An expansive compound of buildings covering the equivalent of 46 football pitches was recently erected on the outskirts of Guangzhou, China's bustling southern metropolis. The sprawling complex of three-storey buildings contains some 5,000 rooms and is the first of what is expected to be a chain of quarantine centres built by the Chinese government to house people arriving from overseas as it forges ahead with its zero-tolerance approach to COVID. The compound is equipped with "5G communication technology and artificial intelligence" infrastructure, and each room, which can host only one person at a time, has cameras at its door and a robot delivery system to "minimise human contact and the risk of cross-infection", according to the introduction to the centre put out by the Guangzhou government. It took the construction team less than three months to finish the project – in an echo of the Huoshenshan and Leishenshan temporary hospitals that were built in record time in the central city of Wuhan as COVID-19 took hold in early 2020. But while those hospitals were greeted with relief, the appearance of the quarantine centre nearly two years after the trauma of Wuhan has left some wondering why China is not relaxing its virus strategy now that the vast majority of its one billion people have been fully vaccinated. They're building more facilities but there is no indication the authorities plan to ease the restrictions that have effectively ended international travel for people in China.

Every day for the past few weeks, charts and graphs plotting the projected apex of COVID-19 infections have been splashed across newspapers and cable news. Many of these models have been built using data from studies on previous outbreaks like SARS or MERS. Now, a team of engineers at MIT has developed a model that uses data from the COVID-19 pandemic in conjunction with a neural network to determine the efficacy of quarantine measures and better predict the spread of the virus. "Our model is the first which uses data from the coronavirus itself and integrates two fields: machine learning and standard epidemiology," explains Raj Dandekar, a Ph.D. candidate studying civil and environmental engineering. Together with George Barbastathis, professor of mechanical engineering, Dandekar has spent the past few months developing the model as part of the final project in class 2.168 (Learning Machines).

Ending the US coronavirus lockdown too early could lead to an explosion of new coronavirus cases, according to a study modelling the spread of the virus. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created a model showing the spread of the deadly virus using publicly available data from Wuhan, Italy, South Korea and the USA. The authors say that any immediate or near-term relaxation of quarantine measures already in place in the US would lead to an'exponential explosion' in COVID-19 cases. It comes as President Donald Trump announced a new three-phase plan to reopen the country that'allows' governors to decide when their states should come out of lockdown measures. The plan provided only a general idea of how and when states would be able to reopen - shying away from specific details or a timeline. 'To preserve the health of our citizens we must also preserve the health and functioning of our economy,' said Trump.