As of this writing, nearly a million people globally have been infected with the novel coronavirus and 50,322 have died. Healthcare systems are overwhelmed, consumers and profiteers are hoarding supplies and some service workers have launched strikes while many others have been let go. In the world of micromobility, we’ve seen Bird lay off hundreds of employees and Lime is reportedly gearing up for layoffs of its own.

Ride Report creates software that enables cities to better work with micromobility operators and has a bird’s-eye view on the industry. In a conversation with TechCrunch, CEO William Henderson outlined some of the trends that have emerged and what we can expect for micromobility operators amid the pandemic — and once it’s over.

“All of this came at a really hard time for micromobility,” he tells TechCrunch. “It couldn’t really have occurred at a worse time in some ways.”

That’s because there was already a lot of pressure on startups in the space to reach profitability on an accelerated timeline, Henderson says. While winter is notoriously known as a rough time, the environment in this pandemic is “micromobility winter on steroids.”

Over the last month, companies have paused operations in cities and started laying off people. Operators Bird and Lime, for example, paused operations across the board last month.

The world’s population is aging, but the needs of elderly people are still being underserved. A United Nations report found that older people make up more than one-fifth of the population in 17 countries, and by 2100, a majority of the world’s population, or 61%, will be aged 60 and above.

One of the most urgent needs for families is caregiving, with demand outstripping the pool of qualified providers. This means many people in their thirties and forties are now part of the “sandwich generation,” juggling jobs and child care while looking after elderly relatives. This creates both an opportunity and challenge for tech startups and investors in almost every market around the world.

In Southeast Asia, Homage is addressing the issue with a platform that takes a curated approach to pairing caregivers and families, using a combination of in-person screening and its matching engine to make the process more efficient. Currently operating in Singapore and Malaysia, the startup announced earlier this year that it will use its Series B funding to expand into five new countries in the region.

Backed by investors, including HealthXCapital, Golden Gate Ventures and EV Ventures, Homage was co-founded in 2016 by chief executive officer Gillian Tee, who grew up in Singapore and was inspired by her family’s own experiences looking for caregivers. Tee says she wanted to build a platform that would make the process of matching caregivers and clients easier, and be scalable into different markets.

“It’s not the easiest space to be in, and I would say that you do need to want to be intentionally working in this space, rather than just falling into it. It goes hand in hand,” she told TechCrunch. “We found that there is a huge market opportunity, but why we’re doing it goes way beyond that.”

How Homage addresses the talent pool shortage

The German pension and insurance industry was a laggard in the world of online a few years ago, but in recent times it has quickly caught up. There’s further evidence of this trend with the news that Xpension (trading as xbAV), an online platform for pensions and life insurance, has raised €25 million in its Series C financing round. This will take its total funding to date to more than €50 million.

The financing round was led by HPE Growth, a growth capital fund. Existing investors Cinco Capital, led by Lars Hinrichs (founder of XING and chairman of Xpension), and Armada Investment, led by Daniel S. Aegerter (founder of Tradex), also participated.

The new funding will be used to scale up Xpension’s corporate pension and life insurance SaaS platform in Germany; expand the offering into private pensions and life insurance and corporate health insurance; and prepare a rollout into other European countries. The company has also launched a video platform for agents to speak to clients, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To date, Xpension has attracted to its platform more than 40 life insurers, 11,000 insurance agents and 3,000 SMEs.

Martin Bockelmann, CEO and founder, commented: “After several years of intensive R&D and broad-based user acquisition, this partnership with HPE Growth allows us to unleash the full potential of our platform in Germany and abroad.”

Tim van Delden, partner at HPE Growth, said: “The move online of the €2.5 trillion global pension and life insurance industry is a huge topic. A SaaS platform like Xpension — which connects life insurers, agents and their corporate and private customers to buy and manage policies — will be a game-changer.”

Speaking to TechCrunch, Hinrichs, the active chariman and largest private shareholder, said: “We target not just occupational pensions but the entire segment, which is worth €700 billion in premiums a year. German pensions are the leading pensions segment in Europe. And we are taking advantage of the recent changes in pension policy.”

It would appear that Xpension is in a strong position to potentially open up to end consumers who don’t have pensions, as have similar U.S. platforms, or even to leverage its position to build its own insurance company at some point.

