Apple launched its own coronavirus screening site and iOS app developed alongside the White House, CDC and FEMA. From a report: The site is pretty simple with basic information about best practices and safety tips alongside a basic screening tool which should give you a fairly solid idea on whether or not you need to be tested for COVID-19. The site which is -- of course -- accessible on mobile and desktop also includes some quick tips on social distancing, isolation, hand-washing, surface disinfecting and symptom monitoring. The app, which contains identical information to the site, is US-only at the moment while the website is available worldwide. Depending on your symptoms, the site will push you to get in contact with your health provider, contact emergency services or it will inform you that you likely do not need to be tested. It will not route you to a testing center directly. Apple says that its app and website gather or collect zero personal information about anyone using it.

Ed Yong, writing for The Atlantic: The world is experienced at making flu vaccines and does so every year. But there are no existing vaccines for coronaviruses -- until now, these viruses seemed to cause diseases that were mild or rare -- so researchers must start from scratch. The first steps have been impressively quick. Last Monday, a possible vaccine created by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health went into early clinical testing. That marks a 63-day gap between scientists sequencing the virus's genes for the first time and doctors injecting a vaccine candidate into a person's arm. "It's overwhelmingly the world record," Fauci said. But it's also the fastest step among many subsequent slow ones. The initial trial will simply tell researchers if the vaccine seems safe, and if it can actually mobilize the immune system. Researchers will then need to check that it actually prevents infection from SARS-CoV-2. They'll need to do animal tests and large-scale trials to ensure that the vaccine doesn't cause severe side effects. They'll need to work out what dose is required, how many shots people need, if the vaccine works in elderly people, and if it requires other chemicals to boost its effectiveness.

"Even if it works, they don't have an easy way to manufacture it at a massive scale," said Seth Berkley of Gavi. That's because Moderna is using a new approach to vaccination. Existing vaccines work by providing the body with inactivated or fragmented viruses, allowing the immune system to prep its defenses ahead of time. By contrast, Moderna's vaccine comprises a sliver of SARS-CoV-2's genetic material -- its RNA. The idea is that the body can use this sliver to build its own viral fragments, which would then form the basis of the immune system's preparations. This approach works in animals, but is unproven in humans. By contrast, French scientists are trying to modify the existing measles vaccine using fragments of the new coronavirus. "The advantage of that is that if we needed hundreds of doses tomorrow, a lot of plants in the world know how to do it," Berkley said. No matter which strategy is faster, Berkley and others estimate that it will take 12 to 18 months to develop a proven vaccine, and then longer still to make it, ship it, and inject it into people's arms.

For weeks, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was a defiant holdout among Western leaders in refusing to lock down his country against the spread of the coronavirus. On Friday, he became the first of those leaders known to have contracted the disease. From a report: Mr. Johnson's diagnosis, confirmed in a test on Thursday, threatened to throw an already rattled British government into turmoil. Fears of a wider contagion grew, as another senior official disclosed he was also infected. Britain faced the alarming prospect of having to confront its greatest crisis since World War II with much of its leadership in quarantine. Mr. Johnson, 55, insisted he would not relinquish his duties. In a remarkable two-minute video posted on Twitter, he used his own case as a sort of teachable moment for the country, appealing to people to work from home and comply with the more drastic social distancing measures he put in place last Monday.

The New York Times has made one of the most comprehensive datasets of coronavirus cases in the United States publicly available in response to requests from researchers, scientists, government officials and businesses who would like access to the data to better understand the virus and model what may come next. From a report: The Times initially began tracking cases in late January after it became clear that no federal government agency was providing the public with an accurate, up-to-date record of cases, tracked to the county level, of people in the U.S. who had tested positive for the virus. The Times led effort has grown from a handful of correspondents to a team of several dozen journalists, including data scientists and student journalists from Northwestern University, the University of Missouri and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, working around the clock to record details about every case. The Times is committed to collecting as much data as possible in connection with the outbreak and is collaborating with the University of California, Berkeley, on an effort in California. By Friday, March 27, The Times had tracked more than 85,000 cases in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and three U.S. territories, over the past eight weeks. More than 1,200 people in the U.S. have died so far.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Scientists warned that the United States someday would become the country hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. That moment arrived on Thursday. In the United States, at least 81,321 people are known to have been infected with the coronavirus, including more than 1,000 deaths -- more cases than China, Italy or any other country has seen, according to data gathered by The New York Times.

