I understand people want to support the Austin economy since losing SXSW is a big hit, however it was cancelled to limit mass gatherings yet people still want to gather.
Even still, my partner and I are keeping an eye open on flights to Europe (we've always wanted to go) and seriously considering taking the risk of buying a flight for in a couple of months time because they are quite literally at half price right now. And I'm not even talking about Italy.
edit: Haha—to clarify, the risk being flight cancellation or border closures not catching or spreading disease.
2nd edit: Wow. I'm drawing a little ire here. I'll reiterate: the risk is in not being able to go because the problem continues. Please take the charitable view (and of my whole comment, not snippets)—not the one that I'm some kind of monster :)
Save your heartache. SXSW lost its "soul" many years ago.
Too many pints in Dublin and then wine in her ancestral village in Portugal and then we're talking.
Even if you're not in the groups with high mortality rates, you can still be a carrier.
I cannot know your intentions, so if they truly are with other people in mind, I apologize.
Do also keep in mind, though, that by purchasing them now you are inevitably biasing yourself towards going.
If you do this in the midst of a pandemic, it's an unethical and selfish act.
I'm certain that just purchasing some discounted airline tickets for sometime later in the year will not in itself cause any negative global health effects. The decision to actually travel can be made entirely separately from that gamble.
If we're still in the height of epidemics during your travel, you will be basically locked in someplace and very hard to see anything.
To sum it up, tremendously stupid idea with utterly selfish tones.
To travel after the trouble with the virus has subsided on tickets purchased during a period of discounted rates?
Or do you mean not traveling because the virus hasn't subsided and tossing the hundreds of dollars down the drain in a gamble?
If neither of these were your conclusions, then respectfully—I think you misunderstood my comments.
Buying flight tickets might be cheap right now but the point is if when your trip starts X weeks from now and the situation is still bad and you don't cancel it, then you are indeed selfish and deserving of the negative comments and down votes.
Further, since nobody knows when this will end (it could continue into 2021 for all we know) and you didn't say you'd cancel your plans if it did (instead you expressed concerns you'd lose money if travel was banned), I feel like you're drastically misunderstanding the 2nd order dangers your actions would have and likely deserve the ire and down votes you're getting.
That is the risk I referred to, as I clarified—not being able to take the trip because the situation didn't improve. I've explained this many times over by now.
I think it's pretty normal. Surreal would be adapting more easily and unconsciously to the new constraints.
Thankfully, continuing to dream doesn't cost us anything, and it doesn't hurt anyone.
Why aren't they already transitioning to remote work? Is there a timeline in place? What are their criteria about what would trigger WFH? What about employees with elderly family members at home? Do they have the necessary systems in place to support a fully remote staff?
It's very likely that management has simply avoided thinking about the topic entirely. If the employees press them for a concrete action plan, then that at least prompts them to start engaging in objective analysis.
It's a massive multinational company, so I'm sure they're thinking about it. Technically no barriers to working from home (I do it every Friday), tempted to just start doing it every day, but would rather they made a formal decision on it first.
You're also asked to work from home for a while if any travelling family member from overseas visits, and if you have no reason to be in the office they won't say no if you just want to work at home and avoid public transport.
Hoping it doesn't cause a big hit to productivity because it's the right thing to do.
Going to be an interesting few weeks as we see how things proceed. To think, somewhere out there, the virus lurks and is headed our way ..
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pests%C3%A4ule
(in German)
But as in all countries by now, older folks should stay home and self quarantine whenever possible.
Notably, the Church of Greece has announced that "the virus cannot be spread through Communion" (where everyone drinks wine from the same cup). You can imagine how angry this self-serving move made most people.
> "the virus cannot be spread through Communion"
I assume Greece is Catholic, right? Because pope himself told people to take the "spiritual communion" instead of the actual one, and yet the Church in Poland doesn't seem to care.
EDIT: sorry. Somehow I thought Orthodox is mainly in Russia. But my rant against Polish Catholic Church still stands. Pope himself shows people what to do, but in Poland, we're going to do the opposite.
It's kind of like the systemd rageforks, only for sillier (unless you're religious, I guess) reasons:
Catholics in Greece are overwhelmingly Orthodox. The Orthodox Catholic church distributes holy communion differently, with a spoon (there is a particular term for it, but I don't know it) that doesn't touch the communicant's mouth. So, they're not drinking from a communal cup.
It's entirely possible for the communicant to exhale / cough / sneeze on the spoon. I don't know what the priest would do if this were to happen.
As an aside, it's widespread right now (but maybe not universal) in Catholic dioceses to not even provide the cup to the congregation during Communion (which is perfectly fine according to Catholic theology btw). edit: additionally, I recently heard about a dispensation in at least one diocese for people who are in any of the COVID-19 risk categories that they don't need to receive Communion for now. I don't know whether this also dispenses them from attending Mass on Sundays (which is otherwise an obligation for all Catholics).
The spoon very much touches the communicant's mouth, and the priest dips it back in the cup afterwards. You're getting spoon-fed wine, essentially, with a whole lot of contact.
Do Orthodox folks not use the term "Catholic" for themselves? I just don't know very many.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_(term)
Greek Orthodox are "Catholic" but they are not "Roman Catholic".
> don't need to receive Communion for now
Regardless of the virus you only need to receive Communion once per year, not at every Mass[2].
[1] https://www.dsj.org/decree-of-special-dispensation-coronavir...
[2] https://forums.catholic.com/t/receive-holy-communion-at-leas...
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/pneumonia.htm
[2] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...
"it's plausible that more than half of the population could get it, and leaders of many western countries have acknowledged that."
Will there ever be apologies for spreading mass hysteria?
E.g. in a recent turnabout Vice President Mike Pence said today that there has been “irresponsible rhetoric” from people who have downplayed the seriousness of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak.
Edit: also pneumonia is caused by a large number of causes. If covid-19 killed as much as all respiratory diseases it would already be scary.
The numbers don't need any mitigating factors but those do exist as well. I don't see South Korea doing anything more extreme than what could be done in the US so that doesn't show the US would be worse. The population density of South Korea is 15x that of the US so that would probably mean the infection rate would be lower in the US. The median age is also higher in South Korea and since this disease affects older people more that would also make the outlook for America better.
"Scientists working at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London and the Institute for Disease Modeling have used these approaches to estimate the infection fatality rate. Currently, these estimates range from 0.5% to 0.94% indicating that COVID-19 is about 10 to 20 times as deadly as seasonal influenza. Evidence coming in from genomics and large-scale testing of fevers is consistent with these conclusions. The only potentially good news is that the epidemic in Korea may ultimately show a lower CFR than the epidemic in China.
...
"On balance, it is reasonable to guess that COVID-19 will infect as many Americans over the next year as influenza does in a typical winter -- somewhere between 25 million and 115 million. Maybe a bit more if the virus turns out to be more contagious than we thought. Maybe a bit less if we put restrictions in place that minimize our travel and our social and professional contacts.
"The bad news is, of course, that these infection numbers translate to 350,000 to 660,000 people dying in the U.S., with an uncertainty range that goes from 50,000 deaths to 5 million deaths. The good news is that this is not a weather forecast. The size of the epidemic, i.e., the total number of infections, is something we can reduce if we decrease our contact patterns and improve our hygiene. If the total number of infections decreases, the total number of deaths will also decrease."
[1] - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-this-epidemiologist-is...
I lean a little tinfoil-hatty; but I get the impression that for all the bullshit self-serving narratives proffered by elites (both economic and political), this is one that they actually seem to believe themselves, privately as well as publicly. If anything, they're more spooked than they're signaling openly.