The crowd fight against COVID-19

Researchers are coming together to fight SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that has caused the global pandemic known as COVID-19.

Alfonso Perez-Escudero, a biophysicist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Toulouse, joined forces with Sara Arganda, a biologist at King Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain and Daniel Calovi of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour in Konstanz, Germany to launch a connection platform called Crowdfight COVID-19.

The Crowdfight COVID-19 initiative is meant to centralize efforts to match volunteers with needs. More than 32,000 scientists joined the campaign, which has received hundreds of requests for help worldwide. This platform connects those with supply needs, data analysis questions, and testing deficits to experts who have volunteered their time to help wherever they can.

Nadia Khan, a neuroscientist, connected with Alexandria Trujillo, a former pharmacologist now working in science policy. They started organizing contact information for other scientists who wanted to find ways to help in the battle against COVID-19. In two days, Khan and Trujillo collected 100 responses and have been working ever since to ensure that volunteers and institutes requesting help find each other.

There are also individuals volunteering to help ramp up testing. A virologist in Vienna, Austria, Karin Kosulin, has coordinated a team to conduct testing at her hospital. 

“Everywhere around the world, tests are needed,” Kosulin told Nature.

In the United Kingdom, an unconventional testing center is being built in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. Basically, PCR machines, required for some types of coronavirus testing, were borrowed from shuttered-up labs to help build the facility. Matthias Trost, a Newcastle University biochemist has 650 individual volunteers ready to help him start screening.

David Lopez Gonzalez is at the National University of Colombia in Bogota. Like many he is worried about limited resources for testing and clinical care in his country. He is glad to have an opportunity to help fight the pandemic. “All my academic life I have been preparing and studying for a moment like this,” he said.