Tech:NYC Newsletter
Posts
COVID-19 Digest: October 8

COVID-19 Digest: October 8

October 08, 2020 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes

COVID-19 Digest

Thursday, October 8, 2020As NYC’s reopening and recovery efforts continue, the digest will focus on the resources that help you make decisions about your businesses and your lives as New Yorkers.

Download COVID Alert NY, the new exposure notification app built by the New York State Dept. of Health and Tech:NYC, here.

Was this digest forwarded to you? Subscribe to get it directly here.

The Latest in New York

The latest: Pres. Trump proposes limited relief days after ending talks with Speaker Pelosi; president pulled out of next week’s debate after it switched to a virtual setting; designated “orange zone” schools closed today in NYC as new localized restrictions take hold; read how Norbert Health is protecting the public with contactless health safety devices in our latest Companies to Watch. Confirmed Cases:

New York State: 470,104 (+1,836)
New York City: 248,696 (+696)
Statewide Fatalities: 25,555 (+10)
Daily NYC Infection Rate: 1.2 percent (-0.3 percent)

General Updates:

The positivity rate in New York’s hotspot zip codes ticked up to 5.8 percent. (NYS) Excluding those zip codes, the state’s latest positivity rate remains at just above one percent. The latest numbers come as New York State conducted a record 145,000+ tests yesterday.
NYC has launched a new website where you can check to see if a particular address or intersection falls within one of the closure zones and what restrictions are in place at that location. Explore the tool here.
More than 800,000 new unemployment benefits claims were filed last week, stalling at a level far higher than the worst week of past recessions. (New York Times) California is not currently accepting new unemployment claims due to backlogs, so the jobless toll is likely significantly higher than what the Labor Dept. reports.
Pres. Trump somewhat walked back the decision he made earlier this week to cease bi-partisan stimulus negotiations until after Election Day. The president proposed more piecemeal relief bills for the airline industry and another round of $1,200 direct payments. (Washington Post) But Democrats signaled they would only support a larger, more comprehensive package. (Wall Street Journal)
The Commission on Presidential Debates announced that next week’s scheduled second presidential debate would shift to a remote, virtual format due to coronavirus concerns. (Wall Street Journal) Shortly after the change was announced, Pres. Trump said he wouldn’t “waste [his] time” with a virtual debate, despite him likely still being contagious with COVID-19.

One event worth your time: We’re relaunching Functions.NYC, our virtual roundtable series featuring the leaders guiding New York’s recovery. As the renewal of indoor dining is met with a simultaneous rollback of restaurant reopenings in certain hotspot neighborhoods, we’ll discuss how the industry is adapting with NYC Hospitality Alliance executive director Andrew Rigie. RSVP to join us Oct. 13 here, and we’ll send you Zoom details.One useful read: I regularly forget that I have New York’s COVID-19 exposure notification app, and that’s a good thing (The Verge)

Survey

The latest results: An estimated 73 million people tuned in for the first debate with Pres. Trump and VP Biden last week, and early numbers show last night’s veep debate drew less than one-third of that at about 22.6 million viewers. Did you plan on watching last night’s debate?

75.7%: Yes
24.3%: No

Today’s poll: More lockdown measures were put in place today in several hotspot zones across the state, including additional school closures. By tomorrow, all nonessential businesses, including indoor and outdoor dining establishments, will have to close back down in the hardest hit “red zones” of the clusters, returning those places back to a full “PAUSE” order similar to that at the peak of the outbreak in spring. Do these isolated restrictions impact your daily life?

*|SURVEY: Yes, I live in one of the restricted zones|*
*|SURVEY: Yes, I work in one of the restricted zones|*
*|SURVEY: No, but I’m concerned about rising rates and will change my behavior accordingly|*
*|SURVEY: No, there is no impact to me at all|*

Find the poll results from all previous editions of this newsletter here.

What You Need to Know

What to Know: Reopening:

School buildings in the orange cluster zones of the state must close beginning today for at least 14 days. (ABC New York) Schools in the red zones are already closed, and students from both zones must move to all-remote learning.
- That means a total of 169 school buildings are now closed. (Chalkbeat) 308 additional sites in the cautionary yellow zones that will be required to conduct mandatory weekly testing beginning tomorrow.
- A full list provided by the NYC Dept. of Education of impacted schools as of yesterday is available here.
The new localized restrictions have been met with resistance from affected community members, many of whom are conservative Haredi Jews. Many have protested in recent nights, largely without masks or attention to social distance. (New York Times)

Related reading:

How leaders can better track and manage their employees' performance remotely without coming off as micromanagers (Business Insider)
Working Remote Leads To Mental Health Challenges: Here’s How To Cope (Forbes)
How to Retool Your Work-from-Home Space, According to 4 Experts (Vogue)

One Company to Watch

NORBERT HEALTH

What does your company do?

Norbert Health co-founder and CEO Alexandre Winter: Norbert Health is building the first medical grade, contactless vital signs scanner and health monitoring solution for the masses. We are building a sleek, plug-and-play, consumer grade device, that measures temperature, cardiac activity, breathing rate without contact, within ten feet, in less than two seconds, and with medical grade accuracy.

You want Norbert Health’s tools to be preventative — to predict health problems before they occur. What do you hope the sector focuses on post-pandemic? Or a decade from now?

AW: Right now our focus is to make health screening automated and ubiquitous — and to help the world deal with the new reality where our health is not our own personal issue anymore, but something that affects the world directly. We’re focused on COVID today, but tomorrow we’ll keep this in mind for the flu, colds, and other conditions.Once vital signs are monitored more regularly in our homes, we’ll be able to train machine learning models to detect almost-invisible patterns that are early signs of the onset of a disease or health issue. We’ll then take immediate action and cure the disease before the first symptom becomes visible. The first examples of this will probably be available before 10 years. I would even say five and a half years.Read the full interview here.

Request: please let us know as your return-to-office policies are developed and what considerations your companies are taking for developing them. Sharing this information is helpful to companies and employees across the NYC ecosystem and can be kept anonymous.

Reminder: Tech:NYC’s resource guide is now available here and contains a comprehensive list of return-to-office plans published in previous digests.

Recruit: A tech talent and job opportunities board from Tech:NYC and AlleyCorp compiles NYC tech workers looking for new roles and NYC-based tech companies hiring open positions. To contribute to the board, click here.

Events:

October 13: Virtual: Functions:NYC: A Conversation on the Future of the Restaurant and Hospitality Industry, with NYC Hospitality Alliance executive director Andrew Rigie. Hosted by Tech:NYC. (Details)
October 13: Virtual: POLITICO Playbook Interview Series, with Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Hosted by POLITICO. (Details)
October 14: Virtual: The Future of Worker Wellbeing, with Justworks CEO Isaac Oates and Human Ventures CEO Heather Hartnett. Hosted by Human Ventures. (Details)
October 14: Virtual: Crain’s Business Forum, with New York State Attorney General Letitia James. Hosted by Crain’s. (Details)
October 21: Virtual: Centering Inclusivity in Your Team’s Strategy, with General (ret.) Stanley McChrystal, Atlassian Head of R&D Dominic Price, Bloomberg L.P. Head of D&I Chris Michel, and more. Hosted by Bloomberg. (Details)

When In Doubt

Check these sources for verified information from government agencies and public health authorities:

Was this digest forwarded to you? Sign up to receive it directly here.