COVID- 19
When the Covid-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill, the Cambridge Cluster got busy doing what it does best: finding innovative solutions to difficult problems. Here, Matthew Gooding takes a look at some of the ways the city’s business community responded to the pandemic
n a shared house on Cambridge’s Oxford Road, three friends watched the spread of Covid-19 across the
globe and decided they needed to do their bit to help with the fightback. The trio of housemates – Ray Siems, Evan Martin and Wilson Griffiths – joined another friend, Ravi Solanki, on two projects to assist frontline NHS workers battling the pandemic. The second project, an online portal for the charity HEROES, helped the organisation assist 90,000 frontline staff in three months, earning recognition from the Royal Academy of Engineering in the process. Their efforts were indicative of the response to the Covid-19 outbreak from across the Cambridge Cluster, with individuals, start-ups and multinationals joining forces to develop solutions to help in the rapidly evolving crisis. As the pandemic moves into the next stage, the city’s brightest minds are sure to play a leading role as society is reshaped and we become accustomed to the ‘new normal’. STOPPING THE SPREAD AND HELPING THE HEROES Ray is CEO and co-founder of Catalyst AI (no relation) and an alumnus of the University of Cambridge engineering department. He and Ravi, at the time a final-year medical student, first worked together to develop Stop the Spread, a website seeking to provide clear, easy-to-digest information on the pandemic for medics and patients. “Ravi was on a placement in a hospital, and when the Covid-19 outbreak started we got talking about the lack of information filtering through down to the patient level,” Ray says. “We wanted to see if there was something that we could do to help, because it was clearly an information problem rather
than a medical one. And that’s where we came up with the idea to work with him and a few other doctors around Cambridge to try to make a more accessible version of the official NHS information.” Put together in three days and drawing together information from official sources that, in the early days of the pandemic, was fragmented and hard to digest, the site was a hit with patients and practitioners alike. “We did a soft launch on the Monday, and by the Tuesday we’d had 20,000 hits,” says Ray. Stop the Spread was used by GP practices and clinical commissioning groups, which recommended it to patients. But as official channels began to up their game with coherent, up-to-date advice, the team were given another opportunity to put their talent
to use. “As the official information started to become more clear and widely disseminated, there was no longer as much as of a need for Stop the Spread,” Ray says. “That was around the time the number of people in hospital was vastly increasing, and we could see there was now a need to look at the effect that was having on healthcare workers.” Through a contact on Twitter, the quartet teamed up with Dr Dominic Pimenta to work on a website for his new charity, HEROES, which was set up to support NHS workers during the crisis. Dr Pimenta had signed up former Chelsea and England footballer Joe Cole as an ambassador, and with a media appearance to launch the charity scheduled, the team again had a tight timescale to create something from scratch.
ABOVE Three of the friends who created Stop the Spread (from lef t to right): Ray Siems, Ravi Solanki and Evan Mar tin
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ISSUE 07
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