fortune--2020-03-31--‘Security Botox’ or ‘amazingly successful’? Inside the battle to patch bug bounties’ biggest vulnera

‘Security Botox’ or ‘amazingly successful’? Inside the battle to patch bug bounties’ biggest vulnerability

In February, three MIT cybersecurity researchers reported that they had found major security flaws in the online voting application Voatz. Offering what’s known as a “bug bounty”—a payment for anyone who discovers and reports a security hole in software—Voatz sought to encourage independent “white hat” hackers to shore up the security of its service.
But the MIT team quickly found the reward was an even bigger problem than the bug. The terms of the Voatz bug bounty, set by the company and administered through the bug reporting platform HackerOne, said researchers couldn’t test Voatz’s app itself. Instead they’d have to use a copy of the app, which the researchers said didn’t work properly. According to MIT team member Michael Specter, that would have been a threat to the validity of the research. The bounty also didn’t allow for reporting of certain kinds of attacks, a restriction the researchers argued didn’t reflect real-world conditions.
While bug bounties have become an increasingly popular part of companies’ cybersecurity toolkit in recent years, researchers have run into an array of problems with the way they are structured and managed. Critics say the programs, particularly those run with intermediaries like HackerOne and Bugcrowd, often limit the scope of researchers’ work and their ability to share findings. These shortcomings, they say, could ultimately leave important software more vulnerable to “black hats,” or malicious hackers.
Katie Moussouris, a former HackerOne executive who has also helped Microsoft start a bounty program, has publicly called attention to these issues. In a keynote address at the RSA security conference in February, Moussouris, who holds significant stock in HackerOne, said that in their current form many bug bounty programs are superficial “security Botox,” meaning they’re better for helping companies to look good than they are for actually securing software.
The leaders of bug bounty services counter that putting guardrails around bounty programs, at least temporarily, serves the larger goal of balancing white-hat ideals of total transparency with the needs of companies whose resources and reputations are on the line.
“Bug bounty programs are amazingly successful at identifying vulnerabilities,” says HackerOne CTO Alex Rice. “Getting companies working with [external] security researchers is the most important step.”
“Buying researchers’ silence”
The controversy surrounding the Voatz bug bounty isn’t an isolated case. In recent incidents involving PayPal, streaming platform Netflix, drone maker DJI, and videoconferencing software Zoom, security researchers reporting bugs through bounty programs found themselves tangled in procedural or contractual runarounds—some of them downright Kafkaesque.
In particular, researchers have been galled by nondisclosure clauses that are often part of bounties run through HackerOne and Bugcrowd. In order to submit a report to some public bounties, researchers must agree to restrictions on discussing their findings publicly. In limiting public knowledge about possible security vulnerabilities, nondisclosure clauses benefit individual companies, critics say, at the expense of broader advances in cybersecurity.
Nondisclosure clauses can be appropriate when security researchers are hired to conduct “penetration testing” under contract, critics grant. But when applied to incoming reports from the public, the clauses appear to undermine a widely accepted practice among cybersecurity researchers known as “coordinated vulnerability disclosure.”
A ticking clock sits at the core of the concept of coordinated disclosure. If a bug has been reported but not fixed within a reasonable time frame—generally, between 30 and 90 days—it is generally considered ethical for a hacker to disclose a bug publicly. That norm originated in the 1990s, when independent security researchers found some companies wouldn’t even acknowledge their reports of dangerous bugs. The threat of releasing a hacking method publicly encouraged businesses to fix their vulnerabilities quickly.
After a bug is patched, publicly discussing it can help programmers to fix or prevent similar vulnerabilities elsewhere. As cybersecurity analyst Keren Elazari has put it, this public dialogue helps make white-hat hackers “the Internet’s immune system.” A recent survey of cybersecurity professionals by the security firm Veracode found that 90% regard public disclosure of vulnerabilities as a “public good” that improves cybersecurity overall.
Chris Wysopal, Veracode’s CTO and one of the pioneers of coordinated disclosure, worries that the rise of bug bounties is weakening that knowledge sharing among security researchers. Recent cases illustrate exactly how that is happening.
For example, when Jonathan Leitschuh discovered a serious vulnerability in the videoconferencing software Zoom last year, he had coordinated-disclosure norms in mind. Ultimately, Leitschuh chose not to pursue a bug bounty Zoom offered through Bugcrowd, because nondisclosure terms would have prevented him from talking about his findings. The bug was fixed only because he was eventually able to go public, he says.
“[Zoom’s] first response was, This is not a vulnerability,” Leitschuh says. “After 24 hours of having the media holding their feet to the fire, they admitted, Okay, it’s a vulnerability.” Leitschuh now thinks that nondisclosure clauses in bug bounties are equivalent to “buying researchers’ silence.” Zoom declined to comment for this story.
Casey Ellis, cofounder and CTO of Bugcrowd, says his company encourages its customers to be generous in their disclosure terms and pushes clients to minimize restrictions. Rice at HackerOne says he also supports disclosure in many cases, but also that existing disclosure standards may not be all they’re cracked up to be. He admits that in the Zoom case, there were “clear benefits to disclosure,” but says that the public and the press often misinterpret disclosures.
“I’m not sure what benefit users get from publishing a bunch of unvalidated security vulnerabilities,” Rice tells Fortune.
The nondisclosure dance
The nondisclosure terms of bug bounty programs often appear to remain in force even if a bug is deemed “out of scope”—broadly, something that’s not considered a threat and therefore won’t be fixed. But the fundamental question of what constitutes a “valid” bug speaks to one of Moussouris’s biggest critiques.
For instance, recent vulnerabilities at PayPal and Netflix were deemed “out of scope” by workers who reviewed bug bounty submissions. But the terms of the bounty programs—PayPal’s through HackerOne, Netflix’s via Bugcrowd—nonetheless restricted the researchers from publicly discussing the exploits they found.
Both findings were ultimately published without permission. Though Rice says HackerOne allows researchers to request permission to publish in such cases, the researchers who reported the PayPal vulnerability did not receive clearance to disclose.
With Netflix’s vulnerability, a Bugcrowd worker warned the researcher that he had violated the platform’s terms by tweeting about his findings after they were deemed out of scope for the bounty. In a statement, Bugcrowd said in part that “it’s important that the disclosure comes only after a discussion between the researcher and customer’s program owners so that both parties reach a mutually agreeable disclosure timeline.” In cases in which a researcher violates disclosure restrictions, Bugcrowd “work(s) with the researcher to remove this information from public forums to protect the researcher and customer.”
The Voatz case, however, has become a dramatic example of the risks of the opacity built into many bug bounties. Because Voatz is considered critical election software, the MIT team ultimately was able to report their discoveries through the U.S. government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, instead of through HackerOne.
Voatz disputed their findings and accused the researchers of acting in “bad faith.” Voatz CEO Nimit Sawhney alleges that the MIT researchers were motivated by an “urge to make a scandal” as part of a “coordinated campaign” whose “main goal is to stop any and all Internet voting.” Specter defends his group’s turning to the media “because they would be best situated to clearly and accurately communicate information to the public at large.”
By early March, West Virginia found the MIT researchers’ claims credible enough that the state decided that it will use a different system for its May primary. On March 13, an independent research group released a second report confirming many of the MIT group’s claims and finding additional issues. According to reporting by Cyberscoop, the report included critical vulnerabilities that had been submitted through Voatz’s HackerOne bounty but were classified as noncritical by the election app.
Then on Monday, March 30, HackerOne announced that it was removing Voatz from the platform, the first time it has taken that drastic action. The move was apparently a response to Voatz’s response to the MIT researchers, including subsequent changes to strip legal protections from hackers testing its app.
Voatz CEO Sawhney characterized HackerOne’s move as a “mutual decision,” but the bug bounty company declined to confirm this characterization. “We work tirelessly to foster a mutually beneficial relationship between security teams and the researcher community,” HackerOne said in a statement to Fortune. “[The Voatz bounty program] ultimately did not adhere to our partnership standards and was no longer productive for either party.”
The irony of all this is that if the MIT group hadn’t skirted HackerOne’s nondisclosure terms and reported its findings to the federal government, the flaws in Voatz’s app may never have come to light at all.
“Chaos, every single time”
Both HackerOne and Bugcrowd have a financial interest in touting the benefits of bounties, while making things easy on their customers. HackerOne, which administers programs for the likes of Nintendo, Starbucks, and Slack, has raised $110 million in venture capital since its 2012 founding. Bugcrowd, a similar service, has raised just over $50 million, and its clients include Fitbit, HP, and Motorola.
But security veterans worry that the fashion for bug bounties, including among major firms, is eclipsing more effective approaches to software security.
Davi Ottenheimer has held executive security roles at MongoDB and EMC, now part of Dell. He considers bug bounties unnecessary to serious cybersecurity, and he says he has consistently gotten good-quality bug reports from independent researchers without running formal bounty programs. “The best researchers, sure, they’ll take some money,” Ottenheimer says. “But mostly what they want is a better world.”
A survey by Veracode confirms that. While 47% of responding organizations said they had a bug bounty program, on average only 19% of their bug reports came through those programs. And while 57% of respondents who had reported a bug said they expected communication about their report, only 18% expected payment.
The MIT researchers who uncovered the Voatz bugs echo that sentiment. “We were interested in figuring out how well they’d respond to the bugs we found,” says Specter. “We weren’t interested in the money at all.”
Veracode’s Wysopal feels messaging from bug bounty platforms has contributed to confusion. “They lead with [the idea that] the crowdsourced way is the best and most efficient way to secure your software,” he says. “But if you look at the economics of it, firms like Google and Facebook look at bug bounties as an add-on, a backstop, icing on the cake.
“The cake is, Let’s have trained developers with the right tools building secure software,” he adds.
Rice considers it HackerOne’s mission to advocate for the benefits of bug bounties, even if that means being flexible on ideals like transparency and disclosure.
“I cannot overstate how much work [disclosure] is for an organization and a communications team,” he says. “It’s chaos every single time…We have customers who sign up for the public scrutiny,” Rice adds, “and those who would rather not.”
But Ottenheimer says that’s exactly the problem: Companies want the good press that comes with bug bounties but without the transparency these programs should entail. “It’s about optics,” he says.
Ottenheimer points out that headline-generating bug bounties failed to prevent one of the biggest disasters in cybersecurity history. “They added a $2 million bounty to the Yahoo budget,” he says. “Yet 3 billion accounts were compromised [later that year].
“The news said, ‘Look how great they are—they spent $2 million.’ But that doesn’t map to safety at all.”
More must-read tech coverage from Fortune:
—How the coronavirus stimulus package would change gig worker benefits
—Inside the global push to 3D-print masks and ventilator parts
—Apple focuses on what’s next amid coronavirus outbreak
—A startup is building computer chips using human neurons
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEO
—WATCH: Best earbuds in 2020: Apple AirPods Pro Vs. Sony WF-1000XM3
Catch up with Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily digest on the business of tech.


fortune--2020-03-31--Why the Democratic candidates need to keep talking about student loans

It ’ s official : The stock market had its worst quarter since 1987—and its worst Q1 ever

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Alison Leonhart spent most of the winter helping guests book ski and snowshoe tours at the Breckenridge Nordic Center in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Then came the coronavirus. “We’re not an essential business,” she says.
Operations at the Nordic Center were shut down a month before ski season typically ends in mid-April. Now she is crossing her fingers she’ll still be able to start her summer job as a kayak instructor at the beginning of June.
After taking a finance class in college, Leonhart has been focused on paying down her student-loan debt as quickly as possible. By making more than the minimum payment every month, Leonhart had already been able to pay off her undergraduate loans and to start chipping away at her outstanding balance from graduate school.
She recognizes she’s been fortunate to be in a position where she could do that, but now she’s not sure she’ll be able to pay more than the minimum. If she encounters a major emergency expense, she might not be able to make her payments at all.
More than 3 million Americans who were laid off filed unemployment claims last week, as the coronavirus shuttered nonessential businesses across the country. Many people are worried about even being able to cover the necessities, let alone whether they’ll be able to make their student-loan payments.
Forty-three million Americans owe a total of more than $1.6 trillion in student-loan debt, which ballooned after the 2008 recession.
“There’s the potential to see large numbers of students who were already struggling with their loans end up going into default,” Eddy Conroy, a researcher at the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University, tells Fortune.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) had been leading the charge on student debt relief before she dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary at the beginning of March. Since then, the conversation on student debt had largely fallen silent until last week, when the extent of economic fallout from the coronavirus became more readily apparent. If the shutdown continues, the need to provide additional relief to student-loan borrowers will loom large in the run-up to the general election in November.
While the temporary suspension of interest and payments provided by the stimulus package adopted last week is good in the short term, it doesn’t offer the long-term relief that many borrowers are seeking. Democratic voters will be looking to former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) for solutions.
The $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed by Congress includes some help for student-loan borrowers. Building on an executive order that waived interest for 60 days starting March 13, the stimulus package will automatically suspend both interest and payments for federal student loans through Sept. 30. Borrowers don’t need to opt in.
The suspension of payments is particularly important, experts say, because it keeps money in people’s pockets. The average student-loan payment is $393 per month, according to the Federal Reserve. For some borrowers, it can be much more than that.
The paused payments also count toward forgiveness through programs such as the public service loan forgiveness and income-driven repayment programs. In addition, the legislation puts a moratorium on all collections, which include wage garnishments and loss of tax refunds. It also protects federal emergency funds, such as the $1,200 stimulus check, from being seized if borrowers are in default.
Student loans were one of the sticking points between Democrats and Republicans during the congressional negotiations for the stimulus bill last week.
Warren has continued to advocate for debt relief after making it one of the cornerstones of her presidential platform (which would have canceled up to $50,000 in student-loan debt for borrowers with a household income less than $100,000). Working with fellow Democratic senators, she sponsored a proposal to cancel a minimum of $10,000 for every federal student-loan borrower.
Biden endorsed the proposal last week, tweeting, “Young people and other student debt holders bore the brunt of the last crisis. It shouldn’t happen again.”
In the House, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) introduced the Student Debt Relief Act, which would forgive $30,000 in debt for borrowers during the coronavirus outbreak.
Republicans argued that both proposals were unfair to people who have repaid their student loans or who did not go to college. Ultimately, the Democratic proposals to cancel debt did not make it into the stimulus package.
More drastic measures will be needed to address the underlying issue of student debt, which experts predict will soar with a new recession. Even if payments are suspended for several months, skyrocketing unemployment means that millions of people aren’t going to be making optional payments, which can be key to paying down the principal. “At the end of this six-month period, they’re going to owe just as much debt as they owed at the beginning,” Tobin Van Ostern, cofounder of social impact startup Savi, tells Fortune.
The situation is also bad for current students, who will most likely be graduating and entering the job market during a recession. Nearly 70% of current college students take out loans and graduate with an average debt of around $30,000.
“People very early on in their careers are more likely to fall behind on their student-loan payments because their employment is a lot less certain,” Doug Webber, a labor economist at Temple University, tells Fortune. “It’s much more costly to be unemployed at the beginning of repaying your student loans because interest is going to pile up.”
The coronavirus may have pushed Biden’s approach to student-loan debt relief further left after he endorsed Warren’s proposed $10,000 buy-down last week. Previously, Biden has taken a more moderate approach than either Sanders or Warren. His education plan, which would cost an estimated $750 million over 10 years, offers up to $50,000 of loan forgiveness for people who work in public service, including retroactively. All borrowers would be automatically enrolled in an income-based-repayment loan plan, with payments capped at 5% of monthly income. Loans and interest would be frozen for borrowers making less than $25,000 a year.
Sanders’s plan can be summarized as “free college, cancel debt.” He has proposed canceling the entire $1.6 trillion, saving around $3,000 a year for the average student-loan borrower. He would also cap student-loan interest rates at 1.88%. He wants to finance this through a $2.4 trillion Wall Street speculation tax over the next 10 years.
Van Ostern points out that the current moratorium on payments and interest expires shortly before the general election, giving the conversation new impetus. In addition, people tend to go back to school during a recession, which could cause the total debt to spiral even further. “You can easily see that in the not-too-distant future, we’re going to be over $2 trillion in student-loan debt, partially due to this crisis,” he says. “People are going to need help over a longer repayment period.”
More must-read politics coverage from Fortune:
—What the coronavirus shutdown means for immigrant workers
—The Supreme Court has shunned technology. Could coronavirus change that?
—Are cash handouts, tax holidays, and bond purchases the global economy’s best hope?
—The workers the U.S. government deems “essential” amid the coronavirus pandemic
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEO
—WATCH: U.S. tax deadline moved from April 15 to July 15
Get up to speed on your morning commute with Fortune’s CEO Daily newsletter.


fortune--2020-03-31--Consortiums and collaborations: Design companies team up to fight the coronavirus

