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  • Will a vaccine turn the tide in the international fight against the coronavirus?

  • And will people get the shot when it becomes available?

  • I'm Carl Azuz, and those are two of the questions we're exploring today on CNN 10.

  • Since coronavirus started spreading around the world in early January, scientists have been trying to find a way to stop it.

  • Some existing medicines have shown promise in treating patients, and researchers are racing to develop new vaccines to try to prevent people from catching COVID-19.

  • There are now more than 100 vaccines being researched worldwide.

  • And in less than two weeks, the nation of Russia plans to approve the world's first coronavirus vaccine.

  • It wants to start mass producing two of them in September and October.

  • A Russian officials says the country's focus wasn't on being the first, but on protecting people.

  • There are concerns, though, about the drug's safety and effectiveness, and whether Russia has carried out enough testing on people.

  • Safety and effectiveness are concerns about any vaccines.

  • What's unique about the ones being tested for coronavirus is how fast they're being developed.

  • Doctors say it takes several years from a common vaccine to go from development to when you can get a shot in a doctor's office.

  • But researchers are trying to make this happen for a coronavirus injection within a matter of months.

  • When it comes to the flu vaccine, scientists say it's our best protection against seasonal influenza.

  • The U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimates it's between 40 and 60 percent effective at preventing doctor visits for the flu.

  • And that's in a year when the shot is a good match for the viruses that are going around.

  • It's hard to say at this point what kind of lasting protection a coronavirus vaccine might provide.

  • Still, developing one is an international priority.

  • It's what millions of us have been hanging our hopes on, to get past this crushing pandemic, to return to work, to school, to go back to our favorite restaurants, to workout at the gym.

  • A deployable vaccine for coronavirus, which experts say could arrive late this year or early next.

  • But experts are now worried that when it comes, many Americans will reject the vaccine.

  • Already, surveys are showing us that nearly half of people are not inclined to take a COVID-19 vaccine, even if it was available today.

  • That's a shocking number, and it's deeply concerning.

  • In May, one poll from The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed only about half of Americans said they'd get the vaccine.

  • 20 percent said they wouldn't.

  • 31 percent weren't sure.

  • Other polls from CNN and The Washington Post and ABC News showed about two thirds of Americans said they would get the vaccine.

  • Still, experts are worried about any significant numbers of people rejecting the vaccine.

  • If a large percentage chose not to get vaccinated, then we would never get herd immunity.

  • Experts say there are several reasons that people don't trust a potential coronavirus vaccine.

  • A lot of people are going to resist the very idea of getting it, because they've been told for months, years now not to trust experts.

  • Experts say, the very name of the project to push the vaccine through fuels skepticism.

  • I think when people hear the term "warp speed," they assume that steps are being skipped.

  • They assume that there are corners that are being cut.

  • And therefore, this may be a vaccine--because it's being made so quickly--it's less than optimal.

  • It may have poor safety qualities or effectiveness qualities.

  • Doctors acknowledge the vaccine likely won't be a magic bullet for coronavirus, that even after it comes out, it could be several months before we know how effective it is.

  • But they have a simple, stark message for those who are rejecting it.

  • The choice not to get a vaccine is a choice to take the real and very serious risk of being infected by this virus and being asked to suffer and/or to be hospitalized or die from this virus.

  • Dr. Paul Offit says a crucial part of this vaccine program is for the president, the task force, any leaders involved in this to be as transparent as possible with the public about the vaccine even before it rolls out.

  • And that means being honest with Americans about what our leaders know and don't know about the vaccine every step of the way.

  • 10 second trivia.

  • Which of these terms comes from a French word meaning "to watch over"?

  • Guard, Assess, Surveil, Preside.

  • Surveil from surveillance has origins in an early 19th century French term.

  • Okay, next report today has to do with the issue of contact tracing.

  • This is a way of trying to figure out how a disease spreads by tracking the people who've come down with it.

