On the ventilator front, a good start would be to order one each of the available ventilators on Alibaba, express shipping. For all the ones that show up, get them examined and tested and torn down if necessary. Publish the results. Get emergency FDA approval.
Order in bulk. Make arrangements with the better suppliers to go to three shifts. Arrange for large air shipments of the good ones to where they are needed. Find out if there's something the supplier needs and get it from them. Basically, use money to overcome all normal obstacles to getting those things where they are needed.
The fastest way to double our capacity of high-quality ventilators during a patient surge is to externally patch extra-tubing to existing ventilators so they can handle two patients instead of just one.<p>This paper documents how it has been done successfully in an emergency: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fijars/a_single_ventilator_for_multiple_simulated/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fijars/a_single_ve...</a><p>Reddit thread yesterday with commentary from ventilator experts: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fijars/a_single_ventilator_for_multiple_simulated/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fijars/a_single_ve...</a><p>Summary: It's definitely feasible and works. Not as good as more full ventilators but in a shortage, probably much better than DIY vents but it requires hoses, Y-splitters, adapters, etc.<p>Request: Make two-for-one emergency kits that adapt to fit popular ventilator models.
Finding ways to mitigate the economic impact of Covid-19 is less sexy, but it is likely to be the place where investors can make the biggest difference to other humans.<p>Zero/low-interest loans will stem the inevitable downward spiral that comes with loss of free cash flow from otherwise great businesses. This is the time to ensure the stable capitalization of good businesses (and investors are likely to get paid back in spades in karma, if not cash, for doing so).
Please, please, please someone fund DRACO antivirals [1]. It is absolutely shameful that they haven't been developed further because of a lack of funding. DRACO would do for viruses what penicillin did for bacteria.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRACO" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRACO</a>
How about a project to understand who is NOT getting Covid-19? There are almost certainly healthcare workers in heavily infected areas who "should have gotten it but haven't". Understanding this could rapidly lead to:<p>- screens to identify who's vulnerable and who's not<p>- therapeutic strategies (probably not ready for this round, but for future rounds)<p>edit: removed errant footnote reference
The US ventilator companies say they can already ramp up production 5x. They just need the orders. And they can probably make more basic units which might be sufficient<p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/baldwin/2020/03/14/ventilator-maker-we-can-ramp-up-production-five-fold/#5023381e5e9a" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/baldwin/2020/03/14/ventilator-m...</a>
Someone should look at Sterilray and Ushio 222nm KrCl excimer lamps. Light at that frequency is extremely effective at destroying viruses but probably does not cause much skin cancer or eye damage like other UV because it is absorbed so fast it doesn't make it through the dead layer of skin etc. There are at least some studies but no FDA approval or mass production. If they work these might make a big difference in transmission in public spaces, especially via surfaces.
There already exists a low cost ventilator that was designed for the India market.<p><a href="https://www.agvahealthcare.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.agvahealthcare.com/</a><p>but good luck getting fda approval.
"I’m trying to fund startups/projects helping with COVID-19, because it’s basically the one thing I know how to do that can help. "<p>You can... donate to the many existing efforts already fighting this?
I wonder how much home pneumonia treatment options like humidifiers, steam, and drinking tons of fluids can impact the hospitalization rate? Quitting/taking a break from smoking has to be a big one too. Can we find ways to encourage more people to do these things, like some kind of viral science-based "Lower Your Covid Risk" website or app? It could promote social distancing too.<p>One of the biggest problems so far imo is lack of clear, unambiguous guidance from authority figures. People in the general population still have wildly misinformed views. Finding creative ways to inject this kind of crucial information into the collective consciousness could have a big impact.
There is a very cheap and effective way to keep surfaces free from coronavirus (without having to continually spray them) that few people seem to have picked up on: copper<p><a href="https://youtu.be/Qb2oWYMrFn8" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Qb2oWYMrFn8</a><p>It kills a wide variety of bacteria & viruses, including coronavirus: <a href="https://www.copperclothing.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Coronavirus-Test-Report-2014.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.copperclothing.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Co...</a><p>Covering surfaces with copper sheeting could be a bit costly, but copper foil tape is really cheap, and easy to apply.
