Brazil is staying off my travel list for a while longer. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14567615/brazil-covid-plague-biological-fukushima-mutant-strains/
I'm regurgitating one of the the dozens of experts on the subject, but bats are an immunologist's nightmare. They are hard to track, fly vast distances, have a whacky biology, digestive and nervous system, eat things that carry some truly awful toxins/pathogens/bugs, and regularly interact with humans. Hell, I remember in Indonesia, you could easily catch (and feed!) one of the flying foxes just by standing under a street light at a certain time of year and giving it a place to perch while it hunts the moths/bugs swirling around the light. They carry rabies with alarming regularity and ease....something that is 100% fatal to most mammals, they just chill with, sometimes infecting entire colonies of bats. Some of the pathogens in their blood/tissue don't die when cooked, and it's not like we're trusting a wet market chef that the bat roast hit the appropriate temperature for human consumption. I don't buy any of the theories that this was a lab-grown virus, because the shit in most of those labs is way, way, worse. Also, if it was lab-grown, there would be genetic markers (usually a biological equivalent of a sign saying "Made in China"). Given the time it took to study and counteract, it's unlikely it's lab-grown because we would have started with a lot more information about it. One of the first things you'd need to know to put it in a lab and secure the lab/bug is how it infects cells and how it spreads, and that whole "protein spike" revelation didn't occur right out of the gate, if memory serves. The Chinese government clammed up when they found out this originated there, and that's not helping the whole "this is a conspiracy" crowd, because if any government would perpetrate that kind of shit....we'd probably bet it's the Chinese. Thought experiment: someone in your office is discovered using glitter. Everyone immediately hates them, as that shit gets everywhere. Management comes down and shuts everyone up about the usage of glitter and blames it on someone whose dog rolled it in their kids' bedroom, so that person isn't lynched in the parking lot. How long does it take for someone in your office across town or your competitor's office to know who the real glitter culprit was? Hint: you can't keep that shit a secret more than 8 or 9 hours. https://www.rt.com/news/330302-conspiracy-theories-oxford-study/ Math is fun, y'all.
How is that nonsense? It's about reducing the rate of spread/infection, and it was a 2 week lag time between infection and results. That's now dropped from 2 weeks to less due to improved testing and faster reacting strains of COVID, but it's still a valid measurement, and one that is being used to lock us down here in ON for a month. Again.
That’s not the way it was sold here. It was used to outline the length of time needed for strict lockdowns, which lasted well into August of 2020. That term’s definition changed over time because know one knew what that hell to do.
Makes sense... but yeah, that 2 weeks was the lag time to see any results from any actions that were taken...
Much later on but makes me giggle I was chastised for supporting our scientists ability to produce a vaccine and asked if I was going to volunteer to be first for a Trump rushed vaccine. Going to have to track that one down.
once hard lockdown started I told my wife, in what I thought was a moment of pessimism, that I thought things wouldn't be back to "normal" for a year. At this point, I don't think they ever will. It'll be like air travel pre and post-9/11.
I went to an MLB game last night. No one was within 10 feet of me other than my wife all night. It was amazing. I hope social distancing sticks around.
Some stuff will be back to normal next year. Some stuff simply won't get put back in the bottle: https://www.psychnewsdaily.com/a-th...er-quit-than-return-to-full-time-office-work/ I think stuff like selling alcohol togo, telemedicine and wearing a mask in public (especially on public transportation) won't go away, because it doesn't need to.
You’d think so. I’ve heard of companies already designating some arbitrary date of when all employees are expected to be back in the office 5 days a week. It’s so absurdly stupid. I wonder how their attrition rates will be impacted?
Google has already announced their plans to force everyone back. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackke...low-to-the-remote-work-trend/?sh=1d48f2991575
I get IT or finance with numbers on a screen. I can tell you our team cohesion suffered in our product development and just isn’t the same getting someone’s opinion via zoom. We get a lot of factory samples and getting everyone in a room to use and critique is so much more efficient than having to have each person come pick it up and give feedback disjointededly. There is one hold out our head of marketing and product development, that still refuses to come in but maybe one day a week. Another person was hired that has some overlapping responsibilities. Here five days a week and now has her hands in everything. Matter of time before she outright replaces the hold out. My company doesn’t have shit for performance metrics so I think that’s why they wanted everyone back. Honestly though my boss had to stay home with her kids and wfh and she admitted there was only so much you could do for our customers without the resources we have in the building. They couldn’t find enough for her to do. Also had perfectly good office workers that turned into slackers at home. Noticeable drop off.
In my last gig, we had staff in 5 states, with at least 20 different schools. The bottleneck was: "My kid's school is still remote, and it's not like I can hire a babysitter." So, they stayed remote. We're 13 months into it, and for most of the projects the wheels didn't fall off because we didn't have the annual potluck. I dunno about other places, but in DC absolutely NO one misses their commute. We struggled to hire statisticians and data scientists because the three locations we were in either had a shallow talent pool, or a hyper-competitive market where we had the lowest salary. Now, if I can hire anywhere.... I can see Airbnb and Southwest doing really well after this, because I might not want to come into the office 3-4 days a week, but I can see there being quarterly in-person get together's where folks fly in.
My company took the opposite route - we were already having some problems recruiting quality candidates for certain roles that were local to our offices. So they just said fuck it, and opened up remote recruiting across the country. Found a some qualified people, and now there are a couple teams whose employees couldn't go into the same office even if they wanted to. Talking to the team managers, it seems like by and large productivity has stayed consistent if not gone up a little bit. Some people are doing worse, some people are doing better, but it seems like mostly a wash - except everyone's commute is gone.
My company took a similar approach. They made it optional and are letting each team decide what makes the most sense for them. My office in the city closed permanently last January because the lease was up and they never built us another one. I don’t have anywhere to go back to even if I wanted to.
I think a mix will be a lot more common. Schedule the collaborative shit for T-Th and let people WFH M,F