Year: 2020

In a press conference on Monday, President Donald Trump indicated that the Senate is set to revisit an aid package designed to respond to the economic and social stresses caused by the novel coronavirus outbreak.

“We’re looking at that through the Senate,” the president said when asked about potential changes to the House bill. 

The bill, which was approved by the House of Representatives early Saturday morning after nearly a full day of negotiations with the White House, included expanded funding for coronavirus testing and aid for American workers whose livelihoods were impacted by the economic fallout caused by the response to the spread of COVID-19.

The bill included an expansion of healthcare benefits, social assistance programs for food and medical coverage, and a provision for paid time off for workers impacted by the disease’s spread — but the provision only covered small and medium-sized businesses.

Critics pointed out that the bill left a huge swath of the American workforce without assurances that they would be able to take time off if they, or a family member or loved one, became ill.

It seems that the Senate will now take up the bill to expand assistance, according to a statement from the president.

“They’re working together very well with the House,” President Trump said. “They’re working to only enhance it and make it better and make it fair for everybody.”

In a press conference on Monday, President Donald Trump indicated that the Senate is set to revisit an aid package designed to respond to the economic and social stresses caused by the novel coronavirus outbreak.

“We’re looking at that through the Senate,” the president said when asked about potential changes to the House bill. 

The bill, which was approved by the House of Representatives early Saturday morning after nearly a full day of negotiations with the White House, included expanded funding for coronavirus testing and aid for American workers whose livelihoods were impacted by the economic fallout caused by the response to the spread of COVID-19.

The bill included an expansion of healthcare benefits, social assistance programs for food and medical coverage, and a provision for paid time off for workers impacted by the disease’s spread — but the provision only covered small and medium-sized businesses.

Critics pointed out that the bill left a huge swath of the American workforce without assurances that they would be able to take time off if they, or a family member or loved one, became ill.

It seems that the Senate will now take up the bill to expand assistance, according to a statement from the president.

“They’re working together very well with the House,” President Trump said. “They’re working to only enhance it and make it better and make it fair for everybody.”

The White House held another press briefing on Monday to provide an update on its response to the continued coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. President Trump opened by identifying new guidelines in place to mitigate and slow the spread of COVID-19. These include advice to begin homeschooling kids wherever possible, as well as avoiding gathering in groups of over 10 people. The administration is also advising avoiding discretionary travel, as well as eating at bars, restaurants and food courts.

These measures, arrived at by Trump’s coronavirus task force, are meant to apply for at least the next 15 days – though in response to a question from the press corps about how long the President imagines the coronavirus situation lasting, he suggested that it could last until “July or August” or “even longer.” That’s a very different tune from when he referred to the coronavirus as a “hoax” employed by the Democrats at a campaign rally in late February.

The recommendations also clarify that not only should individuals stay away bars and restaurants (and to use drive-through, pick-up or delivery instead), in states where there is evidence of COVID-19 transmission, they further recommend that restaurants and bars actually be closed by their owners and operators. These guidelines also says that anyone who feels sick should stay home and contact their medical provider, and that when one member of a household has tested positive, the entire household should quarantine at home to prevent transmission.

Additional guidelines include the existing advice for washing hands, “especially after touching any frequently used item or surface,” avoiding touching your face, sneezing or coughing into a tissue or your elbow, and disinfecting items and surfaces that you use frequently.

Physician and coronavirus task force member Dr. Deborah Birx it is “the millennial that are going to lead us through this” in her remarks, noting that they’re relying on young people to follow this advice especially in order to avoid transmission to more vulnerable members of the population.

Vice President Mike Pence said that “this guidance for the next 15 days is what our experts say is the best opportunity we have to lower the infection rate over the entire course of the coronavirus.”

The ongoing COVID-19 crisis is going to prove a major test of the gig economy. Already an ever-increasingly important part of our daily lives, grocery and food delivery services along with ride-hailing apps are going to play a fundamental role in helping individuals enact government-recommended social distancing.

More often than not, however, these workers get short shrift. Many times those who drive our cars and deliver our food do so with little pay and long hours. As for healthcare, well, that’s a distant dream for many.

This situation is only going to worsen many of these issues, and there’s a very real fear that the United States’ inability to provide the working class with a legitimate social safety net will only incentivize workers to continue to do their job while sick, further exacerbating the spread of the novel coronavirus, in spite of restrictions on gatherings and other attempts to increase social distancing.

Things are changing quickly and will continue to do so. This situation is, in many respects, unprecedented in recent memory. Curbing the impact of COVID-19 and supporting the workers whose job it is to help support those of us who have the job flexibility and financial capabilities to stay at home will require flexibility and creativity on behalf of policy makers. We’ve reached out to a number of those companies whose job it is to ensure the safety and well-being of a team of freelancers.

