Tag: COVID-19

Picking, sorting, processing, and grading tea leaves make up the fabric of life here. And ensuring that people around the globe get their daily cups of chai, Earl Grey, English Breakfast, or Orange Pekoe is crucial to the local economy and jobs.  

To maintain all the above, this multimillion-dollar industry relies on the Colombo Tea Auction – a weekly event that has been held in the national capital under rules and procedures largely unchanged since they were first laid down in the 1880s and 1890s.

Until now, putting lots of fine Ceylon tea under the hammer and up for export was a noisy and very physical affair. Bidding echoed in rapid-fire across the three theater-like auction rooms that were often packed with hundreds of brokers and officials, many of them jotting down numbers of paper sheets.

This ritual ended in mid-March, not because it was regarded as old-fashioned or inefficient, but as a matter of health and safety.

“When the COVID-19 pandemic hit our country, it was impossible for our traditional tea auction to follow social distancing and other health guidelines,” recalls Jayantha Edirisinghe, Sri Lanka’s Tea Commissioner.

The auction schedule was suspended for two weeks. With a potentially devastating economic shock looming, the Sri Lanka Tea Board and its Tea Traders Association turned to a local Microsoft partner, CICRA Solutions, to create a fast digital alternative that would also incorporate the spirit and ways of the old system.

The company had previously scored successes for the industry by automating its complex tea brokering practices and by modernizing the Tea Board’s back-office system. Now, with the pandemic worsening, the time had come for a digital transformation of the whole auction process.

NHS staff at a major hospital in Southampton are managing the surge in people arriving with Coronavirus symptoms by using technology to quickly find out who has the virus and who doesn’t.

Doctors, nurses and specialists at University Hospital Southampton have switched to receiving patients test results on their mobile phone thanks to a bot in Microsoft Teams. This has cut the amount of time it takes to discover if someone has the virus from hours to minutes.

Patients with negative test results can then be moved out of isolation units, where they are routinely placed if they show symptoms, and onto a ward, freeing up space for new people arriving at the hospital.

Previously, healthcare staff would check a desktop computer on a ward or in an office every few hours to see if test results had come in.

Dr Ashwin Pinto, a neurologist at the hospital, said: “We can now give doctors and nurses real-time data. I can get COVID-19 results, which come up on my phone instantly as soon as they are released by the lab.

“We can know where that patient is, so we can make sure they go to the right care environment and that staff are safe as well. That’s been transformational.”

Similar bots are being used in NHS Foundation Trusts across the country

The bot has been created by Microsoft partner Medxnote for use in Teams, which is also being used by healthcare staff to communicate and share information, even when they are not in the hospital. Doctors and nurses can also use Teams to alert colleagues instantly if they are needed in a specific area of the hospital.

Similar bots are being used in NHS Foundation Trusts across the country, including Liverpool University Hospitals and Mid Cheshire NHS Foundation Trust.

All NHS staff were given free access to Teams to support them as they work. Doctors and nurses typically use a combination of pagers and phone calls to communicate. However, mobile phone calls took too long and were difficult to answer while working, and information that was shared was hard to record and track.

Dr Pinto said: “We realised that we needed to surface information in real time. We wanted to be able to give key information directly to the junior doctors so they could know exactly whom to see and whom to prioritise. Teams is the only product we’ve been able to use that surfaces data in a really simple format for the junior doctors and allows them to share it so they can work as a team to prioritise patients.”

Laura Robinson, Health & Life Sciences lead at Microsoft UK, said: “It is crucial that NHS staff can communicate and collaborate quickly and easily, especially in times of crisis. No matter where they are in a hospital, doctors and nurses need to send and receive information in order to offer the best care to patients. Microsoft is proud to be helping healthcare workers on the frontline of the Coronavirus pandemic.”

Tags: doctor, Healthcare, hospital, microsoft, NHS, teams, technology

I am very pleased to announce that, today, Microsoft is committing to the Open COVID Pledge by making its patents available free of charge for use in efforts to end the COVID-19 pandemic and minimize the impact of the disease.  This step joins our other efforts to use technology and innovation to help track the disease and develop solutions, such as mobilizing AI for Health to fight COVID-19 and the Bing COVID19 Tracker. Additional information about Microsoft’s COVID-19 efforts can be found here.

We are always looking for ways we can use our patents to contribute to positive outcomes, and the fight against COVID-19 is one of the most urgent issues of our time. Pledges and open licensing of this kind can help spur innovation, especially in a crisis like this one. Researchers, scientists and others working to fight the virus should be able to develop and deploy effective solutions at scale without obstacles such as being threatened with patent litigation.

