Educational

Professional sports teams are considering adopting facial recognition admissions systems to make stadiums as touchless for fans as possible as part of efforts to provide a safe environment during the pandemic. Both the Los Angeles Football Club and the New York Mets are trying the Clear app, made by

The algorithm and mathematical model used to predict students’ grades by the International Baccalaureate programme, which was forced to cancel exams because of the pandemic, incorporated three elements: coursework, teachers’ predictions of their students’ exam grades, and “school context”, which was

As part of efforts to make returning to campus safer, US universities are considering or implementing mandates requiring students to install exposure notification apps, quarantine enforcement programs, and other unproven new technologies, risking exacerbating existing inequalities in access to both

A preliminary study finds that facial recognition algorithms struggle to identify people wearing masks. The study tested 89 commercial facial recognition algorithms, and the best had error rates between 5% and 50% in matching unmasked photos with photos of the same person wearing a digitally-applied

Manchester-based VST Enterprises is developing a rapid COVID-19 testing kit intended to help restart stadium sporting events. The results of tests, which fans will take the day before the event they wish to attend and provide results within ten minutes, will be stored in VSTE’s V-Health Passport, a

By mid-July, the UK’s contact tracing system was still failing to contact thousands of people in areas with England’s highest infection rates. In London, with the sixth-highest infection rate in England, only 47% of at-risk people were contacted; in partially locked-down Leicester, the rate was 65%

A gap in government guidance means that thousands of legal migrant key workers could be forced to choose between following new public health laws and destitution, according to Labour MPs and charities. They are warning that no recourse to public funds (NRPF) conditions, which apply to roughly 1.4

The Home Office moved dozens of asylum seekers involved in a Covid outbreak more than 120 miles despite an enforcement order saying they should remain in self-isolation for 14 days, the Guardian has learned. Home Office contractors have been accused of being “beyond reckless” in their handling of

Migrants seeking asylum in Britain could be processed offshore under plans being developed by Priti Patel. Officials have ruled out Ascension Island and St Helena as impractical because of their distance from the UK but the Home Secretary is still seeking a third country where asylum seekers could

Thousands of asylum seekers currently accommodated in hotels are facing removal from the UK, the Home Office has announced. A letter from the Home Office, seen by the Independent, states that evictions of refused asylum seekers will take place “with immediate effect” and charities have reported an

By late June, two months after its launch, Australia’s A$1.5 million CovidSafe app had failed to help authorities identify even a single contact of a confirmed case. In the states of Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania the app had not picked up any contacts that had not already

By the end of its first three weeks of availability, the French contact tracing app, “StopCovid”, had seen 1.9 million downloads. Of these, only 68 people had entered a positive COVID-19 test result, and only 14 were notified that they might have been exposed, according to the French junior minister

In late May, Florida fired Rebekah Jones, its geographic information system manager and architect of the state’s COVID-19 data and surveillance dashboard. The dashboard was praised on TV two weeks earlier by Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task

Lovelace Women’s Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the only medical institution in the state dedicated to women’s health, operated a secret policy of separating First Nation mothers, whom they identified either by appearance or by residence in a particular zip code, from their newborn babies as a

Los Angeles Airport (LAX) has begun the first of two six-week voluntary trials in which travellers walk past fever-detecting cameras before reaching security. Those who show a temperature above 100.4F will be taken aside for secondary screening. During the pilot no one will be stopped from

The UK government has instructed bars, restaurants, hairdressers, and churches to record visitors’ contact details when they begin to reopen on July 4 so they can be contacted later if necessary for contact tracing and testing. However, the industry was given no guidance on how to take care of the