Vecoy’s virus traps could be tailored to address emerging new viral outbreaks quickly and efficiently

If this works, it could have an impact on the scale of Louis Pasteur.

2021-03-30:

Scientists estimate that among all the viruses that infect all the animals of the world there may be around 800K which could, in the right circumstances, jump from their habitual hosts into humans and start spreading. Could all of them be identified, too, and sentry posts set up that would provide news of their incursions? The Global Immunological Observatory would ideally test every tiny sample of blood for 100Ks of distinct antibodies. Considering how hard large-scale testing for just sars-cov-2 has proved, this might seem impossibly ambitious.

After the pandemic, there will still be new strains of flu and other viruses to code. There will be a backlog of sequencing work for cancer and prenatal health and rare genetic diseases. There will be an ongoing surveillance effort for SARS-CoV-2 variants. An even bigger job, moreover, involves a continuing project to sequence untold strains of microbes, a project that Ginkgo has been involved with in search of new pharmaceuticals.

now that sequencing is cheap, it will move out of the lab and in situ:

Multiple appliances could benefit from integration with sequencing
sensors, including air conditioning or the main water supply to monitor harmful pathogens

2022-05-04: Bill Gates on how to prevent the next pandemic. He also wrote a book about it. Strangely, he has a misplaced belief in the WHO, which completely failed us.

If we’re going to make COVID-19 the last pandemic, the world needs to get to work right away on 3 key areas:

1. Make and deliver better tools.
1 key step is to create a library of antiviral compounds that are designed to attack common respiratory viruses, so that we can more easily find out if an existing drug will work in the event of an outbreak. We should also expand incentives for generics manufacturers to create low-cost versions of new drugs. We also need to support work on new types of tests that make it easier to collect samples and turn around results quickly, like better versions of the rapid antigen tests that many of us now take at home for COVID or even handheld devices that health workers can use to easily test people in their community.

2. Improve disease monitoring.
Creating the GERM—Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization—team is one of the most important steps we can take to stop the next pandemic. GERM will play a crucial role in virtually every aspect of pandemic prevention, but improving monitoring will be the most significant part of their mandate.

3. Strengthen health systems.
There are steps that countries at every income level should consider, like improving primary health care and deciding in advance of a crisis who will oversee what. Governments and donors also need a global forum where they can coordinate action with poor countries.

2022-05-06:

By feeding biological data about the various types of bats — their diet, the length of their wings, and so on — into their computer, they created a model that could offer predictions about the bats most likely to harbor betacoronaviruses. They found over 300 species that fit the bill.

Since that prediction in 2020, researchers have indeed found betacoronaviruses in 47 species of bats — all of which were on the prediction lists produced by some of the computer models they had created for their study. It was striking the way simple features such as body size could lead to powerful predictions about viruses. “A lot of it is the low-hanging fruit of comparative biology”.