The demand for electricity globally has declined significantly during the Covid-19 outbreak, with many people working from home and offices and factories having shutdown as a result of lockdown measures imposed by governments.

In Europe, utilities have observed weekday demand for electricity akin to pre-crisis weekend levels, with energy demand dropping by about 20 per cent. The picture is similar in the Middle East.

“We are seeing lower demand for energy in the region, and we expect a lower demand outlook in the medium term” says Brendan Cronin, head of Middle East for Afry Management Consulting.

However, while the drop in demand has eased pressure on generation resources in many developed countries, the picture is markedly different in developing countries and states and areas affected by war and conflict. These countries, which were already suffering from shortages of power for long periods of the day, are facing a major challenge to ensure sufficient electricity is available for hospitals and healthcare facilities during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Regional shortfall

Out of the 15 countries analysed for Energy & Utilities’ Mena 2025 power outlook, Iraq, Libya and Lebanon all recorded a higher demand for power over the past two years. Perhaps not unexpected, due to the numerous conflicts in each of these countries, governments have been unable to invest in developing new generation resources or repair damaged infrastructure.

Iraq, in particular, was already facing a major challenge to meet growing demand for power across the country, with installed capacity, 15GW, significantly lower than the 23.5GW peak demand recorded in 2018. With the Covid-19 outbreak causing oil prices to plummet, the oil exporter is facing an even greater challenge to increase the capacity of its power sector and meet the demand of vital healthcare services.

Yemen is also facing significant challenge in meeting the demand for power. In 2014, the last time official data was released for the country’s power sector, only two thirds of the population had access to electricity. The situation has worsened significantly since the war began in 2015, with the number dropping to below 10 per cent by 2017, according to the World Bank.

The problem of power shortages is not unique, of course, to the Middle East. In Sub-Saharan Africa, Powering Healthcare estimates that only 28 per cent of healthcare facilities have a reliable electricity supply, with only 43 per cent of the population electrified at all.

Long-term challenge

The challenge facing countries in ensuring electricity supply for vital services will not just intensify during the initial waves and peaks of the coronavirus – many countries will emerge from the pandemic with significantly damaged economies and less money to spend on key utilities infrastructure.

The rapidly growing clean energy sector is offering significant opportunities to provide power for critical healthcare infrastructure.

Photovoltaic (PV) solar panels with energy storage systems can be installed quickly to rural and off-grid areas to serve health clinics. In addition to providing electricity for hospitals, PV solar installations can be used for water treatment and pumping facilities to ensure hygenic sanitation and water supplies for healthcare facilities.

While much has been made of the ambitious climate change targets and agreements reached as part of the Paris Climate Accord in 2015, the driving force behind the rapid deployment of renewables across the world is the sharp fall in cost of clean energy. This is particularly the case for PV solar, with costs having fallen by more than 10 per cent over the last decade.

For off-grid and remote power supplies, solar energy is also often more reliable in addition to being more cost efficient than existing diesel generators. Daniel Zywietz, CEO and founder of Enerwhere, recently told Energy & Utilities during a live webinar that solar remains the cheapest form of generation for off-grid power generation, even with the dramatic fall in fuel oil prices with the Covid-19 outbreak.

“When you look at the baseline cost of liquid fuels today, it is less than half of what it was two months ago,” says Zywietz. “However, [solar] is still cost competitive against diesel fuel with a solar-hybrid fuel plant, even with this oil price. While the savings are not what they were 3 months, it is still a saving.”

“And in an environment where people and companies are looking for cost savings, it is even more important.”

Financial support

While the economic benefits of using solar energy to meet the electricity needs of rural areas is clear, many regional administrations and central governments that were already struggling to direct adequate funds into their utilities sectors are facing even more economic hardship as a result of the Covid-19 outbreak. International financial institutions will play a key role in ensuring that solar power is harnessed to meet the growing demand for healthcare services across developing countries.

The World Bank’s Yemen Emergency Electricity Access Project provides a prime example of the importance of international financial support to the development of solar power for healthcare services in developing countries.

As part of the project, the World Bank’s International Development Agency partnered the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) to support healthcare facilities across war-torn Yemen. Under the scheme, PV solar is being installed across the country to provide power for clinics, particularly in rural areas.

The Al-Salam Hospital in the Lahj Governorate of the country was a hospital that was forced to close following the onset of the war. However, after the installation of solar systems under the emergency access programme, the hospital now receives 24-hour power supplies and is able to receive and treat patients.

