With more than 6,000 cases of the 2019-nCoV virus confirmed, researchers are hoping that studying the pathogen in the lab will help stop the outbreak


As of today (January 29), the World Health Organization had confirmed a total of 6,065 cases of the new coronavirus that started causing pneumonia-like symptoms in people in Wuhan, China, late last year. Sixty-eight of those confirmed cases come from 15 countries outside of China, raising concerns about the worldwide spread of the pathogen.

Researchers are studying the virus in hopes of aiding the effort to treat infections and minimize further transmission. Julian Druce, head of the Virus Identification Laboratory at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues announced yesterday that they’d successful grown the virus in cell culture, after having isolated it from the first person in the country to be diagnosed with 2019-nCoV infection.

The group, the first outside of China to successfully culture the virus, will share it with the WHO, which will distribute samples to research labs around the globe—something Chinese groups who claim to have grown the virus in the lab have not yet done. Working with the cultured virus may allow researchers to develop better treatments as well as diagnostics by detecting antibodies specific to 2019-nCoV, for example. “There are some things that are much easier to do when you have the virus,” Mike Catton, a deputy director of the Doherty Institute, tells Nature.




The news from Australia comes days after the WHO confirmed the first person-to-person spread of the virus outside of China: an individual in Vietnam who acquired the infection from a family member. Additionally, there have been media reports of a tour-bus driver in Japan who may have contracted the virus while transporting tourists from Wuhan, and a German man is thought to have been infected by a colleague who had recently visited Wuhan, China, according to Nature.

See “Scientists Scrutinize New Coronavirus Genome for Answers”
In a study published today in The Lancet, researchers in China analyzed the genomes of coronaviruses isolated from nine patients in Wuhan and found that 2019-nCoV is most closely related to two bat-derived SARS-like coronaviruses. The findings point to bats, which are sold at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, as a possible origin for the new outbreak. The Chinese team reports that eight patients had recently visited the market; the ninth patient had stayed in a nearby hotel.

“These data are consistent with a bat reservoir for coronaviruses in general and 2019-nCoV in particular,” coauthor Guizhen Wu of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention says in a press release emailed to journalists. “However, despite the importance of bats, it seems likely that another animal host is acting as an intermediate host between bats and humans.” The study also found evidence that the virus has only recently emerged in humans, with the genomes of the viruses isolated from the different patients differing by less than 0.1 percent.

See “Where Coronaviruses Come From”
The WHO is starting a global database to collect anonymized clinical data on infected individuals, and the agency will be hosting a meeting tomorrow to discuss whether the current outbreak should be considered a global health emergency

The possibility that Apple Card applicants were subject to gender bias opens a new frontier for the financial services sector in which regulators are largely absent, argues

In late August, the Apple Card debuted with a minimalist look and completely “no fee” model, creating a frenzy of anticipation. Millions signed up to be alerted for the release. Designed to boost traffic to its slow-to-be-adopted Apple Pay system and increase consumer dependency on iPhones, the Apple Card marked another significant innovation in access to financial services.

Fast forward two months, and Apple Card may now find its place in history for a less positive reason—the dark side of the technological revolution rearing its ugly head. Last week, Danish programmer David Heinemeier Hansson tweeted that after both he and his wife Jamie applied for the Apple Card with much of the same or shared financial information, he was astonished to receive a credit limit 20 times higher, despite his wife’s higher credit score.

Cue the viral tweet storm that followed, rife with accusations of bias in Goldman Sachs’s underwriting model. (Goldman developed and issued the card.) Adding fuel to the fire, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak shared that the same thing had happened to him and his wife. Officials from the New York Department of Financial Services quickly chimed in, assuring the Twitter sphere that they would investigate.

Technology is undeniably transforming the financial services industry. Fintechs, Big Tech, and banks are using increasing volumes of data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to build new algorithms to determine creditworthiness. The lending process, which was historically plagued by frictions, is becoming potentially more accurate, efficient, and cost effective.

For small-business lending, technology is changing the game, providing access to capital for more small businesses that need it to grow and succeed. But when lending relies on algorithms to make loan and underwriting decisions, as the Apple Card situation illustrates, the potential for discrimination grows.

“WHEN LENDING RELIES ON ALGORITHMS TO MAKE LOAN AND UNDERWRITING DECISIONS, AS THE APPLE CARD SITUATION ILLUSTRATES, THE POTENTIAL FOR DISCRIMINATION GROWS."
Should the customers be able to see what pieces of data may have led to a loan rejection or a lower credit limit? Should regulators have access to the algorithms and test them for the impact they have on underserved or protected classes?

The Apple Card situation has raised these questions in a visible way and the public engagement has been strong and immediate. Clearly, this is a new frontier for the financial services sector—and the industry’s regulators are also operating without a roadmap. We need to stop arguing about more versus less financial regulation and begin the hard work of creating smart regulation. This would include at least three parts, all of which are all hard to accomplish:

Disclosure rules on who gets to see what is in the credit algorithms.
Increased expertise at the regulatory agencies.
Data collection to know who is getting loans and where the gaps are occurring.

The Apple Card fiasco is not going to be an isolated incident—it’s the canary in the coal mine for the financial services industry and regulators playing catch up to the implications of the fintech revolution. For all the promise that comes with the Apple Card or other new innovations for deploying capital, if creditworthy customers are being shut out, that’s a problem. Even worse, if we don't understand why, we can’t fix it.