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Chinese scientists published online the genome of coronavirus — all 30,000 biochemical “letters” of its genetic code — on January 10. Boston area start-up Moderna was quickly off to the races and an early winner in finding a vaccine through its work on viral genetics. By February 7, the company’s scientists had manufactured dozens of clinical-grade doses, enough for early trials on healthy volunteers.
Despite that lightning-fast four-week process and more than 20 other companies also seeking a vaccine, our latest Big Read explains why it will be at least a year to 18 months before one is available for widespread use — and typically the process takes several years. After an initial safety trial, there must now be larger clinical studies to test efficacy. The work of Moderna and its competitors may only be useful if coronavirus comes back again in another outbreak next year or becomes an endemic infection like seasonal flu.
In the meantime, the markets are still falling and tech is hunkering down. Samsung Electronics said today it would shift part of its premium smartphone production, manufacturing around 200,000 units a month in Vietnam, with its plant in South Korea suffering repeated closures due to the severe coronavirus outbreak there.
In the gig economy, ride-sharing services are suffering as people avoid close proximity, with Didi Chuxing, which controls more than 90 per cent of China’s ride-hailing market, seeing customer numbers dive.
On the other hand, home delivery is prospering. Postmates from today offers US users the option to instruct drivers to leave deliveries on the doorstep at a set time, rather than handing them over directly. Instacart, a competitor that specialises in groceries, said it would be doing the same, after successfully testing the idea.
Meanwhile, Undercover Economist Tim Harford’s column this week deals with not the spread of coronavirus, but of misinformation about it, as conspiracy theories and fake news abound. For the plague of unreliable and often made-up stories, no vaccine has yet been found.
The Internet of (Five) Things
1. @Jack ‘re-evaluates’ Africa plans
Twitter chief Jack Dorsey told a conference yesterday he was “re-evaluating” plans to go to Africa for as long as six months this year, citing “everything happening in the world, particularly with coronavirus”. “Everything happening” may include activist investor Elliott Management trying to oust him over his lack of focus. John Thornhill’s column this week compares @Jack with another famous Jack — Jack Welch, the former GE chief who died this week. “Whatever their differences in age, temperament, philosophy and style, the two Jacks do have one striking trait in common: a dangerous habit of conflating the individual with the institution,” he says.
2. Waymo worth more than $30bn
Waymo’s $2.25bn funding round this week, the first for Alphabet’s self-driving technology division to involve outside investors, has put a value on it of more than $30bn, we’ve learnt. That makes Waymo worth considerably more than the $19bn assessment for SoftBank-backed Cruise, the autonomous vehicle unit of General Motors.
3. Dawn of the exascale era
HPE and chipmaker AMD have announced they are combining to deliver the US Department of Energy’s El Capitan supercomputer. Richard Waters’ Inside Business column explains this should deliver computing power of two billion billion calculations a second as we enter an era of exascale computing. The US may have a software advantage over China as they compete with one another in this new “space race”.
4. Virgin Media breach could lead to blackmail
We reported on Thursday that personal details of 900,000 Virgin Media customers had been left on an unsecured marketing database of the UK broadband provider, and they had been accessed by a third party. Now Nic Fildes has discovered that customers’ contact details were linked to highly sensitive online material including gambling, pornography and extreme violence websites, which could expose them to potential extortion.
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5. Gay dating app Grindr sold
The Chinese owner of the world’s most popular gay dating app has reached a deal to sell the platform a year after US regulators forced the company into a disposal because of national security concerns. Beijing Kunlun Tech, a gaming company, is to sell Grindr to San Vicente Acquisition for about $608.5m.
Tech tools — Oppo’s smartwatch
China’s Oppo today unveiled its flagship 5G phone, the Find X2 Pro, but there was just as much interest in its first smartwatch, the Oppo Watch. It has an industry-first 3D flexible hyperboloid AMOLED display, which makes it very thin. I looked up hyperboloid and was none the wiser. There is cellular connectivity and health and sleep monitoring included. It launches first in China, later this month, at around $215.
