It is time to stop the next Pandemic. Can an award help?
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It’s hard the moment of the global pandemic. So many other cases were diagnosed as in the first six months of the pandemic in the last two weeks – led by Brazil and India, where more than half occurred from such cases. India in particular is registering more than 400,000 cases a day, and officials fear that is little. Even in the United States, when cases are calming down, so is the vaccine slowed down also making any decisive decision available.
With the escalation of the pandemic, 16 months after it began, there is an urgent need to make the next few efforts to learn the lessons of this crisis the next. Some are political, indicating how countries and the World Health Organization can work better. Others are commercial, offering opportunities for technology companies. And some are big efforts driven by foundations. They all aim to become a time for long-term change by counting the vulnerabilities revealed by the pandemic and reaffirming that this type of opportunity has been wasted before.
“These are the same conversations we heard after the 2003 SARS outbreak, the 2009 flu pandemic, the 2014 Ebola outbreak and the 2016 MERS and 2018 Ebola outbreaks,” says Rick Bright, former director of the U.S. government’s Agency for Advanced Biomedical Research and Development. (BARDA), who he resigned from the federal government to protest how the Trump administration treated Covid. “We continue to have the same conversations. What lessons do we learn? What will we do better next time? And we are still missing.”
In March, Bright became the Rockefeller Foundation’s vice president of pandemic prevention and response is responsible for building a “pandemic prevention institute”. $ 1 billion investment On the way to recovery from Covid. Bright’s institute is one of the first funded efforts to try to do something new from the remnants of Covid: an analysis center that will traverse national repositories of genomic and social data to find global models.
It looks like another high-income endeavor will be the first to write some checks. Next month Trinity challenge, A competition based at the University of Cambridge in the UK, will award first prizes for innovative approaches to leveraging public and private data: a grand prize of € 2 million, with a second prize of € 1 million. (They are approximately $ 2,777,000 and $ 1,398,000, respectively.) The groups have been asked to achieve one or more goals: to identify new epidemics as soon as possible; developing cheap and equitable measures to reduce transmission and dissemination; or dealing with the fact that outbreaks are hardest hit on poor nations and bad groups to make health systems resistant to these shocks.
The challenge is to create Sally Davies, a doctor and former UK medical officer who became a master (or head) of Trinity College in late 2019. “What we’re missing is not just health data – numbers infected and hospitalized and improving, but behavioral data, economic data, mobility data,” Davies says. “It will all affect how we do policy, how we interpret our response and how we can recover. However, these data are not available to governments and public health agencies. Big tech companies have that. So how do we understand that? Think about it. I had: a partnership, a meeting of academics, who can ask questions rigorously, with people who have data and have great engineers, to support a public challenge by asking people to come up with their own solutions. ”
To do so, he hired technical support and technical support from major technology companies, including Facebook, Google and Tencent, along with the media company, drug companies and research universities. The members contribute to all the prizes of 10 million euros and also make them available to small groups that demand the knowledge of the staff. It’s a quick effort: the first round of shipments opened in February and closed in April. Tickets, whatever public, rapid network diagnostic devices, algorithms that monitor social networks to analyze people’s mood, models that monitor the global supply chain of needles, and mapping of rural women’s distribution networks that sell health products.
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