounds the numeric error between the tentative and final return values. the user specifies the granularity of the bounded object "conit" and the strength of the protocol. on the other hand in hampa, the states are final and enjoy integrity provided on top of weak consistency. further, the staleness bound with respect to the pending future state is automatically optimized with static and dynamic analyses. in aqua [ ] , given a query and a staleness bound, the master server dynamically selects a recent enough server to service the query. similarly, trapp [ ] finds recent enough servers for different parts of data that are needed for the query. fracs [ ] allows operations to be buffered at replicas up to a given threshold. in contrast to hampa, these projects do not guarantee integrity and convergence, and do not automatically infer the staleness bounds. piql [ ] bounds the number of key-value store operations for each query trading the precision of the result for performance. however, it does not consider the staleness of replicas. to reduce synchronization, pbs [ ] communicates with only a partial quorum of replicas to bring a total order to operations, and probabilistically bounds the staleness of the observed states. in contrast, hampa performs synchronization with full quorums but only for conflicting calls, and allows different orders for replicas. further, it analyzes and synthesizes replicated objects and supports relational in addition to single-key operations. the trade-off between consistency and latency presented as pacelc [ ] aligns with our experiments. as the consistency decreases (staleness bound increases), the latency decreases (responsiveness increases). warranties [ ] and homeostasis [ ] allow local updates if they keep the validity of certain assertions. although other replicas can rely on the validity of the assertions, the staleness of their state is not bounded. in contrast, hampa maintains a staleness bound. further, it exploits weak consistency and guarantees convergence. this paper presented a relational object specification language that captures the integrity and recency requirements of the object. it presented a syntax-directed analysis that given a specification, infers optimum staleness bounds. in addition, it presented the coordination avoidance conditions, operational semantics, a protocol and a synthesis tool for replicated systems that guarantee convergence, integrity and recency. the recency-aware protocol embeds a solver to decide whether coordination avoidance is safe and increases the responsiveness. consistency tradeoffs in modern distributed database system design causal memory: definitions, implementation, and programming protocol-aware recovery for consensus-based distributed storage syntax and semantics of the weak consistency model specification language cat piql: success-tolerant query processing in the cloud coordination avoidance in database systems feral concurrency control: an empirical investigation of modern application integrity probabilistically bounded staleness for practical partial quorums putting consistency back into eventual consistency cav practi replication replication and fault-tolerance in the isis system automated conflict-free distributed implementation of component-based models verifying eventual consistency of optimistic replication systems formalizing and checking multilevel consistency replicated data types: specification, verification, optimality introduction to reliable and secure distributed programming monotonicity types for distributed dataflow pnuts: yahoo!'s hosted data serving platform spanner: google's globally distributed database dynamo: amazon's highly available key-value store psync: a partially synchronous language for fault-tolerant distributed algorithms monitoring weak consistency weak-consistency specification via visibility relaxation impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process brewer's conjecture and the feasibility of consistent, available, partition-tolerant web services perspectives on the cap theorem cause i'm strong enough: reasoning about consistency choices in distributed systems hamsaz: replication coordination analysis and synthesis an adaptive quality of service aware middleware for replicated services providing high availability using lazy replication time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system the part-time parliament conflict-aware replicated data types automating the choice of consistency levels in replicated systems making georeplicated systems fast as possible, consistent when necessary warranties for faster strong consistency don't settle for eventual: scalable causal consistency for wide-area storage with cops stronger semantics for low-latency geo-replicated storage proving the safety of highly-available distributed objects viewstamped replication: a new primary copy method to support highly-available distributed systems offering a precision-performance tradeoff for aggregation queries over replicated data in search of an understandable consensus algorithm flexible update propagation for weakly consistent replication a formal characterization of epsilon serializability the homeostasis protocol: avoiding transaction coordination through program analysis a comprehensive study of convergent and commutative replicated data types declarative programming over eventually consistent data stores transactional storage for georeplicated systems consistency-based service level agreements for cloud storage eventually consistent replication-aware linearizability design and evaluation of a continuous consistency model for replicated services efficient numerical error bounding for replicated network services combining generality and practicality in a conit-based continuous consistency model for wide-area replication the costs and limits of availability for replicated services minimal replication cost for availability trading replication consistency for performance and availability: an adaptive approach open access this chapter is licensed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license and indicate if changes were made.the images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's creative commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the chapter's creative commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. key: cord- -rnuslepe authors: guo, rongxing title: political and administrative systems date: - - journal: understanding the chinese economies doi: . /b - - - - . - sha: doc_id: cord_uid: rnuslepe china’s political and administrative systems are mysteries to many westerners. at one level, china is a one-party state that has been ruled by the chinese communist party since . in the late s, the same authoritarian regime was waging a massive campaign under the name of the ‘great leap forward’, which resulted in the loss of a large number of lives. from to , the same regime was launching a so-called ‘great cultural revolution’, causing serious cultural and economic damages to this nation. furthermore, influential theories of the political economy of the former socialist systems emphasize that unless the one-party monopoly is abolished, reforms are doomed to fail. obviously, the achievements of china’s modernization defy conventional explanations. consequently, this will lead to the asking of questions such as: how has the chinese political system worked during the past decades? can it be sustained in the long run? keywords political system, chinese communist party (ccp), chinese characteristics, authoritarianism, governance, administrative efficiency, legal system, corruption control bianque saw the duke, he pointed out: 'the ailment has developed into the muscles. it will go from bad to worse if no treatment is conducted.' to this the ruler showed a greater displeasure than before. another ten days went by. on seeing the duke again, bianque warned him that the illness had gone into the stomach and the intestines and that unless an immediate treatment be given, it would go on worsening. again the duke looked angrier. after a third ten days, when bianque saw the duke, he simply turned round and went away… (to be continued) -hanfeizi (c. - bc) according to the constitution of the people's republic of china (prc), all the power in the country belongs to the people who exercise their power through the npc and local people's congresses at all levels; and the people manage the state, economy, culture, and other social affairs through a multitude of means and forms. however, the constitution also stipulates that the prc was founded by the chinese communist party (ccp) which is the leader of the chinese people. the socialist system led by the working class and based on the alliance of the workers and farmers is the fundamental system of the prc. the state council is the official government of china. it initiates legislation and controls the civil service. the state council is indirectly elected by the npc, which assembles in plenary every year to scrutinize and ratify its decisions on domestic and foreign affairs. the chinese people's political consultative congress (cppcc) -an institution similar to the senate in the united states -consists of representatives from the ccp, several democratic parties, democrats with no party affiliations, various people's organizations and ethnic groups, and other specially invited individuals. the primary functions of the cppcc are to conduct political consultations and democratic supervisions, and to discuss and manage state affairs. the approximately , deputies that attend the npc are elected indirectly every five years by the people's congresses of provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities under central government, and by the people's liberation army (pla). the supreme legislative organ of china, the npc, holds regular (annual) meetings in the great hall of the people in beijing to discuss state affairs, to approve those whom are recommended by the chinese communist party central committee (ccpcc) as central government officials, and to issue laws and regulations. in addition to indirectly electing the state council, the npc can also dismiss the holders of the top offices of state. the standing committee of the npc, which is further composed of a series of special committees and working and administrative bodies (see figure . ) is empowered to modify legislation between plenary sessions of, and carry out the daily work of, the npc on a more permanent basis. in practice, although its scrutiny role has been enhanced in recent years and unanimous votes have become less frequent, the independent power of the npc remains limited. although there are other political organizations in china, the only organization that matters is the chinese communist party (ccp). some , ccp delegates are elected to the national congress of the ccp, which is held every five years. the national congress elects the members and alternates of the chinese communist party central committee (ccpcc), which normally sits once a year. the th ccpcc, which was elected in , is composed of members and hundreds more alternates. the central committee for discipline inspection (ccdi) is also elected at this congress. immediately after the closing ceremony of the national congress, the ccpcc members indirectly elect, in addition to the central military commission, the general secretary, members of the politburo and its standing committee, and the secretariat (see figure . ). the politburo and particularly the smaller standing committee of the politburo are where the overall policy of the chinese government is really decided. the ccp has been virtually the most important body of power in china and holds real political power in china's de facto one party state. party organizations run in parallel to those of the government at all levels. the ccp's structure is characterized by 'democratic centralism' (minzhu jizhong), a system whereby the individual party member is subordinate to the organization, and where minority groups or opinions are subordinate to the wishes of the majority, embodied by the ccpcc. at the bottom of this pyramid are 'primary party organizations' in workplaces and villages. the overwhelming majority of delegates to the npc are party members. ccp membership remains essential for a successful career, particularly in the public sector. party membership now stands at nearly million, and this figure continues to increase. indeed, the ccp's 'three represents' theory states clearly that the ccp is no longer the single representative . to be continued at the end of this chapter. . for example, the tenth national people's congress (npc) of march elected hu jintao as president with a total of , votes. just four delegates voted against him, four abstained, and did not vote (guo, , p. of poor, working-class people; rather, it has also become the representative of the economic and cultural elites in china. by openly proclaiming itself a party of the 'economic elite' that has benefited from its free market agenda, the ccp has been hoping to consolidate a reliable base of support for its continued rule. the party's alliance with the rich is just as tight. with its pro-growth policies, its ban on independent trade unions, and its low environmental standards, the ccp has created an advantageous atmosphere for the economic elite to make money. many successful entrepreneurs have also been party members. policies so favor the rich and business that china's economic program, in the words of one western ambassador, resembles 'the dream of the american republican party' (pomfret, ) . since the late s, a new chinese terminology -baipinghas been popularized in mainland china. the term 'baiping' is composed of two chinese characters -'bai' (to place, to put, to arrange, etc.) and 'ping' (flat, uniform, fair, etc.) . the original meaning of baiping is 'to put flat; or to arrange uniform'. the term had been so informal before the twenty-first century that even the edition of cihai -the largest and most influential chinese dictionary published by shanghai cishu publishing house -didn't mention it. notice that the frequently used baiping has extended from its original meaning to 'to treat fairly', 'to compromise', 'to tradeoff', 'to punish' and so on. after the death of deng xiaoping in , jiang zemin must deftly play its various wings against each other. in this scenario, li peng, chairman of the eighth national people's congress (npc), was selected to hold the no. post of the ccpcc, higher than that of zhu rongji, premier of the state council, during the - tenure. this was the first time in the prc's history that the npc chairman held a political rank higher than that of premiership. moreover, a large number of non-communist party and non-party individuals were selected as state leaders with the titles of vice chairpersons of the npc and of the chinese people's political consultative congress (cppcc) in exchange for their support of the ccp as the permanent ruler of the state. for example, during the - and the - tenures, china's state-level leaders included nine standing members of the ccpcc politburo (some of whom also held the posts of president, premier, the npc and cppcc chairmen) and dozens of vice chairpersons of the npc and of the cppcc. the total number has been the highest since the s. in china, the central administrative system includes the central administrative organs under the system of the national people's congress (npc), and the leadership of the central administrative organs over local administrative organs at various levels. the central administrative organ is the state council of the prc. the state council is the highest administrative organ of the state. the state council is the executive body of the highest organ of state power and the highest organ of state administration in the people's republic of china. the state council exercises leadership over local administrative organs at various levels throughout the country, regulates the specific division of power and function of the state administrative organs at the central level and the provincial, autonomous, regional, and municipal level. the premiership assumes overall responsibility for the work of the state council and is responsible to the npc and its standing committee on behalf of the state council. the vice premiers and state councilors, together with the secretary-general of the state council, and ministers, are responsible to the premier. however, in all circumstances, the premier has the final decision making power on all major issues in the work of the state council. for example, the premier has the power to suggest to the npc and its standing committee the appointment or removal of the vice premiers, state councilors, ministers, and secretary-general of the state council. decisions, decrees, and administrative rules and regulations promulgated by the state council, bills, and suggestions of appointments and removals submitted by the state council to the npc and its standing committee are legally valid only after the premier has signed them. the state council is composed of the premier, vice premiers, state councilors, ministers, auditor-general, and the secretary-general. the premier is nominated by the president of the prc, decided by the npc, appointed and removed by the president. the vice premiers, state councilors, ministers, auditor-general, and secretary-general of the state council are nominated by the premier, decided by the npc, appointed and removed by the president of the prc. when the npc is not in session, the choice of state councilors, ministers, auditor-general, and secretary-general are decided by the standing committee of the npc according to nomination by the premier and appointed or removed by the president of the prc. the state council serves for a term of five years. the premier, vice premiers, and state councilors may serve no more than two consecutive terms. entrusted by the premier or the executive meeting of the state council, state councilors may take charge of work in certain aspects or special tasks. they may also represent the state council in conducting foreign affairs. under the leadership of the premier, the secretary-general of the state council is in charge of the day-to-day work of the state council. the auditor-general is in charge of the supervision of state revenue and expenditure, and other financial and monetary activities. all in all, the state council convenes three categories of meetings: l general meetings l executive meetings l working meetings. the general meeting of the state council, which is convened once every two months, or once every quarter of a year under normal conditions, is attended by all members of which the state council is composed, convened and presided over by the premier. the meeting is convened to discuss issues of major importance or matters involving more than one department. the executive meeting of the state council, which is convened once a month under normal conditions, is convened and presided over by the premier and participated by vice premiers, state councilors and the secretary-general. the meeting sets out to discuss major issues in the work of the state council, bills to be submitted to the standing committee of the npc, administrative rules and regulations and important issues submitted by various departments and localities for decision by the state council. the working meeting of the premier, which is convened, whenever necessary, by the premier (or by a vice premier entrusted by the premier) is to discuss and deal with major issues in the daily work of the state council. according to the constitution of , the state council exercises the following functions and powers: . to adopt administrative measures, enact administrative rules and regulations, and issue decisions and orders in accordance with the constitution and the law; and to submit proposals to the national people's congress or its standing committee. . to formulate the tasks and responsibilities of the ministries and commissions of the state council, to exercise unified leadership over the work of the ministries and commissions and to direct all other administrative work of a national character that does not fall within the jurisdiction of the ministries and commissions; to exercise unified leadership over the work of local organs of state administration at various levels throughout the country, and to formulate the detailed division of functions and powers between the central government and the organs of state administration of provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities directly under the central government; to alter or annul inappropriate orders, directives and regulations issued by the ministries or commissions; and to alter or annul inappropriate decisions and orders issued by local organs of state administration at various levels. to draw up and implement the plan for national economic and social development and the state budget; to direct and administer economic affairs and urban and rural development; to conduct foreign affairs and conclude treaties and agreements with foreign states; to direct and administer the building of national defense; to direct and administer the affairs of education, science, culture, public health, physical culture and family planning; to direct and administer civil affairs, public security, judicial administration, supervision and other related matters; to direct and administer affairs concerning the ethnic groups and to safeguard the equal rights of ethnic minorities and the right to autonomy of the ethnic autonomous areas; to protect the legitimate rights and interests of chinese nationals residing abroad and protect the lawful rights and interests of returned overseas chinese and of the family members of chinese nationals residing abroad; to approve the geographic division of provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government, and to approve the establishment and geographic divisions of autonomous prefectures, counties, autonomous counties and cities; to decided on the imposition of martial law in parts of provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities directly under the central government; and to examine and decide on the size of administrative organs and, in accordance with the law, to appoint or remove administrative officials, train them, appraise their performance and reward or punish them. to exercise such other functions and powers as the national people's congress or its standing committee may assign to it. ministries, commissions, the people's bank of china and administrations are departments that make up the state council. under the unified leadership of the state council, they are in charge of directing and administering the administrative affairs in their respective areas and exercise prescribed state administrative powers. the following ministries, commissions, and the people's bank of china, which were set up by the npc for the period from to , are departments that make up the state council. under the unified leadership of the premiership, they are in charge of directing and administering the administrative affairs in their respective areas and exercise prescribed state administrative powers: the ministers assume overall responsibility for the work of the ministries and ministry-level bureau, commissions, and administrations. they direct the work of their respective ministries and commissions, convene and preside over ministerial meetings or general and executive meetings of the commissions, and sign important reports to the state council and decrees and directives issued to lower levels. in addition, these are also organs that are in charge of administrative affairs in special areas, under the leadership of the state council. usually, the administrative rankings of these organs are lower than those of the commission and ministries listed above. leaders of these organs are decided by the executive meeting of the state council, appointed and removed by the premier: in addition, some coordinating organs and provisional organs may be set up by the state council to deal with special affairs. these organs normally have special committees or leading groups headed by the premier, or vice premiers, or state councilors or the secretary-general. they do not, in most cases, have independent working offices while the day-to-day work is placed under permanent ministries, commissions, administrations or other departments. these organs include: l working organs set up for directing the work in certain special areas l coordinating organs l consulting organs composed of specialists and leaders of departments concerned. the entire country is divided into provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities directly under the central government. the provinces and autonomous regions are further divided into autonomous prefectures, counties, autonomous counties, and cities. the counties and autonomous counties are divided into townships, ethnic townships and towns. the municipalities directly under the central government and large cities in the provinces and autonomous regions are divided into districts and counties. china's provincial governments comprise provinces, five autonomous regions, four municipalities directly under the central government, and two special administrative regions (sars) -hong kong and macau -which returned to china in and , respectively (see table . for the names of various administrative divisions in china). it was agreed on handover that the existing political and economic systems that prevailed prior to these dates would be maintained for years. governments at this level (with the exception of the sars) are indirectly elected for five years at plenaries of their respective people's congresses. the system of governments of sars is prescribed by laws enacted by the npc. in addition, government organs may also be set up for special economic zones, development zones, mining industrial zones, and nature reserves. provincial governments are the first-level local state administrative organs in china. provincial governments must accept the unified leadership of the state council which has the power to decide on the division of responsibilities between the central government and provincial administrative organs. the state council also has the power to annul inappropriate decisions and orders of provincial governments. provincial governments implement local laws, regulations, and decisions of the provincial people's congresses and their standing committees, are responsible to and report on their work to provincial people's congresses and their standing committees. provincial people's congresses and their standing committees have the power to supervise the work of provincial governments, change, and annul inappropriate decisions of the provincial governments. provincial governments have the power to exercise unified leadership over the work of governments at the levels of the cities, counties, townships, and towns under their jurisdiction, and to exercise unified administration over economic, social, and cultural affairs. provincial governments may send out agencies, upon approval of the state council. their agencies are normally called 'administrative offices'. the administrative offices, as agencies of the provincial governments, are not governments themselves. the regions under their jurisdiction are not administrative divisions either. the basic responsibilities of the administrative offices are to provide guidance and coordinate the work of the counties and cities within the regions, on behalf of provincial governments. an administrative office has a commissioner, vice commissioners and advisors, appointed and removed by the provincial governments. the working meetings of administrative offices are attended by the commissioners, vice commissioners, advisors, assistant advisors, secretaries-general, and deputy secretaries-general to discuss major issues in the work of the administrative offices. governments of municipalities directly under the central government are first-level local state administrative organs in china. in china, there are currently four municipalities directly under the central government, namely beijing, chongqing, shanghai, and tianjin. governments of these municipalities must accept the unified leadership of the state council which has the power to decide on the division of power and functions between the central government and state administrative organs of municipalities directly under the central government. the state council also has the power to alter or annul decisions and orders made by governments of municipalities directly under the central government. governments of municipalities directly under the central government implement local laws, regulations, and decisions of the people's congresses and their standing committees of the municipalities, are responsible for and report on their work to the people's congresses and their standing committees. people's congresses and their standing committees in the municipalities have the power to supervise the work of the governments of municipalities, change and annul inappropriate decisions and orders of municipal governments. municipal governments have the right to exercise unified leadership over the work of the districts, cities, counties, townships, and towns and exercise unified administration over the economic, social, and cultural affairs in areas under their respective jurisdictions. provinces and municipalities directly under the central government have governors, vice governors, mayors, vice mayors, secretaries-general, directors of departments (or bureaus), and commissions. provincial governors, vice governors, mayors, and vice mayors are elected by the people's congresses of the provinces and municipalities. within two months after their election, provincial governors and municipal mayors shall nominate secretaries-general and directors of departments, bureaus, and commissions to people's congresses of the provinces and municipalities for appointment, and report to the state council for the record. when the people's congresses in provinces or municipalities are not in session, provincial governors or mayors cannot assume their posts, the standing committees of the people's congresses may decide on the acting governors or mayors, selected from among the vice governors or vice mayors to serve until the by-election at the next session of the people's congresses. when the people's congresses in provinces or municipalities are not in session, the appointment or removal of individual vice governors or vice mayors are carried out by the standing committees of the people's congresses. provincial and municipal governments serve a term of five years. in addition to provincial-level administrations, china has sub-provincial (fu shengji) and prefectural (diji) administrations. city governments with sub-provincial ranking refer to governments of relatively large cities whose economic plans are separately listed in the national planning, whose administrative status is lower than that of a full provincial government and which are not administratively controlled by provincial governments. at present, china's sub-provincial ranking cities are shenyang, dalian, changchun, harbin, jinan, qingdao, nanjing, ningbo, hangzhou, xiamen, wuhan, guangzhou, shenzhen, xi'an, and chengdu. prefectural-level cities are large and medium-sized cities not including sub-provincial level cities. normally, they are cities with a non-farming population of more than a quarter of a million. furthermore, the seats of cities have a non-farming population of more than , each, and their industrial production value exceeds billion yuan. they have a relatively advanced tertiary industry whose production value is more than that of the first industry, and makes up more than percent of the gdp in these cities. the revenue in their local budget is beyond million yuan and they have grown into centers of a number of cities or counties. governments of prefectural-level cities consist of mayors, vice mayors, secretaries-general, and directors of bureaus and commissions. mayors and vice mayors are elected by the people's congresses of the cities. when the people's congresses are not in session, the appointment and removal of individual vice mayors are carried out by the standing committees of the people's congresses. governments of prefectural-level cities serve a term of five years. these governments are responsible for and report on their work to the people's congresses and their standing committees at the same level. they are responsible for and report on their work to provincial-level governments and accept the unified leadership of the state council at the same time. they direct the economic, cultural, and administrative work of their cities. they also direct the administrative affairs of their entire regions and the work of the counties and county governments in areas under their jurisdiction. governments of cities where provincial or autonomous regional governments are located and large cities recognized by the state council may formulate their administrative regulations in accordance with the law and administrative regulations of the state council. the system of placing counties and county-level cities under the administration of prefectural-level cities means establishing an administrative organ between the province and counties (county-level cities). this mechanism requires the prefectural-level city to have the dual functions of administering both rural and urban areas. the main models of this mechanism are: l to merge the administrative office of a prefecture with the government of the prefectural-level city where the office is located to establish a new prefectural-level city government to administer the counties and county-level cities l to incorporate a number of counties and county-level cities in the vicinity of a prefectural-level city into the administration of the latter which previously did not administer the counties l to elevate the status of county-level cities or towns into prefectural-level cities, or turn the organs of the administrative office directly into the organs of the prefectural-level city, so as to establish a prefectural-level city government to administer counties and county-level cities. county governments are local governments established in rural areas. county governments administer the governments of townships, ethnic townships, and towns. they may also establish neighborhood offices. when necessary, county governments may, upon approval of provincial, autonomous regional, or municipal governments, set up district offices as their agencies. in areas implementing the system of prefectural-level cities administering counties and county-level cities, and in ethnic self-governing areas, county governments receive leadership from prefectural-level city or autonomous prefectural governments. in areas where prefectural-level cities are not established, and in the four municipalities directly under the central government (i.e., beijing, tianjin, shanghai, and chongqing), county governments receive direct leadership from provincial, autonomous regional, or municipal governments. county-level cities normally grow from towns within a county or are established in place of what was originally a county which has now been dissolved. these are places with a relatively strong rural administrative color. governments of county-level cities administer governments of townships, ethnic townships, and towns. neighborhood offices may also be established under their leadership. governments of county-level cities are mainly in the following two categories: a. in areas without an administrative office, they receive leadership directly from provincial or autonomous regional governments b. in areas implementing a system of prefectural-level city administering the county and county-level city, or in ethnic self-governing areas with county-level city governments, they receive leadership from the prefectural-level city or the autonomous prefectural government. district governments are urban governments established in districts in municipalities directly under the central government, sub-provincial-level cities, and prefectural-level cities. they receive leadership from the governments of municipalities directly under the central government, subprovincial-level cities, and prefectural-level cities. district governments consist of urban district and suburban district governments. urban district governments are located within the urban districts and function as grassroots governments in urban areas. they may have agencies in the form of neighborhood offices. suburban district governments, naturally located within suburban areas of cities, administer governments of townships, ethnic townships, and towns. they may also establish neighborhood offices. governments of counties, county-level cities, and districts are composed of county governors, vice governors, mayors, vice mayors, district heads, deputy heads, and directors of bureaus or sections. county governors, vice governors, mayors, vice mayors, district heads, and deputy heads are elected by the people's congresses of the counties, cities, and districts. when the people's congresses of the counties, cities, and districts are not in session, the standing committees of the people's congresses may decide on the appointment and removal of individual vice governors of counties and vice heads of districts and vice mayors. governments of counties, county-level cities, and districts serve a term of five years. governments of townships, ethnic townships (both referring to rural areas), and towns (urban centers in rural china) are grassroots governments in rural areas. they receive leadership from governments of counties, autonomous counties, county-level cities, and districts. a township, ethnic township, or town government has a head and several deputy heads. the head of an ethnic township government must be a citizen of an ethnic minority origin. heads and deputy heads of townships, ethnic townships, and towns are elected by the people's congresses in the townships, ethnic townships, and towns. governments of townships, ethnic townships, and towns serve a term of three years. it is the provincial-level governments' duty to establish and decide the geographic division of townships, ethnic townships, and towns. people's governments of townships, ethnic townships, and towns carry out the resolutions of the people's congress at the corresponding level, as well as the decisions and orders of the state administrative organs at the next higher level. they also conduct administrative work in their respective administrative areas. local people's governments at various levels are responsible for and report on their work to the state administrative organs at the next higher level. local people's governments at various levels throughout the country are state administrative organs under the unified leadership of the state council and are subordinate to it. local people's governments at and above the county level direct the work of their subordinate departments and of people's governments at lower levels, and have the power to alter or annul inappropriate decisions of their subordinate departments and of the people's governments at lower levels. in addition, there are also systems of governance that operate beneath the various levels of state administration described above. these are the village committees (cunweihui) in rural areas and the resident committees (juweihui) in urban areas. the village committees deal with all administrative matters, including budgets, public services, order, welfare, and dispute resolution (see figure . ). in contrast to their attitude with regard to levels of government that are considered part of the state, the authorities have shown some willingness over the past two decades to countenance direct elections to these committees. there have been attempts to introduce direct elections to village committees. these innovations were part of wider efforts to restore some form of governance at village level. urban residents' committees usually cover anywhere between and over , households. reformers have suggested that urban electoral reform should begin with direct elections. the current chinese constitution was adopted for implementation by the th session of the th national people's congress (npc) on december , . amendments were made to the constitution at the st session of the th npc on april , , the st session of the th npc on march , , and the nd session of the th npc on march , , respectively. it is clear that the leadership of the cpc is stressed in the constitution. also, the guidance of marxism-leninism and mao zedong thought is regarded as the proper intellectual framework and ideology for leading the country to a socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship. the national people's congress (npc) is deemed to be the 'highest organ of state power' in article of the constitution of the people's republic of china ( ) . the npc is partially composed of a permanent body called the standing committee of the npc (articles and - ). the npc is the unicameral body vested with the authority to establish the laws in china pursuant to article . deputies to the npc are elected to their positions for five-year terms (art. ). some powers of the ncp are to amend the constitution, enact laws, elect the president and vice president of the prc, elect the chiefs of the supreme people's court, decide issues of war and peace, and they also have various removal powers (arts - ). when the npc is not in session, the standing committees can enact amendments and additions to laws passed by the npc (art. ). china's legislation is also created at more local levels by the people's congresses of provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities, prefectures, and cities. the constitution notes: ( ) the party branch office tablet is written in red and located on the right side, denoting that the ccp is always in a superior position in china. ( ) the office tablet of the villagers' committee is written in black and located on the left side. provides the structure, authority, and duties of the local people's congresses in articles - . all of the local regulations that are passed by these lower people's congresses must comply with the constitution, laws passed by the npc, and the people's congresses above each of the local congresses in the hierarchy. the judicial system of the prc is established in articles - , and consists of the people's courts, the supreme people's court, the people's procuratorates, the supreme people's procuratorate, military procuratorates and other special people's procuratorates. article refers to the people's procuratorates as 'state organs for legal supervision'. there is a hierarchy within the court structure from the top down: the supreme people's courts, the higher people's courts, the intermediate people's courts, and the basic people's courts (see figure . ). the duties of each of these courts are as follows: at present, the basic people's courts are comprised of thousands of courts at county level. there are hundreds of intermediate people's courts at prefectural or municipal level and higher people's courts located in the provinces. additionally, there are a number of specialized courts, for example, those dealing with railway transportation, forest affairs, the people's liberation army (pla), and maritime issues. litigants are generally limited to one appeal, on the theory of finality of judgment by two trials. cases of second instances are often reviewed de novo as to both law and facts. requests for appellate review take the form of appeals and protests (in criminal cases). appeals are lodged by parties to the case, defendants, and private prosecutors. protests are filed by the procuratorate in criminal cases, when it is believed that an error has occurred in the law, or facts, as determined by the judgment or order of the court of first instance. in civil cases the procuratorate does not possess a right to file a direct protest, but it can initiate adjudication supervision via a protest. adjudication supervision refers to a type of discretionary 'post-final' decision review, which may occur in certain situations in criminal cases. for most of the past thousands of years, the chinese legal system was based on confucian ideology that emphasized ethics and relationships between the people and their leaders. disputes were settled through relationship-based methods such as mediation. the court system was undeveloped and rarely used. after , a marxist-leninist overlay was constructed, which was also to some extent mixed with traditional adherence to confucian-based conflict mediation. it was not until the economic reforms of the late s that a true institutional legal system was introduced, mostly to deal with the demands of the growing economy. as the ccp scrambled after to train lawyers and codify laws, business law took precedence over laws pertaining to civil liberties and individual freedoms. despite an enormous growth in the legal industry, the system is today still grossly lacking in its neutrality, capacity, and mandate, especially in poor and remote areas in china. most importantly, china's legal system lacks neutrality. the ccp approves all court appointments, and judges are technically responsible to the party, not to the people (see box . ). from the basic, intermediate, higher level people's court, and supreme people's court, the ccp hand is evident. the ccp's political and legal committee has the power to intervene in deliberations, and even to overturn verdicts issued. in addition, the infrastructure lacks capacity. for example, there is one lawyer per , people in china (the ratio is one lawyer per people in the united states). and finally, in many western democracies, the ultimate arbiter of a law's constitutionality is the court system. in china, this function becomes muddled and the ccp apparatus often rules on the interpretation of its own laws. recently, there have been some reforms with substantive democratic content -including, for example, village elections. however, this has been unevenly implemented and often fails to live up to hopes for open and contested elections, and reaches only the most local of posts. the electoral law for village-level administrations is still weaker as an instrument of democracy, as are procedures for the indirect selection of higher-level people's congresses. the imperfectly implemented village elections law and the elections that have been held under the law allow much bounded participation, monitor potentially explosive peasant discontent, and strengthen the capacity of the regime. these 'elections serve these functions by sometimes weeding out the most ineffective and despised agents of the regime and by recruiting new cadres who can command popular support as well as their superiors' confidence' (delisle, , p. ). most tangible reform in china's legal system has taken place in the area of civil litigation. these primarily concern business disputes associated with china's rapid economic modernization in which people seek protection and redress from a wide array of abuses committed in the pursuit of economic competitive advantage: patent infringement, business transactions that are not honored, individuals who have been displaced by private and state-directed construction, and labor disputes, to name a few. since , prompted by the need to provide a safe environment for foreign capital, the ccp has increasingly codified business laws and sought to train its lawyers and judges to deal effectively and efficiently with the growing civil and commercial caseload. with the current system skewed toward resolving businessbusiness and state-business disputes, the individual plaintiff is often at a significant disadvantage. other avenues open to individuals who feel they have complaints against the state include the petition system, mediation, and protests -however, none of these options are as effective as in the western nations. the petition system auspiciously provides an avenue by which individuals can lodge complaints about treatment they have received from the government, other individuals, or private companies. remember, in china the hand of the state is involved everywhere, visibly and invisibly, even when disputes seem to involve private companies. there are few private companies that do not have some form of government subsidization and/or regulation. another alternative to the court system includes mediation, which has been described as only somewhat effective, and for which there is not adequate capacity to process all disputes. some instead turn to protests, mainly in rural areas where they get local attention; protesters are often disbanded, and their complaints never communicated to high-level decision-makers. and finally, an important alternative to litigation (one that is used to powerful advantage elsewhere) is severely lacking in china: free media. many . source: 'the legal system in china.' available at http://worldsavvy. org/monitor/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id= & itemid= . accessed on november , . in a construction area designated for the building of affordable housing in xigang village, xushui town, zhengzhou city, henan province, real estate developers have built townhouses and luxurious houses. in june , after receiving complaints from local villagers that the land has not been developed according to its intended use (i.e., the construction of economically affordable apartments), a reporter went to zhengzhou for an interview with lu jun, deputy bureau director of zhengzhou planning bureau. mr lu interrogated the reporter: 'why doesn't your radio station mind its own business? who do you speak for, the party or the people?' it is well known that the land planning bureau controls the lifeline for developers to get rich, so it has become the area hardest hit by corruption. in the planning of urban construction, some corrupt officials have become the developer's spokesmen in the government because they are bribed by the developers. officials and businessmen work in collusion with each other to form a community of common interest. for the interest of the small community, they set aside the legal interests of the country and the ordinary people, take advantage of their public power to grab state-run assets, people's benefits, and wealth, and push themselves to the opposite side of the ordinary people. source: www.echinacities.com. accessed on november , . ( ), wang ( ), and paler ( ) for more detailed analyses. scandals and disputes are settled in other countries simply because they find their way to the newspaper or other public outlets. perpetrators are shamed and agreements are negotiated. without recourse to a free press, the chinese are denied access to a key avenue for airing grievances. the most important distinction between how china and many other countries deal with criminal defendants is in how they perceive presumption of guilt. in the west, criminal suspects are presumed innocent until proven guilty, and generally cannot be arrested and charged without sufficient evidence of wrongdoing. when a suspect does go to trial, it is the duty of the prosecution to prove his/her guilt beyond reasonable doubt. abuses exist within these systems, but the underpinnings favor the individual defendant against the state until guilt is proven. for a long period of time in china, suspects have been assumed guilty by the system and must be proven innocent. this is a critical distinction; suspects face incredible hurdles in proving their innocence; and china's appeals system similarly favors the prosecution. freedom from unreasonable search, seizure, torture, and detention, as well as the right to a fair trial are major demands placed on china by the human rights community worldwide. the ccp aims to build the legal infrastructure of the country and has embarked on this in its technocratic manner of studying the laws of other countries and carefully codifying its 'chinese characteristics'. however, many of the abuses occur at the hands of local and provincial officials among whom corruption is rampant and over whom the central ccp is able to exercise little control. when central ccp elites have been able to detect abuses and arrest responsible officials, the press is ordered to showcase progress for their own people and to outside critics. without adequate transparency within the ccp, or within the legal system in which ccp officials wield a heavy hand, reform will be difficult. while the ccp has promised that there will be movement on both laws and procedures, ordinary people in china still believe that the situation on the ground has not changed significantly. as in other areas, reform in the legal system has often served only a safety valve function -more cases processed, more complaints heard, yet the outcomes remain largely unchanged. whether these small steps forward ultimately add up to momentum remains to be seen, but many believe that an expanding legal system could bring about true democratic progress in the prc. for now, though, there are many who believe that such small venting in the system actually serves to strengthen the authoritarian state. since china undertook its reforms in , the chinese economy has grown at an average rate of nearly ten percent a year. as of , china's per capita gdp was already twelve times greater than it was three decades ago. obviously, for the past three decades, the country's economic development has been reliant upon an unconventional approach -a combination of mixed ownership, basic property rights, and heavy government intervention. the term 'washington consensus' was initially coined in by john williamson to describe a set of ten specific economic policy prescriptions that he considered should constitute the 'standard' reform package promoted for crisis-wracked developing countries by washington-based institutions such as the imf, the world bank, and the us treasury department. it is sometimes used in a narrower sense to refer to economic reforms that were prescribed just for developing nations, which included advice to reduce government deficits, to liberalize and deregulate international trade and cross border investment, and to pursue export led growth (williamson, ). in , joshua cooper ramo, the former foreign editor of time magazine, in his book entitled the beijing consensus, argues that there is a new 'beijing consensus' emerging with distinct attitudes to politics, development, and the global balance of power. ramo argues that china offers hope to developing countries after the collapse of the washington consensus. china has provided, more or less, a more equitable paradigm of economic take-off for poor countries. according to ramo, '[the beijing consensus] replaces the widely-discredited washington consensus, an economic theory made famous in the s for its prescriptive, washington-knows-best approach to telling other nations how to run themselves' (ramo, , p. ) . to develop this further, stefan halper, in his book the beijing consensus: how china's authoritarian model will dominate the twenty-first century, argues that china has provided a welcome non-judgmental alternative to many nations with domestic, social, and economic conditions that are similar to china itself. this new approach to foreign aid, combined with admiration for china's economic success, is boosting its world influence, as well as access to energy and other natural resources. meanwhile, china's autocratic leadership, which shows no sign of liberalizing, has set the foundation for future economic successes; by contrast, us economic progress seems hindered by its democratic processes (halper, (song, ) . in this article, the author points out that the great achievements of china result from its effective political system, which could pave a completely different way to . the washington consensus was most influential during the s. since then, it has become increasingly controversial. modernization, named the china model. the author summarizes six major advantages of china's political system, as follows. the first advantage is that under the one-party system, china could formulate a long-term plan for national development and ensure stabilization of its policies without being affected by the alternation of parties with different positions and ideologies. the second advantage lies in its high efficiency, and promptly effective reaction to emerging challenges and opportunities, especially in response to sudden and catastrophic accidents. the author gives the following examples: terminal no. of the beijing capital international airport built for the beijing olympics was finished in three years, which is not enough time for the approval process in the west. in , after the wenchuan earthquake that hits once in a generation, china impressed the whole world by its quick response and efficient post-disaster reconstruction. the third advantage is china's effective containment of corruption in the social transition period. it is generally accepted that economic prosperity and social transition were usually accompanied by large amounts of corruption throughout human history. however, the author argues that, compared with india and russia in the same period, china has had far less corruption. the fourth advantage is a more responsible government in china. for example, in democratic societies, many officials are elected with fixed terms, and they then will not fall out of power before the end of their term unless they break the law, make wrong decisions, or take no action. once their term expires, they will not be blamed for any problem. in china, however, the principal officials accountability system is gradually improving, and officials must be responsible for their incompetence, negligence of duty, or mistakes at any time. the fifth advantage lies in its personnel training and cadre-selection system and avoiding the waste of talented people. in many western nations, presidents and governors are elected; but in china only those who have rich and successful working experiences at the lower or local levels can be selected to be higher-ranked officials. therefore, the author argues that china's selection of cadres from the lower to a higher level and conscious personnel training is superior to the west's election system. the last advantage is that one party can truly represent the whole people. under the western multiparty system, each party represents different interest groups. but in china, since the reform and opening up, economic policies have been made by the ccp without special bias in favor of any interest groups. however, the chinese political and economic systems are far less perfect than what was just described above. in fact, over the last years, the chinese economy has moved unmistakably toward the market doctrines of neoclassical economics, with an emphasis on prudent fiscal policy, economic openness, privatization, market liberalization, and the protection of private property (yao, ) . since the beginning of its open-door policies, china has benefited increasingly from global interdependence and the modern world's free flow of goods, capital, and people. however, with those benefits have also come the responsibilities of accountability and transparency. china's party-state system has exposed the dearth of political dynamics. since the ccp lacks legitimacy in the classic democratic sense, it has to seek performance-based legitimacy instead. so far, this strategy has succeeded. and there was a proliferation of high-rise buildings and massive construction projects (the three gorges dam, the olympics complex, the high-speed rail system, and so on). however, this also resulted in declining health care (hospitals, like schools, also became money-making centers for local bureaucrats), illegal expropriation of farmers' land, and more corruption, all of which have led to increasing social disorder among peasants who are finding themselves worse off (huang, ) . on the other hand, cadres' pay has increased rapidly, which has, as an example in , induced thousands of college graduates to compete for a single government post. the severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars) epidemic which spread throughout china in april exposed some of china's institutional weakness. yet the greatest impact of the sars crisis may be on china's antiquated political system. chinese mismanagement of the outbreak has plainly exposed just how far political reform has lagged behind economic development. beijing's long concealment of the truth is exposing political faultiness by simultaneously weakening the economy and damaging the government's credibility. the crisis has undermined traditional supporters, aggravating old demographic strains, and emboldening detractors to make more assertive protests against government policy. while the growing pressure from a more demanding public and an increasingly interdependent world has forced china to re-evaluate its political and socioeconomic policies, the extent of any resulting political reform depends upon whether or not the enhanced incentives for accountability and transparency among public officials override the traditional incentives for party and factional loyalty. . from november to , sars infected over , people in countries and killed more than . in addition to the human toll, it was inflicting significant economic damage across asia. besides hong kong, which was among the worst hit, gdp growth rates in taiwan, singapore, and thailand were also lower in . nowhere was sars having more impact than on mainland china, where the disease started. - guo ( , p. ) . kaufmann et al. ( ) for (a) (c) . details on the data sources, the aggregation method, and the interpretation of the indicators, can be found in the methodology paper of kaufmann et al. ( ) . obviously, there are signs that the chinese model will not last because of the growing income inequality and the internal and external imbalances it has created. the ccp's free-market policies have led to increasing inequalities in china, both between different groups of people and among regions. for example, china's overall gini coefficient -a measure of income inequality in which zero equals perfect equality and one absolute inequality -reached about . in , which is higher than most of the other economies (see figure . of chapter ). in addition, china also has the highest urban-rural income gap in the world. as the chinese people demand more than economic gains as their income increases, it will become increasingly difficult for the ccp to contain or discourage social discontent. china's astronomic growth has left it in a precarious situation, however. other developing countries have suffered from the so-called middle-income trap -a situation that often arises when a country's per capita gdp reaches the range of $ , to $ , , the economy stops growing, income inequality increases, and social conflicts erupt. china has now entered this stage, and it still remains unclear how this will affect the chinese economy and society in the long term. at present, the chinese government has tried to manage popular discontent by implementing box . documentary various programs that could quickly address early signs of unrest, such as re-employment centers for unemployed workers, migration programs aimed at lowering regional disparities, and improvement of infrastructure, health care, and education in rural areas. those measures, however, may be too weak to discourage the emergence of powerful interest groups seeking to influence the government (yao, ) . while china's current political system has been driving its economic growth strongly (to be discussed in chapter ), it has also led to the development of a series of socioeconomic problems. however, the large surge in income inequalities was not the only unwanted result of the chinese-style reform. the worsening of social and political progress during the s and the s is another example. for example, china's 'control of corruption' score was more than in (see figure . (a)) but it dropped to only in ; between and its score in terms of 'voice and accountability' was among the lowest of all of the nations considered by the world bank (see figure . (b)) and there is no sign of improvements between and (see figure . (c)). without good reason, china's party-state political system lacked the informational and incentive roles of democracy that, working mainly through open public discussion, could be of pivotal importance for the reach of social and public policies. technically, china has not had an independent judiciary or a legal system that operates outside the influence of the ruling ccp. this is the so-called socialism with chinese characteristics and the one that distinguishes china from western democracies in which the court system is a critical component of the checks and balances placed on the other branches of government. in fact, china's lack of an independent judicial system exacerbates all the other fault lines running through the authoritarian state; there simply is no effective recourse available to individuals whose interests are harmed by the excesses of ccp officials, laws, and institutions. this situation is particularly serious in china's rural, marginal areas. the time when the average individual seeks a forum in which to officially air grievances and pursue some form of justice in china has yet to come (see box . ). before ending our discussion about the characteristics of china's political and administrative systems, let's finish our account of the story told by hanfeizi at the beginning of this chapter: feeling it strange, the duke sent a man to ask bianque for the reason. 'well, an ailment lying in between the skin and the muscles remains on the surface, and so external application with warm water and ointment can cure it,' said bianque, 'if it sinks into muscles, acupuncture will do good; if it resides in the stomach and the intestines, a decoction of herbs will take effect. but when the sickness penetrates into the bone marrow, it becomes fatal and nothing can be done about it. now, as the duke has come to that last stage, i have nothing to recommend.' five days after that, the duke felt pains and ordered his men to look for bianque, but to find that he had fled to the state of qin. soon afterwards, the duke died. china's changing political landscape: prospects for democracy how the chinese economy works - e an introduction to the chinese economy works -the driving forces behind modern day china the beijing consensus: how china's authoritarian model will dominate the twenty-first century capitalism with chinese characteristics: entrepreneurship and the state the worldwide governance indicators: a summary of methodology, data and analytical issues governance matters vii: aggregate and individual governance indicators china statistical yearbook accommodating 'democracy' in a oneparty: introducing village elections in china china's legislation law and the making of a more orderly and representative legislative system under jiang, party changed to remain in power: communist apparatus still rules china, though country has been transformed the beijing consensus. london: the foreign policy centre administrative procedure reforms in china's rule of law context latin american readjustment: how much has happened the end of the beijing consensus -can china's model of authoritarian growth survive? foreign affairs key: cord- -cgoq m u authors: wimmer, simon; mutius, joshua von title: verified certification of reachability checking for timed automata date: - - journal: tools and algorithms for the construction and analysis of systems doi: . / - - - - _ sha: doc_id: cord_uid: cgoq m u prior research has shown how to construct a mechanically verified model checker for timed automata, a popular formalism for modeling real-time systems. in this paper, we shift the focus from verified model checking to certifying unreachability. this allows us to benefit from better approximation operations for symbolic states, and reduces execution time by exploring fewer states and by exploiting parallelism. moreover, this gives us the ability to audit results of unverified model checkers that implement a range of further optimizations, including certificate compression. the resulting tool is evaluated on a set of standard benchmarks to demonstrate its practicality, using a new unverified model checker implementation in standard ml to construct the certificates. timed automata [ ] are a widely used formalism for modeling real-time systems, which is employed in a class of successful model checkers such as uppaal [ ] . these tools can be understood as trust-multipliers: we trust their correctness to deduce trust in the safety of systems checked by these tools. as a consequence, one wants to ensure as rigorously as possible that the computation results of timed automata model checkers are correct. previous work [ ] has addressed this problem by constructing a model checker for timed automata that is fully verified using isabelle/hol [ ] . this tool is intended to be a reference implementation that can be used to scrutinize the correctness of other model checkers. as such, it is mainly able to check small and medium-sized benchmark examples, but the performance gap w.r.t. more practical model checkers prevents it from checking realistic benchmark models within reasonable time and space bounds. we address this issue by shifting the focus from full verified model checking to only certifying that the result produced by an unverified model checker is correct. we only study reachability: it is the most important property that is checked with timed automata model checkers, and some model checkers only support reachability. it is crucial to ensure that a bad state is certainly not reachable if the model checker claims so, thus we want to certify unreachability. certifying that a state is indeed reachable would amount to extracting a timed trace and certifying that the trace is compatible with the model. while implementing this in a verified manner would be comparatively easy, we consider it less important because it corresponds to the bug finding functionality of model checkers, which carries less trust. the recipe for certifying unreachability is simple: the model checker explores a number of states until it determines that there are no more states to be found. if none of the states fulfill the final state predicate (i.e. violates the safety property), then the model checker will answer "unreachable". we use the set of explored states as the unreachability certificate. in essence, we only need to check that the initial state is contained in this set, that there are no outgoing edges from this set, and that none of the states in the set fulfill the final state predicate. the switch to certification holds many advantages. timed automata model checking uses over-approximations of symbolic states to ensure termination. a large variety of these approximation operators has been studied [ , , ] . our previous work [ ] has shown that, while formally proving the correctness of these approximation operations is feasible in principle with an interactive theorem prover, the effort is rather high. instead, to certify unreachability, it is sufficient to only know that the approximation operator indeed yields a state that is at least as big as the precise symbolic state. certifying this property is cheap. moreover, certification eases parallelization. checking that a state is not final and that all its successors are covered by the state set are local properties. we show how to exploit this in a verified implementation, while only mildly increasing the verification effort and the size of the trusted code base. finally, the number of states explored by a model checker can vary immensely, depending on a range of factors such as the chosen approximation operator or the search order. thus, an efficient unverified tool can exploit different heuristics and strategies to compute a state space that is as small as possible, and thereby speedup the certification effort. in this context, we also study a number of compression techniques to reduce the number of states in the certificate after the model checker has concluded its search. we use a new unverified model checker called mlunta, which is implemented in standard ml (sml), to generate certificates for a set of standard benchmarks, and to evaluate our verified certifier's performance on these benchmarks . related work this work is based on an existing isabelle/hol formalization of timed automata model checking [ , ] . other proof-assistant formalizations of timed automata focus on proving elementary properties about the basic formalism [ , ] , or proving properties about concrete automata [ , , ] , but none of them are concerned with model checking. earlier work formalizes a model checker for the modal µ-calculus [ ] , and constructs a verified finite state ltl model checker [ , , ] . the idea of extracting certificates from the model checking process has previously been studied in the context of the µ-calculus [ ] and finite state ltl model checking [ ] . however, these works are not accompanied by a verified certificate checker and do not attempt to scale the approach to practical examples. only the recent work of griggio et al. [ ] provides a practical extraction mechanism and a certificate checker for ltl model checking, but the checker is not verified. to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to examine certification in the context of timed automata model checking. finally, in the context of software verification, the idea of producing certificates for the correctness of a program has been broadly studied [ , ] . isabelle/hol isabelle/hol [ ] is an interactive theorem prover based on higher-order logic (hol). hol can be thought of as a combination of a functional programming language and mathematical logic. isabelle/hol mostly resembles standard mathematical notation. some conventions that are borrowed from functional programming need to be explained, however. functions are mostly curried, i.e. of type τ ⇒ τ ⇒ τ instead of τ × τ ⇒ τ . as a consequence, function application is usually denoted as f a b instead of f (a, b). function abstraction with lambda terms uses the standard syntax λx. t (the function that maps x to t) and can also have paired arguments λ(x, y). t. type variables are written a, b, etc. compound types are written in postfix syntax: τ set is the type of sets of elements of type τ . we use the isabelle/hol convention that free variables are implicitly all-quantified throughout the paper. in parts of the paper, formulas or syntax have been simplified for readability, but we have stayed largely faithful to the isabelle/hol formalization. in short, these are the main contributions of our work: -to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study certification of the model checking results of reachability checking for timed automata, including techniques to compress certificates. -we construct a verified implementation of such a certificate checker, including a number of optimization techniques to make it practically usable. outline the remainder of the paper is organized as follows. the first section briefly recalls the theory of timed automata, and sketches the state-of-the-art model checking process. the second section details our approach to certification and explains how, starting from an abstract theory, a concrete verified implementation of the certificate checker can be obtained. section three illustrates a number of techniques to improve the certificate checker's performance, while only mildly increasing the formalization effort. section four discusses two methods for certificate compression. the paper is concluded by an experimental evaluation and remarks on potential future work. transition systems we take a very simple view of transition systems: they are simply a relation → of type a ⇒ a ⇒ bool for a type of states a. we write a → * b to denote that b can be reached from a via a sequence of →-transitions. timed automata to make the paper self-contained, this paragraph briefly describes timed automata and is mostly reproduced from wimmer and lammich [ ] . for a thorough introduction see the tutorial paper of bengtsson and yi [ ] . compared to standard finite automata, timed automata introduce a notion of clocks. figure depicts an example of a timed automaton. we will assume that clocks are of type nat. a clock valuation u is a function of type nat ⇒ real . locations and transitions are guarded by clock constraints, which have to be fulfilled to stay in a location or to take a transition. clock constraints are conjunctions of constraints of the form c ∼ d for a clock c, an integer d, and ∼ ∈ {<, ≤, =, ≥, >}. we write u |= cc if the clock constraint cc holds for the clock valuation u. we define a timed automaton a as a pair (t , i) where i is a mapping from locations to clock constraints (also named invariants); and t is a set of transitions written as a l −→ g,a,r l where l and l are start and successor location, g is the guard of the transition, a is an action label, and r is a list of clocks that will be reset to zero when the transition is taken. states of timed automata are pairs of a location and a clock valuation. the operational semantics defines two kinds of steps (given as their hol descriptions): for any (timed) automaton a, we consider the transition system that is, each transition consists of a delay step that advances all clocks by some amount of time, followed by an action step that takes a transition and resets the clocks annotated to the transition. given a final state predicate f and an initial state (l , u ), we are interested in whether (l , u ) → * a (l, u) for any l, u with f l. in figure , the final state is l (i.e. f l ←→ l = l ). as the guard for action a is never enabled, l is unreachable. model checking due to the use of clock valuations, the state space of timed automata is inherently infinite. thus, model checking algorithms for timed automata are based on the idea of abstracting from concrete valuations to sets of clock valuations of type (nat ⇒ real ) set, often called zones. the resulting transition system of reachable states from an initial zone is called the zone graph. it is explored in an on-the-fly manner, computing successors on zones, which are typically represented symbolically as difference bound matrices (dbms). knowledge of this data structure is not necessary to understand the rest of the paper. thus we refer the interested reader to bengtsson and yi [ ] and to wimmer and lammich [ , ] for a verification of this data structure. in the remainder we will only use the term "zones" instead of referring to their implementation as dbms. the delicate part of this method is that the number of reachable zones could still be infinite. therefore, over-approximations (or abstractions) of zones are computed to obtain a finite search space. for our purpose, it sufficient to assume an abstraction operator α indeed computes an over-approximation, i.e. z ⊆ α(z) for any zone z. we call the version of the zone graph where abstractions are applied the abstract zone graph [ ] . for a number of such abstraction operators, it can be shown that the abstract zone graph is sound and complete . the proofs are rather intricate, however. thus formalizing them would be a big effort. by focusing on certification of unreachability, this problem vanishes, as we only need to ensure that any state (l, z) that we deem reachable in the zone graph is subsumed by some state (l, z ) with z ⊆ z that is part of the certificate and that was computed by the abstraction (i.e. z = α(z ) for some z ). figure depicts the zone graph of the automaton in figure . each zone z is given as a clock constraint cc such that z = {u | u |= cc}. a model checker like munta would have to explore the full zone graph before being able to decide that l is unreachable. any model checker that uses the same abstraction technique as munta [ ] would not be able to benefit from abstractions for this example and thus the abstract zone graph is the same as the zone graph. however, such a model checker could apply subsumptions while exploring the zone graph. that is, when a symbolic state of the form ( this means that at the end of the model checking process, only the three states in figure a will be stored. the solid edges are part of the zone graph, the zone graph of the automaton depicted in figure . while the dashed edge indicates that the zone at its tail has a successor in the zone graph ((l , {u | u |= c = ∧ c < })) that is subsumed by the tip of the edge. the set of these three states can act as a certificate of unreachability. they essentially form an inductive invariant of the zone graph: for each state in the certificate, all its successors in the zone graph are either contained in the certificate themselves or subsumed by another state in the certificate. thus we know that any symbolic state that is reachable from the initial state is subsumed by some state in the certificate, and as the final state is not contained in the certificate, we can conclude that it is unreachable. figure b shows a certificate with only two states that replaces the two states for l by the state with a dashed border. note that this state is not part of the original zone graph. the certificate fulfills the same invariant property and thus also proves unreachability. we will use this technique of adding larger states to the certificate that are not part of the zone graph for our compression techniques in section . this section first describes our approach to certification abstractly. then, we detail how the existing formalization of a timed automata model checker was extended-with rather low effort-to a verified certifier. in practice, networks of timed automata with additional modeling features such as, e.g. shared state variables, are used. however, due to the existing verified product construction for such a formalism [ ] , it is sufficient to study the case of a single timed automaton here. to work towards a rigorous justification of the certification process, we first study the problem on a more abstract level. consider a transition system → on states of type l × s where l corresponds to the finite state part of timed automata and s corresponds to zones. we assume an invariant p on states, i.e.: this invariant essentially represents a restriction of → to valid states. while this would usually be assumed implicitly, we explicate p here as it is technically more convenient to do so in the isabelle/hol formalization. the interesting feature that sets timed automata model checking apart is subsumption. recall that during the model checking process, it is possible to first discover some (symbolic) state (l, z) (a pair of a discrete state l and a zone z), and to find at some later point that another reachable state (l, z ) subsumes (l, z) because z semantically contains z , i.e. z ⊆ z . at this point the state (l, z) can be discarded as we know that anything that is reachable from (l, z) is also reachable from (l, z ). abstractly, subsumption is modeled by some fixed preorder (i.e. a reflexive and transitive relation) on s which is a simulation relation between → and itself: in the abstract setting, a certificate consists of a set of discrete states l of type l set, and a mapping m of type l ⇒ s set that gives the set of reachable symbolic states that were computed for any discrete state l ∈ l. we say that (l, m ) satisfies p if all states in the certificate (l, m ) satisfy p : moreover, the certificate needs to be closed. following herbreteau et al. [ ] , we call a state covered if it is subsumed by another state in the certificate. a certificate is closed if for each state in the certificate all its successors are covered: the following key theorem states that all reachable states are covered if the initial state is covered: theorem . let (l, m ) be closed and invariant under p . assume l ∈ l, s ∈ m l , s s , and (l , s ) → * (l, s). then l ∈ l and there exists s such that s ∈ m l and s s . proof. by induction on the number of steps in (l , s ) → * (l, s). the following sketches how the run of covering states is constructed. the first line represents (l , s ) → * (l, s) and the states in the third line are all part of the certificate. from the assumptions on l , s , and s , we can first apply the self-simulation property of → to (l , s ) → (l , s ) to obtain a t such that s t and (l , s ) → (l , t ). as the certificate is closed we thus get l ∈ l and we can find an s ∈ m l such that t s (and thus s s by transitivity). the induction hypothesis can then be applied to l , s , and s . we will now say that a certificate (l, m ) is admissible iff it satisfies p , it is closed, it covers the initial state (i.e. there is an s ∈ m l such that s s ), and there is no l ∈ l with f l. in practice, the certification process has to consider one additional complication. a model is typically described in terms of human-readable identifiers, while most model checkers and the verified model checker munta [ ] in particular represent these as natural numbers internally to allow for efficient indexing. in our certifier, this is accounted for by relabeling the human-readable identifiers in a given model to natural numbers in a first (verified) pre-processing step. to save additional transformations of the certificate after it was emitted, we let the unverified model checker additionally emit a textual description of such a renaming. the certifier then just needs to check that the given renaming is injective to ensure that it can safely be applied. together with the theoretical analysis laid out in the last section, we can thus derive the following strategy for certifying unreachability: -an unverified model checker explores the reachable state space of a given model symbolically and checks that none of the discovered states (l, s) fulfills f l. -the set of explored states is emitted as a certificate, possibly followed by compression (see section ). -the model, the final state predicate f , the certificate, and a description of the renaming that was used for the states are passed to the verified certifier. -the certifier checks that the given renaming is injective, renames the model accordingly, applies the product construction and checks that the certificate is admissible. if the process is successful, we can conclude by corollary that no "bad" state (l, s) (i.e. with f l) is reachable symbolically. we will argue that this really implies that the model is safe in the concrete case of timed automata in section . . we now lay out how a verified certificate checker that implements said strategy for an abstract transition system can be constructed in isabelle/hol. listing . displays the definition of the core of the checker that checks whether the certificate is closed in the sense defined above. the program is defined in the non-determinism monad of the imperative refinement framework (irf) [ ] . some parts, such as checking set membership or converting a (finite) set to a list are still left abstract. a non-deterministic specification spec q returns some value v with q v. the body of the program (lines - ) iterates over all discrete states in the certificate l and checks that all corresponding symbolic states are covered. line retrieves the symbolic states that correspond to discrete state l and in line their symbolic successor states are computed. the result (next) is a list of pairs of a discrete state and the set of its corresponding symbolic states. the loop ranging from lines to iterates over this list to ensure that all the successor states are covered. given a discrete state l and a set of symbolic states s , line first converts it into a list xs that can be iterated over. this turns into a vacuous operation when the algorithm is refined to an executable version where sets are implemented as lists. line checks that l is also part of the certificate. then, in line the set of corresponding symbolic states is retrieved and converted to a list ys. finally, lines - ensure that all states in xs are subsumed by some state in ys. to prove soundness of check , we mainly need correctness theorems for the monadic combinators monadic list all and monadic list ex. given a list xs and a monadic implementation q i of a predicate q, they check whether all states (at least one state) in xs satisfy (satisfies) q. this is the correctness theorem for monadic list all, for instance: where list all xs q holds if and only if q holds for all elements in xs. after setting up the irf's verification condition generator with this rule and the corresponding rule for monadic list ex, it is easy to prove that check is sound: where the property closed (l, m ) corresponds to condition ( * ) from above. we then use standard refinement techniques to obtain an algorithm check i that refines check , replacing sets by lists. however, the algorithm is still specified in the non-determinism monad and therefore not executable. we use a simple technique to make it executable. consider the following theorem for monadic list all : monadic list all xs (λx. return (p x)) = return (list all xs p ) . it allows us to replace the non-deterministic combinator monadic list all by the deterministic list all , pushing return to the outside. by exhaustively applying a set of such rewrite rules we obtain an alternative definition of check i where return appears only on the outermost level, and the inner term is deterministic and thus executable. using these techniques, we obtain a simple certificate checker that is executable, provided that we can implement the elementary model checking primitives such as the subsumption check or computing the list of successors of a state. for timed automata, the abstract transition system studied above is the zone graph → zg(a) of a given (single) automaton a. one can show that it simulates → a (completeness of → zg(a) ): this simulation property is sufficient to establish that if there is no reachable state (l, z) in → zg(a) with f l, then no final state (l, u) is reachable in → a : in the formalization, these proofs rely on instantiating a general theory of simulations in transition systems that is derived from the theory of wimmer and lammich [ ] . from corollary we get that there is no reachable final state in → zg(a) if the certificate check is passed. finally, by correctness of the renaming process and the product construction, we can conclude that there is no final reachable state in the input model if there is no final reachable state in → a . all the elementary model checking primitives we need for certification have already been implemented [ ] . the abstract implementation presented above assumes that the model checking primitives are implemented in a purely functional manner (as they are just regular hol functions). the existing (verified) model checker [ ] , however, is an imperative implementation in the imperative hol framework. imperative hol [ ] is a framework for specifying and reasoning about imperative programs in isabelle/hol. it provides a heap monad in which one can use-analogously to the ml family of programming languages-imperative references and arrays to express imperative programs. usually, once we have used an imperative implementation anywhere, the whole program would need to be stated in the heap monad. however, we can employ a technique similar to the one that is used for haskell's st monad [ ] to erase the heap monad in a safe way under certain circumstances. more precisely, if it can be deduced from the type of an imperative computation that no information about references or arrays on the heap can be leaked to the outside of the computation in its result, then the heap monad can be erased for this computation, yielding a pure computation. in the certifier, this is primarily used for computing the symbolic successor of a zone z for a certain transition. to that end, an immutable representation of the dbm m corresponding to z is copied to the a newly allocated imperative array, then the imperative pipeline of computations to compute the successor m is applied to m , and finally m is copied back to an immutable array. taken together, this whole computation does not contain the type of an array or reference in its result type, and thus can safely be turned into a pure computation. as a consequence, we are able to reuse the existing verified model checking primitives, while being able to state the certificate checking algorithm purely functionally. in the concrete checker, the mapping m is implemented using a verified functional hash table implementation based on so-called diff arrays [ ] . this data structure provides a purely functional interface to an underlying imperative array. when a diff array is updated, it performs the update on the imperative array, and stores a difference that can be used to re-compute the old state of the array. reading from the most recent version of a diff array is fast as the value can directly be read from the underlying imperative array. if an old version is accessed, the whole array has to be copied to recompute the old version. this gives diff arrays good performance characteristics, as long as they are mostly used linearly. this is the case in our application as the hash table is filled in an initial phase, after which the hash table is used in a read-only manner. the attentive reader may wonder why we care about a purely functional implementation of the certificate checker at all. indeed, we could use existing techniques [ ] to obtain an imperative implementation of the certificate checker in the heap monad. however, in this setting it would be hard to justify the soundness of executing parts of the checker in parallel. in the purely functional setting, this is much simpler. our approach to parallel execution is minimalist: we only provide means to execute the map combinator on lists in parallel. this is achieved by another custom code translation that is part of the trusted code base. the parallel implementation of map uses a task queue that will contain the individual computations that need to be run for each element of xs, and uses a fixed number of threads to work through this list and assemble the final result. we exploit this map implementation to work through the list of discrete states l in parallel, using the equivalence: list all q xs = list all id (map q xs) . in doing so, we lose the ability to stop execution early once a list element does not satisify q. for the certificate checker, however, we assume that usually the certificate is correct, meaning that we have to go through the whole list anyway. we only parallelize the outermost loop of check i because this should yield reasonably-sized work portions, given that the size of l will typically at least be in the hundreds. in this section we discuss two techniques to improve the performance of the certificate checker without increasing the verification effort significantly. isabelle/hol supports polymorphism and type classes, which are valuable features for sizeable formalization efforts. large parts of our formalization also make use of these features, e.g., most of the timed automata semantics are formalized for a general time domain, and operations on dbms are applicable on dbms whose entries are formed from more general algebraic structures than the ring of integers. while this yields an abstract and general formalized theory, it can get in our way when trying to obtain efficient code. when generating sml code from hol, isabelle uses a so-called dictionary construction to compile out type classes, which are not supported by sml. this means that most functions carry a large number of additional parameters, which are used to look up elementary operations, such as addition of two numbers. these additional lookup operations degrade performance. one solution is to ensure that all relevant constants that are exported to sml are monomorphic (i.e. specialized to the integer type), eliminating the need for the dictionary construction in most places. thus, we apply a semi-automated procedure to achieve this monomorphization. types such as int or nat are unbounded in isabelle/hol meaning they are implemented with the help of big integers in the target languages. to improve performance, we want to use machine integers instead, and instruct isabelle/hol's code generator to do that. this is still sound: sml's standard integer operations throw an exception if an overflow occurs instead of silently wrapping around. the code generator can only achieve partial correctness anyway: if program execution does not fail, then its result is consistent with the evaluated hol term. the last type of optimizations we use can be considered to belong to the category of micro-optimizations. these are improved code generator translations for elementary operations and combinators. we employ such improved translations to use native implementation language primitives to convert from mutable to immutable arrays and back. the other such optimizations we use, is to directly use integer values as counters in imperative loops instead of a natural number representation that would box the integers in a data constructor. in the same way, we use integers directly for array indexing. in this section, we present two techniques to compress the unreachability certificate. by compression we mean reducing the number of zones that are present in the certificate for each discrete state, using the unverified model checker. the first technique relies on subsumption. as explained above, it is possible that the model checker adds a zone z to the set of explored states and later another zone z with z ⊆ z (i.e. z subsumes z). thus the first technique simply filters the set w.r.t. ⊆ in the end. the second technique relies on the following idea: we replace one or more zones by their union, and check that the state space is still closed. this means that we have to check that all the successors of the larger zone are still covered by the current set of states. in that case, we can discard the old zones, and replace them by their union. as the union of two zones is not necessarily convex and thus cannot be represented as a dbm, we do not compute a precise union of zones but their convex hull. this operation is rather cheap as it amounts to taking the pointwise maximum of dbm entries. after computing the convex hull of a number of zones (in canonical form), we only need to apply the expensive operation to restore a canonical form once. the latter technique yields a whole family of compression algorithms by iterating one of the following operations for each discrete state until a fixed-point is reached: a) the convex hull of all zones is computed; b) the convex hull of the first two zones is computed; c) the convex hull of the first two zones that can successfully be joined is put to the front of the list; d) same as c) but considering only discrete states for which compression was successful in the last round; e) same as d) but iterating the operation until saturation. the next section contains an experimental evaluation of these techniques. note that similar techniques for reducing the search-space could also be applied already during model checking. by doing so, the number of states explored and the runtime of model checking could be reduced. this, however, comes at the risk of producing spurious model checking results (i.e. a final state might be deemed reachable, although there is no corresponding reachable state in the timed automaton). we evaluate the checker on a set of benchmarks that is derived from uppaal's standard benchmark suite [ ] . additionally, to cover the advanced modeling features of committed locations and broadcast channels, we use a set of benchmarks that is derived from the pacemaker models of jiang et al. [ ] and a modified version of the fddi benchmark with broadcast channels. a prototype sml implementation of a timed automata model checker (mlunta) is used to compute the certificates. we use reachability properties of the form e♦ false to enforce that the model checker explores the complete state space. the results are given in table . the problem size is specified as the number of automata in the network. we report the total runtime (wall time) of: . the tandem consisting of mlunta (using the first compression technique) and the (verified) certificate checker, both compiled with mlton; . the individual runtime of the (verified) certificate checker for a varying number of threads for parallel computation, compiled with poly/ml as it is the only sml compiler that supports multi-threading; . the runtime of uppaal configured for depth-first search (like mlunta); . the runtime of an unverified sml implementation of the certificate checker based on mlunta (compiled with mlton); . and the runtime of the fully verified model checker munta [ ] extended with the improvements from sections and and compiled with mlton. as can be seen from the results, the tandem is still one order of magnitude slower than uppaal, but certificate checking in isolation is also up to one order of magnitude faster than the previous verified model checker [ ] . note that mlunta explores significantly more states than uppaal and munta for "pacemaker". multi-core scale beyond two threads is relatively unsatisfactory, however. in microbenchmarks, we have identified that the problem appears to be with memory allocation on the heap, even if no data is shared among threads (in our case, only the certificate is shared but successors are computed locally). there does not seem to be an obvious way to improve on this situation for sml implementations. finally, one can see that the verified certifier is not drastically slower than the unverified implementation based on mlunta, indicating that the verified certifier is not missing any obvious significant optimizations. i - m cpu at . ghz with two cores and two threads per core. the column labeled "tandem" gives the runtime for a combination of the unverified sml tool and the verified certificate checker. the next column gives the runtime of the unverified sml certifier, followed by the runtimes of the verified checker for a varying number of threads. all times are given in seconds. table gives the results of evaluating the different compression algorithms on the same set of benchmarks. the second variant is always applied to the compression result of the first variant to avoid trivial computations of the convex hull. variant c) (the most expensive one) can produce drastically smaller certificates than any other variant, and its minimum compression factor is an order of a magnitude higher than for any other variant. nevertheless, only variants and a) appear to be useful in practice, as they are relatively cheap to compute. the other variants could prove useful if the certificates were produced by a significantly more efficient model checker, such as uppaal or tchecker [ ] . on a final note, we have constructed a more than % smaller but valid certificate for the fischer benchmark, suggesting that there is room for improvement on the compression algorithms. we have presented a verified certifier of unreachability certificates for a timed automata. the certificates are ought to be produced by an unverified model checker. experimentation shows that verified certificate checking in isolation is up to an order of magnitude faster than what was previously possible with a verified model checker [ ] . the performance of a tandem of an unverified model checker and the verified certifier could be improved by replacing the certificate-producing part with a highly optimized tool, possibly opening room to use some of the more powerful certificate compression techniques we suggested above. as we pointed out above, there appears to be further room for improvement on the certificate compression algorithms as well. moreover, more sophisticated tools also employ more powerful abstraction techniques, for which our proposed certification technique is still suitable-to a large extent without requiring additional verification effort. an exception is the implicit abstraction technique studied by herbreteau et al. [ ] as it does not compute abstractions of zones explicitly but rather checks subsumptions of the form z ⊆ α(z ) implicitly, meaning that one would have to prove correctness of the subsumption check to validate certificates produced by such a model checking process. finally, we intend to extend this work to certification of emptiness of timed büchi automata in the future, using the idea of subsumption graphs [ ] and relying on an unverified model checker implementation for timed büchi automata to produce the certificates [ , ] . a theory of timed automata static guard analysis in timed automata verification lower and upper bounds in zone based abstractions of timed automata timed automata: semantics, algorithms and tools correctness witnesses: exchanging verification results between verifiers formal verification of an executable ltl model checker with partial order reduction imperative functional programming with isabelle/hol towards a generic tool for reasoning about labeled transition systems a fully verified executable ltl model checker a mechanized semantic framework for real-time systems certifying proofs for ltl model checking why liveness for timed automata is hard, and what we can do about it better abstractions for timed automata certification for configurable program analysis modeling and verification of a dual chamber implantable pacemaker multicore emptiness checking of timed büchi automata using inclusion abstraction refinement to imperative/hol lazy functional state threads uppaal benchmarks certifying model checkers using promela in a fully verified executable ltl model checker isabelle/hol -a proof assistant for higher-order logic modelisation of timed automata in coq from falsification to verification a verified model checker for the modal µ-calculus in coq formalized timed automata munta: a fully verified model checker for realtime systems verified model checking of timed automata artifact for "verified certification of reachability checking for timed automata formal verification framework for safety of real-time system based on timed automata model in pvs manipulating clocks in timed automata using pvs ), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's creative commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the chapter's creative commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use the datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available in the zenodo repository [ ] : https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. . the artifact has been tested on the tacas artifact evaluation vm [ ] . key: cord- -tr ata h authors: sawalha, amr h. title: medical licensure: it is time to eliminate practice borders within the united states date: - - journal: am j med doi: . /j.amjmed. . . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: tr ata h nan at this time of a national health emergency caused by the covid- pandemic, indeed a global health crisis, we are reminded with the oath we took upon ourselves as physicians. we dedicated our lives to the most noble of all missions, saving lives and selfishly helping a fellow human in the time of utmost need. no matter what specialty or career path we take, it is always that "patients come first". the ability to practice medicine is yet, as it should be, a privilege. physicians are entrusted with human lives. it is, therefore, appropriate that medical education, training, and the ability to practice are closely scrutinized and highly regulated. medical schools and residency programs have to maintain accreditations mandated by national standards ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) . in addition, all physicians have to pass the three-step united states medical licensing examination (usmle), which is a prerequisite for obtaining a state-issued medical license to practice medicine in the u.s. ( ) . what is puzzling and defies logic, however, is that securing a medical license to practice medicine in one state does not allow for practicing the same type of medicine in another state in the same country. this contradicts the fact that accreditations and standards for medical education and training are regulated at the national level. are patients living in this country different when they cross state lines? does the human anatomy or physiology change when crossing the mississippi river from missouri to illinois, or driving across the george washington bridge from new york to new jersey for example? does a physician really need to have four different medical licenses from arizona, colorado, new mexico, and utah to treat patients separated by the lines of the four corners monument? or is lupus (a disease i treat) different if a patient wakes up in an eastern versus a western time zone? the status quo of restrictions imposed on the practice of medicine by state medical licensure does not make sense, and needlessly puts a tremendous pressure on the ability of physicians to do what they do best-take care of patients. arguably, the current model of medical licensure in the u.s. restricts patients' access to care. a physician who is entrusted to practice medicine in one state in the u.s. should be entrusted to do the same all over the country. needlessly having to apply and go through verification processes for another medical license for a different state entails significant effort, time, and resources that are better invested in taking care of patients. there is no value in contacting medical schools and residency training programs to verify the medical degree and training records when a physician is already licensed and practicing in good standing in another state. this laborious verification process has already been done by the state where the physician is already licensed. do state medical boards not trust one another or is there a different motivation to keep this illogical bureaucratic process in place? we realize that there are significant financial incentives that come to medical licensing boards from the initial application fees and maintenance fees, and we are not suggesting eliminating these sources of financial revenue. a possible solution is to require state medical boards, by a federal mandate, to recognize medical licenses issued by any of the states or territories within the country. physicians will continue to be required to hold a medical license in good standing to practice medicine. however, this license can be issued from any state regardless of where the physician practices within the country. maintenance of a good standing license to practice medicine will be through the original state that issued that license. indeed, this is exactly the case for the veterans affairs (va) health system, the clinical practice within the national institutes of health (nih), and in military hospitals and clinics around the country. a medical license issued by any state allows practice in any health facility affiliated with these aforementioned health systems. patient care is and should not be different if patients are military personnel, visit the nih clinics, see their physician at a va facility, or none of the above. so why not make this borderless medical licensure model a rule rather than an exception? many millions of americans receive care at va or military medical facilities. an alternative approach is for state medical boards to recognize medical licenses issued by any other state in the country and then use that as the sole basis for issuing a medical license by their own medical boards. if that system was to be adopted, then maintenance of such a license can continue to be issued from the state where a physician lives or wishes to practice, and again entails no loss of revenue to state medical licensing boards. let us advocate to extend the ability of our physicians to practice and remove these artificial inter-state restrictions that serve little if any good to the general public. we suggest that the waiver issued under the emergency declaration act by the u.s. department of health and human services on march , for the "requirements that physicians or other health care professionals hold licenses in the state in which they provide services, if they have an equivalent license from another state (and are not affirmatively barred from practice in that state or any state a part of which is included in the emergency area)" ( ) be extended indefinitely. educational commission for foreign medical graduates accreditation council for graduate medical education united states medical licensing examination waiver or modification of requirements under section of the social security act key: cord- -zkwxc xy authors: renne, jean-paul; roussellet, guillaume; schwenkler, gustavo title: preventing covid- fatalities: state versus federal policies date: - - journal: nan doi: nan sha: doc_id: cord_uid: zkwxc xy are covid- fatalities large when a federal government does not impose containment policies and instead allow states to implement their own policies? we answer this question by developing a stochastic extension of a sird epidemiological model for a country composed of multiple states. our model allows for interstate mobility. we consider three policies: mask mandates, stay-at-home orders, and interstate travel bans. we fit our model to daily u.s. state-level covid- death counts and exploit our estimates to produce various policy counterfactuals. while the restrictions imposed by some states inhibited a significant number of virus deaths, we find that more than two-thirds of u.s. covid- deaths could have been prevented by late september had the federal government imposed federal mandates as early as some of the earliest states did. our results highlight the need for early actions by a federal government for the successful containment of a pandemic. covid- is a rampant disease that has affected the world population to an unprecedented scale. this experience has pushed state and federal governments to implement drastic regulatory policies to contain the spread of the disease. in many countries, such as the united states, state governments can independently implement policies while other states or the federal government do not impose any restrictions. this begets the questions: how effective are policies implemented at a local level? and what could be gained from unified containment policies at the federal level? we answer these questions by developing an extension of the standard sird model of kermack et al. ( ) that allows for travel and commuting across states within a country. in our model, the government of a state can impose three types of regulations. it can impose a mask mandate that shrinks the transmission rate in the state. it can impose a stay-at-home order that shrinks the transmission rate in the state as well as the inflow of out-of-state commuters and travelers. or it can also issue a travel ban that shrinks the inflow of out-of-state travelers. the federal government can force all states to implement the same policies or allow states to decide individually what policies to implement, if any at all. we assume that a coronavirus infection takes on average days to resolve and that the fatality rate of the disease is . %. to incorporate uncertainty about the contagiousness of covid- , we assume that the transmission rates in individual states vary randomly over time and are not directly observable. they fluctuate around a natural mean rate but can be substantially higher or lower at times. we fit our model to data on state-level covid- fatalities from the united states between february and september , . we then run counterfactual experiments using the estimated model under the assumption that states implemented policies different than the ones they adopted in reality. we measure the effectiveness of the different policies by looking at the difference between the observed and counterfactual numbers of virus deaths on september . all of our results are replicable by using our codes that are available on github. our results show that a lack of unified policies at the federal level results in significantly elevated virus deaths nationally. we estimate that more than , deaths could have been we are inspired by mean-field models that are commonly used in the financial economics literature to model credit risk contagion across financial institutions; see cvitanic et al. ( ) , giesecke et al. ( ) , giesecke et al. ( ) , and others. these assumptions are consistent with fernández-villaverde and jones ( ), perez-saez et al. ( ) , and stringhini et al. ( ) , and are benchmarked against alternatives in a sensitivity study. prevented by september , -over two-thirds of all death cases recorded in the u.s. by that date -if the federal government had imposed federal policies that mirrored those of the earliest and strictest states. our results also show that containment policies implemented by individual states are effective. we find that the u.s. would have recorded more than , , additional virus deaths if states had not implemented any containment policies at all. our study suggests that a large number of covid- deaths could have been prevented if the federal government had imposed stay-at-home orders or mask mandates that followed the leads taken by the different states. we estimate that more than , deaths could have been prevented if the federal government had imposed a federal stay-at-home order that had gone into effect on march , , corresponding to the start of the stay-at-home order in california. imposing a federal mask mandate as early as connecticut did on april , , would have prevented more than , deaths. considering that shutting down the national economy with a federal stay-at-home order carries significant economic costs, which we do not consider in this paper, a federal mask mandate would likely be preferred over a federal stay-at-home order. our counterfactuals suggest that between , and , virus deaths could have been prevented if the federal government had enacted a federal mask mandate sometime between march and april , , on top of the stay-at-home and travel ban policies adopted by the different states. an early federal mask mandate would have contributed to slowing down the transmission of the virus early in the spring of , when we estimate the reproduction numbers to have been the highest. while it is questionable whether an early mask mandate would have been realistic or whether there existed political or even scientific consensus for enacting such a policy, what our results indicate is that early action by the federal government that complemented the steps taken by state governments could have resulted in significantly less virus deaths. these results provide an important policy lesson for future waves of the pandemic by highlighting that early by matching death counts only, we estimate that the effective reproduction numbers of the virus in the different states during the spring of must have been up to two-times higher than prevailing estimates that are based on infection cases, which are likely under-measured due to the large number of undetected infections and asymptomatic individuals. since our estimates depend on our modeling and parametric assumptions, we carry out several experiments that assess how sensitive our findings are to our assumed parameter values. these experiments corroborate our findings. during the month of march, the who recommended masks be reserved to medical staff and discouraged a widespread use to the general public (see who interim guidance of april , ). as noted by feng et al. ( ) , the rationale underlying the discouragement of mask use was to preserve the limited supplies of masks in countries were the health-care system and icu use was under pressure. action by a federal regulator when the reproduction rates are high is key to prevent virus deaths. we find that interstate travel bans do not accomplish significant virus death prevention, mostly for two reasons. first, travel bans are often imposed once a regulator becomes aware of the virus, at which point the virus has already penetrated and spread in the states. the first travel ban in the u.s. went into effect in hawaii on march , . our counterfactuals indicate that only around , u.s. virus deaths could have been avoided if the federal regulator had imposed a nationwide ban of interstate travel on the same day as hawaii and maintained it through september . in contrast, we find that close to , deaths could have been prevented if the nationwide interstate travel ban had begun by the start of our sample on february . such an early ban of interstate travel is unrealistic given that the severity of the virus was not perceived to be as serious at that point of time as to justify such a drastic policy. second, interstate mobility scatters virus cases across state lines and this may slow down the spread of the virus within a country. in our model, states that are net importers of individuals record higher numbers of infections than they would in the absence of interstate movement while states that are net exporters of individuals record lower number of infections. when interstate mobility is restricted, infected population that would otherwise disperse out-of-state is forced to stay in-state. the higher concentration of infected population in some states can result in accelerated virus transmission in those states and worse death outcomes at the federal level. our counterfactuals suggest that this is only a minor effect, nonetheless. for example, we find that only around of the more than , virus deaths that could have been prevented with a federal stay-at-home order on march are explained by the fact that interstate commuting and traveling are discouraged when individuals are required to stay at home. our results suggest that policies that restrict cross-border mobility accomplish little in preventing covid- deaths unless they are imposed so early and for so long that they prevent the virus from initially taking hold in a population. to the extent that our results can be extrapolated to a global setting with multiple countries, they suggest that the late banning of international travel may be an ineffective tool in combating covid- . finally, we focus on individual states and find that the states that imposed some of the strictest containment policies were able to reduce the spread of the disease. our counterfactuals suggest that new york would have only recorded % fewer death cases if all states had imposed strict containment policies, while california would have recorded close to , additional deaths if the state government had not imposed any containment policies at all. these results suggest that strict-policy states, such as new york and california, were protected by their policies even when other states implemented weaker policies. on other end of the spectrum, we find that states that adopted weak or no containment policies could have prevented a significant number of covid- deaths by adopting stricter policies. our results suggest that over , deaths could have been prevented if florida and texas had adopted strict containment policies. we also find that the four states that adopted no containment policies in our sample-iowa, nebraska, south dakota, and utah-could have prevented more than % of their death cases by adopting early mask mandates. our results hinge on modeling choices and assumed parameter values. to understand how sensitive our findings are to our choices, we carry out several sensitivity analyses that assume alternative parametric values and provide a reasonable set of bounds for our results. we find, for example, that the number of preventable deaths is higher if we assume that it takes less times for a virus infection to resolve; i.e., if the virus is less severe. this is because, if a virus infection is less severe, there must have been many more infections early on in the sample to match the observed death data. therefore, early action by the federal regulator would have been even more impactful. the sensitivity analyses highlight a key benefit of our approach. by relying on death counts only, we allow our methodology to infer how many infections there must have been to justify the death data. this enables us to make data-driven inferences on how many infections and ultimate deaths could have been prevented through regulatory actions. our contributions are methodological and normative. on the methodological front, we develop a novel model for infectious disease transmission within a country composed of multiple states. our model incorporates the effects of interstate traveling and commuting, as well as uncertain transmission rates. it also allows for independent regulatory policies across states. our methodology delivers daily estimates of the transmission rates and effective reproduction numbers (r ); these objects are jointly estimated for u.s. states based solely on death cases. stochastic sir models of covid- have recently been used by fernández-villaverde and jones ( ) and hong et al. ( ) . deterministic mean-field models of infection rates have been considered by read and keeling ( ) , youssef and scoglio ( ), zhang et al. ( ) , and others. brady et al. ( ) study an sir model with spatial interaction of susceptible and infected people across neighboring states and allow for independent social distancing policies across states. this model, however, does not account for interstate travel. it also does not account for the effects of mask mandates. for single-state models, a related methodology is discussed in gouriéroux and jasiak ( ) and implemented in arroyo marioli et al. ( ) , , and hasan and nasution ( ) using infections data. fernández-villaverde and jones ( ) we briefly describe our model here and provide a detailed model formulation in appendix a. we assume that a unit of time is one day and that a country is composed of several states. we model the number of people in each state that are (i) susceptible to the virus (i.e., have never been infected), (ii) infected by the virus, (iii) recovered from the virus (and immune to subsequent estimates of the r using death counts only but it requires extensive smoothing of the data. studying the economic impact of state-level stay-at-home orders, rothert ( ) infections), and (iv) deceased due to the virus. our model explicitly takes into account the impact of different containment policies on the transmission of the disease. we consider three different types of containment policies: mask mandates, travel bans, and stay-at-home orders. our model also accounts for the effects of traveling and commuting across state lines. each state is endowed with a certain number of inhabitants. on any given day in a given state, the number of people that are contaminated by an infected person is assumed to be a random draw from a poisson distribution whose rate is the product of the policy-adjusted transmission rate in the state and the fraction of the state's population that is susceptible to the virus. if a person is infected on any given day, that person either dies, recovers, or continues to be infected in the next day with certain probabilities. we assume that it takes on average days for an infection to resolve and that the fatality rate by the end of this time period is . %. all in one, on aggregate in a state, the net number of new infections in a day is poisson distributed with rate equal to the product of the policy-adjusted transmission rate, the ratio of susceptible population, and the number of infected inhabitants of the state, after subtracting the number of infected individuals that recover or die from the disease. we assume that the transmission rates in the different states are unobservable and evolve stochastically from day to day. they are positively correlated across states and time. we account for interstate commuting and traveling as follows. each day, an inhabitant of a state can commute to another state, travel to another state, or remain in the home state with given probabilities. inhabitants that stay in their home states contribute to the disease transmission in their home states. commuters travel during parts of the day and return to their home states at the end of a day. they contribute to the transmission of the disease in their home states and the visited states. travelers spend several days in the visited state. they only contribute to the transmission of the disease in the state they visit. the transmission rates in each state, as well as the travel and commuting probabilities across states, are adjusted to reflect the containment policies adopted by the different states. the effects of the different policies are modeled by shrinking the transmission rates or the inflows of travelers and commuters when the policies are active. we assume that a mask mandate in a given state shrinks the transmission rate in that state by % but does not affect the inflow or outflow of travelers and commuters. a travel ban in a given state shrinks the inflow of travelers our assumption on immunity post-infection is merely a simplification given that current evidence on reinfections from covid- is thin and mixed, see, e.g., iwasaki ( ) . we justify this value as follows. based on the estimates of fischer et al. ( ) , we assume that a typical mask by %, but does not affect the transmission rate or the inflow of commuters in that state. finally, a stay-at-home order shrinks both the transmission rate and the inflow of commuters and travelers in that state by %. appendix e considers variations of these parameters and measures the sensitivity of our results to our assumptions. we use mobility, travel, and state-level policy data from the united states to calibrate most of the parameters of our model. we develop a filtering-based maximum likelihood methodology to estimate some of the parameters governing the transmission rates of the different states. we rely on daily state-level death counts from the covid tracking project since they are the least likely to be contaminated with substantial measurement issues (compared to the number of infections, for instance). the sample period is february through september , . appendix b provides details of the approach we take to fit our model to the data. state-level and aggregate death counts. we show in appendix b that our model implies that, in order to match the levels of fatalities we observed over the sample period in u.s. states, the effective r of the disease in the different states must have been substantially higher than through april for the majority of the states. we also show that the r grew larger than in several states over the summer. our estimates suggest that the number of infections in the different states required to match the history of covid- fatalities in the u.s. must have been substantially higher than recorded in the data. unreported model outcomes show that the worn in the u.s. filters out particles by a median value of %. we assume that only half of the population wears masks as suggested by data from the institute of health metrics and evaluation, justifying a reduction factor of approximately %. we estimate the % impact of travel bans as the reduction factor in the average number of daily trips of more than miles that were taken in the u.s. between march and april , , compared to . we assume that travel bans do not reduce the inflow of commuters into a state because travel bans were often accompanied by exemptions for commuters. we estimate the impact of stay-at-home orders on transmission rates as the reduction factor in the average number of daily trips of less than miles taken in versus those taken between march and april , , which is the period in which most stay-at-home orders were active in the united states. because stay-at-home orders were often accompanied by lockdowns which closed out office buildings, we assume that stay-at-home orders also reduce the inflow of commuters into a state. finally, because stay-at-home orders were also associated with closed out tourist attractions, we also assume that stay-at-home orders reduce the inflow of travelers into a state. the fact that our estimation approach relies on death counts data only, as in flaxman et al. ( ) , is an advantage over standard approaches to estimate time-varying reproduction numbers (e.g. bettencourt and ribeiro ( ) , cori et al. ( ) , thompson et al. ( ) ), as these approaches necessitate data on infection cases. estimated number of infected individuals in mid march was about -times larger than data records show, while it was about -time as large as in the data by late september. our results imply that many infected people remained undiagnosed and contributed to the spread of the disease early in the sample. we run counterfactual experiments in our model to study the effectiveness of the different containment policies. the underlying assumption of our counterfactuals is that states deviate from the policies they enacted in reality by imposing stricter or looser restrictions in a hypothetical world. we ask: what would have happened to the death count of a state if it had enacted a stricter containment policy than it actually did? what would have happened if it had adopted a policy that it did not enact in reality? and how would these deviations have impacted the aggregate death count in the u.s. by the end of our sample? we answer these questions for mask mandates, stay-at-home orders, and travel ban policies. we assume that a state adopts a loose policy if it does not impose that policy at all over our sample period. in contrast, we assume that a state adopts a strict policy if it adopts that policy as early as the earliest state adopted the policy in the data, and keeps the policy active until the last state in our sample shuts off that policy. our strict policy scenario therefore avoids forward-looking biases. any regulator could have adopted a strict policy scenario in real life by moving along with the first state that adopted a policy and ending the policy as soon as no other state had the policy in place. the strict scenarios for the different policies are: • stay-at-home: start on march , (the day when california activated its stay-athome mandate) and keep it active through september , (the last day in our sample in which the stay-at-home order was still active in california). • travel ban: start on march , (the day the first interstate travel ban in the u.s. went into effect in hawaii) and keep it active through september , (the last day in our sample in which an interstate travel ban was still active in alaska). • mask mandate: start on april , (the day the first mask mandate in the u.s. went into effect in connecticut) and keep it active through september , (the last day in our sample in which several states had mask mandates in place). the legality of such federal mandates are outside of the scope of this paper. we consider two variations of our counterfactual experiments. one in which only one state at a time deviates from its actual policies at a time, and another one in which all states take on the same policy jointly at the same time. with the first set of experiments we seek to answer how impactful deviations at the state level would have been. the second set of counterfactuals studies how impactful federally mandated polices would have been. to evaluate the effectiveness of the different policies, we compare the number of deaths at the state and federal levels in the different counterfactual experiments to the baseline levels in the data. appendix c provides details of our approach to computing counterfactual results. table shows the results of the counterfactual experiments in which we assume that all states deviate jointly. figure breaks down the number of deaths that could have been prevented through federal mandates by states and displays these in proportion to the number of death in the data of the individual states. figure table and further elaborated in appendix e. the additional sensitivity analyses are consistent with our main conclusions and provide validity for our results. have been prevented if the federal government had imposed strict stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, and interstate travel bans. these states adopted some of the weakest containment policies during our sample period. although table suggests the biggest reduction of fatalities could be achieved through a federal stay-at-home mandate, this comes at the cost of shutting down the national economy. the potential substantial economic costs inherent to that policy cast doubt on whether the federal government would have been persuaded to carry out such a drastic step. instead, imposing a federal mask mandate could have been a cost-effective option. we ask: how many deaths could have been prevented if the federal government had imposed an early federal mask mandate sometime between march and april that complemented the stay-at-home and interstate travel policies that were in effect in the different states? we run an additional counterfactual experiment to answer this question; figure summarizes our findings. our results indicate that between , and , deaths could have been prevented if a federal mask mandate that complemented the state-level stay-at-home and travel ban policies went into effect sometime between mid march and mid april. what drives our findings is that an early federal mask mandate could have provided a significant boost in reducing the potential for infections. as figure in appendix b shows, the effective reproduction number (r ) of the virus was substantially high -much higher than -in all states through april even while stay-at-home orders were in place in the different states. by imposing an early mask mandate, the federal regulator could have contributed to drastically reducing the infection potential in all states early in the sample. this would have contributed to slowing down new infections over time even while some state-level policies were relaxed. indeed, table shows that, in a counterfactual world in which a federal mask mandate had gone into effect on march while no state-level policies had been enacted, only , virus deaths would have been prevented. this result suggests that the key step for the federal regulator would have been to issue an early federal mask mandate that complemented, but did not replace, the state-level stay-at-home and travel ban policies that were enacted over time. the number of deaths that could have been prevented with early federal policies depends on our assumptions on how fatal covid- is and how long it takes for an infection to resolve. we run sensitivity analyses in appendix e to verify that our results are robust to different calibrations. the results of appendix e are generally consistent with table and figures through . they also highlight an important benefit of our methodology. appendix e establishes that the number of preventable deaths is higher if we assume that it takes only days for an infection to resolve. we find that this is the case because, in order to match the number of deaths observed in the data if the virus were less severe, the methodology infers that there must have been many more infected individuals early in the sample so that early federal action would have been even more impactful. we obtain these results because we rely only on death counts to make our inferences and allow the methodology to estimate how many infections there must have been to match the data. this highlights a fundamental benefit of of our approach relative to alternative approaches that rely on infection cases, which may be under-counted in the data due to the large number of asymptomatic cases or undetected infections, looking forward to future waves of the covid- pandemic, our results suggest that early actions by the federal government when the reproduction numbers are high could have a great impact on preventing virus deaths. our counterfactual experiments indicate that the actions taken by individual states benefited both the states that implemented the policies and the u.s. as a nation. we find that the u.s. would have been much worse off if no state had adopted any containment policies. in a hypothetical scenario in which no state had imposed any policies, table indicates that the u.s. would have observed , , additional deaths due to covid- . our results show that states that implemented strict containment policies were able to contain the spread of the disease. figure shows that a state like new york, which had one of the longest running stay-at-home and mask mandates, would have experienced only % fewer death cases if all states had imposed all three strict policies simultaneously. figure also shows that a state like california, which imposed the strictest stay-at-home policy in the country, would have recorded around , additional covid- deaths, or -times its end-of-september toll, if it had not imposed any containment policies at all. these results suggest that the measures adopted by individual states to contain the disease were highly effective and shielded states from inaction from other states. we find that the four states that implemented no containment policies at all during our sample period-iowa, nebraska, south dakota, and utah -could have benefited if they had implemented mask mandates by april without forcing stay-at-home orders or interstate travel bans. figure suggests that strict mask mandates could have prevented as many covid- deaths as - , in iowa ( % of all covid- deaths in the state), in nebraska ( %), in south dakota ( %), and in utah ( %). these results corroborate our findings on the effectiveness of mask mandates for preventing covid- transmission and deaths, both at the federal and the state levels. the results of table is not allowed to cross state borders, infected individuals are forced to stay within the home state. the higher concentration of infected population in those state leads to an accelerated spread of the disease and therefore also to higher infections and death cases. this is showcased in figure of appendix d, in which we plot the estimated cumulative number of infections in south carolina both under the baseline and in the counterfactual in which a strict federal interstate travel ban is imposed. consider wyoming, on the other hand. wyoming is a net importer of travelers and commuters, receiving on an average day a net inflow of around , out-of-state individuals. figure indicates that wyoming would have recorded % fewer death cases if a federal ban of interstate travel had gone into effect on march . figure we show that more than two-thirds of all covid- death cases is the u.s. were preventable had the federal government followed the leads of several states that took early actions to contain the virus. our results indicate that, in the absence of a unified federal approach, the policies enacted in individual states were effective and resulted in reduced virus fatalities. this benefited both the individual states and the u.s. as a whole. as a lesson for future waves of the covid- pandemic, as well as future pandemics, our results highlight the need for decisive and impactful early actions by a federal regulator to complement actions taken by state regulators, especially at times when the reproduction numbers are substantially large. -appendix - a. single-state model we first introduce a single-state model to provide an overview of the assumptions underlying the stochastic evolution of the covid- disease. this provides a basis that we extend in the following section to account for a network of n states. consider individual j that was infected on date t − (i.e., j ∈ { , . . . , i t− }). we assume that the number of people infected by this individual between dates t − and t follows a using the fact that a sum of poisson-distributed variables is poisson, the total number of people infected between dates t − and t is if j is infected on date t, then the probability that she dies between dates t and t + is δ (i.i.d. bernoulli) and, if she does not die, the probability she recovers between dates t and t + is γ/( − δ). (in such a way that the probability she recovers if γ.) the cumulated number of dead people on date t (d t ) is given by d t = d t− + d t , where d t is the number of deaths taking place on date t. under the assumptions stated above, d t follows a binomial distribution: d t ∼ b(i t− , δ). moreover, the number of people who recover between where s t and r t respectively denote the number of susceptible and recovered persons as of date t. (it is easily the transmission rate β t is assumed to follow a non-negative square root process whose euler discretization reads: where ε β,t ∼ n ( , ) and e t− (β t ) = β t− + κ(β − β t− ). let us now write the state-space representation of the model in a context where only d t is the measurement equation is ∆d t = δi t− + ε d,t . the transition equations are: we now consider a n -state model. inhabitants may travel across states for commuting or other reasons -we refer to the latter as "traveling." in terms of notations, superscript j refers to a given state. variables without superscripts denote n -dimensional vectors. we denote by p = [p , . . . , p n ] the vector of the state population sizes. s t , i t , r t and d t are n -dimensional vectors gathering the number of susceptible, infected, recovered, and deceased people in each state. the transmission rates β j,t and the flow probabilities are impacted by the containment policies implemented in the different states. we consider three containment policies: mask mandates, stay-at-home orders, and travel bans. the effect of each policy is captured through the binary variables θ j t,m , θ j t,s and θ j t,t , respectively valued in {θ low m , }, {θ low s , }, and {θ low t , }. the parameters θ low m , θ low s , and θ low t are strictly lower than one; they reflect the effects of the containment policies. more precisely: • the transmission rate β j,t is reduced when mask mandates or stay-at-home policies are implemented. formally, it is of the form β j,t θ j t,m θ j t,s , where β j,t is an exogenous transmission rate following the dynamics depicted by ( ). given that the θ variables are equal to one when the policies are not in place, it follows that β j,t coincides with the effective transmission rate (β j,t ) when mask mandates and stay-at-home policies are not implemented. • the probability that a given inhabitant of state j commutes to state k, that is w com j,k,t , is of the form w com j,k θ k s,t . similarly, the travel probability is given by w trav j,k,t = w trav j,k θ k s,t θ k t,t . these probabilities are therefore lower when (i) stay-at-home orders are in place or (ii) when travel bans are enforced in the visited state. the variables flow j trav,s,t , flow j trav,i,t , and flow j trav,r,t are net travel inflows of susceptible, infected, and recovered populations, respectively. we denote by w k,j trav,t the average fractions of the date-t population of state k that travels to state j; e j is the j th column of the n × n identity matrix; is a n × vector of ones; w j,• trav,t and w •,j trav,t respectively denote the j th row vector and column vector of w trav,t . consistent with the assumptions made in a. . , we have: here, τ trav measures the average number of days that a traveler spends in the visited states. using the poisson approximation of the binomial distribution, we consider that the number of outward travelers is drawn from poisson distributions. for example, the number of susceptible individuals traveling from state k to state j between dates t and t + is: this implies in particular that the net number of inhabitants traveling into state j between dates t and t + (denoted by flow j trav,s,t ) is such that: using the convention w j,j trav,t = , it follows that the n -dimensional vector φ trav,s,t is given by where by the same token, and with obvious notations for φ trav,i,t and φ trav,r,t : φ trav,i,t = Ω trav,t i t and φ trav,r,t = Ω trav,t r t . interstate commuters are people who spend a fraction τ of each day in another state. consider the infected inhabitants of state k working in state j. they contaminate less people in state k because they spend less time in that state. but they may also contaminate people in state j because they spend some time in that state while commuting. we respectively denote by flow j← com,s,t , flow j← com,i,t , and flow j← com,r,t the commuting inflows of susceptible, infected and recovered people in state j. outflows are given by flow j→ com,s,t , flow j→ com,i,t and flow j→ com,r,t . let us denote by w com,t the "commute" matrix; that is, the matrix whose component (i, j), denoted by w i,j com,t , is the fraction of the date-t population of state k that commutes to state j. on date t, the number of susceptible people commuting from state k to state j is: this implies in particular, with obvious vectorial notations, that: with (consistently with the assumptions made in a. . ): where w com is the commute matrix that would prevail under no containment policies. by the same token: all in all, if we denote by flow com,s,t the vector of time-weighted commuters net inflows, we have: with Ω com,t = τ com w com,t − τ com d(w com,t ). each state j features an autonomous β j,t process (see a. . ). these variables, gathered in vector β t , follow non-negative square-root processes whose dynamics is approximated by: where the diagonal elements of Σ are ones and the extra-diagonal entries are set to ρ. the state-space model is characterized by we have: where Ω t− = Ω com,t− + Ω trav,t− , where the latter two matrices are respectively defined in equations ( ) and ( ). notice that the state-space ends up being of size × n , where n is the number of states, so in our application. appendix g details the computation of the conditional variance of [d t , s t , i t , r t , β t ] (see equation in g. ). the previous equations constitute the set of transition equations of the state-space. we complete the formulation with the measurement equations being only the (seasonally adjusted) time series of fatalities per day, for each state, which we denote by d obs t . we assume that the number of deaths per day is measured nearly perfectly, such that: since the state-space is non-linear, we resort to the extended kalman filter for estimation. this requires the computation of the jacobian matrix of e t− [d t , s t , i t , r t , β t ] with respect to [d t− , s t− , i t− , r t− , β t− ], which is closed-form and detailed in appendix h. we then apply a fixed-interval rauch-tung-striebel smoother (backward filter) with the estimated trajectories produced by the filter. our model features several parameters that we need to fix: the death rate δ, the recovery rate γ, the parameters β, κ, σ, and ρ governing the dynamics of transmission rates in the states, the effects θ low m , θ low s , and θ low t of the different containment policies, and the average traveling and commuting flows across states. we proceed as follows to select parameter values. we summarize our parameter estimates in table . we follow fernández-villaverde and jones ( ), perez-saez et al. ( ), and stringhini et al. ( ) and assume that it takes on average days for an infection to resolve. we assume that after this period, an infected person either recovers and becomes immune, or dies with a probability of . %. these assumptions imply that γ = and δ = . % = . . we estimate average interstate travel flows from travel and mobility data in the united states. we collect data on interstate travels from the traveler analysis framework published by the federal highway administration (https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/ analysisframework/ .cfm). we also collect data on state-level mobility and staying-at-home from the trips by distance database of the bureau of transportation statistics (https://www. bts.gov/distribution-trips-distance-national-state-and-county-level). we combine these two databases to compute the percentage of a state's population that stays home before and during the pandemic, as well as the percentage of a state's population that traveled across state boundaries before and during the pandemic. we use these data to determine the travel matrix w trav of appendix a. . . we illustrate the estimated interstate travel network in figure (a figure (b) shows the implied commuting travel network. in this figure, however, the size of a node is proportional to the logarithm of the percentage of a state's population that commutes outwards. we assume that out-of-state commuters spend hours each business day and no time during a weekend in the visited state. we also assume that commuters sleep hours a day and during that time infections are not possible. as a result, we set τ trav = . ≈ × × . we calibrate the parameters θ low m , θ low s , and θ low t to match mobility and mask usage data from the united states. we collect data on when the different policies were active in the different states from the national academy for state health policy (https://www.nashp. org/governors-prioritize-health-for-all/) and the steptoe covid- state regulatory tracker (https://www.steptoe.com/en/news-publications/covid- -state-regulatorytracker.html). figure showcases the time periods in which policies were active in the different states. we also collect data on average mask adoption across u.s. states from the institute of health metrics and evaluation (https://covid .healthdata.org/united-statesof-america). we assume that a stay-at-home policy is in place for the time period that covers any order for staying at home, sheltering at home, or being safer at home issued by a state governor. we neglect any stay-at-home advisories that are not strictly enforced by law officials. we estimate θ low s = . as the reduction factor in the number of short trips taken during the pandemic versus before the pandemic. we consider a travel ban to be active when a state requires inbound travelers to self-quarantine for an extended period of time. travel bans are active in our model only if they apply for all states. that is, we neglect any travel ban that only applies for travelers from selected states. we estimate θ low t = . as the reduction factor in the number of long trips taken during the pandemic versus before the pandemic. finally, we assume that a mask mandate is active if a state requires the use of masks indoors in public places. we do not consider mask mandates to be active if mask wearing is only recommended or only required outdoors. we estimate θ low m = . by assuming that only half of the population adopts mask usage (as suggested by the institute of health metrics and evaluation) and that an average mask used in the u.s. reduces covid- transmission by % (as suggested by fischer et al. ( )). we develop a quasi maximum likelihood methodology to estimate the parameters governing the dynamics of the transmission rates β j,t from daily data on state-level deaths in the united states for the time period between february through september , . we remove weekly seasonality patterns observed in covid- fatality records using an stl approach. our methodology assumes that daily death counts at the state-level are measures with small measurement errors. we take into account all state-level containment policies that were observed over the sample period. we write a non-linear state-space representation of the model, gathering s j t , i j t , r j t , d j t , and β j,t for all states simultaneously ( variables). filtering is easily performed through the first order extended kalman filter algorithm. while we could estimate the speed of reversion κ with our methodology, we find that the data prefers to set κ arbitrarily close to zero, implying an extremely high persistence for the β j,t . this results in numerical instabilities. to avoid these issues, we fix κ = . so that the first-order autocorrelation of the β j,t is . . we then estimate the remaining parameters β, σ, and ρ using our quasi maximum likelihood methodology. the estimates are provided in table . we find that our parameter estimates are more precisely, for each state we evaluate the average number of daily trips of less than miles taken in and compare that number to the average number of daily trips of less than miles taken during the time frame march through april , . we compute θ low s as the average reduction factor across states. we evaluate the average number of daily trips of more than miles taken in and compare that number to the average number of daily trips of more than miles taken during the time frame march through april , . we compute θ low t as the average reduction factor across states. not very sensitive to alternative choices for the value of κ. figure shows the data-implied death counts in each state as well as the smoothed modelimplied death counts. we see that our model performs well at fitting the state-level data. the estimated measurement errors are fairly small. figures and show the smoothed modelimplied effective r and cumulated infections for each state. the data pushes our model to showcase high r in the different states. the highest r were observed in new jersey, new york, and washington in february and march, reaching levels of more than . indeed, we find that the state-level r must have been substantially higher than for most states through overall, our findings suggest that the virus spread drastically in the u.s. through the fall of . in fitting the data, our model estimates that the number of infections in the different states must have been significantly higher than recorded in the data. these observations suggest that there must have been many undiagnosed infections that facilitated the spread of the disease throughout our sample period. note that we never use infections data for the estimation or calibration of our model parameters. this section details how our counterfactual experiments are conducted. the r of state j in our model is given by θ j t,m θ j t,s β j,t /(δ + γ). our estimates of the effective reproduction numbers are one-and-a-half to two-times larger than prevailing estimates in fernández-villaverde and jones ( ). we find that this is driven by a key difference in our models. fernández-villaverde and jones ( ) assume that, while it take two weeks for an infection to resolve, an infected individual is only contagious for the first days of an infection. we, instead, assume that an infected individual is contagious during the whole infection period. we run several experiments in appendix e in which we study whether are results are sensitive to this assumption, and we find that this is not the case. the estimated dynamics constitutes our baseline scenario. all of our results are presented as a difference with respect to this baseline scenario. we compare the outcomes in terms of fatalities. we consider two types of experiments, which we call strict and loose, respectively: • in the strict scenario, we assume that the states start adopting the same policy as that implemented by the earliest state during the sample period and relax it when the latest state does so. the scenarios are as follows: -stay-at-home: start on march , (the day when california activated its stayat-home mandate) and keep it active through september , (the last day in our sample in which the stay-at-home order was still active in california). -travel ban: start on march , (the day the first interstate travel ban in the u.s. went into effect in hawaii) and keep it active through september , (the last day in our sample in which an interstate travel ban was still active in alaska). -mask mandate: start on april , (the day the first mask mandate in the u.s. went into effect in connecticut) and keep it active through september , (the last day in our sample in which several states had mask mandates in place). • for the loose scenario, we assume that states do not implement a specific policy at all. we then re-propagate the model with these counterfactual policies according to the methodology described below. we conduct these two types of experiments one policy at a time, and one last time all together. our analysis is split into joint and state-by-state experiments. for the former, we assume that the federal government imposes on all states the counterfactual policy (strict federal mandate), i.e. to be as strict as the strictest or to do nothing (loose federal mandate). for the latter, we take each state one at a time and assume that only this state follows the strict or loose scenario and compute the counterfactual outcomes one state at a time. recall that the model parameters and the latent variables (s t , i t , r t and β t ) are estimated by employing the extended kalman filter. the observed variables are the numbers of deaths d obs. t , as well as the observed implemented policies θ obs. . in order to derive our counterfactual outcomes, we also extend our filtering approach. the broad idea is the following: we augment the state vector used at the estimation step -i.e. x t = [d t , s t , i t , r t , β t ] -with a similar state vector for a fictitious country (f ict.), with the same number of states, where the counterfactual policies would be implemented. critically, we assume that the basic, standardized, shocks affecting the two countries are almost perfectly correlated, implying in particular that the β t 's are the same for the baseline and fictitious countries. specifically, let us denote by x * t the state vector corresponding to the fictitious country. the transition equation of the augmented state-space model are: where θ obs. and θ f ict. contain the full trajectories of observed and fictitious policies, respectively; where ε t rue,t and ε f ict.,t denote differences of martingale sequence; and where v / (s, i, θ) is such that v / (s, i, θ) v / (s, i, θ) = v(s, i, θ), with the function v defined in ( ). to capture the idea that the two countries are affected by very similar standardized shocks, which are the ε t rue,t 's and the ε f ict.,t 's, we further assume that: on top of the transition equation ( ), the state-space model comprehends the following measurement equation: where d obs. t is the observed vector of numbers of deaths (in the "observed" country). by construction, the filtered variables x t resulting from this augmented state-space framework are exactly equal the the ones of the regular state-space. indeed, it produces the moment e(x t |d obs t , d obs t− , . . . ), which is the same in both state-space models. however, x * t will be different from x t since the implemented policies are different, and their impacts are non-trivial since they are non-linearly propagated in the state-space. as a last step, we provide backward path estimates using the bryson-frazier smoother and compare the paths of d t and d * t produced by the smoother. we used bryson-frazier rather than rauch-tung-striebel because the latter requires to invert the conditional variance-covariance matrices of the transition equations, which are of size ( n × n ) . in our empirical application ( states), this results in matrices of size ( × ) that have to be inverted for each day of data. this results in a large numerical instability. instead, the bryson-frasier smoother only requires the inversion of the variance-covariance matrix of the observables, that is of matrices of size (n × n ). the time series dynamics of the federal counterfactuals are presented on figure . we run several analyses to understand how sensitive our results are with respect to changes in our parameter values. table shows confidence bands that are derived from re-estimating the number of preventable deaths if the policy that deviated from the data was either twice or half as impactful. what we mean in precise terms by this is that if, for example, we assume that a counterfactual is carried out with respect to changes in a mask mandate, we would evaluate the number of preventable deaths by assuming that θ low m is either half or twice as large as indicated in table . this sensitivity analysis provides confidence bands for our estimates of the number of deaths that could have been prevented by adopting policies different than the ones that were adopted in reality by considering that the policies may have a different impact on reducing transmission rates and traveler and commuter inflows than what we assume in our study. we also carry out additional sensitivity analyses with respect to two key parameters in our model: the number of days that it takes for an infection to resolve, and the fatality rate of the disease. tables through repeat the experiments of table by assuming that it either takes or days for an infection to resolve, or that the fatality rate of the disease is . % or %. to obtain the results, we re-estimate the parameters β, σ, and ρ that would be necessary under the new assumptions for the fatality rate or the number of days for infection resolution. the sensitivity analyses are carried out one-by-one. we find that adopting early federal containment policies would have been less impactful and prevented less deaths if an infection took longer time to resolve. vice versa, we find that early federal action would have been more impactful if an infection took less time to resolve. this is primarily because, if the disease were less severe than we assumed and it took less time to resolve an infection, then the methodology estimates that there must have been many more infections early on in the sample to match the number of deaths observed throughout the sample. that means that early action would have been more impactful if the disease is less severe than we assumed. note that this is always a conclusion based on matching the amount of death cases that we observe in the data. if the disease were less severe and we still observed as many deaths as in the data, then the only possible explanation is that there must have been more infections early on in the sample. as a result, early action would have been the more impactful. we find that the number of preventable deaths would not be much different if the virus were less lethal. however, we find that the costs of inaction at the state level would be much higher if the virus were more lethal. we find that close to , , additional deaths would have been observed if no state enacted any policy and if the lethality rate of the virus were %. these observations further corroborate our findings of the success of the policies enacted by the individual states to prevent covid- deaths both at the state and federal levels. we have: because d t + r t , on the one hand, and i t , on the other hand, are independent conditional on the information available on date t − , it follows that: remark: let us introduce z t ≡ ∆i t − e t− (∆i t ). by construction, e t− (z t ) = . it can be seen that z t is the sum of i t− i.i.d. random variables. hence, if i t− is large, we approximately have: conditional on the information available on t − . this is also true for i t , r t and d t + r t . because the conditional variances of these variables are in i t− (and not in i t− ), it follows that, when i t− is large, the deterministic version of the sir model provides a good approximation of the dynamics of (s, i, r, d) -at least up to potential stochastic variation of β t . in the remaining of this appendix, we detail the computation of some of the covariances appearing in equation ( ) cov var t− (r t ) = var t− (e t− (r t |d t )) + e t− (var t− (r t |d t )) using equations ( ) to ( ), we have, in particular: we also have cov(flow com,i,k,t , flow com,i,j,t |i t ) = that is, in vectorial form: which we denote by where function c is defined by the same type of computation leads to var(flow com,s,t |s t ) = c(w com,t , s t , τ ) ( ) var(flow trav,i,t |i t ) = c(w trav,t , i t , ) ( ) var(flow trav,s,t |s t ) = c(w trav,t , s t , ). for any pair of independent random vectors x and y , we have therefore: where Ω t− = Ω trav,t− + Ω com,t− and where d(w , w , s, i, τ, Ω) = c(w , i, τ ) + c(w , i, ) c(w , s, τ ) + c(w , s, ) + c(w , i, τ ) + c(w , i, ) (id + Ω)ss (id + Ω) + c(w , s, τ ) + c(w , s, ) (id + Ω)ii (id + Ω) , function c being defined in ( ). let us use the notation: i * t = i t + flow com,i,t + flow trav,i,t and s * t = s t + flow com,s,t + flow trav,s,t . using the law of total variance: let's denote the previous conditional variance by Θ t− . we have: where Ω t− = Ω com,t− + Ω trav,t− and function d is defined by ( ). what precedes implies that: and where Θ t is defined by equations ( ), and ν is defined in equation ( ). we hereby provide the formulas for the jacobian computation in the extended kalman filter the matrix of partial derivatives is given by: counterfactual assumption travel bans for all states. [- , ; - , ] strict stay-at-home orders in all states, and all other / - , state-level policies remain as in the data. [- , ; - , ] strict mask mandates in all states, and all other state-level / - , policies remain as in the data. [- , ; - , ] strict travel bans in all states, and all other state-level / - , policies remain as in the data. [- , ; - , ] no stay-at-home order, mask mandate, or travel ban + , , in any state. [+ , ; + , , ] no stay-at-home order in any state, but all other + , policies remain as in the data. [+ , ; + , , ] no mask mandate in any states, but all other + , policies remain as in the data. [+ , ; + , , ] no travel ban in any states, but all other + , policies remain as in the data. [+ , ; + , ] mask mandate in all states on march , , while no / - , state adopts any state-level policies. [- , ; , ] strict travel bans in all states by february , , while / - , all other state-level policies remain as in the data. [- , ; - , ] table : results of the counterfactual experiments in which we assume that all states jointly deviate from their enacted policies and adopt either strict or loose versions of the policies instead. the reported values are excess deaths relative to the number of u.s. deaths recorded in our data on september , . in the counterfactuals, we compute the trajectories of death counts per state under the alternative policy scenarios that are consistent with the susceptible, infected, recovered, and dead populations as well as the transmission rates filtered from the observed data. the values in brackets give confidence bounds based on a sensitivity analysis of the estimates of the impact of the different policies on transmission rates and traveler and commuter inflow. the lower bounds assume that any policy that deviates from what it was in the data is half as impactful, while the upper bound assumes that any policy that deviates is twice as impactful. table in appendix e provides the parameter values used for the sensitivity analyses. in the sensitivity analysis, we proceed in a similar way as for the counterfactuals and first compute posterior means of the state-level transmission rates that would explain the observed death counts under the assumption of alternative effectiveness for the different policies. we then compute the number of death that would have been observed if the policies had changed while keeping the recomputed trajectories of the transmission rates fixed. all other state-level policies remain as in the data. table : results of the counterfactual experiments in which we assume that all states jointly deviate from their enacted policies and adopt either strict or loose versions of the policies instead. here, we assume that it takes on average days for an infection to resolve, while keeping the fatality rate of the disease fixed at . %. the reported values are excess deaths relative to the number of u.s. deaths recorded in our data on september , . in the counterfactuals, we compute the trajectories of death counts per state under the alternative policy scenarios that are consistent with the susceptible, infected, recovered, and dead populations as well as the transmission rates filtered from the observed data. the values in brackets give confidence bounds based on a sensitivity analysis of the estimates of the impact of the different policies on transmission rates and traveler and commuter inflow. the lower bounds assume that any policy that deviates from what it was in the data is half as impactful, while the upper bound assumes that any policy that deviates is twice as impactful. table in appendix e provides the parameter values used for the sensitivity analyses. in the sensitivity analysis, we proceed in a similar way as for the counterfactuals and first compute posterior means of the state-level transmission rates that would explain the observed death counts under the assumption of alternative effectiveness for the different policies. we then compute the number of death that would have been observed if the policies had changed while keeping the recomputed trajectories of the transmission rates fixed. counterfactual assumption (γ = . ) all other state-level policies remain as in the data. table : results of the counterfactual experiments in which we assume that all states jointly deviate from their enacted policies and adopt either strict or loose versions of the policies instead. here, we assume that it takes on average days for an infection to resolve, while keeping the fatality rate of the disease fixed at . %. the reported values are excess deaths relative to the number of u.s. deaths recorded in our data on september , . in the counterfactuals, we compute the trajectories of death counts per state under the alternative policy scenarios that are consistent with the susceptible, infected, recovered, and dead populations as well as the transmission rates filtered from the observed data. the values in brackets give confidence bounds based on a sensitivity analysis of the estimates of the impact of the different policies on transmission rates and traveler and commuter inflow. the lower bounds assume that any policy that deviates from what it was in the data is half as impactful, while the upper bound assumes that any policy that deviates is twice as impactful. table in appendix e provides the parameter values used for the sensitivity analyses. in the sensitivity analysis, we proceed in a similar way as for the counterfactuals and first compute posterior means of the state-level transmission rates that would explain the observed death counts under the assumption of alternative effectiveness for the different policies. we then compute the number of death that would have been observed if the policies had changed while keeping the recomputed trajectories of the transmission rates fixed. counterfactual assumption ( all other state-level policies remain as in the data. table : results of the counterfactual experiments in which we assume that all states jointly deviate from their enacted policies and adopt either strict or loose versions of the policies instead. here, we assume that the fatality rate of the disease is . % instead of . %, and keep the number of days that it take for an infection to resolve at days. the reported values are excess deaths relative to the number of u.s. deaths recorded in our data on september , . in the counterfactuals, we compute the trajectories of death counts per state under the alternative policy scenarios that are consistent with the susceptible, infected, recovered, and dead populations as well as the transmission rates filtered from the observed data. the values in brackets give confidence bounds based on a sensitivity analysis of the estimates of the impact of the different policies on transmission rates and traveler and commuter inflow. the lower bounds assume that any policy that deviates from what it was in the data is half as impactful, while the upper bound assumes that any policy that deviates is twice as impactful. table in appendix e provides the parameter values used for the sensitivity analyses. in the sensitivity analysis, we proceed in a similar way as for the counterfactuals and first compute posterior means of the state-level transmission rates that would explain the observed death counts under the assumption of alternative effectiveness for the different policies. we then compute the number of death that would have been observed if the policies had changed while keeping the recomputed trajectories of the transmission rates fixed. counterfactual assumption (δ = . ) all other state-level policies remain as in the data. table : results of the counterfactual experiments in which we assume that all states jointly deviate from their enacted policies and adopt either strict or loose versions of the policies instead. here, we assume that the fatality rate of the disease is % instead of . %, and keep the number of days that it take for an infection to resolve at days. the reported values are excess deaths relative to the number of u.s. deaths recorded in our data on september , . in the counterfactuals, we compute the trajectories of death counts per state under the alternative policy scenarios that are consistent with the susceptible, infected, recovered, and dead populations as well as the transmission rates filtered from the observed data. the values in brackets give confidence bounds based on a sensitivity analysis of the estimates of the impact of the different policies on transmission rates and traveler and commuter inflow. the lower bounds assume that any policy that deviates from what it was in the data is half as impactful, while the upper bound assumes that any policy that deviates is twice as impactful. table in appendix e provides the parameter values used for the sensitivity analyses. in the sensitivity analysis, we proceed in a similar way as for the counterfactuals and first compute posterior means of the state-level transmission rates that would explain the observed death counts under the assumption of alternative effectiveness for the different policies. we then compute the number of death that would have been observed if the policies had changed while keeping the recomputed trajectories of the transmission rates fixed. all states adopt the three policies simultaneously into a strict scenario in which a particular state implements a policy as long as at least one state decides to do so, and a loose scenario in which a state does not implement a particular policy. counterfactual death counts are computed through the methodology detailed in appendix c. figure : number of deaths that could have been prevented through an early federal mask mandate. the x-axis indicates the date in which we assume a federal mask mandate had gone into effect, while the y-axis gives the number of deaths that could have been prevented had a federal mask mandate gone into effect on that date. we assume that state-level stay-at-home and travel ban policies remain as in the data, and that a federal mask mandate supersedes the state-level mask policies. is performed through forward/backward extended kalman filtering, using the time series of death counts per state from february to september , . our estimation methodology is detailed in appendix b. the r estimates correspond to the ratios of estimated β t multiplied by the policy dummies and divided by the sum of the daily fatality and recovery rates (γ + δ). the figure also shows the periods of time in which the different containment policies were active. green shaded areas correspond to active stay-at-home policies, purple areas to active mask mandates, and yellow areas to active travel bans. horizontal blue lines correspond the standard value of r e+ e+ e+ figure : time series of counterfactual death counts in which the federal government imposes strict joint mandates (left axis), along with the number of states that adopted stay-at-home or mask mandates in the data (right axis). the black solid line provides the death count obtained from the original data. the grey, red, and beige solid lines provide the time series of deaths that would have been observed if the federal government had imposed strict stay-at-home, masks, and all policies together on all states, respectively. the strict mandates start as early as the earliest state in the sample, that is march , for stay-at-home, and april , for mask mandates. the red dashed line presents a counterfactual scenario where masks are imposed as early as march , . green and purple-shaded areas provide the number of states that implemented stay-at-home policies and mask mandates in the data, with respect to time. their units are presented on the right axis. social interactions in pandemics: fear, altruism, and reciprocity. nber working paper no. a simple planning problem for covid- lockdown tracking r of covid- : a new 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fatalities in the united states large portfolio asymptotics for loss from default inference for large financial systems analysis of virus propagation: a transition model representation of stochastic epidemiological models a new estimation method for covid time-varying reproduction number using active cases a compartmental epidemic model incorporating probable cases to model covid outbreak in regions with limited testing capacity', medrxiv implications of stochastic transmission rates for managing pandemic risks what reinfections mean for covid- containing papers of a could masks curtail the post-lockdown resurgence of covid- in the us? serology-informed estimates of sars-cov- infection fatality risk disease evolution on networks: the role of contact structure avoidable covid- deaths -and counting -in the u.s. working paper optimal federal redistribution during the uncoordinated response to a pandemic. united states naval academy working papers the psychology underlying biased forecasts of covid- cases and deaths in the united states serocov-pop): a population-based study a modelling framework to assess the likely effectiveness of facemasks in combination with 'lock-down' in managing the covid- pandemic improved inference of time-varying reproduction numbers during infectious disease outbreaks an individual-based approach to sir epidemics in contact nnetworks modeling epidemics spreading on social contact networks key: cord- -fn apbe authors: Češka, milan; chau, calvin; křetínský, jan title: sequaia: a scalable tool for semi-quantitative analysis of chemical reaction networks date: - - journal: computer aided verification doi: . / - - - - _ sha: doc_id: cord_uid: fn apbe chemical reaction networks (crns) play a fundamental role in analysis and design of biochemical systems. they induce continuous-time stochastic systems, whose analysis is a computationally intensive task. we present a tool that implements the recently proposed semi-quantitative analysis of crn. compared to the proposed theory, the tool implements the analysis so that it is more flexible and more precise. further, its gui offers a wide range of visualization procedures that facilitate the interpretation of the analysis results as well as guidance to refine the analysis. finally, we define and implement a new notion of “mean” simulations, summarizing the typical behaviours of the system in a way directly comparable to standard simulations produced by other tools. chemical reaction networks (crns) are a language widely used for modelling and analysis of biochemical systems [ ] as well as for high-level programming of molecular devices [ , ] . they provide a compact formalism equivalent to petri nets [ ] , vector addition systems [ ] and distributed population protocols [ ] . a crn consists of a set of chemical reactions of given species, each running at a certain rate (intuitively, speed). − −−→ d off using mass-action kinetics (the reaction rate is multiplied by the populations of the reactants), the crn induces a infinite population markov chain in fig. . fig. . the markov chain for gene expression, displaying the population of p. to simplify the exposition, don and d off are displayed as discrete "states" of the system, but in fact the two "states" are just shorthands for , and , , respectively. in order to facilitate numerous applications in systems and synthetic biology, various techniques for simulation and formal analysis of crns have been proposed, e.g. [ , , , , ] . we pinpoint several specifics of this setting, necessary to motivate and understand the features of the tool: . the analysis is notoriously difficult and computationally expensive due to several aspects: state-space explosion (exponential growth in the number of species, possibly infinite spaces due to unbounded populations as in fig. , different rates for different populations, again as in fig. ), stochasticity (races between reactions), stiffness (rates of different magnitudes), multimodality (qualitatively different behaviours such as extinction of predators only, or also of preys in the predator-prey models) [ , ] . consequently, even for small crns, simulations may take minutes and analyses hours. . we have to face imprecise inputs. in particular, even if all relevant reactions are known, the rates are typically not. it is then not clear what behaviours can be induced by all possible values. . the analysis output need not be precise numerically, but only qualitatively. for instance, it is important to know that initial growth is followed by extinction and what the order of magnitude of the peak population is, but not necessarily what the exact distribution at an exact time is. unfortunately, it is hard to compute the qualitative information without the quantitative one. . biologists and engineers often seek for plausible explanations of why the system under study features or not the discussed behaviour. in many cases, a set of system simulations/trajectories or population distributions is not sufficient and the ability to provide an accurate explanation for the temporal or steady-state behaviour is another major challenge for the existing techniques. sequaia is a tool for analysis of crn addressing these issues: . it features unprecedented scalability, analysing standard complex benchmarks within a fraction of a second. . it is robust w.r.t. concrete rates, not depending on the exact values but only on their orders of magnitude. . its semi-quantitative analysis is precise enough to conclude on the qualitative behaviour of the system including rare behaviours and on rough estimates of the quantities (population sizes, times). . it produces small abstract models (markov chains) that are explicit, yet interpretable, making the behaviour more explainable. it is based on the technique presented in [ ] , relying on two cornerstones. firstly, it computes a system abstraction with acceleration, abstracting not only states and single transitions, but taking into account segments of paths. the resulting models are small enough to allow for a synoptic observation of the model dynamics. secondly, it performs semi-quantitative analysis, focusing on the most probable behaviours and more qualitative, global descriptions, such as oscillation, rather than fully quantitative sequences of exact transient distributions. this yields explainable models and is a sufficient and computationally cheaper technique. while the basic theory is derived from [ ] , there are a number of new features and differences in our tool, not just the implementation: method: (i) the abstraction is more precise now that the tool can also compute numerical outputs, whereas [ ] focuses on a manually feasible, and hence imprecise, abstraction. (ii) it suggests how to refine the abstractions, providing a knob for trading precision for computational resources. visualization: the gui provides a number of ways to display the results, facilitating understanding the models, including (i) identification of strongly connected parts of 'iterations', corresponding to 'temporarily stable' behaviours, (ii) quantitative information on transient times and steady-state distributions, or (iii) visual qualitative explanations, such as semantic grouping of states or tracking correlations between populations. additional analysis instruments: (i) the new notion of envelope provides an explicit knob to consider not only the most probable, but also less probable behaviours. (ii) the novel concept of mean simulation yields summaries of most probable runs and an analysis output directly comparable to classic simulation-based tools. related work. since a direct analysis of the markov chains induced by crn does not scale well [ ] , deterministic approximations through fluid (mean-field) techniques can be applied [ , ] to large populations, but cannot adequately capture the stochasticity of crns caused by low population species. to this end, both can be combined in hybrid approaches [ , , ] , typically involving a computationally demanding numerical analysis. reduction techniques such as [ , ] are based on approximate bisimulation [ ] , on aggregation according to the crn-specific structure [ , , ] , or state truncation [ , , ] . despite the plethora of techniques, the practical analysis of crns often relies on the stochastic simulation [ ] and its multi-scale improvements [ , , , , , ] . the widely used tool include the platform-independent copasi [ ] , dsd [ ] with a convenient web-based graphical interface, or stochpy [ ] easily extensible using python scientific libraries. in contrast, our approach (i) provides a compact explanation of the system behaviour in the form of tiny models allowing for a synoptic observation (ii) can easily reveal less probable behaviours, and iii) as shown in [ ] , is able to analyse standard complex benchmarks in seconds and thus provides the unprecedented scalability compared to other numerical as well as simulation-based techniques. in this section, we guide the reader through the workflow, discuss the key features of the tool and demonstrate them on examples. the gui is structured into several tabs and panels reflecting the workflow of the tool. first, a crn is either retrieved from a file in the open model tab or a new one is created. either way, the model can be changed in the editor panel together with the analysis parameters. the process continues in the analysis tab. the analysis follows in two steps. first, the semi-quantitative abstraction of the markov chain for the crn is generated; second, the semi-quantitative analysis is performed on the abstraction. the tool offers an explicit option to display the abstraction as a .dot file or to directly run both steps. after the complete analysis is executed, the visualization panel offers a range of options to display the results, including various quantitative properties. finally, the analysed model can be used to generate concrete runs on the simulation tab, which we call mean simulations since they display the "average-case" behaviour. in the following we detail on these key elements. key idea. the abstraction of the state space is simply given by a discretization of the population for each species into finitely many intervals, see fig. (left). the classic may abstraction of the transition function results in non-deterministic self-loops as in fig. (left top) in red, which make impossible to conclude anything useful (except for some safety properties) on the behaviour once we reach such a state, even whether it is ever left at all. instead, [ ] considers sequences of transitions: in this case, sequences of prevalently growing transitions (those increasing the population) are significantly more probable than the prevalently decreasing ones. consequently, the self-looping transitions are accelerated (taken multiple times) to get a "combined" transition that brings a typical representative of this population interval into a higher interval, see fig. (left bottom) also in red. hence the new rate reflects (i) the mass-action kinetics with the typical population in the interval and (ii) the typical number of the transition repetitions before another interval is reached. these accelerated transitions are the key idea of the semi-quantitative abstraction and are denoted by a prefix a. tool inputs. technically, the tool requires, for each species, a (possible empty) list of increasing population thresholds t , t , . . . t n and a population bound t b . the thresholds split the concrete population to the intervals [ , ], ( , here is taken separately to reflect enabledness of actions; the representatives, used for consequent computations, are chosen to be in the middle of the intervals and derived from t b for the last one. (for the empty list we have only one non-zero interval ( , ∞)). the input numbers are supposed to reflect the monitored property of interest and the required precision, the bound t b should give a probable upper bound on the maximal population. how to obtain and iteratively improve these is discussed in sect. . on refinement. example . consider gene expression, now with a 'fast' blocking where the rate of b equals − . a typical simulation can be seen in fig. (right, dotted green line): the number of proteins grows until several dozen, then blocking takes place until extinction. the semi-quantitative abstraction for thresholds , , yields the model in fig. (a) . in contrast to classic abstractions, there are no self-loops and the abstract transitions are assigned concrete rates. one can see that the blocking can in principle take place at any population and that population can decrease also when dna is on, i.e. in states [ , , ·] . however, all this happens with very low probabilities and the model captures this only indirectly through the numerical labelling. this is made explicit during the semi-quantitative analysis. key idea. the aim is to prune the abstraction so that only reasonably probable behaviour is reflected, see the thick transitions in the abstraction in fig. (left bottom) . to this end, we preserve in each state only the transitions with the highest rate h or almost highest rates, i.e. with h > h/envelope where envelope > is a parameter. parameter values in [ , ] ensure we can only look at rates of the same order of magnitude, thus the most probable events and those with e.g. only % chance of happening. higher values then allow for inspection of even less probable behaviours. consequently, the method can naturally handle uncertainty in the reaction rates since typically only the relative magnitudes of the rates are important, actually, only their orders of magnitude. this robustness w.r.t. the input is very beneficial for biologists as the precise rates are often not known. example . the analysis of the previous 'fast' gene expression with envelope = is depicted in fig. (b) . as such it shows the most probable behaviours: the fast growth until the intervals and (i.e. - and - ) and not beyond to (over ), followed by a slower decline. the computed rates induce expected times to pass through a state, matching closely those of the simulation fig. (right, dotted green line). moreover, we see that the blocking transition from interval has a lower probability than the production, is thus less probable. as such it would not even appear as a probable one, for a stricter envelope = . example . a more complicated behaviour arises when the blocking is slow, with rate − as in sect. . a simulation run for this case is depicted in fig. (right, full blue line). one can observe a more balanced competition between blocking and oscillation around - proteins. similarly, while the full abstraction (not shown here) features arbitrary oscillations (also back to no proteins at all), after analysis the pruned abstraction is faithfully modelling the initial growth, subsequent oscillation only in the range of higher populations, followed by blocking and gradual extinction of proteins, see fig. (c) . technically, the analysis relies on repeated alternation of transient and steady-state analysis. first, starting from the initial state, we follow in each state only the transitions with highest rates (most probable ones), until the set of explored state reaches a fixpoint. a part of the created graph is recurrent and forms a bottom strongly connected component (bscc) or a collection thereof. the system temporarily settles in the steady state of this bscc. after some time has passed, also a less probable transition happens almost surely and the "bscc" is exited. these exit points are identified by a steady-state analysis of the bscc, taking the magnitudes of exiting and non-exiting transition rates into account. the exit points trigger a new iteration of the transient and then the steady-state analysis. figure (d) illustrates a situation with two iteration using the slow variant of the model. decreasing envelope to caused that the blocking reaction is explored in the second iteration -as an exit of the bscc found in the first iteration. before that exit happens, the "bscc" represents a "temporary" steady state of the system. as discussed in [ ] , the semi-quantitative analysis provides guarantees in the form of limit behaviour and convergence: firstly, the precision grows with the differences in the orders of magnitudes of involved rates: as their ratios tend to infinity, the error tends to zero; secondly, as the population discretization gets finer, the error in the new "accelerated" transitions is reduced, trivially being zero for complete refinement into singletons. a proper visualization is essential for clear presentation and easy interpretation of the results of our analysis. to this end, the tool and its gui offer various options for visualizing the results. the basic ones, related to the graph structure, are the following. further options, with more quantitative flavour, are discussed in the next section, followed by an example illustrating all of them. as the complete abstract model is typically very large and chaotic, further structuring is necessary. therefore, the default view shows the states arranged and grouped into separate blocks, one for each iteration, additionally coloured distinctly for each iteration. besides, we can restrict which iterations we show. this is useful to zoom in and investigate a particular part of the behaviour. additionally, the arrangement and colouring can be based on aggregating sccs within each iteration (iisccs). this helps to understand the emergence of repetitive behaviour patterns, such as oscillation or (temporary) steady state. it can be also combined with the iteration grouping. collapsed views. in order to understand the system behaviour, one typically needs to have a synoptic overview of the system. for more complex systems, even the pruned abstraction could become too large and the view of the fully expanded system might not be sufficiently compact. in such cases, the aggregates discussed in the previous views, i.e., iterations and iisccs, can be collapsed into a single nodes, hiding the complexity of the exact behaviour pattern within these areas. this allows us, for instance, to ignore the particular (temporary) oscillation or steady state in these states and to focus on more global behaviour, such as what happened before and after this behaviour and how often does it arise. in contrast to zooming in by restricting to certain iteration(s) only, the collapsed views provide a means to zoom out. the produced graphs are also labelled by numerical information. while the quantities cannot be precise due to the simplifications of the extremely scalable analysis, they match the orders of magnitudes of the observed quantities, which is often precise enough for biological purposes; for instance, the peak of protein growth happens after units vs. dozens of seconds in the fast and slow variants of gene expression, respectively. transient analysis. firstly, each abstract transition is labelled with a rate corresponding (in the order of magnitude) to the rate of the concrete transition (or accelerated transition, i.e. a "sequence" of transitions) of a "typical" representative of the abstract state. these rates induce the expected time spent in each transient state of each iteration. indeed, the waiting time is simply the inverse of the sum of the outgoing rates. further, each bscc of each iteration is labelled by an estimate of time before it is left into the next iteration. this is a key notion, which allows us to easily provide transient timing information for very stiff systems (working at different time scales). consider the simple gene model. from fig. (b) and (d) we can easily compute the expected time to the extinction (as the sum of the exit time for all scc on the inspected path). our analysis correctly estimates that the expected extinction time is around and for the fast variant and for the slow variant. steady state analysis. in many biological models, the natural steady state is either extinction or unbounded explosion. hence it does not say much about the "seemingly steady" state (the temporary steady state), i.e., behaviour