Year: 2020

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is moving much more quickly to grant special ’emergency use authorization’ to equipment and tests that could help increase testing for the novel coronavirus in the U.S., which lags behind most countries in the world when it comes to tests conducted relative to the size of its population. One type of test just approved for use could help expand the availability of frontline testing in hospitals and at clinics where patients are receiving care – without requiring round-tripping to a dedicated diagnostics lab.

Cepheid’s COVID-19 test, which the agency approved this week, also has the advantage of being able to be run either with or without use of a nasal swab, which is key because supplies of nasal swabs are taxed globally in light of the need for testing. It’s also a molecular, PCR-based test, with high rates of accuracy just like the lab-based testing that’s already in place across facilities in the U.S., but it uses the company’s GeneXpert machine (basically a diagnostics kit the size of an inkjet printer cartdrige lab in a box roughly the size of an inkjet printer) to produce results on-site.

Cepheid says that around 23,000 of its GeneXpert micro-labs are already in use around the world, with around 5,000 of those located in the U.S. The company’s hardware has been running tests for the flu for years already, with high reliability rates. The new COVID-19 tests for the system will begin to be shipped out by the Sunnyvale-based molecular diagnostics company starting next week.

Testing in the U.S. has increased over the past week, thanks in large part to widespread efforts to expand availability especially in hard-hit regions like New York State. But the need for more tests is still pressing, as the limits of availability mean that essentially only the most severe cases, often requiring confirmed contact tracing or proof of elevated risk, are being tested. Solutions like Cepheid’s, as well as other potential alternative test methods than can be done entirely at home, like Scanwell’s forthcoming test that looks for antibodies in a person’s blood, are much-needed if we hope to truly expand testing to a degree that it can properly inform any coronavirus mitigation strategy.

The path forward now seems pretty clear. First we get through the grim month-and-more ahead, supporting health care workers in any way we can. (Tip: findthemasks.com lists where to donate PPE, personal protective equipment, in the US. If you have any, do so. We are very literally all in this together, and they need it a lot more than you do.) Then we ramp up massive, pervasive, frequent Covid-19 testing infrastructure everywhere. Then we take stock.

Things will get worse before they get better. Hospitals in some places are already creaking at the seams. The patients entering the ICUs today were infected 3-4 weeks ago. Those infected the day of your local lockdown will reach ICUs 3-4 weeks from that day … and their number doubled every several days between the former batch of infections and the latter. The math is bleak. Many places haven’t locked down yet. They will, hopefully sooner rather than later.

What can we do in tech? Well, here’s an NYC doctor saying “We need our technology friends to be making and testing prototypes to rig the ventilators that we do have to support more than one patient at a time.” Here are the UK government’s specifications for Rapidly Manufactured Ventilator Systems. And here’s a suggestion that people ramp down their Dunning-Kruger armchair epidemiology a little–or a lot. Also:

It’s beyond appalling that the US government is only now realizing that they would more need personal protective equipment, but here we are, beyond appalled. Anything we can do to provide more PPE will be hugely beneficial as well.

Then we need to test, test, test. It is also beyond appalling that America has only recently started testing at scale, and that testing is still hugely restricted, but again, here we are, beyond appalled. We need nationwide, or better yet planetwide, ubiquitous testing.

Ideally we’d want everyone to get tested regularly, maybe weekly, symptomatic or not. Realistically, right now we need to massively expand and expand and expand our testing, and trace the contacts of those who test positive, so we know where the virus is and how many people have it. At the moment we’re all but blind.

Once we know, on a quasi-real-time basis, the numbers of the infected in a given area, we’ll be able to talk about lifting the lockdown. Maybe only for temporary periods, in certain areas, for people who don’t have a fever, lest the virus come roaring back. But the point of pervasive testing-and-tracing is that we’ll know whether that risk exists, and be able to respond appropriately.

Currently we’re making overall progress with testing, but at the same time, in places we’re dialling it back, and we’re limited by test kits, by swabs, by testers, and more. We need much, much more testing capacity to come online in the following months. Once we get there, once the blinding lights of pervasive testing have lit up the virus for us and we can watch it in near real time, then life can slowly begin returning back to normal. Ish.

Maybe then we can start thinking about how, in many places, and in many ways, the pandemic has forced us to start doing the right thing as a temporary emergency measure – everything from housing the homeless, to realizing that it’s grocery workers / janitors / drivers / nurses who are actually essential to our civilization and should be celebrated and rewarded accordingly, to admitting that the liquids limit on airplanes is meaningless, and almost everyone can do their office jobs from home.

