What can I do to stay safe and safer?

What choices can I make to keep other people safe?

When is and isn’t it appropriate to isolate oneself or one’s household and to what degree?

Quarantine and isolation are psychologically very challenging. How can the platforms help to mitigate this, and help people to support each other?

What sanitation practices reduce risk?

How does one care for sick household members?

When are visits to doctors or hospitals appropriate?

What is the status of clinical trials and what is known about the feasibility and risks of various treatments?

Pinterest has taken a strong version of this approach, disabling searches for coronavirus-related user generated content and replacing it with WHO information. Platforms don’t necessarily need to go that far — promoting reliable and authoritative sources, and taking down blatant misinformation, can leave room for discussion of the many topics that aren’t yet resolved, while ensuring communities are working together on joint plans for disease mitigation.

2. Square, Apple Pay, EMVCo and other Point of Sale technology companies should remove the touch screen requirements from point of sale UI so that people at checkouts aren’t all touching the same screen. This may for instance involve skipping signature or pin steps for transactions where the probability of fraud is low, or providing defaults and timeouts for user interfaces that ask about receipts and tips.

3. Amazon (as well as home delivery services like Instacart and delivery services offered by supermarkets) should provide high quality training and sanitation equipment for your fulfillment and delivery staff, to ensure they aren’t vectors and can stay healthy. Deliveries may be valuable infrastructure for people staying home, if they can be trusted to be safe.

Ensure that fulfillment center and delivery workers (subcontracted and directly contracted, full-time and part-time) have health insurance, paid time off, and clear training to ensure they are not attending work while ill — these benefits and practices will be essential for the rest of the population to be able to safely rely on deliveries for supplies during periods of self-quarantine.

All delivery services should consider changes to logistics to provide essential goods with less risk of transmission. For instance, Instacart and supermarkets could establish standard packages of essentials that can be delivered without a delivery worker having to search the aisles for numerous specific items.

4. Uber and Lyft are in a somewhat similar situation to Amazon. They should provide their drivers with hand sanitizer dispensers, and require them to be available in cars, to protect both passengers and the drivers themselves. These companies should work with public health authorities and epidemiologists to determine whether offering regular service is constructive in outbreak zones, and consider modifications to their apps in response. In countries where gig workers do not have access to easy financial support if they take sick time or participate in precautionary quarantine, ride sharing companies should provide financial support to their workers to ensure that they do not drive while contagious. [Update: Lyft and Uber have implemented version of these measures]

5. Ebay, Amazon and other online retailers and marketplaces should consider price caps, purchase limits, or other measures to reduce incentives to hoard hand sanitizer as well as masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE). Availability of these resources should be first prioritized to medical workers and those caring for infected individuals, though hand sanitizer is an essential tool for mitigating transmission rates that should be shared across the entire population. [Update: Ebay and Facebook have banned sales of sanitizer and PPE altogether; it’s unclear whether that is better than implementing price caps and rationing]

6. Apple, Google, and other mobile operating system vendors should work to provide an opt-in, privacy preserving OS feature to support contact tracing. Users who opt in could be notified in a non-identifiable way if they had been in the same spaces as subsequently identified cases, in order to enable self-quarantine, monitoring, early detection and prevention of tertiary cases. If such a feature could be built before SARS-CoV-2 is ubiquitous, it could prevent many people from being exposed. In the longer term, such infrastructure could allow future disease epidemics to be more reliably contained, and make large scale contact tracing of the sort that has worked in China and Korea, feasible everywhere. [Update: On 2020-04-10 Apple and Google announced a joint project to offer privacy protective contact tracing APIs and OS features]

7. Telemedicine companies should discount or make their products free where possible. Even where those products are geared around needs and conditions other than COVID-19, meeting needs remotely can free up resources in locations that are being hardest hit by the coronavirus.

Counseling telemedicine services like Psyalive and Joyable may be particularly important, given the waves of anxiety and PTSD that accompany pandemics and quarantines. Insurers have an essential role to play by providing coverage for such services.

8. Collaboration and video conferencing companies such as Atlassian, Asana, GoToMeeting, Slack and Zoom as well as the relevant units of larger tech companies (such as Skype and GitHub within Microsoft) have an important role to play in allowing other organizations to work from home. They should:

Provide discounts or free service for new client signups to help other organizations that have never worked remotely begin to do so.

Staff appropriately for significant growth and potentially months of high reliance on remote working services.

9. Telecommunications companies need to be prepared for massive increases in demand for internet bandwidth as more organizations rely on video calls. With so many lives on the line, telecommunications companies need to approach this demand spike as an emergency service situation rather than an opportunity to maximize revenue, and manage pricing and supply responses accordingly.

10. Philanthropists such Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett, Dustin Moskowitz and Cari Tuna have made a significant difference to pandemic preparedness, and prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, through their funding of large scale philanthropic funds at the Gates Foundation and Open Philanthropy. Other tech founders and wealthy individuals should measure themselves against this baseline. While many of our signatories believe that the most important lines of defense should always be well-funded public institutions, having a wide diversity of approaches and creative application of resources by charitable foundations can significantly improve humanity’s chances against new diseases.



All businesses, beyond the technology industry

11. Every store and office: