Google employee diagnosed with coronavirus | Hacker News Reader

Google employee diagnosed with coronavirus

cnbc.com

246 pointstosh261 comments

Googler working in Zurich here.

FWIW all Google Zurich leads and my whole management chain insisted that people having any kind of symptom (in general, and not just for the Coronavirus) should rest at home & see the doctor to recover and prevent infecting other Googlers.

They also insisted that even "healthy Googlers" feeling insecure coming to work can fully work from home in the coming weeks, and told managers that they shouldn't prevent their managees from doing so.

This company has just always been super comprehensive regarding health conditions. If you don't feel good and just want to go back home to rest or take a 2h nap in the sleeping room you can just do it without any justification. Whenever I discuss this with friends none of them has the same freedom and trust that Google gives us.

Wishing the best to everyone in this scary period.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/symptoms.htm...

Symptoms should not be what causes people to stay home or not

If someone has symptoms, they could have been infecting others for up to 14 days prior

There's fairly little evidence that COVID spreads from unsymptomatic carriers. They may, but not significantly.

Yalemedicine isn't the CDC, but not a bad data point?

https://www.yalemedicine.org/conditions/covid-19/

>The CDC believes SARS-CoV-2 is contagious during the incubation period, which is believed to be 14 days, and symptoms of COVID-19 can appear anytime between two and 14 days after exposure. It has identified the following symptoms

From elsewhere:

> It may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.

This doesn't mean asymptomatic people can't spread the disease, but that the likelyhood of spread from asymptomatic carriers is lower (which makes a lot of sense).

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/transmission...

from your CDC link

>Can someone spread the virus without being sick? People are thought to be most contagious when they are most symptomatic (the sickest). Some spread might be possible before people show symptoms; there have been reports of this occurring with this new coronavirus, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.

So to be clear, people CAN spread the virus before they are noticeably symptomatic, even if they are not at PEAK virulence.

Can confirm -- also a Googler, but from Austin and recently Mountain View. This is both Google's default policy (not feeling well? go home) and recommendations for current conditions, with more emphasis on staying home even if you're uncomfortable. We even have a whole team dedicated to tracking this stuff and keeping Googlers safe.

It's amazing how much outright hate is being spewed here over this -- it borderlines on outright panic.

> This is both Google's default policy (not feeling well? go home)

I can’t imagine many tech companies (or even salaried office jobs) having very different default policies.

That is sort of missing the point in an emerging pandemic.

Google's not my first rodeo, and I can say that many many tech companies I have worked at have unstated policies of "work until you drop" because of the startup culture that pervades tech. Google is not one of those.

Just bear in mind, what you see from the news media is not rarely the whole picture -- especially when the veil of corporate secrecy is involved.

He undermines Google in every post. Par for the course.

You won't get Google's culture. Regardless of the HN bubble it really is employee friendly and it shows in crises like these. Our health insurance is also the best if not way better than other FAANG + Microsoft. When the travel ban happened Google security helped people across the globe. Not many tech companies would do that. Doubt Amazon would.

> Doubt Amazon would.

yikes

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/31/amazon-ex...

Bezos fighting Trump. No history there. Also did Amazon send it's own security to help employees stuck in other countries ? I'm sure they would have charged people for help.

How is Google's work-from-home policy nowadays? Does it differ between Europe and the US?

It all depends between you and your manager. But as long as you're productive and are not always WFH, I have seen no issues with people taking days to WFH. Some specialists and proven architects negotiated to WFH full time.

This completely misses the point.

If people are exposed, they DO NOT KNOW they are sick. There are no symptoms for the first few days even though you're shedding virus.

You are most contagious just prior to symptoms

The point of closing spaces is to force people who FEEL FINE from spreading the virus further.

>You are most contagious just prior to symptoms

Do you have a reputable source for that? The WHO, CDC, and EU state that asymptomatic transmission is minor if it happens at all

Yes, the most recent episode of TWIV, dedicated to Coronavirus.

The onus is on employees to "feel insecure" and take extended work-from-home time, instead of being the default position that one can opt out of.

In practice, that means most don't exercise that option and those who do for any real length of time take a career hit (unknowingly).

Actually I'm going to work the whole next week at home and most of my team mates will do the same even though we don't really feel unsafe at work compared to anywhere else.

Given the current situation I'd say that you probably have more chances to contract the virus when taking public transport or going to public spots/events than I have at work :-)

Statistically speaking, that's probably not quite true.

It's hard to say without more details, but I suspect there are more people in that office that are infected.

Are they decontaminating the office? How many emps are there in the Zurich office?

This isn't the US, this is Europe where employees have rights such as sick days, and they use them, so somebody having an absence from the office due to health reasons is pretty common - certainly not special in any sense to get a career hit out of it.

I think this comment is far more newsworthy than the original article

Once testing actually ramps up in the US... I'd expect similar cases to pop up all over the Bay Area. The Fairfield case was infectious starting weeks ago.

The CDC site shows only 8 more tests having happened in the last few days (aka: preposterously low!). We're really flying blind until we have more data and testing. When the history of this epidemic in the US is written, it will be noted that the entire month of February was wasted diagnostically and critical opportunities to still attempt containment lost.

So it's probably the virus is spreading around the bay area undiagnosed. Has there been any reports of hospitals experiencing higher than normal volumes of flu-like cases?

Unfortunately, it will be a very small signal relative to the total number of respiratory illnesses at this time of year. Moreover, there's often a multi-week lag-time between it spreading and getting cases that get severe enough for hospitalization. Until there's a critical mass of enough infected to get sufficient number of patients with ARDS (like the woman at the UC Davis Medical Center), it may be hard to notice. The problem is, once it's noticed through this method, it's likely spread to a significant number of people. This is what happened in Northern Italy and Iran (and to some extent in Wuhan as well).

And, right on cue: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/a-second-case-of-coron...

Here we go...

While this is true it does not negate the need to mitigate contagion at work.

The CDC and WHO recommend a blended approach to response that includes both perpetual containment and perpetual mitigation efforts.

It's not one or the other.

We have taken — and will continue to take — all necessary precautionary measures... as we prioritize everyone’s health and safety

...

Google’s Zurich office will remain open

So they've taken all necessary precautions except the one that would actually prioritize health and safety by asking all employees in that office (or at least those on the same floor/seating area as the infected employee) to work from home and self-isolate.

I thought the germ theory of disease was already well accepted and we had a pretty good idea of how pandemics spread.

Butts in seats for non-critical work is going to be the downfall on all of this. It's very shortsighted to do things like ban mass gatherings, but risk people's health by insisting on hundreds of people in close quarters to tweak display ads or whatever.

