Industries will have no problems.

Small businesses will fail.

Employees will go even deeper into debt, which is what the big banks want anyway, so hooray for capitalism!

For example, I'm currently very relieved that I'm not the breadwinner in my household. My wife has her government job and she's not going to lose that.

But I work for myself, and my job is mostly on-site technical support. That, of course, is completely impossible at the moment. I wouldn't want to do it anyway, as even in the best of times it's not pleasant to touch some of my customers' keyboards/mice (seriously, some of these people are disgusting).

I've been attempting to shift my work more to low voltage wiring for small businesses and home builds, and it was looking like the best avenue for me going forward, but I haven't gotten enough of that work to switch to it full-time.

As a result, I'm basically unemployed at the moment. I've had two remote support sessions this week, so I've barely made enough money to cover my rare run to the grocery store.

I'm currently weighing the risk of attempting to do the wiring jobs I have slated. I don't want to leave the house and I want to follow the guidelines, but I don't think we're going to qualify for the stimulus package because of my wife's income. So I'm thinking of ways to reduce my risk but also do my work. Things like coordinating with general contractors to see if I can be the only person on site when I'm there. There's an office wiring job that I might end up doing in the middle of the night to avoid contact, but I'd still have to touch doorknobs and handles and that worries me. The virus can live for days on those surfaces.

This. Sucks.

In your circumstance, the only gigs that would seem to be clearly or mostly safe are gigs where you're working on a home or office that's not yet occupied. You do have to worry about the other workers, but around here, where home construction seems to still be ongoing, I've seen all the workers wearing masks.

I agree that I wouldn't want to enter an existing home. You just don't know what you're getting into.

It's a bit more of an interesting question if you're asked to do a gig for an existing business office. If the building is largely unoccupied, because they're all working from home, then you're probably quite safe, since the dwell time of the virus on most surfaces is at most a few days.

My own employer, a large university, tends to normally put off rewiring and AV upgrades until the summers, when fewer people are around and the classrooms aren't booked solid. I guess now would be a great time if they wanted to do that sort of work. I imagine that our IT people are mostly over the initial panic of the switch to online instruction, and now can ponder such things.

I have been gathering info for applying for the SBA Paycheck Protection Program this week. For small businesses, applications open tomorrow and I'm currently waiting for a webinar regarding the application process with Chase to begin.

However, self-employed and independent contractors will be able to apply starting April 10th. So, you should start getting some info together regarding your own compensation for 2019. This is one of the Youtube videos I found to be more informative. However, all is not known yet and a lot of fine details are open to interpretation.

As a small business, the main bits of info we need is date started, average monthly payroll cost for 2019, and annual revenue. The sample form can be found here, but I'm sure the one you fill out will be customized by your financial institution.

The contractor I work with most often just sent out an email to all of his subs that they would only be allowing a single trade/company on a job site at a time with 4 people max, and his two project managers will be scheduling subs and nobody is allowed to be on site unannounced. I'm happy to see the precaution.

It's those new homes I'm least concerned about. I'm working up in the ceiling joists most of the time, and I'm rarely touching any surfaces that other people have touched.

With offices, I'm mostly worried about the other trade people who have been coming and going. I don't know where they've been.

Thanks, Rob, I'll look into that.

Hello everyone. It's been a while. We seem to be coping up here in Manchester.

I've gone from being in the house all day by myself to being in the house all day with the family. Other than a few walks and the weekly trip to the shop, we're staying at home. The only real change is that I can't go swimming every day.

I had a feeling things were starting to 'tits up' around the middle/end of Feb. So I started to restrict my business travel. I also stocked up on the essentials (plasterboard, insulation, timber) so I could carry on converting my loft without needing to visit the builders merchants. Which turned out to be the right thing to do as my preferred supplier shut their doors towards the end of March.

As someone who had Asthma as a kid but seem to have largely grown out of it, I'm still a little worried about what might happen. I still keep my inhalers topped up. But haven't used the 'preventer' one for over 20 years.

