India bans more Chinese apps, e-commerce has doubled during the pandemic, and Bill Gates weighs in on the coronavirus.
It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Wednesday, July 28, and I’m your host, Baneet Braich.
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Just after a month of banning TikTok, India has decided to ban 47 more apps which operate as ‘clones’ of the earlier banned apps. The government earlier banned apps including CamScanner, SHAREit, and UC Browser, and others. According to reports, the government is also drawing up a list of 250 other Chinese apps, citing privacy and national security violations. These apps also include gaming applications. Allegations have also surfaced suggesting that there are links between some of these apps and the Chinese Communist Party. Seems like India has got quite the radar.
During the coronavirus lockdown, e-commerce has been booming as Canadians fled to online shopping. A recent study from Statistics Canada reveals that although retail sales fell by 18 per cent as Canadians stayed home, online sales spiked nearly 100 per cent during that same period. Statistics Canada also says that e-commerce sales hit a record $3.9 billion in May. The latest figures numbers come on the heels of an encouraging 18 per cent bump in in-store retail sales in May. However, that’s still 20 per cent below where they were before the pandemic.
This week former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates shared his thoughts on coronavirus testing in an interview with CNBC. He says that there could be a substantial reduction in the coronavirus death rate by the end of 2020. Some key points from his interview include that despite new therapeutics helping patients with severe symptoms, we will not go back to normalcy just yet. He also emphasized the significance of persuading the public to get the vaccine if and when it becomes available. In terms of what is actually being tested, Gates mentioned Remdesivir as one of the leading treatments in the therapeutic research. It is an antiviral drug that has shown to have reduced the risk of death for severely sick Covid-19 patients by 62 per cent compared with standard care alone.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing.I’m Baneet Braich, thanks for listening.