Bustle Digital Group, owner of a portfolio of digital media properties including Bustle itself, says it laid off two dozen staffers today. That includes eliminating the entire staff of The Outline, a culture site that it acquired a year ago.

In a statement, a BDG spokesperson said the company will continue to host The Outline’s archives, and that founder Josh Topolsky will be “exploring alternative paths forward” for its future.

“The unprecedented impact of COVID-19 has forced us to make some tough business decisions,” a BDG spokesperson said. “Most staff will be taking temporary tiered salary reductions and unfortunately, we have eliminated two dozen positions across the company.”

Topolsky (former editor in chief of Engadget and founder of The Verge) founded The Outline in 2016. The site shifted its publication model over time, laying off its writers while maintaining an editorial team that continued to publish freelance content. It was then acquired by Bustle, and Topolsky went on to launch the tech news site Input under the BDG umbrella.

“[I] am tremendously proud of all the weird, funny, interesting, and brilliant stuff we put into the universe, and all the talented writers we were able to publish,” The Outline’s executive editor Leah Finnegan tweeted this morning. “[T]hank you for reading, and [I] hope you will remember what we did fondly.”

BDG, meanwhile, was founded by CEO Bryan Goldberg (pictured above) in 2013. In the past few years, it hasn’t just acquired The Outline, but also Elite Daily, Mic, Nylon and Gawker. In many cases, the deals came after layoffs or other turmoil.

We’re entering what’s likely to be a brutal few months (or longer) for the media industry, as the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic pullback in advertising. The layoffs have already started, while BuzzFeed is trying to avoid them by cutting employee pay.

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: 479th 1Mby1M Roundtable on April 2, 2020: With Darshana Zaveri, Catalyst Health Ventures

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OctoML, a startup founded by the team behind the Apache TVM machine learning compiler stack project, today announced it has raised a $15 million Series A round led by Amplify, with participation from Madrona Ventures, which led its $3.9 million seed round. The core idea behind OctoML and TVM is to use machine learning to optimize machine learning models so they can more efficiently run on different types of hardware.

“There’s been quite a bit of progress in creating machine learning models,” OctoML CEO and University of Washington professor Luis Ceze told me. “But a lot of the pain has moved to once you have a model, how do you actually make good use of it in the edge and in the clouds?”

That’s where the TVM project comes in, which was launched by Ceze and his collaborators at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. It’s now an Apache incubating project and because it’s seen quite a bit of usage and support from major companies like AWS, ARM, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, Xilinx and others, the team decided to form a commercial venture around it, which became OctoML. Today, even Amazon Alexa’s wake word detection is powered by TVM.

Ceze described TVM as a modern operating system for machine learning models. “A machine learning model is not code, it doesn’t have instructions, it has numbers that describe its statistical modeling,” he said. “There’s quite a few challenges in making it run efficiently on a given hardware platform because there’s literally billions and billions of ways in which you can map a model to specific hardware targets. Picking the right one that performs well is a significant task that typically requires human intuition.”

And that’s where OctoML and its “Octomizer” SaaS product, which it also announced, today come in. Users can upload their model to the service and it will automatically optimize, benchmark and package it for the hardware you specify and in the format you want. For more advanced users, there’s also the option to add the service’s API to their CI/CD pipelines. These optimized models run significantly faster because they can now fully leverage the hardware they run on, but what many businesses will maybe care about even more is that these more efficient models also cost them less to run in the cloud, or that they are able to use cheaper hardware with less performance to get the same results. For some use cases, TVM already results in 80x performance gains.

Currently, the OctoML team consists of about 20 engineers. With this new funding, the company plans to expand its team. Those hires will mostly be engineers, but Ceze also stressed that he wants to hire an evangelist, which makes sense, given the company’s open-source heritage. He also noted that while the Octomizer is a good start, the real goal here is to build a more fully featured MLOps platform. “OctoML’s mission is to build the world’s best platform that automates MLOps,” he said.

ButcherBox CEO Mike Salguero shares a fascinating story of a subscription service for high-quality meat being delivered to consumer homes. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story....

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Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

This morning brought fresh economic bad news for the U.S. economy, with over 700,000 jobs lost in the latest report, despite the window of time measured not including some of March’s worst days, and the data itself not counting as many individuals as it might have; the unemployment rate still rose nearly a full point to 4.4%. The barometer generally expected to rise far higher in a month’s time.