I'm assuming we won't be sending the kids back to school until September at the earliest and we won't see even a mild relaxation of the lockdown until well into the summer. Even then, it won't be back to normal for a long, long time. If ever... I see a lot more permanent working from home and more online/home delivery type shopping. A friend of mine is convinced this is the end of the high street.


Me too, we have a national cycle route that passes right by the side of the house, and I swear it's gone from 1-2 people every 10-15 mins to being like Oxford Circus at rush hour. The main road, on the other hand, is now super quiet. Plus it's a 20 zone, so what little traffic there is, isn't going very fast.

^^^ This 100%. That's exactly how I feel about it. Although I've lost a stone and a half by not 'nipping out' for something unhealthy.

Just did my own for the first time ever. No need to listen to barber's small talk, yay!

Wife has it, probably at least two weeks now but not too bad. My nephew's a doc on a coronavirus ward so she's got a good source of guidance.

Not missing the office at all, but yeah it's very strange. I guess the strangest thing is not knowing what business we'll be going back to. We're primarily a commercial landlord nowadays and pretty much no one is paying rent. I guess a lot of our tenants (mostly SMEs) will go out of business due to CV19.

Interesting times ahead for sure.

As a high street landlord, I'm afraid he's probably right.

Hopefully she'll shrug it off as most people do!

So far, so good here. A friend's teen daughter has some symptoms, but not diagnosed yet. Everyone else I know is okay, for now.

Well she's up and about, was out cutting grass today till the tractor overheated! Have to say the UK response is looking more and more inadequate especially as countries like Denmark and Germany are already partially lifting their restrictions.

Late to the party, and the last one to leave, most likely.

I'm still amazed we're just waving people through at the airports, no checks at all. Herd immunity by stealth.

I guess they've managed to avoid the disastrous peak as they were trying to. Quite a few people I know have been told by their employers that they'll likely be working from home till the end of the year.

I've just found it really hard to motivate myself, so many other things to do...

My modest yard is looking fabulous, and we haven't killed each other here yet.

Catching up on movies that have been on my list forever.

You want to see a bad response? USA #1! Woo...hoo...

Our political leaders are abysmal and our people are even worse. We have armed militias storming state houses because they're mad they can't go to Applebee's for a baked potato. Meanwhile over 2K people a day are dying from it in the US, and that's probably under-reported. And now my wife, the federal employee, is being told they might be sent back to work soon.

Everything sucks and now the US has murder hornets...

Oh, and I had to go to the hardware store yesterday (a support post for our front porch has rotted and I don't want it to fall on anyone), and only about half of the people (including me) were wearing masks. And what's with people not wearing them on their noses? I get that it's uncomfortable, but come on, people.

I also overheard a couple people talking about how "I think that eventually we're just all going to have to get it and that's the only way it'll end." NO YOU MORONS THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS!!!

I really can't understand the armed militia bit, I think we all respect freedom but the freedom to get infected and infect others seems to be a bit extreme

Well... to be fair, that is a valid (though pessimistic) outlook -- herd immunity is a thing, and is largely (IIRC) how the Spanish Flu pandemic ended. I'd certainly hope that 100 years on, our medical knowledge has advanced enough to where our response doesn't require it, though (certain politicians aside). I'd gladly take a yearly vaccination over this.

Here is a screenshot of an Excel spreadsheet I wrote using data from WHO. The WHO data contains about 13,000 rows of daily data for each country where data is available. My spreadsheet has all this data, but summarizes it as shown in the screenshot.

If there are any Excel Geeks reading this, I have also attached a copy of the .xlsx file that you can play with. The main thing you need to know is to look up the two-letter country code in column Z to choose the country you are interested in. Paste that code into a cell in column N and it will display the summary for that country.

Note: The number for USA Deaths Today is suspect for this date. For some reason WHO's data for May 4 was prefaced with a minus sign. Unless they disinterred 1696 dead people and resuscitated them, it seems unlikely. Also, based on trends 1696 is too low a number. I made a probably invalid assumption and just deleted the minus sign, but keep in mind that yesterday's deaths were an even 5,000.

