The global coronavirus pandemic has already caused a tremendous strain on healthcare resources around the world, and it’s leading to a shift in how healthcare is offered. Startup Forward, which debuted in 2016 and has since expanded its tech-focused primary care medical practice to locations in major cities across the U.S., is launching a new initiative called ‘Forward At Home’ that reflects those changes and adapts its care model accordingly.

Forward’s primary differentiator is its focus on what it terms a patient’s ‘baseline,’ which is established by an in-person visit they make when they join that employs a body scanner at a doctor’s office to take a number of readings and produce an interactive chart displayed on-screen in the doctor’s exam room. Forward founder and CEO Adrian Aoun, who previously led special projects at Google before building the health tech company, said that as the company has ramped its efforts to support patients during the COVID-19 pandemic, including through in-clinic and drive-through testing, it also wanted to address the ongoing need for care for non-COVID patients.

“If people aren’t leaving their homes, and frankly, you don’t really want them to leave their homes unless you need them to, you have to figure out how to do all that remotely,” Aoun said in an interview, referring to Forward’s comprehensive biometric data gathering process. “So we’ve we’ve implemented a bunch of different things as rapidly as possible. The first is, how do we collect some biometrics – so we put together a kit that has a bunch of sensors in it that we actually mail to you. This includes an EKG, a connected thermometer, connected blood pressure cuff and a pulse oximeter.”

This approach provides a whole new level of remote care, over and above what’s typically defined as “telemedicine,” which generally amounts to little more than video calls with doctors, Aoun points out. Forward’s approach includes automated vitals monitoring for alerting a doctor if a patient needs intervention, and a patient has access to all their own data in the app as well. The Forward At Home product also take their exam room smart display and brings it to their mobile devices, presenting it for shared consultation between doctor and patient during viral visits, which are available 24/7 to Forward members.

At launch, the service also includes home visits to collect urine and blood samples, as an added measure designed specifically to help patients adhere to CDC and health agency guidelines around self-isolation while also getting a detailed and thorough level of care. Aoun says that this part of the offering doesn’t make sense at scale, and will likely revert to in-clinic visits once the COVID-19 crisis passes.

The rest of the model, though spurred into deployment because of the coronavirus conditions, and the need to limit the number of people going in to medical facilities and hospital all across the country unless they absolutely need to, is here to stay, however. Aoun says that Forward’s goal has always been to address the need for tech-friendly, advanced and comprehensive primary care for everyone, but that it took an approach similar to Tesla’s by addressing the top end of the market first in order to be able to fund development of more broadly available services later on.

Meanwhile, the need to shift as much care as possible to in-home is pressing, and evidence from countries around the world is increasingly pointing to how important that is to stopping the spread.

“The big thing to flatten the curve, the whole point of it, is that the hospitals are going to be overrun,” Aoun said. “So you want to take as many cases as you can, where they don’t actually have to be in the ICU, and treat them outside of the ICU – that’s your first principle. Then your second principle is, and China kind of discovered this early […] they started moving to getting people out of the hospitals, as much as possible for a second reason, which is not that the hospitals are overloaded, but that the hospitals are one of the fastest ways to spread COVID-19.”

That’s a perspective also supported by lessons shared from Italian medical professionals in their effort to deal with the COVID-19 situation there, which has essentially decimated large parts of their medical facility infrastructure.

Forward is also still continuing the other work it’s doing to address COVID-19 needs, including providing its risk assessment screening tool to all, as well as offering testing via clinics and drive-throughs to members, as well as mental health support. It’s also looking to expand its drive-through testing to new sites across the U.S. The Forward At Home initiative, meanwhile, will help ensure that clients who have other pressing health needs aren’t left behind while the effort to combat COVID-19 continues.

Celularity, the venture-backed developer of novel cell therapies for cancer treatments, has received an initial clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to begin early-stage clinical trials on a potential treatment for COVID-19.

The company, which has raised at least $290 million to date (according to Crunchbase), uses “Natural Killer” (NK) cell therapies to boost the immune system’s disease-fighting response.

For Celularity, those NK cells are derived from stem cells cultivated from placental tissue, which hospitals typically treat as medical waste.

Backed by the venture investment firm Section 32, and strategic investors including Celgene, now a division of Bristol Myers; United Therapeutics, a biomedical technology developer; Human Longevity, the troubled venture-backed startup founded by genomics J. Craig Venter; and Sorrento Therapeutics, a publicly traded biomedical company; Celularity was pursuing a number of applications of the novel cell therapy, but its initial focus was on cancer treatments.

The real breakthrough for the company, and one of the reasons why it’s attracted so much capital, is that its cell therapies don’t need to be cultivated from a patient donor — a lengthy and expensive process. Celularity is able to produce NK cells and store them, so that they can be ready for transfusion when they’re needed.

With the the FDA’s clearance, Celularity is going to begin a small, 86-person trial to test the efficacy of its CYNK-001 immunotherapy to treat COVID-19 infected adults, the company said.

There are at least two studies underway in China that are also testing whether Natural Killer cells can be used to treat COVID-19.

NK cells are a type of white blood cell that are part of the body’s immune system. Unlike t-cells, which target particular pathogens, NK cells typically work to support the immune system by identifying and destroying cells in the body that appear to be stressed, either from an infection or a mutation.

The therapy seems to be successful in treating certain types of cancer, and the company’s researchers speculate that it can provide similar results in stopping the ability of the novel coronavirus which causes COVID-19 to spread throughout the body.

However, there are some potential roadblocks and risks to pursuing the NK therapy. Chiefly, COVID-19 is deadly in part because it can push the immune system into overdrive. The “cytokine storm” that results from the infection means that the body starts attacking healthy cells in the lungs which leads to organ failure and death. If that’s the case, then boosting the immune response to COVID-19 might be dangerous for patients.

There’s also the possibility that NK cells might not be able to detect which cells are infected with the coronavirus which causes COVID-19, rendering the therapy ineffective.

“Studies have established that there is robust activation of NK cells during viral infection regardless of the virus class,” said Celularity’s Chief Scientific Officer, Xiaokui Zhang, in a statement. “These functions suggest that CYNK-001 could provide a benefit to COVID-19 patients in terms of limiting SARS-CoV-2 replication and disease progression by eliminating the infected cells.”

