Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[DGuller]

Incidentally, meetings with more than a couple of people is where I much prefer online to live.  For one, the audio quality in conference rooms is just never the same as with everyone being on a headset.  It's really distracting when you have to constantly deal with not being able to hear the participants clearly, or when you have to constantly focus on speaking unnaturally so that others will understand you.  Another issue is that sometimes you just don't have much to do, and just sitting there in a room for an hour or two is even more torturous now, given that you know you can be doing something useful while listening in.

[Sheilbh]

Separately I have heard of someone turning down a job because the organisation expected 3 days in the office

I'm very interested in all these handwringing reports about labour shortages. Will the workforce, even the relatively unskilled part of it, get to call the shots for the first time in 40 years?

Interesting straw in the wind from a very affected industry - and high end jobs like that are actually great entry ways for a career in hospitality:

Restaurant group D&D London plans summer school to fill gaps in workforce
Shortage of workers created by Brexit combined with surge in Covid infections poses challenge to full reopening of hospitality
Sarah Butler
@whatbutlersaw
Thu 1 Jul 2021 17.39 BST

D&D London, the owner of more than 40 high end restaurants including Le Pont de la Tour, Quaglino's and Coq d'Argent, is to launch a summer school for staff in the latest gambit to secure enough workers for the full reopening of hospitality businesses later this month.

Up to 30 participants will be paid to attend the week-long course starting on 5 July. The group said it had struggled to secure enough workers as trade had picked up since its outlets were able to open for restricted dining from April.

Hospitality businesses face a looming crisis as a shortage of workers created by Brexit combines with a surge in Covid infections, forcing some businesses to temporarily close or reduce hours as teams of workers are sent home to isolate after receiving notifications from the NHS test-and-trace app.

The difficulties are expected to worsen from 19 July when hospitality businesses are to fully reopen after months of restricted trading. Businesses are thought to be running at only about three-quarters of capacity as they must ensure social distancing measures.

The industry is raising £5m to support training up 10,000 new recruits by next summer, via the Springboard initiative, as employers say former workers have sought alternative employment or returned to Europe after months of lockdowns kept businesses closed.

Last month D&D said it hoped to hire up to 400 recruits for its total 1,300 UK workforce. It is still seeking at least 200 workers as many former staff decided to return to Europe during the pandemic and now have chosen not to, or have been unable to, return to the UK because of Brexit or Covid travel restrictions.

David Loewi, D&D co-founder, said: "We are recruiting but it is very, very tough. Every restaurant is worried. We have to do something and we are looking at a number of different initiatives [to bring in more staff]. This training scheme is taking people with no experience in hospitality if they have got the right attitude."

He said the first summer school, based in Soho, central London, had already signed up enough recruits, including school leavers and former retail and aviation workers. It will aim to train front of house, kitchen and bar staff.

Those on the kitchen scheme will train as commis chefs with masterclasses from D&D chefs as well as training in food safety, basic knife skills, allergens and hygiene standards. They will also learn classic cookery skills including pasta making, bread baking and how to prepare the perfect omelette.

The courses will end with an interview and successful attenders will get a job at one of D&D's restaurants. If successful, the initiative will be continued with further schools through the summer.

[Josquius]

Separately I have heard of someone turning down a job because the organisation expected 3 days in the office

I'm very interested in all these handwringing reports about labour shortages. Will the workforce, even the relatively unskilled part of it, get to call the shots for the first time in 40 years?

I'm doubtful.
Since brexit became a thing and before I've seen people trying to pain labour and pay as a simple game of supply and demand.
It just doesn't hold up. Look at the example of Japan. Declining population, massive labour shortage that has been going on for a while.... And stagnant wages for 30 years.

Or indeed the trades shortage we've had in the UK for 20+ years. The famous Polish builders did little to plug the holes in that bucket. Still it continued.
Anecdotally there more and more trades people seem to be going self employed, realising the work is plentiful and they can cut out the middle man. My dad and many others remain conservative however and don't like the prospect of having to spend nights chasing work and playing accountant, they just want to put their head down, do the job, and knock off at 5.
It seems to me labour shortages really help the self employed and boost their numbers, more people are willing to take the gamble the more of a glut of work there is. Regular employers however won't be chasing this on pay, they know there's always enough who just want to work.