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Among the often disparate fields of design, engineering, and manufacturing, old rivalries are being put aside and replaced by a spirit of collaboration in the fight against the coronavirus.
In the United Kingdom, 14 companies—including Airbus, BAE systems, Ford, McLaren, GKN, Siemens, and Rolls Royce—have formed a consortium called Ventilator Challenge UK, to produce mechanical ventilators for the National Health Service. Beyond lending factory floor space and logistical know-how, the companies have redeployed some of their most skilled engineers to work on the ventilator effort. The group has received orders for more than 10,000 machines and is ready to start production pending regulatory approval.
This follows last week’s news that Dyson (in collaboration with The Technology Partnership in Cambridge) signed a formal contract for an order of 10,000 of its CoVent—a ventilator recently designed from scratch.
The CoVent needs to secure final regulatory approval, and may not reach production for some weeks. Ventilator Challenge UK’s plans are further along, thanks to the use of two existing designs. Project Oyster, understood as the medical community’s first choice, involves slight tweaks to an existing design by a little-known Oxfordshire firm called Penlon. A parallel effort by the same consortium, nicknamed Project Penguin, will scale up production of a model made by medical equipment firm Smiths Medical at its factory in Luton.
In another example of lightning-fast innovation, designers and engineers at University College London have teamed up with clinicians and the Mercedes Formula One team to create a breathing aid (similar to ones used by sleep apnea patients) that can help keep Coronavirus patients out of intensive care. Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (or CPAP) devices push air and oxygen into the mouth and nose without the need for a ventilator, keeping the lungs open and making it easier to breath. Crucially, unlike when using a mechanical ventilator, the patient doesn’t need to be sedated. In Italy, around half of the patients treated with CPAP devices avoided needing intensive care.
The designs are being evaluated at University College London Hospital; if trials succeed, they will go into mass production, with Mercedes F1 saying it can produce up to 1,000 a day for distribution throughout the NHS.
As mentioned in last week’s newsletter, the Montreal General Hospital Foundation has collaborated with the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre on the Code Life Ventilator Challenge, which asks designers to develop inexpensive, easy-to-build ventilators. Applications close at midnight tonight, with the top three designs announced on April 15.
And there’s more: Richard Branson’s rocket-launch company Virgin Orbit is working with the Bridge Ventilator Consortium in an effort led by the Universities of California and Texas. Starting next month, they hope to build a simple type of medical ventilator at a rate of several hundred a week. In the U.S., manufacturers such as Ford and General Electric are teaming up to build tens of thousands of ventilators, while General Motors is acting in a similar vein and retooling its Kokomo, Indiana plant and partnering with Ventec Life Systems.
All this positive, can-do attitude is heartening, but a sober word of caution came from the Financial Times this week: For all their expertise and clout, it’s unclear whether manufacturers inexperienced in this specific field can overcome the logistical, technical, and regulatory hurdles in time to deliver machines in the enormous numbers that will be required. Here’s hoping that the creative collaborations we’re witnessing will help overcome such hurdles.
More design news below.
Tony Chambers
NEWS BY DESIGN
This edition of Business By Design was curated by Margaret Rhodes.
Marta Carenzi—Mondadori/Getty Images
Best-laid plans. Initially postponed, Salone del Mobile has officially announced that this year’s much-anticipated furniture fair is canceled due to the pandemic. Organizers have rescheduled the Milan event for April 2021.
PSAs for COVID-19. In a brief to the global creative community, the United Nations is asking designers to help with coronavirus-related PSAs. The brief covers six key points, ranging from personal hygiene to donations, and calls on designers to reach as many disperse audiences as possible.
Ventilator shortage. For years, public health officials have tried to design new, cheap ventilators. And for years, consolidation and acquisitions among medical device companies have stalled those efforts.
Adaptive reuse. The American Institute of Architects has formed a task force to advise local and federal governments on how to adapt buildings into emergency healthcare facilities for coronavirus patients.
Environmental bugs. Scientists have discovered a bacteria that feeds on toxic plastic such as non-recyclable polyurethane. Microbiologists will study the genetic code of the bug to assess whether it could help break down plastic waste.
A better mask. Researchers are racing to design a new surgical mask that not only shields its wearer from airborne germs, but also filters and kills viruses. So far, crystal salt and nano-diamonds offer the most promise for anti-viral coating material.
Looting. A Vincent van Gogh painting titled “The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring” was stolen from a small Dutch museum that closed down during the coronavirus pandemic. The heist took place on what would have been van Gogh’s 167th birthday.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
John Maeda delayed the release of his annual Design in Tech report—now called the CX Report—until May, but released an appendix on his findings concerning the state of customer and computational experience.
In it, Maeda looks at the meaning of remote work and current notions of “place,” which he says have changed: “The definition of ‘same place’ was once limited to only a few means of connecting, but now we’re faced with many options—especially with modern technologies.”
The meaning of place, Maeda says, exists along a spectrum. On one end, you have a literal shared, physical space in which people work at the same time. On the other end, you have “asynchronous” space, in which people share a headspace but not a room or timezone. Businesses with a nimble understanding of this shifting reality will weather the coming months better than those that don’t. As Maeda says in his report, “creating a sense of place is the starting point for work to happen.”
BRAINSTORM SESSION
The fashion industry joins the coronavirus fight by making masks, but it’s a mixed message.
As the coronavirus pandemic worsens, apparel companies like Brooks Brothers and Reformation—both of which have U.S. factories—will break from making suits and slinky dresses, respectively, to manufacturing masks for healthcare workers instead. Project Runway co-host Christian Siriano also said he would put his company’s resources towards making masks too. The parallels to World War II, when nylon manufacturers like DuPont started using the material to make parachutes instead of hosiery, are striking.
But masks are a convoluted and political issue. For months, officials asked the general public (read: non-medical workers) not to wear them. Now, experts are calling upon everyone to wear a mask while out in public. And this new advisory still doesn’t elucidate the differences between protective masks, surgical masks, and N95 respirators, of which there’s a dangerous shortage that a new gray market is trying to replenish.
Without access to certain medical-grade fabrics, fashion companies cannot make the kinds of facemasks that the CDC deems safe for healthcare professionals. But until the White House enacts the Domestic Production Act, which would allow companies to produce masks on the government’s orders, designers are relying on industry connections and social media to get a hold of such fabrics. And without more formalized guidance in place, some companies—even those with the best intentions—are sending mixed messages, qualifying their masks as nonsurgical while still donating them only to medical personnel.
The upshot is that a surplus of DIY cotton masks could still help the general public to flatten the curve—as long as apparel companies are willing to sell them to civilians.
QUOTED BY DESIGN
Architecture as an agent of change
“The social side of architecture has been disastrously slighted for many years. Things are now beginning to change for the better, as social issues slip into architecture under the cover of environmentalism. If the moniker we use to recuperate ideas of equity and fairness is ‘environmental justice,’ so be it … the future of the city lies not in the superposition of the next great idea but in the careful articulation and expression of many fresh and familiar differences.”
— Architecture critic Michael Sorkin, speaking with Artforum in 2009. Sorkin died of the coronavirus last week. He was 71.


fortune--2020-03-31--Hospitals tell doctors they’ll be fired if they speak out about lack of gear

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Hospitals are threatening to fire health-care workers who publicize their working conditions during the coronavirus pandemic— and have in some cases followed through.
Ming Lin, an emergency room physician in Washington state, said he was told Friday he was out of a job because he’d given an interview to a newspaper about a Facebook post detailing what he believed to be inadequate protective equipment and testing. In Chicago, a nurse was fired after emailing colleagues that she wanted to wear a more protective mask while on duty. In New York, the NYU Langone Health system has warned employees they could be terminated if they talk to the media without authorization.
“Hospitals are muzzling nurses and other health-care workers in an attempt to preserve their image,” said Ruth Schubert, a spokeswoman for the Washington State Nurses Association. “It is outrageous.”
Hospitals have traditionally had strict media guidelines to protect patient privacy, urging staff to talk with journalists only through official public relations offices. But the pandemic has ushered in a new era, Schubert said.
Health-care workers “must have the ability to tell the public what is really going on inside the facilities where they are caring for Covid-19 patients,” she said.
One reason is to prepare other nurses and doctors for the looming onslaught of cases and encourage donations of much-needed equipment, particularly the personal protective equipment or PPE that protects them from being infected and in turn infecting other patients as well as their families when they go home.
In China, one of the earliest alarms about the mysterious new illness was raised by a doctor in an online chatroom in late December. He was reprimanded and forced to sign a police statement that the post was illegal. He later contracted the disease from a patient and died.
It’s hard to come to grips with the fact that #WhenCoronaVirusIsOver some of us in healthcare will not be standing. And to think that is partially due to a lack of #PPE is infuriating. #GetMePPE pic.twitter.com/id5rrHoQFH — Joseph Sakran (@JosephSakran) March 29, 2020
“It is good and appropriate for health-care workers to be able to express their own fears and concerns, especially when expressing that might get them better protection,” said Glenn Cohen, faculty director of Harvard Law School’s bioethics center. It’s likely hospitals are trying to limit reputational damage because “when health-care workers say they are not being protected, the public gets very upset at the hospital system.”
Doctors are a famously independent profession, where individual medical judgment on what’s best for the patient is prized over administrative dictates. That’s reared its head during the Covid-19 outbreak, with many physicians, nurses and other health-care workers taking to social media to express deep concerns about the lack of protective gear or much-needed patient-care equipment like respirators. Some posts have gone viral and are being shared hundreds of thousands of times, often tagged with #GetMePPE. Privacy laws prohibit disclosing specific patient information, but they don’t bar discussing general working conditions.
After examining a hypoxic woman in her 50s with no medical problems who likely has COVID, I had to clean my single-use face shield that I’ve worn the past three days with disinfectant used to clean hospital beds since we ran out of sanitizing wipes #GetMePPE pic.twitter.com/85xQcmc1dN — Ayrenne Adams, MD MPH (@AyrenneAdamsMD) March 28, 2020
NYU Langone Health employees received a notice Friday from Kathy Lewis, executive vice president of communications, saying that anyone who talked to the media without authorization would be “subject to disciplinary action, including termination.”
Jim Mandler, a spokesman for NYU Langone Health, said the policy was to protect patient and staff confidentiality. “Because information is constantly evolving, it is in the best interest of our staff and the institution that only those with the most updated information are permitted to address these issues with the media.”
New York’s Montefiore Health System requires staff get permission before speaking publicly, and sent a reminder in a March 17 newsletter that all media requests “must be shared and vetted” by the public relations department.
“Associates are not authorized to interact with reporters or speak on behalf of the institution in any capacity, without pre-approval,” according to the policy, which was seen by Bloomberg News.
Lauri Mazurkiewicz, the Chicago nurse who was fired by Northwestern Memorial Hospital after urging colleagues to wear more protective equipment, has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit.
“A lot of hospitals are lying to their workers and saying that simple masks are sufficient and nurses are getting sick and they are dying,” she said.
Mazurkiewicz, 46, has asthma and cares for her father, who suffers from a respiratory disease. At 75, he’s in one of the most at-risk groups of dying from the virus. “I didn’t want to get infected because I’m not wearing the proper mask and then spread it to my patients and my family,” she said.
A Northwestern Memorial Hospital spokesperson declined to comment, citing the lawsuit. The hospital said in an emailed statement that it “is committed to the safety of our employees.”
My babies are too young to read this now. And they’d barely recognize me in my gear. But if they lose me to COVID I want them to know Mommy tried really hard to do her job. #GetMePPE #NYC pic.twitter.com/OMew5G7mjK — Cornelia Griggs (@CorneliaLG) March 29, 2020
Charles Prosper, chief executive of PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center’s Northwest network where Lin worked in Bellingham, said in an email that Lin was “publicly critical” of the hospital’s readiness to deal with patients. Lin’s contract is through TeamHealth, which said it’s seeking to find him new work.
“Our oath is to do no harm,” Lin said. “I spoke out for patient safety and as a result I got terminated.”
Not all hospitals are blocking staff from talking to the press. New York’s Mount Sinai has been scheduling media interviews for nurses, physicians and trainees to help the public understand the severity of the crisis, a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. The University of California San Francisco Medical Center has gotten hundreds of such calls and encouraged workers to talk to reporters.
Nisha Mehta is a 38-year radiologist from Charlotte, North Carolina, who runs two Facebook groups for physicians with around 70,000 members. She’s fielded numerous requests from health-care workers hoping to get their stories into the public arena.
“I’m hearing widespread stories from physicians across the country and they are all saying: ‘We have these stories that we think are important to get out, but we are being told by our hospital systems that we are not allowed to speak to the press, and if we do so there will be extreme consequences,” she said.
Many say they get daily emails urging them not to talk to the media under any circumstances. “The public needs to hear these stories and other physicians need to hear them to be warned against what’s coming,” Mehta said. “It’s so important that everyone understands how bad this is going to get.”
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:
—USPS might have to shutter by June as stimulus package provides no funding
—Everything you need to know about the coronavirus stimulus checks
—Everything you need to know about furloughs—and what they mean for workers
—Political activists make sure Americans register to vote—from a distance
—During the coronavirus crisis, equal pay is more important than ever
—Coronavirus fight could prove fatal for addressing climate change
—PODCAST: Two health care CEOs on why coronavirus tests and vaccines are the ammunition needed to fight COVID-19
—VIDEO: World leaders and health experts on how to stop the spread of COVID-19
Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily newsletter roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business. It’s free to get it in your inbox.


