UW Medicine is implementing its plan to deal with a surge of patients with COVID-19 respiratory symptoms, including the erection of tents outside hospital emergency departments for initial screening.
The surge plan should be fully in place by April 1, the University of Washington’s medical system said today in a news release. UW Medicine manages four hospitals in the Seattle area, including Harborview Medical Center, Valley Medical Center, UW Medical Center – Montlake and UW Medical Center – Northwest.
Apptentive employees who are working from home in Seattle are captured in a photo of a recent video chat. (Photo courtesy of Apptentive)
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 Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network will rely on at-home testing for a wide spectrum of Seattle-area residents. (Photo via SCAN / Seattle-King County Public Health)
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.
Ventec Life Systems’ VOCSN device combines ventilation, oxygen, cough assistance, suction and a nebulizer function. (Ventec via YouTube)
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.
Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash.,, says privacy concerns have to be considered along with public health concerns. (DelBene.House.gov Photo)
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.
Trevor Bedford, an epidemiologist at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, has outlined a three-part strategy for knocking down the coronavirus outbreak. (Fred Hutch Photo)
A Seattle epidemiologist who warned about the threat posed by novel coronavirus when it was a novelty now says he sees a path to stopping the pandemic.
But it’ll take more than just staying at home for a couple of weeks, Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center said today in a series of tweets.
“This is the Apollo program of our times,” Bedford wrote.
Bedford, who analyzed genetic data to figure out that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus had been spreading stealthily in the U.S. for six weeks, began with the standard advice on social distancing.
Although social distancing can “flatten the curve,” a recently published study found that the strategy isn’t likely to bring an end to the outbreak by itself. There’s a good chance that the outbreak would rebound once the restrictions were relaxed.
The study, led by researchers at Imperial College London, concluded that stringent social distancing would have to be maintained until a vaccine is developed – which could take 18 months or more. And the financial cost of maintaining the strategy that long may be unacceptably steep.
“This is the catch-22 as presented by the report,” Bedford tweeted.
Is there a way out? “I have hope that we can solve this thing by doing traditional shoe leather epidemiology of case finding and isolation, but at scale, using modern technology,” Bedford said.
UW Medicine patients are getting checked for coronavirus at a drive-through station set up in a hospital clinic’s parking lot.
A similar station was created a couple of weeks ago inside a parking garage at UW Medical Center Northwest, to test employees of the University of Washington’s medical system. The by-appointment-only station was set up near the original site, at the hospital’s outpatient clinic, and began serving high-risk patients on March 16.
“We have already started to do testing in the hospital emergency department and some clinics. But there are a number of our patients who may not be appropriate for sending in to those environments, to minimize the risk of infection to themselves, and perhaps to others,” Thomas Hei, director of outpatient services for UW Medical Center, explained in a UW video about the operation.
Patients can drive to a spot where they roll down the window and have nasal swab samples taken without getting out of the car. The process takes only a few minutes. Samples are then sent to the lab for processing, with results available within a couple of days.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee discusses the state’s response to the coronavirus outbreak during a bill-signing ceremony. (King County TV via YouTube)
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee says state officials are making joint preparations with the Defense Department to get more hospital beds and medical supplies ready for an expected rise in coronavirus cases.
During an Olympia news briefing, Inslee said he had a “very positive discussion” with Defense Secretary Mark Esper today about a coordinated response. “I would predict that we’re going to be getting real help from the Department of Defense, and that that will be necessary,” he told reporters.
Inslee said the Pentagon’s help will include more than 1,000 hospital beds that are coming in via the National Guard. “There are thousands [of beds] that we are likely to need,” the governor said.
Over the past week, Inslee has put a wide range of emergency measures into place to slow the spread of the outbreak, including closures of sit-down restaurants, bars and schools as well as a ban on sports and entertainment events and on social gatherings of more than 50 people. What’s more, many hospitals have postponed elective procedures to preserve capacity for COVID-19 cases.
Despite all those measures, public health officials worry that a rapid rise in cases requiring hospitalization could overwhelm the state’s medical facilities. As of today, more than 1,000 confirmed coronavirus cases have been reported in Washington, which is nearly four times what the count was a week ago.
Seattle’s tech community is well-represented in the first group of participants to get their shots in the first U.S. clinical trial of a vaccine for coronavirus.
The first volunteer in line was Jennifer Haller, a veteran of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch space venture. Haller now serves as operations manager for Attunely, a Seattle startup that uses machine learning to help debt collection agencies improve their recovery strategies.
“I’m doing great,” Haller told GeekWire from her home after she got her injection at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Research Institute in Seattle. “My arm isn’t sore at all, so it’s even better than a flu shot.”
Attunely’s founder and CEO, Scott Ferris, was supportive of Haller’s participation. “We are very proud of her!” he told GeekWire in an email.
The logo for the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, or CORD-19, is a stylized coronavirus. (CORD-19 Graphic)
A consortium of tech leaders — including Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s charity — today unveiled an AI-enabled database that’s meant to give researchers quicker, surer access to resources relating to coronavirus and how to stop it.
The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, or CORD-19, was created in response to a request from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. It takes advantage of AI tools to organize more than 24,000 articles about the COVID-19 disease and the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes it.
“We think that AI has an important part to play in solving this problem,” said Doug Raymond, general manager for the Semantic Scholar academic search engine at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI2.
AI2’s CEO, Oren Etzioni, said his team leapt at the opportunity to participate in CORD-19. “We hesitated all of negative-two seconds,” he joked.
