essay on importance of internet during covid 19

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The internet and the pandemic, 90% of americans say the internet has been essential or important to them, many made video calls and 40% used technology in new ways. but while tech was a lifeline for some, others faced struggles.

Pew Research Center has a long history of studying technology adoption trends and the impact of digital technology on society. This report focuses on American adults’ experiences with and attitudes about their internet and technology use during the COVID-19 outbreak. For this analysis, we surveyed 4,623 U.S. adults from April 12-18, 2021. Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the  ATP’s methodology .

Chapter 1 of this report includes responses to an open-ended question and the overall report includes a number of quotations to help illustrate themes and add nuance to the survey findings. Quotations may have been lightly edited for grammar, spelling and clarity. The first three themes mentioned in each open-ended response, according to a researcher-developed codebook, were coded into categories for analysis. 

Here are the questions used for this report , along with responses, and its methodology .

The  coronavirus  has transformed many aspects of Americans’ lives. It  shut down  schools, businesses and workplaces and forced millions to  stay at home  for extended lengths of time. Public health authorities recommended  limits on social contact  to try to contain the spread of the virus, and these profoundly altered the way many worked, learned, connected with loved ones, carried out basic daily tasks, celebrated and mourned. For some, technology played a role in this transformation.  

Results from a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted April 12-18, 2021, reveal the extent to which people’s use of the internet has changed, their views about how helpful technology has been for them and the struggles some have faced. 

The vast majority of adults (90%) say the internet has been at least important to them personally during the pandemic, the survey finds. The share who say it has been  essential  – 58% – is up slightly from 53% in April 2020. There have also been upticks in the shares who say the internet has been essential in the past year among those with a bachelor’s degree or more formal education, adults under 30, and those 65 and older. 

A large majority of Americans (81%) also say they talked with others via video calls at some point since the pandemic’s onset. And for 40% of Americans, digital tools have taken on new relevance: They report they used technology or the internet in ways that were new or different to them. Some also sought upgrades to their service as the pandemic unfolded: 29% of broadband users did something to improve the speed, reliability or quality of their high-speed internet connection at home since the beginning of the outbreak.

Still, tech use has not been an unmitigated boon for everyone. “ Zoom fatigue ” was widely speculated to be a problem in the pandemic, and some Americans report related experiences in the new survey: 40% of those who have ever talked with others via video calls since the beginning of the pandemic say they have felt worn out or fatigued often or sometimes by the time they spend on them. Moreover,  changes in screen time  occurred for  Americans generally  and for  parents of young children . The survey finds that a third of all adults say they tried to cut back on time spent on their smartphone or the internet at some point during the pandemic. In addition, 72% of parents of children in grades K-12 say their kids are spending more time on screens compared with before the outbreak. 1

For many, digital interactions could only do so much as a stand-in for in-person communication. About two-thirds of Americans (68%) say the interactions they would have had in person, but instead had online or over the phone, have generally been useful – but not a replacement for in-person contact. Another 15% say these tools haven’t been of much use in their interactions. Still, 17% report that these digital interactions have been just as good as in-person contact.

Some types of technology have been more helpful than others for Americans. For example, 44% say text messages or group messaging apps have helped them a lot to stay connected with family and friends, 38% say the same about voice calls and 30% say this about video calls. Smaller shares say social media sites (20%) and email (19%) have helped them in this way.

The survey offers a snapshot of Americans’ lives just over one year into the pandemic as they reflected back on what had happened. It is important to note the findings were gathered in April 2021, just before  all U.S. adults became eligible for coronavirus vaccine s. At the time, some states were  beginning to loosen restrictions  on businesses and social encounters. This survey also was fielded before the delta variant  became prominent  in the United States,  raising concerns  about new and  evolving variants . 

Here are some of the key takeaways from the survey.

Americans’ tech experiences in the pandemic are linked to digital divides, tech readiness 

Some Americans’ experiences with technology haven’t been smooth or easy during the pandemic. The digital divides related to  internet use  and  affordability  were highlighted by the pandemic and also emerged in new ways as life moved online.

Beyond that, affordability  remained a persistent concern  for a portion of digital tech users as the pandemic continued – about a quarter of home broadband users (26%) and smartphone owners (24%) said in the April 2021 survey that they worried a lot or some about paying their internet and cellphone bills over the next few months. 

From parents of children facing the “ homework gap ” to Americans struggling to  afford home internet , those with lower incomes have been particularly likely to struggle. At the same time, some of those with higher incomes have been affected as well.

Affordability and connection problems have hit broadband users with lower incomes especially hard. Nearly half of broadband users with lower incomes, and about a quarter of those with midrange incomes, say that as of April they were at least somewhat worried about paying their internet bill over the next few months. 3 And home broadband users with lower incomes are roughly 20 points more likely to say they often or sometimes experience problems with their connection than those with relatively high incomes. Still, 55% of those with lower incomes say the internet has been essential to them personally in the pandemic.

At the same time, Americans’ levels of formal education are associated with their experiences turning to tech during the pandemic. 

Those with a bachelor’s or advanced degree are about twice as likely as those with a high school diploma or less formal education to have used tech in new or different ways during the pandemic. There is also roughly a 20 percentage point gap between these two groups in the shares who have made video calls about once a day or more often and who say these calls have helped at least a little to stay connected with family and friends. And 71% of those with a bachelor’s degree or more education say the internet has been essential, compared with 45% of those with a high school diploma or less.

More broadly, not all Americans believe they have key tech skills. In this survey, about a quarter of adults (26%) say they usually need someone else’s help to set up or show them how to use a new computer, smartphone or other electronic device. And one-in-ten report they have little to no confidence in their ability to use these types of devices to do the things they need to do online. This report refers to those who say they experience either or both of these issues as having “lower tech readiness.” Some 30% of adults fall in this category. (A full description of how this group was identified can be found in  Chapter 3. )

These struggles are particularly acute for older adults, some of whom have had to  learn new tech skills  over the course of the pandemic. Roughly two-thirds of adults 75 and older fall into the group having lower tech readiness – that is, they either have little or no confidence in their ability to use their devices, or generally need help setting up and learning how to use new devices. Some 54% of Americans ages 65 to 74 are also in this group. 

Americans with lower tech readiness have had different experiences with technology during the pandemic. While 82% of the Americans with lower tech readiness say the internet has been at least important to them personally during the pandemic, they are less likely than those with higher tech readiness to say the internet has been essential (39% vs. 66%). Some 21% of those with lower tech readiness say digital interactions haven’t been of much use in standing in for in-person contact, compared with 12% of those with higher tech readiness. 

46% of parents with lower incomes whose children faced school closures say their children had at least one problem related to the ‘homework gap’

As school moved online for many families, parents and their children experienced profound changes. Fully 93% of parents with K-12 children at home say these children had some online instruction during the pandemic. Among these parents, 62% report that online learning has gone very or somewhat well, and 70% say it has been very or somewhat easy for them to help their children use technology for online instruction.

Still, 30% of the parents whose children have had online instruction during the pandemic say it has been very or somewhat difficult for them to help their children use technology or the internet for this. 

The survey also shows that children from households with lower incomes who faced school closures in the pandemic have been especially likely to encounter tech-related obstacles in completing their schoolwork – a phenomenon contributing to the “ homework gap .”

Overall, about a third (34%) of all parents whose children’s schools closed at some point say their children have encountered at least one of the tech-related issues we asked about amid COVID-19: having to do schoolwork on a cellphone, being unable to complete schoolwork because of lack of computer access at home, or having to use public Wi-Fi to finish schoolwork because there was no reliable connection at home. 

This share is higher among parents with lower incomes whose children’s schools closed. Nearly half (46%) say their children have faced at least one of these issues. Some with higher incomes were affected as well – about three-in-ten (31%) of these parents with midrange incomes say their children faced one or more of these issues, as do about one-in-five of these parents with higher household incomes.

Prior Center work has documented this “ homework gap ” in other contexts – both  before the coronavirus outbreak  and  near the beginning of the pandemic . In April 2020, for example, parents with lower incomes were particularly likely to think their children would face these struggles amid the outbreak.

Besides issues related to remote schooling, other changes were afoot in families as the pandemic forced many families to shelter in place. For instance, parents’ estimates of their children’s screen time – and family rules around this – changed in some homes. About seven-in-ten parents with children in kindergarten through 12th grade (72%) say their children were spending more time on screens as of the April survey compared with before the outbreak. Some 39% of parents with school-age children say they have become less strict about screen time rules during the outbreak. About one-in-five (18%) say they have become more strict, while 43% have kept screen time rules about the same. 

More adults now favor the idea that schools should provide digital technology to all students during the pandemic than did in April 2020

Americans’ tech struggles related to digital divides gained attention from policymakers and news organizations as the pandemic progressed.

On some policy issues, public attitudes changed over the course of the outbreak – for example, views on what K-12 schools should provide to students shifted. Some 49% now say K-12 schools have a responsibility to provide all students with laptop or tablet computers in order to help them complete their schoolwork during the pandemic, up 12 percentage points from a year ago.

The shares of those who say so have increased for both major political parties over the past year: This view shifted 15 points for Republicans and those who lean toward the GOP, and there was a 9-point increase for Democrats and Democratic leaners.

Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say the government has this responsibility, and within the Republican Party, those with lower incomes are more likely to say this than their counterparts earning more money. 

Video calls and conferencing have been part of everyday life

Americans’ own words provide insight into exactly how their lives changed amid COVID-19. When asked to describe the new or different ways they had used technology, some Americans mention video calls and conferencing facilitating a variety of virtual interactions – including attending events like weddings, family holidays and funerals or transforming where and how they worked. 5 From family calls, shopping for groceries and placing takeout orders online to having telehealth visits with medical professionals or participating in online learning activities, some aspects of life have been virtually transformed: 

“I’ve gone from not even knowing remote programs like Zoom even existed, to using them nearly every day.” – Man, 54

“[I’ve been] h andling … deaths of family and friends remotely, attending and sharing classical music concerts and recitals with other professionals, viewing [my] own church services and Bible classes, shopping. … Basically, [the internet has been] a lifeline.”  – Woman, 69

“I … use Zoom for church youth activities. [I] use Zoom for meetings. I order groceries and takeout food online. We arranged for a ‘digital reception’ for my daughter’s wedding as well as live streaming the event.” – Woman, 44

When asked about video calls specifically, half of Americans report they have talked with others in this way at least once a week since the beginning of the outbreak; one-in-five have used these platforms daily. But how often people have experienced this type of digital connectedness varies by age. For example, about a quarter of adults ages 18 to 49 (27%) say they have connected with others on video calls about once a day or more often, compared with 16% of those 50 to 64 and just 7% of those 65 and older. 

Even as video technology became a part of life for users, many  accounts of burnout  surfaced and some speculated that “Zoom fatigue” was setting in as Americans grew weary of this type of screen time. The survey finds that some 40% of those who participated in video calls since the beginning of the pandemic – a third of all Americans – say they feel worn out or fatigued often or sometimes from the time they spend on video calls. About three-quarters of those who have been on these calls several times a day in the pandemic say this.

Fatigue is not limited to frequent users, however: For example, about a third (34%) of those who have made video calls about once a week say they feel worn out at least sometimes.

These are among the main findings from the survey. Other key results include:

Some Americans’ personal lives and social relationships have changed during the pandemic:  Some 36% of Americans say their own personal lives changed in a major way as a result of the coronavirus outbreak. Another 47% say their personal lives changed, but only a little bit.   About half (52%) of those who say major change has occurred in their personal lives due to the pandemic also say they have used tech in new ways, compared with about four-in-ten (38%) of those whose personal lives changed a little bit and roughly one-in-five (19%) of those who say their personal lives stayed about the same.

Even as tech helped some to stay connected, a quarter of Americans say they feel less close to close family members now compared with before the pandemic, and about four-in-ten (38%) say the same about friends they know well. Roughly half (53%) say this about casual acquaintances.

The majority of those who tried to sign up for vaccine appointments in the first part of the year went online to do so:  Despite early problems with  vaccine rollout  and  online registration systems , in the April survey tech problems did  not  appear to be major struggles for most adults who had tried to sign up online for COVID-19 vaccines. The survey explored Americans’ experiences getting these vaccine appointments and reveals that in April 57% of adults had tried to sign themselves up and 25% had tried to sign someone else up. Fully 78% of those who tried to sign themselves up and 87% of those who tried to sign others up were online registrants. 

When it comes to difficulties with the online vaccine signup process, 29% of those who had tried to sign up online – 13% of all Americans – say it was very or somewhat difficult to sign themselves up for vaccines at that time. Among five reasons for this that the survey asked about, the most common  major  reason was lack of available appointments, rather than tech-related problems. Adults 65 and older who tried to sign themselves up for the vaccine online were the most likely age group to experience at least some difficulty when they tried to get a vaccine appointment.

Tech struggles and usefulness alike vary by race and ethnicity.  Americans’ experiences also have varied across racial and ethnic groups. For example, Black Americans are more likely than White or Hispanic adults to meet the criteria for having “lower tech readiness.” 6 Among broadband users, Black and Hispanic adults were also more likely than White adults to be worried about paying their bills for their high-speed internet access at home as of April, though the share of Hispanic Americans who say this declined sharply since April 2020. And a majority of Black and Hispanic broadband users say they at least sometimes have experienced problems with their internet connection. 

Still, Black adults and Hispanic adults are more likely than White adults to say various technologies – text messages, voice calls, video calls, social media sites and email – have helped them a lot to stay connected with family and friends amid the pandemic.

Tech has helped some adults under 30 to connect with friends, but tech fatigue also set in for some.  Only about one-in-five adults ages 18 to 29 say they feel closer to friends they know well compared with before the pandemic. This share is twice as high as that among adults 50 and older. Adults under 30 are also more likely than any other age group to say social media sites have helped a lot in staying connected with family and friends (30% say so), and about four-in-ten of those ages 18 to 29 say this about video calls. 

Screen time affected some negatively, however. About six-in-ten adults under 30 (57%) who have ever made video calls in the pandemic say they at least sometimes feel worn out or fatigued from spending time on video calls, and about half (49%) of young adults say they have tried to cut back on time spent on the internet or their smartphone.

• Throughout this report, “parents” refers to those who said they were the parent or guardian of any children who were enrolled in elementary, middle or high school and who lived in their household at the time of the survey. ↩
• People with a high-speed internet connection at home also are referred to as “home broadband users” or “broadband users” throughout this report. ↩
• Family incomes are based on 2019 earnings and adjusted for differences in purchasing power by geographic region and for household sizes. Middle income is defined here as two-thirds to double the median annual family income for all panelists on the American Trends Panel. Lower income falls below that range; upper income falls above it. ↩
• A separate  Center study  also fielded in April 2021 asked Americans what the government is responsible for on a number of topics, but did not mention the coronavirus outbreak. Some 43% of Americans said in that survey that the federal government has a responsibility to provide high-speed internet for all Americans. This was a significant increase from 2019, the last time the Center had asked that more general question, when 28% said the same. ↩
• Quotations in this report may have been lightly edited for grammar, spelling and clarity. ↩
• There were not enough Asian American respondents in the sample to be broken out into a separate analysis. As always, their responses are incorporated into the general population figures throughout this report. ↩

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Table of contents, 34% of lower-income home broadband users have had trouble paying for their service amid covid-19, experts say the ‘new normal’ in 2025 will be far more tech-driven, presenting more big challenges, what we’ve learned about americans’ views of technology during the time of covid-19, key findings about americans’ views on covid-19 contact tracing, how americans see digital privacy issues amid the covid-19 outbreak, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

The Internet Will Help Society Survive the COVID-19 Pandemic

The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic and the strong measures taken by governments, businesses, and schools to slow the spread of the virus have led to unprecedented circumstances that have affected how we live, work, learn, and play. While the burden of COVID-19 on the healthcare system is undeniable, the pandemic is also placing strain on the fabric of our society, including our places of work, our schools, and our recreation. 

