Monthly Archives: April 2020

Earlier today, Apple and Google announced a Bluetooth-based COVID-19 contact tracing platform that could alert people if theyve been exposed to the novel coronavirus. Contact tracing is a huge component in ending mass pandemic stay-at-home orders, and while phone tracking cant replace traditional methods like interviews, it can supplement them.

Google and Apple are using Bluetooth LE signals for contact tracing. When two people are near each other, their phones can exchange an anonymous identification key, recording that theyve had close contact. If one person is later diagnosed with COVID-19, they can share that information through an app. The system will notify other users theyve been close to, so those people can self-quarantine if necessary. Ideally, this means you wont have to reveal your name, location, or other personal data.

Beyond those basics, though, there are a lot of questions about how people will actually use the system. Heres what we know so far.

Apple and Google are launching the program in two phases, starting with an application programming interface (API) in mid-May. This API will make sure iOS and Android apps can trace users regardless of which operating system theyre using. But it will be restricted to official apps released by public health authorities on the iOS App Store and Google Play Store.

During this first phase, youll need one of these apps to participate in the program. We dont know whos working with Apple and Google right now, or what the apps will look like. It seems likely theyll be interoperable in some way in other words, a phone with App A could swap a key with App B, as long as theyre both using the API. We could hypothetically see a national government or lots of small local agencies launch their own apps, or governments could approve something built by an outside party like a university. Google and Apple havent publicly nailed down many specifics, so well be watching for those in the coming weeks.

No matter what the apps look like, youll have to proactively add them to your phone, which will almost certainly reduce how many people use them. But in the months after they launch, Google and Apple will be working on a more permanent solution.

Following the API, Google and Apple want to add contact tracing as a core iOS and Android feature. The method is a little vague for now, but the goal is that youd opt in through something like your phone settings. This would turn on the digital key-swapping without requiring a third-party app. Then, if youre exposed, your phone would signal this somehow and urge you to download an app for more information.

This raises a few questions. We dont know much about that handoff process, for instance: do you get a vague pop-up notification, or something with more detail? Were also not sure how Androids fragmented ecosystem might complicate the release. Google could plausibly push a fast update through the Play Store instead of waiting for carriers to roll it out, but it would still be dealing with huge variations in hardware capability. We also dont know if individual government apps might ask for more invasive permissions like location tracking even if Google and Apples core system doesnt use it.

If youve got a phone without Bluetooth LE, of course, none of these apps will work. But iOS has included support since the 2011 iPhone 4S, and the Android platform added support in 2012. So unless youve got a very old phone, youre probably all right.

If you test positive for COVID-19, the system is supposed to upload your last 14 days of anonymous keys to a server. Other peoples phones will automatically download the key lists, and if they have a matching key in their history, theyll get an exposure notification.

The app will need to make sure people are really infected, though otherwise, a troll could cause chaos by falsely claiming to have COVID-19. We dont know exactly how this will work. COVID-19 tests are currently administered by professionals and logged with health authorities, so perhaps Apple and Google could piggyback on that process to validate the tests. But its a huge issue, and theyll need a satisfactory answer.

Either way, sharing your keys is supposed to be voluntary. That seems to mean actually approving an upload, not just granting blanket consent when you install the app but the exact process is another thing were waiting to see.

If people share their data as described above, your phone will check the list once a day and look for key matches, then notify you if it finds one. Googles sample alert is pretty simple: it just reads, You have recently been exposed to someone who has tested positive for COVID-19, and offers a link with more information. That information will be provided by whichever health authority is offering the app, and we dont know what it might include although at the very least, it will probably explain COVID-19 symptoms and self-quarantine guidelines.

Exposure isnt a simple binary process: the more time youve spent with an infected person, the greater the risk. The documentation includes references to duration measured in 5-minute intervals. It could theoretically send that information to users directly, or it might offer a general risk assessment without an exact number, which would provide a greater level of anonymity.

As weve said before, none of this replaces traditional contact tracing interviews. Done right, though, it could add a platform-level system thats easy to use and doesnt overly compromise privacy. Were just still waiting on a lot of details about how that will work.

