Coronavirus Technology Solutions

May 8, 2020

Slovakia is Another Example of the Benefit of Masks 

StartX Creates a Task Force to Accelerate Development of Coronavirus Mitigation Products

Ava Breathe has Unique Mask Design

Mexico Space Agency Develops a New Respirator

Masks and Technology Solutions Very Important for Nursing Home Patients

Kastus Anti-Microbial Coating Effective Against Coronavirus

High Fashion Mask is Available from Lumen Couture

Website Dedicated to Analyzing Mask Decontamination Options

N95 Masks Much Safer than Medical Masks for Wearers

European Meatpackers have Avoided the High Infection Rates

Sanderson Farms has Slowed Lines to Minimize Infection

Cooks Venture says PPE May Have Prevented COVID Cases 

Three Months of Social Distancing Needed for Meaningful Infection Reduction

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Slovakia is Another Example of the Benefit of Masks

McIlvaine has repeatedly speculated that the very low death rate in China from the coronavirus is due to the widespread use of relatively efficient masks. Slovakia has the lowest Covid-19 death rate in Europe, according to Johns Hopkins data (0.46 per 100,000 people)—a wild success, compared to countries like Belgium (73.01, Europe’s highest). Credit can’t go to geographical luck, as neighboring Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland have seen death rates four to eight times as high.

Slovakia benefited in part due to  a large emphasis on masks. “A pivotal moment came on March 13, when the anchor of the country’s most popular television program, Zlatica Puskarova, hosted incoming Prime Minister Igor Matovic and his health minister,“Puskarova began by asking the government officials why they didn’t lead by example, handing them two face masks. They complied immediately, and from the next day the whole country started wearing face protection. Since then, no Slovak politician, news reporter, or celebrity would be seen in public without a mask.”

StartX Creates a Task Force to Accelerate Development of Coronavirus Mitigation Products

StartX is a non-profit community of serial entrepreneurs, industry experts, tenured Stanford professors, and well-funded growth-stage startups. “We believe that entrepreneurs can achieve more as a group, than we can as individuals. We help our companies hire elite talent, secure funding, and tap into one of the most powerful and innovative networks in the world: the Stanford University Alumni Network.”

Start X is now  harnessing its network of scientists and technology to create the StartX Med COVID-19 Task Force

“Our role at StartX is to make sure that if someone does have a cure for something, that it doesn’t just become another paper that’s published in another journal,” said Joseph Huang, CEO of StartX. “If I want to take that all the way to impact real patients, I’ll have mentors and a community and infrastructure and support all the way through all the steps along the way.” StartX also has startups that are developing devices for both medical professionals and everyday people.

Among the many leading-edge biotech, medical device and digital health companies solving critical needs during the COVID-19 pandemic are physicians working with positive cases, companies with FDA cleared solutions and those that are on the fast-track with the CDC. The following are a few ways the StartX Med COVID-19 Task Force is working to provide hope, flatten the curve, and combat the novel coronavirus:

·         Rapid tests suitable for drive through testing, nursing homes, and ER rooms with results in 10 minutes

·         Applications and hardware to assess respiratory issues

·         Rapid solutions to fight developing sepsis and correlating antibiotic resistance resulting from COVID-19 severe complications

·         COVID-19 related applications for remotely monitoring quarantined patients and healthcare workers who have been exposed

·         Rapid RNA testing technologies

·         Testing that provides information on the presence, type and severity of infections

·         Solutions for optimizing hospital operations and supply chain tracking

·         Solutions for automated quarantine management and remote virtual triage

·         A centrifuge system which is readily deployable for remote sample collection and prep

·         A handheld device measuring temperature, lung sounds, airway pressure, pulmonary function, ECG, and SPO2

·         Remote monitoring for respiratory diseases, and other StartX Med technologies already deployed in Wuhan, China

·         Free access to the Bioz research platform for biopharma companies

·         Free virtual COVID-19 evaluation, screening and escalation tool for any hospital in the U.S. to help preserve clinical resources for patients who warrant in-person care

·         StartX Med therapeutics companies with new antiviral drugs to treat COVID-19 and the most common lung disease caused by it, Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), are accelerating their efforts to take their treatments into clinical settings.

“One of our first goals would be for existing StartX genetics companies to be able to ramp-up their current solutions for molecular testing of COVID-19 diagnostics and work with local and state officials and government agencies on deployment,” stated Dr. Michael Niaki, StartX Med COVID-19 Task Force Lead for the Diagnostics Subgroup.

