Emergent Ventures Covid-19 prizes, second cohort

There is another round of prize winners, and I am pleased and honored to announce them:

1. Petr Ludwig.

Petr has been instrumental in building out the #Masks4All movement, and in persuading individuals in the Czech Republic, and in turn the world, to wear masks.  That already has saved numerous lives and made possible — whenever the time is right — an eventual reopening of economies.  And I am pleased to see this movement is now having an impact in the United States.

Here is Petr on Twitter, here is the viral video he had a hand in creating and promoting, his work has been truly impressive, and I also would like to offer praise and recognition to all of the people who have worked with him.

2. www.covid19india.org/

The covid19india project is a website for tracking the progress of Covid-19 cases through India, and it is the result of a collaboration.

It is based on a large volunteer group that is rapidly aggregating and verifying patient-level data by crowdsourcing.They portray a website for tracking the progress of Covid-19 cases through India and open-sources all the (non-personally identifiable) data for researchers and analysts to consume. The data for the react based website and the cluster graph are a crowdsourced Google Sheet filled in by a large and hardworking Ops team at covid19india. They manually fill in each case, from various news sources, as soon as the case is reported. Top contributor amongst 100 odd other code contributors and the maintainer of the website is Jeremy Philemon, an undergraduate at SUNY Binghamton, majoring in Computer Science. Another interesting contribution is from Somesh Kar, a 15 year old high school student at Delhi Public School RK Puram, New Delhi. For the COVID-19 India tracker he worked on the code for the cluster graph. He is interested in computer science tech entrepreneurship and is a designer and developer in his free time. Somesh was joined in this effort by his brother, Sibesh Kar, a tech entrepreneur in New Delhi and the founder of MayaHQ.

3. Debes Christiansen, the head of department at the National Reference Laboratory for Fish and Animal Diseases in the capital, Tórshavn, Faroe Islands.

Here is the story of Debes Christiansen.  Here is one part:

A scientist who adapted his veterinary lab to test for disease among humans rather than salmon is being celebrated for helping the Faroe Islands avoid coronavirus deaths, where a larger proportion of the population has been tested than anywhere in the world.

Debes was prescient in understanding the import of testing, and also in realizing in January that he needed to move quickly.

Please note that I am trying to reach Debes Christiansen — can anyone please help me in this endeavor with an email?

Here is the list of the first cohort of winners, here is the original prize announcement.  Most of the prize money still remains open to be won.  It is worth noting that the winners so far are taking the money and plowing it back into their ongoing and still very valuable work.

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