Let’s bear that in the back of our minds: but right now, we have a very hard month–and likely months–ahead. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it is already later and worse than you think. Whatever we all can do to help, we should.

The effort to combat the spread of the coronavirus pandemic globally relies on testing as a core component of the current strategy, which primarily focuses on isolating individuals to slow the transmission of COVID-19 and give researchers time to develop potential treatments and vaccines. The availability and amount of testing can help chart how the virus is moving through a population, to inform and direct necessary quarantine and contact tracing measures, but one key data point might be the spread and availability of testing sites.

A new group of volunteer coders and medical professionals, including Air Force software organization Kessel Run‘s Chief Data Officer Andrew Kemendo, and data-driven doctor and researcher Jorge A. Caballero, have created a new findecovidtesting.com website, which aims to provide up-to date location info for all testing sites in the U.S.

Immediately, please note that a resource like this is not meant as a directory for private individuals who are looking to show up at a test site, expecting to receive diagnostics. Health officials and experts are attempting to roll out testing as far and wide they’re able, but for the safety of frontline workers, and in order to allocate limited supply of testing materials as effectively as possible, you should always only consult with a medical professional via telehealth, or use one of the various official online screening tools in order to get a test. Just showing up somewhere won’t get you a test, and could put a lot of other people in danger.

That said, this database, which was built by a team of around 15 developers working remotely one the course of just one week, should be viewed as a potential resource to inform those working on the country’s emergency response and COVID-19 mitigation strategy, or efforts to ensure that testing is available across the country in a way that accurately addresses population needs, and that can provide a full picture of the extent of the actual virus spread.

It also could be very useful for individuals – provided it’s used in tandem with screening and telehealth guidance to make sure that people are getting tested based on case prioritization, and according to all possible safety guidelines for the health of those doing the testing.

Kemendo also says that the plan is to potentially scale this to cover countries outside the U.S., provided the group can find a scalable way to populate the location data. Right now, the site info is being scraped and validated manually, while the team works on some kind of infrastructure that might help automate the process as more test sites come online.

The effort and its resulting data will not be monetized at all, Kemendo says, and while it has no single sponsor, the company is working with credits from both Google Cloud Platform and AWS for running the backend. The team is currently looking for suggestions on how best to scale, and reduce the manual workload involved with maintaining an up-to-date listing, and their GitHub project is available here.

Following similar moves by Lime, Bird, Tier and others, Voi Technology, the European e-scooter rentals and so-called micro-mobility startup, says it has “paused” operations in several countries due to the Coronvirus pandemic. This sees the company suspend operations in all but nine key cities.

In a short statement issued to media on Friday, Voi said it had regrettably been “forced” to pause operations in the majority of cities it operates in, with only a handful of its largest cities being serviced.

The cities where Voi is continuing to operate in are: Copenhagen, Helsinki, Gothenburg, Stockholm and Oslo in the Nordics, and Berlin, Hamburg, Nuremberg and Munich in Germany.

More broadly, the Coronavirus outbreak is a major blow to e-scooter companies as cities around the world are restricting movement and social distancing and isolation is, to varying degrees, being practiced. This is seeing many companies putting in place work-from-home policies and negating the need for daily commutes, where e-scooters are often favoured. The world economy is also taking a hit and therefore recreational spending and travel is on an escalating downwards trend too.

More broadly, the business plans of e-scooter rental startups factor in seasonal demand and sources told me a few months ago that runway across the industry was based on deep enough pockets and operational smarts to get through Winter and be in a strong position to capitalise on peak Spring and Summer season demand. Coronavirus inevitably means “Winter” could now last for a very long time indeed.

The rest of the statement from Voi — which raised $85 million in Series B funding in November — follows below:

In the cities we keep open we will drastically reduce our fleet size but will continue to serve our communities and wherever possible we will keep capacity at important hubs, like major transport interchanges and hospitals.

We have been forced to make this hard decision as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. People are working from home and no longer visiting restaurants, pubs, theatres and friends and consequently have stopped using Voi e-scooters to get around.

We plan to kick start our operations again when the situation allows.