fortune--2020-03-31--The Coronavirus Economy: What it means to be a travel influencer when no one can travel anywhere

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Lifestyle blogger and content creator Lindsay Silberman is often seen posting to her Instagram account from far-flung destinations like Thailand and fabulous hotels like the Rosewood Mayakoba in Mexico. Her 165,000 followers chime in with all sorts of inquiries for travel tips, packing inspiration, and which wine she’s drinking. But when news of the extremity of COVID-19’s effects hit last week, she, like many other content producers, asked the question: “If people can’t travel, what do I post about?”
Fortune spoke with Silberman for a new series, The Coronavirus Economy, to ask about how COVID-19 has affected her day-to-day work, what it’s like to work in the travel industry amid a public health crisis, how she’s engaging with her followers now, and how she’s been handling this news, both emotionally and financially.
Lindsay Silberman is a lifestyle blogger and content creator. Lindsay Silberman
Fortune: You were on a trip to St. Barth’s when news of COVID-19 came out. What was it like to watch the story unfold from a relatively isolated location on an island in the Caribbean?
Silberman: It was simultaneously bizarre and disheartening. The island hadn’t been affected yet, so things were business as usual. I spent the last two days of my trip completely glued to the news and social media, trying to get an understanding of what I would be coming home to—and if I would be able to get home at all. People were messaging me telling me to “enjoy paradise, because New York feels like the apocalypse.” Like everyone else, I’m heartbroken thinking about all the ways people are going to be negatively affected by this. It’s not just those who will lose their lives to the virus—it’s going to have devastating consequences for so many people and industries, from travel to small business, and entrepreneurs like myself.
Many influencers and bloggers faced this: There’s a dilemma about whether to post as usual or to focus on COVID-19, given the enormity of the public health crisis. It’s not something to take lightly. How did you handle this decision?
I’ve always had a very open, transparent relationship with my audience on Instagram, so rather than making the decision my own, I left it up to them. I wrote a message along with a poll asking people to vote on the type of content they wanted to see from me. I received thousands of votes, and the vast majority wanted a sense of normalcy.
The overwhelming sentiment was that people were craving an escape from the news, because for most of us, it has become all-consuming. Even influencers were reporting on coronavirus-related topics, giving safety advice, and sharing their perspectives on whether or not people should be traveling. That just didn’t seem natural to me, and I didn’t feel like it was my place. I acknowledged the gravity of the situation, and then continued posting the kinds of things that I know my audience enjoys—funny videos with my husband, beautiful travel photos, self-care tips—anything that would take people’s minds off the news, if just for a few minutes.
I was nervous people would call me insensitive, but in fact, the reaction has been quite the opposite. I received messages from ER doctors and nurses begging me to keep up my usual content—telling me it was what they looked forward to seeing when they got home from work because it reminded them of what life was before, and what life will be like after.
A lot of what you do is travel. How do you approach travel content at the moment?
Aside from the obvious—not being able to travel—I’ve definitely had to shift my priorities on my blog content for this month. I have a handful of travel guides that were scheduled to go live over the next few weeks, and had planned on beginning a few others, but instead I’ll be turning my attention to beauty and lifestyle content—like how to organize your makeup or the behind-the-scenes of blogging—which feels more fitting right now. My website traffic has dipped, but luckily it hasn’t done a complete nosedive, since I cover a diverse range of topics.
One thing I’m not doing is covering anything COVID-related on my site. It’s not my place. I’m not a medical expert, and in terms of travel, my opinion is that people shouldn’t be traveling at all. So there’s not much to say beyond that.
Travel blogger Silberman had to ask herself, “If people can’t travel, what do I post about?” Lindsay Silberman
Has it changed your engagement metrics?
At first it felt weird to post beautiful travel photos [on my feed], but the feedback I’ve gotten from 99% of my followers is that they want to see that kind of thing now more than ever. It’s a form of escapism, I guess. The engagement on my [Instagram] feed has also been higher than normal.
What does it feel like for you to be so homebound?
To be honest, for me it’s a welcome reprieve. I guess because I spend so much time running around and essentially living out of a suitcase, being home has allowed me to take a pause, start thinking about long-term projects, and catch up on things that had been falling through the cracks.
Luckily, you don’t cover travel-related content alone. Your topics include beauty, lifestyle, home design, and, of course, an enthusiasm for rosé. How has this “diversity of your portfolio,” so to speak, benefited you in a time such as this?
Having a diverse portfolio has been crucial. If I relied solely on travel partnerships for my revenue, I would be in a really precarious financial situation right now. I’ve had a handful of brands postpone campaigns, but there’s still a lot I can do from home: skin-care product reviews, makeup tutorials, and fashion try-ons.
The most important thing when it comes to sponsored content right now is being overly sensitive to the situation, and adjusting the content accordingly. While I know that talking about a lipstick or a night cream might feel frivolous to some, at the end of the day, I still have a business to run and bills to pay. I’m just trying to make sure I strike the right balance between addressing what’s happening and trying to continue with business as usual. For example, I launched a charitable initiative to raise money for Feeding America this week.
I’m also lucky in that I have a blog generating additional income, through ads and affiliate links, so I plan to churn out a lot of non-travel content over the next few weeks and months.
How do you plan on continuing to inspire your followers?
I think a lot of content creators are paralyzed with how to handle the situation on their platforms, because no one wants to say or do the wrong thing. But I actually think now is the perfect opportunity to engage your community in a completely different way. In a sense, I think my followers like the content that I’m posting while holed up in my apartment because it’s much more relatable than when I’m gallivanting in St Barth’s.
My goal right now is to keep my audience in good spirits—to provide entertainment, inspiration for future travel, and beauty and skin-care tips. I also run an incredible Facebook group, The SilbSquad, where women all over the world are finding community as they struggle in adjusting to their new normal. We have a thread where brides-to-be are exchanging tips and advice for postponed weddings; in another thread, women are sharing work-from-home playlists and loungewear recommendations. In that respect, my audience feels closer and more engaged than ever.
My income might be taking a hit right now, but if I can use this time to strengthen my relationship with them, I’ll still feel like I’ve accomplished something. I have no doubt it will end up paying off in the future.
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:
—This famed economist doesn’t think we’re headed for another Great Recession
—South Korea has the most comprehensive coronavirus data. What it’s taught us so far
—10 questions about the 2020 election during the coronavirus pandemic, answered
—6 steps to sustainably flatten the coronavirus curve
—How hackers are exploiting the coronavirus—and how to protect yourself
—Hong Kong launches a surveillance operation to track suspected coronavirus patients
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEOs
—WATCH: The race is on to create a coronavirus antiviral drug and vaccine
Subscribe to Fortune’s Outbreak newsletter for a daily roundup of stories on the coronavirus and its impact on global business.