A European coalition of techies and scientists drawn from at least eight countries, and led by Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute for telecoms (HHI), is working on contacts-tracing proximity technology for COVID-19 that’s designed to comply with the region’s strict privacy rules — officially unveiling the effort today.

China-style individual-level location-tracking of people by states via their smartphones even for a public health purpose is hard to imagine in Europe — which has a long history of legal protection for individual privacy. However the coronavirus pandemic is applying pressure to the region’s data protection model, as governments turn to data and mobile technologies to seek help with tracking the spread of the virus, supporting their public health response and mitigating wider social and economic impacts.

Scores of apps are popping up across Europe aimed at attacking coronavirus from different angles. European privacy not-for-profit, noyb, is keeping an updated list of approaches, both led by governments and private sector projects, to use personal data to combat SARS-CoV-2 — with examples so far including contacts tracing, lockdown or quarantine enforcement and COVID-19 self-assessment.

The efficacy of such apps is unclear — but the demand for tech and data to fuel such efforts is coming from all over the place.

In the UK the government has been quick to call in tech giants, including Google, Microsoft and Palantir, to help the National Health Service determine where resources need to be sent during the pandemic. While the European Commission has been leaning on regional telcos to hand over user location data to carry out coronavirus tracking — albeit in aggregated and anonymized form.

The newly unveiled Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) project is a response to the coronavirus pandemic generating a huge spike in demand for citizens’ data that’s intended to offer not just an another app — but what’s described as “a fully privacy-preserving approach” to COVID-19 contacts tracing.

The core idea is to leverage smartphone technology to help disrupt the next wave of infections by notifying individuals who have come into close contact with an infected person — via the proxy of their smartphones having been near enough to carry out a Bluetooth handshake. So far so standard. But the coalition behind the effort wants to steer developments in such a way that the EU response to COVID-19 doesn’t drift towards China-style state surveillance of citizens.

While, for the moment, strict quarantine measures remain in place across much of Europe there may be less imperative for governments to rip up the best practice rulebook to intrude on citizens’ privacy, given the majority of people are locked down at home. But the looming question is what happens when restrictions on daily life are lifted?

Contacts tracing — as a way to offer a chance for interventions that can break any new infection chains — is being touted as a key component of preventing a second wave of coronavirus infections by some, with examples such as Singapore’s TraceTogether app being eyed up by regional lawmakers.

Singapore does appear to have had some success in keeping a second wave of infections from turning into a major outbreak, via an aggressive testing and contacts-tracing regime. But what a small island city-state with a population of less than 6M can do vs a trading bloc of 27 different nations whose collective population exceeds 500M doesn’t necessarily seem immediately comparable.

Europe isn’t going to have a single coronavirus tracing app. It’s already got a patchwork. Hence the people behind PEPP-PT offering a set of “standards, technology, and services” to countries and developers to plug into to get a standardized COVID-19 contacts-tracing approach up and running across the bloc.

The other very European flavored piece here is privacy — and privacy law. “Enforcement of data protection, anonymization, GDPR [the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation] compliance, and security” are baked in, is the top-line claim.

“PEPP-PR was explicitly created to adhere to strong European privacy and data protection laws and principles,” the group writes in an online manifesto. “The idea is to make the technology available to as many countries, managers of infectious disease responses, and developers as quickly and as easily as possible.

“The technical mechanisms and standards provided by PEPP-PT fully protect privacy and leverage the possibilities and features of digital technology to maximize speed and real-time capability of any national pandemic response.”

Hans-Christian Boos, one of the project’s co-initiators — and the founder of an AI company called Arago –discussed the initiative with German newspaper Der Spiegel, telling it: “We collect no location data, no movement profiles, no contact information and no identifiable features of the end devices.”

The newspaper reports PEPP-PT’s approach means apps aligning to this standard would generate only temporary IDs — to avoid individuals being identified. Two or more smartphones running an app that uses the tech and has Bluetooth enabled when they come into proximity would exchange their respective IDs — saving them locally on the device in an encrypted form, according to the report.

Der Spiegel writes that should a user of the app subsequently be diagnosed with coronavirus their doctor would be able to ask them to transfer the contact list to a central server. The doctor would then be able to use the system to warn affected IDs they have had contact with a person who has since been diagnosed with the virus — meaning those at risk individuals could be proactively tested and/or self-isolate.

On its website PEPP-PT explains the approach thus:

Mode 1
If a user is not tested or has tested negative, the anonymous proximity history remains encrypted on the user’s phone and cannot be viewed or transmitted by anybody. At any point in time, only the proximity history that could be relevant for virus transmission is saved, and earlier history is continuously deleted.

Mode 2
If the user of phone A has been confirmed to be SARS-CoV-2 positive, the health authorities will contact user A and provide a TAN code to the user that ensures potential malware cannot inject incorrect infection information into the PEPP-PT system. The user uses this TAN code to voluntarily provide information to the national trust service that permits the notification of PEPP-PT apps recorded in the proximity history and hence potentially infected. Since this history contains anonymous identifiers, neither person can be aware of the other’s identity.

Providing further detail of what it envisages as “Country-dependent trust service operation”, it writes: “The anonymous IDs contain encrypted mechanisms to identify the country of each app that uses PEPP-PT. Using that information, anonymous IDs are handled in a country-specific manner.”

While on healthcare processing is suggests: “A process for how to inform and manage exposed contacts can be defined on a country by country basis.”

Among the other features of PEPP-PT’s mechanisms the group lists in its manifesto are:

• Backend architecture and technology that can be deployed into local IT infrastructure and can handle hundreds of millions of devices and users per country instantly.
• Managing the partner network of national initiatives and providing APIs for integration of PEPP-PT features and functionalities into national health processes (test, communication, …) and national system processes (health logistics, economy logistics, …) giving many local initiatives a local backbone architecture that enforces GDPR and ensures scalability.
• Certification Service to test and approve local implementations to be using the PEPP-PT mechanisms as advertised and thus inheriting the privacy and security testing and approval PEPP-PT mechanisms offer.

Having a standardized approach that could be plugged into a variety of apps would allow for contacts tracing to work across borders — i.e. even if different apps are popular in different EU countries — an important consideration for the bloc, which has 27 Member States.

However there may be questions about the robustness of the privacy protection designed into the approach — if, for example, pseudonymized data is centralized on a server that doctors can access there could be a risk of it leaking and being re-identified. And identification of individual device holders would be legally risky.

