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Comment by cess11 | Hacker News Reader

Don't think I've seen the point about office work spreading disease in a blog post like this before. Do you have any examples of this?

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We’re you in the workforce in 2020?

The entire point of RTO is a reference to returning to the office from when we all decided to not go to work to slow the spread of disease.

If you want a direct example, our first on-site after COVID led to half of my team getting COVID despite testing and masking precautions.

I work in the healthcare industry. Because of this, a lot of people on my extended team still had to go to work, and see patients and their families face-to-face.

The worst part of 2020 for me was repeatedly removing coworkers from the intranet as they died.

If I weren't, would I see examples of such blog posts in your reply?

Why would I point you to a blog post with an example when I already provided one in the post, and when the unspoken premise of the term RTO is a reference to the worldwide phenomena of people not going to the office to avoid spreading a disease.

You may not mean to, but you are coming across as intentionally obtuse. Apologies for my tone of that isn’t the case.

Because that's the topic here. Blog posts venting against "RTO". The message I responded to claimed that TFA didn't have anything "new", but to me, as far as I know this genre, that point being brought up was new.

So I asked for examples, so if they exist and this isn't actually uncommon in such blog posts and I've just been unlucky, then I might find some interesting blogs to read. The absolute bulk of somewhat popular tech work blogging is done by very boring, very self-centered people, and I've found caring about epidemic disease to be a decent indicator that people might not be in short-form social media.

But a bunch of what looks to me like illiterate cretins got in the way. Maybe they're not, but by now I don't really care either way, and have given up on the potential for blog recommendations.

It's a bunch of people in a crowded, shared space. For respiratory/airborne illnesses, the default assumption should be that office work will in fact spread disease.

You probably meant to respond to someone else, I have made no such claim.

You asked for examples about office work spreading disease, in the context of you saying that you hadn't seen the claim before. I took that as an unwillingness to believe the idea until you saw evidence. If that wasn't your point, I obviously didn't understand what you were trying to say, so could you clarify?

[Edit: I see that it could be read to be asking for examples of the claim that office work spreads disease in a piece arguing against RTO. Given that at this time, none of the direct replies read it that way, I'm going to say that it was at a minimum ambiguously worded...]

Your edit is still wrong!

In context, the person was replying to someone who stated “I have read it all when it comes to RTO”. They stated they hadn’t seen a _blog post_ making _this point_ that RTO would cause more sickness. They were never addressing the claim that it does or does not. They were talking about the novelty of this argument for them.

You might want to slow down a bit and re-read what the person actually said in their comment.

Just as a tip: the links between comments and replies on HN is pretty thin so it can be hard to follow the connection between a comment and what it's reply to.

I get fewer (not none!) of this kind of misunderstood reply after adopting a habit of quoting the specific part of a post which I'm replying to, especially when that post makes more than one point.

So in this case (and this is mainly for the benefit of anyone still confused about what happened in this thread):

> > I have heard every possible sentiment about RTO at this point.

> Don't think I've seen the point about office work spreading disease in a blog post like this before. Do you have any examples of this?

It spreads disease and increases sick days and terrible for green house gas reductions and increases inflation (increases demands for gas). The thing that gets me is the same people preaching the world is going to end because of these gases demand we continue these practices. The environmental groups are silence. Who is lying to whomp? Is it all some self delusion.

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