Mycology. Not a company but a novel and underinvested space with 3000+ yr history with antiviral applications. Paul Stamets is the go-to guy here but likely slammed. His talk, into the mycoverse, goes into detail about how he was brought in to do battery testing post-9/11 and how basically all polypore mushrooms (common globally) have some antiviral properties. Some are super-potent. At risk of being called "the crazy mushroom guy" I'm including here because I know this is a vastly underinvested in space and has huge latent potential WRT antivirals. The reason it is underinvested in is because patents are hard (used for 1000s of years) so big pharma stay away. Long shot, but also could be tested everywhere, reasonably cheaply. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0rkcrWqsV4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0rkcrWqsV4</a>
In my opinion, there are several paradoxes linked to COVID-19 that ought to be researched quickly to help screening susceptible individuals and drug development.<p>Children seem immune, which is in stark contrast with common flu. Furthermore, lots of patients that recover from COVID-19 have severe lung damage. Interestingly, I have seen reports of an inverse correlation between lymphocyte count and survival. To me this suggests some autoimmune damage in critically ill patients. Understanding host genetics (HLA) and viral mimotopes is a must. No idea why this is not being done.<p>Tocilizumab, a drug for rheumatoid arthritis, has been repurposed against COVID-19 in Italy, with promising preliminary results. This seems in line with the autoimmune hypothesis I outlined. Other autoimmune disease drugs are getting repurposed too, but there is a lack of basic principles understanding.
Air travel in crammed tiny metal and composite tubes for long periods that need to be turned around in a jiffy thus may be subject to deficient cleaning is most def a vector. For the long term it would great to design airplanes that have a inner tube component that can be pulled with the nose moved up. Basically a bus without an engine. Cheap, can be driven around the unending concourses, can be sterilized properly because an extra one can be used. I think it may even end up being a time and money saver, boarding is a non compressible and long part that could be a lot faster from the sides.Not sure it'a 10X...
There are a lot of mom and pop stores and restaurants that will suffer and may go out of business. If there is a secure, convenient website to set up gift card purchases, it might keep these places afloat.
One historical item that inspires me here are the Liberty Ships: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship</a><p>Designed to be easy to manufacture, the US built more than 1 per day during WWII. It strikes me as a classic example of the design-to-tools approach.<p>And although I obviously don't recommend going just now, you may enjoy visiting the still-functioning one in the Bay Area. Try to get a tour of the engine room if you can. <a href="https://www.ssjeremiahobrien.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ssjeremiahobrien.org/</a>
Sam's ending line "And of course, I think the best thing to do is still to get people to stay home." makes me think we need this app asap: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22585852" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22585852</a>
An idea I had, just putting it here.<p>I tried working [hard] with normal dust masks, one can barely get enough air. The anti viral ones have much denser filters. Some are even closed with a tiny filter. Then, if you simply draw enough vacuum air will find its way around the mask, stuff will go though the filter holes and it leaves marks on your face. The things also clog up pretty fast.<p>I think attaching a long tube would work much better. It could probably be made out of a cheaper material too.
We are launching a initiative to showcase tech projects to fight the covid-19 virus. Fell free to submit your projects <a href="https://taikai.network/taikai/challenges/covid-19" rel="nofollow">https://taikai.network/taikai/challenges/covid-19</a>
Please fund mass manufacture of personal protective gear used by first responders and medical personnel i.e N95/eye-protection/PPE and PAPR. These are in dire short supply.
If there is an actual shortage of ventilators, they will almost certainly use medical and nursing students, and technicians to manually ventilate patients using a self-inflating bag (link describes bag <i>mask</i> ventilation, but the process is much easier and requires much less skill once the bag is attached to the breathing circuit after the patient has been intubated by the emergency or ICU doc.)<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag_valve_mask" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag_valve_mask</a>
I guess fixing the problems listed here would be the most useful to invest in startup wise <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/high-stakes-security-set-ups-making-remote-work-impossible/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/high-stakes-security-set-ups-mak...</a> as they will be problems that persist after the pandemic is over, and can secure clients in wealthy firms for the product that fixes them.
This does seem to be a worthwhile effort and I have no doubt some good will come of it. But I'm not sure targeting COVID is the best idea. Projects can certainly help with that, but they need to scale, fast. Plus any sort of physical requirements like manufacturing is out of the question. What I'd be worried about is the <i>next</i> COVID. I don't mean this in a literal, disease based fashion. We should be asking about the next global disaster. How can our infrastructure break down? What can we do to strengthen it? Who is vulnerable?<p>Also I'm a little concerned about medical projects that are created in an emergency and attempting to do fast track research. Immediate solutions may sound great but we don't want to do more damage in our hastiness. Urgency can lead to wishful thinking which can lead to disaster.
There was a comment yesterday about how easy it is to manufacture iron lungs. A quick search indicates they might be effective (<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15065832" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15065832</a>)<p>Is this being explored?
Can we just put lots of fans in buildings instead of social distancing? Would that help or hurt?<p>Also, an app so that shop owners could close their doors, list their products online, and quickly turn their cashiers into delivery drivers. Bonus is you probably get their business after the crisis.
