COVID-19

[pixelboy]

Probably about time for a thread..

This site is useful.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/


EDIT - Some interesting Links for historical purposes:
First Case in USA - 21 January, 2020
First confirmed case of novel coronavirus in Australia - 25 January 2020



Am I a bad person if I smiled when I read this?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-13/ ... s/12055104

[durbster]

Yes, I suppose the biggest threat to global stability in our lifetimes probably does warrant a thread

The UK is taking a slightly different route to other nations so far, and we are not closing schools or cancelling big gatherings.

To their credit, the government appear to be listening to the experts and taking their advice.

Somebody smarter than me (*cough* Big Kev) probably understands this better but my take is that because people are currently very wary, they are being disciplined about things like washing their hands and not licking each other. The research suggests if we start shutting things down, people will relax and stop doing those basic things and actually make things worse.

Then there's also the panic buying and general other fuckwittery that comes with big announcements.

There's a turning point where they'll have to move to those measures and they're using models to identify when that is. Perhaps it's when all the panic-buyers have no more room for toilet paper.

I think they're doing it the right way and it's nice that expertise is being respected again. Time will tell how it works out.

[norbs]

Listening to experts hey. When it is an immediate threat to their lives, sure. When it is climate change, fuck the experts.

You are not a bad person Pix.

[r8response]

If any c**t deserves the virus, it's lord Potato head.

[CLP]

This article has some interesting, and scary, stats about what it going on around the world currently. I think the take home message is that the time to act was yesterday.

[markus]

Our incompetent band of little girls cosplaying as ministers is doing nothing. We even stopped testing. The one and only good thing about Finland right now is that toilet paper is not running out even though there is a temporary shortage on the shelves (hooray for toilet paper factories).

[w00dsy]

The Canadian PM"s wife has tested positive. Last week she was with Lewis and Julia Gillard.

[durbster]

We're due to do our big shop this weekend. I know some of the shelves have been cleared today.

If you never hear from me again, I've probably been beaten to death over a large bag of pasta.

[Santaria]

Our organisation is being very wary. A lot of our disability clients have respitory issues already so we've asked support staff to minimise public gatherings.

Im absolutely no expert. I'm worried to be honest. Just because of the speed of the spread. My mum has auto immune issues so that won't be good for her either.

Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk

[durbster]

Our whole company worked from home today as a trial, just to see how it would work and iron out any issues if we're forced to do it further down the line.

The big employers in our city are going to be primarily working from home for the next few weeks too, so although it's not official advice, it's already having a big effect.

[norbs]

Our whole company worked from home today as a trial, just to see how it would work and iron out any issues if we're forced to do it further down the line.

The big employers in our city are going to be primarily working from home for the next few weeks too, so although it's not official advice, it's already having a big effect.

Ah yes, the working from home thing is big. And a lot of people in this country are going to realise just how fucking ill prepared our broadband infrastructure is for this.

[w00dsy]

I'm fucked if I can't go to work.

[Cursed]

Well all of Telstra have been told to work from home from Monday until the end of the month. The brain factory running the place sent out the email at 6:30 on a Friday night so I only heard of it through the report on SMH. I normally work from home so it's not a big deal for me.

Unilever's office workers are being told the same, so the Mrs is going to be home disturbing my peace for the rest of the month.

[CLP]

Our (state gov) department is gearing up to do a lot more work from home, and there's a lot of talk around contingency and succession planning. If anyone is interested, there's a publicly accessible paper in the following link:
https://publicsector.sa.gov.au/covid-19 ... ic-sector/

For me personally, I'll be heading in at night over this weekend to copy as much as a can onto a portable hard drive and likely starting doing work from home in advance of any directive. The difficulty in a government department that i've found is that while there might be great flexibility in working arrangements, there is little to none in project deadlines and budget. To date, there's not been any discussion about budget carry over and extensions. So i'm fully expecting a situation along the lines of "Sure, you were isolating as per instructions, but have you finished project XYZ as per the work plan?" <pointing finger menacingly>

There was talk in the bike lock up at work the other day of someone coming back from a trip to Italy and then returning to work the very next day, so that doesn't fill me with joy, even if my chance of exposure is small.

