There are 70 coronavirus vaccines in development globally, with three candidates already being tested in human trials, according to the World Health Organization, as drugmakers race to find a cure for the deadly pathogen. From a report: The furthest along in the clinical process is an experimental vaccine developed by Hong Kong-listed CanSino Biologics and the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology, which is in phase 2. The other two being tested in humans are treatments developed separately by U.S. drugmakers Moderna and Inovio Pharmaceuticals, according to a WHO document. Progress is occurring at unprecedented speed in developing vaccines as the infectious pathogen looks unlikely to be stamped out through containment measures alone. The drug industry is hoping to compress the time it takes to get a vaccine to market -- usually about 10 to 15 years -- to within the next year.

The UK public will soon be able to find out if they may have been in the vicinity of people unwell with coronavirus via a new contact-tracing app, Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has said. From a report: At No 10's daily press conference on Sunday, Hancock said the NHS app would allow people to report their symptoms, and then the app would anonymously alert other app users that had been in contact with that person in recent days. The Guardian reported last week that the app, developed by NHSX -- the health service's digital transformation arm -- with academic and industry partners, is in the advanced stages of evaluation and is weeks away from being ready to be deployed. About 60% of the adult population would need to sign up and engage with the app by registering their symptoms or positive test results for it to be effective. Their proximity to other users would be logged, and they would follow advice given in alerts to self-isolate -- even in cases where they were not aware of having been in contact with someone infected.

A team in Colombia is to test a ventilator made with a Raspberry Pi computer and easy-to-source parts. From a report: The design and computer code were posted online in March by a man in California, who had no prior experience at creating medical equipment. Marco Mascorro, a robotics engineer, said he built the ventilator because knew the machines were in high demand to treat Covid-19. His post prompted a flood of feedback from healthcare workers. He has used the advice to make improvements. "I am a true believer that technology can solve a lot of the problems we have right now specifically in this pandemic," he told the BBC. The Colombian team said the design was important for their South American country because parts for traditional models could be hard to obtain. By contrast, Mr Mascorro's design uses only easy-to-find parts -- for example, the valves it employs can commonly be found at car and plumbing supply stores. The machine is set to be put through a fast-tracked round of tests at two institutions in Bogota -- the University Hospital of the Pontifical Xavierian University and Los Andes University.

Yahoo News shares an encouraging report from former Newsweek correspondent Andrew Romano: Until very recently, nationwide data about how many COVID-19 patients are currently receiving treatment in hospitals was hard to come by. It's still incomplete and inconsistent. But on April 7, researchers at the University of Minnesota launched the U.S. COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project, which is just what it sounds like: the first effort to capture, track, visualize and compare daily data on the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations from the 37 state departments of health that are reporting this information (so far).

The reason this information is so valuable is simple. Because hospitalization typically occurs a week or so after infection, it's less of a lagging indicator than the death count (which trails by two to two and a half weeks) and more directly tied to the trajectory of the epidemic than the testing-dependent case count. It's also a measure of the most pressing public health concern of all: how close we are to exceeding the capacity of our hospital system, which can make COVID-19 much deadlier than it would otherwise be.

Which brings us to New York and California. Chart each state's hospitalization data over the last seven days or so, and two different narratives emerge. Both are encouraging...

On Wednesday, New York's daily death count hit an all-time high: 799. But that reflects infections from weeks ago, before the state's lockdown started. The number of people testing positive stayed relatively flat. Meanwhile, there were fewer new hospitalizations — just 200 — than on any day since March 18. It wasn't a blip. The amount of new daily hospitalizations has been declining since last Thursday: from 1,427 on April 2 to 1,095 on April 3 to 656 on April 6 to 200 on April 8. (There are some questions about inconsistencies between the data from New York state and New York City, but the trend line is the same.) Previously, the total current number of coronavirus patients in New York hospitals had been increasing by at least 20 percent a day for weeks. Now the overall number of hospitalizations is barely increasing at all...

The good news in New York is that the state might be peaking now. The good news in California is that the state might not peak for a long time — but its path to that peak will be so incremental, its curve so flat, that coronavirus patients will never come close to overwhelming the hospital system.
The numbers do look encouraging. (Click on the "Currently Hospitalized" rectangle and then select each state's two-letter abbreviation from the dropdown menu.) In fact, the San Francisco Bay Area recorded its fourth day of declining ICU patients on Saturday. "Home-sheltering efforts may well be paying off, at least according to the number of hospitalizations and patients in ICU," reports the Bay Area Newsgroup.