[Jacob]

We're still 100% remote for the vast majority of our workforce. We have a few people in-office due to their own preference. We are due to make a determination on next steps in early September. I doubt very much we'll go back to everyone in the office full time for a few reasons.

Recruiting and retention is the key driver for success in our business, and the market is very competitive right now. We already have several people who are working in different cities, and they're not going to relocate. A good number of the candidates we are seeing are looking for remote work, and pretty much everyone we've lost has been to other companies hiring remotely.

Going full on office based - and probably even mandating regular in-office presence - is going to harm recruiting and retention, so it's not a good move.

We'll see how it goes.

[Syt]

Separately I have heard of someone turning down a job because the organisation expected 3 days in the office

I'm very interested in all these handwringing reports about labour shortages. Will the workforce, even the relatively unskilled part of it, get to call the shots for the first time in 40 years?

We have the same in Austria, mostly in the hospitality industry, and bakeshops. One owner of a large chain of bakeries complained that she has high turnover and trouble finding people who are willing to work for the entry wage of EUR 1500 (that's about 1250 after taxes; apartment rent will eat 5-600 minimum if you live in a shithole or public housing), working 6 days a week and starting around 3 or 4 am until the late afternoon or evening (they often have to take long breaks of 3 or so hours to spread their hours to the busy periods).

Meanwhile, supermarket entry level jobs pay more for better hours. Waiter and cooking jobs face similar issues. Post pandemic people seem less inclined to work exhausting jobs with crap hours for minimum pay.

[Berkut]

We're still 100% remote for the vast majority of our workforce. We have a few people in-office due to their own preference. We are due to make a determination on next steps in early September. I doubt very much we'll go back to everyone in the office full time for a few reasons.

Recruiting and retention is the key driver for success in our business, and the market is very competitive right now. We already have several people who are working in different cities, and they're not going to relocate. A good number of the candidates we are seeing are looking for remote work, and pretty much everyone we've lost has been to other companies hiring remotely.

Going fulling office based - and probably even mandating regular in-office presence - is going to harm recruiting and retention, so it's not a good move.

We'll see how it goes.

Yep, we are in pretty much the exact same boat.

I think I would just lose good people if I said we were all going back into the office.

In fact, we are trying to think of better ways to retain people, and one of the suggestions is to offer everyone a $2-3k "stipend" that they can only spend on travel to anywhere they want for a week. Not as a vacation, but to just go somewhere interestting and work for a week in that place, instead of their home.

We are a tech company. We think it would be cool if our people took full advantage of the flexibility working from home offers.

[Jacob]

That's an interesting idea Berkut.

[Berkut]

TO be fair, it wasn't my idea.

My idea was that we all stop working on Friday from May to September.

No decrease in expected billable hours or productivity - we just aren't working on Fridays anymore in the summer. No meetings allowed.

If you can get everything done in 8 hours days Mon-Thi, good for you. If you need to work some on Friday, go right ahead. If you want to work 4x10, do that.

But as a company, we don't work on Fridays in the summer.

I thought that would be something that would make it damn hard to leave us, no matter how much more money some bay area company can offer.

[DGuller]

How many of you can do your work from just a laptop?  Without monitors, docking stations, and so on?  The problem I personally have with going somewhere and working from there is that I just can't be productive on a laptop.  I need two monitors to really do my job.

[Berkut]

How many of you can do your work from just a laptop?  Without monitors, docking stations, and so on?  The problem I personally have with going somewhere and working from there is that I just can't be productive on a laptop.  I need two monitors to really do my job.

I have a monitor I take with me when I travel. I hate working on just a laptop screen. I can do it, but it is far from optimal.

[ulmont]

How many of you can do your work from just a laptop?  Without monitors, docking stations, and so on?  The problem I personally have with going somewhere and working from there is that I just can't be productive on a laptop.  I need two monitors to really do my job.

I can do it.  I'm better with at least a 17" laptop screen (which is what my personal machine is), but with a 15" laptop screen I can get things done. 

The dual 23" monitor setup for work is of course preferable.

[The Minsky Moment]

I sometimes work directly on a Surface Pro - though not as much as I did pre COVID.

[celedhring]

To each its own, I experimented with a dual screen setup years ago and thought it added nothing for me except take up table space. Nowadays I work in a 15.4 laptop at home, and an I-pad when on the move.

