Gates Foundation Will Commit 'Total Attention' To Coronavirus Pandemic (thehill.com) 59
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is now devoting all of its attention to addressing the global outbreak of the novel coronavirus, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said in an interview published Sunday. From a report: Gates told The Financial Times that his foundation, which has an endowment of more than $40 billion, was prepared to put all of its resources toward fighting the virus, even if it meant efforts to combat other deadly diseases would suffer as a result. "We've taken an organization that was focused on HIV and malaria and polio eradication, and almost entirely shifted it to work on this," Gates, a leading philanthropist, said. "This has the foundation's total attention. Even our non-health related work, like higher education and K-12 [schools], is completely switched around to look at how you facilitate online learning." The Gates' foundation has already committed $250 million toward coronavirus relief efforts around the world. The group's most recent $150 million pledge is set to go toward international efforts to develop diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines, as well as efforts to provide resources to African and South Asian countries.
In the mean time Malaria continues to kill (Score:4)
"World Health Organisation generally reports "around a million" deaths each year from the disease, out of somewhere between 300-500 million cases."
"The World Health Organization estimates that between 300 and 500 million cases of malaria occur each year and a child dies from malaria every 30 seconds."
On this scale, covid is a kinda slow news day.
Re:In the mean time Malaria continues to kill (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, don't confuse making posts on Facebook or liking Tweets for caring about a problem. If those people had a dog, they'd post about how much they care about it while it sits alone in the corner slowly starving to death.
Re: In the mean time Malaria continues to kill (Score:3)
This pandemic is the biggest concern currently. Malaria is already being worked on and there are vaccines in the pipeline. Not sure it can be sped up without wider support and sense of urgency. Using comparisons with malaria to criticize the COVID-19 work wonâ(TM)t help the malaria situation â" I think you know that. Or do you really believe saying âoeoh look you guys are ignoring malariaâ will make people care about malaria? I donâ(TM)t think so. Weâ(TM)ll be back to business
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The problem with exponential growth is your brain doesn't readily anticipate the changes of scale that come, like clockwork, completely invalidating your understanding of the situation on a regular basis.
Sure, malaria as an annual problem is bigger than COVID-19 *so far*, but COVID-19 is getting bigger quite rapidly. In fact it's probably growing faster than we can measure in places like India or Sub-Saharan Africa.
Even if the death increases we've seen are accurate, and we project that growth to be *linear
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The problem with exponential growth is your brain doesn't readily anticipate the changes of scale that come, like clockwork, completely invalidating your understanding of the situation on a regular basis.
And all of the analyses shows that the coronavirus growth is exponential only at the very beginning of its infection into a new population.
www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest [ft.com]
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And we're at the beginning outside the developed world.
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Exactly. It spreads via a network transmission model. Those are only exponential in early stages. This is the same reason you should never by MLM hype. Network-based growth only produces big results early on, later growth always attenuates. This is why experts talk about "flattening the curve" not "turning an exponential line into a curve".
And, spoiler alert, it appears the exponential growth stage is only about two months in any given population. Yes, COVID is likely to kill more than malaria *this year*.
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It's not eradicable, not any more than the flu. They're already tracking variants as it actively mutates. Its infection rate is too high to contain. Too many asymptomatic carriers. Too many mild cases. Too persistent on surfaces.
It's a freaking common cold on steroids. Eradication is a pipe dream.
Last i heard, models indicate 50-70% of the global population will contract COVID-19 this year alone, despite social distancing and all these costly responses. And in future years, variants will continue to circula
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Sure there's new genetic variants, but there is no evidence they form distinct serotypes.
Smallpox is a virus that mutated too; it has now been eradicated. There are many strains of measles, but they're all prevented by the same vaccine.
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I admire your optimism.
Me, well, my whole family (self included) got a pretty damn nasty coronavirus in 2018. Probably COVID-17 or COVID-18, but how would i know, since they didn't offer that kind of testing. They just said "symptoms match a bad coronavirus that's been going around". So i'm of the rather pessimistic place of thinking that this coronavirus is likely more akin in mutation factor to influenza A or B or even rhinoviruses.
Don't get me wrong, since COVID-19 has turned out to be worse than any of
Re: In the mean time Malaria continues to kill (Score:2)
There's a COVID-17? Strange, there's no search results for that.
