Tag: MIT Technology Review

Why reopening US schools is so complicated

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/05/1020304/reopening-us-schools-complicated/

Excerpt:

The US can look to Europe for how this played out: European countries tried in-person learning last fall but began closing schools as B.1.1.7 swept through the continent. By December, countries including the Netherlands and Germany had shut down their schools in the face of rising case numbers. The CDC says it may need to update school reopening guidelines in light of new information about variants. 

This task is made more difficult because tracking the spread of variants in the US is tough right now. Compared with other countries, it has very few labs doing this work, and while more funding will help, Friedrich says there will still be a gap.

Author(s): Mia Sato

Publication Date: 5 March 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review

India is betting on glitchy software to inoculate 300 million people by August

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/10/1017860/india-covid-vaccine-cowin-software/

Excerpt:

India, which has had the second-highest number of covid-19 cases in the world, has launched one of Asia’s most ambitious vaccination drives, aiming to inoculate 300 million people by August. To make it happen, the government is using a vaccine management system called Co-WIN. For now, the focus is on getting 30 million health-care and frontline workers vaccinated. 

These workers will receive one of two vaccines approved for emergency use: the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine—known locally as Covishield and being manufactured by the Serum Institute of India—and Bharat Biotech’s indigenous vaccine, called Covaxin. 

Co-WIN is the backbone of the vaccination drive, so to speak. It handles registrations, creates vaccination schedules, informs the recipients through text messages, sends people to the right vaccination center, and also creates a vaccination certificate after they’ve received two doses. Although it’s starting with health-care workers, it’s expected to be used for the general public, too, and people will be asked to self-register through the app. 

Author(s): Varsha Bansal

Publication Date: 10 February 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review

Israel’s “green pass” is an early vision of how we leave lockdown

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/01/1020154/israels-green-pass-is-an-early-vision-of-how-we-leave-lockdown/

Excerpt:

Israel’s vaccine passport was released on February 21, to help the country emerge from a month-long lockdown. Vaccinated people can download an app that displays their “green pass” when they are asked to show it. The app can also display proof that someone has recovered from covid-19. (Many proposed passport systems offer multiple ways to show you are not a danger, such as proof of a recent negative test. The Israeli government says that option will come to the app soon, which will be especially useful for children too young to receive an approved vaccine.) Officials hope the benefits of the green pass will encourage vaccination among Israelis who have been hesitant, many of whom are young. 

“People who get vaccinated need to know that something has changed for them, that they can ease up,” says Nadav Eyal, a prominent television journalist. “People want to know that they can have some normalcy back.”

Author(s): Cat Ferguson, Joshua Mitnick

Publication Date: 1 March 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review

Recovering from the SolarWinds hack could take 18 months

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/02/1020166/solarwinds-brandon-wales-hack-recovery-18-months/

Excerpt:

Brandon Wales, the acting director of CISA, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, says that it will be well into 2022 before officials have fully secured the government networks compromised by Russian hackers. The list includes at least nine federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. Even fully understanding the extent of the damage will take months.

“I wouldn’t call this simple,” Wales says. “There are two phases for response to this incident. There is the short-term remediation effort, where we look to remove the adversary from the network, shutting down accounts they control, and shutting down entry points the adversary used to access networks. But given the amount of time they were inside these networks—months—strategic recovery will take time.”

Author(s): Patrick Howell O’Neill

Publication Date: 2 March 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review

Why aren’t kids getting vaccinated?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/08/1017621/why-arent-kids-getting-vaccinated/

Excerpt:

While much of the world is engaged in a frantic scramble to get vaccinated against covid-19, there’s one group noticeably absent from the queues of people at vaccine clinics: children.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is still approved for use only in those aged 16 years or older, and the Moderna vaccine is only for adults. Both are now in trials for younger age groups, and results are expected by the summer. The Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are also due to start trials in children soon. But in a world where most vaccines are given to children under two, why is it that during a global pandemic, children are being left behind? And what does it mean for how the pandemic will unfold in adults? 

