In the third week of February, as the covid-19 epidemic was still flaring in China, I arrived in Kolkata, India. I woke up to a sweltering morning—the black kites outside my hotel room were circling upward, lifted by the warming currents of air—and I went to visit a shrine to the goddess Shitala. Her name means “the cool one”; as the myth has it, she arose from the cold ashes of a sacrificial fire. The heat that she is supposed to diffuse is not just the fury of summer that hits the city in mid-June but also the inner heat of inflammation. She is meant to protect children from smallpox, heal the pain of those who contract it, and dampen the fury of a pox epidemic.

Three months into this pandemic, scientists are coming to understand the novel coronavirus. They know, for example, that as horrible as this virus is, it is not the worst, most apocalyptic virus imaginable. Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, is not as contagious as measles, and although it is very dangerous, it is not as likely to kill an infected person as, say, Ebola.

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The coronavirus pandemic is broadly affecting businesses globally, but it is affecting startups particularly hard. In this article, I have gathered some key advice to startups from leading venture capitalists and others connected to the venture industry.

1. Cash Runway Is Paramount “We suggest you question every assumption about your business, including (cash runway). Do you really have as much runway as you think? Could you withstand a few poor quarters if the economy sputters? Have you made contingency plans? Where could you trim expenses without fundamentally hurting the business?” —Sequoia Capital

CORONAVIRUS continues to spread across the UK, with more than 8,000 confirmed cases. The deadly virus is highly infectious due to its incubation period as well as how easily it is transmitted.

Boris Johnson previously warned that cases of the virus could double every "five to six days" as its spreads across the country quicker than feared.

Here is what you need to know about how long you are contagious for and how long it stays in your system.

The legendary Judy Garland achieved one of her career highlights in the MGM classic Meet Me in St. Louis in 1944, just five years after receiving her only Academy Award for her timeless performance as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. 

Meet Me in St. Louis recounted the story of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. 1904 was a banner year for the city of St. Louis, as it hosted both a World’s Fair and the 1904 Summer Olympics. In its heyday following the U.S. Civil War, St. Louis had emerged as a major port and the 4th largest city in the United States, a position that it continued to hold through the time of the 1904 World’s Fair.  St. Louis had been a great hub of transport and innovation for more than half a century, but in the years between 1950-2010, the city’s population declined 62.7% to a position where it now ranks 64th in size among U.S. cities.

To prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed, states should focus on preventing the spread of COVID-19 at high-risk sites, such as nursing homes, and in high-risk localities, the COVID-19 Policy Alliance — a group of experts brought together by two professors at the MIT Sloan School of Management — said in a presentation released Tuesday.

The Alliance also put online a set of data analytic tools to enable states to identify the highest risk facilities and localities — those with clusters of individuals over 65 or with relevant health issues.

With countries from Italy to the U.S. having waited too long to combat the coronavirus, many experts in public health and epidemiology are pleading with government officials not to compound the mistake by lifting stay-at-home and other social distancing measures too soon — and, in fact, to impose strict ones in U.S. states and cities that haven’t.

About a decade ago, I was a practicing corporate and commercial lawyer constantly questioning the best value I could provide for clients and the industry. There was a clear need for a revolution to change the direction of the legal service delivery model, particularly through automation and AI. So, I fed my “entrepreneurial bug” and left my career in law to start ContractPodAi.

According to the World Health Organization and the CDC, social distancing is currently the most effective way to slow the spread of COVID-19. We created this interactive Scoreboard, updated daily, to empower organizations to measure and understand the efficacy of social distancing initiatives at the local level. Please scroll down and explore the data — the more we all understand, the more lives we can save together.

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Employers should be doing more to protect their workers’ well-being as the COVID-19 outbreak continues.

Millions of working parents are bearing the brunt of the outbreak as they attempt to do their jobs while scrambling to find childcare options. Company leaders have been accommodating, offering many employees the option to work from home as the situation continues to unfold. But this isn’t enough.

Yesterday, the United States surpassed China, becoming the world leader in COVID-19 infections. It's not hard to understand why. Social distancing remains very uneven. Domestic travel continues unchecked. Asymptomatic carriers stay on the move. Starting on the coasts, COVID-19 is now moving inexorably across the nation, coming to a city or town near you.

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As the number of hospitalizations due to Covid-19 continues to rise across the U.S., addressing the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers has become increasingly urgent. Institutions and organizations across the country – including MIT – have been scrambling to collect and send unused face masks to local hospitals.

In the race to help protect doctors, nurses, and patients, some have suggested that technologies like 3D printing be used to quickly manufacture masks. In a recent memo, MIT faculty members Martin Culpepper, Peter Fisher, and Elazer Edelman, with input from Neil Gershenfeld and A. John Hart, detail the risks associated with using 3D printing to build PPE and Covid-19-related medical devices.

On March 11 the World Health Organization officially designated the novel coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. Defined as the worldwide spread of a new disease, such a declaration is the first to be made since the 2009 H1N1 swine flu. As of this writing, there have been approximately 336,000 confirmed cases of the new disease, called COVID-19, resulting in more than 14,600 deaths worldwide.

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Dr. Bruce Aylward has almost 30 years experience in fighting polio, Ebola and other diseases, and now, he’s turned his attention to stopping the spread of COVID-19.

Aylward, the senior adviser to the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), is one of the world’s top officials in charge of fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

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By late spring, the most severe impacts from the coronavirus may be fading, but its impact on how we live and work will not go away. Indeed, many of the most relevant trends — including the rise of dispersed work and living arrangements — were already emerging even before the pandemic emerged.

Hospitals in New York City are gearing up to use the blood of people who have recovered from COVID-19 as a possible antidote for the disease. Researchers hope that the century-old approach of infusing patients with the antibody-laden blood of those who have survived an infection will help the metropolis—now the US epicentre of the outbreak—to avoid the fate of Italy, where intensive-care units (ICUs) are so crowded that doctors have turned away patients who need ventilators to breathe.

For Elizabeth Schneider, her bout withthe coronavirus began with a scratchy throat, exhaustion and a headache. Then came fever, chills and nausea. But she never had shortness of breath or coughing.

Charlie Campbell’s 89-year-old dad had a cough and irregular heart rate and was briefly on oxygen before he recovered. 

Amy Driscoll first experienced shortness of breath and her chest felt constricted.

For Bill Houser, a Superior Court judge in Kitsap County, Washington, the symptoms came on overnight.

For some organizations, near-term survival is the only agenda item. Others are peering through the fog of uncertainty, thinking about how to position themselves once the crisis has passed and things return to normal. The question is, ‘What will normal look like?’ While no one can say how long the crisis will last, what we find on the other side will not look like the normal of recent years.”

These words were written 11 years ago, amid the last global financial crisis, by one of our former managing partners, Ian Davis. They ring true today but if anything, understate the reality the world is currently facing.

Though the coronavirus pandemic is different, the strategies for responding are, in many cases, the same.

The Great Recession showed how a crisis can fuel state disinvestment. “If past is prologue,” one university official said, “we have reason to be concerned.”