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Like i said, "how would i know?" No one gave me an official name. It was a coronavirus, one that probably started going around in late 2017. Way too early to have been the one that only showed up in late 2019, so i ain't gonna call it "covid 19". So sue me if it is shorter to steal their new acronym and apply it to a past coronavirus. Anyway you slice it, that one sucked to have too. Didn't kill us, but it did send us to the hospital. Nasty upper respiratory shit, with mild fevers, lots of fatigue, shortnes
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COVID-19 is caused by a strain of SARS: SARS-CoV-2. SARS is *a* coronavirus, but not all coronaviruses are SARS or closely related to SARS.
You may have had a coronavirus, but you almost certainly did not have anything closely related to COVID-19 in 2019, unless you were hospitalized in Saudi Arabia, which has a small MERS outbreak. MERS is closely related to SARS, and spreads mainly within health care settings.
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And all those well known facts give me zero confidence we're going to come up with a vaccine for COVID-19 that allows us to eradicate it. You realize they're not even sure having gotten the disease confers ongoing immunity? That is not a promising sign.
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This is just scientific hypercaution; you don't assume anything so you don't rule out something that will later surprise you. Every other closely related virus confers immunity, so there's no reason for the average person to worry about it until genuine evidence comes out.
Let's turn that around: there is no evidence that a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 is somehow especially tricky. Animal vaccine trials on its closest relatives have generally be successful.
People get confused because names are misleading. Saying
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I don't think it's a stretch to say that our symptoms from a different coronavirus in early 2018 demonstrate substantially more relationship to covid-19 symptoms than you would find between a dog, snake, or lion. Even in terms of pure percentage of shared genes.
But fine, have it your way. Coronaviruses are all profoundly unrelated, and i am silly to have allowed my personal experiences and scientific hypercaution to instill doubt in our ability to develop a vaccine for covid-19 will that will handle all mut
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Early vaccine animal trials are looking positive, so yes, there's good reason for hope.
Most commonly circulated strains of coronavirus *are* profoundly unrelated to SARS-CoV-2.
Slow mutations (Score:3)
Actually, coronavirus family have a lower mutation rate, thank to an exonuclease which brings proof-reading capability.
(disclaimer: we study that at work)
That increases the chances of vaccine compared to viruses with higher mutation rates like influenza (a vaccine could be good for ~4 years instead of only one season).
Its infection rate is too high to contain.
...as long as it can find potential new host to infect.
- if there is a good working vaccine, it means that it won't find a susceptible host.
- if people stay isolated at home (or at least out o
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Actually, coronavirus family have a lower mutation rate, thank to an exonuclease which brings proof-reading capability.
(disclaimer: we study that at work)
That increases the chances of vaccine compared to viruses with higher mutation rates like influenza (a vaccine could be good for ~4 years instead of only one season).
I had not actually heard this yet. Thank you! That does actually give me more hope for a vaccine's effectiveness.
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On this scale, covid is a kinda slow news day.
So far, and we're only about three months into it. Given the still-exponential growth rate of COVID-19, it will overtake malaria pretty rapidly, at least this year. Keep in mind that exponential growth gets bigger, faster as time goes on. Our innate extrapolation abilities seem to assume constant states, or at most linear growth. To understand exponential growth it's necessary to do -- and to trust -- math.
I assume you'll come back to post about how this comment of yours was foolish, when COVID-19 has
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Nope. Infection rate is too high for covid to sustain increasing death tolls into 2021. If these antibody studies in Santa Clara, LA, New York, and Germany are any indication at all, we are already seeing ~5% infection rates in places that are barely hit, and ~20% in the bad zones.
Lockdowns seem to slow it, but they ain't stopping it and people's tolerance for them is dropping rapidly already. 2020 will see more COVID deaths than malaria deaths, but not 2021.
And do note that it is not exponential growth. It
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If these antibody studies in Santa Clara, LA, New York, and Germany are any indication at all, we are already seeing ~5% infection rates in places that are barely hit, and ~20% in the bad zones.
Run the numbers and you'll see that even if those antibody studies are accurate, we could still easily have a global death toll in the 30M range, even assuming good healthcare is available everywhere (it isn't), and most of it would happen next year. Also, there's a lot of doubt about the accuracy of those numbers. Many of the antibody tests have much higher than expected false positive rates.
Lockdowns seem to slow it, but they ain't stopping it and people's tolerance for them is dropping rapidly already.
Ah, so you're arguing that my 2020 estimate is too low, shifting more of the deaths from next year. Maybe.
And do note that it is not exponential growth. It's network growth, which only looks exponential at the very beginning.
