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Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how other folks who work at large tech shops in the valley feel about working from home for a while. There is nearly zero reason for me to show up at work. I can do nearly everything from home, often better. At work, I'm in a large, open building surrounded by thousands of people.

Am I overreacting? I know there's a good chance we're all going to get COVID-19, but if I can delay it a bit, I lessen the hit to our soon-to-be overworked heath care system and preserve resources for those who can't hide.

I think those of us who have the ability to work from home for a while might want to consider agitating for it to be official policy for the next month or so.

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> Am I overreacting?

Probably not. Mortality rate aside (anywhere from 2% to 5% depending on source), the biggest issue is hospitalization rate (about 20% based on Chinese numbers). No country on the planet could handle that hospitalization rate all at once.

The priority going forward is about managing spread. Keeping spread as slow as possible so the absolute number of people who need to be hospitalized at any particular point in time is as small as possible. That makes it possible for hospitals to keep up and keep the mortality rate as low as possible. You want to have a trickle of patients coming in over a very long time, not a one-day tsunami.

The other thing is that this will absolutely result in shortages. China has already banned the export of many medical supplies and as this sort of nationalism spreads the shortages will be more tangible. New supply chains will eventually emerge for many things, but they will take a while to do so. If you need any medications, now is probably a good time to stock up with as much as reasonably possible.

Do we know how many of those 20% would die without hospital support? I assume the 2-5% takes into account treatment or is that excluding it?

That 2%-5% is based on the current detected cases and deaths attributed to the virus. You can sense where the problem is. Much like the flu, most of the deaths are older people with weak inmune systems that go haywire. Right now, out of an abundance of caution, anyone with symptoms is being hospitalized, that includes people that normally wouldn't be if this was a normal flu season and they showed up at the doctor with same symptoms.

About 4%. That's the death rate in Wuhan with the system maxed out.

The limitation is actually mechanical ventilators.

And how are we going to setup temporary hospitals when portable bed factories are probably all in China?

The problem is even that you can't properly prevent catching it if people are isolated at home since masks and disinfectants start being sold out pretty much world wide.

Happened yesterday in my company. :( Big tech company, 2000+ people, central Europe. First registered patient with COVID-19 in my country is from company I'm working for.

We all received notice to work from home.

It will be huge test now for remote work. I bet lot of people doesn't even know how to connect from home. (people from administration etc)

Which company? I hope we can US companies be proactive about this and not wait for someone to be infected.

Sorry , didn't saw this before. Ericsson Croatia, it is no secret.

Which country are you from?

Based on info OP provided, Croatia

true

I personally am watching others around me do what I consider "overreacting". Once it starts spreading locally though, the response will be reasonable.

The biggest gain in working from home is not protecting yourself, but the spread to all of your coworkers and then to all of the next infections beyond them leading to actual deaths.

Exactly. I'm 0% worried about catching* COVID-19. I suspect I'm at much greater risk of dying from my daily commute. The reason to stay home is for others' sake. We in the tech industry often have jobs where we can stay home with no impact, so, why not do it now?

* There's probably a 100% chance I'll get it at some point, I just don't fear severe consequences from it.

Once you know it's spreading locally, countermeasures are a lot less effective.

I worry about the coming increase in home working where companies aren't prepared for it. What if this paints a picture of broadly lower productivity for the practice across the tech industry? Could this then be used as evidence against home working more widely for the long term?

Yeah, having been much more productive in a previous remote position, I had thought that I was always more productive working from home. During a recent remote stint in my current position (which is normally onsite), I realized how much company culture and having a dedicated home office (which I don't have set up now) were a part of my productivity.

Same here - there is absolutely no reason for me to be physically present in the office so I plan to work from home as much as possible in the near future

no you re not. everyone who can do that should demand it. and not just for the corona, but for reclaiming back your time, and also, occam's razor

Probably overreacting. There is a much greater chance of you dying on your commute than catching the virus if you are in the US, so the virus has not significantly increased your chances of death. And if you are worried about being a carrier, it is far more likely for you to get the flu, which can also be deadly, so the virus has not significantly increased your risk to others either.

Maybe if the US had tens of thousands of cases it would make more sense, but right now I don't see why anyone in North America should be changing their habits given how small the risk is relative to the things we are already exposed to.

The scary thing is that we don't actually know how many infections there are. The test used in the U.S. reportedly isn't accurate.

>I'm curious how other folks who work at large tech shops in the valley feel about working from home for a while.

Am in the UK and not the US but given that I'm healthy and relatively young I don't really see the point. This disease is scary in the aggregate, i.e it imposes huge economic costs. The average case of it is basically having flu symptoms, and I never stayed at home unless I got sick during bad flu seasons.

I'm not really sure why people paint being infected with this like the bubonic plague or something, there is already a bunch of corona viruses raging around all the time anyway.

edit: lots of downvotes because I don't lock myself in because of a corona virus? People here seem to love hysteria a these days.

You are being downvoted, IMO, not for not locking yourself in but ignoring the chance that even you may survive for having strong immune system, you may still potentially be a carrier and transmit to others with weaker immune systems. Don’t be selfish and consider safety of other less fortunate people.

As a society, cost is much higher than cost to yourself only.

>Don’t be selfish and consider safety of other less fortunate people.

In the country right now there are a few dozen cases on a population of 60 million people. Even assuming there is hundreds or thousands of cases, the idea that I stay home (which is a trade-off, because I'm needed at work) isn't rational at all.

If I get sick I'll obviously stay home, as I always do to avoid spreading any disease. But to preemptively lock myself in to avoid a disease that isn't particular dangerous in 80% of people and that has barely spread anywhere is ridiculous.

This is a more-deadly-than-average coronavirus, or so it seems.

