Cosmic Log
Are you looking for educational activities to occupy the kids while you’re cooped up due to the coronavirus outbreak? One option is to make space postcards for the Club for the Future, an educational campaign created by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.
Even as Boeing begins a 14-day production shutdown in the Puget Sound due to the coronavirus outbreak, the aerospace giant is in line for a financial booster shot, thanks to provisions in the $2 trillion relief package drawn up in the Senate.
Boeing’s stock ended the trading session with a 24% gain. Airline stocks rose as well, thanks to $50 billion in promised loans and grants for passenger airlines, and another $8 billion for cargo carriers.
The Senate bill, which hasn’t yet come up for a vote and could still undergo revision, doesn’t specifically call out Boeing. But it does set aside $17 billion in loans for businesses that are considered “critical to maintaining national security.” Sources told The Washington Post that this provision was meant to cover Boeing’s needs, although other companies could be eligible for some of that aid.
That $17 billion by itself doesn’t fully address Boeing’s request for $60 billion in assistance. Other sources of funding — public as well as private — could fill the gap.
Researchers at the University of Washington are launching a study aimed at answering the question that’s on a lot of people’s minds as the coronavirus epidemic spreads through the Seattle area: How are you holding up?
The King County COVID-19 Community Study, a.k.a. KC3S, is recruiting King County residents to tell their stories. The study is scheduled to collect data through April 19.
“We want to start collecting this information now — as the COVID-19 pandemic is unfolding — about how families and communities are being impacted, and how they are adapting,” Nicole Errett, a lecturer in the UW Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, said today in a news release. “Our goal is to understand how individuals are dealing with these new and far-reaching public health response measures and document how communities are rising together to meet unprecedented challenges.”
The results could help researchers and public health officials figure out what works, and what doesn’t, for the current epidemic as well as for future crises.
The scientific sleuths who tracked down the origins of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak in the Seattle area have announced a new initiative to crack the case wide-open — and they’re signing up volunteers for self-testing at home.
So many volunteers responded in the first few hours that the Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network, or SCAN, reached its capacity for today and told people they’ll have to check back later to sign up.
“Due to limited capacity, we will not be able to test every individual,” SCAN’s principal investigator, University of Washington geneticist Jay Shendure, said in a tweet.
The project draws upon financial support from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and is getting assistance with infrastructure and logistics from Amazon Care, a healthcare program for Amazon employees in the Seattle area.
In the wake of the first reported death of an employee in Puget Sound due to COVID-19, Boeing announced today that it’s begun the process of shutting down production operations at its facilities in the Seattle area.
A 14-day suspension is due to begin on March 25, Boeing said in a news release. The suspension will also apply to maintenance activities at Moses Lake, Wash., where more than 250 grounded 737 MAX planes are parked.
The company said the suspension would provide an opportunity to assess the impact of the “accelerating spread of the coronavirus in the region.”
Less than a week after the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy organized a consortium to focus the power of artificial intelligence on addressing the coronavirus outbreak, another tech team is joining the fight — this time, armed with supercomputers and the cloud.
The COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium, organized by OSTP and IBM, has the Seattle area’s powerhouses of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft on board. Google Cloud is in on the effort as well.
There are also academic partners (MIT and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), federal agency partners (NASA and the National Science Foundation) and five Department of Energy labs (Argonne, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Sandia).
Among the resources being brought to bear is the world’s most powerful supercomputer, the Oak Ridge Summit, which packs a 200-petaflop punch.
GM and Bothell, Wash.-based Ventec Life Systems say they’re collaborating to increase production of Ventec’s next-generation ventilators, which will be sorely needed to serve waves of patients during the coronavirus outbreak.
“With GM’s help, Ventec will increase ventilator production,” Ventec CEO Chris Kiple said in a news release. “By tapping their expertise, GM is enabling us to get more ventilators to more hospitals much faster. This partnership will help save lives.”
A nationwide supply gap in ventilators has been identified as one of the urgent challenges as hospitals prepare for what could be hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 patients requiring respiratory care.
The Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers about unauthorized kits that are being marketed to test for coronavirus in the home.
“At this time, the FDA has not authorized any test that is available to purchase for testing yourself at home for COVID-19,” the agency said today in a news release.
Several companies have begun marketing test kits that let consumers to take their own samples, using nasal swabs and/or saliva collection kits, and then send them in to a lab for analysis. In some cases, the consumer is asked to provide a spit sample, as an alternative or a backup. In today’s alert, the FDA left the door open for the use of such tests.
Boeing says its CEO and its chairman will forgo all pay until the end of the year — and that’s just one of the steps the company is taking to ensure that it weathers the financial effects of the coronavirus epidemic.
Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., and two other members of Congress are sounding an alarm over the prospect of using location data to track the coronavirus outbreak.
In a letter to President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, who heads up the White House’s coronavirus task force, the three lawmakers take note of reports that Facebook, Google and other tech companies have been talking with administration officials about using data captured by smartphones and apps for public health purposes.
Although such applications may help public health officials limit the spread of COVID-19, they could also limit personal privacy, according to the letter, which was signed by DelBene as well as Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.; and Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif.