Coronavirus: as governments feud, researchers, scientists and tech firms fill collaborative void in search for cure
- Joint efforts of health care industry, pharmaceutical companies and tech firms are a stark contrast to the Washington-Beijing divisiveness
- As many as 332 Covid-19 clinical trials have been launched from China, South Korea, Europe and North America, according to the medical journal The Lancet
Despite the spread of the coronavirus that has infected 1.5 million people and devastated economies around the world, the United States and China have proven unable to work together at the government level to battle the human crisis. But researchers and scientists from both countries – as well as others – are locking arms to advance vaccines and treatments for Covid-19 from the ground up.
In March, US tech giant Intel and Hong Kong-headquartered Lenovo teamed up to offer supercomputing capacity to support scientists at Shenzhen, China-based BGI Genomics to analyse the virus’ genome. The tech boost will speed up the sequencing, critical in developing vaccines and treatments, to five and a half hours from the previous 150 hours.
As many as 332 Covid-19 clinical trials have been launched from China, South Korea, Europe and North America, with 188 looking for patient recruitment globally, according to the medical journal The Lancet.
“The more collaborations and sharing of scientific data across labs with different but complimentary expertise, the faster we will develop effective treatments and a vaccine,” said Dr Rebecca Haffajee, a health policy researcher at think tank Rand Corporation in Washington. “The virus crosses borders efficiently, and our study of it should do the same.”
The virus has been confirmed in at least 184 countries worldwide and claimed more than 87,000 lives in a matter of months.