Global Corporate Response Against COVID-19 Virus

As the world unites to fight and manage the challenges presented by the global Corona Virus (COVID-19) pandemic, a number of companies across the globe are doing their bit to protect staff, engage local community, educate customers and directly contribute to fight against the virus.

And in line with this BE brings you a small list of what some of the biggest brands are doing

1. Abu Dhabi National Exhibitions Company (ADNEC)’s London’s ExCel conference centre to be transformed to an emergency hospital treating only coronavirus patient. The hospital will be called the NHS Nightingale hospital comprising 4000 beds and 2 wards  with about 2000 people in each
2. MSC Cruises, the global cruise operator has offered to help make up for the lack of beds inside hospitals in Italy by using one of their ships.
3. Big tech companies including Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook have  announced their commitment to keep paying  hourly workers who support their operations across board
4. Google, Amazon and Facebook  have  also established a COVID-19 fund which will enable all staff globally to get paid  sick leave
5. Video recording and sharing service Loom,  has made its Loom Pro free for teachers and students at K-12 schools, universities, and educational institutions. They have also removed the recording limit on free plans and have cut the price for Loom Pro in half.
6. Audible is now offering free audiobooks for kids as the schools and parents/guardians have to home school their kids as a result of the Corona Virus Pandemic
7. Adobe is responding to the closure of school and work from home order by offering its higher education and K-12 institutional customers of their Creative Cloud apps the ability to request temporary “at-home” access for their students and educators. This access is available globally until the end of may 2020
8. Linkedin gives free access to some “LinkedIn Learning” courses.  The company stated “In the coming days, we will make 16 LinkedIn Learning courses available for free including tips on how to: stay productive, build relationships when you’re not face-to-face, use virtual meeting tools (Microsoft Teams, Skype, BlueJeans, Cisco Webex and Zoom), and balance family and work dynamics in a healthy way”.
9. Billionaire entrepreneur and owner of American  basketball franchise Dallas maverick -Mark Cuban is encouraging  his staff to support local businesses by announcing that all employees will be reimbursed for any lunch and coffee purchases from local community and independent businesses .
10. Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk have donated more than 1,200 ventilators and 50,000 Masks  to medical facilities in California as in support of the fight against Covid 19 pandemic. He twitted “Yup, China had an oversupply, so we bought 1255 FDA-approved ResMed, Philips & Medtronic ventilators on Friday night & airshipped them to LA. If you want a free ventilator installed, please let us know!”
11. Nigerian Billionaire Energy Magnate Femi Otedola announced a donation of a sum of N1 billion towards the fight against the Corona virus in Africa’s most populous country Nigeria.
12. Alibaba's Ma donates coronavirus test kits to US and Africa. He has pledged to give  500,000 testing kits and one million masks to America and other African countries including Nigeria, Ethiopia and Rwanda have received shipments from the Alibaba founder. Other Chinese tech companies like Tencent, Didi Chuxing and TikTok have also pledged money and resources to fight the coronavirus outbreak.
13. Uber has announced a 14 day paid leave scheme for drivers ( independent contractors) who fall ill as a result of the corona virus or self-isolating while UberEats is waving commission fees for independent restaurant partners. UberEats understand that as a result of the lockdown in most major cities, the restaurant partners will lose their walk in business and will only have to depend take away orders to survive.
14. Manchester United and Manchester City join forces to donate £100,000 to local food banks. Each club will donate £50,000 to the Trussell Trust’s 19 food bank centres in the Greater Manchester area in order to help vulnerable communities affected by the outbreak.
15. Kering, the group which is home to Gucci  donated 2 million euros to help the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
16. LVMH also using is using it production facilities to manufacture hand sanitizers which will be used to aid the efforts of the French health Authority
17. In Africa, United Bank for Africa Plc (UBA) announced a donation of about U$D14 million, through the UBA Foundation, to catalyse a comprehensive pan-African response to the fight against the Coronavirus (COVID-19) global pandemic.

At BE, our goal as a global positive media platform is to research and share encouraging content that gives people some form of hope  knowing that together we shall get through and overcome.

We will be running and updating this series across over this period and hence we will like to hear and share what your company is also doing during these unprecedented times

Email us at editor@bus-ex.com with your story and updates.