Year: 2020

Rivian, the buzzy electric vehicle startup that is backed up 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, Michigan, 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.

The company said Friday that salaried and hourly employees will continue to be paid during the shutdown. Rivian told TechCrunch that most of its facilities have been at 2 to 5% occupancy for about a week. The length of the shutdown is undetermined at this time, a company spokesperson said.

Rivian spent the majority of its life in the shadows until November 2018 when it revealed its all-electric R1T pickup and R1S SUV at the LA Auto Show. Since then, the electric automaker has picked up investors and commercial customers such as Ford and Amazon, in addition to the reservations consumers have made for its pickup and SUV.

In December, Rivian announced it had raised $1.3 billion in new funding, the fourth round of capital announced by the company in 2019 alone. It followed prior announcements of $700 million led by Amazon, $500 million from Ford (which includes a collaboration on electric vehicle technology) and $350 million from Cox Automotive.

Lincoln, the luxury brand under Ford, is working with Rivian to develop an “all-new” electric vehicle. Amazon has ordered 100,000 all-electric delivery vans from Rivian, with the first deliveries expected to begin in 2021.

The global COVID-29 pandemic has prompted automakers to temporarily suspend operations in Europe and the U.S., where the disease has started to spread. In China, where the disease first started, factories are coming back online.

Automakers have had varied responses to the pandemic; some took action to suspend production faster than others. Honda kicked off closures in the U.S. Ford, GM and FCA followed after the Big 3 formed a task force with the United Auto Workers. Even as these automakers began implementing new safety precautions in its factories based on recommendations that came out of the task force, the UAW continued to pressure them to close. A couple of cases of employees testing positive for COVID-19 accelerated the closures. Nissan and Volkswagen have also paused operations in the U.S.

Tesla has been a notable hold out. The company announced Thursday it would shut down its Fremont, Calif. factory, beginning March 23. The decision to suspend production there came days after Alameda County officials issued an order to close all nonessential businesses. Tesla kept its doors open anyway, even after officials publicly said that it was not an essential business.

Tesla has suspended operations at its New York factory as well. Tesla’s gigafactory near Reno, Nevada, which produces electric motors and battery packs, is fully operational.

Tesla told employees in an email sent March 18, and viewed by TechCrunch, that it was staying open because it has had “conflicting guidance from different levels of government” over whether it could operate. The human resources department told employees in the email to come to work if their job is to produce, service, deliver or test its electric vehicle

But by Thursday, and after meetings with county officials, the company announced it would suspend production. Some basic operations that will support Tesla’s  charging infrastructure and what it describes as its “vehicle and energy services operations” will continue at the factory, which under normal circumstances has more than 10,000 people working there.

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, and that have undergone various degrees of investigation and testing in the ongoing fight against the global coronavirus pandemic. It’s important to note upfront that regardless of what you may have heard, from Trump or any other sources, no drugs or treatments have been proven as effective for either the prevention of contracting COVID-19, or for its treatment.

That said, a number of different clinical studies are currently in progress all over the world, and in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health is looking to fill a 400-volunteer study that will provide clinical results related to use of remdesivir, an antiviral drug developed by Gilead originally as a treatment for Ebola, but it’s still only in clinical trials even for treatment of that disease. This study could also add in other drug candidates as additional test therapies. Meanwhile, studies in China and France have examined the effectiveness of anti-malarial drugs including chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine – including one small-scale study that suggests the positive effects of hydroxycholoroquine in reducing both the duration and symptoms of COVID-19 in combination with an antibiotic called azithromycin.

The important thing to keep in mind when considering these or any other potential treatments for the novel coronavirus, which is still relatively young, is that a lot of what we know about them so far is effectively anecdotal, and based not on the kind of scientifically rigours controlled clinical studies that are normally used in the years-long development and certification of drugs. Instead, treatments like remdesivir and chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine are being deployed in the field by healthcare practitioners based on their approved use in similar (but crucially not the same) situations, like the Ebola and SARS outbreaks.

Often, they’re being used under what’s called ‘compassionate’ grounds in the U.S. This effectively amounts to employing a drug that’s not yet certified for general use in treatment of a patient whose condition is so severe that a doctor is willing to go to desperate lengths to try to alleviate their symptoms. This has the advantage of sidestepping typical testing and approval procedures, and requiring that the results of its use are documented, which contributes to the overall body of clinical knowledge in terms of its effects and interactions with patients and with COVID-19.

It’s not a clinical study, however, and that means there are still a lot of unknowns when it comes to its use that just can’t be learned or asserted based on scattered, individual instances of compassionate care treatment.

“As the Commissioner of FDA and the President mentioned yesterday, we’re trying to strike a balance between making something with the potential of an effect available to the American people, at the same time that we do it under the auspices of a protocol that would give us information to determine if it’s truly safe and truly effective,” explained National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci during a press conference on Friday. “But the information that you’re referring to specifically is anecdotal, it was not done in a controlled clinical trial. So you really can’t make any definitive statement about it.”

