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Greece has suggested EU member states jointly buy patent rights for vaccines against COVID-19 and rapid tests under development to help ensure that if they are effective they are quickly distributed to those in need across the bloc...Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said finding a solution for a rapid distribution of vaccines, when they are available, is difficult but also urgent...At least 20 vaccines against COVID-19 are under development, many of which are subsidised by individual governments or charities...“Ideally, once their efficacy has been proven, such vaccines should be distributed as quickly and fairly as possible, and at a reasonable cost,”...Purchasing such patent rights would give global pharmaceutical companies incentives for further research and development and ensure that European taxpayers’ money was “spent sensibly...READ MORE

Abbott Laboratories won U.S. approval for its molecular test for the Coronavirus strain COVID-19, which will be used by hospitals and academic medical centers to speed diagnostic capabilities...The “emergency use authorization” from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allows Abbott to begin shipping 150,000 laboratory tests immediately, the company said Wednesday. The tests are run on Abbott’s “m2000TM RealTime System,” which is already located in more than 175 U.S hospitals and academic medical centers...Abbott said the company will begin scaling up production at its U.S. manufacturing plant “to reach capacity for 1 million tests per week by end of March.” Abbott said its systems have “the ability to run high volumes of up to 470 tests in 24 hours, helping to meet the increasing demand for testing.”...READ MORE

There are lots of numbers swirling around in the time of coronavirus: Confirmed cases of COVID-19, people tested, number of hospitalizations and, increasingly, new deaths...There are also other data points revealing the finer points of how the virus is affecting people, such as the age and gender of those who have tested positive and what pre-existing conditions people hospitalized after contracting the novel coronavirus have...But those numbers can be difficult to parse without context. Below, The Nevada Independent explores that data and puts it into context, walking through what we do and don’t know about coronavirus in Nevada, how Nevada stacks up against other states and projections for the future...READ MORE

One of the measures that President Trump announced on Friday when he declared the coronavirus national emergency was a website that Google was supposedly developing to facilitate the access to coronavirus testing. Google had 1,700 engineers working on the project, he said. But it turned out that Google didn’t really know it was making such a website. Instead, Google-sister company confirmed that a more limited site was in the works and that it wasn’t the nationwide project Trump referred to. Since Friday Google confirmed it’s working with the US government on a nationwide site, stopping short from revealing any specific details about it. Verily, meanwhile, launched its coronavirus screening site, proving this isn’t the COVID-19 website you expect...READ MORE

Christina Mattina, welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News Network