[Sheilbh]

We have the same in Austria, mostly in the hospitality industry, and bakeshops. One owner of a large chain of bakeries complained that she has high turnover and trouble finding people who are willing to work for the entry wage of EUR 1500 (that's about 1250 after taxes; apartment rent will eat 5-600 minimum if you live in a shithole or public housing), working 6 days a week and starting around 3 or 4 am until the late afternoon or evening (they often have to take long breaks of 3 or so hours to spread their hours to the busy periods).

Meanwhile, supermarket entry level jobs pay more for better hours. Waiter and cooking jobs face similar issues. Post pandemic people seem less inclined to work exhausting jobs with crap hours for minimum pay.

Yep. It's also happening in distribution/logistics here. But there are signs that it is causing wages to nudge up at last - I loved the line from the pub owner in this little bit from the Economist:

Rising vacancies have not yet been accompanied by rising wages. But that may change. Pawel Adrjan, an economist at Indeed, an online-recruitment company, notes that advertised pay in food preparation and service has nudged up from £9.25 ($13.11) at the start of the year to £9.40 now. Asked if he might have to raise wages in order to attract a chef, the Peterborough pub owner pauses for a moment, before admitting "it might come to that". For employers accustomed to being able to hire at will, at a price that suits them, the past few weeks have come as a shock.

How many of you can do your work from just a laptop?  Without monitors, docking stations, and so on?  The problem I personally have with going somewhere and working from there is that I just can't be productive on a laptop.  I need two monitors to really do my job.

I had two monitors at work and I liked it - my employer has asked if I want monitors or anything like that at home, but to be honest I'm more or less okay with just a laptop. It took some adapting but that is also partly the nature of the work I do. I think it will vary.

[Sheilbh]

Also interesting piece in the Guardian on the UK as the world's petri dish - more or less the only place with very high vaccination levels and a wave of the delta variant. As with the alpha variant, when we weren't very vaccinated globally, I hope decision makers in other countries are paying attention and learning because I think the delta variant is going to become the dominant variant everywhere:

'We are a petri dish': world watches UK's race between vaccine and virus
Analysis: UK stands alone in pitting advanced vaccination programme against fast-spreading Delta variant


People queuing for the first dose of Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine being offered to adults over the age of 18 at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Photograph: Steve Taylor/Sopa Images/Rex/Shutterstock
Ian Sample Science editor
@iansample
Fri 2 Jul 2021 07.00 BST

Not for the first time in the coronavirus pandemic, the UK finds itself in a unique position. Through a combination of history, biology, mathematics and politics, the country stands alone in pitting an advanced vaccination programme against a substantial wave of Covid driven almost entirely by the fast-spreading Delta variant.

Nowhere in the world is the race between vaccination and virus more keenly watched than here.

Other countries – and Israel stands out – have vaccinated more of their population. India has endured more Delta cases.

But much of North America, Europe and Asia are behind the UK with their vaccine programmes and are only now seeing Delta take hold.

The World Health Organization believes Delta will become dominant. The variant accounts for a fifth of new cases in the US and but expected to dominate within weeks. After a 10-week decline, cases are rising in Europe. In France, the government's lead science adviser, Prof Jean-François Delfraissy, has warned of a fourth wave driven by the variant.

"The UK is in an absolutely unique position," says Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh. "We have the biggest Delta outbreak in a well-vaccinated country. We are a petri dish for the world."

There is plenty other countries can learn from what happens in the UK in the coming months. Most obvious is how the variant spreads in the population and what impact different vaccines, and different levels of vaccination, have on cases, hospitalisations and deaths.

Analysis by Public Health England has already shown the variant to be about 60% more transmissible than the Alpha, or Kent, variant and perhaps twice as likely to hospitalise people. Countries looking on will want to know who are the people needing hospital care, who needs mechanical ventilation, who dies, and in what numbers.

There is already some good news. While the Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines aren't quite as effective against Delta as they are against the Alpha variant, particularly after one dose, two shots reduce the risk of hospitalisation from Delta infections by 96% and 92% respectively. This is hugely welcome and gives countries a handle on what's to come.

"People will undoubtedly look at the UK and learn as much as they can from our experience," says Prof David Salisbury, former director of immunisation at the Department of Health and assistant fellow on the Global Health Programme at Chatham House.

