U.S. suspending visa services worldwide due to coronavirus

Agreed. That's a pretty big omission by the OP

Yes it took me a year to sort out my visa. When I read this news I thought "how will anyone tell the difference?"

I’m just 2 months behind you, my wife and I were celebrating that we’d be able to live in USA very soon just hours before the embassy announced indefinite suspension of interviews.

To make matters worse; they prioritize family visas under student visas sometimes so this delay could easily be many more months for us. And could require us having to fetch fresh documents from a corrupt government as some for the marriage visa have expiration dates.

Depends on the org you'll be joining. All of the interns I worked with were remote, but I was part of the field division not corporate. Best of luck!

If you can, try to talk with your internship coordinator about your concerns and see if they have any contingency plans. I don't know which company your internship was with, but I recall interns having some flexibility in their placement at AWS. The company might be able to place you in Canada (AWS, for example, has a large presence in Vancouver).

>but it will be far from the same experience

why do you think so? except for free food and the city life of whichever city you were supposed to be in, what's the difference?

Most FAANG have Canadian offices. If you don't get your visa on time but people go back to work in the office, you can ask them to help you find another team in Canada.

A Canadian friend of mine who was going to Amazon got sent to Amazon Japan temporarily, but working on the same team, until the Visa cleared.

Email them, probably, ASAP. These things take some time to propagate some times.

Why would current H1Bs be impacted? They already have their non-immigrant visa no?

For someone already in USA on H1B, I expect there won't be much impact other than added delay, as the processing of H1B within USA is done over mail and not involve interviews.

Consular services for citizens (like passport renewals) will take priority over visas. A lot of countries like the Philippines are already loosening/waiving visa rules for foreigners stuck in the country though.

Visa services are for non-citizens and that's being suspended. Services for citizens are still offered. So if you need to renew your US passport, you can still do it. Also as an added bonus, if you renew your passport through an overseas US embassy, you get it expedited without the extra charge. Meaning you can get your new passport in 2 or 3 weeks rather than months.

Same. Passport expiring soon. I’m living in the UK and can’t go home to the US right now (well I could, but it would require a 2 week quarantine). It’s mildly disconcerting, I hope this doesn’t really go on for 18 months.

It says they are suspending in-person interviews. You can still get renewals.

You're unlikely to be able to travel internationally for a couple months anyway.

You can always travel back to the US on an expired passport. You just can't go anywhere else without a valid one.

We don't want the virus to jump to cross the digital divide, so we're taking every precaution. Stay tuned for updates about MasterCard and Discover.

I don't think you have a monopoly on scaring the shit out of everybody.

Your comment was pretty on the ball. It's also why it won't happen.

Agreed with your previous comment.

It stops the spread of the virus. If you did nothing 5% would die and worse those that have recovered have problems breathing (can't walk up stairs).

Life would come to a halt regardless.

Again, this is about slowing down the spread of the virus so that it won't overwhelm hospitals.

We will live with the virus for decades.

We are pausing the economy to buy us time until a treatment or vaccine is available.

It's been explained thousands of time already, most people will get it eventually, the game is to spread it over time. If you spread it over months hospitals will be able to better take care of patients (not only coronavirus, every other patients too).

> Do people really believe the virus won't be there afterwards?

That's why we're not in charge of it, many smart people are taking what they believe is the best decisions for their country/the world, they probably have more data and knowledge than you, and no, they're probably not as dumb as you're trying to paint them.

If we can massively ramp up testing infrastructure, we can manage and treat the “unpause” a lot better. The more time we can buy now with drastic measures, the better prepared will be to deal with subsequent peaks, spreads, and resource constraints.

It's not a paused, unpaused situation.

It's a brace ourselves to prevent a cascading effect from overtaking our healthcare system. After the initial wave breaks over us, we'll still be dealing it - we hopefully just won't be overwhelmed.

The recipe in China was social distancing, masks and hand sanitizing. Somehow in China politicians understood the concept that germs coming out of your mouth and nose can be most effectively stopped right there - they even advocated makeshift masks while ramping up production of surgical and n95 masks.