What about more social network type projects? As someone living in a relatively cheap apt building in Chicago, I was thinking that this could be an opportunity to get people to actually interact more with the aid of technology, form local support networks for sharing information and other resources, make sure the most vulnerable people have some support, etc. Lots of people are stuck at home, lots of people are nervous, lots of people may need help in the coming weeks. I wish our apartment building had at least a forum for sharing a little info.
Curative Inc, a CDC certified Lab in LA is working to spin up faster testing through "raw material" test kits that can be crowdsourced. They mean the kits can be assmebled by non-tech folks to allow greater self-sourcing of test kits; the testing will be only conducted in certified labs.<p><a href="https://www.curativeinc.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.curativeinc.com</a>
<a href="https://www.covid19-response.com/projects" rel="nofollow">https://www.covid19-response.com/projects</a>
I don’t know if you have already invested in <a href="https://www.starship.xyz" rel="nofollow">https://www.starship.xyz</a> ? If you have double down 10 times, if not do it now: touchless delivery is getting big in China.<p>Just like the famous(?) Chinese hobbyist girl who built a little vehicle to get her groceries, we have a prototype as well, so buy US, ha ha
Apparently you need highly trained technicians to operate the ventilators. So my proposal is to develop the automation, machine learning, remote monitoring, etc so we can scale the ventilator operation. We are really good at scaling things up. Imagine that the ventilator are delivered to homes and a single trained ventilator operator monitors 100 ventilators remotely.
just heard this on
<a href="https://peterattiamd.com/peterhotez/" rel="nofollow">https://peterattiamd.com/peterhotez/</a><p>apparently Dr.Hotez has a Sars-1 candidate vaccine antigen which could be repurposed for Covid-19,<p><a href="https://grantome.com/grant/NIH/R01-AI098775-03S1" rel="nofollow">https://grantome.com/grant/NIH/R01-AI098775-03S1</a><p>but they don't have funding to move it to clinical trials ..
Wouldn’t it make more sense, from a public health perspective, to put that money into the existing local institutions (hospitals, health clinics, food banks) which are vital and soon may be strained to the breaking point?
for any of sam's startup ideas to have an impact on the current Covid-19 pandemic, they need to:<p>0. raise a lot of money because vaccine/therapeutic development is $$$. it's probably not seed funding.<p>1. be successful in researching and developing an approach that works with a novel, unproven approach<p>2. get that approach certified<p>3. scale the manufacturing of the novel approach<p>4. deliver the drugs to patients who need it<p>5. do it all in a timeframe that is faster than what existing companies can do, and within the budget of the money that you've raised.<p>i don't think novel vaccines and therapeutics made by startups are likely to work in time to have an impact on this coronavirus.<p>but, sam's funding can help out if he suggests different problems: logistics planning, increasing care capacity, and increased political pressure.<p>- in the open letter to mike pence (<a href="https://medium.com/@maxinedexter/open-letter-to-vice-president-mike-pence-re-us-covid-19-response-5ee9eaece61e" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@maxinedexter/open-letter-to-vice-preside...</a>) they call for call centers to "coordinate transfers of patients to areas with higher levels or greater capacity for delivering care." if it doesn't exist, software should power this.<p>- same letter: "A tracking method at the state level for people self quarantined must be instituted for public health surveillance and follow up."<p>- cities need additional mobile quarantine facilities. build them out of box shipping containers or something.<p>for this pandemic, we're already behind the 8 ball so i suggest picking simpler projects. if you want to fund novel approaches that require r&d, that's probably more likely to help with the next pandemic.
Quarantine Enforcement using GPS with Symptom Tracking
<a href="https://www.proveneapp.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.proveneapp.com</a><p>Video: <a href="https://vimeo.com/395294573" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/395294573</a>
Deck: <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/128ef7cmu62yv9i/Provene%20Quarantine%20Enforcement%20Monitoring.pdf?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/s/128ef7cmu62yv9i/Provene%20Quaranti...</a><p>It's a monitoring platform - Used for jail diversion, recidivism, drug treatment, etc...Lots of great use cases around quarantine and tracking.
