the times | Tuesday July 28 2020 2GM 9
News
Hamilton sorry for sharing
anti-vaccine conspiracy clip
Emma Yeomans
Google has told its thousands of UK
employees to work from home for
another year in a blow to Boris John-
son’s hopes of refilling city centre
offices to reboot the economy.
The tech giant is one of the first big
companies to formalise such a long
extension to its stay at home order, tell-
ing its 4,500 UK employees that they
need not be in the office until next July.
The order came from Sundar Pichai,
Google’s chief executive, and applies to
the company’s 200,000 full-time and
contract employees around the world.
Google’s British staff are based at four
offices in London and one in Manches-
ter. Their locations next to big railway
stations will be a blow to the retailers,
pubs, cafés and restaurants hoping for
the return of large number of workers.
Google is due to complete a 330m-long
headquarters, longer than the Shard
skyscraper is tall, next to London King’s
Cross in 2022.
The prime minister said this month
that the government’s “work from
home” guidance would end on August 1
in an attempt to reverse the damage
inflicted on the economy by the pan-
demic. From next month people will be
able to return to the workplace at the
discretion of their employers. They
would no longer be advised to stay away
from public transport, Mr Johnson said.
Google is not alone in delaying its
return to the office. Last week the Nat-
west Group, which owns Royal Bank of
Scotland, said that 50,000 of its staff
would stay at home until next year. City
institutions such as Standard Life Aber-
deen have done the same.
Mr Pichai, 48, made the decision to
instruct Google staff to work at home
for longer last week after a debate
among top executives, according to TheMuseum in London, is given a final inspection before the reopening on August 5
Queue app
will keep
shoppers dry
Ben Martin, Alex Ralph
Sainsbury’s is testing a virtual queueing
system that would allow customers to
wait in a car or café before entering a
store instead of standing in the rain.
In a trial at five stores shoppers will
secure their place in a virtual queue
with an app. Those without smart-
phones can ask staff to add them.
The technology would help in
autumn and winter, when the weather
will make waiting outdoors in a socially
distanced queue less appealing.
Sainsbury’s said that the system
could also be useful if shops had to
adapt to local lockdowns or the govern-
ment’s coronavirus guidance changes.
The retailer, which also owns the
Argos chain, is one of Britain’s largest. It
made annual pre-tax profits of
£255 million in the year to March.
The pandemic has accelerated
changes in shopping, pushing more
consumers online to order groceries
and clothes. Customers in a store have
to wear facemasks and shops have
implemented one-way systems with
screens in front of tills.
The virtual queueing trial, which will
use the Ufirst app, will help Sainsbury’s
to regulate the flow of customers into
its stores. The app was originally devel-
oped to help to manage queues at tour-
ist attractions such as museums. It is
already being used abroad, including by
Ikea in Italy and France, and McDo-
nald’s in Italy.
The Sainsbury’s pilot scheme is the
first time that it has been tried by a Brit-
ish retailer. It will run at the Leicester
North store, Dome Roundabout in
Watford and three shops in London:
Uxbridge, Pimlico and Newham Royal
Wharf.
Asda announced a virtual queueing
trial in May at a store in Leeds using
technology developed by Qudini.
As well as speeding up the shift to
shopping online, the Covid-19 crisis has
led to increased use of technology in
stores, including contactless payments.
Sainsbury’s said yesterday that it was
expanding its SmartShop Mobile Pay
system, which allows customers to scan
their shopping with their smartphones
and pay through an app, cutting out the
need to use a physical till.Pilot able to
walk again
A Scottish airline pilot who spent
68 days in a coma after
contracting Covid-19 in Vietnam
has told how he became an
unlikely celebrity as he fought for
his life. Stephen Cameron, 42,
from Motherwell, suffered
multiple organ failure and lost
more than four stone. Mr
Cameron, who was working for
Vietnam Airlines, became known
to millions as Patient 91 — with
updates on his progress being
broadcast nightly. He is now
recovering in hospital in Scotland
and is able to walk after fearing he
would be paralysed. Vietnam has
been lauded as a success story of
the pandemic, acting swiftly to
close borders and enforce
quarantine and contact tracing. It
has recorded just over 400 cases
and no deaths. The country’s
determination to preserve its
record of zero fatalities meant Mr
Cameron was cared for by the best
ICU doctors. Mr Cameron said:
“I’m very humbled by how I’ve
been taken into the hearts of the
Vietnamese people. Most of all I’m
grateful for the bloody-
mindedness of the doctors in not
wanting me to die on their watch.”Fears over NHS delays
Some cancer patients are still in
the dark about when their
treatment will resume, a poll by
Cancer Research UK has found. A
third had treatment disrupted by
the pandemic and two thirds of
those who experienced delays felt
anxious. Michelle Mitchell, chief
executive of Cancer Research UK,
said: “The NHS has started to
restore cancer services and more
people are being referred for tests.”City living loses appeal
The crisis is accelerating migration
away from London as many of
those who have been working
from home want to continue doing
so, a study of 2,000 adults
suggests. Totaljobs, a jobs site, said
43 per cent believed that an offer
of flexible working would
encourage them to move. The
pandemic could cause an “urban
exodus” and “a real opportunity
for regional employers”.Be lenient, colleges told
Sixth forms have been urged to
consider admitting pupils who
miss a grade or two at GCSE this
year. The regulator Ofqual said
grades set by teachers in lieu of
cancelled exams and moderated
centrally should be one of several
factors, along with school reports.