The thing that has blown my mind just recently is that in all the talk of reducing meetings etc, one of our political ministers stated responses to the situation is... to meet regularly to discuss the situation. Nice way to lead by example. Maybe i'm expecting too much from our elected leaders?

[Bails MacKenzie]

Not really, especially since the latest outbreak is among the political leaders...

Much like Woodsy, I'm not going to be in a good spot if work shuts, we're carting grain to China, Queensland and a heap of Victorian farms, if our city base goes down, then the food supply will feel it, but our regional spot is an hour away from anywhere, so we can still keep regional areas supplied.

Still, not enjoying it.

Also the internet is playing up here now that everyone is staying inside...

[Montey]

A quick suggestion, when making preparations to work from home please keep data security in mind.

If everyone takes copies of data (company sensitive materials, intellectual property, client information, etc) home then this presents a significant risk to your employer and consequently, potentially your own employment. I would strongly recommend speaking to your IT team (send them an email on the weekend, they're watching) to ask about what is the best way to allow you to work from home without introducing extra data security & privacy risks. They may very well already have plans in place or nearly in place that you have not just heard about yet - a lot of companies are deploying virtual desktop and remote access solutions so you can still do work within the organisation's IT environment whilst actually being home (for example, my company is deploying virtual desktop solutions and cloud telephony systems so our 24x7 staff can still respond to customer calls whilst working at home, but keeping our data and systems inside our controlled networks).

The bad guys are out in force and are exploiting COVID-19 like any other disaster, they are sending phishing emails out to try and get you to accidentally install malware to thereby allow them to see if they can find your employer's data on your home computer. COVID-19 is a public health nightmare, an economic disaster, and in my area a data security Pandora's Box.

[CLP]

.. to see if they can find your employer's data on your home computer.

(For me) it'd probably easier/cheaper/quicker for the bad guys to put in a FOI request for the data .. or just ask me for the website link to the (already public) data :P

[norbs]

Good advice Montey, assuming people have good IT departments.

We are lucky, we just VPN in to an AWS instance. But traders that are working at home last week were complaining to us about having to use Bitlocker and VPNs and 2FA like it was the end of the world.

[nutty]

Well said Montey, Its been funny dealing with it from my works perspective. I worked for a mobile device software management company for a few years. For ages we had been talking to customers around how they should be investing in remote/mobile technology solutions. Giving workers flexibility to work from home/remote offices ect... Often you would talk about BCP plans (things like the Brisbane Floods is what we would commonly bring up). Yet I can list a lot of companies that acted soo old school around all this, didn’t embrace modern authentication, cloud services or modern VPN technology at the very least. They all acted like they are some special or unique case and they can’t possibly support the concept of modern management and authentication. For the past week I’ve had people reaching out trying to slam in solutions or friends telling me of places that are having to tell staff not to work from home due to remote access limitations.

Since then ive started working for a contact centre software company. Being a big international company ive been super impressed in how we have handled it, the USA management put in a full travel ban a few weeks ago internationally to all staff, they mandated all the high risk offices to be work from home, and everywhere else is only work from office if you need. As of Friday they set work from home for all staff no exceptions. We have been offering free cloud contact centres or free additional licences for our on-premise staff who need to ramp up to handle it all.

[DarrenM]

I'm also working from home starting Monday. We've decided to start now to iron out any issues. We all get public transport to the office and none of us are keen on doing that if it can be avoided. My normally packed buses were 1/2 empty all last week so there must be a lot of people doing it already.

I'll have to work on my timetabling

[Montey]

One of the things I've been contemplating recently is how this may change what is considered normal business practices, in a post COVID-19 era, and I think it could be quite interesting.