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How youll use Apple and Googles coronavirus tracking tool - The Verge

Google is making changes to search results to make it easier for people to find virtual health care options, the company said in a blog post published today. The changes, which will be rolling out over the coming week, appear to make it easier to find telehealth services, which have seen a surge in demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Health care providers that offer virtual care options will be able to add a link to their virtual care website on their business profile, and that link will appear in both search results and on Google Maps. If a health care provider has a page dedicated to COVID-19-related information, Google says it will automatically surface a link to that page as well. You can see what those additions might look like in the below image:

Google will also begin surfacing widely-available virtual care platforms in a standalone card in search results when you search for terms related to immediate care. That card will link out to the virtual care platform and show information such as the out-of-pocket price for an appointment if you dont have insurance. This is launching as a pilot in the US, and people could begin to see links to virtual care offered by Amwell Medical Group, Doctor On Demand, and Anthem in search results starting today, Google tells The Verge. Heres a GIF showing what those results are expected to look like:

However, at this time, Google wont surface these new features if youre searching for COVID-19 conditions or symptoms you need to be making more explicit searches for care to see them, the company tells The Verge.

In March, Google launched enhanced information cards in search results for terms related to the novel coronavirus and a dedicated website with resources about COVID-19. The company is also offering free access to advanced features of Google Meet, its videoconferencing service, to help families, students, and workers who are at home communicate during the pandemic.

Google and Apple have also announced they will be working together to build a system for tracking the spread of COVID-19 into iOS and Android.

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Google will show virtual care options more prominently in search results - The Verge

Google has officially removed the Hangouts brand from its enterprise G Suite offering with the rebranding of Hangouts Chat as Google Chat, the company confirmed to The Verge on Thursday. The rebranding follows a similar name change, confirmed yesterday, from the companion videoconferencing app Hangouts Meet to Google Meet.

This latest modification was first hinted at by an updated G Suite support document listing the Google Chat name alongside Google Meet. Of course, this version of Chat is not to be confused with the other version of Chat, the name Google inexplicably gave its relatively new RCS-based Android messaging protocol.

As for the Hangouts brand, it will continue to live on as the name of the consumer chat app that Google spun out of its shutdown social network Google+ back in 2013 as a spiritual successor to Gchat. There will be no changes to the consumer (classic) version of Hangouts, a Google spokesperson tells The Verge.

Its been a long and winding road for Hangouts over the last nearly seven years or so. The product never achieved the same level of cultural cachet as Gchat. Googles often messy and misguided messaging strategy also meant Hangouts was always competing with nearly a half-dozen other chat and video messaging apps Google insisted on pushing out over the years.

For now, Hangouts for G Suite this is the workplace version of just the chat app will continue to exist after Google postponed its discontinuation back in August of last year. In its place is now Google Chat, once Hangouts Chat, which is more of a Slack competitor for more robust workplace productivity and messaging than it is a straightforward, one-to-one messaging app like the Gchat of old. And for everyone else, your web Gmail account and iOS or Android device can still access the original, consumer version of Hangouts for the foreseeable future.

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Google is rebranding Hangouts Chat as just Google Chat - The Verge

Google Chrome has dominated the internet browser market for the last decade with a staggering near-60% market share and users stretching into the billions.

Rivals to Google Chrome, including Apple's Safari, Microsoft's Edge (formerly known as Internet Explorer), and Mozilla's Firefox have largely failed to convince users to switchbut browser choices are becoming more complex.

Users' desire for greater security, better privacy, and an ill-defined need to "take back control" from the likes of Google and Microsoft has opened the door for alternativesincluding blockchain-based privacy browser Brave, whose chief executive thinks Google "is going to be taken apart over coming years."

Google Chrome has been the largest web browser for a decade but its days of browser dominance could ... [+] be numbered.

"People have had a long time to acclimate to Chrome but users don't like a lot of things about it," said Brave's CEO and former head of Mozilla, Brendan Eich.

"They don't like how it tracks you, they don't like the anti-trust issues Google has become entangled in."

In contrast, Brave claims to aggressively block advertisers and trackers everywhere it can.

The Brave Shields feature, on by default, blocks third-party ads, trackers, autoplaying videos, and device fingerprinting.