Many final grades are expected to
be lower than those submitted by
the teachers. Results are due on
August 20 in England and Wales.Bus drivers put at risk
An earlier lockdown could have
prevented the deaths of London
bus drivers. Researchers studied 27
of 29 drivers who died during the
pandemic and found that the
frontline nature of their jobs added
to their risk. Professor Sir Michael
Marmot, director of the Institute of
Health Equity, said: “Lockdown...
saved bus drivers’ lives. If lockdown
had occurred earlier, it would likely
have saved more lives.”coronavirus in brief
News
Google tells all staff
to work from home
for next 12 months
Tom Knowles
Technology CorrespondentWall Street Journal, which first reported
the move. A source said that Mr Pichai
decided to announce the extension
after hearing about employees with
families who were uncertain if their
children’s schools would be open by the
time they returned to work. It also
allows staff to sign full-year leases on
homes elsewhere if they decide to leave
expensive cities such as San Francisco
or London during the pandemic.
“I know it hasn’t been easy”, Mr
Pichai said in an email to all staff on
Monday. “I hope this will offer the flexi-
bility you need to balance work with
taking care of yourselves and loved
ones over the next 12 months.”
He added: “We are still learning a lot
from our experiences of working from
home and will use that knowledge to
inform our approach to the future of
work at Google.”
Some jobs that require a physical
presence, such as testing new hardware
or maintaining Google’s data centres,
will still require employees to come in.
Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook
chief executive, announced in May that
the bulk of his 45,000 employees would
be able to work from wherever they
pleased. Facebook plans to shift to a
largely remote workforce over the next
five to ten years, with half of employees
eventually expected to work at home.
Twitter has said that almost all of its
5,000 staff would be able to choose
their workplace in future.
The decision from Google may
encourage other tech firms to follow
suit. Microsoft appears to be an outlier
among the tech giants, having told staff
in cities such as New York that they can
return to the office as soon as autumn.
Google said: “To give employees the
ability to plan ahead, we are extending
our global voluntary work from home
option through June 30, 2021, for roles
that don’t need to be in the office.”TIMES PHOTOGRAPER RICHARD POHLELewis Hamilton has apologised after
sharing an anti-vaccination video with
his 18 million followers on Instagram.
The Formula One world champion
posted a video that showed Bill Gates
talking about the progress being made
in creating a Covid-19 vaccine and
implied that the Microsoft founder was
lying. Hamilton removed it after
criticism.
Public health officials and scientists
have said that the anti-vaccination
movement could be one of the biggest
barriers to a successful coronavirus
immunisation campaign. On Friday
the prime minister described anti-
vaxxers as “nuts” and encouraged
Britons to get the flu jab in prepar-
ation for winter.
A poll carried out last month by
YouGov for the Centre for
Countering Digital Hate,
a non-profit organisa-
tion, suggested that up
to one in six Britons
would refuse a Cov-
id-19 jab. Vaccine
misinformation hasalso been linked to resurgent outbreaks
of measles and other diseases that have
been largely eradicated in the West.
The video shared by Hamilton origi-
nated from an American Instagram
“influencer” known as King Bach and
features a clip from a CBS interview
with Mr Gates last week. King Bach,
whose real name is Andrew Bachelor,
has 19.7 million followers on the social
media platform owned by Facebook.
In the video the CBS interviewer
presses Mr Gates, 64, on the potential
side-effects of a vaccine made by the US
pharmaceutical company Moderna.
Mr Gates, who has donated millions to
vaccine research, responds that the
US Food and Drug Administra-
tion would not approve anything
unsafe. He also rejects
unsubstantiated claims that the
vaccine would introduce micro-
chips.
The Instagram video
was captioned: “I re-
member when I told
my first lie.”
Hamilton, 35,
removed the video
from his Instagram
feed. He said that he
supported vaccines
and had not read the
caption.Lewis Hamilton
said that he
supported vaccines