Covid-19 precautions for Stripe employees and customers | Hacker News Reader

Covid-19 precautions for Stripe employees and customers

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218 pointspiinbinary123 comments

I guess one good thing of this panic is that a lot of companies will realize they can do a lot more remote work than they were doing, which is a great thing for the planet.

Perhaps -- I have a feeling it'll go the other way (business will see how challenging remote workers are). Most businesses are not setup for "at home" work, the management style, communication requirements, etc. Further, and perhaps more importantly our infrastructure really isn't setup for that.

Imagine, suddenly having many times the bandwidth usage from VPNs and video conferencing. I'm wondering if the whole U.S. does this, if our national ISP infrastructure can hold up.

Of course it can. The limitation would be vpn appliances but you can elastically create them in awe if u really need to.

Says someone who hasn't seen numerous small(ish) businesses still running their VPN as hardware devices hooked up to ISDN lines...

If you are running vpn concentrates behind an ISDN line you are doing it wrong.

I didn’t say it’s right to do that... just that it is that way many places.

> I'm wondering if the whole U.S. does this, if our national ISP infrastructure can hold up.

I'd be more concerned with bandwidth from people watching Netflix at 4k while at home, despite their Open Connect Appliance.

Surely Netflix's IP blocks are near the top of the list of routes you either block 100% or allow to go outside the VPN.

Not to mention, remote on short notice is definitely not going to have the same productivity level as when people can actually plan their life around it.

Any worker with young kids is going to see their productivity plummet to zero. Especially if the schools close and the kids are home all day.

"Then we shall work in the night"

I often work from home with kids. Occasionally without being locked away in my office. You adapt. Eventually, interruptions don’t break flow as easily or severely. I imagine some people would adapt more quickly and/or thoroughly than others. People are complex and the trade-offs are too.

I believe I am well-liked at work and things are going smoothly. That said, if I were required to come into the office I would probably quit.

Cisco Webex: Supporting customers during this unprecedented time

https://blog.webex.com/video-conferencing/cisco-webex-suppor...

Oh, please, anything but Webex. There are so many good conferencing solutions out there - why is Webex the one that's so popular among "enterprise" companies.

Zoom’s stock (ZM) is up about 50% over the past month...

Don't get confused between the defunct PinkSheets company Zoom Technologies (which plunged 52% today because people figured out their mistakes), and the active Zoom Video Comm. Inc., up about 30% over the past month.

You’re correct about Zoom Technologies though ZM is the proper ticker for the record

We had recently experiment in remote working for two months. I've been doing this one-off for couple of years but I was living with other people who were doing it first time. If you throw normal office workers into remote work situation, without guidance and active management this is what we found:

- if there is local issue stopping work(no electricity for example), it is taken as a chance not to work, instead of solving this issue with the best of their capabilities(keep you batteries charged, go to a cafe etc). When working remotely, it is now workers responsibility to create a work environment.

- all the problems are relayed to the manager, but not the good things or done work. This creates a negative image together with next.

- they rather even avoid regular communication, than try to go extra mile with communicating while working because it is hard and out of they comfort zone.

- discipline to regular working is hard specially in the beginning. This impacts work.

if there is local issue stopping work(no electricity for example)

That seems like a better case than the same issue stopping work at the office so instead of one person out of commission, there's 100 people out of commission and even though they can all go home and work it's basically going to shut down work for an hour or so as they all pack up and head home. Our office has a generator, but it only powers some lights and elevators, the network goes offline after about 20 minutes when the UPS batteries run out.

So it doesn't seem like much of an argument against remote work.

I think the implication is that if an issue blocks work in the workplace, management tends to notice and intervene. This could be by directing people to assist in resolving the issue faster, or by assigning another task not impacted by the issue. ("If you can't finish your bug fix because the test server is down, you can work on documentation instead.")

There's fewer opportunities for that to happen with remote work.

There aren't really many failures of my home office that can't be solved with a 10 minute drive to Starbucks or my local library. Except a regional power failure or a disaster like an earthquake, but the office building would be struck by the same failure.

