Twitter should look into on how working from home affects productivity.
I'm sure it'll decrease in the short term. Although, if this goes on long enough, it would be neat to see if people re-establish strong lines of communication and if there are any productivity gains from certain teams.
Obviously, I'm not hoping that the virus affects peoples lives longer, but they might as well get some data while there are government restrictions.
I believe that’s not the point of the comment. The point is that working from home is something employees desire in general, and this is a good opportunity to see if large scale work from home can still function well for a large organization like Twitter. It would be encouraging if they can make it work.
> Working from home will be mandatory... due in part to government restrictions.
What government restrictions? Not sure about South Korea, but to my knowledge, there aren't any government-mandated measures in Hong Kong or Japan that require non-government employees (except school teachers) to work from home. It's up to businesses to decide what they should do.
it's infuriating to me! i cant even get my parents to take it seriously they keep diminishing my concern and dont even bother to read what I send them. I had to mail them supplies!
If this does turn out to be a nothingburger (seems most here think that it wont) what's the cost of a hedge/being prepared? a few hundred bucks in non-perishable food you can eat later and changed behaviors should probably be doing anyways?!
there's got to be a sensible in between panic bum rushing the store with black friday insanity and doing nothing but repeating the stupid Trump presser TPs
Some people will probably die because of the lockdown in China. There were some reports of HIV medications becoming hard to fill. Multiply that across a nation and there will be consequences.
That doesn't mean it's a bad idea, but it's not only dollars.
The value of statistical life [1] provides a method to estimate the dollar value of a life.
There is no standard concept for the value of a specific human life in economics. However, when looking at risk/reward trade-offs that people make with regard to their health, economists often consider the value of a statistical life (VSL). Note that the VSL is very different from the value of an actual life. It is the value placed on changes in the likelihood of death, not the price someone would pay to avoid certain death.
Given that humans make choices to buy things that reduce their chance of death all the time, we have many sources of how people value their own lives. Humans are often bad at this calculation, yet surprisingly their willing to pay to reduce a certain risk divided by the reduction in risk is pretty consistent in its estimate of how much people value their lives. The number comes out to around $5-10M per life or $125K per year of life.
Thus, we can estimate how many people will be killed by COVID-19 versus the economic cost of trying to contain it and do a cost-benefit analysis.
High level summary:
If we assume that around the same number of people as the flu would be infected annually if we did not stop it, anywhere from 10 - 45 million Americans would catch it yearly. Let's use 20M for this calculation.
Let's assume a COVID-19 mortality rate of 1% given that there are likely way more undetected cases than confirmed cases (given the current rate wrt confirmed cases is closer to 2%).
Most of those deaths are the elderly. Thus, they have fewer years left to live. Let's take the expected age of a person who dies to be 60. Thus their value of remaining life that is lost is $2.4M. Times the total expected deaths is $475B per year of costs simply due to loss of life.
This doesn't take into account loss of future GDP (which is less than the loss of life though) from those deaths nor the loss of GDP from people being sick but recovering.
Then if we assume that to stop the virus, we will need a quarantine as severe as China's and thus suffer extreme economic impacts, then many sectors of the economy will contract dramatically. For example, China has seen a >90% reduction in car sales year over year due to Coronavirus.[2] Hopefully a lot of that will simply be transferred to a future quarter once they have recovered, but that is TBD. For travel, restaurants, etc, it certainly isn't.
I estimated the total cost for the US GDP of containing COVID-19 as $6,605B per year if the goal it to make it extinct like what happened to SARS.
Thus, it is absolutely worth paying the one time fee of losing 1/3 of one's GDP to not pay the perpetual tax of 2.3% of GDP annually due to it sticking around.
My biggest fear though is that we will pay the one time fee with hopes of making it go extinct and it will persist nonetheless in countries with weak public health infrastructure or lax quarantine enforcement. Thus, we will end up with it perpetually anyway. That is especially likely if countries start to believe it is as it becomes a race to the bottom / self fulfilling prophecy where no one wants to take the extreme cost to fight it when other countries are not.
There isn't, not with this kind of stuff. Some things in life are all-or-nothings, comfortably early and overprepared or not prepared at all. In fact I would say most major life events take that pattern. Older people increasingly resemble "survivors" but they may or may not recognize the correlations here.
because a lockdown doesn't necessarily slow down the spread by much (some epidemiologists suggested the Chinese lockdown only slowed the virus by 20% or so) while it has drastic effects on supply chains and the economy in the country. The trade-off is probably not worth it.
I can also be plain counterproductive by making people suspicious of authorities, with the result of sick people avoiding registering their infections or seeking help.
WHO has also taken a lot of criticism in recent days as being extremely solicitous towards China and avoiding anything that looks like criticising them.
That doesn't mean they're wrong, mind you. Just that, if they wanted to keep on the good side of Xi, perhaps they'd exaggerate how good his policies have been.
This is not a comment in good faith. You are accusing parties of something you cannot prove: intent of action. Regardless of how the actions are perceived you may assume malice or something else, but you can't prove it. Even in court of law (I'm not a lawyer, but this is what I have learned) intent is incredibly difficult to prove.
It is better to make claims with data (ie, administration does X, Y, and Z) and the provide reasonable interpretation (these have such and such an outcome on these segments of the population).
This is a gentle reminder that casting aspersions does not benefit anyone and may divide communities on issues that should be talked about in concrete terms. Bumper sticker politics might the status quo on most social media sites, but they have no place here.
Absolutely is a comment in good faith as people are entitled to their opinions and interpretation. I take your comment as condescending; you are not a moderator and shouldn't try to bully people out of expressing their opinions on a message board.
I'm sure it'll decrease in the short term. Although, if this goes on long enough, it would be neat to see if people re-establish strong lines of communication and if there are any productivity gains from certain teams.
Obviously, I'm not hoping that the virus affects peoples lives longer, but they might as well get some data while there are government restrictions.