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UK hospitals use blockchain to trace coronavirus vaccine temperature

UK hospitals use blockchain to track coronavirus vaccine temperature

1.8 ml of sodium chloride is added to a vial of Pfizer / BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine concentrate ready for administration at Guy’s Hospital at the start of the largest vaccination program in UK history on December 8, 2020 in London, UK.

Victoria Jones – Pool | Getty Images

LONDON – Two hospitals in the UK are actively using blockchain technology to maintain the temperature of coronavirus vaccines before they are administered to patients.

The National Health Service facilities in South Warwickshire, England, use technology developed by the UK company Everyware and the US organization Hedera Hashgraph. Everyware uses sensors to monitor devices in real time, while Hedera is a blockchain consortium backed by Google and IBM.

Although blockchain was originally created as a digital ledger for Bitcoin, it has since been adapted by various industries for non-financial applications. For example, IBM and Walmart have used blockchain to track food supply chains and identify potential contamination.

Tom Screen, technical director at Everyware, told CNBC that its sensors would monitor the temperature of refrigerators that store vaccines. The data is then transferred to its own cloud platform, where it is encrypted and then forwarded to Hedera’s blockchain network.

The aim of this operation is to keep a tamper-proof digital record of temperature-sensitive vaccines such as those developed by Pfizer and BioNTech. In theory, hospitals could detect irregularities in the storage of vaccines before they are given to patients.

Pfizer’s vaccine must be stored at temperatures below zero (-70 degrees Celsius) and can only be kept for up to five days in conditions of two to eight degrees Celsius, which creates great logical hurdles for logistics in the distribution.

However, the vaccines developed by Moderna and Oxford-AstraZeneca can be stored at temperatures that are beyond the reach of the average household refrigerator for longer.

Blockchain saw a lot of hype in 2017 when the value of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin skyrocketed. This led to several projects by large companies like IBM and Walmart, as well as governments promising to replace various old paper-based methods of recording.

Today, the craze for blockchain seems to have waned, and trials and products based on the technology are hardly announced by large companies.

When asked why blockchain is needed instead of a regular database, Everyware’s Screen said, “Data stored in a private database can be verified by the status of data recorded in the public ledger.”

“The benefits of having an immutable ledger to check the validity of data as close to the source as possible have a positive impact on the accuracy of the downstream analysis, which increases errors in the source data in the output records,” he said.

Everyware participated in an open tender process involving other bidders to provide its services to the South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust, Screen said.

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Covid kills somebody about each 15 minutes in LA County, forcing hospitals to make ‘powerful choices’

Covid kills someone about every 15 minutes in LA County, forcing hospitals to make 'tough decisions'

An ambulance crew waits with a patient outside the Coast Plaza Hospital emergency room during a surge in coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases in Los Angeles, California on December 26, 2020.

David Swanson | Reuters

The Covid-19 outbreak is so severe in Los Angeles County that ambulances have to wait hours to drop patients off to emergency rooms.

Hospital beds are cluttered in souvenir shops, cafeterias, and conference rooms as hospitals struggle to find space for patients.

The Los Angeles County Emergency Services Department on Monday urged EMS workers to only administer supplemental oxygen when a patient’s saturation level drops below 90% in order to reduce oxygenation. Paramedics have also been advised not to transport adult heart attack patients to hospital unless they can restore “spontaneous circulation” in the field – to focus care on patients who are more likely to survive.

Los Angeles is facing an unprecedented surge in coronavirus patients that is marginalizing hospitals in the area. Public health officials warn that the already dire situation is likely to worsen in January.

“Many hospitals have reached a crisis point and are facing very difficult decisions about patient care,” said Dr. Christina Ghaly, the district’s health manager, at a press conference on Monday. She urged residents to avoid the emergency room unless they need serious medical attention.

Hospitals have reached their limits since Decemer, when the region’s intensive care unit capacity quickly dropped to zero, according to state health officials. More than 8,000 people have now been hospitalized with the virus in the county, and 20% of those people are in intensive care units, data from the county health department shows. With the virus so prevalent, public health officials warn that conditions are likely to get worse before they improve.

Paramedics (EMTs) and health care workers treat patients outside the Huntington Park Community Hospital emergency room during a surge in positive coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases in Huntington Park, California, December 29, 2020.

