Tech's Early Work-From-Home Mandates Helped California, Washington Flatten Curve (cnbc.com) 89
gollum123 shares a report from CNBC: On March 19, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a statewide shelter-in-place order to stem the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus. Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee followed four days later. While they were moving aggressively relative to the rest of the country, the top employers in their states were weeks ahead of them. Twitter was the first to move, strongly encouraging its nearly 5,000 employees to work from home on March 1, because of the rapidly spreading coronavirus, and making the order mandatory on March 11. Amazon told its roughly 50,000 Seattle-area employees on March 4 to work from home if they could. Facebook informed its Bay Area workers the next day that it was 'strongly recommending' they work remotely. Over the next week, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce mostly emptied out, keeping about 200,000 people away from the office. Tech has taken a beating in recent years as critics have attacked the industry's growing power, privacy abuses and executive malfeasance. But the industry's early social-distancing moves are a big reason that California and Washington, two early U.S. hotspots of virus outbreak, have bent the infection curve while other states are deep in crisis.
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You DO of course realize that the virus doesn't magically materialize in specific nationalities, Chinese and Italian people included? Like anything in reality it moves from point A to point B in an observable and trackable way.
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Now that you mention it... on my last two trips to China, both return flights were from Beijing to Boston, direct.
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Re: My pet theory: (Score:2)
However population density and cultural hygiene practices modify the rate of the spread. One of the reasons why Italy, France, and Spain were hard hit while Germany wasn't is because things like kissing those you meet on the cheeks as a greeting is virtually nonexistent in Germany but relatively common in the other 3.
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Re:My pet theory: (Score:5, Interesting)
At this time, the only real statistic is the number of deaths.
Even that isn't a good metric because like those infected, it only counts known instances of death. There are plenty more people dying from covid-19 who can't and won't be tested because there aren't enough kits. Coroners have suspicions people died from covid-19 [cnn.com], but can't test. People die at home from it. Homeless die from it.
We had ~4,600 people die yesterday from covid-19 in the U.S., and those are just the ones we know about.
Re:My pet theory: (Score:4)
Not remotely similar. Deaths, especially in the US are heavily documented. Even if they couldn't tell it was COVID-19, they aren't going to classified under "homicide" or "unknown" or etc. It's still going to be in a similar category as "severe flu". Next year, the COVID-19 category will probably disappear all together.
Infection rate is a totally different beast due to a good dose of asymptomatic carriers and long contagion period without symptoms. These folks lower, but float the infection rate and raise the population yet to be infected. So they artificially make the pandemic seem a little more uncontrolled than it is. But to address the GPs post, neither metric is "useless"; like most metrics. Its just means its scope of utilization is a little different.
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Of course the COVID-19 category will disappear next year. It's going to be replaced by the new and improved COVID-21!
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Of course the COVID-19 category will disappear next year. It's going to be replaced by the new and improved COVID-21!
Now, with more coronas!
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"Died at home from natural causes." Autopsies or biopsies of the deceased are relatively rare. Most of the time you don't know the causes of home deaths unless there was some hospitalization prior.
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At this time, the only real statistic is the number of deaths.
Even that isn't a good metric because like those infected, it only counts known instances of death. There are plenty more people dying from covid-19 who can't and won't be tested because there aren't enough kits. Coroners have suspicions people died from covid-19 [cnn.com], but can't test. People die at home from it. Homeless die from it.
We had ~4,600 people die yesterday from covid-19 in the U.S., and those are just the ones we know about.
Deaths are also being overstated, though, since it seems that "dying with, or even possibly with, COVID-19" is being counted the same as "dying from COVID-19".
We know that infections are being under counted, heavily. We don't know that deaths are, because we have thumbs on the scale in both directions.
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Even that isn't a good metric because like those infected, it only counts known instances of death. There are plenty more people dying from covid-19 who can't and won't be tested because there aren't enough kits.
My state is counting anyone who dies and had symptoms as a COVID-19 death. I suspect the numbers are actually inflated, since people die all the time from respiratory issues. Unfortunately.
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If you need a good metric, correlate the death rate versus population from the same period and area towards today. The raise will be a reasonable estimation of the numbers of deaths for corona. Not to mention, this is not perfect.
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At this time, the only real statistic is the number of deaths.
Even that isn't a good metric because like those infected, it only counts known instances of death.
