A new study has highlighted how free, open source hardware and 3D printing can help global healthcare systems tackle the demand for health supplies in light of the COVID-19 crisis.

The burden of COVID-19 on healthcare systems could be alleviated if local communities were to use both open source hardware and 3D printing according to scientists at the University of Sussex.

Free and open source hardware (FOSH) follows an ethos where blueprints for a tool are made freely available so that anyone can study, learn, modify, customise, and commercialise them.

The old drug discovery system was built to benefit shareholders, not patients. But a new, Linux-like platform could transform the way medicine is developed—and energize the race against COVID-19.

On March 28, 1944, the Dutch minister of education, Gerrit Bolkestein, sent a message to radio listeners asking them to “preserve your diaries and letters” of their experiences of World War II.

“Only if we succeed in bringing this simple, daily material together in overwhelming quantity, only then will the scene of this struggle for freedom be painted in full depth and shine,” he said.

As in 1944, the world faces an unprecedented challenge with the coronavirus pandemic. The outbreak has put tens of millions of people under lockdown, with restrictions preventing many from going outside except for essential trips.

With some turning to their diaries to document this incredible time, fellows from Harvard University's Neiman Foundation for Journalism had a different idea to chronicle daily life.

“At Outride.rs we cover global issues which have local impact — and there never was a bigger challenge than COVID-19 to show how something originating far away can influence our daily lives,” said Jakub Górnicki, Outriders co-founder, in an email with Poynter. “At the same time — we don’t do news. So we asked ourselves what we want to give our audience? And then we asked our community. And the answer is — sense of hope, ideas, solutions — something which will help them get through today and prepare for tomorrow.”

The new project, launched today, is called Radar, and it’s meant to be an open marketplace to collect ideas and solutions to the many problems caused by COVID-19. And many of those responses and solutions can best be found in the work of journalists at the local level.

The source code of Aarogya Setu, Government of India’s contact tracing app, will be made open to the scientific and research community soon, a top NITI Aayog official and member of the app’s core team has confirmed.

At a time when the app has come under sustained criticism for lack of transparency, Arnab Kumar, Program Director, Frontier Technologies at NITI Aayog, said the app development team was “committed” to making Aarogya Setu “open source soon once the product has stabilised”.

The app, which aims to speed up the process of identifying those who may have been exposed to COVID-19, uses Bluetooth to record encrypted IDs from nearby devices that also have the app.

Almost one week since launch, the Government is yet to release its source code, but that has not stopped software specialists from dissecting it.

The industry consensus so far suggests the app works largely as described — it does not collect your GPS location and deletes all information held on the app older than 21 days — but that some of its design could be improved.

About 1.13 million people had downloaded the federal government’s COVIDSafe app by 6am today, just 12 hours after its release last night, said Health Minister Greg Hunt. The government is hoping at least 40% of the population will make use of the app, designed to help reduce the spread of the coronavirus disease.

Previously dubbed TraceTogether – in line with a similar app rolled out in Singapore – the coronavirus contact tracing app has been an ongoing cause of contention among the public. Many people have voiced concerns of an erosion of privacy, and potential misuse of citizen data by the government.

FOSS Responders is a working group of volunteers that aims to future-proof the open source infrastructure we rely on by helping sustain those who maintain the software. The group’s website allows those in need to apply for emergency funds. FOSS Responders is raising money on Open Collective and 100% of donations go to open source technologists in need. So far the group has an estimated annual budget of $8,145.05. Open Collective is also waiving its platform fees on COVID-19 solidarity collectives until the end of June.
On May 22, FOSS Responders plans to host a virtual funding event to provide financial support for organizations affected by the profound economic disruptions caused by the pandemic. Organizers have a $5,000 goal for ticket revenue from general event ticket sales.

There has been an explosion of mobile apps since the covid-19 crisis began in the country.

Apart from Aarogya Setu, the Centre and state governments are using at least 28 mobile applications to tackle the covid-19 pandemic.

These apps have varied purposes — some disseminate information on cases, deaths and so on to users while others are used by officials to track people under quarantine.

There is one common aspect to all of them: None of them is open-sourced.

One of the most famous apps is the Centre’s Aarogya Setu, which collects users’ Bluetooth and location data to track their whereabouts and alert them if they come in contact with a covid-19 positive patient. The app, which has been controversial given privacy concerns, has been downloaded by over 7.5 crore people.

“While there are many initiatives around the globe to encourage scientific collaboration, there is unfortunately little coordination among these teams.”

So says Frédéric Vacher, Head of Innovation for the 3DExperience Lab at Dassault Systèmes. Dassault created an online Open COVID-19 Community which is designed to be a place where engineers, designers and manufacturers worldwide can work together on innovative solutions during the pandemic and stay in touch throughout the process.

The company outright lied about using end-to-end encryption. We learned that it has access to decryption keys, meaning it can potentially snoop on conversations. A team from the University of Toronto found that the software was sometimes sending encryption keys through servers located in communist China, even if none of the participants in the call were from that country. And the term “Zoombombing” has entered the lexicon, with many meetings being spied on or actively disrupted by people spouting racism and displaying Nazi imagery.

Recursion, a digital biology company industrialising drug discovery, released its open-source RxRx19 dataset; the first human cellular morphological dataset of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19). The human cellular morphological data and over 1,600 small molecules has been released to help clinical researchers and machine learning experts around the world who are working to make advances in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The inevitable and necessary responses to Covid-19 — from the lockdown itself, to the underlying and rapidly approved legislation behind it to the contact tracing apps that are now being developed — raise concerns about our civil liberties that in a different time would all have been hotly debated over a considerable time period. Thanks to Covid-19, time is no longer a luxury at humanity’s disposal.