Vivek Murthy, former U.S. Surgeon General, says that even before the Covid-19 pandemic, we were facing another health crisis: loneliness. Studies show that, around the world, more people have been feeling a greater sense of social isolation, which has many negative affects, including increased blood pressure, reduced immune response, and decreased engagement and productivity at work. But organizations can be a place where people find a greater sense of belonging. Murthy wants us to take loneliness more seriously and focus on fostering the types of authentic connections — face-to-face and virtual — that we need to combat it. He’s the author of the book Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.

In March 2020, the improbable suddenly became the unthinkable for Swedish Health Services, the largest nonprofit health care provider in the greater Seattle area, where two of us work as senior executives. An increasing number of Covid-19 patients from a local skilled nursing facility began to arrive at our Seattle hospitals in severe distress. We had been tracking the illness before the first U.S. Covid-19 patient was admitted on January 30 at a sister organization 30 miles north of our headquarters, and we knew how bad it might get — models projected that the region’s healthcare system could soon be overwhelmed.

After being forced to quickly shift plans and stage a remote demo day last month following the outbreak of COVID-19 stateside, Y Combinator announced today that they will officially be fully moving their next batch to a remote format.

In a post today on Y Combinator’s site, YC CEO Michael Seibel announced the move. “We have decided to run the S20 batch remotely, because amid the COVID-19 crises, the safety of founders and YC staff is our top priority.”

Image: https://techcrunch.com

18. Business development managers build businesses up. They typically make between $44,000–$122,000 a year.

Business development managers oversee business development. Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design/Flickr Business development managers find clients, make business plans, manage accounts, and increase revenue by meeting sales goals and maintaining business relationships.

Even before the coronavirus, Nina Brajovic wasn’t so sure about her life in New York. As a consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers, she spent most weeks out of town traveling for work. She often wondered whether she could do her same job for cheaper — and more easily — while based in her hometown, Pittsburgh.

Over the past month, she has gotten a sneak peek of that life, moving back in with her parents to avoid the wall-to-wall density of New York and working out of her childhood bedroom. She is now savoring life’s slowness, eating her father’s soup and watching movies on an L-shaped couch with her mom.

“Nobody knew there’d be a pandemic” … “Nobody has ever seen anything like this before” … “Nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened.”

Those were President Trump’s words in March about the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump’s repeated protestations were questioned by, among others, Trump himself, who told the White House press corps on March 17 that, “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

Image: President Obama is briefed in 2014 by NIH staff including director Anthony Fauci, MD, on pandemic preparations. (NIH)

Last year, Zoom took three months to fix a security flaw that allowed hackers to potentially gain control over certain user's computers running Apple's macOS, according to a report from The New York Times on Monday. 

The issue, which Zoom addressed and fixed last July, was brought to the company's attention from multiple security researchers who participated in a hackathon hosted by Dropbox, the report said. Dropbox, which is a Zoom customer and partner, then presented the findings to Zoom, which only fixed the issues after another researcher found the same flaw.

Image: https://www.businessinsider.com

At PwC’s Global Crisis Centre, we deal with crises every day. But as the COVID-19 outbreak has worsened, the volume of calls fielded by our teams has noticeably increased. By the end of February, the phones were ringing off the hook. Business leaders are concerned, and rightly so, for the welfare of their people and their organizations.

Image: Photograph by BlackJack3D  

Something bizarre happened in the oil markets on Monday: Prices fell so much that some traders paid buyers to take oil off their hands.

The price of the main U.S. oil benchmark fell more than $50 a barrel to end the day about $30 below zero, the first time oil prices have ever turned negative. Such an eye-popping slide is the result of a quirk in the oil market, but it underscores the industry’s disarray as the coronavirus pandemic decimates the world economy.

Image: https://www.nytimes.com

There’s a popular meme going around that neatly captures the tipping point of digital. It’s a short questionnaire asking who is driving your digital transformation. The first two options are “CEO” and “chief digital officer.” Below that, highlighted with a bright red circle, is “COVID-19.”

