Month: April 2020

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Social distancing needs to be more stringent

South Lake Union
Amazon’s banana stand in Seattle’s South Lake Union district was an early victim of social distancing policies enacted to counter the coronavirus outbreak. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)

Although many states are starting to relax restrictions on business activity and contacts, Seattle-area epidemiologists say such restrictions will need to be tightened up to reduce the spread of coronavirus much further.

The only alternative to clamping down harder would be to create a robust system of testing and contact tracing, experts at the Bellevue, Wash.-based Institute for Disease Modeling say in their latest report.

Their conclusions are based on an updated analysis of viral transmission patterns in Seattle and the rest of King County. The numbers suggest that the extent of the pandemic in the county is declining very slowly, if at all.

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CVS and UPS team up for drone deliveries

UPS drone
A UPS drone made by Matternet carries a package with a CVS pharmacy in the background. (UPS Photo)

UPS’ drone subsidiary and the CVS pharmacy chain say they’ll start delivering prescription medicines to the nation’s largest retirement community next month, using Matternet’s M2 drone delivery system.

The service, approved by the Federal Aviation Administration under Part 107 rules, will be available for The Villages, a community in central Florida that’s home to more than 135,000 residents. UPS Flight Forward and CVS will be authorized to operate through the coronavirus pandemic and explore continuing needs as they arise once the pandemic fades.

Physical distancing and restrictions on retail business, enacted in response to the pandemic, are bringing more attention to the potential for drone deliveries.

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Boeing scrubs $4.2 billion deal to buy Embraer

Boeing and Embraer jets
The Boeing-Embraer deal would have added regional jets such as Embraer’s E190-E2 to a lineup that also includes Boeing’s 737 MAX 7 and larger jets. (Embraer Illustration)

Boeing terminated its two-year-old, $4.2 billion agreement to acquire the commercial operations of Embraer, a leading regional-jet manufacturer based in Brazil, as the April 24 deadline for sealing the deal passed.

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Researchers revise recommendations for reopening

The projected dates for relaxing social distancing policies has slipped later, on average, since Friday’s projection. Click on the image for a larger version. (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Graphic)

The latest computer projections from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation deliver a double dose of discouragement about the course of the coronavirus outbreak, especially for those in the institute’s home state.

IHME’s April 22 assessment estimates that conditions could be acceptable for Washington state to loosen its current social distancing restrictions on May 28 — which is 10 days later than the April 17 estimate. Moreover, that assessment assumes that public health officials will have adequate resources for testing patients, conducting contact tracing and isolating those who become infected — which is not assured.

The other discouraging word is that the projected U.S. death toll through Aug. 4 has been raised, from 60,308 on April 17 to 67,641 on April 22. There’s a wide interval of uncertainty to that figure: The institute said it could end up as low as 45,375 or as high as 124,120. (The actual death toll was already nearly beyond that lower bound when IHME made its projection.)

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UW to conduct clinical trial for hydroxychloroquine

The University of Washington School of Medicine is looking for people who have tested positive for COVID-19 to participate in a clinical trial aimed at finding out whether a controversial drug called hydroxychloroquine can keep them from having to be hospitalized.

Word of UW Medicine’s clinical trial comes after reports about a study at Veterans Health Administration medical centers in which COVID-19 patients who took hydroxychloroquine, which is typically used to treat malaria and autoimmune disease, died at higher rates than those who didn’t take the drug.

Today, the Food and Drug Administration warned that hydroxychloroquine carries “known risks” of potentially deadly heart complications — and said the drug should be used in supervised settings such as clinical trials, where the risks can be better studied and mitigated.

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Refactr wins USAF contract for software automation

Seattle-based Refactr has won a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research contract that calls for the Air Force to evaluate the use of the company’s platform to automate software management processes.

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Software tools for COVID-19 research go viral

COVID-19 study connections
This graph charts the connections that link dozens of research studies about coronavirus and related subjects. (Covidgraph.org)

One month after the debut of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, or CORD-19, the database of coronavirus-related research papers has doubled in size – and has given rise to more than a dozen software tools to channel the hundreds of studies that are being published every day about the pandemic.

In a roundup published on the ArXiv preprint server this week, researchers from Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft Research and other partners in the project say CORD-19’s collection has risen from about 28,000 papers to more than 52,000. Every day, several hundred more papers are being published, in peer-reviewed journals and on preprint servers such as BioRxiv and MedRxiv.

CORD-19 aims to make sense of them all, using the Semantic Scholar academic search engine developed by the Allen Institute for AI, also known as AI2.

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Spaceflight signs up for Firefly rocket launch

Firefly stage separation
An artist’s conception shows Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket during stage separation. (Firefly Illustration)

Seattle-based Spaceflight Inc. has signed an agreement to secure most of the payload mass on a Firefly Aerospace rocket that’s due to lift off from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base in 2021.

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Swarm Technologies pushes plan for tiny satellites

Momentus Vigoride shuttle
An artist’s conceptions shows Momentus’ Vigoride in-space shuttle moving a payload in orbit. (Momentus Illustration)

Swarm Technologies has struck an agreement with California-based Momentus for the launch of a dozen telecommunication satellites, each the size of a slice of bread, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in December.

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SpaceX launches Starlink satellites and sets record

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster executed its fourth successful launch and landing as part of a mission that put 60 more Starlink broadband internet satellites into orbit, marking the seventh such mission.

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