Workers fear returning to work – many are resisting the call | Hacker News Reader

Workers fear returning to work – many are resisting the call

latimes.com

74 pointscornett93 comments

I’m a little frustrated that ordinary people making a risk/reward calculation in the absence of complete information are being described as in a state of “fear”.

Not to be glib, but isn't that the definition of fear? Making risk/reward calculations in the absence of complete information. It can lead either to paralysis or action. Such is life.

Sure paralysis sometimes causes inaction but sometimes inaction is an affirmative decision to take no action. That isn’t fear, that’s just strategy.

In fact the single best negotiation advice I ever got was to say nothing when you make an ask and the other side turns you down. Often the uncomfortable silence, even just for a few seconds, will cause the other person to instinctively walk back their firm no and start offering other possible solutions.

It may help to consider the opposite of fear, which is courage or daring, or even foolishness.

You can be described as courageous by staying at home, sure, but you also might be fearful. Are there more dangers at home? Is the risk & reward both higher and the ratio higher? I think those are the questions that ultimately determine the answer.

Given that there may be a huge negative to taking action however instead of inaction seems to suggest that it is fear by that criteria.

"Making risk/reward calculations in the absence of complete information" describes almost all decision making.

Fear is not a bad thing in itself. It's fearing the wrong thing that leads to trouble (and incidentally, I think fear-based paralysis is best defined as a symptom of fearing the wrong thing). When faced with a threat, making a risk/reward calculation is really an attempt to be rationally driven in one's choice of what to fear.

As a corollary, courage can be defined as fearing the results of not being appropriately brave more than the threat itself.

For non-retail fulltime employees who have been successfully productive, working from home has saved time, money, getting sick from fellow commuters and colleagues. That time saved has gone towards living a much healthier life.

Maybe for some people. I find myself drinking more than usual.

I'm drinking less, but you do make a good point. I think the other vices I've picked up are still better than the amount of time I spent commuting and doing nothing productive.

One week my sleep pattern flipped so I was working at night/sleeping after scrum. Back to normal now but starting to shift forward again.

Same for me, although I've been remote for years. Nothing kept my sleep schedule on track like needing to be at the office by 9 a.m. almost every weekday.

Also, remote teams seem more likely to span multiple timezones. That doesn't help the ole' bedtime either.

Haha, have to put "away" on your status at night. Yeah I see general threads get pinged from another country "I'm not here".

Sorry to hear that. Could it be related to pandemic closing down places you usually go, people you see etc?

For me, as an NYC resident, my apartment is small, most of my friends have left the city, none of my usual hangouts are open, and life is utterly monotonous. My wife was laid off and was in a field annihilated by the pandemic.

Every day is the same.

Worse, we've already had the damn disease, and it was utterly mild if it's the one I'm thinking of (testing was hard to get when I got sick so we took antibody tests later).

So I'm having the joy sucked out of my life to protect me from catching a disease I already caught.

Your sacrifice is appreciated by those with weaker immune systems and those who would otherwise risk permanent organ damage. It is a very infectious disease, so the mitigations are very serious.

Me too, but it's the stress from the virus and deteriorating political situation in the US, rather than working from home.

Not sure where you live but around here everyone I know is much more stressed, going out less and putting on weight. I can't wait for this to be over. https://twitter.com/hashtag/QuarantineFifteen?src=hashtag_cl...

I'm in London and agree with parent

Often, people don't say the absolute truth in a work environment. There's a lot of incentive to talk up their lack of time, their crazy workload and their challenges.

Just consider: Everyone gets to hang out in their pajamas and roll out of bed 5 minutes before the workday starts. They have been given easier control over their diet. With a newly flexible schedule, they also gain several hours a day that would have gone to commuting or office chit-chat. That time can be used for exercise and chores. Breaks (and naps!) can be integrated throughout the workday to reduce stress.

My sympathy goes out to anyone taking care of kids, but for everyone else, this represents a huge opportunity. I don't expect everyone to be able to adapt, but most people are smart and flexible and will be doing great, even if they talk up the struggle during small talk. I talk up that struggle, and my life is not perfect, but honestly, this is amazing and I never, ever want to go back to the office.

Do you have kids? Are they still able to attend daycare, if age appropriate?

If they would be at school, will they be attending in the fall remotely, or in person? Or still to be determined?

