Month: June 2020

Categories
GeekWire

A call for earlier testing and treatment for COVID-19

Home testing
The Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network relies on at-home sample collection from a wide spectrum of Seattle-area residents. (Photo via SCAN / Seattle-King County Public Health)

Scientists from Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington say the search for COVID-19 treatments should widen its focus from hospitalized patients to people who are just starting to experience symptoms.

They’re calling for a shift in strategy in an article published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases. “A golden opportunity to intervene early is being missed,” they write.

There’s already been some success in the hunt for drugs that can treat COVID-19. Preliminary results suggest that an experimental antiviral drug called remdesivir can reduce the recovery time for hospitalized patients, while a low-cost steroid known as dexamethasone can reduce the death rate among patients who experience respiratory distress.

But the researchers from the Seattle area, which was ground zero for America’s coronavirus outbreak, say the hunt should be expanded beyond hospitals.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Low-cost steroid could reduce COVID-19 death rate

A study involving thousands of COVID-19 patients in Britain suggests that a low-cost steroid drug known as dexamethasone could significantly reduce the death rate for those sick enough to require respiratory support.

Get the news brief on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Award recognizes research on DNA data storage

Strauss and Ceze
Microsoft’s Karin Strauss and the University of Washington’s Luis Ceze have earned the 2020 Maurice Wilkes Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture. (UW Photo)

University of Washington computer science professor Luis Ceze and Microsoft principal research manager Karin Strauss have won a prestigious award from the Association of Computing Machinery for their work on DNA-based data storage systems.

Get the news brief on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

COVID-19 projections show higher death tolls ahead

Coronavirus models
This chart shows the daily U.S. death toll due to COVID-19 as a solid red line on the left, with a dotted line that traces the seven-day rolling average. To the right, the gray area shows the range of uncertainty in today’s projection from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, with a dashed trend line that stabilizes and then rises sharply. The pink area shows the range of uncertainty for Youyang Gu’s C19Pro projection, with a dotted trend line that gradually rises and then falls. (IHME / COVID19-Projections.com Graphics)

The latest projections for the course of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. suggest that there’s going to be an upswing in the daily death toll, but they differ in how that upswing will develop.

If you go by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, whose computer models have been closely watched since the early days of the pandemic, the trend appears likely to stabilize at somewhere between 650 and 750 COVID-related deaths per day nationwide through the start of September. Then the model calls for a steady rise to more than 1,400 daily deaths by October.

The institute’s best guess is that the cumulative U.S. death toll will exceed 200,000 on Oct. 1. The current U.S. death toll, according to Johns Hopkins University’s coronavirus dashboard, is just over 116,000.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

AirShield aims to reduce COVID-19 risk on airplanes

AirShield ventilation system
Teague’s AirShield design concept would give a different look to the air outlets that are typically placed above the heads of airplane passengers. (Teague Illustration)

A Seattle-based industrial design company has come up with a 3-D-printed ventilation system that it says can create invisible curtains of air around airplane passengers, reducing the risk of coronavirus infections.

Get the news brief on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

FDA ends authorization to use hydroxychloroquine

Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin
Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are the focus of clinical trials. (UW Medicine Photo)

The Food and Drug Administration today revoked its emergency authorization for two related antimalarial drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, to be used for treating COVID-19.

Citing emerging scientific data, the FDA said that the drugs were “unlikely to be effective in treating COVID-19” and that the potential benefits don’t outweigh the known risks, including the incidence of serious cardiac events. For those reasons, the legal criteria for issuing an emergency use authorization “are no longer met,” the FDA said.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

SpaceX sends Starlink and Planet satellites to orbit

SpaceX today launched dozens more of its Starlink broadband internet satellites, plus three piggyback satellites for Planet — marking the first of the company’s in-house rideshare deliveries to orbit.

Get the news brief on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Rocket Lab lofts satellites for NRO, NASA, Australia

Rocket Lab’s low-cost Electron rocket lofted a bevy of small satellites into orbit tonight for the National Reconnaissance Office, NASA and a project backed by the Australian government and the University of New South Wales Canberra Space.

Get the news brief on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Protests haven’t driven up COVID-19 cases … yet

Protest march
Thousands of protesters take part in a “March of Silence” in Seattle on Friday afternoon, the vast majority wearing masks. (GeekWire Photo / Monica Nickelsburg)

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office says it’s seeing no evidence so far that protesters are testing positive for COVID-19 at higher rates than normal after attending protests.

In an online update, mayoral spokesperson Kamaria Hightower wrote that “results are in from UW Medicine, and out of 3,000 tests, fewer than 1% were positive.”

Hightower provided further detail in a follow-up email to GeekWire. “For the free citywide testing results, less than 1% have returned positive,” she wrote. “Individuals are not required to share their history of attending demonstrations; however, a field on the appointment software form does ask your reason for attending, and some have cited their reasoning as having attended a protest.”

For the past two weeks, demonstrators have been gathering in Seattle daily to protest police brutality in the wake of the May 25 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Thousands turned out today for a “March of Silence” from Seattle’s Central District to the Beacon Hill neighborhood.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Japanese firms finish acquisition of Spaceflight

SpaceX SSO-A launch
One of Spaceflight’s most notable acccomplishments was the launch of 64 satellites aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in December 2018. (SpaceX Photo)

Japan’s Mitsui & Co., working in partnership with Yamasa Co. Ltd., has completed the acquisition of Seattle-based Spaceflight Inc. from its parent company, Spaceflight Industries.

Today’s announcement of the transaction’s completion follows up on February’s announcement of the sale for an undisclosed amount. Spaceflight Industries’ other subsidiary, BlackSky Global, isn’t part of the transaction and will continue to operate as a privately held company with offices in Seattle and Herndon, Va.

Spaceflight Industries also has a 50% share in LeoStella, a satellite manufacturing company based in Tukwila, Wash. The other half of that joint venture is owned by Thales Alenia Space, a French-Italian aerospace company.

Mitsui and Yamasa will similarly split ownership of Spaceflight Inc. as a 50-50 joint venture, operating independently with its headquarters remaining in Seattle.

The sale brings a parting of the ways for Spaceflight Inc., which focuses on arranging launch services for rideshare satellites; and BlackSky, which is building a satellite constellation for Earth observation and provides geospatial data analysis tools.

Get the full story on GeekWire.