The Official Coronavirus Discussion

[EBK]

The official announcement yesterday is that schools are not yet closing in my city, but students will be sent home with "remote learning packets" to be used if the need arises.  They seem to be waiting for evidence of community spread, and I will defer to their wisdom.

[matmosphere]

Oh, and thank you for bringing the discussion back Brian. It's nice to have some cool heads and some experts handy.

[madbean]

Because I am not retiring anytime soon, I am actually quite selfishly happy the markets are doing poorly.  I keep pumping the same money into my funds, but I'm getting more shares for my dollars.  Had to explain this to someone just yesterday.  Yes, it could be difficult for someone who is drawing money out of an account, but if you are still paying in, it is a good situation to be in.

My wife and I had a lengthy discussion about this last night. In the last two weeks our retirement has lost almost 25% of its value and that will likely continue. On one hand, yeah, it will come back eventually and we have a lot of safe stock. OTOH, I was hoping to get her to retire within 7 years and now that may no longer be a possibility (if we keep our original goal). But, I'm trying to keep a healthy perspective. A recession was already impending (sorry, "correction"!) and this is just both the firing pin and the thing that is compounding the severity, I guess.

Still, there are more important concerns for the immediate future like safety and trying to maintain some normalcy in the coming weeks. Hey, there's always the chance this thing flips to a zombie apocalypse and at least I can look forward to being woefully unprepared for that.

[benny_profane]

The official announcement yesterday is that schools are not yet closing in my city, but students will be sent home with "remote learning packets" to be used if the need arises.  They seem to be waiting for evidence of community spread, and I will defer to their wisdom.

I don't want this to come across as alarmist, but the lack of confirmed cases as this point should not be taken as evidence of the absence of community-spread viral transmission.

The issue with closing schools (particularly primary/secondary levels) is much more difficult than canceling sporting events. First, that puts an onerous burden on guardians to handle childcare (impacting their work, etc.). Second, those ages groups present an epidemiologic issue: young demographics are not necessarily exhibiting symptoms of the virus (at least to the extent that older demographics are), so they can be asymptomatic carriers. If they are in school, they are contained to a degree; if schools are canceled, that becomes a community risk.

Most of these contact interventions are being issued on the assumption that community spread is more or less in every metro area. The proposed surveillance studies in major US metro areas haven't happened due to the inability to issue enough tests to achieve coverage. Unfortunately, we're no longer in a containment stage; we can mitigate the strain on health systems and attempt to limit the impact of the virus, though.

Public health in outbreaks/epidemics is always tough. There's always a concern of balancing public information but avoiding panic. Also, ensuring the proportionality of the response is an incredibly difficult task. If the response is inadequate, public health systems and leadership failed to address a threat; if it works or the threat proves to be less serious than that for which the response was designed, they failed by going too far. Both can damage public trust in public health systems. In the moment, no one has the benefit of hindsight. Also, the best outcome(s) with public health interventions and programs are seen by most people as just everyday life. It is difficult to express in times like this that measures are constantly running behind the scenes to ensure health and safety for populations.

In the US, state/local municipalities seem to taking ownership of the response due to the lack of adequate federal leadership. Those responses are working out to be rather coordinated, so hopefully that helps. Also, national organizations (e.g., sports and entertainment) are canceling events and other scheduling in a way that also creates a national consistency. I sincerely hope that we start to see more active response measures soon in addition to passive ones.

[jimilee]

I'm getting increasingly annoyed by a guy at work, who honestly does not seem to understand how the stock market works, and that your "money" in the stock market, is tied to the value of the shares you own. If the shares you own go down in value, you have less "money", and if they go up, so does your "money". I'm using quote marks because it is not actual, hard, spendable money until you sell those shares, at which point the money is tied to a set price at one point in time.

If I had spare money, I'd be buying shares in all the long term companies I can that have been dropping. Every single freakin' time an emergency happens, people sellsellsell, and what do you know, after things recover, the share prices go back up... weird, it's like stock prices fluctuate, who knew?

I know, these people are making my "money" go down. We just have to wait it out.


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[Bret608]

The two-year college where I work pretty much followed suit with UW and will extend our spring break by an additional week. Faculty and staff including me will still report to work. However, unlike UW our leadership has not yet said whether the remainder of the semester will happen through online instruction or students will physically come back.

Our public K-12 schools have spring break at the end of this month, but no additional closures have been announced just yet. That said, any large events or field trips are already cancelled. My daughters kind of feel in limbo, especially with things like AP tests coming up.

[madbean]

Hey, there is a new positive side. If we are all "working" at home then we can bullshit all day and build pedals, right?

Maybe we need a COVID-19 group build thread. For funsies.

[alanp]

Hey, there is a new positive side. If we are all "working" at home then we can bullshit all day and build pedals, right?

Ha, I'd like to see them try and run a slaughterhouse with everyone working from home.

I sometimes think that journalists think that everyone, or at least 97% of everyone, work a desk job.

[SirEgno]

Hey, there is a new positive side. If we are all "working" at home then we can bullshit all day and build pedals, right?

yes, just today my last MBP order was delivered!
at the office...

[jimilee]

Hey, there is a new positive side. If we are all "working" at home then we can bullshit all day and build pedals, right?

Maybe we need a COVID-19 group build thread. For funsies.

Oh yeah, I'm totally ready for that. Other than building supplies, I haven't bought anything in the last 3 weeks.


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[dan.schumaker]

Just got the word from my work, next two weeks I'm working from home, only coming in one day a week...

[jjjimi84]

I just checked my work e-mail and all non-essential, non-transportation related jobs may work from home. Amid everything that has been a really tough 8 months for my company and industry as a whole this was a shock. We don't even stop for Christmas, so this will be interesting to see what happens with the union side of things. I guess I am lucky that I have been deemed essential which is nice......I think.

My wife has a little cold going on and was sent home from work, she said everyone stared at her like she was about spray blood on them.

[m-Kresol]

more safety measures were announced in Austria and fake news about it was spread like wildfire before hand, leading people to go nuts. the actual measures take by the governement are not too bad and make total sense. When I came home from work today at 4pm I went shopping as usual to get some stuff for the weekend and next week and there was - expectedly - no pasta, rice, canned stuff anymore, but also no milk, eggs, vegetables. and toilet paper really seems to be the most important part of daily life for people...

anyhow, I'm sure we will get through this even if some things will take more effort to do or will just have to wait. The thing that annoys me most atm is that the canteen closed and that my climbing gym will most likely not be an option in the coming weeks.

Hey, there is a new positive side. If we are all "working" at home then we can bullshit all day and build pedals, right?

if my company finally decides to do home office, I will run out of work quite fast actually as I rely on my lab work and data coming out of it. After doing some CAD, data analysis and project planning, I fully intend to finally finish that darn HiFi amp that has been mostly sitting around since 2017.

[Caedarn]

Recent events have inspired me to change my avatar...
<<<

[EBK]

Remember when I said the plan was not to close schools in my city?

The plan now is to close schools in my city. 

Closed for a month, starting Monday.  My work has expanded telework options in a somewhat ambiguous way, so I will have to work out how that will go exactly.