How will the COVID-19 pandemic change the face of business... 7

[JohnRBaker]

While this forum is ostensibly focused on Engineering, I suspect that the norms across the entire business spectrum, which will include engineering, will be forever changed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

One example is something I saw today:

Twitter Says It Will Let Employees Work From Home Forever

“The past few months have proven we can make that work,” the San Francisco-based social media company said of lessons learned during the pandemic.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/twitter-employees-work-from-home-forever_n_5ebae72bc5b6894ab8b8ee25

Anyway, I welcome other examples or opinions/views on this topic and/or what you think the future will look like, given what we're all experiencing, and by 'all' I mean the entire world, something that is almost totally unique in the annuals of history.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[drawoh]

JohnRBaker,

My resume says I am good at "hands-on assembly and test". It is hard to do this from home.

--
JHG

 

[drawoh]

phamENG,

LewRockwell.com is an anarcho-libertarian site. The article is by Dr. Joseph Mercola, who seems to be controversial.

--
JHG

 

[JohnRBaker]

I understand. For the first 14 years of my engineering career I spent almost as much time in the shop and lab as I did in the office, making sure that our prototypes and first-of-a-kind machines were being manufactured and assembled correctly, and then when those first-of-a-kind machines were out in the field at a customer site, I would have to go there to make sure it had been properly installed and that it was running as expected in a real-world environment. It was only later, in the second half of my 49+ year career that I was in a position were most of what I did was over the net or on the phone. I still had to travel a lot as I attended and often was a speaker at 13 or 14 conferences a year as well as attending trade shows and making visits to some of our larger and more important customers, like GM, Fiat, Daimler, Boeing, etc.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[davefitz]

mea culpa, I confess I did not read the IRstuff references.

As a followup, I suggest today's summary for facts and lesssons learned re: covid 19 published by the swiss policy research organization, which is nominally claiming to report proven facts on the stated subject and compares these to the reported facts in the major media. In the case of covid 19 , they list 30 facts, many of which are surprisingly contrary to the common media reports.

https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/

"...when logic, and proportion, have fallen, sloppy dead..." Grace Slick

 

[BrianPetersen]

If that paper's claim of 0.16% lethality were true, that implies that every person in New York State has been infected with it. This is obviously not true. Therefore, the lethality must be higher than this.

Sweden (no lockdown) has had 511 deaths per million population as of this writing with little sign of infection slowing down, Norway 46 and they were practically done with it two months ago.

Minor digging suggests that "Swiss Policy Research" is some combination of propaganda and conspiracy-theory. For example (and this isn't the only indication),

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/swiss-policy-research/

and unlike "Swiss Policy Research", mediabiasfactcheck explains their rationale.

edit: Even Reddit is on point about that article.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fakenews/comments/fr81jw/hey_reddit_i_need_help_fact_checking_this_article/

 

[kissymoose]

To be fair, the link says "overall lethality" with "an upper limit of 0.40%" The data for NYC so far is max 0.27%. I'm all for questioning the legitimacy of what we're reading though.

 

[BrianPetersen]

How do you figure 0.27% lethality for NYC?

Don't have the city numbers but the state numbers are readily available

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

and NYC represents a good chunk of the population of the state.

As of this writing, 421,637 known cases, 32,215 deaths, 7.64% lethality based on known cases. Everyone knows the real number of cases is far higher but 0.27% lethality would imply that 12 million people in New York State have been infected - 60% of the population of the state - and only 1 in 30 actual cases had been detected ... which seems unlikely.

The only information on antibody testing that I can find is somewhat out of date (April) and it suggested that 14% (state) - 21$ (NYC) of residents had been exposed to coronavirus sufficiently to develop antibodies but I don't know how well it accounted for the potential false-positive rate of the testing. The virus wasn't done with New York at that time, so those numbers are probably higher now ... but not 60%. Probably 20% in the state and that's assuming the false-positive rate of the antibody testing was properly accounted for (and I don't know whether it was). And that would suggest around 1% lethality including accounting for the untested, undocumented, unknown, asymptomatic and low-severity cases. If there is a significant false-positive rate in the antibody testing, this will overestimate the number that have been exposed sufficiently to develop antibodies and thus underestimate the lethality rate.

Even the 20% total infection rate - implying about 1% lethality - would imply that only 1 in 10 actual cases has been detected.

No one knows how many actual cases that there are, but 10 times more than the number detected is probably the upper bound of it.

 

[kissymoose]

Ah yes, you're right. I was calculating lethality as deaths per total population, not deaths per # of those infected.