As a result, Brave claims its browser loads websites between three and six times faster than then likes of Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, Microsoft's Edge, and Mozilla's Firefox. It also reckons it drains less battery life and uses less memory.

"Were not in the personal data business," Brave's website boasts.

Meanwhile, competition enforcers in the U.S. and Europe are investigating how the world's biggest tech companies, most of them from the U.S., use and monetise data, with European Union antitrust regulators opening an investigation into Googles collection of data late last year.

"Google is going to be taken apart over coming yearsmostly due to regulators' dislike of its surveillance methods," Eich, who created Javascript back in 1995, said.

Google has been hit with fines totalling around $10 billion by the E.U.'s competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager over the last two years and ordered to change its business practices.

In mid-March, Brave filed a formal complaint against Google with the Irish General Data Protection Regulation enforcer, where Google's European headquarters are, arguing the search giant has behaved irresponsibly with how it has been collecting and sharing the personal data of its users.

"Preliminary analysis conducted by Brave indicates that Google has several hundred processing purposes that are conflated in a vast, internal data free-for-all," Johnny Ryan, Brave's chief policy officer, wrote in a letter to the U.K.'s antitrust regulator ahead of the complaint in Ireland. "Google's internal data free-for-all should therefore be remedied by data protection enforcement."

Ryan went as far as saying that Googles dubious operational policies are in violation of the GDPR rulebook.

Brave's attack on Google is designed to drive awareness of its privacy and data use practicesespecially among younger users who Eich sees as most sensitive to how they are tracked online.

"Older people have this memory of Google that it's better than it now is," Eich said, adding that Brave has seen outsized interest from Generation Z, those born between 1995 and 2015, who have an "OK boomer mentality."

"Some of these people are skeptical of Google," said Eich. "We're in a post-truth world and people are mutually suspicious."

Brave CEO Brendan Eich, who previously served as the Mozilla Corporation's chief technical officer ... [+] and, briefly, as its chief executive officer, has said he expects Google to be taken apart in coming years--with people increasingly interested in privacy-focused alternatives.

Brave's targeting of younger demographics doesn't stop at data privacy concerns. The browser is closely linked to cryptocurrenciessomething that young people have been found to be far more interested in.

Brave, which launched in 2017 following a massive $35 million initial coin offering fundraiser, allows users to earn its native cryptocurrency BATwhich stands for basic attention tokenby participating in specific activities.

Last month, Brave expanded its cryptocurrency features by adding integration with the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, allowing users to buy and send bitcoin and cryptocurrencies directly on Brave's new tab page.

Elsewhere, major U.S. bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange Gemini has said it will add support for Brave browsers BAT token later this month.

At the beginning of this month, Braves head of marketing revealed the browser added one million new users in March, apparently picking up a boost from millions of people around the world in lockdown and spending more time online due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Brave now boasts 13.5 million monthly active users and daily active users of 4.3 million as of last month.

However, Google Chrome is used by billions around the world everyday. Brave has a long road ahead of it and it's likely to be an uphill struggle to convince many of these Chrome users they should make the switch.

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Billions Of Google Chrome Users Now Have Another Surprising Option - Forbes

Last month, Leo Varadkar, the caretaker prime minister, reactivated his registration as a medical doctor and said he would spend half a day each week fielding calls from people who believe they have contracted the coronavirus.

His decision to go back to work as a physician was motivated by a desire to help ease the burden on health care workers, his spokesman said. He also issued a plea for emigrant Irish doctors and nurses, and others who had left the field, to return to help with the surge of patients. So far, 60,000 have responded.

Ireland has not escaped the scourge of the coronavirus, with 263 deaths, 6,574 confirmed cases, and the expectation is that both numbers will spike in the coming weeks.

Although Dr. Varadkar, 41, was considered a spent force in Irish politics after his party finished last in a three-way Parliamentary race in February, he is now winning praise for his energetic handling of the crisis. He canceled St. Patricks Day festivities, oversaw an aggressive early testing program, closed pubs and schools earlier than other European leaders and has spoken to the public about the contagion in honest, humane terms in other words, like the general practitioner he once was.

He was at sixes and sevens after the election, but he is perceived as having gotten back on track, said Pat Leahy, the political editor of The Irish Times. There is a sense that he showed strong, quick leadership in getting to grips with it.

