Confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. hit 5 million on Sunday, reports the Associated Press, "by far the highest of any country..."

"The failure of the most powerful nation in the world to contain the scourge has been met with astonishment and alarm in Europe." Perhaps nowhere outside the U.S. is America's bungled virus response viewed with more consternation than in Italy, which was ground zero of Europe's epidemic. Italians were unprepared when the outbreak exploded in February, and the country still has one of the world's highest official death tolls at 35,000. But after a strict nationwide, 10-week lockdown, vigilant tracing of new clusters and general acceptance of mask mandates and social distancing, Italy has become a model of virus containment. "Don't they care about their health?" a mask-clad Patrizia Antonini asked about people in the United States as she walked with friends along the banks of Lake Bracciano, north of Rome. "They need to take our precautions. ... They need a real lockdown."

Much of the incredulity in Europe stems from the fact that America had the benefit of time, European experience and medical know-how to treat the virus that the continent itself didn't have when the first COVID-19 patients started filling intensive care units. Yet, more than four months into a sustained outbreak, the U.S. reached the 5 million mark, according to the running count kept by Johns Hopkins University. Health officials believe the actual number is perhaps 10 times higher, or closer to 50 million, given testing limitations and the fact that as many as 40% of all those who are infected have no symptoms....

With America's world's-highest death toll of more than 160,000, its politicized resistance to masks and its rising caseload, European nations have barred American tourists and visitors from other countries with growing cases from freely traveling to the bloc. France and Germany are now imposing tests on arrival for travelers from "at risk" countries, the U.S. included.
America has just 44% of the population of Europe — but 77% of its confirmed virus deaths, according to stats in the article from John Hopkins University. (It cites "America's world's-highest death toll of more than 160,000," while noting that the entire continent of Europe has over 207,000 confirmed virus deaths.) "In the U.S., new cases are running at about 54,000 a day — an immensely high number even when taking into account the country's larger population."

1 out of every 67 Americans has now had a confirmed infection.

slack_justyb shares a report from Ars Technica: As COVID-19 hospitalizations in the US approach the highest levels seen in the pandemic so far, national efforts to track patients and hospital resources remain in shambles after the federal government abruptly seized control of data collection earlier this month. Watchdogs and public health experts were immediately aghast by the switch to the HHS database, fearing the data would be manipulated for political reasons or hidden from public view all together. However, the real threat so far has been the administrative chaos. The switch took effect July 15, giving hospitals and states just days to adjust to the new data collection and submission process.

As such, hospitals have been struggling with the new data reporting, which involves reporting more types of data than the CDC's previous system. Generally, the data includes stats on admissions, discharges, beds and ventilators in use and in reserve, as well as information on patients. For some hospitals, that data has to be harvested from various sources, such as electronic medical records, lab reports, pharmacy data, and administrative sources. Some larger hospital systems have been working to write new scripts to automate new data mining, while others are relying on staff to compile the data manually into excel spreadsheets, which can take multiple hours each day, according to a report by Healthcare IT News. The task has been particularly onerous for small, rural hospitals and hospitals that are already strained by a crush of COVID-19 patients. "It seems the obvious of going from a system that is well tested, to something new and alien to everyone is happening exactly as everyone who has ever done these kinds of conversions predicted," adds Slashdot reader slack_justyb.

An anonymous reader shares a column: Back when there were rumors of Google building an operating system, I thought "Lol." Then I watched then-PM Sundar Pichai announce Chrome OS. My heart raced. It was perfect. I got my email through Gmail, I wrote documents on Docs, I listened to Pandora, I viewed photos on TheFacebook. Why did I need all of Windows Vista? In 2010, I predicted that by 2020 Chrome OS would be the most popular desktop OS in the world. It was fast, lightweight, and $0. "Every Windows and OS X app will be re-built for the browser!" I thought. Outlook > Gmail. Excel > Sheets. Finder > Dropbox. Photoshop > Figma. Terminal > Repl.it. All of your files would be accessible by whoever you wanted, wherever you wanted, all the time. It was obvious. Revolutionary. I haven't installed MSFT Office on a machine since 2009. Sheets and Docs have been good enough for me. The theoretical unlimited computing power and collaboration features meant Google Docs was better than Office (and free!). Then something happened at Google. I'm not sure what. But they stopped innovating on cloud software.