While multilateral agencies can support the development of solar power through emergency and aid programmes, and also through financing support mechanisms such as the IFC’s Scaling Solar initiative, governments will need to support vulnerable energy consumers and utilities.

Support must be provided to utilities to ensure that they remain operational and continue to deliver power during the pandemic, and loans and financial waivers will be critical to ensure that power can be delivered to where it needed most.

The World Bank has also stressed recently the importance of financial assistance and loans for off-grid power and solar suppliers to ensure that services continue.

Innovation

The private sector can also support the development of energy services and solutions for healthcare facilities in remote and developing areas. In 2017, Germany’s Siemens and its partner Solarkiosk inaugurated a ‘Connected Solar Clinic’ at a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan.

With almost 700,000 Syrian refugees having fled to neighbouring Jordan since the civil war began in 2011, there has been a sharp increase in demand for healthcare services. The clinic is able to treat up to 75 patients a day, and is equipped with high-specification medical diagnostics and treatment equipment such as ultrasound and hematology lab. The Connected Solar Clinic is powered by solar energy and is completely independent of Jordan’s electricity grid, providing a blueprint for how solar energy can be harnessed to deliver healthcare services at a time when it has never been more important.

This article originally appeared on Energy & Utilities. 

While the world has accepted the harsh realities of COVID-19 and people have adjusted their lives accordingly, there are still have so many unanswered questions, such as why has COVID-19 taken such a detrimental toll and where are we in the process of finding a cure?

To get a better idea of where science is headed, below are some insights from Serpil Erzurum, MD, Chair of the Lerner Research Institute at Cleveland Clinic in the US.

How is COVID-19 different from viruses like Ebola, H1N1 (swine flu) or SARS?

These viruses are similar because they are encoded with Ribonucleic acid or RNA. They all infect the human host, but the difference between them and COVID-19 is this coronavirus is infectious before you become sick. It is infectious while you look very healthy and that is a very big difference.

If you’ve been infected with the coronavirus, can you become infected again?

This virus is very similar to the first SARS virus where immunity was very effective. Current data suggests that immunity occurs in people who have had the virus and that is effective for preventing them from getting infected again. The best evidence that we do have for effective immunity is the fact that we can take plasma from an individual who was infected, transfer that immunity passively to somebody who does have the infection, and it helps them recover. All those things strongly support that immunity does develop and is effective at neutralising the virus.

Why is COVID-19 antibody testing not the norm?

The problem is that there are a lot of coronaviruses – for example, the common cold is a coronavirus. Immune testing to diagnose COVID-19 is difficult to do because if you have had a common cold a few weeks before and we tested your body, it would look like you have immunity to coronavirus, but not necessarily to COVID-19, and not necessarily that you are protected from catching it. It would be a false reassurance to do immunoglobulin testing as a diagnostic strategy.

When do you think that we can expect to have a vaccine for COVID-19?

The usual strategy for making a vaccine is that you take the live virus, inject it into chicken eggs, allow the virus to grow, and then you deactivate it and inject that into people, so immunity develops. When the real virus comes along, you are protected.

That process can take 12 to 18 months. However, there are new strategies where we do not have to grow the virus. Instead, we can take the nuclear material that encodes part of the virus (the surface proteins) and inject them into the body. The body will recognise it as being foreign, antibodies will develop and attack the surface proteins, so they go away. Now, if the virus enters your body, your body remembers those proteins and the antibodies come and destroy the virus.

There are so many new technologies now that are using this type of strategy. Many studies are already in phase one and some are even entering phase two and phase three. Phase three means large studies and quicker paths to having something available for our community.

Dr. Serpil Erzurum

No country was ready to face the COVID-19 pandemic, which took the world by surprise last December. However, scientific communities have been able to help fight the disease through accelerated research and technological advances.

“We see it in nations as different from ours, such as the United States, that even with their budget in science and research, they are being hit; however, it’s evident that progress in these disciplines has had an influence in tackling it”, assured Susana López Charretón, from the Institute of Biotechnology (IBT) of the UNAM.

From the beginning of the global health emergency in January, Mexico’s scientific communities have begun working on, and investing in, research projects to help tackle the virus.

The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the institution with the most research output in the country, issued an extraordinary call to finance research projects, and the National Council on Science and Technology (Conacyt) launched a National Strategic Program for health (Pronaces), where there is a national project for virology research.

Several multidisciplinary groups created in response to the call are now unveiling the first results.  

The Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), which had already developed vaccines against HIV, Ebola, Zika or Chikungunya, is working on a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 through a viral vector based on a modification of the virus used to eradicate smallpox.