that is stable for a long but finite time. therefore, the tool provides information not only on the steady state of the whole system, but also for each iteration separately since they represent the temporary steady states discussed above. both can be visualized as colouring of states, with higher probabilities corresponding to darker colours, immediatelly giving a synoptic view on frequent behaviours. correlations. finally, correlations between population sizes can be observed as follows. the gui can be given a set of equivalences of the form m ∼ n for species i, j, meaning that if a state has (abstract) population m of species i and n of j then it is regarded as satisfying the correlation in question. it is coloured accordingly and the overall colouring of the system provides further indication under which behaviour or in which phases the correlation holds. example . we demonstrate these visualization options on a more complicated gene expression model [ ] , widely used model for benchmarking crn analyzers, in fig. . as reported in [ , ] , the behaviour oscillates between two steady states with dna on and dna off. moreover, there is a correlation between high amounts of rna present and dna being on, and no rna with dna off. the complete system and its steady state distribution is depicted in the part a) using the iteration and iiscc arrangement. this view shows immediately without seeing any details that the only interesting states are in iteration including all states with a high steady-state probability (the red colouring). therefore, in part b), we zoom in to iteration and use the iiscc arrangement. in order to observe the interesting switches between the temporary steady states, we collapse the iisccs, in the part c), and thus ignore the internal (noninteresting) behaviour of the big iiscc. finally, in part d), we use the correlation colouring to identify states where the required correlation holds (i.e. the blue states). comparing part c) and d) immediately reveals that the system spends the majority of the time in the states where the correlation holds. so far, we have illustrated the concepts and the functionality on models with an appropriate level of abstraction. however, it often happens that we start the investigations with a too coarse abstraction. whenever this happens, it is important to notice this and appropriately refine the abstraction. while [ ] does not discuss this issue, the tool provides support also for that. precision parameters. there are several knobs for trading the size and the precision of the abstraction. they all come as input in the lower half of the editor tab: discretization, bound, and envelope. example . recall the initial abstraction for the gene expression of fig. (with rate − ). the abstraction, using thresholds , predicts an oscillation including low populations of p ( - ) which is not correct (recall that the p oscillates on high populations before the blocking reaction occurs). figure (c) and (d) show the abstraction and the consequent analysis and visualization for a refined model using thresholds , , , (instead of just , ). as already discussed, this abstraction already correctly predicts the system behaviour. discretization. the basic building block of each abstraction is the degree of details it preserves in the abstract states. firstly, it determines how precisely we can observe the evolution of the population. for instance, whenever we want to detect whether a population typically grows beyond a bound or oscillates in a certain interval, such an interval should be present in the discretization. secondly, the discretization should be fine enough so that in each state, the rates are reasonably (in orders of magnitude) precise. fortunately, in our analysis their absolute precision is not vital. in contrast, we only need relative proportions of the rates to have the right magnitude to decide which behaviour is probable. consequently, too rough abstraction is reflected in "non-determinism" when a state has two transitions under similar rate. in such a case, the probable behaviour cannot be determined. therefore, the visualization tab provides in the colorization pane an option to provide suggestions for refinement, including highlighting non-deterministic states, pointing at the natural candidates for refinement. note that we highlight only the states where the two transitions lead to mutually different sccs so that a significant change in behaviour may occur. bounds. similarly, for the single infinite interval (t n , ∞), the tool inputs a bound which is a believed safe upper bound on the population of the species. of course, it may be wrong. this is irrelevant in case when the population explodes beyond all bounds. however, whenever there are transitions from the highest level back to a lower one, its feasibility and rate are in question. optimally, such states do not even occur in the pruned abstraction. if they do, we also highlight them using the colorization for refinement suggestions (in another colour). envelope. as too rough abstractions introduce too much non-determinism, dually, the degree of the non-determinism is determined (even defined) by the envelope, the factor between rates so that even the less probable option is still taken into account (and thus introduces non-determinism). consequently, high values of envelope introduce non-determinism, making the analysis take also less important behaviour into account; in contrast, low values make the analyzed system deterministic, showing only the most probable behaviour. the choice of the envelope thus depends on whether such behaviours should also be reported. since our models, although abstract, have an operational semantics, we can even run simulations on them. moreover, the accelerated transitions, as "sequences" of transitions, have a low variance in the expected time, by the law of large numbers. hence their execution time can be chosen quite precisely in a deterministic way. similarly, the time to leave an iibscc is quite deterministic. thus we can generate simulation where the only random decisions are choices of transitions, but the timing follows the mean time of the respective events. moreover, runs within the pruned abstraction reflect the most important behaviours only. such mean simulations , which can thus be generated from our analysis, represent groups of typical runs (modulo small time shifts and order of transitions within an scc, which are not very relevant). therefore, a few such simulation reflect all the present behaviours (on a level of desired significant probability) and can serve to observe multi-modalities, bifurcations, rough transient timing as well as frequencies in the steady-state and temporary steady-state. to our best knowledge, such a concept has not yet been considered for simulation of stochastic systems. example . figure shows an abstract simulation for our running example with discretisation thresholds , , , . one can readily observe its validity with respect to the typical stochastic simulation in fig. (right, full blue line). we have presented sequaia, a scalable tool for robust and explainable analysis of crns. the analysis is precise enough as cross-validated with simulation-based results on several models widely used in the literature. one of the key contributions of the tool is the visualization, which is essential for clear presentation and easy interpretation of the results of our analysis. approximate model checking of stochastic hybrid systems adaptive aggregation of markov chains: quantitative analysis of chemical reaction networks the computational power of population protocols fluid model checking the slow-scale stochastic simulation algorithm two-domain dna strand displacement a stochastic hybrid approximation for chemical kinetics based on the linear noise approximation maximal aggregation of polynomial dynamical systems semi-quantitative abstraction and analysis of chemical reaction networks modeling and analysis of mass-action kinetics approximate analysis of probabilistic processes: logic, simulation and games robust pctl model checking adaptive solution of the master equation in low dimensions jump-diffusion approximation of stochastic reaction dynamics: error bounds and algorithms exact stochastic simulation of coupled chemical reactions real-time kinetics of gene activity in individual bacteria quasiequilibrium approximation of fast reaction kinetics in stochastic biochemical systems method of conditional moments (mcm) for the chemical master equation probabilistic model checking of complex biological pathways sliding window abstraction for infinite markov chains hybrid numerical solution of the chemical master equation adaptive hybrid simulations for multiscale stochastic reaction networks copasi -a complex pathway simulator parallel program schemata visual dsd: a design and analysis tool for dna strand displacement systems stochpy: a comprehensive, userfriendly tool for simulating stochastic biological processes utilizing stochastic model checking to analyze genetic circuits fast adaptive uniformization of the chemical master equation the finite state projection algorithm for the solution of the chemical master equation petri nets: properties, analysis and applications stochastic chemical kinetics and the quasi-steady-state assumption: application to the gillespie algorithm accurate hybrid stochastic simulation of a system of coupled chemical or biochemical reactions dna as a universal substrate for chemical kinetics stochastic processes in physics and chemistry adaptive aggregation method for the chemical master equation key: cord- -gvudxbc authors: medina gonzález, maría concepción title: mexican law of religion at years of the constitutional reform on religious matters date: - - journal: latin american perspectives on law and religion doi: . / - - - - _ sha: doc_id: cord_uid: gvudxbc in the framework of the centenary of the promulgation of the political constitution of the united mexican states ( ), the current directions of mexican law of religion are addressed. the starting point is the constitutional reform of january , , to articles , , , , and , which are the basis for the development of a law of religion in a positive sense. this reform contains the principles that guarantee the freedom of religion in mexico: separation between state and churches and laicity of state. “mexican law of religion” means the totality of state legal norms that include the religious factor linked to individual, corporate, and collective religious needs and interests under the fundamental principles of religious freedom, secularism (laicity), and separation of the state and religious communities. in this sense, the holders of the religious factor are not only the individual person and the religious communities or religious associations but also the indigenous peoples. for the analysis, i will focus my remarks on some fundamental topics: the amendments to articles and of the political constitution and the new constitution of mexico city; development and legal protection of the dimensions of religious freedom; management of religious diversity as public policy and recent cases, such as the native american church case and the blood transfusion case, since these illustrate the supreme court’s readiness to protect the right of religious freedom. one of the most difficult issues to resolve with respect to the register of religious associations has been how to define “notorio arraigo.” the basic law strives to protect religious freedom and to establish a society tolerant of religious difference. furthermore, increased protection of religious minorities may signal a change in mexican cultural perceptions of religious minorities. mexico is not a place of religious monoculture. in mexico, there is true religious pluralism. although a majority of mexicans declares to profess the catholic religion, the presence of other religions is extensive. the mexican secular (lay = laico) state has the enormous task of managing the religious diversity, and with the mexican law of religion, to take up the challenge of guarantying the full exercise of religious freedom, without constituting ghettos or any type of segregation, to make peaceful religious coexistence possible. the basis for the legal relationship between state and church is to be found in the mexican constitution of . since that date, there have been amendments to articles and on few but important occasions. before constitutional reform of january , , articles (at the time freedom of belief) and (at the time supremacy of state on church) contained anti-clerical provisions, religious associations could not obtain legal personality and the principle of supremacy of state on church predominated. with the constitutional reform of january , to articles (right of education), (at the time freedom of belief), (right of property) and (at the time supremacy of state on church), several anti-clerical provisions were derogated, religious communities and churches could obtain legal personality as "religious associations" (asociaciones religiosas) by the ministry of interior. this constitutional reform showed several processes such as: construction of laicity on the recognition of religious diversity, the visibility of the "religious minorities" at the possibility to be registered as religious associations and obtain legal personality, and recognition of religious diversity within a framework of inclusion and tolerance. in particular, article (today, principle of separation of state and churches) allowed the churches and religious communities to acquire legal personality once they obtained their registration as religious associations by the ministry of interior. now, the last constitutional reform to article on july , , implied the substitution of the expression "every man" for "every person," the introduction of the right to freedom of ethical convictions, conscience, and religion. it makes clear that this freedom includes the right to participate individually or collectively, both in it is worth noting that the concept of "mexican ecclesiastical law" is formally limited, because it refers to the ecclesiastical, to the institutional, to the churches, but not all religious communities are erected in this way, as churches; for example, the case of jewish, buddhist, hindu communities. for that reason, among others, i prefer to refer to the "mexican law of religion" as the set of rules of the state concerning the religious factor that attends to the religious needs and interests at the individual level (individual juridical person), corporate level (religious communities and religious associations), and collective level (indigenous peoples, with respect to their religious practices and customs), under the principles of religious freedom, laicity (laicidad), and separation of state and churches (or religious communities). under mexican law of religion is to be understood the "totality of state juridical norms, which regulate the religious factor related to religious needs and interests of its holders at the individual level, the corporative level (religious communities and religious associations) and the collective level (indigenous people, in the case of their religious usages and customs), and under the fundamental principles: laicity of the state, religious freedom and separation between state and religious communities" (medina gonzález ). public and in private, in ceremonies, devotions or acts of worship, provided they do not constitute an offense punishable by law. although a prohibition is incorporated: "no one can use the public acts of expression of this freedom for political purposes, proselytism or propaganda." before this reform, several civil and non-catholic religious associations demonstrated in about states in the mexican republic to warn that they would not allow the reform of article of the constitution, because it threatens the secular nature of the mexican state and it gives privileges for catholics. they expressed three arguments: (i) the intention of the reform is the dismantling of the secular state. it is intended to use it to demand clerical privileges: mainly replacement of secular education for religious instruction in public schools and control of mass media. (ii) the handling of the reform in the concept of "freedom of religion." the redefinition of "freedom of religion" that the catholic hierarchy seeks to establish offers a tendentious and biased concept of that freedom to provide religious education in public schools as a religious privilege. (iii) the consequences of reform are an affectation of the freedoms of religious minorities. for example, religious education in public schools will cause that children and adolescents who profess a different faith then catholic become victims of acts of intolerance and discrimination. religion is also represented as a factor of division among students professing different faiths and as an element of social polarization that will damage seriously the living together. on the other side, the constitutional reform to article on november , , to include the "lay character" of state was not really necessary to know that "laicity" is the scenario and presuppose for the effective exercise of fundamental freedoms. laicity and religious freedom are not opposed and are not mutually excluded. reference to an "open laicity," "positive laicity," or even "healthy laicity" is made. for example, religious freedom includes the teaching of religion too, and the state has to guarantee it. the current dimension of laicity is particularly in the field of cultural identities and protection of minorities. the issue of laicity is not only "political" but also related to the "minorities," who defend their "vulnerability." the concept of the secular (lay = laico) state is dynamic, and is linked to social processes. in the debate on laicity are present new actors, and not only the traditional state-church or churches but also women, academics, homosexuals, and indigenous people. certainly, the "pathology" of laicity would be to reduce religion to the private sphere alone. the formula "for greater religious freedom" less "lay state" is a fallacy. however, the exercise of religious freedom recognizes limits. there is no doubt that the "recent" constitutional reforms involve two key elements of the rule of law (estado de derecho): (i) popular sovereignty, under article of the constitution (linked to article ). (ii) human rights, including the right to religious freedom established in article of the constitution. for the following analysis, i will focus my remarks on four fundamental aspects: binomial "law and religion"; analysis of the amendments to articles and of the constitution; approaches to public policy management of religious diversity; and cases. this conceptual binomial gives me the opportunity to analyze the amendments to articles and and their constitutional implications, from the perspective of the mexican law of religion, whose core is religious freedom, and it grounds the dignity of the human person, so that i will not focus only in the so-called "church-state relations," which at least in its formal name apparently may be restrictive and not open to religious communities that are not churches. here, i want to refer to the important intervention of frang cois houtart in the assembly of the united nations in , which noted that the world needs alternatives and not merely regulations, since it is not sufficient to rehabilitate or maintain a system but to transform it. it is a question of permitting all forms of knowledge, including traditional forms of all philosophies and cultures, to participate in the construction of alternatives "in breaking the monopoly of westernization." this author considers various aspects among religions: the wisdom of hinduism in relationship to nature, the compassion of buddhism in human relations, the permanent quest for utopia in judaism, the thirst for justice which defines the prophetic current in islam, the emancipatory power of the theology of liberation in christianity, the respect for the sources of life in the concept of the land itself among the indigenous peoples of the americas, the sense of solidarity expressed in the religions of africa, can all make important contributions in the context of mutual tolerance guaranteed by the impartiality of political society. this consideration has its own specific weight to the topic at hand, since to democratize society within a framework of laicity (laicidad) is to allow multiculturalism to be expressed through religious freedom. a lay (laico) state that renounces religious freedom, renounces the claim of this human right in all its dimensions; it loses its right to exist as such, i.e., as a lay (laico) state. this second aspect focuses primarily on distinguishing between the justification for the existence of the constitutional reform to article of january , , and the reason for the existence of the recent amendments to articles and of the constitution. regardless of the political nature attributed to the constitutional reforms of january , , about a "search for legitimacy of the federal executive," it was rather to combat obvious anachronism and open simulation with: (a) the adequacy of the rules in religious matters to social reality, to prevent thereby any simulation; (b) the updating of the regulations on religious freedom. it demands that the mexican government complies with international treaties signed by the mexican state to ensure that fundamental right; and (c) the need to promote, in the awareness of mexican society, respect for the legal system and proper implementation of the law on religious matters. with this constitutional reform and the subsequent issuance of the law on religious associations and public worship (july , ) , several processes took place: (a) the construction of laicity (laicidad) on the recognition of religious diversity. (b) the visibility of religious minorities, which may be registered as religious associations before the ministry of interior to obtain juridical personality. (c) the recognition of religious diversity that creates conditions for inclusion and tolerance that are essential for peaceful coexistence among different believers, religious communities, and religious associations. article , in close connection with article of the mexican constitution, establishes the fundamental characteristics adopted by the political organization of the mexican people. in the year , were registered as religious associations only three communities of catholic orientation (the catholic, apostolic, and roman church in mexico, the mexican episcopal conference, and the primatial archdiocese of mexico); in and were registered diverse religious associations, mostly, different than catholic. "article . national sovereignty is vested essentially and originally in the people. all public power derives from the people and is instituted for their benefit. the people have at all time the inalienable right to alter or amend their form of government". one reason, apparently, "to raise the lay (laica) nature of the state to constitutional rank" was the reaction to assumed acts that "violated" this lay nature (for example: to allow religious services at public hospitals; to deny minority rights; to impose the beliefs of the majority; and to dictate public policies based on religious criteria for or million mexicans as if they were catholics). generally, in the case of the amendment to article of the constitution, it was argued that this reform was made to ratify, to reaffirm the lay (laica) nature of the mexican state, even to defend, and strengthen it against the backward and obscurantist temptation, and against attacks on laicity (laicidad), and that "postponing the fullness of secularity of the state" means the "risk of a successful [attack] from the rhetoric of intransigence." in sum, this constitutional reform was rather "confirmatory," "declarative," and not "foundational" or "constitutive" in character. therefore, even if there had not been any constitutional reform to article , the laicity (laicidad) of the mexican state would have remained intact. and here i want to ask: was the mexican state not lay (laico) already? and if this is so, then the article of the law of religious associations and public worship, which establishes "the mexican state is lay (laico)," was unconstitutional. "deplora el senado que el carácter laico del estado haya sido vulnerado," la jornada, february , , p. . "intelectuales piden a senadores ratificar el carácter laico del estado mexicano," carlos monsiváis censura cerrazón de la derecha, la jornada, february , , p. . "censuran a rivera por su postura sobre el estado laico," rumbo de méxico, february , . see footnote . cf. "navarrete confía en que el senado apruebe reforma para estadolaico," la crónica, february , , p. . the mexican state is lay (laico), not confessional, and does not subscribe to any religion or religious denomination as its own. the conception of a lay (laico) state is dynamic, also linked to social processes. precisely, one of the dimensions of laicity (laicidad) is in the field of cultural identities and the defense of minorities, of course in attention to the following guiding principles: ( ) religious freedom. ( ) separation of state and churches (or rather, religious communities). ( ) no intervention by the authorities in the internal affairs of religious associations (linked to respect for the right of self-determination of religious communities). ( ) authorities may not attend in an official character any religious act of public worship. ( ) churches and other religious communities should not interfere in the functions of the state. ( ) state laicity (laicidad). on november , , the senate declared approved the amendment of article of the constitution, establishing formally the lay (laica) nature of the mexican state, as follows: "article . it is the will of the mexican people to constitute a representative, democratic, lay (laica), and federal republic composed by states, free and sovereign in all matters concerning their internal affairs; but united in a federation established according to principles of this fundamental law." (the underlined is mine). this can be assumed to be a platform to strengthen the management of religious diversity. here, i would refer comparatively, while maintaining a proper sense of proportion, the case of the german law of religion, where, although there is no principle of laicity (laicidad), there is the principle of neutrality. the fundamental law of the federal republic of germany does not explicitly contain the word "neutral," this nature of the german state has been recognized and developed by the jurisprudence of the federal constitutional court. in my opinion, the "laicity" is a scenario, which may be presupposed, where the effective exercise of fundamental freedoms-including the freedom of religiontakes place. therefore, "laicity" and "religious freedom" are not opposed and are not mutually excluded, since a lay (laico) state must ensure full enjoyment of religious freedom. certain documents such as the universal declaration of laicity (laicidad) of xxi century and the lay (laica) charter do not address in its true size, at least explicitly, religious freedom; rather, they include it only by reference, for example, this is related to "freedom to adhere to a religion", "free choice in matters of religion" and the "right to profess or not to profess religious beliefs." the "alphabet of the lay (laica) republic" simply refers to "freedom of worship" or "to exercise any religious option or not practice any one." but it is evident that religious freedom in its complexity implies this and much more. article by decree published on january , first paragraph amended by decree published on july , article . everyone is free to embrace the religion of his choice and to practice all ceremonies, devotions, or observances of his respective faith, either in places of public worship or at home, provided they do not constitute an offense punishable by law the congress cannot dictate laws that establish or prohibit any religion every religious act of public worship must be performed strictly inside places of public worship, which shall at all times be under governmental supervision article . every person has the right to freedom of ethical convictions, conscience and religion, and having or taking, as the case may be, whichever they like. this freedom includes the right to participate, individually or collectively, both in public and in private at ceremonies, dedications or acts of worship, as long as they are not a crime or transgression penalized by the law. nobody can use public expression acts of this freedom with political purposes, proselytism or political propaganda there were several groups, which expressed different reasons for rejecting the amendment to article of the constitution and these were linked to : (a) the intent of reform. it was argued that this was "the dismantling of the lay (laico) state". (b) the manipulation of reform. it was argued that redefining "freedom of religion" was offering a tendentious and biased concept of that freedom. (c) the consequences of reform. there was reference, in this respect, to the effect on the freedoms of religious minorities. a large majority was evangelical groups, as shown by the various demonstrations that occurred in more than states of the mexican republic. approximately, organizations and associations publicly opposed the amendment to article , among which are pentecostal churches, the light of the world, apostolic church of mexico, presbyterian churches, and masonic grand lodge. moreover, it was expressed that some small religious groups are in opposition to this reform, because they considered that the reform would benefit the catholic associations. historic churches-such as the latter-and jewish, orthodox, anglican or traditional evangelical churches supported the amendment to article . it was noted that reference to the supposed "danger" of religious teaching in public schools was common in these three reasons. the reference to religious freedom only as "teaching religion in public schools" represented, rather than a serious approach to the dimensions or areas of religious freedom, a manipulation of the discourse on religious freedom that prevented a serious analysis of its real scope. the article in force provides that: every person has the right to freedom of ethical convictions, conscience and religion, and having or taking, as the case may be, whichever they like. this freedom includes the right to participate individually or collectively, in public or private, in the ceremonies, devotions and acts of worship, provided they do not constitute a crime or an offense punishable by law. no one may use the public acts of expression of this freedom for political purposes, proselytism or propaganda. although the new version of this article uses an inadequate legislative technique, the substance of the constitutional reform of article focuses on: ( ) replacement of "every man" by "every person" in accordance with the terminology adopted by all international instruments on human rights. ( ) the formal introduction of the right to freedom of ethical convictions. (a) freedom of ethical convictions. its inclusion-it seems to me-was linked mutatis mutandis to a formulation used in article of the fundamental law of the federal republic of germany, which refers to the profession of religious and ideological beliefs (or non-religious worldview) called weltanschauung, whose translation into spanish is complex, but in the case of article was adopted simply as "ethical convictions," which creates some confusion especially when this is disassociated from the "freedom of religion." the text of article of the constitutional reform from january , , establishes: "every man is free to embrace the religion of his choice and to practice the ceremonies, devotions and acts of worship, provided they do not constitute a crime or an offense punishable by the law" (first paragraph). "the congress of the union may not enact laws establishing or prohibiting any religion" (second paragraph). "religious acts of public worship must regularly be performed inside the temples. those extraordinarily performed outside of them shall be subject to the law" (third paragraph). "art und weise, wie jemand die welt und ihren sinn sowie sein dasein betrachtet und beurteilt" (mode and form how someone observes and judges the world, its reason and its existence), (wahrig ) . gerhard anschütz considers weltanschauung as the doctrine comprising the total and universal world that seeks to recognize and to value the position of man in the world. (b) freedom of conscience. various international instruments establish, unanimously, freedom of conscience as a fundamental right, where "consciousness" is precisely its subject. note that within the elements of freedom of conscience are: ( ) "freedom of formation of consciousness" as the right guaranteed to every person to follow his own representations in the formation of concepts of religious-moral value or disvalue without any influence of state coercion or social pressure, and perform this purpose under the constitutional legal order (listl and dietrich ) ( ) "freedom of realization of consciousness" implies "to omit" the legal prescribed behavior and "not to observe" the legally established rules of "not to do." it is here that the "right of conscientious objection" is linked with the fundamental right to "freedom of conscience." the international covenant on civil and political rights does not explicitly refer to a right of conscientious objection, however, in general comment no. to article of the covenant, it considers that such right can be derived precisely from article , paragraph , and there shall be no differentiation among conscientious objectors on the basis of the nature of their particular beliefs. at the bottom of the issue about conscientious objection, there is a relationship of tension between constitutional freedom and equality. of course, freedom of conscience does not exclude or exempt, without further ado, the objector, of having to fulfill civic obligations, because a person who is recognized as a conscientious objector must perform, in principle, an alternative service (servicio sustitutorio), in order to reconcile precisely the right to freedom of conscience with the observance of common duties for all within the rule of law. the mexican law of religion provides what one might describe as "conscientious objection secundum legem," for example, that the legislation itself establishes a certain "right to object" to justify the breach of a legal mandate. in addition, it is essential to examine carefully the second paragraph of article of the law of religious associations and public worship, in order to align its content with the current article of the constitution, which expressly guarantees freedom of conscience. (c) freedom of religion. notwithstanding the constitutional reform on human rights from june , (the rules on human rights shall be interpreted in accordance with the constitution and international treaties on this matter, favoring to the people all the time the more extensive protection), and in addition to the requirements of the new law of amparo, (the sphere of protection of rights is extended, the human rights established within international treaties are subject of direct protection) still, the reform of article reinforces full religious freedom, from the interpretation of this in international instruments and from the contributions of comparative law. religious freedom consists of an internum forum and an externum forum. the internum forum relates to the freedom of belief. "positive freedom of belief," i.e., to have or to adopt a belief of one's choice "or preference" (international covenant on civil and political rights) as well as to maintain or to "change his belief" (american convention on human rights); this internum forum includes the "negative freedom of belief," which is summarized in not having any belief. the forum externum relates to the "freedom to profess a belief." "positive freedom of profession" involves the right to say what one believes, which includes the freedom to propagate one's belief, and also the freedom of dispreading other beliefs (what is known as a missionary activity) and to say that one does not believe at all. "the negative freedom of profession" guarantees the right to keep what one believes secret, or the right to silence (schweigerechtin german law of religion). moreover, the freedom of exercise of religion in any form involves exercising it alone, in a community, in private (for example, the called devotio domestica simplex-private devotion without the intervention of a minister of worship of one's religious confession-and devotio domestica qualificata-private devotion involving a minister of worship of one's religious confession), and in public (the called exercitium religionis publicum) (listl and dietrich ) . article , health law for the federal district, where it is provided that doctors, for reasons of a religious nature, may refuse to perform an abortion. this establishes: "religious convictions do not exempt in any case from complying with laws of the country. no one may invoke religious motives to evade the responsibilities and obligations established in the laws." published on april , , in the diario oficial de la federación. the "freedom to adopt a belief" consists usually in search of a community of believers, learn about it, and take its doctrine. the "freedom to change one´s religion" implies in the background "the right to abandon or to resign from being a member from a community of believers and to enter another." this formulation has been considered in many cases instead of "to change one´s religion" because it has been objected usually by islamic countries, such as saudi arabia. see nowak ( ) . moreover, the manifestations of the exercise of religion include, for example (listl and dietrich ) , religious service: as the typical form of religious adoration or proclamation, for example, worship. religious uses: among which are processions, wearing/carrying of religious clothing or (a certain style of) beard, circumcision, prayers, tolling of bells, flying of church banners; in short, rites and rituals of different religions. praxis (practice): conducting religious assemblies, foundation and support of charities and humanitarian institutions; manufacture or acquisition of ritual objects; collecting donations; training of religious leaders; observance of days of rest and specific holidays; missionary activity; sustaining religious hospitals; implementation of development projects; distribution of flyers; pacifists, motivated by a pacifist spirit. teaching: transmission of content from one religion or worldview in religious schools, in public schools, in various forms of non-formal education and in missionary work. also freedom of religious association is part of the fundamental right of religious freedom in its positive and negative aspect. in this regard, religious freedom in mexico should not be a taboo subject. hence, the importance of serious and open debate on issues such as: the right to selfdetermination of religious communities, as well as freedom of expression of their ministers of worship; mass media in the ownership or possession of religious associations; the right of parents to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions, even in public schools; the protection of cultural property of a religious character; and, attention to the problems of displaced indigenous people because of "religious intolerance." it clarifies that this freedom includes the right to participate individually or collectively, in public or private, in ceremonies, devotions, or acts of respective worship, provided they do not constitute a crime or an offense punishable by law. in this respect, it is not that "this freedom includes the right …", but rather "this right includes freedom …" (in accordance with article of the international covenant on civil and political rights, and article of the american convention on human rights ). in addition to the observation about the inadequate legislative technique used, it is considered that such provision falls far short in scope, at least formally, when it refers only to ceremonies, devotions and acts of respective worship. finally, a prohibition is incorporated: no one can use the public acts of expression of this freedom for political purposes, proselytism or propaganda. the questions are: who is the addressee of this? any person? what specifically does "using public acts of expression of this freedom" mean? what does "this freedom" mean? article of the covenant: ( ) "everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. this right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching." article of the convention: "everyone has the right to freedom of conscience and of religion. this right includes freedom to maintain or to change one's religion or beliefs, and freedom to profess or disseminate one's religion or beliefs, either individually or together with others, in public or in private." the "freedom of ethical convictions, conscience and religion" or the "freedom to participate individually or collectively, in public or private, in ceremonies, devotions, or acts of respective worship"? is this prohibition is applicable during an electoral campaign and also in non-election times? what would be the sanction for contravening this provision? by reading this provision, suddenly came to my mind the image of the presidential candidates who gathered at the mass celebrated by pope benedict xvi in silao guanajuato in , where some of them even took communion publicly. president enrique peña nieto also received communion at the mass celebrated by pope francisco on february , , at the basilica of guadalupe during his visit to mexico. if at the time a prohibitive provision like this had been in force, would this prohibition have been applicable to presidential candidates or why could it not be applicable to the president of mexico? moreover, prohibitions against ministers of worship engaging in politics matters existed before, for example, to hold public offices and not be elected for public offices, those who have ceased being ministers of worship with anticipation and in the manner established by law, may be elected (article of the constitution d) and article , first paragraph, larcp); to associate for political purposes, to proselytize in favor of or against any political candidate, party or association (article of the constitution, and articles and larcp); to celebrate political meetings in temples (article of the constitution and article larcp); in developing public acts of their own ministry, to induce the electorate to vote or not to vote for a particular candidate or political party (article cpf). to these, it has been added: "no one can use the public acts of expression of this freedom for political purposes, proselytism or propaganda" as a "burden" additional to the bans for ministers of worship, especially if this prohibitive requirement seems an "openletter" to the exercise of discretional activity of governmental authorities in its application. the laicity (laicidad) of the state, as a scenario and presupposed, where the effective exercise of religious freedom and other fundamental freedoms occurs, also papal mass held on march , , at bicentennial park in silao, guanajuato. see https://www.sdpnoticias.com/nacional/ / / /comulgo-pena-nieto-en-misa-de-elpapa-en-la-basilica and http://www.animalpolitico.com/ / /los-politicos-de-mexico-enprimera-fila-para-ver-al-papa-francisco/. in the doctrine, it is discussed the legal nature of this constitutional impediment of the ministers of worship to exercise a passive vote, placing it within three possible explanations: ( ) an incompatibility on the basis of the principle of state-churches separation. ( ) a mutilation of human rights of ministers of worship, or ( ) a discriminatory treatment. involves the generation of appropriate public policies for the management of religious diversity. at the legislative level, it is necessary to legislate without discrimination, as happened with the derogation of the word "sect" in federal regulations. this word was removed from the federal code of electoral institutions and procedures (cofipe) but this has not been done in case of the federal civil code, because article still includes the word "sect". moreover, the national council to prevent discrimination (conapred) published a handbook for lawmaking without discrimination, which will undoubtedly contribute to that purpose. at the jurisdictional level, the interpretation of "religious freedom and their different facets" and "differences of religious freedom and freedom of worship" is developed. at the federal executive level, it is necessary to comply with the generation of an appropriate public policy of management of religious diversity. among the public policies for management of religious diversity are the following. regardless of the circumstances that involved a significant shift of the administrative body of the federal executive in charge of religious affairs before , it was called "underdirectorate of religious worship, firearms and explosives"; and with the reform from january , , the situation changed toward the formation of a general directorate of religious associations, within an "undersecretariat for population, migration and religious affairs" and today an "undersecretariat of democratic development, social participation and religious affairs." here, it is expedient to review the vision, mission and objectives of this undersecretariat (fig. ) . while the services offered by the general directorate of religious associations formally involve administrative attention to religious diversity, this is only part of public management policy (table ) . since the finally, the law of religious associations and public worship has had important reforms: the management of the federal executive relations with religious associations (churches and religious communities), with full respect for the lay (laico) spirit of public institutions, formally has had as guidelines: (a) improving the relationship with religious communities, religious associations and religious traditions existing in the country; (b) greater openness and fairness for different religions; (c) assumption of a positioning of "non-control" by the authority on religious associations; (d) respect of the internal life of religious associations and religious pluralism; (e) strengthening of interfaith dialogue and coexistence; (f) permanent dialogue with religious organizations and ministers of worship; (g) transparency and access to information on religious matters; (h) improving the administrative service to attend the religious associations; (i) application of modern technology for recording and processing information in religious matters. procedures and services offered by the dgar in religious matters it must be insisted that in the case of holding acts of extraordinarily public worship of religious associations, provisions that strictly correspond to "public performances" should not be applied since it is not possible to fulfill the same requirements for implementation and because "extraordinarily acts of public worship" are not "public spectacles." it is required further to facilitate spiritual support in health, social care, and rehabilitation institutions, making this effectively one of the dimensions of the right to religious freedom of internal people and users. after the earthquake of september , , dioceses, bishops, priests, and lay people attended the emergency in different ways, not only arranging parishes and seminars, as refuge and collection centers, making special collections in the parishes, and channeling everything through cáritas nacional (mexicana) but also offering spiritual accompaniment and psychological attention to the people in need. for its part, the central commission of the jewish community of mexico also helped those affected by the earthquake by establishing collection centers. churches and religious communities are organized to help the society in the health contingency due to covid- . for example, the mexican episcopate conference promotes the "families without hunger" campain. the constitutional and legal normativity on religious matters assumes the principle of non-discrimination in favor of religious diversity. article of the constitution explicitly prohibits discrimination based on religion and establishes that the authorities have the obligation to promote, protect, and ensure the human rights of all people. article of the law of religious associations and public worship recognizes the right of individuals to be free from discrimination, coercion or hostility because of their religious beliefs and the prohibition to restrict the exercise of any work or activity for religious reasons. article of the federal law to prevent and eliminate discrimination prohibits all discriminatory practice. this law establishes the following in article as discriminatory behaviors: to hinder freedom of religion, religious practices or customs, provided they do not violate public order (paragraph xvi), and to deny religious assistance to persons deprived of liberty, serving in the armed forces or interns in assistance or healthcare institutions (paragraph xvii). education authorities have refrained from punishing students-jehovah's witnesses-because of their religious beliefs, who refuse to salute the flag and sing the national anthem at civic ceremonies that take place in schools, according to the general recommendation nr. , issued by the national commission of human rights (may , ) . however, in the case of basic education teachers, for example, jehovah's witnesses are required, in respect of their right to conscientious objection to honoring national symbols, to complying instead of this with an alternative service, so that they should not be separated from their charges-as this happens at the present-because they "do not inculcate love for the country in their students." it is necessary to review the status of coordination agreements on religious matters signed by the ministry of interior principally with the governments of the states agreements-that were ready to be signed-are those corresponding to the states of coahuila, jalisco, puebla and veracruz. agreements in process of elaboration, in case of the states: campeche, guerrero, queretaro, san luis potosi, sonora, tamaulipas, tlaxcala. of zacatecas, chiapas, chihuahua, michoacan, nuevo leon and quintana roo, to update them, and to promote the signing of agreements with the remaining states. the ministry of interior has promoted the translation of the law on religious associations and public worship into various indigenous languages in at least six states. these languages are: tsotsil, tseltal, tojolab'al, zoque, cho'l (in chiapas) ; mazahua (in state of mexico); náwatl (in puebla); náhuatl, tenek (in san luis potosí); náhuatl, totonaca (in veracruz), purhépecha (in michoacán) ; however, translation of the law by itself is not enough, there should also exist informed knowledge about its content, so this topic must be observed too (table ) . the also with respect to those who, exercising their right of self-determination, have decided not to belong to any interfaith council, as has been the case of the christian congregation of jehovah's witnesses. on april , , was inaugurated the first encounter between deputies and interfaith councils. where the deputies pronounced themselves to elaborate a political agenda and initiatives to advance in a regulation of the article of the constitution, whereas representatives of interreligious councils manifested the necessity to legislate in the matter of freedom of conscience and to improve the law of religious associations and public worship, as well as its regulations, in order to defend and promote religious freedom. finally, it was assumed that mexico has much to learn about religious freedom, since the reforms, although they recognized that right, said reforms "are still far from what mexico has signed on human rights issues." it should support religious associations that make use of their right to bring into the country ministers of worship and associated religious persons to participate in pastoral interchanges, as well as for international events held in mexico, so it is necessary to reduce administrative obstacles on matters of inviting foreign ministers of worship into the country. a positive aspect of the mexican lay (laico) state has been to allow special diets in migration centers for people who, for religious reasons, make such request (immigration law, article , ii, second paragraph). this shows more openness to guaranteeing religious freedom. it requires greater collaboration between government and religious associations for the defense and the protection of the rights of migrants, especially of unaccompanied migrant children. finally, members of the tohono otham indigenous people, as it is written on the other side of the rio grande; "tojonoo'otam," as pronounced on the mexican side, are part of the , indigenous people, of whom some , reside in mexico and around , in the united states, in the desert territory of sonora and arizona, divided by km of border that was imposed without having been consulted. to that is added the construction of the "wall," proposed by donald trump, which represents a double offense for this indigenous population. since , there has been a policy of openness by the ministry of education to recognize studies in religious matters, such as theology or religious sciences. provided, they comply with the established legal requirements. for example, official validity was recognized by the ministry of education for the curriculum in judaic at the upper level (october ), which is unprecedented in the history of the jewish community of mexico. the tax treatment of religious associations is regulated through a "general resolution" for all of them. however, the religious associations are not yet considered "nonprofitlegal entities" (personas morales sin fines de lucro) ; they are not authorized to receive donations deductible from income tax ; so this situation should be changed. see http://www.proceso.com.mx/ /pueblo-indigena-separado-la-frontera-va-contra-murotrump. although the law of income tax (ley del impuestosobre la renta) does not expressly refer to religious associations, it establishes that: "for the purposes of this law, are considered non-profit legal persons (…) the following: xvi. civil associations or societies with political, sporting or religious purposes." cf. tax various religious denominations in mexico, especially evangelical churches, have close relationship with churches from the usa who are willing to support them with donations in kind, especially: food, used clothing in good condition, medicines, toys, medical equipment, among others. the current problems, in this case, are customs procedures that carry a high cost, which often turns out to be more expensive than the amount donated, and churches or religious communities do not have sufficient financial resources to cover such costs. it seeks to guide religious associations to find the most appropriate way to receive donations from abroad. at present, they do this through civil associations for welfare; however, it insists that religious associations as "non-profit legal entities" also should come to be considered authorized donees. in this item, it is necessary to determine that ministers of worship are not employees or workers of religious associations, because there is a general assumption that considers religious associations as their employers, who therefore have to pay patronal contributions to the mexican social security institute (imss). that is a mistake. state authorities have recognized that religious associations, churches, and religious communities have much to contribute to mexican society, to rebuild the social net (tejido social), especially in prevention matters, so their specific involvement in the national security plan of the federal government must be known. for now, they work on voluntary disarmament programs that are usually carried out in the atrium of catholic churches. it is important to highlight that "voluntary disarmament" has already been institutionalized by reforming the law on social prevention of crime and violence for the federal district, which was added with an article bis, published on july , , in the official gazette ; as well as the organic law of the public security secretariat of the federal district, whose article was added with a fraction xxx bis, published on july , , in the official gazette. finally, on august , , for example, the government of the state of veracruz and religious organizations signed an agreement to prevent crime. it is necessary to review and to update the interpretative declarations and reservations made at the time by the mexican state in concluding international treaties relating to religious freedom and ministers of worship. at the federal level, the ministry of tourism (sectur) has conducted coordinated actions with state governments and non-governmental agencies to strengthen religious tourism in mexico. this ministry reported that mexico is one of the most visited nations of the world thanks to the architectural, artistic, and cultural wealth of its sanctuaries, comparable in the arrival of tourists to other world religious centers. at the local level, on june , , the "religious tourism program" was presented by the federal district government. the program involves three routes for visitors: ( ) the guadeloupian way (el caminoguadalupano), ( ) bastions of catholicism (baluartes del catolicismo), and ( ) ways of faith (caminos de la fe). this program considers not only catholic, but also buddhist, jewish, methodist, mormon and orthodox temples. ley de prevención social del delito y la violencia para el distrito federal. artículo bis. el gobierno de ciudad de méxico, atenderá el desarme voluntario, a través de las acciones y/o programas conforme a los lineamientos que la secretaría de desarrollo social emita para su implementación. ley orgánica de la secretaría de seguridad pública del distrito federal. artículo °-corresponden a la secretaría las siguientes atribuciones: xxx bis. coadyuvar con la secretaría de desarrollo social de la ciudad de méxico en el desarrollo de la acción interinstitucional denominada "por tu familia, desarme voluntario" y su modalidad "por tu familia, desarme voluntario te acompaña desde tu casa", para generar un ambiente de paz, con la finalidad de establecer acciones de prevención delictiva a través de promover la cultura de la paz y no violencia. https://www.gob.mx/sectur/prensa/mexico-entre-los-paises-mas-visitados-por-turismoreligioso-sectur. the ministry of environment and natural resources (semarnat), in coordination with the ministry of public education (sep), has developed since a program to encourage the called "green schools," which perform actions and environmental management strategies to combat climate change. in , for example, the tarbut hebrew college was recognized as "green school. environmental leader" and the israeli college of mexico as "green school," implying that in the field of environmental sustainability, institutions representing a diversity of religions are taken into consideration for such programs. the general directorate of religious associations must address in a more timely and prudent manner the conflicts on religious intolerance matters that are characterized by the combination of several factors, including political, partisan, economic and agrarian, also caciquism (cacicazgo). these have even instrumentalized religion to cover up political actions or justify violence, making it difficult to identify intolerance as purely religious and to achieve an immediate peaceful solution to the conflicts. the general directorate of religious associations, of the ministry of the interior, denied registration to the native american church of mexico as a religious association, for failing to comply with requirements and deadlines. this decision was based in article of the regulations of the law of religious associations and public worship. faced with the refusal to register, the supreme court of justice of the nation in the amparo under revision / , determined that the formal requirements required by the law for the constitutive registration as a religious association cannot be understood as insurmountable barriers, through which the validity is questioned or the ideological content of a certain religious belief. that study would imply invading an area alien to its powers as authority. in other words, the authority is not entitled to question the content or practices that give life to a certain religious ideology, but must limit itself to verify the formal requirements imposed by the law for registration. in the weighing of the right to religious freedom with the human right to life, a federal judge (eighth district court in the state of chihuahua) ordered that a minor suffering from leukemia received a blood transfusion once the alternative medical treatments had been exhausted, by virtue of which the minor professed the religion jehovah's witnesses. with the sentence, the fundamental right of religious freedom was revised, as well as the rights to a second opinion, informed consent and decision making, regarding medical treatments. however, due to the lack of maturity of the girl to understand the scope of the medical act on her health, the right to life was privileged; so the doctors were authorized to perform the necessary treatments to protect the life of the minor, including blood transfusion. it was also determined that the corresponding reforms were made for the creation of a protocol and procedure so that the doctors, in case of the refusal of the consent of the parents to administer treatments to minors, appear before a judge to argue the case, and it is that judge who analyzes the circumstances, listens to the parties and resolves the corresponding. judge mauricio fernandez de la mora, head of the eighth district court in the state of chihuahua, granted the "amparo" to a woman of the rarámuri ethnic group, who professes the religion jehovah's witnesses, for blood to be transferred to her five-year-old daughter, affected by leukemia, provided other means or alternative treatments have been exhausted, such as those proposed by various doctors, including oncologists at the cancer center of chihuahua. see nota informativa: dgcs/ni: / , poder judicial de la federación. ciudad de méxico, a de julio de . with the amendments to articles and of the mexican constitution, it is clear that a truly secular state (lay/laico state) has to facilitate the effective exercise of religious freedom. the state has to generate a public policy that engages a significant change in the way in which it manages the religious diversity, which makes it comprehensible to decision makers that this field is not in the sphere of persuasion or negotiation but in the necessary observance of rules that ensure religious freedom effectively. this management is expressed in developing actions and strategies for the implementation of in force legal instruments, consistent with mexico's international obligations in this regard; plus informed dialogue between state authorities and religious actors in the meaning of full religious freedom and the responsibility that implies its exercise in the context of a secular state (lay/laico), respectful of religious diversity. according to a typology of violations of religious and ideological freedom by state and non-state agents ( ) we want to highlight here only two recent aspects for the case of mexico (a) criminal sanctions. (b) administrative obstacles. (c) legal sanctions in family and inheritance matters. (d) limitations to the public exercise of religion. (e) prejudices and social stigmatization. (f) obstacles in recognition and registration of religious associations. (g) religious praxis and way of life religious freedom of the indigenous peoples. (k) conscientious objection to military service religious freedom and freedom of opinion. (m) discrimination based on religion and ideology access to public service and public positions. (o) access to education. (p) access to the private economy. (q) limitations to religious freedom based on family law and inheritance desobediencia civil y objeción de conciencia, st edn. national commission for human rights das religionsrecht in mexiko. volumes i and ii. lit, münster nowak m ( ) uno-pakt über bürgerliche und politische rechte und fakultativprotokoll. ccpr-kommentar, engel, norbert p, strassburg wahrig g ( ) deutsches wörterbuch. bertelsmann lexikon key: cord- - zbe qmd authors: abeyratne, ruwantissa title: the epassport — new technology to counter security threats date: - - journal: nan doi: . /s - - -z sha: doc_id: cord_uid: zbe qmd the epassport is the culmination of a sustained process of development of technical specifications for machine readable travel documents (mrtd). it introduces a new dimension to aviation security in that, within the conventional machine readable passport with its machine readable zone, an additional layer of verification of information contained in an electronic chip is placed, which verifies the information in the passport’s machine readable zone by the use of a special reader. much research has gone into the areas of the technology and verification in the development of the epassport. at a symposium held at the international civil aviation organization in early october , the epassport was subjected to much discussion by the various experts gathered from across the globe. this article discusses these deliberations and places them against the backdrop of the privacy of the individual and aviation security law. over states are currently producing and using epassports and there are approximately million in circulation. this accounts for % of all passports used globally. the additional feature that the epassport carries in the conventional machine readable passport is a chip containing biometric and biographic information which have to be validated accurately, efficiently and quickly while retaining the security and integrity of the information. ideally, an epassport should be issued in accordance with the technical specifications approved by the international civil aviation organization (icao). however, this does not happen in all cases of issuance of epassports. this lapse could seriously compromise global security. the nuances of this threat are described and discussed in this article against their legal background. at a recent symposium on machine readable travel documents, biometrics and security standards held at icao on to october , experts addressed icao machine readable travel documents (mrtd) standards and specifications, identity management best practices and related border security issues. foremost among these discussions was the epassport, which is defined by icao as a passport which has a contactless integrated circuit (ic) chip within which is stored data from the machine readable passport page, a biometric measure of the passport and a security object to protect the public key infrastructure (pki) cryptographic technology, and which conforms to the specifications of doc part . the icao facilitation manual defines the epassport as a machine readable passport that has a contactless integrated circuit embedded in it and the capability of being used for biometric identification of the machine readable passport holder in accordance with the standards specified in the relevant part of icao document (machine readable travel documents). epassports are easily recognised by the international epassport symbol on the front cover. it is important to note that the operative terms in the definition of the epassport are "biometric identification" and "public key infrastructure (pki) cryptographic technology". biometric technology involves a measurable, physical characteristic or personal behavioral trait used to recognize the identity, or verify the claimed identity of a person. biometric identification has been defined as "a generic term used to icao is the specialized agency of the united nations handling issues of international civil aviation. icao was established by the convention on international civil aviation, signed at chicago on december (chicago convention). one of the overarching objectives of icao, as contained in article of the convention is to foster the planning and development of international air transport so as to meet the needs of the peoples for safe, regular, efficient and economical air transport. icao has member states, who become members of icao by ratifying or otherwise issuing notice of adherence to the chicago convention. see icao doc / ninth edition . machine readable travel documents part volume icao doc sixth edition: , at page ii- at paragraph . , definitions. see the facilitation manual, doc , icao: montreal, first edition , definitions at x. icao has been working on the development of passports since . the seventh session of the icao facilitation division in recommended that a small panel of qualified experts including representatives of the passports and/or other border control authorities, be established: to determine the establishment of an appropriate document such as a passport card, a normal passport or an identity document with electronically or mechanically readable inscriptions that meet the requirements of document control; the best type of procedures, systems (electronic or mechanical) and equipment for use with the above documents that are within the resources and ability of member states; the feasibility of standardizing the requisite control information and methods of providing this information through automated processes, provided that these processes would meet the requirements of security, speed of handling and economy of operation. http://www.dhs.gov/xtrvlsec/programs/content_multi_image_ .shtm to "verify" means to perform a one-to-one match between proffered biometric data obtained from the holder of the travel document at the time of inquiry with the details of a biometric template created when the holder enrolled in the system. describe automated means of recognizing a living person through the measurement of distinguishing physiological or behavioural traits". biometrics target the distinguishing physiological or behavioral traits of the individual by measuring them and placing them in an automated repository such as machine encoded representations created by computer software algorithms that could make comparisons with the actual features. physiological biometrics that have been found to successfully accommodate this scientific process are facial recognition, fingerprinting and irisrecognition which have been selected by icao as being the most appropriate. the biometric identification process is fourfold: firstly involving the capture or acquisition of the biometric sample; secondly extracting or converting the raw biometric sample obtained into an intermediate form; and thirdly creating templates of the intermediate data is converted into a template for storage; and finally the comparison stage where the information offered by the travel document with that which is stored in the reference template. biometric identification gets into gear each time an mrtd holder (traveler) enters or exists the territory of a state and when the state verifies his identity against the images or templates created at the time his travel document was issued. this measure not only ensures that the holder of the document is the legitimate claimant to that document and to whom it was issued, but also enhances the efficacy of any advance passenger information (api) system used by the state to pre-determine the arrivals to its territory. furthermore, matching biometric data presented in the form of the traveler with the data contained in the template accurately ascertains as to whether the travel document has been tampered with or not. a three way check, which matches the traveler's biometrics with those stored in the template carried in the document and a central database, is an even more efficacious way of determining the genuineness of a travel document. the final and most efficient biometric check is when a four way determine is effected, were the digitized photograph is visually matched (non electronically) with the three way check described above. in this context, it is always recommended that the traveler's facial image (conventional photograph) should be incorporated in the travel document along with the biometric templates in order to ensure that his identity could be verified at locations where there is no direct access to a central database or where the biometric identification process has not entered into the legal process of that location. machine readable travel documents part volume , supra note at page ii- at paragraph . . the chicago convention, supra, note , defines, in article , "territory of a state" as the land areas and territorial waters adjacent to the state under the sovereignty, suzerainty, protection and mandate of such state. api involves exchange of data information between airlines and customs authorities, where an incoming passenger's essential details are notified electronically by the airline carrying that passenger prior to his arrival. the data for api would be stored in the passenger's machine readable passport, in its machine readable zone. this process enables customs authorities to process passengers quickly, thus ensuring a smoother and faster clearance at the customs barriers at airports. one of the drawbacks of this system, which generally works well and has proven to be effective, is that it is quite demanding in terms of the high level of accuracy required. one of the major advantages, on the other hand, is the potential carried by the api process in enhancing aviation security at airports and during flight. see abeyratne ( a, b) issuing states must ensure the accuracy of the biometric matching technology used and functions of the systems employed if the integrity of the conducted checks are to be maintained. they must also have realistic and efficient criteria regarding the number of travel documents checked per minute in a border control situation and follow a regular biometric identification approach such as facial recognition, fingerprint examination or iris identification system. public key infrastructure (pki) cryptographic technology pki cryptographic technology uses a brand new technique known as quantum cryptography, designed to eliminate the terrifying vulnerabilities that arise in the way digitally stored data are exposed to fraudulent use. this new technique uses polarized photons instead of electronic signals to transmit information along cables. photons are tiny particles of light that are so sensitive that when intercepted, they immediately become corrupted. this renders the message unintelligible and alerts both the sender and recipient to the fraudulent or spying attempt. the public key directory -designed and proposed to be used by customs and immigration authorities who check biometric details in an electronic passport, is based on cryptography -and is already a viable tool being actively considered by the aviation community as a fail-safe method for ensuring the accuracy and integrity of passport information. in order to assure inspecting authorities (receiving states) that they would know when the authenticity and integrity of the biometric data stored in the mrtd, which they inspect, are compromised and tampered with, the public key infrastructure (pki) scheme was developed by the tag/mrtd, which has been pioneering work on the mrtd for over a decade. the scheme is not calculated to prescribe global implementation of public key encryption, but rather acts as a facilitator enabling states to make choices in areas such as active or passive authentication, antiskimming and access control and automated border crossing, among other facilitative methods. the establishment of a public key directory, through means of public key cryptology and in a pki environment, is consistent with icao's ultimate aim and vision for the application of biometric technology on the fundamental postulate that there must be a primary interoperable form of biometric technology for use at border control with facilities for verification, as well as by carriers and the issuers of documents. this initial premise is inevitably followed by the assumption that biometric technologies used by document issuers must have certain specifications, particularly for purposes of identification, verification and the creation of watch lists. it is also icao's vision that states, to the extent possible, are protected against changing infrastructure and changing suppliers, and that a technology, once put in place, must be operable or at least retrievable for a period of ten years. the story of the passport-the precursor of the epassportstarts with the birth of an individual and his birth certificate, which records the event of birth and time and place thereof. the civil registry is able, with this document to primarily establish the icao's terms of reference in the development of specifications for machine readable passports stem from the chicago convention which provides for icao's adoption of international standards and recommended practices dealing, inter alia, with customs and immigration procedures. chicago convention, supra note , article (j). it is interesting that, although passports apply to other modes of international travel as well, icao has been singly recognized as the appropriate body to adopt specifications for mrtds. this alone speaks for the uniqueness of icao's facilitation programme. see machine readable travel documents, icao doc / sixth edition , - to - . identity of the person at birth and inform his country of his details for purposes of maintaining census and vital statistics. the passport, which uses this information, gives a person a name and natonality that is required for him to travel internationally. the passport is a basic document in the transport by air of persons. its use therefore is of fundamental importance as a travel document, not only because it reflects the importance of the sovereignty of a state and the nationality of its citizens but also because it stands for the inviolability of relations between states that are linked through air transport. the key consideration of an epassport is global interoperabilitythe crucial need to specify a system for biometrics deployment that is universally interoperable. a logical data structure (lds) for epassports required is for global interoperability. it defines the specifications for the standardized organization of data recorded to a contactless integrated circuit capacity expansion technology of an mrp when selected by an issuing state or organization so that the data is accessible by receiving states. this requires the identification of all mandatory and optional data elements and a prescriptive ordering and/or grouping of data elements that must be followed to achieve global interoperability for reading of details (data elements) recorded in the capacity expansion technology optionally included on an mrp (epassport). the other considerations are uniformitythe need to minimize via specific standard setting, to the extent practical, the different solution variations that may potentially be deployed by member states; technical reliabilitythe need to provide guidelines and parameters to ensure member states deploy technologies that have been proven to provide a high level of confidence from an identity confirmation viewpoint; and that states reading data encoded by other states can be sure that the data supplied to them is of sufficient quality and integrity to enable accurate verification in their own systems; practicalitythe need to ensure that specifications can be operationalized and implemented by states without their having to introduce a plethora of disparate systems and equipment to ensure they meet all possible variations and interpretations of the standards; and durabilitythe requirement that the systems introduced will last the maximum -year life of a travel document, and that future updates will be backward compatible. the major components of a biometric system are: captureacquisition of a raw biometric sample; extractconversion of the raw biometric sample data to an intermediate form; create templateconversion of the intermediate data into a template for storage; and comparecomparison with the information in a stored reference template. in terms of security and privacy of the stored data, both the issuing and any receiving states need to be satisfied that the data stored on the ic has not been altered since it was recorded at the time of issue of the document. in addition, the privacy laws or practice of the issuing state may require that the data cannot be accessed except by an authorized person or organization. accordingly icao has developed specifications in section iv regarding the application and usage of modern encryption techniques, particularly interoperable public key infrastructure (pki) schemes, to be used by states with their machine readable travel documents as made in accordance with the specifications set out in doc . the intent is primarily to augment security through automated means of authentication of mrps and their legitimate holders internationally. in addition, ways and means are recommended to implement international epassport authentication and to provide a path to the use of epassports to facilitate biometric or e-commerce applications. annex to the convention on international civil aviation (facilitation of air transport), in standard . requires icao member states to regularly update security features in new versions of their travel documents, to guard against their misuse and to facilitate detection of cases where such documents have been unlawfully altered, replicated or issued. recommended practice . suggests that member states incorporate biometric data in their machine readable passports, visas and other official travel documents, using one or more optional data storage technologies to supplement the machine readable zone, as specified in doc , machine readable travel documents. the required data stored on the integrated circuit chip is the same as that printed on the data page, that is, the data contained in the machine-readable zone plus the digitized photographic image. fingerprint image(s) and/or iris image(s) are optional biometrics for member states wishing to supplement the facial image with another biometric in the passport. member states incorporating biometric data in their machine readable passports are to store the data in a contactless integrated circuit chip complying with iso/iec and programmed according to the logical data structure as specified by icao. the basic legal issues encompassing the issuance of epassports are privacy of the individual ; and the internal security of a state. ensuring both these are intrinsically and exclusively the responsibility of the state. as for privacy, the chicago convention, which established the regulatory framework for international civil aviation, underscores the fundamental aim of states in the context of civil aviation to exchange privileges which friendly nations have a right to expect from each other. in his message to the conference in chicago, president roosevelt said: "the conference is a great attempt to build enduring institutions of peace, which cannot be endangered by petty considerations or weakened by groundless fears" (the department of state ). the chicago convention, in article of the convention provides that the laws and regulations of a contracting state as to the admission to and departure from its territory of passengers, crew or cargo of aircraft, such as regulations relating to entry, clearance, immigration, passports, customs and quarantine shall be complied with by or on behalf of such passengers, crew or cargo upon entrance into or departure from, or while within the territory of that state. this provision ensures that a contracting state has the right to prescribe its own internal laws with regard to passenger annex to the convention on international civil aviation, th edition, . see (abeyratne a, b) . also by the same author, the exchange of airline passenger information -issues of privacy, communication law, vol. , no. ; : p. - , and also by abeyratne, profiling of passengers at airports -imperatives and discretions, european transport law, vol. xxxviii, no. ; : p. - supra, note . clearance and leaves room for a state to enact laws, rules and regulations to ensure the security of that state and its people at the airport. however, this absolute right is qualified so as to preclude unfettered and arbitrary power of a state, by article which makes each contracting state agree to adopt all practicable measures, through the issuance of special regulations or otherwise, to facilitate and expedite navigation of aircraft between the countries. the above notwithstanding, there are three rights of privacy relating to the display and storage and use of personal data: . the right of an individual to determine what information about oneself to share with others, and to control the disclosure of personal data; . the right of an individual to know what data is disclosed, and what data is collected and where such is stored when the data in question pertains to that individual; the right to dispute incomplete or inaccurate data; and . the right of people who have a legitimate right to know in order to maintain the health and safety of society and to monitor and evaluate the activities of government. [hoffman ( )] it is incontrovertible that the data subject has a right to decide what information about oneself to share with others and more importantly, to know what data is collected about him. this right is balanced by the right of a society to collect data about individuals that belong to it so that the orderly running of government is ensured. the data subject, like any other person, has an inherent right to his privacy. the subject of privacy has been identified as an intriguing and emotive one. the right to privacy is inherent in the right to liberty, and is the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized man (warren and brandies - ) . this right is susceptible to being eroded, as modern technology is capable of easily recording and storing dossiers on every man, woman and child in the world. the data subject's right to privacy, when applied to the context of the full body scanner is brought into focus by alan westin who says: privacy is the claim of individuals, groups or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information is communicated to others. [westin ( )] the role played by technology in modern day commercial transactions has affected a large number of activities pertaining to human interaction. the emergence of the information superhighway and the concomitant evolution of automation have inevitably transformed the social and personal life styles and value systems of individuals, created unexpected business opportunities, reduced operating costs, accelerated transaction times, facilitated accessibility to communications, shortened distances, and removed bureaucratic formalities. [orwell ( ) ] progress notwithstanding, technology has bestowed on humanity its corollaries in the nature of automated mechanisms, devices, features, and procedures which intrude into personal lives of individuals. for instance, when a credit card is used, it is possible to track purchases, (abeyratne (young ) . as far back as in it was claimed that ten reels, each containing , m of tape . cm wide, could store a twenty page dossier on every man, woman, and child in the world. see (jones ). discovering numerous aspects about that particular individual, including, food inclination, leisure activities, and consumer credit behaviour. in similar vein, computer records of an air carrier's reservation system may give out details of the passenger's travel preferences, inter alia, seat selection, destination fondness, ticket purchasing dossier, lodging keenness, temporary address and telephone contacts, attendance at theatres and sport activities, and whether the passenger travels alone or with someone else. in similar vein, does it follow that a full body scanning exercise would reveal imperfections of the human body which person would desire to keep private? this scheme of things may well give the outward perception of surveillance attributable to computer devices monitoring individuals' most intimate activities, preferences and physical attributes, leading to the formation of a genuine "traceable society". the main feature of this complex web of technological activity is that an enormous amount of personal information handled by such varied players from the public and private sector, may bring about concerns of possible "data leaks" in the system, a risk that could have drastic legal consequences affecting an individual's rights to privacy. at the international level, privacy was first recognized as a fundamental freedom in the universal declaration of human rights. thereafter, several other human rights conventions followed the same trend, granting to individuals the fundamental right of privacy. the pre-eminent concern of these international instruments was to establish a necessary legal framework to protect the individual and his rights inherent to the enjoyment of a private life. privacy represents different things for different people. the concept per se has evolved throughout the history of mankind, from the original non-intrusion approach, which defended an individual's property and physical body against unwanted invasions and intrusions, then manifesting in whom to associate with, later for a detailed analysis of the implications of credit cards with respect to the right of privacy see (nock ) . the paramount importance of airline computer reservation system records is reflected in the worldrenowned cases libyan arab jamahiriya v. united kingdom and libyan arab jamahiriya v. united states of america regarding the panam accident at lockerbie, scotland in , where the international court of justice requested air carriers to submit to the court the defendants' flight information and reservation details. see (international court of justice ). in a similar vein, arthur r. miller describes the significance of airline computer reservation system records when dealing with federal, state, local, and other types of investigations where these dossiers could provide valuable information. see also (miller ) . see scott ( ) ; burnham ( ) at . a contrario to the argument supported in this thesis that the advancement of technology directly affects the intimacy of individuals. u.s. circuit judge richard posner favours the idea that other factors, such as urbanisation, income, and mobility development have particularly weakened the information control that, for instance, the government has over individuals: this denotes that individuals' privacy has increased. see posner ( ) . the text reads: "no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks". see universal declaration of human rights. enlarging its scope to include privacy as the individual's decision -making right, and culminating in the control over one's personal information. thus, the conceptual evolution of privacy is directly related to the technological advancement of each particular period in history. the right of privacy, as enunciated by the united states judge thomas m. cooley, was the right "to be let alone" as a part of a more general right to one's personality. this idea was given further impetus by two prominent young lawyers, samuel d. warren and louis d. brandeis, in . before this idea was introduced, the concept of privacy reflected primarily a somewhat physical property or life. the foundations of "information privacy", whereby the individuals would determine when, how, and to what extent information about themselves would be communicated to others, inextricably drawing the right of control of information about oneself, is a cornerstone of privacy. with the development of computer capabilities to handle large amounts of data, privacy has been enlarged to include the collection, storage, use, and disclosure of personal information reidenberg ( ) . the notion of informational privacy protection, a typically american usage, has been particularly popular both in the united states and europe, where the term "data protection" is used. self-determination in the right to protect one's privacy was first judicially embraced by the german bundesverfassungsgericht in . the us supreme court followed this trend by adopting the principle of privacy self-determination in doj v. it must be borne in mind that privacy is not an absolute, unlimited right that operates and applies in isolation (simmel ) . it is not an absolute right, applied unreservedly, to the exclusion of other rights. hence there is frequently the necessity to balance privacy rights with other conflictive rights, such as the freedom of speech and the right to access information when examining individuals' rights vis-à-vis the in this case, the us supreme court acknowledged the right of women to have abortions based on the grounds that the federal government could not interfere within her "decisional privacy" sphere. see roe v. wade, u.s. ( ) . see also cate ( ) . see also zelermyer ( ) . in a remarkable case concerning the legality of a national census scheduled by the authorities, the german constitutional court connected the individual's liberty and the personal data processing of the intended census, to rule that if the individuals do not know for what purposes and who is collecting the data, that situation will eventually create an abdication of the individual's rights to the processor's command, "which cannot be tolerated in a democratic society". see simitis ( ) . see also hoffer ( ) ; gavison ( ) . see cooley ( ) , as cited in warren and brandeis ( ) . the definition of privacy as the "right to be alone" is often erroneously attributed to warren and brandeis. see warren & brandeis. see cooley ( ) as cited in warren and brandeis ( ) . additionally the concept of privacy as "the right to be let alone", and "the right most valued by civilized man: was embraced by us courts in the landmark dissenting opinion of justice louis d. brandeis in olmsted v. united states. see olmsted v. united states, u.s. , ( ) [hereinafter olmstead.] see westin ( ) . for a similar conceptualisation of privacy, see fried ( ) . the former privacy commissioner of british columbia, canada, has asserted that privacy was originally a "non-legal concept". see flaherty ( ). the term "data protection" has been translated from the german word datenschutz, referring to a set of policies seeking to regulate the collection, storage, use, and transfer of personal information. see c.j. bennet, regulating privacy (ithaca. new york: cornell university press, ) at . supra, note . interest of society. this multiplicity of interests will prompt courts to adopt a balanced approach when adjudicating on a person's rights, particularly whose interests of a state are involved. since the data contained in equipment such as body scanners may be subject to trans-border storage, there is a compelling need to consider the introduction of uniform privacy laws in order that the interests of the data subject and the data seeker are protected. although complete uniformity in privacy legislation may be a difficult objective to attain (as has been the attempt to make other aspects of legislation uniform), it will be well worth the while of the international community to at least formulate international standards and recommend practices (in the lines of the various icao annexes) to serve as guidelines of state conduct. after all, as collin mellors pointed out : under international agreements, privacy is now well established as a universal, natural, moral and human right. article of the universal declaration of human rights, article of the united nations covenant on civil and political rights and article of the european convention for the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms, all specify this basic right to privacy. man everywhere has occasion to seek temporary "seclusion or withdrawal from society" and such arrangements cannot define the precise area of the right to privacy. it is such a definition that is now needed so that the two requirements of ensuring respect for information about individuals and their privacy on the one hand, and the encouragement of free and open dissemination of trans-border data flows on the other, are reconciled. in the provision of biometric data, the provider of the information and the receiver thereof are both under obligation to ensure that the data is not used for any purpose other than clearance of the owner of the information through customs barriers. this information may not later be used for commercial or other gain for instance for advertising purposes (such as using the physical profile of a prominent actor or actress whose biometric information originally given for customs clearance). the protection of human rights is the most significant and important task for a modern state, particularly since multi ethnic states are the norm in today's world. globalization and increased migration across borders is gradually putting an end to the concept of the nation state, although resistance to reality can be still seen in instances where majority or dominant cultures impose their identity and interests on groups with whom they share a territory. in such instances, minorities frequently intensify their efforts to preserve and protect their identity, in order to avoid marginalization. polarization between the opposite forces of assimilation on the one hand and protection of minority identity on the other inevitably causes increased intolerance and eventual armed ethnic conflict. in such a scenario, the first duty of governance is to ensure that the rights of a minority society are protected. see halpin ( ) at . see also foschio ( ) . for a comprehensive study on the conflictive interest on privacy and the mass media and the freedom of speech, see pember ( ); prowda ( ) . see also j. montgomery curtis memorial seminar ( the foregoing discussion addressed the right of privacy of the individual which is paramount over most legal considerations. the only factor that would override this would be the security of state. inherent to the concept of security of state is state responsibility to its citizens and others who are in its territory. the fundamental issue in the context of state responsibility for the purposes of this article is to consider whether a state should be considered responsible for its own failure or non-feasance to prevent a private act of terrorism against civil aviation or whether the conduct of the state itself can be impugned by identifying a nexus between the perpetrator's conduct and the state. one view is that an agency paradigm, which may in some circumstances impute to a state reprehensibility on the ground that a principal-agent relationship between the state and the perpetrator existed, can obfuscate the issue and preclude one from conducting a meaningful legal study of the state's conduct. security it is incontrovertible that in issuing an epassport, the state concerned ensures aviation security not only in its own territory but also in the territory of the state to which the epassport holder travels. new and emerging threats to civil aviation are a constant cause for concern to the aviation community. grave threats such as those posed by the carriage of explosives and dangerous pathogens on board, are real and have to be addressed with vigour and regularity. the leakage of dangerous pathogens from laboratories also presents an ominous analogy to the aviation sector in that the same could well occur in the carriage of such dangerous goods by air (abeyratne ) . although past instances of the escape of dangerous pathogens are small in number, nonetheless their occurrence and the threat posed to the wellbeing of humanity cannot be underestimated. in when anthrax spores escaped from two military laboratories in the united states, the authorities agreed that the leakage was due to a security lapse. in a string of such leakages occurred in asia, this time of the sars virus. icao has been addressing these threats for some time and continues to do so on a global basis, particularly with regard to the impact of unpredictable security measures on passenger confidence in aviation security. there has been much support for this approach because of its value as a deterrent. it has been suggested that states adopt an approach providing for a baseline regime, but with the addition of unpredictable measures, thus achieving a balance between certainty and unpredictability. for an in-depth discussion of state responsibility see abeyratne ( ) . caron ( ) cited in becker ( . pathogens are microorganisms (including bacteria, viruses, rickettsia, parasites, fungi) or recombinant microorganisms (hybrid or mutant) that are known or are reasonably expected to cause infectious disease in humans or animals. an year earlier, a covert event occurred in october when anthrax spores were sent through the mail exposing persons in the eastern usa to contaminated mail resulting in deaths, illnesses and identified exposures to anthrax. overt, announced events, in which persons are warned that an exposure has occurred, have taken place in the united states, although most of these were determined to have been hoaxes, that is, there were no true exposures to infectious agents. the security ensured by the introduction of the epassport undoubtedly has its genesis in the maintenance of international peace and security is an important objective of the united nations, which recognizes one of its purposes as being inter alia: to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace. it is clear that the united nations has recognized the application of the principles of international law as an integral part of maintaining international peace and security and avoiding situations which may lead to a breach of the peace. liability of the manufacturer of the electronic chip, often a private entity, and the state is a significant factor in this equation. ultimately, even though the chip incorporated in the epassport is the creation of a public or private entity, is so incorporated in a state documenti.e. the passport, and therefore the state is ultimately liable for defects in the passport. state liability under administrative law can in turn be divided into two limbs: liability for acts of instrumentalities of state; and liability for privatized service providers for whose acts, relating to the provision of technical services, the state would still bear responsibility. the traditional model of administrative responsibility and accountability of the administrative state is based on the premise that parliament controlled the executive but was in turn controlled by the people. added to this, the fundamental postulate lay in the overarching principle that the judiciary played its role in keeping instrumentalities and agencies of the state intact. accountability of the state for its agencies' actions was two fold: one stemming from a statutory power given to that agency by the state; and the other arising from delegation of authority by the state to the agency concerned. in the latter instance, however, the legislature could intervene and share some control of the agency. this gave rise to the inexorable principle that administrative law and judgments of courts on such agencies could be involved only in the former instance, when the state had provided a statutory base for a private agency or entity. in the british case of o'reilly & mackman, the house of lords limited the circumstances in which a public law remedy, such as a declaratory judgment or injunction, could be brought outside of section of the supreme court act of , which prescribed instances of legal actions to be brought against the state for an act of its statutory agent. this is notwithstanding the fact that section of the crown proceedings act allows the court in civil proceedings to issue a declaratory order against the state, although there could be no injunction specific performance orders against a state. furthermore, a later case established that although the claim for judicial review might be brought against the crown, the crown's involvement is merely nominal and the ultimate dispute would be between the claimant and the defendant. in the instance of a privatized service provider, the situation calls for a discussion of the reasons for privatization leading to the legal nature of a privatized entity. the reasons for privatization could well range from improvement of efficiency to reducing government involvement in industrial decision making. the corollaries to privatization are often the widening of share ownership; encouraging share ownership by employees; providing more flexibility to pay policies; and enhancement of economic freedom. there could be two types of privatized service providers: the first being large companies which were once instrumentalities of state, which, even after privatization, do not possess potential for undue competition in the market. these would easily transit to a position in which large companies had been private in the first place, and would not be subject to principles of public law. the second category of the privatized service provider is one which has market power and consequent potential for untrammelled competition. in such cases, the state may regulate the provider by bringing it under the administrative purview of a state agency. these privatized bodies may be vulnerable under public law through the agencies having administrative control over them. one of the analogies in the united kingdom of a privatization of a utility can be observed in the legislative initiative of with the adoption of the telecommunications act which brought about the privatization of a major public utility. the legislation privatized the public corporation british telecom (bt) and abolished bt's monopoly in providing telecom services, thus opening the doors to competition. the director general of telecommunications, established by the act, can grant licenses to operators of telecom systems. the director general is also empowered to refer a matter to the monopolies and mergers commission, particularly on issues related to public interest such as pricing. if this particular feature were to be applicable to a privatized air navigation service provider appointed under statute, there would be the interesting consideration under public law whether that provider complied with article of the chicago convention on charges for services. the operation of the administrative process in a state becomes somewhat complex when viewed in the context of competition policy where the state takes measures to curb the ill-effects on society of monopolies and cartels. an initial difficulty that arose was the th century control of trade, which was aimed at promoting competition proved counter productive, resulting in controlling competition. this difficulty was compounded by the early twentieth century state policy of reluctance r. v. secretary of state ex parte factorframe ltd. [ ] a.c. . for a detailed discussion of the legal liability of states and of a privatized service provider see abeyratne ( ) . from until telecommunications were the responsibility of the post office. the legislation represented telecommunications from kp. services and established british telecom as a public corporation. article provides that every airport in an icao contracting state which is open to public use by its national aircraft shall likewise be open under uniform conditions to aircraft of all other contracting states. the like uniform conditions shall apply to the use, by aircraft of every contracting state, of all air navigation facilities, including radio and meteorological services, which may be provided for public use for the safety and expedition of air navigation services. article also provides that charges applicable to a foreign carrier for the provision of the air navigation services shall not be higher than those imposed on a carrier bearing the service provider state's nationality. to interfere with citizens striking bargains for their benefit. however, after world war , some british governmental measures introduced comprehensive control of market power. british legislators can be proud of three legislative stages of unfair competition control. the first came in the form of the monopolies and restrictive practices (inquiry and control), act which devolved regulatory responsibility on an agencythe monopolies and restriction practices commission (mrpc) -a body outside the normal departmental framework. the second stage commenced with the restrictive trade practices act which addressed the competitive threat of cartels and the restrictive practices court was established to adjudicate an anti-competitive and privy issues. the third stage took on with the expansion of the monopolies commission which investigates monopolies issues. merger irregularities were added to the jurisdiction of the commission with the monopolies and mergers act of . the competition act which followed gave the commission power to investigate particular anti-competitive practices. the final stage of the evaluation demarcates choice of institutions to investigate and adjudicate on anti-competitive practices. from an administrative perspective, the citizen has been known to challenge these state instrumentalities, the most notable of which has been the challenge offered to the various governmental institutions created under statute to define their extent of duty to give reasons for competition legislation. a government's approach to regulation of a public utility, whether public or privatized, is usually based on the public interest rationale where individual consumer choice will determine the demand and supply for goods and their pricing and quantity (ogus ) . in the united kingdom, these factors are intrinsically related to transparency, accountability, proportionality, consistency and targeting. the foremost necessity is to establish a strong security culture in every state. for this, there must be a clear definition of state responsibility and accountability brought to bear by a close and unbreakable link between government and industry stakeholders. a security culture would make states aware of their rights and duties, and, more importantly, enable states to assert them. those who belong to a security culture also know which conduct would compromise security and they are quick to educate and caution those who, out of ignorance, forgetfulness, or personal weakness, partake in insecure conduct. an epassport must necessarily be the result of efficient and fail-safe organizational arrangements. it should be tested at border control by trained professionals. egovernment and eid are the bare essentials for state security. the digital economy has also brought much facilitation that helps the world move to paperless processes which result in greater economy and streamlined processes. however, there must essentially be global harmonization in this process. in this regard icao has made remarkable progress in advancing its mrtd programme to the level it is at now. if harmonization means ensuring consistency between global practices, standardization means compliance with international standards. there is no room for doubt that both harmonization and globalization are needed in this context. mcgregor gow [ ] a.c. . see also sorrell v. smith [ ] a.c. . committee on trusts cmd monopolies and mergers commission exp. elders xl ltd secretary of state for trade industry ex parte lonrho plc see better regulation guide the exchange of airline passenger information -issues of privacy intellectual property rights and privacy issues: the aviation experience in api and biometric identification privatization of hong kong international airport: some legal and economic issues the safe carriage of dangerous pathogens by air: legal and regulatory issues principles of responsibility for private acts of terrorism terrorism and the state, hart monographs in transnational and international law the rise of the computer state. random house the basis of responsibility: attribution and other trans-substantive rules privacy in the information age ) a treatise on the law of torts, nd edn. callaghan, chicago doj v. reporters comm. for freedom of the press motor vehicle records: balancing individual privacy and the public's legitimate need to know privacy: one concept or many privacy: economics and ethics a comment on posner privacy and the limit s of the law rights & law analysis & theory world cyberspace law questions of interpretation and application of the montreal convention arising from the aerial incident at lockerbie some threats of technology to privacy, privacy and human rights curtis memorial seminar ( ) the public, privacy and the press: have the media gone too far? the costs of privacy charter orwell g ( ) nineteen eighty-four. clarendon, oxford pember dr ( ) privacy and the press a layer's ramble down the information superhighway: privacy and security of data legislating privacy. the university of north caroline press data protection law and the european union's directive: the challenge for the united states: setting standards for fair information practice in the u.s. private sector mind your own business -the battle for personal privacy from the market to the polis: the ec directive on the protection for personal data privacy is not an isolated freedom proceedings of the international civil aviation conference the right of privacy - ) the right to privacy privacy and freedom invasion of privacy key: cord- -dzkrar t authors: zhou, weiyi; lee, minha; sun, qianqian; luo, weiyu; xiong, chenfeng; zhang, lei title: an interstate trips analysis during covid- in the united states date: - - journal: nan doi: nan sha: doc_id: cord_uid: dzkrar t the worldwide outbreak of covid- has posed a dire threat to the public. human mobility has changed in various ways over the course of the pandemic. despite current studies on common mobility metrics, research specifically on state-to-state mobility is very limited. by leveraging the mobile phone location data from over million anonymous devices, we estimate the population flow between all states in the united states. we first analyze the temporal pattern and spatial differences of between-state flow from january , to may , . then, with repeated measures anova and post-hoc analysis, we discern different time-course patterns of between-state population flow by pandemic severity groups. a further analysis shows moderate to high correlation between the flow reduction and the pandemic severity, the strength of which varies with different policies. this paper is promising in predicting imported cases. since december, , the novel coronavirus disease, covid- , has been spreading globally at an alarming speed. on march , the coronavirus outbreak was officially declared a global pandemic by the world health organization. at the time, there were , confirmed cases worldwide and countries or territories affected ( ). immediately after this upgraded warning of a global health emergency, the u.s. government issued a national emergency on march and launched coronavirus guidelines for america on march , in which the social distancing intervention was suggested to curb the pandemic ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) . on march , california became the first state in the u.s. to announce a statewide stay-at-home order. over the following three weeks, more than forty state governments successively promulgated similar orders throughout or partially throughout their respective states. after a period of nationwide social distancing intervention, alaska, georgia, oklahoma, and south carolina became the first four states to partially reopen on april . by may , all states had partially reopened. the outbreak poses a serious threat to society. to fight against this coronavirus, it is critical for the public to follow social distancing orders. various mobility metrics of population flow are closely associated with the spread of covid- ( ) . various common mobility metrics, such as percentage of people staying home, miles traveled per person, and number of trips per person, are thoroughly analyzed in a previous paper by the authors ( ) . external trips (defined as trips occurring between two different analysis zones) particularly provide a perspective of the population flows between different regions ( ) . external trip data often act as a critical component to project the number of cases for regional spread in epidemic modeling as well as imported cases in epidemic modeling ( , , ) . in the epidemiologic aspect, analyzing the external trips enlightens researchers and policymakers about the effect of social distancing intervention. from a social science point of view, it allows us to understand human mobility behavior in response to the pandemic and the mobility intervention ( , ( ) ( ) ( ) . additionally, understanding the external trip change and the influence of other factors supports decision-makers in determining next steps for both control measures and society reopening. as revealed from the literature, external trips play an important role during the pandemic. however, there is a lack of research on the reality of external trips in the united states. our paper particularly focuses on external trips in the united states at the state level; that is, interstate trips based on real-world mobility data. this could act as a great source to understand the disease spread as well as public reactions toward the urgent threat ( ) . mobile device location data, a promising data source for analyzing mobility behaviors, have recently gained more attention by researchers and commercial corporations ( , ) . during the current era of covid- , mobile data have been actively utilized to explore pandemic-related behaviors and prevent the spread of the virus ( , ) . by leveraging the valuable information of real-world mobile location data, the authors developed a set of advanced and peer-reviewed algorithms of identifying trips and weighting to population ( ) . then the daily interstate trips for the entire united states from january , to may , (weekends and holidays are removed from analysis) are extracted and aggregated from the results using our previously developed algorithms. this study investigates the patterns of interstate trips in relation to the pandemic through the following aspects. first, a spatiotemporal analysis of states (and the district of columbia), including pre-pandemic and the different phases of pandemic, is conducted to demonstrate the interstate trip variations. second, the study explores the relationship between the reduction of interstate trips and the disease severity. third, the high-, middle-, and low-severity states are compared to show the time course changes of interstate trips through repeated measures anova and post-hoc analysis. fig. presents the temporal changes of inflow interstate trips by state and the spatial differences. fig. a shows the absolute scale of weekdays' average (no holidays) attracted interstate trips during the baseline period (from january to january ) while others (fig. b , c, d, e, f) indicate the percentage changes compared to the baseline during selected weeks. in january, states differ much regarding inflow interstate trips. during the week of february and the week of march , nearly all states show a percentage increase, which is consistent with the natural travel pattern of increased traffic during march. due to the outbreak of covid- , such an increasing trend is terminated and a significant nationwide decrease is observed, as shown during the week of march and the week of april . afterwards, with the partial reopening of society, the inflow interstate trips increase again and some states even exceed the baseline level in the most recent week. we also conduct a more detailed analysis of interstate trips at the origin-destination level between states, as shown in fig. , with states in both axis ordered by the cumulative cases by april (when all states announced stay-in-home orders) in ascending sequence. the absolute trip volume between states for four periods are displayed in the top plots ( fig. a , b, c, d), while the bottom ones ( fig. e , f, g, h) correspondingly present the interstate trip changes between states. during the week of the national emergency announcement, the interstate trips share a similar spatial trend as the baseline with slight increase ( fig. a ). those states with more confirmed cases also have higher external trips between each other, which is also observed in three other periods (fig. e , f, g, h). it intuitively reveals the correlation between human mobility and virus spread. with states successively announcing stay-at-home orders, the demand for travel begins to decline, especially for interstate trips. around % of nationwide decline can be observed during the week when all states issued stay-at-home orders (fig. b ). such decline is more obvious in those states with more cases as shown by clustered blue dots in fig. b , such as new york, louisiana, and new jersey. during the week that partial reopening started in four states, an overall rebound between states can be observed. those states with higher pandemic severity still show a more notable decline (fig. c ). when all states started partial reopening, a more obvious increase is presented and % of state-to-state external trips exceed the baseline level (fig. d ). yet, some reopening states remain at a decreased status, such as florida, texas, and georgia, which are relatively more severely infected (fig. h) . it is noteworthy that the daily average of new cases is still reported as many as , in the u.s. during the reopening stage. although the interstate trips continue to increase amid covid- , it might be hasty to determine that the impact of the pandemic on the external trips is weakened. the relationship between the two is further analyzed in the next section. based on the spatiotemporal changes presented in the section above, it is hypothesized that the percentage change of external trips is sensitive to the severity of covid- . the daily spearman correlation coefficient between percentage change of inflow interstate trips and cumulative cases per , people (defined as the indicator of pandemic severity) of all states and the district of columbia shows interesting time-course changes (fig. ) . this temporal change also generally coincides with that of national new cases. considering that external trips at the state level are mainly long-distance trips that are probably planned ahead, a seven-day time lag is applied when doing correlation analysis since interstate trips might not respond instantaneously to the severity of coronavirus. obviously, the inflow external trips are negatively influenced by covid- , which means that the more severe the pandemic is in a state, the less external trips it attracts. the degree of such influence, additionally, varies over different pandemic phases. in the early stage of the outbreak, beginning with the national emergency declaration on march , there is a decreasing trend of spearman coefficient, reaching the lowest bound of - . , which indicates a notable negative correlation. moreover, this downward trend (i.e., increasing strength of negative correlation) is more stable after march when california first announced their stay-at-home order. the period suggests a notable signal of behavior change that the pandemic severity in the destination state is taken more seriously by travelers. subsequently, the correlation coefficient is stabilized with mild fluctuations from april , when all states announced stay-at-home orders, to april , when the first state announced reopening. during this period, the public experiences an inertia in status without further decline of interstate trips. this could be the ultimate state of social distancing and there are mainly unavoidable interstate trips. afterwards, an increasing trend of negative correlation is shown following april , indicating that the impact of covid- on interstate trips gradually decreases. with the reopening of more and more states, there is a reduced impact of the pandemic on interstate trips. after may with all states already reopening, the trend flattens out but still presents a moderate negative correlation. this may infer a reduced attention to the pandemic under the influence of reopening. nevertheless, such attention remains at a moderate level as shown by the negative spearman coefficient around - . . with repeated measures analysis, a time course pattern of the dependent variable of interest can be established showing response time points with significant effect and durations ( , ) . in a one-way repeated measures anova (rm-anova), the same group of subjects are measured under different levels determined by a single factor, such as at multiple time points, so that the individual differences within the same group do not account for the post treatment measures ( ) . this advantage of eliminating the individual differences yields a smaller error variability than a simple anova, which is more sensitive to the different levels ( , , ) . the rm-anova can be applied to a non-experimental design involving natural changes over time ( ) . upon a significant time effect shown from rm-anova, post hoc tests are expected, which identify the critical time points indicating a significant difference from the others ( ) . with repeated measures one-way anova and post hoc analysis, we investigate the course of interstate trip variations by pandemic severity groups. the study separates states (and the district of columbia) into groups of three based on the severity of pandemic, i.e., cumulative confirmed cases on april . the statistical results for high-, mid-, and low-severity groups are shown in fig. respectively, which reveal several phenomena, as follows. first, the inflow interstate trips of states in the high-severity group experience a rapid decline phase from march to march . this is indicated by a complete independent pink square (pink means being insignificant) in fig. a . in contrast, states of the low-severity group do not have such a particular phase (fig. c) and states of the mid-severity group are somewhere in between (fig. b ). this suggests that the interstate trips towards the states with a higher pandemic severity decrease at a quicker speed. trips to another state are sensitive to the pandemic situation at destination. in the late stage of the studied period, especially after april , more insignificant cells (colored in pink) are associated with earlier dates, which infers that there is a rebound phenomenon of inflow interstate trips. those insignificant cells occur more frequently and earlier in states with lower pandemic severity. the low-severity group rebounds first, the high-severity group rebounds last, and the mid-severity group is again somewhere in between. overall, the analysis shows that, as far as the percentage change of interstate trips is concerned, the public reaction to the pandemic is fairly sensitive to the situation at the destination area and it varies during different phases of the pandemic. the most obvious finding to emerge from this study is that people's mobility change in terms of interstate trips between states is influenced by the progression of the pandemic. in spite of a nationwide decline after the national emergency, the response to the pandemic presents a spatiotemporal difference. in the early stage of the pandemic, the public presents a quick travel behavior change with a notable percentage decrease of interstate trips. later on, such decline slows down and gradually levels off. what is more interesting is that the od-level change of interstate trips is fairly sensitive to the pandemic situation at trips destinations. those states with a relatively higher pandemic severity generally present a more significant reduction of attracted interstate trips. this discriminative treatment of destination states reflects the public perception of risk and precaution of avoiding the exposure to the virus. furthermore, the degree of this discrimination varies over time. at the beginning, these differential interstate trip reductions of states are increasingly correlated with the pandemic prevalence at those destination states. this correlation reaches the peak with a spearman score of - . until most of the states issued stay-at-home orders, and remains at a stable level until the beginning of society reopening. as more and more states are reopened, the degree of this discrimination first weakens and then gradually stabilizes with a spearman score of - . . in order to further investigate this discrimination phenomenon, all states are grouped by high-, mid-, and low-severity. the within-group analysis and group-wise comparisons suggest that the high-severity group of states has a unique stage of decline at a statistically significant higher speed than others. in addition, the attracted interstate trips by the low-severity group of states rebound earlier than the others. in spite of its limitations, this study certainly offers some insight into the interstate trip pattern under the influence of a pandemic. the results, meanwhile, suggest the importance of considering public policies and pandemic severity in the short-term prediction of interstate trips. the findings can additionally be utilized to forecast the imported cases at a state level. raw mobile location data are the sitings (latitude and longitude at a timestamp) for each device. in order to estimate aggregated mobility between different regions, identifying the individual trips from raw location data is the first step of data processing. a rule-based algorithm with three thresholds (i.e. time threshold, distance threshold, and speed threshold) is developed and utilized for trip identification. among the three thresholds, the speed threshold indicates the movement of points, while the distance and time thresholds are utilized to determine the termination of the movement. each point has three possible states: belonging to an existing trip, belonging to a new trip, and invalid record. the state of belonging to an existing trip is assigned when the point satisfies several conditions determined by speed, time, and distance thresholds. otherwise, either the point will be identified as starting a new trip if the speed from this point to the next point exceeds the speed threshold, or the point is treated as an invalid record when the speed is below the threshold. despite the large sample size, the identified trips are still a sample of the population. in order to make the results represent population-level statistics of travel behavior, we applied both devicelevel and trip-level weighting. the device-level weighting uses a market penetration method, which expands the observed sample devices to population level. the weights are calculated by the ratio of total population to the observed residents' devices in each county. take a county with total population for example; if observed devices are determined to reside in this county, a device-level weight of is assigned to the devices. the trip-level weights, additionally, are applied. since the trajectories for each device may not be continuously observed, we develop triplevel weights as makeup factors. first, we derived trip rates (i.e., number of daily trips per person) from the national household travel survey (nhts) for all states. then for each state, the ratio of trip rate from nhts to the weekdays' average trip rate of the first two weeks of february from our data is treated as trip-level weight. for example, if nhts trip rate for a given state is and our data indicates , then a trip-level weight of . is applied to the devices in this state. for each identified trip, the trip origin and destination (latitude and longitude) are spatially joined with the state shape file. accordingly, each trip is represented as originating from a state to another. inter-state trips are an aggregated number of trips occurring between any two given states from day to day. weekends and federal holidays, including january (new year's day), january (birthday of martin luther king jr), and february (president's day), are excluded to eliminate noise. significance plots of inflow interstate trips for different severity groups of states. the significance plot is a matrix, in which each cell shows the p-value of testing two days on x and y axis, respectively. all states are grouped into three severity levels. the testing result for each group is shown by a (high-severity group), b (mid-severity group), and c (low-severity group). the plots indicate different time-course patterns for each group. early evaluation of the wuhan city travel restrictions in response to the novel coronavirus 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during the covid- outbreak in the united states interplay of global multi-scale human mobility, social distancing, government interventions, and covid- dynamics inferring dynamic origin-destination flows by transport mode using mobile phone data modeling real-time human mobility based on mobile phone and transportation data fusion. transportation research part c: emerging technologies mobile phone data for informing public health actions across the covid- pandemic life cycle an interactive covid- mobility impact and social distancing analysis platform monitoring individual morphological changes over time in ovariectomized rats by in vivo micro-computed tomography design and analysis of ecological experiments anova: repeated measures applied multivariate statistics for the social science understanding "within" versus "between" anova designs: benefits and requirements of repeated measures examining amount and pattern of change: comparing repeated measures anova and individual regression analysis we would like to thank and acknowledge our partners and data sources in this effort: ( ) amazon web services and its senior solutions architect, jianjun xu, for providing cloud computing and technical support; ( ) computational algorithms developed and validated in a previous usdot federal highway administration's exploratory advanced research program project; and ( ) covid- confirmed case data from the johns hopkins university github repository and sociodemographic data from the u.s. census bureau. author contributions wz, qs, cx and lz designed the study. wz, qs, and ml analyzed the data. wz, qs, and ml interpreted the data. wz, qs, and ml wrote the first draft. all authors contributed to the final draft. the authors declare no competing interests.data availability wz is responsible for addressing any correspondence and material requests. key: cord- - g ygwdc authors: garcía pinzón, viviana; mantilla, jorge title: contested borders: organized crime, governance, and bordering practices in colombia-venezuela borderlands date: - - journal: trends organ crime doi: . /s - - - sha: doc_id: cord_uid: g ygwdc based on the conceptualizations of organized crime as both an enterprise and a form of governance, borderland as a spatial category, and borders as institutions, this paper looks at the politics of bordering practices by organized crime in the colombian-venezuelan borderlands. it posits that contrary to the common assumptions about transnational organized crime, criminal organizations not only blur or erode the border but rather enforce it to their own benefit. in doing so, these groups set norms to regulate socio-spatial practices, informal and illegal economies, and migration flows, creating overlapping social orders and, lastly, (re)shaping the borderland. theoretically, the analysis brings together insights from political geography, border studies, and organized crime literature, while empirically, it draws on direct observation, criminal justice data, and in-depth interviews. the colombian-venezuelan border is currently considered one of the most dangerous borderlands worldwide as turf wars, among a plethora of non-state armed actors, have spiked violence. meanwhile, the exodus of venezuelan nationals fleeing the political practices and the configuration of borderlands. it regards ocgs as actors that either seek to circumvent the border to carry out their activities or that get involved in crossborder activity to get material gains and for strategic purposes, what rumford ( ) calls "opportunistic use of borders." while we agree with the idea that the relationship between organized crime and borders its etched by economic and strategic motivations, we contend that organized crime has deeper consequences on borders and borderlands than recognized in this strand of literature. in fact, we consider that organized crime constitutes an avenue to explore the social and spatial (re)production of borders. based on these assumptions, the present paper brings insights from political geography and border studies into dialogue with the literature on organized crime and nonstate governance to analyze the role of organized crime in bordering practices in the case of the colombia-venezuelan borderlands. we argue that the confluence of political, socio-economic, and geostrategic factors provided a window of opportunity for ocgs to empower as rulers in this borderland. through the control of illegal paths also known as trochas, the regulation of flows of people and goods across the border, and the control over labor market and migrant population, organized crime brings to bear in the (re)production and managing of the border. the paper speaks to different literatures in the realms of criminology and both security and border studies. we make a case for bordering practices as a realm of nonstate governance and show that criminal organizations engage in bordering practices in a way that goes beyond the mere opportunistic or exploitative use of borders. based on the study of the colombia-venezuela borderlands, we demonstrate how recent political developments provided conditions and incentives for criminal actors to actively partake in bordering practices, notably border management and control of the immigrant population. bridging theoretical contributions from border studies with recent debates on governance and crime, our analysis shades light on the role that illegal actors play in the process of construction and deconstruction of national borders. the rest of the paper is structured as follows: we first introduce the conceptual tenets of the analysis. second, we describe the research strategy, case selection and data sources and analysis. third, we contextualize the trajectories of conflict, violence, and crime in the colombian-venezuelan borderlands. fourth, in the main section of the paper, we analyze the linkages between organized crime and bordering practices. finally, we sum up the findings and discuss their implications in the understanding of the linkages between organized crime and borderlands' spatiality. borders are institutions (newman ; paasi ) . they enact a stable set of rules for human behavior and interaction (north ) and fulfill a set of functions. the defining nature of any border is the establishment of a division between spaces in political, socio-economic, spatial, and symbolic terms. through border control, states define and regulate what people and goods have legitimate access to their territory (andreas ) . as a spatial division, one of the main functions of the border is to protect or 'to act as a barrier' (newman : ) against actors and goods deemed as threats or harmful. while traditional military threats and economic regulation were the main concern for border protection, the state's priorities regarding border security have shifted towards policing and law enforcement (andreas ) . the target of policing is to avoid the territorial access of a plethora of non-state actors, ranging from drug traffickers, terrorists, and smugglers to unauthorized migrants. borders also regulate transborder circulation, defined as the 'in and out' movement between different state territories (newman ) . however, borders are also spaces of interaction and contestation. one of the 'paradoxes of borders' is that they divide and unite at the same time (baud and van schendel ) . another facet connatural to borders is contestation. several actors that aim to manipulate, take advantage or circumvent border control persistently challenge borders and the regulation that they embody. the complex and heterogeneous interplay among rules, practices, and actors is what shapes borders and borderlands. borders are therefore a socio-territorial construction resulting from the legal and geopolitical discourses of states, on the one hand, and the action of border societies, on the other. in what is a co-constitutive relationship, the very existence of the border crosses and affects the character and dynamics of the areas affected by its presence. the impact of the border goes beyond the boundary as such and extends into the territories whose nature and conditions are shaped by the nature of border itself (zartman : ) . the literature refers to these areas with the concept of borderlands (baud and van schendel ; idler ; newman ; zartman ) . idler ( ) argues that the relationship with the central state and transnationality are key aspects of borderlands. like any institution, borders are constantly changing (paasi ) . while some borders are enhanced, others wither away. processes of regional integration imply a reduction or abolition of border controls. for instance, the creation of the 'schengen border-free zone' implied the removal of border controls among most of the member countries of the european union. in contrast, security measures in the aftermath of / led to the strengthening and reclosing of borders. the notion of 'bordering practices' refers to the actions involved in creating, sustaining, and modifying borders between states (parker and adler-nissen : ) . bordering practices encompass a wide range of deeds performed by both the state and non-state actors. according to parker and adler-nissen ( ) , when it comes to order-making processes in borderlands, bordering practices are more important than the existence of the border itself. the literature on borderlands has drawn attention to the role of societal actors in producing and sustaining borders. the state interacts with different non-state actors, such as international organizations or multinational companies, to define and implement border policies (gavrilis ) . in the framework of debates regarding the vernacularization of borders (cooper et al. ) , rumford ( ) coined the term 'border work' to define 'the activity of ordinary people leading to the construction or dissolution of borders, and driven by their own 'grassroots' agendas rather than those of the state" (p. ). although the conceptualization of rumford expands beyond state borders to encompass any spatial scale, the term has been used to analyze the role of borderland communities and ngos in bordering practices (lamb ; laurie et al. ) . organized crime is a multifaceted phenomenon. hence, the concept remains fragmented and vague (von lampe ) . a way to make sense of such complex phenomenon is looking into the activities of ocgs (sergi ; varese ) , focusing on the actions (crimes) of criminal groups and the way they are carried out (sergi ) . the role of power and the capacity to exert social regulation has been crucial in the theorization of the activities of organized crime. the literature identifies one set of market-oriented activities involving the production and trade of illegal goods (von lampe ; varese ). for instance, block ( ) refers to the groups that operate exclusively in the realm of illicit economies as enterprise syndicates. the main purpose of these groups is the provision of goods and services prohibited or highly regulated by the state. in the realm of illegal markets, there is a high level of specialization, with some groups focused on the production of goods and services, and others specializing in the trading of illegal products (shortland and varese ) . another set of activities is defined by the engagement of ocgs in the provision of protection and their capacity to regulate conflicts within markets or among competitors. in this regard, block ( ) identifies a second type of criminal syndicates under the label of power syndicates. unlike enterprise syndicates, the strong point of power syndicate is extorsion and the ability to coerce standing as enforcers and as violence specialists. for instance, the role of coercion has been central to many theorizations of organized crime. gambetta ( ) argues that the landmark of mafias is the provision of private protection and its distinctive function of securing transactions. in a similar vein, sergi ( ) posits that the capacity to govern is what distinguishes mafias as a subgroup within the broader category of organized crime. more recently, based on the definition of economic governance as "the set of rules and norms that regulate exchange" (p. ), varese ( ) has claimed that organized crime is a form of governance and part of a continuum that includes criminal organizations, insurgent groups, and the state. hence, criminal organizations are conceived as competing actors in the aspiration of governing exchanges. in this paper, we understand organized crime as a phenomenon that encompasses both illegal enterprises and governance activities. following shortland and varese ( ) , this case study presents the engagement of ocgs in three types of activities: production of illegal goods, trading of illegal goods, and finally, governance. regarding the last one, the concept of criminal governance has emerged as a way to underscore the role of criminal organizations as de facto rulers and their capacity to shape social order (arias ; barnes ; lessing ) . the existence of criminal governance does not imply the absence or suspension of state governance. on the contrary, as scholars have extensively documented it implies complex interactions and exchanges in which the state and ocgs are not always at loggerheads (arias drawing upon this notion, we argue that criminal actors are part of the governing authorities in the colombian-venezuelan borderlands. they do not only partake in the production and trade of illegal goods but govern over borderland communities in a broad sense. they constitute local authorities setting rules while providing public goods and services. against this backdrop, migration control and customs (public goods) are shaped and cooptated by ocgs. they regulate human mobility and govern immigrants' and borderland communities' lives. therefore, the activities in which they are engaged fit within those classified as bordering practices. the analysis is methodologically arranged as a case study. given that the border area encompasses more than . km , our study focuses on the department of norte de santander (colombia) . we chose this area because the most important border crossing points are located there. additionally, it is at the heart of the local economy as the axis formed by the cities of cucuta in colombia and san antonio in venezuela constitutes the most relevant urban system in the borderland. norte de santander has been the entry point for % of venezuelan migrants traveling to colombia by land (ocha ). likewise, this department concentrates the second largest population of venezuelans in colombia (ocha ; migración colombia ) . the research draws on semi-structured interviews and direct observation conducted in and . the interviews - in total-were conducted in cúcuta, san antonio, and villa del rosario. following a purposive sampling technique, they feature border-crossers, local government officials, journalists, cucuta's police department members, non-profit organizations', and humanitarian workers. the interviews were analyzed using pattern coding (saldaña ) and the data elicited was triangulated with other sources of information such as local and national newspapers, reports of ngos, and secondary literature. regarding direct observation, it was done in the urban area of cucuta, and the zone next to the border, specifically the area known as "la parada". aditionally, the study relies on statistics from official sources and reports by humanitarian organizations. the border between colombia and venezuela has played a crucial role in the colombian armed conflict and the illegal economies that fuel war and crime. while the presence of armed actors in this area goes back to the decades of and , it is possible to identify three periods in the recent history regarding war and organized crime. the first period known as the paramilitary offensive goes from to . it sparked massive displacement of communities and members of leftist guerrillas to venezuela. the second one is comprised of different bilateral crises amid the alleged support of colombian guerrillas by the venezuelan government and goes from to . during this period, colombian guerrillas were debilitated through peace and military efforts and pushed to venezuela as a rear-guard position. the third period, in which this paper focuses, goes from until date. it starts with the venezuelan government's decision of closing the border amid the massive exodus of venezuelans that sparked a migratory and humanitarian crisis as well as the rupture of bilateral relations with colombia. since the early s, venezuela's security situation has deteriorated in the context of an acute economic crisis, authoritarian practices of the bolivarian regime, and political polarization. along the increase of state violence (Ávila ), the country has seen the sprout of a myriad of criminal organizations (pranes) and paramilitary groups (colectivos), which gained control over the illicit markets such as drug trafficking, territories, and populations, chiefly in urban slums and marginalized areas. with a homicide rate of , per . inhabitants in (observatorio venezolano de violencia ), venezuela turned into the most violent country in the world. in the last seven years ( - ), the exodus of venezuelan nationals fleeing political and economic crisis in their country has reached similar proportions to those provoked by the civil war in syria (fieser ) . as the security situation in colombia-venezuela borderlands further deteriorates, their diplomatic relationship has followed the same path leading to a proxy war setting. according to groh ( ) proxy support includes the direct or indirect use of non-state and parastate groups to carry out militarized intimidation or control territory in order to exert influence or achieve specific security or political outcomes. the relation between the state and non-state armed actors (proxy) is one of patron-agent; the state either directs proxy's actions or partakes on them. let us to further elaborate on this point. on the one hand, colombia's government has denounced several times the existence of a coordinated strategy and support between the venezuelan regime and colombian rebel groups, namely the national liberation army (eln) and rearming dissident factions of the former colombian revolutionary armed forces (farc) (reuters ). likewise, several social organizations and journalists have reported on the constant activity of colombian armed groups in at least seventeen states of venezuela and mainly in the borderland ones of zulia, táchira and bolivar. according to local reports, along its control over gold mines and other economic assets, the eln guerrilla recruits new members and has training camps in these areas (fundaredes ) . for colombia, such support from the venezuelan government to colombian insurgencies is a hostile act and a direct threat to its national security. on the other hand, colombia is the main geopolitical platform against the venezuelan regime. as of , the government of colombia has committed to a "de facto" political transition agenda by recognizing the self-proclaimed president of venezuela -juan guaidó-as the legitimate president of the country, while nicolas maduro keeps having command and control over the state apparatus. colombia has played a central role in regional and hemispheric initiatives to push for a democratic transition in venezuela, such as the lima group. in early , colombia's government organized a concert and humanitarian action in the border area. the occasion was used to overtly express support to guaidó, who gave a speech during this activity. in what later became a scandal, it was revealed that local colombian authorities facilitated the irregular crossing of guaidó through the participation of members of "los rastrojos", an organized crime group of paramilitary ethos (the guardian ). one hardly could find a better instance to illustrate the linkages between the state and criminal actors and the overlap of legal and illegal spheres in the borderland than this one. the current relationship between colombia and venezuela can be defined as one of enmity, given that both countries blame each other for advancing hostile strategies to destabilize its counterpart. this has contributed to further aggravate the security and humanitarian crisis in the borderland as no security, immigration or border bilateral policy can be neither coordinated nor developed. against this background, the region has provided a context favorable for the further flourishing of a plethora of non-state armed groups. the following table offers a list of some of the most relevant criminal groups. they encompass ocgs as well as hybrids -insurgencies involved in organized crime activities. given the fragmentation, the rapid pace of change of these groups, and the diversity of organizational structures, the list may not reflect the current constellation of armed actors (table ) . enforcing and exploiting the border: illegal paths and criminal governance smuggling has been a connatural activity to many borderlands (andreas ; sadikki ) , and norte de santander's borderland is not the exception. since the second half of the twentieth century, smuggling of goods such as fuel gas and electronics was regarded as a common activity that has effectively merged with the formal economy. this moral economy is not only the result of sociocultural practices of border-crossing regarded as a legitimate way of making a living but also derives from the political and economic denial of the region by political elites from bogotá and caracas (idler ). illegal paths or trochas have been the spatial mechanism enabling this cross-border activity and can be regarded as a corollary of the "border work" of communities. however, amid the war and criminal activities, the illegal paths have also been used by different armed actors. while one can argue that bordering practices by armed groups were not a new phenomenon in the area, the current migratory and humanitarian crisis and the closure of the border in contributed further to strengthen the power of these actors over borderlands. although the closure was part of a strategy of organized crime control by the venezuelan state, it had a marginal impact on deterring irregular immigration and criminal activities. instead, it created a window of opportunity for organized crime to diversify their illegal profits, extend its control over human mobility, and set new mechanisms through which state officials engage in collusion arrangements with ocgs creating a situation of border control paradox (mantilla ). in the case under analysis, the further border enforcement over binational communities as a political and military artifact changed the relationship between ocgs and space benefiting ocgs in at least three ways. first, the border closure produced a shock in illegal markets and spatial practices since the control of the paths for traditional smuggling and the informal crossing became a major source of illegal profits. with about , people crossing every day -in between pendular immigrants and people trying to flee venezuela-the closure of international ports of entry spilled thousands of people to illegal paths and into the hands of those who control them, altering the current balance of power among organized crime and state authorities. as a local journalist accounts: "smuggling at the border is not anymore just about the gasoline. everything is crossing through the border, which actually makes the control of an illegal path much more profitable than selling drugs or other illegal business. every day, every minute people are crossing and so someone is making money". despite the instability that is supposed to characterize illegal economies and smuggling settings, the tolls that ocgs charge to allow border crossing are fixed and vary allegedly under the operative umbrella of eln source: authors' elaboration based on interviews, officials and ngo's reports according to the goods and people to be smuggled. thus, an irregular immigrant pays a fixed toll for crossing while a truck with licit goods trade illegally, such as medicines or chemical supplies, pays a different one. this scheme of prices matches findings reported in other contexts where informal institutions display differential regulatory nodes according to the type of good (licit/illicit) smuggled (gallien ) . as in any other market, prices react to changes in demand. thus, after the colombia government decided to enforce closure measures at the border in the face of the covid- public health crisis, the price that ocgs were charging to people to use the trochas spiked in almost five hundred percent (el tiempo ). second, besides contributing to further turning the illegal paths into highly regarded assets, the closure of paved the way for the configuration of both an informal sphere of control of transnational migratory flows and an expanded portfolio of illegal and legal markets. according to antillano, zublillaga, sánchez & ortíz (forthcoming), people relying on illegal paths for the sake of immigrating to colombia are those who do not have a valid passport or a migratory card, those who do not have enough time to make the lagging lines to get their passports stamped by colombian migration authorities, or those that were previously deported by the colombian immigration authority. migrants' precariousness makes them dependent on the services offered by ocgs as well as particularly vulnerable to different forms of victimization. furthermore, ocgs play a key role for people trying to flee venezuela given that they provide access to services and connections that are crucial for the immigrants. the services feature the crossing to the colombian side and travel arrangements from this point to other cities in colombia or countries in the region. a bus terminal located next to the "simón bolívar" bridge, the main border-crossing point, is the next stage for many migrants after leaving venezuela. many of our informants commented about the links between ocgs and travel agencies located in the area. ocgs also provide the means of connection to other illegal economies such as sex trade or coca crops related employments. as an illicit market, smuggling does not always rely on violence. rather, it depends on the broader political and social context wherein the criminal group operates more than the nature and the structure of the group itself (andreas and wallman ; sanchez ) . in this sense, the variation on the use of coercion makes difficult to set a clear-cut division between the provision of services demanded by immigrants and human trafficking. although further investigation is required, the evidence collected suggests that ocgs are involved in both activities. some participants talked about the role of ocgs as service providers and facilitators, whilst others point out that some immigrants are brought to the country in the frame of human trafficking networks as victims of different forms of exploitation. likewise, ocgs became de facto rulers in the neighborhoods adjacent to the border. they organize the micro-politics of informality and deliver street justice in places such as "la parada", where immigrants try to have access to humanitarian aid, transportation services, street vending entrepreneurship, or immigration and work permissions. while ocgs perform the role of service providers and social authorities, they also make use of different repertoires of violence and terror, such as beheadings or dismemberments. this is the case of "la frontera," an ocg responsible for multiple massacres between and . in one of the incidents that occurred in january of , body parts of four victims were spread on one of the trochas connecting the two countries (la opinión a). in the investigations leading to set the suspected responsibility of this group, more than one hundred venezuelan and colombian id cards were found in a warehouse revealing the extent to which this group had control of irregular immigrants who were previously reported as missing or who were surrendered to human trafficking networks (la opinión b). engaging in the activities described above, ocgs have become the ultimate customs and migratory authorities, defining the circumstances of place, means, and time in which the border can be crossed or not. furthermore, they perform border governance in ways that assure reliability to those using smuggling services. following idler ( ) criminal governance at the border resembles a social contract-like relationship in which ocgs provide public goods and services and define the rules of appropriate behavior while neglected citizens recognize their shadow authority. third and lastly, the border closure contributed to strengthen collusion mechanisms between the state and ocgs. the relationship between the state and illegality is a complex one in borderland contexts. for goodhand ( ) , state presence in these contexts is contingent, contested, and changing. in contrast to previous research that addresses criminality in colombian borderlands as the consequence of state fragility and its incapacity to deliver effective security (idler ; castrillón and valencia ; villa and souza ), we build on the assumption that state presence cannot simply be equated with law and order. as previous literature has noted, organized crime requires the "studied ignorance or tacit consent"(schneider and schneider ) of the state to work. licit and illicit practices coexist and are imbricated in manifold ways. more so, illicit practices are often part of the processes of state-making and border control (abraham and van schendel ; goodhand ; gallien ) . the strategic interactions between border enforcers and unauthorized border crossers that andreas ( ) calls "border games" imply that state authorities and ocgs often collaborate through the means of corruption. this is a widespread practice in norte de santander where, for years, the overwhelming power of paramilitaries and guerillas left no choice for law enforcement units rather than comply with de facto omerta. however, mechanisms of collusion between the state and ocgs have developed in such ways that, for many residents and participants in illegal economies, state security forces are just, or at least behave as, another ocg. regarding traditional bribery, corruption schemes work through monthly payments depending on the ocg and the rank of state agents. for instance, in the municipality of puerto santander, an agent cooperating with "los rastrojos" receives from to dollars per month, while higher ranks can receive between and dollars. according to both police officers and their families, it is not even an option to say no. a brother in law of a police captain deployed in one of the border checkpoints said "the police here is still afraid of the armed groups, so they limit their job to a passive and blind eye one in the context of generalized extortion. my brother in law is a couple of years away from retirement; he doesn't want problems or unnecessary risks at this point so what else he can do?" nevertheless, only a couple of weeks after this interview, counterintelligence and anti-corruption units captured the police intendant of puerto santander for being an active member of los rastrojos. according to the indictment, he was the second in the command line of this ocg and has been an active member of this group for the last six years (la opinión ). less than a month after this incident, venezuelan security forces captured the police chief of táchira while she was transporting ammunition, pamphlets and war material for los rastrojos (la prensa táchira ). these incidents suggest that the relation between ocgs and the state goes beyond mere intimidation and bribery and that schemes are more similar to state sponsor protection rackets (snyder and duran-martinez ) or that state capture (garay-salamanca and salcedo-albarán ) may be at play. other evidence highlights the fact that state officials directly victimize vulnerable immigrants. reports about colombian migration officials running a scheme of extortion in exchange for easing the migratory process are common in the soup kitchens that philanthropists and volunteers' efforts have brought together at immigrant shelters at the border. presumably, immigration officials retain venezuelan passports and then ask for a money ransom to give them back. these forms of victimization are gender informed. thus, in the case of women, passports can be retained for the sake of sexual favors. it is important to note that, in the context of a migratory crisis and the vulnerability of people fleeing venezuela, passports are the most valuable and useful good someone can hold and, therefore, a mechanism of power and control. victimization infringed by state officials may explain the gap between locals' perceptions of the trochas vis-á-vis state narratives of dangerous criminal groups controlling these illegal paths. similarly, for gasoline smugglers the police fiscal and customs police (polfa in spanish) is regarded as just another ocg. when asked about the interactions with the police, one of their most recognized leaders vehemently claimed: "about the police, i can only say that they are just another group. they steal from us in our face, just like that, straight forward. they confiscate ten pimpinas from us but they only report two. the complicity between criminal bands and the police is pretty obvious from what you can see that is going on". the account of how locals from the norte de santander feel about the border as an artifact imposed by ocgs and by the state fit into what abraham and van schendel ( ) describe as a gap in between behaviors and identity when talking about criminality across borders. the fact that ocgs and the state have similar behaviors to the eyes of the community highlights that the state authority is just one form of political authority among others in the borderlands. the variety of social agents involved in bordering practices, the diversity of the interactions between this variety of actors, and the institutional effects of the parallel set of norms serve to outline the complexity of the relationship between the state, organized crime, and space in the borderlands. bordering practices and organized crime beyond the trochas as mentioned above, the precariousness of the migrants makes them vulnerable to several forms of exploitation and victimization. criminal organizations leverage the availability of cheap labor; they have recruited venezuelan migrants as part of their armed structures or integrated them into illegal markets such as drug production and sexual exploitation (fundaredes ; la opinión ; ocha ) . this is the case of the coca crops and coca laboratories. the catatumbo region, which ranks as the third with the largest number of hectares of coca cultivation in colombia (unodc ) , is part of the colombia-venezuela borderlands. it is estimated that around , venezuelans are in the catatumbo (ocha ). some informants recounted that in the municipality of tibu -which has a high number of hectares of coca cultivation in the region-many of the "raspachines" are venezuelan and noted that the composition of the workforce in coca cultivation in some villages of this municipality went through a transformation over the last years with venezuelans currently making up at least % of the people working on the crops. an officer of a local ngo commented that people working in coca leaf production could earn up to u$ dollars per week. upon arrival in the territory, migrants must abide by the rules and authority of the incumbent ocg. in some cases, they must carry a letter of recommendation to prove that they have "authorization" to live there or must be recommended by a local person to access to the community. in the face of conflicts between settlers and immigrants, ocgs also intervene to solve conflicts and disputes. since the colombian state has no control over the population entering the country through the trochas, local dwellers and humanitarian organizations report that groups such as epl and eln have enforced their own mechanisms to manage and control immigrants. according to ocha ( ), eln issues a sort of migration permit either when people are crossing through illegal paths or when migrants arrive in communities under their control. the license serves as a means to control immigrants' mobility and access to job market. similarly, some of our informants note that this group exerts the same practice in the catatumbo region. in this case, the permit is valid for sixty days and allows the migrant to stay in the region and work; its renewal depends on an assessment of the behavior of the migrant and their compliance with criminal governance rules. traditional state-centric perspectives on crime, borders, and governance have overshadowed the complexities of the relationship between organized crime and borderlands (abraham and van schendel ) . considering this, the article has presented an analysis of the engagement of organized crime on bordering practices and the co-production of borders in the case of the colombia-venezuela borderlands. contrary to common assumptions on organized crime bypassing or circumventing state borders, our study showed that criminal organizations also seek to set norms and regulate the cross-border flux of goods and people; willing to enforce the border for their own benefit if the strategic environment provides the opportunity to do so. similar to other cases (massey ; tinti and reitano ) , rather than deterring organized crime activities, the closure of the border by the venezuelan government created new opportunities and assets for ocgs. namely, it enhanced criminal organizations such as colombian guerrillas, ocgs of paramilitary ethos, and bi-national gangs to further engage and control human and goods smuggling operations, border management, and social control over the migrant population. as shown by previous research, interactions among ocgs and between these and the state can follow different patterns ranging from enmity, to rivalry and cooperation (idler : ). in short, the relationship between ocgs and borderlands should not be taken for granted as traditional national security approaches suggest. bordering practices in the context of illicitness shape local economies and institutions considered rightful by locals (gallien ; rolandsen ) . in addition, organized crime activities in the borderlands exceed conventional definitions focused on the provision of illegal goods, services, and predatory crimes. rather ocgs also constitute the ultimate customs and migratory authorities. particularly, in spatial terms, organized crime power goes beyond the management of the clandestine paths and extends into other levels of the social order in the borderland. for many venezuelan migrants, entering colombia is tantamount to entering a realm where spatial practices, social regulation, and their own life are shaped not by the rules of the colombian state but by ocgs. bordering practices by organized crime shape the borderland and the life of its inhabitants. this case illustrates the complexities of border politics. borders are not the result of the command of the state, but instead of the practices and interaction of multiple actors, ocgs among them. in this regard, the analysis sheds light on how spatial particularities of the borderlands, and the actions of ocgs have profound consequences on the management and (re)shaping of the border. thus, similar to what literature on border studies have described in the case of other societal groups, it is possible to argue that ocgs also engage in 'border work' (rumford ) and perform bordering practices. colombia-venezuela borderlands are shaped by complex interactions between the state, local communities, migrant population, and organized crime. one of the main limitations of this paper and an avenue of future research is to assess how ocgs build legitimacy over negotiations with borderland communities. in addition, although this borderland is a place of despair, it is also a source of hope for thousands who are able to perform social resilience. further research should look into what kind of life and agency is possible for those under criminal governance. bordering practices is, hence, another facet of criminal governance in transnational contexts and should be considered as a set of practices to further document and study within organized crime literature. if we accept the idea that the activities of organized crime are a form of governance (varese ), or that ocgs can decide whether to exert criminal governance or not (lessing ) , then we should consider competitive border-making as an area of dispute, cooperation, and exploitation between ocgs and the state. adding to concepts coined to express the particularities of security in borderlands, such as border effect (idler ), we think that bordering practices offer an untapped analytical potential to understand how and why ocgs get involved in the provision of public goods, the enforcement of rules, and co-constitutive linkages to space. funding open access funding enabled and organized by projekt deal. conflict of interest viviana garcía pinzón declares that she has no conflict of interest. jorge mantilla declares that he has no conflict of interest. research involving human participants or animal studies all interviewees were individually informed about the objectives of the research and conditions of their participation and verbal informed consent was obtained prior to the interview. the research complies with the principles of anonymity and confidentiality to secure the safety of the participants. authors are responsible for correctness of the statements provided in the manuscript. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. illicit flows and criminal things states, borders, and the other side of 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venezuela's guaidó pictured with members of colombian gang violent non-state actors and new forms of governance: exploring the colombian and venezuelan border zone organized crime. analyzing illegal activities, criminal structures, and extra-legal governance understanding life in the borderlands: boundaries in depth and motion publisher's note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations key: cord- -j mvulr authors: prasad, rabinder kumar; sarmah, rosy; chakraborty, subrata title: changing clusters of indian states with respect to number of cases of covid- using incrementalkmn method date: - - journal: nan doi: nan sha: doc_id: cord_uid: j mvulr the novel coronavirus (covid- ) incidence in india is currently experiencing exponential rise but with apparent spatial variation in growth rate and doubling time rate. we classify the states into five clusters with low to the high-risk category and study how the different states moved from one cluster to the other since the onset of the first case on $ ^{th}$ january till the end of unlock that is $ ^{th}$ june . we have implemented a new clustering technique called the incrementalkmn (prasad, r. k., sarmah, r., chakraborty, s.