Microsoft recommends WA and CA employees work from home | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft recommends WA and CA employees work from home

news.microsoft.com

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Just got notice from Microsoft HR that we're to work from home when possible due to COVID-19, through 3/25.

Edit: official announcement https://news.microsoft.com/2020/03/04/kurt-delbenes-march-4-guidance-to-king-county-employees/

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All FAANG+M companies in Seattle have had similar advice today - it was recommended by the King County health department a few hours ago.

Yep: “Workplaces should enact measures that allow people who can work from home to do so.”

https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/health/news/2020/March/4-co...

Overhead in SLU today “at least I can finally find an empty conference room”.

For non Seattle folk SLU is South Lake Union, home to many Amazon buildings as well as Google and Facebook

I don't work at MS, just a valley tech company. We finally got the email encouraging us to work with our managers and WFH when possible. I don't think many people are actually doing it, from what I can tell from my home office. I don't know why more large tech shops aren't doing this.

People can't see who's contagious in the early stages, so they're gambling with their lives by not taking proactive precautions before it's a widespread problem.

COVID-19/SARS-cov-2 is something to take seriously for several reasons:

- To reiterate an important point: "Healthy" infected people go around unwittingly spreading it for several days to a week, so you have no idea who's really sick. And you have no idea how many people in public actually have it at any one time. It's another reason this pathogen is so successful.

- It's a terrible flu for most.

- It can quickly turn life-threatening. A number of bodies were discovered in Wuhan of people trying to walk or drive themselves to the hospital, but they died before reaching it.

- FIXED: If hospitalization is needed, the average CFR is 16% (Russian roulette odds) and 49% for critical condition.

- There is no treatment.

It's going to be a full pandemic in 7-21 days (depending on the area), and last from 19-35 days. For example, someone already died from it within 40 mi / 64 km of where my mom lives in a rural/suburban area. You have to assume the number of infected is 10-30x the number of identified cases because the CDC has strict PUI criteria that are turning away patients. (Oh, and it costs $2000±1000 if you take the test and test negative.)

> If hospitalization is needed, the average fatality rate (critical CFR) is 49%

This is only true for people who are listed in “critical” condition. The fatality rate for most hospitalized people is much lower.

>To reiterate an important point: "Healthy" infected people go around unwittingly spreading it for several days to a week, so you have no idea who's really sick.

According to the newest WHO report (also posted on the frontpage of HN) this doesn't appear to be the case. There are apparently few asymptomatic cases and the disease mainly is spread by people who are symptomatic.

>You have to assume the number of infected is 10-30x the number

This sounds like pure speculation and is probably not a reasonable thing to assume.

In Seattle, the best current estimate (https://bedford.io/blog/ncov-cryptic-transmission/) is 570 infections as of March 2:

> Knowing that transmission was initiated on Jan 15 allows us to estimate the total number of infections that exist in this cluster today. Our preliminary analysis puts this at 570 with an 90% uncertainty interval of between 80 and 1500 infections.

That confidence interval is far too wide to contain any useful information.

As of Monday there were 18 confirmed cases in WA [0]. So even the lower bound of that confidence interval supports the claim that the number of actual cases is significantly higher than the number of confirmed cases (though "only" 4-5 times higher, rather than 10-30 times).

0: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/03/02/coronavirus-...

What should anyone do differently if there are 18 cases vs 80?

If you're going to pick a number to plan for, it's 570, not 80. Yes, the range of possible values includes 80, but it also includes 1500.

So, what would 570 (out of King + Snohomish County population of 3 million) mean? 22% of the population is under 18, so something like 125 minors would have had it (King County has ~600 schools).

The doubling period is 7 days, so ~275 of those cases would have been in week prior to March 2 and ~570 new cases could be expected between March 3-10. If 20% of those need hospitalization[1], that would be ~100 new beds.

With 570 patients (and 275 new), contact tracing is both impossible and ineffective. Let's optimistically assume that people notice their fever immediately and self-quarantine flawlessly. Even then, we don't know who these people encountered in the few days before symptoms began and can't notify them specifically. Either we accept whatever retransmission rate occurs during that period, or do what we can to reduce it by reducing the population-wide minutes spent within 6' of other people.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/coronavirus-in-i... and others

> This sounds like pure speculation and is probably not a reasonable thing to assume.

It is speculation, but not pure speculation - there is some data to back it up.

Trevor Bedford [0] is a researcher at Fred Hutch in Seattle and a professor at UW, focusing on genomic sequencing of viruses.

He estimated two days ago [1] that the number of cases was in the hundreds, with a large degree of uncertainty:

> This approach leads to a similar estimate of the number of current infections at 330 with a 90% uncertainty interval of between 20 and 1500 infections.