During Thursday’s White House coronavirus pandemic task force briefing, Trump made false claims that chloroquine was already approved by the FDA as a treatment for COVID-19 under an emergency authorization. FDA Director Dr. Stephen Hahn clarified that this and remdesivir were being considered and studied by the FDA, as was an approach that would use plasma extracted from patients who’d recovered from COVID-19 as a potential source of antibodies for others. Still, all of these are still quite far away from clinical deployment in any generally approved way.

Meanwhile, Fauci’s cautions should be taken for what they are: Warnings that are primarily meant to emphasize that the reasons the FDA requires clinical studies, even for drugs already tentatively approved for use in other cases, is because it has patient health and safety in mind. 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.

Fauci’s comments Friday explain the risks of putting too much stock in any potential treatment at this stage, even if they are showing promising results among small or even medium-sized deployments.

“You’ve got to be careful when you say fairly effective, it was never done in a clinical trial that compared it to anything,” he said in answer to a reporter’s question about chloroquine’s efficacy in treating SARS. “It was given to individuals and felt that maybe it worked […] Whenever you do a clinical trial, you do standard of care, versus standard of care plus the agent you’re evaluating. That’s the reason why we showed back in Ebola why particular interventions worked.”

A summary survey of various prospective treatments and their current status was published today In Medscape, and this includes the current state of remdesivir and chloroquine investigations, as well as a number of other drugs being studied by researchers. As has been reported here and elsewhere, there are promising signs that they could prove effective in either treatment, or treatment and even preventative use (in the case of remedesivir), but these are, as Dr. Fauci puts it, only the first step that should lead to more sophisticated clinical studies, which themselves will then need competing peer studies to eventually prove out.

When it comes to the entertainment industry, the COVID-19 outbreak isn’t just affecting movie theaters – it’s also halted TV and film production around the world. For Netflix, that’s included production on high-profile titles like “The Witcher” and “Stranger Things.”

So the streaming company just announced that has created a $100 million fund that it says will support the cast and crew who have suddenly found themselves out of work.

In the announcement, Netflix Chief Creative Ted Sarandos said that there are now “hundreds of thousands of cast and crew without jobs,” including “electricians, carpenters and drivers, many of whom are paid hourly wages and work on a project-to-project basis.”

He said that most of this money will go to “the hardest hit workers on our own productions around the world” — though it sounds like the company is still figuring out exactly what form that support will take. (Sarandos noted that Netflix is already providing two weeks pay to the productions suspended last week.)

In addition, Sarandos said $15 million will go to “third parties and non-profits providing emergency relief to out-of-work crew and cast in the countries where we have a large production base.”

In the United States, that includes $1 million each to the SAG-AFTRA Covid-19 Disaster Fund, the Motion Picture and Television Fund and the Actors Fund Emergency Assistance. In Canada, that includes $1 million that will be split between the AFC and Fondation des Artistes. Elsewhere, Sarandos said Netflix is “working with existing industry organizations to create similar creative community emergency relief efforts.”

One of the obstacles to accurately estimating the prevalence of sickness in the general population is that most of our data comes from hospitals, not the 99.9 percent of the world that isn’t hospitals. FluSense is an autonomous, privacy-respecting system that counts the people and coughs in public spaces to keep health authorities informed.

Every year has a flu and cold season, of course, though this year’s is of course far more dire. But it’s like an ordinary flu season in that the main way anyone estimates how many people are sick is by analyzing stats from hospitals and clinics. Patients reporting “influenza-like illness” or certain symptoms get aggregated and tracked centrally. But what about the many folks who just stay home, or go to work sick?

We don’t know what we don’t know here, and that makes estimates of sickness trends — which inform things like vaccine production and hospital staffing — less reliable than they could be. Not only that, but it likely produces biases: Who is less likely to go to a hospital, and more likely to have to work sick? Folks with low incomes and no healthcare.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst are attempting to alleviate this data problem with an automated system they call FluSense, which monitors public spaces, counting the people in them and listening for coughing. A few of these strategically placed in a city could give a great deal of valuable data and insight into flu-like illness in the general population.

Tauhidur Rahman and Forsad Al Hossain describe the system in a recent paper published in an ACM journal. FluSense basically consists of a thermal camera, a microphone, and a compact computing system loaded with a machine learning model trained to detect people and the sounds of coughing.

To be clear at the outset, this isn’t recording or recognizing individual faces; Like a camera doing face detection in order to set focus, this system only sees that a face and body exists and uses that to create a count of people in view. The number of coughs detected is compared to the number of people, and a few other metrics like sneezes and amount of speech, to produce a sort of sickness index — think of it as coughs per person per minute.

Sure, it’s a relatively simple measurement, but there’s nothing like this out there, even in places like clinic waiting rooms where sick people congregate; Admissions staff aren’t keeping a running tally of coughs for daily reporting. One can imagine not only characterizing the types of coughs, but visual markers like how closely packed people are, and location information like sickness indicators in one part of a city versus another.

