OT: Coronavirus

[Guest]

@purplefaithful said:
Is the five-day office week gone for good?Both workers and companies want to keep some work at home.

By Claire Cain Miller New York TimesAugust 2, 2020

Most office workers are in no hurry to return to the office full time, even after the coronavirus is under control. But that does not mean they want to work from home forever. The future, a variety of new data shows, is likely to be workweeks split between office and home.Recent surveys show that both employees and employers support this arrangement. And research suggests that a couple of days a week at each location is the magic number to reap the benefits of each arrangement while canceling out the negatives of both.
“You should never be thinking about full time or zero time,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University whose research has identified causal links between remote work and employee performance. “I’m a firm believer in post-COVID halftime in the office.”
According to a survey by Morning Consult, 47% of those working remotely say that once it is safe to return to work, their ideal arrangement would be to continue working from home one to four days a week. Forty percent would work from home every day, and just 14% would return to the office every day.
The group of workers that is able to work from home is likely to have more education, with higher incomes, and so far they have escaped the most severe job losses from the pandemic. That could change if the economy continues to suffer, which analysts said could affect work-from-home policies — say, for instance, that employers opt to make remote work permanent to cut real estate costs.
In the Survey of Business Uncertainty — which was conducted by the Atlanta Fed, Stanford and the University of Chicago — employers predicted that post-pandemic, 27% of their full-time employees would continue working from home, most for a few days a week. Other surveys of firms have shown that they expect at least 40% of employees to keep working remotely.
Across organizations, work was most effective when employees were home one or two days a week, according to research by Humu, a tech company.
“It creates a shift, where office time is for collaborative work, for innovative work, for having those meetings, and home time is for focused work,” said Stefanie Tignor, director of data and analytics at Humu.
Thinking has changed
Past experiments in remote work at Best Buy and Yahoo were ended because managers decided remote workers were not accountable enough and missed out on in-person collaboration.
But it’s hard to know if the effects would have been different had their competitors, partners and customers also been working from home. Plus, in the past few years, technology for videoconferencing and virtual collaboration has become more seamless, and, because of the shelter-at-home mandates, workers have become more comfortable in using it.
So far, the results of corporate America’s large-scale experiment on remote work have been positive, even with the enormous stresses of the pandemic, including shuttered schools.
In the Morning Consult survey, conducted June 16-20 with 1,066 Americans who said their jobs could be done remotely, nearly two-thirds said they had enjoyed working from home, and just 20% said they had not (the rest were neutral). Three-quarters are happy with how their companies have handled the transition, and 59% would be more likely to apply to a job that offered remote work.
Of the 87% who want to keep working from home, people ages 18-44 and women are slightly more likely to want this arrangement.
49% of the respondents said they were more productive working from home compared with 32% who said they were not (19% did not know). Forty-four percent of respondents said the quality of their work had improved while working remotely during the pandemic, compared with 27% who said it had not and 29% who did not know
https://www.startribune.com/is-the-five-...571972672/

I don't miss my hour long commute (40 hours--a work week--spent in my car every month), but very much miss interacting face to face with co-workers. We're scheduled to go back September 7th, but we'll see...I think we're going to work from home two to three times a week to start. 

[Guest]

Quick sidebar, sports related (COVID too): who the hell is paying for premium online sports content right now?? Like ESPN Insider?? LMAO. They have a story about up and coming young players in the NFL and its premium content. Hilarious. 

[Guest]

We opened the country before we had beaten the virus in order to boost the economy. But would the economy be in better shape right now if we had simply waited?

https://twitter.com/bopinion/status/1289...88416?s=20

[Guest]

@MaroonBells said:

@purplefaithful said:
Is the five-day office week gone for good?Both workers and companies want to keep some work at home.