Delivery.com

The service is among those that have introduced a contactless delivery option, letting users choose from one of three methods:

• Please deliver to my door
• Please leave order outside my door
• Call when here and leave order at building entrance

“We have also taken steps to educate our restaurants, stores and delivery personnel on the importance of these instructions to ensure that your food is brought to you in the safest way possible,” the site writes.

Lyft

In a comment offered to TechCrunch, Lyft says it’s “monitoring the…situation closely.” Here’s the full statementL:

We are monitoring the coronavirus situation closely, and taking action based on guidance from the Centers for Disease Control. Our focus is on keeping our riders, drivers and team members safe. We have an internal task force dedicated solely to this issue, and are prepared to take action as needed.

Postmates

Postmates recently added “non-contact” deliveries to its list of app options. The service launched a Relief Fund aimed at helping shoulder medical expenses for impacted delivery people. It also is offering up to two weeks of paid sick leave for those who test positive for COVID-19.

Seamless

Seamless notes that dine-in has grown upwards of 75% (a number that will no doubt only increase). As such, it will be deferring commission fees to independent restaurants impacted by the crisis. It also is offering of a “contact-free” delivery option.

“For the safety of you and our drivers, drivers will call/text when they arrive and drop off your order on the doorstep, in the lobby or other area designated by you.” This option is now available on the website and latest version of the app.

Uber

In a blog post titled “Supporting you during the Coronavirus,” Uber laid out next steps over the weekend. The top-level item is financial assistance to drivers who are infected and placed in quarantine by a public health authority. Assistance will be provided for up to 14 days.

“Every eligible driver in the U.S. will receive a minimum payment of $50, even if they have only done one trip,” Uber writes. “The minimum payment will differ by country.”

Uber Eats

Like others, Uber Eats is offering a contactless option. The service is also providing some financial assistance to delivery people and providing more than 300,000 free meals to first responders in the U.S. and Canada.

In Europe, Deliveroo and Glovo introduced contactless options last week.

Six Bay Area Counties — San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Marin, Contra Costa and Alameda — announced a “shelter in place” order. The lockdown, unveiled at a press conference earlier, starts at 12:01 AM Tuesday. It’s not a full lockdown, but it’s quite sweeping and strict nonetheless, as North California attempts to curb the exponential spread of COVID-19.

“There is no need to panic,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said in a press conference today, continuing a plea to cooler heads amid the pandemic.

The order will be in place through April 7. Breed added that the date could be adjusted, based on how things play out. “It could be amended to be lengthen or shortened,” she explained, “depending on advice from our public health members.” The team aims to prioritize three elements during the crisis: reducing community spread through social distancing, protecting vulnerable populations and protecting healthcare workers and first responders.

Per the SF Chron, the included communities total more than 6.7 million people. The move follows previous city- and statewide bans on gatherings of more than 250 people, but takes a far more aggressive approach, banning travel via “foot, bicycle, scooter, automobile or public transit” that is deemed non-essential.

Exclusions include healthcare, purchasing “essential” supplies and aiding friends and family who require support. There’s also an exception for non-Bay Area residents looking to return home. Both airports and public transit will remain open under limited operation for essential travel, while requiring people to maintain a six foot “social distancing.”

Services like police, fire and garbage pickup will remain throughout the lockdown. Grocery stores, banks and gas stations will remain open to help residents pick up essential supplies. Bars and gyms will shut down, while restaurants will only be open for takeout. 

An exemption will also be provided to for the tens of thousands of homeless people who reside in the Bay Area, though the city is recommending they seek lodging at a local shelter. Last week San Francisco announced a plan to deploy RVs across the city to quarantine homeless residents infected by the virus.

One of the defining characteristics of the European Union has been its strong policy of taking an open approach when it comes to borders in the region: the EU may be a collection of individual countries, but it works as one, and so when you travel from one to the other as an EU citizen, you can move as freely as you do within your own country. Now, in the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic, all that is changing. Today the EU announced new measures to limit movement between borders within the EU, with the restrictions initially covering 30 days.

After that, Russia, which shares a border with various countries in the EU, also announced its own border closure.

We have already had a number of border closures within the EU and the wider region — in keeping with the global response to movement, and specifically in response to outbreaks that starter earlier (for example, Italy has had travel restrictions in place for weeks at this point). The aim with today’s announcement — laid out in a press briefing — however, is to bring about a more coordinated approach across the region.

“Our measures to contain the Coronavirus outbreak will be effective only if we coordinate on the European level,” said EU president Ursula von der Leyen in a statement. She added that the travel ban does not extend to everyone: emergency medical professionals and other essential goods and services will continue to move across borders, as will citizens of the respective countries coming home, and those making their way home through a country. “We have to take exceptional measures to protect the health of our citizens. But let’s make sure goods and essential services continue to flow in our internal market. This is the only way to prevent shortages of medical equipment or food. It’s not only an economic issue: our single market is a key instrument of European solidarity. I am in discussion with all Member States so that we confront this challenge together, as a Union.”