( )) a severe acute respiratory disease, caused by a novel coronavirus, has spread in the month of november-december throughout china and received worldwide attention. the world health organization (who) officially declared the novel coronavirus (covid- ) epidemic on th january as a public health emergency of international concern. in india, the first case of novel coronavirus was detected on th january in the state of kerala (ward, a. ( , march ) ). as the number of confirmed novel coronavirus positive cases closed , the govt. of india introduced "janta curfew" on th march and after that govt. of india enforced days lockdown phase-i nationwide from th march - th april, nearly all services and factories were suspended (singh, k. d., goel, v., kumar, h., gettleman, j. ( , march ) ). due to the number of confirmed cases of covid- increased, on th april , govt. of india extended the lockdown phase-i period till rd may i.e. lockdown phase-ii, with certain relaxations (bhaskar, u. ( , april ) , dutta, p. k. ( , april ) ). in methodology in order to define data clustering, let d = {x , x , . . . . . . ., x n }, be a data set with n number of data elements, and each data element characterized with m number of features : x i = {x i, , x i, , . . . . . . ..x i,m }. the main objective of clustering is to group these data elements into homogeneous sub-groups such that the intra-cluster similarities are high while inter-cluster similarities are low. the data elements in each sub-group are called a cluster, and the union of all sub-groups is equal to the dataset d. clustering methods have been classified into five different categories, i.e., partition-based, density-based, hierarchical-based, grid-based and model-based (han, jiawei, jian pei, and micheline kamber ( ) ). in the last few decades, clustering algorithms have been extensively used to solve the problem of data-mining. in this research, we have used incrementalkmn (prasad, r. k., sarmah, r., chakraborty, s.,( ) ) clustering method on novel coronavirus (covid- ) data set of india based on confirmed cases, which produced the k desired number of group of states of india i.e. divide the data set into k number of group of states. and apply the growth rate and doubling time from equation . and equation . on desired k number of clusters produced by incrementalkmn (prasad, r. k., sarmah, r., chakraborty, s.,( )) clustering method. the steps of incrementalkmn method is given below: step : select the value of k and dataset d step : set i = and c = φ, where c is empty centroid list. step : select first centroid i.e. c i as mean of a given dataset d. step : update the centroid list c = c ∪ {c i }. step : assign each data objects to its nearest centroid. step : compute the sse of each cluster. step : select i th center i.e. (i ∈ , , ..., k) is selected from maximum sse of a cluster. the i th center is a maximum distance from the data object and the centroid of maximum sse cluster. step : repeat the step until it reaches k number of centroids and finally formed k number of clusters. . compound growth rate (murphy, c. b. ( , may )): in this paper, we have used compound growth rate over regular time intervals of confirmed case for each state phase wise. the growth rate of each state is computed as: growth rate = p resent conf irmed case p ast conf irmed case where, p resent conf irmed case is a ending value, p ast conf irmed case is a beginning value and n is a the number of periods(in days). . doubling time (manias, m. ( , january )): doubling time is a time it takes for a confirmed case to double in size. the doubling time of confirmed case for each cluster is computed with the help of equation . , which is described as: doubling t ime = ln( ) ln( + growth rate) ( . ) the complete flowchart of the methodology adopted is given in fig . in fig , the proposed method start with input data set d and value of k, in this paper, we have considered the value of k is five. in the next step, we have applied the incrementalkmn clustering method using data set d and value of k that produced k number of clusters. in the next phase of the flowchart, it computes the growth rate and doubling time of clusters produced by the incrementalkmn clustering method. the data set of novel coronavirus (covid- ) daily confirmed cases state-wise is collected form (https://api.covid india.org/).in this data set, the total number of confirmed cases in india was , , from th january to th june . in novel coronavirus dataset, we have considered the following states and uts, as an ( we have considered five different clusters (subgroups) of states namely (i) high risk, (ii) moderate-high, (iii) moderate, (iv) moderate-low, and (v) low-risk states with respect to the daily incidence of covid- positive cases. as such the value of k is taken as five in lockdown: the first confirmed case of novel coronavirus in india was reported on th january in the state of kerala (ward, a. ( , march ) ). the number of confirmed covid- positive cases reached close to on th march and by th march that is before lockdown the positive case reached . in fig which depicts the situation prior to the start of the lockdown based on the number of confirmed cases, the states {mh and kl} were on the high-risk state, {hr and up} were on moderate-high risk state, union territory dl and the state ka were on moderate risk state, {gj, la, pb, rj, tg} were on moderate-low risk states and the remaining states and uts were on the low-risk states. in table , the growth rate and doubling time(in days) of each cluster of states are shown. the growth rate of clusters i, ii, and iii states i.e. {gj, la, pb, rj, tg}, {kl, mh}, {dl, ka} were approximately same and doubling time was - days (approximate). whereas, the growth rate of cluster iv i.e. the states {hr and up} were much lees that the top cluster but close to that of cluster v, and doubling time of days(approximately)was nearly time that of the top clusters. the rest of the states and uts before lockdown, the growth rate was low, and the doubling time was approximately - days. down phase-i: table . accordingly, the growth rate of the state of mh before the lockdown was high and in lockdown phase-i, the growth rate decreased considerably from % to %. similarly, the days doubling time before the lock down climbed up to days after lockdown phase-i. on the contrary, the average growth rate of cluster ii i.e. {dl, tn} has increased, and doubling time in lockdown phase-i was decreased as compared to before lockdown. similarly, the average growth rate and doubling time of cluster iii and iv i.e. states {ap, gj, kl, mp, rj, tg, up} and states {hr, jk, ka, pb, wb} have improved in lockdown phase-i. but in cluster v i.e. states and uts {an, ar, as, br, ch, ct, dn, ga, hp, jh, la, mn, ml, mz, nl, or, py, sk, tr, ut}, the average growth rate has increased and doubling time also decreased in lockdown phase-i as compared to before lockdown. in phase-ii, the lockdown was extended nationwide up to rd may with certain relaxations (bhaskar, u. ( , april ) , dutta, p. k. ( , april ) ). in fig based table shows the growth of the rate and doubling time of each cluster of states and uts. the growth rate for both the cluster i that is {mh} and cluster ii i.e. {dl and gj} reported as % is a substantial decrease from their % and % in lockdown phase-i third phase of lockdown started from th - th may, with some more relaxations ( online, e. t. ( , may ), newsworld . ( , may )). the country was divided into zones: red zones, orange zones, and green zones (thacker, t. ( , may )). in fig , again the state mh was in a high-risk category, and dl, gj, and tn formed the moderate-high risk category. the states {mp, rj, up} were in moderate risk, {ap, jk, ka, pb, tg, wb} were in moderate-low risk state, and the rest of the states and uts were in the low-risk category. in phase-iii the growth rate of confirmed cases of all clusters except cluster v in lockdown have decreased and the doubling time of all clusters increased except for cluster v which shows in table in phase-iv, the lockdown was extended for another two weeks from th − th may with some additional relaxations. here, red zones were further divided into to containment and buffer zones ( may ) ). in fig , table . the phase v (or unlock-i) of lockdown started from th − th june with only limited restrictions (sharma, n., ghosh, d. ( , may ) ) . in our study, we have considered the novel coronavirus (covid- ) data set till th june . the state mh was in the high-risk state based on the number of confirmed cases and {dl, tn} was in moderate-high risk state which shows in figure . similarly, the state gj was in moderate risk state, and {mp, rj, up, wb} were in moderate-low risk state, and the rest of the states and uts were in the low-risk state. from table , the growth rate of all clusters has decreased or remained the same in lockdown phase-v as compared to previous phases. similarly, the doubling time of all clusters has increased or remained the same. the doubling time of cluster i i.e. the state mh is in days(approximate). similarly, cluster ii i.e. the states {dl, tn} is required - days(approximate) to double and cluster iii i.e. the state gj is required days to double. the cluster iv and v have days(approximate) and days(approximate) to doubling time. from what we have found it was expected that some of the states/uts lying in the category v will soon move to the category iv in the next weak or so starting th june . in order to verify this, we have then extended our study covering data up to th june to cover the full unlock i period to see how the cluster changed in the last days of this phase. the result is shown in figure . as expected the some of the states {ap, as, br, hr, jk, ka, or, pb, tg} which were in category v moved to category iv. in fact from figure where we have demarcated instead of clusters to reveal hidden groups with the cluster v gave a clear indication of the tendency of the above state towards the next higher risk category (see also table ). ii. lockdown seemingly had its impact on two other states hr(haryana) and up(uttar pradesh) as these states improved down to low risk and moderate low-risk category. iii. based on that we observed that some of the states like ap (andhra pradesh), as (assan), br (bihar), hr (haryana), jk (jammu and kashmir), ka (karnataka), or (odisha), pb (punjab), and tg (telangana) will move up the ladder towards higher risk level in weeks to come. iv. also it appears that some of the states/uts where the onset was late might show surge in coming days to move to a higher category of risk. v. the current study is based on the number of confirmed cases and subject to reporting biases if any in the data source. we have not considered other relevant factors, co-variate and non-pharmaceutical interventions which might completely alter the picture favorably. vi. number of confirmed cases alone can not give a true picture of the prevalence of the disease as it is proportional to the number of tests conducted. in this study, we used incrementalkmn (prasad, r. k., sarmah, r., chakraborty, s.,( )) clustering method to classify the indian states and uts in five different stages of risk on the basis of the number of confirmed cases of novel coronavirus . then evaluated the growth rate and doubling time of confirmed cases of each cluster. as on th june , the state mh (maharastra) in on high-risk category with the doubling time of confirmed cases is - days(approximate). similarly, the union territory of dl (delhi) and the state tn (tamil nadu) are in moderate-high risk state and is expected to join mh in the high-risk state soon as the doubling time of these set of states is - days(approximate). the state gj(gujarat) is in moderate risk sate and has decreased their growth rate during the lockdown phases and the doubling time of this state is days(approximate). moreover, the states mp (madhya pradesh), rj (rajasthan), up (uttar pradesh), and wb (west bengal) are in moderate-low risk state and the growth rate and doubling time are same as the state of mh. rest of the states are in the low-risk cluster but some of the states namely ap (andhra pradesh), as (assam), br (bihar), hr (haryana), jk (jammu and kashmir), ka (karnataka), or (odisha), pb (punjab), and the tg (telangana) are expected to reach next level of risk soon. our aim in this work is not to prove or disprove anything but present the pattern for everyone to see and realize that the situation we are in still remains critical. there is no room to rejoice now by saying we are in low risk compared to mh. yes! mh is ahead of us but not in terms of numbers but we are behind them in time scale and it is a matter of time before we reach and experience that stage. incremental k-means method. lecture notes in computer science pattern recognition and machine intelligence india's coronavirus lockdown and its looming crisis, explained india, day : world's largest coronavirus lockdown begins india to remain closed till may, economy to open up gradually in lockdown . . retrieved in coronavirus lockdown extension, modi wields stick, offers carrot on exit route all major cities named covid- 'red zone' hotspots lockdown extended by weeks, india split into red, green and orange zones centre issues state-wise division of covid- red, orange green zones coronavirus lockdown extended till may, says ndma india lockdown . guidelines: what's allowed and what's not? lockdown . guidelines: nationwide lockdown extended till may , with considerable relaxations unlock ": malls, restaurants, places of worship to reopen data mining: concepts and techniques understanding the compound annual growth rate -cagr doubling time calculator clustering analysis of countries using the covid- cases dataset monitoring novel corona virus (covid- ) infections in india by cluster analysis a review of modern technologies for tackling covid- pandemic machine learning can help get covid- aid to those who need it most automated detection of covid- cases using deep neural networks with x-ray images industry . technologies and their applications in fighting covid- pandemic automatic x-ray covid- lung image classification system based on multi-level thresholding and support vector machine key: cord- - bp qpte authors: gable, lance; hodge, james g. title: public health law and biological terrorism date: - - journal: beyond anthrax doi: . / - - - - _ sha: doc_id: cord_uid: bp qpte nan result in significant illnesses or casualties [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] . consequently, proactive preparations for bioterrorism, even more so than other types of terrorism, involve systematic planning, ongoing training, and redistributions of resources. the prospect of bioterrorism has galvanized widespread support for improved preparedness within federal, state, and local governments and the health care sector throughout the united states. these efforts have targeted a wide range of relevant and intersecting areas. strengthening the public health workforce, infrastructure, and capacity available to respond to an outbreak associated with biological terrorism, is critical. policy-makers have responded by increasing training and funding to these areas [ ] [ ] [ ] . similarly, planners within the public and private sectors have established tactics and procedures to respond to various emergency scenarios. these plans frequently consider methods to improve communications between various emergency responders and others who must have sufficient capability to contact each other in an emergency situation. preparedness planning efforts targeting bioterrorism have occurred concurrently with initiatives to bolster public health infrastructure for other public health emergencies including natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes) and naturally occurring disease outbreaks (e.g., pandemic influenza). finally, preparedness planners have considered some of the ethical concerns raised by bioterrorism attacks and their potentially devastating consequences. a foundational component of these preparedness efforts has been the potential modernization of state and federal public health and emergency response laws. law is a critical component of a well-developed public health system [ ] . public health law grants public health agencies powers to detect, track, prevent, and contain health threats resulting from bioterrorism and other public health emergencies. however, many existing public health and emergency response laws at the state and federal levels may not be sufficient to address biological terrorism. these laws often do not grant public health authorities the necessary powers to stop an outbreak. public health laws vary widely across different jurisdictions. as a result, the legal powers ascribed to public health officials may be different in scope and function in different locales. these laws are also commonly targeted to specific diseases or conditions that may not relate to emerging threats [ ] . public health powers typically lie at the state and local levels of government. the federal government plays a more limited role for practical and legal reasons. public health falls within the state's police powers, an area of state power traditionally reserved to the states under the tenth amendment to the united states constitution [ ] . the federal government will normally become involved in localized public health matters only at the request of the state or if the disease has the potential to cross state or international borders, or affect interstate interests. from a practical perspective, this gives state and local officials greater autonomy to enact laws and policies conducive to the needs of their communities, without interference from the federal government. responses to bioterrorism, however, will almost certainly involve the federal government, since an infectious disease will rarely be contained within the borders of one state. indeed, an outbreak may traverse international boundaries as well, which would clearly entail the input of the federal government. bioterrorism implicates additional concerns beyond public health, including national security and law enforcement considerations. federal public health and legal authorities may specifically respond to multiple components of a bioterrorism attack, as well as offer guidance and expertise to assist state and local governments in their responses. thus, responses to bioterrorism require sufficient legal powers at both the federal and state levels, in addition to a wellconceived plan for coordinating these powers to maximize public benefit. the debate around bioterrorism preparedness has raised salient questions about the role of law in responding to biological threats, highlighted by inherent tensions between protecting the public and upholding individual rights of liberty, privacy, and freedom of association [ ] . balancing these goals requires difficult choices that are further complicated when public health laws are unclear, poorly drafted, or confusing. to assist state and local law-and policy-makers, public health law scholars at the center for law and the public's health at georgetown university law center and the johns hopkins bloomberg school of public health drafted two model state public health acts. the model state emergency health powers act (msehpa) was drafted quickly after september , , with input from the centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) and multiple national partner organizations [ , ] . completed on december , , msehpa has served as a valuable template for states to modernize their public health laws to address public health emergencies, including emergencies caused by bioterrorism. it provides a modern framework for public health powers, authorizing state and local authorities to engage in a range of activities to address a public health emergency. these measures may restrict temporarily the liberty or property of affected individuals or groups to protect the public's health [ ] . to date, states and the district of columbia have introduced bills based on some or all of the provisions of the msehpa, and states and the district of columbia have passed their respective bills [ ] . the turning point model state public health act (turning point act) (completed on september , ) provides a more comprehensive prototype for state public health law reform [ ] . it covers a broad array of topics that extend well beyond emergency situations, including ( ) defining and authorizing the performance of essential public health services and functions; ( ) improving public health infrastructure; ( ) encouraging cooperation between public and private sectors on public health issues; and ( ) protecting the privacy of identifiable data acquired, used, or disclosed by public health authorities [ ] . a third model law, the uniform emergency volunteer health practitioners act (uevhpa), as drafted in by the national conference of commissioners on uniform state laws, provides a further model for emergency public health governance, organized around the challenge of accommodating health professionals who show up spontaneously at the site of a public health emergency or nearby health facilities in order to provide emergency assistance [ ] . the aforementioned model acts recognize that an effective public health response to a bioterrorism-related outbreak will demand strong and clear legal powers. in the following sections, we focus predominantly on two specific areas of public health powers authorized under law: ( ) restrictions on personal liberty (quarantine, isolation, travel restrictions, privacy) and ( ) restrictions on property (decontamination, use of supplies and facilities, disposal of remains). while other areas of law are also relevant to the legal framework needed to address bioterrorism, these two areas feature the most sustained debates and controversies. each of these powers will be considered in the following sections from a legal and ethical perspective. the release of a highly infectious disease into the population presents government officials with a difficult quandary. within the climate of fear that may surround such an outbreak, public health authorities must quickly and accurately assess the risk to the population and take measures accordingly to protect the public's health. under such circumstances, public health authorities may resort to liberty-limiting measures such as quarantine, isolation, travel restrictions, and privacy limitations. personally restrictive actions are particularly likely when the disease is readily communicable, exceptionally virulent, or is of unknown origin. restrictions on personal liberty to respond to a public health crisis are constitutionally permissible, but the scope of restrictions and attendant protections against their misuse varies significantly across different jurisdictions. quarantine and isolation are among the oldest of public health tools. their use predates modern scientific advances in disease testing and treatment, not to mention modern conceptions of civil liberties. they operate on the most basic principle of infectious disease control-keeping healthy individuals separated from those who have been exposed or infected. in modern times, the mass use of quarantine or isolation has faded as rapid medical tests and effective treatments have become available. when quarantine and isolation have been used, they have been directed predominantly at specific infectious individuals, for example, to control recalcitrant tuberculosis patients [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] . nevertheless, for a disease of unknown etiology or a disease that poses a significant threat to a vulnerable population, quarantine and isolation may still be effective techniques to contain an outbreak. depending on the scope of the outbreak, largescale quarantine measures may have to be considered. modern logistics surrounding enactment of a large-scale quarantine would be complex and possibly unworkable [ ] . the terms quarantine and isolation have engendered a great deal of confusion. the two terms are often used interchangeably, but in actuality represent distinct concepts. the term quarantine denotes a compulsory physical separation of an individual or a group of healthy people who have been exposed to a contagious disease to prevent transmission during the incubation period of the disease [ ] . historically, quarantine restrictions were often imposed on travelers to insure that they did not introduce a contagious disease into a country or town. the word itself derives from the latin term quadragina and the italian term quarante, which refer to the -day sequestration period enforced on merchant ships during plague outbreaks [ ] . the term isolation, by contrast, means the separation, for the period of communicability, of known infected persons so as to prevent or limit the transmission of the infectious agent [ ] . precise usage of and differentiation between these terms is vital to insure that those subject to these powers receive appropriate treatment and protection. the current legal framework authorizing the use of quarantine and isolation in the united states stretches across multiple jurisdictions and levels of government. quarantine powers were first implemented at the local level, and later the state level, during the colonial period. the federal quarantine statute, first enacted in , authorized the president to assist states in their use of quarantines [ ] . the federal government subsequently took control over maritime quarantines [ ] . this expanded federal role prompted a debate over whether the federal or state government should administer quarantines-a debate which continues to this day. as discussed below, states claim that their quarantine authority derives from their police power, while the federal government argues that its authority arises from its constitutionally -granted power to regulate interstate commerce. state and local jurisdictions have the primary responsibility for quarantine within their borders. the state quarantine power is derived from the state's inherent police power, reserved to the states under the tenth amendment of the united states constitution. most public health powers have traditionally been recognized as falling under the jurisdiction of state and local governments. the united states supreme court has found that the police powers of the state allow the state to enact regulations to protect the health and safety of its citizens [ ] . the use of quarantine and isolation by state and local governments is therefore legally and constitutionally acceptable, provided that these powers are used appropriately to protect public health and safety. the specific scope of state and local quarantine authority varies considerably between jurisdictions. these differences are evident in the structural distribution of power between the state and local governments and the substantive criteria (or lack thereof) for placing an individual under quarantine. some states have a centralized public health system that retains most public health powers at the state level, including quarantine and isolation decisions. other states delegate these decisions to local public health agencies. in these states, quarantine will generally be under the jurisdiction of local public health officials when the disease is confined to a discrete local area. if the outbreak affects more that one community within the state, the state public health authority will usually have the power to implement quarantine or isolation orders. very few jurisdictions have articulated explicit procedures and policies to determine whether or not an individual should be subject to quarantine. both the msehpa and turning point act propose a systematic process for making this determination that considers the exigencies of the situation. furthermore, they allow for an appeal of the decision if possible under the circumstances [ , ] . federal quarantine powers are much more limited than comparable powers at the state level. the federal government may only apply powers delegated to it under the constitution. pursuant to these delegated powers, federal authorities have the ability to prevent the introduction, transmission, and spread of communicable diseases between states and from foreign countries into the united states. the federal quarantine power stipulates that if there is a risk that disease transmission will cross state lines, the federal government has the authority to implement quarantine [ ] . the federal government is additionally authorized to cooperate with state and local authorities to enact quarantine to contain an interstate disease outbreak [ ] . the federal quarantine response is conducted by the cdc, with assistance from other agencies if necessary, including the department of homeland security (dhs), the department of defense (dod), and the department of justice (doj). federal law establishes a role for a number of federal agencies and departments in the execution of a quarantine order. the secretary of health and human services (hhs) has statutory responsibility for preventing the introduction, transmission, and spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the united states and within the united states and its territories/possessions [ ] . regulations grant the cdc authority to detain, medically examine, or conditionally release individuals reasonably believed to be carrying a communicable disease [ ] . the cdc's division of global migration and quarantine has the specific authority to quarantine individuals seeking to enter the united states. u.s. customs and border protection (cbp) (formerly the u.s. customs service) and officers of the u.s. coast guard are authorized to assist in the enforcement of federal quarantine orders [ ] . personnel from the u.s. citizenship and immigration services (uscis) (formerly the immigration and naturalization service [ins]), the cbp, the u.s. department of agriculture (usda), and the u.s. fish and wildlife service (usfw) all assist the cdc in identifying travelers or other persons who may be infected with illnesses that pose a risk to public health [ ] . federal quarantine authority only extends to specific diseases enumerated by executive order [ ] . however, this list of diseases can be amended quickly when necessary (e.g., as with sars in , and pandemic flu in ) [ , ] . the federal quarantine power has rarely been used in modern times. therefore, it is unclear how widely it could be used to combat a bioterrorism outbreak. public health law experts have demonstrated concern that the existing legal structures for initiating and managing a large-scale quarantine are inadequate at the federal and state levels [ ] . this is problematic because the imposition of a large-scale quarantine will almost certainly involve the use of federal and state powers. under these circumstances, there is the possibility of confusion and controversy over who is in charge. as past bioterrorism simulations and real emergencies like hurricane katrina have demonstrated, if the lines of authority are not clear to officials at all government levels, the public health response can be paralyzed and undermined [ , , , ] . thus, in addition to improving the legal framework within federal and state/local jurisdictions, serious efforts should focus on establishing a coordinated public health response between these jurisdictions. when should public health authorities use quarantine or isolation to restrict individuals during a bioterrorism emergency? the response to this question requires the decision-maker to balance the need for restrictive intervention with the effect it may have on the civil liberties of affected individuals. modern commentary on the acceptability of quarantine asks whether the risk to the population posed by the disease justifies such a serious loss of liberty [ , , ] . in addition to restrictions on liberty, imposing a quarantine temporarily deprives individuals of their economic livelihood, their right to travel or associate freely with others, and may subject them to stigma and discrimination. in a time of great crisis, public sentiment may strongly support such measures, but public sentiment alone is an insufficient justification to use quarantine powers. these powers may be warranted to prevent the continued transmission of a disease that presents a serious risk to the population. it is important, however, that restrictive powers are not used unnecessarily or as an artifice for discrimination [ ] . past quarantines in the united states have led to violence [ ] , increased disease transmission among the quarantined population [ ] , and biased decision making [ ] . in one case, a federal court invalidated a quarantine imposed on an area of san francisco comprised mostly of persons of chinese descent, finding that the public health officials had used an ''evil eye and an unequal hand'' in issuing their quarantine order [ ] . restrictive public health powers such as quarantine and isolation should be used as a last resort to halt the spread of an infectious disease. the law can provide a useful normative framework for making quarantine decisions. the msehpa, for examples, sets out a list of criteria that should be considered when making a quarantine or isolation decision [ ] . in many situations, particularly where the disease is readily diagnosable and treatable, other options may be more defensible from a medical and civil rights perspective. barbera et al. list three key questions to consider when evaluating a quarantine decision: ''( ) do public health and medical analyses warrant the imposition of large-scale quarantine? ( ) are the implementation and maintenance of largescale quarantine feasible? and ( ) do the potential benefits outweigh the possible adverse consequences? [ ] .' ' gostin has outlined several criteria for exercising restrictive public health powers under modern constitutional law [ , ] : compelling state interest in confinement. public health authorities must only resort to restrictive powers when there is a compelling interest that is substantially furthered by civil confinement. only truly dangerous individuals (i.e., posing a significant risk of transmission) can be confined. whenever possible, risks should be assessed through scientific means. targeted intervention. individually restrictive measures should be well targeted to achieving public health objectives. interventions that deprive individuals of liberty or equal protection without justification may be constitutionally impermissible. for example, placing everyone within a geographic area under quarantine is overinclusive if some members would not transmit infection. underinclusive interventions that confine some, but not all, potentially contagious persons may be found to be arbitrary or intentionally discriminatory. least-restrictive alternative. public health authorities should not implement extremely restrictive measures such as quarantine and isolation if they can accomplish their objectives through less drastic means (although it is not likely that they would be required to enact extreme or unduly expensive means to avoid confinement). safe and habitable environment. quarantine and isolation are intended to promote well-being rather than to punish. therefore, individuals being confined should have access to clean living conditions, food, clothing, water, adequate health care, and means to communicate with others outside the quarantine. procedural due process. individuals subject to confinement for public health purposes must be able to access some form of procedural due process depending on the nature and duration of the restraint. where possible, this process should occur before confinement. if emergency circumstances demand immediate confinement, individuals have the right to request a speedy hearing and counsel to contest their confinement. public health authorities may also take actions during a public health emergency that limit the right to privacy, including public health surveillance, reporting, and contact tracing. the ability to identify and track the spread of infection is a vital component of the public health response to an infectious disease outbreak. public health authorities need access to valid and useful information to accomplish these tasks. in this context, public health surveillance and case reporting are indispensable techniques. surveillance allows public health authorities to collect, analyze, and interpret health information to search for concentrations of disease [ ] . a bioterrorism outbreak could be detected through monitoring large increases in purchases of certain medications from pharmacies, clusters of cases detected by emergency rooms or managed care organizations, or spikes in absenteeism from workplaces and schools. case reporting is a form of passive surveillance involving the routine submission of data to a public health agency by external sources such as health care professionals and laboratories, often pursuant to mandatory legal requirements [ , ] . through disease surveillance and reporting, public health authorities may assess the magnitude of the outbreak and appropriately target resources and tactics [ ] . surveillance and case reporting raise privacy concerns since the reports usually contain identifiable data, which could include a person's name or other identifying characteristics. while using anonymous data instead of identifiable information is preferable to protect privacy, personal identifiers may be necessary to effectively track cases in some circumstances. public health authorities responding to bioterrorism may also wish to engage in contact tracing. contact tracing uses identifiable information to identify and contact persons who have been exposed to potentially infected individuals [ ] . surveillance and contact tracing efforts may be utilized in conjunction with quarantine and isolation measures. this permits public health officials to determine the scope of the outbreak and take necessary measures to reduce the risk of further transmission. activities such as public health surveillance, reporting, and contact tracing test the boundaries of the right to privacy. public health authorities must balance the rights of the individual to control information about their infected status with the rights of the public health authority to collect and use this information to protect others in the community. these tensions may be particularly acute when the biological agent is not well understood. persons who may have come into contact with the agent may choose to not cooperate with public health officials, fearing that the outcome of their cooperation will be a loss of privacy or liberty. they may also fear the stigma that often accompanies persons or groups subjected to coercive public health powers. the use of identifiable information in a public health response to bioterrorism is particularly controversial if public health authorities share information with law enforcement agencies. information sharing between public health and law enforcement agencies may be justified to facilitate a swift response to bioterrorism threats and to apprehend the perpetrators of the outbreak. however, access by law enforcement personnel to identifiable information gathered through public health surveillance further jeopardizes the privacy of these data [ ] . members of the community may be less likely to cooperate with public health officials if they suspect that their data may be revealed to law enforcement officials for purposes unrelated to their health. furthermore, this type of data sharing may undermine the credibility of the public health system by calling into question its fundamental goals and the justifications for engaging in surveillance activities and data collection in the first place [ ] . a bioterrorism outbreak may justify interventions subordinating privacy interests to the common good, but the state must meet several rigorous standards. it must demonstrate that the need for the information is necessary to serve a legitimate public health interest. also, it must attempt to use the least amount of information necessary to achieve this interest. finally, it must conduct its activities openly and transparently, and consult with the affected community. law must allow for public health authorities to use coercive powers to manage property under certain circumstances. there are numerous situations that might require management of property in a public health emergency-for example, decontamination of facilities; acquisition of vaccines, medicines, or hospital beds; or use of private facilities for isolation, quarantine, or disposal of human remains. during the anthrax attacks, public health authorities had to close various public and private facilities for decontamination. consistent with legal fair safeguards, including compensation for takings of private property used for public purposes, clear legal authority is needed to manage property to contain a serious health threat [ ] . once a public health emergency has been declared, the msehpa and turning point act allow authorities the power to seize private property for public use that is reasonable and necessary to respond to the public health emergency. this power includes the ability to use and take temporary control of certain private sector businesses and activities that are of critical importance to epidemic control measures. authorities may take control of landfills and other disposable facilities and services to safely eliminate infectious waste such as bodily fluids, biopsy materials, sharps, and other materials that may contain pathogens that otherwise pose a public health risk. the model acts also authorize public health officials to take possession and dispose of all human remains. health care facilities and supplies may be procured or controlled to treat and care for patients and the general public [ , ] . whenever health authorities take private property to use for public health purposes, constitutional law requires that the property owner be provided just compensation. that is, the state must pay private owners for the use of their property [ ] . correspondingly, the acts require the state to pay just compensation to the owner of any facilities or materials temporarily or permanently procured for public use during an emergency. where public health authorities, however, must condemn or destroy any private property that poses a danger to the public (e.g., equipment that is contaminated with anthrax spores), no compensation to the property owners is required although states may choose to make compensation if they wish [ , ] . under existing legal powers to abate public nuisances, authorities are able to condemn, remove, or destroy any property that may harm the public's health [ ] . other permissible property control measures include restricting certain commercial transactions and practices (e.g., price gouging) to address problems arising from the scarcity of resources that often accompanies public health emergencies. the msehpa and turning point acts allow public health officials to regulate the distribution of scarce health care supplies and to control the price of critical items during an emergency. in addition, authorities may seek the assistance of health care providers to perform medical examination and testing services [ , ] . while the proposed use of these property control measures is not without controversy, they may provide public health authorities with important powers to more rapidly address an ongoing public health emergency. the complex and unpredictable threat of bioterrorism demands a serious effort to comprehensively strengthen all areas of public health preparedness. ongoing changes in public health practice help improve preparedness. public health authorities at the national, state, and local levels must also be prepared to work together to build a stronger public health infrastructure, ensure adequate training for emergency responders and other necessary personnel, and use new and existing technologies to combat future outbreaks. moreover, these authorities must understand the role of public health law. laws are essential to the empowerment, and restriction, of authorities to act in the interests of protecting the public's health prior to, during, and following a bioterrorism event. public health law provides the necessary authority for government to engage in public health activities. likewise, it limits government authority to infringe individual rights related to liberty, privacy, and property. many existing public health laws do not sufficiently clarify the contours or extent of public health powers. thus, legal reformation is needed to reflect modern conceptions of public health practice and contemporary constitutional norms. the msehpa and turning point act provide templates for public health law reform. these acts present clear criteria for governmental actions during public health emergencies. they delineate the scope of government public health power, the limits on this power, and the relationships between governments and other actors in emergency response situations. the roles of federal, state, and local governments in utilizing public health powers during public health emergencies must be considered and solidified in advance to avoid confusion or redundancy. public health authorities need to be able to implement a full range of strategies to combat the spread of infectious diseases through bioterrorism while respecting civil liberties. revision of state public health laws consistent with this balance will support and strengthen public health responses to future acts of bioterrorism. outbreak of severe acute 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consciousness in hong kong, shanghai and toronto use of quarantine to prevent transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome -taiwan efficiency of quarantine during an epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome -beijing large scale quarantine following biological terrorism in the united states center for disease control and prevention. legal authorities for isolation and quarantine center for disease control and prevention. division of global migration and quarantine: field operations executive order executive order (amending executive order to include ''influenza caused by novel or reemergent influenza viruses that are causing, or have the potential to cause lessons from katrina: response, recovery, and the public health infrastructure the alphonse and gaston of governmental response to national public health emergencies: lessons learned from hurricane katrina for the federal government and the states the future of public health law aids and quarantine: the revival of an archaic doctrine ethical and legal challenges posed by severe acute respiratory syndrome: implications for the control of severe infectious disease threats confusion, controversy, and quarantine: the muncie smallpox epidemic of knocking out the cholera'': cholera, class, and quarantines a long pull, a strong pull, and all together'': san francisco and the bubonic plague searching eyes: privacy, the state, and disease surveillance in america when terrorism threatens health: how far are limitations on personal and economic liberties justified? key: cord- -a vtc rp authors: awasthi, raghav; guliani, keerat kaur; bhatt, arshita; gill, mehrab singh; nagori, aditya; kumaraguru, ponnurangam; sethi, tavpritesh title: vacsim: learning effective strategies for covid- vaccine distribution using reinforcement learning date: - - journal: nan doi: nan sha: doc_id: cord_uid: a vtc rp a covid- vaccine is our best bet for mitigating the ongoing onslaught of the pandemic. however, vaccine is also expected to be a limited resource. an optimal allocation strategy, especially in countries with access inequities and a temporal separation of hot-spots might be an effective way of halting the disease spread. we approach this problem by proposing a novel pipeline vacsim that dovetails actor-critic using kronecker-factored trust region (acktr) model into a contextual bandits approach for optimizing the distribution of covid- vaccine. whereas the acktr model suggests better actions and rewards, contextual bandits allow online modifications that may need to be implemented on a day-to-day basis in the real world scenario. we evaluate this framework against a naive allocation approach of distributing vaccine proportional to the incidence of covid- cases in five different states across india and demonstrate up to , additional lives potentially saved and a five-fold increase in the efficacy of limiting the spread over a period of days through the vacsim approach. we also propose novel evaluation strategies including a standard compartmental model based projections and a causality preserving evaluation of our model. finally, we contribute a new open-ai environment meant for the vaccine distribution scenario, and open-source vacsim for wide testing and applications across the globe. all countries across the globe are eagerly waiting for the launch of an effective vaccine against sars-cov- . the operation warp speed [ ] aims to deliver million doses of a safe, effective vaccine for covid- by january , however, the pace of development continues to be punctuated by the safety concerns [ ] . as potential candidates start getting ready to enter the market, there will be an urgent need for optimal distribution strategies that would mitigate the pandemic at the fastest rate possible [ ] [ ] . center for american progress estimated that million doses of covid- vaccine along with accompanying syringes will be needed for the us alone to reach herd immunity [ ] . here we summarize the key factors that will need to be considered for effective mitigation: • scarcity of supply: despite large scale production efforts, it is expected that the vaccine will still be a scarce resource as compared to the number of people who would need it. in addition to the vaccine itself, there may also be scarcity in the components leading to its delivery, e.g syringes. the white house director of trade and manufacturing policy stated earlier this year that the us would need million syringes to deliver the vaccine en-masse. this highlights the next challenge of the optimal distribution of scarce resources related to the vaccine. arxiv: . v [cs.ai] sep • equitable distribution: a truly equitable distribution will not just be defined by the population or incidence of new cases alone, although these will be strong factors. other factors ensuring equity of distribution include quantum of exposure e.g. to the healthcare workforce that needs to be protected. in this paper, we assume that the exposure is proportional to the number of cases itself, although the proposed methodology allows more nuanced models to be constructed. there may also be unseen factors such as vaccine hoarding and political influence, which are not accounted for in this work. • transparent, measurable and effective policy: the design of policy would need to be guided by data, before, during and after the vaccine administration to a section of the population. since the viral dynamics are rapidly evolving, the policy should allow changes to be transparent and effects to be measurable in order to ensure maximum efficacy of the scarce vaccine resource. on the larger scale of states and nations, this would imply continuous monitoring of incidence rates vis-a-vis a policy action undertaken. although the aforementioned factors seem straightforward, the resulting dynamics that may emerge during the actual roll-out of the vaccine may be far too complex for human decision making. the daunting nature of such decisionmaking can be easily imagined for large and diverse countries such as india and the united states, especially where health is a state subject. artificial intelligence for learning data-driven policies is expected to aid such decision making as there would be limited means to identify optimal actions in real-world. a "near real-time" evaluation as per the demographic layout of states and consequent initiation of a rapid response to contain the spread of covid- [ ] will be required. furthermore, these policies will need to be contextualized to the many variables governing demand or 'need' for the vaccine distribution to be fair and equitable [ ] . therefore, ground testing of these scenarios is not an option, and countries will have to face this challenge. in this paper, we introduce vacsim, a novel feed-forward reinforcement learning approach for learning effective policy combined with near real-time optimization of vaccine distribution and demonstrate its potential benefit if applied to five states across india. since real-world experimentation was out of question, the change in projected cases obtained via a standard epidemiological model was used to compare the vacsim policy with a naive approach of incidence-based allocation. finally, our novel model is open-sourced and can be easily deployed by policymakers and researchers, thus can be used in any part of the world, by anyone, to make the process of distribution more transparent. actor-critic methods are temporal difference (td) learning-based methods that have a policy structure(actor) which select actions, and an estimated value function(critic) that critiques the actions made by the actor. a markov decision process is represented as a function of (x, a, γ, p, r), at a given time t. an agent performs an action ∈ a following a certain policy π θ (a|x) to receive a reward r(x, a) and a transition to the consequent state x with a probability p (x |x, a). the objective of this task is to maximize the expected γ-discounted cumulative return (given the policy parameters θ). policy gradient methods optimises a policy π θ (a|x) with respect to its parameters and update θ, to maximise j(θ) [ ] , [ ] . as defined in [ ] , policy gradient is expressed as follows: where ψ t is representative of the advantage function a p i(x, a). an advantage function provides a relativistic idea of how useful a certain action is, given a certain state. a good advantage function provides low variance and low bias gradient estimates. in our work, we refer to [ ] , which uses the a c (asynchronous advantage critic) method proposed by [ ] and suggests the following advantage function: where v π φ (x t ) represents the value network, whose parameters are further trained by performing temporal difference updates. the variable k corresponds to the k-step return from the advantage function. trpo [ ] is an on-policy algorithm that is well suited for environments with both discrete and continuous action spaces. considering we make use of the latter, this optimization scheme can be employed in our model. updating policy using trpo involves taking the largest possible step to improve model performance, whilst also satisfying a constraint setting the proximity between the old and the new policies. the constraint is expressed as kl-divergence. if π θ is a policy (θ being the parameters), then the trpo update is performed as follows: where l(θ k , θ) is a surrogate advantage function comparing how the current policy performs with respect to the old policy, and d kl (θ||θ k ) is the average kl-divergence metric. natural gradient descent (ngd) [ ] is an efficient realization of second-order optimization and is based on information geometry. in contrast to first-order methods such as stochastic gradient descent, ngd converges faster by approximating the loss landscape using the fisher information matrix (fim) [ ] as the curvature matrix corresponding to the loss function. kronecker-factored approximate curvature [ ] provides an efficient way to approximate the inverse of fim, which is otherwise a computational challenge associated with this approach. acktr is a scalable and sample efficient algorithm to apply the natural gradient method to policy gradient for actorcritic methods. proposed in [ ] , it is used to calculate and apply the natural gradient update to both actor and critic. it uses a critic to estimate the advantage function. training the model amounts to solving the least-squares problem of minimizing the mean squared error (mse) between the model predictions and the target values, i.e., (r(x) = estimated(x) − target(x)). the contextual bandits algorithm is an extension of the multi-armed bandits approach [ ] which contextualizes the choice of the bandit to its current environment. this serves to circumvent the problem where a multi-armed bandit may simply end up playing the same action multiple times even though the environment (context) may have changed, thus getting stuck at a sub-optimal condition. contextual bandits play an action based on its current context, given a corresponding reward, hence are more relevant to real-world environments such as the vaccine distribution problem attacked in this work. given, for time t = ...n, a set of contexts c and a set of possible actions x and reward/payoffs p are defined. at a particular instant, based on a context c t ∈ c, an action x t ∈ x is chosen and a reward or a payoff p t = f (c t , x t ) is obtained. regret [ ] is a conceptual function to understand and optimize the performance of the bandits problem. since we don't know if an action played was the most "reward-fetching", rewards against all actions that can be played are sampled, and the difference between the action chosen and the action against the maximum reward is defined as 'regret'. therefore, minimizing regret achieves the goal of maximizing reward. for an optimal action x * ∈ x such that the expectation of reward against this action is maximum, p * = max xt∈x (e(p | x t )), the regret and cumulative regret can be expressed as z = [p * − e(p | x t )] and z * = n t= z respectively. in order to derive the exact posterior inference in linear models, a bayesian linear regression [ ] may be performed, and several computationally-efficient versions are available [ ] . linear posteriors assume that the data were generated as per p = c t β + ( ) where ∼ n ( , σ ), p represents the reward or payoff and c is the context. the joint distribution of β and σ for each action is modeled. sequentially estimating the noise level σ for each action allows the algorithm to adaptively improve its understanding of the volume of the hyper-ellipsoid of plausible β's which generally leads to a more aggressive initial exploration phase (for both β and σ ). the posterior at time t for action x t after observing c and p, is where we assume σ ∼ ig(a t , b t ), and β | σ ∼ n (µ t , σ Σ t ), an inverse gamma and gaussian distribution, respectively. their parameters are given by we set the prior hyperparameters to µ = , and Λ = λ id, while a = b = η > . it follows that initially, for . note that we independently model and regress each action's parameters, β i , σ i for i = , . . . , k [ ] . for practical purposes, a and b are initialized as integer values. in this paper, we concatenate the acktr sub-model and contextual bandits sub-model in a feedforward manner. this was done to select the optimal policy through the supervised contextual bandits approach from the ones generated by the reinforcement learning-based acktr model as shown in figure . this was done to address the following challenges that need to be tackled in real-world problems such as optimal vaccine distribution: • solving in real-time: a vaccine distribution problem is expected to be fast-paced. thus an overwhelming amount of brainstorming with constrained resources and time would be required to develop effective policy for a near future. this calls for the development of a prompt and an easily reproducible setup. • lack of ground truth: this is one of the key challenges addressed in this paper. since roll out of the vaccine will not give us the liberty of testing various hypotheses, a lack of ground truth data is generally expected. this is analogous to zero-shot learning problems thus precluding a simple supervised learning based approach. • absence of evaluation with certainty: lack of ground testing naturally implies nil on-ground evaluation. in that case, it often becomes challenging to employ evaluation metrics that offer a significant amount of confidence in results. in order to solve this problem, we rely upon the simulated decrease in number of susceptible people as vaccine is administered. • model scaling: we ensured that the learning process of the models simulates the relationship between different objects in the real world environment accurately, and at the same time can be scaled down in response to computational efficiency and resource utilization challenges. this is done by choosing the right set of assumptions that reflect the real world. while reinforcement learning approaches replicate human decision-making processes, the absence of evaluation makes them less trustworthy, especially when real lives may be at stake. therefore, we pipelined the acktr model with a supervised learning based contextual bandits approach where recommendations for vaccine distribution policy were used as training data for the latter. we extracted the state-wise time series data of covid- characteristics from the website https://mohfw.gov.in/ and use them in the experiments as described below. the five states chosen for this study, i.e., assam, delhi, jharkhand, maharashtra and nagaland are representative of possible scenarios for the vaccine distribution problem, i.e., high incidence(maharashtra and delhi), moderate incidence (assam) and low incidence (jharkhand and nagaland) as on august , . this particular date was chosen following the announcement that india may launch its indigenous vaccine on this date. in choosing the five different states, we hope to generalize our predictions to other states across the spectrum while minimizing the bias introduced into the learning by a widely variant covid- incidence across the country. we also enhanced our modeling context with: population share: the percentage ratio of the population of the state to the population of all the five states. predicted death rate: the percentage ratio of the predicted deaths in the state to the total predicted cases in that state calculated using projections obtained from a fitted standard compartmental model, i.e. a susceptible, exposed, infected and recovered(seir) model. predicted recovery rate: the percentage ratio of the predicted recoveries in the state to the total predicted cases in that state using projections obtained from the seir model. the implementation of acktr and contextual bandit sub-models of vacsim are detailed henceforth: acktr model: open-ai [ ] stable-baselines framework was used to construct a novel and relevant environment suited to our problem statement for acktr to learn in this environment. a. input: with both the observation space and action space being declared as box-type, a context vector describing the situation of the state in terms of total predicted cases, predicted death rate, predicted recovery rate, susceptible cases and population, at a given time, was fed as input. predictions were obtained from seir projections [ ] . the action space was a one-dimensional vector with its size equal to the number of recipients of the vaccine in one round of distribution. notably, we accounted for the cumulative time it would take for vaccine distribution, administration and generation of the immune response by the body i.e. the total time between dispatch of vaccine from the distribution centre to achievement of immunity in the vaccinated individual. this introduces a lag of days between the distribution date of vaccines at day 't', to the gathering of context at day 't+ ' by vacsim using seir projections. b. model working: following are the assumptions used while building the environment: vaccine efficacy % number of recipients per day table : hyper-parameters used during policy learning • the nature of the vaccine is purely preventative and not curative, i.e., it introduces immunity when administered to a susceptible person against future covid infection, but plays no role in fighting against existing infections (if any). • the vaccine has % efficacy i.e. all people who are vaccinated will necessarily develop immunity against future sars-cov- infection. this assumption is easily modifiable and is expected to have little consequence in deciding the optimal allocation, unless data reveal differential immunity response of certain populations within india. however, we leave scope for it to be modified as per the situation by taking this as a hyperparameter for vacsim. • each person requires only dose (vial) of the vaccine to be vaccinated completely and successfully. this too may be treated as a hyperparameter. reward function: the reward function was designed to maximize the decrease in the susceptible population count with the minimum amount of vaccine, considering it to be a limited resource. where r i was the reward given to vaccine recipient i s i was the susceptible population count of the same state days from the day of distribution. q i was the amount of vaccine given to the state by the model. flow: vacsim gives us a recommendation for the distribution ratio between various recipients (indian states) of the vaccine as its output. following this distribution set, it awards the corresponding number of vials to each state and converts a corresponding number of individuals in that the state from susceptible to recovered, thus short-circuiting the seir model. the explore-exploit tradeoff: we tap into the explore-vs-exploit dilemma, allowing the model to reassess its approach with ample opportunities and accordingly, redirect the learning process. we set the exploration rate at %. however, this too is flexible and can be treated as a hyperparameter. hyperparameters: a complete list of the hyperparameters is given in table . c. output: the output of the first sub-model was a distribution set dictating the share of each recipient in the batch of vaccines dispatched at the time of delivery. the output of the first sub-model spanned over days ( september- september ) with each state having a total of episodes being run for each day. for every episode, the distribution sets so obtained (one per episode) were normalised to get the percentage distribution ratio for all states. normalised here refers to the percentage ratio of a given distribution set of a state and the sum of the distribution sets of the states over an entire episode for a given date. since the time period is fifteen days, this amounts to a total of episodes. a. training: these episodes, which comprised of the normalised distribution sets along with the corresponding set of rewards, were then fed to the second sub-model, i.e., contextual bandits as training data set. the action space in this model was assumed to lie in the range [ , ] (both inclusive) to represent the percentage of vaccine that went to each state during the distribution process. the features in the context were the same as in sub-model , except population, which was now replaced by population share (fraction of population of a state with respect to the total recipient population). this was done merely for scaling purposes. c. testing: using the context, normalised actions and the corresponding set of rewards as the training dataset, we tested the model day-wise for a period of fifteen days ( september- september) with each day having fifty possible actions for each state as output, similar to what was done in acktr model. the unadjusted actions (which were not normalised) obtained after testing the model were first adjusted day-wise for each state by taking the mean of all possible fifty actions for the state on that particular day. these were then normalized to obtain the percentage vaccine distribution for the five states for the period under consideration ( days . results indicate that out of the five states, maharashtra, which had the highest number of cases, saw a gradually decreasing trend whereas nagaland, which has the lowest number of cases, sees a gradually increasing trend with respect to the distribution of the vaccine figure (right). we also calculated that if the vaccine were to be distributed on since there is no way that the evaluation of distribution policy can be done in the absence of vaccine and real-world distribution, we defined the naive baseline distribution policy as % of vaccine given to a state = % of infected people in that state and compared it with our model's learned distribution. with doses and states, we simulated the distribution of the available vaccine on september for the naive and vacsim policies. the number of resulting (projected) infections for days after the vaccine distribution were calculated using the seir model. day-wise total cases of all states for both policy models were summarized. our results indicate that the vacsimbased policy would additionally reduces a total of infected cases, with % ci [ , ] , in the next days. as seen from figure (right) and figure (left), in the case where distribution was done using naive approach, vaccine distribution for all the fifteen days was nearly the same with maharashtra, receiving the highest amount of vaccine and nagaland, receiving the least amount of vaccine as expected as per their infection rates. on the other hand, in case of the results obtained through vacsim, each state would get a variable and sufficient amount of vaccine during the fifteen-day period including nagaland, which received a negligible amount under the naive approach. unlike the naive approach, vacsim, therefore was not biased towards any state, thus ensuring equitable distribution while mitigating the epidemic. the ultimate goal of vaccine distribution is to reduce mortality and morbidity. since our model relies entirely upon simulations, in the absence of a vaccine, we checked if the data generated by such an approach follow the cause-andeffect relationships as expected in the real world data. structure-learning was carried out using a data-driven bayesian network [ ] approach using hill climbing algorithm [ ] with akaike information criterion as a scoring function, and ensemble averaging over bootstrapped networks. these models were learned using wiser package [ ] . state-wise time series data of death, recovery, infected people, susceptible people and the amount of vaccine obtained from our model were used to learn the structure. blacklisting among nodes was done such that vaccine percentage cannot be the child node of covid- trajectory indicators (susceptible, recovery, infected people, death). the resulting structure shows a causal relationship between the vaccine amount(parent node) and susceptible count (child node), thus confirming the technical correctness of the vacsim model through an external evaluation approach (refer figure ). researchers worldwide are working around the clock to find a vaccine against sars-cov- , the virus responsible for the covid- pandemic. once available, distribution of the vaccine will have numerous logistical challenges (supply chain, legal agreements, quality control, application to name a few) which might slow down the distribution process. in this paper, we have developed a novel distribution policy model, vacsim using reinforcement learning. we have pipelined an actor-critic using kronecker-factored trust region (acktr) model and bayesian regression-based contextual bandit model in a feed-forward way such that the output (action and rewards) of acktr model are fed into the contextual bandit model in order to provide a sensible context comprising actions and rewards. contextual bandits then optimized the policy considering demographic metrics such as population share of state with respect to the chosen states and time series-based characteristics of the covid- spread (susceptible population, recovery rate, death rate, total infected cases) as context. while distributing the vaccine, identifying the part of the population who needs it the most is a challenging task, and in our case, we addressed it by the usage of the aforementioned context. rather than using the present-day count of infected and susceptible people, we have used seir-based projections, which makes our predicted policy more robust and trustworthy. evaluation of model-driven policy is a tough assignment due to unavailability of ground truth, and we proposed a novel causality-preserving approach to evaluate such models. the open-source code will enable testing of our claims by other researchers. vacsim may have some limitations shared by all rl models, i.e. the transparency of their learning process and the explainability of their decisions. secondly, the development of vacsim has been carried out while observing the pandemic in the past few months. however, the dynamic nature of pandemic may require change in actions, thus calling for common-sense working alongside artificial intelligence. in conclusion, we believe that artificial intelligence has a role to play in optimal distribution of the scarce resources such as vaccines, syringes, drugs, personal protective equipment (ppes) etc. that the world will see in the coming months. we provide a novel, open source, and extensible solution to this problem that policymakers and researchers may refer to while making decisions. astrazeneca covid- vaccine study is put on hold a proposed lottery system to allocate scarce covid- medications: promoting fairness and generating knowledge if a coronavirus vaccine arrives, can the world make enough? a comprehensive covid- vaccine plan a survey of agent-based intelligent decision support systems to support clinical covid- vaccine: development, access and distribution in the indian context policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning with function approximation simple statistical gradient-following algorithms for connectionist reinforcement learning high-dimensional continuous control using generalized advantage estimation scalable trust-region method for deep reinforcement learning using kronecker-factored approximation asynchronous methods for deep reinforcement learning trust region policy optimization new insights and perspectives on the natural gradient method optimizing neural networks with kronecker-factored approximate curvature deep contextual multi-armed bandits deep bayesian bandits showdown: an empirical comparison of bayesian deep networks for thompson sampling thompson sampling for contextual bandits with linear payoffs pattern recognition and machine learning, ser. information science and statistics gym: a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms global stability for the seir model in epidemiology a tutorial on learning with bayesian networks learning bayesian networks by hill climbing: efficient methods based on progressive restriction of the neighborhood wiser: a shiny application for end-to-end bayesian decision network analysis and web-deployment key: cord- -p htdvrp authors: haldon, john; eisenberg, merle; mordechai, lee; izdebski, adam; white, sam title: lessons from the past, policies for the future: resilience and sustainability in past crises date: - - journal: environ syst decis doi: . /s - - - sha: doc_id: cord_uid: p htdvrp this article surveys some examples of the ways past societies have responded to environmental stressors such as famine, war, and pandemic. we show that people in the past did think about system recovery, but only on a sectoral scale. they did perceive challenges and respond appropriately, but within cultural constraints and resource limitations. risk mitigation was generally limited in scope, localized, and again determined by cultural logic that may not necessarily have been aware of more than symptoms, rather than actual causes. we also show that risk-managing and risk-mitigating arrangements often favored the vested interests of elites rather than the population more widely, an issue policy makers today still face. effective risk management and assessment require knowledge of past events to generate comparative risk scenarios. yet understanding the impacts of environmental stress on historical societies is an underdeveloped and fragmented field of study, with substantial disagreement among specialists. as a result, we cannot say with precision what constitutes an existential risk to a given historical society, i.e., a risk that could trigger the collapse of a political or cultural system. past human societies as a whole have been extraordinarily resilient in the face of severe challenges, but the configuration of social and political structures was always impacted in a number of ways, with substantial implications for development pathways (e.g., the different medium-term outcomes of the black death in england and france) (borsch , pp. - ; herlihy ) . historical case studies, therefore, can offer valuable guidance on present day issues in designing risk management strategies and sustainable policies (haldon and rosen ; rosen ) . detailed research into what, if any, role environmental challenges have played in the transformation of previous societies, including in conflict, migration, critical systems failure, and politics, is an essential requirement, along with grounded inquiry into socio-economic feedback loops. the study of complex historical societies can reveal how such challenges worked to transform structural relationships and daily life. but it can also tell us about what happened when the dust settled and how both leaders and governments and the members of society more broadly re-evaluated their situations. there are several key questions that historical case studies reveal. did people in the more distant past think about system recovery? we show that this depends significantly on system structure and capacity, nuanced and constrained by ideological assumptions. contemporaries perceived the scope of recovery within a state as a goal, but were focused on their own institutions, while considering recovery at a global scale was rare and conceptualized and promoted generally within the purview of religion. were people aware and did they respond, negatively or positively, to changes in their (perceived) social situation, impacts on the economy and finance, on beliefs and attitudes? the answers reflect different historically specific understandings * john haldon jhaldon@princeton.edu of a situation, both the type of society as well as their social status. moreover, in the pre-modern/pre-scientific world, moral and religious responses were as important as practical responses. did rulers and elites, or farmers and producers, implement policies that would mitigate risk and absorb future shocks? we suggest how some past societies, ranging from the later roman period down to the early modern world, responded, consciously or less so, to transformative and unpredictable environmental pressures. one common thread of these historical examples is a tendency of system recoveries to focus on elite-level actors, rather than all levels of society that were more numerous. however, as some of these cases demonstrate, a more just and equitable resiliency can lead to longer-term stability for the state and its institutions. how societies in the past responded to stress depends on three key sets of conditions: their complexity (the degree of interdependency across social relationships and structures), their institutional and ideological flexibility, and their systemic redundancy, all of which together determine the resilience of the system. these three conditions do not exist in isolation, but combine and recombine in innumerable historical configurations. historians must reduce this to ideal-typical models, since it is practically impossible to analyze them all. moreover, we must research particular historical case studies to illustrate these general patterns and to show how each case is subtly different from the next. 'resilience' is invoked in different ways within different disciplines. in historical research, it has largely played a role in work on collapse and adaptation, where societies are understood as complex adaptive systems and in which ecological models have been influential. since the basic structural dynamics of a societal system contribute to the types of collapse to which it may be subject, approaches to collapse, and resilience that unites structure and process are the best way forward in applying historical examples to contemporary planning initiatives with respect to environmental problems. this is a helpful approach, especially when allowances are made for individual human agency and belief systems (cumming and petersen ; haldon , building on ecological theory and formal resilience theory; also anderies ; berkes and ross ; gunderson and holling ) . resilience and the potential for a society to maintain cohesion and cultural continuity through periods of systemchallenging stress has costs. the question of how to distribute the costs of resilience, and the degree to which this might be built into any system, varies across time and cultural milieu. in the following, we examine several cases in past societies where we can observe ( ) both top-down and bottom-up responses to significant environmental challenges, how different sectors of society responded or reacted, and where we can detect positive as well as negative outcomes; ( ) the differential costs of resilience when states are faced with substantial economic and political challenges; and ( ) state-and society-level responses to pandemics and both planned and unintended consequences. pandemics: responses, resilience, and consequences by the year , the western roman empire had disappeared as a cohesive political state across western europe, but the eastern roman empire simultaneously flourished. the western half had divided into successor "barbarian" kingdoms, while the eastern roman empire was centered around the balkans, anatolia (mod. turkey), and the middle east. one of its main initiatives, the re-conquest of formerly roman regions in the west, such as north africa and italy, had begun well-with quick and cheap conquests. at the height of this re-conquest in the early s, the justinianic plague erupted across the mediterreanean world and europe. the justinianic plague was a pandemic of the bacterium yersinia pestis that remained active for over two centuries, c. - c.e. its impact on the eurasian population has been suggested as significant (i.e., causing the deaths of tens of millions), while its effects on human behavior from economics to culture and religion have also been described as pivotal (meier ; harper ; sarris ) . some have described it as the watershed moment separating a flourishing ancient world from the darker medieval world. while this master narrative is deeply problematic and has been challenged in recent years, individual outbreaks-the local impact of the plague during that two-century frameworkhave been entirely ignored ). the problematic 'catastrophe' narrative is simply copied and pasted across all of its outbreaks (sarris (sarris , ). yet if we examine particular outbreaks, even the destructive demographic narrative demonstrates the ability of the eastern roman state to react both immediately to the increased numbers of deaths, maintain vital administrative efforts, and continue its long-term political goals. the contemporary writers procopius of caesarea and john of ephesus recorded intricate details about the first outbreak in the city of constantinople in c.e. the number of deaths was significant, especially given the city's urban density, but hard numbers or even percentages are completely uncertain. procopius wrote that the outbreak lasted for three particularly virulent months and claimed that and then , people died per day. using these numbers, the number of deaths would have reached , by the end of the three months, while the population of constantinople was perhaps around , , so these numbers are impossible (procopius, wars , ii. xxii-xxxiii) . john of ephesus included even higher numbers, up to , deaths per day (john of ephesus). some modern scholars have suggested that % of the city's population died and more recently that % died, although these percentages are conjectures based on dubious assumptions (bratton ; stathakopoulos ; harper ) . recent attempts to use epidemiological modeling could not resolve this problematic question (white and mordechai ) . while sixth century romans would not have understood modern epidemiology, there are examples of self-isolation to stop the spread of plague. procopius recounts that many people who had the economic means locked themselves into their houses as a way to avoid infection. sometimes this attempt backfired, since entire houses would perish from plague and the dead would remain unburied for days (procopius, wars , ii. xxii-xxxiii) . during later outbreaks of plague in constantinople, elites, including the emperor himself, fled to nearby urban centers, while in other cases an entire city fled the arrival of the plague, decamping into the mountains (theophanes confessor, chronographia, am ; paul the deacon, history of the lombards , . ). in total, romans understood that the plague was an unexpected new phenomenon and adapted accordingly by trying to mitigate its spread. these lessons of how to prevent the spread of plague also suggest that people around the mediterranean world not only tolerated disruptions to their socio-economic activity, but even embraced them in some cases-preferring flight over simple isolation. despite the limited information at their disposal, communities and individuals attempted to weather the storm using whatever means were at their disposal. as twentieth century disease outbreaks suggest, even a much smaller percentage increase in deaths per day can quickly overwhelm the existing capacity of a modern state to bury its dead (crosby ; kilgannon ) . the imperial administration and the emperor justinian (r. - ), who took a personal hand in directing the response, recognized the overwhelming burial problem and responded quickly by appointing an administrator named theodorus to solve it. theodorus received money to hire people to help bury the poorer members of society, whose families could not afford or arrange for their burial. initially, they were placed in existing cemeteries, but as these filled up, theodorus' task force dug new larger trenches and pits to place the large numbers of bodies, a scene reminiscent of current day burials. theodorus, and by extension the state itself, could clearly adapt to different burial requirements both culturally and logistically as the situation required it. unlike in many cases today, the various political factions stopped their fighting and helped provide the manpower for theodorus to meet his grim new task (procopius). despite the significant mortality, these burial measures resolved the most pressing issue for constantinople: removing dead bodies to ensure other infections did not spread. the pandemic appears to have reached the rest of the mediterranean from egypt, where it arrived perhaps via the red sea and the indian ocean trade from central asia. from egypt, it reached constantinople through the regular grain shipments the city required to sustain its population. other port cities around the eastern mediterranean were struck soon afterwards (procopius). in the first few years after the outbreak in , the grain shipments from egypt appear to have been reduced due to some combination of a smaller population that required less food and the disruption of trade routes due to the pandemic. yet within five years the grain shipments had returned to their original quantity demonstrating that the state had bounced back and was able to provide resources as it had before the outbreak (zuckerman ) . in both of these short-term solutions, the state was remarkably flexible in its approaches to quickly meet an entirely new problem with limited resources at hand. most of the eastern roman budget was used to pay the army, with a smaller amount for the salaries of administrators (hendy , ff.). the roman government was able to quickly shift resources, establish an entirely new ad hoc administrative section, and ensure the continued flow of food to constantinople to prevent large-scale famine despite a significant epidemic outbreak. the short-term flexibility depended on systemic capabilities developed and maintained over centuries, which had long incorporated significant fluctuations to the supply of goods (rickman ). for instance, procurement of grain in egypt was likely a highly planned and regulated practice that had been operating for almost six centuries. both the government in constantinople and local officials in egypt prioritized grain procurement as a core systemic function. the grain shipments had significant built-in redundancies that would guarantee that enough grain reached constantinople despite unexpected (but known and relatively common) dangers such as shipwrecks, spoiled food, and unfavorable sailing weather slowing shipments. administrators often had significant experience in their positions adapting to these known problems and likely passed much of this to their replacements. this approach allowed the system to mitigate disruptions such as the outbreak of plague. however, major political disruptions such as the conquest of egypt by the persians several decades later had a far more significant result-the abrupt ending of all shipments from egyptwhich forced the government to scramble to search for new grain-supplying regions (haldon ) . despite the immediate disruption of plague, the eastern roman state was able to continue its existing military, political, and administrative goals. justinian's re-conquest of italy proceeded in slow, halting steps and was completed within a little over a decade; italy was then integrated back into the eastern roman state (heather ) . in the east, the status quo in the conflict with the persian empire was largely maintained and the roman state continued spending vast sums on the military for the next half century. taxes and resources continued to flow freely to the state with no evidence of plague-related problems (sarris ) . part of this was due, in all probability, to the redundancies built into the imperial system itself as in the case of the grain supply noted above. the late roman system was, by modern standards, inefficient and did not prioritize the market gains at every level or create massive, intricate supply lines. instead, it prioritized flexibility in using governmental resources, while assuming most needs would be met locally, a system that also generated duplication of activity in various administrative departments both centrally and in the provinces. within these constraints, and in part as a direct result of them, the roman state appears to have had little trouble returning to its baseline requirements even amidst the most significant epidemic to yet strike the known world. it is impossible to discern what the immediate demographic (let alone cultural, economic, and social) impact of this plague outbreak was. what is clear, however, is that the state weathered the storm through short-term efforts to protect the population of constantinople, while the populace itself created their own measures to prevent the spread of plague. while commerce and food supplies might have been stressed during the immediate outbreak, contemporary historians do not report on foot shortages; regardless, both of these returned to their pre-outbreak levels within just a few years. the outbreak did not change long-term political goals, the state's ability to fight wars, or raise taxes, and move resources around, and unlike other examples in this paper, there was no discernible change in power structures and elite-lower class labor relations. in fact, the plague outbreak seems not to have catalyzed any significant changes in the way the east roman state was managed. its demographic impact may have produced short-term shock waves across constantinople (and probably other parts of the empire about which we are less well-informed), but it hardly transformed the shape of the world or even the empire. a much better-known case of plague is the notorious black death of - , the second of the three pandemics of yersinia pestis that have impacted the world since the late ancient period (the third was a global pandemic from c. . claims of mortality rates of as much as % give the impression that this event must have been devastating for the societies affected. yet when we examine how different states and societies responded, we find that-without minimizing the terrible impact on people and communities-the medieval world did not grind to a halt, still less did a series of revolutionary transformations occur. indeed, the black death struck at the beginning of the hundred years' war, and in spite of its demographic impact both the kingdoms of england and france continued to field effective armies, even if there was a brief pause in hostilities (similar to contemporary calls for ceasefires in ongoing international conflicts in the context of covid- ). instead, some societal developments that were already under way accelerated while various groups within society responded by exploiting their situation and attempting to slow down, stop or otherwise control changes which they perceived as disadvantageous. the arrival of the black death in is sometimes associated with the eventual breakdown of 'feudalism' and the rise of capitalism, as the plague's high mortality and consequent shortage of labor was supposed to have dramatically changed the way the labor market was structured. in short, it is said to have challenged existing landlord-tenant relationships and the whole basis of serfdom (the legal binding of peasants to the lands of elites). yet in england serfdom was already declining by the time of the black death (hilton , pp. - ; campbell ) . moreover, landlords can respond to labor shortages in various ways-in eastern europe, for example, they increasingly tied labor to the land and imposed a more oppressive serfdom on the peasantry. from the later twelfth century on, reflecting elite demand in respect of consumption and increased expenditures, and backed by royal legislation, landlords in england demanded heavier labor services, reducing peasant holdings and thus the ability of the serfs to do anything more than maintain a bare subsistence. this last tendency was intensified, again with the backing of the state, in further repression of peasants' rights and freedoms following the demographic collapse caused by the pandemic. yet a trend toward labor shortages and demographic changes had set in well before this, following the so-called great famine ( - ). in this context, the black death was less a prime cause than a further exacerbating and intensifying factor (britnell , pp. - ; cohn ; whittle ; postan ; hilton hilton / hilton , . the black death and the accompanying increased pace of demographic contraction did not in themselves, therefore, lead either to the end or to an intensification of servile relationships. rather, a number of regionally nuanced factors played a role, among which one of the most important was the degree of class difference. as wealthier peasants resisted labor services, the poorer members of their communities could be employed-and exploited-as wage earners. indeed, one answer to the lords' demands for greater cash liquidity was the leasing of their estate land to wealthier peasant tenants. where this occurred the demand for wagelabor among the lessees of lords' estate lands rose, thus stimulating a clearer rural social hierarchy (britnell , pp. - , esp. - ) . the internal social structure of peasant communities was the key determining element. the contours of rural and urban society in england shifted considerably between the later twelfth and later fifteenth centuries, but no single factor was the cause. a reassessment of the black death reveals that its diverse indirect consequences were perhaps more important than the immediate, felt and visible impacts as reported by eyewitnesses, that tend to draw our attention. as such, the black death played an important role in accelerating existing trends, pushing some-but over several decades-beyond a threshold that then led to substantial change. when thinking about similar moments in the past or the present, it is the impact on the underlying structures of social and economic organization to which we need to pay attention. government intervention to address problems perceived from the center often fail to adequately take into account the range and complexity of causes underlying the issue addressed in state action. the ottoman empire from the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries ce provides a good illustration of the limits to resilience in a pre-industrial society. beginning from a small emirate in northwest anatolia ca. ce, ottoman rulers had by the s expanded their territory to three continents covering present day countries and built an empire that drew on administratively and geographically diverse sources of income. a key factor in the empire's resilience was thus its size. it developed systems to mobilize crucial resources from distant locations to provision its cities and military and to balance regional surpluses and deficits, including food, labor, timber, and strategic materials (e.g., gunpowder). the security provided by ottoman soldiers as well as legal and tax provisions encouraged the expansion of agriculture and the containment of mobile pastoralism. the empire seemed resilient to socio-environmental stress: when tested by a series of local droughts, shortages and famines during the s- s, ottoman officials were able to contain the damage by shifting tax burdens from the affected areas, ordering fixedprice sales of grain from other provinces, and in some cases arranging direct shipments from local or imperial granaries (white ; mikhail ; agoston ). the ottoman system of resource management could recover from small impacts, but multiple, continuous or repeated shocks pushed it towards breakdown, a situation that underlies the scale of crisis in the empire during the s- s. this was a period of major crisis triggered by environmental and human stressors followed by a protracted and intermittent recovery, in terms of population, agricultural production, political stability and military power. extended drought in central anatolia in - severely curtailed food output causing prices to double. near-famine conditions developed in some regions. this coincided with a series of extraordinarily cold winters, a combination that caused a major epizootic outbreak affecting sheep and cattle across anatolia, the crimea, and the balkans, eventually reaching hungary and central europe. this massive death of livestock deprived rural producers of a major source of wealth and subsistence, and deprived ottoman armies of a key source of protein (white with detail and sources). this was not, however, the only set of stress factors the empire faced, since it was at this time deeply enmeshed in the so-called long war ( - ) with the habsburg empire. therefore, instead of reducing taxation or providing relief supplies-the usual state response to droughts and famines-the state had to increase requisitions from the balkan and anatolian provinces that were the worst hit by escalating shortages and famines. this led to a major rural uprising, the so-called celâlî rebellion ( - ) (white ) . the combination of famine, violence, population displacement and disease generated a significant mortality crisis in parts of the empire-tax records from the s- s suggest up to % mortality in many parts of anatolia after the s (Özel , )-all of which produced a situation that induced a long-term shift in ottoman population and land use (Özel ; white and sources therein; ocakoğlu et al. ) . the history of the late s-early s is a good illustration of how political complexity could constrain resilience in a situation where a combination of factors amplified the negative consequences of state activities, in this case a focus on revenue, provisioning, and military mobilization at the expense of diversification and risk reduction in during environmental stress. lack of agricultural diversification in semi-arid regions, dependence on provinces near the imperial capital for extraordinary taxes and requisitions, lack of spare capacity in dealing with both simultaneous military and infrastructural emergencies, all stressed the system to capacity. these factors combined with difficulties of supplying and pacifying inland regions, poor overland communications and the interaction of famine, flight, insecurity, and disease. together with inadequate public health systems that might mitigate epidemic disease impacts, the result was a severe and sustained population loss leading to an unstable balance between village agriculture and mobile pastoralism-and ultimately a fracturing of state management and control over provincial economies. while the imperial system as a whole held together, the cost of the vulnerabilities inherent in the ottoman system were borne disproportionately by the least privileged social groups. just as in a markedly different context with the eastern roman empire (the case discussed below), this potentially undermined the resilience of the entire socioeconomic and political system, since these groups formed the backbone of pre-modern economies. while these groups possessed a remarkable degree of resilience within the limits imposed by environmental and political conditions, when both acute social and environmental problems combined they could neither sustain their own livelihoods nor shoulder the burdens of imperial economies and ecologies. the role of elites and particular groups in social classes are central to the resilience of 'states' themselves. historically 'states' have tended to be dominated-managed and administered-by members of a power-elite drawn from a socially privileged sector of society. members of such groups are generally concerned as much with their own interests as they are with those of the state or ruler they serve, although some pre-modern states have been able to maintain, for a while, an establishment entirely divorced from the vested interests of their society. the eastern roman empire was undoubtedly one of the most sophisticated states in western eurasia, with a complex and effective fiscal and administrative structure that maximized resource extraction and maintained a balance of power between the state, elites and provincial society. by the early tenth century, after two centuries of rebuilding following the shock of the early islamic conquests, it was entering a period of expansion in both the balkans and the middle east. in parallel, there had evolved a social elite of office holders and landowners who gradually achieved a near monopoly on the senior and middling posts in the military and civil administration. it was their task to implement government policy in the provinces, but their increasing wealth and status meant that by the tenth century they were also a potential source of opposition to the central government. the tension between these two aspects of the east roman state revealed itself in the efforts of the elite to expand its wealth in land, generally at the expense of village communities who were a key element in the state's finances and provided the core of the provincial armies, thus jeopardizing the effectiveness of the central state administration itself. it should be noted that this is a structural problem common to all pre-modern/pre-capitalist systems: states must rely on elites to maintain themselves, yet those elites, whatever their origins, also develop vested interests that compromise or jeopardize those of the state. the ways this relationship has worked itself out historically varied enormously. the problem remains today, of course, although 'elites' are generally both more complexly structured and sectorized (national, international and multinational), and state autonomy-and thus state economies-compromised by global economic factors: the interests of international finance and investment capital rarely overlap neatly with those of nation states, as variations in the markets, particularly during moments of global crisis, daily illustrate. in the s a series of natural disasters disastrously impacted the agriculture of the western anatolian provinces, giving the wealthy or powerful opportunities to absorb further properties into their estates (kaplan ; svoronos ; mcgeer ; morris ). in - ce there occurred a particularly severe winter in the balkans and anatolia, combined with a series of extremely poor reduced harvests. the result was later remembered (just as was the similarly disastrous famine that preceded the black death in europe) as the 'great famine'. in their description of the resulting social crisis, legal sources distinguish between the 'powerful' (military and civil officials paid in gold coin by the central government and possessing liquid assets) and the 'weak' (peasant farmers and laborers whose livelihood and ability to pay their taxes depended on their harvest). the latter were forced into selling their land for food or money to survive. it is not surprising, therefore, that a subsistence crisis provided those with the necessary resources an opportunity to exchange liquid assets for large tracts of land. to protect its own interests the state had to intervene through legislation that attempted to stop this increased inequality. however, the legislation the state promulgated to try to deal with the issue ultimately had only short-term success, chiefly because the people it depended on to implement these laws were themselves the people against whom the legislation was directed. instead, the government was eventually forced to adopt the tactics of the elite, converting public land into imperial estates in order to secure the income derived from them. the great famine of - did not create social change but did accelerate it. its impact was twofold. it presented the better-off with an opportunity to exploit peasants whose livelihood had been destabilized by the severity of the winter. the state reacted by guaranteeing its survival by effectively seizing control itself of the private land of the free peasantry, who thus found themselves reduced to dependency either by the state that should have protected them or by those who sought to dispossess them. in the state's attempt to restrain its own elites, it destroyed the fortunes of the more vulnerable members of society. antioch (today antakya, turkey) in the northeastern corner of the mediterranean, was perhaps the third largest city in the flourishing sixth century eastern roman empire. as an administrative center, it connected the empire's heartlands in the s. balkans and nw. anatolia to its wealthy province of syria. antioch was also an economic and cultural powerhouse, serving as a major node in the network of eastern mediterranean cities and boasting rare amenities for the time (e.g., night lighting), a religious hub (e.g., it was one of the five key centers of christianity), as well as a major economic node in the dense network of eastern mediterranean cities. over the sixth century, antioch suffered a series of major disasters that included at least six destructive earthquakes, a major fire, a foreign sack and several smaller raids, the deportation of many of its citizens to a foreign country, and at least four outbreaks of plague. yet, antioch survived these disasters and remained a major regional center. since antioch could not be allowed to collapse for the political, ideological and administrative reasons summarized above, the central government at constantinople ensured its survival by providing it with constant infusions of resources. these included tax remittances, outside workers and resources for reconstruction after each major disaster, and even an extensive imperial initiative to remodel the city (procopius, buildings , . ). the government complemented its material efforts with public relations campaigns to lure immigrants to antioch. it employed propaganda, such as changing the city's name to theoupolis, literally "the city of god", used in official communications and on newly minted coins. the government instituted additional popular measures such as free food rations, bringing in grain from egypt to the city where it was baked and handed out (part of the same institution that supplied constantinople with grain, discussed above). such practices served to maintain antioch's population by attracting poor and refugees from the greater region and keeping those destitute from the recent disasters in the city. from the perspective of the central government, these actions were successful in maintaining antioch's position, its primary objective in the region. its actions, however, had indirect consequences. although specific economic costs are unknown, the governmental support of antioch was a decades-long process that strained the central government, forcing it to reduce the amount of resources available for other central initiatives such as its foreign policy (e.g., wars in italy). at the same time, drawing immigrants to antioch weakened social cohesion in the city. frequent riots among different groups within the city occurred, frequently based on religious or other markers of difference. the government's pumping of money into antioch had other unintended consequences. the city was part of several trade networks, importing goods from across the mediterranean, such as north african pottery, and exporting them to the inland syrian cities. at the same time, it exported its own local goods, such as olive oil, across the mediterranean. this oil was produced in antioch's hinterland. the disruption of these economic networks damaged antioch's commercial relationships and crashed the local economy, worsening the economic condition of the residents of antioch's hinterland and likely establishing a feedback loop that further encouraged migration to the city. the former trend of rural economic expansion stopped, and although antioch slowly re-established its inter-regional connections, its local olive oil industry never recovered (mordechai ) . whether governmental policy on antioch could resolve these more complex stresses remains unknown. a decade into the seventh century, antioch was lost temporarily to a persian attack and then permanently to islamic conquest. such regional disruptions prevent us from assessing the longer-term results of the imperial government's policies on antioch. although the causes and even the process of the islamic conquest remain unclear and debated, the disruption wrought by the sixth century disasters and the imperial response likely contributed to the eastern provinces' vulnerability over the longer term. a second case study from the same period reveals a different story with the participation of the central government. the history of the eastern regions of the later roman empire in the fifth-seventh centuries ce offers a good example of how one sector within a social system lost even as society as a whole benefitted. between ce and lasting until ca. / ce (izdebski et al. ) , climate change led to increased winter precipitation that enabled a profound transformation in late antique society. the increased winter rainfall, crucial for cereal cultivation in most of the eastern mediterranean, shifted the ecological frontier between arid areas and the land suitable for cereal cultivation. although the introduction of farming on these marginal lands often required sophisticated irrigation and water-harvesting techniques (in the negev desert, for example), the changing climate permitted an extension of agricultural production into regions previously left uncultivated or used only as pastures. eastern roman society was remarkably efficient at turning the environmental challenge of increased precipitation into an economic opportunity, and several regions saw an unprecedented expansion of agriculture and rural settlement (izdebski et al. ) . this increase in agricultural production in turn encouraged contemporaries to specialize in cash crops, such as olives and vine, visible in a number of microregions across the eastern mediterranean (see for instance england et al. ; varinlioğlu ; izdebski a, b) . however, this climate-related economic growth also contributed to a shift in the balance of control over resources between urban and rural populations in anatolia and the levant. in the late fifth and sixth centuries, new agricultural regions had fewer cities, while large villages dominated as opposed to densely populated urban centers. although the dramatic expansion into marginal lands occurred on the fringes of urbanized regions, new settlements encroached on lands that were located beyond the traditional hinterlands of existing urban communities, and escaped their political and economic control (e.g., niewöhner ) . this inaugurated a decline in the political and cultural role of many cities, contributing to an ongoing transformation of economic relationships between town and country, and elites and the producing population (brandes and haldon ) . climate changes allowed rural populations to accelerate this process and become more independent from cities while at the same time leading to a more general urban decline. here we see a situation in which different social groups depend on various ecological niches. environmental stress led to varying consequences for each of them, leading to a renegotiation of economic relationships and to changes in the balance of power. in the late roman world, urban populations were relatively privileged, both in their access to local resources and the state support they often received. in theory, therefore, they should have fared better through greater access to resources. but their position was actually undermined by what would generally be understood as a beneficial environmental change: their control and dominance over rural populations diminished as a result of the expansion of rural settlement onto new agricultural land, made possible to a large extent by a shift in precipitation patterns. a number of conclusions or lessons can be drawn from these examples, all of which involved states or societies that were complex, possessed institutional and ideological flexibility, and a degree of systemic redundancy, which is to say, overlapping institutional arrangements that in many instances could permit elements of one facet of social organization or state structure to fail without jeopardizing the system as a whole. first, the costs of resilience have never been shared evenly among the different components of complex social systems. political complexity has always had advantages and disadvantages in maintaining resilience in the face of environmental stress. resilience in one social group or institution-the rapid return of its baseline function, lifestyle and living conditions-influenced other groups within the same society. but to understand the potential for all groups to receive just returns we need to understand the connections between different social groups and their environments. the underprivileged or less powerful have always been the most likely to bear the costs of societal resilience to environmental stress. the examples also illustrate the point that even where efforts were made consciously to assist a whole community-for example, in the case of sixth century antioch-the outcome could often generate unpredictable changes that could impact that community negatively. not only do shortterm strategies that sustain a state or a specific bundle of vested interests not necessarily promote longer-term societal resilience, they can also increase longer-term structural pressures leading to systemic crisis. to a degree this applies also in the case of the black death in england, where the unforeseen longer-term result of the short-term responses was an increase in peasant social mobility and rural social diversity, facilitating a transformation of the labor market and social class relations. this forced the social elite to realign itself with new fiscal and market circumstances in order to protect its socio-economic dominance and at the same time inaugurated a longer-term challenge to its monopoly on local and central political office. nevertheless, there are examples where states possess sufficient systemic resilience to overcome very serious short-term challenges without further exacerbating existing inequalities, as the example of the justinianic plague suggests. while no modern public health infrastructure existed, the imperial government readjusted quickly to meet two immediate needs: burial of the dead and the provision of food supplies for the population. by fulfilling these two duties and when combined with individual self-isolation, constantinople sustained itself and rebounded within just a few years. flexibility built into the imperial administration provided the empire with the capacity to manage a number of (expected) short-term problems, from lower crop yields to catastrophic weather, that allowed the state to mitigate sudden changes to market supply. these short-term strategies secured the stability to meet the state's longer-term strategic aims such as the re-conquest of italy, as well as continuity of administration and government. secondly, our case studies illustrate that states, even where ideologically predisposed to assist the poorest or weakest in society (e.g., the christian eastern roman empire and the islamic ottoman empire) often resolved challenges, both short-term and longer-term, by pushing increased costs for state survival onto those sectors of the society least able to resist-an inevitable consequence of pre-existing systemic inequalities. in the process, however, the state in the past also unconsciously transformed the relationships between the central power and central and regional elites. the great famine in the eastern roman empire that followed the severe winter of / ce tells exactly this story. this case, along with the example of the catastrophic droughts suffered by the ottomans in the s ce, illustrates how a central government damaged its own economic base when the largest social group, the lower strata of the society, lost its resilience to environmental stress. their vulnerability undermined the foundations of the state's fiscal economy: lack of resilience on the part of the less privileged directly impacted the resources available to the state through taxes and requisitions, thus weakening the core functions of the central government, including the military. a third conclusion is, therefore, that the greater the degree of baseline inequality at the outset of a crisis, the less resilience there is in the system as a whole, the more uneven the distribution of the resilience burden, and the greater the potential for post-solution breakdown of a given social order. social elites, as identifiable groups, generally survive societal crises and transformations because they have a vested interest in preserving their position and generally retain the resources to do so. while individual members or sectors of elites may die or lose their positions of wealth and power, as a visible societal group, they are often still around and at the top of the heap when the dust settles. naturally, there are exceptions: rapid revolutionary events such as in france between and or russia in - can result in the effective removal of much of an established super-elite even if individual members of the old establishment changed sides and joined the revolution. but it is not uncommon, even where a major shift in political and ideological control takes place, for substantial elements of an established elite to adapt to radically changed circumstances and retain their basic socio-economic advantage, even where they are no longer the ruling element. this occurred, for example, with the middling elite of sasanian iran after the islamic conquest in the s- s (pourshariati ; morony ) ; it was true of the middling elites of the western roman empire (halsall ) ; it was true of local balkan elites after the ottoman conquests in the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries ce (kunt ; inalcık ) ; it was just as true of traditional elites throughout the middle east, iran and as far as afghanistan after alexander's conquests in the fourth century bce (adams ; erskine ) . did people in the past think about system recovery? on a global scale, no. but sectorally, as in the case of central governments with the means at their disposal, the answer varied: the degree of the problems they faced, the nature of economic and social class relationships, and, to some extent, the overall ideology and its key motifs were central factors. did people understand the challenges and respond appropriately? here we have to say, it depends: representatives of religions tended to have a more global outlook (i.e., for people of the same faith), but their responses tended to be moral rather than practical (i.e., prayers to stop the calamity), and when they were practical they were inevitably local and shortterm (i.e., famine relief, for example). ruling elites could respond, but they tended to react primarily to perceived threats to their own survival. this might well embrace the entire state, but as we have seen in some of the examples above, such responses were generally compromised by elite interests, as in the tenth century medieval eastern roman empire. furthermore, they usually were able to respond only to the immediately perceived problem-which may have been just a symptom of deeper issues. and were they able to implement policies to mitigate future risk? yes, but again, for example in the case of antioch, often with unforeseen consequences for the longer term. these historical examples illustrate clearly that policy makers and political leaders today generally have a much greater appreciation of threats and risks, potential and actual-which puts them in a far better position to plan for system recovery. their ability to respond appropriately, however, continues to be determined by a range of cultural/ideological, political/structural, and economic factors, including elite interests, many of which work to constrain or even discourage the implementation of potentially effective policies that could address both short-term challenges and mitigate future risks. this becomes particularly acute when these elite interests do not align with those of the far more numerous non-elites, who are significantly more likely to be affected, as we have seen. in this context, we would suggest that the tendency towards structural socio-economic imbalance in responses to environmental challenges must be a question that future policy planners place at the heart of their calculations. because this sort of imbalance has generally been the case until now does not mean it has to be the case in the future-but in what circumstances this would not occur is an important, largely unanswered, and generally avoided question, except as a statement of general rhetoric. ensuring a more equal and just distribution of the costs and thus extending resilience more evenly across all social-economic sectors would appear to be the obvious solution towards a more sustainable future for any complex socio-political system. the hellenistic kingdoms guns for the sultan: technology, 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contagion in the islamic mediterranean modeling the justinianic plague: comparing hypothesized transmission routes peasant politics and class consciousness: the norfolk rebellions of and compared centre de recherche d'histoire et civilisation de byzance. monographies key: cord- -wcgjyk m authors: gorkin, david u.; barozzi, iros; zhao, yuan; zhang, yanxiao; huang, hui; lee, ah young; li, bin; chiou, joshua; wildberg, andre; ding, bo; zhang, bo; wang, mengchi; strattan, j. seth; davidson, jean m.; qiu, yunjiang; afzal, veena; akiyama, jennifer a.; plajzer-frick, ingrid; novak, catherine s.; kato, momoe; garvin, tyler h.; pham, quan t.; harrington, anne n.; mannion, brandon j.; lee, elizabeth a.; fukuda-yuzawa, yoko; he, yupeng; preissl, sebastian; chee, sora; han, jee yun; williams, brian a.; trout, diane; amrhein, henry; yang, hongbo; cherry, j. michael; wang, wei; gaulton, kyle; ecker, joseph r.; shen, yin; dickel, diane e.; visel, axel; pennacchio, len a.; ren, bing title: an atlas of dynamic chromatin landscapes in mouse fetal development date: - - journal: nature doi: . /s - - - sha: doc_id: cord_uid: wcgjyk m the encyclopedia of dna elements (encode) project has established a genomic resource for mammalian development, profiling a diverse panel of mouse tissues at developmental stages from . days after conception until birth, including transcriptomes, methylomes and chromatin states. here we systematically examined the state and accessibility of chromatin in the developing mouse fetus. in total we performed , chromatin immunoprecipitation with sequencing (chip–seq) assays for histone modifications and assay for transposase-accessible chromatin using sequencing (atac–seq) assays for chromatin accessibility across distinct tissue-stages. we used integrative analysis to develop a unified set of chromatin state annotations, infer the identities of dynamic enhancers and key transcriptional regulators, and characterize the relationship between chromatin state and accessibility during developmental gene regulation. we also leveraged these data to link enhancers to putative target genes and demonstrate tissue-specific enrichments of sequence variants associated with disease in humans. the mouse encode data sets provide a compendium of resources for biomedical researchers and achieve, to our knowledge, the most comprehensive view of chromatin dynamics during mammalian fetal development to date. the encyclopedia of dna elements (encode) project has established a genomic resource for mammalian development, profiling a diverse panel of mouse tissues at developmental stages from . days after conception until birth, including transcriptomes, methylomes and chromatin states. here we systematically examined the state and accessibility of chromatin in the developing mouse fetus. in total we performed , chromatin immunoprecipitation with sequencing (chip-seq) assays for histone modifications and assay for transposase-accessible chromatin using sequencing (atac-seq) assays for chromatin accessibility across distinct tissuestages. we used integrative analysis to develop a unified set of chromatin state annotations, infer the identities of dynamic enhancers and key transcriptional regulators, and characterize the relationship between chromatin state and accessibility during developmental gene regulation. we also leveraged these data to link enhancers to putative target genes and demonstrate tissue-specific enrichments of sequence variants associated with disease in humans. the mouse encode data sets provide a compendium of resources for biomedical researchers and achieve, to our knowledge, the most comprehensive view of chromatin dynamics during mammalian fetal development to date. developmental gene regulation relies on a complex interplay between genetic and epigenetic factors. whereas genetic information encoded in the dna sequence provides the instructions for an embryo to develop, epigenetic information is required for each cell in an embryo to obtain its specialized function from this single set of instructions. chromatin encodes epigenetic information in the form of post-translational histone modifications and accessibility to dna binding factors , . developmental programs of gene expression are orchestrated, at least in part, by cis-regulatory sequences that direct the expression of genes in response to specific developmental and environmental cues , . active regulatory sequences show characteristic patterns of histone modification and accessible chromatin that make them amenable to the binding of transcription factors (tfs), which can in turn recruit cofactors and stimulate transcription. these epigenomic properties have proven valuable for genome annotation, because histone modifications and accessibility at a given genome region can reflect the activity of the underlying sequence , . in previous phases of the encode project, epigenomic and transcriptomic data sets were generated from mouse tissues at a single prenatal time point (embryonic day (e) . ) and two postnatal time points ( and weeks after birth) . in the most recent phase of encode, we made a coordinated effort to create resources for the study of mammalian https://doi.org/ . /s - - - fetal development by generating epigenomic and transcriptomic data sets from additional stages of fetal development covering a window from e . until birth at approximately one-day intervals. at each stage, we collected a diverse panel of - tissues to make a total of tissue-stages, with biological replicates per tissue-stage, and each replicate containing tissue pooled from multiple embryos. this common tissue resource was used as input for rna sequencing (rna-seq), whole-genome bisulfite sequencing , atac-seq, and chip-seq for eight histone modifications (atac-seq and chip-seq described here). data from this and all phases of encode are publicly available through the encode portal (https://www.encodeproject.org/). to map chromatin states during mouse fetal development, we performed chip-seq for a set of eight histone modifications that can distinguish between functional elements and activity levels. to assay chromatin accessibility, we used a version of atac-seq optimized for use on frozen tissues (methods). chromatin accessibility can also be mapped by dnase i hypersensitive sites sequencing (dnase-seq), which has been integral to the identification of millions of candidate regulatory sequences in mammalian genomes , , but we chose atac-seq here because it offers a more streamlined workflow. the resulting maps of chromatin accessibility, together with those of histone modifications, provide deep insight into the genomic regions and processes that drive mouse fetal development. • we systematically map chromabulltin state and accessibility across distinct tissue-stages of mouse development, and carry out integrative analyses incorporating additional epigenomic and transcriptomic data sets from the same tissue-stages. • we derive a chromatin state model from combinatorial patterns of histone modifications, encompassing distinct states grouped in broad functional classes: promoter, enhancer, transcriptional, and heterochromatin states. we characterize the spatial and temporal dynamics of chromatin states, finding that approximately - % of the genome differs in chromatin state between tissues at the same stage, and . - % differs between adjacent stages of the same tissue; enhancer chromatin states show the largest differences in both cases. we show that polycomb-mediated repression is pervasive during fetal development at genes that encode transcriptional regulators and enriched at those with human orthologues linked to mendelian diseases. • we identify more than , developmental regions of transposase-accessible chromatin marked by accessible chromatin during mouse fetal development, including approximately , with dynamic temporal activity in at least one tissue. we show that human orthologues of mouse fetal accessible chromatin regions are enriched for human disease-associated sequence variation, with apparent tissue-restricted patterns of enrichment. we show that temporal changes in chromatin accessibility often coincide with changes in enhancer chromatin states, and tend to precede changes in nearby h k ac levels. we predict , enhancer-promoter interactions by measuring the correlation between enhancer-associated chromatin signals and gene expression across tissues-stages. • we show that candidate enhancers with stronger enrichment for marks of regulatory activity such as h k ac show a higher validation rate in reporter assays in vivo. despite the importance of chromatin states and accessibility in determining the functional output of the genome, a comprehensive survey of chromatin dynamics during mammalian fetal development has been lacking aside from very early stages of embryogenesis , . to address this gap, we collected mouse tissues at closely spaced intervals from e . until birth. at each stage, we dissected a diverse panel of tissues from multiple litters of embryos and performed two replicates of atac-seq and chip-seq for each of eight histone modifications chosen to distinguish between different types of functional elements (for example, promoters, enhancers and gene bodies), and activity levels (for example, active, poised and repressed) , (fig. a , b, extended data fig. a, b) . we also profiled tissues at e . , using a micro-chipseq procedure designed for smaller cell numbers and restricting our scope to histone modifications . all chip-seq and atac-seq data sets were processed with a uniform pipeline and subjected to quality standards (methods; fig. c , extended data figs. c-f, , ). whole-genome bisulfite sequencing and rna-seq from other groups are reported in companion manuscripts and used in select analyses below. we observed several notable high-level features of the data series. as expected, the landscape of histone modifications and chromatin accessibility varies between tissues, particularly for marks of activity such as h k ac (acetylation at the th lysine residue of histone h ) (fig. d, extended data fig. ) . within each tissue, chromatin landscapes change progressively across stages (fig. e, extended data fig. a-c) . these developmental dynamics are likely to reflect at least two underlying biological processes: changes in the epigenetic landscape of individual cells within a tissue as they undergo differentiation, and shifts in the relative abundance of different cell types that compose a tissue. although in most cases we cannot separate the relative contributions of these two factors, many of the changes we observe reflect known hallmarks of cellular differentiation. for example, in the developing forebrain, neuronal markers acquire active chromatin signatures during development, whereas genes that encode cell cycle factors show the opposite trend (fig. b, extended data fig. d-f ). to leverage the chromatin state information captured by combinatorial patterns of histone modifications, we used chromhmm , which derived a -state model that shows near-perfect consistency between biological replicates and general agreement with previously published models , , (fig. a, extended data fig. ; methods). we segmented the genome for each tissue-stage with the full complement of eight histone modifications (n = tissue-stages), excluding e . to ensure a consistent approach (extended data fig. ) . each state was assigned a descriptive label based on its similarity to known chromatin signatures , , , and genomic distribution (extended data fig. i ). the resulting chromatin state maps allow the visualization of multiple functional predictions across a range of tissues and stages (fig. b) . the chromatin states fit into four broad functional classes: promoter, enhancer, transcriptional, and heterochromatin states. as expected, promoter states show the highest average levels of chromatin accessibility, followed by enhancer, transcriptional, and heterochromatin (fig. c) . in total, about % of the genome shows a reproducible chromatin signature characteristic of one of these four functional classes in at least one tissue-stage. in this calculation we required that a region be called in the same state in both biological replicates, and we excluded states ('no signal') and ('permissive'), which covered large swaths of the genome (fig. d, extended data fig. a ). this does not necessarily imply that % of the genome sequence is functional during development, but rather that % of the genome sequence is mappable and packaged in chromatin with a reproducible signature in at least one tissue-stage profiled here. these chromatin signatures often reflect transcriptional and/or regulatory activity, but the underlying sequences may not be under negative selection . the breadth of data collected here enabled us to characterize the spatial and temporal dynamics of chromatin states. on average, about . % of the genome differs in chromatin state between tissues at the same article stage (mean . %, . mb; range . - . %, . - . mb). enhancer states are most variable between tissues, consistent with the role of enhancers in defining tissue and cell identity (fig. e , extended data fig. b-e) . indeed, hierarchical clustering based on strong enhancers alone (that is, state ) distinguished tissues and identified similarities in developmental origin (extended data fig. b, c) . within a given tissue, about . % of the genome differs in chromatin state between adjacent developmental stages (mean . %, . mb; range . - . %, . - . mb). enhancer states are most variable, although poised or weak enhancer states are more variable than strong enhancer states (fig. e) . nonetheless, temporal changes in strong enhancer states can capture important developmental processes such as the transition of fetal liver function from haematopoiesis to metabolism (extended data fig. a ). we found that the polycomb-associated heterochromatin state (hc-p, state ) is prevalent at well-characterized regulators of tissue development - (fig. b, extended data fig. b ), while another heterochromatic state characterized by h k me is found mainly in repetitive sequence, as previously described - (extended data fig. ). to more systematically examine the role of polycomb-group (pcg) proteins during mouse development, we assembled a list of , putative pcg target genes with transcription start sites (tsss) marked by hc-p in at least one tissue-stage (extended data figs. c, , supplementary tables , ), many of which overlapped with dna methylation valleys (dmvs) in the same tissue-stage (extended data fig. e ). most of these genes are previously described targets of pcg (extended data fig. a-d) , but roughly one quarter (n = , ) have not been described as pcg targets in mouse - , and have not been described in human or mouse . consistent with previous reports - , tfs are highly enriched among pcg targets (extended data fig. a ). furthermore, we find that tfs with known human mendelian phenotypes (mendelian disease genes, mdgs) are even more likely than other tfs to be pcg targets ( . -fold, p = × − considering all tfs; . -fold, p = . × − excluding zinc finger tfs; fig. f , g, extended data fig. b-d) . these data suggest that pcg-mediated repression has an essential and pervasive role in silencing key regulators outside their normal expression domains and point to failed repression as a potential disease mechanism for further exploration. to build a catalogue of candidate regulatory sequences in mouse fetal development, we identified a non-overlapping set of , regions that were accessible in at least one tissue-stage, referred to below as developmental regions of transposase-accessible chromatin (d-tacs) (fig. a fig. b) , and - % of in vivo validated enhancers are d-tacs in the corresponding tissue at e . (vista reporter expression measured in e . embryos; fig. c , d). to more directly assess the temporal dynamics of chromatin accessibility during development, we identified , dynamic d-tacs that exhibit a significant change in accessibility in at least one stage transition within a tissue ( % of all d-tacs; fig. f , g, extended data fig. c ). most dynamic d-tacs show a significant change at only one stage transition in this developmental window (extended data fig. d , e), suggesting that these changes reflect enduring shifts in cell fate and/or composition rather than rapid on-off switches. gain or loss of accessibility often corresponds to gain or loss of enhancer chromatin states, respectively (fig. h, extended data fig. f, g) . in addition, d-tacs close to each other in the genome are more likely to have correlated activity across tissue-stages (fig. e, supplementary table ), particularly when located in the same topologically associating domain (tad) . catalogues of candidate regulatory sequences can provide valuable resources for the interpretation of non-coding genetic variation linked to disease , , . thus, we investigated whether our d-tac catalogue could provide insights into the genetics of human disease. we first identified putative human orthologues of our mouse d-tacs (supplementary table ). approximately % ( , of , ) of these human sequences have been annotated as accessible chromatin in human cells , , suggesting that they have conserved function. we found that phenotype-associated genetic variation is enriched in the putative human orthologues of mouse d-tacs, including at regions not previously annotated as accessible in human , (fig. i) . moreover, these enrichments show patterns of tissue specificity which may link diseases to tissue-dependent and possibly fetal regulatory programs (fig. j) . however, these patterns can be difficult to interpret, in part because the atac-seq data come from heterogeneous tissues. our group recently published single-nucleus atac-seq of the mouse forebrain , allowing us to further deconvolute several enrichments into specific cell types in this tissue (fig. k) . analysis of human orthologues of mouse enhancer predictions based on dna methylation (fedmrs) has produced similar results . given the important role of enhancers in directing gene expression, we focused on dynamic enhancers as a window into the developmental processes and regulatory factors in each tissue. we identified a highconfidence set of candidate enhancers marked by the strong tss-distal enhancer state (extended data fig. a , supplementary table ), and identified 'dynamic' candidate enhancers for which the h k ac-based activity score changed from stage-to-stage (methods). most dynamic enhancers overlap d-tacs ( - %, median %), but fewer overlap dynamic d-tacs ( - %, median %; extended data fig. b, c) . this may reflect temporal differences in h k ac and accessibility dynamics (extended data fig. d ). we also used our h k ac data to identify 'super-enhancers', which are known to mark key regulators and have important roles in development (fig. b , extended data fig. , supplementary table ). to gain deeper insights into the processes and regulatory factors in each tissue we clustered dynamic candidate enhancers and examined gene ontology (go) terms associated with nearby genes, enrichment for tf binding motifs, and expression patterns of tfs corresponding to table ) . considering the forebrain as an example, we found four predominant clusters (labelled a-d, fig. a ). cluster a represents enhancers that are active early, associated with go terms related to general cns development, and enriched for motifs that probably reflect the role of sox in early brain development , . clusters b and c contain enhancers that are most active in middle stages, associated with neurogenesis and gliogenesis, and enriched for motifs that probably reflect the role of neurod in neurogenesis during mid-to-late gestation . cluster d includes enhancers that are active late, associated with synaptic function, and enriched for motifs that support a role for mef c in synapse formation . the dynamic activity observed across tissue-stages provided the opportunity to predict enhancer target genes using the correlation between gene expression (as measured by rna-seq) and h k ac enrichment at candidate enhancers within the same tad - (fig. c , extended data fig. a -c, supplementary table ) . we derived independent target gene maps for each biological replicate comprising , and , enhancer-gene assignments, respectively, with an overlap of , used for downstream analyses (extended data fig. d-f ). this correlation-based map predicts experimentally determined enhancer-gene interactions - with higher accuracy than assigning an enhancer to the nearest gene (fig. d , extended data fig. g ). we further examined whether this map could be useful for predicting human enhancer-gene relationships (extended data fig. h , supplementary table ). we hypothesized that if our mouse predictions are applicable to human, we should see enrichment for human expression quantitative trait loci (eqtls) that link the human orthologues of mouse enhancers to the predicted target gene(s) by genetic association. indeed, across a variety of human tissues we see significant enrichment of eqtls that article link predicted target genes to candidate enhancers relative to regions equidistant from but on the other side of the target tss ( of tissues with p ≤ . , fisher's exact test; fig. e ), and relative to the nearestgene approach when the distance between tss and eqtl is larger than about kb (fig. f ). this distance-dependent effect may reflect our choice to consider only the 'strong tss-distal enhancer' state, as well as the fact that tss-proximal eqtls are more likely to tag causative variants in promoters, splice sites, or other non-enhancer elements. histone modifications and chromatin accessibility are effective tools for identifying enhancers , , but the quantitative accuracy of these methods has not been well characterized. the level of h k ac enrichment can vary by orders of magnitude across peaks within a single data set. during previous studies we noticed that regions with stronger h k ac validated more frequently in transgenic reporter assays. to more systematically examine the relationship between h k ac signal and validation rate, we used transgenic mouse reporter assays to test enhancers identified in tissues at e . , selected from three h k ac enrichment rank tiers: tier a (selected from ranks - ), tier b (ranks , - , ), and tier c (ranks , - , ) ( fig. a -c, extended data fig. a, supplementary table ). the full list of candidate enhancers from which these elements were chosen contains , , , , and , elements for forebrain, heart, and limb. about % of tier a elements displayed reporter expression in the expected tissue, compared to less than % from the two lower-rank tiers (fig. a , p < . , fisher's exact test). tier a regions that validated in the expected tissue were also more likely to show activity in additional tissues (fig. b , p < . , mann-whitney u test), although we found no significant differences in overall reproducibility between tiers (extended data fig. b ). at all tiers, the validation rate is higher than background rates estimated from regions in the vista database that lack h k ac (heart . %, limb . % and forebrain . %). moreover, these background rates may overestimate the true genomic background because many vista elements were originally tested owing to evolutionary sequence conservation or epigenomic signatures that predict regulatory function. retrospective analysis of more than , regions assayed in vivo and catalogued in vista (assayed at e . ) confirmed the trend described above across a much larger set of test elements (fig. d , supplementary table ). this larger set of elements also allowed us to evaluate other epigenomic data sets. ranks based on p or h k ac chip-seq have the highest accuracy, followed closely by atac-seq and dnase hypersensitivity assays (fig. e, extended data fig. c) . a combined score incorporating chip-seq, atac-seq, and dna methylation as reported in an accompanying manuscript slightly outperforms any individual datatype. taken together, these results demonstrate that loci with stronger enrichment for marks of enhancer activity such as h k ac are more likely to direct reporter expression in the expected tissue. in summary, our results describe a multi-tiered compendium of functional annotations for the developmental mouse genome, including chromatin state maps for distinct tissue-stages, an extensive catalogue of candidate regulatory sequences (many with dynamic temporal activity), enhancer target gene predictions, and a collection of transgenic reporter assays that demonstrates a strong relationship between h k ac signal and validation rate. the results of these reporter assays inform a key question in the field: what proportion of sequences with enhancer chromatin signatures truly function as enhancers in vivo? surveys of chromatin state and chromatin accessibility in a single sample often predict enhancers numbering in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. however, the results of our in vivo reporter assays suggest that the validation rate of chromatin-based enhancer predictions decreases rapidly with rank based on h k ac level. while these results point to the uncertainty inherent in estimates of enhancer abundance, we do not think these estimates should be abandoned entirely. definitive proof of an enhancer's function (or lack thereof) requires more than reporter assays, and remains difficult to ascertain experimentally in a high-throughput manner. ultimately, we think that our results highlight the importance of continued investigation into the molecular basis of enhancer function, as well as the predictive power of chromatin-based enhancer signatures. despite the broad scope of this study, we note some important limitations. first, there are multiple developmental tissues that were not surveyed here (for example, skeleton, gonads and pancreas). second, as noted above, the tissues examined here are heterogeneous, and future efforts to examine the epigenomes of single cells during development will be critical to achieve a deeper understanding of developmental gene regulation. in addition, this study does not address sex-dependent aspects of development. nonetheless, to our knowledge, the survey of fetal chromatin landscapes reported here is unprecedented in its breadth. moreover, the developmental tissue panel examined here is the subject of complementary analyses focused on dna methylation dynamics including methylation-aware enhancer predictions , transcriptomic analysis including deconvolution of whole-tissue data into distinct cell types, prediction of mammalian enhancers using evolutionarily conserved epigenetic patterns identified through massively parallel regulatory assays such as starr-seq , annotation studies focusing on genome evolution through the analysis of pseudogene complements across mouse strains , identification of transcriptional waves mediated by tissue-stage-specific tfs , and uncovering dna motifs regulating histone modifications . given the key role of the mouse as a model system in biomedical research, we believe that these data and insights will be a valuable resource to the biomedical research community. all data sets, methods, and protocols are available at https://www.encodeproject.org/. any methods, additional references, nature research reporting summaries, source data, extended data, supplementary information, acknowledgements, peer review information; details of author contributions and competing interests; and statements of data and code availability are available at https://doi.org/ . /s - - - . publisher's note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. all animal work was reviewed and approved by the lawrence berkeley national laboratory animal welfare and research committee. tissue collection for all developmental stages was performed using c bl/ n strain mus musculus animals. for e . and p , breeding animals were purchased from both charles river laboratories (c bl/ ncrl strain) and taconic biosciences (c bl/ ntac strain). for all remaining developmental stages, breeding animals were purchased exclusively from charles river laboratories (c bl/ ncrl strain). wild-type male and female mice were mated using a standard timed breeding strategy. embryos and p pups were collected for dissection using approved institutional protocols. embryos were excluded if they were not at the expected developmental stage. to avoid sample degradation, only one embryonic litter or p pup was processed at a time, and tissue was kept ice-cold during dissection. collection tubes for each tissue type were placed in a dry ice ethanol bath so that tissue samples could be flash-frozen immediately upon dissection. tissue from multiple embryos was pooled together in the same collection tube, and at least two separate collection tubes were collected for each tissue-stage for biological replication. experimenter blinding was not performed for tissue dissection, as there were no separate treatment and control groups being assessed. randomization was not feasible given the scale of production. tissue was stored in a freezer at − °c or on dry ice until further processing. a step-by-step protocol for tissue collection, including detailedinformation about how embryonic stage was determined, can be found on the encode project website at https:// www.encodeproject.org/documents/ aa c- e - e- cac-d c b /@@download/attachment/standardtissueexcisionprotocol_ .pdf. the complete chip-seq data series includes more than billion sequencing reads from chip-seq experiments, each consisting of two biological replicates derived from different embryo pools (n = , replicates total). chip-seq experiments for all marks and tissues from e . to p were performed as previously described . the chip-seq protocol was modified slightly for all e . experiments owing to the low amount of input (micro-chip-seq). detailed protocols for both standard and micro-chip-seq, including antibodies used and antibody validations performed, are available at https://www.encodeproject.org/ associated with each experiment described here. they can also be found at the links below. standard chip-seq (e . -p ). tissue fixation & sonication: https://www. encodeproject.org/documents/ b-c - -bf f- dd eb d/@@download/attachment/ren_tissue_fixation_and_sonication_v .pdf. immunoprecipitation: https://www.encodeproject.org/ documents/ b -e a- ca- d b-d f f b /@@download/ attachment/ren% lab% encode% chromatin% immunoprecipi tation% protocol_v .pdf. library preparation: https://www.encodeproject.org/documents/ f fbc - e- ae-aa d- a df c /@@ download/attachment/ren_chip_library_preparation_v .pdf. tissue fixation & sonication: https://www. encodeproject.org/documents/ fcaab - ca - - cb- f b d /@@download/attachment/ren% lab% encode% tissue % fixation% and% sonication% protocol% microchip.pdf. immunoprecipitation and library preparation: https://www.encodeproject.org/documents/ e - - -a - bcc bd /@@ download/attachment/ren% lab% encode% chromatin% immunoprecipitation% protocol% microchip.pdf. the full atac-seq data series includes more than billion sequencing reads from experiments (n = replicates total). our atac-seq procedure is based on a previously published method , with modifications to optimize for frozen tissue. in brief, tissues were pulverized with mortar and pestle in liquid nitrogen, and then nuclei permeabilization was performed by resuspension in a nuclei permeabilization buffer (pbs, mm dttm . % igepal-ca , % bsa, × complete protease inhibitor cocktail), and incubation with very gentle rotation at °c. our full atac-seq protocol is available via the encode data portal here: https://www.encodeproject.org/documents/ a fc -f - f -ba a-bd fe d /@@download/attachment/renlab_atac-seq_protocol_ .pdf. we required a minimum of million usable atac-seq read pairs per data set and a minimum fraction of read overlapping tss (frot) of . (extended data fig. ) . we use frot as a measure of signal-to-noise ratio in atac-seq data sets because tsss are widely marked by open chromatin, even in tissues in which the gene is not expressed. we calculate frot for each library as the number of reads that map within kb of a gencode v tss, divided by the total number of usable reads. atac-seq data are highly reproducible between biological replicates of the same tissue-stage as measured by pearson and spearman correlation (extended data fig. ). in addition, multidimensional scaling analysis of atac-seq enrichment across identified peaks confirms that the samples tend to cluster primarily by tissue types and then by developmental stage (extended data fig. ). uniform processing pipeline. histone chip-seq data were analysed using a software pipeline implemented by the encode data coordinating center (dcc) for the encode consortium. each step of the pipeline corresponds to a script written in the python programming language that assembles the input files, runs external programs (such as the macs peak caller), and calculates quality-control metrics. the methodology is similar to that previously described for encode with the following modifications: the mapping step used bwa version . . and samtools version . , and macs version . . was used for signal track generation and peak calling. to ensure adequate sampling of noise for subsequent replicate comparisons, peaks were initially called at a relaxed p threshold of × − . such relaxed peak sets were generated for each biological replicate, for the replicates pooled, and for pooled pseudoreplicates of each true replicate (each pseudoreplicate consists of half the reads sampled without replacement). peaks from the pooled replicate set were retained in the replicated peak set if they overlapped by at least half their length (in bases) peaks from both biological replicates. additionally, peaks that overlapped both pooled pseudoreplicates were added to the replicated peak set. in this way very strong biological replicates could 'rescue' peaks that were only marginal in a second replicate. the pipeline is available to be run on the dnanexus (https://www.dnanexus.com/) web platform, backed by cloud computing from amazon web services (aws), and is the same pipeline used for the analysis of all encode histone chip-seq experiments. the platform provides both an api for programmatic execution of the pipeline and a web-based interface for interactive execution of the same workflows. encode dcc uses this approach to ensure that primary data from different labs within the consortium are processed uniformly, and thus to minimize factors that could confound subsequent comparisons . the encode dcc analysed the experiments in parallel and accessioned the results to the encode portal (https:// www.encodeproject.org/). to facilitate comparisons across stages, one peak list per mark per tissue was generated by merging replicated peaks across stages within each tissue. each peak was then scored using chip-seq fold enrichment over input in each stage in the corresponding tissue using bigwigaverageoverbed (https://github.com/encode-dcc/kentutils/blob/master/bin/linux. x _ /bigwigaverageoverbed), and using bigwigs from either replicate or replicate as indicated. these values were quantile normalized across stages to eliminate potential confounding effects of biases in the distribution of signal between stages. these normalized score tables (one per mark, tissue, replicate) were used for the analyses below. for correlation between replicates of each experiment, we used pearson's correlation as plotted in extended data fig. d . narrow marks (h k me , h k me , h k ac and h k ac) have tighter peaks of enrichment and tend to correlate more strongly than broad marks (h k me , h k me , h k me and h k me ). for correlation between stages, we used pearson's correlation to compare replicates as above for each mark, but comparing all stages to each other within one tissue and one mark. we then categorized these correlations according to how many stages separate the data sets being compared: for example, zero for true biological replicates from the same stage, or seven for comparisons of e . data sets to p data sets. these correlations are plotted in fig. e . to further facilitate comparisons across tissues, a similar approach was taken to that described in 'analysis of data from individual histone marks' above, but in this case generating one master peak list per mark by merging replicated peaks across all tissue-stages. as above, each peak was then scored using chip-seq fold enrichment over input in each tissue-stage, but in this case using data pooled from both replicates (pooled data). these values were then quantile normalized across tissue-stages, and the resulting master score tables (one per mark) were used for hierarchical clustering performed in r with default parameters. the resulting dendrograms are plotted in extended data fig. a . for h k ac k-means clustering in fig. , one additional data processing step was performed before clustering: across each row, the values were converted to a unit vector in r (x/√(sum(x )), to prevent overall enrichment level from dominating the clusters. these unit vector values were used only for clustering; the values plotted are the normalized h k ac enrichment values from the score tables described above. k-means clustering was performed in r with k = and default parameters. rows were ordered within each cluster based on mean normalized enrichment. principal component analysis. the whole genome was split into -kb tiling bins. average fold enrichment signals were calculated for each bin using the bigwigaverageoverbed. bins that overlapped a merged peak by a minimum of % (reciprocal) were denoted as peak-bins. the average fold enrichment signals from each peak-bin were quantile normalized within a given tissue. the signal strength for each peak was calculated as the sum of the signals of all bins that overlapped that peak. principal component analysis was performed on the peak signals for each histone mark with the r function 'prcomp'. pc , pc and pc values were plotted for each sample. to illustrate the characteristic enrichment patterns at active and silent genes in extended data fig. b , we used conservative definitions of 'active' genes as reads per kilobase of transcript per million mapped reads (rpkm) > in every tissue-stage evaluated here, and 'silent' genes were defined as rpkm < in all tissue-stages. metagene profiles were plotted with deeptools plotprofile , using data from e . heart. uniform processing pipeline. atac-seq data were analysed using a standardized software pipeline developed by the encode dcc for the encode consortium to perform quality-control analysis and read alignment. atac-seq reads were trimmed with a custom adaptor script and mapped to mm using bowtie version . . and samtools version . to eliminate pcr duplicates. macs version . . . was used for generating signal tracks and peak calling with the following parameters: -nomodel -shift -ext -pval e- -b -spmr -callsummits. to produce a set of 'replicated' atac-seq peaks for analysis, the peak calling steps above were performed for each pair of replicates independently as well as for a pooled set of data from both replicates. the intersectbed tool from the bedtools v . . suite was used to identify a set of replicated peaks, which we define as the subset of peaks called in the pooled set that were also present independently in both replicate peak call sets. to obtain a uniform d-tac catalogue that can enable multi-dimensional analysis across all tissue-stages, the aforementioned replicated peak sets for each sample were concatenated, merged, sorted, and then labelled using the mergebed and sortbed tools from the bedtools v . . suite. the intersectbed tool was used associate each d-tac with the original tissue-stages where its constituent peaks were accessible. the catalogue was further categorized as being tss distal or proximal based on a ± -kb window around gencode v tsss. to evaluate the sensitivity of our peak calls in detecting potential cis-regulatory elements, we calculated the true positive rate, or fraction of peaks recovered, for every applicable tissue-stage with respect to two reference sets: actively transcribed promoters; and enhancers from the vista enhancer database (accessed july ) with activity at e . . using matched rna-seq downloaded from https://www. encodeproject.org/, transcripts with counts of ≥ tpm were classified as actively transcribed for each tissue-stage. catalogue specificity was assessed by calculating the true negative rate of each tissue-stage's d-tacs against gencode v tsss that were not accessible to matched dnase-seq from https://www.encodeproject. org/. to further probe the tissue-specificity of the d-tac catalogue, the overlap between d-tacs for each tissue at e . and enhancers that showed activity in the matching tissue pattern was calculated and compared to a background hit rate of enhancers with activity in any pattern. enrichment significance was computed using a binomial test. to calculate enrichment in chromhmm states, the d-tac catalogue was overlapped with autosomal chromhmm state calls for each tissuestage (pooled or replicate call set, as indicated). enrichment for a given state s in a particular tissue-stage was calculated as the observed number of base pairs of the d-tac catalogue that overlapped state s, divided by the total number of base pairs expected to overlap state s on the basis of its genome coverage (total bp coverage of d-tac catalogue × fraction of genome covered by state s). to identify differentially accessible d-tacs, for each d-tac in the uniform catalogue, we counted the number of atac-seq reads that overlapped the d-tac for each tissue-stage and replicate using the coverage function in bedtools v . . . for each tissue, d-tacs at any stage were classified as temporally dynamic if they showed a significant change in accessibility (fold change ≥ , p ≤ . ) between any sequential stages of development, using deseq . to investigate the relationship between changes in accessibility and changes in chromatin state, the dynamic d-tacs were classified as either gaining (positive log[fold change]) or losing (negative log[fold change]) accessibility. for each tissue-stage-transition (n to n + ), these sets of gain-or loss-of-accessibility d-tacs were overlapped with chromhmm state calls for stages n and n + . enrichment was calculated by taking the observed fraction of dynamic base pairs that overlapped each combination of states (state at n, state at n + ) and dividing by the expected fraction of base pairs that overlapped each state combination based on the dynamic and non-dynamic d-tacs. to investigate the temporal relationship between h k ac and chromatin accessibility, dynamic strong-enhancers (replicated, chrom-hmm state u ) at each stage-transition were overlapped against d-tacs for the respective tissue to identify matching enhancers and d-tacs. in cases where more than one d-tac overlapped an enhancer, the d-tac with the largest number of overlapping base pairs was selected. the sequential log[fold-change] in atac-seq signal was evaluated at every possible stage-transition for these matching d-tacs and a mean was article taken. these stage-transitions were converted to 'offsets' relative to the strong enhancers and the fold-changes averaged for the purpose of deriving a global trend (that is, for dynamic enhancers at e . -e . ; e . -e . is an offset of , e . -e . is an offset of , and so on until e . -p is an offset of ). the inverse analysis was also performed to assess the log[fold-change] in h k ac at dynamic d-tacs. a correlative map between d-tacs was generated for each chromosome by calculating the pearson correlation coefficient (pcc) for each pair of d-tacs, using the atac-seq read counts normalized to rpkm and log -transformed with a small pseudocount. we define 'correlated d-tacs' as those in the same tad (as defined by mouse embryonic stem (es) cells) with a pairwise pcc ≥ . . to assess d-tac correlations as a function of genomic distance, we assigned each d-tac to a -kb bin. for each bin a, the correlation was measured between its d-tacs and those of bin b, at various distances away ranging from kb to mb. the average of these correlations across all chromosomes was plotted as a function of distance. additionally, to investigate the validity of using mouse es cell tad boundaries as a constraint for the correlative map, the mean correlations between d-tacs at various genomic distances were compared for pairs located within the same tad and those not sharing a tad. the significance of the difference in correlation between intra-tad and inter-tad d-tac pairs was calculated using the wilcoxon signed-rank test. to enable comparison to gwas of human phenotypes, we used liftover with default settings to convert d-tacs from mm to hg genomic coordinates. we then defined novel d-tacs by removing those that overlapped dnasei hypersensitivity sites from any cell line or tissue in two published data sets , , one of which included embryonic tissue. we obtained index variants for all traits in the gwas catalogue (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/gwas/api/search/downloads/full) and retained a unique set of variants that were identified as genome-wide significant (p < × − ) in gwas of individuals with european ancestry. to obtain a background set of variants for enrichment testing, we used the filtered index variants as the input for snpsnap , which matches based on ( ) minor allele frequency, ( ) distance to the nearest annotated gene, ( ) gene density in the surrounding region, and ( ) number of snps in linkage disequilibrium (ld), with the following parameters: european population, ten matched snps, exclude hla snps and input snps, and report clumping. as gwas index variants are not necessarily causal and can be in ld with the true causal variant, we next defined loci for all index and matched background variants as all snps in high ld (r > . ) with the variant in european genomes samples using plink v . p . we then calculated the number of gwas and background loci with at least one variant that overlapped either all d-tacs or novel d-tacs and used a hypergeometric test to assess the enrichment significance of gwas loci compared to matched background loci. to test for enrichment of complex phenotypes and diseases with publicly available summary statistics, we first defined sets of human orthologues of enhancer d-tacs. for each tissue, we collapsed all strong and weak enhancer chromatin states (en-sd, en-sp, en-w) across time points and used liftover to convert genomic coordinates from mm to hg . we then intersected orthologous enhancers with orthologous d-tacs to obtain a set of orthologous enhancer d-tacs for each tissue. we collected summary statistics for human traits and diseases (supplementary table ), converting odds ratios and confidence intervals to log odds ratios and standard errors for binary traits and estimating allele frequencies from the european subset of genomes where unavailable from the summary data. we used polytest to test for enrichment of variant effects on each phenotype within orthologous enhancer d-tac annotations with the parameters '-univariate-maf . -high-mem'. we used hierarchical clustering on signed −log (p) for enrichments that were z-score normalized within studies to group similar phenotypes. cell type enrichment of phenotypes and disease within the mouse forebrain. we obtained the aggregate accessible chromatin peaks for each cell cluster in the p mouse forebrain and removed peaks that overlapped promoters ( kb upstream of mm refseq tsss), retaining sets of promoter-distal peaks . for this analysis, we did not restrict peaks to enhancer chromatin states, as doing so would potentially bias results for cell types that were over-represented in the bulk tissue. we converted genomic coordinates for promoter-distal peaks from mm to hg using liftover. we then used polytest to assess celltype-specific enrichment of phenotypes and diseases that showed at least nominally significant enrichment (p < . ) in mouse forebrain d-tacs from the previous analysis. we used hierarchical clustering on z-score-normalized signed −log (p) for enrichment as described in the previous analysis and plotted results for traits that showed at least nominal significance in at least one cell cluster. we note that the chromatin state annotations reported here are specific to this study and are distinct from larger efforts by the encode data analysis center to integrate data from across the entire consortium into a comprehensive 'encyclopaedia. ' we also note that we excluded e . from the chromhmm analysis because this stage did not have the full complement of eight histone modification profiles, and testing showed that models with only six marks failed to capture the full set of states derived from eight marks (extended data fig. ) . however, we provide a set of chromhmm annotations using the six-mark model on e . on our website here: http://renlab.sdsc.edu/renlab_website// download/encode -mouse-histone-atac/. generating the model. chromatin data sets (.bam files) were downloaded from the encode dcc on october . de-duplicated .bam files for each sample, along with their respective input controls, were binarized using the binarizebam function of chromhmm, with default parameters. models considering - states were learned separately on the two replicates using the learnmodel function, with default parameters. for the rest of the analyses, we leveraged the availability of two distinct replicate time series; namely, we applied the same strategy separately and compared the results a posteriori. the conclusions obtained were invariably consistent, suggesting that the inferences on a single time series (at least in terms of global genomic patterns) are highly reproducible. identifying the optimal number of chromatin states. we devised two strategies to identify the minimal number of states that captures the combinations of histone modifications present in the data, both of which converged on a -state model. first, the chromhmm com-paremodels function was run separately on the two series. this function compares the emission parameters of a selected model to a set of models (in terms of pearson's correlation), and outputs the maximum correlation of each state in the selected model with its best matching state in each other model. we used this function to compare the 'full' model (the one that considers states) to the states in the simpler models. we then calculated the median correlation of all the states against the simpler models, plotted these numbers against the number of states in the model and looked at the number of states at which both series reached a plateau. as a complementary strategy, the emission probabilities from all the models (considering - states) from both replicates were clustered together. the rationale behind this strategy is that very similar states across models will tend to cluster together, so there must be an optimal number of clusters corresponding to the optimal number of states in the model. to this end, we applied k-means clustering with k between and , and evaluated the goodness of the separation for each k as the ratio between the 'between sum of squares' (referred to as between ss) and the 'total sum of squares' (total ss). very cohesive, well-separated clusters tend to approach a ratio of . given a value of k, the ratio was averaged over one hundred realizations of the clustering. the ratio observed for k = was used as a maximum, and the optimal number of states was then defined by the smallest value of k that showed a ratio equal to or higher than % of the maximum. to compare the eight-mark model to a six-mark model (extended data fig. ) we used the tissue-stages for which we had the full complement of eight marks, then downsampled to six marks (h k me , h k me , h k ac, h k me , h k me and h k me ) , and repeated the analyses described above to arrive at an optimal number of states. we then compared the -mark -state model to -mark models with two different numbers of states ( states and states) representing the minimum and maximum of the optimal range, respectively. genome segmentation and chromatin state tracking across genomic positions. the segmentation was run separately for each sample, using the makesegmentation function of chromhmm (default parameters) and the model derived from the first replicate. for the final set of replicated state calls we required that a region was assigned to the same state in both biological replicates (within a given tissue and stage). regions that were not assigned to the same state in both replicates were reclassified as 'no reproducible signal' (distinct from state : no signal in both replicates). the unionbedg functionality of bedtools v . . was used to keep track of the chromatin state of genomic intervals across a defined set of samples. the total coverage of annotated sequence is , , , bp. this number was used as the denominator to calculate per cent genome coverage from chromhmm states in the text and figures. chromatin state trajectories along developmental time. given a replicate for a defined tissue, all those genomic intervals classified in a specified state (for example, number , strong enhancers) at one or more time points were tracked using the approach described above. considering each pair of adjacent developmental time points, the genomic coverage of each transition between each pair of states was then calculated. the resulting numbers were then normalized on the coverage of the largest transition in the time series under investigation (for example, liver, replicate number ) and shown as a directed graph. clustering on enhancer states. after tracking the changes in chromatin state of each genomic base pair in the genome across multiple stages and tissues, the resulting matrix was binarized according to each segment being classified in a specified state ( ) or any other state ( ). the binary distances between all the pairs of samples considered in each specific analysis were then calculated. these were used either for comparisons or hierarchical clustering (ward's method). go analysis. functional enrichments through great were obtained using the greatbatchquery.py script. the resulting lists were first filtered for the relevant ontologies. after that, only the terms showing a binomial fdr ≤ . and a regional enrichment equal or higher than twofold were considered. vista validated elements were downloaded from https://enhancer.lbl.gov on june . mm and hg coordinates were converted to mm using liftover (setting -minmatch to . and . , respectively). vista positive elements with any of the following annotations: forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain, neuraltube, limb, facial mesenchyme or heart were considered for the following analysis. liver was not considered in this enrichment analysis since there are currently fewer than validated elements in vista that show reproducible staining in the liver. coveragebed from bedtools v . . was used to calculate the coverage of the regions in each state in the e . predictions with each tissue-specific group of vista elements. the fraction of bases covered was then normalized to the expected overlap, based on the overall genome-wide coverage of each state. the enrichment for repetitive elements was calculated using the overlapenrichment function of chromhmm. a -kb window was defined around the tss coordinates of all protein coding transcripts in gencode vm . these -kb windows were overlapped with chromh-mm calls ('pooled' set) to determine their chromatin state in each tissue and stage. a tss was classified as active in a given tissue-stage if this -kb window overlapped the active promoter state (state no. , fig. a) , and did not overlap any repressive states (states , , ) . a tss was classified as repressed in a given tissue-stage if this -kb window overlapped the state characteristic of polycomb-mediated repression state (state ), and did not overlap any active states (states , , , , , , , ). tsss that did not meet the criteria for either active or repressed in a given tissue-stage were left unclassified. a gene was classified as a putative pcg target if it had at least one repressed tss in at least one tissue-stage. to determine whether the genes we identified as putative pcg targets had been identified previously, we compared our data to five published studies examining the genome-wide distribution of h k me and/or pcg proteins , - , including the nih epigenome roadmap data set, which examined at more than human sample types. for refs. , , any gene with a tss annotated as h k me -positive in any sample (irrespective of other marks) was considered a previously identified pcg target. for refs. , , any gene classified in one of the 'prc' states in any sample was considered a previously identified pcg target. for ref. , chromhmm state calls for human samples were downloaded on march (' _coremarks_mnemonics' call set). putative pcg target genes in this data set were identified as described above for our mouse chromhmm calls, with the following modifications: the gencode v annotation set was used for human (gencode.v lift . annotation.gtf.gz), and the polycomb-associated heterochromatin states considered were ' _reprpc', ' _reprpcwk', and ' _tssbiv'. any gene with at least one tss overlapping one of these states in at least one sample was considered a previously identified pcg target. ensembl v was used to match mouse gene ids with human orthologous gene ids (attribute = hsapiens_homolog_ensembl_gene). for cpg analyses, a list of cpg islands with corresponding values (length gc#, cpg#, gc%, cpg%) was downloaded from ucsc table browser on january , and overlapped with the list of tsss using bedtools v . . . if a tss overlapped more than one cgi, the corresponding values of all overlapping cgis were combined and associated with the overlapping tss. classification of genes as mdg and/or tf. we obtained a list of mendelian disease genes from https://www.omim.org/ (genemap .txt, accessed on january ). to filter out genes associated with complex diseases or non-disease phenotypes, we performed the following filter steps. ) we required that the genes be classified as type (the molecular basis of the disorder is known). ) we required that the gene have at least one associated phenotype that is not in brackets (nondiseases) or braces (multifactorial disorders), or containing a question mark (relationship between the phenotype and gene is provisional). ) we further required that the human gene ensembl id mapped uniquely to one mouse ensembl id. ) finally, we considered only autosomes, because of the mixed-gender litter pools used for chip-seq. these filtering steps led to a set of , genes that we classified as mdgs. to identify tf genes, we downloaded a list of mouse tfs from the tfclass database (accessed february ). as alternative sources of tf genes to support the tfclass results, we used the dbd: transcription factor prediction database , and genes associated with one or more go terms containing the phrase 'tf' as determined by amigo (accessed on january , taxon_subset_closure_label: mus musculus, document_category: bioentity). amigo was also used in this way to article identify genes associated with one or more go terms containing the word 'development' (extended data fig. ) . genes with at least one transcript tagged as a consensus coding sequence (ccds) in gencode were classified as ccdss in extended data fig. . characterization of dynamic enhancer elements. the temporal dynamic analysis was performed for each tissue separately. first, -kb genomic bins that overlapped with regions defined as chromhmm strong enhancer states in at least one stage were identified. then we selected dynamic elements (bins) from these strong enhancer bins using the bioconductor limma package v . . . limma is a package developed for calling differentially expressed genes for microarray but was also adapted for sequencing data with the loom functionality. limma was used to call differential enrichment between each adjacent stage comparison (for example, e . versus e . , e . versus e . , and so on). p values were calculated with the ebayes function within limma with trend parameter disabled, and were adjusted using the benjamini-hochberg method. a bin was called overall dynamic if its adjusted p value was less than . in any adjacent stage comparison; otherwise it was called a non-dynamic bin. non-dynamic bins were not included in the following analysis to reduce noise. we performed k-means clustering on dynamic bins across stages. the rows (bins) were normalized by dividing by a common value so that the squares of the values sum to . the optimal k was determined using the elbow method to cut off at the k value where percentage of 'withinness' values transition from increasing quickly to increasing steadily with larger k. the resulting heatmaps of the k-means clusters are shown in fig. a and extended data fig. . for each of the identified clusters, we performed enrichment testing of go biological processes using great. over-represented motifs for each dynamic cluster were identified as follows: first, all vertebrate motif position weight matrices (pwms) were downloaded from the jaspar tf database and used to scan the peakbins for motif occurrences with fimo, meme suite v . . . for each motif, we computed the odds ratio and the significance of enrichment in each cluster, comparing to a non-dynamic bin pool using fisher's exact test. the non-dynamic bin pool was sampled with replacement to match the distribution of average signal strength from the dynamic bins. following that, significant tf pwms were grouped in subfamilies using the structural information from tfclass because they share similar if not identical binding motifs. the top significantly over-represented tfs and their associated subfamilies were reported. super-enhancers were identified using rose v . , with default parameters for each tissue-stage with h k ac signals. super-enhancers were then combined within the same tissue and across all tissues to generate a non-redundant set of super-enhancers (extended data fig. c, supplementary table ) . generating the map. the reproducible strong enhancer calls (state no. ) were merged using the mergebed utility from bedtools v . . . after that, those regions or sub-regions that overlapped the intervals ± . kb from the tsss of genes in gencode were excluded from the merged regions using subtractbed from bedtools v . . . regions smaller than kb were enlarged to kb from their central coordinate (to allow more robust signal estimation). this resulted in , putative enhancers. h k ac signals at these regions were then quantified using uniquely aligned, de-duplicated reads. these measurements were carried out using the coveragebed utility from bedtools v . . , then normalized to rpkm according to the sequencing depth of each sample, and log -transformed (zeros were replaced by the smallest detectable value larger than zero). the mrna expression of protein-coding genes was tracked across the samples. small and non-coding rnas were excluded from any subsequent step by considering only those genes with a gencode biotype supporting protein-coding functionality. fpkm were log -transformed (zeros were replaced by the smallest detectable value larger than zero). for each tad defined in the genome of mouse es cells , the putative enhancers and genes were retrieved. all the enhancer-gene pairs within the tad were then evaluated in terms of scc between the h k ac pattern of enrichment and the mrna expression across the samples. each gene was assigned to the putative enhancer showing the highest value of scc. to attach p values to these correlations, a null distribution was estimated empirically, by calculating the scc of the enhancer with all the genes on the chromosome. two strategies were used to estimate a p value: ) a z-score was calculated by subtracting the mean and dividing by the standard deviation of the null, and the corresponding p value was then calculated using the pnorm function in r; ) an empirical p value was defined as the number of times an equal or better than the observed scc was found in the null. only those putative enhancers showing a p value ≤ . (for both strategies) and an scc ≥ . were retained. two maps were independently derived from the two biological replicates. only these overlapping associations were used for further evaluation and analyses. validation of the enhancer-gene map using published chromatin conformation data. capture-c interaction data from the developing limb and brain were retrieved from the geo (gse ). chromatin interaction analysis by paired-end tag sequencing (chia-pet) interactions at sites bound by the cohesion subunit smc a in the developing limb were retrieved from supplementary table of the original publication. enhancer-gene contacts in fetal liver cells as inferred from capture hic were downloaded from arrayexpress (e-mtab- ). in all cases, mm coordinates were mapped to mm using liftover. for each published data set, only those regions in the enhancer-gene map that overlapped any experimentally validated interaction were retained. the fraction of interactions showing experimental support was then calculated for both the gene assigned by correlation and the nearest refseq gene. mapping of mouse enhancer-gene map to human. the putative enhancer regions were mapped to the human genome (hg ) using liftover, with a strategy similar to previous reports . each region was required to both uniquely map to hg , and to uniquely map back to the original region in mm , with the requirement that ≥ % of the bases in each region were mapped back to mouse after being mapped to human. for each enhancer-gene pair, the orthologous human gene was inferred using biomart (ensembl version ; from http://www.ensembl.org/biomart/martview, filters -> multiple species comparisons -> attributes -> homologues -> mouse orthologues). the orthologous pairs were also required to share the same tad in human (tads derived from human es cells ). three thousand, five hundred and seventy of the genes in our mouse map had a human orthologue (gene) and at least one linked enhancer with an alignable region in the human genome (residing in the same human tad). of the , putative enhancers that were successfully mapped to hg , , were assigned to genes with an unambiguous homologue in human. validation of the enhancer-gene map using published eqtl-gene associations. single-tissue eqtl-gene associations generated by the gtex consortium were downloaded from the gtex portal (http:// gtexportal.org, release v p). only those tissues with more than , annotated eqtls were considered. a control set of enhancer-gene associations matching the size and the tss-distance distributions of the real enhancer-gene map was generated. in brief, for each enhancer-gene pair, the distance between the tss of the gene and the central coordinate of the enhancer was calculated; after that, a region the same size of the enhancer centred at the same distance to the tss of the gene but on the opposite side of the enhancer was picked as a control set. for the eqtl analysis, the fraction of eqtls supported by enhancer-gene pairs was then calculated for ten equal-sized bins based on the distance between the enhancer and the tss of the gene. the same procedure was applied to the nearest gene. the fraction of associations supported by eqtls was then calculated, separately for the two groups and for each one of the ten bins. these numbers were used to derive a p value for each bin using fisher's exact test. for this analysis, we considered only those eqtls derived from human tissues for which the equivalent tissue was profiled in this study (brain, heart, liver, lung, stomach and small intestine). comparisons to publicly available maps of enhancer-gene associations. data sets from ref. , genehancer , jeme , and rip-ple were downloaded and consistently re-mapped to the hg genome using liftover. mapping of enhancer-gene associations between different maps was performed using closestbed from bed-tools v . . . prospective testing of elements. names for functionally validated enhancers used throughout this work (mm numbers) are the unique identifiers from the vista enhancer browser (https://enhancer. lbl.gov/) . enhancers were selected for testing as follows: the h k ac peak calls for three tissues (e . heart, forebrain, and limb) were taken from the tss-distal h k ac peaks called using the uniform processing pipeline (mm -minimal) by the encode dcc (narrow peaks from combined replicates). peaks for each tissue were ranked by enrichment score (most to least significant). we then selected predicted enhancers from three different bins within each tissue's ranked list for testing (bins were approximately ranks - , , - , , and , - , ). loci that were already included in the vista enhancer browser or that appeared to overlap unannotated promoters were excluded from testing. in total, predicted enhancers were tested, including top ranked candidates ( per tissue), middle ranked ( per tissue), and lower ranked candidates ( per tissue). transgenic mouse assays were performed in fvb/ncrl strain mice (charles river) as previously described , . in brief, predicted enhancers were pcr amplified and cloned into a plasmid upstream of a minimal hsp promoter and a lacz reporter gene. transgenic embryos were generated by pronuclear injection of the resulting plasmids into fertilized mouse eggs. embryos were implanted into surrogate mothers, collected at e . , and stained for β-galactosidase activity. elements were scored as positive enhancers if at least three embryos had identical β-galactosidase staining in the same tissue. elements were scored as negative if no reproducible staining was observed and at least five embryos harbouring a transgene insertion were obtained. genomic coordinates and results for each element are provided in supplementary table , through the encode project data portal (https://www.encodeproject.org/), and at the vista enhancer browser website (https://enhancer.lbl.gov/). overall, , and elements showing activity in forebrain, limb or heart, respectively, were considered. for each ranked list of h k ac regions, overlap with positive (those elements showing activity in the same tissue from which the h k ac profile was derived) and negative (in all tissues or positive in other tissues) elements was calculated. a spline was used to fit the overlap ( - values) against the rank (smooth.spline r function, degrees of freedom (df) = ), separately for each of the three tissues. to derive estimates of the background validation rates for each tissue, the vista elements missed by the h k ac profiles were leveraged. specifically, the number of vista elements validated in the tissue and part of this set was divided by the total number of vista elements in this set. validation rates across ranked forebrain vista elements were derived using the spline approach described above. each element was annotated to the best overlapping feature (in terms of signal, or lod score of the conserved element), for each one of the following categories: h k ac enrichment, p binding, dnasei-hypersensitive sites (dhss), atac and phastcons conservation. when available, biological replicates were used to derive separate ranks, then the sum of ranks across them was used to re-rank the elements. dhss were downloaded from the encode dcc website (accession: encsr sff) or geo (accessions: gsm , gsm , gsm ). phastcons conserved elements were download from the ucsc genome browser on january (phastconselements way and phastconselement-s wayplacental) . as the encode analysis pipeline was focused primarily on uniquely mapped reads, we used a separate approach to study repetitive regions. more specifically, we used a pipeline with two rounds of mapping steps to re-process all the fastq files. in the first round of mapping, sample reads were aligned to the reference genome mm using bowtie with: bowtie hg -p -t -m -s-chunkmbs -max multimap.fastq input. fastq output.sam . -max is used to separate reads mapping to multiple locations of the genome from uniquely mapped reads. in the second round of mapping, a customized assemblies file was constructed by concatenating genomic instances of each repetitive element subfamily, their -bp flanking genomic sequences and a -bp spacer sequence in fasta format . the annotation file for repetitive elements used in this step was downloaded from repeatmasker.org. a python script was used with parameters as follows: python repenrich.py /data/mm _ repeatmasker.txt /data/sample_a sample_a /data/mm _setup_folder samplea_multimap.fastq samplea_unique.bam-cpus . the number of reads that mapped to repetitive element subfamilies, repetitive element families, or repetitive element classes was determined using information from both uniquely mapped reads that overlap with repetitive element and non-uniquely mapped reads. as some of the repetitive element subfamilies are very similar to each other, a fractional counts method was used to classify the reads that map to multiple repetitive element subfamilies. it sums reads that map uniquely to a repetitive element subfamily once and counts reads that map to multiple subfamilies using a fraction /n s , in which n s is the number of repetitive element subfamilies with which the read aligns. a table of counts that estimate enrichment signal for the repeats classes across different tissues is built as the final output for plotting the figures. data processing in r most of the described data processing steps (plotting, statistical tests, calculating correlations and hierarchical clustering) were performed in the statistical computing environment r v. . . (https://www. r-project.org/). further information on research design is available in the nature research reporting summary linked to this paper. all raw and processed data can be accessed via the encode data collection and coordination (dcc) website: https://www.encodedcc. org via the experiment ids listed in supplementary table . the encode histone chip-seq pipeline is among the collection of encode uniform processing pipelines that can be found here: https:// github.com/encode-dcc/chip-seq-pipeline. for all statistical analyses, confirm that the following items are present in the figure legend, table legend, main text, or methods section. n/a confirmed the exact sample size (n) for each experimental group/condition, given as a discrete number and unit of measurement a statement on whether measurements were taken from distinct samples or whether the same sample was measured repeatedly the statistical test(s) used and whether they are one-or two-sided only common tests should be described solely by name; describe more complex techniques in the methods section. a description of all covariates tested a description of any assumptions or corrections, such as tests of normality and adjustment for multiple comparisons a full description of the statistical parameters including central tendency (e.g. means) or other basic estimates (e.g. regression coefficient) and variation (e.g. standard deviation) or associated estimates of uncertainty (e.g. confidence intervals) for null hypothesis testing, the test statistic (e.g. f, t, r) with confidence intervals, effect sizes, degrees of freedom and p value noted give p values as exact values whenever suitable. for hierarchical and complex designs, identification of the appropriate level for tests and full reporting of outcomes estimates of effect sizes (e.g. cohen's d, pearson's r), indicating how they were calculated our web collection on statistics for biologists contains articles on many of the points above. policy information about availability of computer code no software used. the encode histone chip-seq pipeline is among the collection of encode uniform processing pipelines that can be found here: https:// platform.dnanexus.com/projects/featured. the code is open-source, and available here: https://github.com/encode-dcc/chip-seqpipeline. the atac-seq data were analyzed using a standardized software pipeline implemented by the encode data coordinating center (dcc) for the encode consortium to perform quality-control analysis and read alignment. details in methods, along with versions of specific software packages that were used. the following open source software packages were used in data analysis, as described in methods section: bowtie v . . ; samtools v . or v . as indicated in methods; macs v. . or v . policy information about availability of data all manuscripts must include a data availability statement. this statement should provide the following information, where applicable: -accession codes, unique identifiers, or web links for publicly available datasets -a list of figures that have associated raw data -a description of any restrictions on data availability raw and processed chip-seq data from our study can be accessed via the encode data collection and coordination (dcc) website: www.encodedcc.org. a full list h k me abcam ab polyclonal the specific antibody and lot numbers used for each library can be found in the publicly accessible metadata associated with each experiment at the encode data portal, here: https://www.encodeproject.org/search/? type=experiment&assay_title=chip-seq&award.rfa=encode &lab.title=bing+ren% c+ucsd&limit=all peak calling parameters the encode histone chip-seq pipeline is among the collection of encode uniform processing pipelines that can be found here: https://platform.dnanexus.com/projects/featured. the code is open-source, and available here: https://github.com/ encode-dcc/chip-seq-pipeline. atac-seq pipeline: uniform processing pipeline. atac-seq data were analyzed using a standardized software pipeline implemented by the encode data coordinating center (dcc) for the encode consortium to perform quality-control analysis and read alignment. atac-seq reads were trimmed with a custom adapter script and mapped to mm using bowtie version . . and samtools version . to eliminate pcr duplicates and mitochondrial reads. to center peaks on the tn cut site, the paired-end read ends were converted to single-ended read ends and the read end was shifted bp towards the center of the fragment to account for the tn insertion position by moving the read end towards the center of the fragment. macs version . . . was used for generating signal tracks and peak calling with the following parameters: -nomodel -shift -ext -pval e- -b -spmr -call-summits. to produce a set of "replicated" atac-seq peaks for analysis, the peak calling steps above were performed for each experiment on each pair of replicates independently as well as a pooled set of the two replicates. the intersectbed tool from the bedtools v . . suite was used to identify a set of replicated peaks which we define as the subset of peaks called in the pooled set, were also present in both of the replicate peak call sets. any additional code or scripts are available from authors upon request. a detailed list of encode chip-seq read depth and other standards can be found here: https://www.encodeproject.org/ chip-seq/histone/. the encode histone chip-seq pipeline is among the collection of encode uniform processing pipelines that can be found here: https://platform.dnanexus.com/projects/featured. the code is open-source, and available here: https://github.com/ encode-dcc/chip-seq-pipeline. atac-seq pipeline: uniform processing pipeline. atac-seq data were analyzed using a standardized software pipeline implemented by the encode data coordinating center (dcc) for the encode consortium to perform quality-control analysis and read alignment. atac-seq reads were trimmed with a custom adapter script and mapped to mm using bowtie version . . and samtools version . to eliminate pcr duplicates and mitochondrial reads. to center peaks on the tn cut site, the paired-end read ends were converted to single-ended read ends and the read end was shifted bp towards the center of the fragment to account for the tn insertion position by moving the read end towards the center of the fragment. macs version . . . was used for generating signal tracks and peak calling with the following parameters: -nomodel -shift -ext -pval e- -b -spmr -call-summits. to produce a set of "replicated" atac-seq peaks for analysis, the peak calling steps above were performed for each experiment on each pair of replicates independently as well as a pooled set of the two replicates. the intersectbed tool from the bedtools v . . suite was used to identify a set of replicated peaks which we define as the subset of peaks called in the pooled set, were also present in both of the replicate peak call sets. any additional code or scripts are available from authors upon request. large-scale quality analysis of published chip-seq data deeptools: a flexible platform for exploring deep-sequencing data a global reference for human genetic variation plink: a tool set for whole-genome association and population-based linkage analyses bedtools: a flexible suite of utilities for comparing genomic features great improves functional interpretation of cis-regulatory regions gencode: the reference human genome annotation for the encode project tfclass: an expandable hierarchical classification of human tfs dbd-taxonomically broad tf predictions: new content and functionality the gene ontology consortium. gene ontology: tool for the unification of biology limma powers differential expression analyses for rna-sequencing and microarray studies meme suite: tools for motif discovery and searching master tfs and mediator establish super-enhancers at key cell identity genes selective inhibition of tumor oncogenes by disruption of super-enhancers chromatin state signatures associated with tissue-specific gene expression and enhancer activity in the embryonic limb the biomart community portal: an innovative alternative to large, centralized data repositories the genotype-tissue expression (gtex) pilot analysis: multitissue gene regulation in humans genehancer: genome-wide integration of enhancers and target genes in genecards reconstruction of enhancer-target networks in samples of human primary cells, tissues and cell lines a predictive modeling approach for cell line-specific long-range regulatory interactions in vivo enhancer analysis of human conserved non-coding sequences the ucsc genome browser database: update ultrafast and memory-efficient alignment of short dna sequences to the human genome estimating enrichment of repetitive elements from high-throughput sequence data transcriptional landscape of repetitive elements in normal and cancer human cells the novel mouse mutant, chuzhoi, has disruption of ptk protein and exhibits defects in neural tube, heart and lung development and abnormal planar cell polarity in the ear chip-seq guidelines and practices of the encode and modencode consortia heavy and light roles: myosin in the morphogenesis of the heart analysis of neural crest-derived clones reveals novel aspects of facial development a shared role for sonic hedgehog signalling in patterning chondrichthyan gill arch appendages and tetrapod limbs a double take on bivalent promoters regulation of gene transcription by polycomb proteins disruption of a long-range cis-acting regulator for shh causes preaxial polydactyly see also supplementary table for results. b, violin plots show transgenic enhancer assay reproducibility (that is, the percentage of embryos with reproducible activity) for different rank classes of tested elements. only those enhancers that validated in the correct expected tissue are shown. reproducibility differences between rank classes were not statistically significant (mann-whitney u test). violin plots as in fig. b, sample sizes shown below each violin. c, same schema as in fig. e, but for heart (left) and limb (right) sample sizes were chosen to provide sufficient material for chip-seq of multiple histone modifications data exclusions no data points are excluded, except in rare cases of failed chip-seq libraries that did not meet encode quality criteria replication biological replicates were performed for each experiment, derived from independent embryo pools. quantitative analyses of reproducibility can be found in extended data figure this was not feasible given the scale of tissue dissections and chip-seq data production here. blinding not blinded. this was not feasible given the scale of tissue dissections and chip-seq data production here reporting for specific materials, systems and methods we require information from authors about some types of materials, experimental systems and methods used in many studies. here, indicate whether each material, system or method listed is relevant to your study. if you are not sure if a list item applies to your research, read the appropriate section before selecting a response. at the encode data portal biological sex is not visually obvious for these developmental stages and was not assessed. all biological replicates consisted of tissue from multiple embryos and are, therefore, expected to consist of roughly equal numbers of males and females. the number of embryos pooled for each replicate can be found in the publicly accessible metadata associated with each experiment at the encode data portal all animal work was reviewed and approved by the lawrence berkeley national laboratory animal welfare and research confirm that both raw and final processed data have been deposited in a public database such as geo. confirm that you have deposited or provided access to graph files (e.g. bed files) for the called peaks fig. | see next page for caption. extended data fig. | chip-seq data summary. a, summary of characteristic enrichment patterns for histone modifications surveyed here. modifications are generally categorized as narrow or broad depending on the typical breadth of enrichment. h k me is further distinguished from other broad marks because it shows very few regions of enrichment in non-repetitive sequence in primary tissues and cells . b, metagene plot illustrating the typical patterns of histone modification enrichment at active genes (here defined as rpkm > in all tissue-stages surveyed). chip-seq data plotted are from embryonic heart at e . . c, sequencing depth plotted for every library reported (n = , total, narrow, broad, h k me , input). encode 'usable' read depth standards (mapping quality scores (mapq) > , and after pcr duplicate removal) are indicated to the right. read depth standards changed part way through our study (increasing from m to m for narrow marks, m to m for broad marks, and m to m for input). all narrow mark libraries exceed the m minimal depth. broad mark libraries exceed the m minimal depth with only four exceptions, all of which exceed m. input libraries exceed the m minimal depth with only one exception, which exceeds . m. the read depth standard for h k me is > m mapped reads of any mapq (because h k me is enriched in repetitive sequence, extended data fig. ); all h k me libraries exceed this threshold. box plots: horizontal line, median; box, iqr; whiskers, most extreme value within ± . × iqr. d, mapping quality plotted for every library, measured as the fraction of reads with mapq > . reads with lower mapq scores (that is, non-uniquely mapping reads) were eliminated from downstream analysis. e, three metrics of library complexity are plotted (nrf, pbc , pbc ). see encode data standards for detailed descriptions and formulas. tables below each plot show the percentage of libraries that exceed the thresholds indicated. f, two measures of signal-tonoise ratio are plotted (nsc, rsc). again, detailed descriptions are available in the encode data standards descriptions. these metrics are not well calibrated for broad marks or input and thresholds apply only to narrow marks. fig. | chip-seq peak calling. a, schematic of chip-seq peak calling pipeline. more information can be found here: https://www. encodeproject.org/pipelines/. b, four peak summary statistics plotted for every tissue-stage. from top to bottom: ) number of peaks called (passing idr threshold); ) total coverage of those peaks; ) peak coverage as in ( ), but separated according to tissue; ) peak coverage as in ( ), but separated by stage. e . chip-seq experiments were performed with a modified protocol, and in some cases a different, more sensitive antibody was used (h k ac, h k me ). we suspect that is why e . sometimes appears as an outlier in terms of coverage. n = for all marks, expect for h k me and h k ac where n = . c, peak reproducibility as measured by the percentage of peaks called from the pooled data that were called independently in both individual replicates. d, peak reproducibility as measured by correlation of peak strengths (average fold enrichment over input) between biological replicates. fig. | atac-seq data summary. a, the number of usable read pairs per tissue-stage, after filtering for mapping quality and pcr duplicates. b, the number of replicated atac-seq peaks called per tissue-stage. c, genome coverage of replicated atac-seq peaks at each tissue-stage. d, correlation of atac-seq signal at replicated peaks between biological replicates (n = tissue-stages), as measured by pearson's correlation coefficient (left) or spearman's correlation coefficient (right). e, multidimensional scaling (mds) plot showing that the atac-seq signals at d-tacs tend to separate the samples first by tissue (indicated by coloured shapes) and then by stage (shade of colour within shapes). f, fraction of usable reads overlapping tss (measure of signalto-noise ratio) for the atac-seq data and other reference data. h k ac chip-seq data and input from our encode mouse tissues are shown to provide additional context for interpreting these numbers. peaks are clustered according to how many stages within forebrain they were present at (y-axis, left). the number of peaks in each cluster is indicated to the right. b, pearson's correlation coefficients between h k ac signal in peaks at stages e . -p in forebrain (top) or heart (bottom). c, the x-axis at the top indicates the number of tissues in which a given peak is present ( - ) . the top line plot shows tissue specificity as the percentage of total peaks for a given mark that were called in a given number of tissues. the middle heatmap shows stage specificity as the average fraction of stages within a tissue at which a peak is present. peaks that are more restricted to specific tissues are also more restricted to specific stages within those tissues. the bottom heatmap shows the locations of peaks relative to tsss by plotting the fraction of peaks that overlap an annotated gencode tss. peaks that are more consistent across tissues and across stages also tend to overlap a tss. extended data fig. | see next page for caption. fig. | fifteen-state chromhmm model. a, schematic of the chromhmm strategy applied in this study. b, heatmaps showing the maximum pearson's correlation of each state in the full model (y-axis) with its best matching state in each simpler model (x-axis). the median correlation of all states is shown in the plots on top of the heatmaps. c, classification of the k-means clustering of the emission probabilities from all the models. the optimal number of states was defined by the smallest value of k that showed a ratio equal to or higher than % (orange line) of the maximum clusters' separation (red line). ss, sum of squares. d, the emission probabilities for each chromatin mark in each state, as defined by chromhmm, for both replicates. e, spearman's correlation of emission probabilities from chromhmm models derived from two biological replicates, colour-coded by state (left) or by modification (right). f, comparison of the chromhmm model reported here with previously published chromhmm models. horizontal white bars indicate chromatin states identified in our study that did not have a clear counterpart in those studies. g, similarity between replicates from the same tissue-stage (n = ), from the same tissue any stage (n = ), or from any tissue any stage (n = , ). similarity measured as pairwise binary distance. two-sided mann-whitney test. h, enrichment of each mark in state (permissive) relative to state (no signal, genomic background). the chromhmm emission probability for h k me in state is > -fold higher than genomic background. i, enrichment of chromatin states relative to annotated genes. gene annotations were not considered during model training or genome segmentation. extended data fig. | comparing eight-mark chromhmm model with sixmark models. a, median correlations of the states in the full model (y-axis) with its best matching state in each simpler model (x-axis). the box indicates that a value close to the maximum is already reached with an -state model, and a value virtually equal to the maximum is obtained with a -state model. shaded area represents confidence intervals of the smoothing line obtained using stat_smooth() of ggplot (using default parameters, default method is loess). b, emission probabilities for each histone modification in each state, as defined by chromhmm, for both replicates ( -state model on top, and -state model at the bottom). c, overlap of regions in each of the eight-mark -state models with the regions classified by the -and -state models using only marks. major differences are indicated by asterisks and explained below. left, values for a set of chromhmm annotations made using chip-seq data pooled from both biological replicates. right, values for a more conservative set of chromhmm annotations including only those regions annotated in the same state independently in both biological replicates. n = tissue-stages per box. b, hierarchical relationships among strong enhancers (state no. ) in different tissues during development (clustering according to binary distance, ward's method). this analysis revealed a strong relationship between limb and facial tissue, also observed in clustering of specific histone modifications (extended data fig. a) , and further supporting the hypothesis of that facial structures and limbs have a common developmental origin , . c, enrichment of functional terms (x-axis, go biological processes, p values from great binomial test; fdr is benjamini-hochberg corrected q value) for the sets of strong enhancers (state no. ) across each tissue-stage (y-axis). sample sizes provided in supplementary table . the terms were hierarchically clustered (average linkage) according to pearson's correlation. a subset of the terms highly enriched in both limb and face is listed below the main heatmap. d, fraction of bases (x-axis) annotated in the indicated state consistently in up to seven stages sampled (y-axis). only tissues sampled at seven stages are shown here (n = ). e, sankey diagram showing the origin and fate of all genomic intervals classified as tss-distal strong enhancers (state no. ) in e . forebrain. the chromatin state classification of these regions was tracked across the available developmental stages, and the relative genomic coverage of each chromatin state at each transition is plotted. the thickness of each colour (y-axis) indicates the coverage of each state. fig. | chromatin state dynamics and signature of pcg repression at key regulators. a, the most enriched biological processes (go terms) for genes near putative liver enhancers (n = , ). the significantly enriched terms for each stage were identified and divided into deciles (based on statistical significance). the ten most enriched terms for each stage were then grouped together and hierarchically clustered. genes involved in either haematopoiesis or metabolic processes are colour-coded, as indicated. fig. | h k me heterochromatin. a, genome browser view showing a large region of chromosome (chr : , , - , , ; mm ). signal tracks (fold enrichment over input) are shown for all marks. h k me looks relatively flat, unlike the other marks. we find very few regions of strong h k me enrichment outside repetitive elements, consistent with previous reports of h k me distribution in primary tissues . b, the fraction of total sequencing reads that map to the reference genome (light green), and that map uniquely to the reference genome (mapq ≥ ; dark green). y-axis is the mean for all chip libraries reported here separated by mark (n = for all marks except for h k me and h k ac where n = ), and error bars represent s.d. control bars represent chip input libraries (no ip step). all marks and input have a high mapping rate (mean > %), but h k me has a markedly low rate of unique mapping, suggesting that this modification is specifically enriched in non-unique (that is, repetitive) genomic regions. c, stacked bar plots show the type of repetitive elements from which the non-uniquely mapping reads from b are likely to originate. h k me reads are highly enriched in satellite repeats relative to the input controls. d, genome browser view of chip-seq fold enrichment tracks at pchd (chr : , , - , , ; mm ) and zfp (chr : , , - , , ; mm ) shows significant h k me enrichment (state ) during development. the ′ utrs of zfp genes marked by h k me (reported previously ) are indicated by pink arrowheads. e, as in d, but showing chromatin states across these regions. extended data fig. | see next page for caption. fig. | properties of putative pcg target genes. a, tsss are binned together according to the number of tissue-stages in which they are marked by hc-p ( - , x-axis). for each bin, the fraction of tsss that are k + k (bivalent), k (repressed), k (active), or has no k or k in mouse es cells is plotted, as reported previously . b-d, similar schema to a, but plotting the fraction of tsss bound by ring b (prc component), ezh (prc component), or suz (prc component) in mouse es cells, as previously reported . e, comparison of hc-p regions as reported here and dmvs from ref. . left, metrics related to regions annotated as hc-p in each tissue-stage (x-axis). from top to bottom: number of hc-p regions in each tissue-stage; coverage of hc-p in each tissue-stage; fraction of hc-p regions that overlap a tss; fraction of hc-p regions that overlap a dmv. right, metrics related to regions annotated as dmvs in each tissue-stage (x-axis). from top to bottom: number of dmvs in each tissue-stage; coverage of dmvs in each tissue-stage; fraction of dmv regions that overlap a tss; fraction of dmv regions that overlap a hc-p region. f, schema as in a-d, but with axes switched. for each bin, the fraction of tsss that overlap a cgi is plotted on the x-axis. g-j, the following properties of cgis that overlapped hc-p tsss are plotted (left to right): cgi length; cpg number; cpg percentage; gc percentage. none of these properties is strongly correlated with the number of tissue-stages in which a given tss is marked by hc-p (x-axis), supporting the role of factors other than cgis in recruiting or excluding pcg at target promoters in a tissueand/or stage-restricted fashion , . green line shows loess smooth curve, span . and degree . fig. | see next page for caption. fig. | hc-p enrichment at disease-relevant tf genes. a, enrichment of 'molecular function' go terms in genes near repressed regions (state , hc-p) as measured by great binomial test with benjamini-hochberg correction. go terms on the y-axis are ordered by average enrichment p value across all tissue-stages. the top go terms are listed below, and are all related to tf function. number of regions for each tissue-stage shown in extended data fig. e. b, similar layout to fig. f . the fractions of six gene sets that show evidence of pcg repression are plotted: ) all protein-coding genes (black line); ) the subset of protein-coding genes that code for tfs (green line); ) the subset of protein-coding genes that code for tfs and underlie human mendelian diseases (dark blue line); ) the subset of protein-coding genes that code for tfs but do not underlie human mendelian diseases (light blue line); ) the subset of protein-coding genes that underlie human mendelian diseases; ) the subset of protein-coding genes that underlie human mendelian diseases but are not tfs. the origin of the tf super-sets is indicated on top of each subpanel, from left to right: the tfclass database, the dbd database, and genes associated with a go term containing the phrase 'tf'. c, p values from χ test of independence between pcg repression and mendelian phenotype involvement. different subsets of tf genes were used for this analysis, clockwise from top to bottom: all, all genes annotated as tf in the indicated database (tfclass or dbd); non-zf, genes annotated as tf but not as zinc finger, to ensure that the enrichment for disease genes is not coming only from this large family of tfs; go term development, genes with a go term containing 'development', to show that the enrichment for disease genes exists even amongst tfs that are all likely to have a role in development; ccds, genes with transcripts annotated by the consensus coding sequence (ccds) project, representing high-confidence gene annotations in both the mouse and human genomes. sample sizes shown over each bar. d, patterns of pcg repression at sox (chr : , , - , , ; mm ) , shh (chr : , , - , , ; mm ), pax (chr : , , - , , ; mm ) , and wnt / ihh (chr : , , - , , ; mm ). this small but well-characterized set of genes is known to cause human congenital phenotypes when expressed ectopically during development , . extended data fig. | see next page for caption. fig. | dynamic d-tacs. a, overlapping regions between our d-tac catalogue and the adult single-cell atac-seq atlas from ref. . b, fraction of tested d-tacs active in each tissue that exhibit positive reporter activity in the same tissue. this analysis was performed for three different sets of tissueaccessible d-tacs: all d-tacs, tss-distal d-tacs, and tss-distal d-tacs that overlap state (strong tss-distal enhancers). c, top, number of dynamic d-tacs per tissue. bottom, number of non-dynamic d-tacs per tissue. if a d-tac was called as significantly dynamic at any stage transition within it a tissue it was labelled as dynamic; otherwise it was labelled as non-dynamic. d, stacked bar plot shows the fraction of dynamic d-tacs in each tissue that are dynamic at one, two, three, four, five, or six stage transitions. e, the fraction of dynamic d-tacs within a tissue that undergo significant changes in accessibility at each stage transition. f, similar schema to fig. h but showing each chromatin state separately instead of as supersets. the heatmap shows the chromatin state changes that occur at dynamic d-tacs that gain accessibility at a given stage transition. enrichment is relative to the coverage of each state in total d-tac catalogue. g, as in f, but for d-tacs that lose accessibility at a given stage transition. extended data fig. | chromatin state-based enhancers. a, tissue-specific enrichments of vista enhancers for different chromatin states in e . heart, limb and forebrain. b, top, fraction of dynamic enhancers in each tissue (based on h k ac) that overlap d-tacs accessible in the matching tissue. bottom, fraction of dynamic enhancers in each tissue that overlap d-tacs that were also called as dynamic by atac-seq in the matching tissue. c, top, fraction of dynamic d-tacs in each tissue that overlap enhancers called by chromhmm (state ) in the matching tissue. bottom, fraction of dynamic d-tacs in each tissue that overlap dynamic enhancers called with h k ac in the matching tissue. each point represents one tissue-stage (n = ). d, top, dynamic enhancers that gain h k ac at a given stage transition n to n + . lines show the log fold change in atac-seq signal within d-tacs that overlap those dynamic enhancers at various stage transitions. dynamic enhancers that gain h k ac at a given stage transition tend to gain accessibility as measured by atac-seq either at or before the stage transition in question (sometimes preceding h k ac gain by as much as five stage transitions). mean and s.d., filled circles and vertical lines, respectively. bottom, dynamic enhancers that lose h k ac at a given stage transition n to n + . dynamic enhancers that lose h k ac at a given stage transition tend to lose accessibility as measured by atac-seq either at or after the stage transition in question (sometimes proceeding h k ac loss by as much as five stage transitions). the number of stage comparisons for each offset is: ± n = , ± n = , ± n = , ± n = , ± n = , ± n = . extended data fig. | enhancer target gene predictions. a, schematic of the approach to assign enhancers to target genes. b, genome browser view showing the ascl locus, as in fig. b, but showing chip-seq fold enrichment tracks instead of chromatin states. c, histogram of the number of enhancers per gene. d, for each replicate, the fraction of putative enhancers assigned to the same gene using data from the other available replicate. e, scatter plots showing reproducibility of enhancer-gene maps as measured by correlation between enhancer-gene pairs (left; n = , pairs), and the number of enhancers per gene (right; n = , genes). f, left, fraction of enhancer-gene associations that overlap interactions previously reported in ref. (n = / , ), genehancer (n = , / , ), jeme ( / , ), and ripple ( / , ) . the global level of overlap is low, perhaps in part owing to the different sample types used to predict these interactions. right, distribution of scores for the unique and overlapping pairs in genehancer, jeme and ripple, respectively. where predictions from those reports overlap with ours, their scores are significantly higher. p values calculated using twosided mann-whitney u test. g, as in fig. c , this plot shows that enhancer-gene interactions identified by this correlative approach are generally more likely to be supported by chromatin interaction data than associations derived by a nearest gene approach. to ensure that this was not due to an artefact of the chromatin capture technologies being unable to detect short-range interactions, we used different distance cutoffs ( kb, kb) to define the 'nearest' non-target gene. h, the bcl a locus (chr : , , - , , ; mm ) provides an interesting case in which genetic variation in enhancers regulating a pleiotropic mendelian disease gene may contribute to tissuerestricted phenotypes with lower penetrance. boxes outline enhancer clusters with active chromatin signatures in the cns (left) and liver (right), and which have validated activity in the cns and erythroid lineage, respectively , , (mouse embryonic liver is a site of erythropoiesis). the subpanels on either side of the main browser view show regions of the human genome that correspond to either the cns enhancer cluster (left, chr : , , - , , ; hg ) or liver enhancer cluster (right, chr : , , - , , ; hg ). thick black bars on top represent orthologues of the predicted bcl a enhancers, and thin green bars below represent gwas snps for the embl-ebi gwas catalogue. goo.gl/ gk p methodology replicates all chip-seq and atac-seq experiments were performed on two biological replicates of tissue. for each tissue-stage, we harvested tissues from multiple litters of embryos. tissue was pooled such that each tissue-stage had two biological replicates derived from different embryos. each replicate contains tissue pooled from several embryos (precise numbers are provided at encodedcc.org), but the embryos in each replicate are unique to that replicate. a detailed list of encode chip-seq read depth and other standards can be found here: https://www.encodeproject.org/ chip-seq/histone/. key: cord- -aeyz t c authors: runvik, haakan; medvedev, alexander; eriksson, robin; engblom, stefan title: initialization of a disease transmission model date: - - journal: nan doi: nan sha: doc_id: cord_uid: aeyz t c approaches to the calculation of the full state vector of a larger epidemiological model for the spread of covid- in sweden at the initial time instant from available data and with a simplified dynamical model are proposed and evaluated. the larger epidemiological model is based on a continuous markov chain and captures the demographic composition of and the transport flows between the counties of sweden. its intended use is to predict the outbreak development in temporal and spatial coordinates as well as across the demographic groups. it can also support evaluating and comparing of prospective intervention strategies in terms of e.g. lockdown in certain areas or isolation of specific age groups. the simplified model is a discrete time-invariant linear system that has cumulative infectious incidence, infected population, asymptomatic population, exposed population, and infectious pressure as the state variables. since the system matrix of the model depends on a number transition rates, structural properties of the model are investigated for suitable parameter ranges. it is concluded that the model becomes unobservable for some parameter values. two contrasting approaches to the initial state estimation are considered. one is a version of rauch-tung-striebel smoother and another is based on solving a batch nonlinear optimization problem. the benefits and shortcomings of the considered estimation techniques are analyzed and compared on synthetic data for several swedish counties. this paper is concerned with using publicly available epidemiological data for estimating suitable initial conditions for a large mechanistic general susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered (seir) model of the swedish covid- outbreak. the model incorporates spatial communication between the swedish municipalities, and also includes the swedish demographics, thought to be an important factor for the impact of covid- keeling and rohani ( ) . the viral contraction is driven by an infectious pressure as in widgren et al. ( ) ; engblom et al. ( ) . fig. provides an overview of the modeling approach and specifies the included compartments. the dynamics of the disease transmission are modeled by a discrete-state continuous-time markov chain. a continuous state variable, the environmental compartment, is included to model the infectious pressure. the markov chain model is implemented using the computational framework siminf in r, widgren et al. ( ) . to infer the model parameters, the aim is to utilize a bayesian approach as it allows the use of empirical measures as prior knowledge of the model parameters. the problem of estimating the state vector of a dynamical system backwards in time is known as smoothing. an optimal (minimal variance) fixed-interval smoother for a linear time-invariant model under additive gaussian noise assumption was derived in rauch et al. ( ) . since then, various methods have been devised for more general settings, including state-dependent gaussian noise (aravkin and burke ( ) ) and non-gaussian noise sources (wang et al. ( ) ). in the present work, these two complications occur combined, as the process noise is poisson-distributed rather than gaussian, and also dependent on the plant state. therefore, none of the approaches found in the literature is readily applicable here. instead, to obtain a plausible solution fast, empirical initialization algorithms are developed and compared to determine which one is most suitable in the final setup. to establish ground truth, synthetic data produced by models of increasing complexity are utilized in the performance evaluation. the rest of the paper is organized as follows. first, the model initialization problem is formulated and the properties of the linear time-invariant model that is used to calculate the initial condition are explored. then, three model-based approaches to solving the initialization problem are presented. finally, performance of the considered approaches is evaluated on synthetic data and conclusions are drawn. the inputs to the markov chain model are the parameters inferred from data and an initial chain state. the initial state consists of the epidemiological states in all compartments, including the hidden states, i.e., the exposed and asymptomatic carriers. to find a county-wise initialization, specific to the swedish covid- outbreak, the cumulative infected cases data reported by the swedish public health agency were employed folkhälsomyndigheten ( a) . in sweden, a full disease testing strategy was in effect until march , after which the testing was heavily restricted folkhälsomyndigheten ( b) . with full testing, we assume that the reported cases holds the true number of cumulative infected cases. an accepted standard in stochastic epidemiological modeling is to start simulations when the system has reached some (fairly large) threshold number allen ( ); giordano et al. ( ) . we used the threshold of a reported cases which sweden reached on march ; the data up until march can therefore be used for smoothing. the problem of estimating the infected, exposed, and asymptomatic populations at a given point in time (model initialization point) is therefore investigated, based on the data for cumulative incidence measured over a fixed time horizon. thus, the problem at hand constitutes a fixedinterval smoothing problem. the remaining compartments of the markov chain model do not influence the infected, exposed or asymptomatic populations and are therefore not included at present in the considered estimation problem. epidemiological mathematical models are typically designed in terms of populations and face difficulties in capturing situations, when only a few individuals are infected. this is logically the case in the beginning of an outbreak. besides, an epidemic is not readily recognized until the number of patients in the healthcare system becomes significant, thus making initial data scarce and unreliable. yet, since disease transmission is a dynamical process, a mathematical model of it has to be initialized so that historical data for the observed output agree well with the output produced by the model. as there were no deaths from the disease and very few individuals were in intensive care prior to the chosen point of initialization, the measurements that are used as input to the markov chain model cannot be used for the initialization of it. instead, reported county-wise cumulative incidence from the period of february th to march th are utilized. as contact tracing was discontinued after this period, incidence data from later times are significantly less reliable. since direct inversion of a continuous markov chain is not easily apprehended, the following linear time-invariant approximation is utilized for the initialization of the model for each county, whereas the model states are lumped over the considered age groups. the latter simplification is introduced since the cases were few in the beginning of the outbreak and patient age was not specified in the data. the model is derived as a normal approximation of the poisson distributed forward steps and formulated in statespace form as . is the discrete time corresponding to daily sampling and w k is the process noise sequence, whose properties will be clarified in section . . the state vector elements ] stand for the populations of the model compartments according to: the parameters of the model are specified below σ expected rate of transition from the exposed state, γ a expected rate of transition from asymptomatic state, γ i expected rate of transition from infected state, f fraction of transition from exposed reaching the infected state; the remaining fraction reaches the asymptomatic state, f fraction of transition from asymptomatic state reaching the infected state, the remaining fraction corresponds to the recovery from the disease (not included in ( )), β indirect transmission rate of the environmental infectious pressure, ρ infections pressure decay rate, θ a asymptomatic viral shedding rate, θ e exposed viral shedding rate. the parameters are positive and so are the elements of the state matrix f . therefore, model ( ) is also positive, i.e. the state vector belongs to the positive quadrant provided the initial condition x and w k , k = , , . . . do. the latter condition restricts the distribution of the process noise. to obtain the parameter values for model ( ), prior distributions for the bayesian parameter estimation algorithm of the markov chain model are utilized. the prior distributions are based on empirical data or published estimates. for parameter values from these distributions, the matrix f tends to have one eigenvalue with magnitude larger than one and is therefore unstable. this is expected, since exponential growth is observed during the early phase of a disease outbreak. since the cumulative incidence is the only measured signal, the output of the model is where h = [ ] , and v k is the measurement noise with zero mean and variance r k . the introduction of measurement noise is a matter of complying with the standard assumptions of kalman filtering and not an actual model property. model ( ), ( ) does not possess structural observability for the whole range the parameter values. some combinations of parameter values sampled from the prior distribution make the observability matrix lose rank. in order to analyze the process noise covariance, each error vector w k is separated into two terms: w k = w k + w k , where w k describes the error of approximating the stochasticity of the full markov chain model by the linear dynamics of ( ), and w k captures any other model uncertainty, including both differences between the models (e.g. the spread between counties) and differences between the complete model and the true outbreak dynamics. the process noise covariance matrix q k is split accordingly as q k = q k + q . the model uncertainty is assumed to be additive, independent of k, and uncorrelated between the components. therefore, q is diagonal and constant. the evaluation of the approximation error covariance q k is more challenging. when the markov chain model is sampled, the distributions of the elements of w k are given by sums of poisson processes that are shifted to have zero mean, and with variance that depend on the populations in the different compartments. the matrix q k is thus state-dependent and evaluated to ( ). to avoid confusion with pure time-varying case, the explicit notation is utilized let i d = [ , d] define a finite interval of discrete time instants corresponding to the measurements y k , k ∈ i d , and m ∈ i d be the point of initialization of the markov chain model. an estimatex m|d of x k | k=m defined by model ( ) is then sought from the output data y k , k ∈ i d . the problem at hand was approached using three different methods, which are presented next. the rauch-tung-striebel (rts) smoother (rauch et al. ( ) ) is a recursive method for solving fixed-interval smoothing problems. it is proven to be an optimal smoother, when the noise sources are gaussian and independent of the system states, and lacks theoretical justification in the present case. even stability properties of the rts smoother are not readily guaranteed. however, as the results of section demonstrate, it can nonetheless be used empirically. the stability concerns are not critical as the estimation is performed with a discrete lti model and on a finite time interval. the rts smoother is a two-pass algorithm consisting of a kalman filter that is run for the full interval in a forward pass, followed by a backwards pass, when the state estimates are smoothed. the kalman filter equations that are solved recursively from the initial conditionsx and p | arex wherex k|k− andx k|k are the a priori and a posteriori state estimates, p k|k− and p k|k are the a priori and a posteriori estimate covariances,ỹ k is the innovation, s k is the innovation covariance, and k k is the kalman gain. notice that the kalman filter requires knowledge of the covariance matrix q k for ≤ k ≤ d. in the present case, the covariance matrix is not available, since it depends on the unknown states of the system. therefore, the plant state is replaced by its estimate, and the covariance matrix q k is approximated aŝ the a priori and a posteriori state and covariance estimates at each time are are saved for the backwards pass. then the algorithm proceeds backwards from the last time point d. the smoothed estimatex k|d is calculated recursively via the equationŝ where c k = p k|k f p − k+ |k and p k|d is the smoothed estimate covariance. the problem of estimatingx m|d can be approached as an optimization problem and solved once, rather than recursively. the simplest setup is based on the linear relation between the measurement and the state (i.e. backcasting) and leads to the algebraic system where the properties of the noisew k will be elaborated upon in section . . the state estimation problem is then formulated asx where optimization problem ( ) can be solved using standard techniques for linear least squares. furthermore, positivity of the state estimation can be enforced by using constrained least squares. the basic method presented above can be potentially improved through weighting by taking into account the correlation of the error termsw k . to this end, let s q = {q k } d k= , and define the matrix Ω(s q ) by specifying its elements as then, Ω(s q ) is the covariance matrix of the error termsw k are thus neither uncorrelated nor homoscedastic, so the gauss-markov theorem does not apply to the ordinary least squares formulation in ( ). if the process noise covariance matrices were independent of the system states, the best linear unbiased estimator would be obtained by including the covariance in the formulation aŝ since the process noise is state-dependent in our case, the state estimation problem cannot be approached directly. the matrix Ω(s q ) will be instead estimated. for this purpose, introduce the setŜ q (x m ) of approximated process noise covariance matrices aŝ a simplified version of the estimation problem can then be expressed aŝ since Ω(Ŝ q (x m )) depends on x m , this problem is nonlinear. in this work, its solution is sought iteratively by applying algorithm . solve for the parametrizations of f that appear in this work, the observability matrix Φ that is utilized in solving the least squares problems of state estimation becomes numerically infeasible to calculate if m is too large. the reason for this is that f has eigenvalues that are significantly smaller than one in magnitude, so that repeated inversions result in very large elements in Φ. to avoid this problem, the number of elements that was included in the optimization formulations was limited. for parametrizations, where one eigenvalue of f is very close to zero, the solution was to remove the corresponding state through truncation, thus treating the state as identical zero. the approximationx k = f k−m x m in the nonlinear least squares formulation can also pose problems, when k is significantly smaller than m. for this reason, a simple regularization was implemented, wherex k is set to zero whenever any element of f k−m x m becomes negative. the three estimation algorithms introduced above were evaluated using two types of synthetic data. first, linear model ( ) was used to generate the data, with the same poisson-distributed state dependent noise sources as derived for the estimators. then, the data were generated from stochastic simulations of the markov chain model. in both cases, the models were simulated repeatedly over a time horizon of days (d = ), from identical initial conditions (distinct between the two cases) and with identical parameter values (identical between the two cases), that were randomly selected from the prior parameter distributions. the probability distributions of the state estimation errors for m = were estimated by fitting kernel distribution and compared to each other. the state estimation was performed with the three algorithms for realizations. the process noise covariance was calculated with the diagonal elements of q set to . , and r k = . . measurements for indices k < were neglected in the batch optimization approaches. the estimated distributions for all model states are shown in fig. . the rts smoother appears to perform the best, mostly through lower uncertainty in the infected population estimate. the main difference between the linear and nonlinear least squares formulations is the significantly higher uncertainty in the cumulative incidence estimation for the linear method. this makes sense as the linear method does not exploit the low uncertainty of the measurement of this state, that is encoded in the covariance model. in this case, realizations were generated and data from the three counties that were subject to spread of the disease in the highest number of realizations ( , and respectively) were analyzed. to capture the larger model discrepancy, the diagonal elements of q were set to and r k = . . as above, indices k < were neglected in the batch optimizations. the estimated estimation error distributions for the states i, e and a in the three counties are shown in fig. -fig. . similarly to the case considered in section . , the rts smoother is generally better at estimating the infected population. it is hard to draw conclusions apart from this from the plots, as the characteristics of the distributions vary between the counties. to investigate the effect of the initial estimation on the complete model, this model was simulated using estimated states as initial conditions. the estimated states from the three estimation methods for one realization of the simulation of the complete model were chosen. these are summarized in table . the complete model was simulated times from each of the three sets of initial conditions, for days. the probability distributions of the logarithm of the infected, exposed and asymptomatic populations, in the three counties listed in table , were then estimated using kernel distribution fitting. the results are depicted in fig. -fig. . the main conclusion that can be drawn from these results is that the variations between the considered estimation algorithms have limited effect on the states of the system in the end of the simulation, compared to the variations due the stochastic simulation. a greater variance in the states can be observed for the initial conditions generated by the rts smoother compared to the other, but no fig. . probability distributions of model states for stockholm county according to simulation from estimated initial conditions. general conclusion regarding the initialization methods can be drawn from this, as the results are based on a single estimation instance. three approaches to a fixed interval smoothing problem with the purpose of initialization of a larger epidemiological model have been compared; one based on the rauch-tung-striebel smoother and two batch optimization methods. the non-gaussian state-dependent noise in the model implies that standard approaches could not be used directly, instead covariance estimates were used in two of the methods. the results indicate that the smoother performs better than the other methods, despite the lack of theoretical justification of the method. simulations from estimated initial conditions indicate that the effect of minor estimation errors is limited compared to the variations inherit to the stochastic simulation of the markov chain model. this suggests that computational complexity, robustness and ease of implementation might be of greater importance than high accuracy, when the initialization algorithm is chosen. fig. . probability distributions of model states for vstra gtaland county according to simulation from estimated initial conditions. a primer on stochastic epidemic models: formulation, numerical simulation, and analysis smoothing dynamic systems with state-dependent covariance matrices bayesian epidemiological modeling over high-resolution network data ny fas kräver nya instatser mot covid modelling the covid- epidemic and implementation of population-wide interventions in italy modeling infectious diseases in humans and animals maximum likelihood estimates of linear dynamic systems maximum correntropy rauch-tung-striebel smoother for nonlinear and non-gaussian systems siminf: an r package for data-driven stochastic disease spread simulations spatio-temporal modelling of verotoxigenic e. coli o in cattle in sweden: exploring options for control key: cord- -i xg tpp authors: torres, camilo; verschoor, gerard title: re-imagining environmental governance: gold dredge mining vs territorial health in the colombian amazon date: - - journal: geoforum doi: . /j.geoforum. . . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: i xg tpp this article describes and analyses an encounter in the colombian amazon between indigenous practices and arrangements to manage their environment and the conservation policies of the state. indigenous peoples understand their world as populated by powerful human and nonhuman beings; for them, the moral duty of achieving happiness and abundance for all implies sustaining reciprocal and respectful relations with these beings (including the state). in contrast colombian environmental policy distinguishes between nature and culture, seeking to safeguard landscapes from human interference so that natural processes can unfold unhindered. in practice these partially connected, yet incommensurable worldviews make for a ‘perfect storm’ - opening opportunities for illegal mining. drawing on recent fieldwork among the andoke, an ethnic group well acquainted with extractivism in its different historical modalities and presently affronting the fallout of gold dredge mining we narrate how a parallel, non-state governance system makes it difficult for them to care for their land and entertain mutual and respectful relations with human and nonhuman beings (which we translate as ‘territorial health’). we conclude by arguing for the need to re-imagine environmental governance in ways that more closely engage with what we call pluriversal governance: a form of (environmental) governance that does ontological justice to those involved in the environmental conflict – including, crucially, indigenous people. to achieve just this type of 'sound' or 'good' environmental governance a variety of innovative governance arrangements have been suggested, including adaptive governance (dietz et al., ; folke et al., ) , polycentric governance (newig and fritsch, ; ostrom, a ostrom, , b or participatory and collaborative governance (ansell and gash, ) . in general, these governance varieties plea for the inclusion of a larger diversity of pieces of knowledge and perspectives (bäckstrand, ; blaikie, ; blaikie et al., ; gibson-graham, ) to secure greater feasibility and legitimacy of (government) action as well as to advance social equity and environmental justice. some of these governance innovations explicitly mention the need to include indigenous peoples (brondizio and le tourneau, ) and to integrate the different ways in which people value nature (baud et al., ) . these new (environmental) governance forms undoubtedly have their advantages. they are, for example, viable alternatives to neoliberal forms of governance supported by (supra)national environmental policy-making institutions and conservation ngos that have been much criticized for pushing market-based approaches as universal solutions to environmental problems (fletcher and büscher, ; mcafee, ; van hecken et al., ) . notwithstanding their usefulness, a shared characteristic of environmental governance processes (both neoliberal or otherwise) is that their definitions of problems and proposed solutions are deeply influenced by euro-american assumptions, paradigms and research traditions (leach et al., ) , and hardly (if at all) discuss ontology, i.e., the nature of the 'what' is governed (cf. van wezemael, ; briassoulis, ) . environmental governance, in the main, thus gravitates around the central concepts of 'nature' and 'environment' -concepts with a strong footing on euro-american ontology that are presumed to be universal. yet these concepts are far from universal and, as some commentators have shown (latour, ; stengers, ; viveiros de castro, ) , they operate on the basis of a 'multiculturalist' understanding of the world: the idea that there exists one single, power-laden reality ('nature') that can be perceived differently from a variety of culturally situated perspectivesthe euro-american generally being considered the most 'accurate' one because of the (scientific) method it applies to the study of reality. this is particularly problematic in cases such as the one described above where the main ontological premises of environmental governance (euro-american style) are not shared by the majority of on-theground actors.. indeed, in colombia as elsewhere environmental governance arrangements frequently do not resonate with the problem and solution framings of those who stand at the frontline of resource extraction (often indigenous peoples). in effect this represents an outright infringement on indigenous rights; that is, they are assaults of what descola ( ) calls a 'naturalist' ontology on 'animist' ones. indeed, for the andoke as well as for many other indigenous peoples in the americas and beyond environmental governance paradigms that operate on the basis of a multiculturalist, 'one-world-world' (law, ) are deeply troublesome: they mirror a profoundly colonial stance that, as a rule, pushes aside indigenous definitions of problems and proposed solutions -thus rendering invisible, and ultimately silencing, ontological difference (howitt and suchet-pearson, ; sousa santos, ) . by focusing on the ontologically-laden processes of environmental governance, our article contributes to what blaser and escobar ( ) see as an emerging, third-generation political ecology that focuses not only on epistemological, but above all on ontological issues. the disavowal of indigenous framings of problems and proposed (source acceded in th of april in: https://opiac.org.co/en-riesgo-la-autonomia-y-gobierno-propio-del-pueblo-indigena-andoque-con-zona-minera-indigena-en-eldepartameno-del-amazonas/). solutions in the region of the colombian amazon where we carried out our study has historically generated 'perfect storms' that offer opportunities for parallel governance institutions promoted by illegal, mostly non-indigenous actors to take hold. this has been the case over the last hundred years or so through large-scale rubber extraction (and concomitant genocide) based on indigenous slave labour (echeverri, ) , timber and fur trades bonanzas from the mid- s through the mid- s (guyot, ) , and the perhaps even more nefarious production of cocaine from the mid- s to the early s (gutierrez et al., ; thaler et al., ) overseen by paramilitary groups who at times used violence against local communities that did not want to engage in 'the business'. to redress situations of state-led environmental governance breakdown or grapple with illegal, often violencebased parallel governance forms in this article we argue that, in contexts involving indigenous peoples, managing complex environmental problems necessitates some form of what we call 'pluriversal governance' -a form of governance that does ontological justice to indigenous peoples' worldviews and different ways of thinking environmental problems. to make our argument, in the next section we first present the problem of mining in our study region, and how we went about gathering data to find the underlying sources of environmental governance breakdown. this is followed by section in which we describe state-led environmental governance arrangements and the reasons for their evident failure. section explores andoke understandings and management of their environment (which we gloss with the concept of 'territorial health') and the causes of it going awry with the relatively recent arrival of illegal gold dredge mining. in section we provide a glimpse of the workings of a parallel (though illegal) form of governance focused on dredge mining. we end with a concluding discussion in which we present the reasons for both indigenous and state-led environmental governance failure, and discuss the need for pluriversal governance -a form of governance that does ontological justice to indigenous peoples' way of understanding environmental problems. in the colombian amazon, illegal, small-scale mining has led to severe if not catastrophic social and ecological consequences. in , over . local operations affected . ha and polluted more than rivers (instituto sinchi, ) . a sizable part of these operations, , take place within the indigenous reserves or resguardos that have been created since colombia's new constitution of and which presently shelter the close to different ethnic groups living in the colombian amazon (idem). the main polluting agent is mercury, which is needed to separate gold from unwanted metals. mercury is handled with bare hands and re-used with home-made burners, exposing miners to toxic methyl-mercury gases which lead to respiratory infections and skin rashes. methylmercury finds its way into rivers after use and ends up in the food chain, accumulating in many varieties of fish and top-predators as catfish -the main source of protein of the local population. when consumed, methylmercury can lead to minamata disease (a neurological disorder). in our study region this is very worrying, with levels of methylmercury in human hair surpassing who thresholds in % of cases in (olivero-verbel et al., ) . dredging also modifies the riverbed, and transforms bluffs and riverbanks through the deposition of sediments which in turn affects terrestrial and amphibious animal species. because of these transformations (and the perceived dangers of mercury pollution) some indigenous people have stopped bathing, fishing, or washing clothes on the shores of the main rivers. miners prefer not to talk about these things, and instead boast about the earnings that allow them to access electronic gadgets, beer, and carnal pleasures. as we witnessed, in our area of study mining is coterminous with alcoholism and related diseases, spouse-battering, violent conflicts and fights, or the diving accidents that are part and parcel of this world of gold. women instead openly raise their concerns, and speculate extensively about declining fertility and the spontaneous abortions which seem to occur more frequently after the arrival of mining. they also point to the negative effects mining has on chagra (swidden) dynamics: now that their men work 'in the business' and have no time for agriculture women have difficulty providing enough food for their families -thus compromising food security. the ominous consequences of gold mining begs the question: how is this possible? what are the mechanisms at play behind the failure of environmental governance? to answer these questions we set out to collect data in the aduche resguardo (see fig. ). fieldwork there was carried out over six periods between the beginning of to the end of , with the first and second author coinciding in the field twice in . we carried out about interviews with local people, and recorded stories from gold merchants, indigenous people (both miners and non-miners), shamans, army officers and local shopkeepers. when not in the field, the first author kept regular mobile phone contact with some of the informants. apart from our semi-structured interviews we collected data on the flow of everyday life and experience by way of participant observation (fine, ) . we kept to the ethical guidelines of our home institutions, following standard procedures and practices, and always obtained consent from of our interviewees (whom we have anonymized for safety reasons). the data we use for this article were translated into english, taking care to keep as close as possible to the gossip, fears, jokes, anecdotes and other affects and emotions which we assume reproduced actors' concepts, livelihood practices, embodied moralities, as well as (in the case of andoke elders) their perceptions on the relations between human and non-human forest denizens. the colombian amazon is probably the best conserved area in the amazon basin. it counts for % of the national land area (roughly . km ). administratively, the colombian amazon is shared by six departments in turn divided in municipalities and corregimientos (nonmunicipalized areas -more on this below). the vast, continuous forests gather a large spectrum of visions and practices that shape different forms of state-led environmental governance, the largest one being the administrative figure of resguardos or indigenous reserves ( . % of the area). this is followed by forest reserves ( . %), national parks ( . %), areas substracted from former forest reserves for the purposes of colonization ( . %), and a host of other forms (gutierrez et al., ) . in practice different authorities are in charge of implementing the politico-administrative organization of the country. in national parks policies are implemented through the uaespnn (special administrative unit of the national parks system). in the resguardos aati's (associations of traditional indigenous authorities) are the formal public entities in charge of resource management. in protected areas outside of national parks two different environmental protection agencies are in charge of managing terrestrial resources: corpoamazonia in the departments of putumayo, caquetá and at its peak, in this part of the amazon rubber was extracted in more than slave camps scattered over more than , km of dense rainforest (an area roughly the size of england). uribe ( ) calculates that between , and , indigenous people were exploited, tortured and killed during the heyday of the rubber boom at the beginning of the th century. state-led environmental governance in the colombian amazon is of course not the haphazard outcome of state-indigenous peoples relations but rather the result of the ontologically inflected ways in which the state has historically framed the problems and solutions of the region. understanding governance failures thus needs to take into account that the amazon was, until very recently, seen as terra nullius awaiting colonization -"[a] land without men, for men who need land" (gonzález, : ) , as was the motto of the ministry of agriculture in the 's -a slogan translated into laws and decrees to legalize the exploitation of 'vacant land' as early as . these policies continue to this day through for example the zidres law of that propel large-scale land acquisition and legal land grabbing to promote agribusiness, mainly in the so called baldíos or public vacant lands on the andean foothills and adjacent amazonian plains (lugo, ) . as concerns indigenous population of the region, these were until very recently seen as coming with the exuberant amazonian ecosystemtheir affairs delegated to the discretionary powers of ecclesiastical missions, who in turn received huge amounts of land for their 'effort'. in fact, not until the s (and after huge pressure from national and international ethnic movements) did the colombian state stop treating amazonian ethnic groups as anachronistic, non-viable societies. by the s the colombian state underwent a complete change of heart as regards its stance towards the amazon. policies in support of the wholesale exploitation of natural resources were abruptly turned into conservation policies -even though it maintained its colonization policies in the andean foothills. the change was linked to an emerging, international 'sustainable development' discourse that gained prominence after the stockholm conference ( ), the united nation's first major conference on international environmental issues. this discourse was directly linked to narratives about a 'pristine' amazon as the 'lungs of the earth' -an image that had been carefully but actively crafted since von humboldt's expeditions in the early th century and epitomized by the works of eminent cultural ecologists (cf. meggers, ) . in these basically apolitical narratives, man was seen as the enemy of nature -an enemy that had to be kept at bay at all costs. as a result of this 'nature without people' discourse in the s huge areas of the colombian amazon were turned into national parks (some of them encompassing millions of hectares) and nature and forest reserves. to this day, and even though territorial autonomy has been granted to indigenous peoples in their resguardos, law makes it abundantly clear that this autonomy can only be exercised as long it is not contrary to the conservation vocation of the amazonian bioregion (an entity with formal rights since ). colombian state-led environmental governance is thus based on the idea that unique bioregions have ecological functions that should be conserved. this idea is strengthened by a further, euroamerican ontological assumption about the character of the bounded geographical space that should be conserved and which is best described as 'territory'. in the colombian constitution, 'territory' is defined in the politico-jurisdictional sense; that is, as a geographical space the defines and delimits the sovereignty of the nation. different types of territories exist; in the amazon these are the departments, the municipalities, and the corregimientos or non-municipalized areas. especially the latter category is important in explaining the failure of environmental governance. non-municipalized areas do not have the political-administrative status of municipalities because of their low population numbers. corregimientos lack a municipal council and are administrated by a magistrate appointed by the government of the department to which it belongs. paradoxically, according to the constitution, corregimientos do not exist: all territories must be part of a municipality. while this situation changed (on paper, at least) in this effectively means that between and nearly % of the colombian amazon found itself in a facto legal vacuum. since % of the corregimientos in the colombian amazon overlap with indigenous resguardos (duarte, ) this also means that a large proportion of lands governed by indigenous peoples were not formally recognized by the state and did thus not have the political-administrative power to exercise their territorial vision -a vision that, as we recount in the next section, differs sharply from that of state. state-led environmental governance is not the only governance form in the colombian amazon. as detailed above traditional indigenous authorities or aati's are in charge of managing natural resources within the resguardos -even if not formally recognized by the constitution until . given that dredging for gold occurs in a socioecological milieu for the most part inhabited by indigenous people, in this section we describe how andoke try to steer affairs on the basis of their understanding (however shifting and fluid) of the environment, and the reasons given by some of them to become involved in mining. to zoom in on the ontological precepts underlying indigenous environmental governance, in the next vignette we detail an episode in which the first author caught a glimpse of the concept we call 'territorial health' while falling ill. from the field notes: "tonight i am struck by a strong stomach ache. i consult the local in these co-management forms conflicts arise because e.g. national park authorities do not have a thorough understanding of the traditional territory or the shamanic concept of it (rodríguez et al., ) . in colombia no discrimination exists between small-and large-scale mining operations: all need a mining title or mining concession (law of ) as well as an environmental permit (decree of ). this effectively encourages illegality. an example of this was the titling, in the s, of the putumayo preserve (nearly million hectares) in favor of the caja de crédito agrario, industrial y minero (a state-owned bank). the bank purchased the land from the heirs of the peruvian amazon company, also known as the casa arana, which was notorious for its genocidal practices linked to rubber exploitation (echeverri, (footnote continued) martins, ; morcote-ríos et al., ; watling et al., ) demonstrating the amazon to be, to a large extent, of anthropogenic origin. these finding have had little bearing on policymakers' views. according to benavides and duarte ( ) the (short) bout of stomach ache threw some initial light on concepts of 'health' and 'environment' that were foreign to us. probing deeper in meetings with elders and shamans, walks in the forest, dances, food sharing, gold mining, and other spaces shared with the andoke during fieldwork, we slowly became aware of their more profound meaning -a meaning that was unfamiliar to us and that we argue can best be captured through the concept of 'territorial health' (henceforth th). at the basis of this notion lies the andoke's axiom that the reason for existence of all entities in the world (both human and nonhuman) is given by a 'law of origin' or yetara uai/ka'takadɨ pɨsei (estrada añokazi, ) . this law requires that all entities perform their different activities in accordance to what could be called an 'ecological calendar', and managing human-human and human-nonhuman relations well (in terms of harmony and reciprocity). good management of relations results in 'abundance' or monifue -a concept that can in turn best be translated by the notion of 'dignified life'. according to the andoke, abundance is not synonymous to material wealth, but to both material and spiritual wealth and expressed in the ability of the territory to provide food and care for all entities. 'abundance', in this sense, equals having all that is necessary to live well and in harmony with all forest and river denizens -including their spirit owners. for the andoke, abundance means the 'joy of living' (literally, the 'force of life' or toe ya' pόsοθ tu'si) -expressed as a form of collective happiness achieved through dancing, eating and generally being in the cheerful company of kin. for the andoke, abundance is closely connected to an understanding of territory as body (cf. echeverri, ) . territory, in this sense, is more than a geographical space that can be defined by its social, economic, or environmental characteristics; rather, it is a notion that hinges on the idea of territory as a rhizome dynamically mutating in time and space, where human and nonhuman entities, from the past and the present, from this and from other worlds become entangled in complex webs of (social) relations to organize and shape this 'territory'. as such, this 'body' has its own needs, appetites, desires, and so on. importantly, this body may become ill when these needs and desires are not fulfilled, or when an external entity comes to be part of this 'body' in an ill-suited way -in effect eating away at the body from the inside like a cancerous cell that expands and in time affects all organs if not removed in time. among the andoke, illness is conceived as a constant threat and manifests itself in the form of pain, indisposition, envy, hunger, madness, anger, conflicts, accidents, impulsive behaviour or weakening diseases. illness itself can be brought about by witchcraft performed by humans, (mal de gente) or by spirit owners of animals and fish (or other supranatural creatures). in the first case illness affects the individual; in the latter disease affects not only individual humans but can affect the behaviour of whole families, animal populations, or relations between humans and nonhumans. this is expressed in for example changing fish migrations or foraging patterns of game animals, altered growth cycles (and occurrence) of edible and medicinal plants, inconsistent behaviour of rivers, or shifting rainfall patterns (e.g. rain arriving late or not at all in crucial times of the ecological calendar). to remedy mal de gente, intermediation by shamans or abuelos (elderly people) able to identify the offender (and the behaviour that caused the offense) is called for. in cases where illness affects whole communities of humans or nonhumans complicated negotiations aimed to stop behaviours that are said to distort the health system ensue (e.g. the 'contaminated' fish eaten by the first author). however, the metaphor of the metastasizing, cancerous tissue alluded to above not fully captures the healing capacities of the territory/body. according to our andoke interlocutors, removal or extermination of the cause(s) of illness are not the only solution: rightful accommodation into the territory/body is also a possibility. for example, white people (once considered to be 'cancerous' cells through inquisition and the genocidal practices related to the rubber boom) may be assimilated and come to form part of the body in due time once certain practices are 'improved' (e.g. whites not anymore hunting or indiscriminately killing indigenous people -as used to be the case). in this sense, a sick body has the capacity to heal itself. importantly, the notion of th is not gendered; however, men and women are together responsible for the vitality of the territory, therefore, each gender carries out different tasks. thus, while men are most often in charge of cosmic relations, women take care of the complex dances and rituals that bring joy and strengthen harmony -two indispensable factors to secure the energy flows between humans and nonhumans which maintain fertility and thus the abundance of food and people (arango, ) . when these energy flows are interrupted, th breaks down. in our research area (the aduche reserve) gold dredge mining is widely considered to be a danger for th. according to our informants activities in the area started around / and increased shortly after the financial meltdown of when gold prices skyrocketed. dredge mining was introduced by entrepreneurs from outside the region, and increased rapidly. thus in february we counted dredges working a stretch of km between puerto santander and the mouth of the yarí river. by december of that year the number had increased to . in may we were told that dredges of different sizes were operating in this sector, and in december a total dredges combed the riverbed over a two-kilometre stretch of the aduche reserve. indigenous andoke are the largest part of the workforce on the dredges; considering andoke territorial visions, it is not surprising to find competing interpretations of the activity. the younger generation (especially the males working on dredges) would generally favour the activity -even if sometimes openly recognizing the moral dilemmas for the andoke, as well as for many ethnic groups of the amazon, the 'spirit owner' is a powerful, supra-human entity that owns and controls animals, or plants, or lakes, or rivers. between and early the numbers appear to have stabilized, but we expect numbers to again rise sharply with gold prices going through the ceiling as a result of covid- related global financial uncertainties. involved. for all people involved in 'the business' the most important driver is money. in , an average worker would make (depending on the time of year, the place, and workers' skills) between and usd in - continuous working hours. in this timespan workers would fetch between and g of clean gold. a young indigenous informant put it thus: "this job has given me a lot of money. it has given me the things that other jobs would never have given me [waving a cellular phone as a trophy]. the only downside is that my head sometimes hurts and also my eyes burn a little." in general, most adult women and men would be adamantly against mining. this sometimes leads to (open) inter-generational conflict -to the point that youths can be expelled from their parental maloka when involved in mining. elderly shamans or abuelos in turn put forth additional reasons against mining such as changing relations with water entities (as evident from the fish story in the vignette above), animals and forest spirits. some elders narrated that revengeful animal spirit owners would sent 'infected' game into the forest; consuming this meat would make one highly prone to drowning accidents. or, as an older abuelo told us, these same spirits would just decide to take it all back: likewise, we were told that the spirits owners of cassava and banana were annoyed, changing their flavours and availability. senior andoke also stated that the arrival of foreign diets (e.g. rice, candy, chips, canned food) that became accessible through mining offended spirit owners of animals and plants who felt their food offers were being turned down (despreciados) -a clear sign of miss-appreciation that was punished by the arrival of envy, pettiness, apathy, sloth or alcoholism. healing these situations, in turn, had become difficult as mining had eroded the rules of cosmic conduct, affecting the 'discipline of coca and tobacco' and weakening the very channels through which curative powers trave. as yanai -a well-known shaman of the people of the center -put it: "we shamans have been chosen and trained to run the world (manejar el mundo). we have inherited our tasks from our shamanic ancestors; it is us who must ensure that there is abundance, that there is happiness, that there is no war, that there are no illnesses. since all layers of the world are energetically interconnected we need to see to it that energy flows between the layers is not interrupted. this spiritual energy comes from our sacred places, and we need this energy to communicate between different layers! we the jaguars of the as yanai's and other elders' stories suggest, a 'perfect storm' induced by mining was in the making. the millennial task of caring for land and of ensuring territorial health was in peril. a time-honored moral economy was being disrupted by time-limited, changing state policies and a parallel form of governance focused on gold extraction. in the next section, we offer a cursory glimpse into the modus operandi of what could be called 'dredge governance'. in the second week of june we arrive (together with a university colleague and a few students) in araracuara with the biweekly, twin-engine dornier that connects bogotá and this part of the amazon. an army battalion of around soldiers is stationed next to tarmac airfield, and a few of them are in charge of inspecting the passengers (and the pilot). we know they are putting up a show: none of the soldiers would ever venture out of the heavily-protected garrison ( layers of sandbags) and airfield in fear of being hostigados (fired upon, that is) by farc-ep guerrilla. we also know that a host of different governance schemes coalesce in this beautiful place to legally protect it: a couple of indigenous resguardos, two departments, two different environmental protection agencies, the country's largest forest reserve, a phoney indigenous mining zone, a municipality, a non-municipalized area… we also know that this is a place where, for a variety of reasons (a weak presence of the state, ominous guerrilla activity, powerful local and extra-local mining interests -to name the most important) the law of the strongest rules. we are entering what the cia and international foreign affair ministries call a 'red zone'. after a -minute walk down the granite plateau that serves as both airstrip and army garrison we take a little barge to cross the mighty caquetá river. on the opposite shore puerto santander welcomes us. here we will buy errands, coordinate our fortnightly stay at the aduche resguardo, and confirm the return ticket to bogotá. walking towards the shop where all three things can be done at once we notice a number of new businesses that weren't there on our last fieldtrip. in one of thema billiards room -some men we do not recognize are playing and drinking beers. upon seeing us, one of them instinctively pulls out a mobile from his pocket and dials while keeping his eyes on us. his reaction intimidates us: it clear that he is monitoring the situation and reporting who knows what to who knows whom. we continue to the shop. the caller can still see us, but his mobile is back in his jeans and he now appears to play calmly, only sporadically watching our movements. the shop owner (whom we know) greets us, and invites us to some drinks while remarking in passing that he already knew we were on today's flight and need to buy groceries and gasoline to go to aduche -our destination. apart from the phone call, our welcoming to puerto santander has in the official minimum wage in colombia was usd. . - . troy ounces. in a troy ounce of gold averaged . usd. the maloka is a large, traditional dwelling. it is used for both domestic and ritual purposes. a salado or saltlick is an important breeding and feeding place for some animals, especially for tapirs and other ungulates. for the andoke saltlicks are sacred places that may change location when over-used. pettiness or mezquindad is a term widely used by the andoke to refer to situations in which money is treated as an individual good and not distributed generously and collectively -as local moral values centred around reciprocity dictate. many amazonian ethnic groups consider themselves to be part of the 'people of the center': andoke, uitoto, muinane, miraña, bora, yukuna, nonuya, yuri, passé, and other (smaller) groups -some of whom dwell in the interior of the amazon and live in voluntary isolation (franco garcia, ; londoño sulkin, ; pineda, ; seifart and echeverri, ; van der hammen, ) . these groups share a common linguistic origin, hierarchical structures of clearly defined lineages, as well as political views on the administration and management of their territories. according to archaeological evidence, the 'people of the center' have lived in this area of the amazon for more than . years (morcote-ríos et al., ). central intelligence agency. nothing out of the ordinary. we know the shopkeeper is involved in mining activities, has access to information about who comes and goes (he is the sole airplane ticket agent in the region) and sees to it that this information is spread 'to whom it may concern'. later in the afternoon we meet don nelson from aduche who will take us to the resguardo with his jon boat. he greets us and tells us that (indeed!) "everyone in the place already knows you're here and that you're professors and students, so no-one has made a fuzz about us going down the river". on a later occasion don sandro -shopkeeper in araracuara, links to farc-ep, undisputed local mining kingpin -told the first author that all movements by 'outsiders' were quickly reported to him and others by locals, and that within half a day most people in the region already knew who was where, doing what, and with what intentions. this 'networky' form of coordination is crucial to take timely 'precautions' and 'management measures'. in fact, actors involved in illegal activities spend a large amount of time putting in place reliable information systems and using chat services, and are willing to invest large amounts of money to make this possible (e.g. through the financing of a large telecommunications antenna in to significantly improve cellphone signal in remote areas). as we try to make clear above illegal gold mining and its consequences are not the automatic outcome of the failure of state-led and indigenous governance forms. the failures do however open a window for a diversity of individuals and organizations to exercise their agency and opportunistically make use of the circumstances -often in complicity with influential social networks that include regional and national politicians as well as representatives of (armed) illegal groups. this does not mean that illegal activities in these liminal spaces are easy or straightforward. let us again turn to don sandro, for example. don sandro arrived in the early s from florencia, the capital of the department of caquetá, but has been linked to political, economic and social activities in the region for over years. since he previously ran for mayor in the municipality of solano (department of caquetá), he can count on the support of an important national political party known to have (or have had) links with illegal activities of all sorts -some members having been convicted for this. now consolidated as an influential entrepreneur, don sandro knows the ins and outs of all illegal extraction activities past and present, and likes to boast that he has actively participated in several of them -from hunting endangered species to drug trafficking. don sandro has a wide business portfolio: he owns grocery stores and adult entertainment centers in larger cities, and imports food and other goods into the region either with the regular, weekly cargo flights from bogotá or by dinghy from florencia to puerto solano and from there with carriers and mules to araracuara. in addition, don sandro owns several mining dredges operating along the caquetá river, and has the support of the local population (his workforce). one evening, while killing time in front of his porch, he casually mentioned some of the 'problems of the trade'. he kept repeating: "it is easy to wake up dead here" or "at any moment i could be killed". for example, revealing his anxiety vis-à-vis indigenous peoples (whom he needs yet despises), he commented: the next morning the first author witnessed an incident that illustrates the dangers involved in 'the business'. showing a text message on his cellphone, don sandro exclaims: "look at this! they [farc-ep] are extorting me! they are asking me a million-and-a-half for this order [vats of mercury] from brazil!". the text message leaves no doubt: the money needs to be paid that same day -or else. after a while, he confides: "i am very tired of all this, everyone wants to take my money… my plan is to leave this godforsaken land because i am sure that this business will be short-lived and will soon stop being good for me… this bonanza is not going to bring us anything good, and this abundance of gold is going to be the downfall for all of us." after his 'errand' don sandro discloses that, paradoxically, he clandestinely provides food, drink and other necessities to another front of the same organization that extorts him… conflict and lawlessness seemed to be commonplace in 'dredge governance', and permeated all nodes of the chain we were allowed to observe. in fact, a simplistic way to explain the inability of state-led and indigenous governance forms to contain illegal mining is the capacity of this parallel governance form to instill fear (and hence compliance). living in fear of being "killed at any moment", as don sandro put it, was a tribulation many had to put up with. thus smugglers bringing in mercury from brazil awaited in anxiety whether or not those levying 'taxes' on 'their' part of the river (farc-ep, criminal organizations) would honor prior agreements; workers on dredges were scared of being accused of stealing a gram or two (which they often did) or passing information to outsiders; carroñeros never knew how to stay away of harm's way; prostitutes were terrified of males in a drinking bout soliciting their services. one could literally smell fear and death in these territories -all enshrouded in a code of silence. in aduchewhere money was to be had with such ease -the stakes were high indeed. a veritable concert of laws, decrees, and policies had miserably failed to make this a safer place. this article describes how (illegal) gold dredge mining in the colombian amazon ensues from a failure of environmental governance. how is this possible, we ask? to answer the question it is useful to think of environmental governance not as a unitary process but rather as multiplicity (briassoulis, ) ; that is, as a multitude of rivalling governance forms aiming to steer collective action. as we have seen above in our region of study three different but not unrelated modes of existence (latour, ) co-exist next to one another. all three modes are built on very particular ontological assumptions which in turn give rise to very specific, issue-oriented forms of governance. a first strand of governance arises from a naturalist, multiculturalist ontology focused on conservation; it is (mainly) performed by the institutions of the colombian state. a second form is based on an ontology of care, oriented to what we call 'territorial health', and enacted by indigenous people exclusively. a third one is centered on an ontology in which money and quick rewards are seen as the highest goods; this form is pushed by non-local entrepreneurs, and acted out by indigenous people who have turned their backs on the local moral economy. as we detailed above the first two governance forms fail dearly; the third triumphs. state-led environmental governance fails, we argue, for four reasons. the first is that colombian territorial ordering (and the governance forms it allows) is built on contradicting paradigms ('development' versus 'conservation') that draw their justification from totally different, euroamerican discourses in which man and nature are opposed entities. thus state-led environmental governance limps on the while the military can in principle access all information channeled through the antenna, illegal actors made sure their messages were sufficiently codified to hinder easy detection. carroñeros or 'vultures' are small rafts on which 'independent' workers select mercury-laden sediments often still containing unamalgamated fractions of gold discarded by larger vessels. carroñeros are a source of conflicts as they fight between them to access these sediments. thought that the amazon is terra nullius and should hence be developed by/for agribusiness and the thought that the amazon is a pristine wilderness that should be conserved. understandably, this creates disorientation among indigenous people -a confusion that often translates into distrust and a perceived lack of state legitimacy. a second reason has to do with the geographical, bounded notion of territory entertained by the colombian state, and which is at odds with indigenous, shamanic concepts of it. third, failure has to do with the politico-juridical status of non-municipalized areas (where most resguardos are found), and which creates a legal vacuum in % of the colombian amazon. finally, an important reason is that the colombian state is unable to stop the high levels of violence that are characteristic of its rural areas, and that have in fact increased in the post-conflict era. this is (partially) due to a weak presence of the state in the vast expanses of the amazon. indigenous governance on its part falters for a number of reasons very much related to the causes of state-led governance failure. the first one concerns the legal vacuum created by the constitutionally non-existent figure of corregimientos (which shelter the majority of amazonian indigenous resguardos), and this directly hinders indigenous authorities in the implementation of their territorial visions -visions of territory that contrast sharply with those of the state and prevent them from taking autonomous decisions concerning the well-being of their people. a second but significant explanation we offer for the demise of indigenous governance has to do with the ever-present threat of violence that can be exercised by groups involved in illegal mining. while we did not hear of assassinations of indigenous people opposing mining during fieldwork, it is no secret that that this is a real possibility. formal institutions, including the military, are currently incapable of guaranteeing the safety of indigenous 'activists' defending their territories against organizations that have put in place parallel governance structures that perform state functions and compete with the colombian state -to the point of sometimes displacing it. a third explanation we offer has to do with indigenous peoples' desire to obtain commodities of mass consumption. since the advent of telecommunications, dvd's and the like a few years ago, indigenous people in our study area have been exposed to a rich culture of consumerismeven when the advertised commodities are not available at all and even if few would have the means to acquire them. the ever-renewed desire created by the media is bolstered by the ostentatious usage of (expensive) gadgets such as iphones, smartwatches or expensive clothing by mining entrepreneurs, and makes indigenous people go to great lengths to achieve what they wish -even if knowingly jeopardizing territorial health. "capitalism", as french sociologist pierre bourdieu used to say, "works by seduction". it certainly does so in the colombian amazon. as is evident a certain overlap of reasons exists. so perhaps using large-scale terms such as 'state-led environmental governance' or 'indigenous governance' is profoundly inadequate because of the danger of reification i.e. that explanations for failure must inevitably be found in each dichotomous half -which we clearly cannot. yet to not use these large-scale terms would be to misrepresent important differences and underlying struggles such as, for example, the social mobilization of indigenous communities in the s and s that resulted in the consolidation of powerful and influential local, regional, and national ethnic organizations, the acceptance of indigenous thought as a source of political thought and, ultimately the recognition of indigenous rights in the constitution (gros, ) . so when we use such 'reductionist', large-scale terms we do so, following Østmo and law ( : ) , because it is analytically and politically important "to index asymmetrical patterns of significant difference between particular state and local environmentally relevant practices". thus we find it important to write that indigenous governance indexes a world populated by powerful human and nonhuman beings in which it is a moral duty to achieve happiness and abundance for all by sustaining reciprocal and respectful relations with these beings (including the state). and we find it equally expedient to state that state-led environmental governance points to arrangements that distinguish between nature and culture, seeking to safeguard landscapes from human interference so that natural processes can unfold unhindered. having said this, though, we still want to argue that state-led environmental governance is highly variable -and changing. it is, following mol ( ) , 'more than one, less than many' in that different versions of the environment also overlap in governance practices. importantly, state-indigenous relations have been imbricated in a centuries-long predicament; they are, speaking with strathern ( ) , 'partially connected': one is included in the other -but neither is reducible to the other (law, ) . a comparable argument applies to the (large-scale) term 'indigenous': indigenous practices are highly variable, and there is no such thing as an essential, unchanging 'indigenous culture'. in our specific case, and despite their relative geographical isolation, andoke ways of living are diverse and have changed historically with the arrival of money during earlier resource bonanzas, the introduction of boat engines, and the (relative) integration into market economies. likewise, the relation between andoke and (mostly) white and mestizo settlers is one of longterm reciprocal (albeit asymmetrical) entanglement, most speak spanish as a consequence of colonial history, and some youth would have difficulty in recognizing the practices or vocabularies of shamans. how to deal with failure is, from our perspective, the central element of environmental governance. since failure can, in our case, to a great extent be attributed to a clash of ontologies it follows that the challenge of designing successful environmental governance amounts to the question of how to craft ontological encounters well. we here plea for an ontological turn (holbraad and pedersen, ) in environmental governance practice; that is, the need to overcome the dualist epistemologies that separate humans (culture) from nature and then seek to achieve a kind of integration of humans in (pristine) nature. this means taking seriously indigenous ways of relating to their environment in the framing of environmental problems and solutions. there is, we believe, a dire need to put in place processes of what we would like to coin pluriversal governance: a form of governance that does ontological justice to those involved in environmental conflictincluding, crucially, indigenous peoples and their concepts. indeed, concepts originating from different (invisible, made absent, silenced) worlds could positively affect locally situated, environmental conflicts if admitted as fully-fledged members of environmental governance languages. proposing pluriversal governance begs the question whether different worlds or ontologies are commensurable or not. at first sight, state-led and indigenous governance forms seem to be incommensurable. from the outside, it looks as if they would be bumping heads, and in its latest report, global witness ( ) mentions that in colombia had the highest number of killings ( ) of environmental activists in the world. half of these activists were indigenous people. to provide an example: on the of february , dissident forces of farc-ep occupied the visitor centers of all but one of the colombian amazon's national parks. dissidents took all boats, engines and communication infrastructure from the centers, and national parks personnel was given h to leave the area -or else (personal communication, cahuinarí np warden). the'turn to ontology' in the social sciences is hotly debated. while a deeper treatment of this critique is beyond the scope of this article, controversies range from methodological concerns of how to conceive and describe radically different others (vigh and sausdal, ) , to philosophical anxieties of how to deal with the relativism entailed in shifting from 'multiculturalism' to the idea that many 'worlds' co-exist next to one another (palecek and risjord, ) , to worries about the (negative) political implications of the 'ontological turn' (graeber, ) -especially as this extends euroamerican scientific colonialism (hunt, ; todd, ; sundberg, ) . we partially agree with these critiques. any attempt at translation would seem to immediately fail as ontological assumptions and knowledge practices are just too different to be brought together. but from the inside the picture is different: as we already hinted, indigenous and non-indigenous worlds have been imbricated for centuries, yet the conditions under which each world is composed are incommensurable; they are, in effect, partially connected. commensurable, yet different. this, we argue, opens the door to dialogue. so how would pluriversal governance work in our case? first, by opening up the question over what is to count as the 'object of governance', and insisting on environmentally relevant difference in the context of asymmetrical entanglements between indigenous peoples and the (supra-) national state (Østmo and law, ) . second, by insisting that indigenous people are entitled to take their spirits and other nonhuman paraphernalia with them to governance negotiationsand not asking them politely to leave them on hooks in the cloakroom before entering the negotiation room. this amounts, at all times, to listen to different point of view and reflexively deal with the political task of anticipating, as far as 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network news : towards productive landscapes evidence for the identification of carabayo, the language of an uncontacted people of the colombian amazon, as belonging to the tikuna-yur?ĺ inguistic family democratizar la democracia. los caminos de la democracia participativa. fondo de cultura económica cosmopolitics ii partial connections decolonizing posthumanist geographies from frontier governance to governance frontier: the political geography of brazil's amazon transition an indigenous feminist's take on the ontological turn: 'ontology 'is just another word for colonialism caucho, explotación y guerra: configuración de las fronteras nacionales y expoliación indígena en amazonía towards a power-sensitive and socially-informed analysis of payments for ecosystem services (pes): addressing the gaps in the current debate the contribution of assemblage theory and minor politics for democratic network governance from essence back to existence: anthropology beyond the ontological turn cosmological deixis and amerindian perspectivism historical ecology, human niche construction and landscape in pre-columbian amazonia: a case study of the geoglyph builders of acre the opinions contained in this document are the sole responsibility of the authors. we want to thank all those entities (human and nonhuman) who watch over the territorial health of the amazon. these entities are immersed in socio-environmental conflicts related to gold mining that affect them and their territories. supplementary data to this article can be found online at https:// doi.org/ . /j.geoforum. . . . key: cord- -me n k f authors: majiya, h.; aliyu-paiko, m.; balogu, v. t.; musa, d. a.; salihu, i. m.; kawu, a. a.; bashir, i. y.; sani, a. r.; baba, j.; muhammad, a. t.; jibril, f. l.; bala, e.; obaje, n. g.; aliyu, y. b.; muhammad, r. g.; mohammed, h.; gimba, u. n.; uthman, a.; liman, h. m.; alhaji, s. a.; james, j. k.; makusidi, m. m.; isah, m. d.; abdullahi, i.; ndagi, u.; waziri, b.; bisallah, c. i.; dadi-mamud, n. j.; ibrahim, k.; adamu, a. k. title: seroprevalence of covid- in niger state date: - - journal: nan doi: . / . . . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: me n k f coronavirus disease (covid- ) pandemic is ongoing, and to know how far the virus has spread in niger state, nigeria, a pilot study was carried out to determine the covid- seroprevalence, patterns, dynamics, and risk factors in the state. a cross sectional study design and clustered-stratified-random sampling strategy were used. covid- igg and igm rapid test kits (colloidal gold immunochromatography lateral flow system) were used to determine the presence or absence of antibodies to sars-cov- in the blood of sampled participants across niger state as from th june to th june . the test kits were validated using the blood samples of some of the ncdc confirmed positive and negative covid- cases in the state. covid- igg and igm test results were entered into the epiinfo questionnaire administered simultaneously with each test. epiinfo was then used for both the descriptive and inferential statistical analyses of the data generated. the seroprevalence of covid- in niger state was found to be . % and . % for the positive igg and igm respectively. seroprevalence among age groups, gender and by occupation varied widely. a seroprevalence of . % was recorded among health care workers in niger state. among age groups, covid- seroprevalence was found to be in order of - years ( . %) > - years ( . %) > - years ( %) > years and above ( %) > - years ( . %) > - years ( . %) > years and below ( . %). a seroprevalence of . % was recorded for males and . % for females in the state. covid- asymptomatic rate in the state was found to be . %. the risk analyses showed that the chances of infection are almost the same for both urban and rural dwellers in the state. however, health care workers and those that have had contact with person (s) that travelled out of nigeria in the last six ( ) months are twice ( times) at risk of being infected with the virus. more than half ( . %) of the participants in this study did not practice social distancing at any time since the pandemic started. discussions about knowledge, practice and attitude of the participants are included. the observed niger state covid- seroprevalence means that the herd immunity for covid- is yet to be achieved and the population is still susceptible for more infection and transmission of the virus. if the prevalence stays as reported here, the population will definitely need covid- vaccines when they become available. niger state should fully enforce the use of face/nose masks and observation of social/physical distancing in gatherings including religious gatherings in order to stop or slow the spread of the virus. and inferential statistical analyses of the data generated. the seroprevalence of covid- in niger state was found to be . % and . % for the positive igg and igm respectively. seroprevalence among age groups, gender and by occupation varied widely. a seroprevalence of . % was recorded among health care workers in niger state. among age groups, covid- seroprevalence was found to be in order of - years ( . %) > - years ( . %) > - years ( %) > years and above ( %) > - years ( . %) > - years ( . %) > years and below ( . %). a seroprevalence of . % was recorded for males and . % for females in the state. covid- asymptomatic rate in the state was found to be . %. the risk analyses showed that the chances of infection are almost the same for both urban and rural dwellers in the state. however, health care workers and those that have had contact with person (s) that travelled out of nigeria in the last six ( ) months are twice ( times) at risk of being infected with the virus. more than half ( . %) of the participants in this study did not practice social distancing at any time since the pandemic started. discussions about knowledge, practice and attitude of the participants are included. the observed niger state covid- seroprevalence means that the herd immunity for covid- is yet to be achieved and the population is still susceptible for more infection and transmission of the virus. if the prevalence stays as reported here, the population will definitely need covid- vaccines when they become available. niger state should fully enforce the use of face/nose masks and observation of social/physical distancing in gatherings including religious gatherings in order to stop or slow the spread of the virus. pandemic is caused by a novel coronavirus-sars-cov- that is believed to have crossed from bats to humans for the first time (rothan & byrareddy, ; lai et al., ; shereen et al., ) . covid- is an infectious disease of respiratory system of humans and animals and the virus can be transmitted through facial openings which include mouth, nostrils and maybe eyes (lai et al., ; shereen et al., ; wu et al., ) . the first case of covid- in niger state, nigeria was announced by the ncdc on th april ; this was after about six ( ) weeks when the first confirmed case (index case) of covid- in nigeria was announced on th february when a foreigner in lagos tested positive . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a perpetuity. is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . for sars-cov- . since then, many cases have been confirmed for the state and it is still increasing. coronavirus disease , like most of infectious diseases, the isolation of the aetiologic agent-sars cov- through tissue/cell plate culture technique would have been the gold standard method for the diagnostic test. however, plate culturing is usually laborious, time consuming, complex and costly and therefore impossible to use especially for epidemiological studies where large samples may be involved. also, even though reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (rt-pcr) have been predominantly used to test for the agent of covid- world over including nigeria (who, a; b) , it is laborious, time consuming, costly and complex. infection by many pathogens including viruses do elicit production of antibodies in humans and animals even if no symptoms manifested. the detection of the antibodies in the whole blood/serum/plasma of humans and animals have been used as preliminary diagnoses of infectious diseases (who, a (who, , b c; xiao et al., ) . also because of the relative ease of use and simplicity of the antigen-antibodies test kits compared to cell/tissue culture and pcr, they are mostly used in the epidemiological studies to determine infectious diseases prevalence, patterns, dynamics, and risk factors (who, a (who, , b xiao et al., ) . antigen-antibody based kits unlike other methods can detect previous exposure to the infectious agents (who, a; b; c; xiao et al., )-this information is very important especially in covid- with assumed high rate of asymptomatic cases in order to see how far the virus has spread and infection patterns, effectiveness of social distancing measures enforced and determination of herd immunity to the disease to know the extent of vaccination to do when covid- vaccines become available. this study was aimed at determining the covid- prevalence, patterns and dynamics and risk factors for contracting the disease in niger state. . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a perpetuity. is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . igg/igm rapid test (whole blood/ serum/plasma) is a rapid chromatographic immunoassay for the qualitative detection of igg and igm antibodies to covid- in human whole blood, serum or plasma as an aid in the diagnosis of primary and secondary covid- infections. sterile lancets, cotton wool, face masks, hand gloves, methylated spirit, dustbin, dustbin bags, material transportation bags were all locally purchased. also, three ( ) laptops with epiinfo . . . software installed were used: one laptop for each of the three ( ) geopolitical zones of niger state, nigeria. ethical approval (sta/ /vol/ ) for this study was given by the research ethics committee of the niger sate ministry of health. consents were also sought from each of the participants prior to tests and questionnaire administration, and only those individuals that have given full consent were used in the study. parents/guardians were responsible for the consents of their wards that participated in the study and were under of age. the study area was niger state and its residents were the study population ( figure ). niger state ( figure ) is one of the federating geopolitical states in nigeria. it has minna as its capital. other major towns are bida, kontagora, suleja, new bussa, mokwa, lapai, and agaie. is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint a cross sectional study design and clustered-stratified-random sampling strategy were used. the three ( ) geopolitical zones (zone a, zone b and zone c) in the state were covered fairly ( figure ). places of residents (classified as urban and rural), gender, occupation, age group/range, were the stratifications that were applied in those places chosen in each of the zones (figure ). with full consent to participate in the study, samples were taken randomly from participants for covid- igg and igm rapid tests and questionnaire (created by epiinfo . . . ) administered simultaneously. is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint the covid- igg and igm rapid test kits were validated with the blood samples of those individuals that were confirmed by the ncdc through pcr as positive and or negative for covid- igg/igm rapid tests were carried out using the whole blood of the participants. it is qualitative membrane-based immunoassay for the detection of covid antibodies in whole blood. the tests were carried out and interpreted according to the kits manufacturer's instruction. the test result of each participant was recorded and entered into the epiinfo questionnaire administered for that particular participant. in order to be able to determine the covid- prevalence, patterns and dynamics and risk factors for contracting the disease in niger state, a questionnaire (see supplementary ) was designed and created using epiinfo . . . . the questionnaire was designed to ask some . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a perpetuity. is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint questions with categorical responses (yes or no) and also to accommodate the test results of the participants; this was to be able to run x table statistics including calculating infection risk ratios for many scenarios. covid- igg and igm test results were entered into the epiinfo questionnaire administered simultaneously with each test for a participant. epiinfo was used for both the descriptive and inferential statistical analyses of the data generated. bar charts were plotted in origin pro b ( . ). a cross sectional study design and clustered-stratified-random sampling method were used to choose participants across niger state for this study that was aimed at determining the covid- seroprevalence, patterns, dynamics, and risk factors in the state. although the sample size is small, the sampling strategy employed made it a true representative of the state. the demographic characteristics of the participants in this study are shown in figure considering other demographic characteristics of the participants, male and female participants in this study stood at . % and . % respectively (figure b) . the gender of the participants also reflected the ratio of male to female in nigeria which is . % male to . % female currently (figure b) (countrymeters, ) . the percentage of participants that were urban dwellers in this study was . % while for the rural dwellers, it was . % ( is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint rural areas (worldmeters, ) . also, the participants in this study were categorised either as health care worker ( . %) or non-health care worker ( . %) (figure d) . among health care participants, males constituted . % while . % were females (figure e) . . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a perpetuity. is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint covid- pandemic is ongoing and at the moment, no available vaccines for the disease. for now, the reliable ways of preventing the transmission of the sars-cov- (the causative agent of covid- pandemic) among human populations are social/physical distancing measures and good sanitation and hygiene practices. adherence to these covid- preventive measures should be impacted by the knowledge and beliefs of people about the disease since the measures involve some behavioural changes and practice. people can only believe what they know (aware of) and can practice when they believe. in order to assess the knowledge, attitude and practice of the participants with regards to covid- in niger state, the participants were asked whether they know and believed that the disease is in the state. they were also asked about their adherence to the social distancing and face and hand hygiene. overwhelming majority of the participants ( . %) were aware and know about covid- pandemic (figure a) . however, only . % of the participants believed that the disease is in niger state while . % did not believe (figure b) . more than half ( . %) of the participants in this study did not practice social distancing (figure c) at any time since the pandemic started even as the lockdown was once enforced in the state. majority ( . ) of the participants practiced hand and face hygiene (figure d) . . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a perpetuity. is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint physical distancing and other required covid- control measures may not be observed or enforced (majiya, ) . the second reason is the prevalence of disbeliefs, myths and conspiracy theories. many people did not believe in the existence of covid- (figure b) and especially about the highly contagious nature of the disease. this may be the chief reason why many people did not care to observe social/physical distancing (figure c) even when not enforced on them at the atms, markets, religious gatherings, motor parks, shops, supermarkets etc. also, myths and conspiracy theories such as covid- does not affect black people, that high environmental temperature and weather will kill off the virus, or that covid- is for rich people and elites are some of the reasons why people are slow in accepting the enormity of the pandemic and therefore usually takes observance of social and physical distancing lightly (majiya, ) . thirdly, no efficient and robust housing and biometric data management systems where everyone is accounted for, especially for the purposes of employment, health, security and social welfare. if these are available, foods and other goods purchased online can be sent to houses with ease. in addition, utilities such as power, water, internet etc, are in most cases not provided or grossly inadequately supplied. it is difficult for people to stay back at home and observe social/physical distancing in such situations (majiya, ) . the first confirmed case (index case) of covid- in nigeria was announced on th february when a foreigner in lagos tested positive for sars-cov- . soon after that, many people including the contacts of the index case and those that came back into the country and their contacts tested positive for the virus. although overseas travel prior to the border closures and lockdowns in nigeria has been associated with the increased chance/risk of contracting covid- , this might have changed overtime to more of community transmission of the virus. participants in this study were asked whether they travelled out or have had contact with . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a perpetuity. is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint someone that travelled out of nigeria since when the pandemic started (last months). also, the participants were asked whether they have had flu-like experience in the last months since when the covid- index case was announced in nigeria; this can help deduce the rate of covid- asymptomatic rate in niger state. vast majority ( . %) of the participants did not travel out of nigeria since the beginning of the year when the pandemic started (figure a). only very few ( . %) of the participants did travel out of nigeria in the last months and have returned (figure a) . however, more ( . %) of the participants have had contact with someone that travelled out of the country in the last months (figure is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint system) were used to determine the presence or absence of antibodies to sars-cov- in the blood of sampled participants across the niger state as from th june to th june . the test kits were validated using the blood samples of some of the ncdc confirmed positive and negative covid- cases in the state. all the ten ( ) confirmed ncdc positive cases sampled tested positive for the igg for sars-cov- while all the five ( ) confirmed ncdc negative individuals (that have never tested positive before) tested negative for the igg and is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . igm for the sars-cov- . this means that % sensitivity and specificity were observed for the test kits used in the study. the seroprevalence of covid- in niger state was found to be . % and . % for the positive igg and igm respectively as at when the sampling and tests were carried out ( the number of participants that did not experienced flu-like symptoms in the last months and have tested positive for sars-cov- igg amounted to the covid- complete asymptomatic rate in niger state (figure b) . the covid- asymptomatic rate in the state was found to be . % (figure b) . it has been reported that majority of infected people sars-cov- (about - %) are usually asymptomatic (day, ; nishiura et al; . is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint covid- seroprevalence among age groups, gender and by occupation varied widely ( figure ). among age groups, the covid- seroprevalence was found to be in order of - years ( . %) > - years ( . %) > - years ( %) > years and above ( %) > - years ( . %) > - years ( . %) > years and below ( . %) (figure a) . a seroprevalence of . % was recorded for males and . % for females in the state (figure b). the seroprevalence among the age groups and gender correlated with the most mobile/active of the age groups and gender in our society. age groups - years, - years and - years are the most mobile of the age groups while men are more mobile than the women and therefore can contract the virus easily. generally, around the world, the case fatality of covid- varied widely ( - %) with more cases and fatalities observed in males compared to females (baud et al., ) . seroprevalence of . % was recorded for health care workers in niger state (figure c) . among the non-health care workers in the state, the seroprevalence recorded was . % (figure c) . it is expected for the health care workers to have higher covid- prevalence compared to the non-health care workers because they are the frontline workers responsible for the diagnosis, treatment, and management of patients is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint including symptomatic and asymptomatic covid- patients. covid- seroprevalence among the urban dwellers in the state stood at . % while for the rural dwellers, it was . % (figure d) . the same covid- seroprevalence (about %) was recorded among the overseas returnees and those that did not travel (figure e) . however, a higher covid- seroprevalence ( . %) was recorded for those that had contact with the overseas returnees compared to those that did not have contact with the returnees ( . %) (figure f) . . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a perpetuity. is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . in order to determine the risk factors of covid- and also the effectiveness of covid- preventive measures enforced in the state, x table statistics was used to calculate odd and risk ratios for many scenarios (table ) . when gender of the participants and positive covid- igg results were cross tabulated, the risk ratio recorded for female participants was . (table ). this means that being a female is a protective factor against the infection of sars-cov- in niger state. this also correlated with the covid- seroprevalence recorded among males and females participants (figure b) . the less risk of infection by the females in this study maybe due to the physical attributes such as the less mobility and activity of the females compared to that of males in our society. the risk analyses showed that the chances of infection are almost the same for both urban and rural dwellers in the state even though covid- seroprevalence among urban dwellers was a little higher than that of rural dwellers (table and is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint health care workers and those that had contact with person (s) that travelled out of nigeria in the last six ( ) months are twice ( times) at risk of being infected with the virus (table ) . however, the risk analyses showed that returning from the overseas did not conferred a protection or posed any increased risk of contracting the virus (table ) . world over, health care workers are the frontline workers for the diagnosis, treatment, and management of covid- patients. these enormous essential tasks for controlling the covid- pandemic coupled with the inadequate or lack of ppe in some instances and high asymptomatic rate of covid- among people put the health care workers at greater risk of contracting and transmitting the disease. is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint are almost the same for both urban and rural dwellers in the state. however, health care workers and those that had contact with person (s) that travelled out of nigeria in the last six ( ) months are twice ( times) at risk of being infected with the virus. more than half ( . %) of the participants in this study did not practiced social distancing at any time since the pandemic started. the observed niger state covid- seroprevalence means that herd immunity for the covid- is yet to be achieved and the population is still susceptible for more infection and transmission of the virus. although niger state is out of the enforced lockdown, the covid- cases keep increasing because the population is still susceptible for more infection and transmission of sars-cov- . this study shows that the virus is already here, and we must find ways of living with it such that it caused no or minimal human and socioeconomic losses in niger state and nigeria as a whole. since this study recorded high covid- asymptomatic rate in the state as well as observed mild symptomatic cases of covid- in the communities, isolation and quarantine centers with no fatality, going back to the lockdown should never again be entertained. however, the state should fully enforce the use of face/nose masks and observation of social/physical distancing in gatherings including socioeconomic and religious gatherings in order to stop or slow the spread of the virus. ppes should be made adequately available for all the health care workers in the state. if the prevalence stays as reported in this study, the population will need covid- vaccines when they become available. the sample size used in this pilot study is small although very representative of the state due to the sampling strategy employed. the covid- rapid tests kits that are suitable for epidemiological studies are highly costly. more covid- seroprevalence surveys that can have larger sample size are required and monthly surveys for the next months to determine the rate of infection among the state residents is also needed. validated covid- rapid test . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a perpetuity. is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in (which was not certified by peer review) preprint the copyright holder for this this version posted august , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint real estimates of mortality following covid- infection. the lancet infectious diseases nigeria population ( ) live -countrymeters covid- : identifying and isolating asymptomatic people helped eliminate virus in italian village severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (sars-cov- ) and corona virus disease- (covid- ): the epidemic and the challenges some control measures may lead to more transmissions estimation of the asymptomatic ratio of novel coronavirus infections (covid- ). medrxiv the epidemiology and pathogenesis of coronavirus disease (covid- ) outbreak covid- infection: origin, transmission, and characteristics of human coronaviruses the covid- epidemic laboratory testing for coronavirus disease (covid- ) in suspected human cases: interim guidance laboratory testing for coronavirus disease ( covid- ) in suspected human cases: interim guidance advice on the use of point-of-care immunodiagnostic tests for covid- : scientific brief nigeria population ( ) -worldometer the outbreak of covid- : an overview evolving status of the novel coronavirus infection: proposal of conventional serologic assays for disease diagnosis and infection monitoring this work was funded by the ibrahim badamasi babangida university, lapai, niger state, nigeria. the research team would like to thank the niger state ministry of health for their support throughout the study. names, latitude, and longitude of the of the sampling and testing points key: cord- -xlz hm authors: koh, vanessa; lim, al; tan, jill j. title: the singaporean state and community care in the time of corona date: - - journal: city soc (wash) doi: . /ciso. sha: doc_id: cord_uid: xlz hm nan in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, various health experts praised singapore's response to the virus. on february , , the straits times-singapore's national newspaper-reported that four epidemiologists at harvard university had praised singapore as "a gold standard of nearperfect detection." less than a month later, minister for foreign affairs vivian balakrishnan noted in an interview that this pandemic is "an acid test of every single country's quality of healthcare, standard of governance, and social capital… if any one of these tripods is weak, it will be exposed quite unmercifully." he would later be proven correct, but not in the way he likely intended. by early april, singapore saw a huge surge in covid- cases, as many migrant workers who have built the city-state's infrastructure tested positive. the prime minister subsequently announced the imposition of a "circuit-breaker" (simply put, a lockdown), and the media narrative quickly turned to an examination of the dense and poor living conditions foreign workers have endured as singapore transformed from a model of effective governance to a cautionary tale. technocrats often boast that singapore not only has a competent state that can deliver solutions in times of crisis, but also a socially compliant population that responds to state policies. this trust in government was especially visible during the earlier months of the pandemic (quah ) . one of us has been conducting (now interrupted) fieldwork in singapore since early february, and witnessed various statements that reinforced the notion that a competent government would surely provide a way out of a public health crisis. for example, one singaporean acquaintance suggested that there was no need to worry too much about the virus because the government had learned important lessons from sars years ago. "they have policies in place to ensure we're prepared for an outbreak like this. we are checking temperatures as people enter buildings and doing vigorous contract tracing. there is a whatsapp group to convey factual information to the public to combat fake news so they will know not to panic. it's paternalistic but do you trust people to be prudent or stupid? i tend to go with the latter." a whatsapp message sent by the government to the public advising against panic buying. image credit: vanessa koh the framework of political governance in singapore is largely a technocratic one that operates on the belief that foreign-educated elites will deploy knowledge, logical reasoning, and technical expertise to govern in ways that transcend ideology and partisanship. under such a configuration, the implicit social contract is a negotiated settlement in which people cede substantial amounts of authority to the technocratic governing elite in exchange for persistent delivery on technical (and economic) solutions to a series of challenges. despite bouts of panic buying of groceries every time the prime minister announced that he would address the nation-in anxious anticipation that the government might decide to lock the country down-there was a prevailing sense of security in the state for two months, as shopping malls and public transit remained crowded and everyone clung onto the hope of some semblance of normalcy. as news first broke about the struggles in italy, singaporeans largely remained confident. it was easy to explain the italian healthcare system as being overwhelmed due to their perceived slowness in implementing strict social distancing measures, or to see the system as weakened by punishing austerity measures over the years. by contrast, singaporeans took relative comfort in having a robust healthcare system and a proactive government. certainly, these points are not to be dismissed wholesale. we are not suggesting that there is no validity to certain technocratic policies. contact tracing, for example, has and likely will continue to be useful as the state slowly reopens. every person in singapore is entitled to free testing and citizens and long-term residents will not have to pay out of pocket for treatment. however, we caution against an unshakable faith in a system that promulgates a narrow and elitist definition of care that excludes vulnerable subsets of the city-state's population. at the time of writing (may , ), there are over , confirmed cases of in singapore, and these are differentiated by citizenship or employment status. foreign work permit holders in dormitories account for , ( %) of the , cases. "community cases" (a term most commonly associated with singaporean citizens and permanent residents; excluding imported cases) comprise , cases, which is less than % of the national total. the disparity of these numbers- % of cases from foreign dormitory residents and % of cases from the community-and separate reportage illustrate that there are two realities in singapore: one for those who live in dormitories and another for the rest of the singaporean population. the everyday realities also correspond to this bifurcation. singaporeans that returned from overseas were housed in -star hotels for their -day quarantine period, whereas many work permit holders were forced to stay indoors in crowded dormitories, where often, to men have to occupy one single room. demanded an apology." this reply has been over-sensationalized, but it is evidence of the state's lack of reflexivity and sensitivity during a moment of intense public scrutiny and stress. it would baffle anyone to think that a migrant worker, at risk of being deported, could confront an mp to demand an apology. the workers already face immense debt on top of psychological tolls from being away from family and worrying if the virus will prevent them from sending money home to their families. these worries have driven workers to attempt to speak the language of the state in order to get redress for wages they may not have yet received or ex gratia payments that are often magnitudes smaller than what they are entitled to. they are far too anxious and intelligent to demand an apology. however, situating minister teo's comments within the context of the rest of the speech is essential. her response reads: ms. anthea ong asked about an apology. we interact very closely with the workers themselves, on a very regular basis at the dormitories, and even outside the dormitories whenever i'll ask teams, you know, follow up on their requests and feedback. i think what they're focused on is how we can help them to handle this present situation, not fall sick, and if they fall sick, help take care of them, how to look after their wages being paid, how to ensure that they can send money home (emphasis added). the latter three factors are, in fact, the needs that the migrants have learned to articulate. they are also important according to numerous ngos that have worked with them in the past years, such as healthserve, twc , home, migrant workers centre, and singapore migrant friends. these economic factors capture why they have come to singapore in the first place. on labor day, nmp ong also posted a message on facebook that addressed the workers directly. she writes: "the world sees you now, you are no longer invisible -we must and will do right by you." the use of the word "now" suggests that this is a recent change that emerged as a consequence of scrutiny due to the coronavirus. yet even as ministers are acknowledging the state's responsibility towards the workers, there remains a hesitance in reflecting on the structural conditions that led to the outbreak at the dormitories. when pressed about the living conditions at the dormitories in a recent interview with cnbc, the minister for national development and co-chair of the coronavirus task force lawrence wong cited the provision of recreational facilities and convenient access to amenities as proof of improved conditions over the years. he suggested that the crux of the problem is that "these dormitories are designed for communal living, where the workers eat together, they live together, and they cook together." he went on to say that despite the best efforts at putting in place precautions and safeguards, such as reminding the dormitory operators that "these non-essential communal activities have to be ceased at the start of the outbreak, the lesson we've learned from this experience is that with this unprecedented pandemic, the safeguards were not sufficient and the design of dormitories have to change." by insisting that the way forward is to redesign these places of residence, the state is reducing what is indeed a sociopolitical problem-the second-class treatment that migrant workers endure-to a solely technocratic one that can be solved by a mere architectural makeover. communal activities such as eating and cooking together are not extraordinary even during a global pandemic; those of us who do not live in dormitories engage in these activities with the people who are a part of our respective households. persisting with an anti-politics machine (ferguson ) that views caregiving only as a technocratic project and disregards the social injustices of a political system will only hinder efforts to flatten the curve and prepare for future pandemics. it is useful to distinguish how the state is administering care from how individuals and ngos are doing so. we refer to the distinction felicity aulino makes between care-as-maintenance and care-as-concern in her recent work on the anthropology of care. aulino observes that contemporary usage of the english word "care" may contribute to the tendency to assume a correspondence between particular internal states, such as feeling affection or being concerned ("care about"), and the acts of best providing for another ("to care for") (aulino : ) . aulino cautions against such conflation, which may place an inordinate value on emotional concern in acts of providing for others while obscuring other important facets of care. instead, in her ethnographic work on caregiving practices, aulino focuses on the physical and pragmatic work of maintenance. in the case of care practices in the time of covid- , we examine where state and community approaches fall between the poles of care-as-concern and care-as-maintenance. in isolation, each form of care is often insufficient, but a robust vision of care draws from both concern and maintenance. care-as-maintenance, which is largely understood as the concern of the state, hinges on and plays out in the administering of technocratic care. for instance, in the area of expanding healthcare, technocratic solutions to the upsurge in numbers of people with covid- who need treatment have included conversions of large community facilities into treatment facilities, like when singapore expo was converted into a hospital. administering care-as-maintenance also notably encompasses the state's ability to delegate maintenance to non-state actors, such as private subcontractors who employ and oversee the dormitories of short-term migrant laborers. critiques of care-as-maintenance indict the state's subhumanization of migrant laborers who are often treated as if they need to be "maintained" in order to continue fulfilling their roles. care-as-concern, meanwhile, is evident in the language of care used by ngos and the upswell of community action and civic activism around addressing the plight of migrant laborers. support coalition advocated for seeing the "human aspects" over only "seeing [migrant support] as a humanitarian relief operation" or an intellectual discussion focused solely on policy. in the same conversation, michael cheah, the executive director of healthserve, noted that more care must be paid to workers' breaking points: the stresses of work and life, and loneliness as they navigate distance away from families for whom they must provide. the language of care of ngos and community advocates does not always stress emotional care over practical mediation. notably, calls for empathy have been channeled through allaying the immediate physical needs and logistical anxieties of those unable to advocate for themselves. this closes the gap between calls for care-as-concern and competent care-for-maintenance and includes requests for an increase of ngo oversight to provide better care. other responses by aid organizations, however, have foregrounded personal narratives and private messages between migrant workers and volunteers as testimony in order to emphasize the humanity and plight of migrant workers. such centering of individuals' lives and testimonies is ostensibly a sign of pushback against the sense that singapore's response to covid- neglects to take into account migrant workers' welfare in terms of both policy and statistics. yet the language and means of such outreach measures potentially fall prey to instrumentalizing individual's lives and stories, even if it is in service of raising awareness and drawing attention towards perceived needs and gaps. care-as-concern, when directed at maximizing human pathos, must thus be cautioned against in this unmitigated form on grounds of relational ethics and efficacy. following aulino, and contra some of the rhetoric of aid organizations, we take seriously care-as-maintenance as a valid approach to care in the time of covid- , and note that competence on the part of state actors and policy-makers has little to do with sentiment or "concern" per se in terms of daily problem-solving and an overall moral orientation. rather than adding to existing critiques of the state's lack of care-as-concern, we focus instead on the structural issue of singapore's policies around migrant labor in singapore that now renders present techniques of care-as-maintenance as insufficient. pure care-as-maintenance fails because it renders workers simply as a cost-benefit input-output equation. since the mid- s, singapore has relied on a merry-go-round of migrant nationalitiesinitially, thai and malay, then indonesian and chinese, and now south asian-to service its economy and dependence on cheap labor, while absconding from social responsibility. anthropologists and geographers have documented the asymmetrical power dynamic between state elites and migrant workers who realize the aspirations of the state (constable ; elsheshtawy ; kitiarsa ; yeoh ). singapore's economic model has relied on factor accumulation to deliver its gdp growth at the expense of productivity increase, primarily through labor market policies reliant on large inputs of a cheap, transient pool of unskilled labor (fong and lim ). the model has not changed, perhaps due to growth fetishism or preferring the most convenient route to growth, in spite of evidence of diminishing returns and socio-spatial constraints in singapore (pang and lim : , ) . instead of focusing on improving the workers' skills and quality of life, the government is more interested in depressing their wages to ensure higher capital gains through the input-output framework. for instance, it is not difficult to deport a worker back to their home country and it is also easier to hire a worker from overseas than to hire one who is already in singapore due to kickbacks. sociologist chua beng huat ( ) identifies this as an issue of the ruling party being wary of setting a precedent that would allow migrant workers to make a set of claims and thereby officially designate the state to be the primary caretakers of these workers. that the migrants are not citizens and are classed as "low-skilled" work permit holders place them under a series of legal and practical restrictions, even extending to their reproductive capacities (constable ) . there is also a tunneling effect in their everyday lives, where they experience a limited daily time-space based on a state-mandated policy to limit their mix/interaction between the migrant and host population (collins : ) . even before the outbreak, migrant workers were not allowed to use the same toilet as singaporeans. read together, the "othering" of the migrants, their designation as "inputs" into an economic model to propel singapore to international acclaim, and singapore's trend of utilizing different nationalities of cheap labor point to an urgent need to treat workers with dignity. where public critique has focused on insufficient care-as-concern of the state, we might also look at systemic reasons as to why its techniques of care-as-maintenance are falling short. the enforced disposability of "unskilled" migrant foreign workers from the singaporean state's purview and their inability to gain citizenship based on the work permits they hold is magnified and complicated by a global pandemic when it comes to the matter of yet-fulfilled labor contracts. with employers and agents still owed work and processing fees by migrants who are now quarantined due to being perceived risks to the singaporean public instead of working, and migrants who are unable to return home because of contracts and the need to send remittances back, the recourse of repatriation after the term of employment is no longer the built-in easy option for the state. on the one hand, risk, contagion, and common precarity have complicated the disposability of migrant laborers in terms of their repatriation; on the other, by hothousing migrants in conditions which all but guarantee contraction of covid- , their disposability in singaporean society has never been more obvious. while community advocates and aid organizations stress care-as-concern as necessary affective responses, we must also question why care-as-maintenance has failed this segment of singapore's population. to recognize and care for people as fully human entails not only the recognition of their narratives but the structures under which their basic maintenance of life is and has been troubled. in the aforementioned roundtable with various ngo leaders, some also shared that the media's overemphasis on cramped dormitories is secondary to long-standing issues such the lack of timely payments by employers. of-the-moment responses in the time of covid- may, therefore, fail to highlight areas of provision most needed for migrants in singapore, beyond perceived insufficiencies in both care-as-concern and care-as-maintenance frameworks. practices of care must also be considered alongside its temporalities -how long will care-as-concern last, considering modes of attention based on -hour news cycles and the episodic nature of processing a pandemic? we suggest that the issue at hand is not that the state does not care, but that it relies on an outmoded form of care. care-as-concern as an affective and communal response to the crisis has been rightly advocated for across the board. care-as-maintenance can also be a serious crisis response, but its apparent insufficiencies must be read within a larger context of structural inequalities that dispossess short-term migrant laborers in singapore, rather than simply a lack of accompanying care-as-concern. in sum, the singaporean experience with covid- illustrates how we need to rethink what an ethics of community care constitutes. that the state draws a distinction between migrant worker cases and local "community" spread points to the ways in which "community" is limited to citizens, long-term residents, and skilled migrants ("expats") who inhabit the homes that "lowerskilled" migrant workers have built. care is not just about the application of technocratic policy, but it also entails a concerted effort to reverse historical trends of othering "lower-skilled" nationalities and treating them as inputs into an economic growth model. we echo former nmp sadisavan's ( ) statement that the government's stellar academic and professional credentials cannot replace the need to consult its citizens because of the complexity of contemporary issues. this is especially vital in light of global sentiments of xenophobia that have emerged during the pandemic. in singapore, issues of brownface and the recent facebook post by member of parliament yaacob ibrahim, which expressed his happiness about how the virus had cleared out a space where foreign workers congregate, suggest that what many label as the "silent majority" might have entrenched racist views that have, up until this point, been simply left unsaid. what we can learn from the handling of singapore's covid- situation is that inclusion entails not just access to information, but also recognition within legislative information in terms of statistics, recommendations, and narratives by the state and its media. beyond human interest pieces on the plight of migrants in singapore, what must be remembered of this moment is how existing policies have endangered the vulnerable in singapore for there to be a semblance of movement towards the possibility of inclusive care. rituals of care for the elderly in northern thailand: merit, morality, and the everyday of long-term care we the citizens : black swans & sacred cows transnational mobilities and urban spatialities: notes from the asia-pacific maid to order in hong kong: stories of migrant workers tales of two cities: legislating pregnancy and marriage among foreign domestic workers in singapore and hong kong transitory sites: mapping dubai's 'forgotten' urban spaces the anti-politics machine: "development the "bare life labour, productivity, and singapore's development model singapore's policy response to covid- we the citizens : black swans & sacred cows bifurcated labour: the unequal incorporation of transmigrants in singapore key: cord- -ciuynofm authors: dobbs, mary title: national governance of public health responses in a pandemic? date: - - journal: nan doi: . /err. . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: ciuynofm the world is currently facing the worst pandemic in a century and we were caught unprepared. covid- has proven highly contagious and with severe consequences that are still unfolding. as of april , there were over million confirmed cases and over , related deaths reported worldwide. over million of those confirmed cases were in the preceding days, with the usa accounting for nearly half of those. furthermore, the international monetary fund (imf) is now warning that the world is about to suffer the worst economic recession since the great depression in the s. whilst the nation state and westphalian sovereignty remain the starting points when considering regulatory powers within a territory and engagement on the international sphere, these are not set in stone and considerable variations arise. thus, multilevel governance and regulation theories acknowledge the "reallocation of authority upwards, downwards and sideways from central states". this begs the question of how to determine where the core powers ought to rest. one potential mechanism is by applying subsidiaritya broad concept with roots in ideas of democracy, catholicism and economics or effectiveness. it focuses on "the proper geographic distribution of power". this broadly argues that powers ought to rest at the lowest level possible (due to democracy), unless it would be more effective to allocate them at a higher level. there are three key steps in order to apply subsidiarity, with a range of considerations within them. the first relates to the interest(s) in question. it is necessary to identify them and consider how significant they are to the various levels or constituents, to what extent homogeneity or heterogeneity exists (eg regarding objectives, balance with other interests and broad approaches) and the capacity of other levels to accommodate the heterogeneity. in the context of public health, this normally includes considering issues such as whether there is broad consensus on acting as a welfare state or not and the balance with other societal issues where resources are insufficient, as well as opinions on related issues such as the approach to the economy and markets. whilst each state shares values and goals of strong public health and also a resilient economy, with both closely intertwined in the long term, there is clearly no broad global consensus on the balance between values and approaches to them. the second entails considering the question of effectiveness or efficiency. this includes identifying where the relevant expertise and/or knowledge lie, including whether there is access to resources at a different level or not. in many contexts, this may include local and experiential knowledge. where scientific or other expertise is central to decision-making, centralisation of both the research and the decisionmaking may be efficient, as lower levels may not have the necessary resources and "gaps" could arise. however, in cases of uncertainty, the value of full centralisation may be more questionable. it also includes identifying the potential for externalities, whereby one body's decisions can impact on external bodies and vice versa, and the potential to internalise those externalities or not by centralising. where there are significant negative externalities, this would support centralisation. then finally a balancing act must be undertakenmaking for a very complex calculation, where the division and (re-)allocation of different powers across several levels may be appropriate. but how does this then apply to covid- and the surrounding decision-making? whilst still part of public health, covid- goes beyond the norm. firstly, covid- is highly contagious and spreads swiftly and easily. this is accentuated by potentially long incubation periods and the potential for an individual to be contagious even though they are asymptomatic. the virus also remains viable on surfaces such as paper and plastic for some time, facilitating the spread further. without control measures, the spread has proven to be exponentialwith us all now becoming too familiar with steeply increasing graphs and the term "r ". nor is this limited to one area or country. due to a combination of the above factors, in conjunction with the widespread travel of individuals and products, the virus has spread globally and become a pandemic. furthermore, covid- has devastating effects. we have no vaccines, no tailored effective treatments and no built-in resistance or partial immunity to covid- . whilst most will be asymptomatic or have mild symptoms, it can be fatal, with the elderly, ill and those with "underlying conditions" being particularly vulnerable, and it also can cause severe impairments in the short and long termalthough the extent of these impairments is still to be fully understood. this has further knock-on effects, as some public health systems are overburdened to the point of collapseillnesses or injuries that should be manageable cannot be properly treated, appointments and treatments are postponed and discussions arise about triage for both covid- and non-covid- patients. the combination of the highly contagious nature and severity of impacts is worrying. it also provides for clusters of cases affecting specific groups and industries, including both healthcare workers (exacerbating the public health impacts once more) and other eg rm anderson, h heesterbeek and d klinkenberg, "how will country-based mitigation measures influence the course of the covid- epidemic?" ( ) ( ) the lancet . reproduction number: the mean number of new cases an infected person will create. a vague term that presumably is meant to reassure us, as the majority who die have "underlying conditions", but without clarity to date as to what this involvescould this be a broken leg?and also deprecating the value of those who have died who are elderly, ill or with such conditions. "essential workers" in global supply chains, as well as the economy reflected in the imf's report. all of these feed into each other and risk circular short-and long-term effectswhere the virus is present and elsewhere. consequently, there is the potential for severe externalities by the virus itself if left unmanagedbut this does not mean that the governance of it would lead necessarily to externalities also. but is effective governance possible? a final major concern for the moment, which impacts upon every nation as they react to this, is the underlying uncertainties. we do not understand the disease fully, gathering data and hopefully understanding as we go. that uncertainty relates to when an individual is contagious, the morbidity levels, how to test for the virus, how to test for antibodies, how long a person might be immune for and how to treat or prevent it in future. whilst major strides are being made with each of these aspects, uncertainty still remainsin particular regarding antibodies, immunity and vaccines. furthermore, testing (and subsequent contact tracing) for the disease is sometimes flawed and frequently limitedhampering understanding and making for patchy data to underpin decision-making. consequently, any decision-making is based on the precautionary principle (whether express or otherwise) and it becomes more challenging to identify clear pathways to address the pandemic effectively that also minimise countervailing riskssomething that may in itself justify national rather than international approaches, even whilst benefiting from the centralisation and sharing of scientific data. in light of the goal of public health, the ideal options would be widespread immunity of the entire population and/or complete eradication of the virus, with effective treatment as a support mechanism. however, besides the surrounding uncertainty, nation states have different capacities, and any response has countervailing risks. consequently, nation states have chosen different approaches. the core responses include herd immunity, "flattening the curve" and complete eradication. ( ) herd immunity is where a sufficient proportion of the population have immunity to a disease so that no further members of the population are likely to be affected in the future. for diseases such as polio, this is largely achieved through vaccination, l petetin, "the covid- but as there is no current vaccination for covid- , to achieve this now would entail initially enabling the spread of a disease through a population (as with chicken pox parties). ( ) "flattening the curve" involves trying to control the spread of the disease so that the increase in cases, especially those requiring medical treatment, hospitalisation and specifically the use of ventilators, is slowed (eg until r = ) and remains within the capacity of the public health system. this is about buying time, enabling capacity-building, development of effective treatments and hopefully a vaccine. in order to achieve this, social distancing is essential and contact tracing is a key mechanism. ( ) eradication could be achieved through complete immunity of the population, but equally can be achieved through preventing the spread of the disease (r < and eventually r = ). identification and quarantining of every single actual or potential case in the population, as well as cleansing all potential contaminated areas, are essential. it should be noted that these can overlap and also may include "cocooning" vulnerable individuals, testing for the disease and testing subsequently for antibodies. each of these approaches in theory could be viable and acceptablewe use these approaches when addressing issues such as colds, flus or chicken pox. however, there are numerous issues that challenge their effectiveness and appropriateness in the context of covid- . beyond issues of the rate of transmission, the potential for the virus to remain viable on surfaces or to transmit to and from animals, the potential for asymptomatic individuals to transmit the virus and the virus already being in situ within the population, there are a few other key concerns. firstly, the impacts of the virus are not negligible. herd immunity is desirable, but the current mechanism to achieve it is dependent on the spread of the disease, with resulting deaths and severe impairments for members of the population. cocooning may protect the vulnerable, but we do not know who precisely is vulnerable, and from the daily death rates in hotspots we are seeing that either cocooning is not working or the vulnerable are a much larger proportion of the population than we thought. those pushing for flattening the curve may try to claim a moral high ground, but individuals are still badly affected by covid- , and for both there are knock-on effects on other treatments and the economy. on the other hand, social distancing and lockdowns can impact negatively on both the economy and mental and physical health. secondly, there is no certainty that immunity following recovery will arise or last long enough to prevent continued outbreaks. due to the ongoing uncertainty, we cannot conclude that an individual cannot contract the virus a second time. if they do, it might not be as severe, but their bodies may already be physically damaged and it could lead to covid- 's continued circulationnecessitating continued cocooning of the vulnerable. this is relevant to all three approaches, as it undermines the herd immunity approach entirely, but also may necessitate more extended and more restrictive measures for flattening the curve and eradicationfor instance, public healthcare workers treating covid- patients could repeatedly contract and transmit the virus. thirdly, we do not know when an effective vaccine will be developed and made available in sufficient quantities. the same applies to more effective treatments. it is hoped that these will be developed rapidly, but this is by no means guaranteed, and testing will be required to ensure their safety. it might be that the only (short-or long-term) immunity possible is through contracting the disease and recovering. states may not be able to maintain social distancing or lockdowns due to practical constraints, such as a lack of resources, including finances. clearly, we need further information in order to know what approaches might be the most effective and acceptable in the long term. returning to subsidiarity, though, perhaps this indicates that a decentralised approach to policy-making here is appropriate? after all, it relates to public health (varied balance of values worldwide), with little scientific certainty and where culture may play an important role. however, even if effective, the variations raise a further significant issue that challenges individual national approaches: as we shall see, each nation state has the potential to impact negatively on the others and likewise to be impacted upon. if one returns to the three core approaches and presumes that they are each effective in principleherd immunity will arise, case numbers and severity can be controlled and/or the disease can be eradicated within the populationsimply reflect on the global nature of our society and the continued shifting nature of our populations. if we change the proportion in a population who have immunity, or introduce new sick individuals who need treatment, or simply introduce new carriers to the population, each approach will be set back and have to start again. if vulnerable individuals are no longer cocooning, they risk catching the disease and being severely impacted. consequently, one state's approach(es) will impact on others. the alternative? continued controls on entry into each nation state and restrictions on travelwith entry potentially limited in future to those who have certificates of immunity (akin to yellow fever certificates) or who are willing to be quarantined for weeks. one reason why new zealand has been able to take the eradication approach is that they started testing prior to any cases presenting symptoms and quarantined anyone entering the state. however, crucially, they are also an island distant from most other countries and entry other than by plane or ship is highly challengingand even so, a single case in the future could lead to a new outbreak before it can be controlled, and bear in mind, for instance, the potential for unreliable tests and false negatives. contrast this with the eu's normally porous borders or the federal states within the usaentry can be limited via airports and ports, but the extent of the land borders makes absolute control infeasible. furthermore, the photos of romanians flying to germany and the uk to pick fruit and vegetables in the midst of a pandemic highlight the existing supply chains' dependence on migrant workers. similarly, the importance of a supranational or global approach, or at least considerable cooperation and collaboration, is seen in the flurry of activity and competition for resources. most nation states are under-resourced generally, but especially are not prepared for pandemics and do not have adequate resources in situ, in part due to the economic costs and the lack of need on an ordinary basis. nor are states typically self-sufficient in the production of protective, testing or treatment equipment or components, including ventilators or chemical reagentswe are dependent on both domestic and imported materials. that dependency is now coming to the fore, with shipments to one country being intercepted by other countries, bidding wars between states in the usa (with president trump refusing to intervene when asked by states) and threats to block exports to other countries including canada. yet the stories are not all negativecountries are fast-tracking the production of necessary supplies and distributing these worldwide, including as donations, whilst others are taking in patients for treatment from overburdened countries or sending their own healthcare workers to assist. the pandemic merely highlights what we already know: the issue is not merely the limited resources, but also the control of the distribution of resources and access to them. the benefits of centralisation for decision-making regarding policies and resource distribution are clear. they facilitate coordinated decision-making where externalities become internalised and the long-term effectiveness of the policies is facilitated. whilst there is some centralisation internationally (with the who) and within the eu (with the european centre for disease prevention and control (ecdc)), this primarily involves the gathering and sharing of scientific evidence and provision of guidance. the eu does also, however, have the health threats decision, which has enabled joint procurement of medical equipment and facilitated l o'carroll, "romanian fruit pickers flown to uk amid crisis in farming sector", the guardian, april <https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /apr/ /romanian-fruit-pickers-flown-uk-crisis-farming-sector-coronavirus>. the main obvious exception being cuba, which has been providing considerable assistance to other states. d smith, "new york's andrew cuomo decries 'ebay'-style bidding war for ventilators", the guardian, march <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /mar/ /new-york-andrew-cuomo-coronavirus-ventilators>. q forgey, "'we're not a shipping clerk': trump tells governors to step up efforts to get medical supplies", politico, march <https://www.politico.com/news/ / / /trump-governors-coronavirus-medical-supplies- >. h jackson, "coronavirus: canada to receive 'millions' of masks from china, trudeau says", global news, april <https://globalnews.ca/news/ /coronavirus-trudeau-aid-vulnerable>. eg j bateman, "'solidarity knows no borders': germany treating dozens of coronavirus patients from italy and france", the independent, april <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-germanyitaly-france-hospital-treatment-covid- -a .html>; ng torres and j charles, "despite us warnings, cuba's medical diplomacy triumphs in the caribbean during pandemic", miami herald, april <https://www. miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article .html>. the who's pandemic influenza pandemic framework, which was created by non-binding resolution, is of particular interest. although not applicable to covid- , it demonstrates the potential role of the who in encouraging and facilitating sharing of research and resourcesbut equally through its uniqueness demonstrates the challenges in creating even soft instruments at an international level, much less legally enforceable ones. targeted distributions across the eu. furthermore, the european commission has taken an innovative and impressive step recently by publishing a roadmap for exiting lockdowns across the eu thereby seeking to try and coordinate the exit strategies for the pandemic, even though the powers still rest officially with the member states. such centralisation is essential to address externalities and is clearly possible in principle. however, three obvious difficulties in particular arise here. firstly, we would need to acknowledge and address the different circumstances of each state and region. this would include the state of progression of the disease, but also the capacity limitations of states and their population to implement policiesakin to "common but differentiated responsibilities", but leading to more proactive support internationally. just as we put in place systems to help citizens within individual nations, there would need to be global responsibility and packages for states that did not have the means to address it. we are seeing this to an extent with the world bank, imf and g 's temporary debt relief for poor countries, but more would be needed if there is to be a global approachgenuine, full-blown assistance for countries. "public" becomes a global public. this is going to be very challenging where, for instance, there is no capacity to store food for a few weeks or to self-isolate. secondly, a desire for centralisation is based on the presumption that the centralised approach will be the preferable one. whilst there is the potential to improve the effectiveness of any of the three approaches through a closely implemented and enforced approach across all populations, this does not mean it will be the best onein light of public health objectives or otherwise. for instance, aiming for herd immunity without also effectively protecting the vulnerable and flattening the curve at the same time appears to be prioritising the economy above human health and a weaker precautionary approach. in contrast, if a complete lockdown were undertaken, this might have considerable negative impacts on society and economies if maintained for lengthy periods, but would initially seem to prioritise human health and reflect a strong precautionary approach. but which approach is preferable to society? what would happen if the "wrong" approach were taken globally, whether excessively or insufficiently precautionary? thirdly, linked to this, decentralisation and varied approaches provide for learning opportunities and peer pressure. each state is looking to see what others are doing and adjusting in light of not merely new scientific data and understanding, but also in light of what seems to be working or failing. furthermore, early, substantial restrictions and generally more precautionary approaches have influenced both the timing of responses and the underlying approach in some states (eg the uk switched from a laissez-faire, soft-regulation approach facilitating long-term herd immunity to one that is more restrictive and reflects approaches taken broadly across the eu). consequently, there is "soft centralisation" due to comparisons facilitated by national decision-making. considering the importance of the values at stake and the extensive uncertainty, there is no absolute answer as to which approach will prove right in the long run or as to whether there should be full centralisation of decision-making powers (with recognition of differentiated circumstances and a relatively strong precautionary approach initially whilst information is gathered). it may be that mutual collaboration is the most feasible approach where efforts are taken to minimise externalitiesbut at the end of the day, unless there is a uniform approach taken globally or a vaccine is available for the entire population, the potential for one state to disrupt another's approach will remain. it is necessary to consider whether public health decision-making should be elevated to the global level in the case of pandemics. subsidiarity provides a means to consider whether such powers should be reallocated, even on a temporary basis. both public health/human life and the economy are fundamental values within each state, and the extent of the surrounding uncertainties makes the identification of the appropriate precautionary pathway in the long term more challengingwhich arguably suggests national approaches and trial and error. nonetheless, the potential to undermine another state's approach (externalities) and the nature and level of the potential consequences of continued circulation of the disease supports centralisation of decision-makingat least within epidemiological unitswith caveats as noted. fundamentally, it also raises broader questions about public health, interconnectedness and values. serious health crises exist continuously across the world, both in developed and developing countries; they affect human life and broader society, yet until the issue comes knocking at our own door, we do not step up adequately. so, yes, under ideas of subsidiarity, some centralisation of decision-making, science and distribution of resources appears logical in the context of a serious pandemic. but this leaves unanswered the question of whether some centralisation and responsibility needs to be taken outside of pandemicsof whether we need to acknowledge the relative security and privilege of some and the corresponding insecurity and vulnerability of others in both our local and global societies. a european roadmap to lifting coronavirus containment measures towards stronger eu governance of health threats after the covid- pandemic eg principle of the rio declaration , or arts and of the un framework convention on climate change covid- : g endorses temporary debt relief for the poorest countries remember none of this has been done before : : : i want to learn from those other countries frankly : : : what worked and what didn't work key: cord- -deu ma authors: prabhu, shreekanth m.; subramaniam, natarajan title: surveillance of covid- pandemic using hidden markov model date: - - journal: nan doi: nan sha: doc_id: cord_uid: deu ma covid- pandemic has brought the whole world to a stand-still over the last few months. in particular the pace at which pandemic has spread has taken everybody off-guard. the governments across the world have responded by imposing lock-downs, stopping/restricting travel and mandating social distancing. on the positive side there is wide availability of information on active cases, recoveries and deaths collected daily across regions. however, what has been particularly challenging is to track the spread of the disease by asymptomatic carriers termed as super-spreaders. in this paper we look at applying hidden markov model to get a better assessment of extent of spread. the outcome of such analysis can be useful to governments to design the required interventions/responses in a calibrated manner. the data we have chosen to analyze pertains to indian scenario. covid- is the name given by who to the disease caused by sars cov- virus. whereas the death rates of earlier sars virus were higher than cov- virus, as a pandemic covid- has spread far more speedily infecting lakhs of people. over the last few decades and centuries there has been incidence of pandemics and losses of human lives on large scale from time to time. however, the terminology around pandemic can be confusing. an endemic is something that happens to a particular people or region. for example, malaria is endemic to certain countries. an outbreak is a greater-than-anticipated increase in the number of endemic cases. it can also be a single case in a new area. thus, an outbreak can happen in regions where a given disease is endemic or in totally new regions. if it's not quickly controlled, an outbreak can become an epidemic. an epidemic is often localized to a region, but the number of those infected in that region is significantly higher than normal. when an epidemic spread world-wide due to travel or other reasons it is termed pandemic. it is the geographic spread that is vital to spread of pandemic [ ] . naturally the first response to arrest covid- spread should have been ban of travel from and to regions where the disease was endemic. however due to complex factors which played out that did not happen in a timely manner and the pandemic has been spreading since early january when it was publicly acknowledged world-wide. on top of that people travelling in from only certain countries were screened while infection had already spread to lot more countries. the travellers who did not display symptoms were asked to be in isolation and those who displayed symptoms were quarantined. this again did not happen to the degree that was needed. once an outbreak happens in a new region, expected response was to arrest further spread to more people. this however could only be done retroactively by tracing contacts a newly detected person may have encountered and testing them. the governments had limited capacity to test and they needed to manage them judiciously. this resulted in continued spread of the disease in a latent manner. the covid- spread from person to person via droplets that got dispersed when a person was coughing, sneezing or even talking. it was also suspected that the virus spread through surfaces and on certain surfaces the virus lasted for couple of days or more. many of these conclusions were based on simulation studies and not necessarily attested from field studies. in addition to pervasive mode of spreading another challenge with covid- is that many infected people do not display any symptoms for long periods. table below compares covid- with other viruses [ ] . you can see that covid- has the longest incubation period during which virus can be contagious i.e. even before the symptoms start. a person will continue to be contagious with onset of symptoms and may be for some more time even after recovery. it was also seen that those with pre-existing health problems were more vulnerable. on an average the disease impacted the elderly lot more. in the case of any new virus, medical communities take a few months in the least to come up with a vaccine that can build immunity among people. further, vaccines are of no use to people already sick. to treat them suitable antiviral drugs are needed which can shorten the time people are unwell. they may need to be taken early on and may not work in every case. there has been vocal community of experts urging governments to test, test and test. but considering the size of populations involved and the scale of effort required it has proved impractical. at the same time, it is worthwhile to test only in regions and among communities where there is a possible outbreak. inviting people to common testing facilities can itself expose them to chance of infection. even though there has been debates about herd immunity by allowing the virus to spread among healthier people, making such calls has been rather highly risky. finally, it is not health experts but the politicians and governments who have to take responsibility for their actions. general information on covid- is presented in a lucid manner by robert roy britt [ ] . currently india as of early may , is possibly able to flatten the curve but yet to see a dip in infections [ ] . the situation can change unpredictably as more people are allowed to travel back to india or across india. we hope that this work can help governments calibrate interventions/responses using a relatively simple model. we also outline strategies for building more complex models to deliver fine-grained analysis. the remaining part of the paper is structured as follows. section , covers literature survey where we cover literature on surveillance of past pandemics followed by literature related to covid- . section covers the proposed methodology for covid- pandemic surveillance using hidden markov model. section presents results on application of the proposed methodology to indian context. in section , we make a list of recommendations for better surveillance of covid- pandemic in india. section concludes the paper. the three pandemics in the twentieth century killed between and million people and the h n "swine flu" exposed vulnerabilities that we still have to influenza epidemics. david hutton [ ] has done a review of operations research tools and techniques used for influenza pandemic planning. he covers instances where simulation modelling is used in as a way of representing the real world and being able to estimate the impact of interventions and to improve their performance. among the simulation models, system dynamics approach can capture how the changing level of infection and immunity in the population affects the spread of future infections in the population. system dynamics modelling techniques have been applied to pandemic influenza preparedness problems as varied as social distancing, vaccination, antiviral treatment, and portfolio analysis of interventions. larsen [ ] showed with his simple model that the people with high rates of contact drove the initial growth of the epidemic and that targeting social distancing (reducing contact rates) to the correct subpopulations with high contact rates can prevent the epidemic with limited disruption to the remaining population. nigmatulina and larson [ ] built off that simple dynamic compartmental model of influenza to include multiple interconnected communities. each community has citizens that interact with each other and is connected to other communities by a few travellers each day. this might represent towns near each other. they used this model to compare the impact of vaccination and travel restrictions. they also find that travel restrictions will not be effective: only a complete % travel restriction would stop or significantly slow transmission between communities. the above analysis [ ] and the one by larson alone [ ] use very simple models that can be implemented in spreadsheets, but they provide very powerful policy insights. system dynamics models also have been used to evaluate antiviral use [ ] as well as vaccine delivery mechanisms [ ] and optimal allocation of health-care resources. discrete event simulations are used to manage distribution systems. agent based models have been used where more elaborate data is available to decide on policy choices such as who should be vaccinated first [ ] . vaccine selection problem can be formulated as optimization problem when one has to choose between releasing an available vaccine or waiting for better vaccine. along the same lines, hutton refers to cases where decision analysis, game theory and supply chain analysis are used to manage health-care resources. rath et al. [ ] made use of hidden markov model for automated detection of influenza epidemic. he builds on serfling's method that is commonly used for influenza surveillance. the method uses cyclic regression (to address cyclical data owing to seasonality of epidemics) to model the weekly proportion of deaths from pneumonia and influenza and to define an epidemic threshold that is adjusted for seasonal effects. that approach however suffers from several shortcomings, such as the need for non-epidemic data to model the baseline distribution, and the fact that observations are treated as independent and identically distributed. this can be handled by modeling the data as time series and use hidden markov model to segment it as non-epidemic and epidemic phases. rath et al. in their paper have used exponential distribution for non-epidemic phase and gaussian distribution for epidemic phase. this is a refinement over the work done by le strat & carrat [ ] who made use of only gaussian distributions. covid- pandemic has been an active area of research last few months. there have also been large number of articles in main-stream, social media and as part of professional health-care literature. here we cover literature related to testing procedures and pharmaceutical interventions, non-pharmaceutical interventions followed by mathematical analysis of forecasts globally and in india. finally, we look at aspects related to surveillance and social implications. nandini sethuraman et al. [ ] emphasize on importance of timing to get the correct results in real time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (rt-pcr) tests that are used to detect sars-cov- rna as illustrated in figure below. thus, there is a very real possibility that a sizable number of covid- cases are not detected on testing. as shown in figure above, the negative results do not preclude sars-cov- infection. on top of this, administering rt-pcr tests for the identification of sars-cov- rna is complex and needs specifically trained man-power [ ] . the sars-cov- rna is generally detectable in respiratory specimens during the acute phase of infection. positive results need to be clinically correlated with patient history and other diagnostic information, after ruling out bacterial infection or co-infection with other viruses. according to wikramaratna et al. [ ] , rt-pcr tests are highly specific and the probability of false positives is low but false negatives can also occur if the sample contains insufficient quantities of the virus to be successfully amplified and detected. xu et al. [ ] propose alternative diagnosis via ct scans in combination with deep learning techniques to address relatively low positive rate of rt-pcr tests in the early stage to determine covid- . there is similar work which makes use of x-rays and cnn [ ] . feng shi et al. [ ] made use of random forest algorithms along with ct-scans. they claim detection of rt-pcr tests is only - percent, requiring repeated tests. as far as other pharmaceutical interventions go, there is work that recommends antibody-based therapies [ ] and discovery of potential drugs using deep learning methods [ ] . there were studies on effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, which concluded that for serious patients they did not affect mortality outcomes [ ] . more studies may be needed here. k. kang et al. [ ] talk about repurposing existing drugs by making use of ai to predict drug-target interactions. w, zhang p [ ] have studied herd immunity and vaccination game. they inform that herd immunity can be achieved by voluntary, private vaccination. as of now, research is yet to establish long-term post-infection immunity from covid- [ ] . ferguson et al. [ ] from imperial college london classified possible non-pharmaceutic interventions to tackle covid- under mitigation with focus on slowing the epidemic spread and suppression with objective of reversing the epidemic growth. whereas mitigation included detection, isolation and quarantine of suspect cases, suppression required lock-down of large regions save for bare essentials. they concluded that mitigation is unlikely to be a viable option without overwhelming healthcare systems, suppression is likely necessary in countries able to implement the intensive controls required. some authors [ ] suggested strategies to come out of lock-downs by combining green zones and allowing movements in disconnected zones. there has been flurry of response by mobile app developers to tackle issues related to surveillance with privacy, health and well-being in the context of covid- [ ] . yanfang ye et al. [ ] worked on risk assessment of communities by looking at combination of disease-related, demographic, mobility and social media data. there is also research work [ ] on monitoring covid- social distancing using person detection. kathakali biswas and parongama sen [ ] analyzed the space-time dependence of novel corona virus outbreak using sir model and data from china. their research showed inverse-square law dependence of number of cases against distance from the epicenter. kathakali biswas et al. [ ] also predicted exponential growth of cases based on sir model. their model could also predict how long the disease may last. however. research by anna l ziff and robert m ziff [ ] pointed to exponential growth in death-rates followed by power-law behavior when epidemic peaks and only then exponential decline in death rates. tim k tsang et al. [ ] did a study on how changing case definitions impacted analysis of disease spread in china, leading to overestimation of basic reproductive numbers. some studies [ ] concluded even after the lockdown of wuhan on january , , the number of patients with serious covid- cases continued to rise, exceeding local hospitalization and icu capacities for at least a month. fotios petropoulos et al. [ ] conclude that not only the covid- numbers will grow but also uncertainty about forecasts will also grow. plos editors [ ] are vocal in decrying uncertainty in predicting the manifestation of virus in different countries and difficulties in reconciling potentially contradictory data and advice from models and researchers in managing conflicting political, economic and health priorities. vivek verma et al. [ ] made use of time-to-death periods/lethal periods to predict the morality rates. vishwesha guttal [ ] in their paper covered risk assessment via layered mobile tracing. eksin et al. [ ] have made modifications to standard sir/seir epidemiological models to account for social distancing to arrive at more realistic predictions. some countries have been more successful than others in surveillance of the pandemic. rapid identification and isolation of cases, quarantine of close contacts, and active monitoring of other contacts have been effective in suppressing expansion of the outbreak in singapore [ ] . south korea as widely reported in the press, was successful in containing the disease by using anti-body testing. in india however anti-body test setups imported from china failed to work reliably. the paper [ ] covered the details of french surveillance system and early experience with covid- . kissler et al. [ ] have analyzed the potential transmission dynamics through the pandemic period and beyond. they expect the disease to be around at least till may be with a break. there are many studies that predicted the growth of covid- cases in india. the very first wellknown study [ ] hidden markov model has great promise in the surveillance of covid- pandemic. this is because certain transitions happening in the progression of virus in the larger society have an association with time series data on confirmed/active cases, recoveries and deaths reported from hospitals. a generic hidden markov model is illustrated in figure , where the xi represent the hidden state sequence. the markov process which is hidden behind the dashed line is determined by the current state and state-transition probability matrix a. we are only able to observe the oi, which are related to the (hidden) states of the markov process by the observation probability matrix b. both the matrices a and b are row-stochastic as well as π which contains initial probabilities of hidden states. a, b and π together constitute the hidden markov model. we propose to make use of hidden markov model to perform surveillance of covid- spread. in our model, with each region we associate a state. thus, we define hidden states which should model majority of situations namely healthy, infected, symptomatic and detected. in addition, we define additional states that may seldom get used namely catastrophe- and catastrophe- . table below describes the hidden states. healthy this is the state a region is in prior to the first outbreak of disease and when the region is moving towards normalcy (or non-epidemic phase) h infected people are at different points in incubation phase of - period. general awareness is low and degree of complacency prevails about the disease due to low cases. this is the state of a region when a region is clearly in epidemic phase and patients come to know about their disease after onset of symptoms, typically in later part of incubation phase. this is the state of a region when region is in epidemic phase and patients come to know about their disease before the onset of symptoms during early part of incubation phase. the dynamics of spread suddenly alters due to large number of outward migrations of infected people. the dynamics of spread suddenly alters due to large number of deaths may be due to health sector capacity issues. the above states are aptly considered hidden as in the absence of exhaustive, expensive and repeated testing it is hard to know what state a given region is in at a given point in time. table below represents observations. these observations pertain to reportage on a given day as far as net additions are concerned. dead these observations pertain to additional deaths reported on a given day. total number of deaths reported is generally expected to monotonically increase over time. in these cases, patients could not recover from the disease and expire during the treatment or brought dead to hospitals/reported dead to the authorities. inactive (or active complement) these observations pertain to reduction in the active number of cases. here capacity to treat patients in hospital is freed up due to reduction in active number of cases. the cumulative count of above cases is reported under confirmed. welfare, government of india on their website [ ] . india related data is also available in greater detail on kaggle platform [ ] . for our work, we make use of the former, as it is adequate and convenient. on each day, the public health authorities report aggregate information on confirmed cases, active cases, deaths and recoveries. a, b, π) that best fit the training data where a is state-transition probability matrix, b is visible symbol probability matrix and π is probability distribution of hidden states at the initial stage. for the covid- surveillance scenario, we propose the following alternative solution approach to learning problem instead of standard baum-welch forward-backward em algorithm. . choose a vector of observation sequences catering to different region. each region on a given day can generate a, d, r and a-symbols in different numbers that account for change of observed states of patients on a given day. based on the visible symbols generated above we infer state symbols for that day as follows. thus, at the end of steps to , we have a hidden markov model comprising of a, b and π. the model can then be used for evaluation problem and decoding problem. the state distributions arrived using this model on a given day can be used by governments to design interventions in a calibrated manner. we can further refine the model by using numeric values for probability for b from the model in step and arrive at more refined values of a. we made use of the data on covid- published on daily basis by the ministry of health and family welfare [ ] , government of india to train the hmm. the approach we chose was to make reasonable assumptions about mapping between data reported by hospitals and state of infection in regions as shown in table . then by making use of inferred states we derive state transitions. we followed this approach for data between th april and may th , which is detailed in tables a and b. then based on the derived state transitions we arrive at state transition matrix(a). the computation of which is described in table . now based on our knowledge of states inferred, we compute the observation probability matrix b as shown in table . thus, based on analysis of data between april th and may th we have a refined model parameter b with quantitative values compared to qualitative inferences we started with. we also have learnt the hmm parameter a i.e state transition matrix. now the model learnt is described in table . to enable regional analysis, we provide table that lists the states/uts based on their hidden states and table that reports hidden state sequences for last one week for each of the states and uts. we have chosen to use the model in table only for prospective data (and not retrospectively). we believe this is an appropriate decision as we are primarily looking at sequential data figure illustrates state transitions and figure depicts corresponding mapping between observations and inferred states. figure shows the distribution of inferred states. in all these cases we have used our initial approach for data between april th and may th and then use the learnt model for data between may th to th the approach we recommend is to recompute and refine the hmm every two weeks and apply for the prospective data. we made use of the refined model as of may th for the period may to and data as of june th . the hidden state sequences region-wise along with active cases all the way to june , are shown in table . figure illustrate hidden state transition probabilities of states(regions) of concern compared to similar states(regions). here we assume that the transition sequence leads us towards normalization and hence benign. these transitions are represented clock-wise and with solid-lines. the transitions in opposite sequence are considered as matter of concern and they are represented using dashed-lines and/or in anti-clockwise manner. transition back to the same state is considered benign in case of healthy states as well as detected states. the latter ensures timely detection of pandemic spread. transition back to the same state is considered a matter of concern in case of symptomatic as well as infected states. as earlier benign transitions are marked using solid lines and others using dashd lines. further after a gap of a month we reviewed the data on covid- spread in india on july th and arrived at the hidden states with june th as the base date. the status of states as on july th is given in table . then again, we assessed the incremental spread on july th relative to data on the th and the inferred hidden states of different states and union territories are given in table . in this section we analyse the results we have obtained in order to make policy/process recommendations. we can make the following observations regarding covid- pandemic surveillance in india. it is to be noted that because of inter-state movements of migrants there was some impact on the covid- scenario where certain states may have reported surge in the number of cases due to influx of migrants. here figure , table and table illustrate the data as of may th and figure - illustrate the data as of june th . as shown in figure , the number of healthy states has remained around the same and new infections seem to be still breaking out. on the positive side there seems to be steady reduction in the symptomatic states and increase in the number of detected states. this means there is early detection of the cases to greater degree than earlier. . table overall while things continue to be of concern in delhi, they most probably will normalize much sooner than maharashtra provided new outbreaks of infection are prevented. in case of haryana we can broadly say that percent of the cases it is in healthy state and percent of the cases it is in symptomatic state. here the focus should be on active cases and how to get them cured fast. . figure in summary, we make the following recommendations. • states/uts/zones which predominantly maintain healthy state, should strictly regulate migrations in and out of the region. • for states/uts/zones which show off and on, infected status, focus should be on those who may potentially get infected. these may be health workers or people who typically interact with large number of people or move around a lot. • for states/uts/zones which maintain symptomatic status, the focus should be on nonpharmaceutical interventions such as social distance and containment. • state/uts which maintain detected status yet may have high mortality the focus should be on pharmaceutical interventions and on improving the health infrastructure. table a : covid- progression in india between - - and - - table b : covid- progression in india between - - and - - the main issue unique to covid- spread is that the infected may remain asymptomatic between to days i.e. through the incubation period. during that period, they may be unknowingly spreading the disease. some detections may also get missed if tests return false negatives. we have proposed an approach that takes as input data reported from hospitals in regard to active cases, recoveries and deaths and infers the latent state of regions as far as spread of covid- is concerned. to that end we categorized regions as healthy, infected, symptomatic and detected (before onset of symptoms). we modeled the state of regions as hidden states and reportage from hospitals as observations. we proposed a simpler approach to tackle the hmm learning problem in lieu of baum welch em algorithm. we have also provided a set of recommendations to better manage the surveillance of covid- . we believe our approach can help governments have a better assessment of spread of epidemic in different regions and enable them to plan appropriate interventions/responses. • this paper has made use of hidden markov model (hmm) to assess the state of spread covid- pandemic in regions based on reportage from hospitals. • the hmm states are categorized as healthy, infected, symptomatic and detected. • policy recommendations suggested for each of the above states can be calibrated further by governments. the model can be continually refined to handle prospective and future data. domain experts can contribute towards validating/refining the underlying assumptions in this research. what's the difference between a pandemic, an epidemic, endemic, and an outbreak? how to tell if you have flu, coronavirus or something else the latest coronavirus q&a: everything you need to know now curve flattened but no dip is a concern: aiims chief dr randeep guleria 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(a preprint from www modelling and simulation of covid- propagation in a large population with specific reference to india modeling epidemics spreading on social contact networks covid- and racial/ethnic disparities information as of am ist, ministry of health and family welfare covod- in india, dataset on novel corona virus disease in india karnataka fares better than high prevalence states in covid- fight coronavirus: bengaluru to go under complete lockdown from july to as cases surge key: cord- -yao v authors: carneiro, carlos b.; ferreira, i'uri h.; medeiros, marcelo c.; pires, henrique f.; zilberman, eduardo title: lockdown effects in us states: an artificial counterfactual approach date: - - journal: nan doi: nan sha: doc_id: cord_uid: yao v we adopt an artificial counterfactual approach to assess the impact of lockdowns on the short-run evolution of the number of cases and deaths in some us states. to do so, we explore the different timing in which us states adopted lockdown policies, and divide them among treated and control groups. for each treated state, we construct an artificial counterfactual. on average, and in the very short-run, the counterfactual accumulated number of cases would be two times larger if lockdown policies were not implemented. the evolution of the covid- has been posing several challenges to policymakers. decisions have to be made in a timely fashion, without much undisputed evidence to support them. being a new disease, and despite the enormous research effort to understand it, estimates of the transmission, recovery and death rates remain uncertain. nevertheless, these are key pieces of information to assess potential pressures on the health system capacity, as well as the need of a lockdown policy and its intensity if implemented. not surprisingly, similar regions have implemented different strategies regarding lockdowns. the leading example in the media is the looser social distancing policy in sweden versus strict policies in its scandinavian peers. by informally comparing the evolution of the pandemics in sweden and denmark (or norway), many commentators argue that several covid- cases and deaths in sweden would be avoided in the short-run were a strict lockdown in place. aiming to provide a quantitative assessment on the short-run effects of lockdowns, this paper takes this exercise seriously in the context of us states. given that the timing us states adopted lockdown policies differs among them, we adopt techniques based on synthetic control (sc) approach of abadie and gardeazabal [ ] and abadie et al. [ ] to assess the impact of lockdowns on the short-run evolution of the number of cases and deaths in the treated us states. more specifically, we consider an extension of the original sc method called artificial counterfactual (arco) which was put forward by carvalho et al. [ ] . due to the nonstationary nature of the data, the correction of masini and medeiros [ ] is necessary. our results point to a substantial short-run taming of the cumulative number cases due to the adoption of lockdown policies. on average, for treated states, the counterfactual accumulated number of cases, according to the method adopted here, would be two times larger were lockdown policies not implemented. a key feature of our approach is that it is purely data-driven. in the beginning of the crisis, the majority of papers written by economists to evaluate the effectiveness of lockdowns relied on epidemiological models for analysis, including the most recent ones that incorporate behavioral responses. these models are hard to discipline quantitatively. many calibrated parameters remain uncertain, and models that incorporate behavioral responses need time to mature and agree on a reliable set of ingredients and moments to be matched. model-free approaches like ours or medeiros et al. [ ] should complement policy discussions or forecasting exercises based on those models, especially from a quantitative point of view. there are related papers using state or county level us data. at least one of them, , uses a synthetic control approach but it is restricted solely to california. other papers, such as brzezinski et al. [ ] , and sears et al. [ ] , use variations in the timing of statewide adoption of containment policies, and difference-in-differences models to document substantial reductions in mobility and improvements of health outcomes. the key identification assumption in these papers is that variations in the timing are random after controlling for covariates. brzezinski et al. [ ] also consider an instrumental-variable approach. fowler et al. [ ] and grassi and j. sauvagnat [ ] follow similar empirical strategies but at county level, and also find substantial reductions in cases and fatalities in counties that adopted stay-at-home orders and state-mandated business closures, respectively. our analysis, that rests on alternative identification assumption and method, should be seen as complementary. as the pandemic evolves, and more data become available, we expect more related empirical evidence to be consolidated. the paper is organized as follows. section describes the data, while section presents the empirical strategy. the results are discussed in section . finally, section concludes the paper. additional results are included in the appendix. data on covid- (confirmed) cases are obtained from the repository at the johns hopkins university center for systems science and engineering (jhu csse). we consider the cumulative cases for a subset of the us states and the district of columbia. instead of using the chronological time across the states, we consider the epidemiological time, which means that the day one in a given state is the day that the first covid- case was confirmed there. the econometric approach adopted here relies on the fact that some states adopted a lockdown strategy (the treatment), whereas others did not adopt social distancing measures (control group) and are used to construct the counterfactual. lockdown strategies include a mix of state-wide non-pharmaceutical measures aiming to limit social interactions, such as restrictions on nonessential activities and requirements that residents stay at home. containment policies. see, for example, atkeson [ a] on the uncertainty regarding estimates of the fatality rate. there are also related papers for other countries. for example, fang et al. [ ] for china. the timing of those policies at each state were obtained, and double checked, in several press articles, e.g., https://www.businessinsider.com/us-map-stay-at-home-orders-lockdowns- - and https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ /us/coronavirus-stay-at-home-order.html. in this section, we describe how we assign states to control and treatment groups, and then, describe the method used to construct the counterfactuals. aiming to balance control and treatment states, and at the same time obtain enough observations to estimate properly the model before the lockdown policy was implemented, we divide us states into three groups. for a state to be included in the analysis, a state-wide lockdown policy must be established at least twenty days after the first case. we assume that whenever an individual becomes infected, it takes an average of ten days to show up as a confirmed case in the statistics. hence, the in-sample period used to estimate the synthetic control ("before" the lockdown policy) for each treated state (to be defined below) is the number of days between the tenth day after the first confirmed case and the tenth day after the lockdown strategy was implemented. we choose to start the in-sample from the tenth day as a way to smooth the initial volatility of the data. we adopt a criteria that a state must have at least twenty observations in the in-sample period to be included in the analysis. this criteria excludes states that adopted a state-wide lockdown strategy too early, such as connecticut, new jersey, ohio, among others. these are the unmarked states in table , which reports the dates of the first case and lockdown policy, as well the difference in days between them, and also helps visualize the three groups of states. the remaining states must be divided into treated and control groups. the idea is to find a synthetic control for each of the treated states. the group of potential controls should consist of states that adopted a lockdown policy too late (or never adopted), such that counterfactuals are not contaminated by lockdown policies implemented in those states. at the same time, and for a similar reasoning, the lockdown strategies adopted in treated states must be in place during the period of analysis. this assumption is motivated by the incubation period of the virus. according to the world health organization, the "[...] the incubation period for covid- , which is the time between exposure to the virus (becoming infected) and symptom onset, is on average - days, however can be up to days." see https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/ -sitrep- -covid- .pdf. in the appendix a. , table a . shows the reopen dates for the treated states. fortunately, there are horizons that can balance both goals: enough states to build the synthetic controls and a relative extensive period to construct the counterfactuals. in particular, we restrict the analysis up to the th epidemiological day. this figure accommodates at least ten control states to build the synthetic controls, at the same time it maximizes the out-of-sample days to run the counterfactuals. in this sense, our analysis concerns the very short-run impact of lockdowns, up to nearly three weeks. the treated states are marked in blue in table , and include twenty states: alabama, colorado, florida, georgia, kansas, kentucky, maine, maryland, mississippi, missouri, nevada, new hampshire, new york, north carolina, oregon, pennsylvania, rhode island, south carolina, tennessee, and texas. the potential control states are marked in red, and include ten states: arizona, arkansas, california, illinois, iowa, massachusetts, nebraska, north dakota, south dakota, and washington. nonetheless, due to the lack of variation within the in-sample period, we exclude four states from this control pool as we explain below. importantly, oklahoma, utah and wyoming only implemented partial lockdowns (not reported in the table). therefore, they are hard to classify as either treated or control states. we opt to exclude them from the analysis. figure illustrates the empirical strategy, which is formalized in the next subsection. it plots the evolution of (log) cumulative cases along the epidemiological time. the first vertical dashed line represents the tenth day after the first confirmed case. the in-sample period is represented in between the first and second vertical dashed lines, which mark the tenth day and the following twenty days, respectively. similarly, the out-of-sample period is in between the second and third vertical dashed lines, which mark the th and th epidemiological day, respectively. blue lines represent the treated states, whereas the red ones the potential control states. the turning points from blue full-to dashed-lines represent the days lockdowns were implemented (plus ten days) in treated states. note that new york is clearly an outlier among the treated states, exhibiting a huge amount of cases (more on that below). we use the red lines to build synthetic controls for each full blue-line up to the turning point, and then construct counterfactuals by simulating the synthetic controls forward up to the th day. the idea is to compare them with the blue dashed-lines that capture actual cases. as figure highlights, some states display lack of variation within the in-sample period. just to give an example, washington had had only one confirmed case for the first days since its first confirmed covid- infection. hence, we exclude it from the control group. for similar reasons, we also exclude arizona, illinois, and massachusetts from the control pool. the analysis ended up relying on six control states. we propose a two-step approach using the artificial counterfactual (arco) method introduced by carvalho et al. [ ] with the correction of masini and medeiros [ ] to estimate the number of cases for each us state. let = , , . . . , represents the number of days after the first confirmed case of covid- in a given state. define as the natural logarithm of the number of confirmed cases days after the first case of the disease in this specific treated state, and as a vector containing the logarithm of the number of reported cases for control states also days after the first case has been reported as well as a logarithmic trend: log( ). the inclusion of the trend is important to capture the shape of the curve. the model is estimated as follows. we use the weighted least absolute and shrinkage operator (wlasso) as described in masini and medeiros [ ] to select the control states that will be used to estimate our counterfactual. the goal of the lasso is to balance the trade-off between bias and variance and is an useful tool to select the relevant peers in an environment with very few data points:̂︀ = arg min where = | , |, = , . . . , − , and = . is, for each state, the number of days from the first reported case until the lockdown plus ten extra days, and > is the penalty parameter which is selected by the bayesian information criterion (bic), in accordance with medeiros and mendes [ ] . the weight correction in the lasso is necessary in order to control for the nonstationarity of the data; see masini and medeiros [ ] for a detailed discussion. the counterfactual for = + , . . . , is computed aŝ︀ we also report % confidence intervals based on the resampling procedure proposed in masini and medeiros [ ] . we are interested in examining the effects of lockdown policies not only on the number of cases, but also on the number of deaths. however, we cannot implement the strategy described above because there is not enough variation in deaths for the in-sample period. some states, for instance, implemented a state-wide lockdown policies before the first confirmed death. thus, we propose an alternative method. we consider a counterfactual state for the number of deaths based on the counterfactual estimated for the number of cases. this is not straightforward as in the traditional synthetic control method because the arco methodology described above includes an intercept in the estimation, which is measured in the log of the number of cases, and not only a convex combination of other states. intuitively, the methodology described above chooses a combination of states that is at a fixed distance from the treated unit at the in-sample period and not a convex combination of states that matches exactly the actual number of cases. the intercept controls for all time-invariant characteristics that define the counterfactual. then, we proceed as follows. let be the number of accumulated deaths in state at the day . also, let be the vector of estimated coefficients for the state as in ( ) and used to construct the counterfactual for cases. in addition, let be a vector of the number of deaths for all states in the control pool at time . we define the counterfactual number of deaths in that state as: = −¯+¯ ( ) where¯is the day that state implemented the lockdown policies. that is, we maintain the weights estimated above and adjust the intercept so that the counterfactual series for deaths matches the number of actual observed deaths in the beginning of the quarantine. for the sake of exposition, we relegate the results on cumulative deaths to appendix a. . to illustrate how the method works, figure presents the arco counterfactuals for the states of alabama, colorado, and maine. the timing of the policy intervention ( + ) corresponds to the lockdown date plus ten days. the counterfactual analysis makes it clear the importance of lockdown policies in mitigating the acceleration of the number of covid- confirmed cases in the treated states. as shown in figure a , for example, our results point to a substantial increase in the number of cases in alabama if it had not adopted an early lockdown. similarly, figures b and c reveal the same behavior for the cumulative curves in the other selected states. counterfactuals are constructed with the estimated weights and cumulative cases of the six states that compose the control group. these weights are reported in table a . in appendix a. . in appendix a. , we present similar counterfactual plots for the remaining treated states. in order to assure that the proposed methodology is producing proper counterfactual analysis, we generate placebo results by producing a "synthetic control" for each control state using the remaining control states as control pool. results are displayed in figure , which shows the ratio of the estimated counterfactual cumulative cases to the actual ones for treated states except new york (black lines), and non-treated states (red lines). we assume that the epidemiological day of the placebo intervention is = , marked by the vertical dashed line, which is the median (and the mean) timing of the policy interventions in the treated states. it is reassuring that for half of the placebo counterfactuals the ratios fluctuate around one, whereas for the majority of treated states ratios grew above one at some point (likely around the actual timing of policy intervention). the latter result means that lockdown policies were effective to tame the spread of the virus, whereas the former suggests that results are not driven by chance. regarding south dakota, the only placebo counterfactual that reached a ratio well above one, by using google mobility data (described in appendix a. ), we show that mobility in residential areas increased whereas mobility in outdoor areas decreased substantially once compared to the period before the pandemic (see figures a. and a. in appendix a. ) . this is suggestive that south dakota's population endogenously decided to stay more at home, and avoided environments prone to the risk of contamination. at the time, a proper lockdown policy was not necessary, and south dakota's non-conformity to the placebo test does not seem to invalidate our approach. in contrast, for nebraska and california, the counterfactuals are pointing to a smaller number of cases than the actual ones, which goes against finding that lockdowns were effective to reduce cases of covid- . the case of california is quite emblematic, as the number of cases during the estimation window remained very small and with very low variation. however, the number of cases started to grow at a fast rate much after the cut-off date. the state of nebraska displays a similar pattern. to gauge the quantitative impact of lockdown policies, for each state, whether treated or control used as placebo, we compute the ratio of the counterfactual estimated comulative cases ("without" a lockdown strategy in place) to actual ones on the th epidemiological day, which is the last day used to compute the counterfactual. table reports the mean and median of the ratios across states, whereas table a . in appendix a. reports these ratios for each state. the first row corresponds the case in which controls are used as placebos, whereas the second considers the treated states only. as we discuss below, new york is clearly an outlier, whose ratio reached an implausible value of . as reported in table a . . hence, our preferred specification is displayed in the third row which excludes new york from the pool of treated states. we also compute other two versions of these ratios using the lower bound (lb) and upper bound (up) of the % confidence interval in the numerator. the ratios are clearly above one for the treated units, whether new york is excluded or not. according to our preferred specification, counterfactual estimates suggest that the number of cases would be nearly two times larger were lockdown policies absent. again, it is reassuring that among the controls used as placebo, these average ratios remain around one. regarding the effects of lockdowns on cumulative deaths, we present the results for all treated states in appendix a. . for some states, the counterfactual cumulative deaths exhibit similar patterns to those regarding cumulative cases. but, for many other states, they are not statistically significant at least for the first days after the policy implementation. one possible explanation is that there is a delay between cases and deaths, as the latter is a consequence of the former. hence, deaths only show up in the official statistics days after cases. perhaps, if we could estimate counterfactuals for longer periods, the synthetic accumulated deaths would further decouple from the actual ones. in addition, since weights on the controls are estimated considering the (log) cumulative number of cases, the counterfactuals for cumulative deaths are arguably noisier. as discussed above and presented in table a . in appendix a. , we obtain an implausible ratio (of counterfactuals to actual cumulative cases) of . to new york. this section puts a lens on this state. in particular, figure displays the estimated cumulative number of cases for new york "without" lockdown, as well as extrapolations of the cumulative number of cases based on the mean and median growth rate of the last ten days of the in-sample period. as reported in table , among the treated states, new york was the fastest one to react to the pandemic, and established a state-wide lockdown policy only days after the first case. figure