At the core of this fabric today is the Internet, whose designers are, by many accounts, doing a victory lap right now. Many interesting recent studies show that, overall, the Internet has sustained the changes in traffic load quite well, although peak usage has now extended from “prime time” to all day (9 a.m. to 9 p.m.) and is up almost 40 percent in some parts of the network.

Still, the Internet itself is being tested like never before. Much of the workforce is now working from home; more students — from preschool to college —are engaged in remote learning. All of these activities rely on internet usage, placing unprecedented demand upon broadband network infrastructure and potentially deepening existing inequities in access to reliable, high-speed Internet. 

To understand how these challenges are testing, more than ever, both the Internet’s technical foundation and the society that relies on it, CDAC is launching a new initiative to deploy our expertise and collaborative relationships towards studying how this pandemic has affected the Internet network — how it is responding globally, and how well local communities are able to make use of it. 

In response to a variety of funding calls from the government and industry, we’re initiating projects to study the Internet’s response under crisis, based on an unprecedented coordination of data about network traffic load through granular measurements, proprietary data-sharing agreements, and user experiences, as well as extensive baseline data spanning over ten years. 

Using these tools, we aim to study how the existing Internet infrastructure can sustain exogenous “shocks,” such as the current COVID-19 pandemic, that dramatically shift the location, nature, and scale of network traffic.

This question entails both technical and societal implications. On the technical side, we will explore how network traffic patterns have changed under pandemic “stay-at-home” orders, and how the performance of both networks and popular web applications have responded. These findings can help Internet service providers, content providers such as YouTube or Netflix, and application developers better respond to future surges and shifts in demand, as well as understand how different parts of the network, from the access links to the interconnects, respond to global stresses.

But as the pandemic and its consequences have powerfully demonstrated, the performance of the Internet is not a purely technical question — rather, it has vast and broad societal implications for the economy, for education, for innovation, and for how we interact with each other as members of society, both at at work and at play. Even before COVID-19, experts at the Federal Communications Commission and elsewhere have long decried the “digital divide” and “ homework gap ” between families and students with reliable high-speed internet at home and those without such access.

According to the FCC , as of 2018, 21 million Americans and a quarter of US households with children under 8 years old have no access at all to high-speed Internet; 12 million children in the US are affected by the homework gap, and 18% of students currently lack Internet access at home . Low-income or rural students often rely upon public sources of internet connectivity, such as schools or libraries, to complete assigned work that requires online resources. At a time when even these institutions must close and all schoolwork is homework, inequities in access to digital and online resources are poised to exacerbate these disparities .

Understanding broadband Internet performance in crisis situations will yield important insights about how government policies to close schools and rely on remote e-learning may affect the broader population. We also need to better understand how the increased strain on the Internet affects other critical application areas, such as medicine and public health, remote caregiving, and online legal or political processes. A lower-quality streaming movie is irritating, but the inability to support a doctor-patient video visit could be life-threatening.

We’re excited to already have several partners from industry and government agencies providing data and expertise on network usage and broadband access both before and during the COVID-19 crisis. Yet, the implications of connectivity are far reaching, with implications in fields including economics and social science, education, medicine, and more. If you’re interested in working with us on this critical and urgent research project, please contact us at [email protected] .

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COVID-19 has taught us the internet is critical and needs public interest oversight

Subscribe to the center for technology innovation newsletter, tom wheeler tom wheeler visiting fellow - governance studies , center for technology innovation @tewheels.

April 29, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has graphically illustrated the importance of digital networks and service platforms. Imagine the shelter-in-place reality we would have experienced at the beginning of the 21 st century, only two decades ago: a slow internet and (because of that) nothing like Zoom or Netflix.

Digital networks that deliver the internet to our homes, and the services that ride on those networks have leapt from an ancillary “nice to have” to something that is critical to economic activity and our daily lives. It is time to consider whether these companies are too important to be left to make the rules governing their behavior themselves.

New rules for a new reality

It is neither unusual, nor untoward that innovators make the rules for the new reality they create. After all, they are the ones who see the future. The last time there was a major technological revolution—the industrial revolution—it was industrial capitalists like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan who made the rules. However, it ultimately became necessary to assert the public interest in the oversight of these activities.

The connectivity and services built by information capitalists have become  too important to be left any longer without public participation in determining the rules they follow.

This does not mean that we need heavy-handed regulation like in the industrial era. But it does mean that the critical nature of these digital services warrants public interest representation in decisions about their practices. We know the results of the companies making the rules. Because there was no public representation, our personal information is now a corporate commodity. Similarly, because the companies make their own rules, they are free to hoard that data in order to thwart potential competitors and new services.

The operation of the information economy is different from the operation of the industrial economy. While companies operating in both must invest in the necessary plant and equipment , the economics of how that investment performs differ with the assets used by each. Industrial assets such as coal or ore are exhausted by being use, while information assets are soft, inexhaustible, and iterative. When Ford builds a new truck, for instance, the company incurs incremental costs to procure the glass, metal, tires, and other hard assets. But when Facebook adds a new customer, it reuses the same software that enabled billions of other customers. Similarly, the production of a new truck is an end unto itself. But the addition of a new digital user by a network such as AT&T or a service such as YouTube is the beginning of the iterative production of new data, generated by the use of the product, that can be monetized in new services at virtually no marginal cost to the company.

Four Ideas for Public Participation

Because the economics, and thus the practices, of information companies are different, we must look beyond the industrial era regulatory model. Here are four ideas to incorporate public participation in establishing the rules for the critical services of the information era:

First, do not pretend these challenges can be shoehorned into industrial era regulatory structures. This is not a criticism of the existing agencies whose important work should continue, but a recognition that digital market activity is different. The current regulatory structure, for instance, is built around “who” does something rather than “what” is being done. In the Industrial Age, the networks that carried the product were different from the product itself and separate regulators made sense. In the digital era where the “what” is the manipulation of zeroes and ones, our current regulatory structure has been outpaced and needs to catch up.

Second, digital companies should have a seat at the table in the development of the rules rather than having them force-fed. The National Electrical Code, for instance, is an industry-developed standard that is adopted into law. A “Digital Code of Practice” will similarly allow policies to keep up with technology rather than being tied to old rules. There should be a new federal agency that convenes, oversees, and approves a public-private process that establishes an agency-enforceable Digital Code.

Third, this new Digital Code is not a substitute for antitrust enforcement. The Digital Code is about the behavior of the companies in the services they offer to the public. If a company behaves in an anticompetitive manner, including mergers, that should be the jurisdiction of antitrust enforcers and the Code should not include antitrust exemption.

Fourth, the regulatory oversight needs to be principles-based and agile. Industrial production was a rules-based linear process where each person on the shop floor followed rules for a specific task. Industrial regulation followed the same rigid pattern. In contrast, modern digital products are never finished (think how your smartphone is always updating its software). Digital products are constantly adapting to the changes in their environment. This agile development needs to find its equivalent in agile regulation. Heavy-handed industrial “do this or else” needs to give way to “this is how technology is changing and business practices must evolve as well.”

COVID-19 demonstrated how our networks and the services they deliver are a critical part of our lives and our economy. Something that critical is too important not to have a public interest obligation. At the same time, such public interest oversight must operate in a manner that reflects the realities of the information era and not be stuck in industrial era structures and concepts.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has changed education forever. This is how 

With schools shut across the world, millions of children have had to adapt to new types of learning. Image:  REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes

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Stay up to date:.

• The COVID-19 has resulted in schools shut all across the world. Globally, over 1.2 billion children are out of the classroom.
• As a result, education has changed dramatically, with the distinctive rise of e-learning, whereby teaching is undertaken remotely and on digital platforms.
• Research suggests that online learning has been shown to increase retention of information, and take less time, meaning the changes coronavirus have caused might be here to stay.

While countries are at different points in their COVID-19 infection rates, worldwide there are currently more than 1.2 billion children in 186 countries affected by school closures due to the pandemic. In Denmark, children up to the age of 11 are returning to nurseries and schools after initially closing on 12 March , but in South Korea students are responding to roll calls from their teachers online .

With this sudden shift away from the classroom in many parts of the globe, some are wondering whether the adoption of online learning will continue to persist post-pandemic, and how such a shift would impact the worldwide education market.

Even before COVID-19, there was already high growth and adoption in education technology, with global edtech investments reaching US$18.66 billion in 2019 and the overall market for online education projected to reach $350 Billion by 2025 . Whether it is language apps , virtual tutoring , video conferencing tools, or online learning software , there has been a significant surge in usage since COVID-19.

How is the education sector responding to COVID-19?

In response to significant demand, many online learning platforms are offering free access to their services, including platforms like BYJU’S , a Bangalore-based educational technology and online tutoring firm founded in 2011, which is now the world’s most highly valued edtech company . Since announcing free live classes on its Think and Learn app, BYJU’s has seen a 200% increase in the number of new students using its product, according to Mrinal Mohit, the company's Chief Operating Officer.

Tencent classroom, meanwhile, has been used extensively since mid-February after the Chinese government instructed a quarter of a billion full-time students to resume their studies through online platforms. This resulted in the largest “online movement” in the history of education with approximately 730,000 , or 81% of K-12 students, attending classes via the Tencent K-12 Online School in Wuhan.

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The future of jobs report 2023, how to follow the growth summit 2023.

Other companies are bolstering capabilities to provide a one-stop shop for teachers and students. For example, Lark, a Singapore-based collaboration suite initially developed by ByteDance as an internal tool to meet its own exponential growth, began offering teachers and students unlimited video conferencing time, auto-translation capabilities, real-time co-editing of project work, and smart calendar scheduling, amongst other features. To do so quickly and in a time of crisis, Lark ramped up its global server infrastructure and engineering capabilities to ensure reliable connectivity.

Alibaba’s distance learning solution, DingTalk, had to prepare for a similar influx: “To support large-scale remote work, the platform tapped Alibaba Cloud to deploy more than 100,000 new cloud servers in just two hours last month – setting a new record for rapid capacity expansion,” according to DingTalk CEO, Chen Hang.

Some school districts are forming unique partnerships, like the one between The Los Angeles Unified School District and PBS SoCal/KCET to offer local educational broadcasts, with separate channels focused on different ages, and a range of digital options. Media organizations such as the BBC are also powering virtual learning; Bitesize Daily , launched on 20 April, is offering 14 weeks of curriculum-based learning for kids across the UK with celebrities like Manchester City footballer Sergio Aguero teaching some of the content.

What does this mean for the future of learning?

While some believe that the unplanned and rapid move to online learning – with no training, insufficient bandwidth, and little preparation – will result in a poor user experience that is unconducive to sustained growth, others believe that a new hybrid model of education will emerge, with significant benefits. “I believe that the integration of information technology in education will be further accelerated and that online education will eventually become an integral component of school education,“ says Wang Tao, Vice President of Tencent Cloud and Vice President of Tencent Education.

There have already been successful transitions amongst many universities. For example, Zhejiang University managed to get more than 5,000 courses online just two weeks into the transition using “DingTalk ZJU”. The Imperial College London started offering a course on the science of coronavirus, which is now the most enrolled class launched in 2020 on Coursera .

Many are already touting the benefits: Dr Amjad, a Professor at The University of Jordan who has been using Lark to teach his students says, “It has changed the way of teaching. It enables me to reach out to my students more efficiently and effectively through chat groups, video meetings, voting and also document sharing, especially during this pandemic. My students also find it is easier to communicate on Lark. I will stick to Lark even after coronavirus, I believe traditional offline learning and e-learning can go hand by hand."

These 3 charts show the global growth in online learning

The challenges of online learning.

There are, however, challenges to overcome. Some students without reliable internet access and/or technology struggle to participate in digital learning; this gap is seen across countries and between income brackets within countries. For example, whilst 95% of students in Switzerland, Norway, and Austria have a computer to use for their schoolwork, only 34% in Indonesia do, according to OECD data .

In the US, there is a significant gap between those from privileged and disadvantaged backgrounds: whilst virtually all 15-year-olds from a privileged background said they had a computer to work on, nearly 25% of those from disadvantaged backgrounds did not. While some schools and governments have been providing digital equipment to students in need, such as in New South Wales , Australia, many are still concerned that the pandemic will widenthe digital divide .

Is learning online as effective?

For those who do have access to the right technology, there is evidence that learning online can be more effective in a number of ways. Some research shows that on average, students retain 25-60% more material when learning online compared to only 8-10% in a classroom. This is mostly due to the students being able to learn faster online; e-learning requires 40-60% less time to learn than in a traditional classroom setting because students can learn at their own pace, going back and re-reading, skipping, or accelerating through concepts as they choose.

Nevertheless, the effectiveness of online learning varies amongst age groups. The general consensus on children, especially younger ones, is that a structured environment is required , because kids are more easily distracted. To get the full benefit of online learning, there needs to be a concerted effort to provide this structure and go beyond replicating a physical class/lecture through video capabilities, instead, using a range of collaboration tools and engagement methods that promote “inclusion, personalization and intelligence”, according to Dowson Tong, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent and President of its Cloud and Smart Industries Group.

Since studies have shown that children extensively use their senses to learn, making learning fun and effective through use of technology is crucial, according to BYJU's Mrinal Mohit. “Over a period, we have observed that clever integration of games has demonstrated higher engagement and increased motivation towards learning especially among younger students, making them truly fall in love with learning”, he says.

A changing education imperative

It is clear that this pandemic has utterly disrupted an education system that many assert was already losing its relevance . In his book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century , scholar Yuval Noah Harari outlines how schools continue to focus on traditional academic skills and rote learning , rather than on skills such as critical thinking and adaptability, which will be more important for success in the future. Could the move to online learning be the catalyst to create a new, more effective method of educating students? While some worry that the hasty nature of the transition online may have hindered this goal, others plan to make e-learning part of their ‘new normal’ after experiencing the benefits first-hand.

The importance of disseminating knowledge is highlighted through COVID-19

Major world events are often an inflection point for rapid innovation – a clear example is the rise of e-commerce post-SARS . While we have yet to see whether this will apply to e-learning post-COVID-19, it is one of the few sectors where investment has not dried up . What has been made clear through this pandemic is the importance of disseminating knowledge across borders, companies, and all parts of society. If online learning technology can play a role here, it is incumbent upon all of us to explore its full potential.

