

Microsoft recommends WA and CA employees work from home - ahghtgfhg
https://news.microsoft.com/2020/03/04/kurt-delbenes-march-4-guidance-to-king-county-employees/
Just got notice from Microsoft HR that we&#x27;re to work from home when possible due to COVID-19, through 3&#x2F;25.<p>Edit: official announcement https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.microsoft.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;04&#x2F;kurt-delbenes-march-4-guidance-to-king-county-employees&#x2F;
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alasdair_
All FAANG+M companies in Seattle have had similar advice today - it was
recommended by the King County health department a few hours ago.

~~~
cbsks
Yep: “Workplaces should enact measures that allow people who can work from
home to do so.”

[https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/health/news/2020/March/4-co...](https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/health/news/2020/March/4-covid-
recommendations.aspx)

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femto113
Overhead in SLU today “at least I can finally find an empty conference room”.

For non Seattle folk SLU is South Lake Union, home to many Amazon buildings as
well as Google and Facebook

------
01100011
I don't work at MS, just a valley tech company. We finally got the email
encouraging us to work with our managers and WFH when possible. I don't think
many people are actually doing it, from what I can tell from my home office. I
don't know why more large tech shops aren't doing this.

~~~
anonsivalley652
People can't see who's contagious in the early stages, so they're gambling
with their lives by not taking proactive precautions _before_ it's a
widespread problem.

COVID-19/SARS-cov-2 is something to take seriously for several reasons:

\- To reiterate an important point: "Healthy" infected people go around
unwittingly spreading it for several days to a week, so you have no idea who's
really sick. And you have no idea how many people in public actually have it
at any one time. It's another reason this pathogen is so successful.

\- It's a terrible flu for most.

\- It can quickly turn life-threatening. A number of bodies were discovered in
Wuhan of people trying to walk or drive themselves to the hospital, but they
died before reaching it.

\- FIXED: If hospitalization is needed, the average CFR is 16% (Russian
roulette odds) and 49% for critical condition.

\- There is no treatment.

It's going to be a full pandemic in 7-21 days (depending on the area), and
last from 19-35 days. For example, someone already died from it within 40 mi /
64 km of where my mom lives in a rural/suburban area. You have to assume the
number of infected is 10-30x the number of identified cases because the CDC
has strict PUI criteria that are turning away patients. (Oh, and it costs
$2000±1000 if you take the test and test negative.)

~~~
Barrin92
>To reiterate an important point: "Healthy" infected people go around
unwittingly spreading it for several days to a week, so you have no idea who's
really sick.

According to the newest WHO report (also posted on the frontpage of HN) this
doesn't appear to be the case. There are apparently few asymptomatic cases and
the disease mainly is spread by people who are symptomatic.

>You have to assume the number of infected is 10-30x the number

This sounds like pure speculation and is probably not a reasonable thing to
assume.

~~~
troydavis
In Seattle, the best current estimate ([https://bedford.io/blog/ncov-cryptic-
transmission/](https://bedford.io/blog/ncov-cryptic-transmission/)) is 570
infections as of March 2:

> Knowing that transmission was initiated on Jan 15 allows us to estimate the
> total number of infections that exist in this cluster today. Our preliminary
> analysis puts this at 570 with an 90% uncertainty interval of between 80 and
> 1500 infections.

~~~
pmiller2
That confidence interval is far too wide to contain any useful information.

~~~
evil-olive
As of Monday there were 18 confirmed cases in WA [0]. So even the lower bound
of that confidence interval supports the claim that the number of actual cases
is significantly higher than the number of confirmed cases (though "only" 4-5
times higher, rather than 10-30 times).

0:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/03/02/coronavirus-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/03/02/coronavirus-
live-updates/)

~~~
pmiller2
What should anyone do differently if there are 18 cases vs 80?

~~~
troydavis
If you're going to pick a number to plan for, it's 570, not 80. Yes, the range
of possible values includes 80, but it also includes 1500.

So, what would 570 (out of King + Snohomish County population of 3 million)
mean? 22% of the population is under 18, so something like 125 minors would
have had it (King County has ~600 schools).

The doubling period is 7 days, so ~275 of those cases would have been in week
prior to March 2 and ~570 new cases could be expected between March 3-10. If
20% of those need hospitalization[1], that would be ~100 new beds.

With 570 patients (and 275 new), contact tracing is both impossible and
ineffective. Let's optimistically assume that people notice their fever
immediately and self-quarantine flawlessly. Even then, we don't know who these
people encountered in the few days before symptoms began and can't notify them
specifically. Either we accept whatever retransmission rate occurs during that
period, or do what we can to reduce it by reducing the population-wide minutes
spent within 6' of other people.

[1]: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/coronavirus-
in-i...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/coronavirus-in-italy-
fills-hospital-beds-and-turns-doctors-into-
patients/2020/03/03/60a723a2-5c9e-11ea-ac50-18701e14e06d_story.html) and
others

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stygiansonic
Where does it say CA employees? Does Bay Area in the context of Puget Sound
mean SF Bay Area?

~~~
samcheng
Yes; when you say "Bay Area" in Washington and Oregon, you generally mean SF
Bay Area.

Maybe an exception for those living in Coos Bay?

~~~
c-bayprogrammer
Yes, those of us in Coos Bay and the nearby region refer to this tiny little
area as the "Bay Area". Growing up, I didn't realize SF was the "real" Bay
Area. ;)

------
starpilot
Also in Seattle (well, Bellevue), my company has told us to WFH through the
end of the month. Went out to lunch downtown and the usual place I go to was
empty, normally it's packed.

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mc3
This will be an interesting challenge to suddenly be thrust as a team into
WFH.

~~~
foogazi
Remote first!

Beats joining a team and getting getting covid-19

~~~
mc3
Or even worse... interruptions!