Bing Guan | Reuters

Across California, approximately 370 people die from Covid-19 every day based on a weekly average – a nearly 46% increase compared to a week ago. This comes from a CNBC analysis of the data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

In Los Angeles County, the coronavirus kills someone every 15 minutes on average, the county’s public health director Barbara Ferrer said during Monday’s briefing. The county exceeded a total of 11,000 deaths from Covid-19 on Tuesday, 1,000 of which occurred in less than a week, the health department said in a statement.

Everyone in the area should assume they will be exposed to the disease if they leave their home, Ferrer said. One in five people tested for Covid-19 in Los Angeles County has the virus.

“We’re likely to see the worst of conditions in January facing the entire pandemic, and that’s hard to imagine,” Ferrer said. “The rise in cases is likely to continue for weeks due to holiday and New Year’s parties and returning travelers.”

The staff was stretched thin

Los Angeles County is still grappling with the Covid-19 spate that was sparked by the Thanksgiving holiday and has yet to see the cases that are likely to follow the holidays in late December, Ghaly said. Hospitals are now trying to “do everything they can to prepare”.

Some coronavirus patients have to wait more than a day for a bed to be opened for them in the intensive care unit, shared Dr. Brad Spellberg, chief medical officer of the Los Angeles County University Medical Center’s Southern California Medical Center, emailed CNBC.

A health care worker examines patients in an oxygen tent outside the emergency room of Huntington Park Community Hospital during a surge in positive coronavirus (COVID-19) cases in Huntington Park, California, December 29, 2020.

Bing Guan | Reuters

The hospital had to recruit some of its health care workers to handle the influx of ICU patients, meaning there is no time for elective surgery or other life-saving procedures like colonoscopies, Spellberg said.

Governor Gavin Newsom said during a news conference Monday that the state had sent medical aid teams to the Los Angeles area to ease the burden on hospitals. However, if there is another spike in Covid-19 cases after the December break, the extra staff won’t be enough, Spellberg said.

“Our staff are still very thin, especially in the intensive care unit. You can’t just get more nurses and doctors in the intensive care unit,” Spellberg said in an email, urging people to continue following public health guidelines such as wearing of masks, physical distancing and avoiding the crowds to follow.

“We get knocked down”

The increase is due to the fact that California, along with other states in the United States, began to administer the first shots of Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.

The state has received just over 2 million doses of vaccines, but only 24% of those have been given, according to the state’s Department of Health’s database last updated Wednesday. Newsom said Monday the process is too slow and the state “wants to see things go much faster”.

Ravina Kullar, a Los Angeles-based infectious disease expert and a member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, told CNBC in a telephone interview that she expects vaccinations to speed up in the coming weeks, even though the shots won’t work immediately. Immunity takes a few weeks to build and too few are given to develop herd immunity that would protect the wider population.

“I think we’re going to see some sort of stability that plateau and decrease in some cases, but it will only take time,” said Kullar. “I think it will be until spring, summer, before something really becomes noticeable there.”

Kullar, who works in long-term care facilities and nursing homes in Los Angeles, said every facility she works with is battling a Covid-19 outbreak. These residents, along with health care workers, will be the first to receive vaccination shots in California when they are introduced, Newsom said, adding that there are approximately 3 million people in the state’s early stages of vaccination.

“We’re getting down,” said Kullar. “We have very few staff. I am exhausted, my colleagues are exhausted. It’s a very difficult situation out here.”

– The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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CDC says new Covid pressure in U.S. may stress ‘closely burdened’ hospitals

CDC panel recommends Pfizer Covid vaccine for people 16 years and older, clearing pivotal hurdle

CDC headquarters in Atlanta

Elijah Nouvelage | Bloomberg via Getty Images

Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday that a new strain of Covid-19 now circulating in the United States could further strain hospitals already overwhelmed with coronavirus patients.

Colorado health officials announced Tuesday that they had discovered the first known case of the new and contagious strain of the virus, which was first discovered in the UK. A second separate new strain, identified for the first time in South Africa, could already be in circulation in the US, CDC officials said.

“As the variants spread faster, they could lead to more cases and put even more strain on our already stressed health systems,” said Dr. Henry Walke, the agency’s Covid Incident Manager, in a conference call with reporters.

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Hospitals Are Nonetheless Going through Shortages of Masks and Different Protecting Gear

Hospitals Are Still Facing Shortages of Masks and Other Protective Gear

The incoming administration, he said, is exploring ways to take over the distribution of testing supplies and medical equipment. They are also trying to create financial incentives and “buy” American guidelines to bolster the handful of domestic companies that make PPE, he said. Mr Biden would not hesitate to adopt the Defense Production Act, said Dr. Bright, although he did not provide details on how it would be applied.