And SFGate noted Friday that the statewide hospitalization figures "have also been relatively flat in recent days, with Governor Gavin Newsom expressing guarded optimism after the number of individuals in intensive care units decreased Thursday."

This week the Washington Post asked their "business of health care" reporter to explain the true status in the scientific community of hydroxychloroquine, an already-approved malaria drug also used to control inflammation in lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients.

"There is no clear evidence that the drugs work against the coronavirus," he writes, "despite their use by hospitals and doctors in the United States and other countries since the outbreak began." Their antiviral properties have been proved in test tubes, but rigorous clinical trials to test their effectiveness in humans have not been completed. Limited studies on coronavirus patients have been published by researchers in France and China, but their extremely small size and other problems prevented them from being statistically significant. The French study included a combination of hydroxychloroquine with the antibiotic azithromycin that showed benefit in six patients... Another study in 11 patients in France showed no evidence the regimen works. A Chinese study also showed no benefit over the standard course of treatment.

Mainstream scientists caution against using the drugs without more evidence they are effective... The dangerous side effects of the drugs are much better known. Most seriously, the drugs can trigger arrhythmia, which can lead to a fatal heart attack in patients with cardiovascular disease or who are taking certain drugs, including anti-depression medications. Doctors recommend screening with an electrocardiogram to prevent the drug from being given to the 1 percent of patients at the greatest risk of a cardiac event. The drugs also can cause vision loss called retinopathy with long-term use, and chloroquine has been associated with psychosis...

As the coronavirus has spread from China across the world and to the United States, the dire reality is that there is no vaccine and no approved drug available to treat the serious respiratory symptoms that are claiming thousand of lives.
Long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool shares doubts raised about that small French study, as even its publisher now acknowledges it "does not meet" their own expected standards.

The Post does note that multiple trials are "ongoing" (though six different research centers testing the drug told CNN it would be "months" before results were known). But the Post adds that already "public and political interest has caused runs, hoarding and severe shortages in recent weeks."

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: U.S. deaths due to the coronavirus surpassed 20,000 on Saturday, the highest reported number in the world, according to a Reuters tally, although there are signs the pandemic might be nearing a peak. Italy has the second most reported deaths at 19,468 and Spain is in third place with 16,353.

The United States has five times the population of Italy and nearly seven times the population of Spain.

The United States has seen its highest death tolls to date in the epidemic with roughly 2,000 deaths a day reported for the last four days in a row.
While America has 4.3% of the world's population, it appears to have nearly 20% of the world's 100,000 confirmed fatalities from COVID-19. [Update: This comparison might be skewed by countries underreporting their fatalities.] Long-time blogger Jason Kottke notes the virus is now causing more deaths per day in the U.S. than any other cause, including heart disease and cancer.

But earlier this week Kottke also shared graphs from six different countries visualizing positive new statistics from the Imperial College team suggesting social distancing has worked in 11 European countries they analyzed.

"We estimate that interventions across all 11 countries will have averted 59,000 deaths up to 31 March," the researchers write, adding "Many more deaths will be averted through ensuring that interventions remain in place until transmission drops to low levels."

RadioShack's former CEO tells Canada's National Post newspaper the surprising story of what happened after he left the company in 2004: When it came, rather than being crestfallen, he felt liberated, and free to pursue an "itch" that he had always felt the need to scratch. So he applied to medical school at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario... "I don't miss being a CEO one bit," Levy says. "I enjoyed it immensely, when I was doing it. But do I enjoy what I am doing now? The answer is, immensely."

Brian Levy, MD, was talking about his unusual career path with a reporter, via a socially-distanced phone call, on an April afternoon after wrapping up an overnight shift in the Emergency Department at Brampton Civic Hospital, northwest of Toronto. Brampton Civic is among the busiest emergency departments in Canada. The former CEO initially fancied becoming a psychiatrist, given all his years managing people, but he realized early on in medical school that he was more of a generalist, not to mention a Type-A, adrenaline-junky.

"Emergency medicine is a perfect fit for my personality," he says.
The article notes Levy's department "is eerily quiet, preparing for an expected surge in COVID-19 cases" -- and that in his spare time he's still an electronics geek.

"I am just one of those people who was very fortunate, where things worked out, and where I could do not just do one thing I really enjoyed in life, but two."

The New York Post reports that a COVID-19 vaccine "may be six months away, according to a researcher leading a team of scientists in England." "I think there's a high chance that it will work based on other things that we have done with this type of vaccine," Sarah Gilbert, a professor of virology at Oxford told The Times of London. "It's not just a hunch and as every week goes by we have more data to look at. I would go for 80 percent, that's my personal view."
Gilbert added that if they can find places that haven't imposed a lockdown, "we will get our efficacy results very quickly."

