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Comment by HarryHirsch | Hacker News Reader

Other people are more worried about the uninsured, the fact that there is no sick leave in America, and the fact that most everyone works at-will.

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I've worked many places in my life from gas stations to restaurants to brick & morter stores, and now tech. Throughout all of this sick leave has been encouraged if not mandated. The idea that America "has no sick leave" is simply incorrect. We just don't mandate sick leave by law - and it has actually worked itself out pretty well.

The usual ten days of paid leave just isn't enough. When you have children you'll have used them up already because someone needs to take the kids to the doctor. But when the Coronavirus comes to your area you may have to observe quarantine or - God prevent! - you are sick for weeks. With a disaster of that magnitude you can't rely on individual goodness, you need the government because it has the deepest pockets.

This could easily diverge into a political discussion which should be avoided; but it should be said this system has been in place and working for decades now. Just as we don't see other diseases spread more swiftly within the US due to its sick leave laws (or lack thereof) it's unlikely that we will see the coronavirus do the same. Take a look at the 2009 flu pandemic. It hit the US hard, but per capita it's not even top ten. Much of Europe is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic_by_country

The numbers in that table don't make sense. Belgium has 20.6 confirmed cases per 1000 inhabitants and neighbouring Germany only 2.3? Meanwhile, Wikipedia's article on the 2009 flu in the US says that 60 million people (out of 300 million) caught the disease. It seems that everyone is counting something else.

However, the 2009 swine flu wasn't particularly deadly. CDC estimates about 0.001 % of the world's population dying as a result of respiratory complications: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemi.... The US, according to Wikipedia, had 12000 deaths.

The coronavirus is going to be orders of magnitude worse, and the current informal arrangements in the US will be overwhelmed.

>The coronavirus is going to be orders of magnitude worse, and the current informal arrangements in the US will be overwhelmed.

Are you suggesting that more deadly diseases are more likely to spread among the population per capita? I had thought we were discussing whether the lack of mandated sick days enabled higher spread of infectious diseases.

I'm saying that most everyone caught swine flu and many were working through it. With something more deadly that won't be tolerated, besides pneumonia seems to be a complication in 20 % of the cases and recovery is often slow.

That makes sense. We aren't currently sure what the death rate is though. It's extremely unlikely that all cases are being reported in China, which reduces the denominator and falsely inflates the rate.

If you take Italy as example rather than China, there are 400+ cases reported, likely more existing unreported, but only 12 deaths. That's a .03% rate conservatively which is about the same as the flu (.05%), if we assume (darkly) that a few more people will die.

I don't know how to downvote myself or edit my comment but you're right - in revisiting this after my coffee my math was way off! Crossing our fingers than many cases are asymptomatic enough that they aren't being counted towards this "confirmed cases" total.

> the fact that there is no sick leave in America

A lot of places of employment have sick leave. Years ago I worked at a rural supermarket that gave sick leave.

> and the fact that most everyone works at-will.

And, an employer that fires people who get sick soon finds no one wants to work for them.

Amazon fulfillment centers prove otherwise

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/amazon-workers-pee-bottle/

This says nothing about sick leave, just that Amazon is evil in other respects.

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