Rising unemployment, markets in bear territory, shocking weekly unemployment claims, and some major states just starting lockdowns paint the picture of protracted downturn that has swamped our national and state-led economic response. Some help is coming, but individual payments are probably too small and too late. And a key program aimed at helping small businesses is rife with operational mistakes that will at least delay rollout.

It’s an economic catastrophe, and one that won’t lead to anything like a V-shaped recovery, the vaunted shape that everyone holding equities through the crisis was hoping for. We’re entering a prolonged slump. Precisely how bad isn’t yet known, yes, but it’s going to be bad, with unemployment staying elevated into 2021.

The impacts of the national economic slowdown are going to change the face of venture capital as we’ve come to know it during the last ten years. How so? Let’s talk about it.

After picking through some COVID-19-focused PitchBook data this morning, it’s clear that the era of founder-friendly venture terms is heading for a reset. Even more, recent economic and market data, TechCrunch research and select trends already in motion help paint a picture of a changed startup reality.

So this morning let’s talk about what is coming up for the world of upstart companies and risk embracing capital.

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Darshana Zaveri, Managing Partner at Catalyst Health Ventures. We discussed the firm’s medical device focused investment thesis, including the...

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Under the current lockdown circumstances, it is no surprise that tools supporting remote and virtual workplace are doing well. One such player is remote access service LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM). The...

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Neil Sequeira was a managing director with General Catalyst for more than 13 years before co-founding early-stage firm Defy several years ago with another veteran of the industry, Trae Vassallo, who’d spent the dozen years prior with Kleiner Perkins.

We caught up with Sequeira yesterday afternoon and discussed whether he’s seeing valuations come down and whether he can imagine funding founders who may have an exciting pitch but is unable to meet in-person due to the pandemic.

Our chat has been edited for length.

TechCrunch: How are you, all things considered?

Neil Sequeira: We’ve been pretty busy at home. Obviously, my kids are home, homeschooling and my amazing wife is with them.

At work, we’ve been really busy. We have multiple term sheets out that we’ve done since the stay-at-home order [in the Bay Area] and I actually live within walking distance of my office, where I’m alone but it ends up being like a home office because it’s so close. And it’s great because my kids have been going bonkers.

How are your companies faring?

Forward Partners, the early-stage venture fund and startup studio, has long offered something a little different to the U.K’s tech startup ecosystem, and today the VC is continuing that trend with the launch of “Forward Advances,” a revenue-based finance solution for startups that need to bolster marketing.

Aimed at “fast-growing” e-commerce, marketplace and B2C SaaS businesses, Forward Advances will provide growth capital to startups in return for a 6% flat fee, with repayments taken as a small percentage of monthly revenue.

“Unlike traditional venture capital or standard bank loans, a Forward Advance unlocks a novel way for founders to finance their marketing spend without giving up equity, or having to commit to personal warranties,” explains Forward.

Crucially, this sees repayments structured as a percentage of revenues, meaning that companies won’t be required to make large repayments during tough economic times i.e. slower months mean smaller payments.

In addition to the loan, Forward Partners says founders will have access its startup studio team, comprising product and growth specialists that can offer hands-on expertise and help accelerate their growth. The idea is that alongside capital, Forward Advances will provide insight into how the marketing cash is best deployed to make the most difference.

Forward Partners’ Luke Smith is leading Forward Advances, and says that customer research carried out by the VC revealed that raising capital to invest in marketing is often difficult. “Founders find it lengthy, costly, dilutive, stressful or a combination of all four,” he says. One way to remedy this is by combining “flexible funding” with in-house growth specialists, which is exactly what Forward Partners is doing.

Which brings us to the current Coronavirus pandemic and resulting slowdown and certainty, leading me to ask if there could be a worse time to launch a revenue-based finance product?

“This is definitely a hard time for a lot of e-commerce and marketplace companies, particularly those in sectors that have been hit hard by COVID-19 disruption such as travel or events, and we’ve sadly had to turn down some companies in those spaces,” says Smith.

“However, we’ve seen that a number of sectors such as household goods, gaming or edtech are showing strong growth. We will focus on sectors that are positively impacted or unaffected by the disruption for the next few months and then broaden our sector focus as the market improves. With VC funding expected to pull back, we expect that a lot of companies with strong fundamentals will need cash to fund growth.”

