Cosmic Log
As part of its plan for a 10% workforce reduction, Boeing says that it’s moved from voluntary layoffs to involuntary layoffs and is sending out the first 6,770 notices this week. “I wish there were some other way,” Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun told employees in an email.
Ten days after Washington Gov. Jay Inslee took the Trump administration to task for failing to send enough supplies for coronavirus test kits, public health officials say the gap is closing — and the day is coming closer when anyone in the state who wants a test will truly be able to get one.
There’s still a gap: In his tweet from May 15, Inslee said the state received only 60,000 of the 580,000 nasal swabs that were promised for the month by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services. With a week to go, Washington state officials report receiving 211,800 swabs so far this month.
Charissa Fotinos, deputy chief medical officer for the Washington State Health Care Authority, said supplies are also tight for other items that have to go into every test kit — ranging from the vials of transport media into which the sample swabs are placed, to the little pads that are supposed to absorb any leakage. The items are assembled into kits in a warehouse in Tumwater, Wash., by teams that include state employees as well as National Guard soldiers and volunteers.
“Right now we do have most of those things to keep us for a couple of days of making specimen collection kits, and we’ve ordered more,” Fotinos told GeekWire. “So we’re definitely in a better place than we were two weeks ago. But I can’t tell you that the supply stream will continue as strongly as it is.”
The Washington State Department of Health is in the early stages of a massive effort to interview COVID-19 patients and track down those who might have been infected by those patients.
Contact tracing is a tried and true technique, typically used to stem the spread of infectious diseases ranging from tuberculosis to measles to gonorrhea. Now it’s part of the strategy for getting the coronavirus pandemic under control.
“Contact tracing is going to be an essential part of our reopening and containment efforts moving forward,” said Janet Baseman, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health. “We need to trace every contact possible, because every contact counts in stopping this disease.”
An analysis of 96,000 cases of COVID-19, published today in The Lancet, shows that patients who were treated with the antimalarial drugs chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine had a death rate that was roughly twice as high as for patients who weren’t.
Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center already has dozens of scientists working on infectious diseases, including COVID-19 — but the center’s president and director, Thomas Lynch, says the research community is going to have to kick things up a notch to head off future pandemics.
His prescription? Create institutions like Fred Hutch that are devoted to virology.
“I feel strongly about this,” Lynch, a veteran medical doctor and researcher who took on the Hutch’s top post less than four months ago, said today during an online conversation presented via Zoom for GeekWire members. “I think virology needs a ‘cancer centers’ program, OK?”
President Donald Trump said today that he’s taking hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug that’s being tested as a COVID-19 treatment at the University of Washington and dozens of other sites across the country.
Get the news brief on GeekWire.
The search for COVID-19 therapies has turned to an antibody that was first identified back in 2003, in a blood sample from a patient who recovered from a similar coronavirus-based disease.
Massachusetts-based Moderna’s share price — and the stock market as a whole — were lifted today by the company’s encouraging report about a coronavirus vaccine trial that got its start at Seattle’s Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute.
One of the treatments that’s been talked up by President Donald Trump for COVID-19 — a combination of the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, an antibiotic — is the subject of a nationwide study with UW Medicine playing a role.
The Phase 2b clinical trial, sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease at the National Institutes of Health, will involve 2,000 outpatients who have tested positive for COVID-19 and are in the early stages of treatment.
“We know from a number of different other kinds of infections that if antiviral treatment is going to be effective, it tends to be most effective if it’s given very early on,” Ann Collier, a professor at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine, said in a video about the study.
Alexa, do I need a coronavirus test?
That’s a query that almost certainly was not in the repertoire for Amazon’s voice assistant six months ago. But the ins and outs of the coronavirus outbreak are changing Alexa’s work habits, said Manoj Sindhwani, Amazon’s vice president of Alexa Speech.
“We’re certainly seeing certain shifts,” Sindhwani told GeekWire this week. “You see a lot of people asking about COVID-19. People are not asking about ‘How long will it take for me to get to work.’ ”