Docs and Sheets haven't changed in a decade. Google Drive remains impossible to navigate. Sharing is complicated. Sheets freezes up. I can't easily interact with a Sheets API (I've tried!). Docs still shows page breaks by default! WTF! Even though I have an iPhone and a MacBook, I've been married to Google services. I browse Chrome. I use Gmail. I get directions and lookup restaurants on Maps. I'm a YouTube addict. Yet I've been ungluing myself from Google so far this year. Not because of Google-is-reading-my-emails-and-tracking-every-keystroke reasons, but because I like other software so much more that it's worth switching. At WWDC, Apple shared Safari stats for macOS Big Sur. It reminded me how much Chrome makes my machine go WHURRRRRR. [...] I've given up on Google Docs. I can never find the documents Andy shares with me. The formatting is tired and stuck in the you-might-print-this-out paradigm. Notion is a much better place to write and brainstorm with people. The mobile Google results page is so cluttered that I switched my iPhone's default search to DuckDuckGo. The results are a tad worse, but I'm never doing heavy-duty searches on the go. And now I don't have to scroll past 6 ads to get the first result. DuckDuckGo's privacy is an added bonus.

Founded by Instagram and finance alums, Karat wants to be the black card in every influencer's wallet. From a report: Spencer Donnelly, who goes by TheRussianBadger on YouTube, has cultivated an audience of nearly 2.7 million subscribers for his gaming videos. For years, business has been rosy. YouTube shares a percentage of the ad revenue on each of his videos, and the money is good enough that playing videogames on camera has become a full-time job. A few years ago, he even incorporated The Russian Badger, legitimizing his YouTubing business. The only problem: No bank would give him a serious credit card. "Imagine that you're making $2 or $3 million a year and they're capping you at $20,000 a month," says Donnelly, which was the best he could get from a traditional bank. Donnelly, like many of the creators who make their living on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitch, has long felt shunned by institutions that don't understand that his lifestyle is also his business. That makes him the target market for Karat, a new startup offering financial services to the influencer set.

Karat's first product is the Karat Black Card, designed specifically for influencers, with credit lines starting at $50,000. Its perks can be customized (gamers get cash back on streaming services; beauty influencers get perks for product purchases), and the credit limits are determined by an influencer's social metrics, revenue streams, and cash in hand. To issue the cards, Karat has partnered with the payments company Stripe, which launched its own corporate card late last year. For now, Karat wants to be the flashy card in every influencer's wallet. But eventually, the startup could become a one-stop shop for a creator's business needs. Before its official launch, Karat piloted the black card with a small group of successful creators like Donnelly, many with similar stories of financial frustration.

Long-time Slashdot reader Tim the Gecko writes: Google's IPv6 connectivity stats topped 32% last Saturday for the first time.

But the main story has been the midweek stats. Most mobile phone networks and a good chunk of residential broadband have migrated to IPv6, but the typical corporate network where people used to spend their 9 to 5 is largely IPv4-only. There used to be a big dip in the IPv6 stats during the working week, but widespread working from home has halved that dip, with the typical midweek IPv6 connectivity for Google queries moving upwards from 26% to 29%.

Looking at this graph will be a good way of checking how fast people are returning to the office.

Roughly 70% of all serious security bugs in the Chrome codebase are memory management and safety bugs, Google engineers said. From a report: Half of the 70% are use-after-free vulnerabilities, a type of security issue that arises from incorrect management of memory pointers (addresses), leaving doors open for attackers to attack Chrome's inner components. The percentage was compiled after Google engineers analyzed 912 security bugs fixed in the Chrome stable branch since 2015, bugs that had a "high" or "critical" severity rating. The number is identical to stats shared by Microsoft. Speaking at a security conference in February 2019, Microsoft engineers said that for the past 12 years, around 70% of all security updates for Microsoft products addressed memory safety vulnerabilities.

"Around 70% of our serious security bugs are memory safety problems," the Chromium project announced this week. "Our next major project is to prevent such bugs at source."

ZDNet reports: The percentage was compiled after Google engineers analyzed 912 security bugs fixed in the Chrome stable branch since 2015, bugs that had a "high" or "critical" severity rating. The number is identical to stats shared by Microsoft. Speaking at a security conference in February 2019, Microsoft engineers said that for the past 12 years, around 70% of all security updates for Microsoft products addressed memory safety vulnerabilities. Both companies are basically dealing with the same problem, namely that C and C++, the two predominant programming languages in their codebases, are "unsafe" languages....

