Technology

Giving people even more of a reason to stay home and follow the social distancing measures designed to stop the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S., HBO said it would be making 500 hours of programming free to stream over HBO NOW and HBO GO without a subscription, starting Friday, April 3.

Shows that audiences can stream include some of the best television shows ever made, like &The Sopranos& and &The Wire,& and other very good HBO shows like &Veep& and &Six Feet Under.&

Movie titles like &Pokémon Detective Pikachu&, &Crazy, Stupid, Love& and back catalog gems like (one of my favorite movies of all-time) &Empire of the Sun& join docuseries including &McMillion$& and &The Case Against Adnan Syed& as free-to-stream offerings as well.

Viewers who want to watch what is inarguably the best show ever made (it&The Wire&) can download the HBO NOW or HBO GO apps or visit HBONOW.comorHBOGO.com.

The networkdistribution partners will also make the shows available to stream for free in the coming days, the company said. This offer marks the first time that HBO has made this amount of programming available for free outside of the paywall on either of its apps, the company said.

The full list of HBO content available to stream without a subscription includes:

• Ballers (5 Seasons)

• Barry (2 Seasons)

• Silicon Valley (6 Seasons)

• Six Feet Under (5 Seasons)

• The Sopranos (7 Seasons)

• Succession (2 Seasons)

• True Blood (7 Seasons

• Veep (7 Seasons)

• The Wire (5 Seasons)

10 Docuseries and Documentaries

• The Apollo

• The Case Against Adnan Syed

• Elvis Presley: The Searcher

• I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter

• The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley

• Jane Fonda in Five Acts

• McMillion$

• True Justice: Bryan StevensonFight for Equality

• United Skates

• We Are the Dream: The Kids of the MLK Oakland Oratorical Fest

20 Warner Bros. Theatricals

• Arthur

• Arthur 2: On the Rocks

• Blinded By the Light

• The Bridges of Madison County

• Crazy, Stupid, Love

• Empire of the Sun

• Forget Paris

• Happy Feet Two

• Isn&t It Romantic?

• The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

• Midnight Special

• My Dog Skip

• Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase

• Pan

• Pokémon Detective Pikachu

• Red Riding Hood

• Smallfoot

• Storks

• Sucker Punch

• Unknown

Tesla delivered 88,400 vehicles in the first quarter, beating most analysts expectations despite a 21% decreasefrom the previous quarter as the COVID-19 pandemic put downward pressure on demand and created logistical challenges.

Tesla said Thursday it produced 103,000 electric vehicles in the first quarter, about 2% lower than the previous period.

The deliveries and production figures beat most analysts expectations, causing Tesla shares to jump more than 10.4% in after hours trading. Analysts, who had anticipated lower numbers due to the COVID-19 pandemic, had varying forecasts. A consensus of analysts by FactSeat expected more than 79,908 vehicles would be delivered while Reuters reported IBES data from Refinitiv forecast numbers as high as 93,399 vehicles.

The company, which sells directly to consumers as opposed to using dealerships, was able to beat those expectations in part because it continued to produce and deliver its electric vehicles to customers in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has prompted city, county and state officials to issue stay-at-home orders that have directed non-essential businesses to close. While manufacturing is often exempt from these orders, pressure from the United Auto Workers as well as falling demand has prompted automakers, including GM, Nissan, Ford, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Toyota and Volkswagen suspended production at all U.S. factories.

Tesla also suspended production, beginning March 23, at its plant in Fremont, Calif. However, deliveries have continued.

While COVID-19 still affected Tesla, the company still managed to beat its delivery numbers from the first quarter of 2019.

Herea breakdown of the first quarter 2020 deliveries and production:

• Tesla delivered 88,400 vehicles (compared to 112,000 in Q4 and 63,000 in Q1 2019)
• Tesla produced 103,000 vehicles (compared to 105,000 in Q4 and 77,100 in Q1 2019)

This quarter deliveries included some Model Y vehicles, the newest addition to Teslaportfolio. Model Y production started in January and deliveries began in March according to Tesla.

Tesla also said that its new Shanghai factory, which is producing the Model 3 for Chinese customers, is achieving &record levels of production, despite significant setbacks.& Tesla didn&t provide any details on the levels of production at the Shanghai factory.The first public deliveries of Model 3 sedans produced at its Shanghai factory began January 7, one year after Tesla began construction on its first factory outside the United States.

There have been a few scattered efforts to leverage crowd-sourced self-reporting of symptoms as a way to potentially predict and chart the progress of COVID-19 across the U.S., and around the world. A new effort looks like the most comprehensive, well-organized and credibly backed yet — and it has been developed in part by Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann.

Silbermann and a team from Pinterest enlisted the help of high school friend, and CRISPR gene-editing pioneer / MIT and Harvard Broad Institute member, Dr. Feng Zhang to build what Silbermann termed in a press release a &bridge between citizens and scientists.& The result is the How We Feel app that Silbermann developed along with input from Zhang and a long list of well-regarded public health, computer science, therapeutics, social science and medical professors from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Weill Cornell and more.

How We Feel is a mobile app available for both iOS and Android, which is free to download, and which is designed to make it very easy to self-report whether or not they feel well — and if they&re feeling unwell, what symptoms they&re experiencing. It also asks for information about whether or not you&ve been tested for COVID-19, and whether you&re in self-isolation, and for how long. The amount of interaction required is purposely streamlined to make it easy for anyone to contribute daily, and to do so in a minute or less.

The app doesn&t ask for or collect info like name, phone number or email information. It includes an up-front request that users agree to donate their information, and the data collected will be aggregated and then shared with researchers, public health professionals and doctors, including those who are signed on as collaborators with the project, as well as others (and the project is encouraging collaborators to reach out if interested). Part of the team working on the project are experts in the field of differential privacy,and a goal of the endeavor is to ensure that peopleinformation is used responsibly.

