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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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What effect is the Coronavirus having on your work life and personal life?

Do you go into an office on work days? Is your company taking precautions? Are you taking personal precautions? Are you planning on attending any conferences soon which are up in the air?

Top comments (79)

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leirasanchez profile image
Leira Sánchez

Non-essential business travel has been canceled at work. In my personal life, I'm considering canceling my trip to France. Not without crying a lot first, of course. I have been dreaming about going to France since I started learning French nearly 10 years ago.

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marcusatlocalhost profile image
Marcus

I think it's better to travel now since everybody is more cautious. Better than at the beginning of the year when nobody expected anything.

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Emmanuel K

You could get stuck in a government quarantine (days to weeks) if you happen to be on a flight or in a hotel with someone infected though (this has happened to tons of people). I'd err on the side of caution and wait for the situation to improve a bit.

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marcusatlocalhost profile image
Marcus

That's a valid point!

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leirasanchez profile image
Leira Sánchez

That is a good point

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jennajlee92 profile image
jennajlee92

As long as you're not from Korea, Iran, or Italy (and of course China), travel to France should be fine! I feel like if you've been dreaming about it for so long, you should go. From what I know, the above countries are the ones that have the most people with corona, and places like the U.S. and other countries in Europe are not as invested in the corona scare.

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marcusatlocalhost profile image
Marcus

Sahil, Alexander Gauland don't want you to open this can of worms.

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rhymes • Edited

I live in Milan, Italy which is in the region where most of the detected cases for the virus in the country are, around 1200+ people. Though I don't live in what the government is calling the "red zone" which is around 60 kilometers south from here.

Last week was a bit absurd. Last sunday people here literally ransacked supermarkets in fear that supplies were going to be scarce or rationed. That kinda became a meme the following two days. Cinemas, gyms, stadiums, clubs and schools (of any kind) are still closed now in week 2. Bars went from "they have to be closed after 6pm" to "they can be opened after 6pm if they have table service". I was invited to leave a bar at 5.55pm on saturday.

Museums now on week two can welcome visitors, but only in small groups. The public health system is having trouble finding beds for patients that need to be placed in intensive care as obviously patients need those places for other problems other than the virus as well, but the private hospitals seem to be lending a hand.

Me and my friends are getting a little bit restless as there's not much to do. Though people are around during the day, we're all sort of meeting at each other places for dinner or staying home, waiting. In my neighboorhood I see many closed stores and empty restaurants.

The media isn't helping at all and not all are responding well to the quarantine (people literally tried to escape the quarantined zones the other day).

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thatonejakeb profile image
Jacob Baker

I have a cold at the moment so other than “oMg dO yOu HaVe CoRonAvIrUs???” jokes nothing is different!

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scrabill profile image
Shannon Crabill

The jokes are tired, at best.

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nirebu profile image
Nicolò Rebughini

I've written about this right now. Started this morning but had to finish it later.

TL;DR: for me and my company it means working remote for two full weeks while I'm quarantined. I also had to cancel some long awaited international travel.

Longer version below

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Amara Graham

I'm a remote employee and we just cancelled our quarter planning trip that gets most of the company together at our HQ. So that's a bummer, but I'm trying to stay positive about it because it sounds like we are going to do something almost totally remote planning wise instead so I'm hoping that its still productive!

Conferences and workshops on the other hand are a mess. We assume most large conferences and tradeshows in March/April/May will end up cancelled. We are making a call tomorrow about hosting an upcoming developer event. I don't want to be the person who runs an event and people end up getting sick citing my event as the potential source. I also don't want to inadvertently end up as a carrier.

I have a 6 hour hands on workshop worth of content just hanging out in limbo. Started pulling it apart to think about a virtual offering, but we would need to run a ton of client taxing applications to make that a reality. Just ugh.

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crimsonmed profile image
Médéric Burlet

I'm in Singapore and we had the case of people going crazy and raiding supermarkets (paranoia). Now that people realized its not that crazy life is almost normal.

We just have occasional temperature check in cinema, work etc.

Public transport are a bit less crowded due to paranoid people.

There have been no deaths about it in Singapore. Only successful treatment.

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kayis profile image
K

I work at home, tend to wash my hands far too often and switched from public transport to bike.

But the girlfriend I'm living with is a nurse. So I guess, I'm done for anyway 💩

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

💀

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Kaleb M

So far we haven't had anything come up from work for precautions, but like you, I live in NYC, so coughs on the subway have definitely felt louder.

A friend of mine also sent a picture from Brooklyn's Trader Joe's that had many empty shelves already, so hopefully we all can stock up on necessities in case things become emergency status.

I've definitely been washing my hands for the full 20-30 seconds and if I feel sick, take time to rest or work from home to make verify symptoms and not infect anyone if I get anything!

How about you?

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scrabill profile image
Shannon Crabill

Ekk, of all places to stock up from Trader Joe's seems expensive.

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Kaleb M

agreed!!

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monicat profile image
Monica Macomber

Seattle's getting more activity than I'd like. The office sent out an email about it but we're still running as usual.

I think twice before leaving home, especially for anywhere crowded. I'll probably start doing more grocery deliveries instead of going to the store, and I'm wondering if I should ask my out-of-state family to cancel their visit this month 😞

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José Coelho

Cleaning door handles, elevator buttons and toilets 3x a day and a no hand-shakes policy.
Also most people is cutting down on traveling which is bad for a decentralized project.

Personally just a lot of hand-washing and being alert.

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Massimo Artizzu

I live in Italy.
The first annoyance is that conferences have been postponed (including one where I'll speak at), and meetups cancelled.

Even though I live in one of the most affected regions (Emilia-Romagna), people are still going to work, but with extra precautions. I know some workplaces are reducing gatherings and postponing activities, including some of our clients.

I'm currently in Sardinia (which has no people afftected by the Coronavirus so far), but I'll be back on the 9th. I'm attending my sick father and I fear I won't be allowed to be back due to flight cancellations and travel restrictions.

About my father's hospitalization, the clinic is now more stringent about visits: one person at time, the others must wait outside.

My girlfriend had some university activities suspended last week.

My brother-in-law is stuck in Saudi Arabia. He can't help my sister (who is here) because if he travels to Italy, he won't be able to return to his campus until who knows when. He'd probably lose his job. I think this is the major blow, as my sister hasn't seen her husband in weeks and my BIL his relatives for a month.

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Manuel Ojeda

At this moment I keep going into an office, no issues against COVID-19 here.

I had the intentions to go into the JS Conf Mexico but I don't know if this is going to be cancelled to avoid any possibility in making the outbreak worst.

In summary, everything is fine here where I live but there is other Mexico cities with confirmed cases, so I taking the require precautions

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zoebourque

dev.to/vicky209/best-5-tips-to-use...

Twitter has announced to let their employees work from home. My company is doing the same thing!

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Josh

I live in the LA area. My workplace is taking 0 precautions. Despite the fact that all of the devs here have VPN access, laptops, phones, etc., management is hell-bent on having butts-in-chairs. I'm pretty concerned due to the fact that we're in such a large metropolitan area with a lot of travel to and from affected countries.

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Desiré 👩‍🎓👩‍🏫

I finally managed to be accepted in some really important events in Spain as a speaker... And I had to reject the ones that were celebrated soon just in case.

It's so frustrating since I've been trying to be a speaker since last year unsuccessfully and now this is happening. 😕

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