Right now the world is at war. But this is no ordinary war. It’s a fight with an organism so small we can only detect it through use of a microscope — and if we don’t stop it, it could kill millions of us in the next several decades. No, I’m not talking about COVID-19, though that organism is the one on everyone’s mind right now. I’m talking about antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

You see, more than 700,000 people died globally from bacterial infections last year — 35,000 of them in the U.S. If we do nothing, that number could grow to 10 million annually by 2050, according to a United Nations report.

The problem? Antibiotic overuse at the doctor’s office or in livestock and farming practices. We used a lot of drugs over time to kill off all the bad bacteria — but it only killed off most, not all, of the bad bacteria. And, as the famous line from Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park goes, “life finds a way.”

Enter Felix, a biotech startup in the latest Y Combinator batch that thinks it has a novel approach to keeping bacterial infections at bay – viruses.

It seems weird in a time of widespread concern over the corona virus to be looking at any virus in a good light but as co-founder Robert McBride explains it, Felix’s key technology allows him to target his virus to specific sites on bacteria. This not only kills off the bad bacteria but can also halt its ability to evolve and once more become resistant.

But the idea to use a virus to kill off bacteria is not necessarily new. Bacteriophages, or viruses that can “infect” bacteria, were first discovered by an English researcher in 1915 and commercialized phage therapy began in the U.S. in the 1940’s through Eli Lilly and Company. Right about then antibiotics came along and Western scientists just never seemed to explore the therapy further.

However, with too few new solutions being offered and the standard drug model not working effectively to combat the situation, McBride believes his company can put phage therapy back at the forefront.

Already Felix has tested its solution on an initial group of 10 people to demonstrate its approach.

“We can develop therapies in less time and for less money than traditional antibiotics because we are targeting orphan indications and we already know our therapy can work in humans,” McBride told TechCrunch . “We argue that our approach, which re-sensitizes bacteria to traditional antibiotics could be a first line therapy.”

Felix plans to deploy its treatment in those suffering from cystic fibrosis first as there is no cure for this disease, which tends to require a near constant stream of antibiotics to combat lung infections.

The next step will be to conduct a small clinical trial involving 30 people, then, as the scientific research and development model tends to go, a larger human trial before seeking FDA approval. But McBride hopes his viral solution will prove itself out in time to help the coming onslaught of antibiotic resistance.

“We know the antibiotic resistant challenge is large now and is only going to get worse,” McBride said. “We have an elegant technological solution to this challenge and we know our treatment can work. We want to contribute to a future in which these infections do not kill more than 10 million people a year, a future we can get excited about.”

The flood of status symbol content into Instagram Stories has run dry. No one is going out and doing anything cool right now, and if they are, they should be shamed for it. Beyond sharing video chat happy hour screenshots and quarantine dinner concoctions, our piece-by-piece biographies have ground to a halt. Oddly, what remains feels more social than social networks have in a long time.

With no source material, we’re doing it live. Coronavirus has absolved our desire to share the recent past. The drab days stuck inside blur into each other. The near future is so uncertain that there’s little impetus to make plans. Why schedule an event or get excited for a trip just to get your heartbroken if shelter-in-place orders are extended? We’re left firmly fixed in the present.

What is social media when there’s nothing to brag about? Many of us are discovering it’s a lot more fun. We had turned social media into a sport but spent the whole time staring at the scoreboard rather than embracing the joy of play.

But thankfully, there are no Like counts on Zoom .

Nothing permanent remains. That’s freed us from the external validation that too often rules our decision making. It’s stopped being about how this looks and started being about how this feels. Does it put me at peace, make me laugh, or abate the loneliness? Then do it. There’s no more FOMO because there’s nothing to miss by staying home to read, take a bath, or play board games. You do you.

Being social animals, what feels most natural is to connect. Not asynchronously through feeds of what we just did. But by coexisting concurrently. Professional enterprise technology for agenda-driven video calls has been subverted for meandering, motive-less togetherness. We’re doing what many of us spent our childhoods doing in basements and parking lots: just hanging out.

For evidence, just look at group video chat app Houseparty, where teens aimlessly chill with everyone’s face on screen at once. In Italy, which has tragically been on lock down since COVID-19’s rapid spread in the country, Houseparty wasn’t even in the top 1500 apps a month ago. Today it’s the #1 social app, and the #2 app overall second only to Zoom.

Houseparty topped all the charts on Monday, when Sensor Tower tells TechCrunch that Houseparty’s download rate was 323X higher than its average in February. It’s currently #1 in Portugal (up 371X) and Spain (up 592X) despite being absent from the chart a week earlier.

