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We're in a worldwide pandemic. WHO says, "Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus."
The virus can cause respiratory illness with symptoms such as a cough, fever and in more severe cases, pneumonia and/or death. We recommend following CDC safety guidelines, but also doing your own research. It's exponential growth carries massive business and technological implications.
Over the last few months misinformation has been spreading almost as quickly as the coronavirus. Social media has been inundated with false claims and misleading statements.
Scientists in Singapore have invented a disinfecting robot that imitates human gestures to help cleaning staff overwhelmed since the start of the coronavirus crisis. The "XDBOT" is a rectangular box-shaped robot mounted on wheels and armed with an articulated arm which can be operated remotely. He can reach places that are difficult to clean with great dexterity, such as the space under beds or tables.
The old axiom that one should never waste a good crisis, appears to be the driving force behind one of Big-Tech's biggest rivalries seen in Google and Apple that are now working together in an unorthodox partnership to create the ultimate privacy buster - a coronavirus tracking app.
The COVID-19 Global Hackathon is an opportunity for developers to build software solutions that drive social impact, with the aim of tackling some of the challenges related to the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Governments around the world have instituted lockdowns to try and slow the Covid-19 pandemic, saying that only essential workers should be still going into work. But that just raises the question: who is an essential worker in a pandemic?
More than two thirds of the U.S. population is now stuck at home as more states are creating new restrictions to try to slow the spread of COVID-19. The internet is now being used more than ever as millions are turning to it as an alternative source of social connection, work, and entertainment. In Seattle, one of the cities in the U.S. that was hardest hit by the virus, internet traffic quickly began to rise - from January to March it has risen by an astounding 30%. Other U.S. ISPs are noticing huge spikes in WiFi calling, online gaming, and VPN usage across the country. With a huge number of increased active users, governments and companies alike are making moves to help Americans stay online. One of these steps is the FCC’s Keep Americans Connected pledge that over 70 telecom companies have signed stating that these companies will waive late fees and retain service even with lack of payment. Other companies are making public WiFi networks for students and remote workers. Comcast is setting up public hotspots for free use, Comcast and Spectrum are both offering 2 free months of access to low-income families, and AT&T is suspending broadband usage caps.
No matter where you are on Earth, you can feel the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Coronavirus has a negative impact on the industry, tourism, trade, stock markets, and of course, cryptocurrencies. In this article, we will consider how this epidemic has affected the blockchain industry and how it will affect the development of the cryptocurrency industry.
The burden the COVID-19 novel coronavirus has placed on the world is enormous. There’s a great thirst for information and clarity. So, we at Logz.io have decided to offer a Community COVID-19 Dashboard Project, so that everyone can better understand how the outbreak impacts the world and their region. We see that as a community effort. We invite the global community of engineers and data scientists to add data to this public dashboard that will cover not just the direct impact of the coronavirus on public health, but other aspects of society as well. We want to help everyone better understand the impact of COVID-19 anywhere around the world.
Wearing a face mask has recently become a norm for people across the country as the CDC has resolved that all Americans should wear a face covering when in public to slow the spread. The WHO recommends wearing a face mask if either you are caring for a person that is suspected of having COVID-19 or you yourself are sneezing, coughing, or sick. The WHO also stresses that face masks are only effective if you use them properly, and are not a replacement for frequent handwashing or hand sanitizing. The CDC advises wearing a face mask in a public setting where social distancing is impractical or in areas where transmission can easily happen. The CDC stresses that face masks do not replace other social distancing measures and should be made at home or made of cloth, rather than surgical masks or N95 masks.
One of the most terrifying parts of the current crisis is uncertainty. Uncertainty is one of the most terrifying things people can experience in general. Absolutely everyone I have spoken to is absolutely convinced that a lot of the information available is either biased, doctored or flat-out false.
The COVID-19 crisis has hit the global economy hard, and the software industry was not spared. The long-term effects on the industry are still unclear, but it seems it has become widely acknowledged that the negative impact is going to be massive, and recovery will be slow.
The year 2020 has started off quite roughly: the new COVID-19 virus, already dubbed as a pandemic by the World Health Organization, spread across the world quite rapidly, already infecting hundreds of thousands and killing tens of thousands of people.
As all of us are trying to fight against the fear of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a lot of talk in the e-commerce industry about the imbalance of meeting the demands of consumers for groceries and other essentials. Many families in America, India, and Europe are trying digital e-commerce services for the first time.
If you have been following social media during this pandemic, and it’s hard to avoid it, you may have noticed that conspiracy theories about the origins of the virus are multiplying like weeds.
When the world went into lockdown in March, the blockchain event industry ground to a halt, and then switched to the online format. Fast-forward six months, and the first post-lockdown offline events are already being scheduled. We've chatted with George Mac – CEO of the mining platform KELTA – and the man behind the upcoming SLOBLOCO congress in Bratislava, Slovakia.