Europe’s lead data regulator, the EDPS, recently made a point of tweeting to warn an MEP (and former EC digital commissioner) against the legality of applying Singapore-style Bluetooth-powered contacts tracing in the EU — writing: “Please be cautious comparing Singapore examples with European situation. Remember Singapore has a very specific legal regime on identification of device holder.”

A spokesman for the EDPS told us it’s in contact with data protection agencies of the Member States involved in the PEPP-PT project to collect “relevant information”.

“The general principles presented by EDPB on 20 March, and by EDPS on 24 March are still relevant in that context,” the spokesman added — referring to guidance issued by the privacy regulators last month in which they encouraged anonymization and aggregation should Member States want to use mobile location data for monitoring, containing or mitigating the spread of COVID-19. At least in the first instance.

“When it is not possible to only process anonymous data, the ePrivacy Directive enables Member States to introduce legislative measures to safeguard public security (Art. 15),” the EDPB further noted.

“If measures allowing for the processing of non-anonymised location data are introduced, a Member State is obliged to put in place adequate safeguards, such as providing individuals of electronic communication services the right to a judicial remedy.”

We reached out to the HHI with questions about the PEPP-PT project and were referred to Boos — but at the time of writing had been unable to speak to him.

“The PEPP-PT system is being created by a multi-national European team,” the HHI writes in a press release about the effort. “It is an anonymous and privacy-preserving digital contact tracing approach, which is in full compliance with GDPR and can also be used when traveling between countries through an anonymous multi-country exchange mechanism. No personal data, no location, no Mac-Id of any user is stored or transmitted. PEPP-PT is designed to be incorporated in national corona mobile phone apps as a contact tracing functionality and allows for the integration into the processes of national health services. The solution is offered to be shared openly with any country, given the commitment to achieve interoperability so that the anonymous multi-country exchange mechanism remains functional.”

“PEPP-PT’s international team consists of more than 130 members working across more than seven European countries and includes scientists, technologists, and experts from well-known research institutions and companies,” it adds.

“The result of the team’s work will be owned by a non-profit organization so that the technology and standards are available to all. Our priorities are the well being of world citizens today and the development of tools to limit the impact of future pandemics — all while conforming to European norms and standards.”

The PEPP-PT says its technology-focused efforts are being financed through donations. Per its website, it says it’s adopted the WHO standards for such financing — to “avoid any external influence”.

Of course for the effort to be useful it relies on EU citizens voluntarily downloading one of the aligned contacts tracing apps — and carrying their smartphone everywhere they go, with Bluetooth enabled.

Without substantial penetration of regional smartphones it’s questionable how much of an impact this initiative, or any contacts tracing technology, could have. Although if such tech were able to break even some infection chains people might argue it’s not wasted effort.

Notably, there are signs Europeans are willing to contribute to a public healthcare cause by doing their bit digitally — such as a self-reporting COVID-19 tracking app which last week racked up 750,000 downloads in the UK in 24 hours.

But, at the same time, contacts tracing apps are facing scepticism over their ability to contribute to the fight against COVID-19. Not everyone carries a smartphone, nor knows how to download an app, for instance. There’s plenty of people who would fall outside such a digital net.

Meanwhile, while there’s clearly been a big scramble across the region, at both government and grassroots level, to mobilize digital technology for a public health emergency cause there’s arguably greater imperative to direct effort and resources at scaling up coronavirus testing programs — an area where most European countries continue to lag.

Germany — where some of the key backers of the PEPP-PT are from — being the most notable exception.

At these difficult times, parents are concerned for their children’s education, especially given so much of it has had to go online during the Covid-19 pandemic. But what about pre-schoolers who are missing out?

Pre-school children are sponges for information but don’t get formal training on reading and writing until they enter the classroom when they are less sponge-like and surrounded by 30 other children. Things are tougher for non-English speaking children who’s parents want them to learn English.

Lingumi, a platform aimed at toddlers learning critical skills, has now raised £4 million in a funding round led by China-based technology fund North Summit Capital – a fund run by Alibaba’s former Chief Data Scientist Dr Min Wanli – alongside existing investors LocalGlobe, ADV, and Entrepreneur First.

The startup, launched in 2017, is also announcing the launch of daily free activity packs and videos to support children and families during the COVID-19 outbreak, and has pledged to donate 20% of its sales during this period to the Global Children’s Fund.

Lingumi’s interactive courses offer one-to-one tutoring with a kind ‘social learning’ and its first course helps introduce key English grammar and vocabulary from the age of 2.

Instead of tuning into live lessons with tutors, which are typically timetabled and expensive, Lingumi’s lessons are delivered through interactive speaking tasks, teacher videos, and games. At the end of each lesson, children can see videos of Lingumi friends speaking the same words and phrases as them. Because the kids are watching videos, Lingumi is cheaper than live courses, and thus more flexible for parents.

The company launched the first Lingumi course in China last year, focused on teaching spoken English to non-English speakers. The platform is now being used by more than 100,000 families globally, including in mainland China, Taiwan, UK, Germany, Italy, and France. More than 1.5 million English lessons have taken place in China over the past six months, and 40% of active users are also playing lessons daily. Lingumi says its user base grew 50% during China’s lockdown and it has had a rapid uptake in Europe.

“Lingumi’s rapid expansion in the Chinese market required a strategic local investor, and Dr Min and the team had a clear-sighted understanding of the technology and scale opportunity both in China, and globally.”

Dr Wanli Min, general partner at North Summit Capital, commented: “It is only the most privileged children who can access native English speakers for one-on-one tutoring… Lingumi has the potential to democratize English learning and offer every kid a personalized curriculum empowered by AI & Lingumi’s ‘asynchronous teaching; model.”

Competitors to include Lingumi include live teaching solutions like VIPKid, and learning platforms like Jiliguala in China, or Lingokids in the West.

The relationship between the United Kingdom and Australia is not usually a flashpoint in international relations. After all, the two allies share a common language, ancestry, and monarch. So what caused a dustup recently that saw a senior Australian parliamentarian rebuke the British foreign secretary, and for a group of Australian MPs to then cancel a trip to London in protest?

