Tag: Coronavirus

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CVS and UPS team up for drone deliveries

UPS drone
A UPS drone made by Matternet carries a package with a CVS pharmacy in the background. (UPS Photo)

UPS’ drone subsidiary and the CVS pharmacy chain say they’ll start delivering prescription medicines to the nation’s largest retirement community next month, using Matternet’s M2 drone delivery system.

The service, approved by the Federal Aviation Administration under Part 107 rules, will be available for The Villages, a community in central Florida that’s home to more than 135,000 residents. UPS Flight Forward and CVS will be authorized to operate through the coronavirus pandemic and explore continuing needs as they arise once the pandemic fades.

Physical distancing and restrictions on retail business, enacted in response to the pandemic, are bringing more attention to the potential for drone deliveries.

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Researchers revise recommendations for reopening

The projected dates for relaxing social distancing policies has slipped later, on average, since Friday’s projection. Click on the image for a larger version. (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Graphic)

The latest computer projections from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation deliver a double dose of discouragement about the course of the coronavirus outbreak, especially for those in the institute’s home state.

IHME’s April 22 assessment estimates that conditions could be acceptable for Washington state to loosen its current social distancing restrictions on May 28 — which is 10 days later than the April 17 estimate. Moreover, that assessment assumes that public health officials will have adequate resources for testing patients, conducting contact tracing and isolating those who become infected — which is not assured.

The other discouraging word is that the projected U.S. death toll through Aug. 4 has been raised, from 60,308 on April 17 to 67,641 on April 22. There’s a wide interval of uncertainty to that figure: The institute said it could end up as low as 45,375 or as high as 124,120. (The actual death toll was already nearly beyond that lower bound when IHME made its projection.)

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UW to conduct clinical trial for hydroxychloroquine

The University of Washington School of Medicine is looking for people who have tested positive for COVID-19 to participate in a clinical trial aimed at finding out whether a controversial drug called hydroxychloroquine can keep them from having to be hospitalized.

Word of UW Medicine’s clinical trial comes after reports about a study at Veterans Health Administration medical centers in which COVID-19 patients who took hydroxychloroquine, which is typically used to treat malaria and autoimmune disease, died at higher rates than those who didn’t take the drug.

Today, the Food and Drug Administration warned that hydroxychloroquine carries “known risks” of potentially deadly heart complications — and said the drug should be used in supervised settings such as clinical trials, where the risks can be better studied and mitigated.

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Software tools for COVID-19 research go viral

COVID-19 study connections
This graph charts the connections that link dozens of research studies about coronavirus and related subjects. (Covidgraph.org)

One month after the debut of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, or CORD-19, the database of coronavirus-related research papers has doubled in size – and has given rise to more than a dozen software tools to channel the hundreds of studies that are being published every day about the pandemic.

In a roundup published on the ArXiv preprint server this week, researchers from Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft Research and other partners in the project say CORD-19’s collection has risen from about 28,000 papers to more than 52,000. Every day, several hundred more papers are being published, in peer-reviewed journals and on preprint servers such as BioRxiv and MedRxiv.

CORD-19 aims to make sense of them all, using the Semantic Scholar academic search engine developed by the Allen Institute for AI, also known as AI2.

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Boeing reorganizes for ‘post-pandemic’ era

Greg Smith
Greg Smith is Boeing’s chief financial officer and executive vice president of Enterprise Performance & Strategy. (Boeing Photo)

Boeing has put its chief financial officer in charge of a newly formed group called Enterprise Operations, Finance & Strategy, as part of a reorganization aimed at streamlining the company’s top leadership and preparing for what Boeing calls “the post-pandemic industry footprint.”

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More coronavirus testing supplies sought

Inslee and Pence
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee meets Vice President Mike Pence’s handshake with an “elbow bump” during a March news conference at Camp Murray, Wash. (C-Span Video)

In a strongly worded letter, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee told Vice President Mike Pence today that the state has “nowhere near” the coronavirus testing capability needed to begin initiating pandemic recovery plans.