Better than fixing Covid-19, swing for the fences. Use Covid-19 to fix climate change instead.<p>This disaster is showing us that the goal of cutting emissions and saving our planet, while still sitting down and having a beer and watching Netflix at night is real - it can be done.<p>Of course it's tempting, compelling to try and fix Covid-19. It's a real shit show, and it's here and now and it's cutting people down around us. It's tearing the economic fabric of our world apart. How could we not want to throw everything into solutions?<p>But the hard fact is that even if we were to lose one or two percent of the older slice of the global population to Covid-19, on the other battlefront climate change will keep coming for our youngest generation, and it will be immeasurably harder to stop.<p>Our experience of Covid-19 presents an incredible opportunity - the biggest there's ever been - to launch a full frontal attack on climate change - to really move the needle.<p>We know our current ways of living are unsustainable. But up until now, no-one has known what the alternative was.<p>Now, in Italy, and soon in the US, we're living that alternative as a society.<p>And under that alternative, we are cutting emissions - enormously. It's claimed [1] that "the pandemic ultimately could trigger the most significant reduction of greenhouse gas emissions of the past century".<p>And life is going on.<p>There have been economic lockdowns before, but this is the first one that's happened while there are virtual alternatives and even improvements for the things that we've lost in the physical world.<p>We now have the internet. For the first time, giant corporates can continue to function with their employees locked down in a physical quarantine. Not just FAANGs but all sorts of businesses and organizations.<p>Could we make any of this way of living stick? After Covid-19 has swept overhead past us on its first go-round, can we somehow break our patterns and not jump back into our cars, or onto our cruise lines, or into planes to hotel rooms on the other coast?<p>Can many of us keep living these low energy, virtual lives - even after the virus?<p>That's the long game. Instead of joining everyone in trying to flatten the curve of Covid-19, look for innovations that could somehow lock in these healthy new ways of living that the virus is showing us - flatten our emissions curve.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/03/13/italy-emissions-coronavirus/?arc404=true" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/03/1...</a>
The thing Sam Altman could have done, and still could do, that would have by far the most impact in this and similar crises, is support the adoption of universal health coverage and sick leave policies, as well as financial assistance for those devastated by these shutdowns.<p>Startups are cool. But to the extent the Silicon Valley community has fought against a social safety net and effective public sector they’re part of the problem.<p>Not singling him out specifically here as my understanding is that he actually has done some political work along those lines, but the first sentence here implies that investing in startups is the only thing he knows how to do. That rings false.<p>He’s very wealthy and powerful. He has enormous influence over people who set employee policies at important companies and has the ear of world leaders.[0]<p>There’s many things he could do that are much more effective than investing in startups.<p>[0] <a href="https://youtu.be/rKoACC5iOhQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/rKoACC5iOhQ</a>
Please make sure any startup you fund doesn’t take a selfish approach to patents and intellectual property. Any progress on fighting Covid-19 needs to be shared with the world and not used as a cynical tool for profit.
I'm going to note two things here:<p>First, Sam Altman is no longer president of YC and this is his personal blog. So I think it is probably a mistake to conflate his writing with YC policy.<p>Second, I've been posting here more than a decade. I was initially very open about my diagnosis and my pursuit of non-drug solutions, but that went weird and problematic places, in part because people on the leader made problematic comments at times that looked to me like the baked in assumption was "She's just a girl. She couldn't possibly come up with a brilliant idea like Do A Website about her health stuff." The website in question was listed in my profile at the time. He hadn't taken thirty seconds to look at my profile before opening mouth and inserting foot.<p>Sadly the person may have been trying to flirt with me. It's a debacle I feel my reputation has never recovered from.<p>I still don't know how to get taken seriously and I absolutely can't single-handedly dream up a fix here.<p>I can't figure out what to talk about without engagement. I can't self promote when various gatekeepers actively exclude me for not having the right kind of mostly male-coded credentials because I was a homemaker and full-time mom for a lot of years.<p>I've spent nearly 19 years getting better while the world calls me crazy and actively denies me support. The odds are extremely poor that I will ever get taken seriously.<p>But if it genuinely bothers you that people are dying from this infection, maybe stop and consider setting aside your sexist, classist prejudices about me and try to find some way to help me find my voice and share what I know that has allowed me to successfully get off all the drugs and generally grow healthier while the world laughs in face and tells me I'm a liar and nutcase.<p>And if insisting I'm a lunatic who deserves zero respect matters to you more, then you don't really want a solution to this problem more than you want to remain married to unpleasant character traits.<p>Because you have this person in your midst whose very life depends upon such expertise and would love to share useful information and that's not a secret. It's just absolutely not taken at all seriously and I'm routinely attacked for trying to talk about health stuff at all, even when I'm doing so for my own edification with zero intent to convince anyone else of anything at all.
An AI system that has been trained on survivability based on easily cheked comorbidities (age, BMI, smoker) that can instantly do triage and let hospitals know whether or not to allocate a hospital bed/ventilator to an incoming patient.
You can use an ECMO instead of ventilation:
<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6185806/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6185806/</a><p>Here's a fringe idea in the worse case: Connect one ECMO oxygenator to multiple patients at once using Type-O negative blood. You'd have to filter out the O-negative RBC's as they come in.