But when 100 people at the office lose internet and are sent home, they can't all converge on Starbucks across the street.

Okay, think less "my home internet connection went down" and more "the build server fell over" or "I need confirmation from Bob and he's not responding on Slack." It's a learning-to-work-without-direct-supervision problem, not a technical problem.

Also since you raised the issue: keep in mind that some people simply don't have internet infrastructure at home that's prepared for this kind of use.

Think of rural DSL lines or satellite internet. (Some old, poorly maintained phone lines drop DSL packets like crazy whenever it rains. Don't ask me why.)

Or someone who has a teenager that plays Fortnite and who doesn't know how to implement traffic shaping on their home network. :-)

I'm a fire warden in my office that doesn't have a generator, and if the power goes out for more than about an hour or so, the building chief warden is authorised to direct an evacuation to get people out before we lose emergency lighting.

In any case, at least in the Western world, at reasonably well run companies, infrastructure issues and other major obstructions to the entire team getting work done isn't really a problem for more than a few hours a year? I hope GP has better examples to illustrate this point. (And anyway, here I am, sitting in the office, wasting time commenting on HN instead of doing work. It's not like workers in the office are always 100% focused.)

Well... your perspective is valid but not comprehensive. On the lawn of the building are two rather industrial sized generators. When the power goes out, they go on and they keep going. I don't work at a startup. Nor do I work at 3M. There's a lot of space in between. That space is where a lot of the world works. YMMV.

Yes, I'm sure there are some, maybe many offices that have redundant power, but I've worked for 20 person companies and 20,000 person companies, and they all sent people home when the power went out. Even when I briefly worked in a colocation center, I got sent home during a regional power failure as they wanted to give my desk to a large customer that needed a place to work from to keep their business running.

At one company, I was in charge of IT and finally got signoff to run emergency power from the generator to the data center and IDF's to keep the network online in a power failure. Facilities put an end to that plan when they said that without HVAC, the building would quickly become uninhabitable in the summer or winter. We ended up powering the main datacenter to keep servers online, but not the rest of the network.

This is mentality issue, what we found when we dropped some people into remote work. They didn't link themselves up that they are now responsible for their workplace and not employer.

It is solvable, with active management and active workers, but these are the things we found that needed to be addressed.

This 100 times. There’s a big fallacy in tech circles in which everyone takes their work so seriously that they’ll be working from home just as effective as they’d have from the office.

In reality though things are quite different. Having seen it first hand I can say that there are many employees I’d rather have in the office.

I’m willing to bet on a productivity drop caused by the work-from-home policies that are happening now.

I’m an employee I’d rather have in the office. At home, my productivity is either 20-30% lower or 20-50% higher than in the office. The problem is I can never predict which one it will be on any given day. My productivity in the office is much less variable than that. There are, of course, better and worse days, but I like to keep things as predictable as possible. This, coincidentally, probably makes me easier to manage than if my performance were more variable.

So overall your productivity is about the same, with the benefit to you of no commute time and the benefit to the orginisation of not having to provide you with a desk.

That seems to assume a 50% split between the two day types. I'm the same as pmiller2, and I know my unproductive days at home far outnumber by highly productive days. Furthermore I find my commute beneficial as I'm able to swap from "home head" to "work head" mode much easier than, say, going out for a walk - my local area keeps my "home head" on.

My impression is that I’m about the same way, except I could really do without about half the commute time. I do like being able to (mostly) not work when I’m at home (on call rotation being the main reason I open the work laptop outside the office). Overall, I think I’m less productive on a WFH day than when I’m in the office. I’m not sure if doing more WFH would improve the situation due to more practice or not.

Hopefully this doesn't sound overly critical, but, these sound like cultural issues. I say that only because it was ingrained in me that if what you're doing is not directly making/leading to net positive money for the company, there is no excuse that can mitigate that fact and they will fire you or lay you off quickly (as I saw happen to a few good engineers at a couple companies).

(in case this is helpful for anyone else) W.r.t.,

- local issues stopping work: I've done everything in my power to make sure nothing can affect this; to the point of buying extra batteries for my laptop, buying a hotspot in case internet goes down, making sure that I have a go bag always ready in case the area I'm working in does not have the infrastructure I need (electricity/internet/health hazards), and duplicating my equipment at my parent's place in case I need to work from there.

