Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan to fund nine-month COVID-19 research study

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan on Wednesday announced that they will fund a nine-month research project to better understand the prevalence of Coronavirus in the Bay Area under their Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). The couple has decided to give $13.6 million for the research project.

The research project will be a collaboration between UC San Francisco, Stanford University and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a nonprofit organization separate from CZI with a mission of curing, preventing or managing every disease on the planet.

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In a press release Priscilla Chan, co-founder of CZI stated that in order to reopen society in the Bay Area and keep the keep healthcare workers safe, we need to first understand the epidemiology of this disease.

 “How much of our population is currently infected with COVID-19? How prevalent is asymptomatic spread? And how can we use this information to better understand who may still be at risk in the future? There is no shortcut to answering these questions — it will require testing, retesting, and the sort of rigorous public health surveying this program is focused on in California", the release further said.

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The project will consist of two long-term studies.

The first will be a sample survey of a representative population in the Bay Area with the goal of figuring out how to keep transmission rates low as California re-opens without a vaccine. While scientists around the world are working to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, even the most optimistic estimates expect a vaccine in the summer of 2021 at the earliest. 

The second study will focus on Bay Area healthcare workers to understand whether COVID-19 antibodies will protect individuals from reinfection, and if so, for how long. 

About the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Founded by Dr Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg in 2015, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a new kind of philanthropy that’s leveraging technology to help solve some of the world’s toughest challenges from eradicating disease to improving education, to reforming the criminal justice system.

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