Tag: Coronavirus

Categories
GeekWire

Trump mulls travel bans for U.S. virus hotspots

President Donald Trump discusses the coronavirus outbreak at a White House press briefing. (Global News via YouTube)

In response to the coronavirus outbreak, restrictions on European travel will be extended to Britain and Ireland on March 16 – and President Donald Trump said today that limits on travel from domestic hotspots such as the Seattle area were under consideration as well.

During a White House briefing on the administration’s response to the outbreak, Trump was asked whether he was thinking about domestic travel limitations.

“Specifically from certain areas, yes, we are,” the president replied. “We’re working with the states, and we are considering other restrictions.”

Seattle and the surrounding area in King County have been among the hottest hotspots in the early phases of the U.S. epidemic. As of March 13, King County accounted for about a quarter of the nation’s confirmed coronavirus cases, and nearly two-thirds of deaths.

Tara Lee, communications director for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, said the topic of domestic travel restrictions hasn’t come up.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

 

Categories
GeekWire

White House lays out its COVID-19 testing plan

Coronavirus press conference
Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, shows a flowchart for a website that would screen online visitors for COVID-19 testing, with President Donald Trump at her side. (White House via YouTube)

The Trump administration says it will set up a nationwide screening and testing system for coronavirus that relies upon online self-screening and drive-through sampling stations in store parking lots.

Lots of details about the system have yet to be fleshed out.

For example, the website that will take Americans through the screening process hasn’t yet been finished. Hundreds of parking-lot stations will have to be set up. And it could be challenging to ramp up operations, not only for test-kit production but also for other supplies and personnel.

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 outbreak continues to widen. More than 2,100 confirmed cases have been identified in the U.S., including 568 in Washington state. Thirty-two of the nearly 50 U.S. deaths recorded so far have occurred in King County.

Epidemiologists say it’s likely that tens of thousands of Americans, if not hundreds of thousands, have the virus but have not been tested. They expect the death toll to rise as well.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Advisers ask for virus research to be open for AI

CDC Emergency Operations Center
Staff members at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention support the COVID-19 response in the CDC’s Emergency Operations Center. (CDC Photo)

Science advisers for the White House and 11 other national governments are asking publishers around the world to provide free and open access to all research relating to coronaviruses.

Get the news brief on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

How much do travel bans help in a pandemic?

Drive-through testing
UW Medicine nurses get set to check fellow employees at a coronavirus testing station in a parking garage at University of Washington Medical Center Northwest. (UW Medicine Photo / Katie Chen)

A fresh analysis of the numbers behind the coronavirus outbreak suggests that it’s reached the point where more intensive testing and social distancing will help far more than bans on travel.

Travel restrictions have come to the fore over the past day or so: During an address on March 11, President Donald Trump announced that he was banning most travel by non-U.S. residents coming from 26 European countries, including Germany and France but not including Britain and Ireland.

Today, Trump said he’d also consider banning domestic travel to places like Washington state and California “if an area gets too hot.”

Such strategies led Trevor Bedford, an epidemiologist at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, to run the numbers for likely infections from abroad as well as from community transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Amazon, Gates Foundation boost COVID-19 testing

A lab worker at the University of Washington Virology Lab gets a virus sample ready for testing. Details of the package have been obscured to ensure privacy protection. (UW Medicine via YouTube)

Amazon Care is offering assistance to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for a plan to deliver coronavirus test kits to Seattle homes, CNBC reports.

The plan as described hints at a grand convergence involving two major players on Seattle’s tech scene, plus the University of Washington and the Seattle Flu Study.

Amazon Care is an on-demand healthcare clinic that’s open on a pilot basis to Seattle-area Amazon employees and their families. CNBC quoted unnamed sources as saying Amazon has offered to come up with a plan to deliver the test kits, which include nasal swabs to take samples, at no cost.

In an email to GeekWire, an Amazon spokesperson said “we’re in discussions with leaders in public health about how we can help” – but didn’t provide further details.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

White House seeks tech support on virus info

White House Matrix
The White House is seeking help from tech industry leaders to combat the spread of the coronavirus, as well as the spread of disinformation about it. (White House / Pho.to / GeekWire Graphic)

The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy and other federal agencies today met with Amazon, Microsoft and other tech industry leaders to kick off a campaign aimed at getting the best information about coronavirus out to researchers and the general public.

Get the news brief on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

How red tape tripped up coronavirus sleuths

Seattle Flu Study
The Seattle Flu Study set up kiosks to take nasal swab samples and gather information about the spread of infectious diseases. (University of Washington Photo)

Regulators have blocked the Seattle Flu Study’s guerrilla effort to trace the spread of novel coronavirus, citing ethical concerns, but leaders of the effort say they’re working out an alternate path to continue their investigation.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

How to cope with Seattle’s COVID-19 outbreak

Snowpocalypse
Snowpocalypse! A skier makes his way up a street in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood after a winter storm in February 2019. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)

Fresh projections suggest that 1,100 people in Washington state have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, and that the outbreak could be due for a rapid rise. What to do about it? One piece of advice is to distance yourself from others — and data gathered during last year’s “Snowpocalypse” provides evidence that the strategy works.

The potential risk, and the potential remedy, came into the spotlight today thanks to comments made by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee as well as by researchers who are using the Seattle Flu Study to track the spread of coronavirus.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Hospital does drive-through coronavirus testing

Drive-through testing
A nurse takes samples during a drive-through coronavirus test. (UW Medicine Photo)

A drive-through coronavirus testing site set up at a University of Washington hospital could serve as the model for more such facilities around the Seattle area — and perhaps around the country.

For now, the site in the parking garage of UW Medical Center Northwest is available only by appointment for hospital employees.

“To date, more than 175 staff, faculty and trainees have requested testing, and as of end of day Sunday, 94 have been tested for both flu and COVID-19,” Seth Cohen, the hospital’s medical director of infection prevention and employee health, told GeekWire today in an email.

Cohen said that’s just the start. “We will continue to expand our capacity at this location, and we hope to set up additional locations in the city to improve access to our staff,” he said.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Gates Foundation to boost COVID-19 detection

Bill Gates
Bill Gates at the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2020 annual meeting in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)

By Todd Bishop and Alan Boyle

A report says the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is preparing to fund at-home testing kits for the novel coronavirus in Seattle.

However, the Gates Foundation cautions that the plans aren’t final.

The kits, to be available in the “coming weeks,” would quickly identify hot spots where the disease is spreading, according to The Seattle Times. The newspaper quotes Scott Dowell, leader of coronavirus response at the Gates Foundation, as saying it the initiative “has enormous potential to turn the tide of the epidemic.”

Dowell cautions in the story, however, that there are many details to work out, and a launch date hasn’t been set.

In a statement to GeekWire, the Gates Foundation said, “The Seattle Times article today addressed the potential to adapt the Seattle Flu Study to support local public health agencies in the greater Seattle area in detecting COVID-19.  Our team has and will continue to actively explore ways that we can contribute to local response through the application of the study. While we’re working quickly with our partners to determine what’s possible, details of this support have not yet been finalized.”

Get the full story on GeekWire.