Cosmic Log
Three employees at Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture have tested positive for coronavirus and are now in quarantine, a spokeswoman for the company says.
One case came to light on April 3, and two other cases were confirmed over the weekend, said Linda Mills, Blue Origin’s vice president of communications.
Boeing says its 14-day suspension of operations at its Puget Sound airplane factories, as well as at its maintenance site at Moses Lake in central Washington state, will be extended until further notice.
Need to get out of the house this weekend? Steve Pergam, an epidemiologist at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the University of Washington and the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, acknowledges that maintaining social distancing can leave you feeling “a little discombobulated” – but there are ways to get together safely with friends.
Pergam talked about the COVID-19 pandemic and answered questions about coping with it today during a Facebook live chat, conducted from his home study.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates may be one of the world’s richest individuals, but even he sometimes finds it hard to cope with the huge social changes brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
“I never lived through anything this dramatic,” Gates admitted today during a “Daily Homeroom” live-streamed chat with Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, a non-profit online learning venture.
That may seem ironic, given that the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been working for years on efforts to tamp down diseases, and that Gates himself issued a warning about a global virus outbreak in a prescient 2015 TED talk. But now that it’s happened, Gates isn’t immune to the outbreak’s effects.
Amazon Web Services and two tech industry groups have created a new online resource that lists dozens of digital health products, tools and services to help the health care industry cope with complications brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
TechHealthDirectory.com was launched today by the Consumer Technology Association and the American Telemedicine Association, in response to a challenge issued by the White House’s chief technology officer, Michael Kratsios. Telehealth resources are getting used more widely in the wake of the Trump administration’s moves to expand coverage for medical services that don’t require a visit to overstressed hospitals or clinics.
“The Trump administration recognizes the power of telemedicine and digital health solutions in keeping Americans healthy and safe during this unprecedented time, making it a priority to expand access for patients and doctors alike,” Kratsios said in a news release announcing the directory’s debut.
Amazon Web Services was put in charge of developing and hosting the website.
Seattle’s Infectious Disease Research Institute and a New Jersey company called Celularity have been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration to start trials of an experimental cell-based therapy for COVID-19.
The immunotherapy treatment makes use of natural killer cells, or NK cells, which play a key role in the body’s natural defense against viral infections. Celularity’s NK cell product, known as CYNK-001, is derived from placental stem cells for treating viral diseases as well as some types of blood cancers and tumors.
CYNK-001 has been safely given to patients in early trials for treating leukemia and multiple myeloma. Now the FDA has given investigational new drug clearance for its use to be extended to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus outbreak.
Discussions about future launch plans for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture have reportedly generated internal acrimony due to concerns about the coronavirus outbreak — and that, in turn, has generated reassurances about safety.
The acrimony is laid out in a report from The Verge, based on accounts from unnamed employees as well as an audio recording of a staff meeting at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash.
Employees reportedly worried that plans for a test flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceflight could put them at risk, because the operation would involve traveling to the company’s West Texas launch facility.
Boeing CEO David Calhoun says the company is preparing a voluntary layoff program that’s aimed at reducing the need for “other workforce actions” as it deals with the economic repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic.
In a letter sent to employees, Calhoun said details about how the program works will be laid out in the next three to four weeks. Speaking on background, a Boeing official said several thousand employees are expected to take the voluntary layoff package or retire.
For the past year, Boeing has been struggling with the worldwide grounding of its 737 MAX passenger jets in the wake of two catastrophic crashes. The company was targeting the middle of this year to resolve all the safety issues and win the Federal Aviation Administration’s go-ahead to put the planes back into operation.
Then the pandemic hit. Last month, reports emerged about COVID-19 cases — and at least one death — among employees at Boeing’s production facilities in the Puget Sound region. Those facilities are now in the middle of a 14-day shutdown while Boeing conducts deep-cleaning operations at the plants and assesses the wider impact of the coronavirus outbreak.
Calhoun said Boeing was “doing everything possible to keep this team intact” during the pandemic.
“But one thing is already clear: It will take time for the aerospace industry to recover from the crisis. When the world emerges from the pandemic, the size of the commercial market and the types of products and services our customers want and need will likely be different. We will need to balance the supply and demand accordingly as the industry goes through the recovery process for years to come,” he told employees.
“It’s important we start adjusting to our new reality now,” he wrote.
Who would have thought a video game could identify potential treatments for COVID-19? Researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design certainly thought so, and so far the game has produced 99 chances to win.
The game is a protein-folding puzzler called Foldit, which was created at UW’s Center for Game Science more than a decade ago and has attracted nearly more than 750,000 registered players since then.
Researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine and Bloodworks Northwest are putting out the call for people who have recovered from confirmed cases of COVID-19 to donate blood plasma as part of the quest for treatments.
More than 5,000 people in Washington state have been diagnosed with the disease caused by coronavirus over the past two and a half months, and those who have recovered have developed antibodies that are coded to fight off the virus.
For more than a century, health care providers have used transfusions of blood plasma from the survivors of infectious diseases to boost the ability of others to fight off those diseases, thanks to antibodies in the plasma. Those antibodies can also be used in the lab to create new types of medical treatments.
Scientists are hoping that the strategy will work for coronavirus as well. This week, researchers in China report that they’ve isolated several types of antibodies that seem to be “extremely effective” at blocking the virus.
The UW-Bloodworks team is among several research groups across the U.S. that are studying therapeutic applications for plasma from COVID-19 survivors.