MSPeconomist

My (USA) employer is encouraging any employee who thinks that he/she might have been exposed to the corona virus during domestic or international business travel to file a worker's compensation claim.

Anyone else?

We now have a ban on all employer-paid domestic or foreign business travel by any employee, with (essential) exceptions requiring very high level approval in advance. This starts in a couple days and lasts at least six weeks, although I haven't seen anything regarding people who are currently traveling. The prohibition apparently includes travel by private car, etc., and isn't even limited to travel away from home overnight. Nonemployee business travel that will be reimbursed apparently is *not* included in the ban, although there is language about covering nonrefundable expenses associated with voluntary cancellation of travel.

DTWflyer

All of my clients have currently banned the following for all employees, suppliers, and contractors

- No air travel anywhere, no overnight hotel stays anywhere
- No in-person meetings of more than 10 people
- No access to any other building or facility than your assigned location without EVP/SVP approval
- No external visitors
- Avoid any in-person meetings if at all possible and work from home if at all possible
- All non-business critical projects put on hold

Mind you these are manufacturing companies with global supply chains.
Not sure how long they can sustain themselves operating like this, but this is going to kill the economy if this lasts beyond the end of the month.

I am chilling at home, with not a lot of work to do for the near-future. Hope my employer keeps sending me direct deposit every 2 weeks.
I need to go to Lowes and Home Depot to stock-up and knock off a lot of projects around the house during this downtime

M Singh

All travel at our firm cancelled til June end: no flights, no hotels, no in person meetings outside of organization.

Silver Fox

We are expecting to be told to WAH anyday now with no travel (circa 400k employees). Our well documented BC plans will no doubt prove useful. The last one I looked at still had "pagers" in it. My department doesn't have one. My how we laughed.....Pandemic, yup, that's what it is.

Mama

Check the math. The death rate is what scares people.

MSPeconomist

My employer's travel policy has changed at least three times in the last week. It's very confusing about exactly what is prohibited, with examples that seem to contradict the policy and with key words, such as business and travel, not being defined.

SamirD

My wife just got another travel notice from her company and told me that her friend who manages a lab at Stanford just got wfh orders today. Strangely enough, my wife's trip to Guatemala is still on for next month.

IMOA

China shut down the whole country quarantining its population in place for 6 weeks, italy has placed the entire country in quarantine, closed down all businesses except supermarkets and pharmacies and is still experiencing exponentional growth in cases (which is why current numbers for italy are 50% higher than what you've written and your post is only a day old). Can you explain your logical reasoning for why the cases in the USA would just stop at those levels without intervention?

LonghornDXB

Maybe for the same reason there has been so few deaths in Germany? Or cases in Korea have stopped multiplying? Or Singapore has not collapsed without a Wuhan style lockdown?

North Italy and Wuhan and Iran are 3 places where things have gone awful very quickly. Other places may or may not see similar situations

IMOA

Both Singapore and Korea put in place a very effective campaign on monitoring and social distancing very early and these continue to now. The sorts of things that they did are exactly the sorts of things that I’d suggest are the best approach and exactly the sorts of things the ‘it’s only the flu’ crowd are calling overkill.

Germany has only been running for a week or so so I’d be waiting to see what the real results are. I really hope the first weeks results are indicative of the last.

invisible

Back to the subject, this came today in our Singapore office:

Regarding the very last part - if you are on work visa (is called employment pass), student/academic visa or long term visit visa - if you decide to go to any of the affected countries, you can't easily come back.

largeeyes

Cases here went up 50% today----1800 to 2700. Deaths are still low, but we are a week or more behind Italy in the growth of this. I do think some of the mistakes they made have scared the daylights out of leaders here and the reaction has been different.

acrophobia

Yesterday afternoon, banned all travel - international and domestic - until further notice, and also implemented a firm-wide work from home policy.

enviroian

Got the same notice from my firm today. I'm grounded until further notice. Ugh.

yosithezet

For EP or SPASS or Work Permit or all three?