Those sensible precautions include not going to work where it's impossible to follow proper social distancing.

> You can take sensible precautions and not catch it.

A bit nitpicky, but significant: you can take sensible precautions and reduce the risk of transmission - but there's no reasonable strategy to not catch it.

I just looked up the restrictions for France specifically, and apparently they are set to expire on May 11 -- so that makes more sense. Where I am, most restrictions are still in place and going back to offices now seems ridiculously early, but maybe the situation is different in France.

I was curious since lawsuits over premature return seem like a major business risk, and I was wondering if they'd accounted for it, but if the French govt is allowing it, then yeah, they can probably just point at that to justify it.

It's pretty telling who the government really cares about. When ordering the meat packing plants to stay open in the midst of the pandemic, the top concern voiced by Trump was not about worker health and safety but about corporate liability for any lawsuits.

The amount of risk.

The flu isn't at the forefront of everyone's minds, whereas the coronavirus is; most of the world's in lockdown over it right now. If someone is called back to work early while lockdowns are still going on, the bereaved have someone to point their finger at and say "It's your fault this happened!" -- it seems much more likely to me that they would pursue legal action as a result of these conditions, and consequently it's an important business risk to consider. (It may well be a lesser risk than staying shut from a business's perspective if they're risking the company going bankrupt anyway as a result of not reopening -- but I was curious if they were accounting for it.)

Of course, it's a fair question if we should've been holding organizations to a higher standard for preventing the spread of diseases before. My mom died of the flu when I was 8. If people took infectious diseases more seriously and held organizations responsible for policies that permit diseases to spread so easily, maybe we could do something about flu deaths as well?

People don't normally take many steps to avoid the flu, whereas if you're required to go into work and that's the only time you see people it seems you could make a strong case that being required to go in to work was unsafe and caused you to catch the coronavirus.