We do have a pretty good idea of how pandemics spread, and one of the major vectors is people who must remain isolated failing to isolate themselves. Telling people to self-isolate in response to every small risk doesn't prioritize health on net, because it encourages people not to treat self-isolation as a serious thing.

That's why you isolate everyone. We (smaller company, also in eu, with infections in neighboring countries already) have a plan to just work from home, when first cases appear here. It's not 100% potection of course, but just reducing contact between people.. especially 8h/day in offices, where people sneeze, cough, eat, pick their noses, etc, helps.

They aren't even telling employees which group or floor the employee was in, so employees cannot even gauge their risk level.

Imagine going home to your family without knowing if you've been exposed to a disease that has a ~2% mortality rate.

...and then the company asks everyone to come back into work the next day.

Google's response here is shocking.

For Google's predominant age group the mortality is more in the realms of 0.2%.

And that age group does not have social contact to people over 50?!

Some of these employees may have young children or elderly parents whom they could infect.

Do Google employees not have friends, relatives, parents and grandparents?

But even 30 year olds have friends and family that are in high-risk categories. Do you really want to risk bringing home a disease that puts grandma at a 10% risk of dying?

One of the first people to get it in Italy was a healthy 38 year old man. He had to be put on a respirator for a few days, although he's doing better now.

It's serious, even for younger people, and that's if health care infrastructure doesn't get overwhelmed.

Not shocking at all.

It's a lack of leadership which shouldn't be surprising given that most corporate executives don't really know how to act in situations outside of their realm of experience.

Even the CDC and WHO seem to be a bit out-of-sorts on handling this thing. Google's Zurich office isn't the only one.

The top-down restrictions of who is allowed to get tested have been quite limited, so there's easily tons of people infected who we don't know about, many of them asymptomatic - yet who could still be transferring the virus to vulnerable/less healthy people [1].

Access to testing kits is going to be another constraint going forward if this thing continues spreading and testing criteria does indeed expand (which no doubt are probably correlated).

I have a feeling once the CDC and WHO expand the criteria for who gets tested there is going to be a significant spike in the number of people who we know have it. There's going to be a lot of post-de facto reviews and lessons learned from this experience in the coming future, no doubt.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/health/coronavirus-asympt...

The response difference between the people I interact with regularly (friends, coworkers, HN people, twitter people) and I guess "the rest of the world" is crazy. I just watched a video on Fox News where they interviewed this dude with his kid on his lap talking about his experience in coronavirus quarantine now that he's released. He couldn't stop coughing throughout the interview, was sharing water with his kid... madness.

That was a very scary video. I was physically cringing all throughout watching it and when he drank from the same bottle vocalizing 'no!'. Very depressing.

I thought nobody knew how to act outside the real of experience, I mean, that's the all point of experience.

You can learn from other people's mistakes. Of course, you need the experience of learning about them, but that's more scalable than experiencing all the mistakes yourself.

> realm of experience

Most can't even do that. Their paper experience is with tech and product, but the experience they actually got hired for is political maneuvering.

Sad, but I’ve seen this type of behavior before. It should really be built into the liability insurance covenants or companies will often not care.

I was working at a high rise in Manhattan on 9/11, as a fresh new analyst. After the horrific incidents of the day, we were told to continue working. That continued for about 90 minutes until the company announced an evacuation.

Next we were told to carry all our binders (full of analyst reports) home, so a group of us Brooklyn residents did the 7mile trek with backpacks full of binders plus a 2001-era laptop, one of us had a roller bag because there were so many binders.

This is shocking because, ... why? Because you didn't have appropriate computer network-wide off-site data back-ups to the contents of your binders?

It’s shocking because even after terrorists murdered thousands of people by ramming a plane into a building ,corporate executives were asking people to stay at work in the surrounding buildings.

I was asking because of their 3rd paragraph, not their 2nd.

Because when you are escaping/trekking across bridges and 10ish miles of road on foot in a suit and fancy shoes — you don’t really want to be encumbered carrying weight.

Also remember this is 2001. We did not have VPN in our project office, though I know it existed. We had a modem dial in for remote access and none of our work was on network drives. HOme DSL/CableModem had only recently become popular amongst professionals.

Regardless, I continue to remember the burden of carrying those gigantic binders as I ran across the 59th street bridge and through Queens and Brooklyn...all while wearing wingtip shoes. Awful.

That sounds awful! On such an otherwise lovely morning, too.

What do you think the correct response by management should have been? 15 minutes after the 1st plane hit, everyone shut down, go home, leave the files and binders?

Talking glibly about a situation in which thousands of people died is not a great way in general to get people to your side.

No, when people’s lives are on the line and a building might be brought down due to an airplane crashing into you, you should not even think about binders or paperwork, much less making others think about binders.

I'm not here to get people "on my side". Or even to make a particular argument (which would require actually having a "side")

I am here to understand the thinking of people who thought management should have "done better".

It could well be that this is correct, but it was a very confusing morning, if you will recall, and nobody knew what the hell was going on.

One stupid example is that my friends at Bear Stearns in WTC-7, left the building (evacuated) when the stock markets in NY shut down, and all lived. But the other friends on the bond-desk (traded out of Chicago, which didn't shut down), stayed and all died. (Hard to get a bond trader off his desk!).

It was a horrible day. And also unprecedented. I think it is a little unfrair for people to expect managers to know how to react (immediately and pro-actively!) to an unprecedented event. If I had an argument, it would be that: If I were a manager on that day, I would have been confused. And so would you.

BTW: I do get your point (I think - it's hard to brain-meld, but I think I do), but I believe that I have made my point badly. Which is simply: Managers are made out of people. People are made out of monkeys. Monkeys don't know how to deal with anything they've not got exposed to. So they are left with analogy (and direct experience) and morals and values and frameworks for morals and values. And incentives.

Gosh! That's a lot!

If an airplane hits the world trade center, would I push the fat man in front of the train? (Sorry - moral philosophy question)... Ummmm. I don't know! Would you? WOuld I? How long would I brain freeze? Would I ask people to stay? Go home? Take books? The vault? I don't know! What would you do?

My point here is simply this: You don't know what you were do, in real time, until you are in the hot-chair. You don't! Nobody does. And you will get it wrong. And anything you decide (anything!) will be criticized for decades. By people who were not there.

The hundreds or thousands of lives that could have been saved if evacuations began after the first tower was hit are hardly ever mentioned. No job is worth dying for, but apparently employers think their jobs are. I wonder what the death toll would have been if more people had common sense and started evacuating immediately.

