2020-03-20 COVID-19 AM 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.

Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.

Wayne Gretzky

Cliche? Maybe. True. Absolutely. We are going to return to this in a minute.

US cases are up to 14,300 from about 9,000 yesterday AM and 11,800 yesterday PM. We won’t stop repeating this: known will continue to rise until we have figured out testing. When you see the increase in cases be thinking, “how is the public going to react to this number? Businesses? The state government? City/county governments?” The actual number of cases didn’t jump some massive percentage overnight, the known cases jumped.

Also, you can expect to soon see death counts rising among other headlines that seem really dire. At this point, because we prioritize tests for very sick people, we are testing more people that will die from COVID-19 than people that won’t. Put another way, for every death in the US you hear about there are probably 99 people that have COVID-19 and will recover.

As more relatively healthy people get tested for COVID-19 the mortality rate ought to drop.

Where is the puck going? The top news for us overnight is that Israel is going into a nationwide lockdown and both California and Pennsylvania have statewide lockdowns. Nevada has told, but not ordered, non-essential businesses to shutdown.

The PA orders explicitly halts work at companies such as law, accounting, contractors, etc. This is in line with what we’ve seen in France, Italy, Hong Kong, etc. CA is a “shelter at home,” don’t-go-out-unless-you-absolutely-have-to. These shutdowns allow you to go to bank, grocery store, gas station and pharmacy but very little else.

Nobody at JM Addington has a crystal ball about what other states will do next but the governors don’t either. If we had to guess — and we do — we’d expect that many other states to follow a few days to a couple of weeks behind these measures, including Tennessee. However, we don’t know what legal authority the state or counties have to issue such orders.

Our internal guidance at JM Addington every day this week has been, “assume this is the last day you can get out for two weeks and prioritize accordingly.” If we can get out more, awesome! If not, at least we were ready. And yes, because of that guidance, everyone here has TP (don’t hate us).

Something else we won’t stop repeating, follow data-driven news. Most of the predictions are entirely un-helpful. Everyone is in uncharted waters here. Internally, we are very focused on the data: cases, spread, how other countries/states are responding.

If I have time today I’ll write or record about the specific ways we are responding both personally and as a company.

If these updates are helpful to you do us a favor and let us know in the comments section wherever you saw them posted. Also, if you have a question feel free to put that up, we’ll answer it if we feel we have enough internal expertise.

A little something to watch, one report of out Italy suggests that the Coronavirus was there as early as November or December. If so, that would mean that the virus was circulating weeks before anyone knew it existed and possibly two months before anyone knew it was going to be a big deal.

A chart of essential infrastructure workers from the feds:

Hey look, there JM Addington is in green…