After binging through Netflix and beating the video games, all that’s left to entertain us is each other.

Undivided By Geography

If we’re all stuck at home, it doesn’t matter where that home is. We’ve been released from the confines of which friends are within a 20 minute drive or hour-long train. Just like students are saying they all go to Zoom University since every school’s classes moved online, we all now live in Zoom Town. All commutes have been reduced to how long it takes to generate an invite URL.

Nestled in San Francisco, even pals across the Bay in Berkeley felt far away before. But this week I had hour-long video calls with my favorite people who typically feel out of reach in Chicago and New York. I spent time with babies I hadn’t met in person. And I kept in closer touch with my parents on the other coast, which is more vital and urgent than ever before.

Typically, our time is occupied by acquaintances of circumstance. The co-workers who share our office. The friends who happen to live in the neighborhood. But now we’re each building a virtual family completely of our choosing. The calculus has shifted from who is convenient or who invites us to the most exciting place, to who makes us feel most human.

Even celebrities are getting into it. Rather than pristine portraits and flashy music videos, they’re appearing raw, with crappy lighting, on Facebook and Instagram Live. John Legend played piano for 100,000 people while his wife Chrissy Teigen sat on screen in a towel looking salty like she’s heard “All Of Me” far too many times. That’s more authentic than anything you’ll get on TV.

And without the traditional norms of who we are and aren’t supposed to call, there’s an opportunity to contact those we cared about in a different moment of our lives. The old college roommate, the high school buddy, the mentor who gave you you’re shot. If we have the emotional capacity in these trying times, there’s good to be done. Who do you know who’s single, lives alone, or resides in a city without a dense support network?

Reforging those connections not only surfaces prized memories we may have forgotten, but could help keep someone sane. For those who relied on work and play for social interaction, shelter-in-place is essentially solitary confinement. There’s a looming mental health crisis if we don’t check in on the isolated.

The crisis language of memes

It can be hard to muster the energy to seize these connections, though. We’re all drenched in angst about the health impacts of the virus and financial impacts of the response. I certainly spent a few mornings sleeping in just to make the days feel shorter. When all small talk leads to rehashing our fears, sometimes you don’t have anything to say.

Luckily we don’t have to say anything to communicate. We can share memes instead.

The internet’s response to COVID-19 has been an international outpour of gallow’s humor. From group chats to Instagram joke accounts to Reddit threads to Facebook groups like quarter-million member “Zoom Memes For Quaranteens”, we’re joining up to weather the crisis.

A nervous laugh is better than no laugh at all. Memes allow us to convert our creeping dread and stir craziness into something borderline productive. We can assume an anonymous voice, resharing what some unspecified other made without the vulnerability of self-attribution. We can dive into the creation of memes ourselves, killing time under house arrest in hopes of generating smiles for our generation. And with the feeds and Stories emptied, consuming memes offers a new medium of solidarity. We’re all in this hellscape together so we may as well make fun of it.

The web’s mental immune system has kicked into gear amidst the outbreak. Rather than wallowing in captivity, we’ve developed digital antibodies that are evolving to fight the solitude. We’re spicing up video chats with board games like Codenames. One-off livestreams have turned into wholly online music festivals to bring the sounds of New Orleans or Berlin to the world. Trolls and pranksters are finding ways to get their lulz too, Zoombombing webinars. And after a half-decade of techlash, our industry’s leaders are launching peer-to-peer social safety nets and ways to help small businesses survive until we can be patrons in person again.

Rather than scrounging for experiences to share, we’re inventing them from scratch with the only thing we’re left with us in quarantine: ourselves. When the infection waves pass, I hope this swell of creativity and in-the-moment togetherness stays strong. The best part of the internet isn’t showing off, it’s showing up.

Billions of dollars have flowed into startup investing this decade, but the era appears to be closing with the coronavirus pandemic. Limited partners are saying no to younger venture firms who are still out raising, while cutting back on weaker existing firms in their portfolios, Connie Loizos reports on TechCrunch this week.

Other firms with direct ties to public markets are losing even more access to working capital. Connie thinks we will soon see term sheets getting pulled using force majure clauses (and in fact we’ve been hearing a few rumors). In another sign of pressure in the funding ecosystem, Danny Crichton hears that some investors are preparing for layoffs at their own firms.