fortune--2020-03-31--How to job hunt during the coronavirus pandemic

During the coronavirus pandemic, moving forward in any way careerwise seems complicated at best. But while the economic and social implications of COVID-19 have caused employment numbers to take a hit (in just a week, 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment), there’s still a wide variety of companies that are hiring.
“Sellers of food and other essentials like Walmart and Amazon say they are looking to hire thousands of people,” says Rebecca Binder, senior managing director at RF|Binder, a strategic communications and consulting firm. “Additionally, medical supply manufacturers are seeing demand for their products soar and are recruiting workers.” And as the shift toward digital accelerates now that millions are working from home, technology and services companies that cater to them, as well as online businesses that don’t rely on brick-and-mortar locations, are likely to continue hiring.
Depending on what you want to do and where your skills lie, there is still a job out there for you—even if it may not feel that way. “When job hunting during this difficult time, remember that this is a very unique situation that no one could have ever anticipated,” says Kim Hoffman, Intuit’s director of talent acquisition. The key thing is to be respectful as everyone figures out how to move forward during this trying time, “especially as you reach out to HR representatives who may be overwhelmed helping their employees cope with the change,” says Hoffman.
From needing a lot of patience to a good Wi-Fi connection, here’s how to job hunt right now.
Be patient and acknowledge the situation
The name of the game here is patience. As frustrating as it is to wait for an answer when it comes to getting a job, things are most likely not moving as normal right now. “Many companies are still trying to figure out what the coronavirus means for their business,” says Binder. “While some companies may have hiring freezes, many are still interviewing for open positions—they just may not be moving as fast as originally planned. Show understanding and do not interpret delayed responses as lack of interest.”
Keep this patience in mind when communicating with hiring managers. “You don’t know what companies or employees are dealing with, so it is best to lead with empathy.” If you recently interviewed with a company and have not heard back, it’s okay to reach out to the recruiter. However, says Hoffman, you should consider waiting at least two weeks before following up. “You should preface the email by acknowledging the situation as well as checking to see if there’s anything further they need from you. Then, give them breathing room to respond at their own pace,” she says.
Network and update your resources
While a lot of things may be harder from home, updating your recruiter-facing resources is one that is actually easier. “This is a perfect opportunity to work on your personal branding, like updating your résumé and LinkedIn profile, or building new skills,” says Hoffman. Virtual workshops and online classes can add to your skill level, making you more marketable.
Once you’ve updated all your assets, it’s time to network. There’s plenty of ways to keep doing so while social distancing, but Hoffman recommends reaching out to people for virtual coffee meetings and informal interviews to learn more about opportunities at their company. Just test your Wi-Fi connection first.
Highlight any remote work experience and skills
For anyone who has worked from home before, now is your chance to emphasize this major asset. “Consider adapting your résumé to highlight any previous remote work experience, as well as including any achievements gathered while working from home,” says Sherice Sargent, human resources specialist at Insperity, a provider of human resources and business performance solutions. Did you solve a big crisis or put on a huge presentation from home? Tell recruiters all about it.
After seeing the potential of remote work, it may be incorporated further by companies even after this crisis is over. So while many people are quickly having to adapt to working remotely, it does require a different set of skills that you should highlight if you have them already. “Companies may look for candidates that exhibit soft skills, such as adaptability, creativity, and productivity,” says Sargent. “Additionally, applicants should consider emphasizing their technical aptitude, as a remote setup can demand frequent conference calls or video meetings.”
Graduating seniors should use their university’s online resources
EducationData.org estimates about 3.9 million people will graduate from college this year, many of whom expect to apply for and start jobs shortly thereafter. Yet, without traditional resources like job fairs and in-person internships, this can feel all the more daunting.
Fortunately, “many career service centers have moved online as campuses close, offering students access to a number of resources while remote.” says Christine Cruzvergara, vice president of higher education and student success at Handshake. Resources like this job site and college databases allow students to communicate directly with employers. Cruzvergara explains the importance of checking your account regularly, keeping your profile updated, and reaching out to employers to optimize your chances of being hired.
If a company isn’t hiring right now, ask it to keep you in mind
Maybe you’re interested in working at a company that has implemented a hiring freeze or simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to bring on anyone new soon. “If there are no open positions at the moment, ask if it would be possible to have an informational interview in the coming weeks to learn more,” says Binder. “Companies will still want to build their talent pipeline, so be proactive, persistent, and respectful.” When job hunting, even just getting your name in the door can make a big difference during this challenging time.
More must-read careers coverage from Fortune:
—4 ways to keep networking while social distancing
—17 companies that are hiring during the coronavirus crisis
—Why it’s important to know your communication style at work
—What is a 401(k)? And why do you need one?
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEO
—WATCH: Can you be a leader and an introvert?
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fortune--2020-03-31--CNN’s Chris Cuomo tests positive for coronavirus

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Chris Cuomo, one of CNN’s most prominent anchors, says he has tested positive for the coronavirus.
The host of Cuomo Prime Time, which airs at 9 p.m. ET, and brother of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, says he has quarantined himself in his basement and will continue to do his shows from that location.
“Sooooo in these difficult times that seem to get more difficult and complicated by the day, I just found out that I am positive for coronavirus,” he wrote on Twitter. “I have been exposed to people in recent days who have subsequently tested positive, and I had fever, chills, and shortness of breath. I just hope I didn’t give it to the kids and [wife] Cristina. That would make me feel worse than this illness! I am quarantined in my basement. (Which actually makes the rest of the family seem pleased!) I will do my shows from here. We will all beat this by being smart and tough and united.”
Andrew Cuomo, who has lovingly poked fun at Chris on air several times, offered his support in his daily update, saying, “This virus is the great equalizer. He is going to be fine. He’s young, in good shape, strong—not as strong as he thinks—but he will be fine…In his job, he’s combative and argumentative…but that’s his job, that’s not who he is. He’s a really sweet, beautiful guy, and he’s my best friend.”
Chris Cuomo is the highest-profile media personality to have a confirmed case of coronavirus so far. According to the network, he was last at CNN’s offices on Friday. To date, three CNN employees have tested positive for the coronavirus.
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—The USPS might have to shutter by June as the stimulus package provides no funding
—Everything you need to know about the coronavirus stimulus checks
—Everything you need to know about furloughs—and what they mean for workers
—Political activists make sure Americans register to vote—from a distance
—During the coronavirus crisis, equal pay is more important than ever
—The coronavirus fight could prove fatal to addressing climate change
—PODCAST: Two health care CEOs on why coronavirus tests and vaccines are the ammunition needed to fight COVID-19
—VIDEO: World leaders and health experts on how to stop the spread of COVID-19
Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business, delivered free to your inbox.


fortune--2020-03-31--‘It’ll never be fast enough’: 5 questions for a ventilator manufacturer

Making more ventilators in time to help coronavirus victims is hard enough. But what about manufacturing the sophisticated equipment needed to clinically test them? Or hospital beds for the patients using them?
Those are the sorts of questions occupying John Carlson, a former Johnson & Johnson executive who now oversees medical manufacturing for multinational Flex. As a contract manufacturer for medical-device companies (among other industries), Flex makes ventilators and other in-demand health care equipment at 22 locations globally, including several in the U.S. and Mexico.
Now it’s also working with some unspecified “nontraditional” companies (think automakers), to help them switch over their production lines to the highly regulated world of medical-device manufacturing. “They don’t even know what the basic rules and regulations are to do this,” Carlson says. “But they have a different set of supply networks than we do, so they can tap into different people with different capabilities. There’s a collaborative spirit right now that’s really about saving lives and getting product out there.”
In the following edited and condensed conversation with Fortune, Carlson explains some of the other challenges for companies racing to fix the global ventilator shortage.
Fortune: Where are you seeing specific constraints in the supply chain for making ventilators?
Carlson: Inside any medical device, you’ll have a bunch of common components that you could buy off the shelf, and then a few very custom components that we’ll spend a lot of time making sure we have a supply of. For ventilators, it’s typically components relating to the pump system and the valve where you’ll find the [supply-chain] bottleneck.
What else is holding back manufacturers from producing medical equipment in time to meet U.S. demand?
The final testing of the products usually requires very specific equipment. Being able to rapidly scale that test is another area that can be a constraint. For something like a ventilator, you’ll have an artificial-type lung that the device has to be tested against, to make sure that it has the right flow rate, the right pressure control. Those pieces of the test equipment can be pretty elaborate. Duplicating them is something that we jump on very quickly to make sure that not only can we get the parts, but can we assemble them and [make sure] they perform as they’re intended.
Shortages of ventilators and N95 masks have gotten a lot of attention. What other kinds of medical devices are you seeing particular need for?
Oxygen concentrators, or a [basic] portable system to generate oxygen for patients with compromised lung function. When you’re in a hospital there’s a bunch of infrastructure built into it: You’ve got vacuum systems in the wall. You’ve got oxygen. You’ve got IV systems. But now they’re trying to put patients into hotel rooms and dorm rooms and any place you can to keep them out of the hospital—and none of that infrastructure exists in a hotel room. So some of those basic supplies, as well as simple things like hospital beds, are products where we’re seeing an increase in demand.
Flex manufactures medical devices around the world, but this pandemic has had equally global reach. How have your operations—and your employees—been affected?
We screen their temperatures before they come into the plant. We issued them masks. We check on them regularly. We’re putting in systems and processes to allow them to maintain appropriate distances. We learned a lot with our manufacturing environment in China in February. All this started over the Chinese New Year, where many of our employees [were traveling], and then they were locked down and prevented from coming back. But over the last several weeks, we’ve been able to bring it back, and we’re back to basically full production across all of our China facilities.
The U.S. has less than 20% of the ventilators it might need for hospitalized coronavirus patients, according to some estimates. Can you and your partners ramp up in time?
[Long pause] I don’t know how to answer that. Typically a program like this would take anywhere from 12 to 24 months, and in what used to be months we’re now getting done in days and weeks. We will do enough that it can have a significant impact on the lives of many people. I just don’t know how to quantify if it’s fast enough. It’ll never be fast enough—because if there’s someone today who doesn’t have a product, then we’re not fast enough.
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:
—The USPS might have to shutter by June as stimulus package provides no funding
—Everything you need to know about the coronavirus stimulus checks
—There will be another pandemic after the coronavirus. It’s time to start preparing
—Political activists make sure Americans register to vote—from a distance
—Social distancing creates $8 trillion in economic benefits, study says
—Where do clothing rental and subscriptions fit in a world that works from home?
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEOs
—WATCH: World leaders and health experts on how to stop the spread of COVID-19
Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business, delivered free to your inbox.