With 330 million residents, the United States is the world's third most populous nation, meaning it provides a vast pool of people who can potentially get Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. And it is a sprawling, cacophonous democracy, where states set their own policies and President Trump has sent mixed messages about the scale of the danger and how to fight it, ensuring there was no coherent, unified response to a grave public health threat. A series of missteps and lost opportunities dogged the nation's response. Among them: a failure to take the pandemic seriously even as it engulfed China, a deeply flawed effort to provide broad testing for the virus that left the country blind to the extent of the crisis, and a dire shortage of masks and protective gear to protect doctors and nurses on the front lines, as well as ventilators to keep the critically ill alive. "The world will be a different place when the pandemic is over," the report concludes. It suggests India may become the next global hotspot for virus cases as "it, too, is a vast democracy with deep internal divisions. But its population, 1.3 billion, is far larger, and its people are crowded even more tightly into megacities."

A new consortium of top scientists will be able to use some of the world's most advanced supercomputers to look for solutions. From a report: Advanced computers have defeated chess masters and learned how to pick through mountains of data to recognize faces and voices. Now, a billionaire developer of software and artificial intelligence is teaming up with top universities and companies to see if A.I. can help curb the current and future pandemics. Thomas M. Siebel, founder and chief executive of C3.ai, an artificial intelligence company in Redwood City, Calif., said the public-private consortium would spend $367 million in its initial five years, aiming its first awards at finding ways to slow the new coronavirus that is sweeping the globe. "I cannot imagine a more important use of A.I.," Mr. Siebel said in an interview.

Known as the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, the new research consortium includes commitments from Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago, as well as C3.ai and Microsoft. It seeks to put top scientists onto gargantuan social problems with the help of A.I. -- its first challenge being the pandemic. The new institute will seek new ways of slowing the pathogen's spread, speeding the development of medical treatments, designing and repurposing drugs, planning clinical trials, predicting the disease's evolution, judging the value of interventions, improving public health strategies and finding better ways in the future to fight infectious outbreaks.

According to Johns Hopkins University, there are now more than 510,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide and more than 22,000 people have died from the new coronavirus. While China still has the most confirmed cases, the United States and Italy are close behind. CBS News reports: In the United States, more than 1,000 people have died and more than 75,000 people have been infected. An unprecedented number of Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week as the virus shuttered businesses and normal life across large swaths of the country came to a halt. Roughly 3.3 million people filed a claim for jobless aid in the week ending March 21 -- a nearly fivefold increase over the previous weekly record set in 1982. The Senate has passed an unprecedented $2 trillion relief package to help workers, businesses and the severely strained health care system survive the pandemic. UPDATE: The United States now leads the world with confirmed coronavirus cases. "[A]t least 81,321 people are known to have been infected with the coronavirus, including more than 1,000 deaths -- more cases than China, Italy or any other country has seen," reports The New York Times.

Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker interviews Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard who has focussed much of her career on examining distrust of science in the U.S.: Chotiner: This idea that we reject science because it clashes with our beliefs or experience -- how does that explain why people in Miami, whose homes are going to be flooded, reject global-warming science? Is it partisanship?

Oreskes: The phrase I used was implicatory denial. What we found in "Merchants of Doubt" was that the original merchants of doubt, the people who started the whole thing, way back in the late nineteen-eighties, didn't want to accept the implication that capitalism, as we know it, had failed -- that climate change was a huge market failure and that there was a need for some kind of significant government intervention in the marketplace to address it. So, rather than accept that implication, they questioned the science. Now these things get complicated. People are complicated. One of the things that's happened with climate change over the last thirty years is that, because climate-change denial got picked up by the Republican Party as a political platform, it became polarized according to partisan politics, which is different than, say, vaccination rejection.

And so then it became a talking point for Republicans, and then it became tribal. So now you have this deeply polarized situation in the United States where your views on climate change align very, very strongly with your party affiliation. And now we see a cognitive dissonance. Let's say you live in Florida, and you're now seeing flooding on a rather regular basis. This is completely consistent with the scientific evidence, but you don't accept it as proof of the science. You say, "Oh, well, we've always had flooding, or maybe it's a natural variable." You come up with excuses not to accept the thing that you don't want to accept.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to affect people all over the globe, Airbnb is stepping up with a plan to offer free or subsidized housing to people working on the disease's front lines, namely health care professionals, emergency workers and relief personnel. From a report: The company announced today that it will provide "free or subsidized housing" for 100,000 people working as frontline healthcare, relief for first response professionals focused on stemming the COVID-19 crisis. Airbnb's effort will work by allowing Hosts on its platform to opt-in to making their space available, with any fees that Airbnb would normally charge for using its platform waived for those who participate.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The $2 trillion stimulus package that the U.S. Senate is working to approve today is aimed at helping the country cope with the massive impact of the coronavirus pandemic. But it also includes at least $1.25 billion for federal research agencies to support scientists trying to better understand coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). In addition, it extends a financial hand to universities that have shut down because of the pandemic, some of which could go to support research that has been disrupted.