It is really hard to tell, because it is still very new outside of China, and you can't trust any of the data coming from there -- so we won't really know for 2 more weeks, until the first big round of cases from open countries end in either recovery or death. That said, the Chinese statistics put median time between first symptoms and death (amongst fatal cases) at only 8 days -- and the 600 cases from the cruise ship are all older than that now, with 3 deaths as of yesterday, which suggests that the 2% mortality rate being bandied about is probably not wildly wrong. (It might be 1% or 3%, but probably not 10%+ like fearmongers are saying or 34% like MERS was -- unless fatalities from the cruise ship are being suppressed or there is something special about that group, or, I guess, if the median of 8 days turns out to be wildly, wildly wrong)

Concern seems highly warranted. Vigilance seems warranted. The "ZOMG we all gonna die!" going on does not.

But it sure does get ratings and score political points.

Edit: I have been using https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ to view graphs and tables of the coronavirus data chopped a bunch of different ways. They list sources for all of it, though I haven't vetted the sources.

One of their charts shows a breakdown of closed cases into % cured and % dead. That is currently at 92%/8%, with the recovery rate continually improving, but flattening out. That graph makes it look like the mortality rate may end up higher than 2% -- but still probably not radically so, and we really are extrapolating from very little data.

> One of their charts shows a breakdown of closed cases into % cured and % dead. That is currently at 92%/8%, with the recovery rate continually improving, but flattening out. That graph makes it look like the mortality rate may end up higher than 2% -- but still probably not radically so, and we really are extrapolating from very little data.

I think there's a really large number of people who have been infected who will never be a "case", so I think 2% is still really high. Just look at e.g. Italy where there was no awareness of it spreading until people were already dying - meaning that it had been spreading for some time. Given that a large number of people seem to be asymptomatic or have mild illness, it's highly likely that many other people were infected in the same "cluster" and never knew.

Not that I disagree with your post, but I would expect the average cruise goer to be older than the general population.

Seems worse than the average flu. Not likely that you'll die from it if you're young and not immunocompromised, but just because you don't die doesn't mean there won't be long term health effects. And if you have anyone over age 70 or under age 2 who you care at all about, their lives could be at risk.

Seems like children under 9 are not effected much at all, not sure about under 2 tho.

For some reason, coronaviruses generally rarely affect children -- and those that get it rarely spread it to others despite children being fucking disease magnets.

This seems not to be very well understood, but it is really interesting.

So far there are no known cases affecting children under 2 (as of two days ago when I read the paper about coronavirus and children)

> So far there are no known cases affecting children under 2

This is not the case, there have been a couple of babies infected in Singapore.

There have been several infants in China having contracted COVID-19. But no deaths yet.

Seems worse than the average flu AND unlike the flu, there's no vaccine (and there probably won't be one in time to make much of a difference).

They need a minimum of 18 months (assuming perfect conditions) to be able to commercialize a vaccine.

Can anyone just explain how in hell it takes so long to develop a vaccine?

Vaccine creators aren't supposed to have billions of USD to make their job? What's the real problem here?

1. Come up with the vaccine

2. Test vaccine on animals

3. Prove to regulators vaccine is safe enough for limited human trials

4. Conduct limited human trials

5. Research effectiveness of vaccine / absence of side effects

6. Conduct broader human trials

7. Step 5 again

8. Scale up production of vaccine

Now, imagine that you can fail at any step and go back to the starting point.

I know most people here like to defend the established ways of doing things. But in an crisis like this we need to go back to first principles and see which steps are really needed and what can be speed up.

Every day we waste people die.

a rushed vaccine that has poorly understood side effects like say cancer rate differences or is fatal for people with some other disease is more dangerous than the disease itself. Many more people will end up taking the vaccine than just those having the infection.

If this situation got really bad, what are the chances of this timeline being accelerated? The US has step 1 done now. Could we roll the dice on doing broader human trials immediately and also in parallel scale up production? Sure you might kill people in trials and waste lots of money, but may be better than the alternative of tens of millions dead.

Are you volunteering?

My understanding is that it is very labor intensive and the manufacturing capacity is simply not there to make billions of doses in a short timescale (months).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_vaccine#Manufacturin...

The point of staying in even if you're young and healthy is not for your benefit, but so you don't walk around spreading the virus everywhere to people who aren't as young and healthy.

It's not about you, but it can be hard to think about people other than one's self.

At a nearly 2% mortality rate even for younger people, I think the odds are high enough to be worried. It's obviously not as deadly as the bubonic plague, but this disease is very infectious...

This is not true. A recent study from China showed the mortality rate for 30-39 year olds to be .2% I believe. And the rate goes down from there as age decreases.

Link to source would be very much appreciated.

It's not 2% for younger, it's like <0.5% for less than 40, and something like 10% for older than 70.

Pretty much any halfway rational response on a covid thread is downvoted by the same handful of people. Don’t take it personally.

Multiple doctors in their late 20s or early 30s have died from the coronavirus. If you are under 18 and have good health, then you are pretty safe.

For the doctors in Wuhan in their late 20s and early 30s who died from the virus, overwork compromising their immune system might have been a factor.

I've been trying to find mortality rates for the very young. Infants and toddlers. I haven't been finding much information. Is this being reported? Having twins under a year at home has somehow managed to become an even more stressful event...

There was a study[1] released by China CDC that tracked 44,000 patients to 11 Feb. They found zero deaths under age 9, with 416 cases. The study doesn't load for me, so here's the wayback link[2].

[1] http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20200221051245/http://weekly.chi...

I think the reported rate is 0, with contamination rates being low as well. It seems that currently there are more reasons to be worried for your parents than for your kids.

0 Fatalities 0-9 years old so far.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...

No deaths for 0-9 age group so far

There have been a handful of infections but no fatalities. This virus is essentially a minor cold in young people.

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