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Comment by meddlepal | Hacker News Reader

What's the flu death rate vs Corona for over 70s? This feels like an overreaction.

Frankly, I'd switch due to the lack of respect for the employees alone. He's a software developer, what great harm can come from letting him WFH for a couple of weeks if that makes him feel safer?

Its not just the death rate, it's the hospitalization ratio and the length of being out in bed.

Correct. The death rate doesn’t really matter. What matters is no herd immunity, high r0 and the percent of cases that are severe. I’d also add that human error and the inexplicable need to not sound alarmist and to conform to peer pressure is another huge factor. Nobody wants to take responsibility.

So... from the purely personal perspective of the author who quit: yes, realistically WFH isn't going to keep you alive. If it becomes a pandemic, eventually we're all going to get it. That's what pandemic means.

But straightforward management strategies like remote work still have value, because in a pandemic the problem just that everyone gets stick, it's that everyone gets sick at the same time. So... now you have to compare the mortality rate of a serious but normal flu infection when treated at a well-equipped hospital to the mortality rate of contracting COVID-19 in a city with effectively no hospital space available.

That's what we're trying to fix. And it's doable, but not if everyone (including, very frustratingly, our leaders) tries to pretend like nothing is wrong. If your office environment is plausibly exposed (and in the modern world of international geeks, almost all tech offices are), and you can WFH, you should WFH. Period.

"If your office environment is plausibly exposed (and in the modern world of international geeks, almost all tech offices are), and you can WFH, you should WFH. Period."

I work for a government agency, and I asked my union rep about this, and was told, oh, if there are more cases, maybe they will do something then. You know, you live and die by the rules, and the rules say you can't WFH whenever you want, even though everybody has laptops, unlike when I worked in the private sector.

It's not just the office, it's the public transportation too. I'm generally a fan, but it's hard to argue it's not an extra factor of risk in these situations.

As someone who has done lab testing for a local pharma producer, I definitely do not see this as an overreaction. This is a smart move, especially considering the ones they live at home with.

I hate overly precise numbers - based on what I've read, my one sig. fig. estimate for people under 50 is 0.5% mortality for coronavirus and 0.05% for the flu.

So I do believe that coronavirus is ten times more lethal, but I am currently a lot more worried about the crazy things people do or may do in response. If I caught it, I would be mainly concerned about the social consequences, the quarantine, etc.

On the other hand, having everybody work from home that can, why not? I mean, there are so many things that would be far more unpleasant or desperate later on, and if it reduces the spread even a little, it seems logical to do.

In my workplace, they just put up posters on the bathroom doors saying wash your hands and stuff. Yes, there's one in every office,* but still...if everybody has a laptop, the person at the top needs to just say, everybody go home for the next month. They aren't going to do it until the hysteria reaches a tipping point though.

*and I don't mean one poster

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