More broadly, Smith underlines that Forward Advances is focusing on companies with “strong fundamentals.” This sees the VC look at cash flow as part of the decision making process and will only make advances to companies that it believes will be able to repay the loan. “That said, the loans are unsecured, so we can’t be sure we will get our money back and if companies revenues fall to zero we don’t get repaid,” he explains.

Asked why more VCs don’t offer this kind of product, Smith says that despite making lots of risky investments, the VC industry is generally “very conservative” when it comes to its own business model. “Forward Partners has always been a little different, first by building our studio team that offers a level of support to our portfolio not seen at other VC funds, and now by launching Forward Advances,” he adds. “We see ourselves as a service provider to entrepreneurs and plan to keep broadening the range of services that we offer.”

Lunar, the Nordic challenger bank that started out life as a personal finance manager app (PFM) but since acquired a full banking license last year, has extended it Series B round with an additional €20 million in funding. It brings the Series B total to €46 million, having disclosed €26 million in August last year.

The Series B extension is led by Seed Capital, with participation from Greyhound, Socii and Augustinus. In addition, I’m told that David Helgason, founder of Unity Technologies, has joined the round.

The mobile-only bank is also announcing that Ole Mahrt, Monzo’s former head of product from 2015-2019, is joining the company’s board of directors. The other non-executive board seats are held by Henning Kruse Pedersen, former CEO of Nykredit, Tuva Palm, former CTO at Nordnet Bank and Director at Klarna, Gary Bramall, CMO of Zoopla and Lars Andersen, general partner at Seed Capital.

Having acquired a banking license, Lunar launched its new bank in March, which it says it built from scratch. Accounts are offered for free, alongside a subscription-based service Lunar Premium. In the coming months, the challenger bank says it plans to launch other new financial products including credit facilities, loans and “sustainability driven services,” in a bit to become a fully-fledged alternative to incumbent banks in the Nordics.

Lunar also offers “Lunar Business,” catering for small business banking, including accounting software integrations, loans and more.

“We are pleased to extend our latest funding round and bolster Lunar’s pan-Nordic play,” says Ken Villum Klausen, founder and CEO of Lunar. “We have a vertical strategy focusing only on the Nordics, allowing us to go deep into the defensive banking infrastructure”.

Meanwhile, Lunar claims more than 150,000 users in the Nordics. The bank has offices in Aarhus, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo, and currently has just over 120 employees.

Computer vision techniques used for commercial purposes are turning out to be valuable tools for monitoring people’s behavior during the present pandemic. Zensors, a startup that uses machine learning to track things like restaurant occupancy, lines and so on, is making its platform available for free to airports and other places desperate to take systematic measures against infection.

The company, founded two years ago but covered by TechCrunch in 2016, was among the early adopters of computer vision as a means to extract value from things like security camera feeds. It may seem obvious now that cameras covering a restaurant can and should count open tables and track that data over time, but a few years ago it wasn’t so easy to come up with or accomplish that.

Since then Zensors has built a suite of tools tailored to specific businesses and spaces, like airports, offices and retail environments. They can count open and occupied seats, spot trash, estimate lines and all that kind of thing. Coincidentally, this is exactly the kind of data that managers of these spaces are now very interested in watching closely given the present social distancing measures.

Zensors co-founder Anuraag Jain told Carnegie Mellon University — which the company was spun out of — that it had received a number of inquiries from the likes of airports regarding applying the technology to public health considerations.

Software that counts how many people are in line can be easily adapted to, for example, estimate how close people are standing and send an alert if too many people are congregating or passing through a small space.

“Rather than profiting off them, we thought we would give our help for free,” said Jain. And so, for the next two months at least, Zensors is providing its platform for free to “selected entities who are on the forefront of responding to this crisis, including our airport clients.”

The system has already been augmented to answer COVID-19-specific questions, like whether there are too many people in a given area, when a surface was last cleaned and whether cleaning should be expedited, and how many of a given group are wearing face masks.

Airports surely track some of this information already, but perhaps in a much less structured way. Using a system like this could be helpful for maintaining cleanliness and reducing risk, and no doubt Zensors hopes that having had a taste via what amounts to a free trial, some of these users will become paying clients. Interested parties should get in touch with Zensors via its usual contact page.