Google says that since March 2019, 125 of the 130 Chrome vulnerabilities with a "critical" severity rating were memory corruption-related issues, showing that despite advances in fixing other bug classes, memory management is still a problem... Half of the 70% are use-after-free vulnerabilities, a type of security issue that arises from incorrect management of memory pointers (addresses), leaving doors open for attackers to attack Chrome's inner components...

While software companies have tried before to fix C and C++'s memory management problems, Mozilla has been the one who made a breakthrough by sponsoring, promoting and heavily adopting the Rust programming language in Firefox... Microsoft is also heavily investing in exploring C and C++ alternatives⦠But this week, Google also announced similar plans as well... Going forward, Google says it plans to look into developing custom C++ libraries to use with Chrome's codebase, libraries that have better protections against memory-related bugs. The browser maker is also exploring the MiraclePtr project, which aims to turn "exploitable use-after-free bugs into non-security crashes with acceptable performance, memory, binary size and minimal stability impact."

And last, but not least, Google also said it plans to explore using "safe" languages, where possible. Candidates include Rust, Swift, JavaScript, Kotlin, and Java.

turp182 writes: What's your story? How are you doing? What do you predict? Below is a summary of the stats I've been following, some assumptions, and an overview of my personal situation. Anyway, how you all doing?

"Confirmed coronavirus cases world-wide Friday exceeded 2.7 million, with more than 190,000 dead," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing data from Johns Hopkins University.

While America has just 4.3% of the world's population, "The U.S. accounted for nearly a third of the cases, exceeding 869,000, and more than a quarter of the deaths, at 49,963." [Note: This comparison might be skewed by the number of countries underreporting their cases or deaths.]

The Miami Herald reports: The coronavirus has killed more than 50,000 people in the United States, just four days after passing 40,000 U.S. deaths on Sunday, Johns Hopkins University reports. The total as of early Friday afternoon was more than 50,370, up about 400 deaths since Thursday night, the data shows...

More than 25,000 people have died in Italy, and more than 22,000 in Spain... Most of the U.S. deaths have occurred in New York City: 16,388, the university says.
Two weeks ago America had just 20% of the world's confirmed fatalities.

An anonymous reader quotes SFGate: The statewide order to shelter in place that went into effect on March 20 had a beneficial side-effect: Accidents, injuries and fatalities on California roadways were cut in half, saving the state and residents of California $1 billion, according to a UC Davis study.

In the 22 days after the shelter-in-place order (March 21-April 11), there was an average of 450 vehicle collisions per day throughout the state, according to the study conducted by the Road Ecology Center at UC Davis. During the same period in 2019, there were 1,128 collisions per day. In the 22 days prior to sheltering in place, there were 1,056 accidents per day...

"The reduction in numbers of all collisions, injury, and fatal collision was equivalent to a $40 million/day savings in costs and about $1 billion in savings since the Governor's order went into effect," the study concluded. The figures were calculated using Federal Highway Administration data, which includes savings from "property damage, treatment of injuries, lost time at work, emergency responses, insurance claims, and the equivalent cost of a life."
California has ordered some insurance companies to refund premiums paid in March and April for car accidents.

Yahoo News shares an encouraging report from former Newsweek correspondent Andrew Romano: Until very recently, nationwide data about how many COVID-19 patients are currently receiving treatment in hospitals was hard to come by. It's still incomplete and inconsistent. But on April 7, researchers at the University of Minnesota launched the U.S. COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project, which is just what it sounds like: the first effort to capture, track, visualize and compare daily data on the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations from the 37 state departments of health that are reporting this information (so far).

The reason this information is so valuable is simple. Because hospitalization typically occurs a week or so after infection, it's less of a lagging indicator than the death count (which trails by two to two and a half weeks) and more directly tied to the trajectory of the epidemic than the testing-dependent case count. It's also a measure of the most pressing public health concern of all: how close we are to exceeding the capacity of our hospital system, which can make COVID-19 much deadlier than it would otherwise be.

Which brings us to New York and California. Chart each state's hospitalization data over the last seven days or so, and two different narratives emerge. Both are encouraging...

