COVID-19 @Work (updated)

A co-worker showed me an Intranet page at work that has daily COVID-19 updates. The page also has a tally of the number of infected employees. At my location, there’s probably ~5,000 employees and the latest infection count is ~60 or slightly over 1%. I don’t know if that’s good or bad compared to other companies listed as “essential” but I decided not to go to work yesterday, even though it was a Sunday. Other co-workers were also concerned with the number of infected employees and decided to work from home more often as well.

The scary part of COVID-19 is the wide variety of symptoms for those infected. For a lot of people, there are mild to no symptoms. For others, they sometimes die within days of the infection. You have to assume the worst so avoiding infection should be very important. I really don’t understand the people that congregate in large groups without wearing masks.

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Update: 7/8/2020

I checked our work’s Intranet page and now it says 65 employees infected in my office. That about +3 each workday. We can’t figure out whether they are getting infected at work or outside of work (bars, restaurants, etc.) so it’s difficult to determine the risk of actually showing up to work. In May and June, it did look like we (California) was getting a handle on the spread of the virus but now it’s turned into a sh*tshow again.

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Update: 7/10/2020

As of 5:00 pm yesterday, the infected count in our office site is up to 67. That’s +8 in four days. Why does this feel like a game of Plague?