Note: The countries shown in the screenshot were arbitrarily chosen, mostly because I had heard of them before. Download the whole spreadsheet and you can choose up to 30 of your own countries. I won't go into how the first seven countries chosen got moved to the top of the daily data (not shown in the screenshot) but if you're a true Excel Geek you'll figure out how to do it. (Hint: Look at column I)

tanstaafl.

According to the data we're twice as bad as the US for mortality. I guess at least part of this will be down to population density, maybe mobility too.

Potential flaw in the spreadsheet's methodology:

The "Average Mortality Today" column is not meaningful, because it compares confirmed infections in a single day compared to confirmed deaths on the same single day. People confirmed with infections do not necessarily die on the same day they they are confirmed to be infected, so this column can never be accurate. France looks very weird in that column, and I think that might be the reason.

However, the "average mortality overall" column should be more accurate, and yet France is still an unexpected outlier even there. That might indicate a problem where France doesn't have enough early testing, and confirms many of their cases only after they're dead.

Curious: Where did you get the WHO data from, and, is the spreadsheet programmed to obtain the latest version of that data automatically?

There are websites that give much of this information and don't need manual updating

e.g. (my preferred)
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

or
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Not quite the same but easy to bookmark

I agree, but it does give you some idea of mortality rate comparisons country to country. Column "U" is better methodology as you pointed out, but none of the numbers in columns K, L, T, U, and V with the red asterisks in the description are worth anything other than comparisons because... cell Z1.

tanstaafl.

https://covid19.who.int/

Look underneath the map and there is a link in small blue type "Download Map Data". It will give you a 13,000 row CSV spreadsheet.

Programming the spreadsheet to update automatically is beyond my Excel capabilities. i may be an Excel God among some of my less techie friends because I can do complex formulas, VLookups, conditional formatting etc. (all of which are used in this spreadsheet BTW) but compared to a lot of people (yes, you, Christian!) I'm not even in the rank amateur category.

However, it takes me less than 15 seconds to update the spreadsheet once I have downloaded the CSV file. Open the file, copy it to the clipboard, paste it into cell A3 of the spreadsheet to overwrite the existing data, and its done.

tanstaafl.

Sigh... Just when I was starting to be proud because I had created this world-class spreadsheet that I was sure nobody else had thought of doing, you show me that mine is pure amateur.

I really like the columns yours shows for testing. About my only claim to fame is I can display just the countries I am interested in for country-to-country comparison.

Both of those sites are really good. Much better than my efforts. But I did have a lot of fun putting mine together, and learned a few things in the process.

tanstaafl.

Given the truly pathetic response by the POTUS, here's a solid suggestion on how to use excess death rather than any particular covid-19 specific metrics - many of which are quite suspect here.

I'm sorry to hear that. I imagined the DC area would be a bit more cautious considering the population density and relative closeness to other hot spots.

I'm in a suburb of NYC and during the first couple weeks of the shutdown, the streets were eerily empty. I was the only person coming in to the office to receive incoming shipments and mail, so I have been out and about every day since. For sure, people around here are becoming too comfortable with the situation. Of course, that is only my opinion.

People are still wearing masks in stores. I have seen some people with it not covering their nose, but it's rare. The two big grocery stores (Shoprite and Stop & Shop) are requiring masks and controlling how many people are inside the store at once. While waiting on line outside to enter, people still have their masks on and are careful to remain 6ft apart. I will give credit to the population up here. They really seem to get it. But, there are WAY more cars on the road than a few weeks ago. Some parks are opening up for exercise (playgrounds still closed), but almost every business that was closed in mid-March is still supposed to be closed.

I want to see an end to this as much as anyone, but I'm guessing we're going to see a second wave of COVID and it will possibly be worse than the first. Only because people have had enough of being isolated, not working, missing family, etc. My wife and kid haven't left the grounds of our development in almost two months now, so I am witness to the frustration first-hand.

That is a super useful piece of information. The example graph that they give there is amazing, showing how prior years are surprisingly stable numbers, and how stark and obvious the difference is since the pandemic hit. Wow.

I had to visit one of our building sites daytime today, traffic was almost normal for midday. Definitely more people about than last week, easier to get into the supermarket though.