On Wednesday, New York's daily death count hit an all-time high: 799. But that reflects infections from weeks ago, before the state's lockdown started. The number of people testing positive stayed relatively flat. Meanwhile, there were fewer new hospitalizations — just 200 — than on any day since March 18. It wasn't a blip. The amount of new daily hospitalizations has been declining since last Thursday: from 1,427 on April 2 to 1,095 on April 3 to 656 on April 6 to 200 on April 8. (There are some questions about inconsistencies between the data from New York state and New York City, but the trend line is the same.) Previously, the total current number of coronavirus patients in New York hospitals had been increasing by at least 20 percent a day for weeks. Now the overall number of hospitalizations is barely increasing at all...

The good news in New York is that the state might be peaking now. The good news in California is that the state might not peak for a long time — but its path to that peak will be so incremental, its curve so flat, that coronavirus patients will never come close to overwhelming the hospital system.
The numbers do look encouraging. (Click on the "Currently Hospitalized" rectangle and then select each state's two-letter abbreviation from the dropdown menu.) In fact, the San Francisco Bay Area recorded its fourth day of declining ICU patients on Saturday. "Home-sheltering efforts may well be paying off, at least according to the number of hospitalizations and patients in ICU," reports the Bay Area Newsgroup.

And SFGate noted Friday that the statewide hospitalization figures "have also been relatively flat in recent days, with Governor Gavin Newsom expressing guarded optimism after the number of individuals in intensive care units decreased Thursday."

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: U.S. deaths due to the coronavirus surpassed 20,000 on Saturday, the highest reported number in the world, according to a Reuters tally, although there are signs the pandemic might be nearing a peak. Italy has the second most reported deaths at 19,468 and Spain is in third place with 16,353.

The United States has five times the population of Italy and nearly seven times the population of Spain.

The United States has seen its highest death tolls to date in the epidemic with roughly 2,000 deaths a day reported for the last four days in a row.
While America has 4.3% of the world's population, it appears to have nearly 20% of the world's 100,000 confirmed fatalities from COVID-19. [Update: This comparison might be skewed by countries underreporting their fatalities.] Long-time blogger Jason Kottke notes the virus is now causing more deaths per day in the U.S. than any other cause, including heart disease and cancer.

But earlier this week Kottke also shared graphs from six different countries visualizing positive new statistics from the Imperial College team suggesting social distancing has worked in 11 European countries they analyzed.

"We estimate that interventions across all 11 countries will have averted 59,000 deaths up to 31 March," the researchers write, adding "Many more deaths will be averted through ensuring that interventions remain in place until transmission drops to low levels."

sixoh1 shared this story from the Wall Street Journal: Home internet and wireless connectivity in the U.S. have largely withstood unprecedented demands as more Americans work and learn remotely. Broadband and wireless service providers say traffic has jumped in residential areas at times of the day when families would typically head to offices and schools. Still, that surge in usage hasn't yet resulted in widespread outages or unusually long service disruptions, industry executives and analysts say. That is because the biggest increases in usage are happening during normally fallow periods.

Some service providers have joked that internet usage during the pandemic doesn't compare to the Super Bowl or season finale of the popular HBO show "Game of Thrones" in terms of strain on their networks, Evan Swarztrauber, senior policy adviser to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said this week on a call hosted by consulting company Recon Analytics Inc.Broadband consumption during the hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m . has risen by more than 50% since January, according to broadband data company OpenVault, which measured connections in more than one million homes. Usage during the peak early-evening hours increased 20% as of March 25. OpenVault estimates that average data consumption per household in March will reach nearly 400 gigabytes, a nearly 11% increase over the previous monthly record in January....

Some carriers that use cells on wheels and aerial network-support drones after hurricanes or tornadoes are now deploying those resources to neighborhoods with heavy wireless-service usage and places where health-care facilities need additional connectivity. Several wireless carriers including Verizon, T-Mobile US Inc. and AT&T Inc. have been given temporary access to fresh spectrum over the past week to bolster network capacity.
While Netflix is lowering its video quality in Canada, the Journal reports Netflix isn't as worried about the EU: Netflix Vice President Dave Temkin, speaking on a videoconference hosted by the network analytics company Kentik, said his engineers took some upgrades originally planned for the holiday season near the end of 2020 and simply made them sooner. A European regulator earlier this month asked Netflix to shift all its videos to standard-definition to avoid taxing domestic networks. Mr. Temkin said Netflix managed to shave its bandwidth usage using less drastic measures. "None of it is actually melting down," he said.
And the article also has stats from America's ISPs and cellphone providers:

• AT&T said cellular-data traffic was almost flat, with more customers using their home wi-fi networks instead -- but voice phone calls increased as much as 44%.
• Charter saw increases in daytime network activity, but in most markets "levels remain well below capacity and typical peak evening usage."
• Comcast says its peak traffic increased 20%, but they're still running at 40% capacity.