Even though the death curve is only a lower bound on the number of true Covid-19 related deaths, the curve is still useful to show the progression of deaths. That is, even if the death curve itself is a poor estimator of the truth death curve, the derivative of the official death curve may do a fairly good job of tracking the derivative of the true death curve. This assumes that the criteria for official deaths remains constant and that the growth in uncounted deaths is similar (or that the uncounted deat
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We're talking about number of cases, not number of deaths. Covid-19 can be caught and spread by anyone no matter their health status.
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I really like to eat pasta, does that mean I'm at risk of being Italian? I don't want to catch COVID-19!
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Hey that reminds me. What do you can an Italian with one arm shorter than the other? A speech impediment!
Italians hate Italian Americans (Score:3)
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Do you know any Italian Immigrants? They hate Italian Americans,
Woah that's a little too extreme.
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Re:Working from home isn't that bad (Score:4, Insightful)
You stated the problem yourself:
"And I am saying that despite (lately) being some kind of workaholic."
The separation of work and life gets pretty blurry when working from home.
For people still working, this will be become a more common problem/complaint in the next few weeks/months.
As someone working from home for the last 4.5 years, I've gotten a decent handle on it, but it took awhile to get my personal life and work like to understand and respect the separation.
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Yup, I found that there is no such thing as "work" and "home". It all just jumbles together. I been working from home for the last 10 years. 5 years ago, we still went in 3x a week. It was mostly 6 hours wasted every week getting to and from the office. But 4 years ago, only 1/20th of our department is in our office/state/country; so we go in 2x a month so the building doesn't "forget" our badge.
My calendar has all kinds of Out of Office events for kids/personal/doctor appointments. Basically people/p
There can be some blur but overall massive win (Score:1)
The separation of work and life gets pretty blurry when working from home.
I'm not really sure that is a problem though. Maybe you have some great idea at 10pm, you can spend a half hour on to get something done.
Meanwhile during the day you can take a half hour just to go run and do errands.
So the line can be blurry while still being beneficial to all.
Any blurring towards doing what would be considered extra work, is more than offset by the time saved commuting...
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I personally have found that it's helpful to impose some kind of boundary between working at home and living the rest of my life. I was fortunate enough to get a work provided computer, and I do my best to use it only for work and my personal computer for personal stuff. I try to give myself a schedule for when I start and stop work each day that's similar to what I would have used had I been commuting. Doing all that stuff really helps to balance between home life and work.
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Not only is working from home not that bad, it's fan-fucking-tastic. I've described many of the benefits in other posts, but there's one I left off: I get to see a LOT more of my kids growing up. Going into the office is about as anti-family-friendly as you can get in a civilized world. Instead of just seeing video snapshots of my kids' milestones on Facebook during the day, I get a front-row seat to it!
I also really don't understand people complaining about having problems separating their work life fro
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you forgot one of the best features of working remote... doing the daily stand-up sitting down.
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First retard of the thread spotted. Didn't take long.
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Flu is affected by mass stay-at-home policies even more than CV, so yeah, it should be down. Same to some degree with pneumonia, which is mostly a secondary infection after you get something else. Also, flu season in Africa typically runs from August to March, give or take. We're outside that window, so unless it is a particularly bad flu season, you would expect that number to be pretty low anyway.
Nomenclature (Score:5, Interesting)
Physical distancing being called 'Social Distancing' doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
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It probably comes from the idea that you don't want "social gatherings". I see physical distancing as a sub-category of it. You can shop but keep your distance. But the social aspect is that you shouldn't go to or even plan an event even if everyone will keep 6 feet of distance and wear face masks.
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Social distancing used to mean "keeping at least two meters from other people" - a very useful descriptive term. Since then, however, the term has annoyingly and confusingly being coopted into also meaning "lockdown".
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Social distancing used to mean "keeping at least two meters from other people" - a very useful descriptive term. Since then, however, the term has annoyingly and confusingly being coopted into also meaning "lockdown".
Indeed, it would seem that many rights considered sacred are being easily swept aside in peoples panic. Whilst we're talking about that the whole "flattening the curve" argument concentrating on the Y axis seems to avoid the reality that an extended X axis allows time for the virus to mutate before there is herd immunity established in the younger population.
Such opportunity for unscrupulous politicians where there is crisis to attack the underpinnings of democratic society.
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You cannot expect to be physically distanced between everyone. Your family/roommates you will still be physically close too. If you have to go to the Doctor, they will need to be close to you. We cannot expect to stay 2 meters away from all people at all times.
In America, our social distance is less than 1 meter when people enter our personal bubble we feel anxious. When you are at the grocery store and there is someone looking at a product close by and you want to grab a product, you will normally get
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I don't think folk should tell me how I should speak, but that's just me.