  • Where did they go before they were diagnosed?

  • Who else did they interact with?

  • This is increasingly being used to follow the spread of COVID-19, but it is controversial.

  • On one hand, contact tracing could potentially alert you if you've been around someone who had coronavirus and maybe help keep you from unknowingly spreading it.

  • Critics say it could keep track of information that people expect to be kept private, like when they're at work, when they're at home, where they travel.

  • Some of these pros and cons are playing out in the workplace, as Coronavirus surveillance methods appear there.

  • COVID-19 has drastically changed how we think about the workplace.

  • For employers, bringing employees safely back into the office is no easy feat.

  • But some companies say tracking employees' location using AI could help with social distancing and contact tracing.

  • One of those companies is Cameo, which builds image detection software for existing surveillance cameras.

  • What you need for a camera is to be able to understand where people are in the three-dimensional space, even though it's just a 2D image.

  • Cameo says its software can track both how close employees get to one another, and if they're wearing a mask.

  • Other companies, like Estimote, are trying to do something similar, but with wearable technology.

  • Location tracking, as far as understanding where you are, there's where you are in terms of your specific location, and then there's where are the devices or how are they communicating with each other.

  • When an employee wearing one of Estimote's devices gets too close to another employee's device, the two wearables ping each other over an LTE signal.

  • That interaction is recorded on a map that an employer is able to track.

  • Both companies say the goal of this technology isn't to single out individual employees on the spot, rather, it's meant to optimize the work space for safety purposes.

  • You can see, oh, we have a problem as people are transitioning at shifts at 8 a.m., so let's make sure that we put cones out with tape markers on the floor.

  • Or sometimes even people put hallway monitors for the period that people are changing shifts or they stagger shifts.

  • So, it's meant to be a management tool to tell you where your problems are and where you need to make changes.

  • Another survey by Macworld magazine says one out of five companies have checked employee computer files, voice, or electronic mail.

  • Tracking employees in the workplace is nothing new.

  • Companies have been legally allowed to check employees' work emails and phone calls for decades.

  • But privacy experts worried tracking employees' physical locations with this kind of technology isn't the best solution for a post-COVID-19 workplace.

  • You can't blame an employer for being concerned about social distancing.

  • But having wall-to-wall video cameras is a terrible answer.

  • It's not anonymous, but the employer can't do anything about two employees not social distancing unless it knows who they are.

  • Estimote and Cameo, though, insist that their tracking technologies keep employees' data private.

  • And that ultimately, it's up to the employers to ensure that the technology isn't abused.

  • We don't collect information about a user other than maybe something the company gives us to make a context connection to the device, so, that could just be like an employee ID.

  • And from our perspective, we have no idea what or who that is.

  • The person that looks at the video if they recognize you, just like they would review any other security video, then yes, there's that way that you can recognize.

  • But in the data itself, there's no personally identifiable information.

  • Still, privacy advocates argue that the employees themselves could be just as effective rather than monitoring them with this kind of technology.

  • It's just this reflexive habit of American employers that assume they've gotta come down from the top with monitoring control instead of working with the employees to solve the problem.

  • [10 out of 10]

  • For 10 out of 10 today, there's probably not a long list of animals you'd want to have watching you sleep.

  • But in a venue in Belgium, that's kind of the point.

  • It's a zoo.

  • It's a hotel.

  • It's a place where you can watch TV and a live walrus in your own living room.

  • Starting at $150 a night, this hotel also features rooms with views of wolves, tigers, and bears, oh, my!

  • So, it's kind of like camping with a window to the wild.

  • A window that stays closed, you pray, so you're not prey if the eye of the tiger gets trained on you.

  • Could you bear it?

  • Or would you want to walrus rush out of there after a sleepless night?

  • It's all food for thought.

  • For CNN 10, I'm Carl Azuz.

Will a vaccine turn the tide in the international fight against the coronavirus?

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