In Germany a friend of mine refused to go to a meeting at a client's office where someone tested positive and HR threatened him because he was violating his employment contract.
Counter-datapoint: My employer (SAP) has had one case of COVID-19 among their German workforce. The entire office building has been closed down for disinfection and the employees there are asked to work from home for the quarantine period. All other employees (worldwide afaik) can work from home without informing their manager beforehand (as is the usual policy). All non-essential business travel is prohibited, with exceptions requiring high-tier management approval. Only two examples for exceptions were given: travelling to a data center to access physical hardware, and travelling to a customer site to access intranet services.
EDIT: I realize that this response is easier to do for SAP than for the average company since we are all working in front of computers anyway the entire time, with only 1-2% of tasks tied to physical objects (paper forms, server hardware etc.).
The German ratio of infections to deaths is very low compared to other countries. It may be too early to judge, but given how it's unfolding, this speaks positively about how Germany is responding to the epidemic.
It’s a point of discussion in Europe. They might be skewing the data because they are willfully not testing dead patients with comorbidities. e.g. a late stage cancer patient dies with a respiratory syndrome? Italy tests the body and that person counts against the total coronavirus death toll if the result is positive. Germany doesn’t make the test.
Well, in Bavaria at least, people are forced to self-quarantine for two weeks if they had contact to people from o where in high risk areas. Same goes for children in schools and kindergardens. Some schools are closed already. Corporate travel came more or less to a halt and soccer games are most likely taking place without spectators.
That's Berlin for you though. I think you need to have a much higher threshold for disgust and fear to consider living there.
I'm close to Hamburg. We've had two or three confirmed cases in the county. Patients are quarantined at home and stable. Schools have been temporarily closed, but reopened now. The administration is taking it very serious and people are stocking up on everything, including cake.
That is an incredibly short sighted view. We need to be proactive not reactive. This virus is here and it's here in a big way. Positive cases are not the full picture. Median incubation period is 5 days. Italy is a warning and we're not taking it. We should all be in quarantine now so this doesn't get out of hand rather than wait for it to become uncontrollable and then trying to de-escalate it.
We have months of data now. If the virus gets out of control; countries find that out because the hospital system gets overwhelmed and they have to bring in a hard quarantine.
Countries have to overreact to the circumstances that they are confronted with because in a week the situation will be much worse if they don't. The only options are to overreact when everything seems fine or to overreact when the hospitals are full past capacity.
The choices here are to overreact before the virus gets past the border; overreact when the first cases appear; overreact when the first cluster is identified or overreact when people who can't breath are being turned away from hospitals. We have yet to see what happens past that point because so far everyone has instituted a quarantine then. Germany is at the clusters developing stage.
I don't think you are using "overreact" properly. If it's the appropriate response, then, by definition, is not overreacting.
In line with what you are saying, a problem, is that the proper reaction, if works, looks like an overreaction later. So, politically, there is an incentive to do nothing.
It does sound extremely over the top indeed, but it might be the only way to prevent the spreading. It appears that by the time you find the first case, you are too late as the virus has been spreading all over the place. Maybe quarantining everybody, even from area with zero cases, is too much... but at least people should make a strong effort to reduce social activities for a few months.
Andrea Ricciardi, Professor of Hygiene and adviser to the Ministry of Health: "The most frightening point is the pitted figures on how much the virus can spread. the curves of the graphs elaborated by the epidemiologists and not only in Italy: according to the models, it could strike until 60% of the population, which means that according to the mortality rates there could be a million deaths only in Italy."
This is coming from 3.4% mortality rate from reported cases, but how many are not reported? How many people just suffer a mild cold, or are completely asymptomatic and never get reported? As an overall mortality rate, it is almost certainly too high.
The WHO reports "Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died".
If 50% the population gets infected, and if it's not 3.4% but "just" 3% mortality rate, that's already 1 million dead.
And according to some experts, even 70% infection rate is predicted.
Second, this 3.4% percentage of deceased patients, is at the early stages, with fewer patients and preventive measures (so that most patients that needed hospital treatment got it).