An anonymous reader quotes Wired: Next week, blood banks across the Netherlands are set to begin a nationwide experiment. As donations arrive — about 7,000 of them per week is the norm — they'll be screened with the usual battery of tests that keep the blood supply safe, plus one more: a test for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Then, in a few weeks, another batch of samples will get the same test. And after that, depending on the numbers, there could be further rounds. The blood donors should be fairly representative of Dutch adults ages 18 to 75, and most importantly, they'll all be healthy enough for blood donation — or at least outwardly so...

Identifying what proportion of the population has already been infected is key to making the right decisions about containment... [B]ecause no Covid-19-specific serological [antibody] tests have been fully vetted yet, the FDA's latest guidance is that they shouldn't be relied upon for diagnoses. But in epidemiology circles, those tests are a sought-after tool for understanding the scope of the disease. Since February — which was either three weeks or a lifetime ago — epidemiologists have been trying to get the full scope of the number of infections here in the U.S... [A]s the disease has continued to spread and a patchwork of local "stay at home" rules begins to bend the course of the disease, projecting who has the disease and where the hot spots are has become more difficult for models to capture.

Instead, you need boots-on-the-ground surveillance. In other words, to fill the gap created by a lack of diagnostic tests, you need more testing — but of a different sort. This time you have to know how many total people have already fought the bug, and how recently they've fought it. "Of all the data out there, if there was a good serological assay that was very specific about individuating recent cases, that would be the best data we could have," says Alex Perkins, an epidemiologist at the University of Notre Dame. The key, he says, is drawing blood from a representative sample that would show the true scope of unobserved infections... Another motivation to develop better blood tests is the potential to develop therapeutics from antibody-rich blood serum.
Wired is currently providing free access to stories about the coronavirus.

The World Health Organization believes air pollution kills seven million people each year.

But will this year be different? Forbes reports: The global lockdown inspired by the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, has shuttered factories and reduced travel, slashing lethal pollution including the greenhouse gases that are heating the climate. The lockdown may save more lives from pollution reduction than are threatened by the virus itself, said François Gemenne, director of The Hugo Observatory, which studies the interactions between environmental changes, human migration, and politics.

"Strangely enough, I think the death toll of the coronavirus at the end of the day might be positive, if you consider the deaths from atmospheric pollution," said Gemenne, citing, for example, the 48,000 people who die annually in France because of atmospheric pollution and the more than one million in China... "More than likely the number of lives that would be spared because of these confinement measures would be higher than the number of lives that would be lost because of the pandemic," Gemenne said in an appearance on France 24's The Debate.

The discrepancy in how we react to these divergent threats should give us pause, Gemenne said, to consider why it is that we respond so strongly to one with less lethality and so weakly to one with more.

Microsoft recently added a COVID-19 tracking map at Bing.com. But they're not the only ones visualizing data on infection rates...

Founded in 2008, BibBase offers a free web service that lets scientists create a page of their publications that can then be embedded into other web sites. Now long-time Slashdot moglito describes BibBase's newest project: Slashdot readers might be interested in a tool that we at BibBase.org have created for tracking the evolution of COVID-19 in different countries and regions. It is based on the same data the Johns Hopkins map uses, but allows tracking individual regions (to the degree the data is up to date).

[Disclaimer: Most of us aren't data-vetting scientists. Consider the below just one possible grass-roots interpretation of the data.]

Using this web app it is for instance possible to see that some countries have been able to break the exponential growth in cases. This preselection for instance shows China, South Korea, Norway, and Italy on a log-scale. It is visible from this that after China, also South Korea has been able to curb the spread, and now Norway is showing signs of that as well. In contrast, Italy still seems nowhere near the turning point.

We hope that this tool can help people as well as decision makers understand the relative effectiveness of the approaches used by these countries to curb the spread. We believe it also shows the importance of testing (which has been very good in South Korea). More importantly perhaps to readers, we feel that this is a sign of hope that it is possible to get this under control and that everyone should feel motivated to abide by the strict self distancing we are all trying to enforce.