To the extent Mr. Varadkars training has informed his response to the pandemic, analysts said, it has mainly been in his heeding of expert advice, particularly from Irelands chief medical officer, Dr. Tony Holohan. He also has a firsthand grasp of the importance of masks, surgical gloves and gowns.

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Coronavirus Live Updates: Apple and Google are Building a Tool to Track the Contagion - The New York Times

There have been rumors and leaks aplenty about the Google Pixel 4A, but theyre starting to bubble up even more today. 9to5Google published what it claims is a complete set of specs for the Pixel 4A, and most intriguing of all, it says that Google wont be releasing a Pixel 4A XL. The Pixel 4A will instead split the difference in size between the prior models, with a 5.8-inch display thats a little larger than the 5.6-inch Pixel 3A but slightly smaller than the 6-inch Pixel 3A XL.

Most of whats reported aligns with what weve already heard about the 4A, like that it will house the Snapdragon 730 processor, feature 6GB of RAM, and have a single 12.2MP rear-facing lens. It is also said to have a headphone jack. Though, there are a few new interesting details, like that its screen will get a slight bump up to a 2340 x 1080 resolution (compared to 2280 x 1080), which indicates a slightly taller aspect ratio. According to 9to5Googles reporting, the Pixel 4A will have an OLED screen like the Pixel 3A, which is still a rarity among other semi-affordable phones. The publication also says that it may ship in just two color variations: just black and barely blue.

Its no surprise that the Pixel 4A seems to look a lot like the Pixel 4, though dont expect it to get most of its standout features. The 4A reportedly wont support Face Unlock, and the Soli radar sensors that allow for hand gestures wont make the jump either. Google is also supposedly withholding its Pixel Neural Core, Googles on-device machine learning tools used to boost performance, for the flagship model.

As for when this device will release, 9to5Google gives a vague estimate of any time in the next month or two. Given that Google announced the Pixel 3A at Google I/O 2019, its not a leap to assume that it probably planned on announcing the successor at this years now-canceled conference. So its anyones guess as to when the phone will release. However, another leak we saw today indicates that it might be sooner than later.

A new photo from TechDroiders Twitter post (via Android Central) shows off what is allegedly the Google Pixel 4A retail box. The image doesnt give away many tantalizing details about the phone, though its general design as it appears on the box aligns with what weve seen in the leaks and rumors. Prominently featured is the square-shaped camera bump with its single rear-facing camera lens. It supposedly will feature a hole-punch camera system on the display.

This retail box leak suggests that the phone is ready to be stocked on shelves, and given that a previous leak from TechnoLike Plus stated that the Pixel 4A it used was running an April security patch, it could drop imminently. As for how much it will cost, leaker Evan Blass shared a billboard mockup of the Pixel 4A with a $399 price tag fixed to it. This phone might have a midrange competitor in the photography department with the new Samsung Galaxy A51 that was recently announced. For $400, it comes with a 48MP lens and an ultra-wide-angle lens. Googles phones are notoriously good at taking photos, but if Samsungs phone puts out good results, it might not have as big of a lead this year. Once Google officially releases the Pixel 4A, well put it through the paces to see how it performs in a review.

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Googles midrange Pixel 4A could launch soon, and there may not be an XL version - The Verge

Google is issuing a ban on the use of the Zoom teleconferencing platform for employees. The company is citing security concerns with the app that have arisen since Zoom became one of the most popular services for free video chatting during the COVID-19 pandemic. The news was first reported by BuzzFeed News earlier today.

Google emailed employees last week about the ban, telling workers who had the Zoom app installed on their Google-provided machines that the software would soon no longer function. It is worth noting that Google offers its own enterprise Zoom competitor called Meet as part of its G Suite offering.

We have long had a policy of not allowing employees to use unapproved apps for work that are outside of our corporate network, Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda tells The Verge. Recently, our security team informed employees using Zoom Desktop Client that it will no longer run on corporate computers as it does not meet our security standards for apps used by our employees. Employees who have been using Zoom to stay in touch with family and friends can continue to do so through a web browser or via mobile.