America and Israel have also reported encouraging progress on a vaccine. And in the Netherlands and Australia, researchers are testing the effectiveness of the BCG tuberculosis vaccine developed in the 1920s (with more tests being scheduled for Africa, and experiments in the U.K.) UPI reports researchers in the Netherlands "have started recruiting 1,000 healthcare workers, who are at high risk for COVID-19, in eight hospitals who will receive either the BCG vaccine or a placebo."

The Times of London reports that the U.K. government "signalled that it would be willing to fund the manufacture of millions of doses in advance" if the results of professor Gilbert's research looked promising. "This would allow it to be available immediately to the public if it were proven to work.

"With ministers struggling to find a strategy to exit the lockdown, long-term hopes of a return to normality rely on a vaccine."

hackingbear writes: After testing blood from 500 residents for antibodies to the COVID-19 virus in the town of Gangelt, which is a hot spot of the pandemic in Germany, scientists at a nearby university say they have determined that 14% have been infected and are therefore "immune." Some of those people would have had no symptoms at all. Scientists found that 2% of residents were actively infected by the coronavirus and a total of 14% had antibodies, indicating a prior infection. "From the result of their blood survey, the German team estimated the death rate in the municipality at 0.37% overall, a figure significantly lower than what's shown on a dashboard maintained by Johns Hopkins, where the death rate in Germany among reported cases is 2%," reports MIT Technology Review. In contrast, the 2019-2020 seasonal flu has infected up to 17% of U.S. population and killed ~0.1% of those infected. Since first emerged in late December, or purportedly as early as late November, the COVID-19 has infected over 1.6 million people and killed over 100,000.

wiredmikey writes from a report via SecurityWeek: Authorities in Italy are using Drones equipped with heat sensors to take the temperature of citizens and send the information to a drone operator, who has a thermal map on his hand-held screen -- shining orange and purple blobs. The hovering drone emits a mechanical buzz reminiscent of a wasp and shouts down instructions in a tinny voice. "Attention! You are in a prohibited area. Get out immediately," commands the drone, about the size of a loaf of bread. "Violations of the regulations result in administrative and criminal penalties," the drone says. "Once a person's temperature is read by the drone, you must still stop that person and measure their temperature with a normal thermometer," Matteo Copia, a police commander, said. Copia says the local police force has received new powers that allow it to check people's temperature without their knowledge or permission.

The number of deaths linked to the coronavirus worldwide has passed 100,000 as known infections surged past 1.6 million, according to data collected by The New York Times. From a report: At least 177 countries have reported cases. The most recent was war-torn Yemen, which reported its first coronavirus case on Friday. The death toll in the United States has surpassed that of Spain, with almost 18,000 fatalities related to the virus reported by Friday afternoon. Only Italy has reported more deaths. Although some governments are considering easing restrictions, lockdowns are being extended across much of the world heading into the Easter weekend, and policing measures stepped up. Tokyo's governor parted ways with Japan's national government by requesting the closure of a range of businesses -- including nightclubs, karaoke bars, gyms and movie theaters -- during a state of emergency declared this week.

Engineering teams at Apple and Google have banded together to create a decentralized contact tracing tool that will help individuals determine whether they have been exposed to someone with COVID-19. From a report: Contact tracing is a useful tool that helps public health authorities track the spread of the disease and inform the potentially exposed so that they can get tested. It does this by identifying and 'following up with' people who have come into contact with a COVID-19 affected person. The first phase of the project is an API that public health agencies can integrate into their own apps. The next phase is a system level contact tracing system that will work across iOS and Android devices on an opt-in basis. The system uses on-board radios on your device to transmit an anonymous ID over short ranges -- using Bluetooth beaconing. Servers relay your last 14 days of rotating IDs to other devices which search for a match. A match is determined based on a threshold of time spent and distance maintained between two devices.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A global group of scientists and lawyers announced their efforts to make their intellectual property free for use by others working on coronavirus pandemic relief efforts -- and urged others to do the same -- as part of the "Open Covid Pledge." Mozilla, Creative Commons, and Intel are among the founding members of this effort; Intel contributed to the pledge by opening up its portfolio of over 72,000 patents, according to a press release. Participants are asked to publicly take the pledge by announcing it on their own websites and issuing a press release.

