San Francisco's sweeping directive instructing local residents to "shelter in place" is threatening the future of many of the city's restaurants and cafes. 

And when one Pacific Heights neighborhood restaurant was forced to close shop last weekend, one of Instagram's cofounders, Mike Krieger, sprung into action and built a directory of restaurants offering gift cards in order for San Franciscans to support their city's most beloved eating spots. 

 

In a blog post, Krieger urged local residents to consider buying gift cards for their most cherished eating spots. Gift cards would go a long way to helping support the 12,000+ small businesses that may be forced to permanently close as a consequence of measures to contain the coronavirus outbreak, he said. 

"It's a seemingly small gesture, but it means that the business gets income today to stay afloat through the crisis. You'll get repaid in burgers/lattes/negronis (and gratitude) when they're back on their feet," Krieger wrote. 

And Krieger is hoping that the directory he built, dubbed SaveOurFaves, will help make the process easier for San Franciscans - and help save the city's restaurants. 

"We hope SaveOurFaves will help "flatten the curve" of lost income for restaurants — giving them the resources to make ends meet and preserve the livelihood of wage earners during this difficult time," he wrote.  

Creators on YouTube earn a certain amount of money for every 1,000 views they get on a single video.  

How much money YouTube pays a creator for every 1,000 views is called the CPM rate, which stands for cost per mille (Latin for 1,000). CPM rates vary between creators, and no creator consistently has the same rate.

This number can vary based on a variety of factors, like the type of viewers the video attracts, how long the video is, and the content. Some videos that contain swearing or copyrighted music can be flagged by YouTube and demonetized, earning hardly any money for the creator (or none at all).

Creators with at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 public watch hours in the past year are eligible to apply for YouTube's Partner Program, which lets them put ads in videos. These ads are filtered and placed by Google (called AdSense).

Advertisers usually pay more for an informative, business-related video than a vlog-style video. The rate also depends on seasonality, with lower CPM rates at the start of the year and higher ones toward the end.

Some subjects, like talking about money on YouTube, often can boost a creator's CPM rate by attracting a lucrative audience. For instance, personal-finance creator Marko Zlatic told Business Insider that his audience is valuable to advertisers because they usually are in a high income bracket and care about finance. 

Business Insider spoke with eight YouTube creators about how much each of them earn on average for every 1,000 views. 

Here's what they said:

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Cisco and F5 Networks have seen their stocks tumble as the coronavirus crisis sparked fears of another recession. But a Wall Street analyst said the two tech companies, which provide enterprise tech equipment to businesses, are getting a lift from a consequence of the pandemic: the sudden rise of a remote workforce.

Businesses, including major corporations, are "fully focused on getting workers set up to work remotely," a trend in which Cisco and F5 are "best positioned" given their huge customer bases, Morgan Stanley analyst Meta Marshall told analysts in a note. 

Cisco, which is based in San Jose, is the leading provider of networking hardware and software, including security, used for private data centers and cloud platforms. Seattle-based F5 makes equipment and software used to monitor business networks, to make sure they are working properly and securely.

These products are key to setting up remote access for employees which has become a critical need for many businesses. Despite the downturn, companies in the financial services industry "have spared no expense on incremental purchases to get a workforce set up for remote working."

On the other hand, demand for networking systems in key markets has taken a hit. One example is the government sector. Marshall said government budgets are "beginning to dry up," especially as the federal government has focused its resources to fighting COVID-19.

F5 shares have shed about 25%, while Cisco's stock has dropped about 23% in the past month.

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Netflix recently introduced daily top 10 lists of its most popular movies and TV shows.

Every week, the streaming search engine Reelgood compiles for Business Insider a list of which movies have been most prominent on the streamer's daily lists over the previous week.

This week, they include the Netflix original "Lost Girls" and the 1995 movie "Outbreak," which is among the titles about disasters or deadly viruses that have surged in popularity on Netflix amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Below are Netflix's 7 most popular movies of the week in the US:

The World Health Organisation has launched a chatbot to provide people with information about the novel coronavirus as the pandemic continues to spread across the globe.

