When It Started

The e-mails in our work inbox get automatically deleted after 12 months, so I was going through some of them from February and March last year - just in case there were any I needed to keep.  And it was fascinating going through the company announcements about COVID-19 - and see how quickly they developed from "monitoring the situation closely" to a full on serious outbreak.  From the early stages of restricting non-essential business travel and asking employees who had just traveled to impacted areas to self-quarantine, through to shutting down the Seattle office and then our main headquarters in California.  I think we only shut down a few weeks earlier than anyone else in the US because the first detected cases in the US were in the Seattle area.  And all of this over such a short period of time - the first e-mail on the topic was in late February, then a working from home protocol was issued just to the Seattle site in early March (initally just for the next several days - he says almost a year later!!!).  I found an update from early March stating that "we do not believe that there is a risk working at the site" but with an elevated cleaning protocol.  Followed a few days later by one encouraging employees with higher health risks to consider working from home.  I must have missed this, but our first employee diagnosed with the virus was based in Sweden.  Then by mid-March a local announcement was shared that Seattle schools would be closed for 2 weeks (!), before a global update encouraging all employees to work from home (again, only planned for the next few weeks!), and then finally an update about a "shelter in place" order.  Hello shutdown.  Really all of this happened over about a 3 week span - quite stunning how quickly the entire world turned upside down.