7 ms·
They aren't even telling employees which group or floor the employee was in, so employees cannot even gauge their risk level. Imagine going home to your family
by koheripbal 7y ago
They aren't even telling employees which group or floor the employee was in, so employees cannot even gauge their risk level.
Imagine going home to your family without knowing if you've been exposed to a disease that has a ~2% mortality rate.
...and then the company asks everyone to come back into work the next day.
Google's response here is shocking.
- neuronic 7y agoFor Google's predominant age group the mortality is more in the realms of 0.2%.
- guruz 7y agoAnd that age group does not have social contact to people over 50?!
- Bishop_ 7y agoSome of these employees may have young children or elderly parents whom they could infect.
- cnst 7y agoDo Google employees not have friends, relatives, parents and grandparents?
- Johnny555 7y agoBut even 30 year olds have friends and family that are in high-risk categories. Do you really want to risk bringing home a disease that puts grandma at a 10% risk of dying?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- davidw 7y agoOne of the first people to get it in Italy was a healthy 38 year old man. He had to be put on a respirator for a few days, although he's doing better now. It's serious, even for younger people, and that's if health care infrastructure doesn't get overwhelmed.
- tryitnow 7y agoNot shocking at all. It's a lack of leadership which shouldn't be surprising given that most corporate executives don't really know how to act in situations outside of their realm of experience.
- dmix 7y agoEven the CDC and WHO seem to be a bit out-of-sorts on handling this thing. Google's Zurich office isn't the only one. The top-down restrictions of who is allowed to get tested have been quite limited, so there's easily tons of people infected who we don't know about, many of them asymptomatic - yet who could still be transferring the virus to vulnerable/less healthy people [1]. Access to testing kits is going to be another constraint going forward if this thing continues spreading and testing criteria does indeed expand (which no doubt are probably correlated). I have a feeling once the CDC and WHO expand the criteria for who gets tested there is going to be a significant spike in the number of people who we know have it. There's going to be a lot of post-de facto reviews and lessons learned from this experience in the coming future, no doubt. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/health/coronavirus-asymptomatic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/health/coronavirus-asympt...
- komali2 7y agoThe response difference between the people I interact with regularly (friends, coworkers, HN people, twitter people) and I guess "the rest of the world" is crazy. I just watched a video on Fox News where they interviewed this dude with his kid on his lap talking about his experience in coronavirus quarantine now that he's released. He couldn't stop coughing throughout the interview, was sharing water with his kid... madness.
- jacquesm 7y agoThat was a very scary video. I was physically cringing all throughout watching it and when he drank from the same bottle vocalizing 'no!'. Very depressing.
- 7y ago
- pkaye 7y agoIts probably an employee health privacy issue. With sufficient hints you could probably narrow down who it is.
- koheripbal 7y agoThat explains why they didn't release the name of the employee - not why they didn't tell other employees which FLOOR or GROUP was affected.
- ghaff 7y agoUnless Google has a spectacularly ineffective workplace rumor mill, or whatever the right term is in a situation like this, I'm pretty sure everyone knows the person affected even if they haven't been officially told.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoOr they may have told the affected folks without telling the press. That would be a reasonable compromise.
- koheripbal 7y agoNo - because I know people in this office and they have not told them anything. They didn't even announce it until AFTER work on Friday.
- lostmsu 7y agoCan you share the specific office building? So I could at least notify my friends who work in Google Zurich if they are affected.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoYou mean, you know people who you know to have been exposed to the person who was infected? Are you certain that they were in the same building at the same time? If not it's not really a defeater to my hypothesis. If your friends were not exposed to the infected individual they would not have been notified. Admittedly the scenario I'm proposing seems unlikely. Seems they would have at least mentioned it if they were going to tell the folks who might have had contact with the individual. However. I'm leery of jumping to conclusions.
- BelleOfTheBall 7y agoDo they need to tell them? I feel like people could figure it out on their own, considering the person would be absent and, likely, someone who's traveled recently, and then the info would spread around the office. I still think this is horrible crisis management though.
- koheripbal 7y agoOf course they need to tell them. These employees have families of young children and elderly parents/grandparents. The office is huge and travel to north Italy is extremely common.
- sailfast 7y agoTypically (at least under US law) you cannot legally discuss someone’s health issues without their consent. Not saying it’s a factor here but there is a good reason for these protections to exist that may be slightly less advantageous in the case of an epidemic.
- ajsnigrutin 7y agoThere's probably a guy who broke his leg and stayed at home wondering, why everyone at the office hates him.