UNAM researchers, together with members from public institutions (IMSS, INDRE, INER, among others) sequenced the coronavirus genome to understand mutations.

Another group of UNAM scientists also sequenced the virus, with the aim of supporting health authorities in the detection and diagnosis of the coronavirus, through tests carried out at universities.

Gustavo Cruz, professor at the Institute for Research in Applied Mathematics and Systems (IISMAS, also based at UNAM), adapted a mathematical model developed for the 2009 A(H1N1) epidemic, allowing the average number of infections that each infected person has to be counted, as well as when spikes will occur.

Drug testing

The National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico (IPN) is testing the drug Transferon, a drug it manufactures, which may work to prevent complications of the disease.

Three other drug investigations serve to treat COVID-19 patients: the antiviral Remdesivir; Tocilizumab, a monoclonal antibody, that prevents lung tissue from swelling; and hydroxychloroquine, a medicine for malaria and rheumatic diseases.

Clinical trials of the three investigations have already been approved by the regulatory agency, the Federal Commission for the Protection against Sanitary Risk (Cofepris). Each is in a different phase of investigation, with the most promising appearing to be Remdesivir.

New medical devices

Mexican businesses and researchers are working to develop new devices that help medical professionals care for COVID-19 patients.

XE Médica, a medical equipment company dedicated to innovation, made an isolation capsule with a HEPA filter system to keep it inflated. The capsule prevents the virus from escaping when a patient is transported and protects healthcare staff who have contact with the patient.

Meanwhile, Mexican engineers have created open-source, self-contained respirators that anyone can replicate, based on Spain’s Resistencia Team model. IPN engineers are doing the same with invasive and non-invasive models, all open source. In addition, UNAM engineers are working on a model 10 times more economical than commercial ventilators.

With most employees across the public and private sector in the UAE now working from home, we are having to redefine the concept of ‘well-being at work’. If trying to maintain (and in many cases, save) business is not challenging enough, organisations need to quickly come to grips with how to best support employees who are working remotely, possibly for the first time, and who are dealing with disrupted daily routines, physical isolation, and potentially experiencing more than a little worry and anxiety.

From two global surveys that Aetna International recently commissioned about ‘the business of health’, it would seem that this is going to be quite a challenge for some companies. One of the most surprising results that came out of these surveys was that, before the COVID-19 outbreak, over three-quarters (76 per cent) of UAE employers believed they provided good access to programmes that support health and well-being, but only about a quarter (27 per cent) of employees thought the same – 26 per cent actually rated the support provided by their employer as poor. That’s quite a gap.

These statistics highlight how important it is for businesses to stay in touch with what’s actually happening on the ground, and never has this been more relevant than now. Once seen as a ‘nice-to-have’ bonus, we’ve known for some time that comprehensive health and well-being programmes are increasingly linked to employee performance. In fact, research shows that the provision of these benefits has a direct impact on job satisfaction, engagement and retention. Yet, if the aim is to empower people to take charge of their mental, emotional and physical health at work, there was clearly considerable work to be done before the coronavirus outbreak – and substantially more to be done at the moment.

From a corporate point of view, these difficult times call for something of a culture shift. It can be a tough call for leaders, particularly if they haven’t previously experienced working with remote teams, but as with any type of culture change, the only way to effectively implement change is to model it from the top down. Here are some strategies that can help managers support their teams by embedding new behaviours and offering reassurance where possible:

Inspire psychological safety

It’s highly likely that some members of your team are feeling scared and vulnerable at the moment, due to the ambiguities we’re all facing, so now is the time for leaders to be empathetic, clear, communicative and available. Being realistically optimistic about work, life and how the two might blend together in the short-term is the kind of positive outlook that is contagious. Also, encourage your team to open up and express whatever is worrying them, without fear of judgement or negative repercussions. Simply listening can be hugely helpful.

Keep teams engaged

With so much going on that is out of our control, it can be tricky for people to fully concentrate on their work. Yet being completely engaged in a task – and in flow, when an activity absorbs you to the point that time flies by – can bring a sense of calm and focus that elevates our feelings of well-being. Be wary of micro-managing but do check in regularly with individuals to see how they are progressing on projects. And bear in mind you might need to manage your own expectations about how workloads are handled – flexibility will be especially appreciated by any parents who are also supervising their children’s distance learning while schools are shut.

