Mark Zuckerberg donating $13.6m for Covid-19 research

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative — the philanthropic and investing arm of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan — announced on Wednesday, April 29 that it would give $13.6 million to fund a nine-month research project to better understand the prevalence of coronavirus in the Bay Area, Forbes reports.

The project will be a collaboration between UC San Francisco, Stanford University and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a nonprofit organization separate from CZI that has a lofty mission of curing, preventing or managing every disease on the planet.

“To reopen society in the Bay Area and keep healthcare workers safe, we need to first understand the epidemiology of this disease,” Priscilla Chan, cofounder of CZI, said in a press release. “How much of our population is currently infected with Covid-19? How prevalent is asymptomatic spread? And how can we use this information to better understand who may still be at risk in the future? There is no shortcut to answering these questions — it will require testing, retesting, and the sort of rigorous public health surveying this program is focused on in California.”

The project will consist of two long-term studies. The first will be a sample survey of a representative population in the Bay Area with the goal of figuring out how to keep transmission rates low as California re-opens without a vaccine. While scientists around the world are working to develop a vaccine for Covid-19, even the most optimistic estimates expect a vaccine in the summer of 2021 at the earliest.

The second study will focus on Bay Area healthcare workers to understand whether Covid-19 antibodies will protect individuals from reinfection, and if so, for how long.