Pre-COVID-19 business has been conducted in largely the same manner it has been for 2,000+ years. Commercial exchanges occur by people meeting face-to-face, with a large amount of the decision making based on establishing a personal relationship between the buyer and the seller (a sales person once told me "people buy with their heart first and then justify that decision with their head" and my experience says this is true). COVID-19, however, is forcing organisations to adopt remote working and tele-working practices. This means that organisations who have to keep trading (or risk winding up - a.k.a. most small & medium sized businesses) have to find ways of continuing to sell without using face-to-face meetings; this means that video conferencing is going to become a normal way of doing business whilst COVID-19 is around.

So now let's consider what a post-COVID-19 world looks like, at least to the business community. If organisations get acclimatised to doing business using video conferencing and this method of operation persists it may well become a new normal. Indeed some organisations may find significant productivity improvements within their sales and support teams as a result because they no longer need to lose productive time through the need to travel from meeting to meeting (for example, at the moment I can do at most 3 meetings a day because of the amount of travel required between them and how shitty Melbourne traffic is these days). This increase in sales efficiency alone may cause a significant productivity increase within Western economies (e.g. doing 5 sales meetings per day instead of 3, is a 66% productivity increase.)

I think COVID-19, due to the isolation policies put in place, will be a culture shifting event across the world; and whilst some elements of our culture will be forever changed for the worse, some other areas (including medical research) will see significant advances for the better.

If you need a morale pick-me-up, check out this video on Twitter.



It shows an Italian community, locked away due to quarantine rules, being the most united they have probably ever been since WW2.

[KNAPPO]

I'll be asking my boss on Monday about working from home and taking the computer home to do so. I can't see it being an issue as I do not work off the server.

Mainly doing so to remain flexible if schools are closed and to not rely on our grandma and Nanna picking our kids up from school as they are both 65 and 75.

[Big Kev]

I can't work from home with my job so if we decide to close I'm getting some paint in to do the decorating I had planned for the summer!!

We've already had a few colleagues in self isolation. We're a very international building, such is the nature of science. Probably 50-100 nationalities. We had 2 people in Wuhan when it kicked off, over there for Chinese new year but they isolated when they returned. We currently have one person upstairs in isolation. What's interesting is the NHS is running out of the reagents to do the tests with. We were asked on Friday if we had any to help them out!

The supermarkets are ridiculous. I'm just doing my normal weekly shop and it seems fine but when you see empty isles with no tins, pasta and loo roll you realise how stupid most people are. The knock on effect is my mum, who relies on deliveries, can't get one for another 5 days and a lot of items are unavailable. But hey, they're ok cos they raided the place and got what they needed to be alright. The supermarkets were way too slow to ration the number of items you could pick up, although people will still try and get round it by going in 2-3 times a day and getting even more. The stupid thing is you only need to be in isolation for 2 weeks. They're buying enough for 2 years. I really hope they end up out of pocket with so much they can't eat it all and it goes out of date. Oh not pasta AGAIN mum!!!

As for shutting everything down, the danger is that if you do it too early, everyone goes back to work all complacent thinking it's a done deal and it all kicks off again. You just move the curve that hasn't happened yet, so you almost need to let it pick up a bit before you try to stop it. I'm happy to keep working until I'm told to go home or I get it. I cross the bridge with food deliveries when I get to it. Losing a bit of weight won't hurt!!

[durbster]

We survived our usual fortnightly shop today. Even though they're now rationing the toilet rolls they must have been cleared out within minutes of the shop opening because those shelves were empty (thankfully we don't need any). Although it was definitely busier than usual it doesn't seem the panic-buying hasn't become its own pandemic. Yet.

I learned a bit more about the UK's plan and it does seem well considered.

It's based around the idea that once you've had it, you should no longer be able to spread it and it's actually beneficial for large numbers of people get it. The strategy is to keep the most vulnerable protected while encouraging the virus to spread amongst the least vulnerable to build up an effective herd immunity as soon as possible.

The risk with isolating everyone too early is that you have far fewer people with immunity, which dramatically reduces your protection from a future resurgence.

Therefore, because it doesn't seem to do much harm to kids, keeping the schools and music festivals going is actually a good way of protecting society long term.

[Big Kev]