Announced on Friday, the service lets users of the Facebook-owned messaging app learn more about current infection rates, how to protect themselves, and get answers to frequently asked questions about the disease.

It's one of a number of steps Facebook is taking to try and promote reliable information about COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, that has now infected more than 265,000 people and killed more than 11,000 globally. The Silicon Valley-based tech giant has launched a Coronavirus Information Center that provides info and is prominently placed in its main app, and is deleting dangerous misinformation about the disease.

The WHO's bot is relatively simple, and doesn't respond to natural language or questions from users. Instead, users can send numbers (or emojis) to get more info on corresponding topics — like "mythbusters," "travel advice," or how to donate to aid efforts. (People can access it by following this link on their phones.)

WhatsApp has faced repeated criticism in the past for its role in spreading hoaxes and misinformation. Unlike Facebook's namesake messaging app or its Instagram app, WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption, meaning Facebook cannot actively moderate content that users send one another on ther service.

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The past few weeks have been rocky for Amazon sellers.

As coronavirus spreads across the US and orders for items like food, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper rise, some sellers are struggling to keep up with demand while other sellers are struggling to sell less-essential products like clothing.

Laura Meyer, the founder and CEO of the Amazon-focused ad agency Envision Horizons, recommends sellers that are seeing extreme growth spend more on ads that zero in on keywords that are driving traffic to a page. But she warned sellers against placing higher bids for ads because it can hurt performance.

"Open the budgets for what's working, don't limit them and be on top of any well-performing campaign that seems to go out of budget mid-day," Meyer said during a webinar with sellers on March 19.

She said she's advising clients to use Amazon's mobile ad formats that show more creative than Amazon's core text ad formats. Meyer recommended clients buy Amazon's mobile video ads and sponsored brand formats that appear in search results.

For sellers like grocers and food brands that are rapidly moving through inventory, Meyer recommended pulling back on ad spend to better manage demand.

In addition to sales of household items, she said that products like toys, fitness equipment, and beauty products including hair, skin and nail are increasing from people who are bored and stuck in their house.

"It's really varying across categories," she said.

Meyer quickly polled webinar attendees about their sales during the webinar. 33% of attendees said that they have seen a significant increase in sales over the past week while 15% said that they have seen a significant decrease.

Meyer's clients include Stomp Rocket, a STEM toy for kids, and Oxygen Plus, a wellness product that helps with breathing after workouts.

On March 17, Amazon said that it would stop accepting third-party shipments of nonessential items to prioritize items like health and household products and baby products for sellers that used the Fulfillment by Amazon program. Amazon also plans to hire 100,000 warehouse workers to help get with the ordering surge.

In the interim, Meyer said that non-essential sellers should consider Amazon's fulfillment by merchant program where sellers ship their own products, but said that pricing can be more expensive than the logistics contracts that sellers get from shipping items to Amazon's warehouses. Sellers that ship products on their own are also not eligible for Amazon Prime. Sellers like Amazon Prime because it helps promote products to a wide audience and offers consumers free shipping.

Meyer said that conversion rates for ads that promote non-Prime items are typically lower than ads that promote Prime items and suggested that sellers who have to sell their own items in the coming weeks pull back on advertising.

She also said that Envision Horizons is working with sellers to ship inventory through Amazon's small parcel program once the ban ends on April 5, which helps speed up how fast Amazon checks in products. Meyers said that she expects that check-in times for inventory will be long once Amazon starts accepting non-essential items again, similar to the check-in times for big shopping days like Prime Day and the holidays.

"This is the plan B that we recommend for the time being," she said.

One of the great vulnerabilities America faces in fighting COVID-19 is a lack of tests, so researchers are working around that shortage by harnessing a resource that never runs out: Poop.

A Massachusetts AI startup called Biobot Analytics launched a pro bono project with MIT and Harvard University on Friday to try to track the virus across America by testing wastewater. 

