Amazon Teams Up With Conduent To Control Coronavirus Spread

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is pulling out all stops in its bid to combat the coronavirus crisis. The latest collaboration between its cloud computing arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Conduent (NASDAQ:CNDT) , which offers a business process services, is a testament to the same.

Per the deal, Conduent’s Maven has been made available on AWS in a bid to manage the coronavirus pandemic in an efficient way.

Notably, Maven is a disease surveillance and outbreak management platform that helps in automating the integration of reports from patients and test results from labs.

Further, the platform is currently being utilized in the United States to curb the spread of COVID-19 by tracking, managing and reporting the confirmed cases. Further, it engages patients with high exposure to this contagious virus.

At present, tracing of exponentially increasing number of COVID-19 infected people is vital. AWS is striving to cater to this crucial need with the help of Maven whose COVID-19 module aids in reaching out to people who have come into contact with the infected and validating their symptoms digitally.

With this, Amazon aims at helping the public health agencies and organizations to conduct contact tracing seamlessly and accelerate the implementation of their response protocols to restrict the spread of this deadly virus further.

We note that Maven integration remains one of the noteworthy initiatives of Amazon in the community effort to combat the coronavirus pandemic. This is likely to aid the stock in gaining further momentum across investors.

Coming to the price performance, Amazon has returned 10.3% over a year, outperforming the industry’s rally of 2%.

Amazon’s Strong Anti-COVID-19 Initiatives

The latest initiative highlights Amazon’s deepening focus and concern with regard to highly contagious COVID-19. Moreover, its innovative technologies and robust pick-up and delivery strength are playing a vital role in helping the public health organizations in controlling the spread of coronavirus.

In a bid to offer scalability, security and agility, AWS Application Load Balancer, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon Relational Database Services are being utilized by Maven for management challenging scenario.

Apart from this, AWS has recently announced a new program namely AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative. Notably, the company is investing $20 million in it and aims at accelerating the development of a faster COVID-19 testing.

Further, Amazon has joined forces with a research program namely Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network (SCAN) to deliver and pick up COVID-19 test kits in Seattle, which will be carried out by Amazon Care. With this initiative, the company is focusing on people who are feeling sick and asymptomatic.

On retail front, the company’s Whole Foods stores will dedicate an entire hour to serve only senior citizens in an attempt to keep them safe from crowd as they are more susceptible to COVID-19 infection.

Amazon Ups Initiative in the Pack

Amazon’s latest endeavor provides it a slight edge over other companies including Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) , Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), which are also taking strong measures to help government and people efficiently manage this pandemic situation.

Notably, Alphabet’s health-care division called Verily has recently launched COVID-19 screening and testing website under Project Baseline. This particular site offers screening and potential free testing of coronavirus. The website requires users to begin with the eligibility questionnaire.

Further, Google recently launched a website in the United States, which offers information related to coronavirus symptoms, treatment and preventive remedies from the World Health Organization.

Meanwhile, Baidu has allowed access to its Linearfold algorithm to the scientific and medical teams for the secondary structure prediction of Covid-19 RNA sequence.

Microsoft has unveiled a COVID-19 tracker tool that offers up-to-date infection statistics of each affected country on the tracker. Moreover, the tool provides access to various coronavirus related articles and other information.

We note that competition is intensifying among the tech companies in managing and preventing the spread of the virus on the back of their robust technologies.

Nevertheless, Amazon’s strengthening initiatives to fight against coronavirus are likely to keep it ahead of the pack.

Currently, Amazon carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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