extrapolates the last in-sample observations by using both the observed mean and median growth rates for the last ten days, which yields a similar pattern to the result obtained by applying the synthetic control approach. due to the progression of the virus, particularly in new york city, the in-sample observed rates are quite high once compared to other states as illustrated in figure , which can be explained not only by the dynamics of the city but also by its high population density. hence, new york is clearly an outlier and might not be amenable to our synthetic control approach, which justifies reporting results excluding new york above. in this paper, as opposed to most of the early and incipient literature on the lockdown effects during the covid- crisis, we conisder a purely data-driven approach to assess the impact of lockdowns on the short-run evolution of the number of cases and deaths in some us states. also, as opposed to some recent papers that use a difference-in-difference approach, we adopt a variant of the synthetic control approach, arco, due to carvalho et al. [ ] and masini and medeiros [ ] . on average, according to the synthetic controls, the counterfactual accumulated number of cases would be two times larger were lockdown policies not implemented in treated states. in the first two columns of table a . we show the date of the first confirmed case in every treated state we analyze and its reopen date (plus ten days), whenever available at the time we started to circulate this paper. in the third column, we show the difference (in days) from the first confirmed case and the reopen date plus ten days. these figures illustrate why we had to limit our sample size to only epidemiological days. for example, if we had used days in our analysis, we would have to exclude alabama and maine from our treated states, given that they would not be in a state-wide lockdown in the last days of the out-of-sample period. we report in the first seven rows of table a . the coefficients estimated by the lasso model for each treated state for the + in-sample period. the last two rows display the mean and the median (across the out-of-sample period) of the ratio between the actual cumulative cases and the counterfactual cases for every state. with only two exceptions (missouri and nevada), every state has an out-of-sample mean and median of the observed-to-predicted ratio below one. this means that, on average, the realized cumulative cases were smaller than the counterfactual, which highlight that lockdowns had a meaningful impact on slowing down the covid- spread in these states. table a . reports the ratio of the counterfactual cumulative cases to the actual ones on the th day after the first confirmed case in each state. it also reports the lower and upper limits of the % confidence interval. among the treated states, the ratio is larger than one in of them. for missouri and nevada, there is no evidence on the effectiveness of lockdown policies. for mississipi and south carolina, the impacts of lockdowns are only modest. note that new york is clearly an outlier, with such ratio around . . we discuss this case in the main text. in contrast, among the non-treated states, we obtain ratios close to one for three out of six cases. we assume that the cut-off of the placebo intervention is = , which is the median (and the mean) timing of the policy interventions in the treated states. as discussed in the main text, south dakota, which displays a ratio well above one, experienced a large reduction in outside mobility even without official lockdown measures. california and nebraska, which display ratios below one, had very few covid- confirmed cases during the period before the cut-off. in this section, in figures a. -a. , we report the counterfactual estimates for cumulative deaths based on the methodology described in section . . as we discuss in the main text, although for some states, the counterfactuals exhibit similar shapes to those regarding cumulative cases, for many other states, they are not statistically significant at least for the first days after the policy implementation. we know that lockdowns affect the covid- dynamics by imposing social distancing and mobility restrictions. to help understand the results described in this paper, we analyze the mobility data available at google mobility reports (https://www.google.com/covid /mobility/). google mobility data show how visits and length of stay at different places change compared to a baseline, before the outbreak of the pandemic. in particular, the baseline is the median value, for the corresponding day of the week, during the five weeks between january rd and february th . in order to understand how the population in each group (treated and control states) is behaving during the covid- crisis, we compute the median of mobility changes across our sample period, i.e. the days following the tenth day after the first confirmed case in each state. also, the data concern mobility changes for six categories, being five of them related to outdoor activities. namely, grocery & pharmacy, transit stations, parks, retail & recreation, and workplaces. the remaining one concerns indoor activities, namely, residential. hence, to capture an idea of outdoor mobility changes, we aggregate the aforementioned five categories into a single one defined as the median of the original five categories. in contrast, mobility changes in residential areas capture indoor mobility changes. the two boxplots in figures a. and a. present the median of mobility changes in all analyzed states both in residential and in outdoor areas, respectively. we report results for treated and control states separately. regarding mobility changes in residential areas, on average, residents from every state analyzed spent more time in these areas after the pandemic outbreak. however, those from treated states spent even more time indoor. nevertheless, there are outliers. for instance, residents from south dakota spent a lot more time in residential areas than before the pandemic, which helps understand the results found for this state in the placebo test. we found similar results for mobility changes in outdoor areas. clearly, residents from treated states remained in outside areas less often than residents from controls (always compared to the period before the pandemic). in new york, for example, there was a % decrease of outdoor mobility. once more, south dakota is an outlier for the control group, reinforcing the thesis that its population voluntarily decided to stay more at home. indeed, residents from south dakota spent almost % less time in outside areas, while those from the median state for the control group spent nearly % less. the economic costs of conflict: a case study of the basque country synthetic control methods for comparative case studies: estimating the effect of california's tobacco control program pandemic, shutdown and consumer spending: lessons from scandinavian policy responses to covid. working paper, university of copenhagen a simple planning problem for covid- lockdown how deadly is covid- ? understanding the difficulties with estimation of its fatality rate what will be the economic impact of covid- in the us? rough estimates of disease scenarios an seir infectious disease model with testing and conditional quarantine covid- infection externalities: trading off lives vs. livelihoods. working paper the covid- pandemic: government vs. community action across the united states. working paper arco: an artificial counterfactual approach for high-dimensional panel time-series data when do shelter-in-place orders fight covid- best? policy heterogeneity across states and adoption time the macroeconomics of epidemics human mobility restrictions and the spread of the novel coronavirus ( -ncov) in china the effect of stay-at-home orders on covid- cases and fatalities in the united states. working paper did california's shelter-in-place order work? early coronavirus-related public health effects costs and benefits of closing businesses in a pandemic optimal mitigation policies in a pandemic: social distancing and working from home the effect of social distancing measures on intensive care occupancy: evidence on covid- in scandinavia. working paper counterfactual analysis with artificial controls: inference, high dimensions and nonstationarity ℓ -regularization of high-dimensional time-series models with nongaussian and heteroskedastic innovations short-term covid- forecast for latecomers. working paper villas-boas. are we #stayinghome to flatten the curve? working paper key: cord- - wcp x authors: xiong, chenfeng; hu, songhua; yang, mofeng; younes, hannah n; luo, weiyu; ghader, sepehr; zhang, lei title: data-driven modeling reveals the impact of stay-at-home orders on human mobility during the covid- pandemic in the u.s date: - - journal: nan doi: nan sha: doc_id: cord_uid: wcp x one approach to delay the spread of the novel coronavirus (covid- ) is to reduce human travel by imposing travel restriction policies. it is yet unclear how effective those policies are on suppressing the mobility trend due to the lack of ground truth and large-scale dataset describing human mobility during the pandemic. this study uses real-world location-based service data collected from anonymized mobile devices to uncover mobility changes during covid- and under the 'stay-at-home' state orders in the u.s. the study measures human mobility with two important metrics: daily average number of trips per person and daily average person-miles traveled. the data-driven analysis and modeling attribute less than % of the reduction in the number of trips and person-miles traveled to the effect of the policy. the models developed in the study exhibit high prediction accuracy and can be applied to inform epidemics modeling with empirically verified mobility trends and to support time-sensitive decision-making processes. the coronavirus disease (covid- ) pandemic is undoubtedly one of the worst global health crises seen in decades. the first confirmed case of covid- in the u.s. emerged in washington state on january st, . three months later, over three quarters of a million cases had been confirmed throughout the nation. governments around the world are taking rapid action to mitigate the spread of the disease. the u.s. government proclaimed a national state of emergency on march th, . following an exponential growth in the number of confirmed cases, the federal emergency management agency (fema) announced its first major disaster in the state of new york on march th, , followed by california and washington on march nd (fema, ). as of april th, , fema had announced the covid- pandemic a disaster in every state, with wyoming being the last one. on march th, , california became the first state to institute a "stay-at-home" or "shelter in place" order (state of california, ). by mid-april , all but states had followed suit. three of the states had partial stay-at-home orders, implemented by city mayors or county executives (mervosh et al., ) . one approach to delay the spread is to reduce human travel by imposing travel restriction policies. international and domestic travel restrictions are shown to possibly decrease the rate of case exportations (wells et al., ; chinazzi et al., ) . government appropriations are a crucial component in reducing case fatalities in the u.s. (moghadas et al., ) . research focused on analyzing the impact of such policies on the spread of covid- generally use epidemic models, such as gleam, while people's compliance to such travel restriction policies are either not assumed or assumed as a single factor (chinazzi et al., ) . it is still unclear how effective those policies are on suppressing the mobility trend to flatten the curve largely due to the lack of the ground truth and large-scale dataset describing human mobility patterns during the pandemic. the authors use real-world mobility big data collected from anonymized mobile devices to uncover mobility changes under the "stay-at-home" state orders in the u.s.. to capture the dynamic behavior response to the "stay-at-home" state orders, a data panel of integrated and processed location data representing movements for the entire u.s. was developed, incorporating daily movements, from january st, to april th, , of over million anonymous and optedin individuals daily. then, previously developed and validated spatial-temporal algorithms were used to identify all trips from the data panel. a multi-level weighting procedure expanded the sample to the entire u.s. population, using device-level and trip-level weights to ensure data representativeness in the nation, states, and counties. the data panel and the computational algorithms have been validated based on a variety of independent datasets such as the national household travel survey (nhts) and the american community survey (acs), and peer reviewed by an external expert panel in a u.s. department of transportation federal highway administration's exploratory advanced research program project . two human mobility metrics were developed at the national and statelevel and integrated with covid- case data collected from the johns hopkins university covid- dashboard (dong et al., ), population data, and other data sources for the analyses (acs, ; fhwa, ). • daily average number of trips per person: the total number of identified trips in each day that are above three hundred meters length divided by the total population; • daily average person-miles traveled: the total person-miles traveled in each day across all travel modes (plane, car, bus, rail, bike, walk, etc.) divided by the total population. using the human mobility metrics in january as the comparison benchmark (new year's day, jan st and martin luther king jr. day, jan th are excluded), we quantified the national mobility trend during the covid- , as visualized in figure . people did not reduce their travels until the second week of march, during which the world health organization (who) defined covid- as a global pandemic and the proclamation on declaring a national emergency was made by the white house (who, ; white house, ). immediately following, the sharpest deterioration of mobility was observed in the third week of march. mobility in terms of daily average person-miles traveled has already dropped over % compared to january average when the first state in the u.s., california, announced a "stay-at-home" order. in addition, the decrease of daily average number of trips per person has not dropped as significantly, indicating that more short-distance trips were made. those could be out-door activities, grocery, pharmacy, and fast food, as confirmed in other parallel analyses (google, ; placeiq, ). the big-data analytics suggest that, at the national level, people were already practicing social distancing by the time "stay-at-home" orders were issued by state governors. how effective are those orders in further limiting people's travel? by april th, only states had not issued "stayat-home" orders. we reorganized the mobility data and anchored the data to the dates when different states announced their "stay-at-home" orders, and then quantified the human mobility changes, compared to the january benchmark, three weeks, two weeks, and one week before and after the orders were issued (illustrated in figure ). while the data confirmed that, nationwide, mobility had dropped significantly one week or even two weeks before the orders were issued, an additional . % decrease in daily average number of trips per person and . % decrease in daily average person-miles traveled (pmt) were observed in the week after the order took effect across different states. the states that saw the most significant mobility drop after the orders are nj (- % trip, - % pmt), ny (- % trip, - % pmt), il (- % trip, - % pmt), ca (- % trip, - % pmt), mi (- % trip, - % pmt). the least significant mobility drops (+- %) can be observed in pa, ky, mo, tn, and d.c. "stay-at-home" orders vary widely in when and how they are implemented and enforced. essential activities, such as receiving healthcare services, going grocery shopping, exercising and essential work are authorized during stay-at-home orders. differences in the orders emerge in religious gatherings, where some states allow for gatherings of more than people for special events while most do not. interstate travel is sometimes allowed, although some states, such as alaska, require special permission to leave the state and others, like nevada, require a -day quarantine period for anyone re-entering the state (state of alaska, ; fox , ). education institutions have been ordered closed in nearly half the u.s. states for the remainder of the year. only seven states have recommended that schools be closed as opposed to ordering closure altogether (education week, ). seeing family members outside of their immediate household is also not permitted in several states, unless for the purpose of "caring for the family member," i.e. providing groceries for or medical aid to elderly or immunocompromised family members. additionally, not all "stay-athome" orders are implemented at the state level. many were deployed in counties or cities before the entire state adopted the order. as of mid-april, three states: oklahoma, utah and wyoming had partial stay-at-home orders. enforcement is a crucial component of "stay-at-home" orders. fifteen states (including d.c.) have stated that they would issue fines and possible jail time for persons violating the order; fourteen have stated that they would enforce the order by first issuing a warning, then possibly issuing a fine for a repeated offense; and fourteen more either have not stated how the order would be enforced or have explicitly stated that it would only be enforced through education, without penalties (mazziotta, ) . this variation in how the order is enforced conveys a possible discrepancy in how people respond to the order. risking a fine of $ or above and possible jail time in new jersey, hawaii, the district of columbia, and several other states may deter residents from going out unnecessarily more so than states who solely focus on educating people who violate the order. to quantify how people in different states responded to "stay-at-home" orders during the covid- pandemic, we studied the longitudinal changes in state-level mobility using a generalized additive model (gam) (wood, ; hastie, ; hastie & tibshirani, ) of daily average number of trips per person and daily average person-miles traveled. a notable advantage of gam lies in its flexibility that combines the linear and fixed effects with nonlinear effects such as temporal patterns, variable interaction, and individual-specific random effects. these are essential in longitudinal analysis since observations are intra-subject correlated, time-varying, and with unobserved heterogeneity. the control variables include the covid- related features (daily number of newly confirmed coronavirus cases in the state and that number in the adjacent states), policy-related features (whether the order has been issued, and the levels of enforcements), and other factors contributing to the variation (i.e., random effect of time and states, weekday-weekend variation, and state governor approval rates). our model predicts the daily average number of trips and daily average person-miles traveled across all states with relatively high accuracy (adj. r = . and . , respectively). most of the parameters of control variables are found statistically significant at least at the p< . level. as expected, the daily number of newly confirmed coronavirus cases in the state and that number for the rest of the nation are very effective in persuading people to travel less. we also find that the effect of "stay-at-home" orders negatively contributes to human mobility. more interestingly, the magnitude of the effect intensifies as state enforcement becomes stricter. the models are then applied to estimate the trip reduction and miles-traveled reduction due to the issuance of "stay-at-home" orders by comparing the predictions with and without "stay-at-home" orders. as depicted in figure and figure , only a moderate amount of reductions in human mobility can be attributed to "stay-at-home" orders. nationally speaking, the orders lead to a daily reduction of . trips per person (or . % of average daily number of trips per person) and a daily reduction of . person-miles traveled (or . % of average daily person-miles traveled). state-level effect has also been quantified. stay-at-home orders account for a greater effect in states with more strict enforcement, such as hi (the order leads to . person trips reduced and . miles reduced) and mi. compared to states that issued stay-at-home orders without penalty or without specifying particular enforcement, those enforced with warning and possible fines for repeated offense see an additional . % in trip reduction. enforcement with fines and possible jail time will further reduce . % daily trips per person. the policy effect is greatly related to the timing of the orders. states that had an already deteriorated mobility before the order release or simply issued the order late saw a limited effect, such as ny and nj. understanding and accurately predicting human mobility during a pandemic is critical for the control of spread of covid- and any other highly contagious disease. here, anonymized and privacyenhanced location-based service data in the nation provides ground-truth empirical evidence on how people in the u.s. moved during the covid- outbreak and successfully supported human mobility analytics and modeling. the models were deemed statistically significant and accurate, and estimated the effect of state-issued "stay-at-home" orders and other influential factors on human mobility changes. dynamics in human mobility, such as distance traveled and number of trips made in a day, were thus quantified. these model outputs can be immediately integrated in epidemics models that need empirical data support on human movement to assess transmission of disease and control measures. our immediate next step is to determine hotspot travel destinations in decision support of mitigating spread and reducing local transmissions. table s shows the relative change from the benchmark (i.e., january ) in average number of trips per person and average person-miles traveled (pmt) per state, three, two and one week before and one week after each "stay-at-home" order took effect. • starting from as early as two weeks before each state officially issued the "stay-at-home" order, over states experienced more than % average pmt drop compared to the january benchmark. and an average of % decrease in average pmt ( % decrease in number of trips per person) across all states compared to previous week are observed. these indicate that people were actively taking actions by reducing their travel prior to the issuance of the orders from the state governments. • observation on one week before the "stay-at-home" orders further shows more decrease in pmt, where all states were observed more than % pmt drop, and an average of % decrease in average pmt ( % decrease in number of trips per person) across all states compared to previous week are observed. • one week after each state issued its own "stay-at-home" order, all states experienced more than % average pmt drop, and an average of additional % decrease in average pmt ( % decrease in number of trips per person) across all states compared to previous week are observed. another finding is that the amount decrease in average pmt is larger than that of average number of trips per person, with an average of . %, . % and . % more decrease across all states for two weeks before, one week before and one week after the "stay-at-home" orders are issued. one possible reason is that even though people reduce long-distance or commute trips, they tend to do more short-distance activities such as walking their dogs, jogging and other outdoor exercise activities. as most states' "stay-at-home" allow outdoor exercises, the results indicate that people do follow the orders to some extent. this section provides a detailed description of the gam we employed to examine the policy effects on human mobility change. gam is a semi-parametric model with a linear predictor involving a series of additive non-parametric smooth functions of covariates. compared to the classical ordinary least squares (ols) regression, gam is more flexible with fewer assumptions, which is useful when data cannot meet ols assumptions, such as independence, normality, and homogeneity. additionally, a noticeable advantage of gam lies in its capability and flexibility to handle different formats of nonlinear effects (wood, ) . by changing the spline functions, various effects can be captured under one model framework, including the random effects, the interaction relationships, and the spatiotemporal autocorrelations. as a longitudinal analysis with repeated observations over time for each state, the nonindependence among the repeated observations and the heterogeneous variability over time should be carefully addressed. mixed (also named multilevel) models are widely used to handle the panel data (wolfinger and o'connell, ) . however, traditional mixed models are linear-based and fail to obtain high performance under data with significant nonlinear fluctuation. hence, a gam structure is involved to handle the panel data, with several additive smooth terms besides the linear fixed effect to address the heterogeneous covariance structures. to specific, the additive terms including: ) random effects across all states, to capture the unobserved heterogeneity. ) interactions between stay-at-home order and state, to capture the varying effect of policies across different states; ) time-varying patterns, including an average changing pattern and a seasonally changing pattern (weekly patterns), to fit the autoregressive time series; ) spatiotemporal interactions, to capture the spatiotemporal heterogeneity over time across different states. gam is estimated using the r 'mgcv' package (wood, ) . variance components are estimated by the restricted maximum likelihood estimation (reml), which is widely used in models with random effects. the expression of gam is shown as follows: where " # is the vector of the average number of trips per person or average person-miles traveled in state i over different days; & is the overall intercept; ") is the k th coefficient of fixed effects that vary across different states; k is the total number of fixed effects; ") refers to the k th fixed covariate; l is the total number of covariates that present nonlinear features; " (. ) is a low rank isotropic smooth function and "/ denotes the l th covariate with nonlinear effects; " and " are the r th pair of interaction covariate; r and s are the numbers of variables with interactive effects; < = (. ) is an interaction smooth functions with penalties on each null space component; is the random effect vector of a state, and assumed to follow a gaussian distribution, noted as ( , b ); in this study, random effects are parametric terms penalized by a ridge penalty. two dependent variables are considered, i.e. the daily average number of trips per person (tpp) and the daily average person-miles traveled (pmt), which are used to represent the changes of state-level individual travel frequency. all the dependent variables are the relative value using the corresponding values in january as reference. in other words, they are the increase compared with the same day of the week in january: where d e is the relative dependent variables in day d; e is the absolute dependent variables in day d; e is the week of day d; hhhh )|j k ,j l is the average value of tpp or pmt in days belonging to the week e in january. independent variables include the policy-related features, such as the stay-at-home order with different level of enforcement and the state government approval rate; the cases-related features, such as the daily new cases in the state, the adjacent states, and the nationwide cases; and the temporal variables, such as the time index, the week, and whether is weekend. the variance inflation factor (vif) is used to check for multicollinearity, and variables with vif values greater than . were excluded. it is worth mentioning highly multicollinearity is observed between the number of new cases and the accumulated cases, and thus the accumulated number of cases is excluded. similar high multicollinearity is observed between stay-at-home order and covid- emergency declaration, and we keep the stay-at-home order in the final models. the summary of variables is reported in table s . the average of tpp and pmt are both negative, indicating the trip frequency and trip miles are both presenting the decreasing trends. the large st.d., on the other hand, implying the changes are heterogeneous across different states. the results of the two gams are shown in table s and s , respectively. two components are included: the parametric coefficients, corresponding to the linear fixed effects; and the nonparametric smooth terms, corresponding to the nonlinear effects, random effects (bs='re'), and interaction effects (bs='fs'). model fit indexes are . and . for the two models, indicating that gams fit the data well. linear effects -the stay-at-home orders present significant negative effects on both the number of trips and the person-miles traveled. with the degree of enforcement becoming more severe, the effects of stay-at-home orders on reducing mobility also increase. for case-related variables, the number of nationwide cases is significantly and negatively correlated with both the number of trips and the person-miles traveled. the number of cases in the states, however, only presents a significantly influence on the number of trips, not on the person-miles traveled. for temporal features, the weekend presents significant positive relationships in two models, indicating the reduction of trips on weekends is less than weekdays (i.e. the increment is greater). we also build in a control variable for the effect of governor approval rate and that is deemed insignificant by the model. nonlinear effects -the estimated degrees of freedom (e.d.f.) are all largely greater than . , suggesting that strong nonlinearities exist. besides, the interaction terms in all models present pvalues smaller than . , implying these nonlinear effects are statistically significant. the fitted results by the spline functions are shown in figure s . the values of the vertical axis show the additive effect of the independent variables on the number of trips and the person-miles traveled. italic texts: excluded variables due to multicollinearity. the left figures present the time-dependent random effect (with the dash lines showing the confidence interval), which can be deemed as the impact from other unobserved time-varying factors represented as follows: • a slight mobility drop is captured by the random effect of both models near / / , corresponding to the presidents' day weekend. • a mobility increase is then captured, with a tipping point near / / , four days before who defined the covid- as a pandemic. in line with others' data findings (e.g. placeiq ), we argue this is due to a model-unobserved panic such that people were stocking up goods for the possible lock-down. • a sharp decrease occurs between / / and / / , followed by a dramatic rebound. the rebounding effect for the daily average person-miles traveled is not as steep. this could be due to social distancing fatigue. one explanation is that the increased trips mainly belong to short-distance trips, such as the exercises near home locations. this finding is also in line with other most-recent studies (placeiq, ). the right subplots in figure s (a) and s (b) show the time-varying heterogeneity across different states. with an interaction spline function, these heterogeneities are well captured by the models. despite all the negative and significant effects from the model variables, states such as dc, nj, ma, fl, and tx, present additional decreasing trends in heterogeneity, indicating extra caution in these state residents. states such as id, mt, wy, ut, mostly present increasing trends. the various additive nonlinear effects contribute to a high performance of model fit. the coefficients in the linear part only present the average fixed effects, however, the random effects across different states are eliminated. thus, a partial dependence plot (pdp) method is introduced to examine the effects of stay-at-home orders on travel patterns across different states. pdp is widely used to interpret black-box models like various machine learning methods (friedman, ) . it shows the dependence between the response variable and the predictor, marginalizing over the values of all other predictors. in this study, the partial dependence of stay-at-home order is calculated (see table s ), serving as the policy effect for each state. the plots of pdp are presented in figure and and discussed in the main text. where " is the predicted number of trips or pmt of the state i; o " is the predicted number of trips or pmt of state i when the value of the stay-at-order variable is set as zero. impact of international travel and border control measures on the global spread of the novel coronavirus outbreak the effect of travel restrictions on the spread of the an interactive covid- mobility impact and social distancing analysis platform google covid- community mobility report projecting hospital utilization during the covid- outbreaks in the united states executive order n- - see which states and cities have told residents to stay at home placeiq social distancing tracker: / / data analytics and modeling methods for tracking and predicting origin-destination travel trends based on mobile device proclamation on declaring a national emergency concerning the novel coronavirus disease (covid- ) outbreak american community survey, -year estimates national household travel survey covid- health mandate & sisolak urges travelers to self-quarantine for -days to reduce spread of covid- education week from a $ , fine to a warning: here's how states are enforcing coronavirus stay-at-home orders daily average number of trips per person model (temporal effect and state heterogeneity) (b) daily average person-miles traveled model nonlinear temporal effects in daily average number of trips per person model (a) and daily average person-miles traveled model (b) greedy function approximation: a gradient boosting machine placeiq social distancing tracker: / / generalized linear mixed models a pseudo-likelihood approach thin plate regression splines generalized additive models: an introduction with r we would like to thank and acknowledge our partners and data sources in this effort: ( ) various mobile device location data providers including a covid- international data collaborative led by cuebiq; ( ) amazon web service and its senior solutions architect, jianjun xu, for providing cloud computing and technical support; ( ) computational algorithms developed and validated in a previous usdot federal highway administration's exploratory advanced research program project; and ( ) covid- confirmed case data from the johns hopkins university github repository and sociodemographic data from the u.s. census bureau. key: cord- -o y cic authors: jorge, d. c. p.; rodrigues, m. s.; silva, m. s.; cardim, l. l.; silva, n. b. d.; silveira, i. h.; silva, v. a. f.; pereira, f. a. c.; pinho, s. t. r.; andrade, r. f. s.; ramos, p. i. p.; oliveira, j. f. title: assessing the nationwide impact of covid- mitigation policies on the transmission rate of sars-cov- in brazil date: - - journal: nan doi: . / . . . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: o y cic covid- is now identified in almost all countries in the world, with poorer regions being particularly more disadvantaged to efficiently mitigate the impacts of the pandemic. in the absence of efficient therapeutics or vaccines, control strategies are currently based on non-pharmaceutical interventions, comprising changes in population behavior and governmental interventions, among which the prohibition of mass gatherings, closure of non-essential establishments, quarantine and movement restrictions. in this work we analyzed the effects of published governmental interventions, and population adherence thereof, on the dynamics of covid- cases across all brazilian states, with emphasis on state capitals and remaining inland cities. a generalized seir model with a time-varying transmission rate (tr), that considers transmission by asymptomatic individuals, is presented. confirmed covid- cases were used to calibrate the model parameters using non-linear least squares methods. we analyze the changes on the tr and effective reproduction number as a function of both the extent of enforced measures across brazilian states as well as population movement. the social mobility reduction index, a measure of population movement, together with the stringency index, adapted to incorporate the degree of restrictions imposed by governmental regulations, were used in conjunction to quantify and compare the effects of varying degrees of policy strictness across brazilian states. our results show that population adherence to social distance recommendations plays an important role for the effectiveness of interventions, and represents a major challenge to the control of covid- in low- and middle-income countries. duction number as a function of both the extent of enforced measures across brazilian states as well as population movement. the social mobility reduction index, a measure of population movement, together with the stringency index, adapted to incorporate the degree of restrictions imposed by governmental regulations, were used in conjunction to quantify and compare the effects of varying degrees of policy strictness across brazilian states. our results show that population adherence to social distance recommendations plays an important role for the effectiveness of interventions, and represents a major challenge to the control of covid- in low-and middle-income countries. keywords: brazil; covid- ; mathematical modeling; non-pharmaceutical interventions; transmission rate. covid- , a disease caused by the sars-cov- coronavirus, emerged in december in china and was recognized as a pandemic by the world health organization on march , [ ] . at that moment, brazil had already confirmed cases. on march , with confirmed cases, the brazilian ministry of health recognized community transmission of covid- throughout the national territory, days after the first confirmed case of covid- was identified [ ] . brazil is a country with . million individuals and stark socioeconomic disparities throughout its territory. it is the largest country in south america and the fifth largest nation in the world. accordingly, the many challenges imposed by the covid- pandemic are unprecedented in this country. the political-administrative organization of brazil comprises three spheres of governance: the union (federal government), the states (including the federal district, where the capital city, brasilia, is located) and , municipalities. to reduce the transmission of sars-cov- , federal, state and city governments implemented a series of interventions by means of government decrees [ ] . this included recommendations to identify and isolate confirmed cases and contacts; to restrict unnecessary movements; to practice social distancing; to increase hygiene awareness; to follow respiratory etiquette; to widespread use masks, among others. in the absence of more intensive mitigation policies implemented by the federal government (such as lock-downs and movement restrictions), most measures were adopted by local governments (state/municipalities) [ ] . however, adherence to these policies varied greatly throughout the country, and while some regions enacted more strict controls, others have been more lax. mathematical modeling has been instrumental to inform policies and to evaluate the trends of the covid- pandemic [ , , , , , ] . here we define the transmission rate (tr) in terms of a generalized seir model, that simulates the dynamics of virus spread in a population entirely susceptible to the new virus. in this approach, the tr represents the probability that an infected individual will transmit the disease to a susceptible individual [ ] . therefore, the higher this rate, the greater the number of new cases for a region. downward changes on the tr are expected with the implementation of mitigation policies such as non-pharmaceutical interventions (npi), currently the only option to limit the spread of sars-cov- given the absence of vaccines or effective therapies. in this work, we comparatively analyze the evolution of the covid- transmission rate and reproductive number in all brazilian states, with emphasis on state capitals and remaining inland cities, establishing links with measures of governmental restrictions (npis) implemented in each region together with the human behaviour response, particularly the adherence to recommendations of social distancing. the varying degree of enforced policies across the country offers an opportunity to study the impacts of interventions, including their breadth and timing, on the tr of sars-cov- throughout brazilian states. these findings can be extrapolated to similar settings in other low-and middle-income countries to drive improvements in mitigation policies against subsequent waves of sars-cov- or other potentially pandemic pathogens. the number of confirmed cases of covid- for each brazilian municipality, up to may , was obtained from the ministry of health, brazil, and are publicly available at https://covid.saude.gov.br/ and at https: //brasil.io/datasets/. since the capitals of each state present different dynamics and largely concentrate covid- cases in the initial wave of the epidemic, we considered separately the transmission dynamics of capitals and aggregated the remaining state municipalities (which we refer throughout the text as inland cities, although strictly not all of these are distant from the shore). to evaluate state-wide enforced governmental measures, we relied upon the careful collection of government decrees and resolutions scattered throughout various state government gazettes and other official repositories, since each state uses different platforms to communicate their legislation. we annotated the type of measure enforced, the implementation date, the duration and whether it was valid to the whole state or limited to some regions. as a proxy of the population adherence to recommendations of social distancing, we used information from inloco (https://inloco.com.br/), a brazilian technology start-up that developed an index of social mobility, which seeks to help in fight the pandemic in brazil. data for the index construction is obtained from the unidentified, aggregated geo-movement patterns extracted from million mobile devices throughout the country. the index ranges from to % and measures the proportion of devices from a given municipality that remained within a meter radius from the location identified as home by the device. the higher the index, the greatest the population adherence to social distancing recommendations. the data is available at https://mapabrasileirodacovid.inloco.com.br. examples of other works that used the social mobility reduction index (smri) can be found in [ , ] . lastly, historical average daily flux data throughout the country using road/air/fluvial networks were obtained from the brazilian institute of geography and statistics [ , ] . to comparatively evaluate the governmental measures implemented by the brazilian states, we constructed a stringency index i, similarly to that implemented in [ ] . to score each employed policy we adapted the methodology to the brazilian context by taking into account the specific measures established by the different state governments. measures were classified into two categories: ordinal and cumulative. ordinal measures, denoted by o, are those in which there is a clear order on the intensity of the restriction, so that there are less possibilities of reclassification. for instance, a decree prohibiting agglomerations of more than people, followed by a second decree restricting to people, belong to the ordered category, where the first is more intense than the second. cumulative restrictions, denoted by c, are those with no clear order of intensity, allowing for a wide range of possibilities to classify the restriction. for instance, closure of malls and prohibition to accessing parks and beaches have no clear order to which of these measures is more intense and may lead to subjective classification. in this last case we evaluate each measure by a sum of points defined by sub-measures. the classification varies from (when no measure is applied) to n i (when the most stringent measure is applied), where i corresponds to the i-th submeasure adopted. additionally, to take into account whether the measure was enforced for the whole state or limited to a particular region, each index of classification has a target g i . if the measure is ordinal, then we consider g i = go i , taking the value if the measure is applied for specific areas of the state, and if it is enforced for the whole state. if the measure is cumulative and since the measure will be a sum of the sub-classes, then g i = gc i is the sum of targets for each sub-class, which again is if the sub-class is applied to specific areas or if it is applied to the whole state without exemptions. in this work we have six classes of measures, that are described in supplementary table . the summary of the six measures, as well as their sub-classes and targets are presented in table . the index for the ordinal classes is given by for the cumulative measures the index is defined by where c i are sub-measures. therefore, the total state index i, for a given day, will be taken as the average of the value of the classes i i , thus yielding only measures declared by state governments were considered, given the lack of availability of centralized information regarding the municipalities, as well as the difficulty of evaluating regulations published by each of the , brazilian municipalities. federal government policies were also not considered, as these affect equally all states. . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted june , . . the mathematical model we generalize the usual seir model by taking into account the asymptomatic cases. to account for variations in the tr over time, we assume that the tr parameter varies according to where {t , t , . . . , t n } represent a set of points in time defining the change on the tr; h(t) = lim k→∞ +exp(− kt) is the heaviside step function; and β i are trs that can be obtained by the fitting of the data to the time interval defined by the t i 's. the system of differential equations then reads: in this work we analyze the time intervals (in a daily scale) in which there were observed changes on the tr for each state, capital cities and remaining inland cities, after community transmission of the disease was declared on the state, that is when there is no clear source of origin of the infection in the community. here we estimated the β i 's, δ, p and t i 's parameters using non-linear least squares method, while κ, γ a , γ s were kept fixed. the key epidemiological model parameters and intervals were informed by the literature and are presented in supplementary table . based on the obtained parameter values we also evaluated the basic reproductive number r and the effective reproductive number r(t), where the first one, following the notation introduced in [ ] , is expressed by: the epidemiological meaning of r(t) is the same as for r , namely, it represents the average number of secondary infections that an individual, who became infected at time t, is able to generate. the series of r(t) values indicates the current trend of the epidemic and represents the dissemination of the disease in the population. as in our previous work [ ] , we have: where b(t) represents the daily number of new cases and g(x) is the disease probability distribution function for the time interval between the infection of an individual and its secondary cases. the function g(x) receives contributions from the three compartments e, i a , i s that impact the evaluation of r and r(t). for more details, refer to [ ] . aiming at overcoming the fluctuations in the officially confirmed number of cases (which is impacted by testing capacity and its associated increase, even if momentarily, such as when pending tests accumulate over weekends), we present two series of r(t): the first, evaluated from a -day moving average series of the daily number of newly confirmed cases, as informed by local health authorities, while in the second r(t) series data is replaced by the predictions of the model, which effectively smooths the oscillations produced by the officially confirmed cases, since these values are given by the dynamics of the ode system. . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted june , . . codes used to produce the results presented herein, and related datasets, are available as supplementary material and in a public github repository [ ] . this study was conducted with publicly available data from the covid- epidemic, published by the ministry of health of brazil or third parties. therefore, no approval by an ethics committee was required, according to resolutions / and / (article , sections iii and v) from the national health council (cns), brazil. we initially analyzed the relationship between the identification of sars-cov- in each state and the time interval of the declaration of community transmission by state governments, as well as the connection of virus spread and historical movement patterns of the brazilian population. in figure a we present the interstate flow network (road, air, fluvial), showing that states where viral spread occurred earlier, such as rio de janeiro, minas gerais, distrito federal and bahia were more likely to share a large transportation flux with the state of são paulo. on the other hand, states with the lowest interstate flows, such as acre, roraima and amapá, all located in north region, were among the last to confirm sars-cov- transmission. . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted june , . . once the entry of the virus was confirmed within each state, the capitals were the most affected cities initially, emerging as the epicenter of the epidemic in each state. subsequently, sars-cov- disseminated throughout the inland cities with a different speed, as shown in the top panel plots of supplementary figure , where the incidence of covid- is reported for the brazilian states. in figure b we show the average daily flux between all capitals and the remaining inland cities. we can see that the states of the northeast (sergipe, pernambuco, ceará, bahia), southeast (minas gerais, rio de janeiro) and south (paraná) regions present a higher historical average daily flux of people compared to the remaining states. next, we evaluated the timing of governmental interventions on the number of cases, the breadth of these interventions as measured by the stringency index, and their effects on influencing people's behavior, particularly adhesion to social distancing recommendations. . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted june , . . figure : a) average historical daily flux of people between brazilian states through road/air/fluvial networks. state and flux colors are used only for the purpose of better identification, but otherwise have no specific meaning. b) average historical daily flux of people between state capitals (depicted as red dots) and the remaining inland cities within each state. graphs compiled using data from [ , ] . . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted june , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint a total of regulations published by the brazilian state governments were annotated according to the methods described to construct the stringency index. information on each individual regulation, including description, date of enforcement and validity is available in supplementary table . in contrast to the pattern of disease spread observed through the states, some regions which were first affected by covid- were among those that delayed the implementation of measures to contain viral spread. for instance, são paulo adopted measures only weeks after the confirmation of the first case, on march , the same day of community transmission declaration in the state. a similar scenario occurred in rio de janeiro, where the first restriction measures were only implemented in parallel to the declaration of community transmission. nevertheless, the majority of the state governments ( out of ) implemented restriction measures to contain the covid- spread on march , many of which weeks before declaring community transmission. indeed, six of them (to, rr, pi, pa, mt and ac) adopted measures even before the first registered case. among the measures classified in table , strict quarantine measures (only adopted partially in ap, ba, ce, ma and mt) and restrictions on public transportation were the most weakly implemented measures enforced by the states. figure shows the variation of the stringency index over time for each state relative to the number of confirmed cases per , inhabitants. with the exception of tocantins, mato grosso do sul, espírito santo, paraíba and piauí, all states reached stringency index values over % during the detection period. espírito santo and tocantins were states with the lowest values of the stringency index, ranging from % and % for an average period of days, and reaching a maximum of about % in the remaining period. mato grosso do sul, paraíba and piauí presented stringency index values between % and a maximum of % for most of the period. the remaining states had the index varying between % and %, with ceará and amapá reaching the highest values of % (from may to may ) and % (from may to may ), respectively. however, these were the states with the highest incidence of covid- nationwide. variable adherence to social isolation recommendations was seen across the states, with values of the smri close to % at the beginning of march, followed by a peak to around % at the end of that month. this was observed in both state capitals and inland cities. the evolution of the stringency index for each state, as well as the smri for capitals and inland cities . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted june , . figure ) . our results showed that, once the smri reached its maximum, it was followed by a decreasing trend even with the maintenance of measures by state governments. with respect to the breadth and intervention period of governmental measures, our results led to the identification of three stringency index patterns: ) increase-and-decrease (id), where the stringency index increases initially, but is followed by the lifting of measures leading to its reduction . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted june , . . figure a) ; ) increase-and-steady (is), where stringency measures reach a peak that remains constant over time (depicted by são paulo in figure b) ; ) increase-and-increase (ii), where the stringency index increases successively, probably a mechanism to cope with the accelerated growth of the epidemic in some regions (illustrated by amapá in figure c , distributed in all regions, followed the is pattern. in addition, our results indicated that the reduction of the smri was smaller in states that followed both is and ii patterns (median reduction of - . % and - . %, respectively), compared to states that relaxed their measures according to the id pattern (median reduction of - . %) (figure d ). of note, even in states that promoted relaxation of policies, such as those that followed an id pattern, a fraction of the population close to % still remained in isolation (supplementary figure ) . lastly, we sought to comparatively evaluate the effects of governmental measures and population adherence to social distancing recommendations in the tr of sars-cov- in the brazilian states. table shows the variation of the tr obtained by the seir model, the dates when tr changes (β , β and β parameters) occurred, and the reproduction number r for each state, capital and inland cities. the majority of states presented a decrease of the tr, mainly determined by a decrease of the tr in their capitals, with the exceptions of piauí and tocantins, where capitals presented an increase of the tr. we also observed decreases in the tr throughout inland cities, with the exception of the state of acre. mato grosso do sul presenting a decrease of the tr in the capital, meanwhile the state and inland cities showed increases. three out of the states (df, mt and pr), as well as the inland cities of bahia, exhibited a different behavior, in which a single change on tr (leading to β , β parameters) was . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted june , . . insufficient to accurately fit the model predictions to the observed data. for these regions, we incorporated a third tr parameter over time (β ), which effectively leads to two events of tr change and possibly represents an underlying feature of the dynamics of sars-cov- spread in these places. still in these cases, we see that all regions presented an initial decrease on the tr . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted june , . . followed by a small increase. in % of the states ( / ), the changes on the tr in capital and inland cities occurred at the same time or within a -days window. in the remaining % of the states (am, ap, to, ce, ma, pi, rj), this change was only noticeable days or more after tr changes in capital and inland cities. in addition, although the capitals can be considered the initial route of covid- spread, the results presented in table reveal that the tr of inland cities is on average % higher than that of capitals. in the north region of brazil, on the first half of april, amapá and amazonas were the states with the highest decline of the tr and also the highest reproduction number, with decreases of % and % on the tr and r values of . and . , respectively. consecutively, pará and rondônia presented % and % drop in the tr on mid-april, with r of . and . respectively. the remaining states (to, ac and rr) had changes on the tr occurring from may to may and with r 's between . and . , with acre having the lowest variation on the tr of about %, mostly affected by the increase of the tr that occurred in inland cities. in the northeast region, ceará and rio grande do norte were the first to show a decrease on the tr of about % and % respectively, by the end of march. they were the states with the highest basic reproduction number compared to all states in the country, with values of . and . respectively. followed by that, on the first half of april, maranhão and bahia had % and % of decrease on the tr, with r 's values of . and . respectively. from april to april , we observed decreases of the tr in the states of al, pe, pb and pi ranging from % to %, with basic reproduction numbers varying from . to . . sergipe was the last state in the region to show a reduction on the rate (of around %) on may and with r of . . in the midwest region, mato grosso presented the highest decrease on the tr of % on april , while mato grosso do sul presented an increase on the tr of . % on april . df and go exhibited decreases on the transmission on the second half of april, of respectively, % and %. the reproductive number of all states in the region varied between . and . , the lowest of the country. the states in south and southeast regions had changes on the tr early compared to the states of the other regions, varying between march and april . the decrease on the tr ranged from % to %, with mg being the one with highest decrease and pr the one with the lowest reduction. the basic reproductive number varied between . in pr and . in sc. . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted june , . in an interactive, supplementary plot (available at https://bit.ly/ suppplotbraziltr) we present the fitting of the data to the seir model produced in this work, for both capitals and inland cities of each state. we highlight, in each plot, as vertical dashed red lines, the dates of transition from β to β (and β to β , when applicable). the blue dashed and full lines represent the evolution of the epidemic with a fixed transmission rate β and with both β and β (where β is included when suitable), respectively. the effective reproductive number is also presented for each state, capital and inland cities. the black line represents the r t calculated with reported number of new cases; the blue dashed line represents the r t calculated with the new number of simulated cases obtained from the model. the variation of the tr highlights the variations of the trends of the effective reproductive number. these results show that, in spite of the reduction of the tr in all states, in none of the regions the values of r t fell below one. in this work we evaluated the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions and social mobility reduction patterns on the spread dynamics of sars-cov- throughout the brazilian states, by employing an underlying seir model to estimate trs. our results show that the measures adopted, combined with the population adherence to restrict circulation, contributed to the decrease of the tr in almost all states, an effect that was perceived in both capitals and inland cities. however, in spite of the continued maintenance of governmental restrictions in most regions, population adherence to isolation recommendations gradually decreased over time, even with the expansion of cases throughout the country. this might have reflected in the r(t) values, which we observed to have decreased in all states, but still insufficiently to consider sars-cov- transmission controlled in the country, since it remains above for all brazilian states. thus, public cooperation constitutes a particularly important challenge for tackling covid- in lowand middle-income countries. although the entry of the virus in brazil probably occurred as a result of multiple introductions by returning international travelers [ , , , ] , its subsequent spread has been accelerated by the domestic transportation flows. our results point that states with historically large transportation fluxes with são paulo, initial epicenter of covid- in brazil, were among the first to report cases. the fact that the majority of states did not adopt measures . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted june , . . restricting passenger transportation, or did so in a very lax manner, reinforces this observation. in addition, no brazilian state enforced strict lock-down measures as adopted by other countries. such restrictive policies have shown to significantly decrease the number of cases, deaths, and viral transmission in other countries [ , ] . on the other hand, the economical costs imposed by harsher interventions is even more burdensome to developing countries, where large economical segments rely on consumption and services, usually involving physical contact, such as informal workers, tourism, service and retail businesses. once the entry of the virus was confirmed within each state, the capitals were the most affected initially. then, viral spread continued at different rates, with our results revealing that inland cities present increased tr compared to state capitals. this is of worry considering the large inequalities in the access to health services as well as their distribution in brazil [ , ] , which tend to concentrate near state capitals. we also observed that downward changes on trs occurred first in the capitals, followed by the remaining cities. these results corroborate the association between population flux and viral spread [ ] , and highlights the major role of state capitals to its subsequent diffusion towards smaller, inland cities. capitals also tend to centralize international airports, ports, population density and industries. accordingly, the tr observed in capitals should also affect that of inland cities, as suggested by a meta-population compartmental model [ ] , but the possibility of a second-wave of covid- in these smaller cities, particularly with the lifting of measures, should not be ruled out. we identified common trends in the stringency index that allowed the disclosure of three patterns, with the majority of states conforming to an increase-and-steady pattern, in which the set of governmental policies adopted remained unaltered over time. states that enforced and maintained mitigation measures were likely to observe a less pronounced relaxation of stay-athome advises by their population, as measured by the smri. these results suggest the intimate relationship between the magnitude of governmental measures and the population adherence to such measures, particularly since higher values of stringency implicate in decreased opportunities of public activities. however, individuals throughout all states, in both capitals and inland cities, still reduced their adherence to social isolation in the course of time. the politicization of covid- in brazil [ ] could have had an impact on people's behavior and compliance with sanitary recommendations, particularly when individuals downplay the health risks imposed by sars- . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted june , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint cov- , as has been suggested for a segment of the united states population [ ] . we also observed that even in states that conformed to an increase-anddecrease stringency index pattern, at least a part of the population still maintained adherence to isolation. more studies are warranted to evaluate if this trend associates with specific age-groups, such as the elderly, employment status, such as individuals that have the possibility to continue working from home, education level or perception of risks around covid- . our work has some limitations. first, in order to estimate trs (and changes thereof) we relied upon a generalized form of the seir model which explicitly considers asymptomatic transmission. thus, albeit the estimates of model parameters (or their respective search intervals) were retrieved from the literature for other countries, they could be different from the reality of the ongoing epidemic in brazil. however, while the true extent of sars-cov- transmission by asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic individuals is still debated, current reports conclude that it is an important route of transmission [ , , ] . also, there are delays on the notification system that may be of different magnitudes throughout the regions in brazil. this limitation may impact on the perception of the implemented measures as well as compromise the planning of new ones. we used mobility data from mobile phones as proxies of social isolation as measured by the smri. in particular, the sample of devices monitored using this technology cannot be considered a representative population sample, as state/cities with superior economic status will probably exhibit increased technology adoption by their populations, leading to better accuracy of the mobility patterns in these regions. this is in contrast to rural areas, for instance, where mobile phone usage is limited [ ] . however, considering the general widespread use of mobile phones in the country (with estimates that % of adults report owning a smartphone [ ]), the general trends observed in our work should not be drastically altered by more accurate measurements of social mobility reduction. in sum, our results point to the importance of timely deployment of interventions in curbing the first-wave of the covid- epidemic. yet, population adherence represents a crucial factor for the success of this effort and represents a major challenge in low-and middle-income countries. . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted june , . table . key epidemiological parameters used in the seir model, with their respective value (when fixed) or the search intervals used for parameter estimations. supplementary figure . covid- incidence per state, their capitals and remaining inland cities (upper plots). the bottom subplots exhibit the social mobility reduction index, considered separately for capitals, inland cities and the whole state, and the stringency index, for the state measures, over time. . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted june , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted june , . . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted june , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint who director-general's opening remarks at the media briefing on covid- - ministério da saúde declara transmissão comunitária nacional social distancing measures to control the covid- pandemic: potential impacts and challenges in brazil an seir infectious disease model with testing and conditional quarantine the effect of control strategies to reduce social mixing on outcomes of the covid- epidemic in wuhan, china: a modelling study. the lancet public health first-wave covid- transmissibility and severity in china outside hubei after control measures, and second-wave scenario planning: a modelling impact assessment. the lancet modeling shield immunity to reduce covid- epidemic spread substantial undocumented infection facilitates the rapid dissemination of novel coronavirus (sars-cov- ) evaluating the burden of covid- on hospital resources in bahia, brazil: a modelling-based analysis of . million individuals. medrxiv modeling infectious diseases in humans and animals potential dissemination of epidemics based on brazilian mobile geolocation data. part i: population dynamics and future spreading of infection in the states of sao paulo and rio de janeiro during the pandemic of covid- . medrxiv more than words: leaders' speech and risky behavior during a pandemic. available at ssrn isbn: . ligações rodoviárias e hidroviárias isbn: . ligações aéreas. ibge oxford covid- government response tracker rede covida modelling task-force. mathematical and statistical modeling of covid- in brazil importation and early local transmission of covid- in brazil the ongoing covid- epidemic in minas gerais, brazil: insights from epidemiological data and sars-cov- whole genome sequencing evolution and epidemic spread of sars-cov- in brazil phylogenetic network analysis of sars-cov- genomes evaluation of the lockdowns for the sars-cov- epidemic in italy and spain after one month follow up the efficacy of lockdown against covid- : a cross-country panel analysis. applied health economics and health policy desigualdades geográficas e sociais no acesso aos serviços de saúde no brasil inequities in access to health care in different health systems: a study in municipalities of central colombia and northeastern brazil impact of population movement on the spread of -ncov in china metapopulation modeling of covid- advancing into the countryside: an analysis of mitigation strategies for brazil covid- in brazil:"so what politicizing the covid- pandemic: ideological differences in adherence to social distancing temporal dynamics in viral shedding and transmissibility of covid- estimation of the asymptomatic ratio of novel coronavirus infections (covid- ) this study was financed in part by the coordenação de aperfeiçoamento de pessoal de nível superior -brazil (capes) -finance code . strp was supported by an international cooperation grant (process number key: cord- - wxa authors: lawal, olanrewaju; nwegbu, chidozie title: movement and risk perception: evidence from spatial analysis of mobile phone-based mobility during the covid- lockdown, nigeria date: - - journal: geojournal doi: . /s - - -z sha: doc_id: cord_uid: wxa the emergence of covid- across the globe prompted many countries to institute total lockdown or other models of mobility restrictions to mitigate the spread of the disease. on march th, nigeria instituted a nationwide lockdown. it is pertinent to understand the pattern created by this lockdown. this could offer insights into how people perceive the hazard and the level of compliance across the states in nigeria. mobile phone-based mobility data and the number of new cases from the beginning to the end of the lockdown were utilised. the study examines space-time trends across different place categories at the state level. place categories witnessed mobility reduction as high as %, %, %, %, % for retail and recreation (rtrc), grocery and pharmacy (grph), park, and transport hubs (trst) respectively. most states recorded mobility uptrend towards workplace, retail and recreational areas. multiple correspondence analysis (mca) identified two dimensions from the space-time trends. the first dimension (d ) accounted for % of the variance. examination of the object scores from the mca showed that there are two classes–two risk perception groups. the pattern of mobility recorded shows that there is a variation in mobility restriction compliance across the states. the trend groupings identified captured an aspect of risk perception within each state. thus, pointing to difference in levels of risk acceptance. with the level of misinformation currently being experienced worldwide, concerted efforts should be made on improving risk perception to prevent the re-emergence of the disease. in december , the news of the outbreak of an emerging viral infection broke in the city of wuhan, china. the world health organisation (who) initially declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern and later upgraded it to a global pandemic, following its rapid diffusion to several countries. currently, the number of global covid- cases has surpassed the million mark while deaths arising from these cases are over , . this has never been seen in contemporary times. it is in fact unlike, the previous outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars) of and ebola in west africa of . covid- , within a short period, grew from a local event to a pandemic affecting many people and places. this prompted many countries to institute total lockdown or other models of mobility restrictions to mitigate the spread of the disease. on march th the federal government of nigeria instituted a nationwide lockdown to mitigate the spread of covid- . this lockdown offers one of the most potent tools at mitigating the spread, however, it also presents a serious problem. with the instituted restriction and the induced mobility reduction due to fear and apprehension, the effect on various aspects of the society is going to be disparate over space and across people. thus, it is important to examine the pattern of this mobility restriction across the country, thereby offering insights into the potential impact across the country. in this context, the study examined variation in human mobility during the lockdown period across the country. therefore, providing an understanding of the pattern of mobility restriction compliance and the indication this provides for risk perception during this period. this understanding can provide baseline information for the management of future infectious disease emergencies, response and recovery (social and economic) planning, and evidence to support post-pandemic social and economic development. devastating pandemics have existed since a.d when the world experienced the bubonic plague that wiped out - million people in one year (morony ) . it was one of the worst outbreaks the world experienced, and it lasted for another years, sweeping throughout the mediterranean world until ce. in the year of - , the black plague killed more than million people in the middle eastern lands of china, india, as well as europe (cohn ) . the spanish flu pandemic, caused by an h n virus with genes of avian origin, killed over million people in one year in (cohn ) . in america, , deaths were recorded; , , in sub-saharan africa, and , in nigeria, out of a population of million in less than months (ohadike ) . human mobility facilitates infectious disease transmission. for covid- , rapid diffusion has been attributed to domestic and international travel within china and other countries. for instance, domestic and international travelers from wuhan, china facilitated the spread, particularly during the annual lunar new year celebrations. as travel restrictions were implemented, this effectively slowed down the spread in the early days of the outbreak (chinazzi et al. ; kraemer et al. ) . the recent cases in new zealand where travelers from the uk were implicated in new cases recorded in new zealand with no new cases for days (graham-mclay, ) highlight the importance of human mobility for infectious disease spread. from the foregoing, the relevance of mobility in the spread of infectious diseases is apparent. there is a clear indication that there is going to be another eid in the future, therefore, there is a need to gather insights from the current pandemic on what worked, failed, or need to be improved upon in managing the pandemic. most especially, the compliance of the mobility restriction and potentially the perception it can indicate needs to be thoroughly explored. analyses of spatial patterns and distribution of human activities and natural phenomena are often leveraged for understanding spatial interaction and consequently spread of ideas knowledge and in this context, disease. identification of the pattern of human mobility and the number of new covid- cases is important. this offers an opportunity to examine the effect of the mobility restrictions and thereby design ways to ensure the effectiveness of measures to curtail the spread of covid- . human activities and habitation are directly impacted by location and the opportunity offered by transportation-human mobility. this interrelationship and dependencies often lead to the increasing agglomeration of businesses, industries, and infections/diseases at specific locations (e.g., established urban centres). similarly, there is a tendency for the segregation of people with a similar culture, tradition, behavior, social class, etc. across different regions and locations. literature review covid- found its way into nigeria through an infected italian national who has work engagements in the country when he touched down in lagos state on february , (ncdc ). being the third zoonotic coronavirus outbreak of this century (xie and chen ) with infection and mortality rate seemingly higher than those of the other two-mers and sars, its perilous nature cannot be disregarded (kang et al. ) . this necessitated the nationwide lockdown that was declared by the federal government as a precautionary measure done by countries world over. nigeria took cognizance of the lockdown's effectiveness when the third confirmed case, who was duly notified by the contact tracing team, self-quarantined and later became symptomatic, was cautiously isolated and successfully treated (chia and oyeniran ) thereby mitigating community transmission. by and large, the hardiness of public health systems of countries plagued by the virus can have a significant influence on the case and fatality figures (paintsil ) . despite this, the restriction of movement remains imperative in curtailing the spread of the virus. human mobility has been known to be very important in spreading infectious diseases. balcan et al. ( ) studied the interplay between short-scale commuting flows and long-range air traffic in shaping the spatiotemporal pattern of the global epidemic. their model showed that despite commuting flow being one order of magnitude larger than long-range air traffic, the spatiotemporal pattern of infectious disease spread was mainly determined by airline network and traffic. furthermore, short-range movements were found to be more important for synchronization of the spreading across subpopulations which are weakly connected by air transportation. they found that short-range mobility has an impact on the definition of the subpopulation infection hierarchy. riley ( ) reviewed studies on four different diseases (measles, foot and mouth disease, pandemic influenza, and smallpox). the work showed that the major determinant of the geographic spread and emergence of infectious diseases (and reoccurrence) are disease-relevant human interactions (contact with infected surfaces and person-to-person interaction) and mobility across multiple spatial scales. thus, at the onset of the outbreak, or re-emergence of the pathogen, disease incidence will most likely occur in spatial clusters, as such if containment is activated, it is possible to predict the spread of disease. jones et al. ( ) showed that from to , emerging infectious diseases, showed a nonrandom global pattern, most dominated by zoonoses ( % of the eid and notable increases between and ) while about % of these originates from wildlife. by controlling for spatial reporting bias within countries, the study found that human population density and wildlife host species richness are significant predictors of the emergence of zoonotic eids. in the case of zoonotic eids from the nonwildlife hosts, human population density, growth rate, latitude, and rainfall were found to be significant predictors. eid emergence caused by drug resistance has population density and growth as well as latitude and rainfall as significant predictors. the population density was the only significant predictor of vectorborne eid emergence. the origins eid were found to be significantly correlated with socio-economic, environmental, and ecological factors. contrary to previous analyses indicating pathogen species richness increase towards the equator, the study indicated that eid events are mostly concentrated around °and °north and - °south. adepoju and soladoye ( ) held the view that for a vivid comprehension of the epidemic's transmission patterns, geographical perspective must be considered. moreover, being that social sciences provide comprehensive and robust insights when researching the effects of infectious disease outbreaks on communities and populations socially, contextually, and behaviorally (la et al. ) , it is crucial to incorporate them in epidemiology. based on this, the perception of the disease's threats and the compliance level by the populace can be scientifically deduced. for covid- pandemic awareness measures, olapegba et al. ( ) utilized descriptive statistics to depict the risk perception and precautionary health behaviors as observed by nigerians. the results of their findings showed that out of respondents, . % believed there is a high chance of them contracting the virus in nigeria, . % think they cannot get infected while . % were undecided. on some of the precautionary health behaviors, up to . % indicated their readiness to self-isolate when required to, . % think otherwise while . % were indifferent. also, % abstained from going to public places, . % opposed to it while . % were on either side. however, on the use of face mask, . % were willing to comply, . % found it discomforting and . % were undecided. anchored on perception and impact of the pandemic in nigeria, akintuyi et al. ( ) in their work revealed that of the respondents, % acknowledged the presence of the covid- virus in nigeria while % thought it was a hoax. on the other hand, the movement restriction order hugely affected . % of the respondents and their livelihood while . % did not feel the effect. in their paper, taiwo and olumoyegun ( ) demonstrated how distance played a role in the transmission of the virus in nigeria-from lagos to other state capitals. categorizing the states with international airports, domestic airports, and no airports accordingly, the results showed high variations in the reported case figures for states with international airports as against those states with domestic or no airports. also, they noted that there was a statistically significant difference between the three groups. abdullahi and abdulkadir ( ) analyzed the role of temperature in the dispersion of the covid- virus across geopolitical regions and states in nigeria with the aid of linear trend surface analytical tools. their research further established that no significant relationship exists between varying temperatures across states and covid- spread. in assessing compliance with the mandatory stayhome order and its attendant socio-economic effects on the populace, olabamiji and ajala ( ) employed online questionnaires in acquiring data. with respondents, while . % could neither go to work nor do anything productive from home, % were not fully engaged in their work and . % did not disclose their work status during the lockdown. on the part of its effects, . % lived on their savings, % borrowed funds, . % on salary, . % depended on farm produce, . % each on gifts from relatives and palliatives respectively while . % benefitted from their businesses. addie et al. ( ) portrayed states ranked in order of their vulnerability to covid- in nigeria. with the aid of select population-based indicators, they performed a stepwise regression analysis on their data to point out different vulnerability levels. results obtained showed kebbi state was the most vulnerable with . points followed by zamfara at . points and then sokoto at . points. based on geopolitical zones, north west ranked as the most vulnerable with north east in second place and north central in third place. in a similar vein, fasona ( ) utilized some core transmission drivers to analyze and create maps, at the state level, to show their respective vulnerability level to the virus. the results indicated that states (lagos, fct, kaduna, katsina, kano, rivers, and oyo) had very high vulnerability, states had high vulnerability while that of states stood at medium vulnerability. in modeling covid- transmission predictively in nigeria as was influenced by traveling history and contacts, ogundokun et al. ( ) , using the number of cases data from the ncdc, applied the ordinary least squares estimator in generating a regression analysis model which showed both the daily effects in travel history and contact rates on confirmed cases. between the months of march and may , the results indicated a . % reduction in covid- cases in comparison to the expected figures as a result of the travel ban on both local and international flights. they also noted that the populace chances of contracting the virus due to their travel history and contacts they made increased by % and % respectively. nigeria as a federation has states and abuja as the federal capital territory (fct)- fig. . the states are further divided into lga spread over an area of , square kilometres, including about , km of water. the work of lawal and anyiam ( ) provides more details about the study area. mobility data were sourced from the google covid- mobility report (google llc furthermore, the sum of the place categories except the residential were summed and explored. data for the new cases were collated from the humanitarian data exchange website, under the covid- pandemic initiative (backup rural ). to capture the distribution of mobility across the study area, choropleths of median mobility were produced. these were produced using spss (ibm ) , for each of the place categories as well as the aggregate of all the place categories (except the residential categories). space-time analyses of aggregated mobility values were carried out within a geographic information system (gis)-arcgis (esri ). this was done to identify the spatio-temporal clusters of mobility across the lockdown period. trends were discerned across the study area over time using the mann-kendal test (kendall and gibbons ; mann ) . this approach is a rank correlation analysis for the bin count (sum of value) and their respective time sequence. each period is compared to the one before it and an increase results in a value of ? (an increase over time) while a decrease results in (a decrease over time) and a tie result in zero (no trend over time). this was computed for each time slice (day) and the sum of this was computed for each of the spatial units (states). these sums were compared to the expected sum of zero (no trend over time) and using the variance of the values, as well as number of ties and the number of time slices, as the observed is compared to the expected to deduce the z score and a p-value. the trends across each sector were examined at weekly ( ) intervals for each state. trend categories identified from the space-time analysis were subjected to multiple correspondence analysis. this was carried out to group quantify the nominal categories by assigning numerical values to each state and grouping them. this analysis does maximise intergroup differences and minimise intragroup differences, thus creating homogenous groups based on the trend of mobility across each state. the trend of mobility for the six place categories was utilised for this analysis. the initial analysis assumed there are two dimensions. an equal weight of was given to each of the variables as there was no scientific justification to assign unequal weight. for discretisation, the multiplication approach was adopted. this comprises of standardisation of values, multiplication fig. the nigerian states and the neighbouring countries by , rounding off, the addition of constant value (to ensure the lowest value is ). object principal normalisation method was applied as this optimises for the distance between objects thus, ensuring that within group similarity are minimise and between group are maximised. the results of this analysis would provide insight into the potential grouping of risk perception based on the mobility trend. place category aggregated mobility trend for the retail and recreation category (fig. a) , sokoto showed median mobility of zero while some states experienced an increase (compared to baseline) mobility for this place category. zamfara showed a very high increase in mobility (median %). kebbi, borno, yobe, gombe, and ebonyi represents a group of state with relative median mobility decline of less than % (relative to baseline). the greatest decline (ranging between and %) in mobility were recorded across various states (ekiti, kaduna, lagos, fct, and edo) spanning various regions of the country. the largest decline was recorded for edo state. generally, most of the states recorded median mobility decline ranging between % and %. in the parks place category (fig. b) , gombe state is the only state with the increased median mobility across the country during the period under investigation. abia, adamawa, jigawa, ebonyi, bayelsa, and bauchi state showed a slight decline in mobility (relative to baseline) ranging between % and %. fct, benue, ekiti, and lagos witnessed the highest decline ranging between % and %. while the remaining states recorded declines between % and %. for this place category, all the states witnessed a decline relative to their baselines for the period under consideration (fig. c) . the lowest decline was recorded for yobe state ( %) and the greatest was workplaces; and f residential recorded for zamfara state ( %), this was followed by ekiti ( %), and kano ( %). most of the states ( %) recorded a relative decline ranging between % and %. this place category witnessed a relatively high mobility decline ranging between and (fig. d) . three states namely ebonyi, nasarawa, and niger recorded a median mobility value indicating a slight increase relative to their baseline values ( %- %). kebbi and kogi showed a slight decline of % while % of the geographic units considered recorded decline ranging between % and %. six states (including the fct) showed a considerably high level of decrease in mobility with a median change from baseline ranging between % for the fct and % for rivers state. zamfara recorded a median increase of % relative to the baseline mobility for the workplaces category (fig. e) . this is the only outlier state for this category (i.e. it bucks the trend of declining mobility for this category). states like yobe, bauchi, katsina, kogi, and adamawa recorded a slight decline median values raging between % and %. most of the states recorded a decline c % while four geographic units-kwara, fct, kano, and lagos recorded a decline above %. this place category witnessed a high mobility increase, with a relative percentage increase ranging between and % (fig. f) . the largest increase is recorded for lagos (the epicentre of the covid- infection in nigeria) while the lowest (no change in mobility) is recorded for kogi (one of the last state to record a covid- case). this is a wide variation in the increase across different states and regions, with about % of the state recording % or more median mobility increase for this place category. mobility values for all the place categories except residential were summed to indicate mobility across places where infection may be spreading (unsafe). this term unsafe is relative in this context since there is a possibility that mobility towards residential areas could also spread the disease (community spread). the median mobility (fig. ) for these unsafe categories showed a general reduction in mobility with the lowest mobility decline recorded for ebonyi state ( . ) while the greatest decline was recorded for fct ( ). this computation gave a cumulative overview of how mobility varied for these place categories across states. out of the states and fct showed a cumulative decline above , while only three states (ebonyi, kebbi, and zamfara) recorded a cumulative decline of less than . from the values, four major hotspots for the decline could be identified around lagos, ekiti, fct (kaduna, kano) as well as akwa-ibom state. examination of the weekly aggregated mobility for the retail and recreation category showed that states exhibited no statistically significant trend (fig. a) . five of these states spanned across the north-west and north-eastern part of the country while the other two can be found in the south (bayelsa) and the middle belt (taraba). three states showed a statistically fig. cumulative mobility across unsafe place categories significant downtrend for mobility for this place category, with all of them in the northern part of the country. all other states displayed an uptrend in mobility for this place category. for parks, most of the states showed no statistically significant trend (fig. b) . however, bayelsa and abia states showed a downward trend in mobility for the category. all the other states (in the southern part and the middle belt of the country) showed an upward trend in mobility. yobe and gombe states recorded a declining trend for mobility in the grocery and pharmacy place category (fig. c) . twelve states across the north-western, north-eastern, middle belt, and southern (bayelsa and cross river) parts of the country displayed no statistically significant trend in mobility for this place category. the remaining states spread across different parts of the country-mostly in the southern part displayed a statistically significant upward trend of mobility for this place categories. for this place category, the trend of mobility revealed that there are three contiguous regions across the country (fig. d) . kaduna, plateau, and fct formed a region of uptrend across the central part of the country, while the states from kwara to lagos down to delta and abia formed another contiguous region with a statistically significant uptrend in mobility. a contiguous region of no statistically significant trend surrounds kaduna, fct, and plateau uptrend region. this region of no discernible trend extends down to ebonyi, cross river, akwa-ibom, rivers, and bayelsa state. only a handful of states (borno, jigawa, kano, katsina, and sokoto) showed no statistically significant trend in mobility for workplaces. most states showed an upward trend in mobility during the period under consideration. for the residential place category, two states-(benue and kogi) showed an upward trend in mobility. this could be attributed to a late onset of infection recorded in these states. most of the states across the northeastern and north-western regions of the country showed no discernible trend of mobility. however, from kano down to abuja and nasarawa, niger to lagos, ondo through imo to cross river, there is an upward trend of mobility. ebonyi, rivers, and bayelsa are outliers with no definite mobility trend while being surrounded by states with a clear trend. a look at the new cases of covid- diagnosed during this same period (fig. ) revealed that there is a statistically significant uptrend across many states of the federation. osun, cross river, and taraba states represent a group of outliers, as they have no statistically significant trend and are surrounded by other states with an upward trend in the number of (weekly) new cases. sokoto, zamfara, kano, jigawa, and yobe state also have no discernible trend, however, they have neighbours with an upward trend in the number of new cases (fig. ) . the multiple correspondence analysis identified two dimensions within the mobility trend designation recorded for each state for the six place categories ( table ). the first dimension (d ), showed as high internal consistency (cronbach's alpha = . ) with an explained variance of %. the second dimension (d ) has explained a lesser proportion of the variance across the variables and has a lower level of internal consistency. the summary from table shows how correlated each of the quantified variables is related to the dimensions. most ( ) of the variables loaded highly (measures c . ) into d while none have similar attributes for d . this explained why d has a lower percentage of explained variance and lower internal consistency. from the result (table ) , there is an indication that d is the most relevant dimension for subsequent discussion. hence, the distribution of the object scores for d for each state was represented in fig. . from fig. , there are some contiguous regions with similar characteristics across the northern and southern regions of the country. while there is an element of a divide across the two regions, the difference is pronounced along the south-west and two-step cluster analysis (ibm ) was carried out to examine the natural groupings that may exist within d object scores. the internal consistency of the members within the groups identified was examined using the silhouette measure of cohesion and separation (rousseeuw ) . for this measure, cluster set with silhouette measure value [ . is considered to have a good cluster quality while \ . but [ . is considered fair. the summary of the auto-clustering operation presented in table , indicated that two clusters are the optimal number of clusters from the d object scores. the identification of two clusters is because the highest ratio of distance measure (table ) at . when the number of clusters is compared to . for clusters and . for clusters. based on this result, the cluster distribution showed that states ( . %) belong to cluster while the remaining belong to cluster (fig. ) . this clustering exhibited a good cluster quality (internal consistency) with a silhouette measure of . . the object score utilised is a multidimensional index quantify the trend of mobility across six place categories during the national lockdown period. as such the groups identified could give a reflection of the perception of risk of infection among people of each group of states. examining the cluster membership against the trend categories depicted in fig. a-f , the association can be identified (table ) . cluster members are mostly showing uptrend for grph park, and trst while most of them recorded a downtrend for resd. the mobility trend for rtrc and wkpl could not distinguish between the two clusters. however, for resd, cluster is quite distinct with most members having a downtrend in mobility, while most members of cluster show no discernible trend. most members of cluster also showed no discernible trend for grph, park, and trst. there is a wide variation in changes from baseline mobility for this period across the country. residential witnessed an overwhelming increase towards it while all the other place categories witnessed a decline relative to baseline. moreover, there is no clear-cut regional pattern discernible from the median mobility values for all the place categories. furthermore, while cumulative mobility for the unsafe place categories identified some hotspots of decline, a north-south divide is evident from the pattern. however, highly populated states such as kaduna and kano in the northern part of the country bucked that trend. as the lockdown draws longer, mobility toward retails and recreation facilities is ticking upwards. this is an indication that people need to get necessities and earn a living, movement cannot be effective if there are no alternatives to earn and secure daily needs. for parks, there seems to be a north-south divide in the mobility the ratios of distance measures are based on the current number of clusters against the previous number of clusters fig. distribution of d object scores cluster across the states increased mobility. this is partly due to the need to meet daily necessities and the need to take care of other existing or new ailments. mobility towards transportation hubs indicated that across states where infections were discovered earlier and states around them, people are beginning to accept the risk and travel more. in essence, people are making decisions (to travel) despite the constraints (zsolnai )-the risk of exposure, potentially lack of full understanding of the disease, and their chances of survival. the mobility trend for the workplaces indicated that fatigue is taking hold, and more people are moving towards their workplaces. this could be as a result of the overwhelming population of people who need to earn daily to survive despite the risk. thus, as more people gravitate toward their workplace the mobility trend recorded for residential areas is not surprising. across most states, people are venturing out more as the fatigue of staying at home gets overwhelming, and the need to earn a living is becoming more dominant on their mind. for reported new cases, the upward trend during the lockdown could be partly attributed to the varying level of enforcement of the mobility restriction, coupled with the need for many people to seek their daily income. this may have increased people's exposure and consequently infections. the 'infodemic' of misinformation-many conspiracies and fake news about the virus circulating on social media and the internet (zarocostas ) may also be partly responsible for this trend as there is a lot of scepticism across many parts of the country. write-ups and messages about instant remedies for the virus and several race targeted news were being propagated on various platforms (rathore and farooq ) . this surely will impact how seriously people considered the need to respect the mobility restriction orders. from the trend, there is an indication that mobility decision is being guided across most states by the risk acceptance principle. mobility is picking up with people likely considering covid- as just one of those ailments they are likely to get, as such they are willing to take the risk. with many states also having a few cases, there is also the tendency for people to underestimate the risk. most significantly, the need to earn a living is a more dominant driver of mobility as evident in the uptick in mobility towards transportation hubs, workplaces, and downward mobility trends for residential areas. recent studies showed that in the united states of america, covid- infection rates increased with city size (stier et al. ) . thus, the spread is effectively aided by mobility and proximity to urban landscapes as the quantum of cases is considerably higher for highly urbanised and densely populated states. therefore, the increase in mobility across most states, is an indication of either poor perception of the risk posed by increased mobility and/ or adoption of risk avoidance (non-pharmaceuticals) measures. while some can afford to stay at home, many cannot as they must earn their living every single day evidently, the mobility restriction is a luxury for some trend_grph trend_park trend_resd trend_rtrc and a severe cost for others. it is thus evident that the mitigation measures taken by each country will determine the course of the pandemic (anderson et al. ) . for example, there is evidence showing that as travel restrictions were implemented, this effectively slowed down the spread in the early days of the outbreak (chinazzi et al. ; kraemer et al. ) . while this may be the case, prolonged lockdown without adequate provision to manage the individual challenges such posed to many households (especially in nigeria where many required daily income to survive) will likely witness the waning of compliance as observed. this category of households as well as the rural dwellers were least compliant to the measures (carlitz and makhura ) . it is well established that vulnerability and extent of the impact of disaster or hazard are a function of location as well as the socio-economic circumstances of the people affected (lawal and arokoyu ) . from the mobility trend during the pandemic, some indications of risk perception could be deduced. for example, the level of risk acceptance is almost similar across most states especially considering their mobility towards retail, recreation, and workplaces. however, from the mobility around residential area cluster states are venturing out (more acceptance) while cluster states are neither here nor there about venturing out-an indication of uncertainty about the risk. this uncertainty was also indicated in their mobility towards parks, grocery, and pharmacy as well as transport hubs. the result indicated how knowledge, experience, values, attitudes, and feelings influence the judgement and decision about the acceptability and seriousness of risk-risk perception (slovic ) . there are differences between voluntary (knowingly taken risk) and involuntary (risk we are unable to control or not aware of) risk perception and the public willingness to accept voluntary risk is several folds greater than that of involuntary risks (smith ) . the way people view risk or perceived it is a major problem for mitigation. this was evident from the way varied mobility across the different cluster of states. therefore, actions taken by people (prevention and avoidance) is a function of their perception of the hazard (coppola ) . this perception also skews how they view the consequences and the likelihood of them getting infected. in essence, the actions captured by mobility gave a general indication of some aspects of peoples' perception of the risk, consequences and likelihood them getting infected. while it might be too early to conclude on the effect of the mobility restriction on the covid- spread and cases, it is noteworthy that the extent of compliance varies from state to state as evidenced by the findings from this study. thus, we might expect the evolution of the spread of the disease to follow the pattern of compliance with non-pharmaceutical measures e.g. mobility restrictions, use of face mask, hand washing, restriction of large number gatherings, etc. from the space-time analyses, we can conclude that mobility evolved along the line of necessities for each of the place categories i.e. high decline for most and concurrent increased for residential at the beginning of the lockdown followed by gradual increase for all others except residential towards the end of the lockdown. as mobility started an uptrend even during the lockdown period, there is an indication that generally, peoples' perception of the disease is to consider the pandemic as a voluntary risk. thus, the need to earn a living is much more overwhelming than to stay at home and be safe. higher resolution and multidimensional data would be required to ascertain how this plays out among different groups of people. but it could be expected that the perception may differ from person to person. there was an increase in number of cases during the lockdown, it is possible to conclude that this is as a result of the non-compliance with the lockdown protocols and potentially in the increase in testingleading to quicker identification of infected persons. the changes in compliance over time as indicated by mobility changes gave an indication of changes in risk perception and acceptance aggregated at the state level. thus, the conclusion is that mobility, could indicate how people perceive the risk they are exposed to and the level of risk they are willing to take. however, further research on risk perception and risk compensation during the pandemic is pertinent to examine this in more detail. the study utilised smartphone-based location data, thus, the mobility of people without gps enabled smartphone is not captured and people with phones without google location history enabled are not captured. thus, the data is incomplete but in the absence of mobility data for this period, there are no other alternatives. however, the data can indicate mobility during this period which is critical in tracking the distribution pattern as well as in predicting the number of cases in the various states. from the foregoing, it is pertinent that risk perception and risk acceptance should be tracked and understanding from such be incorporated in the management of the pandemic. as restriction and information fatigue sets in, there is need to device means to change behaviour and stimulate actions and attitude that will ensure people stay safe and prevent the spread and resurgence of covid- across various communities. funding the authors did not receive any funding from any organisation/institution for this study (study was not funded by any grant). conflict of interest the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. human or animal rights this article does not contain any studies involving human or animals performed by any of the authors. proceedings of a special virtual conference on covid- of the association of nigerian geographers determining the vulnerability of states in nigeria to covid- . proceedings of a special virtual conference on covid- of the association of nigerian geographers geospatial enabling strategies for timely containment of covid- pandemic in lagos state perception, impact and coping strategies to covid- pandemic in nigeria how will country-based mitigation measures influence the course of the covid- epidemic? the lancet nigeria: coronavirus (covid- ) 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the covid- pandemic large-scale spatial-transmission models of infectious disease silhouettes: a graphical aid to the interpretation and validation of cluster analysis perception of risk abingdon: routledge covid- attack rate increases with city size. mansueto institute for urban innovation research paper distant decay analysis of airports and the number of confirmed covid- in nigeria insight into novel coronavirus-an updated intrim review and lessons from sars-cov and mers-cov how to fight an infodemic rational choice and the diversity of choices publisher's note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations key: cord- -kdsv v e authors: chathukulam, jos title: the kerala model in the time of covid : rethinking state, society and democracy date: - - journal: world dev doi: . /j.worlddev. . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: kdsv v e kerala, a small state in south india, has been celebrated as a development model by scholars across the world for its exemplary achievements in human development and poverty reduction despite relatively low gdp growth. it was no surprise, then, that the covid pandemic that hit kerala before any other part of india, became a test case for the kerala model in dealing with such a crisis. kerala was lauded across the world once again as a success story in containing this unprecedented pandemic, in treating those infected, and in making needed provisions for those adversely affected by the lockdown. but as it turned out, this celebration was premature as kerala soon faced a third wave of covid infections. the objective of this paper is to examine kerala’s trajectory in achieving the success and then confronting the unanticipated reversal. it will examine the legacy of the kerala model such as robust and decentralized institutions and provisions for healthcare, welfare and safety nets, and especially the capacity of a democratic state working in synergy with civil society and enjoying a high degree of consensus and public trust. it will then examine the new surge of the virus and attempts to establish if this was due to any mistakes made by the state or some deficits in its model of “public action” that includes adversarial politics having a disruptive tenor about it. we will conclude by arguing that the kerala model is still relevant, and that it is still a model in motion. the covid- pandemic that descended upon us suddenly, rapidly spreading across the whole world, has been wreaking havoc on our lives and established habits. it is challenging us to interrogate and rethink many taken-for-granted ideas about our lives and institutions-the relationship between the individual and society, the meaning and value of sociality and communitas, of the common good, and perhaps above all the institutions that serve, govern and constrain us. our focus here is on the institution of the state, the critical actor in dealing with this pandemic. an important fact that has emerged in the wake of this global outbreak is that different states and political regimes behind them responded to the pandemic in very different ways with clearly different outcomes. a seemingly counterintuitive fact that has become clear is that some rich and powerful states (the us and the uk) have emerged as poor performers in effectively responding to the pandemic-in containing the infection by such timely measures as testing and isolating the infected, and in reducing fatalities by providing adequate health care in well-equipped medical centers. on the other hand, there are some relatively poor, so-called under-developed countries and regions, such as vietnam (the economist, ), cambodia and the small state of kerala in india (a state within a state) which have emerged as success stories with a record of early and effective interventions, of controlling the spread of the virus, healing the infected and reducing the death rate. this is a notable and significant fact despite later reversals and second and third wave of covid infections in some of these cases, including that of kerala. this article focuses on the "kerala model" of managing the pandemic. this small state in the south-west coast of india has been well known for nearly half a century for its "model" or pattern of development that achieved high levels of social and human development and rapid reduction in chronic poverty and endemic deprivations despite low economic growth and income (cds, ) i . the "kerala model" ii that has been studied by researchers since the mid- s, is once again in the news across the world as a relative success story in containing the pandemic despite economic constraints and other vulnerabilities such as its dense population iii and constant exposure to foreign contacts iv . indeed, some of these observers see kerala's pandemic management as a decisive test of the the objective of this paper is twofold: to highlight the ways in which kerala handled the pandemic and to analyze the structural and systemic factors behind the state's success. we will especially focus on the state and kerala's model of an effective and vibrant democracy and "public action" in the words of dreze and sen. we argue that while kerala was blessed with good and efficient leaders during this crisis, the more important factors behind kerala's success have been robust institutions of state and governance built over many years with the capacity to take timely and effective measures in handling the crisis. we further examine the unexpected reversal and the rise of third wave of covid infections in an attempt to identify what, if any, mistakes may have been made by kerala and if so if these were due to any deficits inherent in the kerala model. we argue kerala may have made a mistake in relaxing-even abandoning-the rules for the entry of a large wave of nrks returning to the state, and for isolating, testing and tracing these returnees, as kerala had successfully done earlier. while recognizing the unknown and unpredictable nature of this new virus (still being studied by experts) we also identify what may be some deficits in the model such as its tradition of public action that includes adversarial politics having a disruptive tenor about it, especially at a time of impending and contentious election. we argue further that states like kerala which have handled the crisis well have generally been relatively effective models of social democracies in which the state and its institutions work in relative synergy with society and representative social institutions. the paper is organized in four parts. this introductory part is followed by part i which describes the trajectory of the pandemic crisis, timely and effective steps kerala took in managing the pandemic, and then failed to anticipate and prevent a third wave. it also examines deficits in the model that may have been behind the state's failure to prevent a third wave. kerala's adversarial and competitive politics gave birth to public action which in turn laid the foundation for kerala model of development. however, competitive and adversarial politics may have its limitations especially when it comes to managing pandemics like the present one. kerala should have adopted a healthy combination of competitive and adversarial politics and a consensus based democratic approach to tackle the pandemic. part iii analyses the structural and systemic factors behind kerala's relative success, focusing especially on the capacity of the state and its institutions acting in synergy with society. part iv concludes the paper by reflecting upon the kerala experience and attempting to draw some generalizations about the capacity of "effective democracies" such as kerala to eliminate endemic poverty and chronic hunger in contrast to india's abysmal failure in making any serious dent into its record in these as it continues to be home to the single largest pool of chronically poor and hungry people in the world. we suggest that the roots of these lie in a major democratic deficit in the indian system--failed or weak public action, including rational-legal social movements and popular organizations, the space for these increasingly filled by communal, caste and nativist movements (tharamangalam, ) . it also discusses about the dominance of adversarial and competitive politics as the reason of kerala's failure to contain the covid pandemic in its third wave. how did kerala combat this virus better than india and many other countries? through what means? much of the answer to this question is public knowledge by now; for example, italy and the uk were battered by covid in the earlier phase of the pandemic outbreak since they did too little and were too late to take measures to contain the virus by testing, isolating and treating those infected and it resulted in devastating consequences. today, italy, uk, spain or much part of the europe are slowly recovering from the onslaught of the pandemic. the us, the world's richest and most powerful nation, was also confronting this crisis with early denials followed by confusing pronouncements and frequently changing policy initiatives by its authoritarian president even as the virus has spread rapidly turning cities like new york into epicenters of the pandemic. brazil's response to covid has also been a terrible one. india took some bold steps to contain the deadly pandemic by enforcing a stringent nationwide lockdown, but with little consultation, planning or provisioning in place to address the consequences of such a lockdown in a country with high levels of poverty, hunger, homelessness, weak health infrastructure and migrant laborers concentrated in its many urban centers. despite three successive lockdowns, india failed to control the spiraling surge in new covid infections viii . india which is slowly emerging from the lockdown in a phase to phase manner has overtaken brazil and usa and has become the global epicenter of covid pandemic. to see how and why kerala has been effective, we describe a few of the steps it has taken in a short time, then examine the policy priorities and values as well as the institutional structures that enabled kerala to act quickly to battle the pandemic-all of these the legacy of the "kerala model" over a period of time. although, kerala flattened the infection curve during the first two phases of covid ix , it failed to contain the surge in infections in the third phase. kerala's strategies in containing the pandemic in the first and second wave of infections gave way to premature celebrations and it instilled a sense of false safety in the minds of people. the fear factor went completely missing and with the easing of the lockdown people paid little attention to observe physical distancing, hand washing and even wearing masks. deal to collate and handle the health data of those quarantined xi . the major allegation was that the data was collected without the informed consent of the people and the deal lacked strong data protection clauses xii . the government version was that such an exercise was carried out to help medical officials and doctors to make a well-informed choice about possible hospitalization in the case of those quarantined. since the confidential data was collected under the deal made with the us company, questions were raised as to why the government did not disclose any details in the public domain regarding the deal. opposition parties xiii also questioned the rationale behind single handedly appointing the us based sprinklr company that too without putting a global tender for the same. since the cm also manages multiple portfolios including the department of information technology, the controversial deal was enough to rake up a political storm that too in the midst of the pandemic. the logic behind approaching a foreign company when kerala has institutions like centre for development of imaging technology (c-dit) xiv and kerala state it mission xv which are capable of handling big data analytics also raised doubts regarding governments decision. even the government at the centre led by bharatiya janata party (bjp) came down heavily on the state government for inking such a pact with a big data analytics company like sprinklr, when the country has central agencies like national informatics centre (nic) xvi which could easily handle the task assigned to the sprinklr. meanwhile, the kerala government defended its position citing that it took the decision to effectively analyze the covid data quickly. the government version was that it resorted to such a deal as it feared kerala might see an unprecedented jump in covid infection, following the easing of lockdown. it also stated that the ownership of the data lies with the kerala government and not with the sprinklr, which temporarily hosted the data in its server. the state government also said that strong data protection clauses were added to ensure the data privacy. however, the opposition parties weren't satisfied with these explanations and the reluctance of the cm to address the controversy openly added more fuel to the fire xvii . meanwhile, the government constituted a two-member committee to look into the matter. on april there was an outpouring of resentment over kerala government's stand. this unexpected move was dubbed as reluctance to accept more people coming by repatriation flights since the government feared that it will lose control over the fight against the pandemic. the opposition parties including congress, indian union muslim league (iuml) and bjp capitalized the public resentment against the stand of the governments. the opposition parties knew anything involving nrks would be a highly sensitive issue in the state since it has been surviving with the support of the remittances xxvii by overseas workers. it gave the opposition parties an opportunity to exploit the public anger and position themselves as true advocates of nrks. kerala will go to assembly elections next year and keeping it in mind, the ruling ldf, has been trying its best to turn the health crisis into an incredible opportunity to revive its political fortunes. the udf have dubbed the covid management as a mere public relations stunt with an eye on the forthcoming assembly elections. the opposition parties including bjp have accused the ldf for the spike in the infections as the government was too busy with marketing its covid story to international media and conducting debate series called kerala dialogue. the opposition parties in the state have always been skeptical about the kerala model of handling covid pandemic. the criticism by the opposition parties even had misogynistic undertones xxviii . the opposition accused that the health minister was not interested in saving lives and mocked her with misogynistic epithet. xxix however, the segregation of the infected and non -infected returnees from abroad did not happen due to technical difficulties and reluctance of the central government to conduct testing on expatriates boarding aircrafts from overseas. so, state government had no other go but to come up with an alternative strategy, where multi-layer screening facility was set up in airports for returnees xxx .again, on june , the cm wrote to the prime minister to seek the help from the central government to provide facilities for conducting covid test for expatriates returning to kerala via chartered flights. but this move was also met with stiff opposition and criticism from opposition parties and nrks xxxi . in july, a new trend emerged where covid infections through "contact" and local transmission xxxii started to surge in the state with more cases of community spread than imported cases. on july , kerala confirmed its first "covid super spreader" xxxiii incident in the coastal village of poonthura and pulluvila in thiruvanthapuram, the capital of kerala xxxiv . in poonthura and pulluvila, people blocked vehicles of police and attacked health workers. the residents in poonthura and pulluvila alleged that due to stringent lockdown measures they were not even allowed to venture out of their house to buy essential items from shops nearby. the residents complained that no shops in their vicinity were allowed to open and the men in uniform allegedly went around threatening and using bad words against the fishermen coming out of their homes. in addition to that a team of commandoes were but first, a brief overview of kerala and its specific characteristics will be helpful in providing a better context for this discussion. kerala is one of states in india, one of the smallest, but the most densely populated with million people nestled between the arabian sea and the hill ranges of the western ghats xxxvi .kerala is the only state in india without the historically, kerala has had close trade and cultural links with the outside world across the arabian sea; christianity and islam made their substantial presence here in the very early centuries of the founding of these religions making the state one of the most multireligious and multi-cultural. the past few decades saw a mass exodus of kerala's young people seeking employment outside the state, especially in the arabian gulf, but also in europe and north america. the remittances sent by these workers amount to about one third of kerala's state domestic product xxxviii (krishnan, ) . note also that there is a substantial number of migrant workers from other indian states (called "guest workers" by the kerala government) who fill local vacancies at the lower levels of the labor market, attracted by the higher wages and better social security in kerala. in addition to all this, unprecedented income growth and easily available bank loans in recent years have also spurred an exodus of kerala students seeking technical and higher education abroad, not only in the west but even in some remote parts of china and central asia, new destinations for those seeking medical and other degrees at relatively low cost. it is noteworthy that this small state now has four international airports facilitating the high volume of international travel. it is not surprising, then, that kerala was the first state to experience the covid- infection. indeed, the virus was initially brought by keralites returning from wuhan and italy xxxix . how, then, did kerala react to the sudden crisis? the first point to be highlighted here is that kerala may have been among the best prepared states/regions in the world to face this crisis. one reason for this is that it had the experience of successfully handling three crises in the past two years, a very serious nipah epidemic in and two outbreaks of kerala also failed to make use of the vast potential of alternative medical streams like ayurveda and homeopathy in treating covid . meanwhile, as the covid infections have alarmingly increased, the government has started promoting ayurveda as a way of boosting the immunity of the population xlvii . however, government has made it clear that diagnosis, medication and treatment of covid will only be done through scientifically-backed modern medicine. another criticism against kerala was that it was not testing enough. critics point out that kerala was testing less and thus it had relatively few cases earlier. in fact, whether kerala was testing enough was a cause of concern. however, in the beginning kerala, in march, the state was testing the most, followed by maharashtra. kerala with a population of million people conducted tests per million and maharashtra at that time conducted samples per million people. but in mid -april, when covid infections were slowing down in kerala, the aggressive testing strategy was relaxed. there had been allegation that kerala started testing asymptomatic and people with mild symptoms at a later stage. but as on september , , kerala has ramped up its testing from , to , tests per day. critics also argues that kerala invested its energy more in contact tracing than in testing which led to the drastic situation the state is facing now. second, kerala took early steps in monitoring and enforcing the rules of isolation. it has also harnessed and deployed modern technology such as surveillance by drones identifying locations of social gatherings, use of "geofencing" xlviii to enforce quarantine, and location tracking devices to create spatiotemporal maps for re-tracking movements of those infected. government resorted to surveillance technology to track the spread of the covid and to monitor people placed under quarantine. government was forced to resort to technology-based monitoring as the number of lockdown violators and those evading quarantine were increasing in the state. geofencing technology was one among them. what is behind kerala's success, some unique factors specific to kerala, a kerala exceptionalism? this is a complex question, and it is possible to highlight some unique historical and social factors, mentioned above. but our focus here is on institutional and cultural factors that are comparable and amenable to empirical investigation. from this perspective we will highlight the legacy of the "kerala model of development" that has created what some political scientists have called an effective or vibrant democracy (heller, ) , itself the legacy of "public action", as explained by dreze and sen lxxiv . this latter concept includes a proactive and interventionist state that responds to popular demands for basic social security, and a mobilized and politically conscious society that puts pressure on the state and holds it to account. how kerala evolved into such a state, at least close to this ideal, has a relatively long history. when kerala was born as a new state in india in by combining the two princely states of travancore and cochin and the british ruled region of malabar, all the three regions, especially the first two, had a half century old history of anti-caste and social reform movements followed by trade union and socialist movements, these resulting in a mobilized, and a socially and politically conscious population. the new state's first democratically elected government was formed by the communist party of india (cpi), the first time a communist party came to power in a free and multi-party election anywhere in the world lxxv (desai, ) . this government did not last long in a highly contentious political on the negative side, it is important to note two points here. first, the left parties abandoned such critical radical programs as land redistribution. they did enact and implement tenancy reforms that successfully abolished predatory landlordism. the traditional landless classes, of whom the vast majority were (still are) the dalits, received only their house sites or kudikidappu land leaving them where they had been for centuries, landless laborers, now turned into modern types of casual wage laborers lxxix (tharamangalam, ) . second, even the limited distribution of house sites, the most radical among indian states, required organized struggles and intense participation of mass organizations, especially of landless workers. the newly gained home ownership, however limited, did succeed in bestowing a certain sense of dignity to the former hutment dwellers who could no longer be evicted from their houses at the whims of the landlords. we have argued above that the two key elements in the kerala model are ( ) an interventionist state committed to pro-poor policies, and ( ) a mobilized society that engages the state through well-organized mass organizations and parties. in this section we discuss the way in which these two elements have interacted to create and maintain a certain synergy, a "virtuous" relationship. we suggest that this may be critical in understanding why kerala has succeeded where many others such as guatemala, nicaragua, and sri lanka have not been so successful. in examining state-society relations, scholars use different analytical lenses such as "equilibrium," "balance," "synergy," and "state-in-society." we find joel migdal's concept of state-in-society is particularly useful for it shows the state as embedded in society and constructed by social forces, on the one hand, yet enjoying relative autonomy and the capacity to mold and even manipulate social forces and social groups, on the other. .while the state can enjoy relative stability over a period of time, being a system of institutionalized practices, beliefs, and rules, every state is ultimately precarious and vulnerable as an arena in which contesting and changing social forces are continuously at play. we argue that kerala has been successful in maintaining a balance between state and society and among a variety of social groups and organizations. by this we do not mean an equilibrium imposed by some invisible hand, but a synergy created and maintained by institutionalized mechanisms capable of accommodating differences and resolving conflicts. as noted above, in kerala the process involved accommodation and compromise among various interest groups, mediated by rational-legal, modern institutions of the state as well as political parties and other organizations. this is not to suggest that this "virtuous" relationship has been unproblematic, or without dilemmas, strains, or contradictions or that it will be sustained indefinitely and can now be taken for granted. in fact, such a relationship is always precarious and a delicately negotiated one since democratic participation involves and requires critics of a given regime and even political opposition, and states and societies must negotiate inevitable conflicts of interests among social classes and groups. our argument has only been that kerala has not only been successful in maintaining a healthy balance but has, in fact, enhanced the "virtual relationship" between state and society in the context of confronting the four successive crises of floods and epidemics, and that the state's response to the latest and more ferocious covid pandemic, may have been a final test of the "kerala model". unlike the earlier crises, which were of short duration, the covid pandemic is likely to take longer time to resolve. it is therefore a crucial test of resilience of the kerala model. kerala's navodhanam was, indeed a revolution in hope -giving new hope to people who formerly lived without hope, accepting their fate as inevitable and/or unchangeable. kerala historian robin jeffrey (jeffrey, ) has noted, for instance, that by the s large numbers of people in kerala had enthusiastically embraced the belief that they had "entitlements", a concept that figures prominently in the writings of amartya sen. the social reform movements campaigned vigorously for the rights of the lower castes to education. an early associate of sree narayana guru, padmanabhan palpu lxxxi said on the subject: "we are the largest hindu community in kerala. without education no community has attained permanent civilized prosperity. in our community there must be no man or woman without primary education" lxxxii (ramachandran, ) . it is not accidental that universal access to education (first primary and then secondary and even post-secondary) became an issue of high priority in kerala both in terms of public demand and public policy. a notable aspect of mass participation, especially important in health care, has been the pivotal role of "women's agency" (women's empowerment in terms of literacy, education and health, promoting general achievements in human development indicators such as imr, child nutrition and health), as explained by amartya sen (sen, & and ( dreze and sen, the unprecedented covid pandemic has shaken our taken-for granted "common sense" in many respects. kerala which successfully contained the covid in the first two waves of infections is now struggling to contain the pandemic in its third wave. the kerala model of managing and containing covid , which was lauded once across the globe is now looked upon with skepticism. it is also a cautionary tale for the government, media and public at large against celebrating covid success models. kerala's biggest advantage was its robust healthcare system and participatory mode of governance or social democracy when it came to handling the pandemic. however, the pandemic has showed that even a participatory social democratic state face challenges in managing crises and ensuring basic security to all. we will conclude with a brief reflection on the concept of entitlement, made famous by nobel laureate amartya sen in many of his writings but especially in his classic study of famines (sen, ) . his now famous, but somewhat unexpected conclusion was that famines in the modern world are not caused by shortage of food, but by "entitlement failure" lxxxiii . as a corollary to this he also argued that self-governing democracies in the modern world have no famines for the obvious reason that such a government, responding to the needs of the people who elected them, and working in synergy with its citizens and civil society organizations has the knowledge, capacity and the will to take timely and effective steps to obtain and move food to the needy. one of the notable successes of india's sovereign democracy has been the elimination of the periodic famines that had been a recurring feature of colonial india. the country has been free of famines since the s; for the past few decades india has been not just selfsufficient in food supply, but has a substantial surplus, some of it often rotting or eaten by rats in ill-equipped public storages. but here comes india's famous paradox of "hunger amidst plenty" in contrast to kerala, a food deficit state which has eliminated such hunger. as cogently argued by patrick heller, effective democracies put re-distributive pressure on the state. if so, it should be obvious that india fails this test; india is just not an effective democracy --in sharp contrast to kerala which is. atul kohli, who has extensively studied these issues in india supports this conclusion (kohli, (kohli, , (kohli, , (kohli, & . he addresses the class basis of the indian state even better. according to him the redistributive capacity of the indian state, always low, declined even further during the post-reform period. this latter period, he says, has been marked by a shift in the character of the indian state from "a reluctant pro-capitalist state with a socialist ideology to an enthusiastic pro-capitalist state with some commitment to inclusive growth" (kohli, ).he asks if and how democratic politics can counter class power and if "…democracy and activism of the poor (can) modify this dominant pattern of development " (kohli, ) .he sounded an optimistic note as he was writing at a time when popular demands had led to such beneficial legislative measures such as the mgnregs lxxxvi and the national food security act lxxxvii which were beginning to show some success. but the indian state has shifted once again under the bjp which combines even more right-wing economic policies with the ideology and project of hindutva, a militant form of majoritarian hindu nationalism that moved from the fringes of indian society and politics to its mainstream in a short period of time (tharamangalam, ) .no wonder the figures for poverty and hunger are showing no decline as has happened in other southern countries, especially india's own poorer neighbors such as nepal and bangladesh. lxxxviii meanwhile, it is indeed encouraging to see that a few states such as kerala, goa and the so called tribal states mentioned above have continued to follow more promising paths with easily visible outcomes in terms of their social development. we can only hope that the lessons learned from kerala and other states and countries for their best practices during the covid pandemic will continue to resonate with the people of india and the world as they may be re-thinking and re-imagining a better world for the post-covid era. they admitted that they hurled abuses at the health officials and scoffed at them, but residents added that they were forced into doing such activities based on misleading information given to them by external forces. they also said that they have apologized to the health officials in this regard. (interviews with residents on july, lxiii in the wake of nationwide lockdown, guest laborers were housed in shelters in the state. with the easing of the lockdown, many of these the guest labourers are returning to their homes each day. the community kitchens served the guest laborers, the elderly, the homeless, the destitute, and the sick. lxiv a poverty eradication and women empowerment programme of government of kerala why have covid- cases surged in kerala? the hindu -year-old woman in kerala beats covid- in nine days india coronavirus: how kerala's covid success story came undone. bbc news poverty, unemployment and development policy: a case study of selected issues with reference to kerala this is kerala's ayurveda prescription to fight coronavirus and keep infections down. the print congress wins first round over sprinklr deal. the new indian express five years of participatory planning in kerala: rhetoric and reality the sen in the neo-liberal developmental programmes of kerala state formation and radical democracy in india the capabilities approach in the vernacular: the history of capability building in kerala india: development and participation an uncertain glory: india and its contradictions indian development: selected regional perspectives embedded autonomy: states and industrial transformation state-society synergy: government and social capital in development bringing the state back in on our minds: how a southern indian state crushed its coronavirus outbreak. the new york times new delhi: promila & co. in collaboration with the institute for food and development policy limits to kerala model of development: an analysis of fiscal crisis and its implications. thiruvananthapuram: centre for development studies planning commission global hunger index: the challenge of hunger and climate change. welthungerhilfe; and dublin history of kerala: prehistoric to the present do political regimes matter? poverty reduction and regime differences across india social capital as product of class mobilization and state intervention: industrial workers in kerala the labor of development: workers and the transformation of capitalism in kerala degrees of democracy: some comparative lessons from india a virus, social democracy, and dividends for kerala. the hindu land to the tiller: the political economy of agrarian reform in south asia democracy and development in india state and redistributive development in india poverty amid plenty in the new india state-directed development: political power and industrialization in the global periphery row over senior congress leader's "covid rani" remark on kerala health minister foreign remittance, consumption and income. thiruvananthapuram: akg centre for research and studies community kitchen live data state power and social forces: domination and transformation in the third world between euphoria and scepticism: ten years of panchayati raj in kerala taking solidarity seriously: analysing kerala's kudumbashree as a women's sse experiment a study on domestic migrant labour in kerala covid services-norka how a south indian state flattened its coronavirus curve. the diplomat report of the committee for evaluation of decentralized planning and development. government of kerala a decade of decentralisation in kerala: experience and lessons india coronavirus: why celebrating covid- 'success models' is dangerous. bbc news kerala cm's principal secretary removed for alleged connection to gold smuggling accused. the indian express a survey on ageing scenario in kerala senior citizens of india: emerging challenges and concerns indian development: selected regional perspective office of the registrar general. ministry of home affairs(mha). government of india the sample registration system (srs) statistical report in india is carried out by the office of registrar general & census commissioner a store promised buyers cashback of rs , if they got coronavirus within hours of purchase. vice prevalence of risk factors of non-communicable diseases in kerala, india: results of a cross-sectional study education in kerala's development: towards a new agenda carry 'coronavirus -free' health certificate to enter india if flying in from italy, south korea. times of india cm ducks' questions on sprinklr deal. the hindu the coronavirus slayer! how kerala's rock star health minister helped save it from covid- . the guardian kerala could lose rs , cr. in remittances as over lakhs register to return from abroad. the print historical hurdles in the course of the people's planning campaign in kerala, india agrarian class conflict: the political mobilization of agricultural laborers in kuttanad the perils of social development without economic growth: the development debacle of kerala rejoinder" to respondents to the symposium understanding kerala's paradoxes: the problematic of the kerala model of development medical team cornered by mob in kerala covid- hotspot, coughed at, abused. the indian express facebook, twitter followers not impressed by kerala cm pinarayi vijayan's pressers of late. the new indian express kerala sasthra sahitya parishad virus kerala: a portrait of the malabar coast lxv kudumbashree, . on august , authors of this research paper interacted with women who provided support to community kitchens (interview on august , ). lxvi a model that contains multiple centers of sourcing and delivering food, but with a "hub" that coordinates the activities and provides a central point of contact to all the clients. lxvii at present there are a total of janakeeya hotels are functioning in kerala. these days demand for janakeeya hotels are also rising. as per records, , , meals have been provided through these hotels. on july , authors of this research paper interacted with women who manage janakeeya hotels and some of them expressed their doubt towards the sustainability of the hotels. (interview on july , ). lxviii a good example of this is sourcing community-based disaster management plans (cbdms) already prepared by a large number of gram panchayats (village level governments) in the aftermath of the two earlier floods.these plans are based on extensive ward-based data on shelter management, hospital infrastructure, technical resource persons, and trained health workers. this valuable resource is now being used for the fact- lxxxiii take the example of the bengal famine of which killed over million people. sen asks why these million (mostly the rural poor) died while others were well fed, yet others hoarded food and/or exported food out of bengal. the answer has to be sought in the system of food distribution and resource allocation, a complex social, cultural, political and especially legal system. those who starved were the ones who were excluded from access to food in this system, at the center of which was a "war economy" that determined and controlled such access, i.e., "entitlements" to food. lxxxviii it is noteworthy that the best performing indian states in enhancing human development and reducing poverty also include some in the north east such as manipur and nagaland. we would suggest that the critical factor behind the difference between these so-called "tribal" states and the politically powerful, but socially backward north indian states (also the main base of the bjp and the hindutva movement) is the relatively weak presence (if any) of caste in the former and its entrenched and all-encompassing nature in the latter. a second factor may be the early lead of these north east states in literacy and education, mostly due to missionary activities. key: cord- - zvmfvru authors: macilree, john; duval, david timothy title: aeropolitics in a post-covid- world date: - - journal: j air transp manag doi: . /j.jairtraman. . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: zvmfvru we review selected aeropolitical issues that may impact the international aviation sector post-covid- . consideration regarding icao's role in coordinating safety provisions using existing frameworks will be important. issues relating to national airline bailouts and recapitalisation as well as international ownership are also explored. we offer several further, as yet unanswerable, questions about future aeropolitical issues, including how icao will continue to address the crisis, implications for air services capacity restrictions, the impact of deglobalisation and the question of state aid for national carriers and other parts of the aviation system. the purpose of this paper is to unknot potential aeropolitical issues that some states may need to address in a post-covid- environment. our use of the term 'aeropolitics' is intentionally broad. it encompasses not only the legal and economic regulatory structures that are in place between two or more states, but it also encompasses state-centred activities, such as infrastructure provision and state investment, and regulatory frameworks governing global air transport. prognostications are difficult, even in the absence of deadly viruses. for this reason, our assessment is meant to generate discussion at the state level and within the academic community. some issues below had already been in play prior to the pandemic, however the current crisis has amplified their significance. as a un agency, the international civil aviation organisation (icao) is tasked with, and has experience in, providing global oversight and leadership of regulatory provisions centering around international passenger air transport, particularly in times of crisis. icao's founding document, the chicago convention, not only provides the basis for two or more states to conclude an air service agreement (asa), but also the framework for dealing with international health emergencies. this is not surprising given aviation's role in the spread of communicable diseases (see bowen and laroe, ; hodgkinson, ) . icao's role is arguably paramount in the context of the pandemic. its existing frameworks and agreements address how international aviation addresses concerns of disease spread. for instance, article of the chicago convention provides: "each contracting state agrees to take effective measures to prevent the spread by means of air navigation of cholera, typhus (epidemic), smallpox, yellow fever, plague, and such other communicable diseases as the contracting states shall from time to time decide to designate, and to that end contracting states will keep in close consultation with the agencies concerned with international regulations relating to sanitary measures applicable to aircraft. such consultation shall be without prejudice to the application of any existing international convention on this subject to which the contracting states may be parties". several facilitation provisions as well as relevant safety-related sarps (standards and recommended practices) sit within the technical annexes to the convention. annex (titled facilitation, icao, a), specifically ❡ . of chapter , specifies that, with respect to communicable diseases, states are required to establish a national aviation plan as well as a national facilitation programme and subsequent oversight committee. states are also bound, as per ❡ . of chapter of annex , to comply with health provisions as issued by the world health organisation (who), another un agency with whom icao works closely. adherence to who instructions are paramount here, for ❡ . of chapter of annex indicates: "contracting states shall not prevent an aircraft from calling at any international airport for public health reasons unless such action is taken in accordance with the international health regulations ( air transport association (iata) is illustrative of the interplay between these legal provisions. although the details were not known fully at the time of writing, it is possible that the above section may be the basis of iata's position with respect to actions taken by argentina. on april , , the bbc reported ( a) an announcement by the argentinian government that it had banned commercial sales on flights until september , . iata reportedly sent a letter to the argentine government suggesting that the decision conflicted with the existing asas, however precisely how was not entirely clear publicly. at most, ❡ . of annex permits countries to implement public health measures, but it is silent on refusing airlines of trading partners airspace entry. alternatively, iata's position may be that passengers may be subject to quarantine (as necessary), but aircraft operations should not be restricted. regardless, this may be the beginning of international legal challenges with respect to the scope and intent of icao's facilitation provisions. as aviation is a recognised actor in biosecurity (hall, ), naturally there will be interest among states in aligning health policy with aviation policy. states, however, face a dilemma. on the one hand, and as signalled in the preamble of the chicago convention, signatory states have agreed to "create and preserve friendship and understanding among the nationals and peoples of the world, yet its abuse can become a threat to the general security". on the other hand, urgent health-related policies may or may not override this. arising from this conundrum is the question of states' responsibilities versus adherence to the chicago convention and any in-force asas. states face tension between the economic and social role of aviation, the desire to preserve public health (by imposing border closures, for instance) and the requirement, as per international law, standards and guidance associated with being a signatory to the chicago convention. the aforementioned case involving argentina is perhaps just one early example of this tension unfolding. with covid- , this is complicated by asymptomatic carriers of the virus confounding effective border health checks. as is the case in the uk, australia, new zealand and canada, quarantine requirements (two weeks is typical) are helping to quash supply of and demand for international air travel. in a move that illustrates legal concerns regarding government actions, reuters ( a) reported on june , that ryanair, british airways and easyjet were taking legal action, by way of judicial review, against the uk government over its policy as introduced in early june that required a -day quarantine period. the three airlines argued (bbc b) that the policy is excessively restrictive, may not have been based on scientific evidence and there was a lack of consultation. finally, icao is positioned to offer forward guidance on passenger protection and whether there will be harmonisation (again, through icao with assistance from a variety of organisations, including iata and airports council international (aci)) in standard safety protocols. in early march , icao ( b) adopted a declaration that recalled the aforementioned article and urged states to adopt the provisions and sarps of annex , collaborate with public health in information sharing and join the collaborative arrangement for the prevention and management of public health events in civil aviation (capsca). starting on january , , it has been both directly from icao and through capsca that numerous resources have been disseminated, including, for example, regular updates that outline the effects of the virus/disease on civil aviation, guidance for civil aviation authorities on safety risks and initial guidance on the concept of public health corridors (the so-called public health corridor concept, or phcc). on april , , icao established a covid- aviation recovery task force (cart), with the aim "to identify and recommend strategic priorities and policies for states and industry operators" (icao, c). the cart report was adopted by icao council on june , and provides key principles for restart and recovery and makes recommendations. for example, with respect to economic and financial measures, the report (icao, d) argued that these "should be inclusive, targeted, proportionate, transparent, temporary and consistent with icao's policies, while striking an appropriate balance of interests without prejudice to fair competition." it also notes the need to "strengthen public confidence." the report is accompanied by comprehensive guidance material covering airports, aircraft, crew and cargo as well as public health risk mitigation. icao has also offered guidance on safety risks (icao, e) with an effort to "coordinate, collaborate, and communicate". at the time of writing some airlines (but not all; see reuters, b) have produced seat maps that, going forward, effectively block out middle seats in an effort to maintain safe physical distancing. it is unclear on whether this is medically sufficient and whether shrunken passenger demand is ameliorated by this policy. guidance from iata in may (iata, a) indicated that face masks are recommended but that "it should not be assumed that physical distancing on board (e.g., through blocked seats) would be necessary". most us airlines follow this guidance as of the end of may (forbes, ). one further issue being addressed by the icao council at the time of writing relates to the carbon offsetting and reduction scheme for international aviation (corsia) scheme designed to provide marketbased measures to reduce aviation emissions. the base years for cor-sia are currently and , however iata argues that, because of substantially lower emissions in because of the pandemic, only data from should be utilised (iata, b). despite strong growth in certain regions in recent years, the business of passenger transport was, leading up to the pandemic, nevertheless characterised by small margins and significant operating costs. as well as being a key enabler of tourism, aviation plays a critical role as a conduit for global supply chains (morrell and klein, ). it must be remembered that belly-hold cargo capacity (with tourists seated above) is vital for many economies. for most countries, therefore, aviation is positioned importantly in any economic restart post-covid- . some airlines and related aviation sectors, such as airports and air traffic control providers, have signalled to their respective national governments the need for financial support in the form of loans, grants, other cash or fee waivers. because of the provisions in most bilateral asas, international airlines only have restricted access to global capital markets. governments thus face more pressures. first, with government financial resources especially stretched with mass unemployment and fiscal stimuli urgently needed, as well as other industries equally in need of financial support, governments grapple with how much priority should be given to aviation. for a few countries, this includes their aerospace industries, the airliner and engine manufacturers and their respective supply chains. this issue arose during negotiations for a german government equity injection into lufthansa (eventually approved on may , ), where it was proposed that it be conditional on the airline not cancelling any orders it has with airbus (aviation ). it is also complicated by the wto agreement on trade in civil aircraft, the source of a major long-running dispute between boeing and airbus (see below). second, in states with multiple airlines, this will necessitate questions of resource allocation on the part of governments. some national airlines (when more than one exist) might be in entirely different financial situations. iag subsidiary british airways and virgin atlantic, part owned by delta, are examples of this. third, some airlines are providing "essential" services to remote regions. in those instances, a pertinent question arises as to whether a government is obligated to underwrite or provide capital to all airlines equally. fourth, and related, where multiple airlines exist with different business models and cash positions, governments may need to decide, given limited resources, which business model has the best hope going forward once government support is no longer needed. for example, to what extent should governments offer financial relief to airlines whose business models focus on high density, such as low-cost airlines, particularly when physical distancing may be necessary and thus presenting a challenge to yield and profitability? finally, the issue of associating aid with sustainability principles and binding carbon/emissions targets has also been raised, for example in france (flightglo-bal, ) over conditional support for air france and in europe more generally (financial times ). lee and dy ( ) helpfully characterise airline ownership and control in terms of qualitative (control) and quantitative (ownership) dimensions. these distinctions, combined with traffic/capacity rights, are used to determine market access. typically, states would permit airlines of their trading partners access only if they met the common "substantial ownership and effective control" provision contained within the asa (recognising that there exist some rather more relaxed criterion, such as principal place of business and effective regulatory control). a recent example during the pandemic highlights an instance where ownership may have implications other than market access, and particularly when market access is not especially threatened. iag is a spanish-registered holding company and is the single (parent) shareholder in british airways (as well as aer lingus, iberia, level and veuling). as of the end of april , the airline cut nearly , staff (reuters, c) and has signalled that it does not intend to seek formal bailout or government-backed loans. however, at the time of writing, the financial repercussions of the pandemic are only just starting to be felt. iata, for instance, has warned publicly that recovery could be slow amidst uncertain demand for air travel (iata, c). should capital injections be necessary going forward, particularly if the extent and/or uncertainty of covid- persists, will the uk government offer such capital (or loans) in order to preserve connectivity irrespective of eu state aid rules (discussed above with respect to air france) or will there be resistance to such an idea given iag's foreign ownership profile? this example demonstrates that the qualitative/quantitative distinctions used to confer market access are a factor in determining the political decision to offer state aid. as the economic damage from the pandemic continues, further examples will arise. in the coming months, as more information becomes publicly available, additional examples of how airlines have been restructured and assisted by states to meet the massive challenges covid- poses will eventuate. specific examples such as avianca, latam, sas and cathay pacific could be worthy of investigation, as these have complicated multinational structures that involve a number of governments. airport and air traffic management organisation case studies too will provide useful examples of crisis management for future reference. state aid is also of concern for airframe manufacturers. the decadeslong dispute between the united states and the eu with respect to 'unfair' state aid provided to boeing and airbus will likely show no signs of abating given each manufacturer is facing delayed deliveries and outright cancellations by airline customers due to flight rationalisation and caution over demand trajectories post-covid- (world trade organization, ) . the complexity of state aid provision and regulation is demonstrated in the case of europe, where european commission (ec) competition regulation and horizontal asas (european commission, a) add extra layers of bailout consideration, particularly the need for states to receive ec approvals before such aid is made available. typically, existing state aid in the european union cannot be made by member states to national companies because of the potential for competition distortion, yet early examples of this have been seen in the aviation sector following the relaxing of such rules under a 'temporary framework' (european commission, b) . the ec approved on may , a € billion state aid package (loan guarantees) to air france (european commission, c) . not only was wider ec approval required but, as reported (deutsche welle, ) , there are conditions imposed on air france by france, including requirements for the airline to be more profitable, reductions in co emissions, and the suggestion that the airline continue to purchase aircraft from airbus. ryanair ceo michael o'leary was quoted (euronews, ) as suggesting that state aid targeting national airlines was misplaced: "air italia has been renationalised. we don't want state aid but we would like to see significant reductions in airport charges in italy instead of these massive doses of state aid crack cocaine." our assessment raises a number of further questions which are not able to be considered in full at present. first, will criticism be levied against icao (similar to that directed publicly at the who) or will a greater international understanding of its role in the response to international health crises be seen? second, will liberal (open skies) access and capacity/frequency allowances under existing asas be sufficient to carry future demand when large aircraft (for instance, b and a ) are being retired (early) during the pandemic? third, will postneoliberal ideologies and concerns for climate change result in the contraction of global trade and a rise in deglobalisation (livesey, ) with a consequent impact on cargo and passenger demand for international air transport? fourth, are airlines with global reach (partially or wholly) going to be viable, if not economically, then politically? for example, gulf and southeast asian airlines have been affected by the crisis. given they function as global connectors utilising extensive sixth freedom traffic and limited or no domestic operations, they face an uncertain future with the decline in international passenger numbers. given this, will governments, particularly those who have international aviation industries that make disproportionate contributions to their economies, face particular pressure to underwrite these airlines in order to preserve access and connectivity? put another way, are some airlines, airframe and engine manufacturers, and the international aviation industry more generally, simply 'too big to fail'? lufthansa agrees bailout with german government coronavirus: argentina bans commercial flight sales until ryanair and easyjet launch fight over 'devastating' quarantine plan airline networks and the international diffusion of severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars) lufthansa mulls options as air france state aid strings revealed ryanair's o'leary slams 'state aid junkies lufthansa and air france external aviation policy -horizontal agreements coronavirus: commission statement on consulting member states on proposal to further expand state aid temporary framework to recapitalisation measures state aid: commission approves french plans to provide € billion in urgent liquidity support to air france eu eyes ways to attach green strings to airline bailouts french government sets green conditions for air france bailout do you have to wear a mask on an biological invasion, biosecurity, tourism, and globalisation air transport and pandemic influenza iata outlines layered approach for industry re-start carbon offsetting scheme for international aviation (corsia slow recovery needs confidence boosting measures available athtt ps://www annex declaration adopted by the icao council at the fourth meeting of the th session on march relating to the outbreak of novel coronavirus (covid- icao council establishes covid- aviation recovery task force icao, d. cart report -recommendations. available at icao issues new guidance on covid- aviation safety risks mitigating "effective control" restriction on joint venture airlines in asia: philippine airasia case unpacking the possibilities of deglobalisation moving boxes by air: the economics of international air cargo ryanair fight british quarantine with legal action australia's qantas set to ramp up domestic flights without social distancing british airways owner bets on costs not bailouts to survive european communities and certain member states -measures affecting trade in large civil aircraft this research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. the authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. key: cord- -f rx h r authors: wellenius, gregory a.; espinosa, swapnil vispute valeria; fabrikant, alex; tsai, thomas c.; hennessy, jonathan; williams, brian; gadepalli, krishna; boulanger, adam; pearce, adam; kamath, chaitanya; schlosberg, arran; bendebury, catherine; stanton, charlotte; bavadekar, shailesh; pluntke, christopher; desfontaines, damien; jacobson, benjamin; armstrong, zan; gipson, bryant; wilson, royce; widdowson, andrew; chou, katherine; oplinger, andrew; shekel, tomer; jha, ashish k.; google, evgeniy gabrilovich; inc.,; view, mountain; ca,; health, department of environmental; health, boston university school of public; boston,; ma,; surgery, department of; brigham,; hospital, women's; school, harvard medical; policy, department of health; management,; health, harvard t. h. chan school of public; institute, harvard global health; cambridge, title: impacts of state-level policies on social distancing in the united states using aggregated mobility data during the covid- pandemic date: - - journal: nan doi: nan sha: doc_id: cord_uid: f rx h r social distancing has emerged as the primary mitigation strategy to combat the covid- pandemic in the united states. however, large-scale evaluation of the public's response to social distancing campaigns has been lacking. we used anonymized and aggregated mobility data from google location history users to estimate the impact of social distancing recommendations on bulk mobility among users who have opted into this service. we found that state-of-emergency declarations resulted in approximately a % reduction in time spent away from places of residence. implementation of one or more social distancing policies resulted in an additional % reduction in mobility the following week. subsequent shelter-in-place mandates provided an additional % reduction. our findings provide evidence that state-wide mandates are effective in promoting social distancing within this study group. social distancing has emerged as the primary strategy for slowing the spread of the covid- pandemic. social distancing is expected to reduce the frequency of close contact with others and thus minimize the transmission of the sars-cov- coronavirus. prior experience with the h n influenza and ebola suggests that social distancing is effective in reducing disease transmission. ( , ) in china, officials engaged in an unprecedented quarantine of hubei province to contain covid- transmission out of the initial epicenter city of wuhan. ( ) ( ) ( ) as the pandemic spread to new clusters of infection in the united states (u.s.) efforts at containment and then mitigation have been largely at the discretion of state and local governments, leading to a patchwork of directives to encourage social distancing. these policies have included state emergency declarations, work-from-home policies, school closures, closures of non-essential businesses and services, limits placed on large social gatherings, bans on in-restaurant service, and shelter-in-place orders. ( ) to date, there is some limited data that these policies may be working. several news outlets have shown substantial drops in mobility across the nation since early march, although the ties to specific policy interventions are less clear. given the current reliance on social distancing policies to limit the spread of covid- , systematically quantifying the impact of these policies on mobility may be helpful to public health officials. the availability of anonymized and aggregated mobility data represents a novel opportunity to quantify the effectiveness of individual social distancing interventions. ( ) we used aggregated (anonymized with differential privacy) data from google users across the u.s. who have opted-in to location history (the location history feature is off by default and requires explicit opt-in). ( , ) using these data, information on the dates of implementation of various social distancing policies (see supplemental material), and a regression discontinuity approach, we sought to: ) quantify the average effect on mobility of declarations of states of emergency, social distancing policies, and shelter-in-place orders, and ) gain insights into which policies are most effective in promoting social distancing. our primary outcome of interest is the relative change in the time spent away from places of residence, and also considered relative changes in the number of visits to places of work and the number of visits to: ) grocery stores and pharmacies, ) retail, recreation, and eateries), ) parks, and ) transit stops. overall, we observed three waves of state-level responses to covid- : ) a first wave occurring during the first two weeks of march with state of emergency declarations, ) a second wave during the week of march where a variety of specific social distancing orders were implemented, and ) a third wave during the last two weeks of march consisting of orders for residents to shelter in place orders ( figure ). the first state of emergency related to covid- was declared by washington state on february , and most recently by oklahoma and maine on march . many states subsequently ordered that schools close (led by louisiana and virginia on march , ), and/or placed limits on specific activities and businesses in order to promote social distancing. within a week, states and washington dc had implemented at least social distancing policy. in % of states, the first social distancing order imposed was the closure of schools. on march , nevada enacted orders advising residents to shelter in place, followed by california on march , . as of april , % of states had ordered residents to shelter in place. we used the same data that was used to prepare the community mobility reports published by google ( , ) to compute aggregated visit trends to a number of specific categories of locations (see supplemental material). trends were aggregated to the county level (including washington, dc and independent cities that are not otherwise included in county boundaries), and available daily from january through march , . within each county we applied a regression discontinuity analysis to estimate the relative change in the amount of time spent away from places of residence of location history users and the relative change in the number of visits to specific categories of locations in the week after versus before each intervention. the following results should be interpreted in light of several important limitations including that our data are limited to google users who have opted in to location history. on average across the country, a declaration of a state of emergency was associated with a . % ( % confidence interval [ci]: - . %, - . %) decrease in time spent away from places of residence, . % ( % ci: - . %, - . %) fewer visits to the workplace, . % (- . %, - . %) fewer visits to retail outlets and recreational sites, and . % fewer visits to transit stops (- . %, - . %) in the following week ( figure a ). these changes in mobility are noteworthy given that emergency declarations did not necessarily specifically call for increased social distancing and suggests that government messaging, news coverage, and/or actions observed in other countries could have influenced people's activities. visits to parks were also affected by emergency declarations, with a small . % ( % ci: - . %, - . %) average reduction. the smaller impact of emergency declarations on visits to parks versus other venues is likely at least partly explained by the warmer weather and transition to spring during this period. on the other hand, emergency declarations coincided with a relative increase in visits to grocery stores and pharmacies of . % ( % ci: . %, . %), consistent with news reports of individuals stocking up on dry goods, cleaning supplies, and medications at the end of february and early march in anticipation of impending social distancing orders. ( ) we next examined the impact on mobility of the first social distancing policies implemented in each state. we found that on average across the country these orders resulted in additional reductions in mobility above and beyond the changes observed following emergency declarations ( figure b ). specifically, implementation of one or more social distancing policies resulted in a further . % ( % ci: - . %, - . %) reduction in time spent away from places of residence, a further . % (- . %, - . %) reduction in visits to retail and recreational outlets, and a further . % (- . %, - . %) reduction in visits to work in the following week. the same pattern was evident for visits to parks, and for visits to grocery stores and pharmacies. the impacts of social distancing orders varied substantially between states ( figure ). for example, implementation of social distancing policies was associated with a % decrease in the time spent away from places of residence in new jersey versus a % decrease in louisiana, but we note that differences in mobility between states may be due to a number of factors beyond social distancing policies. the median of state-specific changes in time spent away from places of residence was a decrease of %. states that enacted multiple social distancing measures tended to experience greater reductions in mobility. the impact of social distancing orders also varied substantially across counties within each state regardless of the average impact across the state ( supplemental table ). results were consistent when considering changes in visits to work, visits to grocery stores and pharmacies, visits to retail, recreation, and eateries, visits to parks, and visits to transit stops ( supplemental figure ). we next considered the impact on mobility of state-wide orders to shelter in place. among the states that had issued shelter in place orders on or before march , we found substantial reductions in time spent away from places of residence and in visits to all categories of locations ( figure c ). specifically, time spent away from places of residence was . % ( % ci: - . %, - . %) lower in the week following implementation of shelter in place orders versus the prior week. note that these changes are multiplicative over time as all states had already declared a state of emergency and implemented at least one social distancing policy. for comparison, we also show in figure c the change in mobility during the same time frame (march - versus march - , ) among those states that had not yet issued shelter-in-place orders by march . however, note that comparisons between states reflect the influence of a number of factors on mobility in addition to policy differences. given that most states enacted multiple policies to encourage social distancing over a short time period, it is not possible to estimate the independent effects of individual policies. however, in secondary analyses we sought to identify the combinations of social distancing orders that were associated with greater changes in mobility ( figure these results should be interpreted in light of several important limitations. first, our source data are limited to smartphone users who have opted in to google's consumer location history feature. these data may not be representative of the population as whole, and furthermore their representativeness may vary by location. additionally, these limited data are only viewed through the lens of differential privacy algorithms, specifically designed to protect user anonymity and obscure fine detail ( ) . moreover, comparisons across rather than within locations are only descriptive since these regions can differ in substantial ways besides the policy environment. second, our analyses are focused on state-level policies, whereas individual metropolitan areas and counties within a state may have implemented specific social distancing policies prior to implementation of state-level policies (see supplemental figure for detailed examples from king county, wa, westchester county, ny, new york county, ny, and santa clara county, ca). third, we did not assess the impact of social distancing policies or resulting changes in mobility on published counts of confirmed covid- cases or deaths. although such analyses are of critical importance, they are complicated by the heterogeneous availability of testing, delays in reporting, and the inherent latency before social distancing impacts are evident in clinical outcomes, and thus beyond the scope of this report. in summary, using anonymized, aggregated, and differentially private data from google users who opted in to location history, we found that state-mandated social distancing orders were effective in decreasing time spent away from places of residence, as well as reducing visits to work, and visits to both grocery stores/pharmacies and retail/recreational locations. while the majority of states declared states of emergency by early march, the emergency declaration per se had only a modest effect on mobility. in contrast, implementation of one or more specific social distancing orders was associated with an almost % additional reduction in time spent away from places of residence and a % additional reduction in visits to retail and recreational locations. these effects were evident in every state and in virtually every county. although we were unable to estimate the independent effects of different social distancing measures due to their close temporal proximity within each state, we did observe that those states that implemented multiple such measures experienced more pronounced declines in mobility. in addition, limits on bars and restaurants appeared to be the single most effective social distancing order. we conclude that state-based orders intended to promote social distancing appear to be very effective in accomplishing the public health goals of encouraging individuals to stay at home in order to minimize the risk of covid- transmission. our findings not only illustrate the importance of specific social distancing orders, but also demonstrate the magnitude of change in mobility that we might expect from these policies. this information can help public health officials better calibrate and understand the extent to which social distancing can slow down the disease. the anonymized and aggregated dataset analyzed herein was the same one that was used to create the publicly-available google covid- community mobility reports (published at http://google.com/covid /mobility on april , ). the data analyzed in this paper consisted of anonymized, aggregated, and differentially private counts of visits to places in different categories. the publicly available data reflects percentage ratios computed using these counts. the information on dates of policy interventions was aggregated from publicly available data as described in the supplemental material. our overall approach was to use regression discontinuity using each county's recent past as its own control to assess the impact of state declarations of emergency and targeted social distancing policies on the relative changes in the average time spent away from places of residence, the number of visits to work, and the number of visits to: ) grocery stores and pharmacies, ) retail stores, recreational sites, and eateries, ) transit stops, and ) parks. data on state social distancing policies were obtained from official documents issued by state governors and health and education officials. documents were linked from the kaiser family foundation's state data and policy actions tracker ( ) and supplemented with manual searches of state public health websites. dates of policy enactment were cross-checked with the aei covid- action tracker ( ) and the nytimes shelter in place tracker ( ) . policies tracked were categorized as follows: ) state-declared state of emergency, ) state-mandated school closures, ) state-mandated closing of non-essential businesses and services, ) state-mandated limits on large gatherings, ) state-imposed bans on in-restaurant service, and ) state-imposed mandatory quarantines. state-mandated closing of non-essential businesses included any order closing gyms, theaters, and other businesses even if it did not extend to all non-essential businesses. limits on large gatherings referred to any ban on gatherings larger than a certain number of people, though that threshold varied between states. for states that issued additional orders reducing the size of permitted gatherings, the date of the first such order was taken. bans on in-restaurant service excluded mandatory reductions in restaurant capacity and included only those orders that prohibited any restaurant activity except pick-up and delivery. these bans often also included bars and clubs. mandatory quarantine referred to any stay-at-home or shelter-in-place order that prohibited non-essential travel away from the home for all residents. shelter-in-place orders specifically for high-risk individuals were excluded. orders that went into effect at any time after : pm were considered to begin on the following day. we obtained aggregated and anonymized data from groups of google users on mobile devices in all states and washington, dc who have opted in to having their location history data stored. the anonymized dataset used for these analyses is the same as the one used to create the publicly-available google covid- community mobility reports (published at http://google.com/covid /mobility on april , ). the aggregation and anonymization process applied to the initial version of google covid- community mobility reports has been previously described in detail. ( ) the community mobility reports leverage signals such as relative frequency, time and duration of visits to calculate metrics related to places of residence and places of work of location history users as described elsewhere. ( ) the anonymization process is designed to ensure that no personal data, including an individual's location, movement, or contacts, can be derived from the resulting metrics. data were aggregated to the county level (and washington, dc) and available daily from january through march , . within each county we applied a regression discontinuity analysis to estimate the relative change in time spent away from the place of residence (primary outcome) and the relative change in the number of visits to public locations (secondary outcomes) associated with: ) declaration of a state of emergency, ) ordering of one or more social distancing measures, and ) orders for people to shelter-in-place. we note that less populous counties are more likely to have days with missing data for visits to one or more categories of places (e.g., pharmacies) due to privacy filtering and other technical aspects. however, we believe that missing data has negligible effects on the state and national estimates provided because: ) state level estimates are weighted by county population, and populous counties are extremely unlikely to have any metrics which fall below the limits of detection, and ) the (unweighted) correlations between the relative changes in the combined metrics used in this paper (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies considered together), compared to an unbiased, but lower-coverage alternative (e.g., grocery stores only) are very high (> . ). for each county we compared the value of each metric in the week after the date of implementation versus the -day period to days prior to the date of implementation. we included a two-day washout period prior to the implementation date given the public messaging that typically precedes implementation of these orders. given data until march were available, the effects of policies enacted on or before march could be evaluated. the state level estimates reflect population-weighted aggregates of the county-specific estimates. the national estimates are a simple average of the state estimates. because each county and state is compared to its recent past these estimates are causally interpretable. however, comparisons across counties or states are only descriptive since locations can differ substantially in terms of the proportion of the population opted-in to location history; the demographics of this group; the quality of the mobility data and of the google maps data about local establishments; and a number of other factors that may influence the observed changes in mobility beyond differences in the policy environment. we performed a sensitivity analysis to assess the distribution of each outcome metric under the null hypothesis of the policies having no effect. we interpret the relative change across two periods of time (period : january -february , ; period : february - , ), prior to the enactment of any state-level social distancing measures, as observations under the null hypothesis. during this time there were only reported cases of covid- in the u.s., which were isolated in washington state. although there was a small drop in time spent away from the place of residence across these pre-intervention periods, the much larger effects on mobility observed after each of the policies suggests that our observed effect during the exposure period is in fact related to the implementation of social distancing ( supplement figure ). figures and in the main text to gain a sense of how different these effects look when the first social-distancing measures were implemented. under the null hypothesis of no policy-affect, the median observed change is slightly below - %. however, during the first social-distancing measures, the median drop is nearly times as large at - %. for further context, all but two counties during the first social-distancing measures are below the null distribution median, and over % of counties are below the null distribution . % percentile. a comparison between the changes in mobility during first social-distancing measures and changes in mobility under the null hypothesis for each metric is presented in supplemental tables .a and .b . our main analyses estimate the incremental mobility changes after versus before each of three waves of policy orders ( figure ). however, it is also of interest to quantify the overall effect of social distancing by comparing mobility at the end versus the start of march. we define the overall effect as the change in mobility from the week before the term "social distancing" started increasing in google search (march - th) to the last week available in the data (march - th). we see a significant decrease in all metrics. the ordering of the magnitudes is comparable to those in figure b . as expected the overall magnitudes of the drops are larger than any of the incremental effects in figure . table : anova sum of squares decomposition of the variation in the relative change on average time spent away from places of residence across counties for the linear model with the relative pre-post difference in time spent away from the residence as the outcome and state as the only independent variable. the results show that approximately half of the variance in the outcome is explained by differences between states and the remaining variance is largely explained by differences across counties within states. figure .a relative changes in national averages from january -february , to february - , for all metrics of interest. the results are also shown in supplemental table .a. this plot can serve as a reference point for figure in the sense that these periods occurred before any orders were issued and can be interpreted as observations under the null hypothesis of no effect of policy interventions . supplemental figure .b : relative changes in county averages from january -february , to february - , for time spent away from the residence. counties are grouped by state to show the heterogeneity across counties and states before any orders were issued. the changes can be interpreted as observations under the null hypothesis of no policy effect because these periods occurred before any orders were issued population mobility reductions associated with travel restrictions during the ebola epidemic in sierra leone: use of mobile phone data characterizing the epidemiology of the influenza a/h n pandemic in mexico the effect of human mobility and control measures on the covid- epidemic in china an investigation of transmission control measures during the first days of the covid- epidemic in china effective containment explains sub-exponential growth in recent confirmed covid- cases in china governmental public health powers during the covid- pandemic: stay-at-home orders, business closures, and travel restrictions aggregated mobility data could help fight covid- google covid- community mobility reports: anonymization process description panicked shoppers empty shelves as coronavirus anxiety rises kaiser family foundation, state data and policy actions to address coronavirus covid- action tracker see which states and cities have told residents to stay at home supplemental figure : effect of first social distancing order on visits to places of work (a) , visits to grocery stores and pharmacies (b) , visits to retail, recreation, and eateries (c) , visits to transit stops (a) and overall average national effects of social distancing orders relative to period prior to social distancing awareness we are grateful to giorgia abeltino, matthew abueg, skip addison, elizabeth adkison, maha afifi, gerald agapov, ahmet aktay, putri alam, jan antonaros, neha arora, harry askham, boris babenko, arturo bajuelos, avi bar, davi barbosa, sean barclay, pinal bavishi, sherry ben, ashish bora, aleksey boyko, michael bringle, sander bruens, figure : timeline of change in average time spent away from places of residence in king county, washington (i.e. seattle area) (a), westchester county, new york (b), new york county, new york (i.e., manhattan) (c), and santa clara county, california (i.e. san jose area). colored boxes denote the declaration of a state of emergency, the implementation of the first county-level social distancing order, the implementation of the first state-level social distancing order, and county and/or state-level orders for residents to shelter in place. the height of each box corresponds to the change in average time location history users spent away from places of residence in the week before (plus a -day washout period) versus the week after each policy date. key: cord- -w yv jd authors: neff, shawn m.; roecker, christopher b.; okamoto, casey s.; holguin, samuel l.; napuli, jason g.; mattox, ross; hinkeldey, nathan a.; paris, david j. title: guidance concerning chiropractic practice in response to covid- in the u.s.: a summary of state regulators’ web-based information date: - - journal: chiropr man therap doi: . /s - - - sha: doc_id: cord_uid: w yv jd introduction: the covid- pandemic led to unprecedented changes, as many state and local governments enacted stay-at-home orders and non-essential businesses were closed. state chiropractic licensing boards play an important role in protecting the public via regulation of licensure and provision of guidance regarding standards of practice, especially during times of change or uncertainty. objective: the purpose of this study was to summarize the guidance provided in each of the united states, related to chiropractic practice during the covid- pandemic. methods: a review of the public facing websites of governors and state chiropractic licensing boards was conducted in the united states. data were collected regarding the official guidance provided by each state’s chiropractic licensing board as well as the issuance of stay-at-home orders and designations of essential personnel by state governors. descriptive statistics were used to report the findings from this project. results: each of the state governor’s websites and individual state chiropractic licensing board’s websites were surveyed. stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders were issued in % of all states. chiropractors were classified as essential providers in % of states, non-essential in one state ( %), and no guidance was provided in the remaining % of all states. fourteen states ( %) recommended restricting visits to only urgent cases and the remaining states ( %) provided no guidance. twenty-seven states ( %) provided information regarding protecting against infectious disease and the remaining states ( %) provided no guidance. twenty-two states ( %) provided recommendations regarding chiropractic telehealth and the remaining states ( %) provided no guidance. seventeen states ( %) altered license renewal requirements and eight states ( %) issued warnings against advertising misleading or false information regarding spinal manipulation and protection from covid- . conclusion: state guidance during the covid- pandemic was heterogenous, widely variability in accessibility, and often no guidance was provided by state chiropractic licensing boards. some state chiropractic licensing boards chose to assemble guidance for licensees into a single location, which we identified as a best practice for future situations where changes in chiropractic practice must be quickly communicated. in december , a novel coronavirus (sars-cov- ) was identified as it spread within china and described as causing coronavirus disease . this infectious disease spread quickly around the globe; the world health organization declared covid- to be a public health emergency of international concern in january, and a pandemic in march of [ ] . the