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Essay on Importance of Internet: Samples for Students

• Updated on  
• Nov 23, 2023

Internet is not just a need or luxury, it has become a household necessity. It was used as a source of entertainment but now it is impossible to work in offices or study without the Internet. When the global pandemic locked everyone in their house, it became an important medium to connect, study and work. Students were able to study without the risk of catching COVID-19 because of the Internet. The importance of the internet is also a common topic in various entrance exams such as SAT , TOEFL , and UPSC . In this blog, you will learn how to write an essay on the importance of the Internet.

This Blog Includes:

Tips to write the perfect essay on internet, sample 1 of essay on the importance of the internet (100 words), sample essay 2 – importance of the internet (150 words), sample essay 3 on use of internet for student (300 words).

Also Read: LNAT Sample Essays

Now the task of essay writing may not always be easy, hence candidates must always know a few tips to write the perfect essay. Mentioned below are a few tips for writing the correct essay:

• Prepare a basic outline to make sure there is continuity and relevance and no break in the structure of the essay
• Follow a given structure. Begin with an introduction then move on to the body which should be detailed and encapsulate the essence of the topic and finally the conclusion for readers to be able to comprehend the essay in a certain manner
• Students can also try to include solutions in their conclusion to make the essay insightful and lucrative to read.

Also Read: UPSC Essay Topics

The last few years have witnessed heavy reliance on the Internet. This has been because of multiple advantages that it has to offer – for instance, reducing work stress and changing the face of communication most importantly. If we take the current scenario, we cannot ignore how important the Internet is in our everyday lives. It is now indeed a challenging task to visualize a world without the internet. One may define the internet as a large library composed of stuff like – records, pictures, websites, and pieces of information. Another sector in which the internet has an undeniably important role to play is the field of communication. Without access to the internet, the ability to share thoughts and ideas across the globe would have also been just a dream. 

Also Read: IELTS Essay Topics

With the significant progress in technology, the importance of the internet has only multiplied with time. The dependence on the internet has been because of multiple advantages that it has to offer – for instance, reducing work stress and changing the face of communication most importantly. By employing the correct usage of the internet, we can find various information about the world. The internet hosts Wikipedia, which is considered to be one of the largest best-composed reference books kept up by a vast community of volunteer scholars and editors from all over the world. Through the internet, one may get answers to all their curiosity.

In the education sector too, it plays a major role, especially taking into consideration the pandemic. The Internet during the pandemic provided an easy alternative to replace the traditional education system and offers additional resources for studying, students can take their classes in the comforts of their homes. Through the internet, they can also browse for classes – lectures at no extra cost. The presence of the Internet is slowly replacing the use of traditional newspapers. It offers various recreational advantages as well. It can be correctly said that the internet plays a great role in the enhancement of quality of life.

Also Read: TOEFL Sample Essays

One may correctly define the 21st century as the age of science and technology. However, this has been possible not only by the efforts of the current generation but also by the previous generation. The result of one such advancement in the field of science and technology is the Internet. What is the Internet? So the internet can be called a connected group of networks that enable electronic communication. It is considered to be the world’s largest communication connecting millions of users.

The dependence on the internet has been because of multiple advantages that it has to offer – for instance, reducing work stress and changing the face of communication most importantly. Given the current scenario, the Internet has become a massive part of our daily lives, and it is now a challenging task to imagine the world without the Internet. The importance of the Internet in the field of communication definitely cannot be ignored.

Without access to the internet, the ability to share thoughts and ideas across the globe would have been just a dream. Today we can talk to people all over the globe only because of services like email, messenger, etc that are heavily reliant on the internet. Without the internet, it would be hard to imagine how large the world would be. The advent of the internet has made the task of building global friendships very easy.

The youth is mainly attracted by entertainment services. Streaming platforms like Amazon , Netflix, and YouTube have also gained immense popularity among internet users over the past few years. The presence of the Internet is slowly replacing the use of traditional newspapers among people too. 

In addition to these, it has various recreational advantages to offer as well. For instance, people can search for fun videos to watch and play games online with friends and other people all over the globe. Hence, we can say the internet holds immense importance in today’s era. Internet technology has indeed changed the dynamics of how we communicate, respond or entertain ourselves. Its importance in everyday life is never-ending. It can be correctly said that the internet plays a great role in the enhancement of quality of life. In the future too, we will see further changes in technology .

Also Read: SAT to Drop Optional Essays and Subject Tests from the Exam

Related Articles

The internet provides us with facts and data, as well as information and knowledge, to aid in our personal, social, and economic development. The internet has various applications; nevertheless, how we utilize it in our daily lives is determined by our particular needs and ambitions.

Here are five uses of the internet: email; sharing of files; watching movies and listening to songs; research purposes; and education.

The Internet has also altered our interactions with our families, friends, and life partners. Everyone is now connected to everyone else in a more simplified, accessible, and immediate manner; we can conduct part of our personal relationships using our laptops, smartphones, and tablets.

This was all about an essay on importance of Internet. The skill of writing an essay comes in handy when appearing for standardized language tests. Thinking of taking one soon? Leverage Live provides the best online test prep for the same. Register today to know more!

Nikita Puri

Nikita is a creative writer and editor, who is always ready to learn new skills. She has great knowledge about study abroad universities, researching and writing blogs about them. Being a perfectionist, she has a habit of keeping her tasks complete on time before the OCD hits her. When Nikita is not busy working, you can find her eating while binge-watching The office. Also, she breathes music. She has done her bachelor's from Delhi University and her master's from Jamia Millia Islamia.

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Protecting online consumers during the COVID-19 crisis

The COVID-19 crisis has upended the global consumer landscape. Confinement measures have moved consumers further online, changed their demands and exacerbated behavioural biases.

Many mainstream consumers are now financially and psychologically vulnerable and the existing vulnerability of, for instance, the elderly or low-income consumers, has intensified.

There are increasing reports of unfair, misleading and fraudulent commercial practices online. These include financial scams, false claims of coronavirus treatment or prevention, price gouging of essential goods and the promotion of unsafe or counterfeit products.

Many governments must strike a balance between protecting consumers’ health and safety, strengthening consumer trust, and addressing challenges to business and workers. This has led some governments to fast-track procedures and grant exemptions from consumer laws.

Increased international and cross-sector co-operation among government agencies, businesses, and civil society are key to protecting consumers. Information sharing has become more valuable than ever, particularly for agencies with limited resources.

  Profound shifts in consumer behaviour and trust

The COVID-19 crisis has had sudden and wide-ranging effects on consumer behaviour. Public health orders have forced many to stay home and led to a surge in Internet usage. A greater number of consumers are experiencing higher levels of distress caused by direct experience or fear of the health, economic, and social impacts of the crisis, and are vulnerable to commercial exploitation. Confinement measures have restricted traditional forms of commerce, moving businesses online. While some have successfully done so while maintaining consumer trust and protecting employees, many others have not been able to do so, resulting in some cases in diminished consumer choice. In addition, border closures, travel restrictions and social distancing measures have curtailed consumer demand for services such as accommodation, travel and large-scale events, while demand for other products has skyrocketed. Perceived scarcity of essential goods and supply chain ruptures have led to panic buying in some countries, forcing many stores to impose item limits on hygiene products such as hand sanitizers, disinfectants, facemasks and toilet paper; while the surge in teleworking has led to shortages of printers and paper.

Growing consumer demand, together with social distancing and increased hygiene protocols, have also put pressure on critical e-commerce distribution networks, leading to delayed or non-deliveries. Changing requirements on the shipment of non-essential products in some countries have led to further disruptions.

As demand for online services and access to communication services has soared, reliable and affordable broadband services have become crucial. Some communication operators have experienced up to a 60% increase in Internet traffic since the crisis began. Although many such operators and content providers have managed to deal with increased traffic, some content providers such as Netflix and YouTube have reduced streaming quality.

Governments and businesses have taken actions to ensure affordable access to quality broadband services. Communication operators in Japan, for example, have exempted consumers under the age of 25 from some charges to reduce their financial burden. In the United Kingdom, the government and communication operators agreed to keep Internet services affordable for vulnerable consumers; and in the United States, major communication operators, in co-ordination with the US Federal Communications Commission, have pledged to ensure continued access to their services for a period of 60 days and have exempted late fees for consumers who cannot pay their bills during the crisis. Yet the crisis has deepened the digital divide between consumers who have access to the Internet and digital literacy, and those who do not. This division is particularly evident between developed and developing countries, urban and rural areas, the rich and poor, and among the elderly and people with disabilities, for whom purchasing products online may not be an option. If not addressed, these issues will result in increased inequality.

  Unfair, misleading and fraudulent commercial practices are on the rise

As COVID-19 has proliferated worldwide, so too have online scams seeking to take advantage of the crisis. In the United States, more than 22 000 consumer complaints about COVID-19 fraud have been reported to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) between January 2020 and mid-April 2020, amounting to over USD 22 million in consumer losses. Some phishing, malware and identity theft scams have enticed consumers to share their data under false pretences, purporting to be from health or disease control organisations like the World Health Organisation. Other scams seek to financially defraud consumers, including fake charity scams, as well as prominent company imposter scams, for example advertising “free” Netflix subscriptions. Other examples include promising hygiene products that never arrive, or offering fake COVID-19 tests. Reports also indicate that illegal moneylenders are increasing their efforts to exploit financially vulnerable consumers. In the United Kingdom, for example, the England Illegal Money Lending Team has issued a warning about COVID-19 payday loans, while Japan’s Financial Services Agency and National Police Agency have initiated joint investigations into illegal lenders targeting vulnerable consumers on social media. On 20 March 2020, the consumer protection authorities of the EU member states (Consumer Protection Cooperation network) issued a common position on the most reported scams and unfair practices in this context of the crisis, which the European Commission subsequently discussed with key online platforms.

Taking advantage of consumer fear and anxiety, scammers have also propagated deceptive and scientifically unsupported claims that certain products can prevent or treat COVID-19. The US FTC has sent warning letters (some jointly with the US Food and Drug Administration) to more than 60 companies in relation to misleading claims about products including homeopathic drugs, essential oils, traditional Chinese medicine, salt therapy, and vitamin immune boosters. The Consumer Affairs Agency of Japan requested 64 businesses to rectify false or misleading claims related to products such as air cleaners and sanitizers. Canada’s Competition Bureau has also issued compliance warnings to businesses to stop false or misleading claims that certain products (facemasks, ventilation, air purification products) can prevent or protect against the virus. Amid consumer anxiety, claims such as “sells out fast” may be false or misleading, and may reinforce consumer anxiety and panic buying.

Price gouging is another issue for consumers, as some businesses have sought to maximise profits from increased demand for essential goods such as facemasks and hand sanitizer, or basic grocery items or printers, by exponentially raising their prices. The Italian Antitrust Authority is currently investigating several online platforms in relation to excessively priced hand sanitizers and facemasks sold via the platforms by third-party sellers, while French authorities issued a decree to impose a ceiling on the retail price of hand sanitizers. In some countries, consumer and competition agencies are addressing these issues, ensuring that the remedies that are put in place to address pricing gouging do not have deleterious effects lingering beyond the crisis.

The COVID-19 crisis has also heightened product safety risks. Recall notices of facemasks that do not adequately filter airborne particles and may expose consumers to risk of infection if not combined with additional protective measures, have been for example recently submitted to the OECD’s GlobalRecalls portal , a database for governments to share recall information. Moreover, store closures, staff shortages and limited postal services, have made it difficult for businesses to fulfil their recall duties.

  Businesses and governments play a key role in maintaining consumer trust

Consumer trust is essential to the proper functioning of markets. This is particularly true in e-commerce, where consumers are unable to inspect products at a distance.

The role of businesses

As confinement measures have moved consumers online and some traders seek to exploit their vulnerability, many businesses have recognised the importance of strengthening trust. In March, a survey of US consumers found that 52% of adults prefer buying from companies that are publicly protecting customers and staff against COVID-19 risks. Some businesses have changed consumer policies in response to COVID-19 (e.g. offering free shipping, extending time-periods for change-of-mind returns or waiving cancellation fees) and are highlighting options such as no-contact delivery or pick-up services.

Given the large share of e-commerce that they command, online marketplaces have a role to play in strengthening consumer trust during the crisis and promoting responsible conduct of third party sellers on their platforms. Some say they are actively monitoring their sites for scams, excessive pricing and misleading health claims, removing listings and/or suspending accounts, and are also calling for increased support from authorities to identify rogue traders. In the European Union, for example, some have established channels to flag illegal content to member states’ authorities.

The role of policy makers

Consumer protection agencies across the world have moved quickly to alert consumers about key threats associated with the crisis, and several are considering special measures to address them. Faced with the challenge of balancing protection of consumer health and safety with support for businesses and protection of workers, some governments have granted exemptions from laws protecting consumers when in the public interest. For example, some agencies have fast-tracked approval processes for new products such as hand sanitizers to ensure that consumers have access to these products. In Canada, an interim policy easing the enforcement of certain labelling requirements has been issued to facilitate access and sale of consumer products in high demand, such as household cleaning products or hand and body soaps. Likewise, competition authorities in Australia and the United Kingdom have temporarily allowed retailers to collaborate to ensure the continuity of food supplies, and competition authorities in the US have issued guidance on business collaboration to protect citizens’ health and safety during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cross-sector and international co-operation

The crisis has amplified the need for inter-agency co-operation. For example, some product safety and health agencies now share responsibilities over products such as hand sanitizers and facemasks that are manufactured by non-traditional industries and individuals. Consumer and competition authorities have discussed strategies to minimise price gouging, and communication regulators have worked with consumer agencies in some countries to protect consumers from excessive communication services charges.

The crisis has also underscored the interconnected nature of the global community, and the need to support cross-border e-commerce through enhanced international information sharing and co-operation. The OECD and other fora can create efficiencies for consumer agencies (including those with limited resources), businesses and civil society, by enabling them to share best practice, market intelligence and consumer messaging. The International Consumer Protection Enforcement Network (ICPEN) has developed social media campaigns to promote consumer reporting of COVID-19 related consumer protection issues, particularly scams; the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has released information on country initiatives to alert consumers about COVID-19 scams, along with recommendations for governments; and advocacy groups such as Consumers International have contributed guidance on ways to protect consumers from COVID-19 threats.

  Key recommendations

Governments are encouraged to:

Educate consumers about COVID-19 scams, including how to report them and avoid misinformation, building on learnings from behavioural insights.

Establish a dialogue with online businesses about scams and misleading conduct and, to the extent possible, share information to help identify rogue traders.

Foster co-operation between agencies with relevant consumer protection mandates, for example via inter-agency taskforces.

Contribute best practices through OECD and other international fora (e.g. ICPEN and UNCTAD), and notify measures taken against unsafe products, including via the OECD’s GlobalRecalls portal.

Avoid rolling back consumer protection and product safety measures, and consider ways to reduce the administrative burdens on business and streamline compliance processes.

Businesses are encouraged to:

Incorporate learnings from behavioural insights in the promotion, sale and delivery of products, and minimise techniques that take advantage of consumers’ behavioural biases. Clear messaging to reassure consumers about supply chain robustness may help alleviate panic buying.