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wyclif
Somebody should fix the link so it's pointing to the MSFT press release.

------
mohamedmansour
I might bring my work computer home then!

~~~
thrownawaynw
I'm working for a tech firm in one of these two related areas. The idea of
bringing the work computer home sounded good until IT added a number of high-
bandwidth sites to the IT-mandated DNS blacklist software to keep traffic down
for remote workers.

I could see things like Hulu and Pandora being less mission critical than
other sites but then they blocked YouTube and, probably because google mixes
domains a lot, gMail got caught in the net. People were _not_ happy about
that.

~~~
brown9-2
Why does IT care about traffic to non-corporate sites on an employee's home
network?

~~~
dudleypippin
I’ll assume that they’re VPN’ing into work and their IT doesn’t allow split
tunneling. As a result, all traffic has to flow into the VPN concentrator as a
bottleneck.

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abosley
Correction: March 25. Microsoftie.

~~~
anonsivalley652
Does MSFT still use smartcards everywhere?

~~~
sterlind
Yep. They're trying hard to phase them out through Windows Hello but you still
need smart cards to at least bootstrap the Hello registration process, or for
some specialized domains of trust that Hello isn't integrated into.

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pkraft
I first thought WFH stood for Wash F __king Hands.

~~~
jimthrow
I don’t know why this is being downvoted so much. It’s a legitimate
abbreviation considering that washing hands is the most well known deterrent
for the virus

------
srean
The solution according to Hindu Mahasabha is quite clear

[https://theprint.in/health/hindu-mahasabha-plans-gaumutra-
pa...](https://theprint.in/health/hindu-mahasabha-plans-gaumutra-party-with-
cow-dung-cakes-to-fight-coronavirus-in-india/375026/)

These are not a group of random crank. These guys have a sympathetic and
serious listener in the Indian government.

As an Indian all I can say is, "heaven help us", oh wait, they have that
covered already.

------
fractal618
Throwaway username suggests that MS also directed employees not to publicize
this.

~~~
loeg
They likely just don't want to identify their regular account as a Microsoft
employee.

~~~
blaser-waffle
Unless you're posting in an official capacity, absolutely don't link your
posts to your job. Not worth the risk.

------
earthtourist
It seems like the only way out of this without a huge infection rate is a
government mandated stay-at-home period. It probably requires implementing
martial law.

Tech workers going WFH seems like it will be totally ineffectual by itself.

1\. Most other workers can't afford to take time off, aren't permitted to, or
can't do their jobs remotely.

2\. Schools aren't implementing study-at-home yet.

3\. There isn't mass testing in place yet.

For #1 it seems like we need some kind of massive billion gov disaster
insurance bailout to compensate people. And someone still needs to do
essential services, so a skeleton crew needs to be paid overtime and tested
regularly by health officials.

For #2 this could be done tomorrow if it was ordered by health departments.
The main downside would be people being forced to stay home from work, but at
least this problem can be mitigated by families/friends.

For #3 to be implemented at the scale of millions of people, would probably
require deploying the US military going up and down streets requesting
samples.

Anything short of a stay-at-home period seems like it's guaranteed to get us
the majority infection rate that will kill millions, mostly our parents and
grandparents but a large number of young people too.

The damage to the economy of this could be huge. It seems better to overreact
now, pay a huge bill ($1+ trillion, if need be), and prevent a massive loss of
loss and/or economic depression.

~~~
dvtrn
_It probably requires implementing marshal law._

Are you serious? _Martial_ law (let’s at least start by spelling it properly)
is not something you just throw out there and change a setting to disable once
you’re done with.

~~~
earthtourist
There is effectively martial law (yes, I wrote it down wrong, thanks) any time
there's a large fire in CA. Police patrol abandoned neighborhoods. And then
everything goes back to normal. It wouldn't immediately go Red Dawn. Most
people would understand the reasoning and agree with it, however inconvenient
it would be.

Is it better to let millions die or risk the long-term health of the economy?

Why not force people to stay home and watch Netflix for 2 weeks? With
exceptions wherever it makes sense.

~~~
dvtrn
Can we do better than the false dichotomy of “suspend civil liberties and give
the military policing powers or everyone dies”?

I ask this as politely as I can: do you _know_ what it is you’re asking for
when suggesting the enactment of Martial Law here?

~~~
earthtourist
Sure, just explain why it's a false dichotomy so I can understand.

1\. If we get to a 70% infection rate, and the mortality rate is (a low) 1%,
that's 2+ million dead.

2\. A vaccine is likely 18+ months away, which means it won't be here in time.

3\. There is no real hope of stopping the spread without drastic measures.

~~~
dvtrn
_Sure, just explain why it 's a false dichotomy so I can understand._

There are more options available than the two absurd options you presented.
They may require more will from elected leaders and public health officials,
but I take serious exception to immediately suggesting that we either suspend
civil liberties or let people die.

There are several more options available before Martial Law should be allowed
in the same room as options still on the table.

~~~
earthtourist
You still haven't explained an alternative to my "false dichotomy". What
exactly do you propose as a third option?

What option requires "more will" from health officials that would actually
stave off a mass infection? They all seem to be explaining how powerless they
are to stop the spread.

Experts seem pretty unanimous in explaining that this is going to become a
mass infection. They don't seem to be considering a martial law option, and
yet it seems the only thing that could prevent it.

I'm actually not cavalier about suggestion martial law. This just seems like
one of those rare public safety situations that might warrant it.

We could try asking people to stay home but this seems like it would result in
huge compliance problems, which would elongate the stay-at-home period.
Whereas the vast majority of people would stay home under threat of arrest.