- relaying information to the manager: I was taught that keeping my manager happy is nearly equal in importance to making the company money; as long as they're the type to want to be in frequent contact (I've had one that didn't seem to want that), I basically only give them good news (as quickly as I can) or substantial roadblocks that will take me an absurd amount of time to clear on my own.

- avoiding regular communication: I can't make the company money if I'm not functioning well as a team member.

- discipline: Yeah this one was hard because it's not immediately apparent how much a distraction can eat away at your day or how those distractions add up. I seem to learn new ways every week to keep distractions at bay; e.g. leaving my phone "hidden" in a relatively inaccessible place in another room, disabling facebook, blocking my access to news sites, and making sure any cleaning is done in my off hours.

As a counterpoint, there was a study done on call centre employees at Ctrip (big Chinese travel company) that showed a significant increase in productivity: https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/raise-productivity-let.... "Employees working from home completed 13.5 per cent more calls than staff in the office — meaning Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them." So “normal office workers” can potentially benefit from WFH too, not just tech workers.

Interesting article. I think in this specific example call centre employees almost NEED to be remote to be successful whereas tech work don’t.

>It is not so simple. There are lots of factors that could lead to such a ban, including a culture in which remote workers tend to be slacking due to low morale. Also, we were studying call-centre work, which is easily measured and easily performed remotely.

At the company I work for (also a travel company), quite a few people in the call centre work remotely simply because the business grew faster than the building. IT had already started working remotely and after a few trials management just concluded it worked well. I'm not actually sure how many people work remotely now (I work on the other side of the planet, so I can't see them).

> Employees working from home completed 13.5 per cent more calls than staff in the office — meaning Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them.

Were they working 7 days a week? I usually wouldn't be willing to describe 13.5% as "almost 20%".

Our company experimented fully remote for 4 months last year and they found all it took was 3 weeks for team to become seamless and productive was higher. In all hands our CEO jokingly said although the productivity of developers were higher he had no idea what managers were doing during the experiment. Expect managers we were all laughing so hard. It's understandable the anxiety of managers but the company has to provide a sense of job security to the managers or it's hard to implement full remote work.

For us in Hong Kong, the effect of working from home was the fact that revenues and productivity plummeted, and we are now forced to take one day of unpaid leave per week while still putting in 40 hours a week and taking a 20% pay cut for the privilege.

Just sharing as a perspective on why some people may feel that work from home may not be a great idea.

Any idea why productivity dropped that much?

I suspect that a lot of the "productivity drop" in general is a result of trying to measure productivity for remote workers but not office workers. If someone is in the office, managers commonly assume they're working, even if they're spending most of the day faffing around on the internet. If they're at home, you can't see what they're doing so you try to measure it by results. Which shows that they're only doing a couple hours of real work in a day, which gets called a productivity drop even though it was just the baseline.

I mean think about it. If people were less productive then to do the same work you'd need them to work more hours, not fewer, right?

And it's even worse if your metrics do something silly like measure by lines of code or time spent typing. If someone spends an hour walking in a park figuring out how to implement something and then five minutes when they get home to type it into a computer, it's obviously bad accounting to call that an hour of leisure and five minutes of working.

If work from home meant I really never had to come from the office and could work from anywhere, I'd take that pay cut and would move to a smaller, less expensive town. I pay a lot of money and put up with a lot of traffic to live within commuting distance of the office.

What industry do you work in, out of interest? If it's something driven by sales/physical interaction it seems that even if everyone worked just as hard from home, revenue woud still take a hit.

Hong Kong is a different case, the space per person is too small.

Born and raised in HK but don't live/work there, and obviously I can't speak for everyone, but we get brought up in a pretty top-down authoritarian system, with parents/teachers being very stern and unforgiving, so we end up using our smarts to cheat the system at any given opportunity. Autonomy isn't really ingrained into us. Working in the west, I feel that there is more assumed trust and less micromanagement.