Acknowledge that more consumers may be vulnerable during the crisis and consider needs due to health and safety concerns as well as job and other financial losses.

Warn consumers about known scams and increase efforts to identify and remove false or misleading advertising.

(For online marketplaces) Identify and remove listings with misleading claims or excessive pricing. Communicate regularly with authorities about efforts undertaken and challenges encountered.

Further reading

OECD (2020), “Tracking and tracing COVID: Protecting privacy and data while using apps and biometrics”, OECD, Paris, https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/view/?ref=129_129655-7db0lu7dto&title=Tracking-and-Tracing-COVID-Protecting-privacy-and-data-while-using .

OECD (2019), “Good practice guide on online advertising”, OECD Digital Economy Papers , No. 279, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9678e5b1-en .

OECD (2018), “Improving online disclosures with behavioural insights”, OECD Digital Economy Papers , No. 269, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/39026ff4-en .

OECD (2018), Toolkit for protecting digital consumers: A Resource for G20 Policy Makers , OECD, Paris www.oecd.org/internet/consumer/toolkit-for-protecting-digital-consumers.pdf .

OECD (2016), Recommendation of the Council on Consumer Protection in E-commerce , OECD, Paris, https://legalinstruments.oecd.org/en/instruments/OECD-LEGAL-0422 .

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• Published: 23 May 2022

The impact of COVID-19 on digital communication patterns

• Evan DeFilippis   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9757-4374 1 ,
• Stephen Michael Impink   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5910-642X 2 ,
• Madison Singell 3 ,
• Jeffrey T. Polzer 1 &
• Raffaella Sadun 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  9 , Article number:  180 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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• Business and management

We explore the impact of COVID-19 on employees’ digital communication patterns through an event study of lockdowns in 16 large metropolitan areas in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Using de-identified, aggregated meeting and email meta-data from 3,143,270 users, we find, compared to pre-pandemic levels, increases in the number of meetings per person (+12.9 percent) and the number of attendees per meeting (+13.5 percent), but decreases in the average length of meetings (−20.1 percent). Collectively, the net effect is that people spent less time in meetings per day (−11.5 percent) in the post-lockdown period. We also find significant and durable increases in length of the average workday (+8.2 percent, or +48.5 min), along with short-term increases in email activity. These findings provide insight into how formal communication patterns have changed for a large sample of knowledge workers in major cities. We discuss these changes in light of the ongoing challenges faced by organizations and workers struggling to adapt and perform in the face of a global pandemic.

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Introduction

The COVID-19 global pandemic disrupted the way organizations function, just as it disrupted life more generally. As the number of infections increased, governments across the globe closed their borders and shut down physical work sites to reduce the spread of infection caused by the virus. By April 7, 2020, 95 percent of Americans were required to shelter-in-place within their homes, similar to the citizens of many other countries. Organizations responded by altering their work arrangements to accommodate these new realities, including a rapid shift to working from home for large segments of knowledge workers. Many workers were forced to work remotely to perform their jobs regardless of how conducive their home environment or task requirements were to such arrangements. Given the large-scale economic and social upheaval wrought by COVID-19, this abrupt transition to remote work occurred at a time when organizational coordination, decision-making processes, and productivity were never more consequential.

This paper provides a large-scale analysis of how formal digital communication patterns changed in the early stages of the pandemic. For all the anecdotes and speculation about working from home during the pandemic, there is still little systematic evidence on how day-to-day work activities changed due to these unexpected shocks. This paper explores, in particular, how the pandemic altered patterns of interactions—measured through a comprehensive set of meeting and email activity metrics—as organizations rapidly moved their activity to remote work. The analysis is based on de-identified meta-data from an information technology services provider that licenses digital communications solutions to organizations worldwide. We use digital meta-data on emails and meetings for 3,143,270 users across 21,478 de-identified firms located in 16 large metropolitan areas, aggregated by the provider to the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) and day across all available firms (see Appendix, Figs. B1 and B2 ). The meta-data provides information on both email and meeting frequency, as well as other salient aspects of digital communications, such as meeting size, meeting duration, the number of email recipients, the time an email was sent, and related dimensions (see Appendix, Table A1 ).

The precise geographical and longitudinal information contained in the communication meta-data allows us to study the evolution of meeting and email activity before and throughout the first stage of the pandemic. To identify the time at which workers presumably shifted to remote work, we selected 16 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) that experienced government-mandated lockdowns. These lockdowns established a clear breakpoint, after which we could infer that people were working away from their offices. The earliest lockdown in our data occurred on March 8, 2020, in Milan, Italy, and the latest lockdown occurred on March 25, 2020, in Washington, DC (see Table 1 for more information). We report data from a window starting 8 weeks before the lockdown and ending 8 weeks after the lockdown in each MSA to explore how the behavior of workers changed.

Digital communication and remote work

Theorizing about how employees might have responded to the COVID-19 crisis is challenging for many reasons. First, research conducted before the pandemic examined transitions to remote work that were voluntary, less widespread, and performed under less dramatic circumstances (Bloom et al., 2013 ; Choudhury et al., 2019 ). These circumstances are fundamentally different from the situation that organizations found themselves in shortly after the start of the pandemic.

Second, the few examples of forced transitions to remote work which do exist occurred in the aftermath of acute disasters, such as the Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand or the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami in Japan (e.g. Donnelly and Proctor-Thomson, 2015 ; Dye et al., 2014 ), rather than a persistent crisis more similar to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, these transitions typically involved a smaller fraction of the workforce over a shorter duration, making it harder to generalize from them to the circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

Third, there is scarce prior evidence on digital communication across many firms, even in the absence of a crisis. For example, the nascent literature on the “science of meetings” tends to examine the behavior of a single or handful of firms, or use self-report measures derived from survey responses from a subset of firms or workers, instead of digitally-stored communications data at the scale examined in this paper (e.g. Rogelberg et al., 2006 , 2010 ; Allen et al., 2015 ). While there is a growing body of research examining how digital communications have changed since the pandemic (e.g. Cao et al., 2021 ; Yang et al., 2021 ), these studies tend to examine a single company, making it difficult to generalize results across different organizational features, such as size and industry.

Finally, existing research provides little guidance on how various dimensions of organizational communication activities relate to each other, even though they are likely to be interdependent. For example, meeting count—the number of meetings employees attend in a day—is likely to depend on other dimensions of meeting activity, such as meeting duration or size. Organizations may be reluctant to have meetings that are too long, involve many participants, and occur too frequently, as this may inhibit employees from accomplishing their individual work. Similarly, having infrequent, short, and small meetings may also be suboptimal, as it would limit opportunities for organization-wide coordination on broader tasks. The lack of research about how organizations navigate this balancing act makes it difficult to distill clear hypotheses about how the forced shift to remote work during the pandemic affected the different, interrelated dimensions of communication activity examined in this paper.

Because of the lack of existing theory and the novelty of these widespread, forced transitions to remote work, we do not generate a set of hypotheses. Instead, we summarize what we might infer from adjacent research on the individual variables considered in this paper.

Meeting frequency

The communication literature shows that digital communication is generally less information-dense than face-to-face interaction (Sproull and Kiesler, 1986 ; Daft and Lengel, 1986 ). Because virtual work must take place via “lean” informational channels, such as emails and videoconferences, certain social cues that are readily apprehended in-person can be lost when translated into digital mediums (Denstadli et al., 2012 ; Han et al., 2011 ). According to this reasoning, newly virtual teams adjusting to the pandemic should communicate more frequently via email and meet more often to compensate for the lack of rich social and contextual information previously conveyed through face-to-face interaction (Carletta et al., 2000 ; DeSanctis et al., 1993 ). We can arrive at a similar prediction by examining research on virtual teams, which finds that teams working remotely often suffer from a lack of formal accountability as managers cannot directly observe their employees’ performance (Kurland and Bailey, 1999 ). To compensate for this fact, managers on virtual teams may meet more frequently to ensure that employees accomplish organizational tasks (Maurer, 2020 ; White, 2014 ; Wiesenfeld et al., 1999 , 2001 ).

However, emerging research suggests that an unconditional increase in meeting frequency is unlikely, given that virtual meetings tend to be more cognitively demanding, more prone to distraction, and less effective in many ways than their in-person counterparts (Wiederhold, 2020 ). Adding to this problem are the unique challenges associated with technological adoption, including unanticipated service interruptions and the need for skilled meeting organizers who are fluent in the advanced features of meeting platforms and can resolve issues when they arise (Deakin and Wakefield, 2014 ; Seitz, 2016 ). These issues might offset the inclination to hold more meetings if managers acknowledge the diminishing returns to virtual meetings and modulate their frequency as teams transition remotely (Nardi and Whittaker, 2002 ; Wiederhold, 2020 ).

Meeting size

The literature is equally equivocal when it comes to the topic of meeting size. Research on collaboration, for example, observes that organizations often have different norms and conventions governing average meeting size, and that these norms are important predictors of meeting effectiveness, task performance, and inclusiveness in remote collaboration (Allen et al., 2020 ). But the literature is largely silent on whether these pre-existing organizational differences in meeting norms are likely to be preserved as firms transition remotely, or if organizations will be forced to adopt new norms as employees adjust to working from home. Convincing cases can be made for either prediction. For example, we might expect meetings to become larger as organizations shift to remote work since meeting organizers can be more inclusive about who gets invited to virtual meetings, since they do not have to worry about the physical capacity of meeting rooms. Managers may even see advantages to increasing the total number of people invited to meetings, as the problems that organizations face during this time will likely be relevant to a greater fraction of the workforce.

On the other hand, there are also good reasons to predict that meetings would become smaller as organizations get accustomed to remote work. Managers who use meetings primarily as an accountability tool to check-in with remote employees could increase the frequency of one-on-one meetings, which would drive the average size of meetings downward. Meeting organizers are also likely to consider workers’ attentional limitations, which are exacerbated in larger digital meetings where expectations regarding listening behaviors and interaction are less strict (Lyons and Kim, 2010 ). To mitigate these concerns, managers may opt for smaller meetings to minimize the risk of distraction.

Meeting length

Meeting length is another topic about which the literature is inconclusive. While there is a wealth of research discussing the challenges of long or inefficiently staggered meetings (e.g. Rogelberg et al., 2006 ; Stray et al., 2013 ), there is very little empirical research directly testing the dimension of meeting length, and few theoretical pieces that might inform predictions about what to expect as organizations transition remotely. As with other dimensions of meeting activity, plausible cases can be made for expecting either an increase or a decrease in the average length of meetings that employees attend. For example, employees are likely to have a hard time staying engaged in long virtual meetings (Wiederhold, 2020 ), which may force managers to respond by decreasing the length of meetings to reduce strain on employees’ attention. Similarly, as a greater proportion of meetings are used as a “check-in” tool to enforce employee accountability remotely, we might also expect a decrease in average meeting length, since check-in meetings can be completed in a shorter amount of time than other meeting types (Arnfalk and Kogg, 2003 ).

However, we might also expect the average meeting length to increase for a different set of reasons. For example, organizations may simply face more severe and frequent problems in the middle of a pandemic than they usually do. These problems may require longer meetings to adequately share information and ensure tasks are effectively coordinated across employees. Online meetings may also be less efficient than their in-person counterparts, owing to technical problems, communication challenges, and distractions at home. These inefficiencies may require meeting organizers to schedule relatively longer meetings to accommodate challenges inherent to digital media.

Email activity

The trade-offs entailed in these decisions not only affect meeting activity, but communication activity more broadly. After all, much of the information that is exchanged in meetings could be conveyed in written form via email or other text-based tools. For this reason, our paper also focuses on email activity, which continues to be a prominent channel of communication in many organizations. In the context of this paper, email is a particularly important communication stream because it can act as both a complement to and substitute for meeting activity. Many tasks, for example, can be more efficiently accomplished via email, given its asynchronous, text-based format and the potential for one-to-many communication (Larsen et al., 2008 ). Other tasks which may require significant coordination or a large amount of social context and nuance may be better suited for meetings. The degree to which organizations will rely on emails as a complement to or substitute for meeting activity as they transition remotely remains an open question.

To understand how organizations changed their digital communication patterns in response to the pandemic, we analyzed a large sample of aggregated meeting and email meta-data from 3,143,270 users across 21,478 firms in 16 international cities that have been affected by official lockdown orders, reported in Appendix, Figures B1 and B2 . From this meta-data, our data provider, which licenses digital communications services to organizations around the world, built measures of the communication frequency for email (the average count of distinct, internal, and external emails and the average count of recipients) and meetings (the average count of meetings, average meeting duration, and the average count of attendees per meeting). Additionally, we measured broader changes to work patterns, such as the average length of workday (measured from the first communication to the last communication in a given day), the cumulative number of hours people spent in meetings, and the average number of emails sent outside of regular business hours, reported in the Appendix, Table A1 . More details on our measures are reported in the Appendix, Note A6 .

Our data provider cleaned the data in several ways to increase the likelihood that calendar metadata reflected actual organizational activity. First, they dropped meetings with only one attendee or meetings that lasted longer than 8 h since those meetings overwhelmingly corresponded with out-of-office notices or people blocking out personal time on their calendar rather than formal meeting activity. Next, they excluded meetings with greater than 250 attendees to filter out company-wide notices and spam invitations. Lastly, they only provided internal emails based on correspondence between two employees who shared the same corporate domain address (e.g. @company.com).

The data provider matched meeting and email metadata to a list of metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). For each MSA in our data, we included the central business district of the cities and surrounding suburbs and townships within the MSA with populations greater than 100,000 people. The 16 major cities included in the sample were selected based on the following criteria: (1) each city must average at least 50,000 active users across 500 firms in the time period examined; (2) each city must have implemented a clear, government-mandated order for non-essential employees to work from home; and (3) these orders had to take effect around the same time (between March 8 and 28) to more explicitly control for time-specific factors related to the organizational response to COVID-19. The third criteria resulted in the exclusion of Asian cities from the analysis since their lockdowns took place at least a month before other major international cities. Each variable used in this analysis was computed by our provider and delivered to us pre-aggregated at the MSA-level. At no point did the research team have access to personally identifiable or user-level data.

In a secondary data set, our provider calculated and shared email communication aggregates at the industry (SIC-1) and organization size level (i.e., small <250 users, medium 250–500 users, large 1000–2500 users, and enterprise 2500+ users) for each of the 16 MSAs included in this study. Our email provider was unable to provide the industry-level data for meeting measures. We use this dataset only to show that our results are consistent across industry and size levels in various robustness tests.

For the main set of results, we used average meeting and email activity aggregated at the MSA level in the post-lockdown period relative to the pre-lockdown period. We used the following specification for our first set of results, which uses a single dummy variable to test the overall difference between pre- and post-lockdown periods for each outcome variable.

