Coronavirus

That sounds very responsible, uba, I'm glad to hear some sanity on transparency at your workplace.

I'm contracting to a state agency right now, too. One with extensive public interface.

I've been invited to a conference call with the manager of our group. Apparently managers were pulled into a quick conference call to explain what has happened. So by 2:45 I'll be all educated on the issue that, apparently, I only needed to hear about because it's in the press now.

My company is doing contact-tracing and in my building we have a lot of security doors so its easy to see where people have been. Haven't been in the office since pre-pandemic but they're also doing temp checks on entry and if you fail they block your badge for 2 weeks so you literally can't come in.

We just got the thinnest soup imaginable served to us. "We feel awful about this and we're doing everything we can to protect you." I tried to politely ask if management was caught off-guard by the news in the media and got the feeling that the managers hadn't got an answer about that. That's the heart of my curiosity right there. Either they were caught off-guard, i.e., they weren't aware of the cluster, or they have been aware for a week or more and have not provided that information to the organization.

They want to allay fears but I think that paragraph you wrote above does that, and it's not something we're getting. Given the size of our organization we've assuredly had more cases. I'm home likely for a year, so this doesn't affect me very much. But if I were front-line or being asked to come in I'd be a lot more comfortable with some data to work from.

In Denmark we had lockdown for, what, a couple of months in the spring with homeschooling and all that. Then the schools opened without cases exploding and slowly things got more or less back to normal. Still no big parties, concerts have gradually been allowed with sitting audiences and other precautions. The performing arts have been hit hard and I'm personally glad I don't make a living doing comedy anymore.

Then, about a month ago, numbers began rising again and a soft lockdown was implemented. Bars close at ten, no big gatherings, and some other things. Also, people are advised to work from home which for me means two days at the office and three days of home so that we are no more than four people in the offices in a given day. It works pretty well and I love the added flexibility not having to communte gives me. Not sure we can talk the owner into having more work at home days going forward since he personally can't make it work, but I hope.

The current number is pretty much the same as when we did the hard lockdown in March, but there is a huge difference: the amount of testing. So we don't have that many hospitalised, so I'm guessing the amount of non-discovered infected was pretty huge back in the spring. The big question is for how long these soft restrictions will be in place, but most likely for a while. Numbers are trending downwards, but I'm guessing the government also want to keep them down this time.

Also, having a wellfare state is great when suffering from a pandemic. Things have been rough for a lot of people and this will have implications for a long time going forward, but free health care, government help to affected businesses, and guarantied support if you're unemployed goes a long way to help.

We do this too at my work. It's useless. Health security theater, just like most airport security.

Turning out that a lot of the obsession over surfaces and such is similar health security theater.

Yes! That is real protection! My college alma mater is doing two tests a week on every student, faculty, or staff member and has bouncers at the entrances of all buildings who do not allow people in if they do not have their app that certifies they took their mandatory tests.

Gary Sax wrote: Yes! That is real protection! My college alma mater is doing two tests a week on every student, faculty, or staff member and has bouncers at the entrances of all buildings who do not allow people in if they do not have their app that certifies they took their mandatory tests.

My daughter's university's plan is, AFAICT, "Don't get sick." My old alma mater is, in theory, testing 10% of the on-campus students per week.

Sagrilarus wrote: Question to the rest of you -- is this standard operating procedure? In a situation like this is the entire staff of the building notified of potential exposure, or is it limited to direct contact tracing?

No COVID in the country I am currently in, however when I was at Main State during the heyday any case would be reported to each of the Bureau executive directors via a generic email (one person on floor X, office Y who was last in on day Z). My executive director just forwarded those out. We could of course reach out if we felt there was any concern.

Of course they needed to investigate to determine if we fell under generic sick leave rules or workman's comp. If someone's expose to COVID was entirely from work (as mine would have been before I stopped going in) there would be more benefits (and no spending of banked sick leave). There was one point where I only left the apartment to jog or go to work.

Blanket testing of otherwise asymptomatic people is foolish with the tests we currently have.

At my work if you have a positive contact or symptoms you get tested. If you are positive it is a 14 day quarantine. If you are negative it is a 10 day quarantine.

If you have some random symptoms not strongly tied to covid you still get a 10 day quarantine and they don't bother to test you.

So basically any passing contact or symptoms of any kind equals 10 days off work. You can decide whether folks are exploiting this or just not saying that they have mild symptoms because they don't want to miss work. It is a circus.

Yeah, that seems like an excessive overreaction. If it was early in the pandemic and contact tracing was thorough, it might have been a good approach. But even the best tests are unreliable, and the faster tests are even less reliable, so I agree that only people with symptoms should be getting tested right now. Maybe a really crucial individual like the President and his staff should get tested a lot, except that our reckless President apparently didn't isolate himself after testing positive.