| Hello, this is Colum in Beijing. At about 7:30 a.m. this morning, I stopped eating breakfast to look at the website I now visit most often: the dashboard tracking coronavirus cases, run by medical website DXY. Today, I saw that the number of people killed by the virus has reached an unsettling 637 since the start of the outbreak over a month ago. Like many millions of other people in China, I've been mostly holed up indoors, waiting for the highly contagious virus to run its course across the country. Isolated from the outside world, tech has become my lifeline, providing a conduit for my shopping, work and social activity. On Friday, my first task was logging on to the delivery app Hema, owned by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., to order my groceries. Supplies rarely last the day, so it was imperative I got in early—I'm far from alone in avoiding supermarkets and potentially infectious strangers. Other fledgling grocery delivery services, like Tencent Holdings Ltd.-backed MissFresh and JD.com Inc.'s 7FRESH, have also seen a surge in popularity during China's time of crisis. They've all said they're looking after the health of their couriers, providing them with face masks and disinfectant. I've taken their word for it. Fridge stocked, my next stop of the day was logging onto to my laptop. Most offices in the city are closed, so I've been working from home. The internet is slow but stable. Because Google, Facebook and other services are locked away behind China's Great Firewall (unless someone has a virtual private network), I use Bing. A lot of other people, meanwhile, use Chinese search engine Baidu, where according to its owner an average of a billion people per day are searching or browsing for coronavirus information. China's increase in remote work is a precaution that has its drawbacks. With most of the country telecommuting this week, the spike in users has led to crashes and disruption for popular Chinese work apps like Alibaba's DingTalk and Tencent's WeChat Work. While the streets outside my apartment are mostly pin-drop quiet, my virtual social life has been busy. Networks like WeChat, Weibo, Facebook, Twitter and short video platforms like ByteDance Inc.'s Douyin have been flooded with content. People are sharing virus-related information, jokes and memes to while away the time indoors. I've been spending most of my evenings on Twitter, which is fast emerging as the most open source of information on the virus. That's because WeChat posts that contradict the official government narrative are almost immediately scrubbed by authorities. State broadcaster CCTV's nightly news program is notably heavy on feel-good stories and light on new information. By evening, I'm usually so tech-ed out that all I want is to meet friends for a drink. Alas, that may not happen anytime soon. Beijing on Wednesday banned people from gathering at restaurants, even for birthday parties. I'll be sending friends birthday GIFs until the quarantine lifts. —Colum Murphy | 
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