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Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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?

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