A 10% or more of patients of COVID-19 will need hospital treatment and ICU. As the number of patients rise, there wont be as many ICU units (and doctors are getting infected themselves at an alarming rate).
In Italy with ~ 7000 cases, "hospitals are scrambling to increase the number of beds available in intensive care units. Some have closed entire wards to dedicate them to severe coronavirus cases. Others have transformed operating rooms into intensive care units. Doctors are working grueling shifts to cover for colleagues who fall ill".
Let's put it this way, they have 9,172 cases and 463 deaths.
Now imagine with 100,000 or 1,000,000 cases -- still very far from the predicted 70%.
First, using the total population as a basis is just wrong. Some will certainly be immune to a certain degree while others are simply lucky.
Even very aggressive pandemics, hitting totally ill-prepared societies didn't infect every single person. Not even the black death managed to do so. So why do you think COVID-19 would end up doing that?
And using the 3.4% is another issue. Because you have the Wuhan rate, which is much higher than the rate eslewhere. And this thing is a moving target because testing was rather limted earlier. South Korea seems to be the best source to get mortalitiy rates due to their aggressive testing.
Andrea Ricciardi, Professor of Hygiene and adviser to the Ministry of Health: "The most frightening point is the pitted figures on how much the virus can spread. the curves of the graphs elaborated by the epidemiologists and not only in Italy: according to the models, it could strike until 60% of the population, which means that according to the mortality rates there could be a million deaths only in Italy."
Because turkeys are always fat. Happy and healthy is a diiferent story. And they get slaughtered, becasue that is the reason the are at the farm in the first place. Using that analogy for a disease is jst plain wrong.
Because it's only a matter of time before the virus will be in Berlin (if it's not already).
Nobody is suggesting people should quarantine themselves in Berlin, but avoiding crowded spaces, not touching your face and frequently washing your hands doesn't seem at all unreasonable.
It's futile arguing that the risk is low because the officials classified it as such when I stated that I disagree with their risk assessment and management strategy. If I look at a risk matrix I would classify the risk impact of not quarantining as significant to disastrous and the likelihood as very likely. That puts the current situation in all of the world at the highest risk.
One last comment because you clearly seem to prefer to live in your own world.
Assessing risk the way you do has one big issue (it actually has multiple but let's stick with one). When you put Corona in the disastrous category you habe to provide reasons for doing so, otherwise it is just a gut feeling. And by classifying it as disastrous, you run into issues when classifying stuff like Ebola for example. Over-classifying has that effect on measuring systems, that's why you need teams of experts from multiple disciplines to do it properly. And would have to do so at multiple sub levels for each criteria. The whole purpose is to take gut feeling and emotions out of the process. Doing it alone makes the whole exercise pointless.
This over-reliance on "experts" is what got things to this state in the first place. Not that long ago, WHO was adamant in saying that flying to China was still okay and that "there was no reason to take extreme measures". How many lives were lost because of that?
Conversely, had they recommended more aggressive contention measures, how many trips would have been avoided? How much slower would the virus come to Europe? If sirens were ringing 4 weeks ago by the WHO "experts", perhaps Italy wouldn't need to be in lockdown now.
> When you put Corona in the disastrous category you habe to provide reasons for doing so, otherwise it is just a gut feeling.
Not really. We put in the disastrous category because we don't have enough information to claim that it is not a mass-extinction event. In the face of a threat of unknown risk and the potential impact is unbounded, we got to treat it as the worst and prepare for the worst, cost-analysis be damned!
Your comments are breaking the site guidelines by being snarky and posting in the flamewar style. Please don't do that. It's not what this site is for, and it evokes worse from others.
Do you have kids? Older parents? Would you tell them that is totally fine to keep doing what they are doing just because the experts haven't assessed the risk yet?
It doesn't have to be a literal mass-extinction event for this type of thing to lead to some catastrophic events affecting people you know and care about. If it were to happen (I honestly hope it doesn't) to someone you care about, I am sure that "the experts told me things were fine" will be of little consolation.
How about dropping the sarcasm and word-thinking and start to put some thought into the questions I made regarding the WHO recommendations up until some weeks ago? I bet if you could go back in time to Italy just three weeks ago, you wouldn't be telling people to just "listen to the experts", would you?