The south tower had begun evacuation when "an official" announced over the building wide intercom that everything was fine and the people in the stairwell needed to turn around and go back to work. This story, told by survivors who ignored the command, was vehemently denied until the 911 commission reviewed an audio recording in which the message could be heard.

Source?

This page has a massive amount of information about evacuation problems, including a false assertion made over the intercom that the building was safe, and that people needed to turn around because doors were locked, but nothing about "go back to work" except baseless speculation by a sibling of a victim.

It doesn't even make sense, why would management of a building with dozens or hundreds of tenants care who is working?

http://www.mjbarkl.com/locked.htm

Its probably an employee health privacy issue. With sufficient hints you could probably narrow down who it is.

That explains why they didn't release the name of the employee - not why they didn't tell other employees which FLOOR or GROUP was affected.

Unless Google has a spectacularly ineffective workplace rumor mill, or whatever the right term is in a situation like this, I'm pretty sure everyone knows the person affected even if they haven't been officially told.

Or they may have told the affected folks without telling the press. That would be a reasonable compromise.

No - because I know people in this office and they have not told them anything. They didn't even announce it until AFTER work on Friday.

Can you share the specific office building? So I could at least notify my friends who work in Google Zurich if they are affected.

You mean, you know people who you know to have been exposed to the person who was infected? Are you certain that they were in the same building at the same time? If not it's not really a defeater to my hypothesis. If your friends were not exposed to the infected individual they would not have been notified.

Admittedly the scenario I'm proposing seems unlikely. Seems they would have at least mentioned it if they were going to tell the folks who might have had contact with the individual. However. I'm leery of jumping to conclusions.

Do they need to tell them? I feel like people could figure it out on their own, considering the person would be absent and, likely, someone who's traveled recently, and then the info would spread around the office. I still think this is horrible crisis management though.

Of course they need to tell them. These employees have families of young children and elderly parents/grandparents.

The office is huge and travel to north Italy is extremely common.

Typically (at least under US law) you cannot legally discuss someone’s health issues without their consent. Not saying it’s a factor here but there is a good reason for these protections to exist that may be slightly less advantageous in the case of an epidemic.

There's probably a guy who broke his leg and stayed at home wondering, why everyone at the office hates him.

A colleague of mine came back from Milan just a few days ago and he was just sitting there in the office, as nothing was/is happening. Only after some us got pissed, HR anonymously sent him an email to ask him to work from home for the next weeks. Same for anyone having a cold or any symptom, or flying back from one of the countries currently facing the coronavirus

People need to be told what to do, otherwise they don't think they are harming others. This behavior is even more common among young people without family. The moment you have a child, you start to look at all these potential threats and react accordingly.

People need permission from authority before they stop showing up to work.

"Hey [manager], given my recent trip to Italy, I'm going to WFH for [some period of time], make sure I'm healthy..."

"OK."

I assume your company has travel policies in effect? I mostly work from home anyway but, if I were in an office and traveled to a country that wasn't on my company's self-quarantine list, I'd assume I was expected to go into the office. If your company didn't have Italy on their list (and it maybe should be) that's for your travel department to make decisions on not an individual traveler.

Italy wasn't yet on the list, indeed. However, nobody prevents you from sharing it and saying "I am going for a check up". His manager wouldn't have minded at all.

Also, sometimes it's just reading the f news. It's a global thing, everybody want it or not knows about this virus.

Fair enough, I would probably have asked my manager (who probably would have known I was in Italy). We do have APAC travel policies in place. Not sure about other countries. But if I were in the situation where I was coming back from Italy I would probably have asked (as an exempt employee who could work from home anyway) if I should self-quarantine out of caution. I would probably not have gone for a check-up if I felt fine. It's up to HR/Travel of course but things are moving quickly.

According to Wikipedia, Milan airport has 28m passengers per year, about 79k per day.

While northern Italy has highest concentration of cases outside Asia, the likelihood that any individual passenger is infected is very low and the likelihood that /one of them/ is infected, and had already traveled on, is very high.

I think that if we truly want to keep people safe, we should stop making assumptions about how low the risk is, etc. All it takes is that you are in that low percent and that's it. I am not saying we should start panicking, however, leveraging modern tools (remote work) whenever possible is key to reduce the risk even further. It's just prevention.

If your coworker is a danger to you then your whole office was exposed and should be quarantined also.

Not condoning Google but the mortality rate increases with every age bracket and is much lower under 50 years of age. I would assume that the Google office is quite young.

Sure, but as its morality rate is bad in some age brackets, we should protect those people in the age brackets, meaning self-isolating is a good idea to avoid spreading it further.

The rate of employees with young children and grandparents is pretty high.

What makes you think Google employees only care about themselves? You don't think they (and we) should care about the more vulnerable members of society that they will infect?

Young children are not at risk, unlike the flu.

Young children are quite touchy among peers and great at spreading disease to their families. Which means toward peers grand parents.

less at risk is not the same as not at risk. At any rate there are children that have immunity problems that as the virus spreads I worry it will effect them - for example MBL deficiency and it's susceptibility to respiratory ailments https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/mannose-binding-lectin-def... https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/191/10/1697/789682

I think you are taking common idiomatic English and interpreting it as though it is meant to be precise.

"Not at risk" does not mean 0 risk, it means negligible risk.

For example, if I was standing on a cruise ship, am I at risk for drowning? Not really, it's extremely unlikely that I would drown. Could I drown? For sure, I could fall in the ocean, or in the pool, or pass out into a bowl of soup. Despite the nonzero possibility of drowning, if someone saw me on the cruise ship waiting in line for the buffet and yelled "be careful, you are at risk of drowning" at me, I would think they had lost their mind.

But as long as you just keep standing on the deck, you're not going to drown.

But even though the risk of infection is low, I wouldn't say that a child is "not at risk" of contracting the disease if their dad catches it at work and brings it home.

I'd say that he's "at low risk", not "no risk".

Again, not at risk means not at risk. "At risk" means more than average risk. Not at risk means the opposite in common usage, it means much below average. Nobody said anything about "no risk". "low risk" and "not at risk" mean exactly the same thing.

https://www.macmillanthesaurus.com/at-risk

It seems like children are 10 times less likely to get it, though that's very rubbery numbers (based on children being 2% of cases in China despite being about 20% of the population, not that I really trust the numbers are accurate). A 0.1% chance of death (or even 0.01%) is still concerning.

