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Zipline Wants to Bring Medical Drone Delivery to U.S. to Fight COVID-19

A year ago, we visited Rwanda to see how Zipline’s autonomous, fixed-wing delivery drones were providing blood to hospitals and clinics across the country. We were impressed with both Zipline’s system design (involving dramatic catapult launches, parachute drops, and mid-air drone catching), as well as their model of operations, which minimizes waste while making critical supplies available in minutes almost anywhere in the country.

Since then, Zipline has expanded into Ghana, and has plans to start flying in India as well, but the COVID-19 pandemic is changing everything. Africa is preparing for the worst, while in the United States, Zipline is working with the Federal Aviation Administration to try and expedite safety and regulatory approvals for an emergency humanitarian mission with the goal of launching a medical supply delivery network that could help people maintain social distancing or quarantine when necessary by delivering urgent medication nearly to their doorsteps.

In addition to its existing role delivering blood products and medication, Zipline is acting as a centralized distribution network for COVID-19 supplies in Ghana and Rwanda. Things like personal protective equipment (PPE) will be delivered as needed by drone, ensuring that demand is met across the entire healthcare network. This has been a problem in the United States—getting existing supplies where they’re needed takes a lot of organization and coordination, which the US government is finding to be a challenge.

Zipline says that their drones are able to reduce human involvement in the supply chain (a vector for infection), while reducing hospital overcrowding by making it more practical for non-urgent patients to receive care in local clinics closer to home. COVID-19 is also having indirect effects on healthcare, with social distancing and community lockdowns straining blood supplies. With its centralized distribution model, Zipline has helped Rwanda to essentially eliminate wasted (expired) blood products. “We probably waste more blood [in the United States] than is used in all of Rwanda,” Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo told us. But it’s going to take more than blood supply to fight COVID-19, and it may hit Africa particularly hard.

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