New studies show that the virus causing COVID-19 is shed in stool, which means that it's collecting in city sewers. Biobot plans to use samples from wastewater treatment plants across the US to test for the virus and then track the results on a real-time map, applying predictive analytics to try to anticipate its spread. 

The system allows cities to track the scope of the outbreak without depending on individual patient testing or hospital reporting, organizers say. 

There is precedent for the project. In 2013, researchers in Israel detected an outbreak of poliovirus through a wastewater epidemiology program before local clinics reported symptoms. Biobot has also previously applied its methods of combining wastewater testing and AI-powered mapping to another major US health threat: opioid addiction.  

"There is an untapped resource in wastewater that can teach us about public health to someday stop global epidemics," says Biobot Analytics cofounder Mariana Matus, who started researching these topics eight years ago as a first-year PhD student at MIT. The research grew into the MIT Underworlds Project in 2015, and became a fully-fledged company, Biobot, in 2017.

"When the COVID-19 outbreak started accelerating around the world, we realized this was exactly why we started the company," says cofounder Newsha Ghaeli, who previously studied urban planning and architecture.

Here's how the project works: 

Right now, teams at Biobot, Harvard, and MIT are doing the work pro bono, asking only that communities cover the costs of the sampling kit and shipping. Interested cities can fill out this form.

And if something about this distinctive resource being harnessed for research smells a little funny to you, the company has a simple message: "Sewage contains valuable information."  

As much of  Europe moves towards working from home, venture capitalists and startup founders have had to adapt nimbly. Funds must be spent, and startups need cash.

Some European venture capital firms have moved their entire operations online, eschewing face-to-face meetings in favour of video conferencing for pitching.

It's a stark change for founders who are normally ushered into intimidating, gleaming London headquarters for the major funds and have to go through the gruelling process of pitching to a panel of investors.

For the short-term, online meetings look more efficient

Early-stage funds Seedcamp and France's The Family have moved entirely to online events platform Hopin, itself a nascent European startup that recently raised $6.5 million in seed funding.

It's a notable, if temporary, shift from a culture that has tended to prioritize "warm intros" — introductions via networks and contacts — and strong personal chemistry between investor and founding team. A 2017 survey from UK Innovation Hub and Tech City UK found that the most important factor for companies considering raising external investment was personal chemistry and trust with the investor.

Most VCs take a kind of perverse pride in living on planes in order to meet portfolio firms regularly.

They're now finding efficiencies in switching from in-person meetings to video calls.

Oliver Thomas, managing partner at Grafton Capital, said the company was simply able to do more through video calling.

"We can be much more accessible to portfolio company CEOs and first meetings can take place with extremely high engagement, but without the time, expense and carbon footprint of travelling across Europe," he said.

The switch to video pitching also means a shift in etiquette. A call means no handshakes or other social signifiers.

Rob Moffat, a partner at Balderton Capital who regularly runs video pitches, has this advice: "On videoconferences it's even more important to make sure it is a a dialogue between founders and investors, not a monologue. Keep your audience engaged."

He recommends starting with small talk before showing pitch deck slides, setting limits on talking time before interrupting to ask questions or check comprehension issues. 

Startup life will be on hold — meaning hiring freezes and maybe firings

Despite this short-term optimism, investors are cautious about the impact that months of remote work could have on businesses in their portfolio, some of which are quietly freezing hiring. 

"Every single company in our portfolio has had to come up with COVID-19 planning, risk mitigation and a strategy to weather the next nine months (in case the downside is that long)," Eileen Burbidge, partner at Passion Capital, told Business Insider. Passion is an investor in some of Europe's leading startups, including Monzo and Tide. 

European investors are advising startups to shore up cash and reduce unnecessary spending to try and weather the next few months. And just because work is becoming remote, they say, doesn't mean company leaders should go quiet.

"During this period of uncertainty, communication will be paramount," said Karen McCormick, CIO at Beringea. "Good investors will be speaking daily with founders to provide support, guidance and insights from previous downturns."

