Bill Gates Donates Rs 37 Crore To Facilitate Free COVID-19 Test Kits

COVID-19 is spreading at an exponential rate in the US. Among all cities, Seattle is being hit hard. In the US, there are now more than 1,500 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 40 deaths. Washington has the most number of cases at 442.

To tackle this alarming situation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested $5 million in a project that will provide at-home COVID-19 test kits to people in the Seattle area.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s leader of COVID-19 response, Scott Dowell said that their goal would be using these kits to process thousands of samples every day. With these kits, people can take their nose swabs and then send them for testing.

Dowell further added that the test results will come out in one or two days. People who are infected with the virus will have to fill in a questionnaire about their locations as well as their traveling history so that medical staff can know the route of the virus.

He said:

This is just one of the projects that Bill and Gates Melinda Foundation is investing in to fight COVID-19.

Recently, 15,000 medicinal molecules have been paid by the foundation to be shipped to a Rega Institute for Medical Research in Leuven, Belgium from the Scripps Research Institute in California for testing as a potential cure to the deadly virus.

The Coronavirus is believed to have come from Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which is a trading place for wildlife. On 23 January, to prevent the virus from spreading, the Chinese authorities put the city under lockdown. Some airlines have also suspended their flights to mainland China. According to researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the genome sequenced taken from seven patients were reportedly 96% identical to coronavirus from bats.

>>> Bill Gates Is Funding Research On Finding The Cure For Coronavirus