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Inequality, Internet Trends, and Delivery Dogs
Five stories about Covid-19 we’re reading today
Published in
1 min readApr 8, 2020
- Hospitalization patterns across the United States show that Black communities are being hit hardest by Covid-19. The New Yorker examines the particularly dire situation in Detroit, offering the slightest of silver linings: Because Detroit’s epidemic started later than in New York or Seattle, doctors there got a head start in studying the disease.
- The sheer number of people cooped up at home is changing the way we use the internet — and the internet itself. The New York Times reports a drop in mobile app usage but a return to traditional websites, together with increased video chatting and gaming across the web.
- Relatedly, Quartz reports a shift in our emoji usage on Venmo: less 🍕 and 🍺 — bars are closed, after all — but more ❤️, and a 2,000% increase in 😷.
- The MIT Technology Review argues that this wave of change extends to the internet itself. The increased demand created by Covid-19 is pushing big companies like Netflix and Equinix to upgrade their traffic capacity in a major way.
- Even delivery services aren’t quite the same anymore. The Washington Post reports that some businesses are using dogs, outfitted with saddlebags, to deliver wine and groceries to customers’ doorsteps.
