My university just went online-only for the rest of the school year (i.e., until mid-May). We’re on Spring Break right now. Students can come back next week solely to collect their belongings, and can apply for an exemption to live on-campus if they have no other option. The faculty have been asked to come in next week for at least one training session on Zoom, then classes resume the following Monday.
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if anything, I’d say the nuc war fears have been lowered considerably. We’re all fighting the same war now.
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he’s already talking about bailing out the hotel industry. In no way shape or form, would that put $ into his pocket or anything.
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Of course it wouldn’t. I mean it isn’t like Sheldon Adelson donated anything to his campaign.
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A nice, reassuring read. The lack of testing in this country should be the biggest scandal in history.
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Czech Republic’s Deputy Minister of Health is talking about closing the borders of the country if the disease continues to spread.
94 cases and counting
Now that I think about it, I can totally see Trump claiming that Mexico is bringing coronavirus in and using it to close the southern border.
How much? Amazon link?
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It’s too bad we didn’t do the hard work necessary 4 weeks ago because now it’s going to be 100X harder on the country. But I actually don’t blame that part on Trump. I don’t believe any US administration would have had the appetite or the support to do what was necessary at that time. (He still sucks something fierce for downplaying and fake news’ing it.)
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I’m not an IT guy but my desk is next to our IT dept so anecdotal answer only. We have ~25 office based staff, all working on a local network mostly on Dynamics Nav (not the cloud based version) and our IT guys have been looking into setting everyone up for VPNing from home.
In terms of “can it be done?” it’s a 99. In practical terms it’s super time consuming and there’s a load of testing required that just won’t be possible in reasonable time frames, plus there will inevitably be a load of gaps in access and communication as well as the inevitable indivudual issues so it’s a good way off optimal and it’ll take a while to set up on even a basic level. But yeah, it’s not rocket science to set up, it’s just a cumbersome process with a few likely problems afaik
again, IANAITguy
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Just had a chat with Mrs Rugby around financial impacts of this.
Specifically which of her relatives in the Philippines we would need to help out with medical bills.
Fortunately it seems it’s only three that aren’t covered by insurance, and one of those is a kid.
We are still live to paying out 25k total, but that’s not going to ruin us. Healthcare is pretty cheap in the Philippines at least.
Not sure if anyone else is doing the same planning for the US?
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WAAF
In any country with rational people, private healthcare failing people in America during the worst of times would have people shouting for universal healthcare.
Of course, the response will be, “But what about Italy?!” instead of trying to improve it.
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Trump has never been the kind of guy to backtrack after making a statement. If anything, he doubles down. His ego won’t allow him to go back on his narrative.
Society is not going to break down over 5 million deaths, heavily concentrated among the very old.
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Millennials would likely silently celebrate to themselves.
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I agree with this. For most of us it’s going to be a major social and economic disruption but I don’t think we’re going to descend into a lawless hellscape.
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I don’t think that’s a likely scenario, even as a worst case. Like I think that’s a 1% scenario. You need hospitals to be overloaded nationwide for the duration for the mortality rate it would take to get 10 million dead. I think we’re drawing live to a 4-5% mortality rate in the next few months in NYC, Seattle, Boston, the Bay Area, etc… But once it’s crystal clear how brutally bad this thing is, you’re going to see other cities start throwing the kitchen sink at it in terms of preventing the outbreak from overloading their hospitals, and most of them will probably be early enough in the curve to succeed to some degree.
So what’s a more likely worst case scenario is something like:
33M * .7 = 23M infected in the aforementioned cities, with a 4% mortality rate is 925,000 dead there.
Then in the remaining 300M, the infected rate is more like .5 even in a worst case scenario due to rural areas avoiding it and cities putting in great precautions, which gives you 150M infected and the mortality rate is likely more like .6% at that point, for another 900,000.
Horrible, but not 5-10M. 900,000 is about 15 times worse than the worst flu season in the last decade, or about 1.5 times as many people as cancer kills in a given year. While this would be more sudden and unexpected, and thus have more of an economic impact that could cause societal issues, it’s still going to disproportionately impact old people and thus a lot of the economic impact will be less direct.
Even in a worst case scenario like yours, I still don’t think it’s a given that society breaks down. Did society break down from the Spanish Flu? As far as I know, it did not. Granted, we were already in a world war. But I think as long as supply chains are relatively in tact, we are probably going to be okay in terms of society overall. Big recession, maybe even depression, but I don’t see societal collapse.
When armed-to-the-teeth Trumpkins panic and decide someone else is to blame - things could get very very ugly.
Kelhaus is already vomiting over the rotting corpse of 22 politics - saying this means we need to close our borders.