I don't agree. We "made our bed" by accepting certain myths, many of them propagated by China and the esteemed WHO among others. Very prominent was the idea that you can tell who's infected by taking their temperature. We still are doing that even though we now know full well that people can be infected and spreading the virus and feel perfectly well, including NOT having a fever.

In the early days--December, January--the disease became established in North America mostly by people who did not feel sick immediately upon arrival here from overseas. They didn't know they were infected and we didn't know they were infected--nobody even knew for sure that COVID was transmissible from person to person because the Chinese were denying it--and there was no way to know they were infected short of testing every arrival at US ports and airports . . . except we didn't have a reliable test at that point either.

Don't blame the employees for coming in sick, blame the lack of sick leave and work culture that forces (or at least encourages) them to still come in while sick.

Hopefully this has all served as a wake up call as to the necessity of mandatory paid sick leave in all workplaces; and as a reminder that the purpose for staying home while sick is to preserve the health of others instead of being a reflection of laziness or poor work ethic.

1. You don't need to test "en masse" for any important purpose. For epidemiologic purposes--finding out the disease prevalence in the population etc--you need to do serologic testing of scientifically selected samples and they need only be large enough to be statistically valid; Perhaps a few hundred or thousand in each community.

2. At job sites, it is perfectly feasible to test everybody (PCR or antigen test, not antibody serology) and do it frequently, and will become more so rapidly. There already exist the various technologies to get results in minutes (such as Abbott's test and others). These do have some reliability flaws but I suspect those will be worked out. In any case, they are more reliable than "send the coughers home". But whether doing this intensive testing depends on many things including the importance of the work and the importance of the need to have people gathered at one site--the office/factory/plant--to do it. It will cost companies some money and inconvenience and upset some workers. Whether that's worth it will be up to the managers.

3. It is not the "a$$holes" who feel sick and don't stay home you need to worry about. It's the young mail room guy who partied without distancing all weekend but feels perfectly fine and all the other potential "super spreaders" who do not have symptoms and have no way to know they are infecting the entire office unless frequent testing reveals it.

^^^^^you are right. Some workplaces don't have good sick leave. My company has a good PT program but people are still selfish and dont save up any time. They sure go on a lot of trips tho. Maybe corporate America should mandate employees save 40 hours for sick time. Mandatory sick leave should be available for us employees though. That sh!t needs to change.

That's why its good to find a company that values employees. Fortune 500's suck period. Everyone thinks the F500's are where its at, but at those places, your just another figure. Another person on a spreadsheet. If one is wise, you'll get paid more and happier if you go for a smaller or mid-sized company, where one's name is known.

A happier workforce = productive workforce = longer retention.

Lots of studies have shown Americans work longer hours and often don't take paid vacation days like people in other countries because of a feeling they are in a competitive "rat race" with colleagues for promotions and supervisorial approval and "slackers" will lose out.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorl.../#5666e8154c53

These same reasons all apply to staying home when you feel sick as well.

Yeah, it's a difficult cultural problem to tackle. Even places with good benefits that "should" know better (universities, hospitals) there is this culture of workting through illness. Part of this is that there isn't really time to randomly lose.

https://www.chicagobusiness.com/gove...ontact-tracing

I wonder if instead of direct aid, grants to hire a million contact tracers across the country would be a good idea. It both would provide jobs for people who recently lost their jobs and also allow us to operate more "normally"

You need to test en masse to find and quarantine the quick people.

Outside political circles, there seems to be a clear consensus that we could have done more earlier. Covering that up with "but China" is a political stance, despite some truth.

Regarding universities and hospitals, I can recall many times as an intern and resident physician when I was sicker than 90% of the people I saw in the ER (and probably spread my "crud" to them). But we just didn't stay home. There was no slack in the system--nobody to cover for anyone missing from duty. Maybe it's different now but I have trouble believing it.

Even later, as a working primary care doctor, I rarely felt I could be spared to be sick myself. Much of my career I was the only MD there, either in my clinic or sometimes on a ship in the middle of the Pacific.

I don't know what this means.. What's a "quick person". Somebody who's negative today can be positive tomorrow. You can't test everybody every day or even every week or every month using today's PCR swab test.

In the White House they supposedly use the Abbott system, which has accuracy issues, to test everybody coming near the President regularly (not sure how often exactly) but that system gives results in minutes. Quite likely more and more businesses are going to be doing something like this.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/race-is...d=hp_lead_pos6

This is the sort of thing we are going to be doing within months, and it will largely replace the current system of swabs and doing tests in labs taking days. But it will be centered on works sites and other locations who consider it worth the money and necessary to maintain full scale activity. It is not something that's going to be used on the public at large (that is, "en masse"), at least at first.

I doubt much of the public is even that interested in being tested. I'm not until/unless I feel sick or think I've been exposed.

By the way, as American business becomes convinced that to stay open and maximize business activity they are going to need to keep the infected out of workplaces, I predict that America will blast ahead of the rest of the world in testing. But it'll be done by private industry, not government.

I wonder if there is also going to be a peasants revolt and workers demand to stay home and continue to be remote. Big companies are going to have a harder time justifying big crowded offices going forward now that tons of people have been working in their pjs. I do try and be the optimist tho. I think much good will come out of this. It might be a leaner economy but it's clearly forcing consumers to prioritize their spending. Were becoming more German too! Americans saved money and decreased credit card debt in record amounts the last two months. That might have some negative consequences I suppose but it's an interesting trend.

The real interesting thing to watch in the next few years will be remote work at companies (especially big tech). Right now companies pay a premium to bring talent under the same roof, whether in Silicon Valley, New York City, or London. But a remote worker is a remote worker. What benefit do these companies get by paying a remote worker living in New York 3x as much as a remote worker living in Indianapolis? Or 20x as much as a remote worker living in Manila? Right now many of my coworkers are salivating at the opportunity of leaving their high-cost cities to cheaper locales, so they can pay less in taxes, spend less on rent/food, and retire earlier.

I misspoke...meant "quarantine the infected people" is what I intended. Nearly-instant, reliable testing is a huge focus nationally.

I heard about the study through the media but has anyone read it? What are they talking about when they say "we?" No one locked down at the same time and some places pretty much never locked down.

So, who is "we?"

Oh, NYC beaches are open while Chicagos aren't...but they will open SOMETIME this summer...yay

My God.

Well, in the short term this may be true since Chicago and NYC are presently extremely boring places not worth spending any time in (I stopped going into the city months ago except for anything necessary related to my investments).

Ultimately, though, the enormous advantages of city life will once again beckon. You cannot replicate the urbanity, street life, culture, dining, etc etc of these places from some house in suburban Indianapolis

Any slack in a system is "optimized" out by the penny-pinchers. What you gain in "efficiency" you lose in resilience, as I'm sure many will soon find out.

That is true to some extent (not so for Silicon Valley, which has none of those city life advantages), and I definitely fall into the category of people who will not go live in the bush to save money. But there is a significant number of people in New York (and other similar cities) that are there because that is where their job is, not because that is where they would choose to live. I'm one of them.

Do these people really think they'll have jobs if their role could really be performed anywhere?