The terms and conditions of Microsoft’s COVID-19 patent license, which are effective immediately, can be found here. We encourage other intellectual property holders, including other technology companies and universities, to also commit to the pledge and ensure that their intellectual property is working for, and not against, efforts to stop the pandemic.

Tags: COVID-19, Open Data

Microsoft has joined with national, state and local healthcare authorities and providers, researchers, non-profit organizations and governments around the world on our shared mission to develop solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve partnered with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on a Coronavirus self-checker tool, worked directly with hospitals to protect them from ransomware, launched a Coronavirus tracker on Bing, provided AI to decode immune system response to COVID-19 and will continue to embark on many other scientific, technical and logistical efforts to help the global community navigate new challenges and needs.

As countries and companies focus on technologies such as tracking, tracing and testing to fight the pandemic, it’s critical that we also protect people’s privacy. Today, we’re offering seven principles as ideas to consider as we move into the next phases of helping to fight this pandemic.

Governments, public health authorities and industries spanning the globe are engaged in the hard and important work of identifying a path forward to get society back together again. Tracking individuals who are infected, tracing those with whom they have recently come into physical contact and making testing available to those contacts may play an important role in managing the next phase of COVID-19 around the world. As in all other aspects of modern life, digital technologies are likely to be used for tracking, tracing and testing. This requires special care, as sensitive data about our location and health status may be involved.

Preserving privacy as we develop and implement these technical solutions will be critical. Here are seven privacy principles that we offer for governments, public health authorities, academics, employers and industries to consider as we collectively move forward into this next phase of tracking, tracing and testing, and using similar technologies developed to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

1. Obtain meaningful consent by being transparent about the reason for collecting data, what data is collected and how long it is kept. Data should only be collected with consent and used in the manner explained when people are making the decision to participate. Clear and user-friendly information serves to help promote voluntary participation and can ensure everyone interacting with the technology is making informed choices to participate in data collection and is aware of the purpose of the data collection, the type of data that will be collected, the time period the data will be held and the benefits of the data collection.
2. Collect data only for public health purposes. The data collected from an individual for purposes of tracing those who have been in physical contact with an infected person and other public health purposes is owned by the individual and should remain under that person’s control. As a general matter, this data should be used by public health authorities only for the articulated public health purposes, and not for unrelated reasons. Public health authorities should provide input regarding the types of data that will be most useful for fighting the pandemic.
3. Collect the minimal amount of data. Data that is collected by public health authorities for public health purposes, such as tracing, should be limited to only the specific data required, and should only be collected and used for the time period identified as necessary by public health experts.
4. Provide choices to individuals about where their data is stored. The data must be wholly in the individual’s control, including allowing the individual to choose where to store this data, such as on a device or in the cloud.
5. Provide appropriate safeguards to secure the data. Reliable security safeguards such as de-identification, encryption, rotating and random identifiers, decentralized identities or similar measures should be in place to protect people’s data from harmful exposure and hacking attempts.
6. Do not share data or health status without consent, and minimize the data shared. An individual’s data or health status shouldn’t be shared with the individual’s contacts or others without securing the individual’s meaningful consent. If such sharing is pursuant to legal requirements, then the sharing should be strictly limited by the scope of the law. When notifying individuals that they may have been in physical contact with an infected person, only share the minimum amount of data necessary to protect against inferences about the identity of the infected person.
7. Delete data as soon as it is no longer needed for the emergency. Individuals own their own data, whether stored on a device, a server or in the cloud. Copies of the data that were transferred to public health authorities and others for tracing and other public health purposes should be deleted when no longer useful for public health purposes, as defined by public health authorities. None of the individual’s information should be retained by the authorities or others for future unrelated uses or purposes.

These principles are designed to apply to any COVID-19 technological solutions that involve the collection and use of personal data such as health data, precise geolocation data, proximity or adjacency data, and identifiable contacts.

Our approach is grounded in the belief that, for technology to succeed, people need to be in control of their data, and be empowered with information that explains how their data will be collected and used. Furthermore, companies need to be accountable and responsible for this data. Policymakers, advocacy groups and regulators are starting to share their ideas about guidelines to preserve privacy in any deployment of tracking, tracing and testing technology. We don’t have all the answers, and we look for others to contribute additional ideas, but we hope our principles help advance the discussion.

We need to fight COVID-19 and protect privacy

Addressing global problems of this magnitude understandably creates an urgent need for innovative uses of data to fight the pandemic, and we believe these measures must take privacy into account. The good news is that, today, we have more tools and methods than ever – such as differential privacy, federated learning, decentralized identities, privacy-preserving contract tracing protocols and open source repositories, and other techniques for managing data privacy – to allow society to use data for good and be confident that personal information is kept private.