“We believe that FluSense has the potential to expand the arsenal of health surveillance tools used to forecast seasonal flu and other viral respiratory outbreaks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or SARS,” Rahman told TechCrunch. “By understanding the ebb and flow of the symptoms dynamics across different locations, we can have a better understanding of the severity of a novel infectious disease and that way we can enforce targeted public health intervention such as social distancing or vaccination.”

Obviously privacy is an important consideration with something like this, and Rahman explained that was partly why they decided to build their own hardware, since as some may have realized already, this is a system that’s possible (though not trivial) to integrate into existing camera systems.

“The researchers canvassed opinions from clinical care staff and the university ethical review committee to ensure the sensor platform was acceptable and well-aligned with patient protection considerations,” he said. “All persons discussed major hesitations about collection any high-resolution visual imagery in patient areas.”

Similarly, the speech classifier was built specifically to not retain any speech data beyond that someone spoke — can’t leak sensitive data if you never collect any.

The plan for now is to deploy FluSense “in several large public spaces,” one presumes on the UMass campus in order to diversify their data. “We are also looking for funding to run a large-scale multi-city trial,” Rahman said.

In time this could be integrated with other first- and second-hand metrics used in forecasting flu cases. It may not be in time to help much with controlling COVID-19, but it could very well help health authorities plan better for the next flu season, something that could potentially save lives.

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.

It’s unclear how many employees are working on the ventilators and which Tesla factory — it could be Buffalo, New York, Fremont, Calif., Sparks, Nevada or even Shanghai — has dedicated space to the project. The SpaceX facility is located in Hawthorne, Calif.

Musk didn’t describe what capacity would be or how long it might take to scale up such an endeavor.  One Twitter follower recommended building one large ventilator with multiple branches and lines. Musk noted that a single computer, pump and pressure accumulator could do the job, but noted that individual valves per patient would be ideal.

Whatever Musk decides, his project still faces specific obstacles. Certified medical personnel will need to be involved in such an operation and ventilator hardware used in clinical settings still must be approved by the FDA, which could delay production.

Still, the need for ventilators is urgent, prompting other automakers to investigate ways of ramping up production. GM, Volkswagen and Ford have all reportedly either talked to the White House or committed to looking at the problem. Volkswagen said Friday it has created a task force to look into using 3D printing to make hospital ventilators.

De Blasio tweeted out his plea to Musk Thursday morning. “Our country is facing a drastic shortage and we need ventilators ASAP — we will need thousands in this city over the next few weeks. We’re getting them as fast as we can but we could use your help!”

The mayor’s office has reached out to the person who runs Musk’s family office, his communications director and his lobbyist, press secretary Freddi Goldstein told TechCrunch  in an email. “Given his response on Twitter, we’re hopeful he will be able to help,” Goldstein added

The COVID-19 pandemic had elicited a seemingly conflicting mix of responses from Musk. He has downplayed COVID-19 in emails to employees and on social media. In one companywide email sent to SpaceX employees, Musk wrote that they have a higher risk of being killed in a car crash than dying from the coronavirus, BuzzFeed reported last week.

Since then, Musk wrestled with officials in Alameda County to keep Tesla’s Fremont, Calif., factory open in spite of a government directive to close all non-essential businesses. Tesla announced Thursday plans to suspend production there beginning March 23.

Some basic operations that would support Tesla’s  charging infrastructure and what it describes as its “vehicle and energy services operations” will continue at the factory, which under normal circumstances employs more than 10,000 people. Tesla is also suspending operations at its factory in Buffalo, N.Y., except for “those parts and supplies necessary for service, infrastructure and critical supply chains,” the company said in a statement.

Musk has jumped into crises before with mixed results. In 2018, Musk and the Musk Foundation donated $480,350 to add ultraviolet water filtration systems and water stations to all 12 area schools in Flint, Michigan. The effort was delayed but eventually the systems were installed, beginning in fall 2019.

In 2018, he put SpaceX engineers to work on a pod that could be used to save children trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand. Rescuers didn’t use the device and an argument with a cave diving expert that played out on social media and national television led to a defamation lawsuit, after Musk repeatedly called him ‘pedo guy.’ Musk was found not liable for defamation in a federal court in 2019.

 

28% of a nurse’s time is wasted on low-skilled tasks like fetching medical tools. We need them focused on the complex and compassionate work of treating patients, especially amid the coronavirus outbreak. Diligent Robotics wants to give them 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 health care centers use their staffs as efficiently as possible. And since robots can’t be infected by COVID-19, they’re one less potential carrier interacting with vulnerable populations.

Today, Diligent Robotics announces its $10 million Series A that will help it scale up to deliver “more robots to more hospitals” CEO Andrea Thomaz tells me. “We’ve been designing our product, Moxi, side by side with hospital customers because we don’t just want to give them an automation solution for their materials management problems. We want to give them a robot that frontline staff are delighted to work with and feels like a part of the team.”