Russia, meanwhile, had closed off borders with specific countries such as Iran (which has been one of the worst-hit countries globally) and Poland, and now it is closing off its border to all international travel until the beginning of May (for now), with the exception of Russian nationals, airline professionals, diplomats and a few other specific categories.

Border closures are coming into effect the world over in an effort to stem the infection rate of the novel coronavirus, with the UK yesterday announcing more restrictions on travel, and Canada raising its walls earlier today. (The UK is not included in the EU measures, given its exit from the European Union; but it has followed suit regardless on its own steam and via its own policies.)

Many of these measures are coming in the wake of a serious curtailment of travel anyway — a trend that has had a severe impact already on airlines and other companies in the travel and tourism industries.

The impact on tech in Europe (and indeed, globally) has been a palpable chilling effect. Apart from the direct hit that travel, tourism and related startups are feeling, overall it has meant a drastic wave of event cancellations, meetings and overall activity. There has, of course, remained a commitment to continue business as usual, or at least try to, and that will hopefully be a reality in the medium term, even if for now, it’s wheels down, wheels down.

Uber Eats said Monday it will waive delivery fees for all orders from independently owned restaurants on the app as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread and causes cities to shutter all non-essential businesses.

Restaurants throughout the U.S. are facing economic headwinds as city and state officials take steps to stop the spread of COVID-19, a disease caused by novel coronavirus. Denver Mayor Michael Hancock ordered Monday the closure of all restaurants and bars except for delivery and carryout service for the next two months. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti ordered all restaurants in the city to close, except for delivery and takeout until at least March 31. New York City has directed all bars and restaurants to close. Restaurants in NYC can still deliver food.

There are more than 100,000 local restaurants on the Uber Eats app, according to the company.

“As more people stay home, local restaurants need your business more than ever. That’s why we’re waiving the Delivery Fee for all orders from every independent restaurant on Uber Eats—more than 100,000 local restaurants on the app,” the company said in an email Monday morning.

Customers can find the independent restaurants by looking for the EAT LOCAL banner in the app. Delivery Fees will be automatically waived on all applicable orders.

Uber Eats is also taking precautions to limit the spread of COVID-19, including the option of contactless deliveries and working to provide drivers with sanitization materials. The company added that “as always, your food items aren’t touched once they’ve been packed by the restaurant.”

Uber Eats said it will support its delivery people and drivers with financial assistance in the event of a COVID-19 diagnosis or exposure that prevents them from working and is committing more than 300,000 free meals on Uber Eats to healthcare workers and first responders in the U.S. and Canada.

Service, a tool that helped you get compensation when there are flight delays and find lower hotel rates after you’ve already booked, today said it would shut down its service.

The company, which launched in 2015, says it faced a fundraising round that collapsed two weeks ago and was in the middle of an acquisition that collapsed on Friday. It cites the current economic downturn and COVID-19 as the reason for both of these events.

Service will shut down later this week, on Friday, March 20. It’ll try to refund subscribers (pending its cash position), route all pending claims directly to existing users and delete all personal information from its customers within the next 30 days.

It’s worth noting that Service founder and CEO Michael Schneider also notes that since it was founded, the company never turned a profit, even though it recovered over $4,000,000 for its customers.

“Despite partnerships with major brands such as KAYAK and Microsoft, we have never turned a profit, despite a focus on revenue growth and cost cutting through software automation,” Schneider writes. “We were in the middle of a fundraise when it collapsed two weeks ago, and then we were in the middle of an acquisition that collapsed last Friday due to everything going on with COVID-19 and the economy.”

With the current downturn in travel, we’ll likely see more travel startups collapse. Margins are notoriously low in this business and a lot of companies depend on what is essentially affiliate marketing revenue. Since the travel industry is currently in a tailspin, that source of revenue is quickly dwindling for this class of startups.

Service had raised a total of $5.1 million since it was founded. Investors include Founders Fund, which led its seed round, as well as Menlo Ventures, Maveron, Xfund, Flight Ventures and others. The company last raised a convertible note last September.

“I remain proud of what we accomplished over the last nearly five years, and I’m grateful to our investors, employees, and customers for all their support. While I regret not succeeding in building a sustainable long term business, I am proud that we tried, and that we made people’s lives a bit easier around customer service,” writes Schneider.

In a briefing on Monday, research leaders across tech, academia, and the government joined the White House to announce an open dataset full of scientific literature on the novel coronavirus. The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, known as CORD-19, will also add relevant new research moving forward, compiling it into one centralized hub. The new dataset is machine readable, making it easily parsed for machine learning purposes—a key advantage according to researchers involved in the ambitious project.