You might think this is strange, but the short answer is yes.
Now a slightly longer one. Guidelines on how infection risk can be minimised are very consistent. And they make perfect sense. So yes, that's the advice I give my two kids, my parents (both of which fall into the high risk age groups, luckily they are following that advice already without me), and the advice I follow myself.
WHO recommendations are based on the best available picture to them. I prefer to trust someone changing his opinion when data changes over someone who paints a worst case scenario from day one on.
And yes, if someone from my family ultimately dies, which I really don't hope, having done everything experts told us to do to prevent it would be the only consolation there is. The alternative being fear mongering, panic and paranoia. In which any infections happening toy loved ones (assuming I am the only factor behind there behaviour, which I am thankfully not as my family thinks pretty well for themselves) would be to a certain degree on me.
And the experts have assessed the risk. Hence the advice they give. But you do you, ok? As long as you stop spreading stories about mass extinction and stuff like that.
It's of course different when people are making statements about their own nation, or a place that they lived for a long time. But these distinctions are too subtle to matter on the internet. Others will react the same way they do to garden-variety flamebait, so the effects on the site are the same, so it's best to just not go there.
Also, while different, it's not necessarily benign—just more complicated.
Criticisms of national identity can't be topics of curious conversation on the public internet. A small, closed group could, but a large open group can't. 'Large' implies that someone is going to get activated, and 'open' implies that they can show up and comment—at which point game over.
Thank you for understanding the spirit of my comment. I will take this flag as a very good lesson in risk management: no matter how many times you are positive in the exchange, the one time that you strike out can be fatal.
Yes, and the effect is worse because there's a massive disconnect between how we perceive our own intent and how it comes across to readers on the internet--or at least to some segment of readers, but when the community is large enough, every segment is an entire audience.
I can see your point. But if we are going meta... the discussion was going for quite some time exclusively between me and hef and though it got "heated" at one point, I didn't get the feeling that it was derailing at just some senseless uncivil exchange of insults. It is the kind of thing that can happen between a group of people talking at the bar, not just the internet.
Also, precisely due to this disconnect between what we write and how it can be perceived, it does seem helpful to me to occasionally have some curved ball thrown into the mix to help calibrate my sense of (a) where the other party is coming from and (b) check if the other party is willing to listen to you or just participate in a screaming match.
The entire world seems to be acting like that, it's not unique to Germany. Nobody pays attention because the numbers are low, and it's not worth stopping human activities. Then you wake up one day with thousands of cases.
I have a very different experience. I see lots of hand sanitizer everywhere, people are washing their hands constantly, my employer has relaxed rules for working from home (i.e. do it as much as you feel is feasible and reasonable), some schools are closed, people generally avoid crowded trains and buses.
This is in NRW, however, where we have by far the most confirmed cases in Germany. Might be different in other places.
If they closed the office, cleaned it, and tested everyone else, it would be reasonable. But I guess they didn't do this. Which really our society is not set up for.
Actually Covid-19 cleaning solutions would be a temporary business to get into.
i think the focus should be on keeping immune systems up. having supplies of water and vitamin c available. stress-reduction is good for the immune system too. i think it's time to assume we're all going to get it and how best to ride through it.
Well, if they did that is more or less ground for legal action. Managers have something "Fürsorgepflicht", meaning htey have to take care employees are safe. Usually things go the other way round, your employer would not allow you to travel.
depending on how long friend is employed by this company, the resulting leal case could be rather expensive for the employer. Your friend would still have to look for another job, so...
Quarantine isnt just about preventing the illness in the most vulnerable, it's about keeping the explosion if cases at a level that doesn't swamp the healthcare system.
Absolute containment is highly unlikely, but delay can help a ton.
This is exactly the kind of measures that should be taken in the beginning. Italy is far past that: With 9000 confirmed cases they would need to isolate hundreds of thousands of people. For comparison: Italy's entire prison population is 60,000 people. At that point it's just logistically easier to suspend public life over the entire country for a few weeks.
I would certainly like to see the example of a country able to learn from the mistakes of others.