"Immediate action is required to halt the COVID-19 Pandemic and treat those it has affected," the pledge states. "It is a practical and moral imperative that every tool we have at our disposal be applied to develop and deploy technologies on a massive scale without impediment. We therefore pledge to make our intellectual property available free of charge for use in ending the COVID-19 pandemic and minimizing the impact of the disease." From there, people and companies are asked to adopt a license detailing the terms and conditions their intellectual property will be available; while pledgers are permitted to write their own license based on their needs, the organizers wrote "Open COVID License 1.0" as a template for immediate use, which grants usage rights to anyone working toward "minimizing the impact of the disease, including without limitation the diagnosis, prevention, containment, and treatment of the COVID-19 Pandemic." The license is effective until one year after the World Health Organization declares the pandemic to be over. Other participants include Berkeley and UCSF's Innovative Genomics Institute, Fabricatorz Foundation, and United Patents.

jmcbain writes: In many societies, handshakes are a gesture of friendliness. How many times have you shaken hands when meeting new engineering professionals? Probably quite a lot. However, given what we've seen with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, it's time for a new way to greet people. According to a CNBC article, Anthony Fauci, the head advisor of the USA's task force on the coronavirus, says "I don't think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you. Not only would it be good to prevent coronavirus disease, it probably would decrease instances of influenza dramatically in this country." Other scientists agree with Fauci. Gregory Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic Vaccine Research Group has been trying to put an end to handshakes for nearly three decades. He suggests tilting or bowing your head to greet another person like people did many decades ago. "When men greeted other people [back in the day], they raised tor tipped their hat," he says. Bruce Farber, chief of infectious diseases at Northwell Health in New York, thinks Americans need to start implementing other ways to great each other "like [with] a head bob or wave of a hand. This act would maintain proper distance, avoid contact and potential spread of COVID-19," Farber says.

Peter Pitts, former FDA associate commissioner, says shaking hands transmits germs and viruses "as swiftly as kissing and hugging" and until we develop a vaccine against COVID-19, the new normal will have to be "verbal greetings and long-sleeved elbow bumps." He adds: "The social theme song for right now is 'I wanna, but better not, hold your hand.' Love doesn't conquer all."

Foxconn's Wisconsin plant, the controversial recipient of billions of dollars in tax subsidies and the focus of several investigations, will produce ventilators with medical device firm Medtronic. From a report: The partnership was announced by Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak in an interview with CNBC, who said that Foxconn will be manufacturing ventilators based on its PB-560 design in the next four to six weeks. Foxconn's Wisconsin plant was first announced way back in 2017 as a $10 billion LCD factory. It was labeled the "eighth wonder of the world" by President Trump, but Foxconn's plans for the site appear to have changed repeatedly over the years. At various points, Foxconn has said that it would build a smaller LCD factory, no factory at all, or that it would produce other items like a robot coffee kiosk. Now, it appears the factory will, in part at least, produce ventilators, after its planned opening next month.

Tekla Perry writes: In 2001, a rapid, easy-to-use, PCR-based testing system for biological testing was still in prototype form when letters containing anthrax spores started arriving in the mailboxes of journalists and senators. Its creators at startup Cepheid quickly adapted it to test for anthrax, and now it is used to run that test as part of U.S. mail sorting systems. The tool, now called GeneXpert, is also installed in health care facilities around the world. And cartridges to allow these systems to test for COVID-19 -- the first rapid such test approved in the U.S. -- are rolling out. The technology relies on microfluidics, and takes about 45 minutes to run an extremely accurate and sensitive test. Cepheid co-founder Kurt Petersen, now an angel investor, explains how it works. "The test cartridge contains microfluidic channels; these are made out of plastic using high-precision injection molding," explains Petersen. "All the chemicals needed for the process are stored in chambers within the system. In the center of the cartridge, a rotary valve turns to open different pathways, while a tiny plunger -- like a syringe -- moves fluids in and out as needed.

So, the plunger pulls the sample into the center, the valve rotates, and the plunger pushes it into another region of the cartridge to do an operation on it. The system can do that multiple times, moving the sample to different regions with different chemicals, extracting RNA, mixing it with the reverse transcriptase that synthesizes complementary DNA that matches the RNA, and eventually pushing it into PCR reaction tube, where rapid heating and cooling speeds up the process of copying the DNA. Each new copy of the DNA gets a fluorescent molecule attached, which allows an optical system to determine whether or not the targeted gene sequence is in the sample."