The answer is fears over Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant at the center of the 5G next-generation wireless debate. Australian officials were miffed when the British government recommended that the company be allowed to play a limited role in the U.K.’s 5G deployment despite calling it a “high risk” supplier due to its close ties to the Chinese government (the company’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, served for many years as an engineer in the People’s Liberation Army). The Australian government, a fellow member of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (which includes the two countries plus the United States, Canada, and New Zealand), disagreed back in 2017 when it barred Huawei on national security grounds.

Now, two close allies are at cross purposes about the very future of the internet. What’s at stake is not just who equips the future of telecom infrastructure, but the very values that the internet itself holds.

Two countries, ocean(s) apart

It’s not just Australia and Britain that find themselves separated by an ocean (or two). In America, Huawei has become the Trump Administration’s favorite company to hate. In a speech at this year’s Munich Security Conference, Defense Secretary Mark Esper called the company “today’s poster child” for “nefarious activity” while another White House official compared the company to “the Mafia.”  It should come as no surprise that the company is the target of trade restrictions, a criminal action against its CFO, and a concerted diplomatic campaign. 

America’s concerns are twofold. First, that critical infrastructure provided by a Chinese company with such close ties to the country’s central leadership is an unacceptable security risk. Second, that arresting Huawei’s increasing dominance risks surrendering any chance for American leadership in 5G technology.

National security considerations have predominantly driven policymakers in Australia. More alert by geography to the strategic risks posed by China, Canberra moved early and decisively to bar Huawei from participating in its 5G networks at all. “The fundamental issue is one of trust between nations in cyberspace,” writes Simeon Gilding, until recently the head of the Australian Signals Directorate’s signals intelligence and offensive cyber missions.

That lack of trust between China and Australia is compounded by the difficult geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific. “It’s not hard to imagine a time when the U.S. and China end up in some sort of conflict,” says Tom Uren of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). “If there was a shooting war, it is almost inevitable that the U.S. would ask Australia for assistance and then we’d be in this uncomfortable situation if we had Huawei in our networks that our critical telecommunications networks would literally be run by an adversary we were at war with.”

Gilding warned, “It’s simply not reasonable to expect that Huawei would refuse a direction from the Chinese Communist Party.” And no matter what reassurances Huawei executives have given, they just simply haven’t been able to ally those concerns. Beijing didn’t help Huawei’s case when it passed its 2017 Intelligence Law, which obliges all Chinese companies and individuals to assist with intelligence efforts if asked. “People were always afraid [that might happen],” adds Uren, “and having it in writing really solidified those concerns.”

As a result, Canberra’s policy to ban Huawei has been largely uncontroversial. With the exception of some of the country’s telecom companies, “the decision [to ban Huawei] has bipartisan backing,” says Simon Jackman, CEO of the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

Calling out London

American officials wish their British counterparts shared Australia’s outlook – and haven’t been shy about saying so. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged the UK to “relook” at the decision and lobbied Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the issue on a recent trip to London. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Esper has made clear that electing to use Huawei could threaten allies’ access to American intelligence. “If countries choose to go the Huawei route,” Mr. Esper told reporters on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, “it could well jeopardize all the information sharing and intelligence sharing we have been talking about, and that could undermine the alliance, or at least our relationship with that country.”

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo leaves 10 Downing Street after a meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on 30 January 2020 in London, England. (Photo by WIktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

British officials not only believe this to be a bluff – the Five Eyes intelligence alliance is much too strong in their view – but have a different assessment of the risk Huawei poses. “Everyone’s perception of the Huawei risk is particular to them,” says Nigel Inkster, a former deputy chief of MI6 now at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

The U.K. goes even further though. Experts in the British government, which started using Huawei in its 3G and 4G networks back in 2003, believe that not only can the risks be mitigated, but they are being overstated in the first place. “The Australian approach is driven by the kind of worst-case analysis of the risk 5G could pose in effect on the brink of war,” says Inkster. “I don’t think the U.K. envisages going to war with China any time soon.”

Inkster and other top officials remain confident in the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC), which was established by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) back when Huawei was first introduced into Britain’s telecom networks. “We’ve never ‘trusted’ Huawei,” wrote NCSC Technical Director Dr. Ian Levy in a January 2020 blogpost. As a result, the U.K. has “always treated them as a ‘high risk vendor’ and worked to limit their use in the UK and put extra mitigations around their equipment and services.”

Levy and the government’s other cybersecurity experts believe that their system will continue to work. “The basic cyber security measures that have been used for 3/4G also apply to 5G,” argues Marcus Willett, who also served as the first Director of Cyber at GCHQ, Britain’s signals-intelligence agency. “If Huawei had been playing games, we would have discovered it by now,” says Pauline Neville-Jones, a Conservative member of the House of Lords, and previously security minister and cybersecurity advisor in former British Prime Minister David Cameron’s government.

British regulations already restrict Huawei and other high-risk vendors in several ways, including capping their market share at 35% and ensuring their equipment is continuously evaluated by HCSEC. In addition, by preventing Huawei’s 5G kit from being used near sensitive sites and limiting it to the periphery of the network (as opposed to the core), British officials are confident that they can contain any additional risk.

That’s not to say Huawei doesn’t face stiff opposition from some corners. Even if you mitigated the risk, it’s “quite a leap to allow the Chinese to be intimately involved in something as sensitive as this,” one U.K. retired diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic, told me. And the company is no one’s first choice. “If the U.K. didn’t have Huawei in its system, it wouldn’t choose to have Huawei now,” Lady Neville-Jones told me. “But we are in a different place [than Australia] and we have set up a system which we believe enables us to manage the risk. And by God, we will be on alert. We’re not stupid. [But] you say to yourself, at the end of the day, do you trust your technical people or not? And there’s never been a complaint on backdoors or traps.” Indeed, government experts have often caught coding errors she adds. “I suspect the result of [British inspections] is that technically Huawei is a better company than it might otherwise have been.”

The British position is also rooted in game theory. “Even if you could [bring down the network], when would you do it?” asks Willett, formerly of GCHQ. “It is effectively a ‘one shot’ capability – if used by China, it would undermine the position of all Chinese companies in the world tech market. China would therefore presumably save the ‘one shot’ for war or near-war, in which case it would need to be sure it would work. That is not easy.”