In a press conference, U.S. CTO Michael Kratsios called the new dataset the “most extensive collection of machine readable coronavirus literature to date.” Kratsios characterized the project as a “call to action” for the AI community, which can employ machine learning techniques to surface unique insights in the body of data. To come up with guidance for researchers combing through the data, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine collaborated with the World Health Organization to come up with “high priority” questions about the coronavirus related to genetics, incubation, treatment, symptoms and prevention.

The partnership, announced today by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, brings together the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Microsoft Research, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine, Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the Kaggle AI platform, owned by Google.

The database brings together nearly 30,000 scientific articles about COVID-19 as well as related viruses, like SARS-CoV-2 and others in the broader coronavirus group. Around half of those articles make the full text available. Critically, the database will include pre-publication research from resources like medRxiv and bioRxiv, open access archives for pre-print health sciences and biology research.

“Sharing vital information across scientific and medical communities is key to accelerating our ability to respond to the coronavirus pandemic,” said Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Head of Science, Cori Bargmann said of the project.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative hopes that the global machine learning community will be able to help the science community connect the dots on some of the some enduring mysteries about the novel coronavirus as scientists pursue knowledge around prevention, treatment and a vaccine.

For updates to the CORD-19 dataset, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will track new research on a dedicated page on Meta, the research search engine the organization acquired in 2017.

The CORD-19 dataset announcement is certain to roll out more smoothly than the White House’s last attempt at a coronavirus-related partnership with the tech industry. The White House came under criticism last week for President Trump’s announcement that Google would build a dedicated website for COVID-19 screening. In fact, the site was in development by Verily, Alphabet’s life science research group, and intended to serve California residents, beginning with San Mateo and Santa Clara County. (Alphabet is the parent company of Google.)

The site, now live, offers risk screening through an online questionnaire to direct high risk individuals toward local mobile testing sites. At this time, the project has no plans for a nationwide rollout.

Google later clarified that the company is undertaking its own efforts to bring crucial COVID-19 information to users across its products, but that may have become conflated with Verily’s much more limited screening site rollout. On Twitter, Google’s comms team noted that Google is indeed working with the government on a website, but not one intended to screen potential COVID-19 patients or refer them to local testing sites.

In a partial clarification over the weekend, Vice President Pence, one of the the Trump administration’s designated point people on the pandemic, indicated that the White House is “working with Google” but also “working with many other tech companies.” It’s not clear if that means a central site will indeed launch soon out of a White House collaboration with Silicon Valley, but Pence hinted that might be the case. If that centralized site will handle screening and testing location referral is not clear.

“Our best estimate… is that some point early in the week we will have a website that goes up,” Pence said.

The first step to combating climate change for businesses is for them to understand their contributions to it. That’s where the new Y Combinator graduate, SINAI Technologies, comes in.

Founded by Maria Fujihara, a 16-year veteran of the sustainability industry whose previous work had been around the technical adaptation of LEED certification tools, SINAI is the culmination of her years of working to adapt certification tools to international markets and five years spent researching carbon emissions profiles — most recently at Singularity University .

“When I started the company, I started to do carbon offsets,” Fujihara said. “For the past three years companies and governments have been calculating their carbon emissions and they know their carbon footprint and they know their carbon inventory and they’ve been using their carbon inventory to buy carbon credits.”

The market is mature enough for more companies to get involved, she said. “Emissions have only increased in the past six years and not decreased at all,” said Fujihara. “We’re not thinking of mitigation solutions.”

Companies have been focusing on understanding their measurements, but not identifying how to mitigate those emissions through different policies — or even what areas of the business to target, Fujihara said.

“Once we understand their business as user scenarios we can reduce emissions in their value chain,” she said.

The SINAI service automates different reporting and data around emissions for companies to monitor in an easy format. “It’s kind of like doing financial analysis, but doing the environmental analysis in addition,” said Fujihara. “We allow them to do this year-by-year, if not quarter-by-quarter.”

Right now the company is focused on five industries: manufacturing, transportation, apparel and retail, food and beverage and real estate. 

“The building blocks of a carbon journey are: create carbon emissions inventories (footprint), build a low-carbon scenario by selecting options that will reduce emissions, set up a carbon reduction target (science-based or not), calculate their carbon budget, analyze potential carbon taxes, define an optimal carbon price and finally, do external scenario analysis (based on national or international policies compliance),” the company said in a statement. 

Joining Fujihara is Alain Rodriguez, one of the first 20 engineers at Uber who is now focused on the climate issue.

“Basically, we combine climate finance methodologies, to manage emissions reductions and costs related to the implementation of low-carbon technologies (ultimately, this is what a carbon price means for a company). Our inter-dependent modules allow us to onboard companies at any moment of their carbon journey and provide value on every single step,” SINAI said in a statement.