Tag: COVID-19

Victoria Sutton on regulations to get airline data for contact tracing

Victoria Sutton, law professor at Texas Tech, is blogging about coronavirus on her Biominute Blog. Lots of great analysis there.

Particularly worth a look is her discussion of regulations requiring airlines to collect information about passengers for reporting to public health authorities to facilitate contact tracing. Her particular focus is on new U.S. regulations, found in 42 CFR 70 & 71, which allows the CDC to issue orders requiring airlines to provide such information.

Professor Sutton tells a surprising and wince-inducing story of meeting a passenger on a flight in mid March who found out he had previously been on a flight with a passenger who’d tested positive for COVID-19. The twist is that the passenger didn’t find this out by being contacted by public health authorities or the airlines. Instead, he found out about it on the news.

Unpaywalled Research on COVID-19

One of the things Ted Bailey and I talk about in our paper is how copyright and paywalls can create a barrier to the sharing of research findings. As we note, many traditional publishers have lowered their paywalls on coronavirus content, and pre-print servers are becoming an important source of information. Here’s links to some useful unpaywalled resources on coronavirus research.

These links are to COVID-19 specific content.

by Eric E. Johnson
[originally posted April 3, 2020; updated April 4, 2020 with additional links]

FDA launches Coronavirus Treatment Acceleration Program

Yesterday the U.S. Food and Drug Administration launched what it’s calling the Coronavirus Treatment Acceleration Program (CTAP), which it describes as “a special emergency program for possible therapies” that “uses every available method to move new treatments to patients as quickly as possible, while at the same time finding out whether they are helpful or harmful.”

This seems like a very positive step.

Based on the information the FDA has provided, CTAP at this point seems to be mostly about FDA doing its work more rapidly rather than differently. The information released yesterday describes “ultra-rapid, interactive input on most development plans” and “ultra-rapid protocol review.”

Along with the information release about CTAP, the FDA is reporting 10 “therapeutic agents” that are currently in active trials, plus 15 more in planning stages.

by Eric E. Johnson
published April 1, 2020

Op-ed proposes non-profit entity to create an app for tracing and tracking virus exposures

One of the reasons South Korea may be having so much more success in battling the coronavirus pandemic, in addition to its massive testing program, is its phone-based tracing technology. If you know where people are and where they have been, positive test results can allow you to direct that exposed individuals self-isolate immediately. That can help arrest the spread.

In a March 30, 2020 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Glenn Archer and Luciana Borio call for “engaging entrepreneurs, public-health experts, privacy advocates, constitutional lawyers and legislators” to take a look at tech-centered proposals to see what might work in a technological and epidemiological sense while also protecting freedom and privacy. They offer this specific proposal:

“Here is an idea that could work: The federal government should establish a public-trust, nonprofit entity to oversee the development and implementation of digital contact-tracing capability. This entity could develop a contact-tracing app that Americans would voluntarily download. After a user provided consent, each phone would generate an anonymous identification number. When app users are in proximity, the numbers would be exchanged via Bluetooth and stored for a limited time.”

by Eric E. Johnson
published March 31, 2020