It’s true. Across the world, tech giants are filling voids. In China, Alibaba’s Jack Ma shared purported snaps of one million face masks and 500,000 coronavirus testing kits bound for America, where shortages threaten lives.
— Jack Ma (@JackMa) March 16, 2020 Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also lending a hand. He just organised the delivery of 1,200 ventilators to Californian hospitals, as well as other medical supplies, albeit after awkwardly implying that US states weren’t running low on supplies. Household names like Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook are involved, too. They’re sourcing millions of face masks for the US and Europe.
Silicon Valley can only do so much against coronavirus
These are moves spurred on by calls for the world’s biggest companies to step in where governments have failed. Current estimates suggest the US needs roughly 3.5 billion face masks to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, so while sorely needed, that few million pledged by Silicon Valley’s heavyweights will only go so far. Speaking to these concerns, an influential San Francisco pension fund practically begged the S&P 500 on Monday to mobilize their manufacturing and distribution operations to helping the health sector handle COVID-19 . While such an arrangement might appear commonplace somewhere like the US, the notion of powerful corporations playing house with the government is markedly more foreign in Britain — especially those notorious for not paying taxes.
If not Big Tech, then who else?
On the other hand, food distribution streams like soup kitchens are readying to face unprecedented demand as joblessness surges and the economy shrinks. The real kicker comes uncomfortably, in the form of a looming question mark: if relying Big Tech on doesn’t work, what will?