Current StartX Med COVID-19 Task Force Participants include:

Prevention: DawnLight Technologies - Luma Health - Mon Ami - Theranova - Tueo - Qventus

Diagnostics: Avails Medical - Eko - Enable Biosciences - Inflammatix - Lucira Health - Magnetic Insight Mendo - Nirmidas Biotech, Inc. - ProbiusDx - Sandstone Diagnostics - Sensio Air - Sentinel Healthcare - Spire Health - Subtle Medical - Quantumcyte

Treatment: Augmedix - Bioz - Bright.md - Chimera Bio - GEn1E - Globavir BioSciences - Guided Clarity - InfiniGene - KangarooHealth - OMNY - Orcabio - Parzival - Potrero - Qventus - Spot Biosystems - Line Up Health - Wellsheet

“As the number of positive cases continue to soar in the outbreak of COVID-19, there is an imminent need for reducing barriers companies are experiencing with therapeutic medical breakthroughs needing to be deployed,” stated Joseph Huang, CEO of StartX. “We’ve always said that our community of industry leaders can achieve more as a group than as individuals and this is a prime example of how quickly StartX companies and the Stanford entrepreneurship ecosystem can mobilize and come together in times of crisis.”

Ava Breathe has Unique Mask Design

One Start X Med company, AVA Breathe, has taken a look at the various masks and face coverings out there and determined there’s plenty of room for improvement.

“So most people have paper masks or cloth masks and things that are poorly fit and don’t actually maybe properly protect people from this current COVID crisis,” said Eric Sokol, Co-Founder of AVA Breathe. “So we developed a small personal air purifier that you can wear underneath it. So this is really the world’s smallest N90 filter. When coupled with a surgical or cloth mask, it provides a lot of protection, along with sophisticated health monitoring.” That includes the ability to monitor a user’s respiratory rate, respiratory pressure and body temperature.

Sokol is a Stanford professor and physician, who teamed up with two other Stanford professors, to found AVA Breathe and enter StartX. The product also addresses the leak problem.

“We can make this as a little stick on filter, clip on filter or it could be embedded into any high-end mask,” said Sokol. “So you can adjust then your mask so that it’s properly fit and working for you to protect you.”

Sokol says while their products provide immediate protection and detection, it may ultimately be the data collected that someday helps predict how your body reacts to the air you breathe. The startup AVA Breathe spun out of a Stanford Biodesign program and later joined up with StartX.

Mexico Space Agency Develops a New Respirator

Mexico’s National Space Agency has developed a LINX respirator, an accessible and portable breathing device.

“It had to be a unit which was easy to operate, which was portable, and could be taken to remote and more marginalized regions, which would require little maintenance and, fundamentally, whose components could be attained within the country or easily imported,” says Gustavo Medina, director of the agency’s Space Instrument Laboratory.

The ​LINX respirator is currently undergoing medical testing by the country’s health authorities, and Gustavo hopes it will be given the green light for mass production within two months.

Masks and Technology Solutions Very Important for Nursing Home Patients

If nursing home patients are practicing social distancing, they will not be safe due to the ability of the coronavirus to travel long distances through the air. Furthermore this distancing leads to immobility. If patients do not receive some form of exercise, they are much more likely to deteriorate. High efficiency masks and HEPA filtered areas will address this problem. COVID-19 has killed more than 10,000 nursing home residents ​in the United States.

Dr. David Greene works at a care facility in Sonoma County, California. It has had no cases of coronavirus, but staff are taking extreme precautions to keep patients safe.

Dr. David said, “Nursing homes are not like hospitals. A big part of using any of the protective equipment is knowing how to get it on and off so that you don’t infect yourself or anybody else. And they’re just not trained, not used to that. Nursing home care workers in the United States are amongst the lowest paid.”

He also said that the patients in the nursing homes are getting a lot less exercise and the very elderly if they don’t use it, they lose it. “So we’re at risk of having quite a number of people get weak and debilitated and I anticipate that there’s going to be increased falls and that we’ll probably lose some people, not from the virus itself but from the result of our caution,” he added.

Kastus Anti-Microbial Coating Effective Against Coronavirus

A patented surface-coating technology developed by Irish company Kastus® is shown to be effective against human coronavirus on treated surfaces, an independent global testing laboratory has confirmed.