Do you have a yard? How much open space do you have at home? Do you have an office space, or do you have to setup and tear down everyday?

Living with anyone, or alone?

Mine is still able to attend daycare, but I have a number of coworkers who don't have child care so they're figuring it out.

We have a front and back yard, 'own' the house and so can plant/remodel.

There's three of us and so far because of the above we haven't killed each other.

My SO manages developers and says some are burnt out. They may not have had physical contact with anyone in months, may have two people to a one bedroom apartment, have had to try to do virtual learning with their children.

I agree with everything you're saying about social isolation.

Once things open up again, I'd rather use the two hours saved from not commuting everyday to socialize more, than in awkward silence commuting to and from work.

The thing that will restore trust: Clear and transparent daily reporting of comprehensive contact-tracing results.

You don't even need to contact trace if everyone gets tested every day.[1]

The most promising plan I've heard along these lines is detailed in a recent episode of This Week in Virology.[2]

This is possible, practical, and affordable.

The technology for fast pregnancy-test style tests for COVID-19 exists right now, and they could cost as little as $1 per test.

The reason these tests aren't being used yet is because of the FDA's misguided requirements for extremely high sensitivity for COVID-19 tests. If these requirements could be relaxed to allow lower-sensitivity tests, then these tests could go out on the market... or, better yet, the government could take over and ensure everyone gets tested with these tests every day for $1 a test.

Even a more limited plan of testing everyone in just highly affected areas would be way better than what we've got now.

[1] - People could, for instance, get tested each morning, and be required to present their daily test results upon arriving at work (or even online, from home, before they start their commute). If they test positive, they just stay home for a couple of weeks and then go back to work when they test negative again. People at work will have confidence all their colleagues (and virtually everyone else out and about) have tested negative.

[2] - Starting at about 6'20" in to episode 640: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-640/

Testing everyone every day seems unrealistic in the near term. New York's test latency is up to 7 days, which is already beyond the median time for symptoms to appear. Contact tracing would let potentially-affected people quarantine and wait for their test results while other people keep going out. Increasing the number of tests quickly would probably make the latency longer.

The test described in the podcast give results back nearly instantly. They are just less sensitive than currently approved tests, but according to the podcast that doesn't matter too much for various reasons.

I want to quickly plug TWIV here. It is an incredible podcast. I have listened to it for several years, along with its sister podcasts, and have found it incredible useful as a professional scientists and also just for the wonderful stories. The science they discuss is always good.

During COVID they have really stepped up to provide clear and well grounded information to their listeners about the pandemic. Every friday they have been releasing an episode where a doctor on the front lines of the NY pandemic has given a medical update on symptoms and treatments. Invaluable information!

> The technology for fast pregnancy-test style tests for COVID-19 exists right now, and they could cost as little as $1 per test.

Antibody tests or antigen tests? I'm aware of that style of tests for the former but not the latter. You need the latter to do what you describe.

We can do fast, pregnancy-test-style serology now. BD is pushing one to market. 15min turn-around time.

The problem is that their % positive agreement is too low (<90%), and their % negative agreement is based on the PCR benchmark which already churns out a false negative rate of roundabout 30%.

And even their positives are only reasonably reliable (<90%) during peak symptoms. If you're pre, post, or low symptomaticity, its accuracy isnt even characterized (but believed to be low.)

Given all of the above, hyping them up is ... well, ignorant of all of the above, one hopes.

Can you add a citation for the false positives number?

The Abbott Labs test false positive rate was 0.02%, which seems totally acceptable to me

https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/15/fda-says-abbotts-5-minut...

On the other side of the equation, Mina’s point (see paper in my other comment) is that with frequent enough testing, the math of the epidemiology indicates that the sensitivity does not need to be terribly high to have a huge impact on the trajectory of the pandemic

Edit: I see now that you were talking about antibodies, not antigens, sorry

https://www.bd.com/documents/brochures/microbiology-solution...

The low %positive agreement generates false negatives, though, not false positives. False positives, for this context, would be fine.

In this plan people would get tested again on the next day and the day after that and the day after that.

If you don't catch them on the very first day they have enough virus in their body to be above the test threshold, then you'll probably catch them in the next day or two anyway. Also, positive results can be verified with more reliable tests, if you want... or you could just retest with the same test some more, with every consistent result raising one's confidence in the test.