Australian experts are skeptical, though. “I think [the British] are overconfident in their ability to mitigate [the risk],” Uren, the ASPI expert, told me. His view – widely shared in Australia – is that defenders always think they can defend a system until they can’t, and giving a Chinese company access to the network is already a concession too far. “Cybersecurity is all about raising the costs for the attacker,” writes Gildling, the former Australian official. “Network access through vendors — which need to be all over 5G networks to maintain their equipment — effectively reduces the access cost to zero.”

The economic equation in Europe

It’s hard to understate the difference geography makes, though. In America and Australia — Pacific powers — China is physically present. For Europeans — including Britain — the risks of a rising China don’t carry the same emotional weight.

“The idea of China being a direct security threat is still somewhat abstract,” says Dr. Janka Oertel of the European Council on Foreign Relations. With the exception of countries like Poland and Estonia which are reliant on U.S. military support and thus more willing to toe Washington’s line, “European governments have just begun to asses the risk China can pose in the cyber realm.” Partly to allay those rising concerns, Huawei about a year ago established a a Cyber Security Transparency Centre in Brussels, the de facto capital of the European Union. Unlike Britain’s HCSEC, however, it is not an independent evaluation center and it is not designed to carry out the same functions.

Economics dominate the conversation on the continent more than national security concerns. The fragmented telecom market in Europe (105 mobile operators versus just four in America), has also proven beneficial to Huawei. In a competitive environment where cost has become everything, the state-subsidized Huawei is often able to underprice its competitors. Even in Britain, security concerns were weighed against the fact that “stripping out [the Huawei components already in the system] and starting again would carry enormous costs,” Inkster told me.

Still, Oertel thinks the debate in Europe is being debated on the wrong grounds. “It’s really hard to say Huawei is cheaper than Ericsson or Nokia. No one has the numbers because these are all contracts between private companies. We’re talking a lot of hypotheticals.” Her concern is that while Huawei might seem cheaper now, that might change if it’s able to squeeze out competitors and raise prices.

The battle isn’t over yet, though. Ericsson and Nokia maintain that they are competitive on technology and cost. Indeed, Ericsson is already running 27 5G networks in 15 countries and was just selected by the Danish government to build the country’s 5G network, displacing existing Huawei equipment. Meanwhile in Germany, the government’s move toward using Huawei has run into sharp opposition in the Bundestag, the German federal parliament. Norbert Röttgen, a prominent member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s own party, helped draft a bill that would bar any “untrustworthy” company from “both the core and peripheral networks.”

Norbert Roettgen, CDU at the Bundespressekonferenz the occasion of the candidacy for the CDU chairmanship, on February 18, 2020 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Felix Zahn/Photothek via Getty Images)

The Trump Administration is still concerned enough about Huawei’s potential ability to dominate 5G worldwide that it is actively campaigning for a Western alternative. “We are encouraging allied and U.S. tech companies to develop alternative 5G solutions,” Defense Secretary Esper said in Munich, where he also exhorted fellow security officials to “develop our own secure 5G network … so we don’t regret our decisions later.” 

Other American officials have suggested even more extraordinary measures. Declaring in a February speech that nothing less than “our economic future is at stake,” Attorney General William Barr (who also served formerly as a long-time lawyer for U.S. telecom and TechCrunch parent company Verizon) bluntly called on the U.S. and its allies to “actively consider” a proposal for the government and U.S. companies to take a controlling stake in Nokia and Ericsson. “Putting our large market and financial muscle behind one or both of these firms would make it a far more formidable competitor.”

Ericsson dismisses these comments. “Personally, I find it odd that Barr is even thinking like this really,” Gabriel Solomon, a senior Ericsson executive in Europe, told me. “We were first to commercial deployment in four continents. We are in a very competitive market.”

Indeed, that echoes a common view in Europe: that the goal of American policy on Huawei is less about security and more about market share – and making sure America, not China, owns the future of 5G. And that has its own risks. “Cutting out Huawei altogether potentially moves us toward a kind of bipolar, bifurcated internet, which if taken to logical extreme would have some very serious adverse implications for everyone in terms of cost, a slowdown in innovation, and general reduction in intellectual and technical interchange,” says Inkster, the former MI6 official.

Things would be easier, Europeans say, if America presented an obvious alternative. Without one, America’s allies feel they have little choice but to use Huawei if they don’t want to fall behind technologically. “The West has got itself in a mess,” says the retired British diplomat. “It is a striking failure of political cooperation and coordination that we should find ourselves in this position.”

There is still optimism on both sides of the Atlantic that a Western solution can be found. As Röttgen of Germany wrote in a tweet in February:

Rather than pick a champion, another solution would be to level the playing field. “Telecoms security doesn’t pay,” concedes Dr. Levy of HCSEC. And “externalising the security costs of particular choices (including vendor) will help operators make better security risk management decisions.” Another option: better national screening investment mechanisms that would limit the ability of state-owned enterprises to operate unfairly.

But to get there requires coordination and cooperation – and that isn’t necessarily as forthcoming as you might expect. Germans still remember that the NSA hacked Chancellor Merkel’s phone – and the Trump Administration’s trade war has targeted Europe almost as much as it has China. Röttgen cautioned that cooperation on 5G was connected: “[W]e must know that tariffs against Brussels are off the table,” he said in the same tweet. “Partners don’t threaten one another.” Meanwhile, Huawei is earning goodwill by sending medical equipment to Europe to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Technology was supposed to unite us,” laments Jackman, the Australian professor; “instead it’s driving us apart not just from our rivals, but our allies, too.”

On Thursday, the FDA amended their emergency policy around diagnostic testing for SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Following on a change made March 16, the agency opened the door for a number of specific private entities and labs to develop and distribute tests that can provide results on the spot in as little as 15 minutes – but there are some pretty big caveats to keep in mind as you hear about more of these coming to market.

The tests, which are ‘serological,’ meaning they identify the presence of antibodies in a person’s blood, differ considerably from the molecular testing that is currently in use under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) by FDA-approved labs and drive-through testing sites. The serological tests show that a person has developed antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, which means they very likely came into contact with it (and either have it, or have already recovered from having it). The molecular tests actually detect the presence of viral DNA in the blood stream, which is a much more definitive indicator that they currently have an active infection (at least at the time the swab was taken).

Serological tests have still been used widely in countries where the response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been shown to be effective, including in China, Taiwan and Singapore. They’ve also been used in different communities in the U.S., based on earlier guidelines around private lab diagnostics, but on March 26 the FDA named 29 entities who had provided notification to the agency as required and are now therefore able to distribute their tests.