With regard to your objections to the pronunciation that other people are using, paired with your strict ideal of how one should speak being related to education... I must ask, were you schooled in, and have you ever left, your basement?
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"The most annoying moments of the daily briefings is when Dr. Birx says "Pennsah-vania""
Dr. Birx is *from* Pennsylvania. That's how it's said where she is from. (I am from about as far west of Harrisburg as her hometown is east, and I still say it about the same way.)
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They really mean physical distancing. Lately I've been getting more phone calls and social media messages from people I never talk to otherwise.
They won’t admit it at the office. (Score:3, Interesting)
The bosses at the office have a hard time explaining that we got more work done from home.
It shows clearly in the number of cases/problems/requests solved in the last month.
More cases were closed, the queue shrunk and there were a faster response time.
Their official stance were that they wanted to see us sitting at the desk when they walked by once or twice a day, no going into a meeting room or finding a quiet place to write the documentation/ presentation/ spreadsheets. No, you had to sit in the huge open office with all the shouting and impromptu meetings going on around you
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It is largely psychological. A noisy office full of movement feels like there is a lot of work going on. Vs. a quiet one with just some tapping away.
Extraverts like getting promoted to manager jobs, and they like to see people talking and interacting, as it is their experience that is how things get done. While a lot of the workers are introverts who can have that whole conversation in their head then just get back to work.
This is also why some people like the loud rumble of a car, they feel that the sou
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I'm an interovert, and a manager. What a disaster. I hear I am likely to be promoted back to non-manager and am crossing my fingers.
And I like my plugin-hybrid. I can step on the pedal to merge onto the freeway and feel the acceleration with only a quiet hum!
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The bosses at the office have a hard time explaining that we got more work done from home.
Because most bosses are unable to wrap it around their head that many bosses make their team less productive.
Most people, having worked their job for years, would function very well without any supervision at all, and many bosses simply cannot accept that, even, as you said, all the numbers proved it.
From my experience, I would say
~20% of bosses contribute positively to their team's productivity,
~30% or so are neutral,
~25% bosses are detrimental to their teams productivity,
while the remaining ~25% are very
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A lot of times the job of the boss is not to increase productivity, but instead to keep track of what's going on across the team, help out with project planning and estimates, spread out the work, attend meetings so the workers don't have to. Ie, stay out of the way and keep the path clear.
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A lot of times the job of the boss is not to increase productivity, but instead to keep track of what's going on across the team, help out with project planning and estimates, spread out the work, attend meetings so the workers don't have to. Ie, stay out of the way and keep the path clear.
Bosses who think like that are the first half that either contribute positively or neutral.
The other half focus on looking good and getting promoted.
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Maybe you can have more online meetings. That will shrink the difference.
isn't it just a drop in the bucket? (Score:2)
maybe instead in these areas people stay in their burbs and don't go sit in the starbucks all day long.
because majority of the employees who work in the area aren't workers for these companies.
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My small California company was anticipating and preparing for 100% WFH in early January. We didn’t need to do much, just a few extra laptops purchased, and a policy document on taking monitors and keyboards home, along with documenting how to use a soft phone with our Asterisk system. We went 50% WFH on March 3, 75% March 14, and 100% on the 17th.
Our VPN is not as solid as we want; it kicks people off un-gracefully after 8 hours connection time, and our ISP isn’t as robust as what we need. We
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I commute through Cisco-land. Always a major backup at Cisco Way. Then it cleared up. I heard they had a couple of confirmed cases there. A week later the county was shutting things down.
We had the "strongly encouraged" to stay home message, but I was in the office where the equipment was; until I noticed the retroactive part of "stay home if you have traveled through Seattle in the last 14 days". When that was up I came in on Monday and the rumor was that the county shutdown was coming, so I spent th
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There's a lot of supercommuters in the California tech industry -- people who drive long distances to access cheaper property prices. These would complicate trying to control the virus by vectoring the virus between locations.
The same phenomenon in NYC is how the virus got spread regionally to upstate, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Long Island, currently some of the hardest-hit areas of the country.
Furlogs? (Score:4, Informative)
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Where I work, they have a "use it or lose it" policy when it comes to PTO. The fiscal year ends at the end of June, which kinda sucks because you can't exactly go on a "real" vacation right now.
I'd imagine that I'm going to spend the last two weeks of June bored out of my mind in quarantine when I'm basically forced to take my vacation then.