The future for many SMB restaurants is unknown right now. With social distancing and hospitality guidelines varying by state and county, it's been a difficult road. The industry itself was originally projected to reach $899 billion in projected sales in 2020, now, that is unknown.
More than 140 countries have been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. According to stats, 85K+ people have been affected and the numbers are expected to rise.
Today’s technology is about the future of application development rather than the past. The shift to modern tools such as low-code is happening no matter the controversies.
Walking a mile in someone else's shoes, they say, is the best way to understand them. Last week, I donned a foil hat and took to Twitter. I wasn't out to understand conspiracy theorists – I was sarcastically mocking them. But now I do better understand how the fringes are drawn to conspiracy theories.
Coronavirus (COVID-19) which is an infectious disease caused by respiratory illness and symptoms like flu, cough, fever, difficulty breathing, on December 31, 2019, the first case was recorded in Wuhan, China and later the virus got spread around the world and as of now, around 1 million+ confirmed cases are being recorded since then.
You can protect yourself from this virus by following basic precautions like washing your hand frequently, avoid touching your face, maintaining a distance of (1 meter or 3 feet) between people and most importantly if you are sick then immediately call for medical help at your nearest hospital.
In the past decades, the Coronavirus (COVID-19) is one of the most infectious diseases to have spread on our planet Earth. As we have seen that this virus has already created havoc in the entire world, so it becomes necessary to take the help of technology, and here AI comes into the picture.
As the novel coronavirus rips through America, its effect is being felt far beyond the over 1.5 million Americans who are confirmed infected. The ill-health, quarantines, and lockdowns that are needed to fight the virus’s spread are freezing the economy. The fluctuating stock market has wiped out three years of gains. A record 3.3 million Americans have applied for unemployment benefits, the highest number ever recorded.
Right now, there are over 40 open-source ventilator projects seeking to save lives by providing last-resort ventilators when there are not enough officially approved ventilators. Some are better than others. The biggest gap between where they are today and being able to save lives tomorrow is testing.
With the outbreak of COVID-19, staying healthy and keeping your immune system in tip-top shape has become more important than ever. The immune system is the body’s natural response to disease and infection and consists of a number of cells and organs that work together to fight a variety of intruders, such as bacteria, viruses, parasites, and more. COVID-19 is especially dangerous, as compared to a previously existing virus such as the flu, because it is new. Because it is new, no one has been previously exposed, meaning they aren’t already immune to it and are still at risk, regardless of overall health. When exposed to antigens, which is a foreign object that causes a response from the immune system, there is normally a barrier between the antigen and your body. These antigens can be found nearly everywhere, ranging from public spaces, to inside your home, in the great outdoors, and more. In the case where an antigen does enter the body, the immune system sends white blood cells to destroy the antigen before it can get worse and reproduce.
COVID-19 has caused schools all around the world to close their doors and send millions of students to start learning from home. This sudden change is bound to cause problems, and parents, teachers, and students are feeling the effects of this change. Parents are concerned about how well their children will react to the new learning environment. Nearly 90% of parents of students that are learning from home are worried that their child may start to fall behind academically and more than 8 out of every 10 parents are struggling to keep their child engaged and paying attention.
No matter if you started working remotely during the pandemic or you've been part of the gig economy long before - you’ll often wonder how to increase your team productivity while working remotely.
COVID-19 has closed down thousands of businesses, stores, and restaurants have millions of workers laid off or put on furlough. As of April 30, 2020, 30 million working Americans filed an initial unemployment claim - that’s nearly 20% of the total workforce. Laid off employees are totally removed from a company, removed from a company’s payroll, and lose all employer-provided benefits.
The holiday season is all about spreading happiness. It is also the season of big sales for retail stores. Retailers have high hopes of ending the year with big profits. But just like many other things, holiday shopping will be different in 2020. And that’s why retailers have to adjust their holiday sales strategy to achieve their year-end goals.
In this new age of COVID-19, wound care has become harder than ever. Wound care specialists and clinics have seen huge drop-offs in the number of patients that they are able to treat as COVID-19 spreads across the country. Hospital-based, outpatient wound care clinics are shortening hours or closing down entirely. Patients suffering from wounds are cancelling at-home appointments and are declining to visit clinics. Post-operative patients are requiring new ways to be cared for remotely. Nursing homes around the country are banning visitors, including wound care specialists, in an attempt to stave off infection and protect vulnerable patients.
The novel coronavirus might not be the world’s first pandemic or even the deadliest. But the virus has set the stage for a truly unprecedented time of global harmony.
As I write this on April 18, 2020, there are over 156,000 global deaths due to COVID-19, which is actually a tiny percent, however, this disease is incredibly communicable and is still not well understood.
Hippocrates and Galen are foundational figures in the history of medicine (remember the Hippocratic Oath) -- but when it came to the plague they had simple guidance -- “Cito, Longe, Tarde,” which translates as “Leave quickly, go far away and come back slowly.”
