https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-pandemic-robots/

We humans weren’t ready for the novel coronavirus—and neither were the machines. The pandemic has come at an awkward time, technologically speaking. Ever more sophisticated robots and AI are augmenting human workers, rather than replacing them entirely. While it would be nice if we could protect doctors and nurses by turning more tasks over to robots, medicine is particularly hard to automate. It’s fundamentally human, requiring fine motor skills, compassion, and quick life-and-death decision-making we wouldn’t want to leave to machines.

But this pandemic is a unique opportunity to jumpstart the development of medical robot technologies, argue a dozen roboticists in an editorial out today in the journal Science Robotics.