I predict the opposite with home working. Once people are able to return to a workplace they will be pressured to do so. That pressure will be combined with even more leverage, because of carnage caused to peoples livelihood.
I saw this on a much smaller scale after the dot com bubble burst in California.
dublinpilot wrote:
So this would lead me to expect that people now have very few contacts outside their immediate family, giving the virus little chance to infect others (remember few of your contacts will be infected, and your contacts are now dramatically reduced).
Truer answer : we don’t know
Some explanations I have read online
1) A lot of people is still working
2) A lot of new cases are from elderly’s retirement house, I don’t know the english name of them . The virus spreads fast in them
3) (and my favourite one) from about 10 days we have less and less people in hospital and ICU . and we found less cases for the same amount of tests. Today we have 61K tests and only 3800 new cases . We are finding sick people with few or no syntoms at all and those are a lot more than the ones with severe syntoms .One month ago in Lombardy half the people tested were positive. today only 1\10 .
hmng wrote:
What seems to be obvious, is that these spikes of excess mortally, in Italy, now in the UK, in a smaller scale in Netherlands, happen a few weeks after lockdowns.
What maybe you doesn’t understand is that if you get the virus in day 1 you’ll show syntoms in day 5 , get worse and tested in day 10 and die sometimes between day 15 and 35\40 depending on how fast you get proper care and how long you stay with a pipe in your mouth.
Ted wrote:
predict the opposite with home working. Once people are able to return to a workplace they will be pressured to do so. That pressure will be combined with even more leverage, because of carnage caused to peoples livelihood.I saw this on a much smaller scale after the dot com bubble burst in California.
I doubt that. While I don’t work in tech and my job cannot be done remotely, a lot of people I know do. They all work from home now and hope they can stay that way. There’s also the fact that the various video conferencing and teleworking systems in place today are a far cry form the stuff that was around in 2002.
What I predict is that remote working will become much, much more widespread with the occasional office attendance. Which in turn means smaller office buildings and less money spent on said buildings. God for the bottom line. I would not invest in commercial real estate right now….
In terms of employment law, the position which is probably fairly universal in civilised countries is that if the work is there to be done, but you are staying at home, you have to come to work, otherwise you are in breach of your employment contract. You don’t have a right to say that you prefer to work from home.
Some employers will allow it, some won’t. I’ve been employing people since 1978 and can confidently state that some % which is well over 90% even of those who are just sitting on their bum at the office all day (e.g. sales/marketing and actually most “middle management” jobs) cannot work from home productively.
I reckon that if even just 25% of London jobs get moved out of London, that will transform the sardine-class commuting scene. Whether 25% will move, I don’t know, but I doubt it. Most “creative sector” firms in London or any other major capital are there because they believe in that way of working despite the horrific commuting scene which incidentally also ensures you often hardly see your family. I have interviewed many people over the years who do the commute (say 2hrs each way) and they would like to drop it but they won’t take the drop in pay from say 45k to say 25k. They are still looking for say 40k 
LeSving wrote:
I would think the “cause of death” is examined and reported the same way it always has been done. If you test positive, then die in a respirator two weeks after due to lung damage, then cause of death is Covid-19. If you test positive and get hit by a truck two weeks later, then the cause of death is not Covid-19.
Depends on whose counting and what their goals are.
ormazad wrote:
What maybe you doesn’t understand is that if you get the virus in day 1 you’ll show syntoms in day 5 , get worse and tested in day 10 and die sometimes between day 15 and 35\40 depending on how fast you get proper care and how long you stay with a pipe in your mouth.
Or your symptoms are mild enough that you dont even know you had it.
172driver wrote:
What I predict is that remote working will become much, much more widespread with the occasional office attendance. Which in turn means smaller office buildings and less money spent on said buildings. Good for the bottom line. I would not invest in commercial real estate right now….
OTOH, my vacant residential rental property is officially 2 BR plus a dedicated home office, this being an artifact of 40 year ago building permit issues that prevented a closet being built into what has heretofore been used by tenants as a 3rd bedroom. That will be going in the advert next month, given that its apparently a ‘trending’ issue
Regulation 6.-(1) of the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020 states that no person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse.
People may be inclined to interpret what is reasonable in the context of a government and public health command structure which has:
(a) deliberately seeded Covid-positive patients into old-peoples’ care homes;
(b) consistently failed to procure and provide sufficient PPE for healthcare and social care workers, let alone for the general public;
(c) for the last two weeks spurned UK company Apacor’s offer of one million Wells Bio tests per week (the antigen test currently used in Germany).
These efforts by the Secretary of State for Health and his desk-weenies at Public Health England to spread and exacerbate the Covid-19 pandemic seem calculated to negate any purpose of their Regulations.
For what it’s worth, major Swedish newpaper Dagens Nyheter and Swedish National radio both recently had articles on the different ways of counting.
Sweden: People dead according to the population register and known to be infected.
USA: According to the death certificate.
UK, Germany, Italy, Hong Kong: People dead in hospitals and known to be infected.
Norway: Deaths reported by physicians by phone as due to Covid-19.
Belgium: Known or suspected to be infected.
Apparently many countries have no or limited reporting of people who die outside hospitals. This can account for e.g. the large difference between Belgium and the Netherlands. According to the articles above France initially did not count deaths outside of hospitals and when they did, the numbers increased by more than 1/3.