One reason children are not yet priorities for vaccination is that they are much less affected by SARS-CoV-2 infection than adults. Children make up nearly 13% of all cases reported in the United States so far, but less than 3% of all reported hospitalizations and less than 0.21% of all covid-19 deaths. When they have symptoms, they are similar to adults’—cough, fever, sore throat, and runny nose—but less severe.

Author(s): Bianca Nogrady

Publication Date: 8 February 2021

Publication Site: MIT Tech Review

Why a failure to vaccinate the world will put us all at risk

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/13/1018259/why-a-failure-to-vaccinate-the-world-will-put-us-all-at-risk/

Excerpt:

The coronavirus vaccination programs for the world’s richest countries are now in full swing. Almost one-quarter of the UK’s adult population has now had a first dose. The US, while not quite at that pace, has now given at least one dose to more than 35 million people.

But for low-income countries around the globe, the picture is very different—and may be for some time. Many of the world’s poorest are still waiting for the first doses to reach them. Estimates by the Economist Intelligence Unit suggest that some 85 countries in the developing world may not be fully vaccinated until 2023 at the earliest. For example, in January, the World Health Organization warned that the West African nation of Guinea was the only low-income country on the continent to have started vaccinating: but only 25 people (all senior government officials, the AP reported) out of the country’s population of almost 13 million had received a dose at that point.

One of the big problems is there isn’t yet any global rollout, only talk of it, says Chris Dickey, who directs the global and environmental public health program at New York University’s Global Health School. Rodriguez-Barraquer agrees. “The burden of illness and death could be prevented if there was more global coordination in vaccine supply,” she says. 

Author(s): Katharine Gammonarchive page

Publication Date: 13 February 2021

Publication Site: MIT Tech Review

Why a failure to vaccinate the world will put us all at risk

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/13/1018259/why-a-failure-to-vaccinate-the-world-will-put-us-all-at-risk/

Excerpt:

The supply to poorer countries is low mostly because the majority of the available vaccines have been purchased or promised to richer countries in North America and Europe. To address this vaccine inequity, a coalition of international organizations, including the World Health Organization and governments, created a nonprofit called Covax in April 2020.

The idea was to create a global supply of vaccines for 92 low- and middle-income countries. In December, the nonprofit announced that it had secured access to some 2 billion doses for 2021 through donations and commitments from some manufacturers, but it is unclear how many of those will actually be delivered this year. The problem becomes more complicated because many countries are both working through Covax and trying to secure deals with drug makers themselves—making it more challenging for Covax to make deals with those manufacturers at the same time. 

The group aims to vaccinate about 20% of the people in the world, focusing on hard-to-reach populations in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. To do so, it needs another $4.9 billion in addition to the $2.1 billion it has already raised. But there are other problems. The cheaper and easier-to-transport vaccines like the ones pledged by AstraZeneca have been slower to gain regulatory approval. Meanwhile, other companies seem less interested in pitching in: Doctors Without Borders found that only 2% of Pfizer’s global supply had been granted to Covax, and Moderna is still “in talks” with the organization.

Author(s): Katharine Gammon

Publication Date: 13 February 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review

A leaked report shows Pfizer’s vaccine is conquering covid-19 in its largest real-world test

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/19/1019264/a-leaked-report-pfizers-vaccine-conquering-covid-19-in-its-largest-real-world-test/

Excerpt:

A leaked scientific report jointly prepared by Israel’s health ministry and Pfizer claims that the company’s covid-19 vaccine is stopping nine out of 10 infections and the country could approach herd immunity by next month.

The study, based on the health records of hundreds of thousands of Israelis, finds that the vaccine may sharply curtail transmission of the coronavirus. “High vaccine uptake can meaningfully stem the pandemic and offers hope for eventual control of the pandemic as vaccination programs ramp up across the rest of the world,” according to the authors.