We are all aware of the situation that’s currently happening with the Coronavirus. Some people think that it’s not a big deal, it’ll go away in the next month or so, but these people don’t understand how deadly it can be for the tech industry and the global economy as well. Since the global economy is not my field, I’ll focus on the tech industry.
Feelings of isolation and loneliness have spiked in the past few months with most people now stuck at home with the outbreak of COVID-19. However, even before the pandemic, Americans still felt this isolation and loneliness - more than half of American adults said that they felt alone, at least some of the time. All generations, from Gen Z and Millennials to Gen X and Baby Boomers still feel lonely. Working at home may be a culprit for loneliness - remote workers are more likely to feel lonely as compared to traditional workers. K-12 teachers are the least likely to feel lonely - but with millions of students being sent home and online school taking over, this may be changing.
If you've found yourself binging an embarrassing amount of shows and movies on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime in the past few weeks, you may want to consider dedicating some time to stream learning. Streaming learning programs, classes and webinars can give you some "brain exercise" during a time when we must social distance and inherently increase screen time.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is facing an unprecedented crisis and are being forced to quickly adjust to a new way of working. All organisations — large and small are facing a trial by fire against drops in productivity with remote work tools as their arsenal.
The one word that terrifies people in the world right now is COVID-19. Reports from The World Bank state that COVID-19 recession has seen the fastest, steepest downgrades among all the global recession since 1990. As the health and human toll grows, the economic damage is already evident and represents the most substantial economic shock the world has experienced in decades.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues in several countries, causing notable modifications to occur in workplaces; organizations are grabbing on to artificial intelligence, IoT services and as-a-service (aaS) models to conform to the fast-emerging realities. Therefore, only an alternative approach of collaboration can stimulate the clattered productivity and effectiveness of the global workforce in an enterprise, as these changes are sure to have a lasting influence on future workplace practices. Enterprises are looking for a method of transferring employee dependence on physical hardware and allocating increased investment into the software sphere, this is where UCaaS is implemented.
Medicine is taking a turn from physical to digital - by 2025, the digital therapeutics market is projected to hit $7.8 billion. The uses of digital therapeutics range wildly from alleviating symptoms of physiological and neurobehavioral symptoms to therapeutic interventions driven by software and tech to therapies to improve outcomes when combined with regular treatments. They also offer new options to those who have otherwise unmet needs, and can help reduce reliance on medication. Digital therapeutics can also be used in the treatment of diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular, central nervous, respiratory, and gastrointestinal problems.
Life is weird; it keeps changing the roles of the creatures and things that exist on the planet. The current corona pandemic situation that we all are going through has made many changes in our daily activities.
Build a scalable and privacy-first Internet on Second State’s serverless infrastructure. Get the email newsletter on Rust, WebAssembly, serverless, blockchain, and AI.
Instagram has just launched a co-scroll feature to help you survive the quarantine. According to Tech Crunch, it is officially known as Co-Watching; the feature lets friends (or followers) on a video chat go through posts related to a user’s activity. Co-Watching allegedly allows people to react to social media content in groups of two or more; this would mean that the pastime would no longer be a solo hobby.
The world as we know it has changed over the last couple of months. The far-reaching effects of Covid-19 have impacted all areas of daily life and, as we prepare to slowly reopen the economy, nimble small business owners are making the necessary adjustments to adapt their businesses.
For months, financial experts around the world had been predicting an end to what has been the longest economic expansion in American history. That expansion propelled US startup activity to new heights, with near-record levels of new business creation for successive years, and cemented the US's place as the premier startup ecosystem in the world. Many believed the economists' warnings to be alarmist, at best.
The global outbreak of the latest Coronavirus (COVID-19) at the beginning of this year caught many businesses and governments off guard. The global pandemic which to date has claimed the lives of over 347,106 people globally had brought businesses to a complete halt.
Denis Lagutenko - an entrepreneur, the founder of several projects in the fields of the Internet and affiliate marketing, as well as the owner of the manicure network WOW NAIL, one of the first who did not wait for the government guidance on quarantine and switched his companies to remote work before the official announcement.
Connecting with your community is a vital part of building awareness, trust, and loyalty. While this is always challenging, COVID-19's socially distancing has made it harder than ever. However, some small businesses have taken customer connection—both digital and in-person—to the next level despite the struggles that a global pandemic brings.
As we struggle with the Covid-19 pandemic, we are also learning some valuable lessons, and not only about how to handle an outbreak on this scale. We can also learn from the ‘success’ of the virus to build a new economic model that is robust enough to withstand another crisis, as well as creating a dynamic digital finance system to carry us through into the next decade and beyond.
