I posted this comment on Reddit (anyone who can’t link this domain to my Reddit user needs to rethink how names work) in response to a little bit of a misleading article.

The original comment is here. Text follows, copy -pasted with errors and all. It aligns with some of the little blurbs I’ve written already.

My company has two kinds of employees. Those in HQ, and those in stores or warehouses. The HQ people have been told to work from home as much as possible through April. The others have been asked to be diligent, but continue to perform as part of the important infrastructure for moving foods and goods.

There’s a little big of guilt, from time to time, as an HQ employee, because I can literally work anywhere I’ve got a reliable Internet connection. I can group chat, with text or voice or video, with my entire team, leadership, and peers. I don’t have any actual physical connection to the office or the infrastructure we create and maintain.

Conversely, the software we create, and the data it moves, asks real people to do real tasks, arguably in real danger. The “anyone” that can walk into the stores can be a mindful, careful, and social-distancing person, who just needs supplies. Covnersely, it can be a denier or other disinterested party, knowingly. or unknowingly infected, that comes in and shares are and space and touching things. The people in the stores could then be exposed, share that with the other supply chain workers, like the truck drivers and vendor delivery persons who resupply the stores, and then take that back to the warehouses. Then all of the families of all of those people are at risk.

There are a dozen people on my team, all pretty good at social-distancing. We understand and respect the reasons and rules. Yes, each of us has made a trek out in this first week, since we’re distancing and not quarantining, but we’re all being careful, washing, spacing, and not touching what we don’t need to touch.

My daughter is also a front-liner. She’s a nurse, providing continuing care for the most at-risk groups, adults in an elder-care facility. While it should be the case that the people in their facility are most protected, they still get visitors, from family and vendors, in much the same way. The whole facility is at risk for infection from any one of those people, denier or careful, because of all of the other interactions already mentioned. The likelihood of that facility being decimated because of one less-than-careful interaction is very high. She, in turn, risks bringing that home to her family, and by extension the day care my grandchildren attend, and then the other families of the other children at the same facility.

I’m doing a small part. Driven by the fact that our younger children (there’s about a 20-year gap between the older and younger kids) are home from school, also because of social distancing. While we’ve made our couple runs for the. few forgotten things, we’re otherwise confining ourselves to our home, and walking with the kids and dogs down the street, avoiding people while we do it. We’re normally very social with our neighbors, but have cut that off, and limited interaction to shouting over the fence, or waving through our aligned windows.

We’re trusting and hopeful that this small part, done by hopefully millions of households, will help keep our family healthy, reducing the risk of our catching anything, and our risk of spreading anything. This should help “flatten the curve,” allowing the heath care system to provide service to those unfortunate enough to become infected,.

We hope we can continue to do this until the virus dies down, cures or vaccines can be developed, or other mechanisms to mitigate the risks and severity occur. These are different times than most of us have had. Some, in small outbreaks, have done this before, but as a whole, I think most people are like me and carry on after getting a flu shot, no matter how bad the numbers get.