At this point of time, COVID-19 has claimed over 3,000 lives globally. These are known deaths caused by COVID-19 and there may be more than that. To be honest too, this is a very difficult write-up. Not because there is very little information to work with. It is just the fact that COVID-19 news are not getting any better. There is a glimmer of hope though; WHO claims that COVID-19 containment and treatment is very viable.

Still, COVID-19, or more commonly known as Coronavirus at this point has claimed more than just lives. It is affecting communities and commerce as well. Of course it would, people run these businesses and communities, people are getting infected and therefore sick; conducting business activities then is difficult.

We saw Apple getting affected earlier on with their China stores temporarily closing. Foxconn, their manufacturing plant had also stopped operating at some point. Mobile World Congress 2020 has been cancelled; Geneva Motorshow is also being torn down as we speak because they cancelled the event at the very last minute. Even Formula 1 is being heavily affected; they lost China GP this year and who knows which other GP is being cancelled due to the global emergency that is COVID-19.

Plenty are hopeful that the disease will be contained and cured by June or July. That is why some events has been postponed to then. Even Computex 2020 seems to be happening still. The situation now is not very encouraging though.

This week alone we see more victims to COVID-19. On top of new confirmed deaths around the world we see Microsoft’s MVP physical event going completely digital. Facebook is also cancelling the F8 summit. Even Adobe is not spared; Adobe is having their Summit announcements completely online too. The hardest of all is Google having to cancel both their big conferences.

Google has cancelled their Cloud Next event earlier on this week. They announced thought that the conference will be a completely online affair. There was also a sort of expectation that some of the things that would be covered on Cloud Next would appear in Google’s I/O which was still reported to be happening. This morning proved our optimism wrong though. Google is cancelling the Google I/O conference; their biggest developer conference of the year has been cancelled.

If we are right, we are seeing Google’s latest Android 11 on the big stage of Google I/O. It looks like we are going to have to see it on an online stage instead; they show must go on, as they say. There is no final confirmation yet on the online streaming of Google I/O yet though. We are expecting them to go online because Google is completely equipped to livestream all their conferences, which they have done before anyway. Of course, it helps that they own YouTube anyway.

Google is not the first to be hit strongly by COVID-19. We highly doubt that Google will be the last one. We are expecting the Olympics committee to make an announcement soon regarding the Summer Olympics 2020 in Japan. For all you know, Japan might be the one that makes the announcement of a border containment. Still, these are just speculations; take it with a pinch of salt. Not Google’s cancellations though, those are confirmed.

Source: Google, Tech Crunch, 9to5 Google