It’s important to note that these tests have not been reviewed or validated by the FDA, unlike those molecular tests that are included in the organizations emergency use category. Instead, the FDA “does not intend to object to the development and distribution by commercial manufacturers” of these tests, provided they meet a number of criteria, including qualifying the results of their reported test results with the following information:

• This test has not been reviewed by the FDA.
• Negative results do not rule out SARS-CoV-2 infection, particularly in those who have been in contact with the virus. Follow-up testing with a molecular diagnostic should be considered to rule out infection in these individuals.
• Results from antibody testing should not be used as the sole basis to diagnose or exclude SARS-CoV-2 infection or to inform infection status.
• Positive results may be due to past or present infection with non-SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus strains, such as coronavirus HKU1, NL63, OC43, or 229E.

The FDA specifically notes in its emergency use FAQ that these entities have reported their own validation of these tests, and that they won’t be pursuing Emergency Use Authorization. That said, there’s now nothing stopping the entities on this list from distributing their tests, which means they will be able to be put to use in testing Americans and painting a larger picture of the potential spread of the novel coronavirus – with the caveat noted above that the FDA doesn’t consider these tests used alone to be positive confirmation of a definite SARS-CoV-2 case, or conversely, a sure indicator that someone doesn’t have the virus.

Still, in the absence of better options like expanded available of the tests that are approved under the EUA, these serological tests (many of which can provide on-site results with just a pinprick of blood) will be useful in painting a more accurate picture of the overall spread and reach of the coronavirus, especially for smaller clinics, GP clinics and local labs that don’t have priority access to the equipment and supplies needed for the molecular testing efforts.

For instance, ne test on this list, the Healgen Scientific COVID-19 IgG/IgM (Whole Blood/Serum/Plasma) Rapid Test Device, requires no instrumentation and can provide results in just 15 minutes. Distributor Ideal Rehab Care is working with its legal representation Fox Rothschild to begin importing the tests from Singapore for use “as soon as possible.”

The FDA updating its website with Healgen as one of the entities that have notified it of intent to use its serological test is what unlocked the ability for the company to begin distribution: It’s still illegal for anyone not on this list to do so, and the FDA still also specifically prohibits the use of at-home serological tests on its official guidelines.

A new type of test developed by UK researchers from the Brunel University London, Lancaster University and the University of Surrey can provide COVID-19 detection in as little as 30 minutes, using hand-held hardware that costs as little as £100 (around $120 USD) with individual swab sample kits that cost around $5 per person. The test is based on existing technology that has been used in the Philippines for testing viral spread in chickens, but it’s been adapted by researchers for use with COVID-19 in humans, and the team is now working on ramping mass production.

This test would obviously need approval by local health regulatory bodies like the FDA before it goes into active use in any specific geography, but the researchers behind the project are “confident it will respond well,” and say they could even make it available for use “within a few weeks.” The hardware itself is battery-operated and connects to a smartphone application to display diagnostic results and works with nasal or throat swabs, without requiring that samples be round-tripped to a lab.

There are other tests already approved for use that use similar methods for on-site testing, including kits and machines from Cepheid and Mesa Biotech. These require expensive dedicated table-top micro-labs, however, which is installed in dedicated healthcare facilities including hospitals. This test from UK scientists has the advantage of running on inexpensive hardware, with testing capabilities for up to six people at once, which can be deployed in doctor’s offices, hospitals and even potentially workplaces and homes for truly widespread, accessible testing.

Some frontline, rapid results tests are already in use in the EU and China, but these are generally serological tests that rely on the presence of antibodies, whereas this group’s diagnostics are molecular, so it can detect the presence of viral DNA even before antibodies are present. This equipment could even potentially be used to detect the virus in asymptomatic individuals who are self-isolating at home, the group notes, which would go a long way to scoping out the portion of the population that’s not currently a priority for other testing methods, but that could provide valuable insight into the true extend of silent, community-based transmission of the coronavirus.

In a prime example of why President Trump shouldn’t be endorsing any unproven potential treatments for the novel coronavirus behind the current global pandemic, a new small-scale study by researchers in China indicates that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine actually isn’t any more effective than standard, existing best practice for conventional care of patients with the virus.

The study, which included 30 patients with a control of 15 who received no treatment, with the other half being treated with hydroxychloroquine, showed that there was a statistically insignificant difference in the number of patients who tested negative for the drug after a week. During the study, those who received conventional treatment were provided anti-virals that are currently recommended for use in China, including Iopinavir and ritonavir, and after a week, 13 of the 15 control patients showed no sign of the virus, while 14 of the 15 who were treated with hydroxychloroquine showed the same.

An earlier small-scale study of 30 patients by French researchers published last week had shown indication that hydroxychloroquine used alone was effective in reducing the duration and severity of COVID-19, while using it in combination with an antibiotic called azithromycin increased its effectiveness. The study has been criticized by some for its methods – which is the entire purpose of scientific study and medical research, wherein people submit their studies for peer review prior to publication, and then other researchers challenge their assumptions, results and findings.

Trump is obviously not a scientist or medical professional, and yet he has been touting the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine during the White House’s daily coronavirus task force press briefings, and on Twitter, including when he called for them to be “put in use IMMEDIATELY” on March 21. The drug can be lethal in doses that exceed physician’s guidance, however, and a Phoenix-area couple subsequently self-medicated with a form of chloroquine used for cleaning aquariums, citing the President’s information about it as the cause of their decision to take it.

White House task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci has attempted to dissuade anyone from reading too much into what amount to scattered and early scientific research results, but Fauci seems to be falling out of favor with Trump and has not appeared on recent task force briefings.

The bottom line is that all of these potential treatments require, as Fauci has said, proper large-scale clinical trials before any definitive statements can be made about their efficacy against the coronavirus one way or the other. Relying on small scale investigations means that you will see variances in results, which is why you do large-scale testing with proper controls to arrive at more consistent and verifiable research.

Medical professionals around the world are working tirelessly to research various forms of treatment, and to launch exactly these kinds of clinical trials, but they will take time to produce results – and then corroborating research will need to be conducted to show that their results are repeatable and reliable. Meanwhile, treatment using unproven methods will continue due to the severe and life-threatening nature of this disease, which has encouraged the FDA to allow case-by-case use of methods without formal approval on compassionate and investigatory grounds. That said, no one (least of all the President), should be pointing to these as proven solutions before public health agencies have actually done the work to certify them as such.

