Gary Rieschel, founding managing partner at Qiming Venture Partners, one of China’s most prominent venture capital firms, discusses the opportunities he sees in the market. Qiming has closed a new $1.1 billion fund, even as uncertainties around Covid-19 depress startup funding. Rieschel speaks with Selina Wang and Rishaad Salamat on “Bloomberg Markets: China Open.” (Source: Bloomberg)
Image: https://www.bloomberg.com
The idea of “crisis management” requires no explanation right now. Something unexpected and significant happens, and our first instincts are to defend against — and later to understand and manage — the disturbance to the status quo. The crisis is an unpredictable enemy to be tamed for the purpose of restoring normality.
But we may not be able to return to our familiar pre-crisis reality. Pandemics, wars, and other social crises often create new attitudes, needs, and behaviors, which need to be managed. We believe imagination — the capacity to create, evolve, and exploit mental models of things or situations that don’t yet exist — is the crucial factor in seizing and creating new opportunities, and finding new paths to growth.
Image: Illustration by Kirsten Ulve
About a year ago, I made a career transition into professional and academic development support for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. I have found the work immensely fulfilling, and as with any other new position, I spent quite a bit of time in my first several months trying to catch myself up to speed on the lingo of the profession.
As streets have emptied of traffic during the coronavirus crisis and airlines have cut flights, the changes have temporarily helped another public health crisis—air pollution. In the Northeastern U.S., nitrogen dioxide pollution (the air pollution caused by internal combustion engines burning fossil fuels) fell 30% in March as lockdowns began. Los Angeles’s usual smog has nearly disappeared. The same pattern happened earlier in China and Italy as mobility slowed, factories shut down, and hazy skies cleared.
Image: These maps show the air pollution levels in late March 2019 and the late March 2020. Map: courtesy Descartes Labs
It’s hard to imagine now—as most of us are reading this in quarantine, with our feet propped on Costco boxes of spaghetti noodles—but we will one day have to go back to our offices. COVID-19 won’t be eradicated, and not everyone will be immune. But we’ll still be expected to sit at a desk and work. So how will work…work?
Image: courtesy Cushman & Wakefield
K.J. Seung is surprised to be hiring and training new workers in Boston.
His public health nonprofit, Partners in Health, specializes in helping the poorest people in developing nations — tracking down contacts of Ebola patients in Liberia and Sierra Leone; running child health and HIV clinics in Haiti; and operating tuberculosis control programs in Peru. But now it is advertising for 500 people to help do what’s known as contact tracing to try to control Covid-19 in Massachusetts.
Image: Riders on the New York City subway last week wear personal protective equipment. JOHN MINCHILLO/AP
If you are studying to earn a bachelor’s degree in hopes of becoming a reporter, radio announcer, or computer programmer, it might be hard to find a job in the next several years because employment in these occupations are expected to shrink.
Every two years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases employment projections for the United States. These estimate how many people are likely to be employed in various jobs over the next decade.
Image: Reporters and correspondents are projected to have a 12.1% decline in employment between 2018 and 2028. Joyce N. Boghosian
The genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, was published on 11 January 2020, triggering intense global R&D activity to develop a vaccine against the disease. The scale of the humanitarian and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is driving evaluation of next-generation vaccine technology platforms through novel paradigms to accelerate development, and the first COVID-19 vaccine candidate entered human clinical testing with unprecedented rapidity on 16 March 2020.
One of the most common questions that people search about hashtag#coronavirus is how long it lives on surface. Part of the hashtag#healthcommunication and hashtag#healthliteracy is presenting complicated information in different ways. Kudos to my WebMD colleagues for this inforgraphic
This is the second post of the “Epidemic Modeling” series. We will be building up on our discussion from the first post, “Epidemic Modeling 101: Or why your CoVID-19 exponential fits are wrong”, so you might want to start reading there. You can find the notebooks I wrote to implement the models and generate the figures over at the GitHub repository I made specifically for this series:
Image: https://medium.com
