Cosmic Log
Billionaire Elon Musk knows his stuff when it comes to rockets or electric cars. But does that translate into epidemiological expertise? Not completely, according to Washington state’s coronavirus trackers.
Musk weighed in today with a Twitter response to a GeekWire story that focused on Washington’s rising number of COVID-19 cases as well as Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
Tech leaders typically use their TED talks to sketch out an optimistic vision of the future, but today Bill Gates used his to warn about a rough autumn ahead due to the continuing coronavirus pandemic.
“There’s good progress … but nothing that would fundamentally alter the fact that this fall in the United States could be quite bad, and that’s worse than I would have predicted a month ago,” he told moderator Chris Anderson during a live-streamed TED2020 Q&A.
Although Gates didn’t mention President Donald Trump by name, he faulted a lack of American leadership for making things worse.
“We need leadership in terms of admitting that we’ve still got a huge problem here, and not turning that into almost a political thing,” he said. “You know, ‘Isn’t it brilliant, what we did?’ No, it’s not brilliant. … We need a leader who keeps us up to date, is realistic, and shows us the right behavior as well as driving the innovation track.”
As concerns about a resurgence of the coronavirus outbreak are widening, so is the reach of the COVID-19 tracking platform created by Sentinel Healthcare, a Seattle-based medical data startup.
The app-based platform was rolled out three months ago, just as the pandemic was taking hold, and it wasn’t long before it was picked up by UT Health Austin in Texas to keep track of the symptoms of quarantined patients.
“We’ve now contact-traced and diagnosed many, many patients,” said Sentinel Healthcare CEO Nirav Shah, a neurologist and the former stroke director at Swedish Hospital in Seattle.
As of this week, about 1,600 of the app’s users in Texas have been diagnosed with COVID-19, triggering contact tracing for more than 4,000 people, Shah told GeekWire.
Shah said Sentinel Monitor started registering a spike in the number of cases being diagnosed about two weeks ago. “That ended up being borne out,” he said. “Looking back over the past 10 days … we’ve seen almost a tripling or quadrupling of daily case counts.”
Now Sentinel will be putting its platform to the test closer to home.
Today the company announced a partnership with Era Living, which runs eight retirement communities in the Seattle area. Sentinel will support Era Living in testing and monitoring its more than 900 employees and 1,300 residents for COVID-19. Seattle-based Transpara Health will provide logistical and operational support.
A $40.5 million collaborative research center headquartered at Seattle’s Allen Institute aims to create high-resolution maps of brains ravaged by Alzheimer’s disease, to trace new paths to early diagnosis and treatment.
The center will draw upon expertise not only at the institute, but also at UW Medicine and Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. Funding for the next five years comes from the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health.
The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has added mask-on and mask-off options to its computer-based projections for the course of the coronavirus pandemic — and estimates that 33,000 lives could be saved in the U.S. between now and October if masks are required.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has shut down a clinical trial to see if a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin can prevent hospitalization and death due to COVID-19.
The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation announced two contributions to support people affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in Washington state, adding up to $2.2 million.
Scientists from Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington say the search for COVID-19 treatments should widen its focus from hospitalized patients to people who are just starting to experience symptoms.
They’re calling for a shift in strategy in an article published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases. “A golden opportunity to intervene early is being missed,” they write.
There’s already been some success in the hunt for drugs that can treat COVID-19. Preliminary results suggest that an experimental antiviral drug called remdesivir can reduce the recovery time for hospitalized patients, while a low-cost steroid known as dexamethasone can reduce the death rate among patients who experience respiratory distress.
But the researchers from the Seattle area, which was ground zero for America’s coronavirus outbreak, say the hunt should be expanded beyond hospitals.
A study involving thousands of COVID-19 patients in Britain suggests that a low-cost steroid drug known as dexamethasone could significantly reduce the death rate for those sick enough to require respiratory support.
The latest projections for the course of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. suggest that there’s going to be an upswing in the daily death toll, but they differ in how that upswing will develop.
If you go by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, whose computer models have been closely watched since the early days of the pandemic, the trend appears likely to stabilize at somewhere between 650 and 750 COVID-related deaths per day nationwide through the start of September. Then the model calls for a steady rise to more than 1,400 daily deaths by October.
The institute’s best guess is that the cumulative U.S. death toll will exceed 200,000 on Oct. 1. The current U.S. death toll, according to Johns Hopkins University’s coronavirus dashboard, is just over 116,000.