Covid-19: as governments feud, researchers, scientists and tech firms fill collaborative void in search for cure

Joint efforts of health care industry, pharmaceutical companies and tech firms are a stark contrast to the Washington-Beijing divisiveness. As many as 332 Covid-19 clinical trials have been launched from China, South Korea, Europe and North America, according to the medical journal The Lancet. — SCMP

Despite the spread of the coronavirus that has infected 1.5 million people and devastated economies around the world, the United States and China have proven unable to work together at the government level to battle the human crisis. But researchers and scientists from both countries – as well as others – are locking arms to advance vaccines and treatments for Covid-19 from the ground up.

In March, US tech giant Intel and Hong Kong-headquartered Lenovo teamed up to offer supercomputing capacity to support scientists at Shenzhen, China-based BGI Genomics to analyse the virus’ genome. The tech boost will speed up the sequencing, critical in developing vaccines and treatments, to five and a half hours from the previous 150 hours.