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54 news posts in Frontiers in Public Health

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19 Mar 2021

Tragedy of the Commons: The potential role of individualism in the spread of Covid-19

By Dr Yossi Maaravi, Adelson School of Entrepreneurship at IDC, Herzliya John David Photography / Shutterstock.com Dr Yossi Maaravi of the Adelson School of Entrepreneurship at IDC, Herzliya asks whether the phenomenon of social dilemmas and individualism resulted in worse outcomes for the Covid-19 pandemic?   Covid-19 is a real tragedy. But why did this tragedy hit some countries harder than others? While this question has recently been answered based on population age or health policy, a few months ago, my thoughts drifted to another possible explanation: ‘The tragedy of the commons’. A few months later, these thoughts led to research that has been recently published in Frontiers in Public Health. But the story of the inspiration for this research begins many years back. 16 years ago, when I was still a PhD student, I came across Garrett Hardin’s classic article, The Tragedy of the Commons. I was fascinated by the simple yet powerful phenomenon of social dilemmas described in this article. Social dilemmas are circumstances in which certain behaviors that serve the self-interest of every individual member of society might be harmful to the common good. YESSS!!! My new @FrontiersIn article is OUT!We rely on the "The Tragedy of […]

Health

16 Feb 2021

COVID-19 crisis – a technology providing unconventional supply relief

By Kate E. Mullins / EPFL Credit: Felix Schürmann and coauthors When the full-scale effect of the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to be understood in early 2020, the EPFL Blue Brain Project and ETH Zurich, as part of the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force, began collaborating with Spiez Laboratory on an online Platform – Academic Resources for COVID-19 (ARC). In a paper published in Frontiers for Public Health, the authors explain how the ARC Platform was set up to be a service to support Swiss diagnostic laboratories that are testing for SARS-CoV-2. The ARC Platform matched requests for critical equipment, reagents and consumable goods required by Swiss diagnostic laboratories involved in combating COVID-19 with supplies available from Swiss academic groups. Since then, with further input from Swiss startup Apptitude SA, the Platform has evolved with the needs of the epidemiological situation and the technology has been open sourced with the purpose to serve public health as a response solution for other countries and communities in the current COVID-19 crisis or in future crises. In the beginning of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland, diagnostic testing had to be ramped up in a very short time, but even basic molecular […]