2020-03-18 COVID-19 PM Update

For the last few days we’ve been preparing internal reports twice a day for staff. We’ve decided to release these publicly to help you plan.

Nationally cases are up to nearly 9,000 cases from about 6,500 this AM. This is absolutely expected and you should expect to continue to see new cases rise and rise at a faster rate. This is a combination of the USA rolling out tests and testing facilities which take special time and training to set up.

For those of you in East Tennessee, no new cases today. Statewide we’re at 98 up from about 78 yesterday. Those are focused around Nashville right now.

I’m personally surprised that we haven’t seen any community transmission around Knoxville. We are close enough to Nashville that I 100% expect to see some soon and I assume that there are already cases in the community that we haven’t found yet.

Tim Burchett is holding a virtual town hall on Friday at 3:35 PM. You can join by calling (855) 710-6228 or visiting https://burchett.house.gov/live. If you are a small business owner that lives or does business in his district, you should hop on the call.

Bill Gates expects this crisis to last 6 to 10 weeks for Western countries that do a good job shutting down. He is as data-driven as they get and has spent a lot of time over the last few years studying pandemics. We are adopting his estimate for our own internal planning.

The SBA is starting to roll out disaster loans. As of this afternoon I couldn’t find it for Knox or Loudon county but business owners in Texas and New York are able to apply for them. Apply as soon as it comes online.

If you are in the market, make sure that you have a fantastic adviser. I know some if you need a referral. Don’t expect that the market moves mean anything. If I’ve figured anything out watching the markets and futures, they have no idea how to price this in.

Finally, if you haven’t updated your HR policies for COVID-19, last week was the right time to do so. Find a company like Results HR that can help you craft the policy for right now. It doesn’t have to be complicated.

That’s all the news that’s fit to type and then some. Go forth and do good work.