Soon after COVID-19 hit the world, hospitals across the country started quickly filling up with new patients and forcing some of the long-term care patients out of hospitals. Most of those long-term care patients now can’t go to hospitals due to how vulnerable they are to getting COVID-19. In order to still receive the attention and care that they need, many have turned to telemedicine. Technologies like video conferencing, data monitoring, and smartphone apps that are used to help keep and eye on and treat patients have all seen usage start to spike. CareClix, a virtual health company which has over 20 million users, saw a 50% rise in usage in March alone and Zipnosis, another virtual health company, reported a 3,600% increase in virtual visits over the course of just 11 days in February. The idea of telehealth is not a new concept - as early as 1924, Radio New Magazine featured an illustration of a physician attending to his patient via video. In 1967, the University of Miami’s medical school worked with the local fire department to help set up a system where emergency patient info could be transferred remotely.
We are aware of how the coronavirus pandemic has affected the labor market and is killing the middle class. However, here I want to talk about how it is also keeping entrepreneurs on their toes. They are as we speak planning for the ‘new normal’ with every update that comes their way.
Recently there was this news where a single customer decided to buy a bunch of americanos (roughly $1071 worth) just to buy 17 "summer bags" that was launched by Starbucks Korea. This event just to show how Starbucks Korea succeeds in bring customers to their doorstep despite the pandemic.
Bet you’ve never heard this one ― the world will never be the same after the pandemic. Among the many negative things it puts us through, there are at least some that advance us towards more automation in our everyday life. Most businesses and government facilities are going digital; there are no lines in the buildings, no unnecessary contact with people, even the amount of paperwork has shrunk. A lot of these tasks are being carried out at least in part with technologies, and today we’ll take a look at the most efficient implementations of service robots, which more than likely are here to stay.
FinTech has been around for years. Whether you believe it to be the growth of PayPal in a world where digital payments were almost noon-existent to the rise of banking apps that allowed people to make transactions easily, there has always been some form of FinTech available for people to easily live their lives.
Digital Transformation in every field of our lives has led to the increased collection of our personal data on every device we touch from laptops to mobile phones, to tablets, leaving a digital trail. This data is then used for various purposes such as targeted advertising, research proposes or even corporate espionage. But boundaries need to be set to avoid corporate or other malicious parties taking advantage of this information or even corrupting it.
Thousands of COVID-19 deaths have been linked to nursing home residents or their caregivers - but COVID-19 isn’t stopping there. Though hundreds of thousands have been infected, efforts taken by governments such as social distancing have been proven to work. Looking at and comparing cities of similar sizes who enacted social distancing guidelines at different times can give us some insight on how well social distancing works.
The recent COVID-19 outbreak has taken the world to storm and demands for several instant changes both in the social and business world. Employees are now directed to work from home and here come some major issues.
COVID-19 has had a significant effect on nearly every facet of life, including the way we work. And while much of the impact that the crisis has brought to the workforce has been negative, including massive layoffs, meteoric spikes in employee burnout and a dizzying need for continuous adaptation, there’s also an enormous amount of newfound opportunity for workers.
The new normal of remote work is here. While the option to work from home was available at many organizations before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, this way of working has become a forced reality in certain industries. Lockdown restrictions are starting to ease up, but many companies are still enforcing or allowing their teams to work from home full- or part-time.
The definition of Emotional Intelligence states that it is: ”the ability to perceive, understand and influence our own and others’ emotions, across a range of contexts, to guide our current thinking and actions, to help us to achieve our goals”.
No one is sleeping well. There is a lot of uncertainty in the world and it’s not just from the pandemic - the economic downturn and struggle for equal rights seems to be overshadowing the pandemic. People are reporting strange and vivid dreams and nightmares and with it trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, and feeling rested when they wake up. It’s time to start hacking our minds so we can get the sleep we need to maintain our best health.
Technology has advanced rapidly when you look at how far we've come in the last decade or two, even when comparing the mobile phones of 2000 versus today. It's changed the world. Something else changing the world is the COVID-19 pandemic. As we get used to our new normal, technology will play a major role. For retailers, technology will be the most important tool in their journey to survive.
The COVID 19 pandemic has made the necessity for technology in all aspects of life undeniably evident: from online education software to AI technologies to self-train at home.
Your Easter plans for this year probably looked a lot different. Instead of spending time with our families and enjoying the first days of spring, we stayed home wondering how the future will look like.
There are two types of viruses: computer and biological ones. Neither of them brings happiness to those who have been affected. However, they do leave an important mark, and in some cases, the negative effects can last years or even trigger new issues.
Many employers have been asking me what they should write to their employee's during this hard time. I have to had to create a sample template that can be customized by both the employer type and the situation at hand.
You have probably read the stories about how scientists have discovered another universe close to our own, one in which time travels backwards. You may also have read articles that said "no, they haven't". So it currently looks like we don't have definitive evidence of other universes. Yet. That doesn't mean that there are not any other parallel or non-parallel universes out there.
Long before the coronavirus pandemic, governments around the world have been studying the role of a CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) in their economy.
I wrote this article for my fellow CEOs and all the rest of us in order to discover how to lead the organizations and teams who are challenged by these turbulent times.