Can't just jump straight into something like that with no preparation...

I've ran a remote-only company for 8 years and generally struggled to find employees who are suitable working remote. Especially junior employees I've had no luck. The best remote employees I've found are those who tend to be entrepreneurial in nature and usually more senior. They seem to possess the necessary self-discipline and taking ownership of getting work accomplished despite nobody directly keeping an eye on them.

10x this - Not everyone is motivated and deciplined to work a full day without distractions, loss of motivation and productivity.

Employees, young or old, that lack initiative and drive - they will make poor remote workers. Don't let the cool thing of 2020's, i.e. going remote, fool you. The hype these days is digital nomads and all-remote companies (such as Gitlab) but there are disadvantages, you like it or not, it is a fact.

Human bonds get stronger when we're physically present with each other, team dynamics improves and morale improves. I personally cannot do remote-only work and I am an introvert in every sense of the word. No amount of video/VR chat will replace that.

Another good thing is that the world's people are getting much-needed lessons in proper hygiene to prevent spread of disease of any kind, which is has been sorely lacking. It's been a crash course in taking care of yourself.

Or maybe a lot of people riding public transit are realizing they really miss their cars right about now, which isn't so great for the planet.

Seems inevitable that I'll have to work from home for some time once this really gets going. I'm really dreading it. Being at home by myself on weekends is lonely enough. Weeks (or more) without being able to go see my friend at work or outside of work is going to be absolutely awful.

Remote work requires a lot of tooling and processes or else people will just slack off. I'm guilty of that. Been working from home the last two weeks and probably only put in one hour of work each day. We don't have any good way of measuring output so it's extremely easy to just fake it.

Companies without these processes will likely not consider sudden remote work a successful experiment.

WFH is great, it's where I'm personally the most productive from, but unless an entire household can stay at home I think it has little effect on avoiding Covid-19.

You can be the most paranoid person, washing your hands 50 times a day, not touching anything, wearing a gas mask and what not, but when your kid comes home after touching everything at school and outside and then rubbing his/her eyes and they happen to contract the virus then everyone in the same household will eventually contract the virus. Same for your partner, flat mates, etc.

If one person gets it, everyone in a household will get it (eventually). They will cough in the house, they will touch food in the kitchen, they will decongest in the bathroom and spread germs everywhere, they will touch the remote control with their hands where they just coughed in, a keyboard, your phone, etc. etc.

I'm sure WFH will slow down the spread, which itself is good, but don't think you're immune all of a sudden because you avoid public transport to work when there's still so many avenues for the virus to enter your home.

At least in the UK there is talk of closing the schools, and some schools affected have already closed.

In that case WFH is much better as it does not spread to other employees

Here’s Coinbase’s in-depth plan that this appears to be partially based on https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SRP4dnVCvKB7A5WXrESe-cL5...

Some of the phrasing is identical:

> are likely to get sick more easily or for whom getting sick would be particularly problematic

Is Coinbase willing to make their guide on how to stay safe when working from home public? It’s a link in the doc.

There a quite a few links in that doc that would be interesting (and helpful) to read, but are unavailable.

Really frustrated that my employer isn't doing this. I convinced my immediate manager to give everyone approval to WFH, but I cannot fathom why the whole company isn't. I don't know whether it's an issue of priorities, foresight, or capabilities.

I think one reason companies are reluctant to start WFH is that it's unclear when you'd stop. You'd have to have a reason to stop, and it could easily be like six months from now before there's a defensible one.

I would think the main trigger to stop would be once the uncertainty is resolved. If we know it's less deadly than feared, or if we know how big the outbreak is, or if we know how effectively we can control it. If we don't see exponentially rising hospitalizations and deaths in the next few weeks, then relaxing it should be fine.

Sounds okay to me. My employer and my wife's employer's stance is presently indefensible.

Our local health authorities (Seattle) appear to have a clear-eyed picture that things are going to get worse, and that social-distancing measures will be required, yet they prefer to wait and play the game on hard-mode.

It is hard to see why waiting to implement school closures and work holidays is going to be a net benefit.