Industry executives say the only way to guarantee the United States a reliable supply of quality masks and other medical equipment is to recognize the sector as essential to national security, similar to the Pentagon’s approach to companies producing fighter jet components and military personnel manufacture to ensure uniforms remain viable in peacetime.

This could mean that domestic businesses receive loans and subsidies, that state and national inventory must acquire American-made medical devices, and that hospital chains may have to source some of their supplies from domestic manufacturers.

“Masks are not a huge expense,” said Mr. Bowen. “The whole damn market is less than $ 150 million.”

Dan DeLay, who oversees procurement at CommonSpirit Health, the country’s second largest nonprofit hospital chain, said the pandemic opened his eyes to the importance of home care. But it can be difficult to convince hospital managers to buy American-made protective equipment, which can cost 40 percent more than goods made overseas. “If we are serious about domestic manufacturing, we need to make serious investments that will be sustained in the long run if this happens again,” he said.

Currently, the legions of exhausted healthcare workers are focused on managing the current crisis. Mary Turner, president of the Minnesota Nurses Association, said the months of bottlenecks left many members unnoticed and angry. Ms. Turner, who is also an intensive care nurse at North Memorial Medical Center in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, recalled the days leading up to the pandemic when nurses were given an N95 mask for each patient. Nowadays she hears a lot about nurses being forced to use the masks up to ten times “or until they fall off their faces,” she said.

Despite her optimism that a Biden government will be different, it is tired of the political leaders who mark medical workers as frontline warriors but do little to protect them, she said.

“The total disregard for our security was incomprehensible,” she said. “They call us heroes, but we are not treated like soldiers in war because if we were, the federal government would make sure we have everything we need.”

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Kids’s hospitals are pitching in to assist with the flood of grownup Covid-19 sufferers.

Children’s hospitals are pitching in to help with the flood of adult Covid-19 patients.

With Covid-19 patients on the rise threatening to overwhelm hospitals, U.S. public health officials are reaching for a safety valve the Northeast used in the spring: borrowing beds in children’s hospitals to care for adults.

U.S. hospital stays hit a record high of 104,600, according to the Covid Tracking Project, and the nation set a record for the most deaths in a seven-day period last week.

“When the fall came in and the second spike hit, we’re seeing a lot more of it now,” said Amy Knight, president of the Children’s Hospital Association, a national group that represents more than 200 US facilities.

According to Dr. Peter Jay Hotez, Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology and Microbiology, it is rare in American children’s hospitals to admit adult patients or to relax their admission criteria. The fact that this is happening now speaks to the severity of the crisis at Baylor College of Medicine and co-director of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.

“I don’t even know if this happened during the first half of 2009, so I can’t think of too many modern precedents,” he said.

Since coronavirus infections appear to largely spare younger children compared to teenagers and adults, children’s hospitals and the children’s wards of general hospitals tended not to be flooded at the beginning of the pandemic.

“It was more like a trickle of children being hospitalized,” Ms. Knight said.

Since then, however, the number of children who become infected and need hospital care has risen sharply, and children’s hospitals may have less space and resources available if the need for pediatric beds due to influenza increases anyway.

“We are much less able to treat pediatric critical diseases across the country,” said Dr. Brian Cummings, who works in the intensive care unit at MassGeneral Hospital for Children in Boston. “Obviously we are overwhelming the capacity of the adult intensive care unit, and using an even scarcer resource affects all of us who care about children.”

Even so, children’s hospitals are helping with the rise in the coronavirus in a number of ways. The Association of Children’s Hospitals published guidelines in April for several possible approaches, including admitting pediatric patients from general hospitals to free up space in these facilities and increasing their maximum admission age.

St. Louis Children’s Hospital, part of BJC HealthCare, opened its doors to adult patients in November, and another St. Louis children’s hospital, Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital, has accepted transfers for adults without Covid-19. Oishei Children’s Hospital in Buffalo said it will temporarily raise the admission limit to admit patients up to 25 years of age.

During the first major surge in the northeast from April to June, the MassGeneral Hospital for Children admitted adult patients to its 14-bed intensive care unit. “When we saw how hospitals were overwhelmed, everyone wanted to do their part,” said Dr. Cummings.

The unit returned to normal in the summer, but with Massachusetts cases picking up again, he said, “We’re definitely worried we’ll have patients again in the next week or two.”