The problem with MBL deficiency which can be a problem among younger children is that it makes you more susceptible to catching respiratory ailments and suffering worse from them. So as this is still in early stages we might not know how it effects children with MBL deficiency, it might be very bad for them.

So a paper has quoted 0 deaths for under 10 year olds, and you interpret that to mean that children are immune?

Planes crash, the Airbus A380 has suffered 0 crashes, so would you interpret this to mean the A380 cannot crash?

I think a problem with this analogy is you are comparing children not dying from a disease they do have to an airplane which doesn't have the problem you mention.

Lets square up the analogy. So there are 0 deaths for children that get coronavirus, and about 1/5 of the cases have been among children.

Planes crash, and out of all the planes that have crashed about 1/5 of the passengers were children, if 0 of the children died would you interpret this to mean children can't die in plane crashes?

And yes, basically I would interpret it that way if it were true.

Ok, maybe I can make it closer to your analogy:

There were 0 deaths for children that get caronavirus, maybe you think children are much less likely than adults to die if infected? Planes crash, if the A380 has never crashed despite millions and millions of miles in service, would you interpret that to mean that an A380 is much less likely to crash than other plane models that have flown a similar number of miles and had a bunch of crashes?

Again, yes, that is just how statistics work.

Those children's grandparents are at risk, are you saying it is ok to cause 2nd and 3rd order infections?

They have zero fatalities so far. But don't for one second believe that having double pneumonia is a walk in the park and the lung tissue scars will be with you for life. I had pneumonia when I was 24 and to this day I have my reminders of that event. You end up with reduced lung capacity, scarring and you'll be more vulnerable to re-infection.

It's a good thing none of those young google employees have parents, siblings, or friends over the age of 50!

/s (in case it isn't obvious)

Sure, but they don't contribute to Google. (/s)

See my comment elsewhere about the otherwise healthy, young guy on a respirator.

I think if you have a low immune system also doesn't help. And all it takes is that you get a cold, which is unfortunately the worst period now, your body is already weak, and this virus as well, and it might get dangerous.

This story of the "only old people" is just to keep the majority of the population calm, which is good. However, it can happen to any of us to be in a bad period and this sh happens.

But mortality isn’t the only concern. The virus can non-fatally damage the respiratory system. More importantly, there’s the problem of people passing it on to their older friends and family members

And there's evidence that someone can be reinfected after they recover, so this isn't like a flu where once you catch that strain, you gain immunity, you can get covid-19 multiple times. And subsequent infections may be worse.

So do everything you can to avoid it in the first place -- ideally I'll avoid it until a vaccine is developed. (fingers crossed that a vaccine really will be developed)

Apparently some viruses go into remission then come back. I'm not sure if they know if they caught it a second time, or if they "recovered" but really didn't. Either angle has some terrible implications. Hopefully it's rare.

Yeah, that's another theory, that it's "bi-phasic" and comes out of remission, but there's less evidence for that than for "you can get infected twice".

There is no evidence for reinfection, people assumed it was that, but according to specialists it's more likely it works the same as with other viruses

"THREAD/1: We saw now several reports of reinfection and I wanted to talk a little about that. While immunity induced by SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV and human CoVs is not very long lived, an immune response is typically induced and antibodies persist for 1-3 years."

"2) Now, there is evidence that people with COVID19 mount an immune response (e.g. https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.20.20025841v1). That makes re-infection, especially short-term extremely unlikely. What is more likely is, that the patient is still shedding virus but some of the tests were negative."

"3) Follow up tests can turn positive after a few negative tests, e.g. because sampling was better. Also, and this is a very important point, just because somebody still tests positive in a nucleic acid based test, does not mean they are still shedding infectious virus."

"4) E.g. Measles RNA can be detected for months in patients, long after infectious virus shedding has stopped. This is also the case for other viruses. And I think this is the most likely scenario here."

https://twitter.com/florian_krammer/status/12333387467890360...

On the other hand, Japan said they found a clear case of reinfection:

https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...

You can debate whether or not it's really a reinfection or not, but no one is going to really know for sure until quite some time and further studies can be done.

So for now, I wouldn't count on immunity after catching the disease.

Japan may not be the best source for anything right now, their response is a bit in panic.

I'd personally watch any publication from Singapore in this regard - one of their primary learnings from SARS was to become a biotech hub which enabled them to rapidly scale testing in this case and you can assume they have very good surveillance of existing cases.

The Singapore ministry of health site on the topic is really the model of what governments should do in these situations.

https://www.moh.gov.sg/covid-19

They share details on all cases, along with the result of the investigation around whom they have been in contact with and where they have been.

They also created a dashboard with all information: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/7e30edc490a5441a874...

The tech industry's age discrimination is really paying off well it seems.

And those young people dont have parents?

Unless you have cardiovascular disease, diabetes, respiratory disease or hypertension... Then the mortality rates can be up to 10% (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...)

It might be a medical privacy thing - it is a hard thing to balance the privacy needs of the individual with the needs of the group in situation like this.

Seems like you can avoid the privacy issues by just telling the entire office to work from home in this exceptional case.

I think it pretty simple to balance it in this situation - you need to tell. And need to test everyone who could have contact.

It is not AIDS, you aren't going to out someone this way. Just get their permission, 99% they won't mind.

2% only in developed healthcare system. For contrast Iran's number is few times higher

It would be interesting to know what is the percentage of people that have a strong reaction vs. people that experience it just like a cold, which I read is pretty common. Maybe there is even asymptomatic people out there.

I think the ratio in Iran is due to scads of undiagnosed people, not because getting COV is worse there than anywhere else.

FWIW I hear that Iran has a pretty capable and modern healthcare system.

No one knows anything about the real situation and thus the real numbers in Iran. They are highly speculative.

> that has a ~2% mortality rate.

The 2% figure comes directly from dividing deaths by identified cases. Because it takes a while to kill and new cases are growing exponentially this figure is very likely an underestimate. (not certainly an underestimate because non-severe cases are less likely to get counted)

Instead, you can gauge mortality by looking at deaths/(deaths+recoveries). With this method you get a number around 7%. This can produce an overestimate, either because recovery takes a long time or because non-severe cases don't get counted.

This question was also asked about SARS and it turns out that for SARS deaths/cases was a massive underestimate until the rate of the rate of new infections decreased. For SARS d/(d+r) was a much more accurate estimation at all times.

https://blog.zorinaq.com/case-fatality-ratio-ncov/

2% and 7% are both pretty bad, but they have distinctive public policy implications. I hope we're not making bad decisions simply because people handle exponential processes poorly.