To analyze the change in email and meeting measures over different weeks, we used the following specification:

where y i , t are logged email and meeting data at the MSA i and day t level, post is an indicator variable for the period after lockdown, Dτ t is a week indicator variable, relative to the lockdown week, γ i are MSA-level fixed effects, d t are day of the week indicator variables (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.), and u i,t is an error-term. Note that MSA-level fixed effects were selected since that was the level at which our communication data was aggregated by our data provider. MSA-level fixed effects control for average differences across MSAs for the outcome of interest, enabling us to report within-MSA changes.

The “lockdown week” is the 7-day period that includes the lockdown date at its center. Every prior and subsequent week indicator is defined relative to that week. The base week for our regression is defined as one week before the lockdown week since many organizations began making arrangements days in advance of official lockdowns based on news of impending policy changes. Email and meeting measures do not display evidence of a pre-trend in the weeks leading up to the base week and lockdown week. All standard errors are clustered at the MSA level (see Tables 2a , b for details).

We use an OLS regression-based event study to examine how these measures vary before and after government-mandated lockdowns. Our method is similar to other approaches in the literature used to evaluate event-related changes in an outcome of interest (e.g. Henderson, 1990 ; Kothari and Warner, 2007 ). We group digital communication measures into three categories of interest: meeting, email, and work–life balance.

We find an increase in the total meeting count (+12.9% [CI: +11.4% to +14.4%], +0.8 meetings per person per day) Footnote 1 , a decrease in the average meeting duration (−20.1% [−23.0% to −17.1%], −12.1 min per meeting), and an increase in the average number of attendees (+13.5% [+10.6% to +16.5%], +2.1 attendees per meeting). Our results suggest that organizations in the post-lockdown period had shorter, more frequent meetings with more attendees than in the prior period. Additionally, we find that the net effect of all these changes was to significantly reduce the total number of hours employees spent in meetings during the post-lockdown period (−11.5% [−14.3% to −8.7%], −18.6 min per person per day). We report these models in the Appendix in Table A2 .

After assessing the overall post-lockdown changes in meeting activities, we conducted more granular tests to understand how these changes unfolded week by week. Using a similar regression specification, but with dummy variables corresponding to each week, we computed the weekly change in digital communication patterns following the enacted lockdown relative to the base week. In this weekly specification, we find consistent increases in the size and count of meetings and consistent decreases in the length of meetings each week after the lockdown date. The cumulative effect of these changes is a decrease in the total amount of hours employees spend in meetings each week after the lockdown date, relative to the base week. We report the coefficients, denoting the weekly changes in communication relative to the base week and corresponding standard errors, in Table 2a , and graph these coefficients in Fig. 1 .

Depiction of the coefficients from Table 2a .

Turning to emails, we find that two types of email communication increased in the post-lockdown period. First, the average number of internal emails sent increased (+5.2% [+3.0% to +7.6%], +1.4 emails per person per day). Additionally, there is a significant increase in the average number of recipients included in emails sent in the post-lockdown period (+2.9% [+0.3% to +5.5%], +0.25 recipients per email sent). However, external emails did not significantly change in the post-lockdown period. We report the coefficients, denoting the weekly changes in communication relative to the base week and corresponding standard errors, in Table 2b , and graph these coefficients in Fig. 2 . To better understand how these results unfold over time, we analyze our main email measures up to nine months after the initial lockdowns. Appendix Table A5 depicts results from our main specification for all email measures, controlling for industry-level fixed effects. We find that, even 9 months after the lockdown, the total number of internal emails sent remains significantly higher than pre-lockdown levels. However, the average number of email recipients appears to return to pre-lockdown levels by the third month. We interpret this as evidence that certain changes to communication activity, such as increases in the total number of emails sent, reflect enduring changes to digital communication that are associated with the semi-permanent adoption of remote work. In contrast, other changes, such as increases in the average number of recipients per email, are less durable and fade in the immediate aftermath of lockdowns.

Depiction of the coefficients from Table 2b .

We find that the average workday span, defined as the span of time from the first to the last email sent or meeting attended in a 24-h period, increased by +48.5 min (+8.2% [+7.1% to +9.3%]). Consistent with longer workdays, emails sent after business hours also increased (+8.3% [+4.0% to +12.7%], +0.63 emails per person per day). We report these details in the Appendix in Table A2 . Even in the weekly specification, the employee’s average workday span remains elevated, higher than pre-pandemic levels, for the eight post-lockdown weeks examined in the weekly specification. Furthermore, the total number of emails sent increases steeply the week of the lockdown and then decreases persistently in the weeks after, returning to pre-lockdown levels around week four.

We run numerous analyses with different weighting and aggregation schemes to ensure that our results are consistent across specifications. All results, except for email recipients, are robust to weighting regressions by the total number of users in each MSA, as described in the Appendix in Table A3 . Next, we run additional analyses using weekly instead of daily aggregations, reported in the Appendix in Table A4 . These models are consistent with our main set of findings, regardless of the level of aggregation chosen. Furthermore, in additional analysis (available upon request), we examined whether the changes in communication activity observed in the data were driven by specific sectors of the economy, but found similar responses, both in terms of sign and magnitude, across various industries.

Interestingly, Europe is more negatively impacted by the lockdowns than other cities in our sample when controlling for relevant holidays. However, this could be due to a greater intensity of the lockdown regulations in these areas, disrupting life more in the first two months of the pandemic. It is also possible that pre-existing work–life balance norms in European countries contributed to this result due to a ceiling effect. That is, cities with low baseline levels of communication, perhaps owing to stronger work–life balance norms, have more room to increase their email and meeting activity than cities with higher baseline levels of communication. Lastly, we confirm that the user base remains similar throughout this period and share a graphical depiction of meeting and email users in the Appendix in Figs. B1 and B2 .

Careful inspection of these weekly results reveals that some communication patterns began to change even earlier than one week before the lockdown. To account for this variation, we reran the main analysis, but set the reference category to 8 weeks before the lockdown date to formally test whether meeting and email trends 8 weeks into a lockdown were different from the trends observed 8 weeks before the lockdown. We share these results in the Appendix in Figs. B3 and B4 . With few exceptions, we find that the broad trends in meeting and email activity described above hold regardless of whether the reference week is 8 weeks before the lockdown or one week before the lockdown.

Furthermore, we share additional analysis by MSA and industry. We graph each measure by MSA in the Appendix in Figs. B5 – B14 . Lastly, in Appendix Fig. B15 , we provide an industry analysis showing the heterogeneous effect of industry on email intensity, based on the additional industry-level data provided in the secondary data set. This analysis confirms that our results do not vary much by industry. The only industry differentially affected by the pandemic lockdown is the services industry (excluding financial services). In the services industry, we find that email communication does not recover as quickly as other industries after the lockdown, possibly suggesting a reduction in demand for in-person services.

With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing employees worldwide to work from home, organizations have had to make challenging and urgent decisions about how best to utilize digital communication technology in the absence of a shared physical workspace. Our paper examines two important types of digital communication—meeting and email activity—and shows that on average, employees significantly changed their communication behavior in response to the pandemic. While our results are more descriptive in nature and cannot rule out several competing explanations for the observed findings, the existing literature does help us to identify which explanations are most plausible. Overall, our results suggest that the organizations made communication trade-offs in response to the pandemic, increasing meeting and email activity in terms of frequency and the number of people included, but decreasing the overall time spent doing these activities. While our data cannot speak to whether these changes were due to explicit strategic managerial decisions or a consequence of organizations transitioning to remote work, these patterns are consistent with the idea that virtual forms of communication were leveraged to replace the face-to-face interaction typical in an office setting in a way that might have freed up time for employees to get work accomplished throughout the day.

Though an increase in the quantity of virtual communication is perhaps unsurprising in the middle of a pandemic, the extant literature could not have predicted the specific ways in which this occurred. The literature does, however, help us interpret our findings. For example, despite the potential drawbacks of large meetings or emails with many recipients, these forms of communication practices may help synchronize how information is shared (Allen et al., 2015 ; Cohen et al., 2011 ; Mroz et al., 2018 ). Furthermore, expanding the number of email recipients and meeting attendees increases the likelihood that important information is received by all relevant individuals in an organization (Skovholt and Svennevig, 2006 ).

The hypothesis that organizations were forced to leverage meetings and emails as an imperfect substitute to face-to-face interaction is plausible. Still, one finding that should be explained is why internal emails increased (and remained significantly higher than pre-lockdown levels even 9 months after lockdowns), but external email communication did not. One possibility is that communication turned inward as organizations adapted to remote work. Organizations working remotely for the first time likely have a greater need to use email for internal activities (e.g. synchronizing work activity, enforcing accountability, and communicating information), than for external activities, such as establishing new external partnerships. Another important possibility is that a meaningful amount of external communication in our dataset consisted of mass emails sent out as part of newsletters or promotional campaigns, rather than unique external communication efforts with specific individuals. If these mass emails were automated before the pandemic, and therefore not subject to changes in remote working status, then we would not expect to observe significant increases in external communication.

In addition to observing increases in internal email communication, we also observed important changes to meeting activity. Specifically, we found an increase in the frequency and size of meetings, which can be explained by the fact that virtual work limits opportunities for in-office social engagement and serendipitous information sharing with other employees. Managers may have found it necessary to correct this problem by increasing the frequency of “all-hands” meetings for their teams or departments to overcome feelings of social isolation (Carletta et al., 2000 ; Nilles, 1994 ) and maintain a sense of identification with the organization (Wiesenfeld et al., 1999 ).

The observed decline in meeting length is also consistent with research on virtual teams, which finds that employees find it harder to stay engaged in long, virtual meetings compared to in-person meetings (Wasson, 2004 ; Cummins, 2020 ). Additionally, natural distractions at home which compete for attention, such as demands from family and household responsibilities, may make it even harder to focus during a working day (Cummins, 2020 ; Davis and Green, 2020 ). The collective effect of these demands on attention may have motivated managers to shorten the average length of meetings to avoid overwhelming employees adjusting to working-from-home.

The joint effect of having both an increase in meeting frequency and a decrease in meeting length suggests an interesting possibility that meetings may have become more difficult to coordinate efficiently while organizations adapted to working remotely. A greater quantity of meetings involving a greater number of people implies a substantial requirement for coordination among attendees to schedule these meetings. For at least some of these employees, it would be impossible to schedule meetings consecutively so as to minimize interruption to work activity. From the perspective of employee well-being, the total amount of time spent in meetings is less important than the total number of interruptions (Rogelberg et al., 2006 ). For employees involved in highly interdependent tasks (Barrick et al., 2002 ), an increased quantity of meetings may result in greater distraction and deterioration of well-being over time, even if the net amount of time spent in these meetings is decreasing.

Consistent with this possibility, our findings also point to a spillover of virtual communication beyond normal working hours. Employees worked an average of 48.5 min longer after COVID-19 lockdowns, and were significantly more likely to send emails outside of standard working hours. This points to yet another trade-off organizations should be sensitive to—the decision to expand the scope and frequency of communications, with all its attendant coordination costs, is synonymous with a decision to expand the working day for employees. Even with reduced time spent in meetings, the work demands brought about by the pandemic, coupled with personal demands that are always close at hand, likely made it hard to meet obligations within the bounds of normal working hours.

One explanation for why employees might be working more while working from home comes from research on non-traditional work schedules. This literature has shown that managers have a tendency to view employees who take advantage of flexible working hours as less productive or committed to the organization (Chung, 2020 ; Kaplan et al., 2018 ). Given this perception, employees in virtual teams tend to work longer hours to overcome this “flexibility stigma” and to signal progress on certain assignments by communicating more regularly with managers (Chung, 2020 ; Golden and Eddleston, 2020 ). Another worrying possibility is that workers who would rather not work remotely consider having an office away from their home as essential to keeping their work and personal lives separate. For these workers, working from home may blur the distinction between work and other aspects of their personal life, which may result in them working longer hours without being fully aware of doing so.

Some employees may work a similar amount of time, but spread across an irregular schedule, increasing the span of their workdays. Employees working from home, for example, may decide to take periodic breaks throughout the day to accommodate idiosyncratic demands associated with home life (e.g. childcare, spousal responsibilities, etc.) and compensate for these breaks by working later. Because our measure of the working day is computed by taking the length of time between the first and last meeting or email each day, it does not necessarily capture the total amount or intensity of working time. Despite this caveat, the possibility that employees’ working hours have become less regular is still an important feature of work during the pandemic, as there are well-studied consequences to deviating from formal, organization-wide working schedules (e.g. Piasna, 2018 ; Joshi and Bogen, 2007 ).

In addition to estimating the effects of COVID-related lockdowns on patterns of digital communication, our results also offer a few relevant insights for managers and leaders within organizations. First, our data show that organizations are not merely reactive, but remarkably proactive to external shocks. Organizations of different sizes, in different industries, in different parts of the world, changed their patterns of digital communication at least one full week, on average, before government-imposed lockdowns. That is, our findings show that organizations can (and did) rapidly adjust their communication patterns in anticipation of formal policy requirements or response to local environmental conditions (e.g., the increasing spread of the virus in workplaces.) This degree of responsiveness is surprising when juxtaposed with the literature showing that many organizations can be slow to adapt and change, especially as they become large or are required to respond to rapid political and regulatory change (Woods, 2020 ; Wright et al., 2004 ).

Second, our findings point to the utility of passively collected digital communications data. It is worth noting that this study would not have been possible 20 years ago. Researchers would have had to infer the organizational impact of the crisis via survey data shared from a smaller number of organizations, and such data would have taken months, if not years, to collect. Today, however, because of the widespread use of calendar platforms by organizations that automatically collect communications meta-data, it is now possible to glimpse the impact of any event on organizational communication in real-time (Salganik et al., 2020 ). Because we wanted to ensure our results apply to a large number of organizations, we limited our analysis to broad communication measures shared across organizations worldwide. However, communications data can be collected at a much more granular level than the measures used in this paper. For example, Yang et al. ( 2021 ), in a study that complements our broader approach, examines network data at greater depth for a single firm to show that collaboration networks have become more siloed since the adoption of remote work.

Lastly, our findings have implications for managers by highlighting the importance of considering the trade-offs in organizational communication. Shortly after COVID-related lockdowns were imposed, managers found themselves in charge of newly remote workers and had to decide, in real-time, how best to communicate with employees. Difficult decisions had to be made regarding how many emails to send to employees, how many people to include on meeting invitations, and how frequently to schedule “check-in” meetings to heighten accountability. While our data cannot speak to whether managers consciously made these decisions, our data do show meaningful trade-offs in the dimensions of communication activity. In the context of meetings, organizations varied along different dimensions of meeting activity: the number of meetings, the size of meetings, and the length of meetings. While our paper focuses on the short-term response to the emergency situation created by the pandemic, in the long run, the correct balance of these parameters may vary across organizations. How managers and organizations proactively think about the ideal balance of these parameters (if at all) is an important question for future research.

