When I presented our annual results last month, I spoke about the speed of our business continuity planning amid the Covid pandemic. This allowed us to focus on a comprehensive 5-point plan to support our customers and society in this crisis.

What’s it like working at Vodafone? Meet some of our employees here.

Joakim Reiter, Group External Affairs Director, explores how digital transformation can help enable a fairer and greener society in the wake of Covid-19.

Today an estimated 3 billion people are currently under some form of lockdown worldwide, a phenomenon that is having enormous societal and economic impact.

Smart Development Hack is a collaboration of the European Commission and the BMZ (german Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation), and is a development of the hugely successful WirVsVirus hackathon. Vodafone are at the heart of supporting of supporting innovative technology concepts designed to help battle COVID-19.

Vodafone’s Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) team has been supporting European governments with modelling to understand how the novel coronavirus might spread. However, that tool – developed in association with WorldPop, the population mapping programme at the University of Southampton – has its roots in fighting another deadly disease, malaria, in Mozambique on another continent.

Regardless of race, culture or status, people around the world are suffering in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hardships range from the most debilitating - such as hunger and homelessness - to crippling psychological effects such as fear, loneliness and anxiety.

Around the world, people find themselves with an abundance of free time. How they choose to spend this time is completely up to them – although, given the circumstances, many are confined and have limited resources.

Estimates suggest that a coronavirus vaccine could take 18 months to develop at the very minimum. European economies cannot afford to wait anywhere near that long to start returning to normality, even if that means managing further waves of infection.

As part of the DreamLab: Corona-AI project, a team from the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College London, in collaboration with the Vodafone Foundation, are pairing bespoke AI technologies, mobile supercomputing, and big “-omics” data to narrow the search of combinations of existing drugs and food-based drug-like molecules to help in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

When we conducted our global IoT research last year, more than 79% of adopters said IoT helped them to achieve outcomes that wouldn’t have been otherwise possible.

Vodafone Foundation and Imperial College London scientists deploy DreamLab app to speed up coronavirus research

El Economista, a daily Spanish newspaper, recently published a story about the role of Vodafone Spain in ensuring 4G and 5G connectivity, along with complex services and technology solutions, for Europe’s newest and largest field hospital.

There is no credible scientific evidence linking 5G or mobile technologies to the spread of Coronavirus.

Italy is one of the hardest-hit countries in the coronavirus pandemic. The CEO of Vodafone Italy, Aldo Bisio, recently spoke to Corriere della Sera, a daily Italian newspaper.

The technology, created by Corevas, allows for a detailed virtual assessment via smartphone, ensuring there is distance between the patient and doctor. This removes the need for patients to leave the house, lowering the likelihood of infections.

The spread of COVID-19 across Europe is having a significant impact on our day-to-day lives, changing the way we interact with others, introducing new ways of working and curtailing our movements as we adhere to new measures introduced by governments to limit infection and protect the more vulnerable within our societies.