Has anyone seen death and recovery by age? I think it would be interesting to estimate mortality by age using the d/(d+r) method, and perhaps contemplate what effect that might have on the composition of the US senate. :-/

It is also possible that 2% is an overestimate. Unlike SARS for example, it seems many infected, some estimates of 80%, may not even exhibit outward symptoms, like the high fever of SARS. This of course makes containment very difficult, maybe even impossible, to achieve.

Based on a WHO official's statements they found no evidence that this is happening when they went to China. https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/25/new-data-from-china-butt..., https://twitter.com/HelenBranswell/status/123233479099875328... This would push the current numbers as more accurate than not, as well as projected death rate up for the future as the poster you responded to said.

> Has anyone seen death and recovery by age?

This calculates Death Rate = (number of deaths / number of cases) which seems like how you're saying not to, but does split by age.

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

On the other side of it, there's selection bias--most identified cases have visible and notable symptoms, some very severe.

If you have a mild cough or a bit of a cold, you might not think anything of it beyond staying home from work, but that could be COVID-19 (and we might _never_ know that it was).

The case numbers are being severely undercounted though. People aren’t getting tested unless they present severe symptoms.

If you look at the Diamond Princess, where seemingly everybody was exposed to the virus, the actual death rate was about 0.4%, which is within error bars of the flu.

This will likely go higher as many cases are still hospitalized with severe complications.

Please define "many cases" and "severe complications". I'm interested.

Good luck finding any official numbers but a UK citizen from the cruise died this morning, so it's not over yet.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-51677846

3 more people just died, so it's now 0.8%.

Given how it can take weeks to die after being infected, I doubt they will be the last deaths.

Cruises also skew significantly older than the overall population. It’ll be awhile until we know the final numbers, but what we know so far is reassuring.

>Had anyone seen death and recovery by age?

There was a recent (Feb 17) study here with mortality crosstabs (see ‘results’): http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9...

Case fatality rate (N_deaths/N_confirmed_cases):

[0-9]: NA

[10-39]: 0.2%

[40-49]: 0.4%

[50-59]: 1.3%

[60-69]: 3.6%

[70-79]: 8.0%

[>=80]: 14.8%

Indeed. I've seen that, but not deaths,recoveries data. The above has the potential underestimate problem from case growths.

From the Diamond Princess we've got a pretty good idea about mortality. It's almost a conspiracy theory: let the disease run its course in a controlled environment to see how bad it is.

Diamond Princess isolated people, no? That is unlike what we'll see in the broader population.

They include a breakdown by date of onset as well, which isn’t exactly the method you suggest (but I read somewhere that recovery time is ~2 weeks for mild cases and ~3-6 weeks for severe).

Case fatality by date of onset:

[<Dec 31] 14.4% (n=105)

[Jan 1-10] 15.6% (n=653)

[Jan 11-20] 5.7% (n=5417)

[Jan 21-31] 1.9% (n=26468)

[>Feb 1] 0.8% (n=12030)

That does make the overall fatality rate look quite a bit worse than the naive calculation.

Even apart from undercounting of case #s, we know that the # of severe cases is 5% upper bound which is much more likely to be accurate and the deaths are a fraction of that so I would bet on the number being on the lower end than the higher end. Even a 1-2% mortality rate is fairly substantial tho -- 5-10x as deadly as flu.

a doctor friend of mine, familiar with the situation, tells me that 2% is likely an order of magnitude high. That is because in China, only the very ill are getting diagnosed at all. Therefore. the number of deaths is roughly in line, but the number of cases is likely an order of magnitude low.

> That is because in China, only the very ill are getting diagnosed at all.

I don't think this is true, considering China has built new hospitals just for patients who are tested positive but have light symptoms [0].

China also sent 12500 testing kits to Japan [1].

[0]: https://www.zhihu.com/question/369522812

[1]: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200226/p2a/00m/0na/00...

Disclaimer: I'm from China.

In reality the vast majority of people get no symptoms or just basic cold symptoms and will have no idea whatsoever they ever had “COVID-19”.

Both 2% and 7% will end up being massively overstated fear-mongering in a “pandemic” that never really actually qualified as such, and will kill less than 1/100th the number of people who die from Flu this year.

But everyone loves a good disaster story.

Yes, people have done studies and it shows if your above 50 you have a munch higher chance of dying from the disease.

I’d say though you’re fear mongering posting a comment like this, why ? Maybe you don’t realise ?

> I’d say though you’re fear mongering posting a comment like this, why ?

If you're just stating that without posing a counter argument then I think you have failed to understand what I am saying. And that is precisely why I posted.

1. The methodology being used to arrive at the 2-3% figure is unambiguously vulnerable to bias. It may be the case that other biases (under-reporting mild cases) cancels out the effect, or maybe not.

2. The same methodology when applied to SARS was provably biased, and an alternative seemingly equally valid estimator was accurate for SARS and gives a much higher estimate for the mortality rate of coronavirus.

If, in fact, we are off by mortality estimates by a factor of 4 it needs to be more widely known because the appropriate economic trade-off in handling is different at the two mortality levels. (In particular, if the mortality rate is much higher for working age people then economically disruptive countermeasures are more justified.)

I'm doubtful that any comments on hacker news are likely to result in public panic. I think for the most part the audience here is capable of reasoning about these things and making prudent decisions.

Are you qualified to make these claims and assumptions though, do you study viruses ? You’re a scientist who understand these things well?

Ok it’s fine to speculate, but you’re throwing up some big figures in what’s already a panicked situation and pretty much everything you’re saying is based purely on speculation and anecdotal evidence.

I just find it odd health organisations have already done studies, published numbers yet people all cover the internet (on HN of all places) seem to feel like they want to exaggerate the issue, refute the science and don’t trust the existing numbers. Why ?

I am not, but the paper I was referencing was written by people who are: https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/162/5/479/82647 My interesting the question arose out of my experience with non-epidemiological process estimation.

I spoken with a professional epidemiologist and they also agreed.

If CDC were saying that they considered this case and concluded that d/c is a more reliable estimator, I'd be happy to hear it. Instead, it appears d/c -- which is a good estimator for viruses in steady state-- is being used because it's just the default and the only research I can find which has actually evaluated this question found that d/c underestimates in a rapidly spreading infection.

How could you possibly know if anything you wrote is true?

Are you subscribed to all of Google's internal communications?

My understanding is that the 2% mortality rate is not verified, yet. The number of people having only mild cases is just very difficult to assess. There was an interesting thread about this yesterday.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22433359

You are cutting important parts of the statement, the individual was not in the office after showing symptoms and current research shows that it is very unlikely to transmit the virus before showing symptoms.