Deep learning algorithms can diagnose, triage, and monitor coronavirus cases from lung images. Next, can they predict who will need a ventilator? From a report: AI-powered analysis of chest scans has the potential to alleviate the growing burden on radiologists, who must review and prioritize a rising number of patient chest scans each day, experts say. And in the future, the technology might help predict which patients are most likely to need a ventilator or medication, and which can be sent home. "That's the brass ring," says Matthew Lungren, a pediatric radiologist at Stanford University Medical Center and co-director of the Stanford Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging. "That would be the killer app for this." Some companies are selling their tools, others have released free online versions, and various groups are organizing large crowdsourced repositories of medical images to generate new algorithms. "The system we designed can process huge amounts of CT scans per day," says Hayit Greenspan, a professor at Tel-Aviv University and chief scientist of RADLogics, a healthcare software company that recently announced one such AI-based system. "The capability for quickly covering a huge population is there."

What better way to celebrate World Health Day than by threatening to withhold funding for the World Health Organization. That's exactly what President Trump said he was considering today at Tuesday's coronavirus press briefing. The New York Times reports: "We're going to put a hold on money spent to the W.H.O.; we're going to put a very powerful hold on it and we're going to see," Mr. Trump said, accusing the organization of having not been aggressive enough in confronting the dangers from the virus. "They called it wrong. They call it wrong. They really they missed the call." Mr. Trump appeared to be particularly angry at the W.H.O. for issuing a statement saying it did not support his decision on Jan. 31 to restrict some travel from China because of the virus. At the time, the group issued a statement saying that "restricting the movement of people and goods during public health emergencies is ineffective in most situations and may divert resources from other interventions."

"Don't close your borders to China, don't do this," Mr. Trump said, paraphrasing the group and accusing the organization of "not seeing" the outbreak when it started in Wuhan, China. "They didn't see it, how do you not see it? They didn't see it. They didn't report it. If they did see it, they must have seen it, but they didn't report." In fact, the W.H.O. repeatedly issued statements about the emergence of the virus in China and its movement around the world. The budget for the W.H.O. is about $5 billion and comes from member countries around the world. "In 2017, the last year for which figures were available, the United States was required to spend $111 million based on the organization's rules, but sent an additional $401 million in voluntary contributions," reports The New York Times.

Trump said his government will investigate the organization and that "we will look at ending funding." It's unclear if he's planning to eliminate all funding, or only some.

Coronavirus patients in areas that had high levels of air pollution before the pandemic are more likely to die from the infection than patients in cleaner parts of the country, according to a new nationwide study that offers the first clear link between long-term exposure to pollution and Covid-19 death rates. From a report: In an analysis of 3,080 counties in the United States, researchers at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that higher levels of the tiny, dangerous particles in air known as PM 2.5 were associated with higher death rates from the disease. For weeks, public health officials have surmised a link between dirty air and death or serious illness from Covid-19, which is caused by the coronavirus. The Harvard analysis is the first nationwide study to show a statistical link, revealing a "large overlap" between Covid-19 deaths and other diseases associated with long-term exposure to fine particulate matter. "The results of this paper suggest that long-term exposure to air pollution increases vulnerability to experiencing the most severe Covid-19 outcomes," the authors wrote.

Autonomous shuttles are being used to move COVID-19 tests from a Jacksonville, Florida testing site to a nearby Mayo Clinic processing location, in what the medical nonprofit is calling a "first" for the U.S. But as is often the case with autonomous vehicle pilot programs, there's a catch: during each run made to and from the clinic, the self-driving shuttles are being trailed by an SUV driven by a human. The Verge reports: The SUV can be spotted in a video released by the Mayo Clinic, after one of the Mayo Clinic workers loads the cooler of tests onto the self-driving shuttle. The SUV then follows the shuttle across the Mayo Clinic's campus, where the batch of fresh tests is swapped for another cooler. Four of these vehicles have made the same run back and forth each day since March 30th. In a statement provided to The Verge, Joe Moye, the CEO of autonomous vehicle operator Beep, said the Jacksonville Transportation Authority is providing the chase vehicles to "ensure no traffic or pedestrians would potentially impact the delivery path of the COVID-19 samples and supplies." That's despite the fact that the Mayo Clinic's press release says the routes the shuttles are running "are isolated from pedestrians, traffic and staff."

A representative for Beep, which worked with the Mayo Clinic, JTA, and self-driving shuttle builder Navya on the pilot, says that putting the tests in the attendant-less shuttle instead of in an SUV or truck being driven by a human helps limit any potential exposure to the novel coronavirus. And judging from the distance covered in the video released by the Mayo Clinic, it does look like using some sort of vehicle -- autonomous or not -- would indeed help speed up the delivery of the tests to the processing site. Another benefit, according to Moye, is that the shuttle helps keep many Mayo Clinic staff as free as possible, since they would otherwise have to transport the samples themselves.