first case of covid- was reported in the united states (u.s.) on january , and by april , there were approximately , confirmed cases in the u.s. and over . million cases, worldwide [ , ] . these statistics should be considered along with widespread scarcity of testing supplies and frequent testing delays [ ] , which likely resulted in underestimation of the true prevalence of covid- [ ] . in an effort to slow the spread of covid- and reduce strain on the u.s. healthcare system, various u.s. state governments offered guidance in the form of stayat-home orders. these orders outlined how travel should be limited to essential purposes, such as obtaining food or reporting for essential employment, but often amounted to recommendations, rather than enforceable mandates [ ] . state governors were instructed to make independent decisions regarding their respective state's response to the covid- pandemic [ ] . this led to vastly different responses among the various states [ ] . in the u.s. chiropractic, like most health professions, is regulated at the state level, not at the national level [ ] . chiropractors were described as essential healthcare workers in a memo by the u.s. department of homeland security made available on march , [ ] . since the nature of this memo was advisory, rather than a formal federal directive, chiropractors were left to rely on their state's board of chiropractic examiners (i.e. state licensing board or state board) for direction [ ] . at a time when our healthcare system is stressed to its limits, doctors of chiropractic have been described as serving to mitigate the demand of musculoskeletal pain patients on primary care providers, urgent care providers, and emergency departments [ ] . the benefit of providing this service must be balanced with the public health risks that come with providing direct patient care and potentially increasing the spread of covid- [ ] . the objective of this study was to summarize the guidance provided in each of the states related to chiropractic practice during the covid- pandemic and to report these results using descriptive statistics. websites for each state governor's office as well as each state's chiropractic licensing board were searched between april , and april , . these websites were manually searched for guidance related to the status of chiropractic practice during the covid- pandemic. any changes made to these public websites after april , were not captured and, therefore, not included within this report. changes in practice regulations based on covid- that were made before / / and deleted or amended between that date and the study close date were also not included in this study. information obtained and reported within this report was limited to statements directly from, or hyperlinked to, the state governor's or state chiropractic licensing board's websites. governors' websites were accessed using internet search engines (e.g. google searches) while state chiropractic boards' websites were accessed via hyperlinks provided by the federation of chiropractic licensing board's online directory. seven policy domains relevant to chiropractic practice during the covid- pandemic were identified via consensus by the authors of this report. these domains were established by attempting to anticipate the most relevant guidance necessary to inform general chiropractic practice for doctors of chiropractic located throughout the united states. the seven domains involve: .) shelter-in-place or stay-at-home orders/directives, .) classification of chiropractors as essential healthcare providers, .) restriction of chiropractic practice to urgent/ emergent presentations, .) recommendations for infectious disease control or use of personal protective equipment (ppe), .) chiropractic telehealth recommendations, .) alterations to continuing education (ce) or license renewal requirements (e.g. deadline extensions or changes to distance learning limitations), and .) warnings against false, deceptive, or misleading claims related to spinal manipulation/adjustments conferring protection against infection or covid- . in an attempt to capture all relevant policy information and recommendations relevant to this project, a minimum of two authors independently reviewed each of the seven domains involved with this project for each of the united states. any disagreements or ambiguities were discussed with the remaining authors and determinations were made based on consensus discussion and majority vote. these ambiguities were not common and usually involved information that was not directly provided by state board's websites, but was able to be discovered after a meandering path of multiple hyperlinks were followed to identify the relevant information. for pragmatic reasons, this project was limited to only including information that was available within two or fewer hyperlinks from the original governor's website or state chiropractic licensing board's website. all state chiropractic licensing boards and governor's websites were accessed and reviewed as part of this project (see appendix a, additional file ). results from each of this survey's domains were reported for each state in tables , , and . forty-three states ( %) issued shelter-in-place (sip) or stay-at-home (sah) orders in response to the covid- pandemic, while states ( %) did not (see table ). two states (arkansas and oklahoma) did not issue sip/sah orders, but did describe chiropractors as essential healthcare providers. the remaining states without sip/sah orders offered little guidance on any of the domains. in the absence of sip/sah orders, guidance regarding chiropractic practice may have been considered unnecessary. guidance regarding chiropractors' status as essential healthcare providers was provided by states ( %); of these states classified chiropractors as essential, while one state (kentucky) expressly stated that chiropractors were non-essential [ ] . the remaining states ( %) failed to provide guidance regarding whether or not chiropractors were considered essential in their respective states (see table ). in this study, we classified chiropractors in colorado as essential. on march , an executive order by the colorado governor was issued, ordering all chiropractic clinics to close, unless they were operating within a medical facility and restricting visits to only urgent/ emergency situations. on april , the colorado governor reversed that order and permitted communitybased chiropractors to resume clinical practice in situations where delaying care may result in rapid progression of the patient's condition or deterioration of the patient's health [ , ] . guidance varied regarding whether chiropractors were to maintain "business as usual" or restrict their face-toface clinical practice to only those patient interactions which constituted urgent, acute, or emergency patient care (i.e. restricted practice). fourteen state chiropractic licensing boards ( %) provided guidance to restrict face-to-face chiropractic appointments to only those patients deemed to have urgent, acute, or emergency conditions; the remaining states ( %) provided no guidance on whether chiropractors should continue with business as usual or restrict their practices (see table ). guidance regarding physical distancing and the use of personal protective equipment (ppe) has been provided at a national level by the centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) [ ] , and such information may be customized and disseminated by chiropractic state boards to meet specific state and professional requirements. twenty-seven state chiropractic boards ( %) provided information, or hosted links to information, regarding patient safety or ppe; the remaining state boards ( %) provided no guidance regarding patient safety or the use of ppe (see table ). telehealth is the delivery of healthcare services via the use of telecommunication technologies and allows for remote patient care, including screening for red flags, providing patient education, and recommending selfcare activities. twenty-two state chiropractic licensing boards ( %) provided guidance on whether chiropractors were appropriate for providing telehealth services, in their respective states. of the states that provided telehealth guidance, states indicated that chiropractors were eligible to provide telehealth services, while one state (alabama) indicated that that chiropractors were ineligible to provide telehealth services [ ] . the remaining state chiropractic boards ( %) did not provide guidance regarding chiropractors' ability to serve the individuals in their state, via telehealth (see table ). alterations in continuing education (ce) requirements or license renewal requirements may be appropriate during the covid- pandemic, due to disrupted travel and widespread cancelations of academic conferences. a total of state chiropractic licensing boards ( %) provided information regarding such ce or license renewal alterations (see table ). alterations included the following: states increased the allowed number of online credit hours to allow for all of the annual ce credits to be earned from online sources, states extended their ce deadlines, state (vermont) accepted all ce credits from online sources while also extending ce deadlines, and states (california and connecticut) waived their annual ce requirements. state chiropractic licensing boards are responsible for protecting the health, welfare, and safety of the public through licensure, education, and enforcement. that responsibility includes protecting patients from public health misinformation. in response to unsubstantiated claims and advertisements from chiropractors regarding the clinical effects of spinal manipulation/adjustments on immune function, some state chiropractic boards issues warning against providing unsubstantiated information. a total of state chiropractic licensing boards ( %) issued warnings against making false, deceptive, or misleading statements about spinal manipulation and its influence on immune function or inferring that spinal manipulation provides protection from covid- (see table ). pandemics, while infrequent, necessitate timely communication in order to ensure that the public, along with licensed healthcare providers, have the information needed to keep themselves, as well as others safe. uncertainty regarding the various aspects of covid- has made it difficult for leaders to forecast the overall effect and generate effective safety recommendations. some of the state chiropractic boards utilized a format that dramatically improved our ability to discover covid- -related information for their respective states. these involved calling the user's attention, often using a banner or other indicator, to a dedicated website or area of their main website containing consolidated information related to the ongoing covid- pandemic. the dedicated websites provided a single location for licensees, or members of the public, to quickly and easily acquire necessary information. often the dedicated site provided a summary of the most relevant information while providing hyperlinks to more detailed source information (e.g. governor's stay-at-home order). visitors of these websites were encouraged to return regularly to this site for updates and included the date and time the website was last updated; occasionally, newly added information was highlighted to aid in identifying recent changes. these sites were perceived as having the user of the website in mind and were designed to be easily discovered, easily interpreted, and to have maximum overall utility. this model was identified by the authors of this manuscript as a "best practice" when attempting to inform state licensees and the general public about guidance or recommendations. for the majority of states, the authors of this project were left having to search disparate websites to locate fragmented information related to chiropractic practice during the covid- pandemic. having a single site, with consolidated information, seems to reduce the time required to access key information and ensure that all relevant information is communicated from the licensing body to the licensee. the covid- pandemic emerged in the midst of a global pain crisis and opioid epidemic, complicating clinical decision making [ ] . chiropractors and other providers must balance a responsibility to limit contagion with their responsibility to provide access to pain management, which some organizations have deemed a fundamental right [ , ] . the clear need for ongoing pain management, in some form, likely contributed to the nearly universal designation of chiropractors as essential healthcare providers. as portal-of-entry providers, chiropractors can perform triage, evaluation, management, differential diagnosis, deliver treatment, or coordinate necessary referral. there may be advantages to seeking care for musculoskeletal complaints at a chiropractic office as opposed to an emergency department. such advantages include reduced risk of covid- transmission from those presenting to the ed with upper respiratory symptoms as well as conservation of ed resources. in the % of states where chiropractic was deemed an essential healthcare service, the state chiropractic licensing boards uniformly provided guidance that chiropractic care was to be restricted to urgent, acute, or emergent presentations. the definition of "urgent or emergent" is not entirely clear [ ] . differences in patient [ ] and professional [ , ] perception of what constitutes an urgent or emergent situation could result in variable interpretation and practice behaviors. there are several avenues by which the urgency of a condition may be assessed. low back pain is one of leading complaints evaluated in u.s. emergency departments, accounting for . % of all visits [ ] . a review of more than , patient visits revealed that . - . % of patients required immediate attention for spinal pain complaints. the presence of red flags increases the [ ] . one can elicit a history and answers to red flag screening questions via telephone, allowing for triage if red flags are present or reassurance if red flags are absent. atlas and deyo cited several reasons to consider in-person evaluation, including the presence of any red flags, the presence of radicular symptoms, persistence of symptoms beyond weeks, or if a patient desires in-person evaluation despite reassurance [ ] . telehealth and triage are not methods traditionally used by chiropractors; however, chiropractors are certainly capable of adapting to provide such services, if permitted. twenty-two state chiropractic licensing boards supported chiropractic implementing telehealth services, state board recommended against the use of such services, and state boards failed to provide guidance. without clear guidance from their state board, chiropractors are left with uncertainty regarding appropriate clinical practice in the setting of a public health crisis. such uncertainty may delay care to the public or place the provider at risk of disciplinary action if utilizing a service that is not recommended. the covid- pandemic represents a global health crisis where there are currently no effective vaccines, treatments, or cures [ ] . therefore, public health measures aimed to minimize the transmission of this viral pathogen, such as practicing good hand hygiene, maintaining physical distancing, and wearing face masks lie at the heart of limiting the spread of this condition. reports of reduced susceptibility to or recovery from infectious disease following spinal manipulation surfaced during the influenza pandemic [ ] [ ] [ ] . interest in such a connection has persisted in segments of the chiropractic and osteopathic professions over the past years [ , ] . research investigating the relationship between spinal manipulation and immune function has been limited to basic science (non-clinical) studies, involving small sample sizes, and deemed insufficient to validate such claims [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] . as the world struggles with table state chiropractic boards' guidance regarding misinformation during the covid- pandemic a novel virus that has no known treatment or cure, notions of immunomodulation through spinal manipulation have resurfaced on social media, which led to national and international chiropractic organizations providing guidance to their membership. currently, the american chiropractic association (aca), the international chiropractic association (ica), and the world federation of chiropractic (wfc) have all issued statements indicating there is no evidence that spinal manipulation/adjustments have been shown to influence the prevention or treatment of covid- [ , , ] . additionally, "a united statement of the global chiropractic research community against the pseudoscientific claim that chiropractic care boosts immunity" was signed by approximately researchers [ ] . at the time of our data collection only % of state boards of chiropractic had made statements regarding false, deceptive, or misleading statements. it is unclear why the majority of state boards had not chosen to issue statements, but that may change as the pandemic progresses and such claims continue to attract unfavorable media attention. infection rates have differed drastically from state-to-state which may have impacted decision making and resulted in variability regarding the content and timing of board guidance. there are many limitations associated with this study. it is possible that governors or state chiropractic licensing boards posted information that was missed during our search. every attempt was made to thoroughly review each website and capture relevant information, but due to variations in the ways content may have been described or variations in how relevant material may have been hyperlinked, it is possible that information was overlooked and omitted from this report. state chiropractic licensing boards may have also communicated information to their constituents via methods other than their website (e.g., mail, e-mail, or social media). for pragmatic reasons, the methods of this project were limited to reviewing public facing websites. lastly, information made available after april , was not captured or reported as part of this project. it is possible that updates were in development at the time our search was performed, but had not yet been made publicly available or were only available via direct personal communication with personnel associated with each state's chiropractic licensing board. unfortunately, personally communicating with every state board was unfeasible for this project and information obtainable only through direct personal communication was not included in this report. the responses to the covid- pandemic from individual state chiropractic licensing boards were heterogenous and, in many cases, provided little or no guidance regarding changes to chiropractic practice during the covid- pandemic. state chiropractic licensing boards have an implicit mandate to regulate chiropractic practice and protect the public within their respective states. a minority of states collated important covid- -related guidance and information in a single locale, either on or linked directly from their state board's website. the authors of this report consider assembling information into a single publicly available location, displaying the time and date of last update, and highlighting its availability in a central location to be a best practice for communication during emergency situations. we recommend each state board consider adopting this approach to improve delivery of critical information so that relevant changes to practice can be implemented efficiently and universally. supplementary information accompanies this paper at https://doi.org/ . /s - - - . additional file . covid- -navigating the uncharted covid- ) in the u.s. centers for disease control and prevention covid- : us testing ramps up as early response draws harsh criticism seroprevalence of sars-cov- -specific antibodies among adults in centers for disease control and prevention coronavirus: what you need to know. national governors association aca hands down better guidance on the essential critical infrastructure workforce | cisa state licensing boards the epidemiology and pathogenesis of coronavirus disease (covid- ) outbreak executive orders | colorado governor jared polis alabama state board of chiropractic examiners pain management best practices from multispecialty organizations during the covid- pandemic and public health crises access to pain management-still very much a human right legal and ethical aspects of pain management who uses emergency departments inappropriately and when -a national cross-sectional study using a monitoring data system guidance for commissioning integrated urgent and emergency care. a 'whole system disagreement among health care professionals about the urgent care needs of emergency department patients is this problem urgent? attitudes in a community hospital emergency room prevalence of low back pain in emergency settings: a systematic review and meta-analysis low back in the emergency department: prevalence of serious spinal pathologies and diagnostic accuracy of red flags evaluating and managing acute low back pain in the primary care setting a united statement of the global chiropractic research community against the pseudoscientific claim that chiropractic care boosts immunity osteopathic success in the treatment of influenza and pneumonia influenza and its osteopathic management one hundred thousand cases of influenza with a death rate of one-fortieth of that officially reported under conventional medical treatment. coming full circle: osteopathic manipulative treatment and immunity immune function and chiropractic -what does the evidence provide? -revised | international chiropractors association immunologic correlates of reduced spinal mobility: preliminary observations in a dog model enhance phagocytic cell respiratory burst induced by spinal manipulation the effects of specific upper cervical adjustments on the cd counts of hiv positive patients the somatovisceral interface: further evidence let's work together to protect and serve our patients, staff, families and communities publisher's note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations not applicable. authors' contributions sn was a major contributor to study design, participated in data collection and analysis, and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. cr was a major contributor to study design, participated in data collection and analysis, and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. co was a major contributor to study design, participated in data collection and analysis, and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. sh was a major contributor to study design, participated in data collection and analysis, and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. jn, participated in data collection and analysis, and contributed to writing the manuscript. rm participated in data collection and analysis, and contributed to writing the manuscript. nh participated in data collection and analysis, and contributed to writing the manuscript. dp participated in data collection and analysis, and contributed to writing the manuscript. all authors read and approved the final manuscript. not applicable. all data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files.ethics approval and consent to participate not applicable. not applicable. the authors declare that they have no competing interests. key: cord- -is su ga authors: kalogeratos, argyris; mannelli, stefano sarao title: winning the competition: enhancing counter-contagion in sis-like epidemic processes date: - - journal: nan doi: nan sha: doc_id: cord_uid: is su ga in this paper we consider the epidemic competition between two generic diffusion processes, where each competing side is represented by a different state of a stochastic process. for this setting, we present the generalized largest reduction in infectious edges (glrie) dynamic resource allocation strategy to advantage the preferred state against the other. motivated by social epidemics, we apply this method to a generic continuous-time sis-like diffusion model where we allow for: i) arbitrary node transition rate functions that describe the dynamics of propagation depending on the network state, and ii) competition between the healthy (positive) and infected (negative) states, which are both diffusive at the same time, yet mutually exclusive on each node. finally we use simulations to compare empirically the proposed glrie against competitive approaches from literature. in recent years, the growing amount of available data on networks led to a revolution in the application of diffusion processes. the enrichment of analysis by means of detailed information regarding specific populations yielded to a plethora of realistic and accurate models. through diffusion models, it is possible to study disparate branches of knowledge: in economy (competition among products [ ] , viral marketing campaigns [ ] ), in epidemiology (disease spreading, vaccination and immunization problems), in computer science (computer viruses, information flow), in social sciences (social behavior [ ] ) and medicine (obesity diffusion [ ] , smoking cessation [ ] , alcohol consumption [ ] ) are just some instances. a large number of social behaviors can be modeled as states propagating over networks [ , , , ] . consequently to the availability of diffusion models, many intervention strategies were developed aiming to answer questions like: what are the most dangerous computers in a network? how to maximize the customer awareness for a product? on which individuals is better to focus to win a poll? few studies proposed strategies to advantage a state compare to another (like in marketing campaigns) or to mitigate the diffusion of an undesirable state (like in epidemiology). most of them are static strategies based on the network structure (e.g. [ ] ), while others are dynamic strategies that use the whole information about the current state of the system to suggest the best elements to treat. among them, the largest reduction in infectious edges (lrie) [ ] results to be the optimal greedy algorithm for resource allocation under limitations in the resource budget, in the n -intertwined susceptible-infected-susceptible (sis) epidemic model. this model is a two-state continuous-time markov process over a network, in which a node can change state according to a transition rate that is linear in its neighbors' states. however sis models have been deemed too simple to describe the complexity of real-world phenomena such as the contemporary presence of two distinct viruses which spread on the same network. in particular, there can be considered two possible cases; in the first an individual can be infected simultaneously by both diseases (e.g. as in the si i s model [ ] ) and, in the second, mutual exclusivity only one infection is allowed for each individual at a given time (e.g. si | s model [ ] ). other attempts tried to change the dynamical equations (like in the sisa [ , ] ). in this study, we propose the generalized largest reduction in infectious edges (glrie) strategy, which is adapted for the diffusion competition of recurrent epidemics, as well as nonlinearity and saturation of the functions of node transition rates. this strategy includes the lrie strategy [ ] and, as such, provides an optimal greedy approach for this more sophisticated network diffusion setting. glrie computes a node score using only local information about the state of close-by nodes. although in the present formulation the method can be applied to any two-state recurrent markov process and is easily generalizable to more states, in this work we focus on social behaviors that can be 'healthy' or 'unhealthy' with negative effects in the social environment. given a limited amount of resources we would like to target the few key-individuals so as to minimize the negative effects. apart from the mentioned habits affecting one's personal health (e.g. unhealthy diet, smoking, etc.), the recent covid- pandemic highlighted yet another interesting 'unhealthy' misbehavior: the disrespect of confinement under a city lock-down, or of social distantiation guidelines in general. indeed, this kind of misbehavior is a determinant factor for the reproduction rate (the infamous r t ) of an epidemic over time, and can be readily enforced by making more controls in key areas, or using mobility and contact information at individual level. a graph g = (v, e) is a set of nodes v, let n = |v|, endowed with a set of edges e ⊂ v × v. it can be intuitively represented by its adjacency matrix a = { , } n , where each a ij element is if (i, j) ∈ e, and otherwise. without loss of generality, we refer to undirected graphs without self-loops, i.e. a = a t and a ii = , ∀i = , ..., n . the neighborhood of node i is the set of all nodes connected to it with a direct edge, and is denoted by n i = {i k , ∀k ∈ { , ..., d i } : (i k , i) ∈ e}. the size of n i equals to the node degree, i.e. |n i | = d i = j a ji . we also denote the indicator function by {·}. the standard continuous-time homogeneous sis model describes the spread of a disease over a graph, where each node i represents an individual that can be in either the susceptible or the infected state: x i (t) = or , respectively). the system at time t is hence globally represented by the node state vector x(t) ∈ { , } n . the state of a specific node i evolves according to the following stochastic transition rates: where the parameters β, δ are the transition rates encoding respectively the infection aggressiveness and self-recovery capability of nodes. the epidemic control is realized by the resource allocation vector r(t) ∈ { , } n , whose coordinate r i (t) = iff we heal node i at time t, and otherwise. finally, ρ is the increase in recovery rate when a node receives a resource unit (thought as treatment). a generic two-state recurrent model. in this paper we study the dynamic epidemic suppression problem by first introducing the following generic two-states markovian process: (ii. ) i i and h i are two node-specific memoryless functions; respectively the infection rate function and recovery rate function for node i. the rate functions depend on the current overall network state x(t) and implicitly on the network structure (we omit this dependency in our notation). a markovian poisson process can be recovered using the rate functions of eq. ii. as follows: in the dynamic resource allocation (dra) problem [ , ] , the objective is to administer a budget of b treatment resources, each of them of strength ρ, in order to suppress an undesired states diffusion. the treatments can not be stored and their efficiency is limited to a certain value. in [ ] , a greedy dynamic score-based strategy is developed, called largest reduction of infectious edges (lrie), in order to address the dra problem. specifically, each node is associated with a score quantifying how critical it is for further spreading the infection of the standard sis model, eq. (ii. ). other score-based solutions have been proposed, e.g. based on fixed priority planning [ ] , or static ones based on spectral analysis [ ] (see details in sec. iv). the proposed generalized largest reduction in infectious edges (glrie) strategy, each time identifies and targets the most critical nodes in order reduce the disease in as quickly as possible. the idea generalizes the one introduced in [ ] as it to a wider range of models. let n i (t) . = i x i (t) be the number of infected nodes at time t. in a markovian setting, given the state of the population x at time t, the best intervention with respect to the resource allocation vector r would minimize the following cost function: where γ can be chosen so as to give emphasis on short-term effects [ , ] . expanding in series with respect to u, yields: the detailed evaluation of the three terms can be found in the supplementary material . here, though, we present the final results. to simplify our notation, we denote the updated transition rate of node j if node i is considered healthy, respectively: for the positive diffusion by we define accordingly the differences in these rates: then, the final forms of the derivatives are: in the third equation, and since our purpose is to minimize eq. iii. with respect to r i , we let the terms that are independent to any r i to get absorbed in the function Ξ(t). the terms of the expansion provide information about the way in which healing a node affects the cost function: the first order does not provide any new information, the second order suggests something as trivial as to heal only infected nodes, while the third order quantifies the contribution of healing a specific node in reducing the cost function. based on eq. iii. we derive the following score for each infected node i: the score has the following interpretation. we can identify two main parts: the quantification of the transition rate h i + i i of the node, and the effect of its recovery on the neighbors on the one hand, if a node could get easily reinfected (high i i value) or is going to be healed rapidly by either the self-recovery or the positive diffusion (high h i value), then it is not a good candidate to invest resources on. on the other hand, if a possible node recovery would largely increase the healing rate of its infected neighbors (low ∆h −i j value), then the node is attributed with a higher score. finally, if a possible node recovery would largely decrease the infectious rate of its infected neighbors (low ∆i −i j value), then the node gets also higher score. algorithm. at time t, the glrie strategy would take as input the network state x(t)and the budget of resources b. it would independently compute the criticality score of eq. (iii. ) for each node, rank them and finally note with 's in the resource allocation vector r(t) which nodes to target while respecting the budget, i.e. i r(t) = min(b, i x i (t))). the computational cost of the algorithm is o(n + n log n ). in this section we select competitors from the literature, define specific diffusion functions for the comparison, and present simulations on random and real networks. other strategies. as a naive baseline, we use the random allocation (rand) that targets infected nodes at random. the second competitor is the largest reduction in spectral radius (lrsr) [ ] , which is based on spectral graph analysis generalized to arbitrary healing effects (ρ = ∞). lrsr selects nodes that maximize the eigen-drop of the largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix, known as spectral radius. the next competitor is the maxcut minimization (mcm) [ ] , which introduces the priority planning approach. the strategy proceeds according to a precomputed node priorityorder, that is a linear arrangement of the network with minimal maxcut, i.e. maximum number of edges need to be cut in order to split the ordering in two parts. the last but most direct competitor is the greedy dynamic lrie [ ] that we generalize in this work. diffusion function. generally, the state transition rate for a node can be assumed to be a function either of the absolute number of neighbors in the opposing state (standard for sis), or of the fraction of those nodes our of all neighbors. here we take as an example the former option, as the strategies presented in the literature consider that type and it is therefore a fair comparison. future work could include additional experiments with the latter type. social behaviors have complex properties that are not covered by the standard sis models, such as non-linearity and saturation in the node transition rates [ ] . we employ sigmoid functions to model these model properties: where n and d − n are the number of infected and healthy neighbors. also, s i (resp. s h ) parameter controls the saturation level and i (resp. h ) the slope at the origin. next, we present comparative experiments in erdös-rényi (er), preferential attachment (pr), and small-world (sw) random networks of size nodes each. first we gradually introduce non-linearity in the diffusion, and then we show the effects of introducing also competition diffusion. from linear to non-linear spreading. we first consider only the negative diffusion (i.e. h = ) and we gradually increase i in an er random graph, moving gradually from linear (as in the standard sis model) to non-linear functions. fig. shows the average over , simulations of the percentage of infected nodes over time and the % confidence interval under the hypothesis of gaussian distribution. the results show that in the presence of non-linearity our strategy becomes much more efficient than the competitors. introducing competition. next, in fig. we present the effects of the positive diffusion, embedded in the function h, on er, pr, and sw random networks. the last plot each row shows the shape of the diffusion functions used in the simulations. the simulations show that, unlike glrie, the methods of the literature lack modeling power to deal with this complex setting involving non-linearity and competition, and suppress the infection. we performed simulations on the gnutella peer-to-peer network containing , nodes and , edges. two scenarios were used for the simulations, with and without positive diffusion, using a wide range of parameters. out of the many possible evaluation metrics for the quality of a strategy, e.g. expected extinction time (eet), final percentage of infection (fis), area under the curve (auc), we choose the auc. this has many advantages: it provides useful measurements even if the strategy did not removed the infection, which is a limitation of the eet metric; it accounts for the total amount of infected nodes in the process, which in a socioeconomic context is more interesting than the fis metric. the empirical comparison between glrie and competitors such as lrie and mcm is summarized in fig. in each heatmap, we fix the shape of the transition function h of the positive diffusion and only play with the parameters of the function i of the negative diffusion: its saturation level increases along the x-axis and its slope increases along the y-axis. on the top-left side of a heatmap, the epidemic parameters define a weak infection and any strategy would perform well, while on the bottom-right side the infection becomes hard to completely remove for all strategies (given the amount of resources). moreover, in the left border, the low saturation level causes i to already saturate with just one neighbor of the opposing state. in the regime where i is almost linear and h = , glrie and lrie are equivalent and perform almost the same. the general remark on the results is that glrie appears to be the most versatile and best performing strategy in this setting of competitive spreading. in this paper we discussed a general form of recurrent two-states continuous-time markov process that allows both non-linear node transition functions and competition among the two states. we then proposed the generalized lrie (glrie) strategy to suppress the diffusion of the undesired state. experiments showed that glrie is well-adapted to the considered setting of competitive spreading, and makes better use of the resources available by targeting the most critical infected nodes compared to competitors from literature. future work could generalize to more competing epidemic states and the incorporation of factors related to the network structure in the node scores. winner takes all: competing viruses or ideas on fair-play networks the dynamics of viral marketing emotions as infectious diseases in a large social network: the sisa model the spread of obesity in a large social network over years the collective dynamics of smoking in a large social network the spread of alcohol consumption behavior in a large social network infectious disease modeling of social contagion in networks on the vulnerability of large graphs a greedy approach for dynamic control of diffusion processes in networks interacting viruses in networks: can both survive? suppressing epidemics in networks using priority planning optimal control of epidemics in metapopulations optimizing the control of disease infestations at the landscape scale key: cord- -aowxr authors: stoeva, preslava title: dimensions of health security—a conceptual analysis date: - - journal: glob chall doi: . /gch . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: aowxr discussions of the politics and practicalities of confronting health security challenges—from infectious disease outbreaks to antimicrobial resistance and the silent epidemic of noncommunicable diseases—hinge on the conceptualization of health security. there is no consensus among analysts about the specific parameters of health security. this inhibits comparative evaluation and critique, and affects the consistency of advice for policymakers. this article aims to contribute to debates about the meaning and scope of health security by applying baldwin’s ( ) framework for conceptualizing security with a view to propose an alternative framing. asking baldwin’s concept‐defining questions of the health security literature highlights how implicit and explicit assumptions currently place health security squarely within a narrow traditionalist analytical framework. such framing of health security is inaccurate and constraining, as demonstrated by practice and empirical observations. alternative approaches to security propose that security politics can also be multiactor, cooperative, and ethical, while being conscious of postcolonial and feminist critique in search of sustainable solutions to existential threats to individuals and communities. a broader conceptualization of health security can transform the politics of health security, improving health outcomes beyond acute crises and contribute to broader security studies’ debates. discussions of health security periodically climb up the global political agenda, mostly in response to global health-related concerns and challenges-from public health emergencies of international concern and pandemics, e.g., h n , ebola, zika, and the covid- pandemic, [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] to concerns about antimicrobial resistance, defined by the world health organisation (who) as a fundamental threat to human health, development and security, [ ] and the "silent" noncommunicable disease pandemic. [ , ] academic interest in and appetite for health security analysis has not abated either, as indicated by recent "lancet" contributions. [ , [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] the response to the global conceptualizations of health security emerged over time in response to specific health challenges, political and institutional developments. [ , ] academic analysis has broadly (with a few exceptions) sought to fit health into mainstream security studies paradigms instead of using health to broaden security debates through reflection on practice and the engagement of emerging security paradigms. there is a notable reliance on the securitization framework promoted by the copenhagen school [ ] to explain the rise to prominence of health concerns in security politics, but that, it will be argued here has supported, validated, even justified a narrow, privileged view of health security. in his overview of the multiple meanings of health security, mcinnes argues that just like "security," "health security" is "essentially contested" and it is therefore not possible to reach an agreement on the meaning and application of the term. [ ] he observes that the different framings of health security are "not amenable to a single set of agreed criteria" because they have been constructed to serve a particular purpose, are premised on different sets of assumptions, have different uses and privilege diverse interests and agendas. [ ] such observations, however, default on the need for systematic discussion and critical reflection on the way health security has been conceptualized, or the interests that such conceptualization might be serving. the following brief review of the most common health security conceptualizations in historic context highlights the limited engagement with existing specialist knowledge both from across the spectrum of security studies paradigms including critical security studies, postcolonial and feminist approaches, with specialist knowledge of foreign policy, foreign policy analysis, governance, and global health governance or with key developments in practice. the failure to engage with the broader spectrum of existing knowledge constrains the diversity of discussions, interdisciplinary dialog and learning, as well as the possibility of progressive policy impact. links between national security and infectious disease outbreaks were initially identified by us analysts in the mid to late s. [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] the promotion of health in developing countries was included in us national security strategies (nss) in - . [ ] [ ] [ ] infectious diseases were described as a significant challenge in low and middle-income countries, contributing to a slowdown in economic growth. the us "nss a national security strategy for a new century" was the first such document to state that health problems "can undermine the welfare of us citizens, and compromise our national security, economic and humanitarian interests abroad for generations." [ ] health issues of particular interest to the united states included food-borne diseases from imported foodstuffs, new and emerging infectious diseases and hiv/aids. the bush administration re-iterated concerns about the threats posed by biological weapons and pandemic health threats but did not prioritize health-related security as much. [ ] considerations about national and global health made their way back into the us nss in and under the obama administration. pandemic disease was considered a threat to "the security of regions and the health and safety of the american people." [ ] the first uk national security strategy published in claimed it was premised on a broader conceptualization of national security that included "threats to individual citizens and to our way of life, as well as to the integrity and interests of the state" [ ] and listed infectious diseases (particularly the threat of a global influenza pandemic) and bioterrorism as national security concerns. the uk national security strategy defined the risk of a severe influenza pandemic as one of the top three civil emergencies risks. [ ] while the qualification "broader conceptualization" is intended to refer to a move away from concerns of defense and military security, the narrow focus on bioterrorism and communicable disease is symptomatic of traditional, state-centric thinking about security from acute threats originating outside of it. fidler ( ) provides detailed analysis of the practical ways in which the linkages between public health and national security have emerged. he concludes that the realpolitik perspective on national security is driving the development of the concept of public health security in the united states despite three other possible formulations-common, human and ecological security. [ ] rushton ( ) also observes that health security continues to be framed in narrow traditional terms as national security and underpinned by particular concerns of interest to rich industrialized states, which shape a narrow discourse that largely disregards the needs of the global south. [ ] mcinnes adds that "health issues are not identified as national security risks by reference to an explicit set of criteria but rather have arisen in an ad hoc manner and been agreed to intersubjectively by key national and international actors." [ ] these observations inadvertently contribute to normalizing dominant political discourses about the paramount nature of the national interest, the centrality of the interests of powerful states and the relevance of only acute health threats to security thinking. national security is often considered the key objective of foreign policy. hiv/aids was framed as a foreign policy problem by the clinton administration's interagency working group on emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases' report "infectious disease: a global health threat," and the national intelligence council's report "the global infectious disease threat and its implications for the united states." fidler's analysis, however, mistook us' foreign policy focus on emerging and reemerging communicable diseases and bioterrorism for a global trend and a normative shift, claiming that health had achieved "pre-eminent political value for st century humanity." [ ] kickbusch ( ) argued that the us had shaped the international agenda to fit in with its national interests and priorities and in doing so had preferenced a "unilateral hegemonic approach" to multilateral cooperation. [ ] the implications of us leadership in shaping the international health security agenda remain understudied, and yet critically relevant to what is included and excluded from that agenda. the political recognition of health issues as a matter of foreign policy by other states was marked by the oslo ministerial declaration on global health and foreign policy (ministers of foreign affairs of brazil, france, indonesia, norway, senegal, south africa, and thailand, ) and the adoption of un general assembly resolution / , which "recognizes the close relationship between foreign policy and global health and their interdependence and… urges member states to consider health issues in the formulation of foreign policy." [ ] the reason given for linking health policy with foreign policy at the international level was that health problems of global magnitude were deemed to require cooperative solutions. the international community continues to struggle, however, to find such cooperative state-led solutions, as illustrated by the response to the ebola crisis [ ] and by the current response to the covid- pandemic, which has broadly been marked by states leading individual responses. considering the inclusion of health issues on states' foreign policy agendas as novelty, of course, ignores a long tradition of state cooperation dating back at least to the th century. [ ] the analysis of health concerns as issues of national security and foreign policy suffers from some prominent shortcomings. discussions of foreign policy and health make virtually no reference to analytical frameworks from the field of foreign policy and foreign policy analysis, failing to draw on its methodologies, paradigms and empirical knowledge. in other words, the presence of health on foreign policy agendas and its construction as a threat to national security is observed in practice, but not sufficiently interrogated in analytical terms. furthermore, studies often assume generalizability beyond one state (most commonly the usa), which has skewed analysis and aligned it almost exclusively with dominant paradigms of great-power politics, failing to reflect on how health features in the foreign policy agendas of a broader spectrum of states. health concerns have been conceptualized as international security challenges in a number of high-level policy pronouncements. in her role as director general of the world health organisation (who), gro harlem brundtland argued that health was an underlying determinant of development, security, and global stability and that in an interdependent world the functional separation between domestic and international health policy lost its meaning. [ ] brundtland advocated international cooperation in addressing health-related global threats because "[a] world where a billion people are deprived, insecure and vulnerable, is an unsafe world." [ ] these observations are poignantly relevant years on in the fight against the covid- pandemic. further recognition of health issues as "threats to international peace and security" is evident in un security council resolutions. security council resolution ( ) acknowledged the growing impact of the hiv/aids pandemic in africa on social instability and emergency situations, and stressed that if left unchecked, it "may pose a risk to stability and security." [ ] this historic resolution was followed by two others-resolution ( ) and ( ) respectively on hiv/aids and ebola. the eu security strategy ( ) is another example of framing health as an international security threat. it links infectious diseases to poverty, economic failure, political problems and ultimately violent conflict, [ ] and also notes the threat posed by the potential rapid spread of new diseases and the devastation caused by the hiv/aids pandemic. the concept of international security has been discussed almost in passing in the security literature by buzan ( ) , describing it as focused "on the sources and causes of threats, [with its]… purpose being not to block or offset the threats, but to reduce or eliminate them by political action." [ ] this definition is in contrast to his discussion of national security, which focuses on "reducing the vulnerabilities of the state… by increasing self-reliance, or by building countervailing forces to deal with specific threats. [ ] the concept of 'world security" is in the words of ken booth "more encompassing than the notion of international security… [including] the structures and processes within human society… that work toward the reduction of the threats and risks that determine individual and group lives." [ ] both concepts-of international and world security-are very relevant to thinking about mechanisms to reduce health insecurity, but are rarely used by analysts to frame interrogations of the nature, scope and focus of health security politics. it is curious that there has been so little conceptual analysis of these political statements pronouncing health as a global/international security concern. health security as an aspect of human security has received the least attention in the health security literature. health is one of the seven areas identified by undp's "human development report" ( ) as pertinent to human security. much contemporary analysis, however, focuses on the mechanisms through which health affects human security, and not on the political or policy implications of promoting and pursuing human security, or indeed on what such health security policy might look like. health as a human security issue is broadly defined and premised on who's definition of health as "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." [ ] this in turn means a broader view of the range of relevant health threats-going beyond communicable diseases and bioterrorism, to include for example noncommunicable diseases, neglected tropical diseases; as well as considerations about the social determinants of health. this view considers "the many other health challenges faced by more vulnerable groups who are amongst those most affected by the burden of disease." [ ] proponents of this approach further note that health threats are experienced most acutely by marginalized groups and communities and that gains in health anywhere in the world benefit everyone everywhere. [ ] takemi et al. argue that a human security approach can contribute to improvements in health because it focuses on the needs of communities, recognizes people's vulnerabilities and strengthens the interface between protection and empowerment. [ ] critics have argued that human security does not have sufficient political traction, [ , ] building on critiques of the concept as being too broad to serve as a guide for academic research or governmental policy making. [ ] while the term "human security" might have lost political traction, however, the value of promoting human-centered security is deeply embedded in existing human rights norms and humanitarian law, as well as doctrines such as the responsibility to protect. this calls for further substantive analysis of the positioning of health security in a broader normative and political context. as the commission on human security has suggested individual and state security need to be considered as complementary-an avenue for analysis that remains largely unexplored. [ ] all the different framings above share a conscious or an unconscious drive to embed public health concerns into existing frameworks for thinking about security. as barkawi and laffey posit, however, "security relations today [sic] are about the contradictions between old security logics and new security problematics." [ ] health security politics provide an accurate illustration of these tensions between understandings of security as a zero-sum game between great powers and the everyday realities of challenges posed by disease and ill-health, affecting the life and well-being many across the world. these tensions, however, cannot be reconciled by the old security theories, premised on old security logics, because they are partly the cause of the problem. analysis, instead, needs to draw on practice and emerging security paradigms. new frameworks for analyzing security politics include, but are not limited to cooperative security, [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] multiactor approaches to security politics, [ , ] ethical security studies. [ ] these are particularly relevant to analyzing health security politics, which, as will be discussed, include complex interactions between public and private actors, aim to address issues that transcend national borders, and affect individuals and groups more acutely than states. a synthesis between alternative security approaches and empirical insight would provide a solid foundation for a more pragmatic understanding of how the political realms of health and security intersect and indeed interact. conceptual clarity is key in situating analysis, generating comparable findings, and facilitating understanding of commonality and diversity, argues baldwin. [ ] it is the first step in facilitating meaningful scholarly engagement and the development of policy proposals that are "comparable with each other and with the policies of pursuing other goals" and can easily be evaluated by end users. [ ] the questions that define the concept of security are: "security for whom? security for which values? how much security? from what threats? by what means? at what cost?" [ ] this framework is applied here with a view to highlighting implicit and explicit assumptions made about the nature and scope of health security politics in the existing literature. some of the questions from baldwin's framework have been used to frame discussions of health security already in two influential works by simon rushton-"global health security: security for whom? security from what?" [ ] and security and public health. [ ] there are two main issues with these worksfirst, rushton's analysis, as will be discussed below, is cautious and does not push conceptual boundaries far enough to explore the outer limits of health security; and secondly, these works only partially engage with baldwin's framework, meaning that rushton's analysis does not give us a ° view of the implications of assumptions made in relation to each aspect of the concept of health security. mainstream theories of international relations (ir) and security studies assume the state as the main referent object of security. [ ] current health security analysis is also predominantly premised on this assumption. while some studies assert it explicitly, [ , , ] most do so implicitly by either discussing security only in relation to health threats that challenge states' strategic interests, [ , , ] or by examining health as a foreign policy or national security concern, both of which are by definition state-centric. [ , , , ] the main consequence of focusing on the state as the sole referent object of security is that only a narrow set of health problems, which are perceived to cause acute state instability, state failure or destabilize other interstate relations, qualify as relevant security challenges, while many others remain ignored, excluded, and understudied. direct threats to state security are perceived to emanate from diseases that cause large-scale morbidity and mortality, cross national borders and affect populations, rather than just individuals. [ ] it has been argued that such diseases are destabilizing for states only in extreme circumstances-by affecting the health status of military personnel or peacekeepers, [ ] by undermining state structures and political stability, by exacerbating existing political instability, or by impacting the labor force and the economy, and reversing years of economic development. [ ] [ ] [ ] even in these situations, however, the impact of ill-health would be most acutely felt by individuals and communities. diseases (both communicable and noncommunicable) pose an existential threat to individuals, affecting their own and their families' sense of daily security, stability, predictability, well-being, economic, and development prospects, in a way that cannot be experienced at state-level. what is more, ill-health is the most relevant existential threat to people with out of the top causes of death worldwide being healthrelated, [ , ] which makes a strong argument for promoting human-centered security. baldwin argues that conceptually, and for purposes of specifying the concept of security, individuals, states, the international community can all be considered relevant referent objects of security. [ ] but while such analysis is central to gaining a more accurate and nuanced understanding of dynamic and evolving security problematics globally, existing security, and international relations paradigms are poorly equipped for such multiscalar analysis. traditional ir theories consider the preservation of the sovereignty, autonomy, and territorial integrity of states as core values to be secured. [ ] [ ] [ ] the raison d'etre of the state is to protect itself from external invasion or transgression, they argue, and it is only by ensuring its own security that the state is able to guarantee the security of its people. baldwin argues that in practice, other values are sometimes added to the national security agenda and that the values, which are being pursued by security politics ought to be clearly specified, so as to assist analysts in evaluating their relative importance and resource needs in comparison with other policy objectives. [ ] importantly, baldwin further argues against specifying security objectives in absolute terms, because absolute security is unattainable, which justifies his next question about the degree of security sought in a particular issue area. political and normative developments in international politics demonstrate that the spectrum of values that states have agreed to secure is growing. this is illustrated by the emergence of concepts such as human development, [ ] human security, [ ] responsibility to protect. [ ] [ ] [ ] increasing attention has been paid to the protection of civilians in inter-state conflicts through the growing body of international humanitarian law. states have further committed to seeking individual criminal responsibility for acts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by accepting the jurisdiction of the international criminal court and thus offering further protection for people from the exigencies of uncontrolled power. [ ] the influence that these norms and values are having on security policy is understudied by both traditional and critical security studies. these norms demonstrate a shift in values toward securing and protecting individual life and population well-being, alongside traditional state security. most analyses of health security do not engage in depth either with this evolving international normative context or with security studies paradigms that are more human-centered. health security studies struggle to effectively reconcile the values pursued by public health-i.e., the protection and promotion of the health of communities and traditional security studies-identified as existential threats to states. [ ] the values to be secured according to this literature, therefore, continue to be the stability and integrity of states-by means of preventing internal instability and state vulnerability that may be caused by high morbidity and mortality, and external instability caused by state failure and conflict. since assumptions about what values ought to be secured are implicit in the health security literature, the implications of these choices for security policy have not been sufficiently evaluated. at first glance, this question might appear futile and its answer obvious-surely, more security is always better. baldwin clarifies its significance-"[i]n a world in which scarce resources must be allocated among competing objectives, none of which is completely attainable, one cannot escape from the question 'how much is enough?" and one should not try." [ ] morgenthau sets out the realist position on this question: "all nations must allocate their scarce resources as rationally as possible" to guarantee national survival. [ ] offensive and defensive neorealists agree, but disagree on whether state security is best achieved through gaining the "appropriate amount of power" [ ] or through the maximization of power relative to other states. [ ] in practice, increasing spending on the pursuit of some values invariably means reducing spending on the pursuit of others. in a world where most states are not "great powers," the scope of security politics is richer and much more nuanced than presented by ir theories. the question of "how much security" has not been addressed at great length in the health security literature. the literature has broadly operated on the assumption that should health-related issues be "securitized" successfully, they will get the resources needed, which is in line with traditional security thinking on the issue. the scale of resources committed to addressing health crises, however, has so far been decided on an ad hoc basis, primarily by donors (public or private), and has often reflected the perceived proximity or scale of a health threat to national security as argued by rushton. [ ] thus, for example, a recent round of replenishment for the global fund to fight hiv/aids, tuberculosis and malaria saw donors pledge nearly $ billion. [ ] these diseases carry a similar burden of morbidity and mortality as some noncommunicable diseases, which have not received nowhere near as much funding. [ , [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] nuclear defense spending in the uk and us, for example, far outweighs pandemic-preparedness spending, as highlighted by the current coronavirus pandemic. further analysis of the theory and practice of framing health security challenges is therefore urgently needed, with attention drawn specifically to existential threats facing individuals and communities. threats to security are traditionally defined as being external to the state, predetermined by the anarchic structure of the international system, and military in nature. [ ] the sharp decline in violent interstate conflicts and conflict-related deaths, however, as noted by the human security report project, [ ] threatens to deprive these studies of an object. does this mean, then that states and people are secure? one could hardly say so. with the majority of conflicts taking place within states and involving at least one nonstate armed group, [ , ] (with the intensification of violence against civilians, increasing intractability of conflicts and the spread of violent conflict to middle-income countries (iraq, syria, ukraine), assumptions about the nature and causes of conflict are continuously being challenged. [ ] the human cost of these conflicts is currently born extensively by civilians. [ ] in addition to conflict, people across the world lead daily battles for survival against disease, poverty, malnutrition, environmental degradation, climate change, lack of access to clean water, safe food, basic health services, against political oppression, gender-based violence, and so on. in this context, baldwin's argument that there is no reason to limit the concept of security to narrow, vague references at the expense of referring to practical threats that are comported with common usage, [ ] is particularly relevant. the health security literature has broadly kept in line with traditional security approaches on this question as well, by focusing analysis primarily on issues with a crossborder impact on national security, which has led to an overall narrow focus on health-related causes of insecurity-namely, emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases (erids) and bioterrorism. [ , , , ] some scholars have acknowledged that this focus is too narrow, proposing the inclusion of other issues such as internal state instability and illicit activities and an increased engagement of health security with public health and not just with the concerns raised by the foreign policy and security communities. [ ] this, however, is only a marginal broadening of the agenda, which fails to engage with two central questions-the protection of individuals and communities from danger, hazard and risk; and the much more complex question of whether security policy is just about negative security "security from" or whether consideration should be given to positive security as "security to." [ ] mcsweeney also talks about the importance of considering "structural" threats, namely, the unintended consequences of social action [ ] -the structure of the global economy, the pattern of power relations and dependencies within it, the profound influence of the food, tobacco and alcohol industry on government policy, gender inequality, levels of relative and absolute poverty, income inequality, etc. this is not to say that the health security literature is not cognizant of these, just that they have not been explored systematically and in sufficient depth, because too much attention has often been focused on dealing with acute threats. sovereignty grants states legitimate monopoly over the use of violence. employing the sovereign authority of states to respond to security problems is usually synonymous with the threat or use of military force or other types of coercive action. baldwin argues that the "specification of this dimension of security is especially important in discussions of international politics" and expresses concern that tendencies to define the field entirely in terms of the threat and use of military force "can prejudice discussion to favor of military solutions to security problems." [ ] improving and securing health, for example cannot be achieved by military means, even though military personnel and logistics can and have been utilized in emergency responses. pursuing security through nonmilitary means requires a human-centered focus and cooperative approach, where states engage not only with each other but also with a broad spectrum of nonstate actors. in security politics the state is increasingly becoming one actor among many, but with a key facilitating function in delivering security to individuals and communities. responses to health security challenges involve a broad spectrum of public and private actors, including intergovernmental organizations, inter-agency cooperation, civil society organizations, philanthropic foundations, corporate actors, etc.making for a complex governance architecture and a dynamic combination of various means and resources. the role of this panoply of actors has been explored in the context of global health governance, [ ] [ ] [ ] but not sufficiently so in the context of security politics, where the dynamics of governance interactions are distorted. in addition, promoting and improving health requires investment in infrastructure, education, knowledge development, in lifting people out of poverty, enhancing food and environmental security, all of which require concerted, cooperative efforts. this is a different model of thinking about security politics and appropriate security policy, compared with the zero-sum game, military, confrontational approaches proposed by mainstream security studies. some analysts promote the concept of "cooperative security," [ , [ ] [ ] [ ] premised on the changing nature of security threats as well as changing practices of security governance. this is an emerging fields of security analysis on which health security studies ought to draw more extensively. even though the assumption that security ought to be pursued at any cost is at the heart of traditional thinking about security politics, such conceptualization is unrealistic in most situations. as baldwin points out-"costs always matter." [ ] there are virtually no instances in practice where no restrictions on the means and costs of responding to a threat to security are in place, nor where other values are not competing for or having to be sacrificed in the distribution of scarce resources. this is not a question that has been examined in great detail either in mainstream security studies or in the health security literature, suggesting that analysts have adopted the traditional, exceptionalist frame of thinking about security, whereby a successful "securitizing move," automatically guarantees the availability of "sufficient" funds and resources to address security threats. addressing threats to security stemming from ill-health requires resources that go beyond the cost of medicines, as has become apparent through campaigns dealing with the spread of hiv/aids, tuberculosis, malaria, the fight against polio, and recent infectious disease crises-ebola, zika, and the covid- pandemic. the global health security agenda launched in , by the united states together with other states, who, the food and agricultural organisation and the world organisation for animal health, is one such attempt to promote activities aimed at strengthening "core capacities… of public health systems needed to protect global health security." [ ] analysis of the relative cost of security through the improvement of health and the alleviation of existential threats through the strengthening of health systems can be of particular importance in setting out domestic and global security priorities, but also in raising the required funds. cost is in many situations an inhibiting factor in pursuing particular interventions, despite evidence of the need for the latter. it should therefore always be a significant consideration in any health security policy analysis. mainstream international relations theories do not make a significant distinction between long-, medium-, and short-term security goals. their atemporal approach to security is premised on the assumption that the causes of conflict and insecurity do not change over time, due to the unchanging character of the anarchic international system. [ ] ahistoric realist and neorealist analysis seeks to justify the perpetual need to invest in military resources. in his brief discussion of this aspect of security, baldwin warns that short-term security politics often respond to an immediate threat, but a longer-term strategy for security may well conflict with the short-term approach. [ ] the existing health security literature does not tend to explore medium and long-term policy horizons, despite the pertinence of such temporal considerations to a broader view of health security. the health security literature has mainly taken an interest in current crisis [ , , [ ] [ ] [ ] with the aim of understanding the politics and institutions involved in the responses to these. and while such analysis is important and relevant, conclusions often point toward the need for a medium and long-term planning and investment. improvements in overall health security require much more than pandemic preparedness measures, including investment in the development of healthcare infrastructure, health systems strengthening, training of medical personnel. addressing the root causes of noncommunicable diseases, for example, may not be possible in the short-term, as they necessitate regulation and preventive action, which takes time to negotiate and implement as well as longer term planning and infrastructure investment. thinking about health security in differentiated time frames, therefore, could allow for a broader range of goals to be pursued, for more effective distribution of resources between acute and long-term needs and for pursuing goals of prevention, while also providing care where needed. baldwin's concept of security provides a structured and comprehensive framework for thinking about health security. it promotes systematic thinking about the assumptions and practice of health security politics that is not confined by the rigid ontologies of traditional security paradigms, but is open, flexible, and practice oriented. this conceptual framework enables the combination of rich empirical insight from existing studies of health security with a broader spectrum of approaches to security studies, to not only enhance understanding of political dynamics, but to also generate pragmatic policy options, accommodating of normative considerations. this section sets out new parameters for health security analysis that go beyond the constraints of traditional security studies. these require further analysis of practice and engagement with alternative security frameworks to inform health security policy on how best to address persistent criticisms and shortcomings. baldwin's guiding questions are grouped in three categories-ontological, normative and material considerations, and discussed in turn. concerns about the security of individuals have continuously been embodied in new international legal norms and made part of the global policy agenda over the course of the last few decades. the post-cold war years "exposed the fragility of the state in the face of complex forces within it and of trans-state limitations on its practical sovereignty outside it." [ ] instances of conflict, civil strife, political instability, state fragility, and now of the covid- pandemic are reminders that states are not always able or willing to guarantee the security of their citizens. the dominant view of security as a state-centric concept has been presented by its proponents "not as an option, a choice, but as the only one which is valid and rel-evant… [but] the assumption of security studies which ignores the human dimension is contradicted by the practical dependence of policy-makers and theorists alike on the human individual as the ultimate referent, or subject of security," argues mcsweeney. [ ] the argument in favor of foregrounding the security of individuals and communities in conceptual and theoretical debates is supported by practice. its relevance is particularly obvious in the context of (ill)health, which is probably one of the most prominent existential threats to humans, alongside environmental and food security. if the survival of individuals is not safeguarded, the survival of social structures and institutions loses its significance. contextualizing the security of individuals and groups in relation to and within state security is an area of security analysis that needs further attention in a changing landscape of political conflict-examples include the health security of populations in the context of civil war, failed or fragile states, [ ] [ ] [ ] or the provision of health-services in territories held by nonstate groups, e.g., rebels, guerrilla groups, isis; or the security of women and girl refugees fleeing conflict. [ , ] empirical evidence needs to be brought to bear on understandings of security politics in general and health security in particular. in addition to analyzing the relationship between individual, group, and state security, attention needs to further focus on the "providers" of security, which increasingly include specialized nongovernmental organizations, public-private partnerships, philanthropic foundations, multilateral agencies, and others. it has been assumed that this dynamic governance architecture is still under the control of sovereign governments, but there is little evidence to support that, particularly in contexts of conflict, fragile or failing states such as syria, afghanistan, yemen, south sudan. rushton and williams' "partnerships and foundations in global health governance," [ ] harman's "global health governance," and [ ] jeremy youde's "private actors, global health and learning the lessons of history" [ ] are useful starting points in outlining the architecture of health governance, but further analysis is needed to reflect on the idiosyncrasies of security-focused governance and politics. gjorv ( ) advocates the need to adopt a multiactor security model to explore the patterns of security-related governance, which she argues is prompted not only by normative considerations, but is a reflection of the empirical realities facing security practitioners, illustrating her argument with two examples civilmilitary operations and climate change in the arctic. [ ] baldwin's conceptualization of security demonstrates that restrictions on the referent object of security are superficial. when health-related risks and challenges pose an existential danger, they need to be considered as security risks, in recognition that individual and community security is as relevant a consideration to state security and vice versa. health-related existential threats to individuals and communities are further exacerbated by poverty, political instability, state fragility, conflict, and civil strife. but since state security can both determine and be determined by the security of individuals and communities, and since there are other actors involved who impact or are impacted by such insecurities, a more comprehensive understanding of the politics and frameworks of health security policy making is urgently needed. despite traditional theories of international relations discounting normative considerations in matters of security and national security, such considerations are always present. as discussed earlier, adopting a narrow state-centric, militaristic view of security is both an option and a normative choice, and not the only possible or valid one. this is the premise of much critique from critical security studies, as illustrated by works such as krause and williams, [ ] barkawi and laffey, [ ] booth, [ ] peoples and vaughan-williams, [ ] sjoberg, [ ] wibben, [ ] and shepherd. [ ] some analysts are further advocating consideration of security in terms of both positive and negative security, where negative security aligns more with traditional notions of security as "security from," while positive security is seen as enabling and emancipatory-"security to." [ , , ] such a lens enables values such as human life, life in good health, life with dignity, to be placed at the center of security strategy and policy, which in turn demands that security politics become more inclusive, more protective, less focused on privileged views and experiences of security, more human-centric. framing security as a positive value creates space for considerations such as health system strengthening, the provision of primary care and universal health coverage, the prevention of noncommunicable diseases, to be given greater policy priority, which as analysts have argued would not only improve health outcomes overall, but could also strengthen health responses to acute crises. health is an important value on a global scale, as evidenced by the constitution of the who ( ), the alma ata declaration ( ), the international health regulations ( ), the sustainable development goals ( ), along with the intrinsic value of human life, which is the bedrock of all international human rights norms, treaties, and declarations. if life and good health are the values to be secured, however, state policies would have to go beyond seeking to protect individuals and populations from emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases and bioterrorism and take into account a broader spectrum of health-related existential threats to people. diseases posing significant risks to people in low-and middle-income countries include among others neglected tropical diseases (ntds) [ ] [ ] [ ] and noncommunicable diseases. ntds' burden of disease measured in dalys ranked these diseases fourth after lower respiratory infections, hiv/aids, and diarrheal diseases, preceding malaria, tb, and measles. [ ] "noncommunicable diseases (ncds) are the leading cause of death globally and one of the major challenges of the st century." [ ] an estimated % of all deaths globally in resulted from ncds, the world health organisation (who) reports. over the next years, ncds will cost more than usd trillion, pushing millions of people below the poverty line. [ ] much like other global problems, health insecurity disproportionately affects low-and middle-income countries, as well as the poorest and often most disadvantaged strata of societies in high-income countries. an infectious disease pandemic like covid- further worsens health outcomes by compacting morbidity, exponentially increasing mortality and creating a perfect storm even for the relatively well-resourced health systems in high income countries. securing health and well-being is an important goal in a dynamic portfolio of values that need to be protected. how much attention should be devoted to health overall, and to specific health concerns, or the needs of particular groups within this portfolio, are questions that needs to be examined further and in greater detail, drawing on studies of public health in individual states and across borders. the answer to the question "how much security" is also likely to vary over time. analysis of the relative threat posed by a given health issue to individual, community, and state security is a valid consideration for health security politics-using a structured framework to enable comparative analysis is central to health security analysis. due to the relatively high morbidity and mortality, the covid- pandemic has demonstrated that health threats can be elevated to almost absolute, primary status. actions taken to contain the pandemic have included social distancing measures, limiting travel, shutting down economies, governments promising to pay salaries, support private businesses, etc., which are measures that appear unthinkable in most other cases. in the midst of this crisis, however, it is important to remember that pandemics of such scale and scope are relatively rare and to use covid- more as an extreme example than a baseline one. contrary to traditional security approaches premised on the use of military means, health security (whether broadly or narrowly defined) requires the employment of nonviolent, cooperative measures-including investment, humanitarian aid, development assistance, multiactor cooperation, coordination, sharing of information and expertise, etc. as discussed previously, the cost of addressing health security problems is significant, due to the need to establish and support a functioning health system, to train and retain professional staff, to create infrastructure that facilitates the functioning of the health system, but the cost of inaction is high and puts lives at risk. the challenges posed by public health emergencies of international concern and pandemics can be exceptionally far-reaching and damagingglobally, locally, trans-locally, as illustrated by the current spread of the sars cov virus. the human cost of this pandemic has been unprecedented in recent history, the economic costs are yet to be calculated with more than a quarter of the global population in lockdown, international travel restricted and economies shrinking fast. in a world of scarce resources, the means for securing health and the cost of doing it are pertinent policy considerations, which need to be examined in conjunction with the opportunity cost of both not investing in health security and of investing in a different field. the short-termism and immediacy of conventional security politics is counter-productive in approaching problems such as anti-microbial resistance, noncommunicable diseases, maternal and infant mortality. even responses to public health emergencies of international concern, in the form of communicable disease outbreaks, have demonstrated the need to develop a systematic approach-including properly resourcing the work of the who, investing in health systems strengthening and infrastructure. the report of an independent review committee on the h n response noted that "the world is illprepared to respond… to a global, sustained, and threatening public health emergency" as health capacities were not on a path to timely, worldwide implementation. [ ] the international community collectively and states individually appear to have squandered the time since to prepare for the next global pandemic. the health systems in high-income countries are buckling under the weight of the covid pandemic. concerns are growing over its effects the pandemic will have on low-and middle-income countries. in the conclusion to their discussion of the global response to zika virus, gostin and hodge point out that the apathy and short-sightedness of the international community must change, as the consequences of fast-moving epidemics are comparable with humanitarian crises, climate change, and war. [ ] such analysis and current events clearly illustrate that planning has to include the short-, medium-, and long-term and might be more effectively organized at the global level, as states are better off responding together than individually. to sum up, this discussion of the dimensions of health security demonstrates that health security can be conceived of as focusing on the security of people, communities, and states, if we accept that health security politics are centered on the protection of the core values of life and life in good health. since health security is concerned with issues that both pose an existential threat to people and also threaten and destabilize communities, its significance ought to be ranked relatively high. health security politics need to be viewed both as being embedded within the existing normative context of human rights and as themselves promoting a range of valuesincluding dignity, respect, nondiscrimination, emancipation, and empowerment. the pursuit of health security requires material resources like any other type of security. part of the politics surrounding health challenges center on competition for attention and scarce resources. the resources required for the enhancement of health security can be significant, as they involve developing infrastructure, training health professionals, the delivery of care, ensuring the accessibility of medicines, disease prevention, health promotion, and strengthening health systems. [ ] conceptualizing health security in this way, calls for a more holistic approach to encompass both the important work done through responses to global health emergencies and the need for medium-and long-term policies, because in health, just like in strategic politics, prevention is always better than cure. thinking about health security in a systematic way simultaneously highlights the idiosyncrasy of the health security field compared with other fields of security politics and demonstrates the interconnectedness and overlaps between them. baldwin's concept of security provides a guiding framework, a structured conceptualization through which to rethink the way in which health security has been imagined. the flexibility of ontological assumptions that it provides opens possibilities for health security studies to connect with contemporary security paradigms, defying the stereotypes, and constraints of traditional thinking about security. at the very least, it provides a structured framework that allows for comparative analysis of competing accounts of security politics with diverse paradigmatic assumptions. the framework is able to accommodate not just conceptual debate but observations of and reflections on practice. this article sought to contribute to debates about conceptualizing health security and understanding health security politics. it set out to challenge the use of traditional security paradigms, which obscure the significance of public health threats to individual and community security and well-being. the current covid- pandemic has brought these issues to the fore with a much sharper focus than previous public health emergencies of international concern. the brief overview of the different denominations of health security demonstrated that the grounding of existing analysis in securitization theory and constructivist thought has been driven in part by the desire to validate the claim that health-related challenges were indeed relevant security concerns, and in part by the need to fit within existing debates. overall, as has been demonstrated, health security analysis has remained predominantly anchored to the securitization approach, despite critiques levied at the copenhagen school by critical and feminist scholars. [ ] [ ] [ ] health security analysis has only marginally engaged with related bodies of work in the fields of foreign policy, human security or with alternative security paradigms, which has limited the field's dynamism, critical edge, and ability to influence policy debates. this article applied baldwin's framework of the concept of security to existing conceptual and empirical studies of health security to demonstrate how narrowly health security has been conceptualized and how much more analysis is needed for a better understanding of this complex field. traditional security analysis is broadly inhospitable to claims that health issues are a relevant security consideration, leading some analysts to reject the relevance of health to strategic security instead of questioning whether the way that security is framed and defined is still relevant to political and strategic realities and practice. baldwin's framework helps liberate health security analysis from the dogmatic assumptions of traditional security theories, while at the same time providing a structure for rigorous, comprehensive and comparable conceptual debate. experimenting with novel thinking about the ontological, normative and material considerations in health security can help push the boundaries not only of the health security field, but of security studies overall. particular questions for further research emerge-e.g., about the relationship between individual, community and state security, about the way in which resources are allocated to specific fields of security politics, about the differences in short-, medium-, and long-term planning in health security politics, about ways in which to evaluate the relative importance of competing security challenges, the relationship between perceptions and indicators, and so on. the exploration of these questions, based on a clear, explicitly defined concept of health security will promote more systematic thinking about security politics that is open, flexible, and practice oriented. taking a broader, more holistic and historically grounded approach to understanding the politics of health and security brings its own set of challenges. a comprehensive rather than parsimonious way of thinking would inevitably complicate analysis, as it incorporates more variables and tries to capture more, not less of the political and social complexities of security policymaking. questions about normativity and ethics need to be considered. drawing on knowledge across disciplinary borders is rarely unproblematic, as ontological, epistemological, and methodological differences may hinder multidisciplinary dialog. none of these difficulties, however, are insurmountable, as demonstrated by novel approaches to security studies, on which health security analysis ought to build. the pressing needs to rethink the dimensions of health security has regretfully been validated by the unfolding covid- pandemic. writing in the midst of this crisis, it is difficult to assess what the implications of this pandemic would be for societies, economies, health systems. the issues that the pandemic is bringing to the fore, however, are not new. academics have grappled with and tried to draw attention to some of these for at least the last years. [ ] sars cov , the virus that causes covid- , is a health security threat-make no mistake about it. this virus poses an existential risk to humansit threatens individuals, but impacts on communities and on almost every aspect of societal life-family life, social relations and activities, culture, education, the economy, government. governments around the world are using an unprecedented spectrum of measures to reduce morbidity and mortality, previously unseen in peacetime. the who has repeatedly noted that the response to the pandemic would be most effective if states work together in a spirit of cooperation, solidarity, and care. states need people, businesses (including private health care providers) and voluntary organizations to support the pandemic response, which is an illustration of multiactor security politics coordinated by governments and intergovernmental organizations. there is no doubt that this pandemic will bring about change-the extent and nature of the change is currently unknown. what the pandemic has illustrated so far, however, is the need for health systems strengthening, for deepening of global coordination and cooperation, and a stark need to critically reflect on the way we conceptualize security in general and health security in particular without leaving the individual and communities out. at un global leaders commit to act on anti-microbial resistance the lancet foreign policy and security-towards a conceptual framework for research and policy foreign policy and security-towards a conceptual framework for research and policy managing global health security-the world health organization and disease outbreak control routledge handbook of global health security the coming plague: newly emerging diseases in a world out of balance emerging infections: microbial threats to health in the united states america's vital interest in global health: protecting our people, enhancing our economy, and advancing our international interests the global infectious disease threat and its implications for the united states a national security stragety for engagement and enlargement a national security strategy for a new century, national security strategy, the white house security in an interdependent world: the national security strategy of the united kingdom britain in an age of uncertainty: the national security strategy united nations general assembly, resolution / global health and foreign policy, a/res/ / globalization and health united nations security council, resolution , s/res/ states and fear: an agenda for international security studies in the post-cold war era theory of world security world health organisation commission on human security human security now: protecting and empowering people, commission on human security a new concept of cooperative security security beyond the state-private security in international politics ethical security studies: a new research agenda security and public health-pandemics and politics in the contemporary world security: a new framework for analysis foreign policy and security-towards a conceptual framework for research and policy the top causes of death fact sheet no. plagues and peoples politics among nations-the struggle for power and peace theory of international politics political science: the state of the discipline human development report: concept and measurement of human development united nations development programme united nations security council, resolution , s/res/ the tragedy of great power politics the global fund, donors pledge nearly $ billion the emerging global health crisis: noncommunicable diseases in low-and middle-income countries, independent task force report , council on foreign relations war and peace in the st century sipri yearbook -armaments, disarmament and international security pathways for peace: inclusive approaches to preventing violent conflict international committee of the red cross, i saw my city die: voices from the front lines of urban conflict in iraq disease and security-natural plagues and biological weapons in east asia identity and interests: a sociology of international relations secur. hum. rights international theory: positivism and beyond south sudan conflict: violence against healthcare conflict survival critical security studies: concepts and strategies critical security studies: an introduction gender and international security-feminist perspectives feminist security studies-a narrative approach critical approaches to security-an introduction to theories and methods world health organisation, noncommunicable diseases country profiles , world health organisation the global economic burden of non-communicable diseases key: cord- - vcjioon authors: suri, abdul wahab title: the rejuvenation of the withering nation state and bio-power: the new dynamics of human interaction date: - - journal: j bioeth inq doi: . /s - - -y sha: doc_id: cord_uid: vcjioon the outbreak of covid- comes at the time when a shrinking public sector healthcare is an acknowledged fact in post-colonial societies. the policies adopted by the apparatus of most nation states for the past thirty years or more reveal that providing healthcare to all sections of societies is not a priority. the gradual process of economic liberalization has established “market” as the only legitimate mechanism of the distribution of goods/services as per the efficiency principle. the financial markets are globalized in such a manner that nation states are constantly losing their capacity to perform redistributive functions. state withdrawal from the provision of welfare rights is undermining its moral authority to impose any normative imperative to the people who are being left alone at the mercy of market forces. but the spread of covid- on a global scale has provided an opportunity to the nation state. with the help of healthcare systems, the state has reasserted itself as the ultimate archangel to define human beings and their respective status in the newly emerging nomenclature of the public sphere. in this paper, the rejuvenation of the nation state with respect to bio-power will be discussed in the postcolonial context. abstract the outbreak of covid- comes at the time when a shrinking public sector healthcare is an acknowledged fact in post-colonial societies. the policies adopted by the apparatus of most nation states for the past thirty years or more reveal that providing healthcare to all sections of societies is not a priority. the gradual process of economic liberalization has established "market" as the only legitimate mechanism of the distribution of goods/services as per the efficiency principle. the financial markets are globalized in such a manner that nation states are constantly losing their capacity to perform redistributive functions. state withdrawal from the provision of welfare rights is undermining its moral authority to impose any normative imperative to the people who are being left alone at the mercy of market forces. but the spread of covid- on a global scale has provided an opportunity to the nation state. with the help of healthcare systems, the state has reasserted itself as the ultimate archangel to define human beings and their respective status in the newly emerging nomenclature of the public sphere. in this paper, the rejuvenation of the nation state with respect to bio-power will be discussed in the postcolonial context. keywords governmentality . bio-power . healthcare . the covid- discourse and bio-power "who am i?" the central etiological question of human beings has been reasserted once again due to the covid- pandemic. the normative imperative adopted by human beings, that is, "how should i be?", is generally derived from the answer to the first question. thus any substantive change to our ontological status will radically transform the epistemological, axiological and, most importantly, political dynamics of the given metrics in which we all have been situated. covid- and the virus that causes it (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (sars-cov- )) have given us a new identity as actual or potential carriers. unlike some other established pandemic diseases, such as leprosy and plague, the asymptomatic presence of the virus has made it more insidious. the fact that human capacity to deal with covid- entails not only a physiological adaptability but also social and economic dislocation may pose a challenge to the nation-state model. the normative challenge is more acute, because my status as a human being, that is, as someone who answers the questions "who am i?" and "how i should be?", is not easily answered by the nation-state. the covid- discourse will last for a long time because the nation state has had to reverse once again its withering role in the determination of my status as a human being. the reasserted authority of the state is legitimized by prevailing assumptions, which are interwoven into the fabric of mass media and presented as non-contestable axioms. the assumptions are as follows: & covid- is an issue of healthcare. & the state is responsible for ensuring the healthcare of its citizens. & death is avoidable by the application of a superior mechanism of control and surveillance. this paper will critically analyse these assumptions and revisit our general understanding of healthcare. it will be argued that covid - has provided us with an opportunity to break our shackles of self-estrangement, to listen to the call of consciousness, and to regain our authentic mode of existence (langan , ) . the cure of disease and suffering is the prime concern of healthcare. however, the sudden outbreak of covid- has exposed the capacity and response potential of the global healthcare apparatus. the damage caused by only a single virus at the global level has been phenomenal. the fact is that we are surrounded by "an estimated ten nonillion (ten to the thirty-first power) individual viruses on our planet-enough to assign one to every star in the universe one hundred million times over" (wu ) . the issue which has shattered the global order goes beyond the disease and the deaths caused by the virus, it is about the management of carriers and the establishment of a mechanism for differentiating carriers from non-carriers. the crisis is not a matter of "cure" or control of the increasing death toll but the management and the control of masses in the absence of an ultimate therapeutic protocol for treating the disease. therefore, it is reasonable to argue that the contemporary crisis is a crisis of governmentality (foucault , - ) . the global outbreak of the virus has revealed the limitations of the extant mechanism of governmentality. the incapacity of some advanced nation-states to control the masses through their frameworks of governmentality is leading to a revival of disciplinary power in the first world. on the other hand, where modern institutions of control are not comprehensively institutionalized, as in many third world countries, the sovereign power of the state has merely been imposed arbitrarily. the global lockdown has provided us with an opportunity to obtain first-hand experience of these different power dynamics in concrete life-worlds. according to foucault, "baldly at first sight and somewhat schematically we could say that sovereignty is exercised within the borders of territory, discipline is exercised on the body of the individuals, and security is exercised over the whole population" (foucault , - ) . "sovereignty" is the right of the government to exercise power over its people without any interference from outside. the traditional monarchical power is one of the representations of sovereign power, where power is centralized and cannot be challenged. in many parts of the world, states are instrumentalizing this type of power to discipline people in order to control the wide spread of the virus. the brute expression of state power is working because state authorities are seeking legitimacy from healthcare professionals for the use of coercive measures. "disciplinary power" is asserted through modern institutions. "discipline classifies the component thus identified according to definite objectives" (foucault , ) . the expression of power is exercised through disciplinary means, that is, through a variety of institutions like schools, hospitals, prisons, executive and legislative institutions, etc. in this context, the legitimacy of disciplinary power is derived from the dictations of acknowledged authority in the respective area of concern. disciplinary power cannot be effective without institutionalized knowledge. in accordance with this, in healthcare all the standard procedures of operations are dominated by professionals. the disseminated knowledge embedded in modern institutions allows the latter to assess, evaluate, analyse, observe, and foster the psyches of the people. thus, institutions create knowledge and legitimize power expression. this expression of power is manifested in the usual modes of the operation of state authority in many parts of the world. this institutionalized expression of power, discipline, and surveillance can operate in profound ways, and these may be both beneficent and malign as per the discretion of state apparatus. the covid- pandemic has opened up a new avenue to assert coercion and control. the history of political theory reveals that the "power of ruling" which was expressed in pre-modern epochs has gradually transformed into "power of governing." this power of governing presents itself as emancipatory. unlike juridical power, the invisible expression of power creates an illusion of self-governance; it invites human subjects to participate in the governing process. it is not just the power of rules or orders but rather of the questions: "who am i?" and "how should i behave?" it expands the area of control from the public sphere to the dynamics of individual thought. the power of governmentality instructs individuals to govern themselves and shifts power from central authority to the people. sovereignty inhering within people has resulted in instances of violence and murder by individuals against other individuals, violating the operational principles designated by the state authorities. many people have committed suicide after they have tested positive for covid- . governmentality instils or inculcates people to control themselves, their expression and their thought for the benefit of the power institutions. thus, the successful instillation of governmentality is dependent on people participating and consenting to governing processes and procedures. covid- alerts us to the expression of all these three forms of power at play simultaneously. the role of the healthcare apparatus is decisive because without healthcare professionals bio-power cannot be substantiated. according to foucault "by this [bio-power] i mean a number of phenomena that seems to me to be quite significant through which the basic biological features of the human species become the object of a political strategy of a general strategy of power" ( , ). it means that after the normalization of the contemporary traumatic situation one can anticipate new forms of regimentation, surveillance, stratification, segmentation, discrimination, confinement and security protocols, both at home and abroad. let's move towards the second assumption, that healthcare is the responsibility of the nation state. in our part of the world (pakistan) the people in power are constantly informing those who are not that, given that the virus is so contagious, they will be unable to provide healthcare to everyone who is infected or likely to be infected. for this reason, the people are ordered to control themselves. "social distancing" has been presented as an effective solution to avoid infection. this discourse at the subliminal level conveys the false assumption that under normal circumstances the public sector healthcare apparatus is actually capable of accommodating all the sick people affected by diseases other than covid- -which is, of course, untrue. "at least half of the world's population cannot obtain essential health services, according to a new report from the world bank and who" (world health organization ). statistics regarding the available healthcare facilities in pakistan just two years before the covid- outbreak show that healthcare was not in fact a priority for the government. the public sector healthcare apparatus is in shambles and the number of people who do not have any access to healthcare is high. in the field of healthcare, the state has been withering away while the private sector has been flourishing. the who report claims that million people spend at least per cent of their household budgets on health expenses for themselves, a sick child or other family member. for almost million people, these expenses are high enough to push them into extreme poverty, forcing them to survive on just $ . or less a day. (world health organization ). the commodification of diseases and healthcare systems are a bitter truth of our lives. in many third world countries, people who are under a coercive order of lockdown do not expect any healthcare facilities to cure covid- . therefore, they are hesitant to inform authorities about their health conditions and instead utilize traditional methods to combat the virus. the inability of the third world public sector to provide healthcare solutions to all sick people is not surprising because we all are conditioned to these limitations. but the shortcomings we are now witnessing in the first world or "affluent" world implies stringently that we should all revisit our healthcare frameworks. the withering role of the nation state for providing basic healthcare to all needs to be addressed promptly, as an emergency. "the wound is the place where the light enters you" rumi (jalāl ad-dīn muhammad balkhī - ) the covid- pandemic has raised questions about two very important things that directly affect the meanings of our lives: a) it has questioned the role of the "other" in our lives, i.e., "the they." b) it has questioned the centrality of routine life, i.e., the "everydayness." both of these factors, "the they" and "everydayness", according to heidegger, are sources of an inauthentic mode of our existence. covid- has also introduced a "consciousness of death" into the public sphere, which had formerly been colonized by the discourse of life. the governing mechanisms of consumption and production have presented death as something which can be postponed by a better and more capital intensive healthcare apparatus. that is why in our part of the world whenever affluent people get sick they prefer to move abroad. the pandemic outbreak and its high death toll in advanced industrial societies has provided us with an opportunity to revisit the phenomenon of "death" in the context of its ontological foundations. the discourse of death under the controlled conditions of quarantine enables us to revisit the notion of "our existence" and its ontological and intentional relation with death. the lopsided focus on the biological notion of death has abandoned the ontological necessity of "being-towards-end" (heidegger , ) . heidegger considers death as a mode of being to which our existence, our dasein, is exposed. the consciousness of death is essentially the authentic mode of dasein, that is, the being-towardsthe-death. this consciousness of death makes sense of our life. humans oscillate between authentic and inauthentic modes of existence, with the freedom to choose which ever project suits them best (langan , - ) . the routine life embedded in our "everydayness" reminds us of our being-in-the-world and gravitates us towards self-estrangement (brocke , - ) . this self-estrangement means that we constantly strive towards awareness of something other than our selves. the everyday mode of dasein in verfallen has been broken by covid- and has provided us with an opportunity to go beyond distantiality (heidegger , - ) . distantiality, according to heidegger, is the character of being-with-one-another in which the self is subjugated, pejoratively taking away the dasein's concern with its own being and replacing it with "other," i.e., "the they." because of distantiality, when an individual loses his/her/their self in a football stadium, or in a concert, or in a public protest, or in a marathon race, or in a stock market numerical fluctuation, or in a social media like/dislike, the being-with-one-another liquefies or melts one's own dasein into a being-of-the-other. in self-estrangement, we seek pleasure with the eye of "the they." the new consciousness of death brings dasein back to the authentic mode of being-one's-self (heidegger , ) . this authentic mode of dasein by the modification of "the they" makes us self-aware of differences in the public sphere and, most crucially, the fact that racial, ethnic, gender, and class distinctions, including also value addition and fashion trends, are meanings imputed by the consciousness whose ultimate potentiality is death. covid- provides us with an opportunity at a global level to revisit our existential problems in the authentic mode, that is, the mode geared towards our demise, death, and destruction. let us seize this opportunity to go even further and revisit the challenges of environment, healthcare, social injustice, and discrimination so that we can make a better world in the post-covid- age. existence and being by martine heidegger security, territory, population: lectures at the collage de france - being and time the meaning of heidegger: a critical study of an existentialist phenomenology news release: world bank and who: half the world lacks access to essential health services, million still pushed into extreme poverty because of health expenses there are more viruses than stars in universe. why do only some infect us? national geographic publisher's note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations key: cord- -nv tg j authors: hinz, s.; basam, m. m.; aguilera, k. y.; labarge, m. title: internet-based tool for visualizing county and state level covid- trends in the united states. date: - - journal: nan doi: . / . . . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: nv tg j the novel covid- outbreak started in in wuhan china and quickly spread to at least countries. we developed an interactive web application that allows users to visualize the spread of covid- in the unites states at state and county levels. this tool allows visualization of how the virus spreads over time and how state-wide efforts to reduce transmissions have affected the curve in local areas. the downloadable application data allows users to conduct additional analyses. we demonstrate exemplars of trend analyses comparing the daily infection and death rates before and after safer at home orders were implemented per state. the goal was to develop a covid- tracking tool that informs users about the spread of the virus to enable them to make informed decisions after better understanding the presented data. in wuhan (hubai, china) a cluster of pneumonia infections occurred in december of . in january a novel coronavirus sars-cov- was identified as the cause in patient samples from wuhan (zhu et al., ) . this outbreak has since spread to at least countries and infected over million people (as of may , ). response to the pandemic in the united states is coordinated mainly at the state government level. in order to track and visualize the spread of coronavirus disease and evaluate trends in response to state government interventions in the united states, we developed an automatically updating shiny application. this application enables users to view trends in numbers of verified covid- infections and deaths as reported by county health departments across the united states. the county-level and state-level data for covid- infections and deaths is obtained from the new york times (nyt) ongoing github repository (https://github.com/nytimes/covid- -data). their data are compiled from state and local government and health department reports and is updated daily around : pst. state government non-pharmaceutical intervention data were provided through killeen et al. ( ) . county government non-pharmaceutical intervention data were provided by the . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted may , . . https://doi.org/ . / well as a daily counter of both. lastly, we display the date when the nyt data have been last updated. below the map, we display multiple table and plot options for the user to view on a country, state, or county specific level to help with data interpretation. upon opening the app, country-wide plots show the overall impact of covid- on the u.s. (figure ). upon interaction with the map, the plots are updated automatically to show state or county specific data. additionally, we allow for users to filter the data based on previous dates, as well as normalize the number of confirmed infections or deaths by a state or county's population (per k residents). we display two tables that show the top counties in terms of their number of confirmed infections and deaths ( in the trends subpanel a rolling slope plot is displayed that allows for illustration of the "flattening of the curve", or the slope changes of the log transformed cumulative death and infection numbers ( figure j -l). a moving -day window was applied to extract the slope of the linear regression as a function of -week intervals. these windows were calculated for every -day period and the "rolling slope" values were plotted against the date. higher slopes are indicative of a surge in the number of confirmed infections or deaths whereas a slope of indicates stagnant confirmed case or death numbers. . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted may , . . https://doi.org/ . / additionally, we provide our users the ability to download the data, which includes the nyt covid- data, as well as population statistics on each county or state ( figure ). users can view a quick tutorial on how to use the app by clicking on the question mark and the "more information" tab allows them to read an in-depth explanation about the app, data, and functions used. the program was written in r (r. core team, ) using r studio, shiny (chang et al., ) , shinydashboard (chang and ribeiro, ) , leaflet (cheng et al., ) , tidyr , ggplot (wickham, ) , dplyr , zoo (zeileis and grothendieck, ) , data.table (dowle and srinivasan, ) , readr (wickham et al., ) , rgdal (bivand et al., ) , rintrojs (ganz, ) , janitor (firke, ) , and stringr (wickham, ) packages. it is hosted through the authors' private account in shinyapps.io. as a means to reduce the spread of covid- , national guidelines were set at both the county and state level. the implementation of safer at home orders, per state, infections of all states, calculated as the difference in the slope from before and after the safer at home orders were implemented, show a decrease in newly confirmed . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted may , . . https://doi.org/ . / infections ( figure ) . these data transformations are not presently incorporated in the app, but highlight the applicability of the underlying downloadable data. the tool reports confirmed covid- infections and deaths at the state and county level and is automatically updated daily. the interactive map of the us allows users to visualize the distribution of confirmed covid- infections (figure ) with plots for summary statistics, data transformations, and trends for the us. additionally, we implemented data visualization at the state and county level ( figure b) . upon user interaction with the map, the graphs update to reflect the data in the selected state or county (figure a-d), including annotations for statewide stay at home orders, for each state. an emphasis was placed on scientific representation of the case numbers, therefore, population doublings (pds) were calculated on both the log and normal scale ( figure c ). to highlight and track covid- flattening, a rolling slope was calculated ( figure d) , showing the slope of the cumulative case regression over all -week intervals. reductions of the rolling slope indicate a flattening of the curve, whereas increases of the slope indicate an acceleration in reported case number. notably for los angeles county a -week delay in rolling slope reduction is observed between infections and deaths following issuance of the california safer at home order. this tool can be used to visualize how covid- has spread throughout communities and how state-wide efforts to reduce transmission have affected the curve. our rolling slope function is an easily digestible method of evaluating changes in direction and rate of confirmed covid- infections and deaths over time. our goal is to inform people about the spread of this disease and allow them to make more informed decisions after understanding the data. moreover, the downable nature of the data in our application can facilitate further assessments of trends over time. assuming that covid- surveillance will continue in earnest throughout the fall and winter of , and into the spring of , we speculate that visualizations such as the rolling slope may help identify resurgence of infections within counties and states . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted may , . . https://doi.org/ . / the tool can be accessed online (http://usacovid tracker.com) and the underlying data for county and state level can be directly downloaded through the application. . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted may , . . https://doi.org/ . / slope of the linear regression of the log transformed confirmed daily infections before (black) and after (blue) safer at home measures. for states without a safe at home order (dashed line) march , (national average of all state implementation dates) was used as the surrogate date. . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted may , . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint . cc-by-nc-nd . international license it is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted may , . . https://doi.org/ . / rgdal: bindings for the 'geospatial' data abstraction library) shiny: web application framework for r) shinydashboard: create dashboards with 'shiny') leaflet: create interactive web maps with the javascript 'leaflet' library) janitor: simple tools for examining and cleaning dirty data) rintrojs: a wrapper for the intro.js a county-level dataset for informing the united states r: a language and environment for statistical computing ggplot : elegant graphics for data analysis stringr: simple, consistent wrappers for common string operations) dplyr: a grammar of data manipulation) tidyr: tidy messy data) readr: read rectangular text data) zoo: s infrastructure for regular and irregular time series a novel coronavirus from patients with pneumonia in china key: cord- -d l nqgh authors: chui, kenneth kh; cohen, steven a; naumova, elena n title: snowbirds and infection--new phenomena in pneumonia and influenza hospitalizations from winter migration of older adults: a spatiotemporal analysis date: - - journal: bmc public health doi: . / - - - sha: doc_id: cord_uid: d l nqgh background: despite advances in surveillance and prevention, pneumonia and influenza (p&i) remain among the leading causes of mortality in the united states. elderly adults experience the most severe morbidity from influenza-associated diseases, and have the highest rates of seasonal migration within the u.s. compared to other subpopulations. the objective of this study is to assess spatiotemporal patterns in influenza-associated hospitalizations in the elderly, by time, geography, and intensity of p&i. given the high seasonal migration of individuals to florida, this state was examined more closely using harmonic regression to assess spatial and temporal patterns of p&i hospitalizations by state of residence. methods: data containing all medicare-eligible hospitalizations in the united states for - with p&i (icd- -cm codes - ) were abstracted for the + population. hospitalizations were classified by state of residence, provider state, and date of admissions, specifically comparing those admitted between october and march to those admitted between april and september. we then compared the hospitalization profile data of florida residents with that of out-of-state residents by state of primary residence and time of year (in-season or out-of-season). results: we observed distinct seasonal patterns of nonresident p&i hospitalizations, especially comparing typical winter destination states, such as california, arizona, texas, and florida, to other states. although most other states generally experienced a higher proportion of non-resident p&i during the summer months (april-september), these states had higher nonresident p&i during the traditional peak influenza season (october-march). conclusions: this study is among the first to quantify spatiotemporal p&i hospitalization patterns in the elderly, focusing on the change of patterns that are possibly due to seasonal population migration. understanding migration and influenza-associated disease patterns in this vulnerable population is critical to prepare for and potentially prevent influenza outbreaks in this vulnerable population. synchrony and latitudinal gradients in epidemic peaks [ ] . the timing of the seasonal peak in influenza changes annually, ranging from th to rd julian calendar day [ ] . together, space and timing of the seasonal peak work in synchrony to dictate the epidemiological effects of influenza in the population [ ] . the severity of influenza also varies by individual influenza season [ ] . accurate monitoring and estimation of influenza activity require understanding not only influenza dynamics, but also population characteristics and their changes. important dynamic factors such as the transmissibility of influenza strains, the accuracy of contact rate assessment, and the movement of populations within and between geographical units, if not clearly understood and properly modelled, may compromise the precision and accuracy of the estimation. the sars epidemic of [ ] illustrates these complexities by demonstrating the potential of global travel patterns to impact the spread of a virulent infectious agent, the coronavirus, necessitating a systematic investigation on how travel and migration patterns affect disease epidemics. although some historical influenza epidemics and pandemics disproportionately affect the younger population, such as the spanish influenza [ ] and the recent h n pandemic of [ ] , for most seasonal influenza, the elderly (defined as the population aged and above) are the most severely affected. from to , over % of influenza-associated mortality occurred in the elderly, much of which from influenzaassociated pneumonia co-infection. influenza-associated morbidity is highest in the elderly. patients with a primary diagnosis of pneumonia accounted for nearly , average annual hospitalizations from to . there were over . million hospitalizations in the elderly with any-listed diagnosis of pneumonia during that period [ ] . the elderly, who experience the most severe morbidity and highest mortality from influenza, are also one of the most mobile population groups due to their frequent seasonal migrations. popular destinations in the u.s. include florida, arizona, and texas. these migrations can be sizable: in , the proportion of non-permanent elderly residents increases from . % in september (summer time in the us) to . % in january [ ] . unlike younger populations who may travel temporarily for work and leisure, the elderly tend to stay for longer periods of time and use more health services [ ] . these migrations may affect influenza transmission and, as a consequence, change health care service utilization patterns both at their home state and in their temporary residence or lodging [ ] . evidence suggests that hospitalization patterns for in-state residents differ from temporary residents [ ] . this has important implications, not only by potentially affecting the dynamics and transmission patterns of influenza itself, but also by impacting health care service providers. peak seasonal migration to florida and other southern states coincides with the typical peak in influenza, which generally occurs in the winter months [ , ] . there are few studies that have assessed differences in patterns of influenza-related hospitalization in the medicare population simultaneously by time of year, provider state, and state of residence. the purpose of this analysis is to quantify these spatiotemporal patterns in influenza-associated hospitalizations in the elderly using medicare-associated hospitalization claims in the united states for years, including complete influenza seasons (july -june ). we compare spatiotemporal patterns of influenza activity across all states of the u.s., emphasizing the simultaneous comparison of seasonal migration patterns by season. we then focus the analysis on florida, a state known for extensive seasonal migration of elderly adults, to examine how seasonal migration to florida affects the timing, geography, and intensity of pneumonia and influenza across seasons. we abstracted . million out of . million hospitalization records obtained from centers for medicare and medicaid services (cms) based on a set of previously established entry criteria [ ] : admission happened from through , patient's age was or above when admitted, and the patient's diagnoses includes pneumonia and influenza (p&i; international classification of diseases, ninth revision, clinical modification codes - ). variables used in this analysis are patient's age, date of admission, state of residence, and state in which the patient was hospitalized, referred to as "provider state" hereafter. for the national state-level analysis, we compiled cumulative frequencies of the p&i hospitalization in two time periods-october st through march st and april st through september th -approximating the in-and off-seasons. for the analysis on florida, we created a -day-long time series by compiling daily counts of the p&i hospitalization for floridians and non-floridians. the first part of the analysis assessed the spatiotemporal patterns of influenza-associated hospitalizations for all states plus the district of columbia by comparing the ratios of hospitalized residents to hospitalized nonresidents between the two time periods with χ tests. to better explore the relative changes in rates and counts of p&i hospitalizations in specific state of residence and provider state, we visualized these multivariate relationship using bubble matrix plots [ ] . as an extension of the aforementioned χ analysis, a second bubble matrix was made to show the natural log transformed ratio of the number of non-floridians to the number of floridians for each combination of the provider states and states of residence. the second part of the analysis focused on understanding the residential makeup and temporal fluctuation of the elderly hospitalized in florida. demographic characteristics of the two groups (floridian vs. non-floridian) were compared with t-test and χ test. the original states of residence of the non-floridian were tabulated. the counts were then segregated by the two periods of time for calculating the seasonal ratios (frequency of hospitalizations in april-september divided by frequency of hospitalizations in october-march). the resultant ratios were visualized using mapping. to understand the temporal differences between the two residential groups, time-series plots were created illustrating the change in the hospitalization counts between the two groups. we then used harmonic regression to estimate the times to peak for each group, controlled for long-term trends. the general equation of the harmonic regression is as follows: ln[e(counts)] = β + β sin( π t) + β cos( π t) + β (t) + β (t ), where ln[e(counts)] are hospitalization counts modelled with poisson distribution, π is the constant, ω is the frequency, and t is the day in a time series ranging from st to th day. the terms β (t) and β (t ) control for longterm linear and quadratic trends. the coefficients β and β are needed to derive peak timing in days. detailed methods can be found elsewhere [ ] . sas version . (cary, nc) and s-plus version (palo alto, ca) were used for the data abstraction and analysis, respectively. arcgis version . (redlands, ca) was used for mapping. the tufts medical center institutional review board approved the study protocol for this analysis of the cms data. for the majority of states, a significantly higher proportion of non-resident p&i hospitalizations occurred from april-september than from october-march (table ) . significantly higher proportions of non-resident p&i hospitalizations occurred from october-march than in april-september in a minority of states-arizona, california, florida, hawaii, nevada, south carolina, and texas. examining the non-resident p&i hospitalizations, we observe uneven patterns in the distribution of state of residence. figure depicts a bubble plot of the crossclassification of provider state and state of residence for all p&i cases from through from october through march. the size of the bubble represents frequencies of hospitalization and the hue represents rates. information in the diagonal cells was omitted because those cells would be of much higher counts and rates, which is natural because most people are hospitalized in their own state, dwarfing the small but important distinctions among the discordant cells. residents of certain states have a greater propensity to be treated out-of-state for p&i than many other states. non-residents of states such as california, arizona, florida, and texas comprise a notable proportion of the total p&i hospitalizations treated in hospitals in these states. states are displayed alphabetically within census divisions. in general, adjacent groups of states tend to have the largest discordances between provider state and state of residence for p&i cases. this is especially evident in several new england states, new york, new jersey, and pennsylvania, as well as many residents of alabama being treated in neighbouring georgia and florida, and vice versa. there were notable similarities and differences between the typical high season for influenza-october through march-compared to the period of time between april and september, which generally has lower rates of disease. figure depicts the ratio of p&i hospitalizations comparing counts from october to march to counts from april to september, by provider state and state of residence. orange dots represent states in which the rates are higher for october-march than for april-september. blue dots represent states in which p&i rates are higher for april-september than for october-march. higher colour saturations represent rate ratios of higher magnitude. certain states, such as hawaii, arizona, texas, and florida show higher rates of non-resident p&i hospitalizations in october-march than for the time period of april-september for most states. the non-resident p&i cases in arizona appear to come from a fairly even distribution of many other states. in contrast, out-of-state residents being hospitalized in florida for p&i were derived primarily from northeastern, and midwestern states. many northern states had the opposite pattern entirely: the northernmost states-including maine, vermont, north dakota, and montana and others-actually experienced decreases in out-of-state resident p&i hospitalizations during the influenza season compared to the off-season. table . a closer examination of the specific states from which the non-resident p&i cases hospitalized in florida reveals that a large proportion of those individuals are residents of northeast and midwestern states ( table ) . the top six states provided the majority ( . %) of all out-of-state cases: new york, michigan, ohio, pennsylvania, new jersey, and georgia. the two states that share a border with florida, georgia and alabama, provide . % of all non-resident p&i cases. furthermore, the mapping of the seasonal ratios (frequency in april-september/frequency in october-march) of non-floridians hospitalized in florida reveals a distinct spatial pattern ( figure ). states shaded in purple provide more non-resident p&i hospitalizations to florida during between october and march than between april and september. the darker the hue, the greater the difference is between october-march and april-september. in states shaded in green-namely california, nevada, texas, louisiana, alabama, south carolina, hawaii, and florida itself, there were more non-resident p&i cases occurring in florida during april-september than between october and march. examining all p&i cases occurring in florida comparing residents to nonresidents, we observed distinct seasonality in the numbers of p&i hospitalizations attributable to out-of-state residents but who sought care in florida (figure ). this graph illustrates the seasonal peaks in weekly counts of both the resident and nonresident p&i hospitalizations in florida. there is also distinct seasonality in the percent of all p&i hospitalizations attributable to non-florida residents. this percentage oscillated between approximately % during the seasonal nadirs in the summer months to % during the typical wintertime increases. according to the results of the harmonic regression, hospitalizations of the out-of-state patients peaked at about the third week of january, which is about one week later than that of the same-state patients ( th ± . julian calendar day vs. rd ± . , p < . ). we found distinct, state-specific hospitalization patterns that differ across provider states and over time. in several states, such as california, arizona, texas, and florida, among others, the proportion of non-residents being hospitalized for p&i was higher in the winter months than in the summer months, although for most states, the opposite was true. in florida, the proportion of all p&i hospitalizations attributable to out-of-state residents was over three times as high between october and march compared to the usual nadir of influenza activity, april through september. a large portion of out-of-state resident p&i hospitalizations in florida are derived from northeastern and midwestern states, such as new york, michigan, pennsylvania, and ohio. the patterns observed in florida are similar to those observed in other destination states for seasonally migrating elderly, including texas, california, and arizona, except that the composition of states of primary residence are slightly different than that of florida. furthermore, the top contributors of hospitalized nonresidents are not necessarily with the largest proportions of the national elderly population ( figure ). clear discrepancies exist between the proportion of all u.s. elderly living in the state and each state's contribution to non-resident p&i hospitalizations in florida. michigan, for example, has the eighth largest population of elderly in the nation, yet the state contributed the second-highest number of p&i cases to the non-resident p&i hospitalizations in florida. texas contains the national data on seasonal migration of the elderly within the united states are not readily available. estimates of seasonal migration are available only through proxies or surveys [ ] . our findings contribute to the body of knowledge into seasonal migration of elderly in two important ways. first, these findings provide a framework to estimate seasonal migratory patterns of the u.s. elderly population at the level of stateto-state transference. second, these findings highlight the need for adjusting and fine-tuning public health and medical infrastructure necessary to provide critical care for those elderly patients. public health and medical practitioners could use these findings to identify areas where and time when out-of-state elderly visitors may overwhelm the local infrastructures [ ] . suggested services to be evaluated include vaccination programs, hospital beds, home care services, and medical treatments for complications of p&i, particularly for resident and non-resident elderly, who face the most severe morbidity and highest mortality from these diseases. pneumonia and influenza prevention and treatment for elderly has never been more important. as of , the u.s. has million medicare beneficiaries [ ], most of whom are elderly. exacerbating this situation are the rapid expansions of both size and proportion of the elderly population: as the large baby boomer cohort enters the age groups most vulnerable to the effects of influenza-associated morbidity and mortality, the impact of influenza will likely grow precipitously, resulting in an even greater, yet largely preventable strain on the already burdened health care delivery system [ ] . a major strength of this analysis is the use of cms data set, which is one of the most complete ( % coverage [ ] ) sources of information on u.s. elderly hospitalization profile. the recorded dates of admission permitted us to estimate the peak time of the outcome to the day level. other in-depth analyses, such as relationship between hospitalizations with climatic features and holidays, can also be performed [ ] . the analysis has some important limitations, however. first, the data used for the analysis are only a part of all insurance claims, and therefore do not represent the overall burden of p&i in the elderly population. our cases likely represent only the more severe cases of influenza and its complications. furthermore, medicare covers approximately % of the elderly population. therefore, the total number of p&i cases is likely an underestimate of the total p&i burden in the elderly [ ] . second, we defined the patients with out-of-state residential code as non-permanent residents, but we do not know whether non-residents of each state hospitalized for p&i in that state were living a substantial portion of the year in that particular year, or if they were in the state for a short period. there have been reports on elderly population keeping their original state identity while living in another state for a long term, mostly for tax-related benefits [ ] . so, part of the increase in the ratios during winter could have been due to increase in seasonal migrants, while another part could have been due to those long-term stayers who have moved to a warmer place due to their deteriorating health while decided to keep their original state identity. studies on whether snowbirds have less robust health compared to the national elderly are limited, and the results are inconclusive [ ] . in either of the two circumstances, our findings still emphasize the importance to understand more on this non-residential hospitalized elderly population. despite the limitations outlined above, our study is among the first to quantify pneumonia and influenza hospitalization patterns in the elderly with respect to seasonal migration in the united states. information on this seasonal migration patterns and influenza-associated disease patterns in this vulnerable population is critical in preparing for and controlling a potential influenza outbreak. we observed that nearly % of all p&i hospitalizations that occurred in florida in peak influenza months were from patients visiting from another state. influx of people can profoundly impact the health care system in destination states. the statistically significant delay of five days in the hospitalization peak time for the non-floridian implies possible differences in susceptibilities or health seeking behaviors between the two groups or time and place of potential exposure to virus. the results of this and future related studies may explicate certain populations to target with public health interventions, such as vaccination, at the appropriate time to maximize effectiveness and reduce the burden of pneumonia and influenza in the elderly. in future intervention studies, seasonally migrating elderly individuals could be universally vaccinated in their state of primary residence before the start of the influenza season to determine if this process could curtail the spread of influenza in their destination state. additionally, flow mapping with multivariate visualization [ , ] and network analyses [ ] show promise as valuable tools to quantify spatially and temporally how influenza dynamically flows among states to provide the most vulnerable populations the appropriate medical care and preventive measures. this study simultaneously assessed the spatial and temporal components of influenza-associated hospitalizations in the american elderly population, highlighting the seasonal patterns of influenza potentially related to seasonal migration of elderly individuals. given the lack of national data on inter-state seasonal migration, we demonstrated the use of medicare hospitalizations to quantify the impact of seasonal or temporary migration patterns on the distribution of pneumonia and influenza in the united states. understanding where, when, and to whom hospitalizations occur is a critical component to predict, contain, or even prevent the spread of influenza to the vulnerable population of elderly adults, and will allow state and local health officials to plan for localized outbreaks and timely changes in health care services utilization. distribution of influenza vaccine to highrisk groups deaths: final data for seasonal synchronization of influenza in the united states older adult population dynamical resonance can account for seasonality of influenza epidemics influenza seasonality: underlying causes and modeling theories grandparental caregiving, income inequality and respiratory infections in elderly us individuals global patterns in seasonal activity of influenza a/h n , a/h n , and b from to : viral coexistence and latitudinal gradients synchrony, waves, and spatial hierarchies in the spread of influenza the impact of influenza epidemics on mortality: introducing a severity index the severe acute respiratory syndrome the spanish influenza pandemic in occidental europe ( - ) and victim age comparative age distribution of influenza morbidity and mortality during seasonal influenza epidemics and the h n pandemic trends in hospitalizations for pneumonia among persons aged years or older in the united states snowbirds, sunbirds, and stayers: seasonal migration of elderly adults in florida temporary migration: a case study of florida differences in hospitalizations among seasonal migrants, adjacent-state and in-state aged medicare beneficiaries choice of study discipline and the postponement of motherhood in europe: the impact of expected earnings, gender composition, and family attitudes seasonality assessment for biosurveillance systems impact of local resources on hospitalization patterns of medicare beneficiaries and propensity to travel outside local markets experts predict visits by baby boomers will soon strain emergency departments overcoming potential pitfalls in the use of medicare data for epidemiologic research daily variation in usa mortality seasonal influenza in the united states, france, and australia: transmission and prospects for control pension tax may spur snowbirds to relocate. the detroit news detroit sociodemographic and health characteristics of anglophone canadian and u.s. snowbirds visual analytics of spatial interaction patterns for pandemic decision support flow mapping and multivariate visualization of large spatial interaction data how disease models in static networks can fail to approximate disease in dynamic networks pre-publication history the pre-publication history for this paper can be accessed here submit your next manuscript to biomed central and take full advantage of: • convenient online submission • thorough peer review • no space constraints or color figure charges • immediate publication on acceptance • inclusion in pubmed, cas, scopus and google scholar • research which is freely available for redistribution we thank the national institute of allergy and infectious disease (n ai ) for approving the study design and providing financial support. we also wish to thank the centers for medicare and medicaid services for supplying the outcome dataset. the above agencies do not have any influence on the collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; nor in any stage of the preparation of this manuscript. the use of the dataset was approved by the tufts medical center institutional review board. authors' contributions kkhc led the writing process, executed the data visualization, and carried out the time-series analysis; sac conceptualized the analysis, drafted the manuscript, and carried out the rest of the statistical analysis. both kkhc and sac contributed equally to the work. enn purchased the medicare data used in the analysis and provided substantive editorial feedback. all authors read and approved the final manuscript. the authors have no specific financial interests, relationships, or affiliations relevant to the subject of this manuscript. key: cord- -p j kt authors: wiley, lindsay f title: public health law and science in the community mitigation strategy for covid- date: - - journal: j law biosci doi: . /jlb/lsaa sha: doc_id: cord_uid: p j kt in a crisis like the covid- pandemic, the role of judges is first and foremost to adjudicate urgent requests for temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions. this means that judges hearing challenges to bans on gatherings, orders to close gun shops, orders to halt abortion care, and detention of civil immigration detainees in crowded and unsanitary conditions are issuing orders based on the parties’ pleadings alone. there is no time—yet—for the discovery, expert testimony, or amicus briefs from professional groups that typically inform assessments of science by judges. this essay examines the role public health science is likely to play in the coming months as judges field challenges to mandatory orders adopted as part of the community mitigation the covid- pandemic. it identifies voluntary guidelines from international and federal health agencies as a resource judges rely on heavily in reviewing emergency communicable disease control orders and argues that transparency of and accountability for guidelines should therefore be held to a higher bar than their voluntary status might otherwise suggest. u n c o r r e c t e d m a n u s c r i p t the bay area orders, which broke the floodgates on mandatory sheltering-in-place as a strategy for mitigating the spread of covid- in the united states, originated in post- / public health preparedness plans and long-standing relationships between public health scientists and lawyers. the powerful combination of public health science and law has prompted more than its fair share of legal and ethical controversy. from compulsory vaccination orders to sanitary cordons, from "big gulp bans" to prohibitions on the sale of tobacco products at pharmacies, public health laws have often put judges in the position of assessing the reasonableness of restrictions on individual and economic liberty. the standards of review judges have developed to guide this task require political leaders to articulate not only the purpose of their actions but also the fit between their ends and the means they have adopted. assessing the means-ends fit usually boils down to a discussion of scientific evidence and guidelines. although the law governing public health emergency orders is surprisingly unsettled, public health law experts widely agree that an assessment of the "necessity, effectiveness, and scientific rationale" for intrusive measures is a key feature of judicial review. in a crisis like the covid- pandemic, the role of judges is first and foremost to adjudicate urgent requests for temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions. this means that judges hearing challenges to bans on gatherings, orders to stay at home except for essential work and needs, orders to close gun shops, orders to halt abortion care, and detention of civil immigration detainees in crowded and unsanitary conditions are issuing orders based largely on the parties" pleadings alone. there is little time-yet-for the discovery, expert testimony, or amicus briefs from professional groups that typically inform assessments of science by judges. this essay examines the role of public health scientific guidelines in the adjudication of legal challenges to mandatory orders adopted as part of the community mitigation strategy for the covid- pandemic. this examination of judicial precedents arising out of emergency communicable disease control measures-prior to and during the covid- pandemic-reveals that judges rely heavily on guidelines from the world health organization (who) and the u.s. centers for disease control (cdc). this may be cause for concern, given that federal guidelines for covid- have been slow to respond to the reality of covid- "s rapid spread and rising death toll in the us. the white house has issued guidelines independently of cdc and both sets of guidelines have fallen short of endorsing the orders mandating all residents to stay at home that the majority of states and many local governments have imposed. the essay concludes by arguing that because guidelines issued by international and federal agencies play an important role in adjudication of conflicts between emergency communicable disease control orders and civil liberties, they should be held to a higher standard of transparency and accountability than their voluntary nature might otherwise suggest. to mitigate the spread of covid- , federal, state, and local officials have exercised broad powers available to them under public health statutes and emergency declarations to close businesses and restrict the movement of individuals outside their homes. a widely cited report assumes that multi-layered non-pharmaceutical interventions, also known as community mitigation measures, will be necessary for at least three months to reduce peak impacts on health systems. while we wait for a safe and effective vaccine, some degree of community mitigation may be needed on an intermittent basis-in some places at some times-for the year or longer it takes to develop and widely distribute a safe and effective vaccine. past experience shows that community mitigation-through a combination of government supports, protections, and restrictions-is an important strategy to slow the spread of viral epidemics in addition to efforts to increase access to and the capacity of the health care system and the development and deployment of effective medical countermeasures such as vaccines and antivirals (see figure ). early evidence suggests that spread of the virus by people whose infections are not detected may play a particularly important role in covid- , potentially making more targeted containment strategies-measures to test and isolate individuals known to be infected and trace and quarantine their known contacts-insufficient in the absence of broader community mitigation measures to reduce out-of-household contacts among the general population. due to the unprecedented nature of the covid- crisis, the intrusive measures currently in force across many us jurisdictions are largely untested. benefits are anticipated based on modeling and planning exercises developed in preparation for a novel influenza pandemic, and limited studies of measures implemented in mainland china, hong kong, and parts of europe in ongoing research and surveillance are needed to assess these measures in real time. legal authority to impose restrictions on businesses, individuals, and travel may be inferred from the broad public health powers available to state governments and specific delegations of emergency powers to governors and mayors, but these measures are subject to individual rights constraints. by the end of march , lawsuits challenging gathering bans and stay at home orders were pending in the new hampshire state court system and the eastern district of new york. suits requesting injunctive relief for people in criminal custody and immigrant civil detention were pending in at least three federal jurisdictions. several suits on behalf of legal practices, firearms retailers, abortion service providers were also pending in multiple jurisdictions. more court challenges are likely to come as restrictions remain in place for weeks and months. modeling studies and cdc guidelines for pandemic influenza suggest that closing schools and other places where people gather, as every state has done to some extent in response to covid- , impedes the spread of epidemics. school closures have been deployed on a limited basis by individual districts in the us to control the spread of novel influenza viruses, with encouraging results. particularly when schools and workplaces close, it may be necessary to close other places where people would otherwise congregate. state and local restrictions on business operations under penalty of citations, fines, and loss of licenses have been ordered in nearly every us jurisdiction in response to nearly all states and many local governments have ordered bars, restaurants, theaters, gyms, shopping malls, and other settings where people tend to gather to close or limit on-site occupancy. in a majority of jurisdictions, officials have gone further, closing all non-essential businesses to the public, with specified exceptions for health-care, food and agriculture, home repair, first responders, and a few other sectors deemed essential. many have also prohibited elective medical procedures that are not time-sensitive, with a goal of promoting social distancing and preserving health care capacity. at the furthest end of the spectrum, several kylie e c ainslie, et in late april , several jurisdictions indicated that they would begin to ease restrictions on businesses, but warned that limits may need to be re-tightened in response to disease trends. even in times of low community transmission, officials indicated that restrictions on density (e.g., capping occupancy at % of what is permitted under fire safety codes) and interactions among employees and customers (e.g., limiting nonessential retail to curbside pickup) may be in place for long durations. public health authority to regulate businesses under the banner of public health is vast, but constitutional requirements of due process and equal protection of the law bar these powers from being wielded in an arbitrary or capricious manner. in addition, heightened standards of review may apply to restrictions that implicate fundamental rights, such as the right to bear arms or access family planning services. businesses affected by closures could argue that mandated closure of uncrowded, but non-essential shops where customers and employees may maintain physical distance are arbitrary and not reasonably grounded in evidence about how novel coronavirus is transmitted. though authorities could defend these bans on the ground that enforcing physical distancing requirements within each facility would be too cumbersome. the economic impacts of restrictions on businesses have already been devastating. if maintained for a long duration, the effects could be catastrophic, particularly for low-income families and small businesses. congress, federal agencies, and state and local governments have begun to implement programs to provide financial assistance, direct delivery of food and other necessities, and legal protections from eviction and utility shut-offs. yet more supportive measures will undoubtedly be needed as the crisis continues to unfold. bans on large gatherings are a cornerstone of social distancing plans developed in pandemic preparedness exercises. in the us, these restrictions have been tightened as evidence of novel coronavirus community transmission mounted, from bans on groups of , to , to , to , to groups of any size. at times when community transmission is low in any given area, bans could be eased, raising the limit on attendance while requiring physical distancing to be practiced by attendees. physical distancing, particularly for long durations, can severely disrupt access to social and emotional supports. in another early court challenge to state social distancing measures, the plaintiff argued that new hampshire"s ban on large gatherings violates their first amendment rights to assembly and freedom of expression as well as fourteenth amendment right to due process. a suit filed in the eastern district of new york raised a similar challenge to new york"s gathering ban and stay at home order. by the end of march , more than half of states had gone further than banning gatherings by issuing mandates ordering residents to stay at home, with relatively broad exceptions for meeting essential needs and exercising outdoors, enforceable through criminal fines and jail time. while restrictions on gatherings are supported by public health emergency response guidelines, orders confining individuals to their homes are more controversial and have not been assessed as thoroughly in pandemic influenza planning. due to logistical constraints, even mandatory orders to stay at home are dependent on widespread voluntary compliance to be successful. compliance requires public acceptability and trust in government, which may be eroded if restrictions are harshly enforced or maintained for long durations. restrictions on assembly and involuntary confinement of individuals to their homes are typically subjected to the heightened judicial scrutiny, but may be justified by balancing the curtailment of individual liberty against compelling government needs. in the us, limitedduration curfews ordering individuals to stay indoors have occasionally been used by state and local officials to protect the public"s health and safety and prevent civil unrest in the event of natural disasters and other emergencies. courts reviewing challenges to covid- orders might also look to decisions upholding emergency orders restricting access to and movement within specified areas during limited periods of civil unrest. in , for example, a federal appellate court upheld an emergency restricted zone to protect public safety during a meeting of the world trade organization in downtown seattle. but long-term restrictions on activity outside the home by all residents without clear criteria or planning for when mandates might be eased or lifted are deeply problematic and require stronger justification that limited curfews or restricted zones. wholesale restrictions on personal movement do not allow for the individualized risk assessments courts have typically required to quarantine specific individuals infected or exposed to a communicable disease, as discussed below. though some restrictions, such as requirements to maintain a distance of at least six feet from non-household members, might be permissible in theory in light of the best available scientific evidence regarding the spread of novel coronavirus, enforcement on the ground could be highly problematic. even in the absence of prohibited discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or religion, a plaintiff could claim that spotty police enforcement was arbitrary and capricious. given that some local police departments have indicated they will be pursuing more proactive enforcement, threatening large fines and the possibility of jail time, the limits of public health authority to confine individuals could be tested in the courts as the pandemic continues to impact our lives in the months and years to come. some forms of travel restrictions and quarantine of individual travelers may be justified if they are truly necessary to protect people in areas with low community transmission from exposure to people who have recently traveled from areas with high transmission. guarded boundaries between or within us states and territories would raise difficult constitutional questions. bans on interstate travel imposed by state governments would have to navigate constitutional doctrines that constrain states from discriminating against non-residents and interfering with interstate commerce. the federal government has authority to close state borders pursuant to its authority to regulate interstate commerce, subject to individual rights constraints. limited geographic quarantines were established by local governments in some parts of the us more than a century ago to control bubonic plague. at least one lower federal court struck down a quarantine around a portion of san francisco, partly on the grounds that it discriminated against chinese americans and partly on the grounds that it confined the infected and the uninfected together without preventing the spread of disease within the cordon. reverse cordons with mandatory quarantine for all individuals permitted to enter from outside were established in some (mostly geographically isolated) local areas with low or no community transmission during the flu pandemic, and ad-hoc "shotgun quarantines" were adopted by some localities during yellow fever outbreaks in the south beginning in the s, but these measures do not appear to have been challenged in court. completely barring people from exiting an area severely affected by a disease outbreak, absent an assessment of the risks posed by individual travelers, would violate constitutional prohibitions against the deprivation of life and liberty without due process of law under almost every conceivable scenario. barring entry into an area where community transmission is low would implicate individual rights to travel. imposing a travelers" quarantine, as more than a dozen states have ordered for covid- , requiring individuals entering the area to be separated from others for a reasonable incubation period, would provide a less restrictive alternative to completely closed borders. mandatory restrictions in the absence of social supports to minimize secondary harms are deeply unjust. moreover, social supports maximize compliance with guidance and help maintain the public"s trust, bolstering the effectiveness of public health measures. upon initiation of school and workplace closures and guidance or orders to stay at home, governments should act immediately to ensure safe, sanitary, and accessible housing conditions for all. governmental responsibility should be exercised immediately to secure the health and safety of people in custody, detention, and foster care. wherever possible, people in custody should be released from crowded conditions and provided with supports for housing and other essential needs. people experiencing homelessness should be exempted from enforcement of mandatory orders to shelter in place (as most, but not all orders currently in effect have provided). moreover, safe, sanitary, and uncrowded shelter that is physically accessible for people with disabilities should be offered to people who are unhoused, experiencing homelessness, or living in communal settings. people who are experiencing domestic abuse should be proactively protected at a time when they may be cut off from outside contact and supports. safe and sanitary housing regulations should be proactively enforced to mitigate increased exposure to lead, mold, pest infestations, and other hazards, particularly for people living in low-income, federally-financed, or rental housing. federal, state, and local governments are acting to provide legal protections to preserve employment, income, housing, and utilities and financial assistance and direct delivery of essential goods and services for those in need. many of these measures are short-term, however. long-term measures may be required as the pandemic and our response to it unfolds in the coming months. over time, as community transmission is assessed to be minimal in some areas at some times, protective measures and accommodations will be particularly crucial for people who are at the highest risk of severe complications and death from covid- , who may need to stay at home even as others are able to return to work. though a relatively small number of vocal protesters have garnered media attention, the reality is that compliance with covid- community mitigation measures has been widespread and willing for the most part so far. due to logistical, legal, and ethical constraints, restrictions that are mandatory in theory rely on widespread voluntary compliance in practice. as levels of community transmission are assessed to be minimal in some places at some times, mandatory restrictions should be lifted and replaced with voluntary guidelines, but restrictions may need to be re-tightened periodically to keep the curve of the epidemic within health care capacity. throughout this crisis, sustained social supports to justify and enable safe compliance with restrictions and recommendations will be absolutely crucial to the success of the public health response to covid- . long-term, state-wide orders to close nearly all business operations and shelter in place were untested in us courts prior to the covid- pandemic. a small number of court precedents reviewing emergency communicable disease control measures and quarantines of individuals suspected of being exposed provide some guidance to courts reviewing challenges to covid- orders. in these pre-covid cases, judges evince a strong desire to defer to the scientific judgments of elected officials. in jew ho v. williamson, for example, judge william morrow assured authorities that he would "give the widest discretion" to actions taken "in the presence of a great calamity." but he also affirmed his grave constitutional responsibility to review government intrusions upon civil liberties. "is the regulation in this case a reasonable one?" he asked. "is it a proper regulation, directed to accomplish the purpose that appears to have been in view? that is a question for this court to determine." quarantines imposed on individuals, homes, and geographic districts were not an uncommon occurrence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. cases adjudicating legal issues arising from quarantine orders were almost exclusively handled by the state courts, however, and federal rights were not widely understood to be implicated. at the turn of the twentieth century, federal courts began to hear challenges based on individual rights protected under the fourteenth amendment"s guarantees of due process and equal protection. in pre-civil rights era communicable disease control cases, judges applied standards of review that were considerably more deferential than the strict scrutiny standard that civil rights era precedents would later adopt for review of infringements upon fundamental rights and suspect classifications (such as those based on race, ethnicity, or religious affiliation). person to person and place to place and public health methods for combatting it. dr. stephen, who appears to have been invoked as an expert by the plaintiffs, averred that no proper or scientific precautions have been taken by [the san francisco board of health] to prevent the spread of … disease. [they] have proceeded from erroneous theories to still more erroneous and unscientific practices and methods of dealing with the same; for, instead of quarantining the supposedly infected rooms or houses in which … deceased persons lived and died, and the persons who had been brought in contact with and been directly exposed to said disease, [the] defendants have quarantined, and are now maintaining a quarantine over, a large area of territory, and indiscriminately confining therein between ten and twenty thousand people, thereby exposing, and they are now exposing, to the infection of the said disease said large number of persons. informed by dr. stephen"s affidavit, judge morrow demonstrated a remarkably nuanced understanding of the distinction between individual quarantines confining individuals "afflicted" with a highly communicable disease "to their own domiciles until they have so far recovered as not to be liable to communicate the disease to others" with "the object … to confine the disease to the smallest possible number of people" and geographic quarantine (also known as cordon sanitaire), whereby officials "place , persons in one territory, and confine them there," at which point "the danger of such spread of disease is increased, sometimes in an alarming degree, because it is the constant communication of people that are so restrained or imprisoned that causes the spread of the disease." morrow also decried the discriminatory character of the sanitary cordon, which operated almost exclusively against people of chinese descent. his order took a measured approach, lifting the general quarantine "thrown around the entire district" while affirming the authority of city officials "to maintain a quarantine around such places as it may have reason to believe are infected by contagious or infectious diseases." jacobson v. massachusetts, the case which the us supreme court upheld a compulsory vaccination mandate adopted during a smallpox outbreak, adopted a far more deferential posture toward the judgement of the massachusetts legislature and cambridge board of health as to matters of science. jacobson was also an emergency powers case, though it has been widely applied in non-emergency contexts, such as challenges to school vaccination mandates. the cambridge board of health adopted an adult smallpox vaccination mandate following its declaration of a local smallpox outbreak. thus, the court framed the case in terms of "authority to determine for all what ought to be done in an emergency." id. at . dr. stephen described himself as having "held various official positions, such as surgeon to the police, medical officer of health, parish medical officer, and public vaccinator," and having, "for the past thirteen years in the state of california," "given much time and study to the literature of the bubonic plague." he also noted that he was "the regularly appointed physician of the chines [sic] empire reform association, which numbers several thousand chinese residents in the state of california." id. at . id. id. at . u.s. ( ). id. at . the jacobson court grappled mightily with how to judge elected officials" adoption of compulsory public health measures in the absence of perfect information about risks and benefits. justice harlan"s opinion quoted a lengthy passage from a new york state court decision upholding a school vaccination mandate to prevent smallpox outbreaks: the appellant claims that vaccination does not tend to prevent smallpox, but tends to bring about other diseases, and that it does much harm, with no good….the common belief, however, is that it has a decided tendency to prevent the spread of this fearful disease, and to render it less dangerous to those who contract it…. the possibility that the belief may be wrong, and that science may yet show it to be wrong, is not conclusive; for the legislature has the right to pass laws which, according to the common belief of the people, are adapted to prevent the spread of contagious diseases…. while we do not decide, and cannot decide, that vaccination is a preventive of smallpox, we take judicial notice of the fact that this is the common belief of the people of the state, and, with this fact as a foundation, we hold that the statute in question is a health law, enacted in a reasonable and proper exercise of the police power. jacobson upheld the compulsory vaccination mandate as consistent "with the liberty which the constitution the united states secures to every person against deprivation by the state." justice harlan recognized that individual liberty is not "an absolute right in each person to be, in all times and in all circumstances, wholly free from restraint." rather, "every wellordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand." harlan upheld the emergency vaccination mandate on the grounds that the board of health reasonably believed "it was necessary for the public health or the public safety." in closing, however, harlan "observe[d]… that the police power of a state … may be exerted in such circumstances, or by regulations so arbitrary and oppressive in particular cases, as to justify the interference of the courts to prevent wrong and oppression." the court declined to "usurp the functions of another branch of government," by "adjudg[ing], as matter of law, that the mode adopted under the sanction of the state, to protect the people at large was arbitrary, and not justified by the necessities of the case." but its decision also recognized that the "acknowledged power of a local community to protect itself against an epidemic threatening the safety of all might be exercised in particular circumstances and in reference to particular persons in such an arbitrary, unreasonable manner, or might go so far beyond what was reasonably required for the safety of the public, as to authorize or compel the courts to interfere for the protection of such persons." surprisingly many courts have continued to employ jacobson"s pre-civil rights era standard of "non-arbitrary and justified by public health necessity" (with "necessity" not being used in the strict sense of the word) to judge routine compulsory public health measures (especially school vaccination mandates) while declining to decide whether strict scrutiny applies. lower federal court decisions on challenges to individual quarantine orders for smallpox and ebola virus disease are also instructive for judges fielding covid- constitutional challenges. although these cases have been decided during and after the civil rights era, in which courts recognized the importance of more searching judicial review to protect fundamental rights to liberty, their approach to scrutinizing emergency communicable disease control orders has been non-strict in ways that mirror jacobson and jew ho (though without necessarily citing them). in , the federal district court for the eastern district of new york declined to release ellen siegel from a federal quarantine facility where she was being held after visiting stockholm, sweden at a time when it was designated a "small pox infected local area" by swedish health authorities. in us ex rel. siegel v. shinnick, judge john francis dooling, jr. carefully reviewed the international sanitary regulations adopted by the world health organization (who), which deferred to the declarations of local health officials as to when a local area is "free of local infection." he also noted who guidelines indicating that declaration of local infection could be safely terminated "twenty-eight days after the last reported case of small pox dies, recovers or is isolated." siegel argued that the designation of stockholm as affected by smallpox at the time of her visit was in error because (as both parties agreed) the most recently reported case had later been determined to be a false positive. dooling could have done the math himself and determined that, following who guidelines, stockholm could have ( - ) . but these orders do not trigger the same degree of deference from courts that emergency orders adopted under conditions that limit the feasibility of rigorous scientific risk assessments and so i do not address them here, given limits on space. been designated safe from smallpox prior to siegel"s arrival. but instead he deferred to swedish health authorities: it does not appear that others are legally competent to (as they would be hopelessly handicapped in seeking to) make a determination on such a question as whether or not stockholm can now be regarded as not an infected local area on the basis that the last reported case went into isolation [more than days prior to siegel"s arrival]; responsibility for applying that standard rests with the territorial health administration and depends on whether, also, all measures of prophylaxis have been taken and maintained to prevent recurrence of the disease. it is idle and dangerous to suggest that private judgment or judicial ipse dixit can, acting on the one datum of the date june as the last identified and reported case, undertake to supercede [sic] the continuing declaration of the interested territorial health administration that stockholm is still a small pox infected local area. although he deferred to swedish health authorities" designation of stockholm as an affected area, judge dooling carefully reviewed the actions of the federal public health service, which ordered siegel"s quarantine upon her return to the us. in upholding the quarantine order, dooling pointed to the importance of an individualized risk assessment, "taking into account previous vaccinations and the possibilities of her exposure to infection." siegel was initially asked to present a certificate of vaccination against smallpox, but she had failed to produce detectable antibodies following a series of vaccination attempts and could not be certified as successfully vaccinated. dooling noted that federal health officials had not detailed siegel"s husband, who apparently had been successfully vaccinated prior to the trip to stockholm. the judge also emphasized the need to adopt less restrictive alternatives, where available. he urged "caution[] against light use of isolation," which "is not to be substituted for surveillance unless the health authority considers the risk of transmission of the infection by the suspect to be exceptionally serious." the order in siegel was, however, highly deferential to federal health officials" scientific risk assessment based on the best available evidence and relying on the precautionary principle. dooling noted that "the judgment required is that of a public health officer and not of a lawyer used to insist[ing] on positive evidence to support action; their task is to measure risk to the public and to seek for what can reassure and, not finding it, to proceed reasonably to make the public health secure. they deal in a terrible context and the consequences of mistaken indulgence can be irretrievably tragic. to supercede [sic] their judgment there must be a reliable showing of error." men" who testified on behalf of the federal defendants as "shar[ing] a concern that was evident and real and reasoned." in a footnote, dooling noted that the procedure followed by health officials was not directly constrained by federal or international regulations, but "remains a function of the gravity of the situation as measured by their expert judgments dispassionately formed." his description of the defendant"s "expert" and "dispassionate[]} determinations as not only reasoned but "evident and real" appears to be consistent with the "non-arbitrary and justified by the necessities of the case" standard applied by the jacobson court. more recently, state and federal courts fielded two lawsuits involving kaci hickox, a nurse who, upon her return from treating ebola patients in sierra leone, was briefly detained by federal health authorities for a health screening at newark international airport, then handed over to new jersey officials who held her under a state quarantine order, then released to her partner"s home state of maine where the governor ordered state troopers to guard her home and follow her movements while health officers from the state"s center for disease control monitored her temperature and symptoms daily. first, a state trial judge in maine was asked to impose a court-ordered home quarantine, which hickox resisted on the grounds that it was not based on a reasonable assessment of the risk she posed to others. hickox later filed a suit for damages in the federal district court in new jersey. in hickox v. mayhew, maine state trial court judge charles laverdiere, followed his predecessors in looking to guidelines from health agencies. in the press, hickox argued that because that she did not have any symptoms and the best available evidence demonstrated that transmission by asymptomatic individuals was not a concern, an involuntary quarantine was inappropriate. judge laverdiere ultimately determined that hickox could properly be subjected to an order mandating direct active monitoring (with direct observation by state health authorities at least once per day to review symptoms and monitor temperature with a second daily follow-up by phone), a less restrictive limitation on her liberty than the home quarantine restrictions the state had requested. in reaching this result, the judge noted that "the only information that the court has before it regarding the dangers of infection posed by" hickox, was from the affidavit of "shiela pinette, d.o., director of the maine center for disease control and prevention, together with the attachments from the u.s. centers for disease control." in particular, both parties agreed that hickox was "asymptomatic (no fever or other symptoms consistent with ebola), as of the last check pursuant to her direct active monitoring." judge laverdiere followed dr. pinette"s conclusion that the imposition of direct active monitoring was functionally dictated by cdc"s (voluntary) guidelines: "therefore the guidance issued by u.s. cdc states that she is subject to direct active monitoring. health care workers in the "some risk" category require direct active monitoring for the -day incubation period." in his concluding "observations," laverdiere noted that he was "fully aware of the misconceptions, misinformation, bad science and bad information being spread from shore to shore … with respect to ebola" and "that people are acting out of fear and that this fear is not entirely rational. however, whether that fear is rational or not, it is present and it is real." the judge chided hickox to ensure that her "actions at this point, as a health care professional, need to demonstrate her full understanding of human nature and the real fear that exists" and "guide herself accordingly." in a subsequent suit arising out of her initial quarantine in new jersey, hickox"s constitutional arguments were rejected, but she eventually reached a settlement on state law grounds that included new protections for people quarantined in new jersey. in hickox v. christie, federal district court judge kevin mcnulty had the benefits of time and hindsight. he fielded the suit for damages several months after the quarantine on hickox had been lifted, when it was clear that she never contracted ebola virus and ebola panic among americans had passed. still, judge mcnulty relied on cdc guidance to justify the state"s quarantine. noting that he did "not need to make any finding as to its accuracy," he "simply note[d] that the authorities could reasonably have relied on it" at the time they detained hickox. unlike laverdiere, mcnulty took a somewhat more skeptical stance toward cdc guidance, which adopted a less cautious approach toward exposed but asymptomatic individuals than new jersey officials applied. mcnulty pointed out that cdc guidance did not automatically dictate how hickox should have been handled, because the guidance "contain[ed] recommendations, and it note[d] the importance of public health officials" exercise of their judgment." mcnulty declined to formally endorse requirements of individualized risk assessments and the least restrictive means, which public health law experts have urged are constitutionally required for mandatory quarantines of individuals believed to pose a risk of transmitting communicable disease. he "assume[d] without deciding that the… "individualized assessment" of the individual"s illness and ability or willingness to abide by treatment can, mutatis mutandis, be adapted to the situation of a temporary detention for observation based on a risk of infection." ultimately, he concluded that "an erroneous application of cdc guidelines does not correspond to a constitutional cause of action." federal guidelines have struggled to keep pace with the restrictions imposed by governments in response to the spread of sars-cov- . with respect to community mitigation and non-pharmaceutical interventions, on march , cdc quietly posted a document titled "implementation of mitigation strategies for communities with local covid- transmission." described as "a framework for actions which local and state health departments can recommend in their community to both prepare for and mitigate community transmission of covid- ," this document recommended that "these actions should be guided by the local characteristics of disease transmission, demographics, and public health and healthcare system capacity." in places with "substantial" community transmission, defined as occurring when there is "[l]arge scale community transmission," with "healthcare staffing significantly impacted, multiple cases within communal settings like healthcare facilities, schools, mass gatherings etc.," the framework recommended that "[a]ll individuals should limit community movement and adapt to disruptions in routine activities (e.g., school and/or work closures) according to guidance from local officials." the framework additionally recommended that in periods of substantial community transmission, organizations should "cancel community and faith-based gatherings of any size." separately, cdc issued guidelines for large community events and mass gatherings recommending cancellation of "gatherings of more than people for organizations that serve higher-risk populations." notably, even as nearly every state issued mandatory orders restricting the operation of commercial businesses, cdc"s only guidance for "keeping commercial establishments safe" recommended disinfection of surfaces, steps to stagger customer flow and frequent hand washing, while the cdc website suggested businesses "[c]onsider establishing policies and practices for social distancing … if recommended by state and local health authorities." in mid-march, cdc also issued a series of specific guidance documents for specific localities and states, including the cities of santa clara, seattle, and new rochelle, and the states of florida and massachusetts. notably the cdc guidance for santa clara recommended "laser focused" and less restrictive interventions that were inconsistent with the county-wide shelter-in- place order the santa clara health officer issued a day earlier. cdc guidance for other locations similarly recommended less stringent measures than state and local authorities had already adopted. the white house issued competing guidance on march . the " days to stop the spread" guidelines, later amended to " days," recommended that certain groups-people who feel ill, people who test positive for coronavirus and their family members, and people who are older or who have serious underlying health conditions that put them at increased risk-should stay at home. it also recommended that everyone should "avoid social gatherings in groups of more than people," "eating or drinking at bars, restaurants, and food courts," and "discretionary travel, shopping trips, and social visits." with respect to closures, the guidelines noted that "[g]overnors in states with evidence of community transmission should close schools in affected and surrounding areas" and "[i]n states with evidence of community transmission, bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed." this guidance adopted a far less cautious stance toward mitigating the spread of novel coronavirus than the mandatory stay-at-home and non-essential business closure orders in effect in the majority of states at the time the white house guidelines were released. subsequently, on april , the white house released new "guidelines for opening up america again," which set forth a phased approach to resuming social gatherings, resuming elective medical procedures, and reopening schools and the types of businesses that the previous white house guidelines had recommended for closure (including bars, restaurants, gyms, and venues where groups of people gather).. the guidelines established "gating" criteria for reopening "large venues" and gyms after a sustained downward trajectory in the number of syndromic and reported cases for days and at a point when hospitals are able to treat patients without resorting to crisis standards of care and to test health care workers exposed to novel coronavirus. if the same gating criteria are met following the reopening of gathering places in phase one, states were advised to proceed to phase two, in which schools, bars, and other higherrisk settings are reopened. the few courts that have reviewed early covid- civil liberties challenges to date have followed pre-covid precedents in relying on voluntary guidelines from international and federal authorities, but that may prove more challenging as restrictions imposed by state and local governments exceed what cdc has endorsed, particularly given that the white house is offering guidelines that conflict with cdc"s. in binford v. sununu, a new hampshire state trial court upheld the state"s ban on gatherings of or more people (new hampshire later lowered the limit for groups) and prohibition of dine-in service at bars and restaurants, rejecting the plaintiffs" argument that these restrictions impermissibly infringed upon his rights under the first and fourteenth amendments. in an opinion issued on march , nine days after the white house"s " days to stop the spread" guidance went into effect, judge john c. kissinger noted that these restrictions were "clearly supported by the recommendations put forth by the white house and cdc" without specifying which recommendations were applicable. judge kissinger undoubtedly reached the right result in upholding the ban on gatherings of or more people, but he based his holding on troubling reasoning. adopting the position that the governor has "authority to suspend civil liberties" in an emergency, the court applied a "good faith/some factual basis" test to uphold the restrictions. this test, which comes from an th circuit case upholding a nightly curfew in miami-dade county in the aftermath of hurricane andrew, eschews the courts" constitutional responsibility to determine whether the state has adopted "a proper regulation, directed to accomplish the purpose that appears to have been in view?" in the words of judge morrow in jew ho. the lack of clear guidelines from cdc supporting the state"s reasonable measure may have played a role in judge kissinger"s decision to resort to the extreme of adopting a suspension rule. in its objection to the plaintiff"s complaint, the state did not argue for suspension. it cited the th circuit hurricane case, but without specifically referring to or endorsing the suspension rule. the state also cited specific cdc and white house guidelines, which it described as recommending cancellation of planned gatherings of or more people, but (as noted above) the cdc"s guidance was limited to organizations "that serve higher risk populations" and neither guideline specifically endorsed mandatory limits on bar and restaurant service. in a situation where conflicting guidelines have been issued, a court applying a rational basis test or jacobson"s standard should defer to the choice of a political branch to follow the more cautious guidelines. in challenges based on civil liberties, this will typically result in upholding restrictions. but at the time binford was decided, no federal guidelines recommended bans on gatherings for the general population, leaving the state with little cover to defend its ban. in a higher profile case, the fifth circuit upheld application of the texas emergency order prohibiting elective medical care to all abortions, partially on the grounds that cdc had recommended preserving face masks and the centers for medicare and medicaid services had binford v. sununu, supra note . recommended limiting unnecessary medical procedures to reduce opportunities for disease transmission. in re abbott relied on a warped characterization of jacobson as establishing "the controlling standards, established by the supreme court over a century ago, for adjudging the validity of emergency measures." the majority set aside the heightened review typically applied to restrictions on abortion in favor of a rule that "the scope of judicial authority to review rights-claims" during "a public health crisis" is limited to cases where "a statute purporting to have been enacted to protect the public health, the public morals, or the public safety, has no real or substantial relation to those objects, or is, beyond all question, a plain, palpable invasion of rights secured by the fundamental law." moreover, the fifth circuit suggested that in a crisis, this minimal level of scrutiny applies equally to "one"s right to peaceably assemble, to publicly worship, to travel, and even to leave one"s home." although not explicitly endorsing a suspension principle, in re abbott"s manipulation of jacobson achieves essentially the same result: applying an exceedingly low standard of review in times of crisis. as robert gatter argued in his critique of ebola quarantine cases, judges" "responsibility to assure [relevant scientific] facts are discovered and accounted for … is inherent in even the most deferential standard of judicial review. a court asked to address whether a public health agency has acted reasonably and without abusing its discretion need not simply defer to the expertise of the agency without requiring that the agency to identify and explain the logic the agency deployed to reach its conclusion that quarantine was appropriate." the same is true of officials charged with developing emergency communicable disease control guidelines that, while technically voluntary, are likely to be relied on to enforce involuntary-and highly intrusive-measures by state and local governments. clear guidelines developed by cdc through transparent processes that include publication of peer reviewed analyses and literature reviews give states important cover for defending emergency orders in the face of civil liberties challenges. in the absence of an "easy" route to defending state and local restrictions as consistent with evidence-based guidelines, judges who wish to uphold emergency orders may resort to less searching forms of review. though the result-upholding the restrictions-may be the right one in most cases, a knee-jerk approach that endorses a governor"s authority to suspend the civil liberties protected by the federal constitution will not be helpful to developing a sustainable long-term strategy for mitigating the current pandemic or for future public health law preparedness efforts. as the fifth circuit"s coronavirus abortion decisions demonstrate, when courts abandon the ordinary levels of even if conflicting guidelines are released-as has been the case with separate sets of covid- guidelines coming from the white house and the cdc-courts following jacobson"s standard of review should defer to elected officials" choice as to which guidelines they adopt. a cautious set of guidelines may provide adequate cover to states to enforce some forms of community mitigation even if alternative, less cautious guidelines are available. and if a higher standard of review applies, as is the case for abortion restrictions, then the availability of a less restrictive alternative can and should lead courts to question the necessity of harsh limits. governments must earn the public"s trust by acting transparently, fairly, and effectively and communicating their plans and guidance clearly. the way we respond to the covid- crisis-how state and local governments wield authoritarian powers necessary to combat the spread of disease and how we protect the people who are most vulnerable to the disease itself and the secondary harms that will arise out of our efforts to combat it-will shape public health law and the society we live in for generations to come. ) (dismissing suit for damages by class of individuals quarantined under state orders in connecticut nurse says she won't have officials violate 'my civil rights new jersey accepts rights for people in quarantine to end ebola suit for a critical assessment of cdc"s ebola guidance and its effect on related court decisions, see robert gatter, ebola, quarantine, and flawed cdc policy, u. miami bus. l. rev. ( ); see also robert gatter, three lost ebola facts and public health legal preparedness cdc, implementation of mitigation strategies for communities cdc, resources for large community events & mass gatherings what every american and community can do now to decrease the spread of the coronavirus interim guidance for businesses and employers to plan and respond to coronavirus disease s recommendations for day mitigation strategies for days to slow the spread was later revised and replaced with days to slow the spread, the president's coronavirus guidelines for america trump announces guidelines for opening up america again guidelines: opening up american again citing centers for disease control and prevention three lost ebola facts, supra note key: cord- - embihmf authors: wagner, aaron b.; hill, elaine l.; ryan, sean e.; sun, ziteng; deng, grace; bhadane, sourbh; martinez, victor hernandez; wu, peter; li, dongmei; anand, ajay; acharya, jayadev; matteson, david s. title: social distancing merely stabilized covid‐ in the us date: - - journal: stat (int stat inst) doi: . /sta . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: embihmf social distancing measures have been imposed across the us in order to stem the spread of covid‐ . we quantify the reduction in doubling rate, by state, that is associated with this intervention. using the earlier of k‐ school closures and restaurant closures, by state, to define the start of the intervention, and considering daily confirmed cases through april rd, , we find that social distancing is associated with a statistically‐significant (p < . ) reduction in the doubling rate for all states except for nebraska, north dakota, and south dakota, when controlling for false discovery, with the doubling rate averaged across the states falling from . ( . , . ) days(‐ ) to . (‐ . , . ) days(‐ ). however, we do not find that social distancing has made the spread subcritical. instead, social distancing has merely stabilized the spread of the disease. we provide an illustration of our findings for each state, including estimates of the effective reproduction number, r, both with and without social distancing. we also discuss the policy implications of our findings. we have used k- school (education week ) and restaurant (wida ) closures as indicators of interventions. these were chosen because they represent the first widely-disruptive social distancing measures that were imposed. if a school closure was announced in the evening, we consider it as applying the next day. if closure was announced on a weekend, we used the first weekday for which schools were closed. the earlier of restaurant closing and school closing is defined as the intervention date for each state (table b ) . taking the earlier of the two reduces the likelihood of anticipatory behavior. for the analysis in appendix a on the confirmed case delay, we use data on covid- cases by illness onset recorded by the (cdc ). we reference data on testing in new york state in section . this data was obtained from the covid tracking project (covid tracking project ). we focus on estimating the doubling rate, β, measured in inverse days, of new infections across the fifty states and the district of columbia , both before and after the intervention. we assume that during each period, the number of new infections per day is expressed as where n is a discrete time index, α is a constant, and {wn} is a mean-zero gaussian noise process. the parameters α and β are assumed to vary both with the intervention and across states. other than the change at the intervention, we assume that β is constant over time within a state. this is tantamount to modeling the spread of the disease as a branching process (athreya & ney ) , which is appropriate if the time horizon is sufficiently short that the fraction of susceptible individuals is approximately constant. when working with branching-process models of infectious diseases, it is common to consider the expected number of new infections caused by a single infected individual; in epidemiology this is called the effective reproduction number, r. if r > , then the number of infected individual grows exponentially and we say the process is supercritical. if r < , it contracts exponentially, and we say the process is subcritical. if r = , we call the process critical. one can compute r from the doubling rate β and the distribution of the serial interval using the lotka-euler equation (dublin & lotka ; feller ) . for any serial interval distribution, this transformation maps positive β values to superunity r values and negative β values to subunity r values. we focus on the doubling rate, rather than r, because it can be more directly estimated from the time-series of confirmed cases and because it is more useful for making short-term predictions about confirmed case counts and hospital loads. one can obtain a simple upper bound on r in terms of β and the mean serial interval µ by applying jensen's inequality to the lotka-euler equation (wallinga & lipsitch ) , prior work has estimated µ at days for covid- (du et al. ; nishiura., lintona, & akhmetzhanova ) . all of the doubling-rate estimates in this paper can be translated to estimated upper bounds on r using this inequality, although the resulting bounds are less certain than the underlying estimates of β due to the exponentiation and uncertainty about µ. considering each state in isolation, we estimate the doubling rate before and after the intervention as follows. let cn denote the number of new confirmed cases on day n, where the index n = refers to the first day after march st for which the state records at least two consecutive days of positive confirmed cases. this convention is designed to appropriately handle states with one very early case (e.g., washington) followed by many days of zero cases. we model cn as proportional to a delayed version of the quantity in ( ): where < θ ≤ represents the fraction of newly infected people that are confirmed to have the disease; note that θ can be absorbed into α for the purposes of modeling cn. we apply the transformation including the effect of the intervention (but ignoring the effect of the add-one transformation to cn), we model {yn} as where (·) is the standard indicator function, and {wn} satisfies where {zn} is an independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) gaussian sequence with mean zero and variance σ , making {wn} a first-order autoregressive [ar( )] gaussian process. the parameter d represents the state-specific intervention date defined in the previous section. thus d is known but state-dependent. the quantity n, which we call the confirmed case delay, represents the average time (in days) between when someone is infected with sars-cov- and when they are confirmed to have covid- and included in the published counts. we assume that n is integervalued. the parameters β and β are the doubling rates before and after, respectively, the intervention. the unknown parameters in the model are α, β , β , n, γ, σ . we are particularly interested in β , β , and n. for each of the states, we fit the model using two approaches, which differ primarily in how they handle the confirmed case delay, n. the first, which we call the learned-delay approach, fits n to the data on par with the other parameters in the model. this is tantamount to finding a changepoint in the {yn} time-series for which there is a significant difference between the doubling rates. the difference between the changepoint epoch and d then forms a point estimate of n. for this purpose, we use an algorithm that declines to identify a changepoint (effectively setting (fearnhead, maidstone, & letchford ) . for states with a detected changepoint, we then obtain a point estimate of n in addition to the other parameters, which can vary by state. this approach assumes γ = , so that the errors are taken to be i.i.d. the second approach, which we call fixed-delay, takes the confirmed case delay to be n = for all states. this choice can be justified as follows. first, . is the median estimate of n across the states obtained by the learned-delay method (see fig. ). second, estimating the confirmed case delay from a separate analysis of cdc data gives a point estimate days, as described in appendix a. the fixed-delay method does not require that γ = , i.e., it allows for {wn} to be ar( ). for both methods, the unknown parameters are estimated via maximum likelihood. the code for both methods is available, along with copies of the datasets used and the scripts needed to produce the figures in the paper (wagner et al. ). tables b and b in appendix b show the results of the learned-delay model and fixed-delay model, respectively. fig. compiles all of the findings from both models. table b includes estimates of the confirmed case delay, n, for those states for which a changepoint is detected by the learned-delay model. this column of the table is plotted in fig. , and a histogram is provided in fig. . the median is . days, which supports the choice used in the fixed-delay model, as noted earlier. the model declines to declare a changepoint for three states, whose standard plot is shown fig. . for such states, this model does not find evidence of the efficacy of the social distancing measures imposed. for nebraska in particular, the intervention occurred quite late (apr. rd), so it is possible that the change is simply not observed in the available data. it should also be noted that these states had some of the lowest pre-intervention doubling rates, according to fig. . standard plots (showing the fitted learned-delay model) for each state are provided in figs. b -b in appendix b. as exemplars, we consider three states that were among the first in the us to have confirmed cases, namely new york, california, and washington. these states have large numbers of confirmed cases, making the data from these states of higher quality. since the number of deaths is at least an order of magnitude lower than the number of cases, for most states the former is too noisy to be of much use. for these states, however, it provides a useful comparison with the confirmed case counts. the results of our analysis for these three states is shown in fig. . for all three states, we see two regimes for the growth rate for both the confirmed cases and deaths data. the growth rate begins in a supercritical state indicating exponential growth. the growth rate then decreases substantially, presumably indicating that the intervention is making an impact, albeit with a delayed effect. however, we note that the number of confirmed cases and deaths does not rapidly decline after the change for california and new york, whereas the washington plot appears to show a decrease in both cases and deaths as a result of the intervention. to determine the significance level of this finding, we turn to the fixed-delay model, which provides approximate % confidence intervals for the doubling rates and their difference (see table b ) using the student's t distribution to account for the small sample size. it also provides approximate p-values against the null hypotheses that β ≥ , β ≤ , and β ≥ β . we utilize a one-sided t-test for both cases, with a significance level of . . a one-sided test is appropriate since we hypothesize the pre-intervention period should show signs of rapid growth in the number of cases, and after the intervention, there should be a significant decrease in the doubling rate. we find that the intervention is associated with a statisticallysignificant decrease in the doubling rate (p < . ) for all states, even after controlling for false discovery rates using the benjamini-hochberg procedure (benjamini & hochberg ) , except for nebraska, south dakota, and north dakota. when controlling for false discovery, we are not able to conclude that any of the states have achieved a negative β ; washington comes the closest with respect to statistical significance. recall that nebraska, south dakota, and north dakota are also the states for which the learned-delay method does not find a significant changepoint. the point estimates across the ensemble of states also show a substantial reduction in the doubling rate associated with the intervention, with the post-intervention doubling rate being close to critical. the pre-intervention doubling-rate averaged across all states is . ( . , . ) days − . post-intervention, it is . (− . , . ) days − , the difference being − . (− . , − . ) days − . using eq. ( ), these estimates translate to estimated upper bounds on r pre-and post-intervention of . and . , respectively, or a % reduction in contact between contagious and susceptible individuals. it should be emphasized, however, that there is a considerable variation in these values among the states, and the r induced from the average doubling rate is distinct from the average of the induced r values. estimated bounds on r for each state are provided in table b and fig. . thus while this study finds social distancing measures to be effective at reducing the spread of sars-cov- , it does not find conclusive evidence that they have pushed the spread into the subcritical (β < ) regime. across the ensemble of states, the post-intervention slopes are in fact quite close to zero. the mean slope of the point estimates is . days − , as noted earlier, with of the states having a post-intervention doubling rate between − . and . days − , which corresponds to a doubling or halving time exceeding twenty days. this indicates that the pandemic across many regions plateaued, rather than contracted, post-intervention, with each infected individual infecting nearly one other individual on average (r = ). in those locations, covid- under social distancing provides a naturally-occurring example of a near-critical branching process (athreya & ney ) , and the observed plateau should be contrasted with the symmetrical apex that is presumed in some predictive models (ihme covid- health service utilization forecasting team ). for the fixed-delay method, we conducted a sensitivity analysis on the order of the autoregressive noise process and found that allowing for higher-order dependence did not significantly improve the fit. for each state, we conducted a ljung-box test for up to lags on the residuals of our fixed-delay model, and after adjusting for multiple testing using an fdr procedure (benjamini & hochberg ) , none of the states showed evidence of higher-order autocorrelation. we also tested for residual normality using kolmogorov-smirnov test, and also found that after adjusting for multiple testing, none of the states showed statistically-significant deviations from normality. this study finds that the social distancing measures enacted in the us are associated with a significant decrease in the doubling rate of covid- infections. indeed, the exponential growth that was observed pre-intervention was stabilized with the intervention. the study thus provides support for the use of social distancing measures. the study also points to the importance of timeliness when imposing such measures. roughly speaking, the number of daily new cases was doubling every three days pre-intervention, and became constant with the intervention. as such, we expect that intervening just three days earlier would have halved the number of daily new cases post-intervention. given the substantial social and economic costs of such measures, there is interest in the question of when they should be relaxed. as of late april, some states have already begun this process with georgia allowing certain businesses, such as gyms and barbershops, to reopen (hagemann & booker ). in fact, alabama, florida, georgia, mississippi, south carolina and tennessee announced a coordinated attempt to reopen (dixon ; mcardle ) . standard plots for these states are shown in fig. . since a systematic relaxation of social distancing will presumably increase the doubling rate, from a public health perspective it is advisable to relax such measures only when there is evidence that the spread has become subcritical. among negative doubling rates, those that are farther from zero (i.e., are larger in absolute value) allow for more relaxation of social distancing measures without the spread returning to supercriticality. we see that the curves for these states appear similar to those for the early states in fig. . in particular, we see a substantial change in the growth rate occurring some days after the intervention, but the spread does not appear to have become subcritical, with the exception of south carolina and possibly florida. this study finds that other states, such as idaho, vermont, montana, washington, and hawaii have a stronger basis for relaxing social distancing at this time. the lack of clear subcriticality among the post-intervention doubling rates suggests that existing social distancing measures will need to remain in place for some time. on the other hand, it is possible that a subset of the existing social distancing measures are responsible for the observed reductions in the doubling rate. if this is the case, then the remaining measures could be relaxed with no harmful effect. also, any additional measures taken, such as contract tracing or the use of masks, will tend to reduce the doubling rate further. finally, in the absence of a change in interventions, the doubling rate will tend to decrease over time as the population of susceptible individuals decreases. our analysis relies on the number of confirmed cases of covid- reported by federal, state, territorial, and local authorities. beyond the delay between infection and confirmation, which was discussed earlier, this statistic likely underestimates the number of actual cases, and it could be subject to selection bias. we note, however, that if the confirmed case counts reflect a constant fraction θ of the actual number of cases, as assumed in our model, then this undercount will not materially affect the estimation of the doubling rate β since θ · cn and cn grow at the same exponential rate. likewise, the doubling rates in different subpopulations cannot diverge so long as those subpopulations are sufficiently connected, making sampling bias less of a concern. of greater concern is variability in the availability of tests, as temporal variation in testing could affect the estimates of the doubling rate. new york state, for instance, saw a rapid increase in the number of daily tests followed by a plateauing around march th, as shown in fig. . this approximately coincides with the detected changepoint in the number of confirmed cases by the learned-delay method. it is possible that for some states, the abrupt change that we detect in confirmed cases does not reflect an actual change in the spread of disease but only a change in detection capabilities. controlling for this effect is challenging because the data on the number of tests is subject to additional types of errors. states vary in whether their test counts report the number of distinct people tested or the number of tests performed, and whether they represent the number of tests taken or completed. data on the number of tests is also not available for all of the states for the time interval considered here, as some states initially reported only confirmed cases. one could potentially rely on the number of deaths attributed to covid- instead of the number of confirmed cases. this approach is subject to four complications, however. first, the mean time between infection and death is presumably longer than the time between infection and mitigating this concern, we note that for new york, the number of tests plateaued slightly before the number of cases did. we also note that data on deaths and hospitalizations, while lower in quality than the number of confirmed cases, are broadly consistent with the findings based on the confirmed case count alone. notably, we do not see pronounced increases or decreases in deaths or hospitalizations post-intervention for states in which the estimated doubling rate post-intervention is near zero. we also do not see a saturation in the fraction of positive tests, which would indicate an uncaptured exponential increase in the number of actual covid- patients. finally, several states have continued to see supercritical growth post-intervention. another limitation of our analysis is that it treats states separately and thereby ignores the influence that neighboring states have on one another. nor does it capitalize on the potential similarity among the model parameters for similar states. we also assume an unchanging reservoir of susceptible individuals; an sir-type model (e.g., martcheva ( ) ) is appropriate when the fraction of the population that is exposed to the virus varies over the period under study. our analysis assumes a single changepoint when the first large-scale social distancing measures are imposed. it cannot distinguish among the relative benefits of different interventions imposed around the same time. it also does not account for anticipatory behavioral changes that could have preceded the formal imposition of interventions. several factors, for which this study does not control, could have contributed to differing doubling rates between the pre-and post-intervention periods, separate from the social distancing measures considered here. these include improvements in treatment, changes in the weather, and the adoption of mask-wearing. an analysis that controls for these effects would be valuable, as would one that used mobility data instead of state policies as the input. subsequent analyses may require additional changepoints as states relax, and possibly reimpose, social distancing measures, however. the confirmed case delay could also vary over time as a result of changing testing protocols. the data that support the findings of this study are openly available from the new york the quantity n is the sum of the mean incubation time and the mean time between symptom onset and confirmed diagnosis. various works have estimated the mean incubation time to be days (backer, klinkenberg, & wallinga ; lauer et al. ; li et al. ) . we focus here on estimating the time between symptom onset and confirmed diagnosis. we estimate this quantity using data from the cdc (cdc ). the cdc reports covid- cases in the united states by date of illness onset from january , , to april , , as well as by date of confirmed diagnosis (fig. a , top) . the cdc warns that estimates are not accurate after april , due to difficulty in accurately determining illness onset after community spread began. we truncate the time-series so that both end when their respective cumulative counts reach , (fig. a , middle) . the lag between illness onset and case confirmation is determined using a normalized cross-correlation operation (fig. a , bottom) . the lag is estimated to be days. when added to the incubation time, this results in a total time of days from exposure to confirmed test, which essentially coincides with the estimate of . days obtained in the body of the paper. an earlier work estimated the mean time from symptom onset to confirmed test to be . days (pellis et al. ) , which translates to a point estimate of n of about days. f o r r e v i e w o n l y evidence based management guideline for the covid- pandemic -review article flattening the curve for incarcerated populations -covid- in jails and prisons branching processes the incubation period of -ncov infections among travellers from wuhan controlling the false discovery rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing interrupted time series regression for the evaluation of public health interventions: a tutorial real time bayesian estimation of the epidemic potential of emerging infectious diseases covid- cases by date of illness-onset clinical characteristics of covid- in china strong social distancing measures in the united states reduced the covid- growth rate the covid tracking project inferring change points in the covid- spreading reveals the effectiveness of interventions southern governors create a covid- coalition and experts fear a 'perfect storm'. politico pro the serial interval of covid- from publicly reported confirmed cases. medrxiv on the true rate of natural increase, as exemplified by the population of the united states map: coronavirus and school closures covid- -navigating the uncharted detecting changes in slope with an penalty on the integral equation of renewal theory we signed up for this!" -student and trainee responses to the covid- pandemic asymptomatic transmission, the achilles' heel of current strategies to control covid- mild or moderate covid- branching processes. the annals of mathematical statistics forecasting the impact of the first wave of the covid- pandemic on hospital demand and deaths for the usa and european economic area countries. medrxiv the incubation period of coronavirus disease (covid- ) from publicly reported confirmed cases: estimation and application early transmission dynamics in wuhan, china, of novel coronavirus-infected pneumonia an introduction to mathematical epidemiology coalition of six southern states coordinating reopening economies interrupted time series analysis a poor-man's approach to the effective reproduction number: the covid- case. medrxiv the new york times coronavirus (covid- ) data in the united states serial interval of novel coronavirus (covid- ) infections challenges in control of covid- : short doubling time and long delay to effect of interventions use of interrupted time series analysis in evaluating health care quality improvements on qualitative robustness of the lotka-nagaev estimator for the offspring mean of a supercritical galton-watson process social distancing to slow the us covid- epidemic: an interrupted time-series analysis. medrxiv interrupted time series design to evaluate the effect of the icd- -cm to icd- -cm coding transition on injury hospitalization trends the metric we need to manage covid- the benefits and costs of flattening the curve for covid- . available at ssrn gdsc covid- github respostory how generation intervals shape the relationship between growth rates and reproductive numbers different epidemic curves for severe acute respiratory syndrome reveal similar impacts of control measures which states have closed restaurants and bars due to coronavirus? today key: cord- - p bkcnt authors: ghosh, abhishek; choudhury, shinjini; basu, aniruddha; mahintamani, tathagata; sharma, kshitiz; pillai, renjith r; basu, debasish; mattoo, s.k. title: extended lockdown and india's alcohol policy: a qualitative analysis of newspaper articles date: - - journal: int j drug policy doi: . /j.drugpo. . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: p bkcnt objectives: : since th march india went into a complete and extended lockdown. alcohol production, sales, and purchase were barred with this overnight prohibition order. we conducted a qualitative analysis of the media reports published within the first month of the nationwide lockdown with the objectives (a) using the media reports as indications of possible public health impact and population response of a sudden alcohol prohibition in india, (b) suggesting areas for future research. methods: : we performed thematic and content analysis of articles published online in national newspapers between the th march, and th april, . initial inductive, followed by deductive coding was done in this exploratory thematic analysis. results: the thematic analysis revealed four main themes: the beneficial aspects of the policy, the harmful aspects of the policy, non-compliance and attempts to change and / or subvert the policy, popularity and level of public buy-in of the policy. we generated relevant sub-themes under main themes. two additional themes, not directly related to the sudden prohibition, were use of stigmatizing language and ethical concerns. the content analysis showed the frequency of the appearance of the main themes and proportions of sub-themes and codes under those main themes. conclusion: : the harms, perceived from the media reports, should be balanced against the potential benefits. absence of a national-level alcohol policy was made apparent by the reflexive, disconnected , and conflictual measures. future research could systematically examine the potential ramifications of alcohol prohibition on public health, social, and economic aspects. according to the nation-wide survey published last year, an estimated million ( . percent) people in india consume alcohol and million ( . percent) were dependent on it (ambekar et al., ) . in addition to the number of people who are dependent on alcohol an additional million ( percent) experience hazardous consumption. more than % of alcohol consumed consisted of "spirits" (i.e. indian made foreign liquor and country-made liquor) (ambekar et al., ; benegal, ; gaunekar et al., ; mohan, chopra, ray, & sethi, ) . among the sear countries, india had the highest yearly per capita alcohol consumption of . litres (world health organization, ) . all these three factors together pose a serious public health threat. the proportion of young drinkers rose from % to % in the last two decades, and the age of initiation declined from years to years (prasad, ). the threat is multiplied by an added concern of a powerful alcohol lobby, led by multinational corporations, which targets india's emerging market of young drinkers (schess, jambhale, bhatia, velleman, & nadkarni, ) . the enthusiasm of the corporations is fuelled by a steady change in the level of acceptance and attitude towards alcohol from a culture of abstinence to ambivalence to covertly permissive (benegal, ; prasad, ). india needed a national level alcohol policy to minimize the public health impact of the aforementioned factors. however, india's alcohol policy is governed by the states. the three main pillars of the policy aresupply reduction to prohibition; taxation; and tertiary prevention (schess et al., ) . presently, alcohol sales and consumption is illegal in five of the states and union territories of the country, whereas for a large majority of other states alcohol sales-tax constitutes - % of their total revenues (benegal, ) . the government of india does not receive any taxation revenue from alcohol. taxation, although used successfully elsewhere, has not been effective in india to reduce consumption because of easy access to unrecorded alcohol (e.g. illicit or tax evaded). as per the global status report ( ) nearly half of the total alcohol consumed in the country fell in the unrecorded category (world health organization, ) . preventive services such as community-based, school or college-based prevention programs, brief intervention at primary care, and emergency services are mostly nonexistent in india. to this backdrop of a population vulnerable to serious public health impact, ineffectual policy, and a motivated third-party, since th march with overnight notice, india went into a complete and extended lockdown, with the intention to contain the spread of sars-cov- . alcohol being a non-essential commodity, all production, sales, and purchase were prohibited akin to an overnight prohibition order, enforced by the government of india. there was, however, an inherent contradiction to the enforcement of a national level policy because alcohol policy was a state-subject until that point. in normal times, the constitutional scheme ensures the autonomy of the states with regard to the spheres of activities earmarked for the states in the constitution. however, exceptions can be made during emergencies (arora, ). the main arguments behind the government of india's prohibition were: alcohol's potential harmful effect on the immune system, possible flouting of physical distancing and hand hygiene under the influence of alcohol, the possibility that alcohol may contribute to the domestic violence which was on the rise during the pandemic, and finally to reduce the healthcare burden resulting from alcohol-related accidents and violence (nadkarni, ) . we read several newspaper reports of suicide, consumption of illicit and harmful liquor or non-alcoholic beverages within a week of the lockdown. a research report from a tertiary care hospital in southern india showed a significant increase in the number of patients with complicated alcohol withdrawal (narasimha et al., ; pulla, ) . india was not the only country to impose a nation-wide prohibition during the covid- pandemic. south africa, sri lanka, thailand, and greenland, have also forced similar restrictions (french, ) . results of prohibition from south africa portrayed a beneficial effect. an article from the washington post quoted the director of alcohol research at the south african medical research council, reporting fewer admissions to the trauma units following the week of prohibition. the modelling of data by the council showed at least people are being saved every single day, who would have otherwise died from alcohol-related traumas (mogotsi and bearak, ; council, ) . sri lankan media, on the other hand, reported the proliferation of home-breweries and illicit distilleries across the country, and the availability of high-price alcohol in the grey market (rakshit, ) . hence, prohibition seems to have different effects across countries. there were still other countries such as canada, the us and the uk which designated alcohol as an essential commodity and continued the supply during the pandemic. several commentators have discussed the harmful effects of such policies-encouraging the general population to drink and sending a message that alcohol is essential for lives (hobin & smith, ; neufeld, lachenmeier, ferreira-borges & rehm, ) . a direct population survey, which would have been ideal to understand the effect of prohibition, was not possible under the present circumstances. therefore, alternative data sources can be explored. researchers so far have used alcohol sales data or isolated media reports (nadkarni, kapoor & pathare, ; borges & rehm, ) . we wanted to systematically explore the scope of the media reports, using the media as an indicator of potential harms and benefits. at the same time we acknowledge that media as a data source can be biased, and there are issues with accurate factual reporting and reliability. therefore, the result of this paper should be read with these caveats in mind. we conducted a qualitative analysis of the media reports published within the first month of the nationwide lockdown with the objectives of (a) using the media reports as indications of possible public health impact and population response to a sudden alcohol prohibition in india, (b) suggesting areas for future research. the study had an exploratory design which systematically looked at the response of individuals, public and society at large, government and non-government organizations which primarily deal with public health and related aspects of alcohol by studying newspaper reports. by a consensus among the authors, the following search words were selected. type of news-items was only in english, published between th march to th april with the search words: "alcohol", "alcohol policy", "state", "alcohol treatment", "illicit liquor", "alcohol ban", "alcohol revenue", "alcohol suicide", "alcohol lobby", "alcohol e-marketing", "alcohol withdrawal", "alcoholics", "chief minister alcohol", "isopropyl alcohol", "alcohol revenue" "alcohol poisoning", "alcohol price" "alcohol home-delivery". the search was made on google news (india). the rationale for using google news india was as follows: a large majority of the best selling newspapers in india have a digital version (e-paper). hence, an online search on google news india, in addition to the exclusively online media reports, was likely to uncover the reports of the online editions of the print media. besides, there were two other reasons for screening the media reports through google news-(a) the covid- pandemic resulted in nearly percent decline in the print newspaper sales in different cities india (gonews desk, ), (b) india has a growing number of internet users and it is second largest in the world. more than percent of internet users use google as their search engine (mishra & chanchani, ) , (c) the lockdown, travel restrictions, and closure of libraries, and outlets selling newspapers had made it impossible to check the print editions. the choice of only english papers was determined given that (a) the eighth schedule of the indian constitution recognized languages and english was (and still is) one of the official languages across indian states. therefore, a search of english media reports was likely to be more generalizable than searching in different regional languages; and (b) most widely circulated english newspapers (e.g. times of india, hindustan times, the indian express) have versions in hindi and other regional languages. the period includes the most intensive phase of lockdown between th march and th april when there was a virtual clampdown on all activities and people were not allowed to step out of their homes. only emergency and essential activities like purchasing essential food, attending hospital, and attending pharmacies were allowed during this period. after th april there was some relaxation in some of the states but mostly all states were in lockdown with heavy restrictions on nonessential activities. qualitative thematic analysis was done by the coding, categorization and theme generation which was done after meticulous data immersion. a comprehensive coding frame with definitions and examples for each item was designed by peer debriefing and researcher triangulation to guide the coder in identifying the main four themes and subthemes. the codes were generated inductively under the broad domains of 'impact of alcohol prohibition policy among various stakeholders' and 'response to the prohibition policy' for the newspaper reports of the initial two weeks that is till th april. for the remaining weeks a deductive approach was taken for coding. however, any additional codes, discovered were documented and discussed. two of the authors (ag and ab) independently undertook the coding. ag and ab are both qualified addiction psychiatrists and have been working in the field of addiction medicine for more than six years. all the coding was done manually. each characteristic was coded as being either present ( ) or absent ( ). we did not force concordance between the investigators in order to explore multiple perspectives. in case of any additional code generation by one of them (ab or ag), it was taken into account by mutual consensus. once all the codes were finalized, themes and sub-themes were generated by triangulation. a diagramming approach was taken to understand the connections between the themes and subthemes. the themes were labelled tentatively with the objective of finalizing the names following the third team meeting. three team meetings and peer debriefings were done during this period. the first meeting aimed to (a) document theoretical and reflexive thoughts; (b) share thoughts about potential codes. the second meeting was held following the inductive code generation and creation of the coding framework. the third meeting was held with the objectives of (a) ratifying any additional codes; (b) discussing the main themes and sub-themes and vetting by the team members. the overarching flow of ideas was noted. in sum we assumed a factist epistemological paradigm, the emerging categories/sub-themes and themes led us to an overall understanding of the response of all the stakeholders to this sudden prohibition the themes, sub-themes, and codes retrieved from each article were entered into an excel sheet by tm and these were cross-checked by ag. the frequencies were mentioned in the content analysis we followed the methodology by göbekli et al., and nowell et al., . ethical clearance was obtained from the all india institute of medical sciences, rishikesh, india-ethics committee (ref: / /psy/ - ). a total of news articles from newspapers were accessed for the study. for further details please see the article selection flow diagram ( fig. ) . ……the three major newspapers contributing to these media reports were: times of india ( . %), the hindu ( . %), and the indian express ( . %). for other mastheads please see supplementary table . all articles were published between th of march, and th of april, . among them, articles had only online publication and the rest ( ) had both print and online versions. the news articles from national and regional news were ( . %) and ( . %), respectively. regional articles were from states and union territories. kerala ( . %), karnataka ( . %), telangana ( %), tamilnadu ( . %), and west bengal ( . %) were the first five states represented in the regional news. the types of articles and their states of origin are depicted in supplementary table . fig. gives a detailed distribution of the states represented in the analysis. ………four main themes emerged when all the articles were analysed: (a) "the beneficial aspects of the policy," (b) "the harmful aspects of the policy," (c) "non-compliance and attempts to change and/ or subvert the policy," and (d) "popularity and level of public buyin of the policy." we could identify two additional themes, which could not be considered as direct repercussions of the sudden prohibition, nevertheless were important markers of societal attitudes towards individuals who use alcohol. these themes are "use of stigmatising language" and "ethical concerns". table gives an example of the coding schemes, and generation of sub-themes and themes. fig. depicts the themes and sub-themes in a nutshell. the main theme "beneficial aspects of the policy" is represented by the following codes: several medical practitioners described the lockdown as "an opportunity for treatment" of persons with alcohol dependence. as per a newspaper report, a document generated by the national drug dependence treatment centre, all india institute of medical sciences (aiims), referred to the lockdown situation as a blessing in disguise for some people who could use this opportunity to quit drinking altogether (phull, ) . media reports indicated that the number of people presenting with alcohol withdrawal to functioning outpatient services and emergency departments of general and psychiatric hospitals, and addiction treatment centres showed a sharp rise in the weeks following the enforcement of the lockdown. the articles reflected similar news coming largely from the southern parts of the country (kerala, telangana, tamilnadu) both from the cities and the rural districts. one news report quoted the superintendent of the institute of mental health in erragadda, hyderabad saying -"we have received to patients today who are suffering from withdrawal symptoms. close to per cent of them are dealing with the withdrawal of alcohol.." (mojumder, ) reports from addiction treatment centres under the department of excise in kerala, "vimukthi", read-"according to the officials of vimukthi, ever since then, in just a week's time, people were admitted to the deaddiction centres under vimukthi alone. "this is not the usual pattern. not more than - people usually get admitted to the vimukthi centres in a week…." (mithun & joseph, ) calls to the national helpline numbers as well as different state helplines for alcohol and other substance use saw an unprecedented rise. a title of one news article read -"coronavirus lockdown: helpline for drug addicts, alcoholics reports % surge in calls" (businesstoday.in, a) a hospital from tamilnadu, too, reported within the first week of the ban -"we have been getting at least five to six calls per day from places like chennai and hyderabad in the past week, and the number is sure to go up as the lockdown progresses" (nainar n, ) a. ghosh, et al. international journal of drug policy ( ) involvement of the self-help groups alcoholics anonymous (aa) arranged for telephonic communication as part of a pan india initiative to continue their meetings during the time of lockdown severely restricting movement. with the use of conference calls and different slots for better coordination, these meetings are being held. the reports were from both southern and north-eastern states namely from kerala, karnataka, and meghalaya. reports read-"in a pan india initiative, aa is using telephonic communication where callers are put on a conference call -since people are working from home, different slots are provided. regional meetings are also held separately. the addicts' families can participate in the conference calls. only addicts will be allowed to speak," said a member of karnataka area committee, aa….." (de'sousa, ) telemedicine and tele-counselling services were initiated in different parts across the country. in one of the states, a free online counselling platform was launched. in several places, counsellors worked from home, attending calls from patients or their family members (mithun & joseph, ) . one of the opinion types of article indicated a possible beneficial aspect of the alcohol prohibition could be a reduction in domestic violence (agarwal & srivas, ) . their assumption was based on a study conducted in the slums of mumbai, which revealed women whose husbands consumed alcohol were two times more likely to experience intimate partner violence than those whose husbands did not consume alcohol (begum, donta, nair & prakasam, ) . this report assumed significance in the background of increased complaints of domestic violence received by the national commission for women, within the first one week of lockdown (khandekar, ) . (srivastava, ) inclusion of alcohol in the list of essential commodities a. ghosh, et al. international journal of drug policy ( ) the harmful aspects of the policy as a recent study estimated, an approximate million people in india had problematic use of alcohol, almost half of whom consumed alcohol in a dependent pattern (ambekar et al., ) . the newspaper reports possibly indicated the distress experienced by this population, reflected by the following codes. this was perhaps the most tragic and extreme fallout of the sudden unavailability of alcohol and one of the first news topics related to the ban on alcohol which came to light. the southern state of kerala reported the death of people by suicide within the first days of lockdown (jayakumar, ) . as per the news reports, all such deaths could be attributed to severe distress from marked withdrawal symptoms in these persons with alcohol dependence. in addition to kerala, suicide deaths or attempts allegedly due to non-availability of alcohol were reported from assam, meghalaya, karnataka, chattisgarh, telangana, and tamil nadu. although the media predominantly observed these deaths by suicide as a fall-out of distress due to non-availability of alcohol some did report alternative or additional perspectives of mental health problems and depression (swamy, ) . a. ghosh, et al. international journal of drug policy ( ) consumption of non-consumable alcohol according to the media reports, as people resorted to desperate measures to access alcohol, some people drank non-consumable forms of alcohol such as paint varnish, after-shave lotions or hand sanitisers. within the first couple of weeks of lockdown, several such incidents were reported from tamil nadu where people died after drinking hand sanitisers or paint varnish and soft drinks mixed with after-shave lotion (dhns, ). one such case was also reported from kerala, and nine from uttar pradesh (swamy, ) . media reported that sales of illicit liquor shot up rapidly following a. ghosh, et al. international journal of drug policy ( ) the ban. although the prices were several times higher than usual, stocks of illegally bought liquor were clearing at a very rapid pace. few people could afford such high prices. those not having enough money, looked for cheaper alternatives and often ended up consuming spurious liquor, risking their health. reports of illicit and spurious liquor consumption and resultant deaths and hospitalizations were reported from uttar pradesh and tamil nadu (siddiqui, ) . in the slums of hyderabad, one newspaper report noted that this significant population of teenage children of poor migrant workers with alcohol dependence, began to experience symptoms of marked alcohol withdrawal. the article quoted the head of a non-profit organisation running shelter camps in the city saying -"at least minors in the camps sheltering over a hundred migrant workers and homeless persons have been showing moderate to severe withdrawal symptoms." (menon, ) the high demand for treatment was not always met with a corresponding increase in the treatment provisions. media reports suggested that most of the private de-addiction centres decided to remain closed or function only with the admitted patients, due to the lockdown. all new patients were referred to government hospitals for management. due to most centres refusing new admissions and referring patients to government hospitals, people seeking treatment remained unattended. however, such reports came only from tamil nadu (lakshmanan, ) . we could identify the following three sub-themes under this main theme-non-compliance at the state level, at the individual level, and illicit or criminal activities. the states of kerala and punjab had initially included alcohol among the list of essential commodities, to continue its sale even post lockdown. in kerala, while private liquor stores were closed, the staterun kerala state beverages (manufacturing and marketing) corporation limited (bevco) remained open. however, both states had to stop following directives from the government of india. the government of punjab had requested government of indiato allow the sale to address the significant loss of revenue which followed banning the sale of alcohol. in tune with this, the international spirits and wine association of india, lobbied the government of india to classify alcohol as an 'essential item'. the northeastern states of assam and meghalaya allowed the sale of alcohol for limited hours on permitted days while under strict enforcement of social distancing and other precautionary measures (ani correspondent, ). in assam, the state government allowed the opening of liquor shops, from am to pm. distilleries, breweries, bottling plants were also allowed to open (additional commissioner of excise, ). in meghalaya, liquor stores opened from am to pm from th to th april. only a single member from each household would be permitted to buy, along with measures restricting movements between the districts. meghalaya also permitted home delivery of alcohol in areas without liquor shops. however, following a second directive from the government of india refusing any relaxation to alcohol sale or production, both states had to withdraw their orders. as per times of india th april report, the excise department of govt of karnataka made a proposal to allow sale of liquor between am and pm. the newspaper reported that this may improve excise earning and state revenue but on the flip side of it sale for only a few hours a day may lead to huge rush thereby violating guidelines to prevent the virus (gejji, ) . however, later it was withdrawn by the karnataka government. in kerala, the state government formulated plans to supply alcohol upon certification by a government medical practitioner that the person was experiencing symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. the government cited the recent suicides among those experiencing alcohol withdrawal as the primary reason for initiating this unprecedented step. it decided to issue special "liquor passes" from the state excise department on the production of such certification (government of kerala, ) they placed a limit of litres of alcohol per person for a week and plans were to supply the alcohol to the homes of the applicants (pti, a). the state of west bengal had started making plans to enable online home delivery of alcohol, ensuring that the norms of social distancing were maintained while attempting to generate revenue from the sales. the state of west bengal saw a discrepancy between the messages conveyed by police and excise departments regarding the same piece of information, again suggesting inter-department incoordination (fpj webdesk, a). kerala had planned doorstep delivery so that crowding at liquor outlets could be avoided. however, none of the plans could be enacted. in those areas without liquor shops, meghalaya has allowed home delivery (team latestly, ). there have been various whatsapp groups forwarding numbers of people selling alcohol in metro cities like mumbai at escalated rates (fpj webdesk, b). as mentioned in the press trust of india and corroborated from the notice issued by the revenue department of the government of west bengal, the state government attempted to make up for the loss in revenues by imposing a sales tax of % of the mrp in addition to the existing excise and additional taxes (pti, b; government of west bengal, ) however, for alcohol users who were forced to pay up to % more than the usual price as per different newspaper reports (tnn, ). when the government of kerala decided to provide special "liquor passes" through the state excise department, to persons experiencing signs and symptoms of alcohol withdrawal upon certification by a government medical practitioner, a large number of fake prescriptions were detected. most lacked the doctor's seal while some were from retired doctors, private doctors or ayurvedic practitioners all of which led to the rejection of their applications. a newspaper report read, "an excise officer said most of the prescriptions did not have the seal of the doctors and were fake. some brought prescriptions from retired and private doctors (express news service, a)." another way that people responded to the situation was trying to brew alcohol at home. an article read, "some social media users are also trying to brew and share recipes for home-made alcohol (de sousa, )." another newspaper reported an incident of selling illicit home-made liquor by a "socially connected" person from kerala, "a covid volunteer was arrested by the varkala police on saturday for selling alcohol made using various components, including sanitisers, and for selling it to clients to whom he delivered it on his bike (express news service, b)." people were also using free rice given in ration shops a. ghosh, et al. international journal of drug policy ( ) for the preparation of country liquor -this has been reported from assam (g plus news, ). in some parts of west bengal previously banned liquors were again found to be brewed. an example: 'rakshi, a traditional distilled nepali beverage banned in bengal, has suddenly outstripped illicit country liquor in demand in several parts of barrackpore police commissionerate during the lockdown. police have found out that a few nepali families, who sell momos and other chinese fast food, at khardah are behind the revival of the strong drink that is usually made from rice, barley or millet' (chaudhury, ) good samaritan response a newspaper article reported on one of the most circulated viral videos showing a man distributing alcohol to daily wage workers in hyderabad, prompting varying comments of "crazy", "fame-seeking", "dev-maanush (godsent)" and also sparked debates on the pros and cons of the ban (khandekar, ) . this one month period saw a spate of illegal activities related to the consumption of alcohol. while some struggled to cope with the sudden stoppage of alcohol, others saw opportunities to make money through illegal means, often leading to disruption and arrests. the following codes illustrate such activities. amidst the unavailability of alcohol, there have also been a growing number of thefts and robberies of bars and liquor stores. the majority of such reports came in from the states of karnataka, maharashtra, tamil nadu, telangana, chhattisgarh and andhra pradesh along with capital delhi (shekhar, ) . while the sale of alcohol from legal outlets remained closed, there was an increase in smuggling illicit and spurious liquor. there were frequent reports of seizures of large amounts of illicit liquor by the authorities. innovative means of smuggling were seen such as hiding alcohol in milk cans or sale from authorised milk booths, while reports came in of a stash of cartons of liquor in an ambulance in delhi (pti, c) . grey market sellers during this time charged double the price and even hooch was expensive (reuters, ) . alcohol was sold under the garb of essential items and medications -it was found to be smuggled in milk cans by a person posing as a milkman or as homeopathic medications (joshi, ; team newsable, ) . as people continued to search for alcohol, several reports of online scams came to the fore. most of these gangs established contacts through social media, promising online delivery of alcohol, usually charging exorbitant rates, meanwhile getting access to bank account details and often making away with large sums amounting to lakhs of rupees. while authorities cautioned against such fraudulent activities, people's desperate search for alcohol often led them to these traps. news of such frauds were reported in different parts of the country with the cities of kolkata, mumbai, bengaluru, hyderabad, gurugram, mangalore witnessing many such cases. social media has also been used as a tool by online fraudsters claiming to sell alcohol and people selling illicit liquor or home-brewed liquor to access their target population, with anonymity inherent in this medium of communication undoubtedly promoting such use. as an example, several residents have been cheated online by making payment through e-wallet or other upi platforms, as reported by the media outlet, hindustan times (dhankhar, ) . newspapers have also reported details about the modus operandi of such illegal transactions of alcohol, such as: the masterminds "would never meet the buyer anticipating that he would get caught. he would cross-check the name of buyers on true caller before processing the deal," said an official. after stashing the liquor bottle at the designated spot, he would call the buyer and give the location. he would hide and watch from a distance to ensure that the liquor reached the right person' (the hindu correspondent, b). the prohibition of alcohol enforced by the government of india received a mixed response from the stakeholders, as detailed in the media analysed herein. while a large number of states, organizations of alcohol manufacturers and sellers, and a few celebrities opposed the ban, a few other states, health professionals, and the judiciary supported or upheld the prohibition (pti, d). the different sellers' bodies repeatedly tried to draw the focus towards the loss of revenue and rise in black market sales of alcohol while trying to persuade the government of india and state governments to relax the ban on alcohol. one newspaper report quoted the international spirits and wines association of india (iswai) chairman saying -"states are strapped for cash. - percent of a state's revenue comes from alcohol. this is a significant revenue stream that comes directly to state coffers and can help in these cash-strapped times particularly when there is pressure to provide a safety net" (businesstoday.in, b) . the sellers' body -confederation of indian alcoholic beverage companies (ciabc) made recommendations to the commerce minister of the government of india, health minister and chief ministers of all states to allow home delivery of alcoholic beverages. they also focussed on the sudden lack of employment of the workers in the huge alcohol industry while urging the government to resume the sale of liquor. the ciabc and international spirits and wines association of india (iswai) requested phased re-openings of liquor stores outside the hotspot areas, for a longer duration to reduce crowding. they also suggested providing licenses to the shops for - home delivery workers through which the government could control the frequency and the amount of liquor being delivered. the sellers' bodies also advocated for online alcohol delivery or etailing of alcohol. they had recommended this to minimise the gathering in front of liquor shops. they also suggested identity proof for age verification during applications made online or through phone calls. there were widely varying reactions of the medical fraternity and other sources of help to the different situations which arose in the country in relation to the ban on alcohol. the following two codes provide an illustration. as discussed, when kerala decided to issue special "liquor passes" to those suffering from alcohol withdrawal upon such certification by government medical practitioners, the medical professionals in the state as well as across the country criticised the move, calling it "unethical". the kerala government medical officers association (kgmoa) protested by observing a black day and wearing black badges and bands to work. news reports quoted a kgmoa office-bearer saying -"there are scientific methods of treating people with withdrawal a. ghosh, et al. international journal of drug policy ( ) symptoms and that's the medical protocol. this is something which will affect our morale and numerous side effects will surface. we will not be doing this." (ians, ) other medical bodies such as the ima (indian medical association) and indian society of gastroenterology's kerala chapter refused to prescribe it, saying it was against medical ethics. the kgmoa and the ima then filed petitions in the kerala high court to stop the government from proceeding further with provision of "liquor passes." however, not all medical professionals were aligned to the policy of prohibition. the director of the centre for mental health law and policy in pune expressed his belief that the current alcohol crisis was a result of the states' contradictory approach to alcohol which was both puritanical and pragmatic (hamid & harigovind, ) . a psychiatrist in karnataka also filed a public interest litigation against the sudden ban and advocated for allowing the liquor shops to open. this plea was turned down by karnataka high court (the hindu correspondent, a). the high courts of kerala and karnataka were primarily involved in this scenario for differing reasons. in kerala, as mentioned above, the kgmoa and ima filed petitions to stop the government's decision to provide alcohol, based on certifications by doctors. the kerala high court stayed the move for three weeks (prathapan tn vs state of kerala and others, ). a newspaper report quoted the bench as saying -"we are concerned that the state government has taken a unilateral decision to administer more alcohol to persons suffering from alcohol withdrawal syndrome. this is a recipe for disaster." (swamy, ) in karnataka, following a pil filed by a private psychiatrist requesting reopening of liquor shops, the karnataka high court ordered the psychiatrist to contribute rs , to the prime minister's fund. the loss of revenue was cited as one of the major reasons for the states to oppose the alcohol prohibition. the estimated daily revenue loss due to stoppage of alcohol sales was around usd . million daily in india, and most of the states earned around - % of their revenue from alcohol. the worst-hit states were maharashtra, uttar pradesh, telangana and karnataka, which earned approximately usd million, usd million, usd million and usd million respectively during the financial year - . we did not conduct a qualitative analysis of the social media but the thematic analysis of the newspaper reports identified a particular subtheme with the response from the social media. in an age of digitisation and ubiquitous social networking through the internet, social media has quickly become the source of information of dubious authenticity, often acting as a tool for rumour-mongering. it has also evolved as a platform for expression of opinions of a significant portion of the population. consequently, in the present scenario, social media platforms have been used in diverse ways. the social media platform twitter saw trends of #liquorfreeindia doing the rounds which drew a lot of reactions, both light-hearted and those with serious overtones (saxena, ) . a viral video depicted a political leader of the ruling party in the newly enforced prohibitionist state of bihar, in an inebriated state and led to significant public shaming and political mudslinging. celebrities from different fields had their own take on the situation. while some advocated for the ban, there were others including a famous movie director who urged the state governments to relax the ban and allow alcohol sales for limited hours. newspaper article mentioned veteran bollywood actor's tweet: "think. government should for some time in the evening open all licensed liquor stores. don't get me wrong. man will be at home only what with all this depression, uncertainty around. cops, doctors, civilians etc... need some release (bangalore mirror bureau, ). the following themes were not directly related to the alcohol prohibition but were relevant for understanding the socio-cultural milieu and newspaper reporting standards. a common theme that featured in most of the news articles that were analysed was the use of stigmatizing language in the context of alcohol use and dependence. terms such as "tipplers", "addicts", "boozers" and "drunkards" used to refer to persons with alcohol dependence is a reflection of this stigma. many of these words were used in the title of the news article (indulekha, ; nidheesh, ) . one of the other noticeable themes that emerged from the news reports was the lack of privacy of the affected individuals, with articles on reported suicide or isopropanol (methanol) poisoning providing detailed personal identification data. we performed a content analysis to determine the frequency of the themes, sub-themes and codes. there was coexistence of different themes, sub-themes and codes within a single article. the most prevalent theme was 'non-compliance and attempts to change and or subvert the policy' which was found around times in the articles. there were various state-driven endeavours to subvert this ban-like 'distribution of liquor pass' (n= , . %), 'plans for online and doorstep delivery' (n= , . %), 'limited hours sale of alcohol' (n= , . %), 'inclusion of alcohol in the list of essential commodities' (n= , . %) and 'tax hikes' (n= , . %). non-compliance at the individual level consisted of 'attempts to brew alcohol at home' (n= , . %), 'forging prescription to obtain liquor pass' (n= , . %) and 'good samaritan response' (n= , . %). there were various reports of illegal activities non-complying with this ban, like 'smuggling of illicit and spurious liquor' (n= , . %), 'online scams' (n= , . %) and 'thefts/robberies of bars, liquor shops and hotels' (n= , . %). the 'popularity and level of public buy-in' was the next most common theme, which appeared times in our search. the main subthemes were 'view of healthcare professionals' which was found times in our search. 'doctors' protest against the "liquor pass" '(n= , %). some doctors also expressed their views against the national policy (n= , . %) as a result the judiciary had passed decisions (n= , . %). another subtheme was 'views of the alcohol sellers and manufacturers' that appeared times. the alcohol sellers recommended for the resumption of business to the governments (n= , %) through phased reopening of the liquor shops or online delivery. the most frequent cause proposed for these recommendations was revenue loss' (n= , . %). there was considerable 'social media response' both for and against the ban (n= , . %). celebrities (n= , . %) also expressed their opinions regarding the ban. there were accounts of the 'harmful effects' of the abrupt alcohol ban. it included several reports of suicide (n= , . %), fatal or near-fatal consequences of consumption of non-consumable alcohol like aftershave lotion or hand sanitizer (n= , . %), and consumption of spurious liquor (n= , . %). the other aspects of the harm were the 'closure of private de-addiction centres' (n= , . %) and alcohol withdrawal in migrant adolescents (n= , . %). a. ghosh, et al. international journal of drug policy ( ) although many news reports focussed on the negative and subversive aspects of the ban, there were accounts of the beneficial effects of the ban. on the part of the patients, this led to increased treatment-seeking (n= , . %) for alcohol use. the service providers were also viewing this ban as an 'opportunity for treatment' of patients with alcohol use disorder (n= , %). as in-person consultation was not a viable treatment option, the teleconsultation services flourished as an alternative treatment platform (n= , . %), and self-help groups like 'alcoholics anonymous' also played their role in helping those in need of treatment (n= , . %). the ban on alcohol has presumably led to a relative reduction in domestic violence during the lockdown period (n= , . %). we found the use of stigmatizing languages (like 'drunkard', 'tippler', 'alcoholic') in articles and contents with ethical concern (like a. ghosh, et al. international journal of drug policy ( ) exposing the names and other personal details of suicide victims) in articles. the distribution of frequency of the themes, sub-themes, and codes are presented in fig. . we conducted thematic analyses of articles, published over a span of one month in a wide-range of english dailies and online-only newspapers. we followed a predetermined and systematic approach to retrieve the newspaper articles, to do the thematic analysis and extraction of themes and sub-themes. we believe this was a relatively novel, feasible, resource-friendly and time-saving strategy to indicate the possible effects of this sudden national policy. . one basic premise of the rigour of this study has been the trustworthiness and reflexivity as reflected by the authors by clarifying their own perspective as addiction psychiatry professionals (lincoln, guba, & pilotta, ) . credibility has been established by peer scrutiny of the coding process and data triangulation by a discussion of the results amongst the authors. we also carried out a content analysis of the themes to quantify the relative dominance of the themes and to make the qualitative research transparent and replicable. both thematic and content analysis added to the methodological triangulation and the overall robustness of the qualitative study. however, the authors acknowledge that the dynamic nature of qualitative results is variable based upon the epistemological and ontological paradigms assumed (silverman, ) . drawing a causal inference (as was done by the media reports) would have been an oversimplification for several reasons-(a) the covid- pandemic itself might increase the risk of suicide by enhancing the risk of mental illness, loss of employment, financial hardships, and bereavement (gunnel et al., ), (b) some media reports had actually suggested a possibility of underlying depression in many of these individuals (swamy, ) . a psychological autopsy could have been a scientifically valid way to discern the possible causes. countries such as the usa, where alcohol sale was not banned during the pandemic, had witnessed several cases of methanol poisoning due to consumption of alcohol-based hand rubs (yip et al, ) . similar cases, on a large scale, were also reported from iran, which is otherwise a dry country (haghdoost, ) .these instances were likely to be driven by the myth that consumption of alcohol-hand rubs will kill the sars-cov . therefore, the events of consumption of non-alcoholic beverages, reported by the indian newspapers could also be a result of similar myths. the content analysis revealed media reports focussed more on the harmful aspects of the policy than the potential benefits of prohibition. nevertheless, this result was not an evidence of harms outweighing the benefits because media reports were not done with scientific rigor and there was financial, political, and ideological bias inherent to the reporting. in sum, the qualitative analysis of newspaper reports indicated potential public health-related benefits and harms of the sudden alcohol prohibition in india. future research could systematically explore issues flagged by the media reports. our study results showed a few limitations in india's alcohol policy: firstly, alcohol policy in india was a state-matter. therefore, ban imposed by the government of india on alcohol unmasked the incoordination between the government of india and the states, between the states, and even within departments of a state. the disconcerted attempts to subvert the national level policy resulted in confusion among the public and medical professionals. the judiciary had to intervene in one particular case. all these were reflective of the incoordination in the planning and implementation of alcohol policy. secondly, alcohol is a huge revenue generating commodity for the states and therefore, the alcohol policy is largely driven by financial incentives rather than a focus towards public health (benegal, ) . thirdly, states' attempt to subvert the policy by the government of india by alcohol home delivery and online delivery was potentially harmful for several reasons-(a) evidence from russia showed percent stockpiled alcohol at home and only a very small proportion intended to use it as hand sanitizer (neufeld, ) . commentators also raised the possibility of overcompensated drinking-at home in the absence of social inhibitions (neufeld, ) ; (b) the boredom, stress, and social isolation during the pandemic could contribute to increase in alcohol use (the lancet gastroenterology hepatology ; hoblin & smith, ); (c) economically disadvantaged group of individuals with alcohol use disorders would not be able to afford either online or home delivery of alcohol. importantly, they are more vulnerable to alcoholrelated harms as opposed to the group, which could afford such services (katikireddi et al., ) ; (d) easier access to alcohol might give a wrong message to the non-using population that alcohol is an essential commodity and reduce the public perception of harm (hoblin & smith, ). all these factors together suggested that home or online delivery of alcohol was likely to produce more harm than benefit. firstly, the lockdown, prohibition, and consequent response from the stakeholders indicated a need for national alcohol policy in india. the disconnected attempts of states to restore 'normalcy,' discrepancies between state departments, conflicts with the government of india, and the resultant confusion among the public could have been averted by national-level policy. secondly, the indian alcohol policy requires a public health reorientation, i.e. policy aimed at reducing the harms of alcohol, both at the individual and the societal level (babor et al., ) . beginning with the abrupt prohibition and to recurrent themes of the compulsion for the states to compensate for the excise-related revenue loss, the involvement of commercial entities in decision making (even remotely), an under-equipped health care infrastructure, and desperate measures of state to "prescribe alcohol" to alleviate suffering were some glaring examples of a lack of public-health oriented decision making. a comparison of alcohol control policies among countries, across the globe, showed an inverse relationship between alcohol harms and the strength of policy measures (brand, saisana, rynn, pennoni, & lowenfels, ) . the strength was defined by the "alcohol policy index," with public health as the basic common denominator. thirdly, the "suddenness" of the prohibition might have been responsible for most of the potential harms and confusion between the states and the government of india . a discussion with the states and other stakeholders prior to the enforcement of the prohibition could have resulted in a more coordinated implementation of the policy. fourthly, the harmful aspects of the prohibition were largely applicable to individuals with alcohol dependence. our analysis revealed the need for improving the availability and access to treatment, and enhancing public awareness for the same. finally, use of stigmatizing words to describe people with alcohol use-related problems and direct breach of privacy indicated that there is a need for media reporting guidelines to use neutral language and to monitor the level of adherence with the existing guidelines. this study has several limitations. firstly, the analysis was based on the english newspapers with online access. news reports published in regional languages were not reviewed for the content analysis. nevertheless, a majority of the news items accessed and analysed were from the regional-section of national newspapers or regional newspapers. secondly, our narrative was solely based on news reports, which might be biased because of its political predilections and financial conflicts of interest. however, we conducted an extensive newspaper survey and included all news items retrieved by our search. thirdly, newspaper reports are not peer-reviewed literature and no causal inference should be drawn from the reports, such as an increase a. ghosh, et al. international journal of drug policy ( ) in the incidence of death by suicide might also be contributed by the financial burden, stress of the outbreak, or underlying mental illness. however, these reports suggested a trend, which should be subjected to scientific scrutiny in the future. fourthly, by design, we reviewed the first one month of post-lockdown prohibition. in india, prohibition continued even after that. although our thematic analysis captured the immediate effect of prohibition on public health and on other stakeholders it might have missed some delayed responses such as permitting alcohol sale through food-delivery mobile applications in a few states or opening of shops for limited hours in a few others. the newspaper analysis indicated beneficial and harmful aspects of an unplanned and unprecedented alcohol prohibition during the lockdown. the absence of a national-level alcohol policy was made apparent by the reflexive, disconnected, and conflictual policy measures. the lack of a public health orientation to the policy augmented the harm. the sudden alcohol prohibition was, perhaps, a learning lesson for countries like india, which are yet to have a strong public healthoriented national alcohol policy and emphasized the need for a balanced approach aiming at the reduction of alcohol-related harm. nevertheless, the harms, perceived from the media reports, should be balanced against the potential benefits of prohibition such as reduction of domestic violence and increased treatment seeking. besides, one should exercise caution in drawing any firm conclusion from media reports, which are not considered to be a source of scientific evidence. a disproportionately higher reporting of harmful effects of alcohol prohibition could result from visibility or presentation bias of media reporting. having said that, we believe, the analysis of newspaper reports underlined the possible areas for future research. supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi: . /j.drugpo. . . magnitude of substance use in india people follow social distancing norms while queuing outside liquor shops in assam's dibrugarh. business standard administrative powers between center and states in india alcohol: no ordinary commodity: research and public policy a case for reopening liquor vends with all the adequate safe socio-demographic factors associated with domestic violence in urban slums india: alcohol and public health comparative analysis of alcohol control policies in countries coronavirus lockdown: helpline for drug addicts, alcoholics reports % surge in calls industry body seeks alcohol home delivery amid coronavirus 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countries lockdown effect: alcoholics turn up at hyderabad's erragadda hospital covid- and forced alcohol abstinence in india: the dilemmas around ethics and rights lockdown hits those battling alcohol addiction the hardest. the hindu retrieved st complicated alcohol withdrawal-an unintended consequence of covid- lockdown is alcohol an "essential good" during covid- ? yes, but only as a disinfectant!. alcoholism hyderabad man arrested for distributing free alcohol amid coronavirus lockdown hc stays kerala govt's decision to allow liquor for addicts amid lockdown. live mint thematic analysis: striving to meet the trustworthiness criteria covid- lockdown hangs heavy on boozers in himachal alcohol use on the rise in india state of kerala and others, general secretary government medical officers' association v. state of kerala and others, jossey matthew vs state of kerala and others tipplers in kerala with withdrawal symptoms to get special passes to buy liquor west bengal imposes per cent sales tax on liquor liquor stash in ambulance; milkman. cop among several held in delhi in crackdown on bootlegging no bars, no 'thekas', no alcohol, lockout sobering experience for tipplers covid- : india imposes lockdown for days and cases rise stay on liquor supply based on doctor's prescription in kerala amid covid alcohol ban. sri lankans are brewing moonshine lockdown sends grey-market booze prices soaring. the times of india daarunahi re baba. dawaiihai': twitterati reacts as #liquorfreeindia trends amidst countrywide liquor ban policy environment impacting the societal harm caused by alcohol in india: protocol for a scoping review besides coronavirus, protection of liquor bottles in state-run stores is another task for tamil nadu authorities. outlook india. retrieved st spurious liquor claims two lives, six ill amid lockdown in uttar pradesh. the times of india. retrieved st doing qualitative research kerala cm directs excise dept to provide liquor to those with doctor's prescription after surge in suicides west bengal government to allow home delivery of alcohol amid covid- lockdown. retrieved on th kerala hc stays govt order to provide liquor on prescription, calls it 'recipe for disaster liquor sellers seek permission for online, on-call sale of alcohol during coronavirus lockdown illegal liquor sellers find a new way to run their business during coronavirus lockdown psychiatrist withdraws plea for opening liquor shops after high court warning. the hindu man arrested for selling liquor by advertising on social media. the hindu after dry weeks, offloading of liquor set to start at ware. the times of india global status report on road safety : summary. retrieved from the world health organization serious adverse health events, including death, associated with ingesting alcohol-based hand sanitizers containing methanol -arizona and new mexico key: cord- -bzos k authors: spier, jaap title: ‘the “strongest” climate ruling yet’: the dutch supreme court’s urgenda judgment date: - - journal: neth int law rev doi: . /s - - - sha: doc_id: cord_uid: bzos k the dutch supreme court’s urgenda judgment breaks new ground. it is the first court to order a state to reduce its ghg emissions. the state has to reduce its ghg emissions by at least % before the end of . a series of important issues have been considered in review: can human rights serve as a basis for the injunctive relief sought?, the role of the precautionary principle, the need for a consistent policy, suum cuique tribuere, minimal causation (each state has to assume responsibility for ‘its part’), is the marginal causal contribution of dutch emissions an insurmountable hurdle?, minimum obligations, a disproportionate burden, the role of the paris agreement, and the political issue doctrine. this case note analyses and discusses these issues. in addition it speculates what could or should happen if the state does not comply with the judgment. the case note elaborates on the prospects of the urgenda judgment as a precedent for other national courts. lastly, it discusses whether the judgment could be of any avail in shaping obligations of the corporate sector. on december , the dutch supreme court (hereinafter: sc) rendered the world's '"strongest" climate ruling yet', according to a headline in the new york times. it upheld a judgment that the dutch state is obliged to reduce, by the end of , its greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions by at least % compared to . the case was initiated by urgenda, a dutch ngo striving for a rapid transition towards a sustainable society. the judgment is groundbreaking and courageous. what follows is a summary of the judgment (sect. ), a commentary (sects. [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] and an assessment of the judgment's wider implications (sect. ). in the district court of the hague ordered the state to reduce its emissions by the end of by at least % compared to . in the court of appeal of the hague confirmed this judgment. the sc rejected the state's appeal. the sc observed that it is not disputed that climate change poses a genuine threat in the coming decades. the sc elaborates on that point, emphasising that according to more recent insights global warming should not go beyond . °c. turning to the protection of human rights, based on the european convention on the protection of human rights (hereinafter: echr), the sc noted that the convention requires the states parties to the convention to protect the rights established therein for their inhabitants. article echr protects the right to life, while article echr ensures the right to respect for private and family life. according to the case law of the european court of human rights (hereinafter: ecthr), these provisions oblige a contracting state to take suitable measures if a real and immediate risk to people's lives or welfare exists and the state is aware of that risk. the obligation to take suitable measures also applies to environmental hazards that threaten large groups or the population as a whole, even if the hazards will only materialise over the long term. while articles and echr are not permitted to result in an impossible or disproportionate burden being imposed on a state, they do oblige the state to take measures that are suitable to avert the imminent hazard as much as reasonably possible. pursuant to article echr, national law must offer an effective legal remedy against a violation or an imminent violation of the rights protected by the echr. see https ://www.urgen da.nl/. the summary is borrowed from the unofficial english translation of the supreme court's summary. in the translation the summary emphasises that it 'does not supersede the grounds for this judgment'. the dutch text speaks of 'komt niet in de plaats van' which means-my translation-'does not substitute'. below, quotations from the judgment are also borrowed from the unofficial translation. that was also emphasised by the high court of ireland in friends of the irish environment v. the government of ireland [ ] iech , para. . that is an inaccurate translation. the dutch text-also, but less, inaccurate-speaks of 'welzijn van personen ' . see each country is responsible for its own share of ghg emissions. hence, it cannot escape responsibility by arguing that, compared to the rest of the world, its own emissions are relatively limited in scope and that a reduction would have very little impact on a global scale. the state is obliged to reduce its ghg emissions in proportion to its share. this obligation is based on articles and echr, because there is a grave risk that dangerous climate change will occur, endangering the lives and welfare of many people in the netherlands. when giving substance to the positive obligations imposed on the state pursuant to articles and echr, broadly supported scientific insights and internationally accepted standards must be taken into account. important in this respect are, inter alia, the reports by the intergovernmental panel on climate change (hereinafter: ipcc). the ipcc's report contains a scenario in which global warming could reasonably be expected to be limited to a maximum of °c. to that effect the (kyoto protocol) annex i countries would have to reduce their emissions in by - %, and in by - %, compared to . at the annual climate conferences held in the context of the united nations framework convention on climate change (hereinafter: unfccc) since , virtually every country has regularly pointed out the necessity of acting in accordance with the scenario of the ipcc and achieving a - % reduction of ghg gas emissions in . the scientifically supported necessity of reducing emissions by % in , compared to , has been expressed on multiple occasions by and in the eu. since , a broadly supported insight has arisen that, to be safe, global warming must remain limited to . °c, rather than °c. the paris agreement of therefore expressly states that the states must strive to limit warming to . °c. that will require an even greater emissions reduction than was previously assumed. hence, there is a great degree of consensus on the urgent necessity for the annex i countries to reduce ghg emissions by at least - % in . this consensus must be taken into consideration when interpreting and applying articles and echr. until , the state's policy was aimed at achieving a reduction of % in compared to . according to the state, that was necessary to stay on a credible pathway to keep the °c target within reach. after , however, the state's reduction target for was lowered from a % reduction by the netherlands to a % reduction in an eu context. the state has not explained that-and why-a reduction of just % in is considered responsible in an eu context, in contrast to the - % reduction in , which is internationally broadly supported and is considered necessary. there is a broad consensus 'within' climate science and the international community that the longer reduction measures to achieve the envisaged final target are postponed, the more comprehensive and more expensive they will become. a postponement also creates a greater risk of an abrupt climate change occurring as the result of a tipping point being reached. in light of that generally accepted insight, it was up to the state to explain that the proposed acceleration of the reduction after would be feasible and sufficiently effective to meet the targets for and , and thus to keep the °c target and the . °c target within reach. the state failed to do so. the state has asserted that it is not for the courts to undertake the political considerations necessary for a decision on the reduction of ghg emissions. in the dutch system of government, the decision-making on ghg emissions belongs to the government and parliament. they have a large degree of discretion to make the political considerations necessary in this regard. it is up to the courts to decide whether the government and parliament have remained within the limits of the law. those limits ensue inter alia from the echr. the dutch constitution requires dutch courts to apply the echr provisions in accordance with the ecthr's interpretation of these provisions. this mandate for the courts to offer legal protection, even against the government, is an essential component of a democratic state under the rule of law. the court of appeal's judgment is consistent with the foregoing, as it held that the state's policy regarding ghg reduction is obviously not meeting the requirements pursuant to articles and echr to take suitable measures to protect the residents of the netherlands from dangerous climate change. furthermore, the order which the court of appeal issued was limited to the lower limit ( %) of the internationally endorsed minimum reduction of - % in . this order leaves it up to the state to determine which specific measures it will take to comply with that order. if legislative measures are required to achieve such compliance, it is up to the state to determine what specific legislation is desirable and necessary. at first instance the district court based its decision on tort law (in brief: a legally relevant threat of irreversible damage). that legal basis was challenged by urgenda on appeal. the court of appeal turned to human rights law as the legal basis for its judgment. it did not answer the question of whether tort law could also be a viable legal basis. part of the ideas submitted in this case note is borrowed from my case note in dutch in nederlandse jurisprudentie / . as a rule under dutch law a threat of damage suffices for injunctive relief. whether this rule of thumb can be invoked depends on a kind of cost-benefit analysis. see in a european context art. : principles of european tort law. see on the tort law perspective the advisory opinion of deputy procurator general langemeijer and advocate general wissink, ecli:nl:phr: : (hereinafter: the advisory opinion), paras. . - . . strictly speaking the court of appeal was not allowed to offer a different legal basis. that was only possible if the legal basis of the appealed judgment was mistaken. for reasons i fail to understand the state did not raise this point before the sc. the judgment mentions in particular article (the right to life) and article echr (the right to respect for private and family life). it should be emphasised that the sc confined itself to dutch residents (urgenda speaks about citizens). human rights law is a sound legal basis for the injunctive relief granted, i think. the sc's explanation is convincing. a recent irish judgment takes a different stance: 'it is not for the domestic court to declare rights under the convention, but that is a matter for the european court'. a recent decision of the un human rights committee in the context of a climate change refugee deported by new zealand to kiribati illustrates that the view that climate change and human rights are inter-linked is no longer a novelty. under article echr a state has to take 'appropriate steps if there is a real and immediate risk to persons and the state […] is aware of that risk'. real and immediate refers to 'a risk that is both genuine and imminent. the term "immediate" does not refer to imminence in the sense that the risk must materialise within a short period of time, but rather that the risk in question is directly threatening the persons involved. the protection of article echr also regards risks that may only materialise in the longer term.' further down the sc elaborates on this point. in light of the facts no other conclusion can be drawn but that the state is required pursuant to articles and echr to take measures to counter the genuine threat of dangerous climate change if this were merely a national problem. given the findings above […] this constitutes a 'real and immediate risk' […] and it entails the risk that the lives and welfare of dutch residents could be seriously jeopardised. the same applies to, inter alia, a possible sharp rise in the sea level, which could render part of the netherlands uninhabitable. the fact that this risk will only be able to materialise a few decades from now and that it will not impact specific persons or a specific group of persons but large parts of the legal grounds . . and . . , also for an elaboration on the meaning of these rights. see also legal grounds . . - . . , . . - . . and . , and in considerable detail, the advisory opinion, paras. . - . . legal ground . ; see also . the same holds true for tort law, i think. see population does not mean […] that articles and ehcr offer no protection from this threat. the sc has ruled that 'based on the aforementioned facts' the court of appeal's judgment 'that there was "a real threat of dangerous climate change, resulting in the serious risk that the current generation of citizens will be confronted with loss of life and/or a disruption of family life"' is quite understandable. the sc seemingly refers to 'local areas of extreme heat, extreme drought, extreme precipitation, or other extreme weather', an adverse impact on health, the loss of territory and human lives and explicitly to sea level rise. the sc seems to think that one or more of these adverse consequences will scourge the netherlands, or at least a sufficient number of its citizens, within the lifetime of the current generation. this does not clearly follow from the facts on which the judgment is based, but it is certainly not unlikely, to say the least. after all, the netherlands already experiences serious droughts. it is beyond reasonable doubt that things will deteriorate as global temperature increases. the rather undetermined risk formulated in the judgment makes it difficult to assess whether it is convincing on this point. so much is clear: the sc takes the view that the real threat may materialise within the lifespan of the current citizens and as to the alleged inhabitability in 'a few decades from now'. that apparently constitutes a real and immediate risk in the sense of articles and echr. according to the current state of climate science, a sea level rise at a rate that makes part of the country uninhabitable 'in a few decades' is very unlikely. see in more detail sect. . the sc is right that the materialisation of a risk in 'a few decades' is not an obstacle for the applicability of articles and . the protection of article echr also regards risks that may only materialise in the longer term. ' in the longer term' seems to include a period of up to years. the sc refers to the case law of the ecthr about a time span of - years in the context of article , whilst it notes that the positive obligation emanating from article overlaps the obligation flowing legal ground . . legal ground . to which legal ground . . refers (it also refers to . - . ). andré nollkaemper and laura burgers seem to suggest that the hugely adverse consequences for (future) western european victims play a role, nollkaemper and burgers ( ), p. . they may be right that this has influenced the sc's judgment. but it does not follow from legal ground . . which is explicitly confined to the dutch population; see also legal ground . . further down nollkaemper and burgers rightly observe that the sc did not consider the extraterritorial effect of the echr (p. ); see also legal ground . . . see ipcc special report of , ipcc ( ). see tatar v. romania, no. / , january (only available in french) mentioned in fn. of the judgment; see also taskin and others v. turkey, no. / , november . legal ground . . . in gorovenky and bugara v. ukraine, no. / , january , the ecthr emphasised 'that article enjoins the state not only to refrain from the intentional and unlawful taking of life, but also to take appropriate steps to safeguard the lives of those within its jurisdiction […] . it may apply in situations concerning the requirement of personal protection of one or more individuals identifiable in advance […] and in cases raising the obligation to afford general protection to society (see maiorano and others v. italy, no. / , § , december ). '. from article . the former case was-inter alia-about alleged health and safety consequences caused by sodium cyanide from a goldmine. the government contended that this risk was hypothetical, it might only materialise after - years and it was therefore not serious and imminent. the ecthr did not explicitly pay attention to this defence but the most likely reading is that it was rejected. the sc also seems to suggest that a risk that could materialise within the lifespan of the current generation-which probably means: within years or so-falls under the protection of the echr. i strongly support the view that article (and ) should be applicable to serious threats as mentioned by the sc, even if they could 'only' arise after, say, years or more from now, but i am less sure that this follows from the ecthr's case law, let alone the case law to which the sc refers. the law is, however, a living instrument and should-and often does-keep pace with the changing demands of society. the precautionary principle is paraded several times. it is useful that the sc has confirmed its importance, although this is barely a revelation. the sc rightly refers to an ecthr judgment. it is glaringly obvious that unabated climate change poses a serious threat to many countries, which entails a series of adverse consequences. it is true that there are uncertainties about what precisely will happen and when, but the predominant view, both politically and scientifically, is that climate change must be kept well below °c and that a series of catastrophes will occur if that threshold is passed, as the sc rightly emphasises throughout the judgment. in the context of sharp sea level rise which could render part of the netherlands uninhabitable the sc has ruled that '[t]he fact that this risk will only be able to materialise in a few decades from now […] does not mean […] that articles and echr offer no protection from this threat' which is 'consistent with the precautionary principle'. in this setting the reference to the precautionary principle begs questions. so far only a few experts believe that the sea level will rise by more than m during this century. only in exceptional circumstances will a sea level rise of one meter be problematic; under normal circumstances dikes could protect the country against such a rise of sea level. although 'a few decades' is ambiguous, to normal parlance it does not encompass years or more (i.e. the remaining period the dutch text speaks of: 'zal kunnen realiseren', which means: could materialise. legal ground . . . some do; see vaughan ( ). a higher amount of sea level rise than m may be problematic; see zuidema ( ). in legal ground . . the sc notes that it depends on the circumstances which measures must be taken. until the end of this century). hence, the likelihood of a devastating sea level rise is extremely low (in the netherlands). if i am right in saying so, it is either or: the sc is mistaken as to the sea level rise or it takes the view that an extremely low probability suffices. i am inclined to think that this legal ground is a slip of the pen. the precautionary principle pops up again in legal grounds . . and . . . the sc rules that currently no technology is available to remove sufficient ghgs from the atmosphere on a sufficiently large scale. hence, it would be an irresponsible risk to rely on such technology. i could not agree more. the sc could not get enough of the precautionary principle. it also held thataccording to the court of appeal-the concentrations of a maximum target of or ppm are based on estimates. 'the precautionary principle therefore means that more far-reaching measures should be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rather than less far-reaching measures.' if it is reasonably possible to reduce emissions to a higher extent i fully second that view. but it has a high level of studyroom wisdom, unless the sc wants to say: the maximum reasonably and feasibly possible must be done. the ambiguous 'rather than' suggests that this is indeed what the sc had in mind. it is not saying that the precautionary principle has to be applied irrespective of the likelihood or the consequences for society. in that context one should bear in mind that the carbon budget of some high-end developed countries will be depleted within to years and of some countries even within years. to those countries it will already be quite a challenge to reduce their emissions to zero in due time. on the same note: the sc rightly emphasises that tipping points may be passed between °c and °c. would this mean, in the sc's line of thought, that the precautionary principle requires to reduce global ghg emissions at the highest rate possible, irrespective of the cost? even if that would destroy the economy and end up in global poverty? such a stance would also put a very heavy burden on least developed and low-end developing countries, if they, too, had to reduce their ghg emissions at the greatest pace possible. such a position would be difficult to reconcile with the common but differentiated responsibilities feature. this question is all the more pertinent and inconvenient because it is beyond cavil that (quite a) few major and powerful emitters will refrain from reducing their ghg emissions in the near future at great pace and to the extent needed. if not for legal, at least for practical purposes other countries will have to fill that gap. in the very near future that will put an extremely heavy burden on them, to put it mildly. would that point is also mentioned in borgarting court of appeal january , http://clima tecas echar t.com/non-us-case/green peace -nordi c-assn-and-natur e-youth -v-norwa y-minis try-of-petro leum-and-energ y/, p. . legal ground . . . on paper that would perhaps be possible before the end of , but quite a challenge if the state would be confronted with such an obligation a year in advance only. legal ground . . the precautionary principle require them to assume that burden irrespective of the consequences? the sc ruled that '[t]he policy a state implements when taking measures must be consistent'. that indeed follows from a ecthr judgment. it has, however, to be taken con grano salis. it belabours the obvious, i think, that a government's policy is not, nor should be, cast in stone. different factors, varying from changing views and the needs of society, a different political colour of the government and new scientific insights may be a justification for a different position. that, however, is no justification for taking a different stance on the need for taking specific action, such as reducing ghg emissions without proper scientific backing. the political wind may change. this may justify reducing unnecessarily ambitious reduction pledges, which, by the way, are quite rare. but it is no justification for taking a nonsensical position as the present case illustrates. if all signals-including earlier pledges, views e tutti quanti-point to the urgent need to reduce emissions by x% there is no justification for less. period. according to the sc the state 'is obliged to do "its part" in order to prevent dangerous climate change, even if it is a global problem'. it mentions a series of arguments. one of them is the 'no-harm rule' of international law. the argument fuels the idea that the state has an obligation, but i wonder whether it explains that the state has 'to do its part'. that argument comes close to a petitio principii. more convincing are the references to the unfccc convention, the ilc's draft articles of responsibility of states for internationally wrongful acts, adopted by the general assembly of the un and to 'many countries [that] have corresponding rules in their liability system'. the commentary on the update of the enterprises principles will elaborate on this point under gap filling obligations and a reality check. it will probably be published in the second half of the autumn of . '. in that respect i agree with backes and van der veen, ab rechtspraak bestuursrecht / , who make a similar point. legal grounds . . and . . legal ground . . . legal grounds . . and . . , although the sc is right that this convention does not make clear what 'its part' means (legal ground . . final paragraph, my paraphrase). legal ground . . . the sc holds that the defence that a country's share in global ghg emissions is 'very small' cannot be successfully invoked. otherwise a country could easily escape from its obligations by invoking this defence. that argument is convincing and in line with both the oslo principles and the enterprises principles. for practical purposes it is no more than a-valuable and welcome-magic word. the sc adds that climate change threatens human rights, which is also acknowledged in an international context ; adequate protection (art. echr) requires that individual states are responsible for their part. in the context of the obligation of doing 'its part' the sc notes that the determination of these parts 'belongs in principle to the political domain, both internationally and nationally '. under certain circumstances, there may also be such clear views, agreements and/or consensus in an international context about the distribution of measures among countries that the courts can establish what-in accordance with the widely supported view of states and international organisations, which view is also based on the insights of climate science-can in any case be regarded as the state's minimum fair share. […] . it follows from the ecthr case law […] that, under certain circumstances, agreements and rules that are not binding in and of themselves may also be meaningful in relation to such establishment. this may be the case if those rules and agreements are the expression of a very widely supported view or insight and are therefore important for the interpretation and application of the state's positive obligations under articles and echr. 'in determining the state's minimum obligations, the courts must observe restraint, especially if rules or agreements are involved that are not binding in legal ground . . with additional arguments in . see advisory opinion, paras. . - . with further references. legal ground . . . legal ground . . legal ground . . in the first paragraph of legal ground . the sc speaks of 'clearly the lower limit', the translation of 'evident de ondergrens'; ('evidently') is perhaps even stronger than 'clearly'. two distinguished dutch law professors contend that the sc converts widely shared opinions of experts-in the case in point climate change scientists-into legally binding norms. case note ch.w. backes and g.a. van der veen, ab rechtspraak bestuursrecht / under . themselves.' the concept is familiar in the human rights context. it was also adopted by a recent judgment rendered by the verwaltungsgericht berlin. the sc explains at quite some length why this approach means that the state has to reduce its emissions by at least %. it starts with a convincing analysis of the international consensus about the - % target. the exposé concludes that the 'high degree of consensus [about the urgent need to reduce ghg emissions by at least - % by compared to levels] can be regarded as a common ground within the meaning of the ecthr case law […] which according to that case law must be taken into account when interpreting and applying the echr'. the sc subsequently explains why the - % also applies to the state. the state was until of the opinion that 'a reduction of - % by was necessary to stay on a credible track to keep the °c target within reach '. the state's argument that such a reduction is unnecessary is rejected. the sc notes that the state did not explain 'that and why […] and taking into account the precautionary principle applicable in this context, a policy aimed at % reduction by can still be considered responsible '. the sc concludes that a reduction of % is 'an absolute minimum' seeing that 'there is a large degree of consensus in the international community and climate science that at least this reduction by the annex i countries, including the netherlands, is urgently needed'. the sc adds that this is 'also in line with what the state itself considers necessary for other years' and that the state 'has not been able to provide a proper substantiation of its claim that deviating from that target is nevertheless responsible '. this approach means that the impact of pledges (a kind of self-determination) is limited. as a rule the consensus in the international community and climate science suffices, although 'self-determination' will make it even more difficult to explain why a state wants to do less. interestingly and importantly the former consensus does not require legally binding instruments. the judgment does not seem to rule out that 'self-determination' below the just mentioned level can be a justification for lower reduction measures, but only if it is sufficiently substantiated. i am inclined to think that it will be an uphill fight to provide such a substantiation. this may be different in extreme scenarios, for instance legal ground . . the sc's approach is in line with spier ( ), pp. et seq. see about minimum obligations in the context of human rights, tasioulas ( ). see http://www.geric htsen tsche idung en.berli n-brand enbur g.de/jport al/porta l/t/ b/bs/ /page/samml ung.psml?pid=dokum entan zeige &showd occas e= &js_peid=treff erlis te&docum entnu mber= &numbe rofre sults = &fromd octod oc=yes&doc.id=jure &doc. part=l&doc natural catastrophes that have destroyed a major part of the country which means that the funds to achieve the required reductions are temporarily unavailable. the application of the concept 'minimum obligation' may be difficult. or, perhaps, i should say: it is not the panacea, but a step in the right direction. what does it mean if the international consensus about the measures to be taken falls significantly short of what needs to be done from the angle of climate science? in the context of climate change a reality. what should a court do if an ngo-or a least developed country-seeks injunctive relief in, say, to the effect that a high-end developed country has to curb its emissions to zero by, say , if the carbon budget may well be depleted by then? is the sc suggesting that the precautionary principle requires calculations to be based on in spite of a lack of widespread support for that view in the international community and climate science? if the answer would be in the affirmative, would that mean that the precautionary principle supersedes the minimum obligation approach? if the chance that the carbon budget will be depleted by would be sufficiently realistic (which includes a likelihood of well below %) an answer in the affirmative would be a giant step forward to the benefit of the climate. as explained at some length below, it is highly likely that the carbon budget will be depleted before . that, in turn, means that the international consensus, which is at best based on the need to reduce net ghg emissions to zero by , falls short of what needs to be done. if the minimum obligations feature would mean that consensus would be the upper limit of the courts' room for manoeuvre, as may well be the case, the future looks grim. this does not, let alone necessarily, mean that clearly insufficient measures or a clearly insufficient consensus should not constitute a minimum obligation. the concept is a valuable step forward and a major gain if courts would otherwise abstain. this being said, courts willing to issue injunctive relief for what is needed deserve our utmost gratitude; they will be remembered in history as gatekeepers of a slowly collapsing world. last but not least: the merits and shortcomings of this feature illustrate that a focus on international law only is a mistake. it is not only understandable but also unavoidable that national courts operate within the boundaries of the case law of the relevant international courts and tribunals if they apply international instruments. these boundaries disappear if national courts apply domestic law, for instance tort law. in doing so they may rely on, or become inspired by, the case law of international courts and tribunals, but they may also develop or shape national law otherwise. that shaping process could be a basis to escape from the limits posed by minimum obligations. even though national courts cannot avoid respecting the political primacy, that primacy should not be a fig leaf for allowing politicians to ruin the planet. more than %? the court of appeal suggested-barely hidden-that it would have been willing to issue injunctive relief for a higher percentage than : . […] the court is of the opinion that the state fails to fulfil its duty of care pursuant to articles and echr by not wanting to reduce emissions by at least % by end- . a reduction of % should be considered a minimum, in connection with which recent insights about an even more ambitious reduction in connection with the . °c target have not even been taken into consideration. the sc reiterates the urgent need for reductions between and % in emphasising that the state has to achieve a reduction of at least % : it has been recognised for some years that global warming should not be limited to a maximum of °c to prevent dangerous climate change, but to a maximum of . °c. […] this necessitates a greater reduction in greenhouse gas emissions than is necessary for a target of no more than °c. further down the sc notes that the need for this [at least %] requires the state to aim for a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by more than % by , rather than a reduction that is lower. the . °c perspective is in line with the view that it is still possible to keep global warming below . °c, which is a rather optimistic assumption; see sect. . the sc probably wants to say that global warming should be kept as close to . °c as possible, but even in that case it will require draconian measures of all kinds. that may be in line with the strongly emerging view among climate scientists, but it is not easy to reconcile with the prevailing view of even progressive regions (such as the eu), business leaders and even ngos which does not go beyond the message that global net emissions should be reduced to zero by . in line with the strasbourg case law the sc reminds us that 'articles and echr must not result in an impossible or under the given circumstances disproportionate burden being imposed on the state'. that, i think, also carries weight if a strict application of the precautionary principle would have devastating effects on society. the state contended that it is close to impossible to reduce the required emissions between the date of the judgment and the end of . the sc is deaf to this defence. it argues that the district court's order dates back to , which judgment had immediate effect. in addition, the state was well aware of the seriousness of the climate problem and it initially strived for a reduction of % by . this argument is convincing, if not self-explanatory. the more important issue is: how far can it be stretched if other courts would adopt the sc's approach? states, in particular developed states, know very well that they contribute disproportionally to climate change, that they have to reduce their emissions significantly and that many of their pledges (ndcs) fall short of their fair share of what needs to be done. it may be true that they do not know with great precision what needs to be done by each of them, at the very least they do know that much higher reductions are required, both by the world at large and by themselves. that is almost universally acknowledged and also follows from a un environment programme report mentioned in the urgenda judgment. this notion gives rise to the question of whether in future cases judges will rule that this knowledge means that the relevant states are under an obligation to effectuate significant non-achieved reductions within a short time span and that the defendants' laziness means that such a requirement is not disproportionally burdensome. it can only be hoped that courts will be courageous enough to deliver such judgments. otherwise there is no hope to keep global warming at bay. not surprisingly, time and again the sc refers to the paris agreement (pa). the pa contains two important elements. first 'it aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of global climate change […] by […] holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below °c above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to . °c above pre-industrial levels' (art. para. ) and a series of provisions to reach that goal (art. ). it is left to the parties legal ground . . . legal ground . . . i realise that many will argue that the law is clear: the obligations emanate from the paris agreement. that is certainly true, in that the paris agreement contains the very minimum that needs to be done by states. it is, however, barely a revelation that the paris agreement does not suffice. that, i strongly believe, means that states have further-reaching obligations. see for a similar view oslo principle which was never challenged at presentations. the enterprises principles contain a similar provision: principle . legal ground . . . the report is even more sobering, un environment programme ( a). to determine their goals, which means that it is unlikely that, together, they will achieve the reductions to achieve the goal of article . there is a strongly emerging view that net zero emissions should be achieved by . much more likely than not the carbon budget will be depleted long before then. first and foremost: ghg emissions are still not decreasing and there is very little reason to believe that most countries are going to curb their emissions significantly in the near future. thorgeirsson ( ) , 'it is very significant both in legal terms and politically that this reality is explicitly stated in a legal instrument' (p. ). see, also for many references, preston ( b) and world economic forum ( ). un environment programme ( b) and carbon brief ( ). a highly interesting article in nature contends that 'the world's remaining emissions budget for a : chance of staying within . °c of warming is only about gigatonnes (gt) of co . permafrost emissions could take an estimated % ( gt co ) of this budget, and that's without including methane from deep permafrost or undersea hydrates. if forests are close to tipping points, amazon dieback could release another gt co and boreal forests a further gt co . with global total co emissions still at more than gt per year, the remaining budget could be all but erased already'. lenton et al. ( ) . the world energy outlook casts doubt as to whether it is realistic to achieve the reductions required. based on the current policy 'energy demand rises by . % each year until '. international energy agency (iea) ( ), the gold standard of energy analysis, p. . the iea expects 'that almost one-fifth of the growth in global energy use in was due to hotter summers pushing up demand for cooling and cold snaps leading to higher heating needs' (p. ). it expects that 'the rise in africa's oil consumption to is larger than that of china, while the continent also sees a major expansion in natural gas use, prompted in part by a series of large discoveries made in recent years' (p. ). 'the expected growth in population in africa's hottest regions also means that up to half a billion additional people would need air conditioners or other cooling services by ' (p. ) and notes that 'over the past years, asia has accounted for % of all coal-fired capacity built worldwide, and these plants have potentially long operational lifetimes ahead of them. in developing economies in asia, existing coal-fired plants are just years old on average' (p. ). see https ://atmos phere .coper nicus .eu/cams-monit ors-unpre ceden ted-wildfi res-arcti c. hence, to keep global warming, as formulated in the paris agreement, 'well below degrees' almost certainly means much more stringent reduction obligations for states. it is very unlikely that climate change can be kept below . °c (the sc emphasises that 'the temperature can only safely rise by no more than . °c'). for the avoidance of doubt my sobering observations may be mistaken. miracles happen and the transition towards a carbon-neutral society may gain traction much sooner than expected. climate science may paint a grimmer picture than necessary, although thus far, the opposite has happened as the and reports by the ipcc illustrate. it is also possible that affordable technology, such as carbon capture and storage, will become available at the scale needed. it would, however, be fraught with risk and irreconcilable with the precautionary principle to bet on these uncertainties, if not rather hypothetical developments. the sc does not lend its ears to the defence that this case is about a political issue requiring abstinence by courts. the sc subtly reminds the state that it has to remain within the limits of the law by which it is bound. case law in other countries shows that this view is not universally adopted. the state did not contend that there is no majority in parliament for taking the measures required to comply with the judgment. happily, there is such a majority. but a majority in parliament cannot be taken for granted if countries continue to take a sit-and-wait position or if they confine themselves to incremental steps, which, sadly, is no exception. if, at some stage, probably sooner than later, 'the law' would require far-reaching measures which would impair the economy significantly, courts may feel reluctant to issue the relief needed to avert damage to vital interests of the younger and future generation(s), the environment, other living species and the economy. judges do not operate in a vacuum. they are part of society and aim to serve it the best they can: 'we must rise to the key challenges of our time, or risk being legal ground . under (not numbered in the english translation). legal ground . under and . . the dutch text speaks of a 'safe rise of temperature' ('veilige temperatuurstijging'), which suggests that keeping global warming below that threshold is safe. the increasing number of natural catastrophes illustrates that this statement is mistaken. to some extent the corona virus will be a blessing in disguise, but it is in the laps of the gods what its impact will be in the mid and longer term. see in considerable detail faure and partain ( ). legal grounds . - . and for a comparative overview the advisory opinion, paras. . - . . for instance juliana v. united states, no. - , wl ( th cir. ), http://blogs .law.colum bia.edu/clima te-chang e-litig ation /wp-conte nt/uploa ds/sites / /case-docum ents/ / _docke t- - _opini on.pdf and natur og ungdom and föreningen greenpeace norden v. government of norway, borgarting court of appeal january , http://clima tecas echar t.com/non-uscase/green peace -nordi c-assn-and-natur e-youth -v-norwa y-minis try-of-petro leum-and-energ y/. see also the cases mentioned in footnotes and . part of these interests are not (directly) covered by the echr. destroyed by them' as laurent fabius, the president of the french constitutional council, put it. naturally, he realises that the 'construction of environmental justice' by courts will generate increasing 'attacks on the highest courts'. he hits the mark saying that 'those who wish to destroy the rule of law have understood that if their brutalism is to prevail, they must attack these institutions and the judges whose task it is to protect the rule of law'. if-almost a prophecy-this brutalism will gain ground, judges will find themselves in a very uncomfortable position. but we have not yet reached that stage if courts are willing 'to do their part' as the sc put it in a different context. even in worst case scenarios quite a few cases will be about what is, even by then, still reasonably achievable. for a while it was uncertain whether the state would comply with the judgment. in the meantime there is a favourable chance that it will. to that effect the corona crisis plays a not unimportant role. non-compliance by the state would be the ultimate litmus test of the rule of law. in such a scenario urgenda could seek a financial penalty (dwangsom) to be determined by the court to be paid to urgenda for every day (or other period to be determined by the court) the state does not comply with the judgment. a symbolic penalty of, say, € would likely not be an incentive. perhaps it would be if the court would add that the amount will be significantly increased if non-compliance continues after a period to be specified by the court. to me the serious difficulty with significant penalties to be paid to urgenda is that tax payers' money would have to be paid to urgenda which could spend it at its will, thus for practical purposes making political choices. the most effective measures, such as phasing out coal-fired power plants, cannot be effectuated by urgenda. personally, i hope that the court will resist issuing penalties, if sought. i realise that this would be a major blow to the rule of law, a not uncommon feature in relation to judgments by international courts or tribunals. still in the non-compliance scenario: alternatively urgenda might seek a court order on how to materialise the non-achieved reductions. a judgment to that effect would be less problematic, particularly so if the court would grant the state the opportunity of achieving the same amount of reductions otherwise within a the highest french court. speech on january , at the european court of human rights, https ://www.echr.coe.int/docum ents/speec h_ _fabiu s_jy_eng.pdf. see in much more detail brian j. preston's sobering analysis, preston ( a), pp. - . if the impact of the corona crisis would only be temporal-a likely scenario-and if that impact would have been decisive to reduce dutch emissions by % the question arises whether the state would have complied with the judgment. that depends on the interpretation of the injunctive relief. i prefer not to anticipate on that discussion. art. a wetboek van burgerlijke rechtsvordering (code of civil procedure). well-defined period of time. depending on the formulation of the judgment, it might be enforceable. the real challenges lie ahead of us. the future looks bleak as explained in sect. . in the most likely scenario, in the near future courts will have to choose between courage and realism, or perhaps i should say fatalism, i.e. the devil or the deep blue sea. if they opt for judgments required to achieve the almost universally adopted goals, the defendants will be required to take far-reaching and costly measures, significantly more demanding than the relatively modest measures to be taken by the netherlands to comply with the urgenda judgment. one does not need a crystal ball to predict that some, and arguably many, states-also states considering the rule of law of paramount importance-will not (easily) comply with such judgments. if this sobering forecast would come true, climate change will not only cause a global catastrophe but also ruin the rule of law. the judgment sets a 'precedent' for dutch cases. for other jurisdictions it 'only' matters if and to the extent the arguments appeal to other courts. whether that is likely to be the case depends on the persuasiveness of the arguments and whether these courts are prepared to accept that the issues in point are not merely political issues. in spite of a few reservations discussed above i hope the sc's judgment will seduce courts in other countries to take up the gauntlet in the fight against climate change. the judgment offers a series of interesting legal concepts worthy of consideration in litigation across the dutch border. the dutch sc is not the first court that has been prepared to enter the climate change scene in an active-some will argue: activist-way. an advisory opinion of the inter-american court of human rights and the groundbreaking judgment gloucester resources ltd. v see n. . the dissenting judge staton begs the question: 'where is the hope in today's decision? plaintiffs' claims are based on science […] if plaintiffs' fears, backed by the government's own studies, prove true history will not judge us kindly. when the seas envelop our coastal cities, fires and drought haunt our interiors, and storms ravage everything between, those remaining will ask: why did so many do so little?' (p. ). see for more details setzer and byrnes ( ). high court of ireland in friends of the irish environment v. the government of ireland [ ] iech reversed by the supreme court, (unapproved version), http://clima tecas echar t.com/non-us-case/frien ds-of-theirish -envir onmen t-v-irela nd, verwaltungsgericht berlin vg k . , http://www.geric htsen tsche idung en.berli n-brand enbur g.de/jport al/porta l/t/ b/bs/ /page/samml ung.psml?pid=dokum entan zeige &showd occas e= &js_peid=treff erlis te&docum entnu mber= &numbe rofre sults = &fromd octod oc=yes&doc. id=jure &doc.part=l&doc.price = . #focus point and superior court of quebec in environnement jeunesse v. attorney general of canada, http://clima tecas echar t.com/non-us-case/envir onnem ent-jeune sse-v-canad ian-gover nment /, ultimately on procedural grounds (the arbitrary composition of the 'class'). in the short term it seems a safe bet that courts will become increasingly willing to step in if ever more catastrophic natural events occur, although they may face fierce criticism the bolder their judgments will become. interestingly, the iba's model statute for proceedings offers a highly important article about legal remedies available in government-related climate proceedings. this model statute will hopefully inspire courts that are hesitant to judge these kinds of cases on their merits. to me the most intriguing question is whether the judgment will have wider implications, both in relation to states and the corporate world. first a caveat: the judgment in point does not answer any of the following questions, not even for dutch law. in the netherlands part of such cases, in particular those about permits and the like, have to be submitted to administrative courts and will ultimately be decided by the judicial branch of the council of state. although the different branches of the dutch judiciary try to align with each other's case law, they are not obliged to do so. it is to be expected that the urgent need to keep global warming well below °c will be given ever more weight in relation to impact assessments. a recent judgment about a new runway for heathrow airport is telling, although the court of appeal emphasises that it is not saying that the permit cannot be granted. it 'only' emphasises that the climate change angle must be given genuine weight. an even more courageous judgment by an austrian lower court-there is no room for a new runway fat the airport of vienna -was reversed by the supreme administrative court. in gloucester resources v. minister of planning, about a new coal mine, climate change played an important, though not a decisive, role in upholding the refusal of consent. an important, albeit somewhat chaotic, norwegian judgment about awarding production licences for petroleum on the norwegian continental shelf deserves specific attention. the licence was challenged by greenpeace et al. on alleged international bar association ( ), model statute for proceedings challenging government failure to act on climate change, art. . it may be useful to disclose that i served as a member of the working group. part of the sections below is borrowed from jaap spier's contribution to the website of clyde & co (london), https ://resil ience .clyde co.com/artic les/the-urgen da-judgm ent-and-its-poten tial-impli catio ns. ( ) ewca civ. . between the lines the court seems to suggest that the new runway is incompatible with the uk's commitment to reduce ghg emissions and mitigate climate change under the paris agreement (para. ). incompatibility with the constitution of norway and articles and echr. the borgarting court of appeal emphasised that 'the severity of the environmental harm will […] be the key criterion, based on the significance for human health and the productive capacity and diversity of the natural environment' (art. para. of the constitution). actual harm is not required, a risk suffices in line with the precautionary principle. it comes down to 'what harm remains after measures have been taken.' 'the societal considerations behind the encroachment on the natural environment and the societal costs of the measures are key.' all emissions, both from the production and the combustion-domestically or abroad-carry weight. the court discusses the impact on norway and notes that there are currently no largescale technical solutions available for carbon capture and storage. norway does not meet its self-imposed target ( % reductions by compared to ) ; 'total reported national contributions are too low to fulfil the paris agreement targets '. the court-unrealistically -assumes 'a well-functioning emissions allowance trading system'. in spite of the fact that the court emphasises the urgent need to 'drastically' reduce ghg emissions, it notes that 'a country can go a long way towards buying itself out '. without much ado, the court holds that 'increased emissions from the norwegian continental shelf will not affect the total emissions within the sectors required '. what follows are unsubstantiated speculations about what might happen concerning norwegian reductions of ghgs. the court seems to follow the baron von münchhausen process: 'the view that there is room for the emissions presumes that measures will be taken to reduce total national emissions that can provide such room '. at any rate 'possible future emissions related to the production licenses […] do not bear such importance for the national emissions, when the measures taken are also consolidated, that the threshold under article has been exceeded'. '[a] gradual phasing-out of norwegian exports of oil and gas […] does not necessarily mean that the world's energy requirements as a whole will be covered in a more climate-friendly manner.' in the court's view the adverse consequences of the licences and the possible harm ('it cannot be ruled out that these will result in loss of human life') do 'not clearly fulfil the requirement for a "real and immediate risk" '. even if the risk would be 'real and immediate' the outcome would be the same for the reasons mentioned in relation to article constitution. the dutch sc's approach would lead to a different outcome, i think. the international community and climate science are in full agreement that global emissions must be reduced significantly. for the reasons mentioned above it will be quite a challenge to achieve the significant reductions required. high-end developed countries, even more so if their emissions per capita are high, which applies to both norway and the netherlands, have to take the lead. more oil and gas means higher ghg emissions. it is counterproductive to the urgent need for a transition to renewable energy and will make it impossible to reduce global emissions to zero in the near future. if there were room for the exploitation of new oil or gas fields, priority should be given to least developed and low-end developing countries which, i think, is in line with the common but differentiated responsibilities feature to which the court of appeal refers in a different context. the reason for devoting so much attention to this case is that creating obstacles to new fossil fuel production is low hanging fruit. it does not cost a penny. to the contrary: it is a gain for the climate. the notion that enterprises have to respect human rights is swiftly gaining ground. strikingly, at the conference of the parties (cop) in madrid commissioner cadiz of the philippines' commission on human rights announced the commission's conclusion in a case initiated by greenpeace south east asia that legal responsibility for climate change is not covered by current international human rights law. in the context of the liability of major fossil fuel corporations he contends that it is up to the respective countries to 'pass strong legislation and establish liability in their courts '. in my view the idea that human rights do not play a role concerning climate change is a rearguard action. i share, however, commissioner cadiz' (the commission's?) view that carbon majors (and, i should add, other enterprises) 'definitely have an obligation to respect human rights as enunciated under the united nations p. with elaboration on p. . p. . strikingly, the norwegian court also highlights the relevance of such 'agreements': pp. guiding principles on business and human rights '. the commission could also have referred to the oecd guidelines for multinational enterprises and the global compact. many corporations, captains of industry, investors, and institutions such as the global compact do not cease to emphasise the urgent need to take bold action, a wise and well-considered position. enterprises increasingly and laudably issue pledges to reduce their emissions significantly, to align with the paris agreement or even to effectuate zero emissions by . climate change science strongly supports the view that global emissions must be reduced significantly and at great pace. the ipcc reports of and leave no room for doubt: a hell of a lot must be done right now; see sect. . as a matter of fact, quite a few enterprises lag far behind these pledges and the like. as explained above, it is open to debate whether there will still be a carbon budget by . it can only be hoped that courts are willing to adopt a similar approach concerning emissions of the corporate world as the sc has done in the urgenda case by applying at least the concept of minimum obligations. that begs the question of how to 'define' the relevant minimum obligations in the context of enterprises. to the best of my knowledge that is unchartered territory. the sc's reference to 'such clear views […] based on the insights of climate science' should not be any different in that context, i think. the urgent need to reduce emissions to zero by is barely disputable. i am strongly inclined to believe that enterprises based in a eu country have a minimum obligation to reduce their ghg emissions to net zero by . that is the current eu strategy. the imperative to reduce emissions to net zero by is increasingly accepted in the political domain, albeit certainly not universally. it is in line with the insights offered by climate science. the linear approach advocated by the sc seems the preferable solution between now and . exceptions could be allowed if the eu as a whole effectively takes countervailing measures to offset the remaining emissions of one or more countries or enterprises. a similar approach could be adopted for enterprises based in other countries which have made similar pledges or acknowledged the urgent need to reduce ghg emissions to zero by . what about enterprises in the too many countries that have not pledged to reduce their emissions to zero by and do not even acknowledge the need to do so? the sc formula does not provide a sound basis for net zero emissions by for enterprises based in these countries. after all, for them the urgent need can only be based on scientific insights and by themselves they do not suffice to constitute a minimum obligation. it is open to debate whether there is already a sufficient amount of consensus about net zero emissions by in the international community. be that as it may, such enterprises have at least to align with the ndcs of the countries in which they are based, unless they can provide a compelling justification why lower reductions suffice in their case, i think. in my quest to discern minimum reduction obligations of enterprises i have not applied the full formula of the judgment. in particular the sc's provisos 'under certain circumstances' and the restraint required in applying the formula were not explicitly mentioned. in the context of enterprises that is less needed because determining their obligations is less of a political, or perhaps i should say politicised, issue. the good news for enterprises is that compliance with their minimum obligations may shield against liability. 'may' should be emphasised. minimum obligations do not suffice to keep global warming below fatal thresholds. it is crystal clear-also to states and enterprises-that more must be done. enterprises have to take into account the possibility that courts will be more demanding than urging compliance with minimum obligations. other legal bases, either or not in conjunction with human rights, may well serve as a sound basis for obligations exceeding the 'minimum', however defined. enterprises should keep in mind that the insights in climate science are ever-changing. the longer we (the world) delay(s) action, the smaller the carbon budget, which means that a steeper rate of reductions is required if we are to achieve the target to avert catastrophic climate change. hence, measures that could seem to be sufficient for the coming decade, could become obsolete in a couple of years as the insights change and (a large part of) the world continues to emit excessively. it is an unfortunate given that those who are reducing their ghg emissions at great pace will have to take up (part) of the non-achieved emissions by those who do little or nothing. that, i think, is not only a moral and political, but also a legal obligation. it is also the logical consequence of the sc's judgment based as it is on the insights of climate science and the 'clear views […] in an international context'; see sect. . in sect. mention was made of the sc's rejection of the state's argument that it is close to impossible to achieve the reductions required by the court by the end of . enterprises would be best advised to reckon with similar judgments if they clearly fell short of complying with at least their minimum obligations. if they did not at least reduce their emissions at the 'minimum rate', they have to reckon with similar judgments which allow them little time to meet that obligation. that presupposes that the enterprises could reasonably have known their minimum obligation. many will argue that they were unaware of the same. as a rule such defences are doomed to founder. one is supposed to know the law as it will emanate from future judgments. those who take a sit-and-wait position expose themselves and their boards to claims for damages. michael kirby, a retired justice in the high court of australia, hit the mark: 'it would be unwise to wait for a future royal commission or litigation to unveil the neglect, indifference and carelessness of those in responsible positions of decision-making who are sleepwalking in a blindfold while potentially important problems are looming '. the issue in this case is whether the dutch state is obliged to reduce, by the end of , the emission of greenhouse gases originating from dutch soil by at least % compared to , and whether the courts can order the state to do so. urgenda sought a court order directing the state to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases so that, by the end of , those emissions will have been reduced by %, or in any case at by at least %, compared to . in , the district court allowed urgenda's claim, in the sense that the state was ordered to reduce emissions by the end of by at least % compared to . in , the court of appeal confirmed the district court's judgment. the state instituted an appeal in cassation in respect of the court of appeal's decision, asserting a large number of objections to that decision. the deputy procurator general and the advocate general advised the supreme court to reject the state's appeal and thus to allow the court of appeal's decision to stand. the supreme court concludes that the state's appeal in cassation must be rejected. that means that the order which the district court issued to the state and which was confirmed by the court of appeal, directing the state to reduce greenhouse gases by the end of by at least % compared to , will stand as a final order. the supreme court's opinion rests on the facts and assumptions which were established by the court of appeal and which were not disputed by the state or urgenda in cassation. in cassation, the supreme court determines whether the court of appeal properly applied the law and whether, based on the facts that may be taken into consideration, the court of appeal's opinion is comprehensible and adequately substantiated. the grounds for the supreme court's judgment are laid down below in sects. - of the judgment. these grounds will be summarised below. this summary does not supersede the grounds for this judgment and does not fully reflect the supreme court's opinion. dangerous climate change (see paras. . - . , below) urgenda and the state both endorse the view of climate science that a genuine threat exists that the climate will undergo a dangerous change in the coming decades. there is a great deal of agreement on the presence of that threat in climate science and the international community. in that respect and briefly put, this comes down to the following. the emission of greenhouse gases, including co , is leading to a higher concentration of those gases in the atmosphere. these greenhouse gases retain the heat radiated by the earth. because over the last century and a half since the start of the industrial revolution, an ever-increasing volume of greenhouse gases is being emitted, the earth is becoming warmer and warmer. in that period, the earth has warmed by approximately . oc, the largest part of which ( . oc) has occurred in the last forty years. climate science and the international community largely agree on the premise that the warming of the earth must be limited to no more than oc, and according to more recent insights to no more than . oc. the warming of the earth beyond that temperature limit may have extremely dire consequences, such as extreme heat, extreme drought, extreme precipitation, a disruption of ecosystems that could jeopardise the food supply, among other things, and a rise in the sea level resulting from the melting of glaciers and the polar ice caps. that warming may also result in tipping points, as a result of which the climate on earth or in particular regions of earth changes abruptly and comprehensively. all of this will jeopardise the lives, welfare and living environment of many people all over the world, including in the netherlands. some of these consequences are already happening right now. protection of human rights based on the echr (see paras. . . - . . , below) the european convention on the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms (echr) requires the states which are parties to the convention to protect the rights and freedoms established in the convention for their inhabitants. article echr protects the right to life, and article echr protects the right to respect for private and family life. according to the case law of the european court of human rights (ecthr), a contracting state is obliged by these provisions to take suitable measures if a real and immediate risk to people's lives or welfare exists and the state is aware of that risk. the obligation to take suitable measures also applies when it comes to environmental hazards that threaten large groups or the population as a whole, even if the hazards will only materialise over the long term. while articles and echr are not permitted to result in an impossible or disproportionate burden being imposed on a state, those provisions do oblige the state to take measures that are actually suitable to avert the imminent hazard as much as reasonably possible. pursuant to article echr, national law must offer an effective legal remedy against a violation or imminent violation of the rights that are safeguarded by the echr. this means that the national courts must be able to provide effective legal protection. global problem and national responsibility (see paras. . . - . , below) the risk of dangerous climate change is global in nature: greenhouse gases are emitted not just from dutch territory, but around the world. the consequences of those emissions are also experienced around the world. the netherlands is a party to the united nations framework convention on climate change (unfccc). the objective of that convention is to keep the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to a level at which a disruption of the climate system through human action can be prevented. the unfccc is based on the premise that all member countries must take measures to prevent climate change, in accordance with their specific responsibilities and options. each country is thus responsible for its own share. that means that a country cannot escape its own share of the responsibility to take measures by arguing that compared to the rest of the world, its own emissions are relatively limited in scope and that a reduction of its own emissions would have very little impact on a global scale. the state is therefore obliged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its territory in proportion to its share of the responsibility. this obligation of the state to do 'its part' is based on articles and echr, because there is a grave risk that dangerous climate change will occur that will endanger the lives and welfare of many people in the netherlands. what, specifically, does the state's obligation to do 'its part' entail? (see paras. . - . . , below) when giving substance to the positive obligations imposed on the state pursuant to articles and echr, one must take into account broadly supported scientific insights and internationally accepted standards. important in this respect are, among other things, the reports from the ipcc. the ipcc is a scientific body and intergovernmental organisation that was set up in the context of the united nations to handle climatological studies and developments. the ipcc's report contained a scenario in which the warming of the earth could reasonably be expected to be limited to a maximum of oc. in order to achieve this target, the annex i countries (these being the developed countries, including the netherlands) would have to reduce their emissions in by - %, and in by - %, compared to . at the annual climate conferences held in the context of the unfccc since , virtually every country has regularly pointed out the necessity of acting in accordance with the scenario of the ipcc and achieving a - % reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in . the scientifically supported necessity of reducing emissions by % in compared to has been expressed on multiple occasions by and in the eu. furthermore, since , a broadly supported insight has arisen that, to be safe, the warming of the earth must remain limited to . oc, rather than oc. the paris agreement of therefore expressly states that the states must strive to limit warming to . oc. that will require an even greater emissions reduction than was previously assumed. all in all, there is a great degree of consensus on the urgent necessity for the annex i countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least - % in . the consensus on this target must be taken into consideration when interpreting and applying articles and echr. the urgent necessity for a reduction of - % in also applies to the netherlands on an individual basis. the policy of the state (see paras. . . - . . , below) the state and urgenda are both of the opinion that it is necessary to limit the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in order to in order to achieve either the oc target or the . oc target. their views differ, however, with regard to the speed at which greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced. until , the state's policy was aimed at achieving an emissions reduction in of % compared to . according to the state, that was necessary to stay on a credible pathway to keep the oc target within reach. after , however, the state's reduction target for was lowered from a % reduction by the netherlands to a % reduction in an eu context. after the reduction in , the state intends to accelerate the reduction to % in and % in . those targets for and have since been laid down in the dutch climate act. the state has not explained, however, that -and why -a reduction of just % in is considered responsible in an eu context, in contrast to the - % reduction in , which is internationally broadly supported and is considered necessary. there is a broad consensus within climate science and the international community that the longer reduction measures to achieve the envisaged final target are postponed, the more comprehensive and more expensive they will become. postponement also creates a greater risk of an abrupt climate change occurring as the result of a tipping point being reached. in light of that generally endorsed insight, it was up to the state to explain that the proposed acceleration of the reduction after would be feasible and sufficiently effective to meet the targets for and , and thus to keep the oc target and the . oc target within reach. the state did not do this, however. the court of appeal was thus entitled to rule that the state must comply with the target, considered necessary by the international community, of a reduction by at least % in . the courts and the political domain (see paras. . - . . , below) the state has asserted that it is not for the courts to undertake the political considerations necessary for a decision on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. in the dutch system of government, the decision-making on greenhouse gas emissions belongs to the government and parliament. they have a large degree of discretion to make the political considerations that are necessary in this regard. it is up to the courts to decide whether, in taking their decisions, the government and parliament have remained within the limits of the law by which they are bound. those limits ensue from the echr, among other things. the dutch constitution requires the dutch courts to apply the provisions of this convention, and they must do so in accordance with the ecthr's interpretation of these provisions. this mandate to the courts to offer legal protection, even against the government, is an essential component of a democratic state under the rule of law. the court of appeal's judgment is consistent with the foregoing, as the court of appeal held that the state's policy regarding greenhouse gas reduction is obviously not meeting the requirements pursuant to articles and echr to take suitable measures to protect the residents of the netherlands from dangerous climate change. furthermore, the order which the court of appeal issued to the state was limited to the lower limit ( %) of the internationally endorsed, minimum necessary reduction of - % in . the order that was issued leaves it up to the state to determine which specific measures it will take to comply with that order. if legislative measures are required to achieve such compliance, it is up to the state to determine which specific legislation is desirable and necessary. in short, the essence of the supreme court's judgment is that the order which the district court issued to the state and which was confirmed by the court of appeal, directing the state to reduce greenhouse gases by the end of by at least % compared to , will be allowed to stand. pursuant to articles and echr, the court of appeal can and may conclude that the state is obliged to achieve that reduction, due to the risk of dangerous climate change that could have a severe impact on the lives and welfare of the residents of the netherlands. and of its judgment can be taken as a starting point. the parties do not dispute these facts in cassation. the supreme court will therefore base its judgment on those facts (article ( ) dccp). the most relevant of these are the following. -since the beginning of the industrial revolution, mankind has consumed energy on a large scale. this energy has predominantly been generated by the combustion of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas). this releases carbon dioxide. this compound of carbon and oxygen is referred to by its chemical formula: co . part of the co that is released is emitted into the atmosphere, where it remains for hundreds of years or more and is partly absorbed by the ecosystems in forests and oceans. this absorption capacity is dropping continuously due to deforestation and the warming of the sea water. -co is the most significant greenhouse gas and, in tandem with other greenhouse gases, it retains the heat radiated by our planet in the atmosphere. this is called the 'greenhouse effect'. the greenhouse effect increases as more co is emitted into the atmosphere, which in turn exacerbates global warming. the climate is slow to respond to the emission of greenhouse gases: the full warming effect of the greenhouse gases being emitted today will not be felt for another thirty to forty years. other greenhouse gases include methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases. -concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are expressed in parts per million (hereinafter: ppm). the term 'ppm co equivalent' is used to express the total concentration of all greenhouse gases, in which respect the concentration of all of the other, non-co greenhouse gases is converted into co equivalents based on the warming effect. -there is a direct, linear connection between the greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans, which are partly caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and the warming of the planet. the planet is already approximately . °c warmer than it was at the start of the industrial revolution. the court of appeal assumed that the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stood at ppm at the time it rendered its judgment. in recent decades, worldwide emissions of co have increased by % annually. -the rise in the planet's temperature can be prevented or reduced by ensuring that fewer greenhouse gases are emitted into the atmosphere. this is referred to as 'mitigation'. measures can also be taken to anticipate the effects of climate change, such as raising dikes in low-lying areas. the taking of such measures is referred to as 'adaptation'. -there has long been a consensus in climate science -the science that studies climate and climate change -and in the international community that the average temperature on earth may not rise by more than °c compared to the average temperature in the pre-industrial era. according to climate scientists, if the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has not risen above ppm by the year , there is a reasonable chance that this objective (hereinafter: "the two-degree target") will be achieved. in recent years, new insights have shown that the temperature can only safely rise by no more than . °c, which translates into a greenhouse gas concentration level of no more than ppm in the year . -when viewed in light of the maximum concentration level of or ppm in the year and the current concentration level of greenhouse gases ( ppm), it is clear that the world has very little leeway left when it comes to the emission of greenhouse gases. the total worldwide leeway that now remains for emitting greenhouse gases is referred to as the 'carbon budget'. in the meantime, the chance that the warming of the earth can be limited to a maximum temperature increase of . oc has become extremely slim. -if the earth warms by substantially more than °c compared to the pre-industrial era, this would cause, inter alia: flooding as a result of sea level rise; heat stress as a result of more intense and longer-lasting heat waves, increases in respiratory ailments associated with deteriorating air quality resulting from periods of drought (with severe forest fires), increased spread of infectious diseases, severe flooding as a result of torrential rainfall, and disruptions of the production of food and the supply of drinking water. ecosystems, flora and fauna will be eroded and there will be a loss of biodiversity. an inadequate climate policy will, in the sec- a temperature increase of °c above the level of the pre-industrial era entails the risk of a dangerous, irreversible change in the climate. after an analysis of various reduction scenarios, this report states that to be able to achieve a maximum volume of ppm in the year , the emissions of greenhouse gases by the countries listed in annex i to the unfccc (including the netherlands) must be % to % lower in the year than they were in the year . -the ipcc published its fifth assessment report in - (hereinafter: ar ). this report established, inter alia, that the planet is warming as a result of the increase in the concentration of co in the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and that this is being caused by human activities, in particular by the burning of oil, gas and coal and by deforestation. in ar , the ipcc concluded that if the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stabilises at around ppm in the year , the chance that the global temperature increase would remain under °c was "likely", that is, higher than %. in % of the scenarios for achieving this target detailed in ar , assumptions are made regarding 'negative emissions': in other words, the extraction of co from the atmosphere. the unfccc and the climate conferences ( ) the united nations framework convention on climate change (unfccc) was ratified in . the purpose of this convention is to promote the stabilisation of the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a level at which would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference (i.e.: interference caused by humans) with the climate system. the parties to the unfccc are referred to as annex i countries and non-annex i countries. the annex i countries are the developed countries, including the netherlands. according to article ( ) of the convention, the annex i countries must take the lead, in an international context, in counteracting climate change and its negative consequences. they have committed themselves to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. they must periodically report on the measures they have taken. the objective is to return the level of emissions to the level in . in the preamble they refer to the urgency of a major reduction in admissions. -in cancún, the parties to the kyoto protocol stated that the annex i countries had to continue to take the lead in counteracting climate change and that, given ar , this "would require annex i parties as a group to reduce emissions in a range of - per cent below levels by ". the parties to the kyoto protocol have urged the annex i countries to raise their level of ambition in relation to the commitments they already made, with a view to the - % range referred to in ar . in the 'cancun pledges', the eu countries as a group declared themselves prepared to achieve a % reduction by compared to , and offered to achieve a % reduction on the condition that other countries were to undertake the achievement of similar reduction targets. -at the climate conference in doha in (cop- ), all annex i countries were called on to raise their reduction targets to at least - % in . an amendment to the kyoto protocol was adopted, in which the eu committed to a reduction of % in compared to , and offered to reduce emissions by % if other countries were to undertake the achievement of similar reduction targets. this condition was not met. the doha amendment did not enter into force. the paris agreement ( ) the paris agreement was concluded at the climate conference in paris in (cop- ). this convention calls on each contracting state to account for its own responsibilities. the convention stipulates that global warming must be kept "well below °c" as compared to the average pre-industrial levels, striving to limit the temperature increase to . °c. the parties must prepare ambitious national climate plans and of which the level of ambition must increase with each new plan. -since , unep (referred to in ( ), above) has been reporting annually on the difference between the desired emissions level and the reduction targets to which the parties have committed: this is referred to as the 'emissions gap'. in the annual report, unep noted, for the third time running, that the contracting states' commitments were falling short and greenhouse gases emissions were increasing rather than decreasing. unep also notes that the annex i countries fail to meet their joint emissions targets to achieve a - % reduction in , as laid down in the ar referred to above in ( ) . unep concludes that it is becoming increasingly improbable that emissions will be low enough in to achieve the °c target at the lowest possible cost. although later reduction actions could ultimately lead to the same temperature targets, according to unep these would be more difficult, costlier and riskier. -unep's annual report states that, in light of the paris agreement, an enhanced pre- mitigation action is more urgent than ever. unep notes that if the emissions gap that has been observed is not bridged by , then it will be extremely improbable that the °c target can still be achieved. this was why, according to unep, the targets for need to be more ambitious. ( ) according to the expectations that existed when the court of appeal's judgment was rendered, the eu as a whole would achieve an actual emissions reduction in of - % compared to . would strive to achieve an emissions reduction of at least % in compared to . according to the government agreement, the eu reduction target of % in was not sufficient to achieve the two-degree target, let alone the . °c ambition laid down in the paris agreement. -dutch co emissions per capita of the population are relatively high compared to other industrialised countries. in terms of emissions, the netherlands was ranked th out of countries when the court of appeal rendered its judgment. of the countries with even higher emissions, only had higher per capita emissions, none of which were eu member states. of the total volume of dutch greenhouse gas emissions, % consists of co . dutch co emissions have barely decreased since and have even risen in recent years (up until the court of appeal's judgment). in the - period, the netherlands achieved a . % reduction in co -equivalent emissions. the reduction is attributable to greenhouse gases other than co . in that same period, the fifteen largest eu member states achieved an emissions reduction of . %, and the eu as a whole achieved a reduction of . % . moreover, - % of the reduction in the - period was due to the economic crisis. had this crisis not occurred, emissions for this period would have been substantially higher (and the reduction substantially lower). -when the court of appeal rendered its judgment, it was expected that the netherlands would achieve a reduction of % in , and taking into account a margin for uncertainty, of - %. the district court refers to a substantially lower expectation in its judgment. the difference is largely attributable to a new calculation method (which is more consistent with that used by the ipcc, but) as a result of which the theoretical reduction percentage is achieved earlier even though the situation is actually more serious. the difference can largely be explained by the fact that the emissions calculation in the base year of was retrospectively adjusted upwards. urgenda's view is that the state is doing too little to prevent dangerous climate change. in these proceedings, to the extent relevant in cassation, it is requesting an order instructing the state to limit the volume of greenhouse gas emissions in the netherlands such that this volume would be reduced by % at the end of the year , or at least by a minimum of %, compared to the volume in the year . it institutes its claim pursuant to article : a dcc, which enables interest organisations to bring class action suits. it is pursuing its claim, to the extent relevant in cassation, on behalf of the interests of the current residents of the netherlands (the inhabitants of the netherlands) who are being threatened with dangerous climate change. . . urgenda has, briefly put, asserted the following grounds for its claims. the greenhouse gas emissions from the netherlands are contributing to a dangerous change in the climate. the netherlands' share of worldwide emissions is excessive, speaking both absolutely and relatively (per capita of the population). this means that dutch emissions, for which the state as a sovereign power has systemic responsibility, are unlawful, since they violate the due care which is part of the state's duty of care to those whose interests urgenda represents (article : ( ) dcc), as well as articles and echr. under both national and international law, the state is obliged, in order to prevent dangerous climate change, to ensure the reduction of the dutch emissions level. this duty of care entails that, in , the netherlands must achieve a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of - % compared to emissions in , in accordance with the target referred to in ar (see para. . ( ), above). a reduction of this magnitude is necessary in order to maintain the prospect of achieving the °c target. this is also the most cost-effective option. the defences asserted by the state include the following. the requirements of neither article : dcc (court order) nor article : dcc (unlawful act) have been met. there is no basis in either national or international law for a duty that legally requires the state to take measures in order to achieve the reduction target as sought. the target laid down in ar is not a legally binding standard. articles and echr do not imply an obligation for state to take mitigating or other measures to counter climate change. granting the reduction order being sought would also essentially come down to an impermissible order to create legislation and would contravene the political freedom accruing to the government and parliament and, thus, the system of separation of powers. postponing the mitigation as advocated by the state -a less stringent reduction between now and and a sharp reduction starting in -will in fact significantly contribute to the risk of dangerous climate change and therefore cannot be deemed a sufficient and acceptable alternative to the scientifically proven and acknowledged higher reduction path of - % in . (para. . ) the state did not argue that a reduction order of - % would result in an undue burden for the netherlands. on the contrary: the state also argues that a higher reduction target is one of the possibilities. if the reduction is less than - %, the state is failing to fulfil its duty of care and is therefore acting unlawfully. imposing an obligation of higher than % is not allowable due to the state's discretionary power. (para. . ) the reduction order sought by urgenda does not constitute an order to the state to take certain legislative or policy-making measures. if the claim is allowed, the state will retain full discretion, which is pre-eminently vested in it, to determine how to comply with that order. (para. urgenda's standing dutch law determines who is permitted access to the dutch courts, including, in the case of urgenda in these proceedings, article : a dcc, which provides for class actions brought by interest groups. since individuals who fall under the state's jurisdiction may rely on articles and echr, which have direct effect in the netherlands, urgenda may also do so on behalf of these individuals, pursuant to article : a dcc. (para. ) the parties do not dispute that urgenda has standing to pursue its claim to the extent it is acting on behalf of the current generation of dutch nationals against the emission of greenhouse gases in dutch territory. it is entirely plausible that the current generation of dutch nationals, in particular but not limited to the younger individuals in this group, will have to deal with the adverse effects of climate change in their lifetime if global emissions of greenhouse gases are not adequately reduced. (para. ) their interests lend themselves to consolidation as is required for instituting a claim pursuant to article : a dcc. (para. ) the state has a positive obligation pursuant to article echr to protect the lives of citizens within its jurisdiction, while article echr obliges the state to protect their right to their home life and private life. this obligation applies to all activities, public and non-public, which could jeopardise the rights protected in these articles, and certainly in the face of industrial activities which by their very nature are dangerous. if the government knows that there is a real and imminent threat, the state must take precautionary measures to prevent infringement as far as possible. (paras. the established facts and circumstances imply that there is a real threat of dangerous climate change, resulting in the serious risk that the current generation of dutch inhabitants will be confronted with losing their lives or having their family lives disrupted. articles and echr imply that the state has a duty to protect against this genuine threat. (paras. - ) the end goal is clear and is not disputed between the parties. by the year , global greenhouse gas emissions must have ceased entirely. nor do the parties hold differing opinions as to the required interim target of - % reduction relative to by , and urgenda endorses the reduction target of % relative to by , as established by the government. the dispute between the parties specifically concerns the question of whether the state can be required to achieve a reduction of at least % relative to by the end of . (para. ) a significant effort will have to be made between now and to reach the % target in ; more efforts than the limited efforts the netherlands has undertaken so far. it has also been established that it would be advisable to start the reduction efforts at as early a stage as possible to limit the total emissions in this period. delaying the reduction will lead to greater risks for the climate. a delay would, after all, allow greenhouse gas emissions to continue in the meantime; greenhouse gases which would linger in the atmosphere for a very long time and further contribute to global warming. an even distribution of reduction efforts over the period up to would mean that the state should achieve a substantially higher reduction in than %. an even distribution is also the starting point of the state for its reduction target of % by , which has been derived in a linear fashion from the % target for . if extrapolated to the present, this would result in a % reduction by , as confirmed by the state in answering the court of appeal's questions." (para. ) in ar , the ipcc concluded that a concentration level not exceeding ppm in is permissible to keep the two-degree target within reach. following an analysis of the various reduction scenarios, the ipcc concluded that in order to reach this concentration level, the total greenhouse gas emissions in of annex i countries, of which the netherlands is one, must be - % lower than levels. in ar , the ipcc also assumed that a concentration level of ppm may not be exceeded in order to achieve the two-degree target. (para. ) it is highly uncertain whether it will be possible -as ar assumes -to use certain technologies to extract co from the atmosphere. given the current state of affairs, climate scenarios based on such technologies bear little resemblance to reality. ar might thus have painted too rosy a picture, and it cannot be assumed outright, as the state does, that the 'multiple mitigation pathways' listed by the ipcc in ar could, as a practical matter, lead to the achievement of the two-degree target. furthermore, it is plausible that no reduction percentages as of were included in ar , because, in , the ipcc's focus was on targets for . therefore, the ar report does not give cause to assume that the reduction scenario laid down in ar has been superseded and that a reduction of less than - % by would now be sufficient to achieve the two-degree target. in order to assess whether the state has met its duty of care, the court of appeal will take as a starting point that an emission reduction of - % in is required to achieve the two-degree target. (para. ) the ppm scenario and the related necessity to reduce co emissions by - % by are absolutely not overly pessimistic starting points to use as a basis for determining the state's duty of care. it is not certain whether the two-degree target can be achieved with this scenario. furthermore, climate science has now acknowledged that a temperature rise of . oc is much more likely to be safe than a rise of oc. (para. ) the ipcc report which states that a reduction of - % by the end of is needed to achieve the two-degree target (ar ) dates all the way back to . since that time, virtually all cops (in bali, cancún, durban, doha and warsaw) have referred to this - % standard and annex i countries have been urged to align their reduction targets accordingly. this may not have established a legal standard with a direct effect, but it does confirm the fact that a reduction of at least - % in co emissions is needed to prevent dangerous climate change. (para. ) until , the netherlands assumed its own reduction target to be % in . a letter dated october from the minister of vrom shows that the state itself was convinced that a scenario with a reduction of less than %- % in would lack credibility to keep the two-degree target within reach. the dutch reduction target for was subsequently adjusted downwards. but a substantiation based on climate science was never given, while it is an established fact that postponing reductions in the meantime will cause continued emissions of co , which in turn will contribute to further global warming. more specifically, the state failed to give reasons why a reduction of only % by (at the eu level) should currently be regarded as credible, for instance by presenting a scenario which proves how -in concert with the efforts of other countries -the currently proposed postponed reduction could still lead to achieving the two-degree target. the eu itself also deemed a reduction of % for necessary to prevent dangerous climate change. (para. ) the state asserts that a 'waterbed effect' would result if the netherlands takes measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that fall within the scope of the ets. specifically, those measures would create leeway for other eu countries to emit more greenhouse gases. therefore, according to the state, national measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions within the framework of the ets are pointless. this argument does not hold. just like the netherlands, other eu countries bear their own responsibility for reducing co emissions as much as possible. it cannot automatically be assumed that the other member states will take less far-reaching measures than the netherlands. on the contrary, compared to member states such as germany, the united kingdom, denmark, sweden and france, dutch reduction efforts are lagging far behind. (paras. and ) the state also pointed out the risk of 'carbon leakage', which the state understands to be the risk that companies will move their production to other countries with less strict greenhouse gas reduction obligations. the state has failed to substantiate that this risk will actually occur if the netherlands were to increase its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions before the end of . (para. ) the state has also argued that adaptation and mitigation are complementary strategies to limit the risks of climate change and that urgenda has failed to appreciate the adaptation measures that the state has taken or will take. this argument also fails. although it is true that the consequences of climate change can be cushioned by adaptation, it has not been made clear or plausible that the potentially disastrous consequences of excessive global warming can be adequately prevented with adaptation. so while it is certainly logical for the state also to take adaptation measures, this does not diminish its obligation to reduce co emissions quicker than it has planned. (para. ) the state has furthermore argued that the emission reduction percentage of - % in is intended for the annex i countries as a whole, and that this percentage can therefore not be taken as a starting point for the emission reduction an individual annex i country, such as the netherlands, should achieve. the state has failed to provide substantiation for why a lower emission reduction percentage should apply to the netherlands than to the annex i countries as a whole. that is not obvious, considering a distribution in proportion to the per capita gdp, which inter alia has been taken as a starting point in the eu's effort sharing decision for distributing the eu emission reductions among the member states. it can be assumed that the netherlands has one of the highest per capita gdps of the annex i countries and the per capita gdp in any case is far above the average of those countries. that is also evident from appendix ii of the effort sharing decision, in which the netherlands is allocated a reduction percentage ( % relative to ) that is among the highest of the eu member states. it is therefore reasonable to assume that what applies to the annex i countries as a whole should at least also apply to the netherlands. (para. the state has also asserted that dutch greenhouse gas emissions, in absolute terms and compared with global emissions, are minimal, that the state cannot solve the problem on its own, that the worldwide community must cooperate. these arguments are not such that they warrant the absence of more ambitious, genuine action. the court of appeal, too, acknowledges that this is a global problem and that the state cannot solve this problem on its own. however, this does not release the state from its obligation to take measures in/on its territory, within its capabilities, which in concert with the efforts of other states provide protection from the hazards of dangerous climate change. (paras. and ) the fact that full scientific certainty regarding the efficacy of the ordered reduction scenario is lacking does not mean, given the due observance of the precautionary principle, that the state is entitled to refrain from taking measures. the high degree of plausibility of that efficacy is sufficient. (para. ) the existence of a real risk of the danger for which measures have to be taken is sufficient to issue an order. it has been established that this is the case. moreover, if the opinion of the state were to be followed, an effective legal remedy for a global problem as complex as this one would be lacking. after all, each state held accountable would then be able to argue that it does not have to take measures if other states do not do so either. that is a consequence that cannot be accepted, also because urgenda does not have the option to summon all eligible states to appear in a dutch court. (para. ) regarding the plea of a lack of the required relativity as meant in article : dcc, the court of appeal notes at the outset that these proceedings constitute an action for an order and not an action for damages. the standards that have been violated (articles and echr) do seek to protect urgenda (or those it represents). (para. ) the state argues that the system of the separation of powers should not be interfered with because it is not the courts, but the democratically legitimised government, that is the appropriate body to make the attendant policy choices. this argument is rejected in this case, also because the state violates human rights, which calls for the provision of measures, while at the same time the order to reduce emissions gives the state sufficient room to decide how it can comply with the order. (para. ) the district court correctly held that urgenda's claim is not intended to create legislation, either by parliament or by lower government bodies, and that the state retains complete freedom to determine how it will comply with the order. the order also will in no way prescribe the substance which this legislation must have. for this reason alone, the order is not an 'order to enact legislation'. moreover, the state has failed to substantiate why compliance with the order can only be achieved through creating legislation by parliament or by lower government bodies. (para. ) the foregoing implies that, up to now, the state has done too little to prevent dangerous climate change and is doing too little to catch up, at least in the short term (up to the end of ). targets for and beyond do not diminish the fact that a dangerous situation is imminent which requires intervention right now. in addition to the risks in that context, the social costs also come into play. the later reduction actions are taken, the sooner the available carbon budget will be depleted, which in turn would require considerably more ambitious measures to be taken at a later stage, as is acknowledged by the state, to ultimately achieve the desired level of % reduction by . (para. ) the state cannot hide behind the reduction target of % by at eu level. first of all, also the eu deems a greater reduction in necessary from a climate science perspective. in addition, the eu as a whole is expected to achieve a reduction of - % in ; much higher than the agreed %. also taken into consideration is the fact that, in the past, the netherlands, as an annex i country, acknowledged the severity of the climate situation time and again and, mainly based on climate scientific arguments, for years premised its policy on a reduction of - % by , with a concrete policy target of % by then. after , this policy objective was adjusted downwards to % by at eu level, without any scientific substantiation and despite the fact that more and more was becoming known about the serious consequences of greenhouse gas emissions for global warming. (para. ) based on this, the court of appeal held that the state was failing to fulfil its duty of care pursuant to articles and echr by not wanting to reduce emissions by at least % by the end of . a reduction of % should be considered a minimum, in connection with which recent insights about an even more ambitious reduction in connection with the . °c target have not even been taken into consideration. there is a genuine chance that the reduction by will prove to be (substantially) lower than %. such a margin of uncertainty is unacceptable. since there also are clear indications that the current measures will be insufficient to prevent dangerous climate change, even leaving aside the question of whether the current policy will actually be implemented, measures have to be chosen, also in view of the precautionary principle, that are safe, or at least as safe as possible. the very serious dangers, not contested by the state, associated with a temperature rise of °c or . °c -let alone higher -also preclude such a margin of uncertainty. (para. ) . the state has put forward nine grounds for cassation, each of which contains multiple complaints in cassation. briefly put, the complaints assert the following. . grounds for cassation and are aimed at the court of appeal's interpretation of articles and echr. according to the state, there are various reasons why no protection can be derived from these provisions in this case, or at any rate the court of appeal failed to provide adequate grounds for its holding that such protection can indeed be derived. according to ground for cassation , the court of appeal also failed to recognise that the ecthr leaves the national states a margin of appreciation in the application of these provisions. lend themselves to being combined as is required in order to be able to institute a claim pursuant to article : a dcc. the court of appeal should therefore have dismissed urgenda's claim for lack of standing to the extent it was based on articles and echr. according to this ground for cassation, those provisions only guarantee individual rights and do not protect society as a whole. . grounds for cassation - assert the following. the state is not legally bound to a reduction target of % in . the state did not agree to this reduction target, nor is it an internationally accepted standard. the state is, however, bound in both an international and european context to a target of % in by the eu as a whole. the eu will easily surpass this percentage (specifically, by a reduction of between % and %). the reduction target of % in is, moreover, not actually necessary to meeting the two-degree target. that necessity is not implied by the ipcc reports. the recommended extra reduction for the netherlands in will have no measurable effect on the global rise in temperature. furthermore, the reduction target of % in was once proposed as an overall target for a group of wealthy countries as a whole (the annex i countries, of which the netherlands is one) and not as a target for an individual country like the netherlands. the netherlands cannot solve the global climate problem on its own. in addition, the % reduction target in has been superseded by ar , as well as the distinction between annex i countries and other countries. the court of appeal either failed to recognise this or neglected to take it into proper account. moreover, the court of appeal failed to appreciate that it is up to the state to determine which reduction pathway it follows. the court of appeal wrongfully impinged on the discretionary leeway to which the state is entitled. . in conclusion, ground for cassation raises two issues. first, the state complains that the district court order that was confirmed by the court of appeal was tantamount to an order to create legislation, which is impermissible under supreme court case law. this ground for cassation also asserts that the court of appeal failed to recognise that it is not for the courts to make the political considerations necessary for a decision on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. . the substance of the aforementioned ground raises various issues. those issues will be dealt with below, as follows. first, by way of an introduction, the danger and consequences of climate change established by the court of appeal will be discussed in more detail (see . - . ). subsequently, an answer is provided to the question of whether, as the court of appeal held, articles and echr oblige the state to take measures to counter that threat (see . - . ). next is discussed which specific obligations on the part of the state that this may imply (see . - . ). afterwards, it is discussed whether the state is bound by the - % target stated in ar , as the court of appeal found (see . - . . ). finally, the permissibility of the district court order confirmed by the court of appeal will be discussed (see . - . ). . given the widely accepted, on climate science derived insights established by the court of appeal which the parties do not dispute, the findings of fact regarding the danger and consequences of climate change are, briefly and in essence, the following. . the emission of greenhouse gases, which are the partial result of burning of fossil fuels and the resultant release of the greenhouse gas co , is leading to an everhigher concentration of those gases in the atmosphere. this is warming the planet, which is resulting in a variety of hazardous consequences. this may result in local areas of extreme heat, extreme drought, extreme precipitation, or other extreme weather. it is also causing both glacial ice and the ice in and near the polar regions to melt, which is raising the sea level. some of these consequences are already happening right now. that warming may also result in tipping points, as a result of which the climate on earth or in particular regions of earth changes abruptly and comprehensively. this will result in, among other things, the significant erosion of ecosystems which will, example, jeopardise the food supply, result in the loss of territory and habitable areas, endanger health, and cost human lives. . climate science long ago reached a high degree of consensus that the warming of the earth must be limited to no more than °c and that this means that the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere must remain limited to a maximum of ppm. climate science has since arrived at the insight that a safe warming of the earth must not exceed . °c and that this means that the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere must remain limited to a maximum of ppm. exceeding these concentrations would involve a serious degree of danger that the consequences referred to in . will materialise on a large scale. below, for brevity's sake, the materialisation of this danger will be referred to below as 'dangerous climate change', as it was in the court of appeal's judgment. . if the emission of greenhouse gases is not sufficiently reduced, the possibility that dangerous climate change will materialise in the foreseeable future cannot be excluded. according to the ar "synthesis report" ar , which the ipcc published in as part of the ar report referred to above in para. . ( ), there is a danger that the tipping points referred to above in para. . will occur at a steepening rate once there is a warming between °c and °c. . as is clear from the facts stated above in para. . in ( ) et seq., this has been recognised at international level. the unfccc, which was concluded in , states that its objective is to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. since then, annual climate conferences have been held