Look out for signs of struggle

Keep an eye on how isolation and loneliness might be affecting people, particularly if they aren’t used to working remotely or if they live alone. We’re sociable creatures and the risk is that feeling cut off can lead to depression. If your team is particularly large, you might like to consider a ‘buddy’ system. Stay as connected as you can by using online options that allow you to see each other face-to-face whenever possible and consider rotating who chairs each meeting. It can really make a difference to people feeling involved even though they are physically distanced.

Ensure resources are easily accessible

Now is the time to publicise the different options available as part of your corporate wellness scheme. Check in with your employee assistance programme (EAP) plan and any additional support your health insurer may be providing such as mindfulness apps or access to virtual coaching, counselling or other health services. Then send regular round-ups and reminders about what is on offer, as well as links for convenience. And as a leader, if you decide to try a resource, talk about your experience so your team know it’s ok to try it for themselves.

Think differently

Instead of feeling stuck, encourage your team to use this time as an opportunity to develop new skills and have fun. Many companies have online training programmes that are underutilised, or you could pull together team quizzes, bake-offs and even painting competitions. Learning something new offers a great psychological boost as well as being a good distraction from other worries, so creatively come up with (or welcome) ideas, see what people are enthusiastic about and then do what you can to make activities fun and interactive. Even something silly will spark a sense of camaraderie that can go a long way in keeping spirits up.

COVID-19 is challenging us to come to terms with new ways of working, but it’ also presents an opportunity for organisation leaders to build a strong organisation culture — one that can serve as a platform for growth and attracting talent, long after this crisis.

For five days in June (22-26 June 2020) the global healthcare community will be brought together on a scale like never seen before through a new experience delivered entirely online, Omnia Health Live. The virtual event is brought by Informa Markets Healthcare, organiser of world-leading events Arab Health, Hospitalar, FIME and Medlab Middle East.

Omnia Health Live answers the needs of the healthcare industry during these challenging times by providing unprecedented opportunities for professionals to network and access expert knowledge, wherever they happen to be in the world, ensuring that business goes on amidst the uncertainty.

Related: Omnia Health Live Blog: Updates from the virtual healthcare event

Requiring no more than a device with a stable internet connection, the free-to-attend event will give attendees access to the online platform to interact daily in virtual meetings and webinars, consume articles and features, and much more, all conveniently delivered to their browser.

Powered by Grip, the award-winning online event networking technology, Omnia Health Live will see the participation of top names in the healthcare industry such as Tom Lawry, National Director for AI, Health & Life Sciences at Microsoft; pioneering surgeon Prof Sir Alfred Cuschieri; and Prof Dr Mahmud Mossa-Basha, MD, radiologist and chair of the RSNA COVID-19 Task Force.

Attendees will benefit from educational content provided by industry experts in 70 virtual sessions, while free CME credits provided by Cleveland Clinic will be granted to healthcare professionals attending the webinars. There will be opportunities to network, set up meetings and exchange virtual business cards.

Wouter Molman, Executive Vice President for Informa Markets – Healthcare, said “Omnia Health Live is part of our unwavering commitment to support the healthcare community whatever the circumstances. As the world moves to virtual technologies, we couldn’t be more excited to offer a new world-class event – a global mechanism allowing the healthcare industry to collaborate and connect on a level never seen before.”  

For more information, including how to join the experience, visit the Omnia Health Live website.

Radiologists and clinicians can now freely use AiRay, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) radiology solution, to assist in the detection of the novel coronavirus disease, COVID-19, signs at any Chest Computed Tomography (CT) scan. This is considered the region’s first implementation of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in the field of radiology and medical imaging.

TachyHealth, the leading Artificial Intelligence healthcare startup, has been working on the research and development of this deep learning model for 2 months using 805 images of laboratory confirmed COVID-19 chest CT images to achieve a validated real-life accuracy performance of 88%. The computer vision model is based on a pre-trained very deep neural network with several hidden layers optimized based on Imagenet dataset which contains millions of images with several hundred categories.

Related: When is COVID-19 peaking in your MENA country?

AiRay for COVID-19 is part of TachyHealth’s efforts to utilise the power of cutting-edge technology, cloud computing, and machine learning to enhance the diagnosis of patients amid the COVID-19 pandemic and boost the ability of the healthcare systems to respond better to the surge increase in the need for the radiology services.

Artificial Intelligence plays a significant role in the current and future radiology practice by leveraging the machines capabilities to meet the needs of the radiologists, technologists, and the wider healthcare professionals. This free release of AiRay will be especially beneficial in geographical areas where the radiologists are in shortage and being overwhelmed by the interpretation of the CT scans.