The round led by DNX Ventures brings Diligent Robotics to $15.75 million in total funding that’s propelled it to the fifth generation of its Moxi robot. It currently has two deployed in Dallas, TX but is already working with two of the three top hospital networks in the U.S. ““As the current pandemic and circumstance has shown, the real heroes are our healthcare providers” says Q Motiwala, partner at DNX Ventures. The new cash from DNX, True Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, Next Coast Ventures, Grit Ventures, E14 Fund, and Promus Ventures will help Diligent Robotics expand Moxi’s use cases and seamlessly complement nurses’ workflows to help alleviate the talent crunch.

Thomaz came up with the idea for a hospital droid after doing her Ph.D. in social robotics at the MIT Media lab. Her co-founder and CTO Vivien Chu had done a masters at UPenn on how to give robots a sense of touch, and then came to work with Thomaz at Georgia Tech. They were inspired by a study revealing how nurses spent so much time acting as hosptial gofers, so in 2016 they applied for and won a National Science Foundation grant of $750,000 that funded a six-month sprint to build a prototype of Moxi.

Since then, 18-person Diligent Robotics has worked with hundreds of nurses to learn about exactly what they need from an autonomous assistant. “Today you will go about your day, and you probably won’t interact with any robots….we want to change that” Thomaz tells me. “The only way you can really bring robots out of the warehouses, off of the factory floors, is to build a robot that can work in our dynamic and messy everyday human environments.” The startup’s intention isn’t to full replace humans, which it doesn’t think is possible, but to let them focus on the most human elements of their jobs.

Moxi is about the size of a human but designed to look like an 80s movie robot so as not to engender and uncanny valley cyborg weirdness. Its head and eyes can move to signal intent, like which direction it’s about to move in, while sounds let it communicate with nurses and acknowledge their commands. A moving pillar lets it adjust its height while its gripper hand and arm can pick and put down smaller pieces of hospital equipment. Its round shape and courteous navigation makes sure it can politely share crowded hallways and travel via elevator.

Diligent Robotics’ solution engineers work with hospitals to teach Moxi how to get around and what they need. The company hopes to eventually build the ability to learn and adapt right into the bot so nurses can teach it new tasks on the fly. “The team continues to demonstrate unmatched robotics-specific innovation by combining social intelligence and human-guided learning capabilities” says True Ventures partner and Diligent board member Rohit Sharma.

Hospitals pay an upfront fee to buy Moxi robots, and then there’s a monthly fee for the software, services, and maintenance. Thomaz admits that “Hospitals are naturally risk-averse, and can be wary to take up new technology” so the startup is taking a slow and steady approach to deployment so it can convince buyers that Moxi is worth the learning curve.

Diligent Robotics will be competing with companies like Aethon’s TUG bot for pulling laundry and pharmacy carts. Other players in the hospital tech space include Xenex’s machine that disinfects rooms with light, and surgical bots like those from Johnson & Johnson’s Auris and Intuitive Surgical.

Diligent Robotics hopes to differentiate itself by building social intelligence into Moxi so it feels more like an intern than a gadget. “Time again, we hear from our hospital partners that Moxi not only returns time back to their day but also brings a smile to their face” says Thomaz. The company wants to evolve Moxi for other dull, dirty, or dangerous service jobs.

Eventually, Diligent Robotics hopes to bring Moxi into people’s homes. “While we don’t see robots replacing the companionship and the human connection, we do dream of a time that robots could making nursing homes more pleasant by offsetting the often staggering numbers of caretakers to bed ratios (as bad as 30:1)” Thomaz concludes. That way, Moxi could “help people age with dignity and hold onto their independence for as long as possible.”

In recent weeks, the novel coronavirus has permeated nearly every aspect of our lives, from the work we do, to the food we buy, to the simple things we’ve tended to take for granted, like leaving our homes and socializing.

Even the stories I write that are ostensibly not about the virus are always — somehow — about the virus.

When we look back at this moment in time, the sheer ubiquity of the topic will, perhaps, be its defining characteristic. And while we flirt with notions of escapism, the fact of the matter is that we’ll never fully get away from COVID-19 until it is completely eradicated.

Among the constant and mostly unwanted reminders in my own life is my work inbox. I’m being pitched coronavirus-related stories dozens of times a day at this point, running the gamut from the tasteful and thoughtful to the cringe-inducing. In the early days of the outbreak, when I first began receiving these pitches, they all sort of felt as though they were being done in bad taste.

Pitching against tragedy is not an uncommon practice in public relations. Like online content generators that juice SEO with trending buzzwords, the phenomenon is a common one amongst many PR reps. And frankly, by the time the realities of COVID-19 came to our shores, the isolated act of including references to the pandemic in a pitch no longer felt crass in the same way. COVID-19 is our reality now, and will be for a while. Perhaps it follows, then, that it will also bear mentions in the pitches that cross our inboxes.

