Business Owners: Prepare for Covid-19

I may be an alarmist.  However, I and my company are taking the novel coronavirus, COVID19, very seriously.  We have restricted company related travel for the month of March and are likely to restrict travel in April as well.  We have asked employees to work form home.  We are washing and disinfecting our offices daily.

Should Your Office Prepare for Covid-19?

I do not believe that myself or my team represent a particularly at-risk population, but I do believe that it is incumbent on leaders to take proactive steps to prevent the spread of disease.  This outbreak represents the first opportunity that our young company has faced to show that leadership.

Currently, the social network analysis that we have started on COVID19 suggests that the illness is going to get much, much worse before it gets better.  Because the virus is novel, there is zero immunity in the general population.  There is no vaccine.  And while many are hopeful that an infected individual will not get the illness again – we simply do not know

The R0 (R-naught) appears to be somewhere between two and four, but the length of time for transmission appears to be quite long – meaning that healthy people can be spreading the disease across communities for a period of time that is unusually long. Infected people may not know that they are infected for up to 14 days.  Moreover, the infected may be provided with limited information to suggest that they are even sick – as the illness can be quite mild in many cases. 

(For more information about how this number is calculated, I found this video from Penn State (https://youtu.be/8KSQRdROrwc)  which I found at this article (https://vitals.lifehacker.com/what-is-the-coronaviruss-r0-and-why-does-it-matter-1841264885) particularly helpful.)

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So, what does that mean?

The problem is threefold:

1) The spread is likely to occur across many populations and communities

2) Many, particularly the young, can be carriers without being aware that they are carrying the disease and thus there is no non-distributed way to limit spread at this point

3) The hospitalization rate and mortality rate are deceptively high compared to influenza or other illnesses to which the virus is being compared.

This is why the CDC and WHO (World Health Organization) recommend a number of preventative strategies associated with social distancing and hygiene.  The goal is to reduce the spreads speed – not just the overall spread. This is called flattening the curve.

From current estimates of WHO, the mortality rate is 3.4% of cases, with the current rate in Italy over 6%.  The hospitalization rate according to estimates is high.  For example, South Korea has more than 7700 cases in hospitals and the recovery period is long – approximately 3-6 weeks.  This means that the use of hospital equipment will extend much further into the future than many can contemplate easily.  Because of this, many communities will face the same type of shortages and triaging occurring in Italy today. 

South Korea has accomplished this by testing a significant portion of those that may be potentially impacted (more than 180k, compared to US numbers in the neighborhood of 6k), making personal choices to social distance and be unusually attentive to hygiene and canceling events and meetings before you NEED to.  

Mixing people from around the country and then returning to your place of origin is one way that the virus can spread across the whole country.  Making it increasingly difficult for non-infected regions to remain non-infected. 

Battling Covid-19 at the Office:

So, to that end, my company is being proactive.  We don’t want praise for this behavior.  We want to explain it so that others take the same precautions.  This is a time when the whole uninfected group needs to take actions BEFORE they are infected or BEFORE there is an epidemic in their own community.  Success will mean we look like idiots and alarmists. 

At Chapman and Company, we know we are weird and already strange compared to many organizations that we interact with.  That is one reason our views are considered innovative and useful.  So, here’s what we are doing:

  • We have asked everyone to work from home

  • We are disinfecting our office every day – even though it is just me

  • We are placing restrictions on travel

  • We are communicating about why we are nervous

  • We emptied our community candy bowls

  • We are attempting to influence other groups to follow suit

It is often hard to stand up and lead in times where success makes you look like idiots.  We don’t care.  We believe the right thing to do is to communicate why we are concerned.  We have looked at the data (the math part – not the virus/health part).  We have discussed social networks and the mechanisms for transmission.  We have analyzed our own behavior.  We recognize that we are as likely to be carriers and transmitters as be sick people – and so, we have proactively changed our behavior.

Feature Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels

Thomas Chapman