Source?

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/transmission.... Some spread might be possible before people show symptoms; there have been reports of this occurring with this new coronavirus, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.

page not found. Presumably this one?

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/transmission...

It's worth noting that this document does not make any claim that it cannot spread prior to symptoms. It says this:

" - People are thought to be most contagious when they are most symptomatic (the sickest). - Some spread might be possible before people show symptoms; there have been reports of this occurring with this new coronavirus, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads."

Note, I did also not say it was impossible but very unlikely. Perhaps that is too strong, but it what I was told.

Please do not spread unverified claims.

The UK NHS service on 111 is issuing the same guidance, and telling travellers that they do not need to self quarantine unless they are showing symptoms.

Dude, science is only important when it makes money, not when it prevents one from making money ;-)

Presumably there's a spectrum for the closeness and duration of contact, which determines who gets tested / isolated / etc.

Let's say that somebody travels back from Italy, and stops by the office for 5 minutes on the way home, to pick up something. The people at the office are going to be about as exposed as the people who were at the airport that day. I presume we don't try to track down or isolate everyone at that airport?

(To go a bit further, as far as I can tell, in none of the Swiss cases is there any kind of information that would let the public reason about whether they could have been exposed. E.g. about which trams or trains the people with an infection took.)

While if somebody spent a full day coughing at the office, went to the cafeteria for lunch and dinner, had a few meetings, etc. Well... Seems like you'd want to isolate a lot of people. And that's not a decision the company gets to make, it'd be done for them by the authorities, and a lot of people would know.

If no details of any sort have been released to employees, it kind of suggests this case was at the first end of the spectrum.

Seems like you'd want to isolate a lot of people. And that's not a decision the company gets to make, it'd be done for them by the authorities, and a lot of people would know.

Why not? Why can't Google say "Out of an abundance of caution, we're closing the office for 2 weeks and asking employees to work from home. We recommend, but do not require, that employees take steps to self-isolate themselves and monitor themselves for symptoms."

I understand that authorities could force companies to close offices, but I don't understand why a company couldn't make the decision to do so on their own.

If no details of any sort have been released to employees, it kind of suggests this case was at the first end of the spectrum.

I don't see how it suggests anything at all?

> Why not?

Your question seems to have nothing to do with what you quoted. The context for that was the case where, given what we know about the transmission parameters of the virus, it was plausible that the employee had infected others. And in that case, of course the company has no choice in the matter. Those people get isolated, no matter what.

What you seem to want to discuss is a totally different case. One where the authorities don't think there's sufficient risk to isolate anyone, but the company shuts down the office anyway. Correct?

Surely there's some kind of a threshold that comes into play in that case. There must be scenarios where transmission is so unlikely that you think there's no point in shutting down the office. One in thousand? One in a million? One in a trillion?

What you seem to want to discuss is a totally different case. One where the authorities don't think there's sufficient risk to isolate anyone, but the company shuts down the office anyway. Correct?

Correct. I'm surprised there was any confusion.

Google is well placed to shut down an office with little cost, if it were a manufacturing plant it may be a different situation since telling everyone to work from home means that no work gets done. But Google is well equipped to support teleworkers, so there's little cost to them.

The authorities are still learning about the disease so even if something is deemed low risk today, it may be determined to have been a much higher risk tomorrow.

Why would Google voluntarily do such a thing when profit is their main motive, though? Short-term, probably, practically speaking.

> So they've taken all necessary precautions except the one that would actually prioritize health and safety by asking all employees in that office (or at least those on the same floor/seating area as the infected employee) to work from home and self-isolate.

You need butts in seats to know you're getting your money's worth.

/sarcasm?

Hm either sarcasm or putting myself in a BigCo middle manager mindset?

The weird thing here is I imagine the number of people who can't do their job effectively from home at a Google office is super low. Asking people to stay home likely wouldn't even significantly impact business.

The Google employees that do their work over VPN can probably work from home.

Foodservice, janitors, and security, OTOH...

True, though if you close the office and let people work from home who can do their work from home, you also don't actually need the work from food service, janitors, security, etc. You just lock the doors and tell them to stay home. (I'd say in this case Google should still ensure those people get paid, though I guess that's not a guarantee considering how they treat TVCs.)

Google doesn't even use VPN's. It's wonderful: https://thenewstack.io/beyondcorp-google-ditched-virtual-pri...

> Foodservice, janitors, and security, OTOH...

All completely unnecessary jobs when no one is in the office.

Given that there is always some risk of infectious disease, and working from home would probably always reduce that risk, what is the risk level threshold above which it's appropriate to close an office?

> I thought the germ theory of disease was already well accepted

It's Google, so they might need to reinvent their own (no doubt better) theory.

my employer/client (Dutch government) is taking the same approach. I don't like it, especially because they are the government. They should be a little bit more paranoid about these things.

The germ theory of disease is just a theory, while butts-in-seats management is a fact.

It's almost unbelievable that they haven't closed that Zurich office down.

A group of employees I know at that office went out tonight in Zurich for a night out on the town.

Google's response here is almost unconscionably irresponsible. It's almost like they want the residents of the city to get infected.

Is Zurich shutdown? If not, I don’t see why google employees in Zurich should have special restrictions.

Google should absolutely have special restrictions now that there is a confirmed case in the office though. There should be a quarantine in place for everyone they came into contact with for at least 14 days.

They aren't even telling other employees who it was, so employees literally have ZERO idea how at-risk they (and their families) are.

In this scenario, the safest bet is just a 14 day quarantine for the entire office. There are probably legal reasons why they Google can't disclose. If health authorities do contact traces, it will get out anyway. But there's nothing stopping Google from doing this besides carelessness

I'm almost positive your job cannot tell people about your health.

No, but they can:

1. Close the office and allow people to work from home.

2. Alert employees who are the most likely to have been in contact with that individual, without naming the individual.

I'm pretty sure closing your office and allowing your employees to work from home when there's a pandemic falls under the category of "Don't be Evil"

> 2. Alert employees who are the most likely to have been in contact with that individual, without naming the individual.

How do we know that's not being done? The article mentions "taking all necessary measures", that can easily be interpreted as additional measures not specified in the public release.

As someone with friends in that specific Google office - I can tell you that employees have been told NOTHING.

Google didn't even send the email until AFTER business hours on Friday.

Despicable.

> As someone with friends in that specific Google office - I can tell you that employees have been told NOTHING.