Details of the legislation have yet to emerge after Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress worked out their differences in negotiations that ran into the early morning. But a 22-page summary (PDF) released by the Senate Appropriations Committee this morning contains these highlights:

- The National Institutes of Health would receive $945 million for "vaccine, therapeutic, and diagnostic research" on COVID-19 as well as on "the underlying risks to cardiovascular and pulmonary conditions."
- The National Science Foundation would receive $76 million to supplement an ongoing program that allows scientists to jump into the field for pilot studies on all manner of natural disasters.
- The Department of Energy's Office of Science would get $99.5 million to cover the additional costs of operating user facilities at its national laboratories, including support for equipment and staff.
- The U.S. Forest Service would get $3 million to "reestablish experiments impacted by travel restrictions" stemming from the pandemic, including an ongoing forest inventory.

In addition, three research agencies would receive a total of $86 million "to support continuity of operations" affected by COVID-19. NASA would receive $60 million for the costs of rescheduling scientific missions, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would get $20 million to supplement "life and property related services" within its National Weather Service, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology would receive $6 million to support "research and measurement science" aimed at developing better diagnostics and testing of the coronavirus.

Nuclear scientists in Austria are closing in on new coronavirus testing kits that could dramatically lower the cost and time it takes to diagnose people for the disease. From a report: With Covid-19 tests in short supply in many places, some individuals have turned to private laboratories that can genetically detect the pathogen. That process, called reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction, or RT-PCR, can cost as much as $400 in some private facilities. But the International Atomic Energy Agency expects it can produce Covid-19 tests costing as little as 10 euros ($10.83) that yield a diagnosis within hours, according to an spokesperson, who said the IAEA kits are close to being shipped. While the IAEA's individual tests may top out at 15 euros a person, countries will still need laboratories to process the results. Setting up a new facility from scratch can cost as much as 100,000 euros, according to the agency. The IAEA's lab outside Vienna has previously developed kits testing for Ebola, Zika and African Swine Fever. Fourteen countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America asked the agency's scientists earlier this month to help them ramp up testing. The effort drew an extra $5 million of funding on Tuesday from the U.S. State Department.

People are having to use videolinks to say their last goodbyes to dying relatives with Covid-19 because hospitals are curtailing visits to prevent spread of the virus. From a report: In a sad scene that is increasingly being played out out across the country, in the early hours of Tuesday morning a patient with coronavirus was taken off a ventilator at a hospital in south-east London. His wife and two children were unable to be with him but watched at home via videolink, after agreement from staff in the intensive treatment unit.

Coronavirus RNA survived for up to 17 days aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship, lasting far longer on surfaces than previous research has shown, according to new data published this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From a report: The study examined the Japanese and U.S. government efforts to contain the COVID-19 outbreaks on the Carnival-owned Diamond Princess ship in Japan and the Grand Princess ship in California. Passengers and crew on both ships were quarantined on board after previous guests, who didn't have any symptoms while aboard each of the ships, tested positive for COVID-19 after landing ashore. The RNA, the genetic material of the virus that causes COVID-19, "was identified on a variety of surfaces in cabins of both symptomatic and asymptomatic infected passengers up to 17 days after cabins were vacated on the Diamond Princess but before disinfection procedures had been conducted," the researchers wrote, adding that the finding doesn't necessarily mean the virus spread by surface. The CDC said researchers couldn't "determine whether transmission occurred from contaminated surfaces," and that further study of COVID-19's spread through touching surfaces on cruise ships was warranted.

Amazon said on Tuesday that it is temporarily discontinuing accepting orders for "lower-priority" products in India and prioritizing servicing urgent items such as household staples, health care, and personal safety products as the e-commerce player -- along with several of its competitors -- grapples with coronavirus outbreak in one of its key overseas markets. From a report: "To serve our customers' most urgent needs while also ensuring safety of our employees, we are temporarily prioritizing our available fulfilment and logistics capacity to serve products that are currently critical for our customers such as household staples, packaged food, health care, hygiene, personal safety and other high priority products," the American e-commerce giant said in a statement. "This also means that we have to temporarily stop taking orders and disable shipments for lower-priority products," it added. Understandably, the company said it did not have a timeline to share for how long this new measure would last. Amazon has taken a similar approach in the U.S. and Italy. The move, which goes into effect today, comes as nearly every Indian state has imposed a lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: A nationwide shortage of two drugs touted as possible treatments for the coronavirus is being driven in part by doctors inappropriately prescribing the medicines for family, friends and themselves, according to pharmacists and state regulators. Demand for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine surged over the past several days as President Donald Trump promoted them as possible treatments for the coronavirus and online forums buzzed with excitement over a small study suggesting the combination of hydroxychloroquine and a commonly used antibiotic could be effective in treating COVID-19.