I’m not an expert in communications or crisis management. And the extent of my work in PR was a few months fresh out of college, when I took a freelance writing gig to help keep my head above water in New York City. I hated it, and, frankly, I was probably extremely bad at it.

While I know enough now to recognize a distasteful pitch when I see it, I was curious how people in the public relations industry navigate the question. I reached out to handful of reps I’ve generally had a good experience with and asked how they best do their work when the world around them is falling apart at the seams.

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.

“The high street is being hit hard by Coronavirus but the sector can play a critical role in helping the thousands of people who rely on it — for work and as an essential service — during this difficult time,” said Eats UK general manager, Toussaint Wattinne, in a statement.

“We are putting in place a range of initiatives to continue to support restaurant partners, particularly small business owners, as they keep their kitchens firing to feed people across the country.”

Another support measure it’s offering is a new opt-in program for all restaurants on its platform to get daily payments, rather than the standard weekly payment — to help with cash flow.

Today the UK government finally ordered bars and restaurants to close — having previously only advised citizens to stay away from social spaces to help reduce the spread of COVID-19.

Confirmed cases in the country have been increasing steady in recent weeks, approaching 4,000 at the time of writing, with 177 deaths recorded in total so far.

The closure order applies to bars and restaurants nationwide from tonight (Saturday morning) — cementing the economic shock the coronavirus is dealing to the sector.

However food delivery remains an option on the table: Earlier this week the government said it would relax planning regulations to allow pubs and restaurants to offer takeout services straightaway, without needing to apply for permission.

Uber Eats looks to be hoping to capitalize on the contingency provision by onboarding restaurants that haven’t previously offered takeout. It said today it’s adding a fast-tracked onboarding process for new restaurants to help them get online on its platform as soon as possible.

It’s also expanding the number of convenience stores available via the app — and waiving delivery fees for them too.

Keeping the nation fed through the crisis is another pressing operational headache for the UK government as worried shoppers have stripped supermarket shelves — putting strain on ‘just in time’ supply chains. Again, Uber looks to be hoping to help plug any gaps by expanding the surface area for food and grocery orders.

Also today it said it will be introducing a new contactless delivery product feature as a measure that’s intended to shrink the health risks for couriers making deliveries.

The public health crisis has shone a critical spotlight on the lack of protections for platform workers who aren’t covered by employment rights like sick pay — meaning they can either self isolate or earn money.

Several other European on-demand delivery apps have already added similar contactless provisions.

Even as the Trump Administration calls for states to not release unemployment data for the month of March, Goldman Sachs on Thursday issued its own predictions on the jobs market and the broader health of the U.S. economy on Friday.

The financial services giant is predicting unemployment claims to spike to just over 2 million as a result of the massive slow down in the U.S. economy as states respond to the COVID-19 outbreak. Goldman calls it “the largest increase in initial jobless claims and the highest level on record.”

Today the bank issued its broader prognosis for the health of the U.S. economy. “We now assume a peak 20% decline in the level of manufacturing output by April. This effect captures the impact of reduced domestic demand for non-food goods, reduced foreign demand for US goods, exports, supply chain disruptions and plant closures,” the bank wrote.

Using corollary data from Asian countries that were hit earlier by the virus, the bank is projecting that there will be a 50% decline in broker commissions and spending on home improvement as well as a 25% decline in homebuilding and business structures throughout April.

Overall, the firm expects declines in “services consumption, manufacturing activity, and building investment to lower the level of FDP in April by 10%.

The bright side of this economic shit sandwich is that April should be the worst of it, according to the bank. “We assume that this drag then fades gradually by 10% each month. While the exact timing is highly uncertain and relapses are plausible, the assumption of a gradual recovery reflects the potential contributions from factors such as effective mitigation and testing actions, weather effects, medical breakthroughs or adaptation by firms and consumers,” according to the bank.

In a public health emergency that relies on people keeping an anti-social distance from each other to avoid spreading a highly contagious virus for which humans have no pre-existing immunity governments around the world have been quick to look to technology companies for help.

Background tracking is, after all, what many Internet giants’ ad-targeting business models rely on. While, in the US, telcos were recently exposed sharing highly granular location data for commercial ends.

Some of these privacy-hostile practices face ongoing challenges under existing data protection laws in Europe — and/or have at least attracted regulator attention in the US, which lacks a comprehensive digital privacy framework — but a pandemic is clearly an exceptional circumstance. So we’re seeing governments turn 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.

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. (Verily has said the data is stored separately and not linked to other Google products, although the privacy policy does allow data to be shared with third parties including Salesforce for customer service purposes.)

In the UK the government has also been reported to be in discussions with telcos about mapping mobile users’ movements during the crisis — though not at an individual level. It was reported to have held an early meeting with tech companies to ask what resources they could contribute to the fight against COVID-19.