Bluetooth location beacon startup Estimote has adapted its technological expertise to develop a new product designed specifically for curbing the spread of COVID-19. The company created a new range of wearable devices that co-founder Steve Cheney believes can enhance workplace safety for those who have to be co-located at a physical workplace even while social distancing and physical isolation measures are in place.

The devices, called simply the “Proof of Health” wearables, aim to provide contact tracing — in other words, monitoring the potential spread of the coronavirus from person-to-person — at the level of a local workplace facility. The intention is to give employers a way to hopefully maintain a pulse on any possible transmission among their workforces and provide them with the ability to hopefully curtail any local spread before it becomes an outsized risk.

The hardware includes passive GPS location tracking, as well as proximity sensors powered by Bluetooth and ultra-wide-band radio connectivity, a rechargeable battery and built-in LTE. It also includes a manual control to change a wearer’s health status, recording states like certified health, symptomatic and verified infected. When a user updates their state to indicate possible or verified infection, that updates others they’ve been in contact with based on proximity and location-data history. This information is also stored in a health dashboard that provides detailed logs of possible contacts for centralized management. That’s designed for internal use within an organization for now, but Cheney tells me he’s working now to see if there might be a way to collaborate with WHO or other external health organizations to potentially leverage the information for tracing across enterprises and populations, too.

These are intended to come in a number of different form factors: the pebble-like version that exists today, which can be clipped to a lanyard for wearing and displaying around a person’s neck; a wrist-worn version with an integrated adjustable strap; and a card format that’s more compact for carrying and could work alongside traditional security badges often used for facility access control. The pebble-like design is already in production and 2,000 will be deployed now, with a plan to ramp production for as many as 10,000 more in the near future using the company’s Poland-based manufacturing resources.

Estimote has been building programmable sensor tech for enterprises for nearly a decade and has worked with large global companies, including Apple and Amazon . Cheney tells me that he quickly recognized the need for the application of this technology to the unique problems presented by the pandemic, but Estimote was already 18 months into developing it for other uses, including in hospitality industries for employee safety/panic button deployment.

“This stack has been in full production for 18 months,” he said via message. “We can program all wearables remotely (they’re LTE connected). Say a factory deploys this — we write an app to the wearable remotely. This is programmable IoT.

“Who knew the virus would require proof of health vis-a-vis location diagnostics tech,” he added.

Many have proposed technology-based solutions for contact tracing, including leveraging existing data gathered by smartphones and consumer applications to chart transmission. But those efforts also have considerable privacy implications, and require use of a smartphone — something Cheney says isn’t really viable for accurate workplace tracking in high-traffic environments. By creating a dedicated wearable, Cheney says that Estimote can help employers avoid doing something “invasive” with their workforce, since it’s instead tied to a fit-for-purpose device with data shared only with their employers, and it’s in a form factor they can remove and have some control over. Mobile devices also can’t do nearly as fine-grained tracking with indoor environments as dedicated hardware can manage, he says.

And contact tracing at this hyperlocal level won’t necessarily just provide employers with early warning signs for curbing the spread earlier and more thoroughly than they would otherwise. In fact, larger-scale contact tracing fed by sensor data could inform new and improved strategies for COVID-19 response.

“Typically, contact tracing relies on the memory of individuals, or some high-level assumptions (for example, the shift someone worked),” said Brianna Vechhio-Pagán of John Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab via a statement. “New technologies can now track interactions within a transmissible, or ~6-foot range, thus reducing the error introduced by other methods. By combining very dense contact tracing data from Bluetooth and UWB signals with information about infection status and symptoms, we may discover new and improved ways to keep patients and staff safe.”

With the ultimate duration of measures like physical distancing essentially up-in-the-air, and some predictions indicating they’ll continue for many months, even if they vary in terms of severity, solutions like Estimote’s could become essential to keeping essential services and businesses operating while also doing the utmost to protect the health and safety of the workers incurring those risks. More far-reaching measures might be needed, too, including general-public-connected, contact-tracing programs, and efforts like this one should help inform the design and development of those.

As the largest federal stimulus package in the history of the United States, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, injects a planned $2.2 trillion into the U.S. economy, fintech startups are angling to get a seat at the table when it comes to distributing the cash.

“In the last crisis, banks stepped away from the kinds of lending that our members do,” says Scott Stewart, the head of the Innovative Lending Platform Association. “The bank process [for lending] is quite lengthy. Our members are underwriting loans using algorithms at speed and scale.”

