Dell Technologies provided an initial donation of two million yuan ($284,000 USD) to fund badly-needed materials including surgical masks, protective clothing and eye protectors for local hospitals, under the guidance of the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the assistance of China Youth Development Foundation and Hubei Youth Development Foundation.
Dell is now in the process of extending its support in China, Delivering an in-kind IT infrastructure donation valued at 6 million yuan ($853,000 USD) to the Hubei CDC in China. This donation will help upgrade the IT infrastructure of Hubei CDC and enable the center to respond to the epidemic situation more effectively. This will also substantially enhance the center's ability to provide public health services over the long term by optimizing service support and enabling new capabilities such as hybrid-cloud-based PaaS.
Dell has set aside another $3 million USD in funds and in-kind technology donations to help meet the greatest needs of its communities and the front-line organizations working to treat and contain COVID-19 around the world. As the situation evolves, Dell will continue to assess opportunities to leverage its technology to deliver support where it is needed most.
The company has set up a fundraising page where team members can donate to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Foundation to help in the relief efforts. The CDC Foundation's Emergency Response Fund is used to meet fast-emerging needs identified by the CDC to help respond to the public health threat posed by COVID-19. These include additional support for state and local health departments, support for the global response, logistics, communications, data management, personal protective equipment, critical response supplies and more. And through the Dell match program, Dell will match every team member donation, dollar for dollar up to $10,000 per employee per year.
Dell will also be working with customers in the area of infectious disease prevention and control. For example, their advanced computing clusters are being used to understand disease outbreaks, including how diseases like COVID-19 are spreading and how to better track them. For example, The University of Texas at Austin and other institutions in Hong Kong, mainland China and France used the Texas Advanced Computing Center’s (TACC) Wrangler system to analyze comprehensive travel data from location-based services to develop a model of the spread of the virus through China.
Together with the City of Round Rock, Round Rock Community Foundation and the Round Rock Chamber, Dell Technologies is a founding member of Round Rock Cares, a fund with an initial investment of $100,000 USD to support small and local businesses in the Round Rock, Texas community.
To further support its local Austin community, Dell Technologies has made a donation to the All Together ATX fund, a joint initiative between the Austin Community Foundation (ACF) and the United Way for Greater Austin. This fund will support the Greater Austin community during the COVID-19 pandemic with needs including food insecurity, basic and medical needs, employment and child care. The fund will provide resources to nonprofit organizations working with vulnerable populations who are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 and the economic consequences of the outbreak. Dell Technologies will also serve on the advisory committee set up by the Austin Community Foundation and United Way for Greater Austin made up of philanthropic public sector leaders and community advisors.
Dell Technologies has provided the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) – a Dell Technologies strategic non-profit partner in the area of pediatric cancer – with access to Dell Technologies’ Zenith Supercomputer. TGen is conducting population-level sequencing for rapid genomic analysis, which gives public health organizations the ability to rapidly identify which strains of COVID-19 are circulating more than others, what might be causing focal outbreaks, and how fast the genome is mutating and changing. By comparing the results within the context of global genomic information, this COVID-19 sequencing program could inform biomedical researchers in the hunt for better targets for new treatments and vaccines for COVID-19.
To support Folding@home’s efforts to simulate the dynamics of proteins involved in COVID19 and hunt for new therapeutic opportunities, Dell Technologies is engaging users of our Alienware PCs to ‘lend’ their computing power. Each simulation a person runs on their own PC increases the chances of finding possible ‘druggable sites’ on the proteins, which can lead to treatment options for the disease.
Dell Technologies is supporting Ventilator Challenge UK, a consortium of significant UK industrial, technology and engineering businesses from across the aerospace, automotive and medical sectors producing medical ventilators for the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).
The team at Boomi got together to hack ways to help its communities at this time. They came up with 100 ideas in just 24 hours. The idea that rose to the top was ‘Answers on Demand’ – a completely free question and answer ‘bot’ which can sit on an organization’s website and handle the huge influx of questions they are fielding during this time. And recognizing the limited IT resources at these organizations, Boomi designed Answers on Demand to be easy – it can be configured in as fast as 10 minutes with only the most basic technical skills required to set it up.
Working with the i2b2 tranSMART Foundation and its members, Dell Technologies are supporting the Foundation’s open source platforms to rapidly create a federation of translational research centers. This federation will enable large-scale population monitoring of COVID-19 patients, mobilizing the data from their network of more than 200 institutions worldwide to identify and collect datasets and tools that can be leveraged to study COVID-19 by the scientific and clinical research community. This timely, comprehensive data on COVID-19 patients across the globe is helping to broker research on prevention and cures, including identifying “hot spots” for where medical resources are most needed.
Dell has provided an in-kind laptop donation to the largest public health hospital in Brazil, SP Hospital das Clínicas. These laptops will provide a mobile solution to enable the team leading 3,500 physicians, nurses and support staff to collaborate in real time as they open up additional treatment areas to meet anticipated demand for those infected with COVID-19.
Dell has donated a number of items to hospitals around Malaysia, including Hospital Seberang Jaya (300 cartons of nitrile gloves; 3,000 Surgical Masks; 2,000 Face Shields; 1,200 KN95 Face Masks; 50 bundles of full set isolation gowns); Teluk Intan Hospital (108 Hand sanitizers (500 ml); 2,000 pieces of 3-Ply Face Masks; 10,000 Nitrile Gloves; 1 unit Notebook Computer); and Hospital Sungai Buloh (108 bottles Hand Sanitizer (500ml) and 10,000 Nitrile Gloves).