"It's disgraceful, is what it is," said Garth Reynolds, executive director of the Illinois Pharmacists Association, which started getting calls and emails Saturday from members saying they were receiving questionable prescriptions. "And completely selfish." Reynolds said the Illinois Pharmacists Association has started reaching out to pharmacists and medical groups throughout the state to urge doctors, nurses and physician assistants not to write prescriptions for themselves and those close to them. "We even had a couple of examples of prescribers trying to say that the individual they were calling in for had rheumatoid arthritis," he said, explaining that pharmacists suspected that wasn't true. "I mean, that's fraud." In one case, Reynolds said, the prescriber initially tried to get the pills without an explanation and only offered up that the individual had rheumatoid arthritis after the pharmacist questioned the prescription. In a bulletin to pharmacists on Sunday, the state association wrote that it was "disturbed by the current actions of prescribers" and instructed members on how to file a complaint against physicians and nurses who were doing it. It's important to note that there is little evidence that the drugs work to treat coronavirus, although clinical trials are underway to find out.

The report mentions a man in his 60s who died after ingesting a version of the chloroquine commonly used to clean fish tanks. "The man, who thought he might have COVID-19, took a small amount of the substance in a misguided effort to treat his symptoms," reports ProPublica. "His wife was also hospitalized after taking the substance but survived."

Ford announced today that it's partnering with 3M and GE to build respirators, ventilators and face shields for front-line healthcare workers and COVID-19 patients. TechCrunch reports: 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 more than 100,000 units per week. 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, Mich. 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 U.K. 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. "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," the report adds. "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."

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Tuesday the government would impose a nationwide lockdown from midnight for 21 days to stem the spread of the coronavirus. "There will be a total ban on venturing out of your homes," Modi said in a televised address.

Communities living in warmer places appear to have a comparative advantage to slow the transmission of coronavirus infections, according to an early analysis by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From a report: The researchers found that most coronavirus transmissions had occurred in regions with low temperatures, between 37.4 and 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit (or 3 and 17 degrees Celsius). While countries with equatorial climates and those in the Southern Hemisphere, currently in the middle of summer, have reported coronavirus cases, regions with average temperatures above 64.4 degrees Fahrenheit (or 18 degrees Celsius) account for fewer than 6 percent of global cases so far. "Wherever the temperatures were colder, the number of the cases started increasing quickly," said Qasim Bukhari, a computational scientist at M.I.T. who is a co-author of the study. "You see this in Europe, even though the health care there is among the world's best."

sciencehabit writes: Science Magazine has learned that researchers across the U.S. are euthanizing thousands of lab mice in anticipation of a shortage of workers who can care for them. Some scientists have had to sacrifice half or more of their colonies, potentially resulting in the loss of months or years of work. "I was staring at my mice one by one and deciding who lives and who dies," says one researcher. "It was really rough." At the moment, Science has not seen evidence that larger animals such as cats, dogs, or monkeys are being proactively euthanized. That will likely remain the case. Unlike larger animals, mice breed quickly and must be used quickly. And because they comprise about 95% of all research animals, they suck up the most money and time.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: President Donald Trump is considering easing health directives that prevent the spread of the coronavirus in an attempt to contain economic fallout. A new analysis suggests that those measures are helping to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Economists led by Northwestern University's Martin Eichenbaum wrote that keeping social-distancing measures in place before the number of new virus cases declines -- in other words, before a peak in the infection rate -- could limit infections and prevent as many as 600,000 additional U.S. deaths. While the economic damage is deeper when optimal health measures are taken, a recession is unavoidable even without them, as infected people would stay at home to recover and millions die, the report shows.

Under a worst-case scenario, with stores remaining open and no social isolation policies, as many as 215 million Americans could become infected and 2.2 million could die from the spread of the virus, the economists' data shows. That's based on an estimate from German Chancellor Angela Merkel that up to 70% of that country's population could become infected without a vaccine. It also matches the worst-case global estimate from Harvard University epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch.