Recently released US e-commerce data show how consumer behaviours are adapting to life under stay-at-home orders, home working and spending a lot more time with household cohabitees. Perhaps not too many surprises on what categories are winners and what are losers but the quantum of change and ranking still makes interesting reading. Its relevancy goes beyond the FMCG industry. It is also provides advanced warning to other sectors of what is coming next. As a recent Kantar report looking at recent Chinese retail data questions, are we facing “a new era, an acceleration of latent trends or just a short-lived blip?”

Recently released US e-commerce data show how consumer behaviours are adapting to life under stay-at-home orders, home working and spending a lot more time with household cohabitees. Perhaps not too many surprises on what categories are winners and what are losers but the quantum of change and ranking still makes interesting reading. Its relevancy goes beyond the FMCG industry. It is also provides advanced warning to other sectors of what is coming next. As a recent Kantar report looking at recent Chinese retail data questions, are we facing “a new era, an acceleration of latent trends or just a short-lived blip?”

At the time of writing, John Hopkins University has recorded 109,312 deaths with patients testing positive for the COVID-19 disease. There are, sadly, many more deaths that have not been reported to date (e.g. at home & care home deaths). Of the 1.8m confirmed cases, only 0.4m have been classified as totally recovered. Yesterday 0.1m new infections were reported – a trend yet to peak. Many more deaths are bound to follow. Even when this has abated, it is widely expected that official figures will be a significant underestimate. Death toll predictions range anywhere up to 2 million people. A horribly large number of people. How does COVID-19 rank as a global killer? Attached is the latest data I could find from the World Health Organisation ranking the top 10 causes of death across the world in 2016. At the moment, COVID-19 would not make the top 10 and it might not make the top 10 (based on more optimistic projections). Annual Flu WHO estimates that 290,000-650,000 respiratory deaths occur each year associated with seasonable flu. So why is the world in lockdown? COVID-19 is more likely to hospitalise and more likely to kill than seasonal flu. So, quite simply, the issue is about flow control. Every country’s health systems would break under the surge in demand but for the containment policies now in place.

Kudos to harry29ford! He has produced a fantastic piece of visualisation to produce a great illustration of how COVID-19 deaths have evolved over time (from the date of the first death) compared to epidemics of the 21st century to date. An epidemic occurs when there is a rapid spread of a disease to a larger number of people in a given population within a short period of time. A pandemic is an epidemic that has spread across a continent or globally. This video shows the difference very clearly!

COVID-19 – An event without precedent? SARS-CoV-2 is a novel (new) strain of Coronavirus so the disease it causes – COVID-19 – is something everyone is having to learn about as we go along. Deadly Coronaviruses are not new There are many types of Coronavirus and whilst most cause only mild illnesses, at least two other human coronaviruses are known to cause severe symptoms: (1) SARS-CoV (2002-3) which emerged out of China and caused the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was more deadly but much less infectious than COVID-19. The virus rapidly spread across 29 countries but was eventually contained and there have been no outbreaks of SARS anywhere in the world since 2003. (2) MERS-CoV (2012) which emerged out of Saudi Arabia and had a death rate of 34% but which has been mainly limited to the Middle East. There are currently no vaccines or specific drug treatments for coronaviruses. Conditions that facilitate the creation of new strains Coronaviruses are zoonotic, meaning that they can be transmitted from people to animals. Both SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and likely SARS-CoV-2 originally came from bats, though other animals that act as intermediaries spreading coronaviruses to humans. Many of the early cases of COVID-19 were traced back to the Baishazhou wet market in Wuhan (which has now re-opened despite pressure from the US in particular). Influenza Pandemics Flu Pandemics are not new – see attached chart. The deadliest was the “Spanish flu” which had both a high infection rate and death rate. Whilst this did not occur within the lifetime of most world leaders, there are still plenty of people alive today who would have been young children when that hit. World reaction The combination of high infection rate, a significant death rate and long incubation period have forced world governments into unprecedented action – lockdowns/stay-at-home orders have impacted most of the world’s population. As to what else is truly unprecedented, make your own mind up…

There is some very interesting data coming out of Wuhan, China about COVID-19, including more details of what happens to hospitalised patients with severe COVID-19. From anecdotal feedback we have got from EU doctors, this seems to be a close reflection of what is happening in Europe too. It does illustrate just how critical week 2 is to someone infected with the Coronavirus.

nuaxia, a healthcare information technology platform announces that it has significantly upgraded its proprietary technology platform. In December 2018, nuaxia announced the launch of its third generation platform which leverages 7 AI engines to deliver its unique, behavioural science based analytics. nuaxia has now completed a number of significant enhancements to improve the speed and scale by which its video data can be captured and analysed including: Visualisation tool for summarising and analysing video data Fast clip compilation tool Self-serve admin function for clients Enhanced blurring function A slick new user interface Re-engineered platform to a containerized system “Chatbot 1.0” capability for multi-part video questioning nuaxia is now offering this capability as a service that can be included within any market research survey.  This allows clients to access the benefits of the nuaxia platform whilst continuing to use their existing research and data collection providers. Peter Chopra, nuaxia’s CEO comments: “The market research industry has been struggling to properly leverage the value of video-based responses.  The key issue driving that is the huge amount of data that video provides. This problem is especially true for nuaxia’s clients as our approach goes beyond the words to measure emotional (system 1) responses too.  Leveraging our full service experience, we have created impactful and actionable client deliverables. Furthermore, we have significantly reduced the amount of analyst time required so that findings can be delivered at the speed of business. We will continue to focus on innovative and forward-thinking leaders and projects where delivering holistic and reliable research is paramount.” For further information, please visit nuaxia.com

nuaxia, a healthcare information technology platform announces that it has launched the third generation of its proprietary technology platform​. nuaxia has made significant enhancements in five key areas: First, the development of an enterprise level system for storing and managing video data. Second, AI-powered analysis functionality to allow businesses to make fast, deep insight on visual information. Third, an extended suite of behavioural economics capabilities including tone of voice and word sentiment analysis to add to its facial coding capability which was launched at the start of this year. Fourth, a suite of reporting and collaboration tools to support the sharing and engagement in its video stories. Fifth, the development of API functionality to allow for easy integration of information into and out of its technology platform. nuaxia is now able to: ● Recruit respondents through its own HCP Membership and patients partnerships; ● Conduct both quantitative and qualitative video based research (both directly or using third party interview data); ● Create customer story libraries; and ● Provide automated analysis and reporting on video and traditional research data Peter Chopra, nuaxia’s CEO comments: “When we launched nuaxia, it was obvious that video based research would play a major role in how market research is conducted in the future. We, like the consumer video research specialists, have developed a full suite of video capture capabilities. However, no one seems to have properly realised the potential of this form of research yet. Our approach has been to focus on the analysis and reporting of visual data and our third generation platform has been developed to create an industry leading approach in this area. As the only healthcare focused video research specialist, our third generation platform not only enhances our capabilities on our existing services, it will also form the heart of a number of new specific service offerings in 2019.” For further information, please visit ​nuaxia.com

LONDON, UK: February 13, 2018 – nuaxia, a healthcare information technology platform announces that it has entered into a strategic partnership with Affectiva, the global leader in Artificial Emotional Intelligence (Emotion AI). nuaxia will combine Affectiva’s facial coding with its video capture and analysis capability to provide clients with much deeper insights into their customers’ implicit meaning and system 1 thinking. In addition to the ability to process its videos using the Affectiva processing engine, nuaxia also announces some significant new functionality upgrades to its own platform. nuaxia’s video capture capacity now allows for video engagements to simultaneously show stimuli and capture responses in real time. nuaxia is also releasing a new video dashboard that allows clients full analysis capability. Peter Chopra, nuaxia’s CEO comments: “The emotional analytics market is forecast to exceed $1.7 billion by 2022. nuaxia has long advocated the benefits of augmenting traditional survey based research approaches with deeper “system 1” driven analytics. Our relationship with Affectiva will open this capability to the healthcare sector.” Dr. Rana el Kaliouby, Affectiva co-Founder and CEO, commented: "We're very excited to be working with nuaxia, a pioneering company in the healthcare sector. Emotions predict customer behavior, brand perception and brand loyalty. Our emotion recognition technology is perfectly suited to nuaxia’s unique strengths in capturing video and voice responses. Both organizations are focused on gaining a far deeper insight into the reasons behind decision-making and this partnership is set to benefit the world’s largest healthcare brands and their customers About www.nuaxia.com: nuaxia is a healthcare focused marketing, information, research and recruitment business. It currently offers businesses and institutions in the healthcare sector the ability to launch Video Interviews and Micro Engagements with healthcare experts and patients using its technology Platform. nuaxia processes work "at the speed of business" to provide better quality engagements that better impact and influence decision-making. nuaxia positions itself as putting its Members First (physicians, other healthcare professionals and patients). By putting its Members First, nuaxia is tackling the industry issue of plummeting response rates in order to provide its Clients with results that can be relied upon for decision-making. About Affectiva: Affectiva is the pioneer in Emotion AI, the next frontier of artificial intelligence. Affectiva's mission is to bring emotional intelligence to the digital world with its emotion recognition technology that senses and analyzes facial and vocal expressions of emotion. Affectiva's patented software is built on an emotion AI science platform that uses computer vision, deep learning and the world's largest emotion data repository of nearly 6 million faces analyzed from 87 countries, amounting to more than 2 billion facial frames. For more information on Affectiva, please visit www.affectiva.com.