A new Sydney-based non-profit volunteer organization called RapidWard launches this week, with a focus on getting critical medical supplies from producers in China to healthcare professionals, doctors, hospitals and governments worldwide who need them. The group, founded by serial entrepreneur and advisor Milton Zhou, has ample supply chain experience and recognized the need for a solution that focused on establishing distribution pathways that eschew markups in order to make supplies available at-cost.

Zhou, Australian-born founder of Chinese descent who leads Australian sustainable energy company Maoneng as CEO, has been following the coronavirus pandemic and the impact its had in terms of incurring panic buying and hoarding behaviour for much-needed medical equipment. Through existing personal connections, Zhou says that he has access to a factory in China that produces a type of test kit used broadly in that nation’s efforts to combat the spread of COVID-19 (and approved by its equivalent of the FDA).

These kits can produce results in just 15 minutes, using a serological assay that looks for the presence of antibodies in a patient’s bloodstream. This differs from the PCR type of test that is currently in use in the U.S., which looks for the presence of viral DNA in patient mucus samples collected via swab. While the serological test can’t detect COVID-19 during the incubation period, it is reliable once symptoms begin to present, and could help greatly with in-situ diagnostic efforts for patients already presenting with known indicators – freeing up PCR tests for broader use, including asymptomatic screening.

These kits can be provided in volumes of 70,000 per day by RapidWard’s suppliers, the company says, and will be available at the cost of production and shipping of $12 per test. Zhou said that RapidWard is also sourcing lab-free 15-minute saliva-based tests that are in use in both Korea and China, and that can be supplied at a volume of up to 20 units per day.

RapidWard’s supplies also include disposable N95 masks that meet the standards of the FDA and the National Institutes for Occupational Safety and Health, and its partners can produce them (to FDA specs) at a volume of up to 100,000 per day. As with the tests, RapidWard’s focus is on sourcing and supplying these at-cost, without any markups or profits for the organization itself.

Right now, the company is focused on working with and supplying official health organizations and governments in need, but it does have a means for individuals to sign up to register interest, since it plans on offering equipment directly to consumers should supply ever catch up to a point where it’s meeting critical health professional demand and that becomes possible.

RapidWard is encouraging any government or medical institution in need of supplies to get in touch. Even if it can’t provision directly, Zhou says they’re interested in working with these parties to sort out supply chains in China wherever they’re able.

Ford announced the details of its current manufacturing efforts around building much-needed medical supplies for front-line healthcare workers and COVID-19 patients on Tuesday. Its efforts include building Powered Air-Purifying Respirators (PAPRs) with partner 3M, including a new design that employs existing parts from both partners to deliver effectiveness and highly-scalable production capacity.

Ford says that it’s also going to be building face shields, leaning on its 3D printing capabilities, with an anticipated production rate of over 100,000 units per week. These are key pieces of personal protective equipment (PPE) used by frontline healthcare staff to protect them against virus-containing droplets that are spread by patients through coughing and sneezing in clinical settings. The company has designed a new face shield, which will be tested with the first 1,000 units this week at Detroit Mercy, Henry Ford Health Systems and Detroit Medical Center Sinai-Grace Hospitals in Michigan to evaluate their efficacy. Provided they perform as planned, Ford anticipates scaling to building 75,000 by end of week, with 100,000 able to be made in one of the company’s Plymouth, MI production facilities each week thereafter.

The automaker is also going to be working with GE on expanding production capacity for GE Healthcare’s ventilator, with a simplified design that should allow for higher volume production. That’s part of a response to a U.S. government request for more units to support healthcare needs, the company said. On top of its U.S.-focused ventilator project with GE, Ford is also working on a separate effort to spin up ventilator production targeting the UK based on a request for aid from that country’s government, and it’s also shipping back 165,000 N95 respirator masks that were sent by the company from the U.S. to China earlier this year, since the need for that equipment is now greater back in the U.S., the company said, and China’s situation continues to improve.

Over the weekend, President Trump tweeted that U.S. automakers, including Ford, GM and Tesla had received the “go ahead” to make “ventilators and other metal products, fast.”

“We have had preliminary discussions with the U.S. and U.K. governments and looking into the feasibility,” Ford spokesperson Rachel McCleery said at the time in a statement to TechCrunch . “It’s vital that we all pull together to help the country weather this crisis and come out the other side stronger than ever.”

Based on this update, it seems like Ford did indeed move quickly to take stock of where it could contribute, and in what capacity. The company will be looking at using both its own and partner facilities to produce this much-needed medical equipment, it said on Tuesday during a press conference call about the announcement, and it’ll also be leveraging existing parts and equipment to speed production capabilities and capacity.

The PAPRs that Ford is building, for instance, will use off-the-shelf components from the automaker’s F-150 truck’s cooled seating, as well as 3M’s existing HEPA filters. These respirators could potentially offer significant advantages in use compared to N95s, since they are battery-powered and can filter airborne virus particles for up to eight hours on a single, swappable standard power tool battery pack worn at the waist. Asked about production timelines and capacity, 3M Global Technical Director Mike Kesti said that they’re still working that out, with a focus on how Ford can supplement existing PAPR production before moving into producing their new version.

“[Ford is] helping us expand the capacity of our existing units,” Kesti said. “So impact will be over the next days and weeks to just increase capacity of our existing [PAPR]. But we’re also working closely together with them the leverage components both from Ford, that they have available, and 3M, particularly our filters that meet the NIOSH [National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health] regulatory requirements, and trying to integrate that into a modified design that will meet the NIOSH regulation performance requirements, and scale it up as as quickly as possible.”

Ford is also assisting 3M with ramping production of its existing N95 respiratory masks, Kesti said.

Ford and GE don’t yet have a timeline, or estimates of production capacity for the new types of ventilators they’re working on either, but the team is “working feverishly to get to the release point,” according to GE Healthcare VP and Chief Quality Officer Tom Westrick.

“We don’t have specific timelines and numbers related to the to the design and the release of the new ventilators,” he said. “Although, obviously this is of utmost importance to both us and Ford.”

A startup behind one of the world’s most successful tech platforms for doctors has launched a new initiative to try and track the spread of the Coronavirus, initially in the UK but soon in the US.

