The coronavirus situation that is wreaking havoc all over the world is not a joke, and Google thinks so too.
In fact, they’re taking it so seriously that they’ve cancelled the infamous April Fools’ Jokes this year.
Google is Cancelling Its Annual Iconic April Fool’s Jokes This Year Due to COVID-19
Year in and year out, Google has been infamous for its multiple elaborate pranks.
These pranks usually touch on nearly every major product the company makes.
Last year, we could play Snake on Google Maps.
That said, in light of the treacherous COVID-19 outbreak, Google has decided to do the responsible thing and pull out of the April Fool’s Day Celebrations this year.
According to Business Insider, an internal email from Google revealed that Google will “take the year off from that tradition out of respect for all those fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. Our highest goal right now is to be helpful to people, so let’s save the jokes for next April, which will undoubtedly be a whole lot brighter than this one.”
The email added, “We’ve already stopped any centralized April Fool’s efforts but realize there may be smaller projects within teams that we don’t know about.”
“Please suss out those efforts and make sure your teams pause on any jokes they may have planned — internally or externally.”
The email was from Google’s head of marketing Lorraine Twohill.
We can’t help but agree with Google’s decision as even though it isn’t the most favourable one to April Fool’s Day Fans, a day that’s dedicated to misleading people and ” adding extraneous, misinforming features to critical products like Google search, YouTube, Gmail, or Maps” just doesn’t seem like the right thing to do at this moment in time.
The Situation In Singapore
Indeed, the COVID-19 situation is serious all over the world, including Singapore.
There are 70 new cases of the coronavirus reported today with 41 being imported from Europe, North America, ASEAN and other parts of Asia.
As for the remaining 29 local cases, 15 of them are linked to previously confirmed cases or clusters. There are now 2 more linked cases to the SingPost Cluster, bringing the cluster to a total of 5 cases.
In total, we have 802 confirmed cases in Singapore
198 of them have recovered and are discharged, while 19 are now in ICU. 3 have passed away. The conditions of the remaining patients are either stable or improving.
The Situation In The United States
In the United States, there are a total of over 120,000 COVID-19 cases, and a death toll of 2,000.
They have the largest number of coronavirus cases all over the world now.
However, the death toll is lower than that of other countries like Italy, Spain and China.