Amazon offers supplies, educational & technical support for COVID-19
An e-tail giant is providing a variety of services designed to provide relief from and combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
To help meet the immediate needs of residents in the Puget Sound region of its home state of Washington, Amazon is donating 250,000 items such as linens, towels, shelf-stable food, Amazon devices, entertainment items, and other supplies to four temporary housing sites in King County, Washington, supporting patients in quarantine or recovery due to COVID-19.
In addition, Amazon is donating credits to help cover the cost of essential items to hundreds of families with immediate needs through community partner Bellevue LifeSpring. Through the end of April, families within the Bellevue, Wash. school district who are unable to reach the district's sites to pick up food boxes or physical food vouchers will be able to shop online for eligible groceries, health products, and personal care items sold on Amazon and get them delivered directly to their doorstep.
The Amazon Future Engineer program is providing access to a variety of free, online learning opportunities. Amazon Future Engineer is a childhood-to-career program aimed at increasing access to computer science education for children and adults from underserved and underrepresented communities. During the COVID-19 crisis, Amazon Future Engineer is providing resources from lesson plans to online coding programs for all grades.
Furthermore, Amazon is working closely with the World Health Organization (WHO) to accelerate the effort to track the virus, understand its outbreak, and to better contain its spread. AWS is supplying WHO with cloud technologies and supporting them with technical expertise. This includes building "data lakes" aggregating epidemiological country data, as well as translating medical training videos into different languages.
Customers can use the Amazon.com site to donate to Feeding America, the American Red Cross, and Save the Children. Users of the Amazon Alexa voice assistant can say, "Alexa, make a donation to Feeding America COVID-19 Response."