Developed by MedShr – the app used by a million doctors to aid them in the diagnostic process – LetsBeatCOVID.net is designed to allow members of the public to complete a short survey about their health and exposure to COVID-19 in order that health services can save more lives.

Members of the public are asked to complete a short anonymous survey about themselves and are able to add information for others in their household or family. They can then update their responses if their situation changes using a randomly generated code to log back in. MedShr says users will, therefore, be able to hide their identity if they are concerned about their privacy. They will, however, be asked to verify their location via the phone’s browser in order to generate more accurate data about the spread of symptoms.
 
Anyone who completes the survey and chooses to enter their email will also get personalized guidance to help them understand their personal situation.

The not-for-profit initiative is led by Dr Asif Qasim, a Consultant Cardiologist based in London, England. Dr Qasim founded MedShr, an online network that enables doctors to connect and share data and knowledge with each other, in 2013.

Dr. Qasim said: “A million doctors around the world are working very hard to protect patients with COVID-19 in difficult and unprecedented circumstances. We are hearing from them that they don’t have the information they need to plan services and avert a crisis such as the one Italy is now facing. We believe this app could help.” Dr. Qasim says the data will be shared with health authorities fighting the pandemic.

LetsBeatCOVID.net could make it easier for members of the public to provide the information urgently needed by hospitals and governments by allowing hospitals to understand how many people are: more likely to require medical help or hospitalization; have been in contact with someone with COVID-19 but do not have any symptoms; have mild symptoms of COVID-19; or believe or know they have already had COVID-19 and recovered.

The spread and devastating impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) is unprecedented. Hospitals in China and Italy have struggled to care for the large numbers of people who become infected with the virus, especially those who needed Intensive Care and breathing support with a ventilator. Doctors and scientists believe that the UK, US and many other countries could be just a few weeks away from the devastating death toll that Italy is now experiencing. 

MedShr is a HIPAA and GDPR compliant professional network for doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals currently used by over one million members in 190 countries.

During two of this week’s White House briefings, President Trump referred specifically to two potential treatments that have been identified by medical researchers and clinicians, and that have undergone various degrees of investigation and testing in the ongoing fight against the global coronavirus pandemic. It’s important to note upfront that regardless of what you may have heard, from Trump or any other sources, no drugs or treatments have been proven as effective for either the prevention of contracting COVID-19, or for its treatment.

That said, a number of different clinical studies are currently in progress all over the world, and in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health is looking to fill a 400-volunteer study that will provide clinical results related to use of remdesivir, an antiviral drug developed by Gilead originally as a treatment for Ebola, but it’s still only in clinical trials even for treatment of that disease. This study could also add in other drug candidates as additional test therapies. Meanwhile, studies in China and France have examined the effectiveness of anti-malarial drugs including chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine – including one small-scale study that suggests the positive effects of hydroxycholoroquine in reducing both the duration and symptoms of COVID-19 in combination with an antibiotic called azithromycin.

The important thing to keep in mind when considering these or any other potential treatments for the novel coronavirus, which is still relatively young, is that a lot of what we know about them so far is effectively anecdotal, and based not on the kind of scientifically rigours controlled clinical studies that are normally used in the years-long development and certification of drugs. Instead, treatments like remdesivir and chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine are being deployed in the field by healthcare practitioners based on their approved use in similar (but crucially not the same) situations, like the Ebola and SARS outbreaks.

Often, they’re being used under what’s called ‘compassionate’ grounds in the U.S. This effectively amounts to employing a drug that’s not yet certified for general use in treatment of a patient whose condition is so severe that a doctor is willing to go to desperate lengths to try to alleviate their symptoms. This has the advantage of sidestepping typical testing and approval procedures, and requiring that the results of its use are documented, which contributes to the overall body of clinical knowledge in terms of its effects and interactions with patients and with COVID-19.

It’s not a clinical study, however, and that means there are still a lot of unknowns when it comes to its use that just can’t be learned or asserted based on scattered, individual instances of compassionate care treatment.

“As the Commissioner of FDA and the President mentioned yesterday, we’re trying to strike a balance between making something with the potential of an effect available to the American people, at the same time that we do it under the auspices of a protocol that would give us information to determine if it’s truly safe and truly effective,” explained National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci during a press conference on Friday. “But the information that you’re referring to specifically is anecdotal, it was not done in a controlled clinical trial. So you really can’t make any definitive statement about it.”

During Thursday’s White House coronavirus pandemic task force briefing, Trump made false claims that chloroquine was already approved by the FDA as a treatment for COVID-19 under an emergency authorization. FDA Director Dr. Stephen Hahn clarified that this and remdesivir were being considered and studied by the FDA, as was an approach that would use plasma extracted from patients who’d recovered from COVID-19 as a potential source of antibodies for others. Still, all of these are still quite far away from clinical deployment in any generally approved way.

Meanwhile, Fauci’s cautions should be taken for what they are: Warnings that are primarily meant to emphasize that the reasons the FDA requires clinical studies, even for drugs already tentatively approved for use in other cases, is because it has patient health and safety in mind. While chloroquine has been used for decades to treat malaria, and chronic rheumatoid arthritis, it can have dangerous side effects, including death, if taken incorrectly. Even when taken correctly, it can cause things like stomach distress, and even permanent damage to a person’s vision.

Fauci’s comments Friday explain the risks of putting too much stock in any potential treatment at this stage, even if they are showing promising results among small or even medium-sized deployments.

“You’ve got to be careful when you say fairly effective, it was never done in a clinical trial that compared it to anything,” he said in answer to a reporter’s question about chloroquine’s efficacy in treating SARS. “It was given to individuals and felt that maybe it worked […] Whenever you do a clinical trial, you do standard of care, versus standard of care plus the agent you’re evaluating. That’s the reason why we showed back in Ebola why particular interventions worked.”

A summary survey of various prospective treatments and their current status was published today In Medscape, and this includes the current state of remdesivir and chloroquine investigations, as well as a number of other drugs being studied by researchers. As has been reported here and elsewhere, there are promising signs that they could prove effective in either treatment, or treatment and even preventative use (in the case of remedesivir), but these are, as Dr. Fauci puts it, only the first step that should lead to more sophisticated clinical studies, which themselves will then need competing peer studies to eventually prove out.