This is solely an estimate of the infections here in the Seattle area, based on gene sequencing.

0: https://bedford.io/team/trevor-bedford/

1: https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1234589820946534401

Where does it say CA employees? Does Bay Area in the context of Puget Sound mean SF Bay Area?

Yes; when you say "Bay Area" in Washington and Oregon, you generally mean SF Bay Area.

Maybe an exception for those living in Coos Bay?

Yes, those of us in Coos Bay and the nearby region refer to this tiny little area as the "Bay Area". Growing up, I didn't realize SF was the "real" Bay Area. ;)

Yes. No one in Seattle would call here the "Bay Area". We do have Elliot Bay [0] but not an "Elliot Bay Area" - Seattle and its environs are referred to as the Puget Sound [1] region.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodies_of_water_of_Seattle#/me...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puget_Sound#/media/File:Map_pu...

Thanks for the explanations everyone. I was confused because the title at [0] says "Kurt DelBene’s March 4 guidance to King County employees", but Bay Area is only mentioned in one of the headings. Thanks for the clarifications.

0. https://news.microsoft.com/2020/03/04/kurt-delbenes-march-4-...

Hard to see how any part of the SF Bay Area could be in King County.

Also in Seattle (well, Bellevue), my company has told us to WFH through the end of the month. Went out to lunch downtown and the usual place I go to was empty, normally it's packed.

This will be an interesting challenge to suddenly be thrust as a team into WFH.

Remote first!

Beats joining a team and getting getting covid-19

Or even worse... interruptions!

Somebody should fix the link so it's pointing to the MSFT press release.

I might bring my work computer home then!

I'm working for a tech firm in one of these two related areas. The idea of bringing the work computer home sounded good until IT added a number of high-bandwidth sites to the IT-mandated DNS blacklist software to keep traffic down for remote workers.

I could see things like Hulu and Pandora being less mission critical than other sites but then they blocked YouTube and, probably because google mixes domains a lot, gMail got caught in the net. People were not happy about that.

No split tunnel vpn?

Can't you use a split tunnel to do this without a blacklist?

Not a VPN. DNS blacklist at the O/S level. Mostly as an antiviral/antiphishing defense.

Virtualbox gets around it just fine. =)

Yes. OpenVPN makes it simple enough that I could figure out how to modify the default configuration I was handed.

Gmail on phone corp mail on vpn.

I don't understand the problem. Use your personal computer for personal stuff, and your work computer for work stuff. What am I missing?

I don't know either. The backlash has been really amusing.

It's ranged from engineers claiming they can't work without streaming music to backend office staff saying they need YouTube to help them understand how to work Microsoft Office.

gMail is an interesting edge case, though. I keep a tab open all day long as well as do probably a lot of people. But it's not for company business so it seems like that's not a place to complain. But people are.

Seriously, to any of you CEO/CTOs tuning in out there: the next time you're lining up a RIF just block Netflix for an afternoon and tag the people that complain to IT. There's your low-hanging fruit.

we're all mostly technical in here

why the hell are you logging into personal accounts from work devices

+1.

like sometimes you need to check something on your personal accounts, but that's usually a one-off to do with a private browser. anecdote: i applied to grad school and got a reference from my boss but there were some issues and had to log in to the school account to check things.

that said, unless you're in a secure or radio-free facility use your damn phone.

Why does IT care about traffic to non-corporate sites on an employee's home network?

I’ll assume that they’re VPN’ing into work and their IT doesn’t allow split tunneling. As a result, all traffic has to flow into the VPN concentrator as a bottleneck.

If the laptop is setup to route all traffic through the corporate VPN as many businesses do it doesn't just affect your home network.

Some of the FedRamp standards require a VPN and prohibit split tunneling (i.e. Spotify goes directly out to the internet and the VPN only exposes routes to internal company hosts).

AFAICT, most of them allow split tunnels for work VPN -- most work VPNs are set up to allow access to corporate resources, not block normal usage. Some places have very high security requirements.

Most of the IT-admins in Microsoft told people they can bring their monitors and computers home if they need them.

Why not bring just your soft creds (vpn cert)?

Correction: March 25. Microsoftie.

Thanks, fixed.

Does MSFT still use smartcards everywhere?

Nope

Yep. They're trying hard to phase them out through Windows Hello but you still need smart cards to at least bootstrap the Hello registration process, or for some specialized domains of trust that Hello isn't integrated into.

I first thought WFH stood for Wash Fking Hands.