Limitations

While our data establish that employees changed their email and meeting activity patterns in response to lockdowns, our findings are not without limitations. First, our data only represent a subset of the possible communication occurring within a firm. Non-email communication, such as messaging via consumer or other business communication platforms, and informal meetings not scheduled via calendar invitations, are not reflected in our data. Our analysis does not capture these cross-platform substitutions outside our provider’s data. Therefore, this paper’s findings should be interpreted cautiously as the effect of COVID-19 lockdowns on more formal digital communication patterns, the email and meeting activity facilitated through the company’s communication platform, rather than the net effect of all communication occurring within a firm. As such, other types of communication (e.g. watercooler conversations, instant messenger, phone calls, etc.) were not captured by our email provider’s email and calendar system and were not analyzed in our study. As a result, our analysis may miss important ways in which organizations responded to the pandemic by increasing their use of non-email and meeting channels. For example, organizations might have reacted to the loss of serendipitous in-person conversation by increasing their use of other business communication platforms, like Slack or Microsoft Teams, which are not captured in our data.

A second limitation is that at least three distinct events or phenomena can occur in concert with COVID-related lockdowns: firms transition to remote work, there is a shock to demand due to macroeconomic forces, and behavior is changed for non-work-related reasons. Even controlling for industry and firm size, we cannot disentangle which of these forces is responsible for the effects observed in the paper. As such, the effects documented in the paper should be interpreted as the joint effect of all the forces that co-occur with COVID-19 lockdowns. Related to this, we treat all government-mandated lockdowns as similar in terms of their influence on organizational communication. In reality, firms may have responded to lockdowns in distinct and important ways. For example, Yang et al. ( 2021 ) note that some firms may have adopted a “hybrid work model” in response to the pandemic in which employees spend part of their week working remotely and the other part working in the office. Other organizations are more likely to adopt a “mixed-mode” model in which some employees work remotely full-time, and other employees are full-time office workers. Whether a firm adopted a hybrid working model, a mixed-mode model, or something more extreme has important implications for assessing the impact of remote work on organizational communication.

Third, even though we take great lengths to ensure that calendar data reflects real organizational activity, there is still the possibility that some fraction of our meeting meta-data may not perfectly capture organizational work. For our meeting length variable, a similar problem occurs if a meeting lasts longer or shorter than scheduled on the calendar. The extent to which meeting length, frequency, and size are incorrectly estimated will likely vary substantially across firms, but we have no reason to expect that this bias will vary systematically in a particular direction rendering our estimates unreliable. Measurement error of this sort also does not diminish the practical significance of the results.

Given the unprecedented nature of the changes wrought by COVID-19, it was unclear from the outset how employees would adapt their communication patterns as they transitioned to working from outside their offices. We find that COVID-related lockdowns are associated with: (1) an increase in the total volume of meeting and email activity; (2) a decrease in the average length of meetings; and (3) an increase in the span of the workday. We also found an increase in the average size of meetings and a decrease in the total amount of time spent in meetings after the implementation of COVID-19 lockdowns.

In analyzing digital communication patterns across a large number of firms and regions, we build upon an emerging literature that uses communication meta-data to measure the relationship between patterns of communication and organizational outcomes (Impink et al., 2020 ; Polzer et al., 2018 ; Kleinbaum et al., 2013 ; Srivastava et al., 2018 ). More substantively, we contribute to the literature on virtual work, which has traditionally focused on the impact to organizations when a small subset of employees voluntarily transition to remote work (e.g., Bloom et al., 2013 ; Choudhury et al., 2019 ). Our findings clarify how core communicative functions in an organization change when remote work is implemented under less auspicious conditions—when the transition is mandatory and involves entire organizations.

Data availability

Please contact the corresponding author: Jeffrey Polzer ([email protected]) to be provided with information on how to contact the email provider in our study to apply for access to use the data or to be provided with the code (R and STATA) used to run our analyses.

The details reported in parentheticals are the following: the percentage change of the outcome variable compared to pre-lockdown levels computed from the regression, the 95% confidence interval for this percentage change, and the raw change in the outcome variable in its original units.

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DeFilippis, E., Impink, S.M., Singell, M. et al. The impact of COVID-19 on digital communication patterns. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 9 , 180 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01190-9

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Role of technology in COVID-19 pandemic

Novel Corona Virus is the most recent pandemic, which has struck more than 210 countries and territories all over the world placing states in a perilous position. Enormous research are being done on the virus detection, providing treatments to relief symptoms and developing its vaccine, which, according to an estimate, might take one to two more years. Therefore, WHO has laid stress upon the governments worldwide to guarantee competent surveillance and identification of infected individuals to control severity of COVID-19 pandemic effects. Latest technologies, such as IoMT, drones, robots, UVs, GPS, and Bluetooth, can play a primary role in such circumstances to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 outbreak. Therefore, our study highlights numerous technological solutions, which are of great help in controlling disease spread and facing challenges caused by it.

5.1. Introduction

Pandemics leave a tremendous effect in our lives both socially and economically. Over the past hundred years, world has seen quite some deadly pandemics. Although, COVID-19 is the newest of its kind but relating to the past pandemics and how people benefited at that time by technology can be a great guide in current scenario. A few successful solutions deployed in past pandemics are discussed in this chapter.

Examining the technology and related systems that are helpful in the disease identification, limiting disease spread, and disease prevention is of paramount importance. Different new age technologies can be adopted by the government as an initial response strategy. This chapter mainly focuses on the use of the Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), and other smart emerging technologies like drones, robots, autonomous vehicles (AVs), Bluetooth, and global positioning system (GPS), which can be helpful in handling this pandemic.

IoT is a promising technology of interconnected computing devices, transmitting data over the network without any human intervention. In the recent times, IoMT has captivated major attention from the field of healthcare. It is a blend of medical devices and software applications connected to healthcare IT systems.

In the current critical scenario of nCOVID-19, the most significant issue after the development of vaccine is an efficient way of reachability to the patients. This can be best done by using the concept of IoT.

Drones, robots, and AVs technology not only ensure minimum human interaction but also can be beneficial to access contagious COVID-19 patients. Wearables, making use of the Bluetooth and GPS technology, is another efficient way to monitor individual’s health and their day-to-day stress levels in isolation. Altogether, these technologies can add a consequential share in the new paradigm of Tele Medicine, either for prevention of disease or identification and monitoring of the masses, paramedical staff, symptomatic, and asymptomatic COVID positives during the pandemic.

5.2. Technology and medical science

Medical science and technological innovation go together for a healthier future. Technology has made substantial and revolutionary contributions to the field of medical care, which has eventually helped in extending the life span of people throughout the world. Besides, it has also improved the quality of life by an efficient way of disease diagnosis and treatment. Thermometer, microscope, ophthalmoscope, stethoscope, laryngoscope, and X-ray are among the initial inventions in medical technology. Fig. 5.1 shows how the modernization in medical industry has been grouped [1] .

Modernization of medical industry.

As this chapter mainly focuses on the impact of technology in medical science, the below section describes the evolution of technology in healthcare.

5.2.1. Electrocardiography (EKG)

This technology benefits from the fact that an electric current exists in the heart, which allows it to be monitored with the help of an external device by the physicians. In electrocardiography (EKG), electrodes are attached on the skin externally, which monitors the electrical activity across the thorax. The result is known as an electrocardiogram [2] .

5.2.2. X-ray

A German professor of Physics, Wilhelm Roentgen discovered a radiation, which could penetrate solid objects with a low density, and the resulting process could be seen on a fluorescent screen and recorded on a photographic film. This discovery aided the physicians to see the inside of human body and facilitate the process of disease diagnosis [3] .

5.2.3. Ultrasound

An ultrasound yields the pictures of the inside body. It makes use of high-frequency sound waves. As ultrasound images are taken in real time, they can show the structure and movement of the organs.

This technology uses magnetic field and radio waves to picturize organs inside the body ensuring minimum damage. It is being used extensively for the detection of neurologic and musculoskeletal disorders and for the examination of cancer patients. MRI is superior to other imaging techniques as it can show problems that could not be seen otherwise [2] .

In the recent times, technological and digital transformations have joined hands together for a healthier future. Some of the latest developments are remote consultations, telemedicine, targeted treatments, and healthcare mobile apps.

5.3. Past pandemics and technology

No doubt, current pandemic has changed the world totally. But unfortunately, a plethora of disease outbreaks and epidemics are observed in the last century. While corona viruses such as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV have been responsible for a majority of these outbreaks, different types of influenza viruses, such as H1N1, H2N2, and H3N2, have been at the helm of all the four pandemics in the past years. The H1N1 further caused outbreak of two pandemics:

• 1. Spanish Flu of 1918–19
• 2. Swine Flu in 2009–10

While the H2N2 and H3N2 influenza viruses have been responsible for the Asian Flu of 1957–58, and the Hong Kong Flu of 1968–69, respectively [4] ( Fig. 5.2 )

A view of past pandemics.

Pandemics can cause serious threats locally and globally if not handled in time and wisely. Intensity of hazardous effects by pandemics varies among regions, proportional to the factor of population density. Disease outbreaks of avian flu, Asian flu, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) were raised from densely populated Asian-Pacific region. According to data collected from 2003 outbreak, SARS affected 29 countries, resulting in 8096 infections and 774 deaths [5] .

5.3.1. Simulation models

Then the mobilization among people who are with close contact to each other is next factor that can result in uncontrolled diseases spread. Various simulation models were designed after 2003 SARS pandemic to closely predict different scenarios and disease spread among urban areas. Kwok-Leung Tsui and Zoie Shui-Yee Wong, with their coworkers, developed a simulation model that can evaluate an epidemic scenario influenced by intervention techniques and disease parameters [6] .

5.3.2. Electronic surveillance system

During 1920s, a lot of work was done for the implementation of surveillance system for early detection of disease spread. Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-Based Epidemics (ESSENCE) is one such example. This surveillance system provides very early warning of unusual health conditions among entries using clinical and nonclinical data or more precisely any syndrome or untraditional health information [7] .

5.3.3. Monitoring online search engines

The seasonal influenza disease’s spread is of major concern in health sector. A new strain of influenza virus for which no immunity among people exists may result in pandemic with millions of fatalities [8] . This is why new versions of the vaccines are developed twice a year, as the influenza virus rapidly changes [9] . A way to do early detection of virus spread was proposed in 2009 by Jeremy Ginsberg and their colleagues. According to their work, early spread detection is possible by monitoring health-seeking behavior in the form of online search engine queries. These queries can reach huge number by millions of users around the world each day. The gathered data are then analyzed to track influenza-like illness in a population with large number of relevant Google search queries. But this approach can be applied in the areas where the population of web searchers is large.

5.4. Use of technology during COVID-19

5.4.1. internet of things (iot) and internet of medical things (iomt).

IoT is also known as the Internet of Everything or the Industrial Internet. It is a new technology paradigm, which comprises a network with machines and devices that can efficiently interact with each other. IoT has gathered major attention from many industries all over the world and is expected to be an integral part of future technology [10] .

IoT is becoming popular for many reasons. The most important reasons being the wide availability of broadband Internet, the reduced cost of hardware, and an enormous amount of people using smartphones, wearables capable of collecting data, and other “smart” products ( Fig. 5.3 ).

IoT in current era.

IoT can possibly affect every single sector of our life. However, the fields that will be significantly affected by this technology include:

• • Manufacturing and production.
• • Health and medicine.
• • Transportation.

This chapter highlights the use IoT in healthcare.

IoMT combines medical devices and applications to connect the information technology systems of healthcare by using various networking technologies. IoMT is making its place in society at a fast pace with a big percentage of global healthcare organizations already making use of it.

IoMT is a smart platform, which makes use of smart sensors, smart devices, and innovative communication protocols in order to examine the biomedical signals and subsequently diagnosing the disease of patients without much human involvement. Figure 5.4 shows a brief architecture of IoMT [11] .

Architecture of IoMT.

IoMT applications

IoMT may find its applications in the following:

• • Remote monitoring of patients.
• • Order tracking for medications.
• • Transmitting the medical information monitored by the wearables to the concerned healthcare professionals [10] .

5.4.1.1. IoMT device classification

IoMT devices can be classified as below:

5.4.1.1.1. Wearables

Wearables are further classified in to two categories:

Fitness wearables.

Clinical grade wearables.

5.4.1.1.2 Remote patient monitoring devices

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) has enabled the physicians to monitor and manage patients in a nontraditional manner. RPM collects the health data from individuals in one location, which can be a patient’s home and then transmits this information electronically to healthcare providers who might be in a different location so that they can make their assessments and provide recommendations [12] .

This approach saves time and provides services while ensuring patient’s comfort. It can be used to send reminders and revised medical plans to patients based on their physical activities. According to IHS (Information Handling Services), more than four million patients will monitor their health conditions remotely by 2020. Some famous examples include remote blood sampling devices, continuous glucose monitoring device, and affordable surgical robots ( Fig. 5.7 ).

Remote patient monitoring architecture.

Smart pills are also known as digital pills, which are equipped with ingestible electronic sensors in order to track patient’s compliance with medication. They contain drug sensors that get activated on coming in contact with stomach acids and then send wireless message to devices like tablets, smartphones, or patches outside the body. Abilify MyCite is a popular example of a smart pill ( Fig. 5.8 ).

Deployment of smart pills [14] .

5.4.1.1.3 Point-of-care devices

Point-of-care devices are diagnostic devices that can be found in doctors’ offices, hospitals, and mostly in patients’ home. They are used to acquire diagnostic results while they are with the patient or close to the patient. Common examples are devices used to test glucose and cholesterol levels, pregnancy testing, oximeter, tests for drugs of abuse, etc. The most prominent advantages of these devices include portability, convenience, and speed ( Fig. 5.9 ).

Point-of-care devices.

5.4.1.2 Internet of Medical Things in COVID-19

The unprecedented outbreak of the novel coronavirus also known as COVID-19 poses a major global challenge. As the treatment of the disease is still under way, an optimal approach will be to find an efficient mechanism of disease diagnosis and management. A healthcare system capitalizing on the IoT can help achieve the utmost goal ( Fig. 5.10 ).

A step-up process chart for using IoT during COVID-19 pandemic.

5.4.1.2.1. Disease diagnosis

The standard testing method being used currently for COVID-19 screening is the reverse real-time PCR assay (rRT-PCR). It is a time-consuming, molecular-based test, which on the average needs 4–6 h to deliver the results. It also requires trained specialists and a well-resourced laboratory. This eventually puts a limit on the number of tests that can be conducted, which is not satisfactory in such critical circumstances. Hence, alternative rapid diagnostic tools are urgently needed.

In such a situation, a promising technique can be the point-of-care (POC) devices that employ lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA) technology to detect COVID-19 in human serum. This technology relies on the fact that after the COVID-19 infection, IgG and IgM antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 can be detected in human blood and their levels in the blood can offer an insight into the disease stage and its growth. With an increase in the number of cases worldwide, numerous POC LFIA devices have come to the front as rapid diagnostic tools [15] .

5.4.1.2.2. Disease monitoring

In the current pandemic situation, the number of COVID-19 patients is increasing at an alarming rate, which calls for an efficient monitoring and surveillance system for impactful patient tracing.

IoT can play a vital role during this pandemic in context to contact tracing, cluster identification, and compliance of quarantine.