The TWiV episode goes in to detail about how if the goal is reducing the spread of the virus on a population level, then we only really care about a narrow window of infectivity, not about when people are infected but don't yet have enough virus to infect others. The cheap, quick tests they're talking about are good enough for this purpose.

They're reasonably quick. They are not cheap. $35 a pop or so. For our local elementary school, that would run ~115K a week.

The tests mentioned in the TWiV episode I'm talking about cost only $1 per test.

I suspect that’s marginal cost of production, not actual price. I’m one of the folks in charge of this exact issue for the healthcare chain I work for; we can negotiate volume discounts, but nothing that brings us from $35 to $1.

> People could, for instance, get tested each morning, and be required to present their daily test results upon arriving at work

I don't think test turnaround time is this quick in the U.S.

Only because they're using the wrong type of tests.

If your test has a 5% false positive rate, which is considered normal, then you'll be misdiagnosed as sick on average once per month. That seems not too helpful.

Abbott Labs FP rate was stated as 0.02%

https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/15/fda-says-abbotts-5-minut...

If you're testing every day, the false positives and false negatives will wash out after another test or two. The more you test, the more confidence you can have in multiple consistent test results.

> You don't even need to contact trace if everyone gets tested every day

If you have a factory capable putting out 350M tests/day (let's not even get in to logistics or the next steps), please hang out your shingle.

If not, then perhaps considering plans within the realm of possibility is a better use of time.

Paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.22.20136309v...

Op ed: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/opinion/coronavirus-tests...

This isn’t like PCR testing. It’s closer to insulin testing, in terms of the expense and difficulty of creation of the tests (and the means of interpreting the results). 350M is well within the range of possibility.

And the reward to having a reopened economy and significantly reduced death toll could justify very large investment.

"If you have a factory capable putting out 350M tests/day (let's not even get in to logistics or the next steps), please hang out your shingle."

From the above mentioned TWiV podcast[1]:

"Take every manufacturing company that knows how to print paper, adapt their tools to print monoclonal antibodies on to those sheets and just start slicing it up and shipping it out. It's as easy as that, I mean, you know, I'm simplifying it a bit, but..."

And, as the host of TWiV said in an earlier podcast[2]:

"It's not undoable. If this were World War 2, you would figure out a way to do it! This is war. This is World War C19. I don't accept excuses. I got a letter from a laboratory person who said 'You have no idea what it takes to develop and execute a test, how many people, how much this and how much that..' and I said 'You're missing the point. You gotta try. You can't say why you can't do it. This is war. Let's do it!"

In fact, I believe he's actually understating the point. This disease has the potential to kill more Americans than died in all of the wars its ever been in combined, if it hasn't already. The stakes are enormous.

Let's get it done.

[1] - from about 32 minutes in to podcast 640 - https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-640/

[2] - from about 1 hour, 47 minutes in to podcast 638 - https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-638/

With a disease that has such uncertainty over its spread, its long term effects, and its recovery, I think it's silly to be certain about what will restore trust and how this will play out.

to your suggestion, what is a contact tracing result look like? anonymized -> 53 persons tested positive today who had near contact with 204 persons? how does that restore trust? I can't imagine you meant non anonymized.

> With a disease that has such uncertainty over its spread, its long term effects, and its recovery, I think it's silly to be certain about what will restore trust and how this will play out.

I see this comment a lot among friends and family, I call it ‘Blank-Checking’ because you can use it to basically shut down any argument, no questions asked.

Well since the discussion is about what it will take to convince people it's safe to go back to work, any proposed strategy will have to deal with that tendency.

A sample template that I believe would go a long way to restoring trust:

"Thursday in King County, contact tracers tracked cases from 301 of the 672 new cases identified Wednesday. They contacted and referred 5,000 people for quarantine and testing. Tuesday's contact tracing efforts identified 15% of the cases reported Wednesday, up from 5% a week ago. The number of contact tracers working in King County will expand from 300 to 1500 in the coming week.

We continue to see a high volume of cases associated with the Home Depot on Aurora, the Wallingford QFC, and UW's fraternity row. If you have been to any of these places within the last two weeks, we encourage you to seek testing immediately.

Testing is free, takes less than two minutes, and wait-times are less than ten minutes at most testing sites across Seattle. For more information, visit covid.seattle.gov or call 206-555-1212.

Your assistance is deeply appreciated. The sooner we can contact-trace every case, the sooner we can stop the COVID-19 outbreak and return to life as normal."

As daily reporting of this sort becomes part of the rhythm of life, it will both build trust and point the way for the community and government to reach to ~90%+ contact-tracing coverage. When full contact-tracing coverage is achieved, the case count can begin to drop rapidly.

This fight can be won. Winning saves lives.

The contact tracing in US is non-existant. My town has tracers but they dont seem to do much. Our neighbour was positive but wasn't even asked where she went.

BTW has any country with good contact tracing posted any details about where most people get infected? I can't believe we're 6 months into this and still don't know if grocery shopping is risky or not. In the US I read all the updates but still dont know who is getting infected or where.

In Germany, the consensus is that indoor 15+ minutes is risky. So outdoor farmers market, beach, takeaway are all fine. But for supermarkets, everyone has to wear a mask to keep the air safe to breathe. Smear infection appears highly unlikely. So grocery shopping can be both risky or safe, depending on whether it's inside or outside and whether people wear masks or not.

Accordingly, most infections occur at private parties, in indoor restaurants, and in crowded factories, like meat processing plants.

This. I doubt the human capital required would make any financial sense for many companies. Digital contact tracing, on the other hand, is also a bust.

I wrote a 10 min post on it - https://tolusnotes.com/state-of-digital-contact-tracing-in-t...

Here in Oregon, the latest update was that they had fallen under the 95% benchmark for contact tracing. I don't know the details on what that 95% measures.

Also, they mentioned that while in the past, most case counts were from breakouts, that has changed. Now most case counts are "sporadic" cases, meaning no known infection source. The implication is that it's just out there in the general public now.

Oregon also currently has lousy test availability, at least as of a couple of days ago. One person I know seeking a test was basically denied - they couldn't even get scheduled. Something about too many tests being sent from Oregon to California and Arizona.

Transmission varies widely by individual. This preprint estimates that 10% of infected people cause 80% of infections. https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-67 There's also plenty of research showing that the "three C's" are major factors: closed spaces, crowded places, and close contact. In fact if we could just cut down on the superspreading events, that might be enough to knock the average reproduction rate below 1. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/just-10-20-of-covid-...

No amount of contact-tracing can make believe that jobs that pay a pittance are worth risking one's life for.

Contact tracing is the way to allow individual citizens to accurately assess which jobs are risky.

Many people I know aren't really afraid of catching the virus, they go out to bars, stores, and other places to meet people with abandon.

They don't want to go back to work because they have gotten to taste passive income (unemployment money) and don't want to have to go back to trading most of their time for less money then they can get for free by not going back.

Wow.. that's really cynical. Are you sure this article exclusively talk about people on unemployment benefits?

Anecdotal, but I've seen people in my social networks on unemployment say things to the effect of "If the government could afford to pay us this entire time to not work, then why should we go back?" Implying that the government has been withholding livable basic income from people this entire time, and coronavirus lockdowns have proved it.

I am aware of such people too. Their worldview is skewed. But that doesn't mean we should look down on them. Before knowing what I know now, I was extremely ignorant too. It's possible for anyone to fill that gap

I don't know how widespread it is, but I definitely have seen it in some of my social network. People who were previously making more than unemployment, but not much more than the new covid-doubled unemployment, are straight-up refusing to go to work, because why would you go to work for the same money?

Granted, these aren't high-flying careerists, given that "double unemployment" is more than or similar to what they were already making. But still. It's a rational response.

Discouraging people from working is a feature, not a bug.

The number one thing you can do to make free markets work better is reduce transaction costs. Generous unemployment benefits make it easier to hold out for the right job. In fact, we should start giving them to people who leave a job for any reason, not just the "good" ones.

Making people desperate is not just a human cost, but an assault on the proper workings of a market economy. Funneling people to suboptimal jobs is something that has to be resolved anyway, eventually. So it's not a gain for society.

Even of those still employed, many are starting to like their "work from home" lifestyle, and are perfectly happy to keep bringing up safety concerns if it means they get to spend more months in their pyjamas....