Elsewhere in Europe, Italy — which remains the European nation worst hit by the virus — has reportedly sought anonymized data from Facebook and local telcos that aggregates users’ movement to help with contact tracing or other forms of monitoring.

While there are clear public health imperatives to ensure populations are following instructions to reduce social contact, the prospect of Western democracies making like China and actively monitoring citizens’ movements raises uneasy questions about the long term impact of such measures on civil liberties.

Plus, if governments seek to expand state surveillance powers by directly leaning on the private sector to keep tabs on citizens it risks cementing a commercial exploitation of privacy — at a time when there’s been substantial push-back over the background profiling of web users for behavioral ads.

“Unprecedented levels of surveillance, data exploitation, and misinformation are being tested across the world,” warns civil rights campaign group Privacy International, which is tracking what it dubs the “extraordinary measures” being taken during the pandemic.

A couple of examples include telcos in Israel sharing location data with state agencies for COVID-19 contact tracing and the UK government tabling emergency legislation that relaxes the rules around intercept warrants.

“Many of those measures are based on extraordinary powers, only to be used temporarily in emergencies. Others use exemptions in data protection laws to share data. Some may be effective and based on advice from epidemiologists, others will not be. But all of them must be temporary, necessary, and proportionate,” it adds. “It is essential to keep track of them. When the pandemic is over, such extraordinary measures must be put to an end and held to account.”

At the same time employers may feel under pressure to be monitoring their own staff to try to reduce COVID-19 risks right now — which raises questions about how they can contribute to a vital public health cause without overstepping any legal bounds.

We talked to two lawyers from Linklaters to get their perspective on the rules that wrap extraordinary steps such as tracking citizens’ movements and their health data, and how European and US data regulators are responding so far to the coronavirus crisis.

Bear in mind it’s a fast-moving situation — with some governments (including the UK and Israel) legislating to extend state surveillance powers during the pandemic.

The interviews below have been lighted edited for length and clarity

Europe and the UK

Dr Daniel Pauly, technology, media & telecommunications partner at Linklaters in Frankfurt 

Data protection law has not been suspended. At least when it comes to Europe. So data protection law still applies — without any restrictions. This is the baseline on which we need to work and for which we need to start. Then we need to differentiate between what the government can do and what employers can do in particular.

It’s very important to understand that when we look at governments they do have the means to allow themselves a certain use of data. Because there are opening clauses, flexibility clauses, in particular in the GDPR, when it comes to public health concerns, cross-border threats.

By using the legislation process they may introduce further powers. To give you one example what the Germany government did to respond is they created a special law — the coronavirus notification regulation — we already have in place a law governing the use of personal data in respect of certain serious infections. And what they did is they simply added the coronavirus infection to that list, which now means that hospitals and doctors must notify the competent authority of any COVID-19 infection.

This is pretty far reaching. They need to transmit names, contact details, sex, date of birth and many other details to allow the competent authority to gather that data and to analyze that data.

Another important topic in that field is the use of telecommunications data — in particular mobile phone data. Efficient use of that data might be one of the reasons why they obviously were quite successful in China with reducing the threat from the virus.

In Europe the government may not simply use mobile phone data and movement data — they have to anonymize it first and this is what, in Germany and other European jurisdictions, happened — including the UK — that anonymized mobile phone data has been handed over to organizations who start analyzing that data to get a better view of how the people behave, how the people move and what they need to do in order to restrict further movement. Or to restrict public life. This is the view on the government at least in Europe and the UK.

Transparency obligations [related to government use of personal data] are stemming from the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation]. When they would like to make use of mobile phone data this is the ePrivacy directive. This is not as transparent as the GDPR is and they did not succeed in replacing that piece of legislation by new regulation. So the ePrivacy directive gives again the various Member States, including the UK, the possibility to introduce further and more restrictive laws [for public health reasons].

[If Internet companies such as Google were to be asked by European governments to pass data on users for a coronavirus tracking purpose] it has to be taken into consideration that they have not included this in their records of processing activities — in their data protection notifications and information.

So it would be at least from a pure legal perspective it would be a huge step — and I’m wondering whether it would be feasible without the governments introducing special laws for that.

If [EU] governments would make use of private companies to provide them with data which has not been collected for such purposes — so that would be a huge step from the perspective of the GDPR at least. I’m not aware of something like this. I’ve certainly read there are discussions ongoing with Netflix to reduce the net traffic but I haven’t heard anything about making use of the data Google has.

I wouldn’t expect it in Europe — and particularly in Germany. Tracking people, tracking and monitoring what they are doing this is almost last resort — so I wouldn’t expect that in the next couple of weeks. And I hope then it’s over.

[So far], from my perspective, the European regulators have responded [to the coronavirus crisis] in a pretty reasonable manner by saying that, in particular, any response to the virus must be proportionate.

