Boris Johnson calls on tech companies for help to fight coronavirus

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has urged the UK’s leading tech companies and artificial intelligence researchers to help in the fight against the coronavirus.

In a meeting on Wednesday night with executives from around 30 different companies from the UK, the Prime Minister called for what has been named “a digital Dunkirk”. He said that tech firms should provide relevant resources to contain the outbreak.

According to an attendee who spoke to The Guardian, each company was asked to volunteer resources: "They went around the table, laid out what they were dealing with, what they were looking for, and asked: 'What do you have to offer?'."

Uber offered to provide free taxi rides for medical staff, while the likes of food delivery service Deliveroo offered to feed hospital workers.

Amazon said it would provide its video conferencing tools and other aspects of its cloud computing services to the health service for free.

The main focus of the meeting was on tech companies which had the ability to reach millions of citizens and help them access the right information through their platforms across in a way that traditional media could not.

The call for help followed the UK government's announcement of a 2% Digital Sales Tax that was set to go into effect on 1 April.

The tax, which was unveiled in the new budget earlier in the same week, would be levied on search engines, social media services and online marketplaces which 'derive value from UK users'.

It was targeted at companies including Google, Amazon and Facebook and was expected to bring in an extra £65m of fiscal revenues in 2020.