If the schools close and you have kids, you're not going to be working either way.

And wait, isn't Seattle hosting a 100k attendee international ComicCon in ten days? How can you argue that's more responsible than your employer is being?

Oh! Maybe your "they" refers to Seattle, not your employer in contrast to Seattle. Confused.

We already have WFH days, like once in a week. Tried to convince the manager to expand this to general WFH for all employees if possible. His statement: Not yet. He will do so as soon as our government (Swiss) suggests it.

I can't blame him and think that our government does not take it serious enough. I just went to work by train from Switzerland to Germany and it's business as usual. The general consensus of all people around me is "Meh, don't panic" while I watch the exponential curve of new cases going up an see neighbouring countries like Italy and France doing damage control.

All larger events with more than 1000 people were disallowed by our government, including carneval. But many people disregarded this and still gathered. But in Germany carneval is still allowed.

I believe, we'll have a huge wake-up-call in the next 2 weeks here in Europe. But what do I know. Maybe I'm just freaking out too much? We'll see. I'm not in the risk group but am worried about older people and people with other illnesses like diabetes. I feel sorry for them.

> I believe, we'll have a huge wake-up-call in the next 2 weeks here in Europe.

I would have thought the situation in Italy qualifies as a wake up call.

Herd mentality, the inability to cope with exponential growth and a fundamental sense of optimism and faith in our leaders and institutions overshadows everything what happens in Italy.

We're so fundamentally used to "We'll be fine" and most of us never experienced any kind of societal and economic hardship.

I really hope, that in the aftermath we'll learn from our mistakes.

I wonder how much business travel, in-person meetings, working in offices, etc won't rebound after this?

Hopefully quite a lot, assuming workplaces realise the benefits.

I work remote and I really miss more interactions, even some of the pointless meetings. Obviously thats just the loneliness talking, but I wish remote companies had some hubs you needed to live near so you could go in when you needed it. An 80/20 (remote/office) model would be perfect.

One reason I asked at least part of the question is that I co-own a co-working space (and work out of it) and we might eventually be impacted by this health issue.

If you haven't, you should try a part-time desk if there are any spaces near you. We have a few part-timers and I always appreciate the social side of a shared space, including having a variety of people/jobs around me.

I agree with this. Perhaps I don't know what I'm talking about, but it feels like it would be difficult to execute. A smaller office space would be ideal, but what if half of those 80/20 folks come in on the same day? Would people have to be sent home?

> I wish remote companies had some hubs you needed to live near

1. You can't really move houses easily unless you're young and unmarried. (I wouldn't have done this at any stage in my career)

2. Many remote companies have employees across cities and smaller towns - building or renting these hubs everywhere will not be economical.

I’m thinking 4 or 5 hubs in the country, depending on the size of the company. You live within 2 hours and commute a handful of times a quarter.

You must live in Europe. :-)

4 or 5 hubs would cover maybe half of California.

Ha, yeah, depending on traffic that barely gets you San Diego and LA.

No I live between Sacramento and Tahoe. A hub in the Bay Area would be fine if I only went once or twice a month. I don’t like 100% distributed remote model. We need to be anchored to something.

A company doesn’t need employees in every state.

As someone that's taking the train to work in the Bay area I so hope my employer does this soon...

Ah, I'm in the same train as you.

I feel for the sales guys who get paid on commission and can’t travel.

I wonder if as a company transitions to remote if many employees take advantage and work few hours vs a company that was already remote.

I wonder if as a company transitions to remote if many employees take advantage and work few hours vs a company that was already remote.

Deadlines and other commitments won't change, it's up to managers to make sure employee output stays on track. Though if the disease spreads many employees may be out of commission with the illness or caring for family members.

My company discourages work from home, but has multiple offices and we all rely on Slack and video conferencing so much that it'd be pretty apparent if everyone was WFH and someone went for a hike ride instead of working.

I find that my productivity improves when I WFH, but I have a dedicated office area to retreat to (plus I save 60 - 90 minutes of commute time)

Thanks for bringing this up. I always see only positives when discussing remote work but there’s never any consideration made for those who otherwise whose jobs rely on in-person interaction.

