So, my company just reported that we had an employee test positive for COVID-19. He was here in Austin, but left to go home to India on 2/28. He stopped off in NYC on 2/29 and flew through Dubai at some point, and then reported to work in India for a couple of days before feeling ill, going to the doc, getting tested for COVID19, and coming up positive. While here in the Austin area, he worked and interacted with a handful of his team members, at the same campus where I office.
I work from home primarily and rarely go into the office, it's highly unlikely I would have come into contact with him, or anyone else he came into contact with.
But the real point here, is that my company has decided to move to work-from-home for ALL employees that can, thru 3/24. Some teams, primarily hardware engineers, won't be able to do that. The equipment they're designing/testing is all in labs that are on our campuses. But the rest of us in operational or finance or support roles, can, and must, work from home.
We're seeing a lot of the same, although I believe at this time we haven't had any employee [even worldwide] test positive. We instituted travel bans for international, restricted company meetings over a certain size, and moved certain meetings which would normally require people to fly in to one site to be remote. I might have a meeting coming up the first week of April in Colorado, and it remains to be seen whether that will be changed to be remote instead--I know my wife doesn't want me to go.
Like you, I work from home primarily now (went from about 30-40% work from home to 90% once we got the puppy). For my role that's normal; it's a field role and most of my peers work from home as they don't live near an office. I just happen to be near a major office so I have a desk there. But just this past week they've been making sure that people in other roles have been validating all of their work-from-home capability (connectivity, VPN, etc) in case they get the order to start.
Personally I think some of the panic is a bit overblown. But that said, we're currently at 730 cases tested positive in the US and 26 deaths. That's 3.6%, and given that probably 500+ of those positive tests have occurred in the last 96 hours, I would expect the death rate just amongst those 730 patients to climb as some of those 730 won't recover. Granted, I'm sure there are some unreported cases where [younger, healthier] people are either having mild symptoms and not getting checked out, or might even be entirely asymptomatic. As
@847badgerfan says, that 3.6% rate is only based upon known positive tested patients, and clearly doesn't include everyone at this point. But it's still higher than we'd like to see.
And of course, people stockpiling their bunkers are buying Costco, Target, Walmart etc out of toilet paper, water, cleaning supplies, etc. It's madness.