This economy’s income inequality is well documented. The pandemic has begun to accelerate the widening of this gap. Those who are able to work
during a lockdown are HEAVILY advantaged. Now that it appears the United States has squandered the benefits of a lockdown, one has to accept the fact there will be more lockdowns.
With Australia having taken the first steps out of lockdown, and COVID-19 is being more controlled domestically, the question now looms – will there be a return to normalcy, or are there things that will now have changed permanently?
Last year, if someone would have told you that 2020 would bring record-breaking unemployment levels, millions of forced business closures, and a global disease outbreak that would claim the lives of millions of people worldwide (and counting), you would have thought they were crazy. Yet, here we are.
In recent months, individuals across the globe have shifted to a remote way of life, including working from home, virtual dating, drive-by birthday parties and now, even doctor’s appointments. The healthcare sector quickly implemented changes to provide a more remote experience to comply with social distancing regulations.
To decrease the number of face-to-face doctor’s appointments and adhere to social distancing limitations and regulations, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced they “will not impose penalties for noncompliance” with the regulatory requirements under the HIPAA Rules against covered health care providers in connection with the good faith provision of telehealth during the COVID-19 nationwide public health emergency.
"What I see is how the pandemic is exposing the inefficiency and inequality of the existing fiat system. Governments are printing money to bailout those who recklessly spent it during the good years. Banks lending government-backed money to those who don't need it instead of helping businesses in distress." - Lior Yaffe, Co-Founder, Jelrurida
The day that the Italian borders were reopened after the lockdown — on June 3rd — I drove across the Brenner Pass with an overwhelming joy. I could finally rejoin my family and my old friends.
In today's most talked about and not-talked about global news: Minneapolis; Brazil; Trump vs. Twitter; Xpeng vs. China; and two well-intentioned men with machetes and a broom end up in the wrong home Down Under.
Are you worried about the health or livelihoods of you and your loved ones? It's important to remember that you're not alone. The CDC takes your stress seriously enough during the pandemic that they have published signs and guidelines for detecting and handling stress and anxiety.
The CDC suggests to manage your own stress you consider taking the following steps:
OK, so maybe we’re all growing a little tired of staring at our computer screens all day. But would you rather be going into an office every day and potentially contracting the coronavirus? What about business travel? If your boss asked you to go on a business trip to a conference that involved airfare and eating out at restaurants, would you be completely comfortable with that right now? Chances are we are constantly weighing the risks and rewards of things these days to make decisions that three months ago were no big deal. Until there’s a vaccine or a cure, chances are we aren’t going to feel totally comfortable getting “back to normal” just yet. Sp what will business start to look like as people get back to normal activities from a distance?
As COVID-19 continues to devastate communities around the world, governments’ initial reactions - which were mostly that of surprise and shock - have been replaced with sheer determination to fight off the novel coronavirus by any means possible. Contact tracing is the latest approach, though by no means is it a novel one.
Like other industries, the world of marketing has had to go through a paradigm shift in the era of COVID-19. Just as Zoom has become a household name when it hadn’t been prior, consumer patterns have shifted to adjust to the pandemic. Whether the industry likes it or not, changes in a company’s marketing dynamic are not only happening — they’re also affecting brand image and customer engagement.
Incumbent Banks and financial technology startups (Fintechs) face very different challenges as they navigate the COVID-19 crisis. Despite sharing customers and offering similar products, their business models, how they operate, their balance sheets and culture vary tremendously. Each one of these differences impacts how they will perform during and after the crisis.
It turns out hundreds of workers at that Rialto warehouse tested positive for COVID-19 over the past two and a half months, according to worker notifications...
We all spent a year getting used to remote work; now, the big question is how do we transition back to the in-person work pattern in a new world with Covid-19?
[115. How to Do B2B Focused Advertising Without Creeping Out Your Targets
The coronavirus pandemic is creating unprecedented challenges, both for public health and the economy — and those challenges are causing many businesses to lay off their employees and shutter their doors, at least for the time being.
Very early on in the COVID-19 outbreak - before it had even been labelled a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation - multiple supply chain disruptions were announced as a result of the virus’s impact in China, which naturally had significant implications for global trade. Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce company, experienced such intense supply chain disruptions in the wake of the pandemic that it chose to temporarily cease the shipping of any items considered non-essential - and it isn’t the only company to do so.
By now almost every country has either had cases confirmed within their borders or has set some legal structure in place to battle the spread of the Corona Virus. The United States leads the world with the most cases, currently sitting at over 160K cases confirmed. My twitter feed is saturated with posts about this global pandemic. People are posting about their struggles, their joys, their opinions and occasionally about the facts. It seems this Virus is all that matters right now in the world. But I want to encourage you through this post — there is more to life.
Covid-19 has brought out the worst in us, with an increase in reported incidents of cyberbullying and harassment online. The cases have expanded from social media to a newly adopted “Remote-working” environment.
