Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $220,000 over two years to UC Berkeley to support a project led by Professors Amy Pickering and Michael Kremer to assess the prevalence of COVID-19 infections in rural Kenya. The project will survey a subset of 14,000 households across 240 villages in order to estimate asymptomatic and symptomatic cumulative population infection prevalence by age group, generate data to inform estimates of the effective reproductive number (Rt) in the study area, identify risk factors for infection, and assess the utility of mobile phone surveys as a low-cost surveillance tool.
This falls within Open Philanthropy’s work on scientific research, specifically within its interest in science supporting biosecurity and pandemic preparedness.