. @WHO Scientific Director @doctorsoumya kicks off Day 2 of the @rd_blueprint mtg. We're going to hear about what the key research goals for COVID are over the next 6-12 months.

Here's the agenda for this session:

. @srinmurthy99 lays out the clinical data management plans:

Here are the priorities...

Focusing on resource-limited settings. This is one of the key roles for @WHO as COVID is now rising in many LMICs

Another key issue - use of unregistered interventions (i.e. drugs that are not specifically designed for COVID):

Dr. Farida Al Hosani from @uaegov reviews epidemiology key research goals:

Wide variation in implementation of interventions among countries is a key potential problem.

Here are the specific research studies @WHO is calling for re. epidemiology of COVID.

Critical need is to understand role of children (0-19) in transmitting COVID, subclinically or not. How infectious are they? What percentage get sick? What role to they play in transmission - esp. re. schools as risk for case spikes.

What's the role of super-spreading events? Which facilities, settings, institutions are likely to see spikes of cases that drive transmission?

One thing that struck me from this report is that there was little discussion of how we get ready for vaccination - what the coverage would need to be to get effective control. Maybe there is a feeling that vaccination is so far off (12+ months) that this isn't a priority?

. @Dr_Wildlife on research priorities for animal-human interactions:

Still a key goal to find the ORIGINS of COVID-19. Here's how @WHO sees a strategy to do that.

What will happen next - could it get into other species? We don't want a plague-like situation where it gets into so many species it's hard to control.

How is it transmitted? How is it spread? What about the role of global food transport (Cf. recent Beijing outbreak).

What about policies that could be brought in to prevent future spread, future COVID-like events in the "Century of Pandemics"

Need to identify hotspots for emergence, linked to the drivers that cause them, especially re. the food chain. Linked to Economist article this week: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/06/25/pandemic-proofing-the-planet?utm_campaign=coronavirus-special-edition&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=2020-06-27&utm_content=article-link-1

We know which animals are key for carrying viruses naturally, and therefore which to avoid pressures on that could lead to pandemics