During these pandemic times, one of the biggest concerns for teachers is how they will continue to engage students and keep an eye on their progress from afar.
If you’re thinking about leaving the corporate world and becoming a freelancer, have you considered how that shift might impact your relationship with your wife, husband, or partner?
With the U.S. taking the title of most reported COVID-19 cases in any one nation, staying at home is being pushed more than ever. But staying at home all day every day can have some negative side effects on the mind and body. Social isolation can lead to a multitude of health concerns including heightened risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Even just short periods of time alone can increase anxiety and depression after only a few days mainly due to the fact that most people rely on one or two close relationships to help them stay level-headed and secure. This is most common in high income earners, those with a graduate degree, married couples, and people over the age of 65.
Large or small, over the past few months all organizations have been impacted by COVID-19 in one way or another. For startups with limited resources and small teams, adjusting to the downturn has been especially difficult. As we collectively adjust to the new normal, Heavybit has been collaborating with industry experts and experienced leaders to learn what teams can do to weather uncertain times more effectively and develop educational COVID resources for startups.
If every cloud has a silver lining, eCommerce has found one in COVID-19. Due to the fear over risks of infection, consumers, in general, are avoiding in-person shopping in brick-and-mortar stores and choosing to shop online instead. In the first eight months of 2020, online sales generated $497 billion in revenue. Adobe estimates that COVID-19 has lifted eCommerce sales by $107 billion since March.
This blog post should not be considered authoritative in any way. It simply an imperfect attempt to highlight some guiding principles. I am convinced these guiding principles could be useful for you, your dear-ones and your team.
Covid19 taken the world by storm. People have been panicking and buying toilet paper like no tomorrow. Celebrities have been making sure to keep us caught up on latest videos of them eating cereal. Anxious teens and twenty year olds have been extra moody.
Playing a key role in the fight against the COVID-19 health crisis, data scientists have been working to expand the scope of their analyses to encapsulate foot traffic data, social distancing metrics, and various other forms of recently gathered data relevant to the pandemic. As such, big data is continually enabling the development of groundbreaking research and policymaking derived from concrete, data driven insights, helping mitigate the adverse impacts of the pandemic. Namely, data scientists are using their knowledge and skills to combat COVID-19 through the following key mechanisms:
Amid the COVID crisis, the education industry is going through a constant transformation. The things which were optional a few months back have become the need of the hour. Augmented reality in education has existed for many years but its real power has been unveiled in 2020.
The coronavirus shutdown has been challenging for every small business, but especially so for service businesses, which generally rely on in-person interactions. The National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that over 100,000 small businesses have closed permanently due to the crisis – and that’s based on figures calculated back in April.
During an age of social distancing, the amount of kids and teens using computers, tablets, and phones has gone up drastically as well as how long they are using those devices. This is causing over 80% of parents to worry about how much time their children spend online and more than half think that their children may have gotten addicted to screens by the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the start of the pandemic, 66% of children are spending time on screens - 60% spend more than 3 hours with screens, 49% spend over 6 hours online each day, more than a 500% increase from 2019, and 30% are online without supervision for more than 4 hours per day. Only 34% of kids spend more time playing without a screen than with a screen during the pandemic. From 2015 to 2019, children’s use every day of computers for homework has doubled, and in May 2020, 80% of classrooms switched to an online and remote classroom. Too much screen time for small children and teens can leave a lasting impact. Children under the age of 2, who regularly watch at least 1 hour of television per day, show an increased risk of a number of delays, such as cognitive, motor, and language delays. Children between the ages of 2 to 6 who use screens frequently have been shown to be more likely to develop emotional problems and suffer from family dysfunction. Teens and young adults who regularly spend long stretches of time on social media display higher rates of depression and even higher rates of suicide. The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests a limit on screen time for children under the age of 6 of 1 hour and the WHO and CDC recommend 2 hours of screen time or less for children under the age of 18. Different screens have been shown to have different effects. Watching television has shown some of the most negative effects because it has no active interaction with the child.
In May 2020, Deloitte mapped out 4 potential scenarios for the global travel and hospitality industry to get to the “next normal.” Each scenario evaluated known unknowns such as disease severity, government collaboration, healthcare response, economic consequences, and social cohesion.
While the global pandemic has caused a lot of distress among workers and service providers, things are gradually getting better now. With services starting to work everywhere, the transportation industry has also bounced back.
I started this blog post on disaster communications initially in response to the wildfires in Australia and earthquakes in Puerto Rico (seems a lifetime ago doesn't it?). But, of course, we're now also thinking about the COVID-19 global pandemic, which, like a disaster, is displacing people from their normal ways of operating.
The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is surging, and one area in which its use is even more important in 2020 – the year of a global pandemic – is in health technology, or healthtech.