Logisti
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Doubt on the antibody numbers is fine, but i think there's been enough of those done w/similar results that the burden of proof has shifted on to the doubters. And is that any surprise? These lockdowns aren't total, people are still in grocery stores and hardware stores and interacting. And we knew going in that there are very high rates of asymptomatic and mild cases that still spread the infection. The numbers may prove wrong, but right now it seems likely they are right.
That said, yes, lots of deaths to
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Btw, the curves are not quite logistic either, as those are asymptotic. Disease models are bell shaped.
A logistic distribution is bell-shaped, and its CDF is the logistic function, which is asymptotic. Disease active case counts follow a bell-shaped curve, cumulative counts look like a logistic function. Obviously these are idealized models, so messy reality never tracks them precisely.
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Covid-19 has gone from killing half a dozen people per day to a total of 200,000 in only four months. At the peak, it was killing a person every 14 seconds. That rate is only being slowed down by locking down whole countries.
Wassamatta U? It's killing more people than the flu now, so you have to move the goalposts somewhere else?
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>> a child dies from malaria every 30 seconds
Yes. COVID now kill twice than malaria.
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Yet Slasdhot doesn't post my submissions about the new N train sets and how they compare to the classic HO scale or my submissions on the nutritional merits of a vore-based diet.
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bio-tech is still tech.
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bio-tech is still tech.
Biotech is Godzilla!
Re:why should I care ? (Score:4, Funny)
Look on the bright side, it could be a story about Trump instead.
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Re:That asshat! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Blaming China is deflection. Even if you assume that China launched this intentionally, a viral pandemic was a given regardless. It was a matter of time. If your country reacts incompetently, that's no other country's fault.
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The US results are in line with every other developed country I've heard of. The CCP didn't just lie to the US and their own people.
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The US results are in line with every other developed country I've heard of. The CCP didn't just lie to the US and their own people.
Seriously. Didn’t you just read the /. story on Australia and NZ. We are looking at possible elimination because of the excellent response of our governments. Trump and co failed miserably.
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Gonna stay perpetually isolated from the rest of the world? Sure you got every last case? Because if even one slips through you are back to rapid spread.
Elimination is a politician's fantasy. It's too infectious, there are too many mild/asymptomatic cases. There's far more cases than you think (even in NZ), and it's here to stay, y'all. The only questions are:
A) Whether you will get it before you have access to a vaccine.
B) If you get it before an effective vaccine is available, will you have a bad case and
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Thanks but no thanks (Score:2)
Er...how 'bout you stick to that focus rather than trying to grab the limelight? It's quite likely those diseases will continue to be deadly. Not to mention the famous fallacy that because you're good at X you're good at Y. (See various peanut farmer - reality show host - community organizer - Governor of Texas - president references.).
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OK I get that, but we currently have no vaccine to distribute. Why not stay on target and keep the existing network strong?
>> I could see that if the US federal govt manufactures a vaccine for COVID and wants to distribute it as efficiently as possible it would presumably end up distributed via neighborhood pharmacy and grocery stores
I also get that, but that's an argument AGAINST using Gates' distri
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Already the NHS (British health services) is calculating that Measures against Corona will cost *alot* more death than Corona. And this is britain. It will only be worse in 2nd and 3rd world countries where sanity does not prevail
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What a lame social justice troll.
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Heh. Didn't realize it made me an SJW to think that maybe the lives of children, particularly poor ones, might deserve more aid and attention than the lives of old people who have reasonable access to health care already.
Gates is a CCP Apologist, Just Like the NBA (Score:2)
“Microsoft has had a presence in China for more than 20 years [microsoft.com], entering the market in 1992. Our founder, Bill Gates, had the foresight to establish an office in Beijing, accurately predicting the country’s transition to the booming economy we see today."
He's been sucking on that tit for a long time.
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Evil within Twitter again, exposing Witch family Satanic
Forces.
They deleted the Account where this video
(which I've mirrored, in retweet)
put out.
Take a look at what they don't want you to know.
https://twitter.com/StevWork/s... [twitter.com]
Trust Bill Gates! (Score:1)
Here are the facts on Covid-19:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.co... [wiley.com]
And of course Fauci PAID for the development of the virus in the Wuhan lab. And he and Gates have been working together for years.
But sure, let's let the guy who STOLE DOS from it's inventor, and CONNED IBM into paying for a non-exclusive license and then used monopoly power to hinder technological advancement of the entire species for 40 YEARS to spend billions on developing a vaccine that will net him 7+ TRILLION and lead to a dystopia where
Just wants to beat India (Score:1)