- mk89 7y agoA colleague of mine came back from Milan just a few days ago and he was just sitting there in the office, as nothing was/is happening. Only after some us got pissed, HR anonymously sent him an email to ask him to work from home for the next weeks. Same for anyone having a cold or any symptom, or flying back from one of the countries currently facing the coronavirus People need to be told what to do, otherwise they don't think they are harming others. This behavior is even more common among young people without family. The moment you have a child, you start to look at all these potential threats and react accordingly.
- whatshisface 7y ago
- notlukesky 7y agoNot condoning Google but the mortality rate increases with every age bracket and is much lower under 50 years of age. I would assume that the Google office is quite young.
- capableweb 7y agoSure, but as its morality rate is bad in some age brackets, we should protect those people in the age brackets, meaning self-isolating is a good idea to avoid spreading it further.
- koheripbal 7y agoThe rate of employees with young children and grandparents is pretty high. What makes you think Google employees only care about themselves? You don't think they (and we) should care about the more vulnerable members of society that they will infect?
- NeutronStar 7y agoYoung children don't die from this coronavirus tho... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...
- username90 7y agoYoung children are not at risk, unlike the flu.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoless at risk is not the same as not at risk. At any rate there are children that have immunity problems that as the virus spreads I worry it will effect them - for example MBL deficiency and it's susceptibility to respiratory ailments https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/mannose-binding-lectin-deficiency https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/mannose-binding-lectin-def... https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/191/10/1697/789682 https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/191/10/1697/789682
- NeutronStar 7y agoIt's an all age 2% mortality rate. But to even reach 2% mortality rate you have to be like 60+ years old. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...
- outside1234 7y agoIt might be a medical privacy thing - it is a hard thing to balance the privacy needs of the individual with the needs of the group in situation like this.
- dave5104 7y agoSeems like you can avoid the privacy issues by just telling the entire office to work from home in this exceptional case.
- aquadrop 7y agoI think it pretty simple to balance it in this situation - you need to tell. And need to test everyone who could have contact.
- tomjen3 7y agoIt is not AIDS, you aren't going to out someone this way. Just get their permission, 99% they won't mind.
- novaRom 7y ago2% only in developed healthcare system. For contrast Iran's number is few times higher
- RobertoG 7y agoIt would be interesting to know what is the percentage of people that have a strong reaction vs. people that experience it just like a cold, which I read is pretty common. Maybe there is even asymptomatic people out there.
- glangdale 7y agoI think the ratio in Iran is due to scads of undiagnosed people, not because getting COV is worse there than anywhere else.
- ska 7y agoFWIW I hear that Iran has a pretty capable and modern healthcare system.
- baxtr 7y agoNo one knows anything about the real situation and thus the real numbers in Iran. They are highly speculative.
- nullc 7y ago> that has a ~2% mortality rate. The 2% figure comes directly from dividing deaths by identified cases. Because it takes a while to kill and new cases are growing exponentially this figure is very likely an underestimate. (not certainly an underestimate because non-severe cases are less likely to get counted) Instead, you can gauge mortality by looking at deaths/(deaths+recoveries). With this method you get a number around 7%. This can produce an overestimate, either because recovery takes a long time or because non-severe cases don't get counted. This question was also asked about SARS and it turns out that for SARS deaths/cases was a massive underestimate until the rate of the rate of new infections decreased. For SARS d/(d+r) was a much more accurate estimation at all times. https://blog.zorinaq.com/case-fatality-ratio-ncov/ https://blog.zorinaq.com/case-fatality-ratio-ncov/ 2% and 7% are both pretty bad, but they have distinctive public policy implications. I hope we're not making bad decisions simply because people handle exponential processes poorly. Has anyone seen death and recovery by age? I think it would be interesting to estimate mortality by age using the d/(d+r) method, and perhaps contemplate what effect that might have on the composition of the US senate. :-/
- rpearl 7y agoOn the other side of it, there's selection bias--most identified cases have visible and notable symptoms, some very severe. If you have a mild cough or a bit of a cold, you might not think anything of it beyond staying home from work, but that could be COVID-19 (and we might _never_ know that it was).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dailyrorschach 7y agoIt is also possible that 2% is an overestimate. Unlike SARS for example, it seems many infected, some estimates of 80%, may not even exhibit outward symptoms, like the high fever of SARS. This of course makes containment very difficult, maybe even impossible, to achieve.
- 7y ago
- gowld 7y agoHow could you possibly know if anything you wrote is true? Are you subscribed to all of Google's internal communications?
- baxtr 7y agoMy understanding is that the 2% mortality rate is not verified, yet. The number of people having only mild cases is just very difficult to assess. There was an interesting thread about this yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22433359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22433359