With the pandemic’s impact just starting to be felt across global economies, everyone is bracing for hard times. So, if you’re a startup with fresh funding in the bank, Danny suggests that now is an especially good time to make a funding announcement that stands out.

Over on Extra Crunch, we’ve been going deeper on what startups and investors are facing and how they can adapt. “I expected 20-30% declines in valuation, but I would up that today to 50-60% in the earliest stages based on feedback I have heard,” Danny details in his latest update on pandemic fundraising trends.

Alex Wilhelm interviewed a growth-stage investor who thinks that Q4 may be the earliest that bigger startups will be able to do raises — and probably not from new investors right away. Everyone is trying to support existing portfolios too.

But what is really changing, when you look at the time scales of startups? Here’s an even-keeled view from long-time VC Mike Volpi, in an interview with Connie this week:

“[The business of venture is a very long-term one. For the average holding period we have within our portfolio companies is probably eight years. If you think about an investment that we made even, let’s say, last year, it’s going to look really different seven years from now. So these moments of fluctuation for us as VCs shouldn’t impact our thinking too much. They’re unpleasant. You have to be thoughtful about how to manage through them. But from an investment perspective, we shouldn’t really let it get too much in in the scope of how we think about it.”

The great unicorn stall?

Alex had been writing a popular series on companies on their way to IPO. Now the window on hundreds of unicorns appears to have closed for months if not longer. “Procore and Accolade, for instance, have filed publicly to debut but have yet to price and pull the trigger on their offering,” he writes on Extra Crunch this week. “Asana and DoorDash and Postmates have all filed privately to go public, but given the insane repricing of their comps on the public markets, no public filings appear to be in the offing.” He then breaks out Airbnb’s particular situation as a travel unicorn in a time of frozen borders.

Y Combinator’s first remote-first demo day 

While the entire event was online, we covered it as usual in a series of articles breaking out the entire class by categories:

Healthcare, Biotech, Fintech and Nonprofits

Hardware, Robots, AI and Developer Tools

Consumer Companies

B2B Companies

While the storied seed-stage venture firm has emphasized physical location to help its founders connect and learn, it is now considering making the next class fully remote.

You can find our casual take on the companies in this wrap-up call.  We put together our list of 20 favorites, including reasons why, for Extra Crunch. Subscribers can also listen to Natasha Mascarenhas’ Equity interview with CEO Michael Seibel.

Where top VCs are investing in remote events

Suddenly everybody needs to come up with new solutions to remote events. But what does that even look like? Arman Tabatabai surveyed five investors with bets in the space for Extra Crunch on what they think will be happening next. Respondents include:

• Sarah Cannon, Index Ventures
• Connie Chan, Andreessen Horowitz
• Andrei Brasoveanu, Accel
• Ryan Kuder, Techstars Anywhere
• Paul Murphy, Northzone

TechCrunch can help you stay connected

I swear the whole newsletter was not just building up to this moment, but we are also working out our plans for Disrupt and other conferences this year. For starters, we’ll have a discounted pass for the livestream and recorded videos of the main stage. More details here!

We’re also experimenting with lighter-weight ways for startup people to stay in the loop from anywhere through Extra Crunch. Danny kicked off a weekly conference call with investors and other specialists. Check out the recording from this week with Niko Bonatsos of General Catalyst; stay tuned next Tuesday for a live call with resident immigration law columnist Sophie Alcorn.

Across the week

TechCrunch

Wondering if venture capital is open for business? A new initiative has investors saying yes
Startups rethink what it means to be high-touch during a pandemic
Beware of ‘ZoomBombing:’ screensharing filth to video calls
PSA: Yes you can join a Zoom meeting in the browser

Extra Crunch

Dear Sophie: How do I get visas for my team to work from home?
Manage remote teams with a transparent culture
Founders who share insights can build industry trust at scale
Can Apple keep the AR industry alive?

#EquityPod

From Alex:

“This week’s episode was a testament to making do, as we’ve had to cancel some trips, juggle a few guests, and get up and running as a podcast that have guests dial in without losing our stride. So, this week Danny and Natasha and Alex were joined by Unshackled VC’s Manan Mehta. And it went pretty ok, aside from a hiccup or two, expect Equity to still feature guests as often as it makes sense, even if we’re currently locked out of our own studio….”

Listen to the rest here.

Much of the world is waking up to a strange new reality. As the Coronavirus COVID-19 swept across the planet, today may go down in history as the day when huge numbers of countries were largely united in a global shut-down to address the pandemic.