"If the UK has a certain percentage of people double vaccinated and France has a third less, they might extrapolate to what that could mean for them. I'm sure that's what public health people will be doing in many countries when they look at the UK data."

Perhaps the most crucial question is this: can vaccination break the link between Delta variant infection and hospitalisation, or between infection and death?

The concept of breaking the link entirely makes more sense in epidemiology textbooks than in the real world.

While vaccines massively reduce the risk of death, they do not reduce it to zero, and they do far less to prevent infection. When a highly transmissible variant such as Delta is in circulation, it will still have a good chance of spreading widely and finding those people who are unvaccinated, or not-well protected from their shots.

How well it does this in the UK will alert other countries to how threatened their own vaccination programmes may be.

"The link cannot be entirely broken unless you have eradicated the virus," says Salisbury. "If the virus is still in circulation, there have to be some consequences from it."

All of which leads to the related question of what proportion of the population needs to be vaccinated to crush a national epidemic – and is this even achievable?

Israel originally pushed down on cases with aggressive vaccination, but cases have risen again with the arrival of the Delta variant.

For now, Israel is keen to watch and wait, to see if cases rise, but not severe illness. But while Israel relies largely on the Pfizer vaccine, the UK has bet on Oxford/AstraZeneca.

For that reason, other countries that are banking on the cheaper, more easily stored Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine will be watching the UK . "If the UK avoids serious damage it will be important for those countries that have been relying on Oxford/AstraZeneca," says William Hanage, a professor of the evolution and epidemiology of infectious disease at Harvard.

To crush an epidemic of Delta variant, scientists believe 85% of the population need to be protected by a vaccine that prevents all onward transmission.

But that assumes the virus is allowed to let rip with no other measures to control it. "At the moment we clearly haven't vaccinated enough people to stop the virus circulating," says Woolhouse.

"What that tells you is we are not at the herd immunity threshold yet. The delta variant, being more transmissible, has raised the bar."

Countries looking on will want to see how the UK handles this dilemma. Vaccination and the immunity people have from past infection will get us a long way, but more measures are likely to be needed to eventually control the epidemic.

Siân Griffiths, emeritus professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the co-chair of the Hong Kong government's inquiry into Sars, says south-east Asian countries are watching the UK, along with Israel, to see how they cope with Delta.

Many of these countries went for a zero-Covid approach and have extremely low vaccination rates. They are now seeing cases of Delta variant spring up and will need to throw more into vaccination. "What you're seeing is a gradual realisation that it isn't going to be a world without Covid," she says.

As the UK goes into the autumn, a combined Covid and flu vaccination programme may swing into action, giving time for Australia, New Zealand and other countries in the southern hemisphere to see the impact before their winter arrives.

But there are behavioural lessons to be had too. While the UK has worrying inequalities around who takes up the vaccine, coverage across the population is the envy of the world.

"Many countries are trying out different ways to get people to come forward," says Griffiths. "They might want to look at why the UK has come forward for vaccination in the numbers it has."

I think we are sort of now at the stage of herd immunity as policy in that it seems very unlikely that the remaining restrictions won't be lifted in July. Plus - personally - the restrictions no longer make a difference to daily life except for wearing a mask indoors. I can go and see friends, eat out etc. So we'll have most people vaccinated but young people who are less at risk getting vaccinated and/or getting infected.

But we're at 85% with at least one dose and about 62% with two doses - I think that combined with natural immunity/antibodies will probably get us to something like population immunity. The vaccines are broadly protecting the most at risk and young kids are still really not a big risk for transmission - but the delta variant is going through teens/young adults, see the ONS survey data:


Hospitalisations and deaths are rising, but they are still pretty low and their connection to the case numbers is far, far weaker. So hospitalisations per 100,000 people are now up to 1.9 from a low of 1.1 - that compares with 35 in the winter wave - and is in line with the most optimistic SAGE projections. I'm still not convinced if we should lift the remaining restrictions yet but if you extrapolate forward to July 19 I think the hospitalisations are still at a probably manageable level:


But the UK is fairly well along its vaccine program and this all emphasises that it's key for other countries to roll it out as much as possible. For places like the US, or Romania, it feels like if this variant can get into the unvaccinated population it will have an impact and may be a real problem.