I don’t know why this is being downvoted so much. It’s a legitimate abbreviation considering that washing hands is the most well known deterrent for the virus

The solution according to Hindu Mahasabha is quite clear

https://theprint.in/health/hindu-mahasabha-plans-gaumutra-pa...

These are not a group of random crank. These guys have a sympathetic and serious listener in the Indian government.

As an Indian all I can say is, "heaven help us", oh wait, they have that covered already.

Throwaway username suggests that MS also directed employees not to publicize this.

MS employee here. There's been no direction not to publicize this, in fact, this guidance is published on our public blogs[0].

[0]: https://news.microsoft.com/2020/03/04/kurt-delbenes-march-4-...

They likely just don't want to identify their regular account as a Microsoft employee.

Unless you're posting in an official capacity, absolutely don't link your posts to your job. Not worth the risk.

It seems like the only way out of this without a huge infection rate is a government mandated stay-at-home period. It probably requires implementing martial law.

Tech workers going WFH seems like it will be totally ineffectual by itself.

1. Most other workers can't afford to take time off, aren't permitted to, or can't do their jobs remotely.

2. Schools aren't implementing study-at-home yet.

3. There isn't mass testing in place yet.

For #1 it seems like we need some kind of massive billion gov disaster insurance bailout to compensate people. And someone still needs to do essential services, so a skeleton crew needs to be paid overtime and tested regularly by health officials.

For #2 this could be done tomorrow if it was ordered by health departments. The main downside would be people being forced to stay home from work, but at least this problem can be mitigated by families/friends.

For #3 to be implemented at the scale of millions of people, would probably require deploying the US military going up and down streets requesting samples.

Anything short of a stay-at-home period seems like it's guaranteed to get us the majority infection rate that will kill millions, mostly our parents and grandparents but a large number of young people too.

The damage to the economy of this could be huge. It seems better to overreact now, pay a huge bill ($1+ trillion, if need be), and prevent a massive loss of loss and/or economic depression.

> large number of young people too

Most of the info I've seen on this suggest that the young aren't particularly susceptible to the virus.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/specific-groups/ch...

Yeah, that is exciting, we should all hope it turns out to be accurate. But by young, I just mean people age <60, not children. If 10% of the fatalities are people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, or 50s, that could be hundreds of thousands of people.

I see what you are saying now. Wasn't clear from your earlier comment.

I hope that the mortality rate turns out to be lower than it appears at the moment (i.e. an undercount of infected people).

It probably requires implementing marshal law.

Are you serious? Martial law (let’s at least start by spelling it properly) is not something you just throw out there and change a setting to disable once you’re done with.

There is effectively martial law (yes, I wrote it down wrong, thanks) any time there's a large fire in CA. Police patrol abandoned neighborhoods. And then everything goes back to normal. It wouldn't immediately go Red Dawn. Most people would understand the reasoning and agree with it, however inconvenient it would be.

Is it better to let millions die or risk the long-term health of the economy?

Why not force people to stay home and watch Netflix for 2 weeks? With exceptions wherever it makes sense.

Can we do better than the false dichotomy of “suspend civil liberties and give the military policing powers or everyone dies”?

I ask this as politely as I can: do you know what it is you’re asking for when suggesting the enactment of Martial Law here?

Sure, just explain why it's a false dichotomy so I can understand.

1. If we get to a 70% infection rate, and the mortality rate is (a low) 1%, that's 2+ million dead.

2. A vaccine is likely 18+ months away, which means it won't be here in time.

3. There is no real hope of stopping the spread without drastic measures.

Sure, just explain why it's a false dichotomy so I can understand.

There are more options available than the two absurd options you presented. They may require more will from elected leaders and public health officials, but I take serious exception to immediately suggesting that we either suspend civil liberties or let people die.

There are several more options available before Martial Law should be allowed in the same room as options still on the table.

You still haven't explained an alternative to my "false dichotomy". What exactly do you propose as a third option?

What option requires "more will" from health officials that would actually stave off a mass infection? They all seem to be explaining how powerless they are to stop the spread.

Experts seem pretty unanimous in explaining that this is going to become a mass infection. They don't seem to be considering a martial law option, and yet it seems the only thing that could prevent it.

I'm actually not cavalier about suggestion martial law. This just seems like one of those rare public safety situations that might warrant it.

We could try asking people to stay home but this seems like it would result in huge compliance problems, which would elongate the stay-at-home period. Whereas the vast majority of people would stay home under threat of arrest.

The US FedGov + state and local authorities have the ability to issue quarantines using local police or other forces. No different than the police enforcing a curfew or other regulations. These have been used several times; my grandmother told me stories about being quarantined in Philadelphia during the 1930s.

https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin...

There are links at the bottom to specific legislation.

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