The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropy founded by Priscilla Chan, MD, and Mark Zuckerberg, is donating $13.6 million to a research collaboration that will examine the spread of COVID-19 in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The collaboration, between University of California San Francisco, Stanford (Calif.) University and research nonprofit Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, will focus on two long-term studies.
The first study will test a representative sample of about 4,000 Bay Area residents, who have tested negative for COVID-19 and been following stay-at-home guidelines, every month through December to determine the rate of new infections. Researchers will also conduct antibody testing to check if participants have been infected with the new coronavirus without knowing it and recovered.
The second study aims determine the rate at which healthcare workers acquire COVID-19 with or without symptoms as well as whether COVID-19 antibodies protect individuals against reinfection. Researchers will enroll 3,500 Bay Area healthcare workers who previously tested negative for COVID-19 and retest them every week for at least 12 weeks.
"To reopen society in the Bay Area and keep healthcare workers safe, we need to first understand the epidemiology of this disease," said Dr. Chan, co-CEO of Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. “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."