by the cop, the highest body under that convention, which comprises representatives of the contracting states. at each of those conferences, the point is emphasised that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is urgent and the contracting states are called on to make that reduction a reality. at several conferences, specific agreements have also been made about that reduction. the insight referred to above in para. . -that the warming of the earth must remain limited to a maximum of °c and that the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere must be limited to a maximum of ppm in order to prevent dangerous climate change -has been endorsed by the ipcc and the cop. the insight that a safe warming is limited to a maximum of . °c, and that this means that the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere must be limited to a maximum of ppm, was included in the paris agreement of , which was based on the unfccc and which was signed by more than countries, including the netherlands. . the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is becoming ever more urgent. every emission of greenhouse gases leads to an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and thus contributes to reaching the critical limits of ppm and ppm. in any case, the limited remaining carbon budget (see above in para. . ( )) means that each postponement of a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions will require a future reduction to be more stringent in order to stay within the confines of the remaining carbon budget. in its annual reports, the unep reports on the emissions gap, which is the difference between emissions based on the emissions-reduction target which countries reported to the un -in which respect the assumption is that these targets have been achieved -and the desired emissions (see above in para. . ( )). the unep report states that, in light of the paris agreement, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is more urgent than ever. the unep also remarks that if the emissions gap is not bridged by , achieving the target of a maximum warming of °c is extremely unlikely. . based on the aforementioned facts, the court of appeal concluded, quite understandably, in para. that there was "a real threat of dangerous climate change, resulting in the serious risk that the current generation of citizens will be confronted with loss of life and/or a disruption of family life". the court of appeal also held, in para. , that it was "clearly plausible that the current generation of dutch nationals, in particular but not limited to the younger individuals in this group, will have to deal with the adverse effects of climate change in their lifetime if global emissions of greenhouse gases are not adequately reduced." . the netherlands is a party to the unfccc and to the paris agreement, and the state acknowledges the facts stated above. the state does not challenge the court of appeal's conclusion, as referred to above in para. . , and acknowledges the urgent need to take measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. the state also does not dispute that it is required to contribute to that emissions reduction. what the state does challenge is that articles and echr oblige it to take these measures, as the court of appeal held, and that it is obliged based on those provisions to ensure that the volume of greenhouse gases being emitted at the end of is % less than it was in . . according to the state, articles and echr do not oblige it to offer protection from the genuine threat of dangerous climate change. the state asserts that this danger is not specific enough to fall within the scope of protection afforded by articles , and echr. to that end, the state asserts that the threat is global in nature; in other words, that it is global in both cause and scope, and that it relates to the environment, which the state argues is not protected as such by the echr. (a) the meaning of articles , and echr; positive treaty obligations . . article echr provides that the contracting parties must secure to everyone within their jurisdiction the rights and freedoms defined in section i of the echr. in other words, echr protection is afforded to the persons who fall within the states' jurisdiction. in the netherlands this regards, primarily and to the extent relevant in this case, the residents of the netherlands. . . article echr protects the right to life. according to established ecthr case law, this provision also encompasses a contracting state's positive obligation to take appropriate steps to safeguard the lives of those within its jurisdiction. according to that case law, this obligation applies, inter alia, if the situation in question entails hazardous industrial activities, regardless of whether these are conducted by the government itself or by others, and also in situations involving natural disasters. the ecthr has on multiple occasions found that article echr was violated with regard to a state's acts or omissions in relation to a natural or environmental disaster. it is obliged to take appropriate steps if there is a real and immediate risk to persons and the state in question is aware of that risk. in this context, the term 'real and immediate risk' must be understood to refer to a risk that is both genuine and imminent. the term 'immediate' does not refer to imminence in the sense that the risk must materialise within a short period of time, but rather that the risk in question is directly threatening the persons involved. the protection of article echr also regards risks that may only materialise in the longer term. . . article echr protects the right to respect for private and family life. this provision also relates to environmental issues. the echr may not entail a right to protection of the living environment, but according to established ecthr case law, protection may be derived from article echr in cases in which the materialisation of environmental hazards may have direct consequences for a person's private lives and are sufficiently serious, even if that person's health is not in jeopardy. according to that case law, when it comes to environmental issues, article echr encompasses the positive obligation to take reasonable and appropriate measures to protect individuals against possible serious damage to their environment. the ecthr has found that article echr was violated in various cases involving environmental harm. the obligation to take measures exists if there is a risk that serious environmental contamination may affect individuals' well-being and prevent them from enjoying their homes in such a way as to affect their private and family life adversely. that risk need not exist in the short term. . . according to the ecthr, when it comes to activities that are hazardous to the environment, the positive obligation implied by article echr largely overlaps with the obligation implied by article echr. the case law regarding the former obligation therefore applies to the latter obligation. in the case of environmentally hazardous activities, the state is expected to take the same measures pursuant to article echr that it would have to take pursuant to article echr. therefore, the obligations pursuant to articles and echr will be referred to collectively below. . . the protection afforded by articles and echr is not limited to specific persons, but to society or the population as a whole. the latter is for instance the case with environmental hazards. in the case of environmental hazards that endanger an entire region, articles and echr offer protection to the residents of that region. . . the obligation to take appropriate steps pursuant to articles and echr also encompasses the duty of the state to take preventive measures to counter the danger, even if the materialisation of that danger is uncertain. this is consistent with the precautionary principle. if it is clear that the real and immediate risk referred to above in paras. . . and . . exists, states are obliged to take appropriates steps without having a margin of appreciation. the states do have discretion in choosing the steps to be taken, although these must actually be reasonable and suitable. the obligation pursuant to articles and echr to take appropriate steps to counter an imminent threat may encompass both mitigation measures (measures to prevent the threat from materialising) or adaptation measures (measures to lessen or soften the impact of that materialisation). according to ecthr case law, which measures are suitable in a given case depends on the circumstances of that case. . . the court may determine whether the measures taken by a state are reasonable and suitable. the policy a state implements when taking measures must be consistent and the state must take measures in good time. a state must take due diligence into account in its policy. the court can determine whether the policy implemented satisfies these requirements. in many instances found in ecthr case law, a state's policy has been found to be inadequate, or a state has failed to provide sufficient substantiation that its policy is not inadequate. in its judgment in jugheli et al./georgia , for example, the ecthr held as follows: " . the court reiterates that it is not its task to determine what exactly should have been done in the present situation to reduce the impact of the plant's activities upon the applicants in a more efficient way. however, it is within the court's jurisdiction to assess whether the government approached the problem with due diligence and gave consideration to all the competing interests. in this respect the court reiterates that the onus is on the state to justify, using detailed and rigorous data, a situation in which certain individuals bear a heavy burden on behalf of the rest of the community (see fadeyeva, cited above, § ). looking at the present case from this perspective, the court notes that the government did not present to the court any relevant environmental studies or documents informative of their policy towards the plant and the air pollution emanating therefrom that had been affecting the applicants during the period concerned." . . articles and echr must not result in an impossible or under the given circumstances disproportionate burden being imposed on a state. if a state has taken reasonable and suitable measures, the mere fact that those measures were unable to deter the hazard does not mean that the state failed to meet the obligation that had been imposed on it. the obligations ensuing from articles and echr regard measures to be taken by a state, not the achievement, or guarantee of the achievement, of the envisaged result. . . according to established ecthr case law, the provisions of the echr must be interpreted and applied so as to make its safeguards practical and effective. according to the ecthr, this 'effectiveness principle' ensues from "the object and purpose of the convention as an instrument for the protection of individual human beings". this also regards the application of article ( ) of the vienna convention on the law of treaties, which stipulates that a treaty must be interpreted in good faith in accordance with the ordinary meaning to be given to the terms of the treaty in the light of its object and purpose. . . according to ecthr case law, an interpretation of the echr must also take into account the relevant rules of international law referred to in article ( )(c) of the vienna convention on the law of treaties. for example, in its judgment in nada/switzerland, the ecthr held as follows: " . moreover, the court reiterates that the convention cannot be interpreted in a vacuum but must be interpreted in harmony with the general principles of international law. account should be taken, as indicated in article § (c) of the vienna convention on the law of treaties, of "any relevant rules of international law applicable in the relations between the parties", and in particular the rules concerning the international protection of human rights (…)." furthermore, in accordance with article ( ), opening words and paragraph (b), of the vienna convention on the law of treaties, an interpretation of treaty provisions must take the member states' application practice into account. the ecthr's holding in the demir and baykara/turkey judgment was consistent with the foregoing: " . the court, in defining the meaning of terms and notions in the text of the convention, can and must take into account elements of international law other than the convention, the interpretation of such elements by competent organs, and the practice of european states reflecting their common values. the consensus emerging from specialised international instruments and from the practice of contracting states may constitute a relevant consideration for the court when it interprets the provisions of the convention in specific cases. . in this context, it is not necessary for the respondent state to have ratified the entire collection of instruments that are applicable in respect of the precise subject matter of the case concerned. it will be sufficient for the court that the relevant international instruments denote a continuous evolution in the norms and principles applied in international law or in the domestic law of the majority of member states of the council of europe and show, in a precise area, that there is common ground in modern societies (…)." in this context, is spoken of the common-ground method of interpreting the echr, in accordance with the last section of the findings cited above. according to ecthr case law, an interpretation and application of the echr must also take scientific insights and generally accepted standards into account. (c) article echr article echr is also relevant to the interpretation of articles and echr; article provides that if the rights and freedoms under the echr are violated, there exists the right to an effective remedy before a national authority. according to ecthr case law, this provision guarantees the existence of a remedy at national level to compel the observance of these rights and freedoms. in cases involving an arguable complaint regarding the violation of those rights and freedoms, national law must therefore offer a remedy that leads to obtaining appropriate relief. the scope of this obligation depends on the nature of the violation. the remedy must be both practically and legally effective. a remedy is considered effective as meant in article echr if it will prevent or end the violation or if the remedy offers adequate redress for a violation that has already occurred. in the case of more serious violations, the available remedies must provide for both: the prevention or end of the violation as well as redress. national states are thus required to provide remedies that can effectively prevent more serious violations. . . the remedy must ensure that a national court determines whether the rights and freedoms ensuing from the echr have been violated and that this court does so in accordance with the rules of the echr and the interpretation of those rules by the ecthr. in short: the remedy must offer effective legal protection from possible violations of the rights and freedoms ensuing from the echr. (d) do articles and echr apply to the global problem of the danger of climate change? . . pursuant to articles and of the dutch constitution, dutch courts must apply every provision of the echr that is binding on all persons. because the echr also subjects the netherlands to the jurisdiction of the ecthr (article echr), dutch courts must interpret those provisions as the ecthr has, or interpret them premised on the same interpretation standards used by the ecthr. this means that the findings above in paras. . . - . . must also be used as a premise by the dutch courts. . . pursuant to the findings above in paras. . . - . . , no other conclusion can be drawn but that the state is required pursuant to articles and echr to take measures to counter the genuine threat of dangerous climate change if this were merely a national problem. given the findings above in paras. . - . , after all, this constitutes a 'real and immediate risk' as referred to above in para. . . and it entails the risk that the lives and welfare of dutch residents could be seriously jeopardised. the same applies to, inter alia, the possible sharp rise in the sea level, which could render part of the netherlands uninhabitable. the fact that this risk will only be able to materialise a few decades from now and that it will not impact specific persons or a specific group of persons but large parts of the population does not mean -contrary to the state's assertions -that articles and echr offer no protection from this threat (see above in para. . . and the conclusion of paras. . . and . . ). this is consistent with the precautionary principle (see para. . . , above). the mere existence of a sufficiently genuine possibility that this risk will materialise means that suitable measures must be taken. . . as the state has asserted, the ecthr has not yet issued any judgments regarding climate change or decided any cases that bear the hallmarks that are particular to issues of climate change. those hallmarks are, briefly put, the dangers presented by a globally occurring activity -the emission of greenhouse gases all over the world, and not just from dutch territory -whose consequences will have a worldwide impact, including in the netherlands. the question is whether the global nature of the emissions and the consequences thereof entail that no protection can be derived from articles and echr, such that those provisions impose no obligation on the state in this case. . . the supreme court considers the answer to this question to be sufficiently clear. it will therefore give the answer to this question itself and will not submit it to the ecthr for an advisory opinion, as is possible but not compulsory under protocol no. to the echr, which entered into effect on june . in addition, both parties have asked the supreme court to hand down its judgment before the end of , in view of the time to which the district court's order, upheld by the court of appeal, relates, which is the end of . (e) joint responsibility of the states and partial responsibility of individual states . . the answer to the question referred to in . . above is in the opinion of the supreme court, that, under articles and echr, the netherlands is obliged to do 'its part' in order to prevent dangerous climate change, even if it is a global problem. this is based on the following grounds. . . the unfccc is based on the idea that climate change is a global problem that needs to be solved globally. where emissions of greenhouse gases take place from the territories of all countries and all countries are affected, measures will have to be taken by all countries. therefore, all countries will have to do the necessary. the preamble to this convention states, among other things, the following in this context: "acknowledging that the global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities and their social and economic conditions, (…). recalling also that states have (…) the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other states or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction." . . the objective of the unfccc is to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous human induced interference with the climate system (article ). article contains various principles to achieve this objective. for instance, article ( ) provides that the parties "should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities". article ( ) provides that the parties "should take precautionary measures to anticipate, prevent or minimize the causes of climate change and mitigate its adverse effects". and article provides, put succinctly, that all parties will take measures and develop policy in this area. it follows from these provisions that each state has an obligation to take the necessary measures in accordance with its specific responsibilities and possibilities. . . at the annual climate change conferences held on the basis of the unfccc since , the provisions mentioned above in . . have been further developed in various cop decisions. in each case these are based first and foremost on an acknowledgement of the above understanding: all countries will have to do the necessary. articles et seq. of the paris agreement reiterates this in so many words. . . this understanding corresponds to what is commonly referred to as the 'no harm principle', a generally accepted principle of international law which entails that countries must not cause each other harm. this is also referred to in the preamble to the unfccc (in the section cited in . . above). countries can be called to account for the duty arising from this principle. applied to greenhouse gas emissions, this means that they can be called upon to make their contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. this approach justifies partial responsibility: each country is responsible for its part and can therefore be called to account in that respect. . . this partial responsibility is in line with what is adopted in national and international practice in the event of unlawful acts that give rise to only part of the cause of the damage. partial responsibility is in line with, inter alia, the draft articles on responsibility of states for internationally wrongful acts, as proposed by the un international law commission and adopted by the un general assembly. this is apparent, for example, in the explanatory notes to article ( ) thereof, in which the following is remarked: " . according to paragraph of article , where several states are responsible for the same internationally wrongful act, the responsibility of each state may be invoked in relation to that act. the general rule in international law is that of separate responsibility of a state for its own wrongful acts and paragraph reflects this general rule. (…) . article only addresses the situation of a plurality of responsible states in relation to the same internationally wrongful act. the identification of such an act will depend on the particular primary obligation, and cannot be prescribed in the abstract. of course, situations can also arise where several states by separate internationally wrongful conduct have contributed to causing the same damage. for example, several states might contribute to polluting a river by the separate discharge of pollutants. (…) in such cases, the responsibility of each participating state is determined individually, on the basis of its own conduct and by reference to its own international obligations." many countries have corresponding rules in their liability law system. it is true that article ( ) unfccc referred to in . . above entails that the distribution of the measures to be taken against climate change must not be based solely on the basis of responsibility for past emissions by a country, and that consideration must also be given to the possibilities for countries to reduce their emissions. but that does not detract from the fact that the underlying principle of these widely accepted rules is always that, in short, 'partial fault' also justifies partial responsibility. . . partly in view of the serious consequences of dangerous climate change as referred to in . above, the defence that a state does not have to take responsibility because other countries do not comply with their partial responsibility, cannot be accepted. nor can the assertion that a country's own share in global greenhouse gas emissions is very small and that reducing emissions from one's own territory makes little difference on a global scale, be accepted as a defence. indeed, acceptance of these defences would mean that a country could easily evade its partial responsibility by pointing out other countries or its own small share. if, on the other hand, this defence is ruled out, each country can be effectively called to account for its share of emissions and the chance of all countries actually making their contribution will be greatest, in accordance with the principles laid down in the preamble to the unfccc cited above in . . . . . also important in this context is that, as has been considered in . above about the carbon budget, each reduction of greenhouse gas emissions has a positive effect on combating dangerous climate change, as every reduction means that more room remains in the carbon budget. the defence that a duty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on the part of the individual states does not help because other countries will continue their emissions cannot be accepted for this reason either: no reduction is negligible. . . climate change threatens human rights, as follows from what has been considered in . . above. this is also recognised internationally outside the context of the council of europe. in order to ensure adequate protection from the threat to those rights resulting from climate change, it should be possible to invoke those rights against individual states, also with regard to the aforementioned partial responsibility. this is in line with the principle of effective interpretation, referred to in . . above, that the ecthr applies when interpreting the echr and also with the right to effective legal protection guaranteed by article echr, referred to . . - . . above. . in view of the considerations in . . - . . above, the supreme court finds that articles and echr relating to the risk of climate change should be interpreted in such a way that these provisions oblige the contracting states to do 'their part' to counter that danger. in light both of the facts set out in . - . and of the individual responsibility of the contracting states, this constitutes an interpretation of the positive obligations laid down in those provisions that corresponds to its substance and purport as mentioned in . . - . . above. this interpretation is in accordance with the standards set out in . . - . . that the ecthr applies when interpreting the echr and that the supreme court must also apply when interpreting the echr. (f) can this obligation pursuant to articles and echr also be relied upon in a case involving a claim pursuant to article : a dcc? it follows from the above that, as the court of appeal has ruled, the state is obliged on the basis of articles and echr to take appropriate measures against the threat of dangerous climate change, in accordance with its share as referred to in . above. . . urgenda, which in this case, on the basis of article : a dcc, represents the interests of the residents of the netherlands with respect to whom the obligation referred to in . . above applies, can invoke this obligation. after all, the interests of those residents are sufficiently similar and therefore lend themselves to being pooled, so as to promote efficient and effective legal protection for their benefit. especially in cases involving environmental interests, such as the present case, legal protection through the pooling of interests is highly efficient and effective. this is also in line with article ( ) in conjunction with article ( ) of the aarhus convention, which guarantees interest groups access to justice in order to challenge violations of environmental law, and in line with article echr (see . . - . . above). . . as the court of appeal rightly held in para. , the fact that urgenda does not have a right to complain to the ecthr on the basis of article echr, because it is not itself a potential victim of the threatened violation of articles and echr, does not detract from urgenda's right to institute proceedings. after all, this does not deprive urgenda of the power to institute a claim under dutch law in accordance with article : a dcc on behalf of residents who are in fact such victims. (g) assessment of the complaints in cassation . the complaints of grounds for cassation - fail on the basis of the above. the same applies to the complaints of grounds for cassation - insofar as these relate to the court of appeal's opinion that articles and echr subject the state to the duty to take measures to counter dangerous climate change. assumptions in answering the question of what specific obligation on the part of the state results from the foregoing . as considered above, pursuant to articles and echr the state is obliged towards the residents of the netherlands, in accordance with its share as referred to above in . , to take adequate measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from dutch territory. however, this does not yet answer the question of what this obligation on the part of the state means in concrete terms. . the answer to this question belongs, in principle, to the political domain, both internationally and nationally. states will have to agree among themselves on their respective individual share in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and make the necessary choices and considerations in this regard. such agreements have been made, in the unfccc, but only in the form of the general obligations mentioned in . . above and principles set out in articles and of the unfccc. these general obligations and principles mean that a fair distribution must take place, taking into account the responsibility and state of development of the individual countries. for obvious political reasons, international or otherwise, some which relating to negotiation strategy, the emission reduction agreements made at the various climate conferences are not legally binding in themselves. . in the dutch constitutional system, making the agreement referred to in . above falls within the competence of the government, which is subject to parliamentary oversight. the netherlands can also decide to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its territory without binding or non-binding international agreements. the netherlands is also obliged to do so, as has been considered in . . above. although determining the share to be contributed by the netherlands in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is, in that context too, in principle, a matter for the government and parliament, the courts can assess whether the measures taken by the state are too little in view of what is clearly the lower limit of its share in the measures to be taken worldwide against dangerous climate change. it is clear, for example, in view of what has been considered above in . . - . , that the state cannot at any rate do nothing at all and that the courts can rule that the state is in breach of its obligation referred to in . . above if it does nothing. under certain circumstances, there may also be such clear views, agreements and/or consensus in an international context about the distribution of measures among countries that the courts can establish what -in accordance with the widely supported view of states and international organisations, which view is also based on the insights of climate science -can in any case be regarded as the state's minimum fair share. on the basis of the standards referred to above in . . and . . (including the common ground method), which the dutch courts are obliged to apply when interpreting the echr (see above in . . ), the courts are then obliged to proceed to establishing such and to attach consequences to it in their judgment on the extent of the state's positive obligations. it follows from the ecthr case law referred to above in . . that, under certain circumstances, agreements and rules that are not binding in and of themselves may also be meaningful in relation to such establishment. this may be the case if those rules and agreements are the expression of a very widely supported view or insight and are therefore important for the interpretation and application of the state's positive obligations under articles and echr. . the right to effective legal protection under article echr mentioned above in . . - . . entails, in a case such as this, that the courts must examine whether it is possible to grant effective legal protection by examining whether there are sufficient objective grounds from which a concrete standard can be derived in the case in question. . in addition, the courts can assess whether the state, with regard to the threat of a dangerous climate change, is complying with its duty mentioned above in . . under articles and echr to observe due diligence and pursue good governance. under certain circumstances, the obligation to take measures of a certain scope or quality may arise from this duty. furthermore, this duty implies that, under certain circumstances, the state must properly substantiate that the policy it pursues meets the requirements to be imposed, i.e. that it pursues a policy through which it remains above the lower limit of its fair share. . in determining the state's minimum obligations, the courts must observe restraint, especially if rules or agreements are involved that are not binding in themselves. it is therefore only in clear-cut cases that the courts can rule, on the grounds referred to above in . - . , that the state has a legal obligation to take measures. the - % target for annex i countries . the first question to be addressed in these proceedings is whether the % to % reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in compared to , which is based on ar (hereinafter: 'the - % target'), formulated as a target for the annex i countries, represents a corresponding obligation for the state. the state rightly argues that this target is not a binding rule or agreement in and of itself. the question is therefore whether this target nevertheless binds the state on one or more of the grounds mentioned above in . - . this scenario provides for annex i countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by % to % in and by % to % in , both compared to emissions. the distribution of measures between annex i countries and other countries in this scenario is based on the principles of articles and unfccc. the scenario was written for the target of a maximum concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere of ppm by . this is the concentration at which global warming is reasonably expected to be limited to a maximum of °c. ar was established on the assumption that this is probably the critical limit above which there is risk of dangerous climate change. the scenario offers a good chance of not exceeding the limit of warming of more than °c. the bali action plan, established at the bali climate change conference in (cop- ) endorses the need for far-reaching reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to prevent dangerous climate change. in this respect, reference was made to, among other things, the scenario referred to in . . . it bears noting here that at climate change conferences decisions are often made on the basis of consensus. . . at the cancún climate change conference in (cop- ), the countries that are parties to the kyoto protocol passed a resolution, the preamble to which expresses, among other things, that, taking into account the findings in ar , the annex i countries as a group should reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by % to % by compared to : "also recognizing that the contribution of working group iii to the fourth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, climate change : mitigation of climate change, indicates that achieving the lowest levels assessed by the intergovernmental panel on climate change to date and its corresponding potential damage limitation would require annex i parties as a group to reduce emissions in a range of - per cent below levels by , through means that may be available to these parties to reach their emission reduction targets, (…)" in the same resolution, the parties to the kyoto protocol urged annex i countries to raise their level of ambition to meet the ar target individually or as a group: " . urges annex i parties to raise the level of ambition of the emission reductions to be achieved by them individually or jointly, with a view to reducing their aggregate level of emissions of greenhouse gases in accordance with the range indicated by working group iii to the fourth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, climate change : mitigation of climate change, and taking into account the quantitative implications of the use of land use, land-use change and forestry activities, emissions trading and project-based mechanism and the carry-over of units from the first to the second commitment period; (…)." at the durban climate change conference in (cop- ), these countries passed another resolution, the preamble to which explicitly states that the target for annex i countries is to reduce their total emissions by at least % to % compared to levels: "aiming to ensure that aggregate emissions of greenhouse gases by parties included in annex i are reduced by at least - per cent below levels by , noting in this regard the relevance of the review referred to in chapter v of decision /cp. to be concluded by , (…)" the need for a reduction of this magnitude was also expressed at the doha climate change conference in (cop- ) in a resolution passed by the cop of countries party to the kyoto protocol. for the first time, the countries themselves stated in a resolution that, "in order to increase the ambition of its commitment", the annex i countries should strive to achieve at least a - % reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by compared to levels. the need for a reduction of this magnitude was also expressed at the climate change conferences in warsaw, lima and paris in , and , respectively (cop- , cop- and cop- ). at these conferences, this need has been endorsed again and again in resolutions, by reference either to the doha amendment or to resolutions passed at previous conferences. the preamble to the cop decision to adopt the paris agreement stresses the urgency of achieving this reduction. climate change conferences after no longer explicitly addressed or referred to the reduction target of - % by . at those conferences, however, the need for sufficient reductions in greenhouse gas emissions before and by has always been stressed. . . as the court of appeal established in para. , the - % target has not been superseded by the - ar , contrary to what the state suggests. this report, too, is based on the target of a maximum concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere of ppm by as part of the objective that global warming not exceed oc. ar no longer discusses . indeed, this report focuses on later years, i.e. and in particular and , and no longer contains targets for . the and cop resolutions mentioned above in . . , which date from after ar , still refer to the need for annex i countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by % to % by in accordance with ar . the distinction made in unfccc between annex i countries and other countries was dropped in ar , because by that time countries other than annex i countries had to be deemed developed countries as well. it emerges from the above, however, that, contrary to what the state argues, this does not mean that ar 's reduction scenario for has become outdated. . . ar does contain new scenarios to achieve by and the reductions in greenhouse gas concentrations deemed necessary. these are largely based on the premise that there will not be a sufficient reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and that the concentration of greenhouse gases will therefore have to be reduced by taking measures to remove these gases from the atmosphere (see . ( ) above). it is certain, however, that at the moment there is no technology that allows this to take place on a sufficiently large scale. therefore, as the court of appeal held in para. , these new scenarios cannot be taken as a starting point for policy at this time without taking irresponsible risks by doing so. taking such risks would run counter to the precautionary principle that must be observed when applying articles and echr and article ( ) unfccc (see . . and . . above). it does not appear, therefore, that these new scenarios have been taken as a starting point for subsequent decisions at climate change conferences. the court of appeal's finding that the - % target has not been superseded by ar is therefore understandable and serves as a starting point in cassation. . . the eu also took as a starting point the need for the ar scenario mentioned above in . in case this condition would not be met -which has proved to be the case -the eu has committed itself to a % reduction by . however, by the eu is expected to achieve a reduction of - % compared to . . . it follows from the above that there is a high degree of consensus in the international community on the need for in any case the annex i countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by % to % by , in order to reduce global warming to the maximum of °c deemed responsible at the time of ar . . . after , when ar came into being, a high degree of consensus on the need for even greater reductions was reached in the climate science community and the international community. as mentioned in . above, it has been recognised for some years that global warming should not be limited to a maximum of °c to prevent dangerous climate change, but to a maximum of . °c. therefore, the paris agreement explicitly stipulates that the states will endeavour to limit warming to . °c, "recognising that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change" (article ( ), opening words and (a), of the agreement). this necessitates a greater reduction in greenhouse gas emissions than is necessary for a target of no more than °c. . . the unep's annual report, referring to the carbon budget and the emissions gap described in . above, therefore states that, in light of the paris agreement, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is more urgent than ever. the unep also remarks that if the emissions gap is not bridged by , achieving the two-degree target is extremely unlikely. even if the reduction targets underlying the paris agreement are fully achieved, % of the carbon budget corresponding with the two-degree target will be used up by . starting from a . °c target, the carbon budget will even have been completely exhausted by then. that is why even more ambitious reduction targets are needed for the year , according to the unep. the unep concludes that "later-action scenarios may not be feasible in practice and, as a result, temperature targets could be missed" and that "lateraction scenarios pose greater risks of climate impacts". . . with regard to the above, it must be taken into account that, as the court of appeal established in para. without being disputed in cassation, that the maximum targets of . °c or °c and the related concentrations of a maximum of or ppm are based on estimates. it is therefore possible that dangerous climate change will occur even with less global warming and a lower concentration of greenhouse gases, for example because a tipping point is reached or because ice melts at a higher rate (see . above). the precautionary principle therefore means that more far-reaching measures should be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rather than less far-reaching measures. . . from what has been considered above in . . - . . , it follows once again that there is a high degree of international consensus on the urgent need for the annex i countries to reduce greenhouse emissions by at least - % by compared to levels, in order to achieve at least the two-degree target, which is the maximum target to be deemed responsible. this high degree of consensus can be regarded as common ground within the meaning of the ecthr case law referred to above in . . , which according to that case law must be taken into account when interpreting and applying the echr. the state has argued that the - % target only applies to the annex i countries as a group and not to each of them individually. therefore, according to the state, this objective allegedly does not apply to it individually. in addition, the state has argued that the eu as a whole is committed to a % reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by (see . . above) and that it was agreed at eu level that the netherlands would contribute to this by reducing its greenhouse gas emissions in by % for the ets sector and by % for the non-ets sector, both compared to levels. according to the state, it complies with all its obligations by making these contributions. . . in and of itself, it is correct that the - % target in ar was included for the annex i countries as a group. however, as shown by the considerations in . . and . . above, the unfccc and the paris agreement are both based on the individual responsibility of states. therefore, in principle, the target from ar also applies to the individual states within the group of annex i countries. as will become clear in . . , the state itself interpreted this target in the same way. both the unfccc and the paris agreement provide for states to cooperate and conclude an agreement whereby they jointly reduce their emissions and whereby one may do more than the other (article ( )(a), last sentence, unfccc and article ( ) and ( ) paris agreement). the state has not argued, however, that such an agreement was concluded by it in relation to the - % target of ar . . . the purport of the state's reference to the agreements at eu level as mentioned in . . above is not that such an agreement was reached at eu level. the state refers to those agreements only because, in its view, they are only standards that oblige it to achieve a certain concrete reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. however, this argument fails to recognise that, as considered in . and . - . above, the state may also be obliged to make such a reduction on the basis of articles and echr, in which regard the consensus mentioned above in . . is important. incidentally, as far as the present case has shown, the said agreements at eu level are not intended to replace the obligations of the individual eu member states under the unfccc. at the cancún climate change conference in , the eu formulated its own reduction target as it is a party to the unfccc on its own. by virtue of the agreements made within the eu on the distribution of measures necessary to enable the eu to achieve this reduction target, the netherlands is subject to the reduction obligations set out in . . above. however, these agreements are without prejudice to the individual responsibility of the eu member states by any other virtue. the effort sharing decision therefore states in consideration of the preamble that this decision does not preclude more stringent national objectives. this also follows from article tfeu. in addition, the eu itself expressed the need for % reduction by and the eu as a whole is expected to achieve a - % reduction by compared to , which is above the minimum target of % of the ar scenario and significantly more than the % reduction undertaken by the eu at the cancún climate change conference in . . . moreover, the court of appeal rightly held in para. that it would not be obvious for a lower reduction rate to apply to the netherlands as an annex i country than to the annex i countries as a whole. as the court of appeal considered in para. , the netherlands is one of the countries with very high per capita emissions of greenhouse gases. in the above agreements at eu level, the reduction percentage agreed upon for the netherlands is, accordingly, one of the highest reduction percentages applicable to the eu member states (annex ii to the effort sharing decision). it can be assumed that this high percentage corresponds to the possibilities and responsibilities of the netherlands. as the court of appeal established in para. , the state has not substantiated why a lower percentage should apply. . . in ground for cassation . . , the state complains that the court of appeal ignored the state's argument that it was contributing to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions by providing knowledge and financial resources to developing countries, with which those countries could take mitigation and adaptation measures. however, it did not elaborate on this assertion. the state did, amongst other things, not put forward that this contribution realises a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and that this should be taken into account when answering the question as to which target applies to the state and whether the state achieves the target applicable to it. this complaint therefore fails. . . in view of the foregoing, the court of appeal rightly ruled that the urgent need for a - % reduction by also applies to the netherlands individually. as considered in . above, the state acknowledges the need of the target of a maximum concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere of or ppm by , with global warming reasonably expected to be limited to no more than . °c or °c. in this context, the state also endorsed the targets set out in the ar scenario. as regards that scenario's targets of % to % reduction by and of ppm by (now ppm by ), it still endorses them. for the year , the state assumed a reduction target of % until . according to the letter from the minister of housing, spatial planning and the environment dated october cited above in . ( ), the state, like the eu (see . . and . . above), was at the time of the opinion that a reduction of % to % by was necessary to stay on a credible track to keep the °c target within reach. . . after , the state adjusted its target for downwards to the % reduction at eu level as referred to in . . above. in these proceedings, the state argues that, on closer inspection, achieving a % to % reduction by is not necessary, because the same result can be achieved by accelerating the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the netherlands after . the state argues that it intends to have this accelerated reduction take place after and that it prefers this reduction path over the ar scenario. the question, however, is whether an accelerated reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the netherlands after can indeed achieve the same result. in this context, the following facts taken into account by the court of appeal are relevant. . . all greenhouse gas emissions lead to a reduction in the carbon budget still available (see also . above). any postponement of the reduction of emissions therefore means that emissions in the future will have to be reduced on an increasingly large scale in order to make up for the postponement in terms of both of time and size. this means that, in principle, for each postponement of emissions reductions, the reduction measures to be taken at a later date will have to be increasingly far-reaching and costly in order to achieve the intended result, and it will also be riskier. the unep already warned about this in its annual report (see . ( ) above). . . following ar , it became clear that in order to prevent dangerous climate change even greater reductions of greenhouse gas emissions are actually needed in the short term and that this need is becoming increasingly urgent, both before and in the subsequent period up to (see also . . - . . above). also according to the netherlands environmental assessment agency (planbureau voor de leefomgeving) (the pbl) -which is an independent research institute that is part of the ministry of infrastructure and the environment -a policy is needed, in view of the paris agreement, that goes far beyond the current policies of the countries in question. according to the pbl in a report, the dutch policy should be tightened in the short time in order to align it with the paris agreement. . . the state acknowledges the fact referred to in . . above (para. of the court of appeal's judgments) and does not contest the facts mentioned in . . above. moreover, it has meanwhile formulated a reduction target for of % and for of % (these targets have been laid down in the dutch climate act after the date of the court of appeal's judgment ). the target of % for was derived linearly from the target of % for . on request, the state informed the court of appeal that if this line were extended to this would result in a target of % for that year (para. ). . . in view of the considerations in . . - . . above, there may be serious doubts as to whether, with the % reduction envisaged by the state at eu level by , the overall reduction over the next few decades, which the state itself believes to be necessary in any case, is still feasible. after all, the need for this reduction requires the state to aim for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by more than % by , rather than a reduction that is lower. the state has not explained that and why, despite the above and taking into account the precautionary principle applicable in this context, a policy aimed at % reduction by can still be considered responsible. the state has not provided any insight into which measures it intends to take in the coming years, let alone why these measures, in spite of the above, would be both practically feasible and sufficient to contribute to the prevention of dangerous climate change to a sufficient extent in line with the netherlands' share. the state has confined itself to asserting that there "are certainly possibilities" in this context. in view of the above, the court of appeal was allowed to rule in para. that the state has insufficiently substantiated that it would be possible for a responsible policy to prevent dangerous climate change to include a greenhouse gas emissions reduction target of less than at least % by . therefore, in accordance with the foregoing considerations in . - . , there is reason to come to the conclusion that the state should in any event adhere to the target of at least % reduction by . as stated above, there is a large degree of consensus in the international community and climate science that at least this reduction by the annex i countries, including the netherlands, is urgently needed (see . . and . . above). proper legal protection means that this consensus can be invoked when implementing the positive obligations incumbent on the state pursuant to articles and echr. the target of achieving a reduction of at least % by is also in line with what the state itself considers necessary for other years ( , and (see . . - . . above). in the context of the positive obligation on the state under articles and echr to take appropriate measures to prevent dangerous climate change, this target can therefore be regarded as an absolute minimum. as the state has not been able to provide a proper substantiation of its claim that deviating from that target is nevertheless responsible (see . . above), it must adhere to the target of %. it should therefore strive to achieve at least this reduction by , as the court of appeal rightly held in para. . . . the state has also argued, in ground for cassation . , that it meets its obligations under articles and echr by taking adaptation measures, whether or not in combination with mitigation measures already taken and proposed, and that it therefore does not have to meet the - % target. in para. , however, the court of appeal established fully comprehensibly that although it is correct that the consequences of climate change can be mitigated by taking adaptation measures, it has not been demonstrated or made plausible that the potentially disastrous consequences of excessive global warming can be adequately prevented by such measures. this finding also implies that even if account is taken of the fact that the state is taking adaptation measures, mitigation measures that reduce emissions by at least % by are urgently needed, also for the netherlands. the state's aforementioned argument therefore does not hold. . . it should also be noted that the court of appeal's judgment implies in paras. and that the state has not sufficiently substantiated that the reduction of at least % by is an impossible or disproportionate burden, as referred to in . . above. in this context, the state only referred to the short time remaining until the end of and to the impairment of the level playing field of the dutch business community in an international context. in connection with the first argument, the court of appeal took into account that the district court's order to the state dates back to , i.e. has been in force since then, and that the state has moreover been aware of the seriousness of the climate problem for some time and initially pursued a policy aimed at a % reduction by (para. ). with respect to the second argument, the court of appeal took into account that other eu countries pursue much stricter climate policies and that the state has not explained this argument in more detail (para. ). by doing so, the court of appeal has comprehensibly rejected the state's assertion that there would be an impossible or disproportionate burden. ground for cassation . , which accuses the court of appeal of not having investigated this assertion, is therefore unfounded. (e) assessment of complaints in cassation . . the complaints referred to in . - . of the opinion proffered by the deputy procurator general and the advocate general cannot lead to cassation for the reasons stated there. . . insofar as complaints from grounds for cassation - have not been dealt with in the foregoing, these cannot lead to cassation either. with regard to article ( ) djoa, this does not require any further substantiation since the complaints do not require answers to legal questions in the interest of unity of law or legal development. permissibility of the order issued; political domain . the state argues in ground for cassation that the district court's order to reduce dutch greenhouse gas emissions by at least % in compared to levels, which was upheld by the court of appeal, is impermissible for two reasons. the first reason is that the order amounts to an order to create legislation, which according to supreme court case law is not permissible. the second reason is, briefly put, that it is not for the courts to make the political considerations necessary for a decision on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. the following is considered in response to these arguments. (a) order to create legislation . . . if the government is obliged to do something, it may be ordered to do so by the courts, as anyone may be, at the request of the entitled party (article : dcc). this is a fundamental rule of constitutional democracy, which has been enshrined in our legal order. as far as the rights and freedoms set out in the echr are concerned, this rule is consistent with the right to effective legal protection laid down in article echr referred to above in . . - . . . partly in connection with this fundamental rule, the dutch constitution stipulates that civil courts have jurisdiction over all claims, so that they can always grant legal protection if no legal protection is offered by another court. . . . it follows from the considerations in . . - . above that, in this case, the state has a legal duty by virtue of the protection it must provide to residents of the netherlands on the basis of articles and echr in order to protect their right to life and their right to private and family life. it may therefore be ordered to comply with this duty by the courts, unless there are grounds for an exception in accordance with article : dcc. under that provision, an exception arises if the law so provides or if it follows from the nature of the obligation or the legal act. the supreme court case law relating to orders to create legislation constitutes an application of this exception. . . . this case law is based on two considerations. first of all, there is the consideration that the courts should not intervene in the political decision-making process involved in the creation of legislation. secondly, there is the considera-tion that such an order should create an arrangement that also applies to parties other than the parties to the proceedings. . . . the first consideration does not mean that courts cannot enter the field of political decision-making at all. in the case law referred to above, therefore, the earlier case law of the supreme court has been reiterated, which dictates that, on the basis of article of the dutch constitution, the courts must disapply legislation if any binding provisions of treaties entail such. it has also been decided in that case law that the courts may issue a declaratory decision to the effect that the public body in question is acting unlawfully by failing to enact legislation with a particular content. the first consideration on which the case law referred to in . . is based must therefore be understood to mean that the courts should not interfere in the political decision-making process regarding the expediency of creating legislation with a specific, concretely defined content by issuing an order to create legislation. in view of the constitutional relationships, it is solely for the legislator concerned to determine for itself whether legislation with a particular content will be enacted. therefore, the courts cannot order the legislator to create legislation with a particular content. . . . the second consideration on which the case law referred to in . . above is based relates to the circumstance that the civil courts only pronounce binding decisions between the parties to the dispute (cf. article dccp). the courts do not have the power to decide in a manner binding on everyone how a statutory provision should read. an order to create legislation is therefore subject to the objection that third parties, which are not involved in the proceedings and are therefore not bound by the judgment, would still be bound (indirectly) by that order by virtue of the fact that that legislation would also apply to them. this objection does not arise in the case of an order not to apply statutory provisions, which applies only to a particular claimant, or in the case of a declaratory decision. the same applies to a general order to take measures, while respecting the legislator's freedom, as referred to in the second paragraph of . . above, to create or not to create legislation with a particular content. after all, the courts in that case do not determine the content of the statutory provision by issuing their order; this determination is still reserved to the legislator in question. . . . it follows from the above that the courts are only not permitted to issue an order to create legislation with a particular, specific content. after all, only then do the objections arise which are raised in the consideration on which the case law referred to in . . above is based. therefore, the courts are not prevented to issue a declaratory decision to the effect that the omission of legislation is unlawful (see . . above). they may also order the public body in question to take measures in order to achieve a certain goal, as long as that order does not amount to an order to create legislation with a particular content. in the supreme court judgment of april (sgp), the impermissibility of courts issuing an order to create legislation is for that reason limited to this case. . . . in light of the foregoing, the district court's order, upheld by the court of appeal, constitutes an application of the main rule of article : dcc. indeed, this order does not amount to an order to take specific legislative meas-ures, but leaves the state free to choose the measures to be taken in order to achieve a % reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by . this is not altered by the fact that many of the possible measures to be taken will require legislation, as argued by the state. after all, it remains for the state to determine what measures will be taken and what legislation will be enacted to achieve that reduction. the exception to article : dcc made in the case law referred to in . . above therefore does not apply in this case. (b) political domain . . . this brings the supreme court to the assessment of the state's more general argument that it is not for the courts to make the political considerations necessary for a decision on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. . . . as considered in . above, in the dutch constitutional system of decisionmaking on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is a power of the government and parliament. they have a large degree of discretion to make the political considerations that are necessary in this regard. it is up to the courts to decide whether, in availing themselves of this discretion, the government and parliament have remained within the limits of the law by which they are bound. . . . the limits referred to in . . above include those for the state arising from the echr. as considered in . . above, the netherlands is bound by the echr and the dutch courts are obliged under articles and of the dutch constitution to apply its provisions in accordance with the interpretation of the ecthr. the protection of human rights it provides is an essential component of a democratic state under the rule of law. . . . this case involves an exceptional situation. after all, there is the threat of dangerous climate change and it is clear that measures are urgently needed, as the district court and court of appeal have established and the state acknowledges as well (see . - . above). the state is obliged to do 'its part' in this context (see . . - . . above). towards the residents of the netherlands, whose interests urgenda is defending in this case, that duty follows from articles and echr, on the basis of which the state is obliged to protect the right to life and the right to private and family life of its residents (see . - . . and . - . . above). the fact that annex i countries, including the netherlands, will need to reduce their emissions by at least % by follows from the view generally held in climate science and in the international community, which view has been established by the district court and the court of appeal (see . . - . . above). the policy that the state pursues since and intends to pursue in the future (see . . above), whereby measures are postponed for a prolonged period of time, is clearly not in accordance with this, as the court of appeal has established. at least the state has failed to make it clear that its policy is in fact in accordance with the above (see . . and . . above). . . . in this case, therefore, the court of appeal was allowed to rule that the state is in any case obliged to achieve the aforementioned reduction of at least % by . (c) assessment of the complaints in cassation . ground for cassation therefore cannot lead to cassation either. the supreme court: -rejects the appeal; -orders the state to pay the costs of the proceedings in cassation, up to this decision estimated on the part of urgenda at eur . guide on article of the european convention on human rights ), nos. - , - and - and the ecthr judgments mentioned there /turkey), paras. and - (article echr also applies to the threat of environmental pollution that might materialise only in twenty to fifty years gorovenky and bugara/ukraine), para. , and ecthr with regard to article echr, see /malta), para. . with regard to article echr, see, inter alia Öneryildiz/turkey), para. dubetska et al./ukraine), paras. - , and ecthr budayeva et al./russia), para. , and ecthr vienna convention on the law of treaties / (demir and baykara/turkey) / (Öneryildiz/turkey), paras. , , and (meaning 'dangerous activities'), and ecthr neshkov et al./bulgaria), paras. and , and ecthr kuppinger/germany), paras. and , with regard to a violation of article echr, and ecthr neshkov et al./bulgaria), paras. and , and ecthr wpnr . cf. also article : of principles of european tort law. for the netherlands, see: supreme court see in this sense also the judgment of the supreme court of united states in the case massachusetts et al. v. environmental protection agency et al inter alia, the data mentioned in . - . of the opinion proffered by the deputy procurator general and the advocate general parliamentary papers ii ecli:nl:hr: :ad (de nieuwe meer), para. . , and parliamentary papers ii convention on access to information, public participation in decision-making and access to justice in environmental matters see box . from the working group iii report that forms part of ar united nations framework convention on climate change, compilation of economy-wide emission reduction targets to be implemented by parties included in annex i to the convention according to the glossary of the report, 'later-action scenarios and , and parliamentary papers ii supreme court ecli:nl:hr: :ao (faunabescherming/fryslân), paras. . . and . . , supreme court ecli:nl:hr: :ae (waterpakt), para. . , third paragraph, and supreme court , which involved a similar declaratory decision and supreme court ecli:nl:hr: :bk (sgp) countries commit to net zero co emissions by earth's hottest decade on record marked by extreme storms and deadly wildfires. https ://insid eclim atene ws.org/news/ /decad e-clima te-heat-droug ht-extre me-storm s-arcti c-seaice-antar ctica -green land the legal form of the paris agreement and nature of its obligations the concept of 'due diligence' in the un guiding principles on business and human rights safe climate. a report of the special rapporteur on the issue of human rights obligations relating to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment analysis: how much 'carbon-budget' is left to limit global warming to . c which countries have a net zero carbon goal? climate home news the hague expert group on global climate obligations ( ) oslo principles on global climate obligations climate change and human rights-can the courts fix it international bar association ( ) model statute for proceedings challenging government failure to act on climate change summary for policymakers how long can oceans continue to absorb earth's excess heat environmental and planning law in the age of human rights and climate change report of the independent expert john knox on the issue of human rights obligations relating to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment. un general assembly a/hrc/ / climate change and human rights law: where we are now climate tipping points-too risky to bet against a new classic in climate change litigation: the dutch supreme court decision in the urgenda case the evolving role of environmental rights in climate change litigation comment: environmental law and populism, the end of enlighted environmental law docum ents/speec hes% and % pap ers/prest oncj/prest on% cj% -% the % imp act% of% the % par is% agr eemen t% on% cli mate% cha nge% lit igati on% and % law central concepts in the paris agreement and how they evolved climate change litigation and human rights: pushing the boundaries in 'strongest' climate ruling yet, dutch court orders leaders to take action global trends in climate litigation injunctive relief: opportunities and challenges: thoughts about a potentially promising legal vehicle to stem the tide mistake of law and sustainability trajectories of the earth system in the anthropocene minimum core obligations: human rights in the here and now the paris agreement on climate change, analysis and commentary temperature rise is 'locked-in' in the arctic ipcc report: sea levels could be a metre higher by the net-zero challenge nederland start proefproject met dubbele dijken the fourth ipcc assessment report ( ) key: cord- - z pchyq authors: adolph, c.; amano, k.; bang-jensen, b.; fullman, n.; magistro, b.; reinke, g.; wilkerson, j. title: governor partisanship explains the adoption of statewide mandates to wear face coverings date: - - journal: nan doi: . / . . . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: z pchyq public mask use has emerged as a key tool in response to covid- . we develop and document a classification of statewide mask mandates that reveals variation in their scope and timing. some u.s. states quickly mandated the wearing of face coverings in most public spaces, whereas others issued narrow mandates or no mandate at all. we consider how differences in covid- epidemiological indicators, state capacity, and partisan politics affect when states adopted broad mask mandates. the most important predictor is whether a state is led by a republican governor. these states were much slower to adopt mandates, if they did so at all. covid- indicators such as confirmed cases or deaths per million are much less important predictors of statewide mask mandates. this finding highlights a key challenge to public efforts to increase mask-wearing, widely believed to be one of the most effective tools for preventing the spread of sars-cov- while restoring economic activity. public mask wearing is now widely viewed as a low-cost and effective means for reducing sars-cov- virus transmission ( ; ; ). however, it was not until april , more than a month after the first reported case of the novel coronavirus in the us, that the cdc formally recommended mask wearing to the general public ( ) . across the u.s., voluntary adherence to the cdc's mask recommendation has been uneven. unlike some other societies, mask wearing in response to contagion is not a cultural norm in the u.s. ( ) . the absence of such a norm or a national mask mandate has resulted in considerable policy variation across states ( ) . as with other non-pharmaceutical interventions (npis), such as business and school closings and stay-at-home directives ( ), many u.s. states did not broadly require that citizens wear masks across a range of indoor public spaces, even as the scientific and public heath case for mask wearing grew stronger. there was also considerable variation in how quickly states adopted mandates, among those that did. at first glance, this variation appears to fall sharply along political party lines. for example, sixteen of the states that have not adopted broad mandates are led by republican governors. it is also the case that most of the early-adopting states were led by democratic governors. but it is possible that first impressions fail to account for other factors. the mounting scientific evidence that masks are an effective means for slowing the spread of sars-cov- makes it more important to understand the most important drivers of state covid- responses. using originally collected data on mask mandates across states, we examine how differences in covid- indicators, state capacity, and partisan politics may have affected the speed of mask mandate adoption. specifically, we recorded when a state issued a mask mandate (if it did), developed a three-point scale to classify the breadth of each mandate, and performed an event history analysis to explore variations in the timing of the broadest mandates that require individuals to wear masks while indoors in public spaces. controlling for the seven-day moving average of reported covid- deaths and state citizen ideology, we find the governor's party affiliation is the most important predictor of state differences in the timing of indoor public mask mandates. the marginal effect of a having republican governor instead of a democrat was a . day ( % ci: . to . ) delay in the announcement of broad state-wide mask mandates. this effect is far larger than the effect of any other variables examined and is robust to many different sensitivity analyses testing a large number of possible confounders. we collected data on all statewide directives mandating masks issued over the period april to august . we consider a public mask mandate to be any policy that requires individuals to wear masks or other mouth and nose coverings when they are outside their places of residence. we include only mandates which apply to all individuals within a given setting, allowing exceptions for individuals with certain medical conditions or for young children. our data thus do not include mandates which only require the use of masks or other personal protective equipment by specific employees as part of business operations. to further capture variation across mask mandates applying to the general public, we create a typology with three ordered categories that encompass all state-wide public mask mandates issued over this period: limited mandate (level ). policies in this category involve limited mask mandates applying only to specific public settings. for example, mask mandates at this level might apply only to transportation services (e.g., issued by vermont on may , augmented to a level policy on july ) ( ; ), to retail establishments (e.g., issued by alaska on april and ended on may ) ( ), or to large gatherings where social distancing is not possible (e.g., issued by new hampshire on august )( ). a common example of a limited mandate is one which applies only to people visiting government buildings (e.g., issued by utah on june and south carolina on august ) ( ; ). broad indoor mandate (level ). policies in this category constitute broad mask mandates requiring the use of masks or cloth face coverings by the public across most or all sectors of public activity indoors or in enclosed spaces. mandates in this category may also include requirements that members of the public wear masks while waiting in line to enter an indoor space, or while using or waiting for shared transportation. for example, minnesota's mask mandate (issued july ) requires people over five years of age who are medically able to wear facial coverings or masks "in an indoor business or public indoor space, including when waiting outdoors to enter an indoor business or public indoor space, and when riding on public transportation, in a taxi, in a ridesharing vehicle, or in a vehicle that is being used for business purposes" ( ) . broad indoor and outdoor mandate (level ). policies in this most comprehensive category mandate the use of face coverings by the public across all public indoor spaces and in outdoor settings, though exceptions may be made for outdoor mask wearing where . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. is the (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint . this version posted september , . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint social distancing is possible. for instance, new york issued a mask policy on april mandating all individuals who are medically able and over two years of age to wear a mask when in a public place and unable to maintain social distancing ( ) . washington state's mask mandate, issued june , requires that "every person. . . wear a face covering that covers their nose and mouth when in any indoor or outdoor setting" ( ) . because level reflects a very limited mask mandate from the perspective of preventing transmission of the novel coronavirus, we concentrate our analysis on adoption of mandates at level or : mandates that at a minimum include a broad requirement to wear masks indoors in public spaces. for these policies, we coded both the dates on which statewide policies were issued in each state at each level, as well as the date of enactment of each policy. because our objective is to better understand the factors that influenced governors' decisions to implement mask mandates, we focus on the dates the policies were issued. (if our objective were instead to study the effects of mask mandates, the date of enactment might be more appropriate. notably, we include a sensitivity analysis using dates of enactment that does not find substantive or statistical differences in the factors predicting mask mandate adoption.) the top panel of figure shows when broad statewide mandates requiring masks in indoor public spaces (level or higher mandates) were adopted across the us, starting in april . the bottom panel shows when the broadest dual indoor-outdoor mandates were adopted (level ). these adoptions occurred in two phases: from the middle of april to the end of may, eleven states adopted level or higher mandates; most ( ) were level mandates. the second phase began in mid-to late-june, and continued into early august. in this later phase, an additional states adopted mask mandates of at least level or higher, bringing the total number of states with broad mandates to . most of these ( ) were also level mandates (for a total of level mandates). four of these (maryland, michigan, new jersey, and oregon) had already adopted level mandates in april. thus, by august , two-thirds of states, containing at least % of the u.s. population, had a statewide mask mandate requiring masks in indoor settings. half of states, containing % of the population, further required masks to be worn outdoors statewide. we use cox proportional hazards models to explore how different factors influenced the timing of broad statewide mask mandates across the fifty u.s. states. these factors . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. is the (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint . alaska and hawaii adopted limited mask mandates (level ) but later ended those mandates. sources: authors' original data collection ( ) . data available at http://covid statepolicy. org. . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. is the (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint . . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. is the (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint . this version posted september , . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint include covid- indicators, state capacity, and partisan politics. figure reports the results from our baseline model, which controls for the log of covid- deaths per million population reported in the state as seven-day moving averages, the ideological orientation of each state's citizenry, and the party of the governor ( ; ; ) . these results are reported both using traditional hazard ratios (top panel of figure ) and as average marginal effects across all fifty states, expressed as the average expected days of delay associated with each factor (bottom panel of figure ). by far, the most powerful predictor of broad mask mandate adoption and timing is the political party of the governor. holding constant state ideology and the rate of deaths per million, at any given time democratic governors are . times ( % ci: . to . times) more likely to adopt a mask mandate than are republican governors. we can also use the estimated cox model to predict the total expected delay hypothetically associated with having a republican governor (rather than a democratic governor) in each state, while leaving state ideology and daily deaths per million at their observed values for each state-day. we find that averaged across the fifty states, the marginal effect of having a republican governor is a . day delay in adopting a broad indoor mask mandate ( % ci: . to . days). the party of the governor is not the only political variable that influences the likelihood of adoption. holding constant the party of the governor, states with more liberal citizens adopt mandates earlier than states with more conservative citizens. for example, states at the th percentile of citizen ideology (more liberal) are . times more likely to adopt mask mandates at a given time than more conservative states at the th percentile of citizen ideology ( % ci: . to . times). the marginal effect of this inter-quartile difference in citizen ideology is a . day delay of indoor mask mandates in more conservative states ( % ci: . to . days). researchers and policy-makers use several metrics to track sars-cov- transmission, and governors have access to daily data on covid- measures including confirmed cases, deaths, and positive test result rates. in our models, daily deaths per million consistently dominates measures of new cases per million and test positivity rates as a factor associated with the timing of broad statewide mask mandates. nevertheless, the effect of daily deaths is much weaker than the effect of governors' party affiliation. we find that a state at the th percentile for daily covid- deaths per million population is . times more likely to adopt a mask mandate than a state at the th percentile ( % ci: . to . ). our model suggests a state with a lower rate of daily covid- deaths will adopt mask mandates . days later than a state with a higher daily death rate ( % ci: . to . days). . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. is the (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint . as republican governors and conservative citizens often go together, the relative importance of politics on mask mandate adoption is even greater. when combined, the expected delay in adopting at least an indoor mask mandate for a state with both a republican governor and a conservative citizenry is . days ( % ci: . to . days) when compared to a democratic governor in a liberal state. the majority of this delay is attributable to the party of the executive, highlighting the importance of state-level political leadership in fighting the virus. . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. is the (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint . this version posted september , . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint we conducted several additional analyses to test the robustness of these findings. first, we considered the possibility that our results were sensitive to either the source of daily covid- data used in the model or the set of covid- indicators used for each state-day. our baseline model used data reported by the new york times on daily covid- deaths for each state ( ) . figure reports results from a series of models that use alternative sources of daily death counts ( ; ) . as the top of the figure makes clear, the gap between the effect of governor partisanship and the effect of deaths per million remains at least as large as in the baseline model across the alternative indicators. while deaths are perhaps the most politically salient consequence of the pandemic, they are the least timely indicator of the severity of transmission in a given place and time, operating at a lag of approximately two or more weeks from the time of infection ( ; ). we therefore consider models adding controls for more timely indicators of the spread of sars-cov- : the number of confirmed covid- cases per million reported in each state each day and the rate of test positivity (in both cases, as sevenday moving averages). states taking prompt action to stem the spread of the virus should arguably be responsive to these indicators. although the effect of higher rates of case growth is in the expected direction of possibly encouraging mask mandates, the relationship is not statistically significant in a model that controls for the count of deaths. (this pattern holds regardless of the data source used for confirmed cases.) the rate of positive tests in a state had no relationship with mandate timing once deaths per million is controlled. in all models, the partisan effect was unchanged. in addition to alternative measures of public health indicators, we consider a series of additional control variables, none of which alter our findings regarding the effect of partisan governors ( figure ). first, we add a third measure of partisan politics, either trump's vote share in the state in the presidential election or the percentage of people in the state who watch fox news regularly ( ; ) . neither helps explain mask mandate timing in models that also control for governor party and citizen ideology. this may indicate that direct effects of these factors cannot be isolated, or that their impact on timing is mediated through governors and through their conservative audiences. next, we consider the possibility that states adopt mask mandates either in imitation of policies adopted by other states or in reaction to the spread of the virus in neighboring states. we find that, controlling for governor party, citizen ideology, and the daily death rate within a state, neither the adoption of mask mandates by neighboring states nor the average death rate in neighboring states is associated with the timing of mandates. we also control for the rate of mask mandate adoption in "peer states": cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. is the (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint . . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. is the (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint . this version posted september , . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint other states (often not neighbors) identified using network analysis as the innovators which a given state most often imitates across a variety of policy areas ( ) . somewhat puzzlingly, whether peer states have adopted mandates is negatively associated with mandate adoption once our baseline controls are included, a result we suspect is spurious (and which does not alter our main findings). other controls which fail to explain mandate timing when added to the model include the percentage of state residents above the age of or in possession of a college degree ( ) , as well as the log of population density ( ) and the log of gross state product per capita (a reasonable non-finding given the minimal economic consequences of a mask mandate, in contrast to many other non-pharmaceutical interventions) ( ) . we consider one last control: the (pre-epidemic) count of icu beds in each state per capita, which if low might add urgency to state policies to combat the pandemic ( ) . we find the opposite: states with more icu beds per capita are more likely to adopt mask mandates. it may be that states that are more generally prepared to address health care needs are also more likely to implement preventive services such as mandates. in any event, inclusion of this control does not alter our main findings. finally, we consider changes to the model outcome and scope. the first change is simple: instead of measuring time to the issuance of mask mandates, we model the time to the enactment dates contained in those mandates; our results are unchanged. the second modification is more noteworthy and divides the data into two periods. in the first period, the months of april and may, states that adopted mask mandates did so either before they eased social distancing mandates, or concurrent with efforts to ease social distancing and re-open business sectors. for most states, the second period, june and july, followed substantial easing of social distancing policies and saw rising numbers of cases starting in mid-june ( ) . in the first period, states may have issued mask mandates as a preventative policy layer to mitigate transmission risks associated with easing social distancing restrictions ( ) . by the second period, the benefits of wearing non-medical masks against sars-cov- transmission were better understood ( ; ). despite partisan resistance to mask mandates on the part of republican voters and president trump, one could imagine governors of both parties coalescing in june and july around mask mandates as the least costly intervention to protect fragile state economies and create a path to normal social interactions ( ; ). yet when we restrict our analysis to start on june instead of april , we find substantively similar relationships -and an even stronger partisan governor effect (hazard ratio of . , %ci: . to . ), suggesting mask mandates became more partisan in the summer of . . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. is the (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint . this version posted september , . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint masks are an important tool in the strategies of countries that have slowed the spread of covid- ( ; ) . near-universal mask wearing reduces the risk implicit in returning to aspects of normal life, and may be especially important for protecting essential workers who are not able to limit their exposure ( ; ; ) . in some countries, mask wearing is a well-established cultural norm ( ). this was not the case in the u.s. prior to covid- . by early summer , governors of both parties surely recognized the pandemic's threat to their states and were also well aware that it was transmitted via aerosols. one might therefore expect these leaders to be eager to encourage mask wearing as an alternative to the steep social and economic costs implicit in prolonged social distancing measures such as stay-at-home orders. the rapid progression of the pandemic also suggests that mandates, rather than public education campaigns, would be the preferred approach to ensuring mask compliance. why, then, were so many republican governors reluctant to promote a relatively low-cost and effective intervention? our event history analysis cannot speak to motives. the most likely explanation, we believe, is that the absence of a mask wearing norm in the u.s. opened the door to reactionary responses. from the beginning of the pandemic, president trump has seemed more concerned about the pandemic's threat to the economy than to public health, and may see mask wearing as a prominent public reminder of a problem that he was consistently trying to minimize. the president remains opposed to a national mandate ( ) and has mocked those who do wear masks ( ) . his behavior promoted partisan division on mask wearing. republican identifiers are now much less likely than democratic identifiers to say that they wear masks all or most of the time ( % vs. % in august ) ( ) . in addition, many americans, and especially republicans, resisted mask wearing as a sign of weakness or "unmanly" behavior ( ; ; ) , perhaps based on the mistaken assumption that self-protection is the primary objective of mask wearing. this political dynamic may help to explain why president trump steadfastly refused to wear a mask despite widespread urging that he set a public example ( ) , and why he publicly mocked democratic presidential nominee joe biden for wearing one. the u.s. is as polarized politically as it has ever been, including across and within state governments ( ; ; ) . a plausible hypothesis is that many republican governors delayed imposing mask mandates, not because they believed them to be ineffective or unnecessary, but because they were unpopular with republican voters, who continue to support trump by wide margins ( ) . a republican governor who man- . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. is the (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint . this version posted september , . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint dated masks risked being portrayed as weak, threatening their base of support and possibly the support of their party's national leader. democratic antipathy toward trump and his cavalier rejection of the recommendations of his own government, a generally positive view of mask wearing among constituents ( ; ; ) , and widespread mask wearing by democratic leaders (including biden) made it much easier politically for democratic governors to support mask mandates. although republican governors were generally more resistant to mandates, some eventually succumbed to the reality of rising cases and deaths in their states (including greg abbott of texas, kay ivey of alabama, and tate reeves of mississippi). others, however, continued to reject the recommendations of public health officials in the face of rampant cases and deaths in their states (including brian kemp in georgia, ron desantis in florida, and doug ducey in arizona). by the end of our study period, states required masks indoors (level or higher), so that three-quarters of americans now live under state-wide indoor mask mandates. the remaining resistance is highly partisan: thirteen of the states that have yet to adopt broad mandates are led by republican governors. mask wearing can help to reduce transmission of the coronavirus. widespread compliance with mask mandates in many localities across the u.s. suggests that a valuable norm may be developing that will have longer term positive consequences for pandemic response ( ) . however, at the state-level, the politicization of this important intervention has delayed the adoption of broad, consistent mandates on an affordable and effective behavior to reduce coronavirus spread. we estimate an event history model to predict the timing of announced mask mandates across u.s. states from april , to august , . specifically, we model the likelihood that a state will implement a mask mandate of at least level (broadly requiring face coverings indoors) as a function of time in days with a cox proportional hazards model, clustering standard errors by state. all states are at risk of adopting a mandate starting on april , and remain at risk until they adopt a mandate at either level or level . in this model, the baseline hazard rate non-parametrically captures the effects of purely national trends -such as the common tendency of states to adopt mask mandates due to the national resurgence of new covid- cases and deaths, or as a result of new scientific findings regarding the effectiveness of masks in reducing . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. is the (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint . this version posted september , . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint coronavirus transmission. this leaves only cross-state variation in the timing of mask mandates to be explained by covariates. our primary specification, reported in table , includes two time-invariant covariates -the ideological orientation of each state's citizenry and the party of the governor ( ; ) . we also control for a time-varying covariate, the daily reported covid- deaths per million population in each state using data from the new york times (on covid- deaths) ( ) and the us census (on population) ( ) . deaths per million enter the model as a seven-day average (to smooth over differential rates of reporting over weekends and weekdays) and logged (to allow for diminishing marginal effects of rising covid- deaths and to mitigate the influence of outliers, which in some cases likely reflect idiosyncratic reporting delays). logging this term improves model fit (concordance increases from . to . ), but poses the problem of how to deal with seven-day averages over periods with no reported deaths. a common but flawed solution is to add a small "fudge" factor (e.g., . , or , etc.) to cases of zero deaths to ensure the log of deaths per million is always defined; however, this technique produces different results depending on the (arbitrary) amount added. this is an underappreciated but unsurprising problem, as the range of plausible adjustments covers several orders of magnitude. while differences across plausible "fudge" factors do not affect our substantive or statistical conclusions enough to change our findings, a non-arbitrary solution is preferable. instead, we rely on the data to suggest the appropriate treatment of zeros by including an additional covariate indicating cases of exact zero values of the moving average of deaths. in turn, before logging the moving average of deaths, we replace zeros with ones, ensuring (without loss of generality) that the zero cases drop out of the log term. the results from this zero-adjusted log specification are similar to those from models that use a "fudge" factor, but arguably less arbitrary and more data-driven. the hazard ratios associated with each covariate in our primary model are reported in table . the schoenfeld residuals for each covariate shows no evidence of violation of proportionality, supporting the proportional hazard assumption. for continuous covariates, we show the hazard ratio associated with an interquartile shift in the covariate, as recommended by harrell ( ) . these are the hazard ratios reported in the top panel of figure in the main text. following the approach of adolph et al. ( ), we contextualize these findings by computing the average marginal effect of each covariate averaged across the fifty states ( ) , expressed as the expected days of delay associated with each covariate, averaged across the fifty states with all other covariates taking on their observed values day by day for each state. these quantities are shown in the bot- . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. is the (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint . tom of figure in the main text. analyses were performed in r (version . . ) using the survival and coxed ( ) packages. all visualizations were constructed using the tile package ( ) . in addition to the primary model reported in the table and figure , we consider a series of sensitivity analyses. throughout these analyses, we attempt to keep each estimated model parsimonious, as including too many covariates is a particular concern for event history models with small numbers of observed events ( ) . the first sensitivity analyses reported in figure simply replace the new york times death data used in the primary model with data from alternative sources (the covid tracking project or johns hopkins university) ( ; ) . however, most of the sensitivity analyses retain the covariates of the primary model and serially add a single additional covariate. as a final robustness check, we report a complementary analysis focusing on the time to adoption of mandates requiring masks both indoors and outdoors (level mandates). the results of this analysis are reported in table and figure . only half of the states had adopted so broad a mask directive by august , and while the hazard ratio associated with a higher moving-average of deaths per million was little changed from the more inclusive model of both level and level mandates ( . versus . ), the haz- . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. is the (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint . . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. is the (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint . this version posted september , . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint ard rate associated with the party of the governor shrank (from . to . ) and the hazard rate associated with conservative citizen ideology grew (from . to . ). in all cases, these results remained significant at the . level and associated with substantively noteworthy average marginal effects. states with higher rates of daily deaths per million could be expected to adopt combined indoor-outdoor mask mandates . ( % ci: . to . ) days later than states with low rates of daily deaths. the expected delay associated with republican governors was . days ( % ci: . to . ), while more states with more conservative citizens could be expected to adopt level mandates . ( % ci: . to . ) days later than states with liberal citizens. the combined delay for states with republican governors and conservative citizens was . days ( % ci . to . ). . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. is the (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint . this version posted september , . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. is the (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint . . cc-by-nd . international license it is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. is the (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint . this version posted september , . https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint physical distancing, face masks, and eye protection to prevent person-to-person transmission of sars-cov- and covid- : a systematic review and meta-analysis community use of face masks and covid- : evidence from a natural experiment of state mandates in the us face masks against covid- : an evidence review. preprints recommendation regarding the use of cloth face coverings, especially in areas of significant community-based transmission face masks are in. the atlantic what countries have mask laws? pandemic politics: timing state-level social distancing responses to covid- addendum to executive order - archived at http://covid statepolicy.org as state policy source vermont archived at http:// covid statepolicy.org as state policy source alaska emergency order pursuant to executive order - . august archived at http:// covid statepolicy.org as state policy source southcarolina archived at http:// covid statepolicy.org as state policy source utah archived at http:// covid statepolicy.org as state policy source minnesota archived at http:// covid statepolicy.org as state policy source newyork archived at http://covid statepolicy.org as state policy source washington state-level social distancing policies in response to covid- in the us. version . covid- ) data in the united states updated measures of citizen and government ideology. data file the national conference of state legislators. state partisan composition. data file the covid tracking project. states current and historical data. data file novel coronavirus covid- ( -ncov) data repository. data file visualizing the lagged connection between covid- cases and deaths in the united states: an animation using per capita state-level data case-fatality risk estimates for covid- calculated by using a lag time for fatality presidential election results: donald j. trump wins cable news viewership: fox news persistent policy pathways: inferring diffusion networks in the american states global burden of disease study population estimates - . data file us census. population density. data file gross state product. data file harvard global health institute. hospital capacity by state. data file as virus surges, younger people account for disturbing number of cases absence of apparent transmission of sars-cov- from two stylists after exposure at a hair salon with a universal face covering policy a modelling framework to assess the likely effectiveness of facemasks in combination with 'lock-down' in managing the covid- pandemic impact of population mask wearing on covid- post lockdown. medrxiv donald trump vows not to order americans to wear masks biden, seizing on masks as a campaign issue, calls for a mandate. the new york times most americans say they regularly wore a mask in stores in the past month; fewer see others doing it the effect of messaging and gender on intentions to wear a face covering to slow down covid- transmission development and validation of the masculinity contest culture scale masks and emasculation: why some men refuse to take safety precautions trump wears mask in public for first time during visit to walter reed interest group activists and the polarization of state legislatures no middle ground: how informal party organizations control nominations and polarize legislatures the ideological mapping of american legislatures presidential approval ratings -donald trump partisan pandemic: how partisanship and public health concerns affect individuals' social distancing during covid- . ssrn, a detailed map of who is wearing masks in the u.s. the new york times face coverings for covid- : from medical intervention to social practice regression modeling strategies: with applications to linear models, logistic and ordinal regression, and survival analysis simulating duration data for the cox model importance of events per independent variable in proportional hazards regression analysis. ii. accuracy and precision of regression estimates key: cord- - gvv tna authors: tok, evren; koç, muammer; d'alessandro, cristina title: entrepreneurship in a transformative and resource-rich state: the case of qatar date: - - journal: extr ind soc doi: . /j.exis. . . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: gvv tna countries blessed with natural resources have generally struggled to achieve sustainable economic development and prosperity. population growth, the depletion of natural resources coupled with mismanagement, and sharp fluctuations in prices of those resources are among the main reasons for sub-optimal economic performance. some resource-rich countries have been expending effort and money in an attempt to change this inverse relationship (a.k.a. “the resource curse”) by designing policies to diversify their economies with high value-added industries and sectors. qatar is a such country and point of the interest in this article. qatar's political and economic structure, its efforts to diversify its economy, and the potential for improved entrepreneurial outcomes with high value-added products, services, businesses, and industries are analyzed. the country has been very effective in maximizing the benefits of its oil resources and especially its large natural gas reserves, becoming the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (lng) in the world. revenues from oil and gas sales have been invested in the domestic economy and global assets. thus far, however, it has not shown the in-house capacity for innovation and entrepreneurship critical for sustainable economic diversification going forward. this publication was made possible in part by nprp grant # - - from the qatar national research fund (a member of the qatar foundation). across the world, a significant number of countries have substantial natural resource reserves such as minerals, oil, and natural gas. the fortunes of those countries often underwent dramatic changes as the discovery of resources spurred economic activity and substantially increased their revenues, but not necessarily improving the well-being of their citizens overall. many of these countries have faced political upheavals and the reversal of initial economic gains, and some have ended up in a worse situation than they were before the discovery of the natural resources. countries which have suffered from this "resource curse" (sachs & warner, ) include zimbabwe, iraq, libya, and dr congo. the primary reasons for such undesired outcomes are mismanagement of the new resources, internal power struggles, rampant corruption, sharp fluctuations in the value of the rent resource, increasing population, and de-industrialization in other sectors (hertog, ; hvidt, ; van der ploeg, ) . however, not all resource-rich countries suffer from this inverse relationship between resource wealth and social chaos and underdevelopment (gray, ; levins, ) . norway, australia, and canada are among the industrially advanced countries which possess large natural resources but have maintained a stable political system and relative immunity to wild fluctuations in the value of their resources (mehlum, moene, & torvik, ) . the states of the gulf cooperation council (gcc) -bahrain, kuwait, oman, saudi arabia, qatar, and uaehave also utilized their large oil and gas wealth to propel rapid development starting from the s, with a relatively stable social order (hertog, ; kubursi, ; . however, these states rely heavily on oil and gas revenues for funding state expenses as well as covering the costs of imports . they are keenly aware of the potential pitfalls of such a dependence on a single natural resource, and have therefore initiated a series of developmental plans and visions to diversify their economies . in this paper, we define them as "transformative states" in their quest for economic diversification, and focus on their potential to achieve this target through a case study on qatar. the paper is organized as follows. section examines the economic structure of qatar from a transformative state perspective, highlighting three important economic "circuits". section then discusses the challenges posed to the current transformative economic structure of the country with a special focus on the future of the oil and gas sectors. section visits the literature on innovation and analyses the potential, incentives, and capacity for innovation and entrepreneurship in qatar. section discusses the paper's findings and offers some conclusions. located in the east-central section of the arabian peninsula, qatar is itself a peninsula as % of its land is surrounded by the arabian gulf. the country's only land border is with saudi arabia, and it shares maritime borders with bahrain, saudi arabia, uae, and iran. the total land area of qatar is a little over , km . qatar gained its independence from the british colonial administration in after the latter's withdrawal from the region, which coincided with the discovery of large oil reserves beginning in the s (hanieh, ) . prior to the discovery of oil, qatar was a barren land with a small population focused mainly on fishing and pearling activities. the biggestand only sizeablecity of the country is doha, where the majority of the population lives. the country's total population is around . million of which . million are male and . million are female, according to the ministry of development planning and statistics of qatar (https://www.mdps.gov.qa). although there are no official statistics on the proportion of immigrants, the cia world factbook estimates that immigrants comprise more than % of the total while the local population constitutes less than % (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/qa.html). the majority of the migrant population come from southeast asian countries and work in low-skilled jobs such as housekeeping, construction, and basic services (gardner et al., ) . a small migrant workforce with advanced education and experience fills critical engineering jobs, consulting services, and management positions alongside qatari nationals (fargues, ; gardner et al., ) . like the other gcc member states, qatar is considered a transformative state economy which indicates that while extraction and utilization of oil and gas provide the country's main export revenue (rent), it has simultaneously been attempting to diversify its economy using such revenues. the country's political system is a tribal monarchy ruled by the al-thani family which has a strong alliance with all the leading tribes in the country (gray, ) . the government has exclusive control of the country's oil and gas revenue, which allows it to provide numerous benefits to its citizens, such as a zero-taxation regime, high salaries for public sector workers, free schooling, healthcare, and housing, in exchange for the transfer of political representation to the ruling family . this exchange of economic benefits for political rights is known in the literature as "the ruling agreement" (hvidt, ) and is depicted in figure ; overall, such a ruling agreement guides economic, social, and political structures, decisions, and transformations. within a transformative economic system, there are three important zones of operation which can be labelled the productive circuit, the finance circuit, and the commodity circuit (hanieh, ) . the productive circuit involves rent-creating business activities such as the oil and gas sectors, including petrochemicals: it is an essential part of the transformative economy as it brings export revenue to the state. the cost of oil and gas production in the gcc states is relatively cheap compared to the rest of the world due to the concentration of conventional oil and gas wells in the region (shah, ) . the governments of the gcc states, including qatar, exercise exclusive control over most of the sectors in the productive circuit (especially oil and gas production) through laws and decrees , which allows them to implement "the ruling agreement" mentioned above (hvidt, ) . apart from the oil and gas sectors, gcc governments have gradually expanded the scope of the productive circuit by investing in energyintensive sectors such as aluminum and steel production to increase their profits by utilizing the inexpensive energy available to them (hertog, ) . the gcc governments first allowed private businesses to operate in limited areas of the productive circuit such as the construction industry and subcontracting services ; this has been followed by the creation of service sectors in the productive circuit such as telecommunications and aviation in which gcc governments are leading players (callen, cherif, hasanov, hegazy, & khandelwal, ) . the second important circuit in a transformative state is the finance sector (hanieh, ) . after gaining independence from the colonial powers, the gcc states rapidly established numerous local banks to transfer income from the oil and gas industry. these banks transferred resources to domestic firms and individuals in the form of credit that stimulated the local economy. many of these local banks are owned by the government, the ruling families, or the merchant families in the gulf who form the political and economic elite of the gcc countries (hanieh, ) ; these powerful owners are represented on the boards of directors, giving them effective control over the management of the bank and its capital (al-muharrami, matthews, & khabari, ) . therefore, the finance circuit is effectively used to entrench "the ruling agreement" in the gulf states, allocating capital not in the most efficient way, but through preferential treatment to the selected families and groups. the final circuit in a transformative economy is the commodity circuit. a transformative state usually imports a significant share of consumer goods such as cars, home appliances, and personal products from abroad (hvidt, ) . the "dutch disease" theory argues that income from the export of oil and gas sales results in an increase in the price of nontradable goods and domestic services due to the overall income increase in the country (ismail, ) . this is because nontradable services or goods are hard to exchange with tradable ones, which results in higher prices of nontradable goods and hence better profits in those industries (matsen & torvik, ) . the commodity circuit includes the trading and selling of these nontradable goods and services such as product dealerships, education and healthcare (kaya, tok, koc, mezher, & tsai, ) . a transformative government usually allocates to local businessmen exclusive trading licences for importing or re-exporting a certain commodity product as part of "the ruling agreement" (krane, ). thanks to preferential treatment by the government, there are famous trading and business family conglomerates in each of the gcc states which control certain sectors (yalcin, ) . coupled with the circulation of rent revenue from productive and finance circuits in the domestic economy, exclusive trading rights have allowed elite families to conglomerate to realize sizeable profits and rapid expansion of their businesses (hanieh, ) . the family conglomerates consist of known tribal leaders including some royal family members and merchant families of the gcc states. the first discovery of oil in qatar was in in dukhan field, from which production of , barrels a day started in (al-siddiqi & dawe, ) . after a lull during world war ii, international interest in oil in the region resumed post-war, and investment for exploration and drilling in the region increased rapidly (kubursi, ) . during the s and s, a string of new oil fields, both onshore and offshore, were discovered that propelled the country's oil production to more , barrels per day (al-siddiqi & dawe, ) . after qatar gained independence in , the largest single natural gas field in the world (the north field) was discovered, which stretches from the northern shores of qatar to its maritime borders with iran. the north field contains trillion cubic feet of non-associated gas in a single location, which accounts for . % of the world's total known conventional gas reserves (bp, ) . the exploitation of this huge gas field was very limited in the s and s (al-siddiqi & dawe, ) , but there has been rapid development regarding extraction and utilization of the natural gas in the north field since the s. large-scale investments in liquefied natural gas (lng) and its sale on world markets have made qatar one of the largest natural gas exporters in the world. while a relatively small producer of crude oil (accounting for less than % of the world's production), qatar is currently the world leader of lng production and export, with a capacity of more than million tons of lng per year (d'alessandro, ; tsafos, ) . furthermore, the country has the largest gas-to-liquids (gtl) facility in the world with a capacity of around , barrels per day, in which natural gas is processed into oil derivatives such as naphtha and diesel (ahmed et al., ) . figure shows the timeline of developments in qatar regarding the utilization of the natural gas found in the north field. qatar currently produces crude oil, liquified natural gas, paraffin, helium, and some other petrochemical products such as ammonia, urea, and polyethylene, with its international partners on an output-sharing basis (rystad energy, ) . the government of qatar has pursued a vertical integration strategy in capturing the value of its oil and gas reserves. the state-owned qatar petroleum (qp) has joint ventures (jv) and sub-units covering all aspects, from exploration and drilling of oil and gas to their refinement and liquefaction, transportation, and marketing to international customers (ibrahim & harrigan, ) . qp-owned nakilat operates more than large-tonnage ships to transport lng to the world markets. qp is currently studying an ambitious plan to expand its operations from lng production to petrochemical products in tandem with its international partners. qatar has greatly benefited from the strategic and wise management of its oil and gas reserves by qp. however, the volatility and recent fall in international oil prices have seriously affected state revenues and made economic diversification a matter of urgency. figure (tsafos, ) the country has a relatively small manufacturing capacity outside of the oil and gas industries, and petrochemicals and gtl production. the mesaieed industrial area is home to qatar steel and qatar aluminum companies, both owned by qp. qatar steel has a production capacity of more than million metric tonnes of steel derivatives per year. qatar aluminum has a production capacity of , metric tonnes per year. these two companies are among the largest manufacturing entities in the gcc (hanieh, ) ; however, their outputs are comparatively minor in terms of the global steel and aluminum industries whose outputs exceed million tonnes per year for each sector. while there are notable family conglomerates operating in construction and consultancy businesses in qatar, such as al-mana, al-fardan, nasser bin khaled (nbk), faisal bin qassem, rumailah, ghanem al-thani holdings (snoj, ) , the size, scale, and scope of private entities in the productive circuit are limited and much smaller than those of the state-owned companies due to the structure of the transformative state (hanieh, ; . statistics of qatar. this report indicates that the majority of qatar's manufacturing activity occurs in the petrochemical sector, which is directly linked to oil and gas (mdps, ). as a result, oil and gas-related businesses in the productive circuit, which is solely under state control, constitute the majority of the economic activity in the country (gray, ) . countries in the middle east have the lowest oil and gas production costs in the world (less than usd per barrel) thanks to the concentration in the region of conventional oil and gas fields, which are less technically challenging and less costly to develop than unconventional sources (kilian, ) . with average oil prices in excess of usd per barrel, the profits from hydrocarbon-related revenues have been unmatched in any other sector in the productive circuit. figure shows the average cost of oil production, in usd per barrel, across the world for the year . the finance circuit in qatar is heavily controlled by the government, the ruling family, and merchant families, although the level of control is less rigid than in the other gcc states (hanieh, ) . figure highlights the ownership structure of the major banks operating in qatar where majority of the shares are either owned by the state via qatar investment authority (qia) or merchant families touted as khaleeji capital (hanieh, ) . the finance circuit in qatar serves a crucial role in transferring revenue surplus (excess profits) from the productive circuit to domestic economic activities, especially to the commodity circuit. by having a significant degree of control in the management of the financial system, the qatari government is able to use these excess funds to further strengthen "the ruling agreement" (gray, ; levins, ) . the allocation of credit by state-controlled banks to domestic private businesses (merchant families) is not just based on their economic performance, but also on the relationship between the two entities (hvidt, ) . the business families and tribes which have a close relationship with the ruling family, and hence the state, are usually able to access easy and favorable credit from the banks (yalcin, ) . the finance circuit, therefore, is effectively used as a bridge between the productive circuit and the commodity circuit. there is no significant manufacturing of capital goods used for production (machinery and heavy equipment) in the gcc states. this has resulted in the import of necessary capital goods from advanced economies. rapid improvements in the economic conditions of gcc citizens and expatriate workers have also created a huge demand for basic consumer goods such as food products, cars, luxury goods, home appliances, and apparel (hanieh, ) . due to the lack of industrial base, most consumer goods also need to be imported. the state has given exclusive licences to family businesses established by influential locals to import certain capital goods and many consumer goods as part of "the ruling agreement". in the commodity circuit, qatar's economic structure is similar to the other gcc states . there are numerous families from known tribes who operate in the commodity circuit through exclusive business contracts, licences and dealerships in qatar (snoj, ) . as there is currently no form of taxation in qatarwhether income tax, value added tax or corporation tax (gray, ) -qatar's economy depends on income from oil and gas businesses to cover government spending and to stimulate economic growth. the completion of lng production, filling, and exportation facilities have compounded that dependency: qatar has become the richest nation on earth in terms of per capita gdp with a large amount of revenue particularly from lng sales (parcero & ryan, ; rystad energy, ) . the country's economic growth rate was spectacular in the last years, even outstripping that of china (imf, ). figure highlights the phenomenal increase in qatar's gdp since , when the lng investments of the s started yielding large revenues (ibrahim & harrigan, ) . the state of qatar is able to run a generous welfare programme for its citizens, which includes free public education, healthcare, and housing; it offers well-paying public sector jobs, and salaries for unemployed and dependents (gray, ) ; it provides food support and it heavily subsidizes electricity, water, and gas for its citizens and residents, although there have been some recent tariff hikes as a part of an economic reform (krane & hung, ) . due to its relatively small population and huge oil and gas revenues, qatar can afford to be the most generous among the gcc states in terms of supporting its citizens under "the ruling agreement" (babar, ) . based on statistics from the imf ( ), figure shows the dominance of oil and gas revenues in the qatari economy which enable the government to provide such high levels of welfare in the country. there are three dynamics to be taken into account when examining the ability of qatar and other gcc states to maintain current levels of social spending with money generated from selling hydrocarbons, mainly oil. first, the price of oil in international markets has always been volatile, which directly affects the revenue of the gcc states from exported oil (kilian, ) . second, the size of the local population in all the gcc states has been increasing (fargues, ) . this increase in the population means that the state has to distribute more resources locally as a part of "the ruling agreement", even in the face of dwindling revenues. third, domestic consumption of oil and gas in the gcc states is continuously increasing, which reduces the oil and gas available for export (al-khatteeb, ) . these factors negatively affect the revenue of the gcc governments, and hence the balance of their relationships with their citizens. oil prices are currently much lower than usd per barrel in the international markets due to corona virus and excess supply in the markets. this will only increase the urgency of theeconomic diversification in the country. oil is the most traded commodity in the world in terms of monetary value per annum. following the oil embargo of , it became not just a valuable but also an extremely strategic commodity for the global economy (hamilton, ) . the price of oil has been subject to fluctuation and change throughout the last years (baffes & kshirsagar, ) : figure illustrates this constant volatility in the oil price between and . since , the supply of oil and gas extracted from shale, canadian tar sands, and offshore production have increased, culminating in a sharp price drop (arezki & blanchard, ) . there is a good chance that oil prices may never go back to a point where most oil-producing states can balance their budgets (kilian, ) . in addition to the invention of new oil technologies and the discovery of new oil deposits, increasing efforts to decarbonize the global economy in a bid to tackle climate change have already started to dent the demand for oil and gas in the transportation and power sectors (kuczyński & denis, ) . this increases volatility in the revenues qatar receives from oil and gas exports (as shown in figure above). newly discovered shale oil formations, deep-ocean oil, and arctic oil basins have the potential to provide plenty of oil and gas for years to come, which may further reduce oil prices (kilian, ) . moreover, thanks to new technologies, the cost of producing oil from such difficult locations is falling rapidly (mlada, ) , which is also likely to have an impact on international oil prices. figure shows the production cost curves from the biggest shale oil fields in the world (mlada, ) . the fall in the production cost of shale oil has propelled us oil production to historic levels, as shown in figure (pioneer, ). meanwhile, rapid advancements in, and deployment of, renewable energy technologies such as solar energy, wind energy, and battery storage are reducing the consumption of fossil fuels in the transportation and power sectors (adib, ) . the development of electric vehicles (ev) which can potentially replace the internal combustion engine (ice) as the main mode of land transportation has been accelerated (arbib & seba, ) . the anticipated replacement of oil-based ice cars with evs should result in much lower demand, and therefore in a lower price for oil by the s. the advancement of evs is expected to shave a sizeable demand for oil and gas more than million barrels per day for the whole world (the red bar in figure ) with dramatic repercussions for the oil and gas rich countries such as qatar (arbib & seba, ) . it is very likely that global oil prices could drop to a range of usd to usd per barrel once evs spread widely across the global market circa and lower the demand for oil and gas. as mentioned earlier, the rapid growth in local population will strain the government finances further due to increasing spending for social commitments in the form of various government spending. table shows the total population of the gcc states, including both citizens and residents, i.e. native qataris and immigrants. due to a lack of detailed data, it is difficult to isolate the number of citizens and their growth projections from the totals. however, there is a general perception that the population growth rate of the citizens in the gcc states is higher than the total population growth rate (kinninmont, ) . table shows rapid population growth in all gcc states since ; there is no sign of this dramatic population increase coming to an end. for qatar, this increase in the size of the population implies increased state spending to maintain "the ruling agreement" described above. partly related to population growth, the domestic use of hydrocarbon resources in gcc states has also been increasing continuously (el-katiri, ). table highlights the increasing trend of domestic consumption of petroleum products in gcc states between and , and shows that qatar has seen the highest increase. meeting this increased domestic demand means a reduction in the amount available for export, which has clear implications for state revenues. the three patterns discussed above have already started to strain the ability of governments of the gcc states, including qatar, to maintain their transformative policy framework. al-khatteeb ( ) shows that even under conservative fiscal policies, most gcc states will be running significant budget deficits given the average oil price level in the last four years. figure shows the fiscal breakeven point for gcc states in - . for most countries, the average oil price of usd per barrel (the broken red line in figure ) is lower than the oil price needed to achieve a balanced budget (imf, ). the consistently low level of international oil prices, rapid rise in the population, and increasing domestic use of oil are testing the ability of the gcc states to sustain "the ruling agreement". these states need to diversify their economies through knowledge-based and innovation-driven economic structures if they are to maintain the current living standards and welfare of their citizens. economic diversification has thus become a priority for the gcc states to keep "the ruling agreement" intact (hertog, ) . although it is the richest gcc state in gdp per capita, and highest in oil and gas exports per capita, qatar also needs to pursue economic diversification in order to meet these challenges. the qatari government itself is fully aware of this, as its vision document clearly demonstrates (hvidt, ) . innovation and entrepreneurship outside of the oil and gas industries have become a must in order to transform the economy and safeguard the welfare of future generations in qatar. the process of innovation is path-dependent, and has certain requirements such as rules-based governance, a strong education system, access to venture capital, and clarity and ease of regulations (acemoglu, ; fuchs & shapira, ; lau & lo, ; nelson, ; scheel, ) . innovation can take the form of an upgrade to existing technology, products, services or systems, as well as the creation of a completely new value. innovation is defined by business dictionary as: the process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value or for which customers will pay. to be called an innovation, an idea must be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need. innovation involves the deliberate application of information, imagination, and initiative in deriving greater or different values from resources and includes all processes by which new ideas are generated and converted into useful products. in business, innovation often results when ideas are applied by the company in order to further satisfy the needs and expectations of the customers. (http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/innovation.html) incremental (evolutionary) innovation occurs when changes to an existing method or product or service make it either cheaper or more effective, which results in increased value (lau & lo, ) . this type of innovation is very common in industrialized and highly diversified countries (economies or industries) (fuchs & shapira, ) . this paper has already mentioned qatar's achievement of incremental innovation in its advanced liquefied natural gas (lng) industry and its gas-to-liquids (gtl) production with its international partners (d'alessandro, ; rystad energy, ) . however, given the sheer dominance of the oil and gas industries, this level of incremental innovation has only been repeated in a few other industries such as steel and aviation . disruptive (revolutionary) innovation, on the other hand, completely revamps an existing market, service, product or entire industry by bringing a totally new set of ideas and applications to commercial realization (miniaoui & schilirò, (arbib & seba, ) . compared to incremental innovation, disruptive innovation is more unpredictable and chaotic but it usually yields higher profits and returns to those who manage the process successfully (lau & lo, ) . this kind of innovation requires a much broader supportive ecosystem than incremental innovation, such as access to venture capital, highly skilled labour, strong research and development capacity, well-defined and protected property rights, and easy entry to the final markets (acemoglu, ) . it is not surprising that the majority of disruptive innovation of the past yearstransistors, computers, the internet, online search engines, ride-hailing, electric cars, social media, etc.has come from the united states, as the usa boasts many of the best universities, a strong research and development culture, and a well-functioning venture capital system, along with strong protection for property rights and easy access to the market for newcomers (arbib & seba, ; nelson, ) . the most important actor during an innovation process is the entrepreneur who transforms a new idea, a patent, a prototype, or a design into reality (minniti & bygrave, ) . business dictionary defines entrepreneurship (the acts of an entrepreneur) as: the capacity and willingness to develop, organize and manage a business venture along with any of its risks in order to make a profit. the most obvious example of entrepreneurship is the starting of new businesses. in economics, entrepreneurship combined with land, labor, natural resources, and capital can produce profit. entrepreneurial spirit is characterized by innovation and risk-taking, and is an essential part of a nation's ability to succeed in an ever-changing and increasingly competitive global marketplace. (http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/entrepreneurship.html) an entrepreneur pool is thus critical for innovation in an industry, market or country (buettner, ) . the build-up of such a pool of talented individuals, and the provision of incentives and legal, financial, and logistical support are essential for value creation through innovation (parker, ). in the resource-rich gcc states, the development of entrepreneurship within the local population is seen as an essential goal for two important reasons (miniaoui and schilirò, ; kaya et al., ) . first, entrepreneurs are critical for the transition to a knowledge-based economy to reduce dependence on hydrocarbon-related industries . second, encouraging an entrepreneurial spirit which shifts employees out of the public sector workforce also reduces the burden on the public finances (lowering the fiscal breakeven point as it relates to oil prices, as depicted in figure ). this in turn enables the continuation or improvement of services to the population as a whole (kaya et al., ) . in this context, the authorities in qatar have shown an increasing interest in supporting entrepreneurship and small and medium enterprises (smes) in the push towards an innovationbased economy (ennis, ) . the highest echelons of the state apparatus have made support to smes and entrepreneurs inside the country a top priority in order to diversify the economy away from the oil and gas sectors. these initiatives and support schemes are driven by the expectation that well-paying jobs will be created in the private sector, easing pressure on the state's welfare capacity (kshetri & ajami, ) . in line with other gcc states, countless initiatives have been launched in qatar to foster innovation and entrepreneurship to spearhead economic diversification (miniaoui & schilirò, ) . the education city was established in and gradually expanded by opening campuses of well-known us universities to deliver vital education and knowledge transfer from abroad (ennis, ) . plans, especially for qatari nationals (ennis, ) . the state of qatar has recently taken regulatory actions to make business easier and to remove hurdles faced by entrepreneurs (ennis, ) . however, the country's "ease of doing business" rankings have slipped globally since , as can be seen in figure . the "ease of doing business" index measures a country's performance in terms of the ease of establishing a new firm or company (permits, licences, and registration) and protecting its rights (cross-border payments, a predictable tax regime, and contract enforcement), where the top-ranked country has the best environment for doing business (jayasuriya, ) . this index thus provides a broad measure of a country's receptivity to foreign investment and its position with regard to the protection of business rights such as equal access to the market and contract enforcement. in , qatar ranked out of countries. arabia, kuwait or djibouti, it has a long way to go to catch up with uae which was ranked th globally, well ahead of any other country in the middle east and north africa. table shows the top countries in the region in terms of the ease of doing business for the year . bahrain oman tunisia qatar malta kuwait djibouti since uae is close to qatar in terms of population, income, and geographical location, the experience of the uae can provide both important lessons (parcero & ryan, ) . the federal structure of the uae, in which each emirate has its own jurisdiction, creates an internally competitive economic environment which has paved the way for a business-friendly environment since the s, especially in dubai (krane, ) . the establishment of numerous free zones and a sound legal system attracted much-needed entrepreneurial talent which culminated in the creation of the region's most successful startups such as souq.com and kareem (parcero & ryan, ) . the absolutist political system seen in most of the gcc states has been countered in uae by the federal structure and economic autonomy of each state . although relatively limitedand quickly depleted -dubai's oil and gas reserves played an active role in the s in creating a business-friendly environment and acting as a magnet to attract talented expatriates (davidson, ) . uae's high score in the ease of doing business index takes account of a variety of inclusivity factors such as protection of private property, ease of entry to markets, and low levels of corruption, which can be partly attributed to its structure, which is postulated as "market-preserving federalism" weingast, ) . uae has also diverted some of its sovereign wealth fund (swf) investments into more technical companies, startups and other potentially risky investments in a bid for higher returns, in contrast to the classical and risk-averse approach generally pursued in the gcc states (amar, carpantier, & lecourt, ; braunstein, ; hvidt, ) . given qatar's limited industrial and manufacturing base, the scope for innovation and entrepreneurial success in high value-added sectors seems limited, at least in the short term. to compensate for the lack of investment opportunities in advanced and high value-added domestic industries, qatar can look overseas for investment in these areas. qia has assets of more than usd billion invested globally (amar et al., ) . some of those funds, together with future surpluses from oil and gas sales, can be invested in high-tech startups and companies in countries like the usa or china. this will diversify qatar's portfolio and help to safeguard the government's income stream against any dramatic change in the value of oil and gas. whatever the incentives, the potential for innovation and entrepreneurship cannot be realized if there is not enough capacity within the system which has been built on past experience and knowledge (coombs & hull, ; ernst & kim, ) . a country's industrial and services infrastructure and a pool of experienced labour are great sources of innovation and entrepreneurship particularly in terms of responding to problems and opportunities that occur during normal work operations (fuchs & shapira, ) . a sizeable number of entrepreneurs work on fields and areas closely related to their previous employment and experience, often driven by the search for solutions to a problem or the quest to fill an identified product gap (parker, ) . minniti & bygrave ( ) similarly note that entrepreneurs greatly benefit from their previous experience in industry or service sectors while pursuing new business. as discussed in section , the productive circuit in qatar is largely concentrated in the oil and gas industries and petrochemicals sector. further industrial expansion has happened on a limited scale in energy-intensive sectors such as aluminum and steel production (ibrahim & harrigan, ) . the commodity circuit in the country encompasses general service sectors such as dealerships, education, and healthcare, catering to local demand. compared to a more industrialized country, therefore, the level of industrial and service experience of qatar's labour force is limited to a few areas. moreover, a sizeable portion of those skilled jobs are held by short to medium-stay expatriates in the absence of a large local population. it can be argued that the country does not possess a very large pool of entrepreneurial talent due to the transformative economic structure, the temporary status of skilled labour, and the small size of the local population. in this context, too, qatar might consider following the example of uae's attempts to attract foreign talent by offering incentives such as full ownership of a company and residency, and a fair and equal playing level (at least in certain non-oil industries and businesses). in fact, qatar has passed a number of laws and amendments in recent years to allow foreigners to purchase real estate and to set up a company with full ownership in certain zones and sectors, as well as granting residency visas without a local sponsor (ulrichsen, ) . these are sensible steps for the country to take in attracting international talent while heavily investing in the education of locals and supporting them in their entrepreneurial ambitions. discoveries of oil and natural gas reserves propelled qatar into becoming a significant energy power; it now ranks as the largest lng exporter in the world. after gaining its independence in , qatar embarked on a rapid development trajectory with a world-class infrastructure and very high living standards. it has the highest gdp per capita in the world as a result of the successful utilization and channelling of its oil and gas fortunes (imf, ) . the state has retained its centuries-old tribal system and absolutist governance while spearheading the way for a transformative economic structure based on oil and gas revenues (luciani, ) . in exchange for the lack of political rights and representation in decision making, the population has been economically compensated by the state in two ways. first, and akin to the other gcc states, qatar established a very generous welfare system whereby citizens are entitled to free education, housing, and healthcare, as well as well-paying public sector jobs (military, police, bureaucracy) all funded by oil and gas revenues (gray, ) . additionally, the merchant families, including some of the ruling tribe (al-thani), were granted exclusive business licences and favourable credit to establish and run firms in the commodity circuit such as dealerships, services, and trading companies as the second leg of economic support to citizens . the state has kept the majority of the productive circuit to itself, including all oil and gas-related activities, the petrochemical industry, and energy-intensive industries such as aluminum and steel, in order to maintain its economic authority (ibrahim & harrigan, ) . this paper has highlighted three important dynamics that may challenge the sustainability of the current economic system in all the oil-and gas-rich transformative states. the rapid development and exponential deployment of renewable energy technologies coupled with the electrification of transportation pose a serious threat to the value of oil and gas and hence to the revenues collected by the state (arbib & seba, ) . all the gcc states including qatar have experienced rapid growth in their local populations which puts considerable pressure on those states which seek to maintain the transformative status quo for a larger population . the high oil and gas prices of the past decade encouraged the development of previously uneconomical reservoirs such as deep offshore, shale formations, and tar sands (kilian, ) . the additional supplies from those new reserve fields have resulted in a glut and driven oil prices well below earlier levels, with the possibility that they may never recover (kilian, ) . thus, the transformative states need to diversify their economies through knowledge-based and innovation-driven initiatives in order to maintain the current living standards and welfare of their citizens. economic diversification has become a top priority in the gcc states to keep "the ruling agreement" intact (hertog, ) . the construction of world-class infrastructure from housing to telecommunications, the significant expansion of the lng industry along with petrochemicals, and rapidly growing higher education capacity all give reasons for optimism about qatar's future in a world where oil and gas are no longer as valuable as before. the completion of numerous museums, sightseeing areas, and world-class hotels will boost the domestic economy and further income will flow into the country from major events such as the fifa world cup in , and beyond (henderson, ; imf, ; morakabati, beavis, & fletcher, ) . given its small local population and its immense oil and gas reservesas well as their effective utilization -qatar is well-placed to survive the challenges of energy transition dynamics discussed above (van de graaf & bond, ). figure depicts oil and gas production per capita across the gcc states and clearly shows the favourable position of qatar, whose per capita production is more than three times that of any of the other states. qatar is especially well-positioned in global lng markets due to its conventional (cheap) gas reserves and its integrated infrastructure, as discussed in section . the government recently lifted the self-imposed moratorium on further gas production from the coveted north field, and announced the expansion of natural gas production and an increase in lng export capacity of more than % in the next four years (rystad energy, ) . qp continues to pursue a very active oil and gas exploration, production, and exporting strategy on a global scale with its longterm partners such as exxon mobil and total (visconti, ) . beyond oil and gas, the country has undertaken infrastructure investment on a massive scale since , with a special focus on the preparations for the fifa world cup (agence france-presse, ). the complete revamp of the country's infrastructure from seaports and airports to roads and hospitals is expected to be completed by (agence france-presse, ). the phase-out of this largescale capital spending is expected to leave a surplus of rent revenue which the government can use for overseas investment in the years following . the process of innovation and entrepreneurship has been analysed in three subcomponents for the case of qatar. the potential, incentives, and capacity for innovation and entrepreneurship to promote a successful economic diversification away from dependence on oil and gas revenues appear to be limited in qatar. the country has a unique demographic structure in which more than % of residents are expatriates, many working on short-term contracts and/or in low-skilled jobs (ennis, ) . expatriates also constitute the majority of the technical and specialty employment positions, usually on a short-to medium-term basis. the recent push by the government for qatarization of the workforce has slightly changed that dynamic as more qatari nationals were employed in private or semi-government industries (hertog, ) . to date, attempts at innovation and entrepreneurship in the country have been largely geared towards import-substitution of basic goods (such as dairy products or perishable goods) and services, rather than risky high-tech ventures with much more promising returns (ennis, ) . however, the expansion of petroleum-related industries and energy-intensive sectors such as steel and aluminum could unlock further innovation and entrepreneurship opportunities in the country. thanks to massive oil and gas revenues, "the ruling agreement" between the leadership and the people has resulted in a cradle-to-grave welfare system which is unparalleled in the world , but which does not encourage innovation. the support provided to powerful merchant families by the government in the simple but lucrative "commodity circuit" is another hidden barrier suppressing the motivation for entrepreneurial activity (hanieh, ) . these traditional measures to ensure the economic well-being of the citizens may become counterproductive to the incentives rolled out by the government in pursuit of innovation and entrepreneurship. before closing, it is important to point out a lacuna in this paper with regard to the future of innovation and entrepreneurship in qatar. in recent years, political differences among the oligarchic versus democratic societies renewables global status report qatar spending $ m a week on world cup projects improving the anti-knocking properties of gas to liquid (gtl) naptha gulf oil economies must wake up or face decades of decline. the brookings institute market structure and competitive conditions in the arab gcc banking system qatar's oil and gasfields: a review gcc sovereign wealth funds: why do they take 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sending asian countries a guide to the most powerful families in qatar qatar leaves opec economic diversification and the emergence of inclusive economic institutions in the gulf cooperation council states lessons and legacies of the blockade of qatar a new world: the geopolitics of the energy transformation natural resources: curse or blessing qatar petroleum's acquisition of % stake in two of exxonmobil's affiliates in argentina the economic role of political institutions: market-preserving federalism and economic development adam hanieh: capitalism and class in the gulf arab states. capital & class key: cord- -ipzntrm authors: dutta, anwesha; fischer, harry w. title: the local governance of covid- : disease prevention and social security in rural india date: - - journal: world dev doi: . /j.worlddev. . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: ipzntrm countries around the world have undertaken a wide range of strategies to halt the spread of covid- and control the economic fallout left in its wake. rural areas of developing countries pose particular difficulties for developing and implementing effective responses owing to underdeveloped health infrastructure, uneven state capacity for infection control, and endemic poverty. this paper makes the case for the critical role of local governance in coordinating pandemic response by examining how state authorities are attempting to bridge the gap between the need for rapid, vigorous response to the pandemic and local realities in three indian states -- rajasthan, odisha, and kerala. through a combination of interviews with mid and low-level bureaucrats and a review of policy documents, we show how the urgency of covid- response has galvanized new kinds of cross-sectoral and multi-scalar interaction between administrative units involved in coordinating responses, as local governments have assumed central responsibility in the implementation of disease control and social security mechanisms. evidence from kerala in particular suggests that the state’s long term investment in democratic local government and arrangements for incorporating women within grassroots state functions (through its kudumbashree program) has built a high degree of public trust and cooperation with state actors, while local authorities embrace an ethic of care in the implementation of state responses. these observations, from the early months of the pandemic in south asia, can serve as a foundation for future studies of how existing institutional arrangements and their histories pattern the long-term success of disease control and livelihood support as the pandemic proceeds. governance, we argue, will be as important to understanding the trajectory of covid- impacts and recovery as biology, demography, and economy. covid- has upended life around the globe. at the time of writing -may of -cases have been identified in over countries around the world, while the global infection rate continues to grow at exponential rates. as countries race to put in measures to confront the current crisis, there remains much uncertainty in how the situation will progress in the coming months. alongside direct effects of disease on health and mortality, widespread social and economic disruptions will have far reaching impacts on human well-being (bavel et al. , summer et al. , sibley et al. . while much public attention has focused on international and national policy responses (pena et al. ) , these efforts will ultimately need to be carried out by local-level institutions. as such, it is the character of local institutions, and their relationship with a broader set of governance arrangements across scales, that is likely to play a central role in determining the outcomes of different interventions, with significant implications for the trajectory of infection as well as longerterm outcomes for human well-being. this article provides preliminary analysis of how local level institutions are being operationalised for both disease control and social welfare mechanisms in rural india. as a country with over , local governmental units (gram panchayats), india has undertaken what is arguably the largest and most expansive mobilization of local governments around the world to the current crisis. there are several fundamental challenges to coordinating covid- response, for which local governance is likely to be particularly important. to begin with, there is a high level of uncertainty inherent in crafting responses to a crisis for which substantial existing policy experience does not yet exist. there is clearly a great deal of uncertainty concerning epidemiological aspects of the virus itself, with fundamental issues relating to transmission, treatment, and infection trajectories not yet well understood (who ). yet the ways that the virus and different control measures will interact with different societies -and different populations within them -is equally unclear. as anthropologist veena notes, "one issue that this pandemic has brought to the fore is that the experiences of governance vary enormously across different regions of the world -indeed, that the same policies such as the lockdowns will play out very differently for the middle classes and for the poor." economist jishnu has pointed out the uncertainties associated with feeding data on complex human behavior into epidemiological models, especially in the indian context; lack of basic knowledge of both the disease and human response to different policy measures raises critical questions about the validity of assumptions being used to guide planning efforts. it is indeed notable that these diverse disciplinary backgrounds -biomedical sciences, economists, and anthropologists -can all agree, at least on one thing: there is a lot we do not know, and need to know, to effectively address the present pandemic. this uncertainty highlights a critical challenge for implementing real-world responses in many administrative contexts. what kinds of subnational institutional arrangements will be responsive enough to match the standardized policy actions crafted at higher scales of government with complex, variable, and changing conditions on the ground? indeed, simply reaching the public to coordinate responses is likely to be a monumental task in many contexts, particularly in rural areas of the developing world. while public attention to date has focused on infection hotspots, largely in densely populated urban centres, rural areas pose particular challenges for conceiving and implementing policies for covid- . inadequate health facilities, poor water sanitation and hygiene infrastructures, high rates of wage labour migration, close living quarters, and low levels of public health awareness are just some of the difficulties that public authorities face for controlling infection (ranscombe ) . high rates of endemic poverty, weak food distribution networks, significant dependence on migratory wage labour, and more also suggest that economic dislocation resulting from infection control measures holds significant risk of hunger or worse (zetzsche , khanna et al. , barnett-howell and mobarak . there is an acute challenge of operating in many rural areas, where state presence is often highly variable, and low-level bureaucrats often struggle to bridge the gap between the highly formalized work of state institutions and the informal and syncretic worlds in which policy is expected to operate (corbridge et al. , gupta ). in settings where access to basic, well-defined social services remains uneven at best, effectively tracing, testing, isolating, and monitoring quickly developing infections is likely to be a monumental undertaking indeed. under such conditions, local governance is likely to be especially important in bridging the gap between policy measures and local realities for the coordination of responses to . a focus on local institutions is, of course, not new. from the s onward, scores of countries around the world have undertaken reforms for decentralization based on the belief that local governments are better able to carry many government functions than more distant bureaucratic institutions (manor , faguet . a large and growing body of research affirms that, while outcomes are uneven, vesting power and resources with local authorities can lead to gains in a wide variety of state functions relating to public service delivery, rural development, and the delivery of social security mechanisms (rondinelli et al. , heller et al. , faguet . local governments have also been observed to play a key role in coordinating responses to extreme climate events and other disasters (engle and lemos , agarwal et al. , tselois and tompkins . additionally, decentralized health systems have been shown to empower communities in health decision-making and thus making basic health care more responsive to local needs (munoz et al. ). there are many theoretical explanations for why local government preforms better for a variety of grassroot state functions. we highlight three key reasons that local governance is likely to play an essential role in covid- response. first, local governments are, quite simply, more closely connected to public and better able to navigate context-specific local conditions (manor ) . in contrast to more distant state bureaucrats, local authorities are often far more knowledgeable about local needs, more able to mobilize key local actors, are better positioned to monitor activities at the grassroots, and are better able to anticipate and resolve site-specific challenges that arise (agrawal , singh and sharma ) . second, local authorities are themselves embedded within the societies that they serve and likely to be more responsive to the public's urgent needs. not only are they often more accessible to the general public than more distant bureaucrats (kruks-wisner ), local authorities are embedded within an incentive structure that is likely to make them more accountable to local needs -both as a result of formal sanctions such as elections as well as the more general threat of public judgement and diminished personal reputation (agrawal and ribot , faguet , joshi & schultze-kraft . third, local government is often perceived as more legitimate than other external actors for carrying out different kinds of state regulatory functions. in electoral institutions, local authorities are directly selected by the public and thus may reflect citizens' values and aspirations, and often sense of identify (fischer , witsoe . citizens' perceived ability to engage directly with their leaders may likewise increase the perceived legitimacy of their actions (vogel and henstra ) . as previous experience reveals, trust in local governance can be an important factor in effective communication management in times of disasters (long staff and yanh ) , and conversely, distrust in government institutions often stands in the way of cooperation with public health recommendations especially in crisis times, observed during the h n pandemic in (quinn et al. ). these three characteristics -local governments' ability to negotiate context-specific local conditions, responsiveness toward the public, and perceived legitimacy to carry out state functions -are all likely to be important for the current crisis. in short, they suggest that local government may be better able to reach the public with various disease control and social security functions, with a higher degree of local cooperation as well as responsiveness to the public in delivering social security mechanisms at a time of unprecedented distress. yet the present situation also poses particular challenges compared to other local governance activities. while local governments have been called upon to address a variety of state functions over the years, responding to covid- requires a coupling of public health response with basic social security at an unprecedented scale -and this in a very short time frame. the challenges of social regulation in the context of covid- may also generate tensions between different local government functions. for example, local authorities' role in working with police to enforce strict lockdowns could run counter to political pressures embedded in elected structures. yet, local government is still likely to be better able than other administrative institutions to navigate such contradictory pressures inherent in a necessarily complex and unprecedented response in the face of covid- . perhaps never have local governments had such great and immediate importance; and quite arguably, never have their core functions been so dramatically extended in such rapid speed. how local institutions take on these new roles is likely to have significant bearing on the longterm trajectory of covid- response, with implications on disease control and infection rate, as well as the success of public support to protect the welfare at a time of severe social and economic dislocation. it is for this reasons that the present paper examines how local-level institutions are being operationalized in the present moment. while it is far too early to know how the situation will play out from our vantage point of the early days of covid- in south asia, our paper provides a record of how low level authorities are responding to the present challenge, which may serve as a foundation for future studies into how local governance conditions shape longterm trajectories of infection response and recovery in the years to come. india imposed a nationwide lockdown, considered one of the strictest in the world on th march . initial news reports revealed unprecedented social and economic disruption, on a scale not seen since the beginning of the post-colonial era. with millions of migrants returning home from urban localities to rural areas, a sudden and drastic decline in off-farm employment opportunities, and widespread disruption of social services, the authors quickly mobilized to understand how the pandemic was being experienced at the local level -and the governance structures that were being called upon to manage this situation. since we were unable to carry out our own field research, we reached out to a wide range of existing contacts across india in order to interview persons at the frontline of implementation of pandemic control and response measures. despite clear methodological limitations on who we could contact remotely and the information we were able to acquire, we felt that the emerging story was much too important to not be told, and that even imperfect information was better than none at all in the quickly developing pandemic situation. our sample is comprised of interviews with lower level bureaucrats, panchayat presidents, and kudumbashree leaders and heads of villages in the states of kerala, rajasthan and odisha. we interviewed three respondents from each state, who were the individuals that we could get in touch with remotely, and amidst a great increase in administrative functions that left many key actors with limited spare time for conversations. contacts with informants was made through our existing network in the three states and subsequent referrals to bureaucrats through these associations. the interviews were conducted remotely on the phone with additional follow up questions through whatsapp messages as needed. we panchayat is the lowest system of rural local administrative government in india. ii) the operationalization of subnational and local institutions for pandemic response in practice. in order to understand the ways bureaucratic departments were engaging with local institutions, we enquired about processes of implementing orders on the ground, ways of monitoring by state governments, follow up mechanisms available to local governments, the availability of financial support to carry out key functions, and the role of various local institutions and civil society actors in managing different responses. we also asked questions on the tensions between the different levels of government in negotiating the new and unprecedented responses they were required to undertake. iii) actions of local governments and their decision-making processes. we sought to better understand the level of local discretion in carrying out actions mandated at higher scales as well as the extent of local governments' compliance. we also tried to gather information related to local governments' ability to adapt responses -including existing policy support mechanisms such as india's employment guarantee schemes (mgnrega), provisions for subsidized food (through the public distribution system), and other social security mechanisms (emergency cash transfers) to the fast-evolving situation on the ground. iv) finally, we focused on interviewee's self-perceptions and reflections of the pandemic situation more specific to challenges encountered, as well as perceived successes and scope for improvement. these themes and questions were adapted to fit individual interviews within the scope of time available afforded by phone interviews with individuals in facing immense pressures on their own time to manage emerging tasks. we recognized, also, that bureaucrats would be inclined to show their "best face"; we have thus been careful not to assume responses are a fully accurate description, but a partial and suggestive account of some things happening on the ground. still, one of the things that really struck us throughout the course of interviews was just how much, many bureaucrats wanted to talk about the situation that was clearly both extraordinarily stressful and personally frightening for many in charge. a few of the bureaucrats repeatedly asked us to not quote them when they felt they might have divulged sensitive information on the pandemic management situation, including personal accounts about being unhappy with the coordination between the state government and the district administration, the unavailability of budget to make cash transfers for the poor, and the potential risk of being exposed to the virus itself in line of duty, without the availability of personal protective equipment such as face masks. (we do not identify the specific districts in our sample to ensure anonymity of key bureaucrats interviewed in these districts.) based on our relatively small sample and the lack of detailed data on infection rates or socioeconomic outcomes at the time of writing, we refrain from making both broad assessments of overall governance "effectiveness" based on such accounts. to the extent possible, we tried to corroborate our interview findings from bureaucrats through informal interviews over whatsapp calls and messages with a handful of additional civil society actors within our personal networks (three in each state); these actors came from a diverse mix of backgrounds including actors employed in ngos, social science researchers, and journalists. throughout this period, we were also in close contact with local government and bureaucrats in other indian states not including in this paper, especially assam, chhattisgarh and himachal pradesh where we have long-term research engagements, thus affording us a broader view of state responses in other parts of india. the formal rank of our respondents and their roles and functions are summarised in table . under whose provisions the lockdown was imposed. during the early days of the lockdown, major notifications and guidelines relating to covid- were primarily being issued by the union ministry of home affairs (mha) and not the ministry of health and family welfare (epw ). since the language used was mostly related to "law and order", we searched the mha website using keywords such as "lockdowns," "curfews," "fines" and "surveillance." in addition, we carefully scoured the government of india's websites of, the ministry of health extremely useful. all of these sources helped to complement our primary data, providing at least some means to triangulate our findings and contextualize them within broader processes happening across india during the period of our research. the indian government's decision to impose a -day lockdown, on th of march , came after being urged by the world health organization (who) to take aggressive action to contain the spread of covid- (lancet ). the lockdown was imposed with a four hours' notice and went into effect from the midnight of th of march. these sudden and drastic measures came at great shock to citizens across the country, however we learned through interviews that some administrators had prior notification that the lockdown would be imposed. as in other parts of the world, social distancing along with restrictive mass restrictions on movement is being used as the most widely adopted strategy for mitigation and spread of infection. this nation-wide lockdown has been imposed through the disaster management however, the rd amendment left significant discretion to india's states for its implementation, leading to very different character of local governance across the countryvariation which has been the topic of significant and ongoing analysis (singh and sharma , manor , maiorano et al. ). there is reason to believe that these variations will also shape covid- response. we have selected our study sites to encompasses some of the wide variation across india. rajasthan and odisha are somewhat poorer states, and despite social movements to promote more responsive governance -including activism leading up to india's right to information (rti) act ( ) -that emerged from rajasthan, both states have had variable success in improving the overall quality of governance as well as uneven development achievements overall (dreze and sen ). kerala in contrast is relatively prosperous, with a very robust civil society, a history of vibrant electoral competition at the state level and is generally celebrated for its significant social development achievements, which are at or near the top of india's states in areas such as literacy, health, and nutrition (heller ) . importantly, it also has a history of very strong state support for panchayats, especially through the state's "people's campaign for decentralized planning", which has been described as "the most ambitious effort to build local institutions of participatory democratic governance ever undertaken in the subcontinent" (heller et al. ). finally, the state's heralded kudumbashree program, a women-focused anti-poverty program that has given women a particularly strong and institutionalized presence in local government across the state (williams et al. ) . kerala and odisha have also had experience in dealing with health and natural disasters which has influenced current local institutional response to covid- . the covid- crisis has led the district magistrate (dm) to play a key role in both disease control and social protection in close coordination with panchayats. specifically, based on the ndma guidelines, district administrations across india have constituted district-level "task forces" to coordinate administration and containment efforts through the lockdown period. ( ) mitigating the spread of infection from urban centers to rural areas and ( ) helping to deal with widespread economic fallout from loss of cash income and consequent food insecurity for a large proportion of the population that already lives close to the margin to begin with. consequently, district authorities have issued guidelines to panchayats to undertake a wide variety of functions, as summarized in the table . importantly, instructions issued by the dm in order to implement policies related to disease control and social protection are ultimately the following sections further explore how local institutions have been operationalized to fulfill these activities as well as their implications -both for the structure and functions of panchayats in india as well as for the covid- response and recovery. in the initial days of the lockdown, there was an urgent need to control pandemic while also ensuring basic welfare and food security for citizens. under ndma, the central government issued guidelines to the states and district administrations for concrete actions undertaken by panchayats and other local actors, such as health care and community workers. of paramount urgency was to control the spread of infection from returning migrant laborers. to do so, panchayats have been instructed to work together with frontline health workers like the accredited social health activist (asha), auxiliary nurse midwives (anm), women shgs, local community members like teachers, and others. this is done through the formation of a committee at the panchayat or village level known as control rooms (in rajasthan), rapid response teams (in odisha) and panchayat jagruta sammittee (in kerala) . named differently across indian states, the committees perform similar functions. panchayats are also in charge of distributing cooked food to quarantine centers and households without income through community run kitchens. since agriculture has been recognized as an essential service by the national government, the dm has also instructions to panchayats for overlooking allocation of work through the mgnrega, providing access to agricultural inputs for farmers and also working with district administration to ensure linkages to storage facilities for crops and transportation for distribution. the range of functions being given to panchayats is impressive, however it is important to note that india's existing experience with decentralization suggests that the extent to which they are able to follow through with these tasks is likely vary significant in different parts of the country. together, these tasks -and in particular of monitoring the public to halt the spread of the virus --represent a great increase in state directives being coordinated at local and district levels. many actors in charge of these efforts did not feel prepared to assume these tasks. as a local bureaucrat (tehsildar ) from odisha described, "all of a sudden the government asked us to initiate cash transfers and also distribute food and cash…we did not have hard cash initially and banks were also not operating at full capacity due to the lockdown. we also had to figure out which local institutional machineries and actors we shall use and how in order for benefits to reach maximum number of people. it took us a about ten days just to figure out the logistics." underscoring the perception of urgency in response to the current situation, war metaphors have become common. 'at the state level we have a war room with senior bureaucrats in charge and responsible for coordinating covid- response in the state', recounted the additional magistrate of a district in rajasthan. the bureaucrat from odisha noted that "the government machinery is working * , with military like discipline." the kudambashree leader mentioned how they are using a 'volunteer army' of , across panchayats in kerala to respond to the covid- crisis. a tehsildar also known as an executive magistrate is a tax officer with the district revenue department in india, pakistan and bangladesh. yet, while coping with the sudden great expansion of new responsibilities, other more routine activities have been overshadowed such as health treatment of chronic diseases like tuberculosis, and routine immunization programs. the village head in rajasthan and tehsildar in odisha recounted that almost all development projects under india's employment guarantee scheme (mgnrega) had temporarily stopped, while agriculture suffered since this is the harvest season and lockdown has led to breaks in agricultural supply chains. other village development works also had to be discontinued. the village head summed it up by saying, "all development have come to a standstill". the central government's response to the covid- crisis, through the ndma, redefined existing institutional roles with a multipronged approach that has led to an integration of several institutional actors across state with district and local administrations. we already mentioned the key role that is being played by the dms who have been put in a position to make key binding decisions in operationalizing state guidelines. the table below highlights the functions of district level task forces set up in odisha, rajasthan and kerala. the dm is in a position to issue orders to several line departments and local level institutions and make decisions regarding sealing of district borders and to restrict movement within the districts, which the dm achieves through regular patrols by lower level bureaucrats. as the additional dm from rajasthan recounted to us, that district administration had never faced a situation so big and it has led to the entire district level machinery to work on one platform as well as with districts in other states for inter-state movement of migrants. he also added that the success or failure in implementation depended solely on the discretion and vision of the dm given his powers under the ndma. at the same time, dm's have faced new institutional imperatives for their actions, described as forms of 'deterrence' that, according to the additional dm of rajasthan, worked as a 'pushing force'. this included suspension from job if bureaucrats were not able to maintain lockdown regulations in their areas of jurisdiction. there have also been strict monitoring mechanisms imposed by dms; in odisha the bureaucrats we interviewed said they were required to report at least twice daily to the dm. at the level of the panchayats, panchayat level committees have been constituted. in both rajasthan and odisha, these have been constituted at the village level, knows as control rooms and rapid response forces (rrf), respectively. in kerala, the panchayats have more autonomy in both formulating and implementing responses related to covid- . in rajasthan and odisha, the core members constitute elected members of the panchayat, head of the village, schoolteachers, heads of self-help groups (shgs), asha and anm workers. they are responsible for coordinating activities on the ground as well as reporting to district administration of any emerging issues. the core members, who also belong to various departments like panchayat, health, education then mobilize other members from these institutions along with the public more generally as well as, at times, civic associations such as youth, women, and farmers groups. this has led to both leveraging and convergence of panchayats working together with local health, education and sanitation departments. in other words, the 'panchayat committees' link the elected authority of panchayats with other kinds of skilled individuals within the state as a linchpin to coordinate local responses. in despite these new collaborations, the indian bureaucracy runs on issuing directives and notifications which is also how things have been set in motion in the current crisis mode. the district administration with the dm at the top issues' orders percolating to the panchayats. this arrangement is sustained not just through perceived urgency; bureaucrats themselves could be penalized, issued show cause notices, arrested and fined if they fail to effectively implement government issues implementation procedures for lockdown. the fright of punishment percolates down to the bureaucrats and officers working below the dm, who are also compulsorily required to report to the dm twice a day, as mentioned above. there has been a proliferation of orders or government communications, notifications and guidelines aimed directly at citizens as well as for internal communication to bureaucrats. these are also long and phrased in ways that are difficult for either panchayat leaders or many field-level officers to comprehend. the national and state governments till rd of may had issued over government communications ranging from, specifying what one could buy or sell, determining the number of people who could attend a marriage or a funeral, or even whether one is allowed to leave the house to feed a stray dog. to give an example, the lockdown necessitated the closure of public spaces like village markets, places of worship and industries and enterprises, ensuring that essential enterprises and services remain open. but what constituted essential was also revised over the course of the lockdown. while alcohol was considered a non-essential commodity initially, it was deemed essential for a few days in the states of assam and kerala, and then classified as unessential once again. these standardized procedures often present their own complications. in our conversation with a village headman in rajasthan, for example, we learned that although the village was allocated a budget to procure a certain number of masks by the district administration, the headmen would have to place a requisition with the district administration to procure these masks from the district headquarters; on its own the panchayat was not allowed to procure the masks. in odisha, although the tehsildar we interviewed was legally permitted to impose fines on those violating lockdown, but he would have to pass an ordinance in order to impose and collect these fines. the top-down nature of bureaucratic institutions notwithstanding, local governments have a significant role in the current and fast evolving crisis. panchayats are clearly doing more than just providing relief measures; they are leveraging their positions as an institution of legitimacy with elected representatives to converge with other local institutions in addressing issues spanning from disease control, to monitoring of mobility, providing agricultural support, managing of quarantine centers and more. strikingly, our interviews showed a pervading sense of fear about the spread of the disease and increasingly so with the returning of migrants to villages. as a local bureaucrat in odisha described to us, when the district administration ordered the panchayats to set up quarantine centers in villages for returning migrants, several villagers protested out of fear of infection spread and wanted to seal off entry. only after the panchayat called meetings with local community and explained the situation, then they were given consent by the villagers. this illustrates not just how important inter-personal relationships in the community have been for making public health measures work, but also the very intimate ways in which local governments are often able to navigate social realities at a time of great fear and uncertainty. panchayats have also played a critical role assessing needs for the delivery of relief measures which was carried out by panchayat level committees. in kerala, rajasthan and odisha, the panchayats helped identify individuals and households who were outside of the government welfare schemes and in need of social support. in kerala, the panchayat president described to us how households in the village who are facing financial distress have approached elected panchayat leaders directly, who could then identify sources of public funding or social support mechanisms to help the household. at the same time, panchayats have been called upon to help implement various measures for social control which was done in close coordination with the police department. across india, the police have a central role in enforcing lockdown restrictions through activities ranging from asking violators to go home, using the threat of force to vacate public spaces, drawing lines to space people out in front of shops in markets, standing at the naka (barricade) to check cars at the state and even district borders, and arresting offenders. at times this has been accompanied by excessive force and even brutality such as beatings, as documented in the national media. our interviews with village heads across show that panchayats have the dual role of providing social security while implementing social regulations which sometimes put them in an awkward position, when police had to be called upon to report both violations of lockdown and/or isolation of suspected covid- cases. our interviews also show that in some villages police personnel also joined the local covid- management committee in patrols to enforce lockdown. one of the most striking things that we found in course of our interviews was the extent to which the present moment has spurred people at the district and grassroots level into action, expressed through a sentiment of social responsibility to confront present challenges. we found most of the bureaucrats we spoke with to be genuinely concerned about their districts and the general wellbeing of people. bureaucrats said to us that they themselves were scared due to the lack of protective gear and daily exposure in course of their duty, yet they still prioritized disease control. village headman and panchayat presidents also expressed a sense of fear and yet lauded the efforts of thousands of volunteers and grassroots health workers who went door to door. this was particularly true in the case of the kudambashree in kerala, which has been explicitly recognized as a part of kerala's response strategy. the kudumbashree is a poverty eradication program modeled through formation of women self help groups (shgs). it is built on an extensive network with participation from nearly four million economically women who implement programs and projects aimed at livelihood security and wellbeing. one of the key themes in the development of kudumbashree as an institution has been its convergence with panchayats across the state for planning, implementation, and sharing of resources. in short, the kudumbashree works together with the panchayats and is not a subordinate to it, which has served as a key channel for many women to gain prominences in local governance activities throughout the state. across its statewide membership, the kudumbashree comprises over , people. we interviewed a kudumbashree leader named lalitha , who explained to us their close relationship with those in, home isolation and also in quarantine facilities. they make phone calls to individuals in quarantine to monitor their health status and follow up for seven days post quarantine period. she also noted that it was not difficult to find volunteers; indeed, people have been ready and willing to work without remuneration simply for the good of their communities. she explained how daily calls to check up on quarantined individuals often led to friendship. she told us, with laughter in her voice, that even after the completion of quarantine, "they still call me and say, 'how are you doing lalitha, we have not heard from you in a while?'" although the imagery of the state in india is often considered to be distant, apathetic and anonymous, our interviews indicate that the mobilization of volunteer groups, frequent home visits, close planning and monitoring with the community has been underscored by an ethics of care. these examples are perhaps one of the strongest reasons that local governance is needed at the moment: it provides an avenue to harness the interests and concern of committed individuals toward public needs. the kerala case in particular highlights how sustained commitment toward supporting institutions can create a favorable relationship that are especially conducive to channeling these kinds of positive outcomes. working through the kudumbashree has, as an effect, brought an intimate ethic of care channeled through interpersonal relationships into disease prevention and control. the aforementioned case material shows some of the ways in which responses to have been coordinated through a combination of low-level administrative authorities, elected village governments, and other state and civil society groups. in aggregate, these activities represent a mammoth undertaking that has, at least for the time being, not only greatly expanded the roles and functions of local governments but also led to new forms of institutional interaction with administrative authorities across scales. the evidence presented here has several key implications for understanding institutional dimensions of policy response efforts in the present moment. to begin with, the material illustrates just how important local governance has been for carrying out response to covid- . while administrative authorities like the dm are ultimately in charge, they rely heavily on local level institutions for many different aspects of response. there are many actions that only local institutions have the knowledge, legitimacy, and coordinating capacity to do. accordingly, disease response is not simply the straightforward application of predefined biomedical guidelines; the character of governance -the nature of institutions, their capacities, and legitimacy -shapes how state responses will unfold over the long-term. as we have argued, such factors deserve at least as much attention in the trajectory of covid- as biology, demography, economy, or other factors in understanding the spread of virus and its impacts upon society. second, the effectiveness of local governments in carrying out responses to covid- are rooted in broader histories of policy interventions. india's rd constitutional amendment and subsequent interventions that have expanded the roles and capacities of local governments have all provided an important foundation for the efforts observed above. in the case of kerala in particular, especially robust, long-term support for local governments as a key arena for empowered local governance has made these institutions into a formidable force for confronting the present pandemic (isaac and sadananda ) , exemplified by a strong degree of trust and collaboration between state actors and citizens present in our data. these histories of institutional support over the past two decades may be as important for covid- responses as any of the policies quickly designed since the emergence of the virus. third, the experience of coordinating responses to covid- shows how large shocks can serve as a key force to propel institutional change. this is particularly notable in contexts such as india, which has a notoriously inflexible bureaucratic machinery. in the present context, the urgent need for rapid responses in conjunction with central directives to coordinate actions through integrative governance arrangements have led to new kinds cross-sectoral and multi-scalar collaborations for the implementing of response actions down the village level. such emergent forms of collaboration across established institutional divides seem likely to afford greater flexibility to negotiate actions on the ground. whether and to what extent these novel forms of coordination may leave a lasting imprint on local institutional practice remains to be seen. our case material -drawn from three states representing a diversity of social, economic, and political contexts -shows just how central local government has been to the story of covid- in india. as the local institutional foundation to carry out response measures, they are likely to play a critical role in confronting covid- in many other parts of the world as well. the future, of course, remains highly uncertain. as disease trajectories and recovery continues to be analyzed for years to come, analysis of local institutions will be important not just for understanding why different kinds of policy responses were adopted, but also the mechanics through which they have been brought into being at the local level. the present case provides some evidence of how local governments have been operationalized in the early days of covid- in india, which can serve as a foundation for future studies of how local institutional dynamics, their histories, and the government policies they are called upon to carry out influence the long-term success of disease control and livelihood support as the pandemic proceeds. forests, governance, and sustainability: common property theory and its contributions accountability in decentralization: a framework with south asian and west african cases environmentality: technologies of government and the making of subjects climate policy processes, local institutions, and adaptation actions: mechanisms of translation and influence the benefits and costs of social distancing in rich and poor countries health surveillance during covid- pandemic what difference does a constitutional amendment 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coronavirus disease one million or one hundred million casualties?-the impact of the covid- crisis on low-and middle-income countries-. available at ssrn countries around the world have undertaken a wide range of strategies to halt the spread of covid- and control the economic fallout left in its wake. rural areas of developing countries pose particular difficulties for developing and implementing effective responses owing to underdeveloped health infrastructure, uneven state capacity for infection control, and endemic poverty. this paper makes the case for the critical role of local governance in coordinating pandemic response by examining how state authorities are attempting to bridge the gap between the need for rapid, vigorous response to the pandemic and local realities in three indian states --rajasthan, odisha, and kerala. through a combination of interviews with mid and low-level bureaucrats and a review of policy documents, we show how the urgency of covid- response has galvanized new kinds of cross-sectoral and multi-scalar interaction between administrative units involved in coordinating responses, as local governments have assumed central responsibility in the implementation of disease control and social security mechanisms. evidence from kerala in particular suggests that the state's long term investment in democratic local government and arrangements for incorporating women within grassroots state functions (through its kudumbashree program) has built a high degree of public trust and cooperation with state actors, while local authorities embrace an ethic of care in the implementation of state responses. these observations, from the early months of the pandemic in south asia, can serve as a foundation for future studies of how existing institutional arrangements and their histories pattern the long-term success of disease control and livelihood support as the pandemic proceeds. governance, we argue, will be as important to understanding the trajectory of covid- impacts and recovery as biology, demography, and economy.keywords: covid- , governance, local institutions, social protection, panchayats, india evidence from kerala illustrates how long-term support for local governments improves public trust and effectiveness of response.governance is as important to understanding covid- impacts and recovery as biology, demography, and economy.