fortune--2020-03-31--Marriott says new data breach affects 5.2 million guests

Marriott says guests’ names, loyalty account information and other personal details may have been accessed in the second major data breach to hit the company in less than two years.
Marriott said Tuesday approximately 5.2 million guests worldwide may have been affected. The information taken may have included names, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, loyalty information for linked companies like airlines and room preferences. Marriott said it’s still investigating but it doesn’t believe credit card information, passport numbers or driver’s license information was accessed.
Marriott said it noticed an unexpected amount of guest information was accessed at the end of February using the login credentials of two employees at a franchised property. The company said it believes the activity began in mid-January.
Marriott has disabled those logins and is assisting authorities in their investigation. The company didn’t say whether the employees whose logins were used were suspected.
In November 2018, Marriott announced a massive data breach in which hackers accessed information on as many as 383 million guests. In that case, Marriott said unencrypted passport numbers for at least 5.25 million guests were accessed, as well as credit card information for 8.6 million guests. The affected hotel brands were operated by Starwood before it was acquired by Marriott in 2016.
The FBI led the investigation of that data theft, and investigators suspected the hackers were working on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, the rough equivalent of the CIA.
Marriott said Tuesday it has informed guests of the new data breach. The Bethesda, Maryland-based company is offering affected guests free enrollment in a personal information monitoring service for up to one year.
“Marriott also remains committed to further strengthening its protections to detect and remediate incidents such as this in the future,” the company said in a statement.


fortune--2020-03-31--March consumer confidence plunge indicates a ‘severe contraction rather than a temporary shock’

American consumers—the backbone of the economy—are feeling less confident as households start to feel the pain of the coronavirus slowdown.
Consumer confidence dropped sharply in March, according to the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index. The index published Tuesday came in at 120, down from 132.6 in February and 130.4 in January.
“March’s decline in confidence is more in line with a severe contraction—rather than a temporary shock—and further declines are sure to follow,” said Lynn Franco, senior director of economic indicators at the Conference Board in its press release.
The Consumer Confidence Index of 120 in March is its lowest reading since June 2017, when it was at 117.3. However, even during a month when unemployment claims hit a record 3.3. million, consumers were still more confident in March than they were entering, during, or following the 2007–2009 Great Recession.
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—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEO
—WATCH: U.S. tax deadline moved from April 15 to July 15
Subscribe to Fortune’s Bull Sheet for no-nonsense finance news and analysis daily.


fortune--2020-03-31--White House turns to statistical models for coronavirus forecast

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Like forecasters tracking a megastorm, White House officials are relying on statistical models to help predict the impact of the coronavirus outbreak and try to protect as many people as possible.
The public could get its first close look at the Trump administration’s own projections Tuesday at the daily briefing.
High numbers of potential deaths estimated under different models have focused President Donald Trump’s attention. He’s dropped talk of reopening the country by Easter and instead called on Americans to stay home for another month and avoid social contact.
Such models are a standard tool of epidemiology, the branch of medicine that deals with how diseases spread and how to control them. But they’re really just fancy estimates, and results vary by what factors the modelers put in. Some models updated on a daily basis may seem disconcerting to average folks searching for certainty.
White House coronavirus task force adviser Dr. Deborah Birx and the National Institutes of Health’s Dr. Anthony Fauci have been talking about the models at press briefings. Fauci on Sunday cited one estimate of 100,000 deaths. Birx has described how officials are working to refine their own model.
On Monday, Trump signaled that the White House will explain its forecast soon. “We will meet again tomorrow for some statistics,” he told reporters at the daily briefing. As soon as it’s released, the White House model is certain to get a thorough vetting by independent experts.
The models can feed in numbers from around the country on deaths and other data points. They use statistical analysis to predict the outbreak’s path, ferocity and ultimate impact as measured in people sickened, hospitals overwhelmed and lives lost. Fauci and Birx have talked about using testing data — once enough is available.
Part of the idea is to try to drill down close to the community level, providing a tailored view that can help state and local officials. For example, the age of a local population can make a difference.
A senior administration official said other streams of data being analyzed include local hospital capacity, the ability of health departments to trace the contacts of people who test positive, the types of businesses in a community and whether they could ensure worker safety if they reopen and economic modeling under varying scenarios. The official provided details on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing planning.
Birx said the White House task force has looked at about a dozen models designed by other experts.
“And then we went back to the drawing board over the last week or two and worked from the ground up, utilizing actual reporting of cases,” she explained.
Birx singled out projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle, suggesting that model is close to how government experts see the situation.
As of Tuesday morning, the IHME forecast predicted about 84,000 U.S. deaths through early August, with the highest number of daily deaths occurring April 15. That would be three days after Easter.
The model generated attention because it offered the first state-by-state outlook for the next several months, based on how the outbreak is reacting to the various containment efforts put in place at different times around the country. It shows how the outbreak will unfold at a different pace in various states. For example, the model predicts it will peak about a month earlier in New York than in Texas.
The IHME model is what’s called a “planning model” that can help local authorities and hospitals plan for such things as how many ICU beds they’ll need from week to week.
“Nobody has a crystal ball,” said Dr. Christopher Murray of the University of Washington, who developed the model. It is updated daily as new data arrives. While it is aimed at professionals, Murray hopes the model also helps the general public understand that the social distancing that’s in place “is a long process.”
Just like a massive evacuation can save lives in a Category 4 hurricane, social distancing and shuttered workplaces can slow the rate at which the virus spreads, in hopes that severe illness and deaths may not hit a particular locality all at once. Overwhelmed hospitals unable to care for patients could make things worse.
Fauci says models are useful, but they represent well-informed guesswork. They involve a wide span of possible results, from a best-case scenario to calamitous impacts. Usually the mid-range estimate gets cited. But sometimes, it’s worst-case projection.
“What I like to do — as a scientist, a physician, a public health official — is to not ignore models,” said Fauci. But to “look at the data as it’s evolving and do everything you possibly can to mitigate that instead of getting overly anxious about the extremes of the model.”
For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, or death. The vast majority of people recover.
The virus has caused a global pandemic that has sickened about 800,000 people and killed tens of thousands, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:
—USPS might have to shutter by June as stimulus package provides no funding
—Everything you need to know about the coronavirus stimulus checks
—There will be another pandemic after the coronavirus. It’s time to start preparing
—Political activists make sure Americans register to vote—from a distance
—Social distancing creates $8 trillion in economic benefits, study says
—Where do clothing rental and subscriptions fit in a world that works from home?
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEO
—WATCH: World leaders and health experts on how to stop the spread of COVID-19
Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily newsletter roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business. It’s free to get it in your inbox.


fortune--2020-03-31--Walmart will start taking workers’ temperatures and provide them with masks and gloves

