[lug] curiosity about WFH

Thu Mar 19 07:54:35 MDT 2020

Hi Stephen,

I have seen this plot in various contexts, e.g.
https://www.bvsd.org/current-topics/coronavirus/district-updates (click
"Boulder Valley School District Schools Closing Starting March 13 to Limit
Spread of Coronavirus" direct link does not work), the New York Times
mentioned there, the Washington Post...  None of them labeled.

One reasons for not labeling the X is that the timing of various things
related to this virus are unknown: how fast (and how likely) it spread from
person to person, how long it takes for people to recover, etc. Obviously
these numbers vary from person to person, but solid statistics are needed
to build a model and we do not have such statistics. After all, worldwide
only 200,000 got sick and less than 8,000 died from COVID-19. For
comparison, just in the USA almost 200,000 people die from regular flu and
pneumonia EACH YEAR, i.e. way more than 3,000 die each single week, so
that's a solid statistics (source:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2019-2020/data/NCHSData10.csv )

I do not understand why they do not label the Y axis, since the information
about the medical system capacity should be well known.

One thing that only few sources mention and which to me is the most
important aspect of this whole discussion is that the area under the curve
stay the same. That is, everybody eventually get sick, and the total number
of deaths will be identical (provided that we stay under the medical
facility capacity). The only "way out" of this pandemic is having everybody
immunized, i.e. sick. Unless.... yes, vaccinated. However my understanding
is that the vaccine is 12-18 years in the future. Can you imagine the
social unrest if they say "lock yourself down for up to 18 months?" Easier
to say: "a couple of weeks and then we will re-evaluate", and then "another
month" and so on. Put the frog (that is, us) in boiling water and it will
jump out. Cook it slowly and it probably won't.

I know I am the minority and that most people prefer the "wait for vaccine
with a frog approach", but I will share my personal opinion anyway. No
flaming, please.
My personal opinion is that we should try to have the disease spread as
fast as possible while keeping the peak under the capacity. With the
exception of **voluntary** isolation by people who deem it appropriate for
their situation, e.g. the elderly or people with immunodeficiencies (which
should have made similar choices before anyway...)

Take care,
Davide

On Thu, Mar 19, 2020 at 6:55 AM Stephen Queen <svqueen at gmail.com> wrote:

> I needed to express my concerns about the graph in the aforementioned link
> in the section on Flattening the Curve. I know this is a small group that
> has very little influence on what can or will happen. But I respect most if
> not all the members and maybe someone can help my thinking. I worked most
> of my life doing hardware engineering. One of the things pointed out to me
> early in my career was that when a component of hardware vendor didn't
> mention or wasn't clear on a specification that I should be skeptical
> regarding the spec. Another fact I noticed about specifications is that
> good specs don't come without some cost to other specs. For example,
> sometimes a low noise component came at the cost of higher power. The
> component manufacturer would put the specs on noise right at the front of
> the data sheet, and the specs on power would be buried in the back. Looking
> at the graph I'm questioning, there is no label on the x axis or the y
> axis. The line showing the healthcare capacity is not labeled as well. I
> understand that the reason is that these are all unknowns. What concerns me
> the most is this info comes from people that are most interested in not
> overwhelming the health care system. With an unknown T axis as I expressed
> in my previous message, I'm very concerned about other just as important
> resources becoming over whelmed. Examples of these resources are
> availability and distribution of food, fresh water, power, communication,
> and sanitation resources. What do other people think or know about these
> concerns?
>
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 5:25 PM Tommaso Curto <tommaso.curto at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> The situation in the company I work for is very well described in the
>> article below... happy reading!
>> https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/16/charter-coronavirus-work-home/amp/
>>
>> Tommaso
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 18, 2020, 4:41 PM George Sexton <georges at mhsoftware.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> The company I'm working for has a great WFH policy. My manager, and two
>>> other people on our team aren't even in-state. One in San Diego, one in
>>> Arkansas, and one somewhere in the Bay Area. They all work from home. I've
>>> never personally met the one in Arkansas and I've been there two years.
>>>
>>> It's typical for snow storm days to just take laptops home the night
>>> before. There's a lot of good infrastructure. We've also got software
>>> (VOIP) phones, so if you dial my work #, the app on my PC gives me the
>>> option to answer. The same app (Avaya IX Workplace) also does video
>>> conferencing. For headset, I have a bluetooth dongle that works with my
>>> hearing aids. Our only concern now is that if we're 100% WFH, the VPN will
>>> be overrun. We encountered some issues so far, but pretty minor.
>>>
>>> As far as the current crisis goes, I looked at it last Tuesday (3/10)
>>> afternoon and said this is crazy, and I started WFH on Wednesday (3/11) of
>>> last week. The company as a whole finally declared WFH for North America
>>> effective Monday (3/16). EMEA is up to the site director.
>>>
>>> They haven't locked down the building, so if people need to go in to do
>>> hardware work, they can. I've heard in EMEA that the buildings are locked
>>> down and you need specific permission to enter.
>>>
>>> George
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 3/16/2020 5:00 PM, Davide Del Vento wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi folks,
>>> I'm curious about the WFH policies at various companies (your
>>> employers). Have they relaxed the WFH options? Mandated WFH?
>>>
>>> My employer, NCAR/UCAR, on March 6th relaxed its policies from the
>>> previous sort of "discuss options with your supervisors and find a mutual
>>> agreement" to "if you do not feel comfortable coming to work, any employee
>>> may choose to work from home". Last Friday, March 13th, almost at the end
>>> of the day, they made WFH mandatory for practically everybody and forbade
>>> access by staff to its buildings starting tomorrow at noon. On Sunday PM,
>>> they even abruptly cancelled shuttle and cafeteria services for today,
>>> making it quite challenging for those who do not drive and needed to
>>> collect items from office before the building became off-limits.
>>>
>>> Anybody willing to share what others are doing? I'm quite curious.
>>> Cheers,
>>> Davide
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>> --
>>> George Sexton
>>> (303) 438 9585 x102
>>> MH Software, Inc.
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>>
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>
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