I'm talking about contacting the people that may have come into contact with the sick employee not contacting the entire office. How do we know that's not being done? We don't have any details here to draw conclusions that this isn't being handled correctly. We don't know if the employee wasn't already working from home, came back from a vacation, was into office very little time or made very little contact with coworkers. You're assuming the worst, that the employee in question was mingling with everyone for days while being sick and then that the announcement going out on Friday was somehow too late (that the management was made aware of it for many days before the announcement went out).

> Google didn't even send the email until AFTER business hours on Friday.

Is that too late? How long did Google know about the sick employee as being confirmed with this virus before they decided to make a public announcement about it?

> They aren't even telling other employees who it was

That would be an insane violation of privacy.

For the company, yes. But the government can overrule that in these scenarios.

Not in the case of possible epidemic. It would be insane not to test every person that was in close contact.

Infectious diseases do not care about your HR policy.

I think disclosing medical information is an issue of law, not corporate HR policy.

Infectious diseases don't care about that either. I'm not suggesting broadcasting the person's name, but I am sure you can think of mitigation measures that might be applicable and wise even if they increased the possibility of identification by inference.

If I caught the coronavirus I would absolutely want and expect my employer to broadcast my name everywhere so that anyone who even thinks they came in contact with me could take appropriate measures.

I hope that I'd just take that step myself in a similar situation, but people react irrationally and I can totally see why someone wouldn't.

"Someone in building X floor Y" is not "disclosing medical information".

They could say, someone on the marketing team got sick, and quarantine (=work from home) the whole team or the whole floor. Or just say "someone on the third floor". Or just make the whole building work from home.

Was there today - it was definitely not in shutdown mode. There was a few people wearing face masks in the airport, some of which were staff of the shops.

Chevron employee in London was confirmed infected. Chevron shutdown that London office and have all staff WFH.

Just looked up citations given the downvotes, and you're right, the employee wasn't confirmed infected. The employee is suspected to be infected, and they still shutdown the office.

https://www.cityam.com/coronavirus-chevron-tells-canary-whar...

Can they not work from home?

I'm not sure why is this a shocker. It's extremely likely that there will be infections in all cities of the world, after all there's no coordinated global shutdown. Planes from Milan keep taking off every 5 minutes (well, during the day, now it's quite late so the frequency has gone down): https://www.flightradar24.com/data/airports/mxp

It is probably here, in your big city, too.

But Google makes it special because Google, it seems.

It is a logical fallacy to assume that because a mistake is being continuously made, that it therefore isn't a mistake.

...also, having an employee IN THE OFFICE have Coronavirus is a much much bigger risk than a random passenger from Milan.

In our office, in Europe, it is mandatory to work from home for 2 weeks after traveling to any area affected by the virus (whatever it is a personal or job related trip).

I do not think that USA work culture is compatible with this measure. I hope I am proved wrong and health care takes higher priority that having people siting in an office.

My office is doing it. No business travel to China, SK, Japan, or Italy. Personal travel mandates a self-quarantine.

we received the same regulation today. also official company events are cancelled.

BTW, this is Google policy here in MTV as well.

Unfortunately US culture is to keep working if you don't want to lose your job.

This is not true and highly depends on employer.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/29/facts-about...

71% of all nonfarm payroll employees, or, 107.8 million people are in the service sector. Chop out "professional and business services" and "education and health services," industries you could reasonably assume people have sick days in, and you have 43mil people who it is reasonable to assume can't take a sick day.

https://www.popsci.com/flu-season-paid-sick-leave/

A large portion of jobs in US are service jobs which are easily replaceable by other people, and service jobs are low paying so losing a days work can be financially catastrophic for the person.

Around half of all workers in the US are paid hourly. "Sick day" means "no pay" for most of them.

edit: according to most recent data [0] it's actually 58.5% of all workers are hourly. Do they get paid sick leave?

[0] https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2018/home.htm

Sure, but if you're paid hourly, isn't "sick day/no pay" true for pretty much any country in the world?

Better to lose 2% of your workforce permanently than lose 100% for two weeks. Why? Well, if your turnover is that employees only stay for one year on average (typical for properly managed software companies), then two weeks is 3.8% of that time: twice the man-week mortality rate of letting the illness roll through!

(A big /s for anyone that didn't catch it.)

2 weeks? More like 18 months until a vaccine is distributed.

From the perspective of the government, this might be literally true. 0.2% mortality rate for people of working age, so if we assume an average of 25 more productive years then that's losing (0.002 * 25 years = 18.26 days) a bit less than three weeks of productivity per person.

Add in another week off for everyone who gets the virus, and there's less work disruption from having people continue as normal, take time off when they get sick, and go back to work than there would be from "quarantine everyone for a month", like China did in Wuhan. (This means that you lose >20% of your retiree population, of course - but that's not really a downside from the perspective of someone looking at Social Security contributions and actuarial tables)

Indeed. And honestly, I'm not sure if I could blame anyone in government for thinking this way.

In our industry, majority of companies can easily continue operating under WFH regime. But most other industries can't. The damage to the economy must be kept in check, or otherwise the virus will be the least of everyone's worry. Quarantine is livable for as long as enough food is still made and delivered for everyone, and utilities are maintained.

Not to mention that taking extremely disruptive steps to minimize spread of the virus is only worthwhile (in any sense) if it actually works. I could certainly see the CDC determining that it wouldn't work, even with a month-long shelter-in-place order - and while consigning a few percent of the population to death-by-superflu is harsh, having those people die despite giving the economy a 10% haircut for the year would be worse.

Disruptive self-quarantines serve a purpose even in the case of an out-of-control epidemic. The mortality rate isn't very high, but the number of hospital beds for severe cases are limited. Ditto the number of diseased people who can be away from work at once without having disproportionate effects on society. A 10% sick rate might be managable over the course of a year, but a 60% sick rate over two months is probably not.

Aggressive self-quarantines reduces the peak number of diseased, and hence improves both the prospects of both the seriously ill (who will have medical treatment available) and society's ability to keep functioning while the epidemic runs its course.

> taking extremely disruptive steps to minimize spread of the virus is only worthwhile (in any sense) if it actually works

China has demonstrated that disruptive steps have flattened the epidemic curve.

> having those people die despite giving the economy a 10% haircut for the year would be worse

Do you imagine that there is a society in which this stupid Sophie’s Choice hypothetical actually plays out as you suggest?

If an uncontained pandemic is hospitalizing and killing their friends and relatives and overwhelming the healthcare system, do you think people will (a) show up to work and be productive and (b) continue to spend money as they did prior to the pandemic in order to sustain economic growth?