Inslee requested federal assistance to boost that capability through a robust national testing system.

The governor said state officials have been trying to procure the supplies for 2.5 million sample collection kits — including swabs, viral transport media and reagents. “We are nowhere near that today,” he wrote.

Charissa Fotinos, deputy chief medical officer at the Washington State Health Care Authority, told journalists during a follow-up teleconference that “we should have, by early next week, 30,000 kits that can be deployed across the state.”

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UW calls a halt to use of questionable test kits

Sample collection kits
Collection kits were made by Lingen Precision Medical Products in Shanghai. (Lingen Photo via Alibaba)

The University of Washington School of Medicine has alerted Seattle-King County public health officials and other partners to stop using a donated supply of specimen collection kits for coronavirus testing, due to quality control concerns.

In response, the Washington State Department of Health issued a recall order for about 12,000 of the Chinese-made kits, which were sent to local health jurisdictions, tribal nations and its partners across the state.

Concerns were raised on April 17 after UW Medicine determined that some of the kits, which were airlifted from Shanghai a couple of weeks ago with logistical assistance from Amazon, showed signs of contamination.

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Microsoft creates Plasma Bot to fight COVID-19

Antibodies in lab
Polyclonal hyperimmune globulin treatments, also known as H-Ig, are manufactured by pooling together multiple plasma donations to concentrate antibodies. (Takeda Photo)

Microsoft is teaming up with the world’s leading plasma companies to streamline the process of developing an antibody-based therapy for COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus.

The Seattle-area software giant’s contribution takes the form of an app called the CoVIg-19 Plasma Bot, a self-screening tool that puts people who have recovered from COVID-19 in touch with plasma collection centers across the United States. The effort could lead to a new type of therapy for the disease, known as polyclonal hyperimmune globulin or H-Ig.

Blood plasma from survivors of other types of infectious disease is known to have a therapeutic effect, thanks to the antibodies that those survivors developed in the course of fighting off pathogens. Early indications suggest that convalescent plasma could have a beneficial effect for COVID-19 patients as well, and clinical trials are underway to confirm those results.

H-Ig takes the concept a step further by pooling multiple plasma donations, concentrating the antibodies and purifying the solution. The purification process minimizes the risk of contamination, and because the medicine is concentrated, it can be delivered in lower volumes and less time. H-Ig medications also have a longer shelf life than plasma, which allows for easier storage and shipping.

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How much longer should COVID-19 shutdowns last?

Reopening map
A color-coded map from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation shows when states are projected to reach thresholds for easing social distancing restrictions. (IHME Graphic)

The University of Washington epidemiologists who set up a widely watched model projecting the future course of the coronavirus outbreak have translated those projections into suggested time frames for loosening strict shelter-at-home orders across the country.

For Washington state, that time frame is the week of May 18, which is two weeks longer than the current expiration date for Gov. Jay Inslee’s “Stay Home, Stay Healthy” order.

Based on the current projections from UW’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, four states — Montana, Vermont, West Virginia and Hawaii — could loosen their restrictions as early as the week of May 4. Other states, ranging from Massachusetts and North Dakota to Arizona, may have to wait until the week of June 8 or later.

Those projected dates could shift, of course, depending on how the institute tweaks its models, which it’s done repeatedly over the past month. And in the end, it’s up to the nation’s governors, not researchers, to determine how strict their social distancing policies are.

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Volunteers wanted for virus-tracking study

Michael Boeckh
Michael Boeckh heads the Infectious Disease Sciences Program at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. (Fred Hutch News Service Photo / Robert Hood)c

Are you at risk of getting COVID-19? You may be just the kind of person researchers at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is looking for, to help them learn how the virus spreads and whether someone who has weathered the disease can be re-infected.

The longitudinal research project, known as CovidWatch, could contribute to the development of vaccines and other methods to help the body mount a safe and effective immune response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

CovidWatch joins other outbreak-fighting efforts in which Fred Hutch’s researchers play a role, including the Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network and NextTrace.

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