Tag: covid19

Keeping Track of Work Tasks

At work, we started using Zendesk. It has been very effective. Also, due to COVID-19, we were briefly down to 2 people able to work.. recently, one of us got back to being better. Rather than a “fixed days working from home each week” (I used to get Wednesday WFH) we’re switching to a “3 person rotation of who is in the office”, since we need to have an onsite presence for our primary job function, which is to keep all the folks in the warehouse productive.

This is leading to “onsite” days, where pretty much deal with the flow of tickets .. and then deal with other little problem things that need to be fixed. These days entirely run by email and Zendesk. The person onsite triages the incoming stuff so that the offsite folks can focus on their project work. Going back through Pending tickets and updating statuses as we wait for other folks to respond and do their parts.

And then there’s two days of “offsite”. Blessed ability to focus in deep on tasks, because the interruption buzz is being handled by the onsite person. Spent about 2 hours working on a 8-part CTE (common table expression) with a colleague today. Got the web page that reports it partially done, another 4-6 hours tomorrow and it will be done.

Currently, we have an Open Projects spreadsheet (we were using Microsoft Teams Tasks, and prior to that ClickUp) which lists these projects. I’m thinking we’re going to transfer them into Zendesk but with a tag of “project” — and alter the other views to exclude them. That itself is a project.

Covid-19 – why are we so vigilant when seems like nobody has it?

So, there’s this other thing going on – the protests. And restaurants are open. And it feels like there is social pressure .. don’t wear a mask, you look stupid. Maybe just me. Feels like, “If this were a real problem, more people would have it.”

Human feelings are nice, but.. they don’t scale well.

What’s the right percentage of people who should be sick in order for it to “feel” right? Lets say.. 10%.

At 4.4 Million people in KY.. wait, no, that’s assuming even spread. Lets just go with, “In the metropolitan area that I live in, 10%”.

At 600,000 people, that means 60,000 people would be exhibiting symptoms.

According to the most recent numbers (link), 6700 active cases, 500 hospitalizations, 70 in the ICU. So about 7% hospitalized, and 1% ICU. So if 60000 folks where “active”, then 5000 hospitalizations, and 700 in the ICU. We have (link) in the magnitude of 2500 hospital beds across the state of KY and 1500-ish ICU rooms.. but that’s for 4.6 MILLION people. I can’t find the exact numbers for Louisville, but basically:

If “enough” people around us seem sick, then the hospital system would be overwhelmed and we’d be seeing the 10%+ death rates that were seen in other places that got overwhelmed.

So, if we win, it looks like: Nobody around us, nobody we know, gets the virus. And still a ton of people die.

I guess i’ll continue to wear my mask and try not to be a vector, even if 99.9% of the time, i’m not near anybody with the virus, and I’m probably not carrying it either.