It is critically important to identify infected individuals in crowded places, which is being done mostly by using infrared thermometers. However, it does not seem to be much efficient as first, thermometer might not cover all the people in crowd and second, it might lead to the spread of virus as it has to be done by a health officer, who is examining many people standing in a queue and anyone among them can be infected. Hence, an alternative technology is required and IoT seems to be promising in this regard [16] .

Following are some useful IoT technologies adapted for effective identification of patients:

• 1. Smart thermometers: Smart thermometers are medical thermometers that can transmit their readings to be collected, stored, and analyzed.These thermometers can be deployed in public areas to screen people with high fevers. As these are mostly linked to some mobile application, it allows them to be immediately transmitted their analysis to concerned establishments. Upon receiving, the establishment assimilates the data and produces maps on daily basis presenting regions facing an upsurge in high fevers in order to allow the authorities to locate potential hotspots.

These battery-operated buttons can be rapidly deployed in facilities of any size. They function to signal quick alerts to the supervisors so that they can be warned of any issues related to cleaning and maintenance as they can be a risk for public safety [17] .

5.4.1.2.3. Disease management

With the rapid spread of COVID-19, the whole world has implemented strict lockdown measures to reduce the spread of disease. According to an estimate, approximately 10 billion people have been self-quarantined at home. On the other hand, essential medical supplies and equipment have been on high demand. In order to seek medical help, the citizens, some of whom can be potential patients, must leave their homes, which contradicts the efforts being done for isolation and quarantine. Also, due to the lack of proper isolation wards, the health community has prompted the patients with minor or suspected symptoms to stay in their homes.

Additionally, the lack of isolation wards and proper medical devices has prompted the medical community to encourage those with mild or suspected symptoms to remain at home. In such critical situation, IoMT can be used as a medical podium not only to aid the affected individuals to get the suitable healthcare facilities at home but also to create an extensive disease management database for governments and healthcare organizations.

Fig. 5.11 shows such a platform where the process of disease management will follow the following sequence of steps:

• • Individuals who are experiencing insignificant symptoms do not have to be in the hospital. Instead, they can acquire the diagnostic and healthcare requirements such as thermometers, masks, gloves, sanitizers, and POC kits used for detecting and monitoring COVID-19 and medications at their homes.
• • Patients can then use the Internet in order to upload their regular health status to the IoMT platform from where their details will be broadcasted to the closest hospitals, Centre for disease control (CDC), and local health agencies.
• • Hospitals can then provide consultations online depending on the health condition of every patient. Subsequently, the CDC and health agencies could assign equipment and places of quarantine, if needed.

Use of IoMT for disease management.

IoMT platform has many advantages. It allows the disease status to be dynamically monitored by the patients and receive their medical requirements without transmitting the disease to others. Such a platform will also be less expensive and will offer more systematic database for efficient monitoring of virus spread [15] .

5.4.2. Drone technology

A drone is an aircraft without a human pilot on board and a type of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). It has a ground-based controller, and a system of communications between the two. There are different ways to operate UAV flights:

• 1. Remote control by a human operator
• 2. Autonomously by onboard computers [18]
• 3. Piloted by an autonomous robot

UAVs in general and drones specifically were originally used for targeted missions that could be dangerous, risky, or trivial for humans. Sometimes, people misunderstand the terms UAV and autonomous drone and wrongfully use them for each other. Yes, many UAVs are automated as clear from its title, that is, they can achieve independent goals but still rely on human operators or some control. However, an autonomous drone itself is a UAV, but can operate without human intervention [19] . To make it clearer, these drones can take off, fly, complete the assigned target, and land completely at their own (autonomously). Hence, we can derive a statement from this discussion that UAV is not always an autonomous drone, but an autonomous drone is a category of UAVs.

So, in autonomous drones, any ground control system or communications management software plays an important role to carry out operations; thus, such drones are also considered part of UAS (Unmanned Aircraft System). To deploy such control, drones also employ host of advanced technologies such as cloud computing, computer vision, artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and thermal sensors [20] .

The drones are mostly used in military applications, commercial purpose, scientific researches, agricultural field, medical (in current COVID-19 pandemic, which we will discuss in next section), and other applications [21] such as policing and surveillance usually in masses, aerial photography and drone racing as hobby, infrastructure inspections, and smuggling of prohibited goods and drugs ( Fig. 5.12 ).

A modern drone.

5.4.2.1 Versatility in drones

There is further classification of drones depending upon multiple factors; they are as follows:

In this category, the classification of drones is done by the type of wings deployed or how the drone takeoffs, flies, or lands. The main classes differentiated by structural build are multirotor systems and fixed wings system. The third type is hybrid systems, which combine features of both multi-rotor and fizzed systems.

Because of the absence of a pilot, drones always have a certain level of autonomy. An important distinction within the concept of autonomy is the difference between automatic and autonomous systems. In this category, we have different levels of autonomy by which drone is achieving its goals.

This category will differentiate drones from the range or altitude they can cover without any accident or defect.

Other important characteristics of a drone are its size and weight. They can be categorized as nano, micro, mini, small, and tactical drones [22] . Clarke distinguishes large drones and small drones and divides the small drones in multiple subcategories [23] . The lower weight limit of large drones is 150 kg for fixed-wing drones and 100 kg for multirotor drones.Mini drones can vary in weight from several grams up to several kilograms. These mini drones are mainly suitable for indoor applications and recreational applications.

Such type of drones is just for hobby purpose and used at homes. These drones do not require any license to operate and are usually controlled by controller and fly with less precision.

The payload is extra function or feature added with drone to achieve the required goal. Sensors and cameras are most common payloads attached to any drone nowadays. Some drones can be used to transport parcels, drugs, goods, or any information between two destinations. All such loads can differentiate drones from each other.

Drones run from energy source and serve different targets. The energy source selected to run any drone relies on difficulty level in achieving the required target. Also, the type of drone defined by characteristics discussed above can decide fuel type. The main energy sources that differentiate the drones are:

• a. traditional airplane fuel,
• b. battery cells,
• c. fuel cells, and
• d. solar cells.

5.4.2.2 Usability of drones during COVID-19 pandemic

The involvement of drones in military operations has increased since late 1990s. But civilian drones with commercial-grade low-cost technology are also getting popular and are already been used for various rescue tasks and natural disasters around the world. In this section, we will present the possible ways that can be helpful in fighting and disaster or disease spread specifically during COVID-19.The first country to face the wrath of COVID-19 has made great use of drone technology to counter its spread. Taking that as an inspiration, countries around the world have joined forces with numerous researchers and innovators in an attempt to find ingenious ways of using drones to fight any future or current pandemic at the best.

5.4.2.2.1 Drones as telemedicine and transfer units

Drones can be used to facilitate access to medical care in demoted communities. Demoted communities lack infrastructure and proper transportation. Therefore, drones are particularly helpful in such communities to help in the delivery of necessary health services and supplies in a time-effective manner. Drones travel faster than any manned vehicle and hence can overcome topographic challenges that would be very challenging to overcome by other forms of transportation.

As the person with COVID-19 is contagious, medicines and food can be transferred to the person in isolation. An example of autonomous drone is Beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) [24] . These drones can fly far beyond visual line of sight while maximizing production, reducing costs and risks, and ensuring site safety and security, hence protecting the human workforce in times of a pandemic [25] . They can also be used for consumer-related missions like package delivery, as demonstrated by Amazon Prime Air, and critical deliveries of health supplies.

5.4.2.2.2 Drones for surveillance and screening

Drones with camera as payload are being used mainly for surveillance other than hobbyist photography. They can be ideal for crowd surveillance due to their feature to provide current location bird eye or aerial view in no time. That is why many countries around the world are deploying drones for crowd surveillance especially during COVID-19 pandemic.

Surveillance drones added with temperature sensor can updated about body temperature of peoples in any community area. Countries including China and India have also adopted the drone technology for crowd surveillance. The drones deployed are equipped with surveillance cameras that can effectively monitor sensitive areas in the city and allow the police to handle any unwarranted situation promptly.

5.4.2.2.3 Drones for public announcements

In addition to crowd surveillance, drones can prove to be highly useful for broadcasting important information, particularly in areas that lack open channels for communication. In California, Florida, and New Jersey, officials have used drones to get messages to homeless communities or notify and warn people about social distancing. The police authority in Madrid, Spain, used a drone equipped with a loudspeaker to inform people of the guidelines put in place regarding the state of emergency that was imposed [26] .

European countries are also getting benefit from drones; many countries have deployed drones for making public announcements for public awareness during pandemics to stop spread of diseases [27] or disasters.

5.4.2.2.4. Drones for disinfecting places

Drone technology is benefiting people where there is need to avoid direct contact with viruses and bacteria. Using drones, disinfectants can be sprayed in contaminated areas. Increase of demand has been observed for spraying drones in agricultural lands during last decade. The Spanish military has recently adopted the use of agricultural drones made by DJI, a leading Chinese drone manufacturer, to spray disinfecting chemicals over public spaces [28] . On average, these spraying drones have a load capacity of 16 L and can disinfect one-tenth of a kilometer in an hour [27] .

5.4.3 Robots

5.4.3.1 usability in covid-19 pandemic.

Robots are smart machines and remained helpful during current COVID-19 pandemic. Robots can easily be deployed as frontline warrior in medical units due to less risk of contagious disease spread from the patients who are suffering.

Additionally, ultraviolet (UV) disinfection method (method to disinfect the areas from contagious diseases) is easily achieved with robots through preprogrammed procedures; hence, limiting the transfer of the disease via contaminated surfaces in hospitals or isolation centers. The autonomous disinfecting robots with very little or no human contact are recommended as compared to the manual decontamination, which involves the cleaning staff and may risk their lives [29] .

Many countries all over the world took advantage from robot technology for not only mitigating the spread of COVID-19 disease but also for the sake of monitoring social and emotional health of patients and people in isolation. Other than the above-mentioned services, a few more helpful features of robots during the disaster are concluded below;

• • Delivery : Robots are deployed during COVID-19 pandemic to deliver medicines, medical equipment, and serving food in medical units to avoid contact with patients directly, hence giving relief to medical staff. A Kerala-based Indian startup named Asimov Robotics has developed a three-wheeled robot that can be used to perform all these tasks while assisting patients in isolation wards [4] .
• • Social distancing : Robots with cameras are helpful to keep check in public, if social distancing is being followed or not. In addition, guiding public about preventive measures should be observed in public especially in affected areas.
• • Disinfecting : As discussed earlier, robots are safer for disinfecting equipment and places of concern. A Danish robotics company has developed multiple disinfection robots, which disinfect effected area or equipment by UV light radiation. The UV rays tear apart strands of virus’ DNA, hence making it harmless. The company named UVD has delivered its robots in China, healthcare markets in Europe, and United States. Their claim is that the robots can operate for about 2.5 h and disinfect about nine or ten rooms on a single charge [30] .
• • Emotional support : Many countries during pandemic underwent into strict lockdowns for months. Prolonged isolation affects mental health of people in negative way. Special robots are developed to share the emotions of people in isolation. These robots are virtually controlled by doctors to keep check of patient’s health condition.
• • Medical procedures and surgeries : The contagious nature of COVID-19 put many medical experts at added risk while performing regular procedures and surgeries. As the virus easily spreads through mouth and droplets, the dentist, oncologist, and ENT surgeons [31] stand at front of the danger zone. Although, general-purpose procedures were postponed during the pandemic by almost every country effected but still emergencies need special attention. Robotic surgeries are already being successfully done in different medical fields far before the pandemic crisis. Even with personal protective equipments (PPEs), physical distancing is the key to avoid virus spread. Consequently, during pandemic nonautonomous robots can prove to be safer alternative where close contact through patient’s mouth and nasal cavity become necessity.

5.4.3.2. Robots replacing humans

Before we take a dive into the robot’s history and their present-day prominence, it is significant to mention here a few statements defining robots.

Robot in Czech is a word for worker or servant. According to Robot Institute of America, a robot is, “A reprogrammable, multifunctional manipulator designed to move material, parts, tools, or specialized devices through various programmed motions for the performance of variety of tasks.’. Similarly, by Merriam Webster Dictionary, robot is, “A machine that resembles a living creature in being capable of moving independently (as by walking or rolling on wheels) and performing complex actions (such as grasping and moving objects)” [32] . According to Greg Freiherr, while science fiction robots have been capable of independent thought, emotions, even a little cooking and sewing, scientists are finding that endowing a mechanical being with even the most basic human functions is a monumental challenge.

In the mid-1900s, robots break into three categories, namely industrial, research, and educational. The first industrial robot, “Unimate” was developed in United States in 1954. George Devol, who coins the term Universal Automation, designed the very first programmable robot. He later shortens this to Unimation, which becomes the name of the first robot company in 1962 ( Fig. 5.13 ).

Devol, Engelberger, and their colleagues working on the development of the unimate.

Robot technology is maturing with time and in developed countries, large academic medical centers and health systems are the early adopters of robots. However, the increasing demand of robots indicates soon they will be found everywhere in abundance. Robots are designed to perform assigned tasks with high precision. They have extraordinary operational efficiency and are cost-effective. Normally, humans do work for their employers around 8–10 h at average. Robot has the ability to perform with efficiency rate almost three times greater (excluding one to two hours’ time of charging) effectively than the capability of any human.

It is true; today, robots have replaced humans by way of performing precarious, detailed, and recurring tasks in various industries including agriculture, automobile, construction, entertainment, healthcare, laboratories, manufacturing, military, mining, transportation, warehouses, and law enforcement. The overview of different tasks done by them in industries is compiled below ( Fig. 5.14 ).

Visual chart for robots in different fields and application.

5.4.3.3 Unmanned vehicles

Unmanned vehicles are without involvement of any human driver aboard. They can cover far-flung and difficult areas, impossible by any human driven vehicle. As compared to traditional vehicles, they have additional features of high safety, reliability, intelligence, and efficiency because of small size.

These vehicles can either be remote-controlled, remote-guided vehicles or autonomous, which are capable of sensing and navigating on their own. These autonomous driverless vehicles work according to the paths defined by installed sensors to sense surrounding environment or obstacles on the way with the help of intelligent software. The destination is fed by the software installed in these vehicles or at control station.

The vehicle and equipment that operate with little or no operator intervention are always an attraction because they save the labor cost in commercial areas and remove the direct involvement of operator specifically during dangerous applications. During the disaster or any global health crisis like COVID-19 pandemic, AVs can be of great help. They can ease the stress on existing delivery mechanisms while mitigating the spread of virus spread [33] . During 2016, a company JD.com, an e-commerce company, began testing the country’s first developed self-driving vehicle for domestic usage. The other companies in market soon joined this race to compete each other. During the pandemic, China led the charge in the use of AVs. Beijing-headquartered White Rhino Auto Company, in alliance with UNIDO’s Investment and Technology Promotion Office (ITPO), dispatched two autonomous delivery vehicles from Beijing to the Guanggu Field Hospital in the Hubei Province of China [34] .

These UVs proved to be very useful during pandemic; hence, they can serve in various ways. These tasks may include delivering medical supplies within hospitals, distributing meals and medicines in isolation centers, on demand groceries delivery home-to-home during lockdowns, decontaminate infected surroundings, awareness announcements in large gatherings, and much more ( Fig. 5.15 ).

