A colleague of mine came back from Milan just a few days ago and he was just sitting there in the office, as nothing was/is happening. Only after some us got pissed, HR anonymously sent him an email to ask him to work from home for the next weeks. Same for anyone having a cold or any symptom, or flying back from one of the countries currently facing the coronavirus

People need to be told what to do, otherwise they don't think they are harming others. This behavior is even more common among young people without family. The moment you have a child, you start to look at all these potential threats and react accordingly.

People need permission from authority before they stop showing up to work.

"Hey [manager], given my recent trip to Italy, I'm going to WFH for [some period of time], make sure I'm healthy..."

"OK."

I assume your company has travel policies in effect? I mostly work from home anyway but, if I were in an office and traveled to a country that wasn't on my company's self-quarantine list, I'd assume I was expected to go into the office. If your company didn't have Italy on their list (and it maybe should be) that's for your travel department to make decisions on not an individual traveler.

Italy wasn't yet on the list, indeed. However, nobody prevents you from sharing it and saying "I am going for a check up". His manager wouldn't have minded at all.

Also, sometimes it's just reading the f news. It's a global thing, everybody want it or not knows about this virus.

Fair enough, I would probably have asked my manager (who probably would have known I was in Italy). We do have APAC travel policies in place. Not sure about other countries. But if I were in the situation where I was coming back from Italy I would probably have asked (as an exempt employee who could work from home anyway) if I should self-quarantine out of caution. I would probably not have gone for a check-up if I felt fine. It's up to HR/Travel of course but things are moving quickly.

According to Wikipedia, Milan airport has 28m passengers per year, about 79k per day.

While northern Italy has highest concentration of cases outside Asia, the likelihood that any individual passenger is infected is very low and the likelihood that /one of them/ is infected, and had already traveled on, is very high.

I think that if we truly want to keep people safe, we should stop making assumptions about how low the risk is, etc. All it takes is that you are in that low percent and that's it. I am not saying we should start panicking, however, leveraging modern tools (remote work) whenever possible is key to reduce the risk even further. It's just prevention.

If your coworker is a danger to you then your whole office was exposed and should be quarantined also.

Of course they need to tell them. These employees have families of young children and elderly parents/grandparents.

The office is huge and travel to north Italy is extremely common.

Typically (at least under US law) you cannot legally discuss someone’s health issues without their consent. Not saying it’s a factor here but there is a good reason for these protections to exist that may be slightly less advantageous in the case of an epidemic.

There's probably a guy who broke his leg and stayed at home wondering, why everyone at the office hates him.