I am currently in France and the only measure is social distancing. Police dont wear masks, no hand sanitizer at supermarket entrance. It is simply not available although it is mostly just 70% alcohol. I have masks and I wear them when I go out but people (strangers) even tell me on the street that they are useless. I think Louis Pasteur is agitatedly turning in his grave.

It looks like we'll have to wait until China can supply us with enough masks. Until then pressing "unpause" will start the epidemic all over again - if the confinement is going to halt it.

> Do people really believe the virus won't be there afterwards?

Of course people believe the virus will be there afterwards, it will almost certainly never go away. Look at how much effort the world put into eradicating Smallpox.

That effort will not be repeated given the current conservative politics in the US, Britain, and Russia. Modern conservatism is financially backed by the kind of capitalists that have enormous amounts of cash to spend on preventing regulation of their industries (like oil, health insurance, for-profit universities, churches).

That has led to a massive anti-science, anti-social safety net, anti-vaxx backlash. It will be impossible to get the entire world to coöperate and get eradicate it as we did with Smallpox.

But.

By buying time and saving lives now, we give ourselves a chance to develop vaccines. In functioning developed countries, we will build herd immunity through vaccination.

Meanwhile, countries like the USA will have regular COVID-19 outbreaks in pockets where somebody decides not to vaccinate their children, just as we do with Measles and other entirely preventable diseases.

Sorry to be so gloom-and-doom, but connect the dots between "YOLO, I'm young, I'm healthy, I'm off to Spring Break in Florida and Hawaii during a pandemic, sucks to be anybody who gets it from me," and, "Vaccines? We don't need any of that elitist Liberal malarky."

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p.s. You got a lot of downvotes. Nobody can explain exactly why any comment gets downvoted, but my suggestion is that your questions are good, but leading off with a statement that you are struggling to see how this will help may be perceived as jumping to a conclusion without paying attention to any of the knowledge about this that is readily available, and then expressing absolute confidence in your evaluation of what will happen.

I cannot read your mind, but others may perceive it as being a bit Dunning-Kruger, like you have jumped to a conclusion without doing even cursory research, and assuming that you know enough that you don't need to listen to any of the many experts who are saying the opposite of what you are saying.

Again, I don't purport to tell you what you're thinking, just sharing a (quite possibly wrong) conjecture for why your otherwise good question gets a negative response.

Ironically, the problem is not that we have done too much damage in the short term but that we haven't done enough. What we need to do is stop people from going outside unless absolutely necessary. It's pretty much that simple, but no one likes what that looks like: martial law, forced quarantine, forced house arrest like they have in China. The government should deal with the short term pain by stepping in and back stoping every business by guaranteeing payroll for a few months. It will be insanely expensive and be political suicide, but it would work (as seen in China). What won't work is the weak, iterative preventive methods we are employing now which don't stop the virus from spreading (as people won't comply) and lead to prolonged economic pain.

i'd love to see your calculations for that. unless you're talking about a temporary uptick in grave digger openings.

No ... this is a glimpse of the kind of changes the world needs to make anyways to stave off destructive climate change. The world needs to learn to be together virtually ... that means remote work for knowledge workers, better local communities that let residents walk to get everything they need (groceries, restaurants, bars, etc), less flying to far flung parts of the world (at great carbon cost).

We can still greatly expand our reach beyond what many people do today through technology, without having bankers and executives commuting by plane every week.

I am guessing you are not in the 2-4 million people who get to die then?

That’s not the only problem. Say you aren’t high risk, great! But do you really want to live in a world without a functioning health care system. Because that is what you are promoting. When hospitals get overwhelmed, even minor issues can become catastrophic.

In a car crash? Need some surgical repair? Too bad, we’re not open for business because we’re trying to keep critically ill patients alive and need the gowns and equipment for healthcare workers.

Yes, let's put money before people to prove how great our system is!

What if the only sick thing in the first place was our economy ? At least all BS start-ups with no useful products/service living on investors money will start to drop like flies, and if you ask me I'm feeling much better about that than having to burry my parents or grandparents.

It's not just the elderly who will die if the system is overwhelmed. Nearly 40% of those that are sick enough to require hospital care are between the ages of 20 and 64[1]. If everyone is getting it at the same time and there's not enough health care to go around, those 20-64 year olds will be dying too. I'm guessing you yourself may fall into that age cohort.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/health/coronavirus-young-...