Founded in 2014, this pioneering antimicrobial surface-coating technology has a far reaching impact across a wide range of consumer brands and industries, and can be applied across everything from smartphones and touchscreen kiosks to screen protectors and ceramic tiles.

Kastus has previously been proven to block up to 99.99 per cent of surface bacteria and fungi including antibiotic-resistant superbugs such as MRSA and E. coli. Now new independent testing conducted by a leading Global test laboratory has confirmed that the Kastus technology is effective against human coronavirus on coated surfaces.

The Kastus coating is applied and baked into the top layer of the glass or ceramics surface during the manufacturing process. Once it's locked in, the Kastus coating is constantly working to help protect the underlying touchscreen device, glass, or ceramic surface, while its antimicrobial power is always on through the lifetime of the product.

"With this new validation and testing, we're giving brands and commercial partners across the globe a solution that they can build into their products to get industry back on its feet again," said company chief executive John Browne. "Our unique technology is particularly relevant to those businesses who use shared touchscreens and devices, helping to mitigate the spread of the virus, while addressing consumer concerns and reluctancy to use public touchscreens."

While the Kastus coating is primarily designed for use on new products, companies can retrospectively add screen protectors with the coating applied to help provide enhanced protection, meaning it could soon be widely available across products such as touchscreen kiosks in restaurants, shopping centres and airports.  www.kastus.com

High Fashion Mask is Available from Lumen Couture

A  $95 LED Matrix Face Mask  allows wearers to write their own text: draw designs or use a  phone’s microphone or music tracks for equalizer effects. The construction is a Dual-layer cotton and mesh material with LED Flex Panel. It is washable. Electronics are removable for cleaning and sanitation. This is a novelty/fashion mask and not tested for medical efficiency nor does it make claims for medical protection. The tech components can be removed for normal wear and better air circulation. Battery and charge cord included.

This mask is not efficient enough to provide maximum protection.  However, it does show the potential for fashionable masks.

Website Dedicated to Analyzing Mask Decontamination Options

A team of 60 scientists and engineers, students and clinicians, drawn from universities and the private sector, are unveiling N95decon.org, a website that synthesizes the scientific literature about mask decontamination to create a set of best practices to decontaminate and reuse this protective face covering during the current emergency.

“While there is no perfect method for decontamination of N95 masks, it is crucial that decision-makers and users have as much information as possible about the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches,” said Manu Prakash, an associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford who helped coordinate this ad hoc, volunteer undertaking. “We aim to provide information and evidence in this critical time to help those on the front lines of this crisis make risk management decisions given the specific conditions and limitations they face.”

The team members who came together over the last few weeks scoured hundreds of peer-reviewed publications and held continuous online meetings to review studies of decontamination methods that have been used on previous viral and bacterial pathogens and then to assess the potential to use these methods on the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19.

Their goal was to provide overwhelmed health officials with reliable, pre-digested scientific information about the pros and cons of three decontamination methods should local shortages force a choice between decontamination and reuse or going unmasked.

The three methods involve either heat and humidity; a specific wavelength of light called ultraviolet C (UVC); or treatment with hydrogen peroxide vapors (HPV).

The scientists did not endorse any one method but instead sought to describe the circumstances under which each might be effective against the virus provided rigorous procedures were followed. They concluded, for instance, that devices that rely on heat are effective under specific temperature, humidity and time parameters. With UVC devices, the group advised making sure masks are properly oriented to the light so the entire surface is bathed in sufficient energy. They also found that the HPV method could potentially be used to decontaminate masks in volume – a recommendation that is backed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which has already certified certain vendors to offer hydrogen peroxide vapor treatments on a large scale.

N95decon.org will help facilitate the rapid deployment of these emergency measures by pointing decision makers to sources of reliable and detailed how-to information provided by other organizations, institutions and commercial services. For example, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control on Tuesday released a data-driven fact sheet and a detailed overview for implementing the same three decontamination methods.

Prakash and his collaborators stressed that decontamination does not solve the N95 shortage and expressed hope that new masks will be made available to health care workers and first responders in large numbers as soon as possible.