In the U.S., the need for this conversation in the midst of a pandemic underscores the urgency for a strong federal privacy law. An updated legal framework placing obligations on businesses that collect and use personal data would help provide the necessary guardrails for companies to know how to protect and respect personal data as they create tools and technologies to address urgent societal needs.

Considering the bigger picture

In the context of rising excitement about the possibility of leveraging computing technologies to help with mitigating the pandemic, we note that the issues with, and opportunities for, helping with COVID-19 are complex. Technical advances, such as the use of mobile phones to collect data of various kinds, need to be considered in the larger context of the complexity of the world, such as how comfortable people will be sharing data, the availability of testing resources, the efficacy of the methods under realistic situations of usage, and evolving local and national policies. Concerns over any technology or program include inclusion and the potential for systematic discrimination based on numerous factors. For example, different populations may face different challenges when attempting to participate in health-centric programs based on access to, and familiarity with, technology, depending on race, age, education and income levels. These are also vital issues to address as we move forward.

Privacy and ethical concerns must be considered as we move forward to use data responsibly to defeat the COVID-19 pandemic. Microsoft is committed to serving as a constructive partner in this fight.

Tags: COVID-19, data collection, data privacy, Privacy

The world is searching for ways to fight COVID-19, leading to a surge of research efforts to create effective therapies. Thankfully, as the human immune system learns to fight off the disease and people recover, we see some very promising ways that people’s naturally produced antibodies, which are present in convalescent plasma, can be used as treatment for others. The use of convalescent plasma is a technique dating back to the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic and was effective more recently during the SARS outbreak. Today, there is mounting clinical evidence that plasma collected from those who have recovered from COVID-19 can be used to treat ill COVID-19 patients.

There are two core approaches to using convalescent plasma to fight COVID-19 – each serving a different need. First and most direct is the approach of gathering convalescent plasma donations and making transfusions available to patients, for either therapeutic purposes or, more frequently, as part of research studies and clinical trials. This is a pragmatic and meaningful effort and we applaud all the organizations involved.

A different approach is to use the plasma in larger scale to make a potential therapy called a polyclonal hyperimmune globulin (H-Ig). Through the product manufacturing process, multiple plasma donations are pooled together and the antibodies are concentrated to consistent and reliable levels, meaning the medicine can be delivered in lower volumes and therefore would likely take less time to administer to patients than plasma itself. The H-Ig process also minimizes risk of any known virus or bacteria passing from donor to patient, thanks to the rigorous virus inactivation and removal steps that are embedded in the plasma product manufacturing process. Finally, H-Ig also has a longer shelf life, which permits easier storage and shipping for any outbreaks in the future. These attributes also make H-Ig relatively easy for hospitals to manage and distribute this potentially lifesaving medicine to patients.

The question is, how can we scale up the manufacture and distribution of H-Ig treatment? One promising approach has been developed by the CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance, which has been formed by the world’s leading plasma companies: Biotest, BPL, LFB, and Octapharma along with CSL Behring and Takeda. The “I” and “g” in CoVIg-19 stand for immune globulin, which the CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance will use to create an investigational medicine. With advisory support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, these leading scientists, innovators, and experts in drug manufacturing have joined together in an effort to accelerate the development of a potential H-Ig therapy for COVID-19. They are collaborating across key aspects such as plasma collection, clinical trial development, and product manufacturing. Plasma-derived therapies, like H-Ig, have already been shown to be effective in treating severe viral respiratory infections. The combined capability of these leading commercial manufacturers gives us hope for a scalable, reliable and sustainable treatment for COVID-19.

At Microsoft, we conducted a careful (but rapid) assessment, including consultation not only with our own experts but also several external partners. This assessment involved gaining an understanding of the underlying science and potential medical benefits. We are now convinced that the CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance has a real chance to save lives, at significant scale, and possibly much sooner than other approaches currently being developed. We were also impressed that these alliance members had committed to working together for the public good, setting aside commercial and competitive goals. We are thus devoting our computing infrastructure, plus engineering and research personnel, to support this esteemed group and kick off the first phase: helping healthy individuals who have recovered from COVID-19 to sign up to donate plasma at licensed plasma collection centers across the United States. Together with the alliance partners, we’re launching the CoVIg-19 Plasma Bot, a self-screening tool that anyone can use to see if they qualify to donate their plasma. Like Microsoft did with the CDC Coronavirus Self-Checker bot and more than 1,300 other COVID-19 bots around the world, we’ve followed standard protocols to help guide individuals through the qualification and education process.

The Plasma Bot and the home page and donor recruitment site for the alliance will live at https://covig-19plasmaalliance.org/ and we expect to make the bot available through other web, social and search channels as well to maximize awareness for potential plasma donors. Donation should be fairly convenient in most cases: more than 50% of the eligible donor population in the U.S. lives within 15 miles of one of the 500 centers operated by CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance member companies. Recruitment will start in the United States, and then expand to Europe.