Unmanned Vehicle for delivery medicines and grocery, in China.

5.4.4 Bluetooth and GPS technology

Bluetooth technology is a short-range technology that operates in UHF radio waves spectrum (ultra high frequency 300 MHz–3 GHz). Mainly, it is used to deploy low-cost, low-power, and short-time wireless connections between desktops, laptops, and Bluetooth devices like mobile phones, printers, digital cameras, headsets, keyboards, and even a computer mouse. This cutting-edge technology uses globally available radio frequency band between 2.402 and 2.480 GHz, which is dedicated for industrial, scientific, and medical use. In a nutshell, Bluetooth technology unplugs your digital peripherals and makes cable clutter a thing of the past [35] .

The Bluetooth technology is very helpful for proximity calculation and preferred over other technologies because of its least invasive nature. With this technology, it is easy to monitor relative distance between two nodes without getting actual location of devices.

GPS is a navigation system that uses satellites to provide positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services to its users [36] .

During COVID-19, governments can make use of the GPS technology for tracking the current and the historical location of positive patients. This will eventually help in backtracking other potential COVID-19 patients.

5.4.4.1. Applications of GPS

Some common uses of GPS during COVID-19 pandemic are:

During this deadly pandemic, many countries have released different versions of mobile applications leveraging GPS in order to identify the COVID-19 patients and help control the spread of virus. Most of these applications are downloadable for free using individuals’ mobile numbers. Once launched, it will categorize the users as safe or unsafe using different criterions such as existence of virus symptoms, or international travel history. The GPS location of the suspected cell phone users will be stored in the database. This information can be later used for various purposes such as (1) to alert a safe user if he meets a suspected virus victim and (2) to send the GPS location of the victim to the healthcare officials if any emergency help is needed [4] .

Many countries are making use of smart helmets equipped with built-in GPS modules, optical camera, and infrared thermal camera for screening the suspected COVID-19 carriers. The infrared camera scans the given area for any high temperature. Once an individual with a high temperature is detected, the optical camera captures the face of the suspected individual. The GPS module then determines the position coordinates and after tagging it, a notification is sent to assigned smart mobile through a GSM, which will be subsequently used for various purposes mentioned above [16] .

Another efficient approach to combat the effects of COVID-19 can be the use of Smart Ambulance System, which is an integration of GPS and GSM. The GPS component is used to identify the location of the patient and the ambulance, whereas the GSM is used for data transmission. This system consists of an end-to-end smart health application. Once an emergency request is generated by a registered GSM mobile user facing extreme virus symptoms, such a system can track the location of the patient using the GPS embedded in the mobile, identify the nearest hospital with available beds, and urgently send them smart ambulances equipped with major requirements of a critical COVID-19 patient such as oxygen cylinder, oximeters, and other instruments for measuring the vitals. The timely delivery of patient to the hospital is extremely important. The ambulance is also equipped with (1) GPS module to determine updated ambulance location so that the paramedics can select the ambulances, which are already in the same route as the patient and for calculating the shortest/fastest possible route to the selected hospital; (2) GSM module in order to transmit any essential information to the paramedics’ database or the hospital. It will be even better if the time for patient’s transportation can be utilized to gather major medical information about him/her and transmit it to the hospital using GSM in order to enable them to make prior emergency arrangements [37] , [38] .

5.4.4.2. Asymptomatic and suspected patients tracking

Controlling the coronavirus spread is the key factor to mitigate COVID-19 disease. So far, many advancements and inventions in the technology have been done, in order to reduce direct virus exposure in societies, decontamination of suspected places, and effected surveillance of masses. Before looking further at possibilities to control virus spread, it is important to dig down to the level of coronavirus transmission biological details. The virus may enter the body through mouth, nose, and eyes, if a person with prior COVID-negative exposes to exhaled droplets of an infected person, touched the contaminated surface, aerosol, and possibly through fecal–oral contamination [39] .

Here, we discuss all the possible transmission routes that may be cause of catching virus for a healthy person. Later on, these can be helpful in prevention of disease spread.

• 1. Symptomatic transmission : It is transmission of virus by getting in direct contact of a person having known symptoms of COVID-19.
• 2. Presymptomatic transmission : This is transmission by a person who is going to develop COVID-19 disease obvious symptoms. But at time of contact, both people are unaware of it.
• 3. Asymptomatic transmission : Some COVID positive patients develop delayed symptoms or none at all. Indication of being virus carrier is indicated by routine or follow-up checkups.
• 4. Environmental transmission : The transmission of disease can also occur via contaminated surfaces, and specifically in hidden way which in general could be unknown and typically not to be attributable to contact with the source.

5.4.4.2.1. Contact tracing

In all such cases, discussed before, prompt contact tracing can assuredly reduce the disease spread. By informing concerned authorities, which formerly contact without any hassle targeted people in need of quarantine or isolation.

Contact tracing mechanism is done on one suspected individual by strenuously tracing the infected person’s footsteps, and later following up anyone with whom they may have crossed the paths. Many countries, badly affected by current pandemic, are spending millions of US dollars for deploying contact tracing network. Massachusetts recently allocated US$ 44 million to hire 1000, New York State announced it will hire 17,000, and California plans to hire as many as 20,000 contact tracers [39] . A few apps are developed while many are in testing phase, which could be helpful in tracing either asymptomatic or presymptomatic COVID positive patients.

Digital apps for contact tracing mostly use GPS and Bluetooth technology to trace contacts. GPS technology can give information of exact location for the concerned contact with correct time stamp, that is, what time person A was at location X. An example of such app deployed in Utah uses GPS [40] . If any person using that app is diagnosed with COVID-19, the concerned person guides them and asks to share the history of their locations during past days; it is usually the period of 14 days. After collection and compilation of location data, all the relevant people were informed to go in isolation in case of close contact. The app’s cofounder and chief strategy officer, Jared Allgood made sure that the identity of patient remains hidden in all process.

Whereas, some apps which trace the contact with Bluetooth technology in smart phones collect data of close contacts that have been around near proximity during last 14 days (in case a person is tested COVID positive). Bluetooth technology is more reliable in contact tracing, as it will directly list down all those who got near to asymptotic or presymptomatic patient because of it short-range nature. But still one needs to keep on Bluetooth all time and only pairing is possible to those who also have Bluetooth in their smart phone turned on. Moreover, even if Bluetooth is on for both parties, it will not pair with the second party until both have close contact for few seconds. Hence, no data will be recorded of a COVID positive passer-by even with obvious symptoms ( Fig. 5.16 ).

Concept of contact tracing using Bluetooth technology.

5.4.5. Telemedicine: a new era

A very recent development that is ushering in the field of medical science is telemedicine. Telemedicine refers to the practice of remote patient care when the healthcare provider and patient are not physically present with each other. It offers the following advantages:

• 1. With telemedicine, a patient can consult a specialist anywhere on the globe.
• 2. It reduces the workload of overburdened hospital staff.
• 3. In case of disease outbreaks, it lessens the chances of disease speed from the patient to the healthcare personnel.
• 4. It can prove to be a lifesaver in emergency situations requiring immediate critical care.
• 5. From the perspective of patients, it means a shorter waiting time and hence a faster recovery.
• 6. It also enables people in rural parts of a country with unsatisfactory medical services have a quicker and easier access to healthcare.

Fig. 5.17 shows the basic idea of telemedicine. It is an integration of various technologies discussed above in order to make the healthcare facilities available at patient’s doorstep.

Telemedicine, an integration of technologies.

5.5. Case study

Although many case studies can be quoted in the context of technology’s use to combat COVID-19. The one mentioned below is a contact tracing mobile application using GPS in order to track the positive COVID-19 patients.

5.5.1. AAROGYA SETU app

As an attempt to minimize the spread of COVID-19, this contact tracing application has been developed by National Informatics Centre, which is a part of Ministry of Electronics and IT, India. The application can be downloaded by any Indian citizen for free and is available for both iOS and Android users. When launched, the application will enquire the users if they had a recent international travel history or if they are experiencing some symptoms of the disease. If none of these holds true, then the patient is said to be in green zone. A database will contain the list of all positive COVID-19 patients who are marked to be in the red zone.

This application integrates GPS location of the cell phone user with the Bluetooth technology to check if he has been exposed to a COVID-19 patient existing in the database.

If the individual in the green zone comes in close contact with another individual in the red zone, then the former will be alerted. In addition, he/she will also receive the guidelines to be followed and required relevant information. The application became extremely popular among the citizens and within first 5 days of its launch, 10 million downloads were recorded [4] .

5.6 Conclusion

The current pandemic has drastically affected every aspect of our life. It has changed peoples’ way of viewing different things. The whole world is on the lookout for best alternates of the available technological solutions. All the technologies discussed in this chapter are for prevention, mitigation, and restoration from aftermath of the disease spread.

IoMT has made a sizeable contribution in current pandemic. It is a promising technology that has shown potential in the collection, analysis, and effective transmission of health data to the concerned departments. Therefore, it is a choice of preference to be deployed for disease monitoring and management during this deadly pandemic. Drones have changed the entire concept of how things are delivered. Similarly, robots are replacing humans. UMVs are approaching to places where traditional man driven vehicles are unable to reach. Bluetooth and GPS are being deployed to look out for disease carriers in the surroundings.

IoMT, drones, and robots have joined hands together for the advancement of telemedicine field, which can be used for spreading limited clinical resources across a wide geographic area. It improves quality of care and access during the ongoing pandemic. All these technologies are on the way of maturing to help us fight against the deadliest pandemics.

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Student Opinion

How Did the Covid-19 Pandemic Affect You, Your Family and Your Community?

This week is the fourth anniversary of the pandemic. What are your most lasting memories? How did it reshape your life — and the world?

By Jeremy Engle

It has been four years since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. The New York Times writes of the anniversary:

Four years ago today, society began to shut down. Shortly after noon Eastern on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid — or “the coronavirus,” then the more popular term — to be a global pandemic. Stocks plummeted in the afternoon. In the span of a single hour that night, President Donald Trump delivered an Oval Office address about Covid, Tom Hanks posted on Instagram that he had the virus and the N.B.A. announced it had canceled the rest of its season. It was a Wednesday, and thousands of schools would shut by the end of the week. Workplaces closed, too. People washed their hands frequently and touched elbows instead of shaking hands (although the C.D.C. continued to discourage widespread mask wearing for several more weeks). The worst pandemic in a century had begun.

For some people, the earliest days of the pandemic may feel like a lifetime ago; for others, it may feel like just yesterday. But for all of us Covid has indelibly changed our lives and the world. What do you remember about the earliest days of the pandemic? When did it first hit home for you? How did it affect you, your family and your community? What lessons did you learn about yourself and the world?

In “ Four Years On, Covid Has Reshaped Life for Many Americans ,” Julie Bosman writes that while the threat of severe illness and death has faded for many people, the pandemic’s effects still linger:

Jessie Thompson, a 36-year-old mother of two in Chicago, is reminded of the Covid-19 pandemic every day. Sometimes it happens when she picks up her children from day care and then lets them romp around at a neighborhood park on the way home. Other times, it’s when she gets out the shower at 7 a.m. after a weekday workout. “I always think: In my past life, I’d have to be on the train in 15 minutes,” said Ms. Thompson, a manager at United Airlines. A hybrid work schedule has replaced her daily commute to the company headquarters in downtown Chicago, giving Ms. Thompson more time with her children and a deeper connection to her neighbors. “The pandemic is such a negative memory,” she said. “But I have this bright spot of goodness from it.” For much of the United States, the pandemic is now firmly in the past, four years to the day that the Trump administration declared a national emergency as the virus spread uncontrollably. But for many Americans, the pandemic’s effects are still a prominent part of their daily lives. In interviews, some people said that the changes are subtle but unmistakable: Their world feels a little smaller, with less socializing and fewer crowds. Parents who began to home-school their children never stopped. Many people are continuing to mourn relatives and spouses who died of Covid or of complications from the coronavirus. The World Health Organization dropped its global health emergency designation in May 2023, but millions of people who survived the virus are suffering from long Covid, a mysterious and frequently debilitating condition that causes fatigue, muscle pain and cognitive decline . One common sentiment has emerged. The changes brought on by the pandemic now feel lasting, a shift that may have permanently reshaped American life.

As part of our coverage of the pandemic’s anniversary, The Times asked readers how Covid has changed their attitudes toward life. Here is what they said:

“I’m a much more grateful person. Life is precious, and I see the beauty in all the little miracles that happen all around me. I’m a humbled human being now. I have more empathy and compassion towards everyone.” — Gil Gallegos, 59, Las Vegas, N.M. “The pandemic has completely changed my approach to educating my child. My spouse and I had never seriously considered home-schooling until March 2020. Now, we wouldn’t have it any other way.” — Kim Harper, 47, Clinton, Md. “I had contamination O.C.D. before the pandemic began. The last four years have been a steady string of my worst fears coming true. I never feel safe anymore. I know very well now that my body can betray me at any time.” — Adelia Brown, 23, Madison, Wis. “I don’t take for granted the pleasure of being around people. Going to a show, a road trip, a restaurant, people watching at the opera. I love it.” — Philip Gunnels, 66, Sugar Land, Texas “My remaining years are limited. On the one hand, I feel cheated out of many experiences I was looking forward to; on the other hand, I do not want to live my remaining years with long Covid. It’s hard.” — Sandra Wulach, 77, Edison, N.J.

Students, read one or both of the articles and then tell us:

How did the Covid-19 pandemic affect you, your family and your community? How did it reshape your life and the world? What are your most lasting memories of this difficult period? What do you want to remember most? What do you want to forget?

How did you change during this time? What did you learn about yourself and about life? What do you wish you knew then that you know now?

Ms. Bosman writes that some of the people she interviewed revealed that four years after the global pandemic began, “Their world feels a little smaller, with less socializing and fewer crowds.” However, Gil Gallegos told The Times: “I’m a much more grateful person. Life is precious, and I see the beauty in all the little miracles that happen all around me. I’m a humbled human being now. I have more empathy and compassion towards everyone.” Which of the experiences shared in the two articles reminded you the most of your own during and after the pandemic and why? How did Covid change your overall outlook on life?

“The last normal day of school.” “The nursing home shut its doors.” “The bride wore Lululemon.” These are just a few quotes from “ When the Pandemic Hit Home ,” an article in which The Times asked readers to share their memories of the world shutting down. Read the article and then tell us about a time when the pandemic hit home for you.

In the last four years, scientists have unraveled some of the biggest mysteries about Covid. In another article , The Times explores many remaining questions about the coronavirus: Are superdodgers real? Is Covid seasonal? And what’s behind its strangest symptoms? Read the article and then tell us what questions you still have about the virus and its effects.

How do you think history books will tell the story of the pandemic? If you were to put together a time capsule of artifacts from this era to show people 100 years from now, what would you include and why? What will you tell your grandchildren about what it was like to live during this time?

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.

Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.

Jeremy Engle joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2018 after spending more than 20 years as a classroom humanities and documentary-making teacher, professional developer and curriculum designer working with students and teachers across the country. More about Jeremy Engle