An uncontained pandemic is ipso facto an economic threat. Flattening the epidemic curve is good for people’s health and good for the economy.

> China has demonstrated that disruptive steps have flattened the epidemic curve.

Sure, China's demonstrated that "one person from your apartment complex can leave to buy supplies every two days"-tier restrictions can have positive effect. But, again, that only works if a high percentage of people follow it, and there's a lot of people in the states who'd very much not.

> Do you imagine that there is a society in which this stupid Sophie’s Choice hypothetical actually plays out as you suggest?

Sure - one where the young don't die to the disease despite catching it.

Flattening the curve can be useful, but only in moderately severe situations - small outbreaks can be handled without flattening (this probably won't be the case here), in a 'moderate' outbreak flattening brings the peak within hospital capacity, and in a severe outbreak the 'flattened' curve is still far above the capacity of the medical system to handle. And an unconstrained spread of COVID-19 would be 'severe' by this criteria.

Really? My US company just instituted the same policy.

I work in the US and my company instituted the same rule.

My US company has instituted this policy, and it's highly encouraged to work from home if you're not feeling well for any reason.

This will be a turning point for remote jobs.

And you'd be wrong. Amazon is requiring the same thing.

I would expect to work from home more in the US. Also traveling is not necessarily as common as it would be in Europe unless it was within the US.

Work for US based company, 2 weeks WFH after traveling to "Level 2" or "Level 3" countries (for any reason) is required. A few of my friends companies have similar policies.

I work in the US and this is our policy. 2 week self isolation after travel to affected countries and all non-critical work travel is cancelled, including domestic.

It's interesting that Switzerland has banned all events involving more than 1000 people but not all workplaces with more than 1000 people. I suppose the logic is that people travel further for events?

People are packed together a lot more closely at an event than at work.

This virus transmits most efficiently in a cool dry environment, like an A/C controlled office.

That is why the hotel in Singapore and the cruise ship were such hotbeds for transmission.

What Google is doing here is acting with complete idiocy - with ZERO regard for employee health and safety.

Depending on the event (arena concert vs outdoor festival), maybe not more closely than at a tech company open office

More travel, more mixing. There's probably also more of a short-term optionality with events (although cancelations affect lots of people in various ways) than with basically telling companies to send everyone home.

Banning events is also cheaper.

I just watched the press conference where someone from the swiss federal council was asked this exact question. The reasoning given was that a) an office is less packed b) it's easier to follow hygiene procedures, such as regularly washing hands or using sanitizers in an office setting.

But frankly, the real reason is probably just: economic damage.

For now the federal government's priority is not to lose track of the infection chain.

They also believe it's a lot easier for people to be cautious and apply protective measures at workplaces (and public transportation, but I'm a bit skeptical here) compared to big public events like the Geneva motor show, concerts, carnivals, sports games, ...

the logic is they don't want the economy to shut down just yet, whereas they wouldnt like unnecessary things like parties to infect people that could then force them to enact measures that would shut down the economy.

The problem also is that Switzerland is way smaller than China. China could shut down a whole province and have the rest of the country help them.

Switzerland is much smaller and realistically would have to shut down the whole country. Then you're depending on foreign countries, which is outside the government reach. This is a much more difficult choice, if they decide to keep their food or medical supplies for themselves there's nothing you can do.

And now it's in Santa Clara county:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/02/28/santa-clara-county-an...

Seems like a good time to work from home. I mean if Google can't do it then ... ?

Headlines like this irk me. I expected it to be a Google employee in the Bay Area, or a major US city, not Switzerland.

Not everything revolves around the US, and not every HN user is from the US.

True enough, but CNBC is primarily a US audience, I believe. Correct me if I am wrong.

Fair enough. I think many HN users, myself included, primarily look at the headlines and not at the domain though.

Would be really helpful if the person's home city was mentioned, in addition to the name of the place they briefly passed through. "Google employee", in addition to to being reductive and dehumanizing, is vague. There's not even anything here to suggest the ill person is American, or Swiss, or what.

Why would the nationality matter?

As to city - it's Zurich, they live in Zurich (or in the extended Zurich suburbs, perhaps as far as Lachen or Winterthur or Zug).

It matters because the facts in the article are consistent with the idea that the person visited the Zurich office and returned to their place of origin, or they just live there.

I was trying to figure this out for a re-print as well; I guess they intentionally not mention whether the person is assigned to Zurich or was just visiting from elsewhere.

Neither CNBC nor BI has any explicit information about these rather important distinctions; especially considering that folks at Google travel so much.

He's probably from Eastern-Europe, like most Googlers there, not Switzerland.

There are plenty of Italians, Chinese and Iranians in Switzerland - not at all clear why you'd choose to pick on eastern Europeans given how few cases there are in those countries.

It's true, when I was working there there were almost no Chinese people for example, but the office got more international since - not that it would really matter.

I'd just ask my tech lead to work from home from now on. It was never a problem at Google for me.

I am hearing Amazon has restricted non-essential travel for all its employees (even domestically within the US), which sounds like a bigger news than this. Maybe someone can confirm.

Yes, this is correct:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/amazon-pauses-non-essential-...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-amazon-com/a...

So has google for the most part: "it has restricted its employees from traveling to Iran and parts of Italy. In March that will expand to Japan and South Korea. The company had already prohibited travel to China, except for employees returning home." [0].

[0]: https://www.npr.org/2020/02/28/810494030/google-employee-tes...

Not sure how you're interpreting this thread. Most of Amazon's employees are here in the US. And Amazon discouraging US domestic travel (which obviously isn't as critical as those regions, yet) has nothing to do with what you quoted above.

I thought Youtube comments were the cliche, then I met HN comments on the Coronavirus.

Even an attempt to understand why this particular case out of the 100,000 would be discussed is pointless given the comments.

Because a lot of people on HN work for google and upvoted the article until it ended up on the homepage. People tend to care more about things they can relate to. George Carlin had a bit about that, how when there is an earthquake in Pakistan nobody cares but when there is a car crash in front of their door they'll gawk for hours.

Why is CNBC still calling it coronavirus when WHO has asked for this outbreak to be called COVID-19?

because everyone is still searching for news related to "coronavirus", and also "coronavirus" is easier to say/remember than "covid-19"?

Epidemiology 101

Those of us who don’t know history will repeat it.

What history? SARS and MERS?

Broad St Chlorea outbreak, the birth of epidemiology.

Which had everything to do with drinking contaminated water and nothing to do with person to person contact.

You shut off the choke point, let things fizzle out. As I type, people are still coming and going.

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