I've started going to the beach on nice afternoons and/or drinking beer on the job. Not looking forward to the office.

Unless you _really_ like your coworkers, or have a horrible work environment at home, if your job can be done remote its almost a universally better experience. I worked exclusively remote for 3 years, and I _never_ want to go back to working in the office full time.

I am pretty introverted (which is not exactly unique on this site I'm sure) and I genuinely like and miss many of my coworkers. Sure, I talk to them on zoom all the time, but that's not the same as having a social meal (or even coffee break) with them and shooting the shit about whatever.

Overall, I agree working remotely has been great for family time, saved a ton of time in commuting, saved some money, but even as an introvert, I'm not sure it's exactly "better" overall or not. I don't expect to go back to the office anytime soon and that's just fine with me, but it would be nice to add back some of the social experiences that are being lost right now (both inside and outside of work circles).

Yeah, I can see the argument that work at least in theory is a group of people who have (or had) similar interests. However work from home gives me so much more time flexibility that if I want to go to some meetup, I just would (Pre coronavirus).

Yeah, that's the tough thing to separate. How much am I missing social interactions of colleagues vs just social interactions outside my house in general.

In my case it helped to have physical zone which I was "at work" in. It allowed me to figure out what was work related and not. If I wanted to talk to them outside of that mental barrier, not about work, then I liked THEM, vs having to be paid to talk to them.

Humans often form "vetocracies" when it comes to anything that can be argued as safety related...

If anyone feels unsafe in the office, everyone will stay home... It doesn't take many people to start manipulating that effect.

It's a lot more complicated than that. Many of these people are chronically underpaid, the service industry in particular. Yes, of course they like the extra unemployment money, but I bet 95% would prefer to return to work and be paid a fair, livable wage, comparable to what they're receiving on unemployment.

Let’s not paint with broad strokes. I’m sure the people who are too selfish to wear a mask or limit their activities in any way are also selfish enough to be ok with someone else paying their bills. But there’s also a lot of people who want to earn their keep and they want things back to normal so they can get back to work.

One of the more dangerous narratives in American politics is theory that social programs are bad because they breed leeches. So we’ve been cutting those to the bone. Now one of the scariest aspects of the pandemic in the US is how little to no social net exists for people who are down on their luck. If shit hits the fan , it could get really ugly for a lot of Americans.

I struggle to think of major social programs that we've cut at all, much less "to the bone."

There was a sea change in views on welfare in the 80s-90s[1], culminating with the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. Between means-testing, spending caps and staffing cuts, virtually all welfare programs have been decimated over the last 25 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_...

Providing a monetary incentive to discourage behavior which is risky or leads to negative societal outcomes--i.e. performing non-essential work in a crowded workplace in the face of an uncontrolled pandemic--seems pretty reasonable, honestly.

Don’t know about that, my team was demonstrably productive and the idea of taking the subway into the office just because isn’t appealing. Of course I’ll do what I have to do, but they let me stay remote for the time being because I can’t imagine productively working with a mask on all day.

In standup, it’s visible that like nobody actually went in. It’s a developing situation. Point being, really, that there’s a lot more going on than a set of people preferring to remain on unemployment (which isn’t all that much)

What is the hospital bill going to look like for 20 days on the ICU?

Say it doesn't kill you, I can see how it can easily wipe you out financially (at-least in the US).

That was one of the considerations for my fiancee quitting her job in retail. We judged that her income as a commissioned salesperson at 50% of my income was not worth the potential hospital bills. Plus the potential lifetime of debilitating side-effects which would put an end to whatever lifestyle we have planned. So we went to a single income.

I can't wait to go back to the office since I'm not able to stay nearly as productive at home. I work with hardware, so not having all my equipment right next to me on my desk has been a bit of a roadblock. I'm expected to stay home at least through the end of the year, though, and I'm willing to do it for the safety of myself and my coworkers, but I really don't want it to last much longer than that.

Can't blame them.

I heard about another big Corona outbreak in a German factory. I think that eroded the trust in employers even more.

https://archive.is/MCql7

People are giant transmission vectors. We're not going to be able to have "safe" return to work until we get tests that can be done in minutes, by self serve kiosks, and that cost less than the daily value produced by said workers.

That or a vaccine, and requirements to be vaccinated to work.

What is a 'worker'?

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