Signs of hope seem rare these days, so we wanted to share this.
The BibBase blog has more information, noting that "the current data set seems to be missing data from the U.S. until just recently, which reflects in unreasonably abrupt increases in the charts for the U.S. and its states."

An anonymous reader quotes the nonprofit environmental magazine Grist: On Sunday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a new set of guidelines for citizens hoping to help contain the burgeoning outbreak. They included working from home, if possible, avoiding subways during rush hour (a breeding ground for respiratory viruses), and walking or biking to work if possible to avoid crowding on public transportation... Now, less than a week later, it's clear that inexperience and physical impediments weren't enough to keep New Yorkers from adopting a more hygienic, climate-friendly, people-powered form of transportation. The city's Department of Transportation announced on Wednesday that it's seen a 50 percent increase in bike traffic on bridges connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens compared to last March. New York City's bike share program, Citi Bike, has also seen an enormous upswing in demand. Citi Bike announced on Thursday that rides are up 67 percent compared to a year ago...

[T]he coronavirus pandemic has also caused a 15 percent drop in rush-hour traffic this week compared to the same time last year. That means less pollution for cyclists to choke on and fewer chances of dangerous collisions.

The five years between 2013 and 2017 saw a 200% increase in the number of commercially-insured Americans diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or early-onset dementia between the ages of 30 to 64. "While the underlying cause is not clear, advances in technology are certainly allowing for earlier and more definitive diagnosis," says a Blue Cross executive.

The data was collected by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (and its licensee Independence Blue Cross) in a report titled Early-Onset Dementia and Alzheimer's Rates Grow for Younger Americans. schwit1 shared their announcement: Among that group, the average age of a person living with either form of dementia is 49... The number diagnosed with these conditions increased 373% among 30- to 44-year-olds, 311% among 45- to 54-year-olds and 143% among 55- to 64-year-olds from 2013 to 2017...

The study also took a deeper look into early-onset Alzheimer's disease and found that more than 37,000 commercially insured Americans between the ages of 30 and 64 were diagnosed with the condition in 2017 — a 131% jump in diagnoses since 2013.

"America is approaching one of its most contentious hours," writes the Phildadelphia Inquirer, "and officially, it's one that doesn't exist." According to the National Conference of State Legislators, lawmakers in 32 states are considering bills that would change the current system of splitting the year into about eight months of daylight time and the rest, standard. "It's been a hot issue," said Jim Reed, an NCSL official. And it's getting hotter, he added. Every year more state lawmakers are considering changing the system.

The preponderance are pushing for year-round daylight time, although Congress has forbidden states from doing so. Pennsylvania has four different proposed time-change bills, and three of those essentially endorse year-round daylight time. Yet, if the issue were put to a national primary, all-standard, all-the-time would win decisively, according to a poll conducted last year. More than 70% of those surveyed said, Please, stop with the changes, period...

DST critics have pointed to studies pointing to possible connections to an increase in heart disease when the clocks go up, and the impacts of disrupted body rhythms resulting from disrupted sleep patterns. Proponents say later sunsets mean more Vitamin D and more opportunities to luxuriate in the later twilights.

"Gig economy workers may have won an important, if conditional, battle in their push for better conditions," reports Engadget: Instacart employees in the Chicago suburb of Skokie have voted to unionize through their local branch of United Food and Commercial Workers, giving them more collective bargaining power than they had before.

The move only covers 15 staffers who operate at the Mariano's grocery store, but it's the first time Instacart employees have unionized in the U.S. and could affect issues like turnover rates, work pacing and mysterious employee rating algorithms. In a statement, Instacart said it "will honor" the unionization vote pending certification of the results, and that it intended to negotiate in "good faith" on a collective bargaining agreement. The company added that it "respect[s] our employees' rights to explore unionization."
Motherboard reports that prior to the vote Instacart had "enlisted high-level managers to visit the Mariano's grocery store where the unionizing workers pick and pack groceries for delivery. The managers distributed anti-union literature warning employees that a union would drain paychecks and 'exercise a great deal of control' over workers."

They also cite stats from the "Collective Actions in Tech" database showing there were 100 organizing actions in just the last year by workers at Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft -- and note that this month will also see the results of a vote by Kickstarter employees on whether to unionize.