By Knvul Sheikh and Katie Thomas, New York Times
Just three months after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, several biotech companies are beginning trials of promising vaccines and treatments.
On New Year’s Eve, the software company BlueDot pushed out a notification to its customers about a mysterious illness that appeared in Wuhan, China.
Catherine Graham, The Hub, Johns Hopkins University
Their prototype, developed in response to the urgent need for more ventilators to treat patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome caused by COVID-19, aims to address safety concerns about cross-contamination and correctly managing air flow to patients
While a significant portion of the population finds itself temporarily out of work, this is certainly not the case for researchers developing the tools to fight COVID-19. In Quebec, a team specializing in biochemistry got the green light to develop a new test to detect the coronavirus in a few minutes, a process which currently takes several hours.
When it comes to assessing the risk of transmission of an infectious disease like COVID-19 and evaluating the effectiveness of measures like physical distancing, mathematics and mathematical modelling are crucial.
A new podcast hosted by the University of Toronto’s Vivek Goel offers timely and reliable information about the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We want this podcast to be an informed source people can go to in order to hear about what’s next for the pandemic,” says Goel, U of T’s vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives.
“Our goal is to help make sense of the complex and often conflicting messages about COVID-19 that are bombarding Canadians.”
by Christopher Rowland, Washington Post
Millions of doses of anti-malarial drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine will be distributed to hospitals across the country to try to slow the disease in seriously ill patients
Arthur McDonald, a Queen’s University professor who shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics, is leading an effort by Canadian scientists at two national laboratories to produce a stripped-down, easy-to-manufacture hospital ventilator in time to meet an urgent demand for the machines because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Researchers at the TRIUMF particle accelerator in Vancouver and the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories at Chalk River, Ont., are now aiming to complete two working prototypes of their ventilator, one at each location, over the coming week.
Katie Pearce, Hub, Johns Hopkins University
With a vaccine for COVID-19 still a long way from being realized, Johns Hopkins immunologist Arturo Casadevall is working to revive a century-old blood-derived treatment for use in the United States in hopes of slowing the spread of the disease.
With the right pieces in place, the treatment could be set up at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore within a matter of weeks, Casadevall says.
WHO is gathering the latest scientific findings and knowledge on coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and compiling it in a database. We update the database daily from searches of bibliographic databases, hand searches of the table of contents of relevant journals, and the addition of other relevant scientific articles that come to our attention. The entries in the database may not be exhaustive and new research will be added regularly.