In the last few months everything about our lives has either disappeared or gone online. Instead of going out to restaurants we order meals through apps. Instead of going to the grocery store we order groceries through apps. And instead of going into an office or school, many of us are working and going to school online. Online school has some implications for the long term, particularly when it comes to college. College is an important time to network and meet people who will be in your field throughout your lifetime, so what happens to college when everything moves online?
Americans have been reporting increased feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and even hopelessness at least once per week since the start of the COVID pandemic. In fact, at the end of April, 3 in 4 American adults expected a second wave of the virus and supported continued social distancing.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the world to a standstill. With over 5 million global cases and counting, the medical professionals from all over the world have joined hands to find a vaccine. However, until that happens, the only precaution that can be taken is to stay at home.
As COVID-19 has swept across the country, it’s also left behind a trail of shuttered businesses and mounting job losses. To say that this pandemic has adversely impacted our economy would be putting it mildly. However, the one silver lining amongst all of this is that our healthcare system is now, once again, under the spotlight.
The great lock down has helped to slow the spread of Covid-19. But it also came at a great cost to the global economy. Unlike a recession, many nonessential businesses have been closed with no clear timetable to reopen. The initial jobless claims in the US have swelled to more than 26 million since mid-March. While we see some glimmers of hope, we are not out of the woods yet. Businesses are anxious to reopen but we are also concerned with the health risks associated with it. The dilemma is if we reopen too quickly, we might risk triggering a second wave of Coronavirus which could be even worse.
In the past decade, mobile and internet technology has become more accessible, which has changed the way of travelling. Ride hailing apps such Uber, Lyft or Grab have been preferred more by the riders to travel than other offline modes.
Like most people, over the past 2–3 months I have spent an unhealthy amount of time incessantly checking for Coronavirus updates, reading opinion pieces and going down Twitter rabbit holes trying to make sense of the new world we now live in. As things started to settle into the new normal of social distancing and self-isolation, I shifted from thinking about the immediate to thinking about the future and was trying to answer one question. What are the the new trends and lasting tailwinds that will shape our future in the wake of this pandemic?
If you told me two months ago that today would be the first day of quarantine that I would digitally get pen to paper, two-months-ago-me would have been outraged at quarantine-me. With no competition for my attention, I assumed that every creative pursuit that I’d put off for lack of time would come bursting out of me in a personal Renaissance like Bob Dylan producing The Basement Tapes. If Shakespeare wrote King Lear during plague quarantine, surely I could do something during my quarantine.
If you told me two months ago that today would be the first day of quarantine that I would digitally get pen to paper, two-months-ago-me would have been outraged at quarantine-me. With no competition for my attention, I assumed that every creative pursuit that I’d put off for lack of time would come bursting out of me in a personal Renaissance like Bob Dylan producing The Basement Tapes. If Shakespeare wrote King Lear during plague quarantine, surely I could do something during my quarantine.
This article proposes adaptive pool testing which involves testing a combined sample from multiple people as a methodology to increase testing capacity for Sars-COv2 using PCR. Pool test involve that if a pool is detected positive, each sample from the pool will be tested separately. Also, this article proposes an optimization algorithm for the pool size-determine the optimum number of samples that can be combined into a single test in order to obtain the best results with minimum number of tests.
COVID-19 has been hitting the healthcare system pretty hard these last few weeks. In U.S. hospitals they are now facing critical shortages of equipment. As of the end of March, nearly 1 in 4 hospitals have fewer than 100 N95 masks on hand and 1 in 5 reports immediate need for more ventilators. Already back in February, the FDA reported shortages in drugs related to coronavirus.
I haven't worked from an office in about 4 months. The one time I stopped by at the end of March to pickup a testing device and a big monitor I met about 4 people out of ca. 70 in my department. The office is a ghost town, with tumbleweeds and all. We've all adjusted our lives significantly, we learned to cope as organization and as individuals. Now that we have somewhat adjusted and the memories of the before times are fading I think it's time to take inventory. How did we do? What did we learn? If we don't write it down now we won't remember.
The Coronavirus outbreak is no less than a fortune for Zoom. The cloud meetings app has seen enormous growth that roots from the disruption of normal routine due to lockdowns everywhere. From the surge of Zoom app downloads worldwide to the company almost doubling its annual revenue, 2020 may have a bad start for most of us but for Zoom it’s their heydays.
March 13, 2020. I’ll remember this day as Charcoal Grey Friday in honor of my Costco sweatpants (thanks mother-in-law) and it being the hardest day of my career at GrowthHit.
The scariest thing you never want to hear come from an automated recording from your primary care physician’s office are the words “we are closed indefinitely until things clear up”.
Since COVID-19 has been at large and the world in quarantine, selling face-to-face has come to a complete stop. For those businesses who have refused to recognize that we are in a digital age and that at some point in time they would have to either be on-board and adapt, or be eaten up and dissolved, the time is now. You’re either in or you’re out.
