Hasta La Gadget!

After years of waiting, a new Half-Life game is almost here. While everything else is getting canceled or rescheduled, the release of Half-Life: Alyx will happen on March 23rd. Valve tweeted tonight that the game will go live at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. F…

Tuesday’s elections, conducted under the cloud of a coronavirus pandemic, will be the last state primaries until April.

On Jan. 22, Trump said he had no concerns coronavirus would become a pandemic. On Tuesday, he said he’d always known it.

Image credit – Michele Faini

In more critical cases of the coronavirus, patients might need to be hooked up to a respirator to help them breathe. Shortage of respirator valves has never been an issue, but in places like Italy where the number of coronavirus cases are in the thousands, this has put an incredible amount of strain on the country’s healthcare system.

As such, hospitals are starting to run out of these life-saving respiratory valves, but thanks to the work of a group of volunteers, they have turned to the use of 3D printing where these valves are being made en masse and while being incredibly cheap, where each 3D printed valve is said to cost around $1, versus $11,000 which is how much it would have cost if bought from the manufacturer.

The volunteers had initially asked the manufacturer for access to the blueprints to the valve, but were turned down, and were in fact threatened by the company with a patent infringement lawsuit. However, according to the volunteers, this was done to help save lives and that they have no intention of distributing the drawings or making a profit from it.

One of the volunteers, a 3D printing expert and research and development designer at Lonati SpA, Michele Faini, he wrote in a post on Facebook (translated from Italian) saying, “[The patients] were people in danger of life, and we acted. Period. We have no intention of profit on this situation, we are not going to use the designs or product beyond the strict need for us forced to act, we are not going to spread the drawing.”

Volunteers Are 3D Printing Respiratory Valves Used For Coronavirus Treatments

, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

When a person with an infectious disease is identified, one of the things that health officials need to do is try and determine where that person has been, where they might have caught the disease, and who they might have come into contact with. This will allow them to prevent further spread of the disease.

Now with the coronavirus outbreak, it seems that this is more important than ever, and a report from The Washington Post has revealed that the US government has approached various tech companies such as Facebook and Google to request for location data, where it will be used to help track the spread of the virus as well as provide them with a better understanding on how to prevent its spread, and how effective social distancing is.

Understandably, there are some who might feel uncomfortable with this kind of information being given to the government as it can come across like an invasion of their privacy, although given the severity of the outbreak, there might not be much of a choice. If it’s any comfort though, government sources have told the publication that there are no plans to build a “government database”, and that information will be used to help provide health officials and researchers a better idea on how the virus spreads.

It can also be used to help predict potential hotspots, which in turn will allow the government to allocate health resources more efficiently.

US Government Wants To Use Location Data To Track And Understand The Coronavirus

, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.