By Claire Cain Miller New York TimesAugust 2, 2020

Most office workers are in no hurry to return to the office full time, even after the coronavirus is under control. But that does not mean they want to work from home forever. The future, a variety of new data shows, is likely to be workweeks split between office and home.Recent surveys show that both employees and employers support this arrangement. And research suggests that a couple of days a week at each location is the magic number to reap the benefits of each arrangement while canceling out the negatives of both.
“You should never be thinking about full time or zero time,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University whose research has identified causal links between remote work and employee performance. “I’m a firm believer in post-COVID halftime in the office.”
According to a survey by Morning Consult, 47% of those working remotely say that once it is safe to return to work, their ideal arrangement would be to continue working from home one to four days a week. Forty percent would work from home every day, and just 14% would return to the office every day.
The group of workers that is able to work from home is likely to have more education, with higher incomes, and so far they have escaped the most severe job losses from the pandemic. That could change if the economy continues to suffer, which analysts said could affect work-from-home policies — say, for instance, that employers opt to make remote work permanent to cut real estate costs.
In the Survey of Business Uncertainty — which was conducted by the Atlanta Fed, Stanford and the University of Chicago — employers predicted that post-pandemic, 27% of their full-time employees would continue working from home, most for a few days a week. Other surveys of firms have shown that they expect at least 40% of employees to keep working remotely.
Across organizations, work was most effective when employees were home one or two days a week, according to research by Humu, a tech company.
“It creates a shift, where office time is for collaborative work, for innovative work, for having those meetings, and home time is for focused work,” said Stefanie Tignor, director of data and analytics at Humu.
Thinking has changed
Past experiments in remote work at Best Buy and Yahoo were ended because managers decided remote workers were not accountable enough and missed out on in-person collaboration.
But it’s hard to know if the effects would have been different had their competitors, partners and customers also been working from home. Plus, in the past few years, technology for videoconferencing and virtual collaboration has become more seamless, and, because of the shelter-at-home mandates, workers have become more comfortable in using it.
So far, the results of corporate America’s large-scale experiment on remote work have been positive, even with the enormous stresses of the pandemic, including shuttered schools.
In the Morning Consult survey, conducted June 16-20 with 1,066 Americans who said their jobs could be done remotely, nearly two-thirds said they had enjoyed working from home, and just 20% said they had not (the rest were neutral). Three-quarters are happy with how their companies have handled the transition, and 59% would be more likely to apply to a job that offered remote work.
Of the 87% who want to keep working from home, people ages 18-44 and women are slightly more likely to want this arrangement.
49% of the respondents said they were more productive working from home compared with 32% who said they were not (19% did not know). Forty-four percent of respondents said the quality of their work had improved while working remotely during the pandemic, compared with 27% who said it had not and 29% who did not know
https://www.startribune.com/is-the-five-...571972672/

I don't miss my hour long commute (40 hours--a work week--spent in my car every month), but very much miss interacting face to face with co-workers. We're scheduled to go back September 7th, but we'll see...I think we're going to work from home two to three times a week to start. 

The Big Food Company I retired from has a campus of 1000's. They were due back in Sept. That wont happen now till sometime in CY21...

[Guest]

@MaroonBells said:
We opened the country before we had beaten the virus in order to boost the economy. But would the economy be in better shape right now if we had simply waited?

https://twitter.com/bopinion/status/1289...88416?s=20

The economy will continue to languish (badly) until the covid #'s are much better. That really should the rallying cry for Washington and us (the people) regardless of what party we vote for. Flatten the F'ing curve. Nothing good can happen till the curves are flattened. Up here in Mpls, we just had to dial-back in restaurants again. 

Short-term is trying to keep people afloat today financially and test/trace/isolate.

There will be no norm again until there is a vaccine. 

[Guest]

quick question,   does the DC mayor have jurisdiction over the capital grounds and the comings and goings people there?

I have read that the state of Georgia is on a list of mandatory travel quarantines for 14 days for anybody that has been there.   How many politicians went to the Lewis funeral last week?  Will they be forced to stay away from work (not that anybody would notice) for 2 weeks now? 

[Guest]

so is HCQ really "settled science"?  apparently not at The Yale School of Public Health.    Long read but in a nut shell a "distinguished" epidemiologist with the school thinks its being dismissed to soon and that addiotional research and  use as an outpatient drug would be prudent to get a hold on this virus.  quick google search on Dr. Harvey Risch did not come back as him being something of a crack pot...( yet) ,  so perhaps this has some merit?

https://watermark.silverchair.com/kwaa093.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAArMwggKvBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggKgMIICnAIBADCCApUGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMqqqAxgGvyLnFLR2lAgEQgIICZmB0H_MA_NZIqZjouVENJZX9iw1eUgCfgxIsQQQZNEEbu4iYUBEd9ycmZB5aTKHT-_LzcSbF7eR9B-uxrLvxgWYjfuc9DKKrnyX6aYT3Mi8WekxDgPgU2R7vA0gGSepk8YXCg1Su24Pb0jztMlIIgLcVwGPIt5eAUarnA5eEKlP1I2oQe2FY7u4_sOjNZ9Kyfna-avB4tgBEiWzxEIVBzJPYBlKeNbJ7xbx9pLCnAnR5VfrXB5t_ra28FG5Ildp2Abf7ldJbpj-eaRp6clv2sjzojOlraRkVCaD0Im-lSdQYsEoqywOeLpSs7DMHeNWAN6jHEY79qnv3iwu5eo3z6SQ4WLbYVuxR43pW6Vullx5kANH4KGudFC6iOk8qYnMhSso-j4EbkIOHUcUsJF6y7OeafMF5ugI4X8xY3m2jiHIsiWe2yLlp7vN4DXlNggehq8TMhP2dyac6dv2OgI50S37s6ONla6Mh8TXGH40zkkGxJEBJVgrY3ocLfj7KxWYLrW2gE1S8614xZDKTWdePZgWZgvG7TrvEBfMkdx-of2KBgtYFyZ4ZqZylh6bYTVmrzAsj3Z0oCaANYbXrUXdXOshO0a9Wrw871s5O10d2OEny9FNS-DgKno8TqmU6FNuOJEslczpq3zPLDX_FG3X8vI9ihnXUj-HJWx8KCuOclO6CKHPpMm5tz1ZwSoZGBOZ0XtPeNP3lxu1wqCffsNmknVsV99z2Q3gmUyYHRvt-OOqbo1JKC_GctBs9X0Hz4l0efzlxKNTu0waWRtZB1WOLIidjHD9lCjIUAJogEeI60mGAvKAwxJnv

[Guest]

[Guest]

When did this entire thing become stop the spread?  It is impossible.  We are simply prolonging the cycle by doing what we are doing.  The only effective way to accomplish what they are trying to do now is put every positive on Quarantine and control it that way, not a politically palatable option.

