Less Funding For Digital | The New Omicron Variant | Africa’s Post-Pandemic Plans

Plus: 6 out of 10 Americans aren’t ready to end mask mandates on planes

Digital health venture funding hit $6 billion across 183 deals in the first quarter of 2022 with an average deal size of $32.8 million, according to the latest report from Rock Health. This is lower than the $6.7 billion recorded in the first quarter of last year and a significant step down from the $7.3 billion in venture funding in the fourth quarter of 2021. The report notes that there could be something seasonal at play – in past years, the first quarter tends to be a low, if not the lowest, funding quarter. But the bigger picture question is whether this is an early indication of a “digital health venture funding correction” and whether we have seen the end of sky-high valuations that seem absurdly far removed from revenue and customer numbers.  

And when it comes to the public markets, the SPAC boom of 2021 seems to be going bust in 2022, as digital health companies that went public via blank check companies have dragged down the averages when it comes to stock price performance of the cohort. From July 1, 2021 to March 31, 2022, the Rock Health Digital Health Index, a basket of publicly traded digital health companies, was down 38% overall versus negative 5% for the S&P 500. The average digital health SPAC share price fell 57% in the same period. “The rise-and-fall of COVID variants, energy shocks, and inflation numbers signal murky waters for digital health investors, and Q1’s somewhat restrained (dare we say rational?) funding numbers may reflect investor caution,” according to the report. 

Global public health experts Agnes Binagwaho, Githinji Gitahi, John Nkengasong and Vanessa Kerry discuss a new plan to invest in the healthcare workforce in Africa, where 36 out of 57 countries face dire shortages.

Deals Of The Week

PathAI Partnership: GlaxoSmithKline has announced it’s signed a multi-year partnership with Boston-based PathAI. The deal is aimed at accelerating research and development programs for oncology and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis. 

Value-Based Cloud: San Francisco-based Clarify Health closed a $150 million series D round led by the SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The fundraising is aimed at scaling the company’s value-based payments platform and cloud analytics capabilities. 

Telehealth for Menopause: San Francisco-based Evernow, which has developed a telehealth platformed geared towards women in perimenopause and menopause, announced that it’s raised a $28.5 million series A round led by venture firm NEA. 

AI For Listening: Eleos Health announced that it raised a $20 million series A round co-led by Eight Road Ventures and F-Prime. The company is developing software that can listen in on sessions between patients and their mental health provider, autonomously providing data to fill out EHRs and assisting in helping providers find insights in treating patients. 

Noteworthy

This week, Walmart began opening the first of five new doctor-staffed “Walmart Health” centers in the lucrative Florida market as the retail giant looks to expand low-cost healthcare services to tens of thousands of its customers.

A new report in the United Kingdom found that over 200 babies have died in avoidable ways over the past two decades at a western England hospital trust, which uncovered numerous other safety issues as well.  

Walgreens is opening a new VillageMD clinic attached to a drugstore on average “every three days” this year, the pharmacy chain’s CEO says.

Coronavirus Updates

Dating life has never been easy, but 63% of Americans currently looking for romantic attachments say that life during Covid has only made things more difficult, according to a poll by Pew Research. About one-third of respondents said it made things basically the same. But one thing has changed–over 40% of respondents say they would not date someone who isn’t vaccinated for Covid. 56% don’t care about vaccination status, but for those who’ve chosen not to get vaccinated, that’s one more reason for prospective partners to swipe left. (Except for that 2% of Americans who will only date someone who isn’t vaccinated.) In life outside of dating, polls are finding that Americans are still wary of Covid-19. A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that a majority of Americans still aren’t getting back to their normal, pre-pandemic lives. A similar number say they don’t want health measures like masking to go away entirely, and 80% report they’ve still worn a mask in a public place in the past month. 

In other coronavirus news:

Fluvoxamine, a cheap and widely available pill used around the world to treat mental illness, is very likely to reduce the risk of being hospitalized with Covid-19, according to new peer-reviewed research. 

At least two Broadway shows have canceled performances this week due to Covid-19 cases within the cast—and others are playing with understudies in major roles—with transmission beginning to rise again in New York City.

President Joe Biden announced the nationwide moratorium on federal student loan repayments, which was one of the first Covid relief efforts, will be extended again, from May 1 to August 31.

Shanghai reported more than 13,000 new Covid-19 cases on Tuesday as the city’s outbreak surges despite an ongoing lockdown, prompting authorities in the Chinese financial hub to indefinitely extend curbs that were scheduled to end this week.

Across Forbes

• Forbes 2022 Next Billion-Dollar Startups List: Nominations Are Open

• ‘Mattress Mack’ On The Economics Of His Multi-Million-Dollar Sports Bets

• Nigeria-Born Tope Awotona Poured His Life Savings Into Calendly. Now He’s One Of America’s Wealthiest Immigrants

What Else We Are Reading

• America Is Staring Down Its First So What? Wave (The Atlantic)

• ‘We need to be much more diverse’: More than half of data used in health care AI comes from the U.S. and China (Stat)

• What triggers severe COVID? Infected immune cells hold clues (Nature)