COVID-19 - Nevada Governor's Office of Economic …



COVID-19 World Reopening Summary – ID Brief (as of May 10th, 2020)Many countries have started reopening their economy at different rates and with varying strategies. We are tracking the daily updates on best practices in fighting the virus and reopening economies in selected countries. Our focus is highlighting information on six main categories: Reopening Phases, Sector/Tourism Approaches (value-added sectors), Support for Startups and SMEs, Testing/Surveillance Technologies, COVD-19 Second Waves/Challenges/Mistakes (in economies’ reopening), and countries’ Wins/Achievements.Reopening:In China factories are now back to operating at around 80% of capacity. In early April, businesses with high transmission risk, including restaurants, hotels, and education institutions were allowed to reopen. 99% of large businesses restarted. Also, Macau authorities started loosening quarantine requirements, but visitors must prove they tested negative for COVID-19 before they can board their flight.End of April/beginning of May - most European countries have started a gradual reopening of their economies fueled by a fear of deep recession in the whole European Union territory.Interestingly, Taiwan never needed to shut businesses or impose lockdowns to stop the spread of the virus. In addition to early screening and detection, emergency powers also enabled smartphone location tracking to form “electronic fences” around people under quarantine, imposing steep fines if they leave home. Sector Approaches (tourism and car production as examples of value-added sectors to economies):Feb. 20 – in Macau some casinos have reopened with strict health & safety restrictions (but discretionary spending by Chinese consumers – after opening their economy – is already 40% down year-to-year).March 12th - Singapore introduced their SG Clean quality mark certification to show safe/clean hotels to boost tourism. Poland is one of the first countries which have reopened hotels (on May 4th).April 23rd - Volkswagen in Germany resumed production of its new ID.3 electric car at a factory in Zwickau; beginning of May Renault opened its manufacturing plants in France; May 3rd – Fiat Chrysler restarted production in Southern Italy and resumed some operations at other factories across the country; May 4th - Ferrari reopened its Maranello and Modena factories in Northern Italy. Support for Startups and SMEs:April 1st - to stimulate its growing startup community, Indian investors, entrepreneurs, and advisors have pooled 1 billion INR ($13 million) to create the Action Covid-19 Team (ACT) Grant. This grant is eligible to SMEs, NGOs, and startups who are developing solutions specific to the coronavirus (prevention, testing, PPE, mental health support, medical equipment).Germany is committing €2 billion specifically towards financing its tech sector during the pandemic. This aid will be distributed through their “Special Start-up Support Program,” so to supplement the anticipated €10 billion “Future Fund” the German government had been in development for startup support prior to the coronavirus.National Center for Research and Development (NCBR) allocated 200 million PLN (around 50 million USD) to help Polish startups to combat the COVID-19 crisis. The competition focus is on (1) diagnostics – including devices for rapid detection of coronavirus; (2) treatment – research into the use of existing or new drugs, as well as work on vaccines; (3) prevention – preventive measures limiting the spread of a pandemic including bio-shields.UK government has announced their “Future Fund” scheme to support startup companies during the pandemic. It is to launch in May and will remain open until the end of September 2020. They are allocating ?250 million to the fund and are looking to invest anywhere in between ?125,000 and ?5 million to eligible startup companies.Testing/Surveillance Technologies:Under Germany's contact tracing policy, every person who has come into contact with an infected patient in the last two weeks is tracked down and tested. Germany is building a network of 100 thousand healthcare investigators/detectives to support COVID-19 medical investigation. S. Korea developed a system to support epidemiological investigations using the “Smart City Data Hub”. Aggressive contact tracing operation, which integrates GPS data, credit card data and surveillance footage as well as other information from 28 different data sources to perform real-time analysis to quickly and precisely identify those who might have come into close contact with a COVID-19 patient.Citizens in Australia are downloading the government’s voluntary coronavirus tracking app that notifies them if someone they know has the virus; French tech startup Socios is developing an immunity pass for sporting events so that “only fans who are at low or zero health risk are initially able to attend matches”; Germany is adopting Apple and Google's "exposure notification" software initiative - this approach follows other European countries' decentralized protocol (DP-3T) that makes use of the app voluntary.Israel’s Health