The sooner recovered COVID-19 patients donate convalescent plasma, the sooner the alliance may be able to start manufacturing a potential therapy and begin clinical trials. These trials will determine if this therapy could help high-risk COVID-19 patients recover and whether it could protect high-risk individuals from the disease. Time is of the essence: we’re now in an especially important but small window of opportunity with a critical mass of people hitting peak immunity as they recover from COVID-19.

Like many of you, we’ve felt overwhelmed at times by the changes that COVID-19 has brought on society. But even more so, we’ve felt incredibly encouraged seeing people across the planet coming together in truly heroic ways to respond to this pandemic. With this new program, we have a chance to make even more people heroes, starting with those who’ve survived COVID-19. Please take a moment to share this with potential donors, so we can all play our part in making a difference.

Tags: COVID-19

Every day, communities around the world are indebted to critical care and first response nonprofits playing an incredibly important role in supporting and delivering vital services. The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a spotlight on these community heroes as their employees and volunteers have gone beyond the call of duty to sacrifice their own well-being for all of us. At Microsoft, we’ve heard countless stories of nonprofits transitioning to a remote working environment while continuing their services, such as helping at-risk children and families during the crisis.

Two and half years ago, we launched Tech for Social Impact within Microsoft Philanthropies to make world-class cloud technology accessible and affordable for nonprofits to drive even greater impact. Today, we’re building on our long-standing support to the nonprofit sector by committing $35 million to double our Microsoft Azure credits, increase our Windows benefits and add new pro bono services to help critical care and first response nonprofits in their efforts to combat COVID-19.  This will help free up scarce resources, support remote work and training, and enable organizations to securely utilize data analysis in their COVID-19 response. While we have temporarily placed limits in some regions on free Azure offers to prioritize existing customers, Microsoft is committed to serve and enable first responders with the technology and resources they need in this critical time.  

The commitment specifics:  

Eligibility: 

• This offer is prioritized for critical care and first response nonprofits, limited to: health support, human services, public safety, food and nutrition, housing support and COVID-19 research organizations. It is active between now and June 30, 2020, for eligible nonprofits. 

Benefits: 

• Double the Azure credit for specified nonprofits from $3,500 to $7,000 to be used within 12 months
• To support Window Virtual Desktop scenarios we are making 100 licenses of Windows Upgrade available through our TechSoup donation offer and coupling that with a Windows Enterprise E3 trial for up to 100 seats for six months.  This will provide the base operating system licenses to take advantage of all the Windows Virtual Desktop capabilities for mid-size organizations
• To help organizations rapidly deploy we are setting up three new remote services free of charge:
  

o Azure Onboarding Concierge: To help organizations set up their Azure credit subscription, understand administrator roles, cost management and governance best practices

o Windows Virtual Desktop Help Desk: To support organizations with technical questions during their deployment of Windows Virtual Desktop, and will engage organizations with a partner or FastTrack for long–term extended support to ensure an efficient and effective deployment

o Microsoft Community Training (MCT) Concierge: Microsoft Community Training supports personalized learning for a large-scale mobile-based community. This service provides an overview of available content and assists with configuration and deployment 

 Getting Started: 

• Existing eligible organizations:  See these benefits in the Microsoft Nonprofit Portal by clicking the COVID-19 response offer and begin provisioning 
• New eligible organizations: Start by registering through the Microsoft Nonprofit Portal by clicking “get started” to begin the nonprofit validation process and, once approved as an eligible nonprofit that meets the first response and critical care requirements, the Microsoft nonprofit portal will be provisioned with the COVID-19 response offer
  
• Additional details: See our FAQ guide  

We’ve heard from many organizations responding to COVID-19 of the need to organize and drive actionable insights from their data. To support this, we are announcing the Nonprofit Data Warehouse Quickstart available for all nonprofits, which helps organizations integrate disparate data sources into a single data warehouse and visualize the data via PowerBI. With this tool, organizations can leverage the power of data to determine the most efficient use of resources and more effectively support communities on the ground in this challenging climate.

This Microsoft Philanthropies announcement, alongside our AI for Health focus, is part of Microsoft’s larger commitment toward combating COVID-19, as we are working to support remote education and empower students around the world, enabling businesses to work from home, securing needed medical supplies and supporting local communities. Today’s news builds on our current offers for all nonprofits and we recommend reviewing our COVID-19 Resource Guide for Nonprofits for additional background information.  

We deeply appreciate the heroic work of nonprofits across the globe and remain steadfast in our efforts to provide them with the resources to help us overcome COVID-19.  

Tags: AI for Health, Azure, Community, COVID-19, nonprofits, Tech for Social Impact, windows enterprise