We still have that law in place and we need to consider that the data we’re talking about is health data — it’s the most protected data of all. Having said that there are some ways at least the GDPR is allowing the government and allowing employers to make use of that data. In particular when it comes to processing for substantial public interest. Or if it’s required for the purposes of preventive medicine or necessary for reasons of public interest.

So the legislator was wise enough to include clauses allowing the use of such data under certain circumstances and there are a number of supervisory authorities who already made public guidelines how to make use of these statutory permissions. And what they basically said was it always needs to be figured out on a case by case basis whether the data is really required in the specific case.

To give you an example, it was made clear that an employer may not ask an employee where he has been during his vacation — but he may ask have you been in any of the risk areas? And then the sufficient answer is yes or no. They do not need any further data. So it’s always [about approaching this] a smart way — by being smart you get the information you need; it’s not the flood gate suddenly opened.

You really need to look at the specific case and see how to get the data you need. Usually it’s a yes or no which is sufficient in the particular case.

The US

Caitlin Potratz Metcalf, senior U.S. associate at Linklaters and a Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP/US)

Even though you don’t have a structured privacy framework in the US — or one specific regulator that covers privacy — you’ve got some of the same issues. The FCC [Federal Communications Commission] will go after companies that take any action that is inconsistent with their privacy policies. And that would be misleading to consumers. Their initial focus is on consumer protection, not privacy, but in the last couple of years they’ve been wearing two hats. So there is a focus on privacy even though we don’t have a national privacy law [equivalent in scope to the EU’s GDPR] but it’s coming from a consumer protection point of view.

So, for example, the FCC back in February actually announced potential sanctions against four major telecoms companies int he US with respect to sharing data related to cell phone tracking — it wasn’t the geolocation in an app but actually pinging off cell towers — and sharing that data to third parties without proper safeguards. Because that wasn’t disclosed in their privacy policies.

They haven’t actually issued those fines but it was announced that they may pursue a $208M fine total against these four companies: AT&T, Verizon*, T-Mobile, Sprint… So they do take it very seriously about how that data is safeguarded, how it’s being shared. And the fact that we have a state of emergency doesn’t change that emphasis on consumer protection.

You’ll see the same is true for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) — that’s responsible for any medical or health data.

That is really limited towards entities that are covered entities under HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] or their business associates. So it doesn’t apply to everybody across the board. But if you are a hospital health plan provider, whether you’re an employer and you have a group health plan, an insurer, or a business associate supporting one of those covered entities then you have to comply with HIPAA to the extent you’re handling protected health information. And that’s a bit narrower than the definition of personal data that you’d have under GDPR.

So you’re really looking at identifying information for that patient: Their medical status, their birth date, address, things like that that might be very identifiable and related to the person. But you could share things that are more general. For example you have a middle aged man from this county who’s tested positive for COVID and is at XYZ facility being treated and his condition is stable. Or his condition is critical. So you could share that kind of level of detail — but not further.

And so HHS in February had issued a bullet stressing that you can’t set aside the privacy and security safeguards under HIPAA during an emergency. They stressed to all covered entities that you have to still comply with the law — sanctions are still in place. And to the extent that you do have to disclose some of the protected health information it has to be to the minimum extent necessary. And that can be disclosed either to other hospitals, to a regulator in order to help stem the spread of COVID and also in order to provide treatment to a patient. So they listed a couple of different exceptions how you can share that information but really stressing the minimum necessary.

The same would be true for an employer — like of a group health plan — if they’re trying to share information about employees but it’s going to be very narrow in what they can actually share. And they can’t just cite as an exception that it’s for the public health interest.. You don’t necessarily have to disclose what country they’ve been to it’s just have they been to a region that’s on a restricted list for travel. So it’s finding creative ways to relay the necessary information you need and if there’s anything less intrusive you’re required to go that route.

That said, just last week HHS also issued another bullet saying that they would waive HIPAA sanctions and penalties during the nationwide public health emergency. But it was only directed to hospitals — so it doesn’t apply to all covered entities.

They also issued another bulletin saying that they would lax restrictions on basically sharing data on using electronic means. So there’s very heightened restrictions on how you can share data electronically when it relates to medical and health information. And so this was allowing doctors to communicate by FaceTime or video chat and other methods that may not be encrypted or secure. Or communicate with patients etc. So they’re giving a waiver or just softening some of the restrictions related to transferring health data electronically.

So you can see it’s an evolving situation but they’ve still taken a very reserved and kind of conservative approach — really emphasizing that you do need to comply with your obligation to protect health data. So that’s where you see the strongest implementations. And then the FCC coming at it from a consumer protection point of view.

Going back to the point you made earlier about Google sharing data [with governments] — you could get there, it just depends on how their privacy policies are structured.

In terms of tracking individuals we don’t have a national statute like GDPR that would prevent that but it would also be very difficult to anonymize that data because it’s so tied to individuals — it’s like your DNA; you can map a person leaving home, going to work or school, going to a doctor’s office, coming back home — and it really does have very sensitive information and because of all the specific data points it means it’s very difficult to anonymize it and provide it in a format that wouldn’t violate someone’s privacy without their consent. And so while you may not need full consent in the US you would still need to have notice and transparency about the policies.

