- Italian volunteers 3-D-printed a proprietary $11,000 ventilator valve for ≈ $1 each, prompting the manufacturer to threaten legal action—highlighting open-source hardware’s clash with IP during the pandemic.  
- Early clinical data from China and France indicated that 600 mg/day hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) rendered 90 % of COVID-19 patients PCR-negative within six days, with the HCQ + azithromycin combination showing the strongest effect.  
- A Japanese government study reported that the anti-influenza drug favipiravir (Avigan) is effective against SARS-CoV-2, sparking informal discussion of kitchen-scale synthesis (noted to be fluorinated and non-trivial).  
- Bottlenecks in U.S. testing capacity were identified as CLIA certification limits on academic labs and reliance on 96-well real-time PCR machines; researchers are lobbying to waive CLIA rules and adapt high-throughput Roche cobas 8000 analyzers for COVID-19 RT-PCR.  
- Rapid 15-minute antibody-based COVID-19 test kits (CFDA-approved, used in China, Australia, Singapore) were sourced by private individuals faster than CDC distribution, pointing to decentralized procurement as a stop-gap.  
- Allen Institute’s CORD-19 dataset (47,000+ scholarly articles) was released on Kaggle to crowdsource AI-driven literature analysis for drug-repurposing and epidemiological insights.  
- A 2004 paper on fast isothermal nucleic-acid amplification was resurfaced as a potential route to low-cost, field-deployable diagnostics without thermocyclers.