Tag: virus

Introducing the COVID Defense Initiative (CDI)

On By gyonas4 Comments
Gerry Yonas introduces COVID Defense Initiative
Illustration by Jenna Gibson

On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan gave a televised address on national security that surprised everyone as he challenged “the scientific community who gave us nuclear weapons to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” His brief words led to the creation of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and initiated my involvement in a giant program that, although it did not lead to an effective missile defense, did effectively flummox the Soviet Union.

Now we face a global health, economic, political and social threat that could possibly be as risky for all of us as the strategic missile threat we faced in the 1980s. I think we need to approach this real threat from a systems engineering approach, starting with a presidential call for action not just to the bioscience community, but also to the nation’s engineering community.

What I am suggesting is a multilayer defense involving detection and response similar to the concepts we created in the 1983 Fletcher Study. I described this study in my book “Death Rays and Delusions” and the basic approach was an information-based layered system of systems. The needed technology did not exist at that time and is still not available, so the notion of applying this methodology to a very dangerous, contagious and asymptomatic virus may seem a bit unrealistic The biggest deficiencies at that time were the need for space deployed high sensitivity and high specificity sensors, directed energy and kinetic interceptors and the command and control for the entire system.

I may be overly optimistic, but I am suggesting that the COVID Defense Initiative can provide an extremely useful approach. The virus defense technology needed for this system is no more available today than the technology we needed 35 years ago for the SDI, but now is the time for the national commitment and investment to make it real.

I envision a future system beginning with a readily available real time virus detection system. The  reliable sensors would be coupled through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Syndromic Surveillance Program to other symptomatic measurements and would provide the means to identify the threat and track it using millions of other simultaneous data sources.

Facility design would be required to prevent the infected person from entering an otherwise virus free location. A next step would be an immediate antiviral treatment  that might be provided using an inhaler. If the detection, reporting and treatment are included in a widely available system of systems, we could achieve a highly effective defense system that could be coupled with a vaccine to reduce the probability of infection. This multilayer approach would reduce the probability of spreading of the disease. As in our multilayer SDI system concept, there would still be a threat, but the probability of infection would become acceptably small .

canary wearing a face mask

Canary ROC curve and architecture

On By gyonas10 Comments

A ROC curve shows the relationship between a sensor’s sensitivity and specificity. If the sensor is sensitive but can’t discriminate a true positive signal from a false signal it is useless. That was the problem I have written about on the subject of mid course missile defense and the problem of discrimination of real targets from decoys. Since we could not find a practical approach to discrimination, we could not make mid course intercept work. We expected the interceptor missile would have a terrible ROC curve if the adversary deployed effective decoys.

Let’s say the problem is to deploy a sensor in a coal mine to protect the miners. Since a canary succumbs to CO before the miners are affected, the canary provides a useful warning. The ROC curve for the canary makes it an excellent sensor to detect a poisonous environment. We could instead find a particularly weak miner and use  the miner as a warning indicator, but waiting to see if miners show some symptoms would not be a reasonable approach. To improve the miner as a sensor, we could try to create a ROC curve for miners based on if they they have CO in their lungs, are pre symptomatic,  slightly sick with a fever,  or just becoming unconscious, but the canary is certainly the preferred approach.

So  would we  use coal miners as sensors and then shut down coal mines if miners die on the job? Instead we could ventilate the coal mines to avoid CO build up and still use the canary, or maybe install a more modern CO sensor and keep the coal mines operating. I admit  coal mines are going away, but the metaphor might be useful.

So I wondered, why we are using people as sensors for detecting virus containing aerosols that are inhaled? The ROC curve for the RNA sensor has not been published, but I suspect its performance depends on when the sample is collected relative to time of the exposure of the person, how well the swab is stuck up somebody’s nose,  and the sensitivity of the analysis. One article claimed the false negative rate was 25%, but no ROC curve was published. An additional sensor such as fever detection could result in excessive false positives. If just a fever detector is used there would be unacceptable false negatives.

If instead, if  we have a closed space, such as an assisted living center, a business, air plane, restaurant, movie theater  or factory,  it could be ventilated with filtered air, sterilized  and an aerosol analysis sensor such as  an optical bio sensor could be used as a detector.

The optical sensor might be extremely sensitive and specific to the virus molecule. Except it does not exist as yet, but it is not impossible….I guess since considerable research is under way.

People would enter the protected environment through a revolving door that has its own aerosol sensor to instantly detect if the person entering has contaminated breath or clothing, and if so, the person would be rejected. This suggestion would require a major architecture redesign approach involving reliance on this as yet unavailable canary.