Then it would be slightly different if you’re a California resident — the degree that you need under the new California law [CCPA] to provide disclosures and give individuals the opportunity to opt out if you were to share their information. So in that case, where the telecoms companies are potentially going to be sued by the FCC for sharing data with third parties, that in particular would also violate the new California law if consumers weren’t given the opportunity to opt out of having their information sold.

So there’s a lot of different puzzle pieces that fit together since we have a patchwork quilt of data protection — depending on the different state and federal laws.

The government, I guess, could issue other mandates or regulations [to requisition telco tracking data for a COVID-related public health purpose] — I don’t know that they will. I would envisage more of a call to arms requesting support and assistance from the private sector. Not a mandate that you must share your data, given the way our government is structured. Unless things get incredibly dire I don’t really see a mandate to companies that they have to share certain data in order to be able to track patients.

[If Google makes use of health-related searches/queries to enrich user profiles it uses for commercial purposes] that in and of itself wouldn’t be protected health information.

Google is not a [HIPAA] covered entity. And depending on what type of support it’s providing for covered entities it may be in limited circumstances could be considered a business associate that could be subject to HIPAA but in the context of just collecting data on consumers it wouldn’t be governed by that.

So as long as it’s not doing anything outside the scope of what’s already in its privacy policies then it’s fine — so the fact that it’s collecting data based on searches that you run on Google that should be in the privacy policy anyway. It doesn’t need to be specific to the type of search that you’re running. So the fact that it’s looking up how to get COVID testing or treatment or what are the symptoms for COVID, things like that, that can all be tied to the data [it holds on users] and enriched. And that can also be shared and sold to third parties — unless you’re a California resident. They have a separate privacy policy for California residents… They just have to consistent with their privacy policy.

The interesting thing to me is maybe the approach that Asia has taken — where they have a lot more influence over the commercial sector and data tracking–  and so you actually have the regulator stepping in and doing more tracking, not just private companies. But private companies are able to provide tracking information.

You see it actually with Uber. They’ve issued additional privacy notices to consumers — saying that to the extent we become aware of a passenger that has had COVID or a driver, we will notify people who have come into contact with that Uber over a given time period. They’re trying to take the initiative to do their own tracking to protect workers and consumers.

And they can do that — they just have to be careful about how much detail they share about personal information. Not naming names of who was impacted [but rather saying something like] ‘in the last 24 hours you may have ridden in an Uber that was impacted or known to have an infected individual in the Uber’.

[When it comes to telehealth platforms and privacy protections] it depends if they’re considered a business associate of a covered entity. So they may not be a covered entity themselves but if they are a business associate supporting a covered entity — for example a hospital or a clinic or insurers sharing that data and relying on a telehealth platform. In that context they would be governed by some of the same privacy and security regulations under HIPAA.

Some of them are slightly different for a business associate compared to a covered entity but generally you step in the shoes of the covered entity if you’re handling the covered entity’s data and have the same restrictions apply to you.

Aggregate data wouldn’t be considered protected health information — so they could [for example] share a symptom heat map that doesn’t identify specific individuals or patients and their health data.

[But] standalone telehealth apps that are collecting data directly from the consumer are not covered by HIPAA.

That’s actually a big loophole in terms of consumer protection, privacy protections related to health data. You have the same issue for all the health fitness apps — whether it’s your fitbit or other health apps or if you’re pregnant and you have an app that tracks your maternity or your period or things like that. Any of that data that’s collected is not protected.

The only protections you have are whatever disclosures are in the privacy policies. And in them having to be transparent and act within that privacy policy. If they don’t they can face an enforcement action by the FCC but that is not regulated by the Department of Health and Human Services under HIPAA.

So it’s a very different approach than under GDPR which is much more comprehensive.

That’s not to say in the future we might see a tightening of restrictions on that but individuals are freely giving that information — and in theory should read the privacy policy that’s provided when you log into the app. But most users probably don’t read that and then that data can be shared with other third parties.

They could share it with a regulator, they could sell it to other third parties so long as they have the proper disclosure that they may sell your personal information or share it with third parties. It depends on how they’re privacy policy is crafted. So long as it covers those specific actions. And for California residents it’s a more specific test — there are more disclosures that are required.

For example the type of data that you’re collecting, the purpose that you’re collecting it for, how you intend to process that data, who you intend to share it with and why. So it’s tightened for California residents but for the rest of the US you just have to be consistent with your privacy policy and you aren’t required to have the same level of disclosures.

More sophisticated, larger companies, though, definitely are already complying with GDPR — or endeavouring to comply with the California law — and so they have more sophisticated, detailed privacy notices than are maybe required by law in the US. But they’re kind of operating on a global platform and trying to have a global privacy policy.

*Disclosure: Verizon is TechCrunch’s parent company