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Comment by GhostVII | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a pretty strong overreaction. The flu leads to about half a million hospitalizations in the US each year, while COVID-19 has lead to dozens. So your team is thousands of times more likely to transmit the flu then COVID-19 - even if COVID-19 is 50x more dangerous, it is far more likely that your team will cause hospitalizations due to the flu. I don't see why anyone should be taking precautions for COVID-19 that they weren't already taking for the flu if they are in the US.

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The reason for the reaction is described in my post. We now have community transmission 50 miles away from my office that was undetected for at least 2 weeks. At the moment, nobody knows how many cases there are.

The flu is less virulent, less deadly, and most people get flu shots which creates herd immunity.

The R naught and the percent requiring advanced hospital care are the reason to be so aggressive with this. Days matter and can save hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of lives. Watch this at about the 23:00 minute mark. https://youtu.be/-o0q1XMRKYM

Why do people who bring up the flu not seem to understand that if your company is big and your office is white collar that everybody there pretty much already has the flu shot if they're not a dumbass?

There are a few reasons why this may not be a strong overreaction. The first is that since flu is always with us, we normalize the risk. This doesn't mean that our chosen countermeasures and decisions for flu is actually correct or optimal, just that we're for the moment comfortable with them. Just like how lots of young people don't get the flu vaccine until after they actually get the flu.

So just because their current flu countermeasures don't include the measures proposed doesn't mean that it's not rational to consider them. Their prior actions could actually be irrational, and the context shift is just allowing them to adjust their perception and actions.

The second is that since WFH is an preventative measure designed to minimize the probability of COVID-19 reaching flu transmission rates, you can't simply say that "the current risk is low", you have to try to consider the likelyhood of risk significantly increasing without action.

Let's be real here, even if COVID-19 was literally exactly a different flu, it would be still be a problem and we should be planning for it carefully. North American hospitals are cost conscious and therefore typically only have enough resources to just about cover a normal flu season spike. Doubling (say nothing about 10x) the amount the hospitalizations required would be an incredible stress to the system.

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