Coinbase Coronavirus Planning

Disclaimer: I think there's only a 5-8% chance of it becoming globally-widespread, which is still a lot given its enormous potential to kill children and the elderly by the tens of millions globally.

The main issue in containment is seemingly healthy-but-contagious carriers are unwittingly spreading the virus far-and-wide. In China and other places, temperature monitoring checking-points are laughably-ineffective safety theater that don't address the problem with a sufficient quarantine to close-off certain regions sufficiently. It's this lack of quarantining travelers and infected areas until they exceed the incubation interval to a sufficiently narrow confidence interval that is playing a dangerous game of brinksmanship with the world because of greed.

In this specific instance of Coinbase's plan, if 100 people are already infected near their offices, that's much too late because surveillance of this pathogen is always reactive based on presentations to hospitals, not proactive anticipation of infections that exist at the current time. It would be wiser to go to fully-remote working as soon as there are more than 4000 cases in any one state or most than 2000 cases in two states because California is the most populous state and SF is one of the most likely destinations apart from NYC.

A personal preparation Public Service Announcement™ would look like this:

0. Be ready to self-quarantine before it is widespread, since this particular pathogen is easy to under-recognize. Stockpile a reasonable amount of normal food and medication for say 3-5 months based on math (# of meals * time), not guessing. Items that would get used normally anyhow. Panic buying too much, too little or wrong products would be throwing money away, taking them away from others who could've used them and/or being un(der)prepared.

1. Set sane, quantitive decision-point conditions to self-quarantine and stick to it.

2. PPE for individuals wouldn't really ever be necessary, most people don't use them correctly and it takes supplies away from first responders and tradespeople who need them. In the very unlikely circumstance that someone had a life-threatening emergency during a pandemic, you can bet your bottom dollar that an ambulance and ambulance crew is going to be fully decked-out in PPE because they don't want to take any chances. Furthermore, a better solution would be mandating quarantine of known infected individuals to stay away from others rather than rudely and selfishly going out in public coughing and sneezing on everyone else.

3. Self-quarantining, should it ever become necessary, should also have a decision end-point based on something reasonable like an acceleration of total new cases falling rapidly towards zero (concave down). Waiting around for absolutely zero risk would be wasteful.