If this helps non remote employees (and managers) develop empathy for remote employees, well, that'll be amazing at pushing remote culture forward.

We've actually done remote experiments at Stripe in order to do just that. Where whole teams will get spread across as many places as possible and we attempt to keep everything as it was in order to discover the holes in the daily processes we have.

A lot of companies are doing this in the Bay Area, even closing offices and mandating WFH (in addition to suspending travel).

It’s an interesting experiment to see what’s it’s like to work with everyone fully remote.

We did the same thing today. Bunch tech companies have been talking to each other about how to handle this. Expect to see more announcements along these lines.

Flew to SF for CodeBeam, crossing my fingers I didn’t poke the pooch.

> Airports and air travel are likely to be higher-risk.

Who says an airport is any more risky than public life in a city? There is no personal interaction between travellers at all.

High volumes of travelers siphoning through the same paths, touching the same surfaces, interacting with the same service personnel.

Those travelers being from all-over, thus introducing new region-to-region microbiota mixes. Those travelers often tired or dehydrated from long plane travel across time-zones.

Even a heavily-trafficked park, grocery store, or DMV-like public service outlet might not face the same volume of widely-exposed & weary people as an airport does.

At this point, I think we can assume that the virus is spreading in America, and building steam.

The major metropolitan cities are going to get hit. NYC, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

But fear not, the virus is still controllable, since most of America is suburbia and rural. But we need to begin work-from-home on a massive scale, and begin temperature monitoring of people and ourselves.

Suburban and rural areas will get hit too, it’ll just take longer. They may not ride the subway or have an elevator they share with neighbors, but they travel, they go to work and school, they buy groceries, they go to church, etc.

All that said, I’d much rather be in a rural area right now instead of Manhattan!

I'd love it if a tech company had the balls to just say "we're not the cdc, here is their advice, no one will be required to attend if sick or to travel if they don't want to".

Instead every HR person in Silicon Valley is wetting themself to play doctor...

A reminder:

The risk of getting COVID-19 in the U.S. is currently low.

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

Also, expect positive cases to explode in number over the next two weeks as testing capacity comes on line and massive number of tests are administered.

I want to get it to get it over with. Kind of weird that San Francisco isn't ground zero for this in USA yet.

Hope the news of reinfection complications is wrong.

I want to get it to get it over with

I want to avoid it completely until a vaccine is ready. Just like I want to avoid the flu.

It might be ground zero. No one been testing for it, those under 50 seem to exhibit symptoms so mild they aren’t even worth going to the doctor for, most people go to the doctor only as a last resort because of deductibles, and healthcare professionals have likely passed it off as the flu. Hundreds to thousands die from the flu every week. They don’t test them all. If even 1% are misdiagnosed the infection could be far more widespread than realized.

Even if the fatality rate is 2%, that means the estimated number of infections in Washington is 100+. For every person who dies you can figure 50-200 infections.

With the flu, we model and estimate infections. With the coronavirus we seem to only be counting confirmed infections. This change in methodology will make the total infections look smaller and the fatality rate (possibly) arbitrarily higher as a result.

If you're going to get it, it's defiantly better to get it now because you'll have the best Drs in your city looking after you before the flood of patients come in and they are overwhelmed.

I'd rather wait until after the big wave of infections hit so there's still bed space available, but doctors know exactly how to treat this. I'd rather be the 100th case of COVID-19 my doctor has treated than the 1st.

Yeah seriously. Case histories and treatment protocols in the US have yet to be published aside from the one for the first patient.

FYI you can't just "get it over with". Some people have been infected multiple times already.

Its almost like my post was made for your specific comment.

Anyway, hope the news of reinfection complications is premature and incorrect

I feel the exact same way. Please just let me get it, and i can stop reading/hearing/watching news about it and just get on with my life.

Going on a trip to somewhere, screening for Corvid-19.. "don't worry, i had it and survived". Quarantine a hotel/cruise ship/whatever - "yeah, have fun, i'm out of here".

