STATE/LOCAL
PPE Donations to Boulder Community Health
There is a national shortage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for hospital and medical staff. The university is coordinating donations of PPE and other essential items for Boulder Community Health and other local organizations. If you have donations that will not impact your critical operations supply, please email emergency.management@colorado.edu. Someone will then be in touch about the next logistical steps.
The following items are in demand:
- Sterile and non-sterile gloves in unopened boxes – preferably latex-free
- Hand sanitizer – unopened containers
- Bleach bottles or sprays – unopened containers
- Bleach wipes – unopened containers
- Isopropyl alcohol – unopened bottles
- Eye protection and goggles – unused in box or wrapper
- Clear face shields – unused only
- Masks – tie, ear loop – unopened boxes only (no cloth masks)
- Respirator masks – N95, N99, P100 of all sizes in unopened boxes. Extra filters also needed.
- PAPR respirators – 3M or MaxAir and unused. Hoods, filters, batteries, chargers, tubes to go with these units are also needed
- Disposable gowns – unused
- Shoe covers – unopened boxes
- Biohazard bags – unused
Request from Governor Polis's Clinical Rapid Response Team
Governor Jared Polis's Clinical Rapid Response team is seeking 3 Clinical directors who would be willing to serve on a Laboratory Developed Test Rapid Response team. These individuals need to meet the qualifications to serve as the director of a CLIA certified lab and would assess new Laboratory Developed Tests for COVID-19.
Additionally, Children's Hospital is in need of staff (masters level and bachelors level) who can run and help run COVID-19 samples. They are running samples for their hospital and several other systems and need additional staff to ramp up capacity even more. I know that some labs aren't necessarily operating because of social distancing and there maybe grad students trained in molecular biology that could help here.
Please email suggestions to Dan Powers, Executive Director at CO-LABS.
Laboratory Developed Test Rapid Response team
- 3 Clinical Lab Directors or equivalent
- Must meet qualification necessary to run a CLIA lab
- Capable of quickly assessing the validity of new laboratory developed tests
Additional Capacity for Children's Hospital
- 4 Molecular Microbiologists with MLS or MB(ASCP) or Equivalent
- Needed to perform SARS-CoV-2 testing
- 4 Technologists with MLS(ASCP) or equivalent
- To support specimen processing of test samples upon arrival, auxiliary testing to support the outbreak
- 4 Lab Assistants – High School Diploma or above
- To support specimen entry into the system, including account creation and management
FEDERAL
White House Call to Action to the Tech Community on New Machine Readable COVID-19 Dataset
Last week, researchers and leaders released the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), which represents the most extensive machine-readable Coronavirus literature collection available for data and text mining to date, with over 29,000 articles, more than 13,000 of which have full text. The White House along with others issues a call to action to the nation’s artificial intelligence experts to develop new text and data mining techniques that can help the science community answer high-priority scientific questions related to COVID-19.
The CORD-19 resource is available on the Allen Institute’s SemanticScholar.org website and will continue to be updated as new research is published in archival services and peer-reviewed publications. Researchers should submit the text and data mining tools and insights they develop in response to this call to action via the Kaggle platform. Through Kaggle, a machine learning and data science community owned by Google Cloud, these tools will be openly available for researchers around the world.
A list of the initial key questions can be found under the Tasks section of this dataset. These key scientific questions are drawn from the NASEM’s SCIED (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats) research topics and the World Health Organization’s R&D Blueprint for COVID-19.
The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium
The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium is a unique private-public effort spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the U.S. Department of Energy and IBM to bring together federal government, industry, and academic leaders who are volunteering free compute time and resources on their world-class machines.
Researchers are invited to submit COVID-19 related research proposals to the consortium via this online portal, which will then be reviewed for matching with computing resources from one of the partner institutions. An expert panel comprised of top scientists and computing researchers will work with proposers to assess the public health benefit of the work, with emphasis on projects that can ensure rapid results.
Proposals should: 1) not exceed two pages; 2) not include any proprietary information; and 3) include descriptions of the sections below.
A. Scientific/Technical Goal
Describe how your proposed work contributes to our understanding of COVID-19 and/or improves the nation's ability to respond to the pandemic.
- What is the scientific/technical goal?
- What is the plan and timetable for getting to the goal?
- What is the expected period for performance (one week to three months)?
B. Compute Resource Estimate
To the extent possible, provide an estimate of the scale and type of the resources needed to complete the work. The links in the Resources section (coming soon) are available to help you answer this question.
- Are there specific computing architectures or systems that are most appropriate (e.g. GPUs, large memory, large core counts on shared memory node, etc.)
- How much computing support will this effort approximately require in terms of core, node, or GPU hours?
- How distributed can the computation be, and can it be split across multiple HPC systems?
C. Support Needs
Describe whether collaboration or support from staff at the National labs or other HPC facilities will be essential, helpful, or unnecessary. Estimates of necessary application support are very helpful. Teams should also identify any restrictions that might apply to the project, such as export-controlled code, ITAR restrictions, proprietary data sets, or HIPAA restrictions.
D. Team Preparedness
Summarize your team's qualifications and readiness to execute the project.
- What is the expected lead time before you can begin the simulation runs?
- What systems have you recently used and how big were the simulation runs?