The next generation of wireless is here, and several countries are locked in a fierce battle for the top spot in global 5G development. By 2020, more than one-fifth of the world's countries will have launched 5G services.

Securing global 5G leadership is a national priority for many countries because the winner is expected to secure more than a decade of competitive advantages. The spread of 5G is pivotal for the connected world — its technical upgrades will supercharge adoption of transformative technologies and strengthen the value of old ones.

For many startup founders, the coronavirus outbreak and the accompanying market turmoil represent the first real economic crisis after a decade-long bull market.

Tech firms are adapting by moving to remote work, but face long-term disruption to their growth, fundraising, and hiring. Some businesses — even those which looked healthy before the coronavirus crisis — will likely collapse thanks to the unexpected slowdown.

Europe's tech investors are trying to put a brave face on events, but predict a recession and a market shakeout.

"I want to be honest with founders that it makes the already hard process of raising capital that much harder. Some VCs claim it's business as usual and I think that's disingenuous," said Paul Murphy, partner at Northzone.

But startups can mitigate their risk. Business Insider consulted nine European venture capitalists and asked them to share a piece of advice for founders trying to navigate 2020's "black swan" event.

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NASA has sent all but an essential cluster of its 17,000-person workforce home in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Jim Bridenstine, the US space agency's administrator, made the announcement Tuesday evening.

"Effective immediately, all employees and contractors will move to mandatory telework until further notice," Bridenstine said in a statement emailed by NASA's public affairs office. "Mission-essential personnel will continue to be granted access onsite."

Bridenstine noted that "a limited amount of employees have tested positive for COVID-19," as the respiratory illness caused by coronavirus is called. As of Tuesday evening, confirmed cases at NASA included its Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

"[I]t is imperative that we take this pre-emptive step to thwart further spreading of the virus among the workforce and our communities," Bridenstine added.

NASA's agency-wide move follows a phase called "Stage 3" from a recently unveiled "Response Framework" document, which it created to rapidly mitigate the spread of the coronavirus among workers, if necessary.

Stage 1 applies to mostly functional access to centers and facilities, with an emphasis on social distancing, reduction in non-essential travel, and other activities to reduce the spread of the virus. The last phase, called Stage 4 — which only Ames is currently subject to, per a NASA coronavirus page — is a near-total closure of all facilities, "except to protect life and critical infrastructure."

"This is the first time NASA has been in this situation," a spokesperson told Business Insider.

Coronavirus is confirmed to have infected about 200,000 people around the world and killed 8,000, according to Johns Hopkins University, and approximately half of all cases have not yet resolved. The overall mortality rate of the novel coronavirus is reported to be as high as 3.4% or, more recently, approximately 1.4%, according to STAT.

However, many cases are still going undetected due to testing shortfalls and the fact that some people with COVID-19 show no obvious symptoms. Deaths are also weighted heavily toward those people who are older or have what appear to be underlying risk factors such as heart disease, kidney disease, liver disease, or cancer, according to a March 11 study published The Lancet.

NASA previously tightened access to its astronauts, including those slated to fly SpaceX's new Crew Dragon spaceship for the first time this spring — and return the US to flight since the retirement of the space shuttle program in July 2011. NASA is also working to develop the Space Launch System and Orion spaceship to send astronauts back to the moon mid-decade, and possibly on to Mars in the 2030s.

Business Insider asked the NASA spokesperson which missions and projects would be affected by the agency-wide escalation in its response plan, but they did not immediately provide a response.

San Francisco has ruled that the city's many cannabis dispensaries can continue to operate during the citywide shutdown, the city's public health department announced Tuesday evening. 

"Cannabis is an essential medicine for many San Francisco residents. Dispensaries can continue to operate as essential businesses during this time, while practicing social distancing and other public health recommendations," the San Francisco Department of Public Health tweeted. 

The news comes a day after the city's new "shelter in place" rules that required all non-essential businesses either operate remotely or close shop until April 7 to help contain the coronavirus outbreak, which at that time included cannabis dispensaries. 

