Greetings!
Over the past two weeks in Hong Kong, COVID-19 case counts set record highs almost daily, with a new record reaching over 34,000 yesterday, February 28. Local schools will close for summer break by March 17 while “schools that offer non-local curriculum will be allowed to continue online classes as scheduled.” Over 400 schools are being considered for use as testing centers. Within an afternoon, supermarket shelves were stripped after rumors of a region-wide lockdown.
On February 18, Nasa’s Perseverance rover completed one year of its mission to hunt for microbes on Mars.
Positive change is a long road. Hang in there! Thank you for your consistent support!
What’s happening - a selection
Taxes…
Taxes are complicated… As a multi-national in Hong Kong owning a Hong Kong company, I am now responsible for three types of tax returns across two jurisdictions – profits and salaries tax return in one and income tax return in the other.
With the salaries tax calculated on a fiscal year of April 1 of one year to March 31 of the next, income tax calculated from January 1 - Dec 31 of the same year, and profits tax calculated on a fiscal year of your choosing, it sure is an exciting of accounting and compliance to navigate.
Do you relate to any of this? Would you like to share? Or hear what I’ve learned?
I have spoken with dozens of professionals with some knowledge, professional or experiential, of some angle of this situation and by the end of this year (and possibly by the end of April) I will have hired an accountant, an auditor, and at least one tax filing professional.
If you’d like to chat about any of this, just reply to this email – or reach me however you usually reach me.
💡 What is happening right now in the Asian financial hub Hong Kong?
Join us on Thursday, March 10 at 5:00 pm HKT (10:00 am CET) for GBO Virtual Meeting: The HK Business Environment – Past, Present, and Future
GBO Hong Kong Member, Choy Yiu Chan, Dutch Chinese with 10+ years of life and work experience in Shanghai and a business owner in Hong Kong since 2017, will share with you her views on the past, present and future of this unique place and its business environment. Come ready with your questions for a moderated conversation!
To learn more and register, visit the event page.
Did our last event sound awesome?
Watch the video here - The VC Experience - with Ritesh Nandwani
Of course there’s more happening… Perfectionism, procrastination, and many things discussed offline for now… Stay tuned
This week’s science post - online March 01, 2022
How does socioeconomic disadvantage shape COVID-19 infection rates?
Researchers in the United States investigated this question for San Francisco, Seattle/King County, and the state of Wisconsin using COVID-19 case counts in these areas from the beginning of the pandemic in the United States through February 2021, just before vaccines became widely available.
They also asked, which seems to have more impact on COVID-19 infection levels: 1) residential disadvantage - disadvantage in the neighborhood where a person lives, or 2) mobility-based disadvantage - disadvantage among neighborhoods they interact with?
Indicators of neighborhood disadvantage for this study were percentages of poverty, unemployment, single-headed households, public assistance receipt, adults without a high school diploma, adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher, and workers who were managers or professionals.
To look at 1) residential disadvantage, researchers used data from nearly 2000 'tracts' of land covered by the census in 2015-2019. To look at 2) mobility-based disadvantage, researchers used anonymized location data captured on 45 million mobile devices over the same 'tracts'.
Neighborhoods were ranked according to their levels of residential and mobility-based disadvantage and divided into quartiles of 'low', 'medium', and 'high' disadvantage. They explored 7 different models for analyzing possible relationships between these data and COVID-19 data.
Throughout all three regions, the mobility-based disadvantage was a stronger predictor for COVID-19 infection rates than residential disadvantage.
"For example, the Central Waterfront/Dogpatch neighborhood in eastern San Francisco is in the lowest quartile of [residential disadvantage] but the second highest quartile of [mobility-based disadvantage]. Consistent with the latter, its COVID-19 infection rate was in the city’s 60th percentile."
According to these data, disadvantage begets disadvantage. Case rates could be more than twice as high in areas with high disadvantage compared with areas of medium disadvantage.
This study represented 661,612 individuals who tested positive, an undercount given the lack of sufficient testing during the early part of the pandemic in the United States.
The study, published February 18, 2022 in Science Advances https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abl3825
#wearamask #covid19 #disparities #racialdisparities #testing #research #socioeconomic #data #inequality
Human Resources – the most important resource in any enterprise
Amit Chatterjee - Hong Kong-based enthusiast of cigars and Microsoft Excel. He grew up in Boston and has been involved in startups in the US and Asia. He also has incredible instinct for the human below the behavior. Realizing he needed to be on the cutting edge, involved with creative-tech, and working with super talented people to breathe, he founded Shadow Factory. Shadow Factory is now a leading firm in extended reality, or XR (related to augmented reality - AR and virtual reality -VR) - enhancing storytelling, shopping and education experiences, and life in the metaverse in general. Ask him how life has a way to slingshot you back to who you are no matter where you are, and how people pass each other in cars on cliffside roads in the mountains of India. Do try out some of Shadow Factory's fun filters.
Interesting Reads
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - by Rebecca Skloot, 2011
Henrietta Lacks was 30 years old and living near Baltimore, Maryland, USA when she went to Johns Hopkins, the only nearby hospital that treated black patients, feeling a "knot" in her abdomen that turned out to be cervical cancer. Before she died within the year, doctors had taken cells from her tumor and learned to grow them in the lab over and over again, for infinite generations of cells.
These cells, now known as HeLa, were the first cells ever "immortalized" - they could reproduce an infinite number of times. They could be grown, frozen, shipped, thawed, regrown in a new place. Scientists could test the impacts of drugs, vaccines, cosmetics, microorganisms, everything you might want to test on cells in the lab.
This critical breakthrough shaped biology as we know it and is the foundation of a multibillion-dollar industry.
Henrietta's cells were taken, grown, distributed, and commercialized without the knowledge of her or her family for decades. Until the late 90s, the stories in the press stated the cells came from a "donor" named Helen Lane.
When science journalist Rebecca Skloot interviewed members of the Lacks family for this book in the early 2000s, most were without health insurance, some were in prison, some were undersupported by social security while Henrietta is buried in an unmarked grave in the family cemetery. The book chronicles the genesis of the HeLa cell line, its journey through the media, and the family's journey to understand what happened.
In 2021, ten years after this book was published, the Lacks family hired an attorney to seek compensation from pharmaceutical companies that profited from using HeLa cells.
About
The Weekly RoundUp is Clear Water Science Consulting’s weekly newsletter – a collection of news from select locales, sharable business updates and insights, and features of interesting people and media.
Clear Water Science Consulting empowers science and scientists through effective communication. Our main activities are science communication (content creation, editing, technical review) and full-suite coaching for people interested in science and research (communication and soft skills coaching, research coaching, career coaching) – one-on-one and workshops.
Lately, we’ve expanded into personal coaching, where the same curiosity, inquiry, patience, and persistence is helping people help themselves become more empowered actors of their own lives.
Visit our website to learn more about our vision, services, portfolio, and reviews.
For our regular content, check out our updates and science posts, many of them about COVID, on LinkedIn.
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Neither science nor the human experience has borders. As ambassadors for GBO, the unboring business club, Hong Kong, we provide opportunities for business owners in HK and around the globe to build friendships, rapport, and identify opportunities.