This whole thing is (probably) blown out of proportions. Most of the known cases only present mild symptoms, and many are even asymptomatic, and you have to add to that the probably 10x cases that are never reported because in the northen hemisphere it is flu season and common cold season, and everybody is experiencing symptoms that could be Corvid-19, or just a regular common cold.

With the limited amount of testing that's been done so far, I don't know that anyone can really provide a reasonable estimate of risk.

That fact chart seems to be out of date:

The risk of getting COVID-19 in the U.S. is currently low

Some people who have traveled to places where many people have gotten sick with COVID-19 may be monitored by health officials to protect their health and the health of other people in the community.

Community spread has now been confirmed in a number of places across the USA.

That doesn't mean anyone needs to panic, but continue taking reasonable precautions and if companies can let their workers work from home without excessive impact, it seems that doing so is a reasonable precaution.

The very sick will present themselves at hospitals and get tested. Form that you can estimate the total number of infected.

>Community spread has now been confirmed in a number of places across the USA.

Yes, but the risk of getting the virus in the US is still low because there are perhaps thousands infected and 340 million people in the country.

I live and work in a metro area of about 3 million people. This area was pretty heavily hit be Coronavirus with 6 deaths so far, so let's say there are 3000 infected people walking around.

So far, not too bad, right? I only have a 1/1000 chance of running across one of those people.

But, I take the bus to work, which holds around 50 people, and any of those people could be harboring the virus (possibly completely symptom free), so my chance of just being exposed to it on the bus is 1/20.

That ignores the chance of being exposed from the ~100 people on my office floor, or the ~200 or so people in the office cafeteria, etc. Though the bus is the most likely avenue of exposure -- I trust my coworker to stay home when they feel ill, but not everyone that rides the bus has the luxury to take sick leave when they need it (or even to visit the doctor when they are ill)

Granted, just being exposed is no guarantee that I'll contract the disease and I don't know what that chance is, but my risk of exposure is not exactly low.

I do wash my hands and try to avoid touching my face, etc, but none of that matters if the guy standing in the bus in front of me sneezes without properly covering his mouth and I inhale his viral mist.

>I don't know what that chance is

The people who do know, the CDC aren't recommending you stay home.

Yes, the agency that bungled the testing program by telling states they had to use federal testing kits, then sending out faulty kits, then saying that the kits were fine after all, then sending out such a limited quantity of kits (200 for the entire state of California) that only the most serious cases would be tested, and now it's possible that the lab that assembled the kits as contaminated so they may be tainted after all.

Finally they gave states permission to use their own kits so now we should get some real figures for infection rates.

The same agency that tells me that all I need to do to remain safe is to wash my hands frequently, while they also say that will only reduce my risk of infection by 16 - 21%.

https://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/why-handwashing.htm

Oh, and the CDC was effectively silenced by the White House, so now all communications will be tainted by politics.

So, I'm not putting too much credence in the CDC right now, other than to assume that if they say to do something, then it should be taken seriously.

So meanwhile, I'm continuing to go to work, and washing/sanitizing my hands frequently but all things considered, I'd rather stay home until the full scope of the outbreak is known. It seems that some mild over-reaction is better than under-reaction, at least until we have a good sense for how many people are infected, how quickly it's spreading, and what the USA mortality rate is (which may differ than other countries due to different standards of health care)

>I'm not putting too much credence in the CDC right now

Then who is your goto source?

My own mental aggregation of news sources both local (which includes US government/CDC releases) and foreign sources to see what's happening in countries harder hit than the USA (Italy and Korea) to get a sense of what may be coming here. It's hard to put much credence in the news out of China since the government has such a tight hold on information.

Remember that public health policy is not about keeping you healthy, it's about keeping the general population healthy even if it puts some people at a higher risk, so you've literally got to take your own health and safety into your own hands. It's arguably good for public health to keep people going to their jobs, keeping shops and grocery stores open, keeping gas stations open, etc. But that grocery store cashier is exposing himself to hundreds of people every day, so he may be putting himself at risk even as he helps reduce the impact to others by helping them to buy food.

And now we're in an even worse situation where public health has been politicized in order to protect the current administration, so keeping people healthy may be sacrificed to keep the stock market healthy.