When the shutdown was initially announced Monday afternoon, San Francisco residents began flocking to their neighborhood dispensaries, while dispensaries scrambled to find out whether they would be forced to close.

Later that evening, some dispensaries sent out notices informing their customers that they would temporarily close because of the new rules. "We are staying open late tonight (10PM) in order to give our Members time to acquire their medicine," one dispensary informed customers. 

The latest news would grant those dispensaries a reprieve. 

Facebook is blocking users from posting some legitimate news articles about the coronavirus in what appears to be a bug in its spam filters.

On Tuesday, multiple Facebook users reported on Twitter that they found themselves unable to post articles from certain news outlets including Business Insider, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, and the Times of Israel. It's not clear exactly what has gone wrong, and Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

In the face of the mounting COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook has sent many of its content moderators home, saying it will rely more on automated software instead. Alex Stamos, an outspoken former Facebook security exec, speculated that this shift might be to blame.

"It looks like an anti-spam rule at FB is going haywire," he wrote on Twitter. "Facebook sent home content moderators yesterday, who generally can't [work from home] due to privacy commitments the company has made. We might be seeing the start of the [machine learning going nuts with less human oversight."

Facebook denied that the bug was related to any changes to its content moderator workforce.

In a tweet, VP of Integrity Guy Rosen said: "We're on this - this is a bug in an anti-spam system, unrelated to any changes in our content moderator workforce. We're in the process of fixing and bringing all these posts back."

Here are some of the complaints: 

 

Microsoft has notified employees in the Seattle and San Francisco Bay areas to continue working remotely through at least April 7 amid the coronavirus crisis, Business Insider has learned.

The decision – disclosed by two sources who asked not to be named because they aren't authorized to speak about company policies – came after San Francisco issued a public health order requiring residents to stay home except for essential needs. The order includes an exception for "essential" jobs.

Microsoft confirmed the news.

Microsoft previously asked "all employees who are in a job that can be done from home" to do so through March 25. Microsoft declined to specify what kinds of employees are required to work on-site, but an email reviewed by Business Insider reveals they include field sales people.

Microsoft has disclosed two Seattle-area employees contracted COVID-19, but the company declined to provide an update about whether they are additional cases among its workforce.

Microsoft recently canceled its Build developer conference – one of its largest events of the year – and said it would move the event it online, citing health concerns amid the spread of coronavirus.

The company has also offered to pay vendors who work hourly even if conditions mean they can't come to work and offered paid leave to parents who can't work remotely while their children are home.

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A group of Google employees are challenging the company's treatment of contract workers amid the corona virus outbreak, contending that safety measures designed to protect employees from infection exclude the army of temporary and contract workers that perform vital tasks for the search giant.

On Tuesday, a list of demands written by Google workers began circulating internally that calls for better protections for contract workers at the $772 billion company and asks for greater clarity over Google's policies, Business Insider has learned. 

The letter cites contract workers for Google at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania office who were required to continue to come into the office even after Google encouraged its regular, full-time employees to work remotely. The Pittsburgh workers, employed by contractor HCL Technologies, protested on Monday by wearing black to the office cafeteria.

"We know that leadership clearly values the health and safety of our workplaces and communities," a group of Google workers wrote in the document that circulated internally on Tuesday. "But when it comes to our 'extended workforce,' Google and its contracting agencies are falling short."

Google has around 119,000 employees throughout the world — and a similar number of temporary workers, contractors, and external vendors (TVCs). Google's policies on TVCs have proved immensely contentious over the last few years, with critics complaining they amount to a "second-class" workforce denied the perks and privileges afforded to proper Google employees.

As COVID-19 (the disease caused by the coronavirus) has spread, sickening more than 181,000 people and killing more than 7,500, Google has taken steps to enable its workforce to work remotely and lock down its facilities. But some employees are concerned that the company's efforts don't do enough for TVC workers.