Even well before the COVID-19 pandemic shined a spotlight on Zooms vulnerabilities, the company was facing criticism for lax privacy and security protections, like in July of last year when a macOS flaw allowed a Zoom URL to forcibly activate a MacBook webcam.

Since Zoom has emerged as a leading teleconferencing provider during the pandemic, however, the platforms litany of other issues have been magnified, especially around the ease with which random strangers can locate and jump into Zoom calls. The practice is now known as Zoombombing, and the FBI says it will prosecute people for it. Part of the reason is due to Zoom never having been designed for consumer use at this scale; the company said earlier this month that it grew from 10 million to 200 million users in the past three months.

Other issues have included exposed Zoom recordings, undisclosed data sharing with Facebook, exposed LinkedIn profiles, and a malware-like installer for macOS. The company now faces a full-blown privacy and security backlash. Zoom has responded by racing to plug holes and beef up its consumer and corporate protections to stave off stiff competition from Microsoft Teams and Skype, Googles G Suite apps, and other more traditional teleconferencing providers. Zoom said earlier this month that it would pause new features for 90 days to focus on privacy and security.

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Google bans its employees from using Zoom over security concerns - The Verge

When it comes to predicting the spread of an infectious disease, its crucial to understand what Ryan Tibshirani, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, calls the the pyramid of severity. The bottom of the pyramid is asymptomatic carriers (those who have the infection but feel fine); the next level is symptomatic carriers (those who are feeling ill); then come hospitalizations, critical hospitalizations, and finally deaths.

Every level of the pyramid has a clear relationship to the next: For example, sadly, its pretty predictable how many people will die once you know how many people are under critical care, says Tibshirani, who is part of CMUs Delphi research group, one of the best flu-forecasting teams in the US. The goal, therefore, is to have a clear measure of the lower levels of the pyramid, as the foundation for forecasting the higher ones.

But in the US, building such a model is a Herculean task. A lack of testing makes it impossible to assess the number of asymptomatic carriers. The results also dont accurately reflect how many symptomatic carriers there are. Different counties have different testing requirementssome choosing only to test patients who require hospitalization. Test results also often take upwards of a week to return.

The remaining option is to measure symptomatic carriers through a large-scale, self-reported survey. But such an initiative wont work unless it covers a big enough cross section of the entire population. Now the Delphi group, which has been working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help it coordinate the national pandemic response, has turned to the largest platforms in the US: Facebook and Google.

In a new partnership with Delphi, both tech giants have agreed to help gather data from those who voluntarily choose to report whether theyre experiencing covid-like symptoms. Facebook will target a fraction of their US users with a CMU-run survey, while Google has thus far been using its Opinion Rewards app, which lets users respond to questions for app store credit. The hope is this new information will allow the lab to produce county-by-county projections that will help policymakers allocate resources more effectively.

Neither company will ever actually see the survey results; theyre merely pointing users to the questions administered and processed by the lab. The lab will also never share any of the raw data back to either company. Still, the agreements represent a major deviation from typical data-sharing practices, which could raise privacy concerns. If this wasn't a pandemic, I dont know that companies would want to take the risk of being associated with or asking directly for such a personal piece of information as health, Tibshirani says.

Without such cooperation, the researchers wouldve been hard pressed to find the data anywhere else. Several other apps allow users to self-report symptoms, including a popular one in the UK known as the Covid Symptom Tracker that has been downloaded over 1.5 million times. But none of them offer the same systematic and expansive coverage as a Facebook or Google-administered survey, says Tibshirani. He hopes the project will collect millions of responses each week.

Tibshirani doesnt know whether the collaborations with Facebook and Google will last once the pandemic is over. Without the urgency and pressure of the global crisis, he isnt sure the platforms or their users will still be willing to give up such intimate health information. But he and the rest of the lab are grateful for what they are getting now. I think that this has the potential for enormous impact, he says.

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How Facebook and Google are helping the CDC forecast coronavirus - MIT Technology Review

A brief outage on Googles Cloud Platform led to failures at Gmail, Snapchat and the smart home company Nest on Wednesday afternoon.

The failure, which began at 3.35pm BST, affected a number of tools that Google uses internally and provides to other companies to host web services.

At the root was a tool called Cloud IAM, which hooks together a number of other products all used to make the internet work.

