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COVID-19 Impacts- No Conspiracy Theories

Discuss anything that doesn't fit elsewhere on the site. As a reminder, religion, politics and weaponry are prohibited.
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Sporkboy
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COVID-19 Impacts- No Conspiracy Theories

Post by Sporkboy »

This has been on my mind and hopefully this thread doesn’t get quarantined like the other one. Please let’s keep this to how the Coronavirus is impacting your life/work/watch usage habits. How are you preparing? Links to information is OK, but let’s keep political stuff and conspiracy theories out of it.

My daughter’s preschool is closing for 2 weeks, so I will be working from home, maybe going to work occasionally to check on computers and stuff.

I do technical and misc. support for a decent sized behavioral neuroscience lab in Boston-MA-USA, so the last few days have been full of technical configurations and getting people set up to work remotely. I have seen so many laptops. I wish I would have pushed my boss about this last week, but she said I was catastrophizing the situation.

I know Watchpalooza is now working from home (Germany?). How is everyone else faring? Be sure to mention where you are.
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Re: COVID-19 Impacts- No Conspiracy Theories

Post by The Sultan of SoWhat »

I am retired--living in New Jersey--and so have no employment story to tell. My daughter, however, works at an American-style school in Shanghai. This was her latest update (3/11):

Pretty much same old same old here. Although, very few new cases of virus—and those that we have had are now “imported” from Italy, Iran, Japan, or Korea. No word on back to school yet, but the nearby bank has reopened, and there’s lots more movement on the street.

About 80% of our students are failing everything. Some are fully enrolled in other schools in Taiwan, New Zealand, etc., until they return, and also trying to keep up with our online work. Others are just sleeping all day, I guess. Not much parental involvement, and the whole expectation is on us to “catch them up” when we’re back in school. If we are told to work into the summer that will be the last straw.

[My granddaughter] is going absolutely nuts. She hates doing any kind of physical activity (like, walking) unless it’s actually playing sports. So, this Saturday I’m letting her get together with some other kids (from school and otherwise) to play frisbee.
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Re: COVID-19 Impacts- No Conspiracy Theories

Post by Sussa »

I’m in the Boston area. I already worked from home, so no change there except that the company has also banned me from traveling back to home office (no interstate travel). They’re preparing for WFH for all office-based workers but haven’t announced it yet. My spouse is a professor at a university that decided to go 100% online for the rest of the semester. I’m in a Master’s program and the university is switching to online only for at least a few weeks.

Unfortunately a close, out of state family member passed away this week and I couldn’t bear the thought of not being there for the rest of my family, so I’m traveling right now. Traffic to the airport mid-day on a weekday was comparable to an early weekend morning. The airport itself was also less busy than I’ve ever seen it. The plane was maybe half full. I fly the same route often, and the plane is always full. Lots of hand washing, hand sanitizer, and avoiding the free breakfast buffet at the hotel. And trying my best to not touch my face.
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Re: COVID-19 Impacts- No Conspiracy Theories

Post by Rabirnie »

I’m in Columbia, SC and work from home for a healthcare IT consulting group. No change to my work environment, but I have spent all week working with my clients to build and implement changes in the EHR (Electronic Health Record) to accurately capture data (and charges) pertaining to the virus. I work in the revenue cycle/hospital billing side of things, so it’s not as crazy for me as it is for the clinical teams. I know they have been feeling the heat this week as preparations ramp up. I’ll just be interested to see how it all shakes out because the billing codes for COVID are brand new and payers aka the cartel have antiquated claims processing systems and are notoriously slow to change things. So we are helping forecast revenue shortfalls/longer turnaround time for AR. The CEO/CFO are very much plugged in to these convos and it’s difficult to accurately project what might happen given all the unknowns.

Most of my division works remotely, but other groups in the company travel every week. At this point, it is up to our clients to decide whether they want our consultants on site or remote. However, I will say our company put out a memo to say that if employees felt unsafe/unhealthy traveling that our company would bite the bullet and eat the costs if needed. I think that’s a smart move and I appreciate the flexibility offered by our company.

My dad works for the University of SC as a senior leader in Public Safety and he has been on call around the clock working with the university on a plan. They extended spring break an extra week, which may me more dangerous to the kids than the virus [emoji12][emoji481]. The kids will then switch to online classes for at least 2 weeks. He mentioned how much the athletic department fought the sports hiatus because of a loss of revenue.

He also is the president of a local soccer club and they host a tournament around St Pats every year. It is a major revenue generator for the club and they have 275+ teams coming in to compete. They just postponed the tournament last night given the evolving situation.

My mom is a nurse working in outpatient oncology infusion and has not seen a change to her work environment yet. However, the health system she works for did set up a triage tent outside of the ER for patients presenting with COVID symptoms in order to keep the patient pop separate.


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Re: COVID-19 Impacts- No Conspiracy Theories

Post by MoT »

Most everything I do is from home, so I am fortunate in that regard. I'm also somewhat of an introvert, so limiting my social activities shouldn't be much of an issue.
Rabirnie wrote: Fri Mar 13, 2020 9:09 am I work in the revenue cycle/hospital billing side of things
Mrs.MoT is an audit and appeals coordinator for a fairly large health system here. She hasn't mentioned any specific changes being implemented but has noticed a lot of inter-office and inter-department chatter about things that may happen.
Rabirnie wrote: Fri Mar 13, 2020 9:09 am My mom is a nurse working in outpatient oncology infusion
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Re: COVID-19 Impacts- No Conspiracy Theories

Post by Rabirnie »

ManOnTime wrote: Fri Mar 13, 2020 9:48 am Most everything I do is from home, so I am fortunate in that regard. I'm also somewhat of an introvert, so limiting my social activities shouldn't be much of an issue.

Mrs.MoT is an audit and appeals coordinator for a fairly large health system here. She hasn't mentioned any specific changes being implemented but has noticed a lot of inter-office and inter-department chatter about things that may happen.

Your mother is a hero. Please let her know there are those of us out here who can't adequately express our admiration and gratitude for everything they do.
Funny enough, I am massively extroverted, so this job has kind of been killing me. My wife does keep our daughter and a few kids from our neighborhood during the day, so I do have human interaction, but not nearly enough to satiate the issue.

What system is your wife's health system on? What health system does she work for? You don't have to answer these questions if you don't want to, but I'm always curious. My firm specializes in the Epic EHR and they have about 60% of the US market share and growing.

As far as my mother is concerned, you are 100% correct. She drives me crazy, as most mothers do, but I am continually astounded as to how she is even able to go to work every day and keep it together. She just moved to outpatient a year or two ago, but spent 35 years working the inpatient oncology unit. That unit doesn't tend to have many positive outcomes. Over the years she has cared for her own mother, a close family friend, and countless others in our community who have been impacted by such a terrible and vicious disease. I can only say that it is a calling for her and hope that I someday feel called to do something even remotely as noble.
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Re: COVID-19 Impacts- No Conspiracy Theories

Post by Boourns »

Panic has officially hit here in North Texas. Sometimes I leave work in early afternoon to beat traffic and work from home the remainder of the day. Yesterday at around 2:30 I stopped at local grocery store on the way home. No hand sanitizer, barely any hand soap, no toilet paper at all, super low on milk, etc. My wife stopped at the same store after work around 5:30. No kleenex, no soap left, no napkins, no pasta, no pasta sauce, no milk at all.

The school district we live in was on spring break this week, and it yesterday it extended it another week. Fortunately our kid is pre-K so his daycare is still open. I expect my wife's company -- pretty large with multistate presence -- to be work from home next week. My employer is a smaller local company, so it might take a little longer, but I regularly work from home anyway so it won't be as big of a deal.
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Re: COVID-19 Impacts- No Conspiracy Theories

Post by cortman »

Not much panic here in rural Missouri. I've been going in to work as usual with no plans to stop at this point. People have bought out all the toilet paper which is stupid and annoying as we were actually in need of some recently and couldn't find it anywhere. Stores, restaurants, roads are still full. I'm not too worried as we are physically remote from any medium sized city, our children aren't in school yet, and we are all pretty healthy.
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Re: COVID-19 Impacts- No Conspiracy Theories

Post by AndroidIsAwesome »

Here in Canada my entire semester of school was put online only starting today. Nobody really knows what's going to happen but it's really screwed up a ton of academic related things. Massive research projects I had been working on for months have been suspended permanently now as well.

Edit- also NHL season was cancelled so Canadians are losing their ****
Last edited by AndroidIsAwesome on Fri Mar 13, 2020 11:44 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: COVID-19 Impacts- No Conspiracy Theories

Post by TheJohnP »

We have been strongly encouraged to work from home over the past week.
Today got the email that starting on Monday the company is enacting a global work from home initiative until further notice.
They had already stopped all corporate travel a few weeks ago with only business critical travel allowed.
Working from home isn't an issue, so that's a plus.
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Re: COVID-19 Impacts- No Conspiracy Theories

Post by 59yukon01 »

I live in Kentucky, and I think at the moment we have 11 confirmed cases statewide, and one from my city has already been released from the hospital to stay at home.

My wife works for a non-profit cancer support place, so understandably they have to be super conscious of their members, so all group support sessions have been cancelled, and staff started working from home today. Their raises were just put on hold as well.

I've been in outside sales for 35 years, but with my client base I spend most of my time in the office answering emails/phone calls anymore. Effective Monday we've been asked to work from home. I'll have to try and stay busy, but unfortunately I can see a huge drop in business just from the first of the month. So my wallet will suffer also.

I'm not an alarmist or panicky type person, but have to admit it's starting to play with my mind somewhat. I've stated from the beginning this won't be any worse than any other flu season, but then the "what if I'm wrong" thoughts keep popping in my head. So I'm being more cautious now, but we're pretty much homebodies anyway.

Also with KY being the heartland of college hoops, to hear March Madness being cancelled means the world is coming to an end. [emoji6]

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Re: COVID-19 Impacts- No Conspiracy Theories

Post by MoT »

Rabirnie wrote: Fri Mar 13, 2020 10:22 am What system is your wife's health system on? What health system does she work for? You don't have to answer these questions if you don't want to, but I'm always curious. My firm specializes in the Epic EHR and they have about 60% of the US market share and growing.
She worked for Hennepin Health (formerly Hennepin County Medical Center) for 20 years and moved to North Memorial Health in 2018, just a few months before her diagnosis. Boy, did that add to the stress.

Both places use Epic.
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Re: COVID-19 Impacts- No Conspiracy Theories

Post by Sporkboy »

My workplace is encouraging everyone to work remotely starting Monday. This was the first that the organization mentioned of it and so I am guessing a lot of people aren’t ready. As it is, I will be in Monday morning to troubleshoot before we go completely remote.
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Re: COVID-19 Impacts- No Conspiracy Theories

Post by Boourns »

Rabirnie wrote: Fri Mar 13, 2020 10:22 am My firm specializes in the Epic EHR and they have about 60% of the US market share and growing.
Not to get too far off topic, but geez I did not realize that. I worked for Epic 15 years ago when I first got out of college. Left to go to grad school... what a mistake that was!
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Re: COVID-19 Impacts- No Conspiracy Theories

Post by Robotaz »

Schools closed for two weeks. Government is starting to shut down. Of course my slave-driving company, Death Star Industries, has mentioned nothing so, “get your ass to work, pawn”!

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