Related: Report: Medical Imaging Trends 2020

This initial cloud release of AiRay was designed not to store any confidential information to ensure patient safety and confidentiality. The model has achieved a satisfactory performance for the current emigrant situation with a very strong capability for future improvement when more data is available.

On the benefits of this initiative, Dr. Osama AbouElkhir, the CEO, shared: “We wanted to help in this crisis in areas where we have our unique capabilities. This is the first Artificial Intelligence solution in the Middle East and North Africa that is provided for free to support the identification of the COVID-19 findings in the chest CT images.

We followed a rigorous method to build our AI model following the latest studies and guidelines including those of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), Royal College of Radiologists (RCR), European Society of Radiology (ESR), and the UK Surgical Royal Colleges, amongst others.

There is a growing body of evidence supporting the role of the CT in the assessment of patients with severe respiratory distress and for aiding the diagnosis of COVID-19 in persons under investigation (PUI). As we are moving further with this development, we’re opening the door for collaboration with researchers, hospitals, universities, and radiology centers to further improve the model from both radiological and machine learning perspectives.”

Highlighting the merits of the data collection and model performance, Ahmed Sahlol, PhD, the head of AI research in TachyHealth added: “We’ve collected the images from credible evidence, studies, and resources to create a heterogenous dataset that encompasses wide array of images from different hospitals, axial cuts, CT machine, patient positions, patient demographics (age, gender), and clinical conditions. We minimized the bias in the algorithm by training the model on raw (real world) images instead of carrying out a heavy cleaning and pre-processing on the dataset. So, our model achieved both, reality and acceptable efficiency.

This was performed because we wanted the model to be used in real world scenarios instead of performing exceptionally well in a laboratory-controlled setting and very poor afterwards. Thus, the performance of our model reached 88% in accuracy, 75% in recall, 81% for accuracy precision, and 78% for the F1 score.

We believe that the model should be viewed as an assistant (computer-aided) rather than replacement or substitution to professional radiological practice. We keep improving the model performance with more data collected on daily basis as well as fine tuning the architecture of the model.”

In 2016, The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated 3.6 billion diagnostic medical imaging examinations are performed worldwide every year. This number continues to grow as more people access medical imaging facilities while the complexity of the healthcare diseases increases.

On the other side, radiologists are in shortage globally, especially in developing countries and rural areas. In 2015, Liberia for example, only had 2 radiologists, whilst Ghana had 34 radiologists and Kenya had 200 radiologists. Even in developed countries, in the UK for example, three quarters of radiology clinical directors say they do not have enough radiology consultants to deliver safe and effective patient care whilst their workload of reading and interpreting medical images has increased by 30% between 2012 and 2017.

From both the supply and demand data, there is a growing need for scalable and accurate cognitive radiological systems. Advanced Artificial Intelligence systems are gaining trust for their abilities to accurately analyse, interpret, and report on medical images.

Dr. Amr Fawzy, MD, the Chief Medical Officer said, “We see AI as an opportunity to better serve the patients around the world, support the research in deep technology, advance the collaborations between healthcare professionals across the region, and improve the overall value-based healthcare.

For hospitals, medical centers, and radiology centers who are facing issues in availability of the radiologists, the timeline of reporting, or the burn-out of the radiology team, AiRay is a boon as it brings AI easily into their everyday practice.

In the event of a pandemic like COVID-19, this solution would help manage the accelerating demand from those communicable diseases. Radiologists can also achieve productivity gains working with AI from anywhere with features-rich cloud-based secure system, enables them to see more patients, interpret more images who in turn, the patients, receive more timely and accurate care.

In the future, AiRay will be integrated with both the radiology information system (RIS) as well as the picture archiving and communication system (PACS) to be part of the routine workflow of the radiologists. AiRay is developed as a common platform for high scalability across the health ecosystem with little upfront costs”

Mo Khadra, the Chief Technology Officer said “We’re working on an end-to-end solution to increase AiRay capabilities by adding multiple features to augment access to medical services such as teleradiology services, prioritization of the radiology list, multi-party video conferencing for consultation with multi-disciplinary care teams, file sharing, visualizing medical reports for reference during the radiologist confirmation, amongst others.

The AI system communicates with both the RIS and PACS using the widely known health data exchange protocols (HL7) and using the global technical image standards (DICOM) to provide a platform that is interoperable with other IT systems at the care delivery point. We are redesigning the machine-human interaction with a view about interoperability between the rigorous legacy healthcare systems and keeping process simple and accessible using end-to- end encryption and protection with highest security measures.

We want to build a system that help physicians, clinicians, and radiologists, do what they are good at .... Taking care of our families and loved ones”