The How We Feel app is, as mentioned, one of a number of similar efforts out there, but this approach has a number of advantages when compared to existing projects. First, ita mobile app, whereas some rely on web-based portals that are less convenient for the average consumer, especially when you want continued use over time. Second, they&re motivating use through positive means — Silbermann and his wife Divya will be providing a donated meal to nonprofit Feeding America for every time a person downloads and uses the app for the first time, up to a maximum of 10 million meals. Finally, italready designed in partnership with, and backed by, world-class academic institutions and researchers, and seems best-positioned to be able to get the information it gathers to the greatest number of those in a position to help.

How We Feel is organized as an entirely independent, nonprofit organization, and ithoping to expand its availability and scientific collaboration globally. Itan ambitious project, but also one that could be critically important in supplementing testing efforts and other means of tracking the progress and course of the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. While self-reported information on its own is far from a 100% accurate or reliable source, taken in aggregate at scale, it could be a very effective leading indicator of new or emerging viral hotspots, or provide scientific researches with other valuable insights when used in combination with other signals.

Despite reports of historic unemployment, with roughly 6.6 million Americans filing for unemployment, domestic stocks rose during regular trading today.

One day after grim estimates on the potential death toll from the COVID-19 epidemic in the U.S. sent stocks tumbling, and amid a continuing economic fallout from the governmentresponse to slow the spread of the disease, all three major U.S. indices gained.

Meanwhile, the federal government in the U.S. continues to work on the specifics of how to funnel nearly $2 trillion into the American economy as part of the CARES Act stimulus package. And pharmaceutical and medical device companies are working day and night to develop better diagnostics tools and novel therapies to treat the virus while potential vaccines slowly make their way through the regulatory approval process.

Herethe tale of the tape:

• Dow Jones Industrial Average: +469.93, +2.24%
• S-P 500: +56.40, +2.28%
• Nasdaq Composite: +126.73, +1.72

The tech-heavy Nasdaq rose the least of the major indices, indicating that the up-day wasn&t as bright for the technology industry. This fact was underscored by aselloff among shares of SaaS and cloud stocks, as measured by the Bessemer cloud index that fell 1.4% on the day. The Nasdaq remains in bear market territory.

After-hours today, shares of Tesla shot higher after the electric car company announced delivery numbers that delighted investors. The volatile company announced 88,400 deliveries for the three-month period, ahead of expectations of 79,900 (per FactSet).

Looking ahead, it doesn&t feel like the market has digested the scale of economic impact that the new unemployment claims implies; with employment falling sharply, demand contracting and economies around the world prioritizing safety over commerce, the world could be in for more than an economic pause, or lull. We may be staring down the first weeks of a depression.

Despite false assertions by the president to the contrary, any potential treatments to counter or prevent COVID-19 are still only at the stage of early investigations, which include one-off treatment with special individual case authorizations, and small-scale clinical examinations. Nothing so far has approached the level of scrutiny needed to actually say anything definitively about their actual ability to treat COVID-19 or the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes it, but the first large-scale U.S. clinical study for one treatment candidate is seeking volunteers and looking to get underway.

The study will be conducted by the Henry Ford Health System, which is seeking 3,000 volunteers from healthcare and first responder working environments. Depending on response, the researchers behind the study are looking to begin as early as next week. Study lead researcher Dr. William W. O&Neil said in a press release announcing the study that the goal is to seek a more definitive scientific answer to the question of whether or not hydroxychloroquine might work as a preventative medicine to help protect medical front-line workers with greater risk exposure from contracting the coronavirus.

Hydroxychloroquine (as well as chloroquine) has been in the spotlight as a potential COVID-19 treatment due mostly to repeated name-check that President Trump has given the drug during his daily White House coronavirus task force press briefings. Trump has gone too far in suggesting that the drug, which is commonly used both as an anti-malarial and in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, could be an effective treatment and should be thrust into use. At one point, he claimed that he FDA had granted an emergency approval for its use as a COVID-19 treatment, but Dr. Anthony Fauci clarified that it was not approved for that use, and that clinical studies still need to be performed to evaluate how it works in addressing COVID-19.

Studies thus far around hydroxychloroquine have been small-scale, as mentioned. One, conducted by researchers in France, produced results that indicated the drug was effective in treating those already infected, particularly when paired with a specific antibiotic. Another, more recent study from China, showed that there was no difference in terms of viral duration or symptoms when comparing treatment with hydroxychloroquine with treatment using standard anti-viral drugs, already a common practice in addressing cases of the disease.

This Henry Ford study looks like it could provide better answers to some of these questions around the drug, though the specific approach of seeking to validate prophylactic (preventative) use will mean treatment-oriented applications will still have to be studied separately. The design of the study will be a true blind study, with participants split into three groups that receive &unidentified, specific pills& (possibly anti-virals or some equivalent); hydroxychloroquine; or placebo pills, respectively. They won&t know which they&ve received, and they&ll be contacted weekly by researchers running the study, then in-person both at week four and week eight to determine if they have any symptoms of COVID-19, or any side effects from the medication. They&ll get regular blood draws, and the results will be compared to see if thereany difference between each cohort in terms of how many contracted COVID-19.

These are front-line healthcare workers, so in theory they should unfortunately be at high risk of contracting the disease. That, plus the large sample size, should provide results that provide much clearer answers about hydroxychloroquinepotential preventative effects. Even after the study is complete, other competing large-scale trials would ideally be run to prove out or cast doubt on these results, but we&ll be in a better position than we are now to say anything scientifically valid about the drug and its use.