Re:Furlogs? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well... I haven't had a "real" vacation where I left the house and did something out of state since Thanksgiving at this point. Because of that, I'm pretty stressed out and need a break. Sitting at home and watching my kid watch YouTube videos while my wife watches the Food Network isn't going to cut it. I need to travel and see some new scenery!
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I'd imagine that I'm going to spend the last two weeks of June bored out of my mind in quarantine when I'm basically forced to take my vacation then.
Really? I find myself somewhat jealous of people who suddenly have a ton of time to work on their hobbies, learn musical instruments, etc. Then I mentally slap myself to remind myself that I am very grateful that I can continue working and getting paid without interruption, in a time where so many people are out of work and worried about paying their bills. But I have been thinking about taking a couple of weeks off and spending my days out in the workshop building stuff for fun. I think that would be v
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I can't start a new hobby or do half of my current hobbies because we can't go anywhere. We can't go to any of the natural outdoor places even. So this leaves me sitting on the computer more time then even I feel comfortable with.
I'm actually super fortunate I get to go to work as an essential (haha okay I guess we can call me that) worker because it gets me out of the house.
I haven't had a vacation since last August. I planned to take two weeks this June and go camping at two different national parks, but
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Happened to my sister; mostly corporate opportunism, but some legit concern for financials and being more nimble if things persist.
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I haven't heard anything about mandatory, but just yesterday, my manager sent an odd email suggesting that everyone had been working hard non-stop for the last month, (since we all went WFH,) and should consider taking some vacation.
I didn't think anything of it at the time, but since you mentioned it...
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We've got an off-the-books vacation plan. Take however much you want as long as the boss approves, and it's mixed in with sick leave. Mostly it's an accounting bonus (vacation doesn't show up on the books). The drawback is that you're not being pushed to take vacation. Which means for me if I want to wait until a slowdown between projects for a vacation that it will never come; if I say "I want two weeks off now", I'll be told that it screws up the schedule and this is a key time, but I'm not the sort to
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Not surprising (Score:1)
Why not do this regardless of COVID-19? (Score:1)
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Check the pollution drop. They should have been doing this for years now.
See above about bosses. Bosses *like* having people physically buzzing around them.
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It depends. If someone can easiy work at home then that's useful. Do it. Not everyone can though. If you just need a monitor to do the job, then working from home should be ok. It would be nice if the company kicked in a stipend to help you with your internet or upgrade your phone.
I find it highly annoying to work from home. I had to take over the dining room table because my home office doesn't have the space (it's got my personal computer, no room for a laptop or equipment). Now if I had plenty of a
No love for Oregon?! (Score:2)
California has a 70% higher infection rate (700/M vs 412/M). Washington is more than triple (1400/M). Yet Oregon gets skipped over in success stories. We are doing better than virtually every other state in flatting the curve.
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Without testing, infection rate isn't a viable statistic. Nobody knows the infection rate if you only test people with symptoms.
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Don't be smug - most don't have this luxury (Score:3)
I love being able to work from home, but I can see outside my bubble and know that while my company is doing really well and for me this is just missing out on commuting to the office, most people are really suffering economically. What especially infuriates me is the daily rants on nextdoor.com by the wealthy, housewives, and retired complaining about everyone who isn't social distancing up to their standards, presumably because they're going to work and worried about making ends meet, not an illness that has a
So I am of two minds. If you have an economy based on people using computers, yes, objectively, you're well prepared for this. That is an in disputable fact. However, it's just ugly to gloat and pat yourself on the back for helping flatten the curve. The majority of those people who aren't doing their part, can't. Their jobs require a physical presence. I feel ambivalent about celebrating the obvious. I am not in this situation because I planned for a pandemic. I am in this situation because I got lucky...what I love to do is very pandemic friendly and by chance, I picked an employer whose stock went up during the pandemic. Like most who prosper, my pandemic success is mostly luck. This post just comes off a bit tone-deaf to and elitist to me.
California is doing remarkably well (Score:2)
1403 - New York City (11477 deaths, population of 8.175 million) [wikipedia.org]
1149 - San Marino
853 - New York state
453 - Andorra
445 - Belgium
417 - Spain
367 - Italy
275 - France
215 - UK
202 - Netherlands
153 - Switzerland
139- Sweden
115 - Channel Islands
110 - Luxembourg
107 - US
98 - Ireland
64 - Portugul
60 - U.S. excluding New York (18635 deaths in 308.8 mil
And their contractors? (Score:1)