Yes every dealth is tragic but look at the numbers realistically and compare to other diseases and health issue and you will see the numbers do not justify the panic.

Reality of this entire this thing is mass Exposure has been messed with therefore the natural immunity factor is severely retarded and the true cycle has been prolonged.  Vaccines today benefit greatly from the natural immunity factor of all their targeted diseases.

[Guest]

Who will be first in line to get COVID-19 vaccine?

By LAURAN NEERGAARD Associated PressAugust 3, 2020 — 8:56am

U.S. health authorities hope by late next month to have some draft guidance on how to ration initial doses, but it’s a vexing decision.
“Not everybody’s going to like the answer,” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, recently told one of the advisory groups the government asked to help decide. “There will be many people who feel that they should have been at the top of the list.”
Traditionally, first in line for a scarce vaccine are health workers and the people most vulnerable to the targeted infection.
But Collins tossed new ideas into the mix: Consider geography and give priority to people where an outbreak is hitting hardest.
And don’t forget volunteers in the final stage of vaccine testing who get dummy shots, the comparison group needed to tell if the real shots truly work.
“We owe them ... some special priority,” Collins said.
Huge studies this summer aim to prove which of several experimental COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective. Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. began tests last week that eventually will include 30,000 volunteers each; in the next few months, equally large calls for volunteers will go out to test shots made by AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax. And some vaccines made in China are in smaller late-stage studies in other countries.
For all the promises of the U.S. stockpiling millions of doses, the hard truth: Even if a vaccine is declared safe and effective by year's end, there won’t be enough for everyone who wants it right away -- especially as most potential vaccines require two doses.
It’s a global dilemma. The World Health Organization is grappling with the same who-goes-first question as it tries to ensure vaccines are fairly distributed to poor countries -- decisions made even harder as wealthy nations corner the market for the first doses.
In the U.S., the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a group established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is supposed to recommend who to vaccinate and when -- advice that the government almost always follows.
But a COVID-19 vaccine decision is so tricky that this time around, ethicists and vaccine experts from the National Academy of Medicine, chartered by Congress to advise the government, are being asked to weigh in, too.
Setting priorities will require “creative, moral common sense,” said Bill Foege, who devised the vaccination strategy that led to global eradication of smallpox. Foege is co-leading the academy’s deliberations, calling it “both this opportunity and this burden.”
With vaccine misinformation abounding and fears that politics might intrude, CDC Director Robert Redfield said the public must see vaccine allocation as “equitable, fair and transparent.”
How to decide? The CDC’s opening suggestion: First vaccinate 12 million of the most critical health, national security and other essential workers. Next would be 110 million people at high risk from the coronavirus -- those over 65 who live in long-term care facilities, or those of any age who are in poor health -- or who also are deemed essential workers. The general population would come later.
CDC’s vaccine advisers wanted to know who’s really essential. “I wouldn’t consider myself a critical health care worker,” admitted Dr. Peter Szilagyi, a pediatrician at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Indeed, the risks for health workers today are far different than in the pandemic’s early days. Now, health workers in COVID-19 treatment units often are the best protected; others may be more at risk, committee members noted.
Beyond the health and security fields, does “essential” mean poultry plant workers or schoolteachers? And what if the vaccine doesn’t work as well among vulnerable populations as among younger, healthier people? It’s a real worry, given that older people’s immune systems don’t rev up as well to flu vaccine.
With Black, Latino and Native American populations disproportionately hit by the coronavirus, failing to address that diversity means “whatever comes out of our group will be looked at very suspiciously,” said ACIP chairman Dr. Jose Romero, Arkansas’ interim health secretary.
Consider the urban poor who live in crowded conditions, have less access to health care and can’t work from home like more privileged Americans, added Dr. Sharon Frey of St. Louis University.
And it may be worth vaccinating entire families rather than trying to single out just one high-risk person in a household, said Dr. Henry Bernstein of Northwell Health.
Whoever gets to go first, a mass vaccination campaign while people are supposed to be keeping their distance is a tall order. During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, families waited in long lines in parking lots and at health departments when their turn came up, crowding that authorities know they must avoid this time around.
Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s effort to speed vaccine manufacturing and distribution, is working out how to rapidly transport the right number of doses to wherever vaccinations are set to occur.
Drive-through vaccinations, pop-up clinics and other innovative ideas are all on the table, said CDC’s Dr. Nancy Messonnier.
As soon as a vaccine is declared effective, “we want to be able the next day, frankly, to start these programs,” Messonnier said. “It’s a long road.”