Under the CARES Act, roughly $450 billion in loans are set to be distributed through the Small Business Administration and other entities. While Congress is still working out the details, fintech companies are thinking that they should — and will — have a role to play getting stimulus money into the hands of entrepreneurs.

“The Treasury Department and the SBA have the authority and have been instructed in the legislation to allow us into the room,” says Stewart. “We will have to go through some sort of process to become qualified non-bank lenders.”

The argument for handing some of the responsibility for distributing the stimulus dollars to startups to disburse comes from the ability of these companies to approve loans faster than typical banks.

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The global coronavirus pandemic has already caused a tremendous strain on healthcare resources around the world, and it’s leading to a shift in how healthcare is offered. Startup Forward, which debuted in 2016 and has since expanded its tech-focused primary care medical practice to locations in major cities across the U.S., is launching a new initiative called “Forward At Home” that reflects those changes and adapts its care model accordingly.

Forward’s primary differentiator is its focus on what it terms a patient’s “baseline,” which is established by an in-person visit they make when they join; it employs a body scanner at a doctor’s office to take a number of readings and produces an interactive chart displayed on-screen in the doctor’s exam room. Forward founder and CEO Adrian Aoun, who previously led special projects at Google before building the health tech company, said that as the company has ramped its efforts to support patients during the COVID-19 pandemic, including through in-clinic and drive-through testing, it also wanted to address the ongoing need for care for non-COVID patients.

“If people aren’t leaving their homes, and frankly, you don’t really want them to leave their homes unless you need them to, you have to figure out how to do all that remotely,” Aoun said in an interview, referring to Forward’s comprehensive biometric data gathering process. “So we’ve implemented a bunch of different things as rapidly as possible. The first is, how do we collect some biometrics — so we put together a kit that has a bunch of sensors in it that we actually mail to you. This includes an EKG, a connected thermometer, connected blood pressure cuff and a pulse oximeter.”

This approach provides a whole new level of remote care, over and above what’s typically defined as “telemedicine,” which generally amounts to little more than video calls with doctors, Aoun points out. Forward’s approach includes automated vitals monitoring for alerting a doctor if a patient needs intervention, and a patient has access to all their own data in the app as well. The Forward At Home product also takes their exam room smart display and brings it to their mobile devices, presenting it for shared consultation between doctor and patient during viral visits, which are available 24/7 to Forward members.

At launch, the service also includes home visits to collect urine and blood samples, as an added measure designed specifically to help patients adhere to CDC and health agency guidelines around self-isolation, while also getting a detailed and thorough level of care. Aoun says that this part of the offering doesn’t make sense at scale, and will likely revert to in-clinic visits once the COVID-19 crisis passes.

The rest of the model, though spurred into deployment because of the coronavirus conditions, and the need to limit the number of people going in to medical facilities and hospital all across the country unless they absolutely need to, is here to stay, however. Aoun says that Forward’s goal has always been to address the need for tech-friendly, advanced and comprehensive primary care for everyone, but that it took an approach similar to Tesla’s by addressing the top end of the market first in order to be able to fund development of more broadly available services later on.

Meanwhile, the need to shift as much care as possible to in-home is pressing, and evidence from countries around the world is increasingly pointing to how important that is to stopping the spread.

“The big thing to flatten the curve, the whole point of it, is that the hospitals are going to be overrun,” Aoun said. “So you want to take as many cases as you can, where they don’t actually have to be in the ICU, and treat them outside of the ICU — that’s your first principle. Then your second principle is, and China kind of discovered this early […] they started moving to getting people out of the hospitals, as much as possible for a second reason, which is not that the hospitals are overloaded, but that the hospitals are one of the fastest ways to spread COVID-19.”

That’s a perspective also supported by lessons shared from Italian medical professionals in their effort to deal with the COVID-19 situation there, which has essentially decimated large parts of their medical facility infrastructure.

Forward is also still continuing the other work it’s doing to address COVID-19 needs, including providing its risk assessment screening tool to all, as well as offering testing via clinics and drive-throughs to members, as well as mental health support. It’s also looking to expand its drive-through testing to new sites across the U.S. The Forward At Home initiative, meanwhile, will help ensure that clients who have other pressing health needs aren’t left behind while the effort to combat COVID-19 continues.