"We're working closely with all our vendor partners to increase the ability for their employees to work from home by rolling out remote access as quickly as possible," Google spokesperson Jenn Kaiser said in an email to Business Insider. "HCL employees in Google Pittsburgh were approved for remote access today and no HCL employees will be required to come into the Pittsburgh office starting tomorrow."

The memo's writers — who describe themselves as "a coalition of employees and TVCs who want Google to be Googley — issued two demands: That "no one should be in a Google office unless absolutely necessary," and that "every employee of [Google's parent company] Alphabet, whether direct or contracted, must have complete confidence they can stay home with no disruption to pay."

The memo highlighted the office in Pittsburgh, which has contract workers from HCL: "Workers who are contracted through HCL were expected to come into work this week, despite Pittsburgh declaring a state of emergency, closing its schools, and urging non-essential businesses to close." (Earlier in March, The Washington Post also published a story detailing concerns by HCL workers about its policies.)

These HCL workers recently unionized, and their union tweeted a photo of a worker protest against the coronavirus policies in the company cafeteria on Monday.

The memo writers are also asking TVCs at Google to share their experiences around the company's coronavirus policies, though it is not clear how widely circulated the memo has been or how many responses it has elicited.

"Google has recommended that all North American workers work from home ... but entire offices full of TVCs have no yet had their remote access requests approved, and they are asked to come into the office while this is pending," they wrote.

"Google has promised that if offices close, workers without remote access will be compensated for the hours they would have worked. But offices have not closed ... TVCs are increasingly being forced to chose between risking infection by going to work, or losing wages."

In a statement, HCL spokesperson Meenakshi Benjwal said: "HCL employs close to 150,000 people worldwide and 20,000 in the United States and our employee's health and safety is our top priority.  We are taking an abundance of caution by deploying new sick-leave and remote work policies to help our employees take better care of themselves and their families and help prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Specific to our Pittsburgh-based employees, we have already communicated a work from home option in consultation with our client, Google. We are enabling a remote working model to keep their health and safety as the priority in line with our other global efforts around the COVID-19 situation."

Google employees previously said they were largely confident about their employer's overall preparations for COVID-19, Business Insider reported earlier in March. "We've been preparing for weeks, with company-wide communications daily, sometimes multiple times a day," a Canadian employee said. "Bottom line: nobody could be more prepared or execute on such a massive scale like this except Google."

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The city of San Francisco is one of many Bay Area cities that is now under a three-week "shelter in place" order in an effort to contain the coronavirus disease.

The order directs the region's estimated 6.7 million residents to remain indoors as much as possible and to only venture outside for essential needs. But the Bay Area' estimated 28,200 homeless individuals are exempt from the directive and are instead encouraged to seek shelter until officials can find ways to house them.

A few options for San Francisco, as The San Francisco Chronicle reports, could be to use the city's churches, state-owned facilities, and closed school campuses. As the coronavirus disease, known as COVID-19, continues to spread, having sheltered space is important to avoid contracting — and transmitting — the virus.

The San Francisco public school district was shut down for three weeks on March 13. The unoccupied campuses may be viable options to temporarily house those who are homeless. Churches have been asked to house homeless individuals as well.

Hotels in the city are also being looked at as potential makeshift shelters. Trent Rhorer, head of the San Francisco Human Services Agency, told the Chronicle that he has secured 500 hotel rooms so far as a means to get people off the streets. Those who have tested positive for the virus and need to be quarantined would have first priority.

A 2019 count placed the number of homeless individuals in San Francisco at 8,011. There are no confirmed deaths of the virus in the city's homeless population, but a man living in homelessness in Santa Clara County died of the coronavirus Monday.

Housing those living on the street is a challenge that officials across the Bay Area and the state are grappling with. As part of a multi-million-dollar statewide effort led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, two Oakland hotels have already been leased that will offer 400 rooms. Two San Mateo county hotels have also been leased, according to the Chronicle.