TechCrunch brings you a wrap of the technology world’s response to the virus do far in our own dedicated “COVID-19-updates” coverage.

• In Extra Crunch we cover how you should pitch a story in the era of COVID-19

In our main coverage:

• Google says Coronavirus has become its biggest search topic by a country mile this year, and to continue its efforts to harness that attention in the best possible way, late on Friday the company launched a new information portal dedicated to the pandemic as well as an improved search experience for desktop and mobile.

• In response to COVID-19, Hulu has added a free live news stream to its on-demand app for customers who only subscribe to its on-demand service, not its live TV add-on. The news coverage is provided in partnership with ABC News Live, and brings live news 24/7 to Hulu on-demand subscribers as part of their existing subscription.

• Unfortunately, “Robocalls”, which have been targeting the vulnerable and unsuspecting for years, are taking advantage of the current global catastrophe to enhance their scams. The FCC warns that it has received numerous reports of coronavirus-related robocall cons in the wild — here’s what to look for.

• Two major tech companies — Amazon and IBM — have each announced programs to encourage developers to find solutions to a variety of problems related to the pandemic.

• Google announced on Twitter that it is canceling its annual I/O developer conference out of concern for the health and safety of all involved. It will not be holding any online conference in its place either.

• Rivian, the buzzy electric vehicle startup that is backed by Amazon and Ford, is shutting down all of its facilities due to the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by Coronavirus. Rivian employs more than 2,000 workers across several locations, including its headquarters in Plymouth, Mich., a factory in Normal, Ill. as well as operations in San Jose and Irvine, Calif., where engineers are working on autonomous vehicle technology. Rivian also has an office in the U.K.

• During two of this week’s White House briefings, President Trump referred specifically to two potential treatments that have been identified by medical researchers and clinicians. But no drugs or treatments have been proven as effective for either the prevention of contracting COVID-19 or for its treatment. While chloroquine has been used for decades to treat malaria, and chronic rheumatoid arthritis, it can have dangerous side effects, including death, if taken incorrectly. Even when taken correctly, it can cause things like stomach distress and even permanent damage to a person’s vision.

• The COVID-19 outbreak isn’t just affecting movie theaters — it has also halted TV and film production around the world. For Netflix, that has included production on high-profile titles like “The Witcher” and “Stranger Things.” So the streaming company just announced that it has created a $100 million fund that it says will support the cast and crew who have suddenly found themselves out of work.

• Elon Musk tweeted Friday that Tesla and SpaceX employees are “working on ventilators” even though he doesn’t believe they will be needed. His confirmation on Twitter that both of the companies he leads are working on ventilators comes a day after New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio made a direct plea to Musk to help alleviate a shortage at hospitals gearing up to combat COVID-19.

• Uber Eats is waiving delivery and activations fees in the UK to support restaurants hit by decreasing demand during the coronavirus crisis. The measure will apply until March 31 when it says it will review it. On Monday the on-demand food delivery giant announced a similar waiver of delivery fees in the US. The announcement by Uber Eats UK comes shortly after Just Eat UK said it would reduce its commission and waive some fees for 30 days — as part of an emergency support package for partner restaurants struggling to cope with disruption to their businesses.

• Privacy-hostile practices by tech giants face ongoing legislative challenges, but a pandemic is clearly an exceptional circumstance. These days, governments are now turning to the tech sector for help. US President Donald Trump was reported last week to have summoned a number of tech companies to the White House to discuss how mobile location data could be used for tracking citizens. And in another development this month he announced Google was working on a nationwide coronavirus screening site — in fact it’s Verily, a different division of Alphabet. But concerns were quickly raised that the site requires users to sign in with a Google account, suggesting users’ health-related queries could be linked to other online activity the tech giant monetizes via ads.

• Diligent Robotics wants to give nurses a helper droid that can run errands for them around the hospital. The startup’s bot Moxi is equipped with a flexible arm, gripper hand and full mobility so it can hunt down lightweight medical resources, navigate a clinic’s hallways and drop them off for the nurse. With the world facing a critical shortage of medical care professionals, Moxi could help healthcare centers use their staff as efficiently as possible. And because robots can’t be infected by COVID-19, they’re one less potential carrier interacting with vulnerable populations.

