Browsing: Government

Singapore has developed an event testing approach to make possible large events, weddings,  and conferences.  The pilot program will run from late October until December will utilize antigen rapid tests (ARTs) for the pre-event testing, which can return “fairly accurate” results within about half an hour, according to the Ministry of Health (MOH). The ART results will be valid for 24 hours from the time of the swab, and it must be valid at the point of entry until the end of the event, said MOH in a technical briefing on the matter. According to MOH officials:  “If you go…

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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), announced a third round of contract awards for scale-up and manufacturing of new COVID-19 testing technologies. The six new Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative contracts total $98.35 million for point-of-care and other novel test approaches that provide new modes of sample collection, processing and return of results. Innovations in these new technologies include integration with smart devices, mobile-lab processing that can be deployed to COVID-19 hot spots, and test results available within minutes. These awards are part of the RADx Tech program, focused on rapidly advancing early testing…

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This COVID drama could soon end if we were to get smart on testing. Harvard professor Michael Mina is someone to watch. You will likely be seeing a lot of him in the coming weeks as he seems to have sorted out this COVID testing issue which we to date have complete missed, misunderstood, and bungled. Mina’s presentation is clear, compelling, obvious and simple. We don’t need a highly sensitive test to see who is infected. We need simple test to see who is infectious. His Harvard lab has done the analysis and the argument holds. The irony is that…

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SUMMARY: NPR reports more than 8 in 10 supported aggressive new measures by the federal government, including expanded testing are needed. The author suggests we have relied on poorly coordinated efforts among 50 states and thousands of local jurisdictions to solve a national problem. “The United States is not currently on course to get control of this epidemic,” said a Johns Hopkins University report. “It is time to reset.”. The writer suggests testing every American once a week for four weeks. There’s a model for this idea. In March, the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT converted its lab into a…

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Ingelsby, Director of Health at Johns Hopkins fields questions about the unpreparedness of our health system. “How is it that we are in a shortage situation again?” He says that it is the nature of a continued problem and that a national dashboard to provide visibility to the supply chain for PPE and tests would help greatly.

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Dr. Birx wants Florida to start new ‘Pool Testing’ for COVID-19 The White House Coronavirus Task Force is looking at a groundbreaking way to boost testing and, in turn, identifying positive cases in the state. It’s called “Pool Testing,” which would allow allow large groups of people — like families or students — to all be tested at the same time. Dr. Deborah Birx Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the task force, says Florida is a great place to try this kind of testing. She says it could bump up testing from 5,000 tests per day to 50,000. “This is…

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COVID-19 drug development is the research process to develop a  therapeutic prescription drug that would alleviate the severity of 2019-20 coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Internationally as of March 2020, some 100  firms, university research groups, and health organizations were involved in stages of vaccine or drug development. The World Health Organization (WHO), European Medicines Agency (EMA), US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Chinese government and drug manufacturers were coordinating with academic and industry researchers to speed development of vaccines, antiviral drugs, and monoclonal antibody therapies. By late March, 536 clinical studies were registered with the World Health Organization International Clinical Trials Registry Platform to develop post-infection therapies for COVID-19 infections, with numerous established antiviral compounds for treating…

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Is the cure worse than the disease? It appears physicians immersed in the midst of it all are seeing it that way. Most compelling was an opinion written by St. Barnabas Hospital Emergency director Daniel G. Murphy MD.  The Bronx New York hospital which serves a lower income community is in the center of the pandemic. Another physician, Scott Atlas MD who is from Stanford has taken to the airwaves advocating an end to the lockdown. We summarize their perspectives as the controversy will likely grow. Both wrote opinions for the New York Post that appeared April 26th and 27th.…

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