Mitigation work is currently under way by our engineering team, Google said. We believe that most impact was mitigated at 0740 US/Pacific [1540 BST], allowing many services to recover. Impact is now believed to be limited more directly to use of the IAM API.

The outages came after a period of intense growth in web traffic, which has caused problems at a number of companies, including Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Google did not answer questions about the cause of the problems but said it was still investigating.

The outage led to emails failing to be delivered at Gmail, and some security cameras hooked up to Nest temporarily failing to record footage.

It also took out Snapchat completely, for more than an hour. The service was still down as of 5pm BST. Gmail was quickly restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future, Google said. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but may experience delays in sending or receiving messages. Google declared the outage resolved at 4:57pm BST.

Big cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure underpin a significant amount of the internet, which means failures there can cascade into widespread outages. In 2017, a configuration error at Amazon broke AWS so severely that the company was unable even to update the website that reported outages for two hours, and left much of the US east coast without access to services including Amazon, Netflix and Twitter for most of the day

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Google outage hits Gmail, Snapchat and Nest - The Guardian

Former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has been through debilitating crisis like the Great Recession of 2008-9, but nothing like COVID-19.

The strongest companies recover quicker than the weaker ones, Schmidt, who was CEO of Google GOOGL, -0.03% GOOG, +0.09% for 10 years until 2011 and executive chairman until 2017, said in a Zoom conference with about 200 business executives, investors, celebrities, and the press late Tuesday. (MarketWatch was one of the attendees.) To put this delicately, use the opportunity of the crisis to reconfigure and ensure the decisions you make now make you stronger when this lifts -- a year or maybe less.

Schmidt, who is technical adviser to Google parent Alphabet Inc. and teaches at Stanford University, was speaking to an eclectic group world-wide that included Oscar-winning actress Goldie Hawn, an executive from Square Inc. SQ, +3.80% , and restaurateurs. The topic, Where we go from here: Predictions for the post-COVID-19 world, was hosted by analytics company Collective[i].

The pandemic-economic crisis underscores the necessity for a national broadband policy to reach rural areas, and a more even playing field for the economically disadvantaged who either dont have access to laptops or Wi-Fi to take advantage of technology from Google or Zoom Video Communications Inc. ZM, +5.68% , according to Schmidt.

We need a plan, and we dont have one, he said. We have an opportunity to move to something called TeleEverything... for health, education, manufacturing. And fixing bandwidth accessibility for everyone.

At the same time, big tech has evolved in moderating content as more people express their views through social media and online video outlets, he said. There was this belief 10 years ago, it was OK to have open dialogue, Schmidt said. Now, some tech companies [he did not name any] are rightfully going after liars and manipulators of misinformation, especially around coronavirus. Now, we have a moral responsibility.

There are five or 10 examples, which are excellent, Schmidt continued, evidently alluding to Google and Facebook Inc. FB, +0.52% . It is a welcome maturation in the industry to police the dangerous, crazy people.

Schmidts take on COVID-19 came several hours after MarketWatch spoke with longtime Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO, -1.29% CEO John Chambers, who believes the pandemic will wreak havoc on the world economy for nine months to a year. He believes, however, that some startups and Fortune 500 companies will emerge stronger from the rubble if they make the digital transformation to big data, artificial intelligence, 5G, and edge computing.

See also: The CEO who built Cisco into a powerhouse has a sobering coronavirus diagnosis: At least nine months of economic pain

Schmidt shares the same vision and roughly the same timeline. And, like Chambers, he is hesitant to compare COVID-19 to anything before it.

This [situation] is not a comparison, said Schmidt, who navigated Google through the Great Recession of 2008-09. In 2008, for example, Google repriced stock options to employees to stabilize its workforce and retain talent. It was the right decision at the time, Schmidt said.

With the planet paralyzed amid nearly 1.5 million cases and more than 85,000 deaths world-wide, government and business leaders face a challenge never encountered before, Schmidt cautioned.

This is the first time as a species we have had to face the same problem as a planet, Schmidt said near the end of the 90-minute forum. About 11,000 years ago, when we hard to learn how to do farming. We can either join together or split apart.

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Former Google CEO: This is the first time as a species we have had to face the same problem as a planet - MarketWatch