That doesn't mean people should abandon society and run for the hills, but when you see deaths and signs of community spread near you and it's clear that there's not enough testing to determine the scope of the illness, it's probably best to avoid large social gatherings, maybe skip going to the movie theater for a while. And if your company allows it, stop going to the office and work from home.

>It's arguably good for public health to keep people going to their jobs, keeping shops and grocery stores open, keeping gas stations open, etc. But that grocery store cashier is exposing himself to hundreds of people every day, so he may be putting himself at risk even as he helps reduce the impact to others by helping them to buy food.

I really don't think the CDC's agenda includes sacrificing individuals for the greater good. But a variety of opinions is what makes life interesting!

I think you are safe on the bus.

https://twitter.com/tmprowell/status/1234923333877223424

yes, the risk is low, and proactive action taken like this will help keep it low. The risk is low until it isn't - and suspending travel while suggesting vulnerable populations avoid coming in to work will help keep the risk as low as possible for as long as possible.

If you read ahead on the CDC summary page (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/summary.html), you can see that they say that "It’s likely that at some point, widespread transmission of COVID-19 in the United States will occur."

If you see the CDC as an authority then you'd also see Stripes policy as overkill since CDC isn't recommending people work from home or cancel travel within the US or restrict visitors to their offices.

The CDC does not really inspire confidence given the botched manner in which testing was conducted and the lack of strong leadership.

Who is a better authority?

Definitely the payments company with zero medical, specifically infectious pandemic training

The Hong Kong government has actually done a solid job so far, considering they share a land border and high speed rail system with China.

NPR made the case that Hong Kong sacrificed too much for containment, but the underlying message is that their containment is working.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/01/8103920...

Edit: HK center for health protection https://www.chp.gov.hk/en/index.html

At this point HK center for health protection doesn't have travel advisories for the US.

I wonder if such a strict shut down will be helpful. How long is it maintainable, and do they expect to remain virus-free after that? E.g. they quarantine a lot of people for 2-3 weeks, no one gets sick, they return to business as usual, and boom, a sick traveller (asymptomatic at the airport) infects a few people...

That is the thesis of the NPR article. Personally, I think minimizing disease is more important than minimizing economic loss.

I think it's pretty clear that the US government has an interest in downplaying the risks in order to buoy the stock market - government spokesmen have repeatedly told falsehoods[1] to try and calm the public. The CDC is much more independent and analytical than anything coming from the white house, but I still think it's fair to be skeptical, cautious and certainly a good idea for companies to get contingencies in order. One of Stripe's offices is in Seattle where they've had at least 6 Corvid-19 deaths.

1. Like that there are only 15 infected people and that number will only go down.

Why are we destroying business?

We will hit a mini GFC or I think a GFC+

And now on top of that companies are just going remote. Not done before and all of a sudden with limited planning.

So they will lose more business unless it's an Easter miracle and remote work is so amazing without planning it can still break even.

Whats the plan here? 'Everyone' is going to get it.

Right now you can slow it down. If you are in Winter, then slowing it until Summer will help. If you are in Summer slowing it until Winter probably will screw you.

But I'd like to know what Stripe is trying to do. What model is it trying to achieve. Or is this designed by a committee? Does WHO agree? Is it trying to spread the disease out internally? Or is it just random flailing around?

Slowing down its spread matters.

A company working remotely while its workers eventually contract the virus piecemeal on a presumably much slower and staggered schedule is far better than having your entire offices out sick wholesale for weeks.

Not to mention it's better for society and our health system in general to slow the spread.

Stripe is being a good and responsible employer.

I'm sure of their good intentions, the question is how informed their choice of measures is.

On a societal level, you want to slow it down. A lot of deaths in Wuhan were caused by medical system overload. A small percentage of infected died even after getting invasive breathing assistance, etc. But many others didn't get a hospital bed at all and presumably died with milder conditions.

There's a big difference in the fatality rate inside and outside Wuhan, and that difference is from an overloaded system. ~5% in Wuhan versus <1% in the rest of China.*

* https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...

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