In other news from around the web:

• The Telegram app emerged a few years ago as a challenger to WhatsApp and took off largely in non-Western countries. A story today in the China Tech site Abacus explores how Telegram is emerging as an alternative source of news form outside China ‘Great Firewall’, and is being accessed by citizens there who are hungry for uncensored news about the COVID-19 pandemic. The “2019-nCoV outbreak real-time broadcast,” channel now has more than 87,000 subscribers, with recent messages getting between 15,000 and 20,000 views, according to Telegram channel’s view counter.

• Another report today in The Verge explores how Amazon workers across the US and in many other countries are finding themselves designated as “key workers” who must continue to show up to deliver goods nations, like the US, which have gone into an effective quarantine. However, many of those workers are concerned that safety precautions, benefits, and protections have not changed sufficiently to reflect the new reality of living and working in a pandemic, and that even Amazon warehouses that keep operating as everything else shuts down many workers there are of course likely to contract the virus.

• Getaround is a startup that actually launched at TechCrunch Disrupt several years ago, and the car-sharing company has soared in distribution and valuation in the last few years. But with the Coronavirus outbreak suddenly affecting people unwilling or unable to share a personal car that might well be owned by someone infected by the virus, Getaround is now experiencing a huge plunge in demand. As a result, the company is now, according to Bloomberg. reportedly seeking a sale after finding itself “dangerously short on cash”, according to people familiar with the matter.

• Over at Microsoft, the tech giant is now offering its Healthcare Bot service to organizations on the frontlines of the COVID-19 response to help screen patients for potential infection and care. As an example, the CDC just released a COVID-19 assessment bot that can quickly assess the symptoms and risk factors for people worried about infection, provide information and suggest the next course of action such as contacting a medical provider or, for those who do not need in-person medical care, managing the illness safely at home.

The news is significant because several healthcare startups such as Babylon Health and Ada Health already offer such AI-powered ‘chat’ apps which many will likely be turning to in this crisis.

It’s been two-and-a-half years since the news first broke that Steven Spielberg would be rebooting his ’80s anthology series “Amazing Stories” for Apple’s then-unnamed streaming service.

Now, after some behind-the-scenes drama, “Amazing Stories” has launched on Apple TV+, with the first two segments currently available. The first, “The Cellar,” is a time travel romance, while “The Heat” is a combination ghost story/murder mystery/sports drama.

As we explain on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, it’s hard to tell exactly who this show was made for. Both of the episodes aired so far get pretty goofy, as if the show was made for kids — but they also move into surprisingly dark territory. Both start with familiar setups, then take some surprising twists and turns, but the results aren’t very satisfying.

In the end, it was hard for any of us to muster any enthusiasm for watching the show’s remaining three episodes.

You can listen to our full review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple . You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

And if you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:

0:00 Intro
0:44 “Amazing Stories” review
25:50 “Amazing Stories” spoiler discussion

WhatsApp, one of the most popular instant messaging platforms on the planet, is testing a feature that could make it simpler for its 2 billion users to tell whether the assertion made in messages they have received is true.

In the recent most beta version of its Android app, the Facebook-owned service has given users the ability to quickly comb through the web with the text or video they have received for more context.

WhatsApp has been testing this feature in some capacity for several quarters now (last year, it allowed some users to look up an image on the web), but a spokesperson has now told TechCrunch that the platform plans to roll out this feature in the near future.

“We are working on new features to help empower users to find out more information about the messages they receive that have been forwarded many times. This feature is currently in testing, and we look forward to rolling it out in the near future,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

The timely test of this feature comes at a time when WhatsApp and other messaging platforms are being used more often than ever before as people stay in touch with their friends, families, and colleagues in the face of a global pandemic.

And as it has happened in the past, several platforms including WhatsApp are grappling with spread of misinformation — this time about the coronavirus.

But WhatsApp has moved to take action much swiftly this time. It began reaching out to dozens of governments last month to assist in their efforts to provide accurate information to the general public, it said today.

Earlier today, India announced a WhatsApp bot to help its citizens be better informed about coronavirus. Earlier this week, the World Health Organization also announced a WhatsApp bot for people globally to bust myths about the coronavirus and answer some of the most frequently asked questions about the disease.

“The WHO Health Alert is the latest official NGO or government helpline to become available on WhatsApp, joining the Singapore Government, The Israel Ministry of Health, the South Africa Department of Health, and KOMINFO Indonesia. We are actively working to launch local services with other countries as well,” WhatsApp said in a statement.