As health concerns mount among retail workers closely interacting with the public on a daily basis during the coronavirus pandemic, Walmart said on Tuesday it would begin taking employees’ temperatures as they report to work.
Over the next three weeks, the largest private sector U.S. employer with 1.4 million workers will implement a new policy turning back any employee at stores, distribution centers, or e-commerce fulfillment centers with a temperature of 100 degrees or more as measured by the infrared thermometers Walmart will provide its facilities. Such workers will still be paid but sent home and asked to seek medical help.
The company will also start providing workers with general surgical masks and gloves in the coming weeks if they want them, even though the Centers for Disease Control does not recommend them for healthy workers. Walmart will not provide workers with N95 masks, citing the urgent need for them among at-risk medical workers. The company expects to provide 7 million masks a week.
“Increasingly, we’re seeing that retail workers are being asked to do heroic work in order to keep America fed,” Walmart executive vice president Dan Bartlett told reporters on a conference call.
But U.S. workers clearly want more than accolades for heroism from employers or even the general public. Walmart’s move comes as many service workers are mobilizing to demand better protection from employers as they deliver food, stock shelves, and serve customers in stores.
Earlier this week, Instacart workers walked out, asking for $5 hazard pay, more sick pay, and more extensive safety protection. Some 60 Amazon workers walked off the job at a Staten Island, N.Y., center for similar reasons. And on Tuesday, workers at Whole Foods, an Amazon division, are planning a “sick out,” as they ask for hazard pay and more sanitation.
“We have an obligation to listen to our associates,” said Bartlett.
If a Walmart employee clocks a high temperature and is sent home, they can return to work only after three sub-100-degree days. Workers can receive up to two weeks’ worth of sick days while under quarantine.
As the largest U.S. grocer by far, with $190 billion in food sales last year, Walmart cannot afford to have an angry or sick workforce as people stock up on food.
What’s more, Walmart is in the process of hiring 150,000 temporary workers to help it handle the surge of stock-up shopping, and these measures will be key to filling those jobs. Bartlett said Walmart’s supply chain has adjusted to “this new normal” and just under 50,000 temporary employees have already been hired.
Other steps Walmart has taken include plexiglass dividers to minimize exposure for cashiers and taped markings on the floor to help people stay six feet away from each other. Bartlett said U.S. stores will test one-way aisles to prevent people from bunching up. He also noted that Walmart had extensive expertise in crowd control thanks to its Black Friday events.
Retailers normally prefer it when shoppers linger since it increases the odds of impulse buying, but Bartlett said Walmart is hoping customers will be efficient, minimizing their time at the store to make social distancing easier. “This is not the time to have a social gathering,” he quipped.
While Walmart will take employees’ temperatures, it has no plans to go a step further and do the same with customers. In that case, Bartlett said, it would have to be a directive from government officials.
More must-read retail coverage from Fortune:
—Which stores are open—and closed—during the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.?
—How re-commerce players like Poshmark and eBay are adapting to the coronavirus
—How Nike is overcoming the coronavirus’s impact on its China business
—It may be a while before many of America’s stores open again
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEOs
—WATCH: The greatest designs of modern times
Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.


fortune--2020-03-31--SiriusXM offers free access to all as coronavirus pandemic continues

SiriusXM is dropping its subscription fees to give people another entertainment option as the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic continues to spread. The satellite radio service will offer free access to its full lineup of channels through May 15, Howard Stern announced during his morning show Tuesday.
The decision will bring more than 300 channels to people who are practicing social distancing and staying in their homes. Access will come via the SiriusXM app and at SiriusXM.com/streamfree.
“With so many people asked to stay at home…we hope it’s a valuable source of information or diversion, a generous mix of fresh live content, and a source of companionship that comes from the hosts on our many shows and channels,” said Jim Meyer, SiriusXM CEO, in a statement.
SiriusXM is one of several entertainment services that is making its content available for free during the outbreak. CBS All Access is offering a month free to nonsubscribers who use the coupon code “GIFT.” And Sling TV is offering 14 days for free.
The moves are more than philanthropic. Music-streaming services have seen a drop in listeners since the coronavirus crisis began, as people aren’t commuting, and bars and restaurants are closed. During the week of March 13 through March 19, streams dropped 7.6%, according to data analytics provider Alpha Data.
More must-read entertainment coverage from Fortune:
—As people stay home, interest in streaming services is surging. So is piracy.
—What to watch on Netflix while social distancing
—What to watch on Disney+ while social distancing
—What to watch on Amazon Prime while social distancing
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEOs
—WATCH: One on one with Grace Potter
Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.


fortune--2020-03-31--How businesses are preparing for the next pandemic

This is the web version of Eye on A.I., Fortune’s weekly newsletter covering artificial intelligence and business. To get it delivered weekly to your in-box, sign up here.
There’s no bright side to the coronavirus killing tens of thousands of people. But it has, in some cases, sped up businesses adopting certain technologies so they can be better prepared if the current epidemic drags on and for the next epidemic.
Last week, Dongyan Wang, a vice president at the business software startup Landing AI, said that the coronavirus has led more manufacturers to consider upgrading their factories with cutting-edge data crunching. His startup is increasingly being contacted by companies that want to install more A.I. technologies to automate their operations—especially companies with facilities in Asia.
As an example, Wang cited an unnamed Chinese manufacturing firm CEO who told him that if one worker out of thousands contracts the coronavirus, he would be required to temporarily close the factory like he recently had to do. As a result, the company is “accelerating” its adoption of A.I. and machine learning over the next few years “to help augment the workers,” Wang said.
Left unsaid is the possibility that the technology would reduce the overall number of workers needed in the factory.
The hope is that the cost of new A.I. technology would pay off the next time a pandemic or some other disaster blocks hundreds or thousands of employees from working.
Wang’s comments came at the MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital A.I. conference, which is typically an in-person event. But in a sign of the times, it was held online this year due to the coronavirus.
Meanwhile, tech news site The Information reported that Amazon “has seen a huge swell in sales inquiries” for its A.I. powered Connect service for call-center workers. Workers in big call center operations in the Philippines and elsewhere have been quarantined and are therefore unable to work—or may soon be unable to do so.
As The Wall Street Journal reported, “Businesses are scrambling for temp workers and using bots to help filter callers who need a live person from those who can be helped in other ways.” In essence, companies are trying to make do with less.
It’s unclear what the outcome of all this spending on A.I. would mean to workers of the future. Unions are increasingly negotiating protections for employees impacted by automation. But the push by businesses to adopt A.I. may be happening faster than labor contracts are being drafted.
Jonathan Vanian
@JonathanVanian
jonathan.vanian@fortune.com
A.I. IN THE NEWS
“Sensitive technologies.” Microsoft said it would “divest its shareholding” in the startup AnyVision, which was the subject of an NBC News article published in fall describing allegations that the Israeli company's facial recognition technology was used to secretly monitor West Bank Palestinians. Although Microsoft said that an independent audit of the startup “demonstrated that AnyVision’s technology has not previously and does not currently power a mass surveillance program in the West Bank,” it chose to cut ties with the startup and stop investment in other companies selling facial-recognition technology. “By making a global change to its investment policies to end minority investments in companies that sell facial recognition technology, Microsoft’s focus has shifted to commercial relationships that afford Microsoft greater oversight and control over the use of sensitive technologies,” the company said in a statement on its venture capital website.
A.I.-powered chip design. Google researchers are exploring the use of reinforcement learning—the A.I. technique that helps computers learn through repetition—to help create more energy-efficient computer chips, MIT Technology Review reported. The researcher’s technology helps with the challenging problem of placing components on a computer chip in the most optimal way. As the report describes, the chip-placement process “requires the careful configuration of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of components across multiple layers in a constrained area.”
Here comes another A.I. “framework.” Huawei has open-sourced its MindSpore A.I. toolset for app development, which means coders can now access the so-called framework for free, VentureBeat reported. Institutions like the University of Edinburgh, Peking University, and Imperial College London are backing the A.I. toolset, which joins a growing list of A.I. frameworks like Google’s TensorFlow and Facebook’s PyTorch, used by researchers to create neural networks.
Chinese big data startup gets big funding. MiningLamp Technology, a Chinese startup specializing in big data and A.I., has received $300 million in funding from investors including Chinese tech giant Tencent and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, reported the South China Morning Post. The report said that the startup’s “fundraising comes amid a global coronavirus pandemic, expected to further dampen China’s funding environment which had already been cooling amid an overall slowdown in the domestic economy as well as an ongoing tech war with the US.”
THE MISSING DATA
Catherine D’Ignazio, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology assistant professor of urban science and planning, talked to The Guardian about the importance of collecting data that’s more representative of society. After all, the accuracy of A.I.-powered systems are determined by the underlying data used to train them. D’Ignazio, who recently co-wrote the book Data Feminism , explains how certain societal groups have been negatively impacted via current data-collection methods:
One way they are losing is that data most of us would think is important isn’t being collected. We have detailed datasets on things like the length of guinea pig teeth and items lost on the New York City subway. But, in the US, missing data includes maternal mortality data, which has only started being collected recently, and sexual harassment data. And so much of our health and medical understanding is based on research that has been done exclusively on the male body.
EYE ON A.I. RESEARCH
Deep learning, what is it good for? Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and Alphabet chairman, and Cornell University PhD computer science candidate Maithra Raghu published a paper that details several ways deep learning has been used to aid scientific discovery. The paper is essentially a primer on the various machine learning techniques that have become popular in a recent years and is intended for researchers interested in applying those techniques to their area of study.
Some of the topics the paper details includes strategies related to data augmentation, “an important part of the deep learning workflow” that “refers to the process of artificially increasing the size and diversity of the training data by applying a variety of transformations to the raw data instances.”
The paper also includes some helpful “implementation tips” for people dipping their toes into deep learning:
Explore Your Data
Before starting with steps in the learning phase (see Figure 1), make sure to perform a thorough exploration of your data. What are the results of simple dimensionality reduction methods or clustering? Are the labels reliable? Is there imbalance amongst different classes? Are different subpopulations appropriately represented?
Try Simple Methods
When starting off with a completely new problem, it is useful to try the simplest version possible. (It might even be worthwhile starting with no learning at all — how does the naïve majority baseline perform? For datasets with large imbalances, it may be quite strong!) If the dataset is very large, is there some smaller subsampled/downscaled version that can be used for faster preliminary testing? What is the simplest model that might work well? How does a majority baseline perform? (This ties in settings where the data has class imbalance.) Does the model (as expected) overfit to very small subsets of the data
FORTUNE ON A.I.
Apple releases COVID-19 screening app, website—By Chris Morris
IBM and The Weather Channel debut coronavirus map—By Jonathan Vanian
With 5G, wearable devices are expected to become even more sci-fi—By Jennifer Alsever
BRAIN FOOD
Deep learning comes to the human brain. It’s only fitting that this week’s “Brain Food” section highlights Jeremy Kahn’s recent story about a startup attempting to create computer chips that are embedded with human neurons. Yes, that means Cortical Labs is “building miniature disembodied brains” in the hopes of creating more energy-efficient A.I. chips that can “eventually be the key to delivering the kinds of complex reasoning and conceptual understanding that today’s A.I. can’t produce.”
From the article:
Using real neurons avoids several other difficulties that software-based neural networks have. For instance, to get artificial neural networks to start learning well, their programmers usually have to engage in a laborious process of manually adjusting the initial coefficients, or weights, that will be applied to each type of data point the network processes. Another challenge is to get the software to balance how much it should be trying to explore new solutions to a problem versus relying on solutions the network has already discovered that work well.