The nationwide study was described by the Israeli news website Ynet on Thursday, and a copy was obtained by MIT Technology Review.

Author(s): Joshua Mitnick, Antonio Regalado

Publication Date: 19 February 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review

He started a covid-19 vaccine company. Then he hosted a superspreader event.

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/13/1018374/peter-diamandis-covid-superspreader-a360-conference/

Excerpt:

At least 20 people contracted covid-19 at an indoor, mostly unmasked gathering for wealthy executives hosted by Peter Diamandis, the Singularity University and XPrize Foundation cofounder.

At the time, a regional stay-at-home order made the gathering illegal. The outbreak wasn’t reported to authorities as required and rules on health data privacy may have been broken.

Diamandis is not sure how many people have tested positive, citing either 21 or 24 cases, not counting secondary infections.

Author(s): Eileen Guo

Publication Date: 13 February 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review

Chicago thinks Zocdoc can help solve its vaccine chaos

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/12/1018092/vaccine-signup-chicago-zocdoc-frustrating-as-tech-companies-step-in-deeper-inequalities-harder-to-fix/

Excerpt:

In early February, the Department of Public Health announced a plan to help ease some of those technical problems: a partnership with Zocdoc, the popular online health-care scheduling company. Zocdoc is acting as a unified portal for multiple providers, so that people can sign up with a single, more user-friendly tool rather than wrestle with several different systems at once. While Chicago is the first city to make this specific agreement with Zocdoc, other health agencies are launching similar partnerships with private startups.

Before the pandemic, Zocdoc acted as a one-stop shop where patients could check out different doctors, compare medical providers, and make appointments. The company’s CEO, Oliver Kharraz, says the years spent bridging a fragmented health-care system unknowingly prepared it for taking on covid-19 vaccination appointments. After the idea was tested with the Mount Sinai Health System in New York, Zocdoc says, Chicago reached out about a partnership—and the system was up and running within a few weeks. Zocdoc connects with 1,400 different scheduling systems: doctors’ workflows remain unchanged, but patients all see the same simple interface no matter which provider they’re using.

Author(s): Mia Sato

Publication Date: 12 February 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review

People are fed up with broken vaccine appointment tools — so they’re building their own

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/01/1016725/people-are-building-their-own-vaccine-appointment-tools/

Excerpt:

That very day, January 2, Craver worked from 3 in the afternoon until 11:30 at night to create Covid19 Vaccine TX, a site listing possible vaccination locations across the state. As a digital product designer, she knew that a site like this would have to be easy to read, intuitive to navigate, and quick to update. The idea was that people could upload information about vaccination sites, with each entry answering three questions: Was the vaccine available that day? Was the location taking appointments? Was there a wait list?

Craver loaded the project on the cloud-based spreadsheet service Airtable, posted a link on Reddit, and went to bed. When she woke up the next morning at 7 a.m., one entry was filled out. “At least somebody cares,” she remembers thinking. She spent the rest of the day manually inserting information for about 1,400 locations in the state. “I’ve been going nonstop since,” she says, estimating that she puts in about 40 hours of her free time every week to maintain the site. It has received 50,000 total visitors since launch.

Author(s): Tanya Basu

Publication Date: 1 February 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review

What went wrong with America’s $44 million vaccine data system?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/30/1017086/cdc-44-million-vaccine-data-vams-problems/

Excerpt:

The chaos of the vaccine rollout in the US has been well documented: states receiving half their expected doses; clinics canceling first shots because of unreliable supplies; people endlessly hitting “Refresh” on sign-up websites or lining up outside clinics without an appointment, hoping for a spare shot. 

The CDC saw this coming.

“VAMS was intended to fill a need that states and jurisdictions were not equipped to do themselves,” says Noam Arzt, the president of HLN Consulting, which helps build health information systems. 

Author: Cat Ferguson

Publication Date: 30 January 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review