> When you're dealing with exponential growth, the time to act is when it feels too early.
If you’re in the United States, where testing has been infuriatingly limited, the fact of the matter is you have no idea what the spread in your community is. The numbers aren’t low because nobody has the virus, they’re low because nobody has been tested. If we did actual testing, they might come in low or they might come in high, who knows. As it stands, nobody has any real idea just how bad the spread is here. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Given that, the safest course is to assume the spread is high, and act accordingly.
This is the likely reason for such a high number of celebrities in the news testing positive -- it's already everywhere; they are the only ones getting tested.
[1] https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/ohio-de...
It is hindsight, but expontial grow means that despite not testing we didn't have a problem two months ago. Maybe we should have been in lock down a week ago, but anything sooner would be overreacting and not necessary. Most of the US is on lock down now which seems like about the right time to start. No more than a week sooner can be seriously argued.
Most people who get sick think its a normal cold. They stay at home for a week, and when they can barely breath anymore, they finally enter the emergency room.
If you make everyone work from home, you'll end up with a temporary loss in productivity (thus money, which again comes and goes). Even if one of them does get infected anyway, they won't spread it to the rest of the team. The relationship with your employees is preserved because you're not forcing them to take risks.
If you force them to work in the office, it's just a matter of time before all of them get sick. The productivity will drop to zero, yet you'll still have to pay them sick leave and their opinion of your company will be tainted forever because you and your greed are the reason they are now all sick.
Not to mention, this is all assuming your employees are relatively young and have no pre-existing medical conditions that would make the infection life-threatening. Otherwise, we're not just talking about relationships but actual lives being put at risk.
The problem is twice as hard every time the number of cases doubles. If you don't want to work from home for many months, start working from home now.
Working from home isn't as bad as it seems. Modern collaboration tools are great. Our research group and wider laboratory have gotten into the swing of things within a week.
Are you sure? I think it's the other way around. Nothing I can do (apart from staying completely indoors, which I can't because I don't have enough supplies (food, etc.) to last for months) can prevent me from being infected (eventually). Luckily I'm in the low-risk group (young); I advised my parents the latter (hopefully they're following my advice).
Obviously there are a lot of people required to get groceries to you, but if you are not in medicine or groceries stay home. That is a large supply chain but sti tiny and even those people are not going to other functions which reduces risk
Businesses in Washington State have shuttered or gone to work from home over the last 3 weeks, had most businesses made this change earlier(eg: at the beginning of those 3 weeks) we would see much less spread and quicker easing of restrictions.
Is Alberta doing widespread Covid-19 testing yet? We had cases of teens with no international travel getting Covid-19 in February according to the Seattle Flu Study, there are likely more cases in Edmonton that exhibit minimal symptoms currently.
Seattle Flu Study: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...
I wouldn't say that; reports coming out of Seattle look pretty grim.
"...Reports from the Seattle area, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, indicate that some of the city’s hospitals are nearly overwhelmed. One hospital’s note to staff, shared with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, says the “local COVID-19 trajectory is likely to be similar to that of Northern Italy.” The hospital is down to a four-day supply of gloves..."
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/14/coronavirus-hospital-wor...
When the first case was detected, the office was closed and work from home became mandatory at least through the beginning of April.
The right thing to do from every perspective is close your office. If any of your employees is has a risk factor and dies of covid you will spend the rest of your life wondering if you could have prevented it - trust me I know.
[1] https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...
[2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/17YyCmjb2Z2QwMiRR...
Thinking of the cancelation of the NBA season an how Mark Cuban's response was thar it seemed "crazy" and "surreal". Now, it seems obvious and late.
Don't wait - tell everyone now to work from home, prep like mad, and isolate hard.
The damage will be far less than anyone getting it. You'll also get down that critical learning curve far faster.
Congratulations, Good luck, stay well.
People will understand disruptions due to Covid. It's not business as normal. Google told the entire north american staff to stay home. Be glad that you can still all be relatively productive while remote, and enjoy your runway while you don't have to pay for the lights in your offices.
Exponential growth means employee expectations will go from "completely safe at work" to "don't leave home except for food" pretty fast. You don't want to be that guy who asks employees to violate the (possibly government imposed) lock down to keep the lights on.
As a co-founder/CEO of any company your first responsibility is for the health of your employees and those that depend on them. If you play games with that then you should not be in a leadership position to begin with.
Here is the full text of our email, feel free to C&P:
As you are no doubt aware there is a virus on the loose
and it isn't pretty.
The better ways to acquire it are to spend some time with
a bunch of total strangers in close confinement sharing
each others air. This includes all forms of public
transport.
These are exceptional (hopefully!) circumstances and I want to
make several things perfectly clear:
(1) You do not have to travel if you do not want to,
there is no obligation to participate in any of
the jobs in the next coming weeks/months and
not participating will *never* be held against
you in any form. You may opt to participate
remotely instead of on-site without financial
penalty.
(2) If you do travel, please take all precautions
possible to avoid getting ill, I'd really hate
myself if it turns out that we caused people to
fall ill (or worse) on account of the work we do,
your health comes first, always.
(3) There is a lot of misinformation going around,
some of it - unfortunately - spread by authorities
that really should know better. The current figures
are - to the best of my knowledge - 2-3% mortality
rate and an R0 (the rate at which the disease
spreads) of about 3. This makes this virus between
20 and 90 times more dangerous than the seasonal
flu, which has a .1% mortality rate and an R0 of
about 0.7-1.
(4) If you decide to participate but not in person
then we should enable video conferencing to do some
of the interviews, these should focus on the people
lower in the food chain at the companies we look at.
Please let us know your preference in time, talk to
Marco to ensure he is aware of what will happen so
that we can communicate it to the customers and the
targets alike.
(5) The virus outbreak is still in its early days, the
situation is *extremely* fluid, and you should make
an effort to stay informed and adapt your plans
immediately if you feel the situation warrants it.
Please do communicate any such changes.
Best regards, and please stay safe,
You should have implemented WoH weeks ago. Thinking whether or not doing it now is a disservice to all humanity and a testament of why we have reached this situation as a society.
These people certainly have more exposure to other humans than most people do. But not so much that they should be making up whole percentages of the infected population. I believe they are just well connected and wealthy and it's easier for them to get tested.
You can't have confirmed cases without testing. I've come to believe these confirmed case numbers may be having a negative effect on our understanding of the situation.
One side: it's much more widespread than we realize.
Other side: it's much more mild and less fatal than we first thought.
That's all you need tk knoe.
The first tested case. Given the delay between onset and diagnosis, + amounts of tests being actually done, + the couple days you mention, you may as well have over a thousand infected people in your city now, and you won't know until a) more tests start being made, or b) some of these people will start getting hospitalized in the next couple of days.
Do you not trust them the employees to work their part on their own?
Move your employees to WFH now.
Ensure you all have the infrastructure at home to support being as effective as possible.
If other companies did nothing, then you would do nothing.
Interesting. Entrepreneurs are usually way more forward thinking.
We are at a critical point where we have just closed our seed round this past week. We have both put so much energy and time into this moment and we were ready to work harder and focus on scaling and growth.
Of course, the more tragic situation around us makes our issues seem small. I think we will likely announce to our team to work from home starting Monday. How surreal.