Yes, innovators and disruptors, it's once again time for our weekly newsletter! I hope everyone is doing well during these difficult times.

This week we want to shed some light on emotional wellbeing. What is emotional wellbeing, you ask? In short, it means focusing on yourself and handling the ups and downs of life.

With all of the stress these days from a disrupted economy, health risks, home schooling, and so much more, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and confused.  In these challenging times, It's important to pay attention to your mental wellbeing and to create opportunities for self-care.

Last week, President Trump walked back statements saying his "authority is total" when deciding when to reopen the economy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, instead stating that he was OK with governors taking the lead in deciding when and how to reopen their states.

Now, governors are taking the national spotlight as they make their decisions. And though the United States' governors all share the same title, the nation's 50 state leaders do not share the same salary.

Jay Abraham has been consulting for businesses across several industries for decades. He has witnessed and gone through 4 previous recessions. Not only has he been able to pull his business through those economic downturns, but he has also been able to help entrepreneurs and employees navigate those turbulent times.

Venture capitalists seeking to revolutionise cancer treatment and testing helped propel biomedical venture capital investment to new heights in 2019.

In an analysis of US medical venture funding across 17 areas of the human body, the industry set records in both the blood and immune system categories, largely because of interest in new ways of detecting cancer in the blood and harnessing immune cells’ tumour fighting powers.

Image: https://www.penews.com

Most small businesses I advise still rely on traditional advertising models, assuming they can create enough media “noise” to get customers attention and sway them. You don’t realize that person-to-person noise now dominates all channels through social media, effectively hiding business marketing messages. You now need a personal context in your marketing to get results.

Just over three weeks ago the CARES Act, a massive piece of legislation designed to combat the economic havoc being wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, was enacted.

One significant piece of that legislation is the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which allows small businesses to borrow funds from the Small Business Administration and affiliated lenders roughly equivalent to 2.5 months of payroll costs. The use of borrowed funds is restricted to “payroll costs” (employee compensation, group health benefits, retirement benefits, state unemployment taxes), rent, mortgage interest, interest on other loans and utilities.

The Finnish Youth Research Society's (FYRS) new Youth Barometer 2019 indicates that teenage and young adult respondents are taking more of an interest in entrepreneurship than in previous years.

Boys and under-20s have particularly taken an interest in starting a business.

Image: Lilly Nysten works as an upholsterer in Helsinki. Image: Eleni Paspatis / Yle

Mother Nature has its nuanced way of educating us. Following a century of scientific and technological advances that triggered unprecedented economic growth, our civilization perceived its superiority over nature as undisputed.

Like corrections to irrationally exuberant stock markets, however, COVID-19 is a correction to human hubris. Nature is teaching all humans, rich and poor, to be humble. Although we thought we can manipulate nature at our will, here comes a primitive coronavirus with negligible information content relative to our brain, threatening to kill us and wreck our economy, causing as much damage from the side effects triggered by our societal reaction to it as from its direct medical impact.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — With speed and ingenuity, more than 100 researchers across Penn State are shifting their research programs to address the COVID-19 crisis, thanks to funding from a seed grant initiative led by the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences. In total, the initiative awarded $2.25 million to 47 teams of researchers from three campuses, 10 colleges and more than 25 departments.

Image: The seed grants are supporting 47 projects aimed at preventing and treating COVID-19 and creating tools that address the social and economic impacts of the pandemic.IMAGE: FUSION MEDICAL ANIMATION, UNSPLASH

Companies are becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of gamification. It promotes disinhibition, reduces prejudice, encourages cross-disciplinary teamwork and co-creation, helps groups with very different profiles to speak the same language and achieves a level of engagement that drives participants to go one step further. These benefits are particularly important when it comes to ensuring success in creative thinking and innovation.

Image: https://innovationexcellence.com