Headlines 

The Race to Get Convalescent Plasma to Covid-19 Patients

One morning a few weeks ago, Rebecca Haley realized that her job had changed. Haley is the medical director for blood collection at Bloodworks Northwest, a nonprofit that serves 90 hospitals in the Pacific Northwest. But, Haley decided, regular blood and platelet donations weren’t the focus anymore. Like thousands of blood centers across the country, Bloodworks needed to collect something new: plasma from Covid-19 survivors. How Long Does the Coronavirus Live on Surfaces?  Plus: What it means to “flatten the curve,” and everything else you need to know about the…

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Headlines 

Chloroquine May Fight Covid-19and Silicon Valleys Into It

The chatter about a promising drug to fight Covid-19 started, as chatter often does (but science does not), on Twitter. A blockchain investor named James Todaro Google doc he’d cowritten, explaining the idea. What Is the Coronavirus? Plus: How can I avoid catching it? Is Covid-19 more deadly than the flu? Our in-house Know-It-Alls answer your questions. nearly a dozen drugs to treat coronavirus are in clinical trials in China, just one—remdesivir, an antiviral that was in trials against Ebola and the coronavirus MERS—is in linked to Todaro’s Google document;…

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Odds and Ends 

Healthcare startup Lyfebin exposed medical images

Healthcare startup Lyfebin exposed thousands of medical imaging files, such as X-rays, MRI scans and ultrasounds. The Los Angeles-based healthcare startup allows doctors and medical staff to store medical images in its “secure environment,” per its website, allowing patients and doctors access from anywhere. But the files were found stored in an unprotected Amazon Web Services (AWS) storage bucket, without a password, allowing anyone who knew the easy-to-guess web address access to the data. The files were dated between September 2018 to October 2019. After we reached out to warn…

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