Those living on the streets are more at risk of contracting infectious diseases, such as the coronavirus. Many don't have the luxury of taking the recommended precautions to avoid contracting COVID-19, like handwashing and keeping a distance from sick people, as Business Insider's Holly Secon reported.

More DoorDash couriers now have access to the hand sanitizer and gloves the company has stockpiled for them, but half of all such workers still can't get such supplies from the company.

The food delivery startup notified delivery drivers Monday evening that it was making the supplies available in around 500 additional cities and towns, bringing to the total number to about 900, company spokeswoman Liz Jarvis-Shean told Business Insider. About 40% of the active couriers that work for DoorDash or Caviar, another delivery company that DoorDash bought last year, now have access to the supplies, she said.

"We're working to get that to 100% in the US before the end of the week," Jarvis-Shean said.

DoorDash CEO Tony Xu told Business Insider last week that the company had stocked up on tens of thousands of gloves and bottles of hand sanitizer to help keep its delivery workers safe during the coronavirus crisis. The company is offering the supplies, which have been hard to come by in many areas thanks to the pandemic, for just the cost of shipping.

Initially, however, DoorDash sharply limited the number of areas in which it was offering the sanitizer and gloves. As of Saturday, it was only making them available in some 400 cities and towns. At the time, the company was prioritizing those markets that had been hardest hit by the epidemic, Jarvis-Shean said at the time.

DoorDash-rival Uber has also said that it is offering "sanitization products" to its delivery workers. Those include disinfecting wipes and other "materials," company spokeswoman Meghan Casserly said. Uber is likewise focusing on the most "in-need markets," she said.

"Supplies, as you know, are extremely limited. We'll have more to share in the coming days," Casserly said, declining offer more details about Uber's program.

Numerous US cities have ordered that restaurants no longer allow or severely limit their number of dine-in guests in response to the pandemic, potentially boosting demand for food deliveries.

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On Monday, Uber told its 22,000 employees that it had put a hiring freeze in place until the end of May, to contain costs while the coronavirus crises cyclones through the world.

The company has seen usage of its primary service, rideshares, decline by as much as 50% in locked-down cities like Seattle, where employees are working from home and retail, entertainment and non-essential services are shuttered, Uber CFO Nelson Chai said Monday on CNBC's Squawk Box.

Uber Eats, which accounts for about 25% of Uber's gross bookings, has maintained demand, Chai said. While eat-in restaurants are being banned in some cities, or being avoided on others, food delivery service is still allowed just about everywhere. In fact, Uber has announced a plan to help 100,000 restaurants stay alive by ditching its delivery fees and increasing marketing.

Chai was confident that Uber would bounce back quickly for two reasons: One is because he's looking at Hong Kong, which recently lifted its lockdown. Rides in Hong Kong are quickly bouncing back from being down by 45% to down by 30%, Chai said, as people slowly get back to a more normal routine.

The other is because the company has plenty of cash on hand. "It's not about profits and losses it's about liquidity in order to make it through this crises," he said. Chai said the company has $10 billion cash on hand, plus payments on the company's long-term debt won't start coming due until 2023.

Lyft, which declined comment on the fate of its rideshare business, is also suffering, according to data on consumer credit card spending analyzed by Earnest Research.

Both Uber and Lyft have promised to pay drivers who have the virus or have been ordered to quarantine up to two weeks pay, with Uber explaining that the pay would be based on average daily earnings over a six month period. 

But the worrisome part is that such an offer doesn't help all the other drivers who depend on rideshare demand for a living.

If there's a silver lining in these numbers, it's that when factoring in larger urban areas (not single cities) Earnest's Research shows that demand has not cratered everywhere for everyone. In the New York Tri-state area, for instance, ridership was up as people avoid more crowded public transportation.

Earnest's data shows that the locked-down Seattle area is down the most for both companies but that the New York area, as of last week, was still using rideshare services. This can be expected to dip as the Tri-state area increases its restrictions to slow the spread of the virus.

Here's the latest data on how rideshare workers are impacted by the virus as of last week, based on core based statistical areas (CBSA), which refers to designated regions.