fortune--2020-03-31--New online store offers help to shuttered indie booksellers

Andy Hunter, founder of a new online sales outlet for independent booksellers, had seen a crisis building well before the coronavirus pandemic shut down many of the country’s stores.
“Between 2015 and 2018, I saw this big jump in the percentage of weekly sales for physical books that were going to Amazon.com,” Hunter says. “And it seemed like independent bookstores needed to do something to adapt, because the writing was on the wall.”
In January, Hunter launched Bookshop.org, which offers everything from the new Hilary Mantel novel to such classics as Boccaccio’s “The Decameron,” and shares proceeds with independent stores. Hunter says weekly sales at first were around $30,000, but jumped to more than $450,000 by mid-March, as the virus spread and readers no longer could visit their favorite local stores.
On Tuesday, Simon & Schuster became the first of the major publishers to launch a formal partnership with Bookshop.org. Simon & Schuster is adding buy buttons for Bookshop.org to all of its websites and promoting Bookshop through emails and elsewhere online. It also has enlisted numerous authors, among them Stephen King, Susan Orlean and Jason Reynolds, to get the word out about Bookshop on social media and elsewhere.
“Independent bookstores are the lifeline of the intellect,” King said in a statement. “They have to remain strong, especially in difficult times like these.”
“Indie booksellers have consistently served as bonding agents for our communities,” Reynolds said in a statement. “They work tirelessly to make sure we not only have books, but also a base, a place to come and simply be. They are, quite literally, the cover that protects the pages of who we are. And now, it’s time for us to protect them.”
Hunter, who previously founded the digital publisher Electric Literature and helped create the online publication Literary Hub, sees Bookshop.org as serving a niche within a niche in independent selling. While stores such as Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, and the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have built effective presences online, many have lacked the resources and/or the desire to do the same.
Allison K Hill, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, the trade group for independent stores, says many have seen “unprecedented online sales lately.” She cautioned, “These sales don’t make up for lost sales due to stores being closed,” but added, “We’re also lucky to have Bookshop as part of the indie bookstore ecosystem, especially during this crisis.”
Joelle Hill, owner of The Bookshop in Nashville, Tennessee, had been thinking for a while about investing in e-commerce, but was deterred by the logistics. Her store is just 550 square feet and she has limited space for more inventory. When she heard about Bookshop.org, its name comfortably close to her store’s name, she did a “mental heel kick.”
“My storefront has been closed as of March 15, and, since then, I have been putting most of my energy into creating curated lists on our Bookshop.org page and trying to convince folks (via social media) to order their books (plus games and puzzles) from us to prepare for what looks to be a long stretch of staying at home ahead,” she wrote in a recent email.
“Our customers have shown up for us in such a big way that it honestly makes my heart ache with appreciation—for them and for the Bookshop.org folks who created what has essentially turned out to be a lifeline during this terrible time.”


fortune--2020-03-31--Coronavirus fight could prove fatal for another global challenge: Addressing climate change

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Fighting the coronavirus is like a war. But to address climate change, “we need to win the peace,” says Mark Carney, UN special envoy on climate action and climate finance, and governor of the Bank of England until earlier this year.
The spread of the coronavirus has created a life-or-death crisis not just for individuals and for health care systems—but for businesses and economies as a whole. As governments and businesses face down the coronavirus crisis, the question will be where this war leaves the challenge the world was facing before the coronavirus—and will face again after: climate change.
Will the devastation of the coronavirus offer a chance to intervene on a mass scale to support renewables and cut emissions—or cause a potentially fatal loss of momentum?
“Winning the peace” won’t be easy, Carney acknowledged at a recent event on investors and climate change. “Because the costs of fighting the pandemic will diminish the capacity of governments, businesses, and financial institutions to tackle the next crisis—and we should acknowledge that,” said Carney.
But the current situation should hold a lesson, he added: If the world can address the coronavirus, it can address climate change too.
Survival first, climate later
Before the coronavirus, momentum seemed to be building behind governments and businesses taking steps to address climate change. As 2020 began, wildfires were destroying vast swaths of Australia; the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg had become a household name; and major investors like BlackRock had pledged to put climate at the center of their portfolios. It would also be a critical year for fulfilling climate goals. In order to meet the Paris Agreement guidelines of cutting emissions to net zero by 2050, emissions must fall by half by 2030—so there’s not a year to waste.
But the spread of the coronavirus has thrown an even more urgent crisis at governments and business: how to save the lives of millions of people, prevent health care systems from collapsing, and shore up economies that must now enter something comparable to an induced coma.
Brian Murray, director of the Duke University Energy Initiative, says when he talks to executives, the message is clear: “I have to prioritize the survival of my company right now, and I’ll get back to you on that climate stuff after we’ve survived.”
That has put into question not only whether fresh commitments to cut emissions will be made, but also whether companies that have already made commitments will aim to keep them—or be able to.
While global emissions are likely to plummet this year due to the vast restrictions on travel and industry that have already produced cleaner air in major cities and manufacturing regions, those emissions are declining due to “economic meltdown” rather than long-term policy change, said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, in a conference call with the Atlantic Council.
Unlike in 2019, when emissions unexpectedly flattened due to long-term changes—developed nations moving away from coal, in particular, and ramping up renewable energy sources—any drop could be undone by a rapid restart of economic engines and the jettisoning of climate commitments in the name of recovery.
“Before this crisis, many governments around the world, many companies around the world have set targets how much and how seriously they will reduce emissions,” said Birol. “Now in my view, this is a test, to see if they will go through with their commitments. It will not be easy.”
“We’re in a catastrophe”
However, some analysts hold out hope that after confronting a crisis of this scale of the coronavirus pandemic, people will start to look at addressing climate change differently.
“What I think of the reality is, we’re in a catastrophe,” said Rebecca Henderson, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of the forthcoming book Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire. “And I hope it will make it much more likely, and easy to understand, that we have some larger catastrophes coming our way.”
Henderson says she is “very hopeful” that after a career trying to persuade people that the future is unlikely to be business as usual, the coronavirus crisis will make people realize that, in fact, the future is not fixed.
But others are less optimistic.
“My own feeling is people will try to get back to the lives they had back in December as quickly as possible,” says Mark Barrett, a professor of energy and environmental systems modeling at University College London.
While the crisis could drive home the risk of not facing up to climate change—and introduce the public to harsh interventions—rapidly reducing emissions is a different kind of problem.
“There’s no sort of quick fixes, like social isolation. It requires investment, planning, over long periods,” Barrett said. “It’s going to be disaster on an epic scale—10,000 times greater than the coronavirus.”
“Once the war is over”
Still, there is an opportunity here for governments that are willing to seize the moment.
“I don’t by any stretch of the imagination think climate change is going to drop off the agenda,” said Fiona Reynolds, CEO at the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investing. “We’re already seeing investors and governments talking about [how] the shape of the recovery needs to be green and sustainable.”
In March, UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged governments to attach green provisions to relief deals and put the Paris Agreement at the center of such deals, arguing, “We must keep our promises for people and planet.” It would be a window, in other words, to kick-start a Green New Deal.
That call is being heeded more in Europe, Reynolds notes. The EU as well as the U.K. have already committed to reaching “net zero” emissions by 2050.
At the U.S. state level, too, some are calling for green intervention as a key part of policies to rebuild the post-coronavirus economy. In the presentation alongside Carney, Betty Yee, California’s state controller and a board member for Calpers, the country’s largest public pension fund, said that there should be a “climate risk component” in all public and private financing, and monetary policy, directed toward rebuilding the economy.
But at the national level in the U.S., elements of the $2 trillion relief bill that would prioritize green development were stripped away—an inevitability, said Duke’s Murray, to get support for businesses passed without creating a “political hell storm” that could delay the bill.
Still, speaking about the post-coronavirus economy, Carney noted that in Britain, the period after World War II—a period that has been routinely referred to in recent weeks—brought about massive changes in society: the creation of the country’s welfare state, as well as reforms of health care and education. The same could be true this time, he said.
“Once this war is over, may the challenge really be to create a planet that is fit for our grandchildren,” he said.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—The great African air conditioning boom is about to begin—and it could strain the planet
—As the U.K. goes into lockdown, London faces isolation—and clear skies
—Big Oil’s Hail Mary
—Business is finally starting to reckon with climate change—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEO
—WATCH: PSEG CEO on climate change action: “It should have been done yesterday”
Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily newsletter roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business. It’s free to get it in your inbox.