Ministry has released its own contact tracing app, called “HaMagen” (or “The Shield”). The app takes location data from the user’s phone to compare with the Health Ministry’s server information on location histories of confirmed cases in the 14 days prior to their diagnosis. But users’ personal and location data remains private, meaning that the app cannot trace individuals without their knowledge or consent; as ID found out during the webinar organized by Israeli Consulate in LA - the app is completely voluntary and allows users to decide if they report any exposure to the virus to the ministry.Second Waves/Challenges/Mistakes:April 8th - Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan declared a state of emergency; Japan opened the economy being unprepared to it, especially on testing and tracing side. The major lesson to take from Japan - if you are successful in the containment the first time around, unless you expand the testing capacity, it's difficult to identify community and hospital transmissions.The UK government has made mistakes first not reacting quickly, then not being able to build sufficient testing capacity. The British government gave up quickly on the sort of test-and-isolate strategy common in countries that have kept deaths down.Wins/Achievements:New Zealand has had extraordinary success in conquering the virus (they have already announced COVID-19 elimination), partly as a consequence of its isolation and low population density but also because it introduced strict lockdown measures and all but closed its borders: in April, Australia and New Zealand have case-fatality rates of just above 1%, compared with 6% in the US and 13.5% each for Italy and the UK. Neither Australia nor New Zealand currently has community transmission. Hong Kong has consecutively seen zero cases of the coronavirus since April 27. The key to Japan's model is the social distancing method known as “the three Cs,” referring to (1) closed spaces with poor ventilation, (2) crowded places with many people nearby and (3) close-contact settings such as close-range conversations. The model is attributed to relative low level of COVID-19 deaths in Japan.In South Korea, the biggest success has been with mass testing, which it was able to quickly implement at scale because it had incentivized domestic biotech firms to start test development and production in January.The critical elements of Taiwan’s model are scientific evidence-based decision-making and winning over public confidence and support. Very early reaction on COVID-19 outbreak in China, mass use of face masks and strict quarantine policies, and respecting advice from medical professionals are the fundaments of Taiwan’s winning model.Final Thoughts:The most successful countries in fighting COVID-19 have implemented several measures at the same time: strict social distancing, obligatory masks, mass testing and high-tech tracing technologies including mobile apps. Some of them are already working on post-COVID development strategies like South Korea which is preparing the “full” digitalization strategy to transform the whole country into the smart nation (based on smart cities technologies). High technologies effectively helped such countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, Israel or Germany to contain the virus. Without extensive testing this is extremely difficult to manage a transition to the reopened economy and there is a high risk of the “second wave”. Tracking COVID and protecting privacy at the same time starts to be a challenge (especially in China, but e.g. South Koreans have broadly accepted the loss of privacy as a necessary trade-off).The danger of a second wave of the spread of the virus has unfortunately become a reality for some countries like Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Singapore, and the UK. Some commonalties of contributing factors were not reacting quick enough to the virus, insufficient testing, reopening too soon and quickly, and international travelers and residences entering without proper screening.Startups seem to be the group of companies hit hardest and many countries like Canada, Czech Republic, New Zealand, India, Poland, and South Korea are implementing different forms of support (ID plans several moderated interviews with NVG partners supporting startups in Nevada including incubators & accelerators and co-working spaces to assess the situation and propose steps to strengthen Nevada’s startup ecosystem). A gradual return to normality requires extraordinary level of collaboration between states and regions. Australia and New Zealand are discussing the possibility of opening up borders to each other, creating a travel corridor or "travel bubble" between the two nations; Germany and France are collaborating to share medical resources and data gathering on mobility among other things (and Nevada joined California, Oregon, Washington, and Colorado for COVID-19 response and reopening economy – an important decision as nearly one-half of Las Vegas visitors were from the Western States). ................
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