N95 Masks Much Safer than Medical Masks for Wearers

One of the conclusions of the N95decon group relative to mask performance is displayed on the website. Medical and cloth masks not only reduce respiratory droplet transmission to the outside from the wearer  but also reduce the number of particles that reach the inside of the mask from the outside, thereby protecting the wearer (van der Sande et al., 2008). One carefully controlled study (Lai et al., 2012) was done with mannequins, where one expelled respiratory-like particles at 1 or 2 feet from another mannequin that wore either a fully-sealed or a mask with gaps under the eyes or on the sides (e.g. a medical-type mask). The number of particles ‘inhaled’ by the masked mannequin was measured to assess protection. The fully-sealed mask provided >97% protection under all conditions, including a mimicked cough at a short distance. The medical mask provided between 30% and 100% protection, depending on the number of gaps between the mask and the face, for how long the other mannequin was expelling particles, and the distance from the other mannequin. Another study with mannequins used influenza viral particles and found that medical masks blocked > 50% of infectious viral particles that were breathed in.

European Meatpackers have Avoided the High Infection Rates

The cold, damp conditions and crowded workstations in meatpacking plants make infectious diseases particularly hard to control. But not impossible. In Europe, where labor protections are stronger and most plants are smaller and more automated than in the U.S., the industry has avoided disabling outbreaks. Danish Crown A/S, a huge pork producer, has had employees contract Covid-19 but has prevented plantwide spikes by employing strict hygiene practices, a spokesman says. Goikoa, of Spain, the nation with the most coronavirus cases after the U.S., says its plants have operated at full capacity throughout the pandemic. Britain, with the world’s fourth-most infections and second-most deaths, has minimized plant shutdowns through rigid social distancing, says Nick Allen, CEO of the British Meat Processors Association. Police showed up outside plants to lecture workers on keeping their distance, he says.

Sanderson Farms has Slowed Lines to Minimize Infection

Sanderson Farms Inc., America’s third-largest poultry producer, has had about 100 workers test positive for Covid-19 out of 17,000 employees in its 13 plants across the South. In late March, Sanderson became aware of a coronavirus outbreak in Dougherty County, GA, near its 1,400-worker plant in the city of Moultrie. It sent more than 400 workers home, with pay, to quarantine for two weeks whether or not they were showing symptoms. The plant had to slow its line speed by 15%, but it averted a spike in infection, a closure, and possibly worse. None of the Dougherty County workers tested positive, and there have been no reports of deaths among Sanderson workers.

Mike Cockrell, the company’s chief financial officer, says Sanderson expects its chicken production will be 4% less this fiscal year than it estimated before the pandemic. But “no one even asks how much it costs to protect workers,” he says. “We’ll add it up when this is all over.”

Cooks Venture says PPE May Have Prevented COVID Cases

The health and well-being of meatpacking workers has always been a socioeconomic problem at root, says Matthew Wadiak, founder and CEO of Cooks Venture, a small Arkansas-based producer that sells pasture-raised chickens directly to consumers. The company hasn’t had a Covid-19 case among the 200 employees at its processing plant in Oklahoma. One reason is that from the start of the pandemic, Cooks Venture provided lots of protective gear and reconfigured the plant to spread out workers. But the bigger reason, Wadiak argues, is that the company pays better. His entry-level employees earn 20% more than other poultry workers in Oklahoma, enough for them to afford housing that’s not overcrowded. When you’re jammed into a group house, as so many meat workers are, social distancing is almost impossible.

Three Months of Social Distancing Needed for Meaningful Infection Reduction

Social distancing didn’t meaningfully reduce the number of deaths from the Spanish flu a century ago because it didn’t last long enough, says a new research paper that has implications for the response to Covid-19.

Harvard University economist Robert Barro writes that “the likely reason” school closings, prohibitions on public gatherings, and quarantines and isolation in various U.S. cities didn’t save many lives is that they “had an average duration of only one month.”

“The lesson for the ongoing coronavirus pandemic in 2020 is that, to curtail overall deaths, the NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions] used have to be maintained for substantially longer than a few weeks. Most likely, 12 weeks work much better than 4-6 weeks,” Barro writes in the National Bureau of Economic Research working paper.

Barro's calculation doesn't take into account the economic losses from an extended shutdown. But in an email, he says any decline in gross domestic product has to be weighed against the economic value of saving lives. He uses $10 million for the value of a single life, based on estimates of how much additional money people demand to be paid for jobs that increase the risk of dying. At 12 weeks, he says, the benefits from a shutdown exceed the costs. (McIlvaine uses $58 million for each death and includes the 10 people sickened for each death and the life quality lost by each. It also includes the hospital and other direct costs.)