At first, you ignore it. Then you label it a ‘them’ problem. They should have known better, acted sooner. You move on with your life. You only start to really pay attention when London and New York get affected. Not unlike terrorist attacks, lives seem to matter more in some places. Could this happen to you?
In the event when Corona virus caused great disruption in the whole world, and people are compelled to stay at home, many people are also falling prone to mental illness like depression and anxiety.
There is an old saying in trading circles that goes “buy the rumour and sell the news”. As rumours of impending lockdowns and travel bans spread in late February, uncertainty was sowed in international financial markets.
I remote-chat this afternoon with Marco Helmut Sobol, a veteran game developer with roots in the late 1980's, also a serial founder in the games industry, and technologist.
This article and the repo referenced here is intended to help Data Scientists and data processing professionals to handle and manage data related to the COVID-19 disease outbreak. I hope this information helps researchers to find new ways of analysis to defeat the COVID-10 disease outbreak, as well as empower them to solve more complex math calc using less time.
The worldwide lockdown following the coronavirus pandemic was truly a time for remote work to shine if there ever was one. With most of the globe’s workforce being stranded in their homes and away from the office, the only solution for most was to move their labor to the remote setting.
Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, remote employees and Work from Home arrangements were becoming increasingly common. An Owl Labs 2019 State of Remote Work Report found that 54% of U.S. workers work remotely at least once per month, 48% work remotely at least once per week, and 30% work remotely full-time. Global Workplace Analytics is forecasting a 25-30% increase in working remotely with adoption increasing proportionately with the amount of time we spend in shelter at home and work from home conditions due to COVID-19.
Humanity faced pandemics previously. One can recall the Spanish flu epidemic that took place a hundred years ago, or the Black Death, which killed half of Europe’s population in the Middle Ages. But what distinguishes the coronavirus pandemic?
Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin are slowly making a transition from speculative investment instruments to payments. Special attention to payment habits and the financial life cycle as the COVID-19 pandemic leads to more calls for dematerialization of payments.
Since my previous article about COVID Innovations, in which I highlighted 20 ordinary professionals and companies undertaking extraordinary actions to drive change to tackle this pandemic, new change makers have emerged on the horizon. Acting as role models worthy of our admiration and attention, more and more industry giants are taking the lead, including:
These are weird and unsure times in which we live. And while the full effect on our health by the corona virus is not completely established or understood, it is now having significant stress on the economy,the businesses and our personal finances.
I decided to cover today the concept of how to push your business in the post-pandemic world since I think it is more than ever a tragic and unprecedented situation that we are in today.
This article is to study how social distancing impacts the spread of the corona virus and thus impacting the number of hospital beds needed. This study is based on varying the basic reproduction number Ro and simulating its impact on the spread of the virus using a simple Epidemic model called SIR.
Several months ago, saying that the “cure” that facial recognition offers is worse than the ills it solves would have seemed hyperbolic. But now, the metaphor has become all too literal -- and the medicine it promises isn’t quite so easy to reject when sickness is sweeping the globe.
Three months into 2020, and we already have "Can we uninstall 2020, this version has a virus in it" memes swarming us in social media. With countries and cities getting into lockdowns and lives pulled into a standstill, Coronavirus, or more sophisticatedly titled as COVID-19, has made communities stay away from each other for survival.
Asymbol of American prosperity was obliterated on September 11, 2001, along with more than 3,000 innocent American lives. It is a day (in the words of President Roosevelt after the attack on Pearl Harbor) that will live in infamy.
::: To efficiently and effectively resolve hospital bed and hospital staff housing deficits nationwide, cargo architecture firm Three Squared designs two custom-outfitted mobile shipping container units—one housing multiple hospital beds for patients, another for housing attending medical staff—complete with electrical and full bathrooms :::
Without wanting to sound like an alarmist, the current pandemic has forced businesses to depend more than ever on a digital strategy. Overnight, the offline channels of live-events, conferences, trade fairs, and face to face interactions disappeared. The solution to the enormous challenge of social distancing is to mitigate this loss.
It's currently coronavirus vs. the world, with cases popping up on nearly every continent. While the virus is having drastic effects on our daily habits, it also comes with a heavy impact on the job market.
As nonprofits transition to a remote workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic, significant changes to the traditional IT systems at most organizations are afoot. Meetings have gone virtual, staff are using both work and personal devices, and nearly everyone is connecting to the Internet on their home Wi-Fi networks. Along with all this comes new security concerns that nonprofits must keep in mind to keep their systems safe.
The great lock down has helped to slow the spread of Covid-19. But it also came at a great cost to the global economy. Unlike a recession, many nonessential businesses have been closed with no clear timetable to reopen. The initial jobless claims in the US have swelled to more than 26 million since mid-March. While we see some glimmers of hope, we are not out of the woods yet. Businesses are anxious to reopen but we are also concerned with the health risks associated with it. The dilemma is if we reopen too quickly, we might risk triggering a second wave of Coronavirus which could be even worse.
