The Legionella Zombie Attack at the End of the First Sars-CoV-2 Movie

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/05/21/nation/after-coronavirus-office-workers-might-face-unexpected-health-threats/

Legionnaire’s disease (and I probably still spelled that wrong) is caused by a _bacteria_, that for the purposes of this blog post, I will call legionella, but which is actually called Legionella pneumophila. With that name, you will be unsurprised to know that it causes pneumonia, especially in people with compromised immune systems. It tends to grow in stagnant water in building plumbing. We have closed a lot of buildings, and are now opening them back up. Are we checking the water for legionella?

From a horror movie perspective, of course we saw this coming! This is the zombie or vampire or WTF hand reaching up through the loose soil on top of a freshly closed grave. We _think_ we are finally through the worst of it but duh duh duh!

Even better, apparently closing down buildings en masse for a couple months and then opening them back up en masse is a pretty Not Normal thing to do (who knew!?!), so we actually have no real idea what might be going on in Them Thar Pipes.

Toilet flumes!

Aerosolized germs from turning on the taps to wash your hands frequently to slow the spread of the other disease this horror show is about!

Yeah, we are not going back to those schools any time soon.

ETA: While we are all busy staring at those CDC guidelines for reopening schools or running summer camps or WTF, and talking about, really? Are they serious? And noting all the unusual-for-the-CDC softeners (where feasible, if possible, but, you know, if you can’t shrug guess y’all are just gonna be dealing with a lot more transmission!). While we are all busy doing this, this is a thing that did not even cross my mind. I was thinking, wow, HVAC systems in schools. Are they recirculating air through the whole school? Because that would be bad, and no amount of handwashing and masks is going to fix _that_. But I was NOT thinking, ooooh, legionella in the pipes.

What other hands are going to reach up through the loose soil on top of the grave we put that vampire in.

I ran across the Globe article just doing my normal check the news routine. But I have also been pursuing the question of why did Fairfax County cancel all the summer camps run by county’s rec department. A partial answer is that a bunch of Maryland and Arlington County in Virginia had already canceled. But that just pushes things out a layer.

https://wtop.com/howard-county/2019/10/9-howard-co-schools-test-positive-for-legionella-bacteria/

Last fall, Howard County in Maryland detect legionella in many of their schools (where many of their summer camps are held). CDC guidance on reopening buildings specifically addresses the increased risk of legionella colonies developing in places where there is already legionella biofilm.

So in much the same way that my town’s schools will often be closed for snow, when there is remarkably little snow impact in town, because the snow hit neighboring communities very hard and many of our teachers live in those communities, I think it is reasonable to expect slightly confusing announcements of ongoing closures that ultimately come down to what is going on nearby. I have no idea if Fairfax County schools have a specific to them legionella concern, but they are watching a bunch of other places shut their county summer camps, and probably thinking, wow, if nothing else, all of those kids are going to be trying to get into our camps. Naw, fuck that, we are closing, too. Further, the people who teach summer camps in Fairfax County may well live in Maryland; what do I know?

Summer Camp Roundup!

Summer camp is important.

(If you disagree, that is OK! I am not here to convince you. Please feel free to leave now. Bye!)

(1) Summer camp is practice to figure out what will work and what will not work in the fall. If you cannot make something work outdoors, in the sunshine, with a smaller number of kids, Woe Is You come fall.

(2) Summer camp is an important component of affordable child care. If it is not available, some important fraction of your workforce will have to provide that child care directly to their own kids and be not or at least less available to do other work in the economy. Also, a lot of .those children will wind up having far less effective, non-abusive supervision.

(3) Summer camp is an important component of maintaining and developing school readiness. Kids that are already regressing are not magically going to stop over the summer. The longer the period of non-structured time a kid experiences, the more difficult the transition back to structured time.

And yet, we are canceling summer camp! It is important, and here is a very partial list of canceled summer camp:

https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2020/05/13/summer-camps-are-closed-or-on-hold-leaving-families-scrambling

Mentions in here include a camp for the deaf, a camp for those with Type 1 diabetes, It also describes people planning to take FMLA to spend the summer with their kids who, without the structure of school (even school at time), are not going to be okay.

https://wtop.com/coronavirus/2020/05/arlington-county-summer-camps-canceled-due-to-covid-19-concerns/

3 counties in Maryland and 1 in Virginia are mentioned. I found it after I learned that Fairfax County was making the same choice.

https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/fairfax-county-cancels-summer-camps-coronavirus/65-0d569789-1757-4614-8e59-6a3c4163c745

Connecticut LOOKED like it was going ahead with camps. But that may be a bit fluid!

https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/governors-latest-executive-order-affects-camps-summer-school/2273509/

No resident camps. If you were not already running a camp, you do not get to start one now. And probably more to come.

Vermont is looking likely to go ahead (in part because I think camp is a major part of Vermont’s economy).

In Maine, York tried really hard and decided it was not gonna work:

https://www.seacoastonline.com/news/20200512/york-parks-and-recreation-cancels-summer-camps

In Which My Walking Partner and I Shop Online

I, of course, have been doing mail order since before web mail order was a Thing. (Obligatory brag about having first shopped at Amazon on Dec 22 1995.) Shame-y fashion remarks in person (when I commented to an office-mate who really hated me that I ordered clothes online, she said, it shows) and on television (when Cordelia snarks at Willow about the softer side of sears) do not phase me one tiny bit, and yet, for the last several years I have made a point of buying clothes in person when possible. I tell people I shop at the Middle Aged Mom Store, by which I mean Kohl’s, but if I have ever placed an online order with Kohl’s before today, it has left no record of same in my password manager.

Anyway. I broke down today, and just ordered a bunch of clothes on Kohl’s. My t-shirts needed a refresh.

I was partly inspired by my walking partner. She has a depth of commitment to in person, paper book shopping that I find heroic. She got most of the way through her TBR pile, before finally, within the last week and a half, breaking down and figuring out how to order online. It took her a few tries to get through the billing information entry process, but she did it, as near as I can tell, all by herself and she has been gleefully making up for lost weekend book shopping trips nearly every day since she got it working.

My friend J. is convinced that teleworking will be taken away Once Again, and Helaine Olen agrees with him:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/20/telecommuting-is-not-future/

“the employer will likely remember that money spent on real estate is often money well spent.
Online communications can lead to misunderstandings and bad feelings — anyone who has spent much time on social media knows that humor and tone are easy things to misinterpret. There are serendipitous benefits to in-person collaboration that no number of Zoom meetings or Slack channels can replicate. A number of companies — Yahoo and Bank of America come to mind — rescinded telecommuting privileges in the recent past, claiming the practice was detrimental to corporate teamwork.
There is also the psychological pull of keeping workers in the same places as the boss. Employers frequently see themselves as better able to monitor and control their employees when they are actually on the premises.”

I think that hits the high points.

I sort of was susceptible to this theory (it saddened me, but seemed almost depressingly plausible) until my Priestess’ local office was closed permanently. When I learned that the cost per employee of that office per month was north of a grand, I about fell out of my chair.

For a grand per employee per month, we can identify the people who take offense too readily and run them through some Zoom HR training to get the fuck over themselves, and we will have recorded evidence of the people who are incredibly offensive to use as a basis for firing their asses for cause. Monitoring features available with telework will replace the bosses who think of themselves as better able to do their job in person (and honestly, most of them were not justifying their cost anyway).

Serendipitous benefits to in-person collaboration are an interesting angle, tho. Like the NYT opinion piece about how we will miss the social aspects of the office when we do not have it any more, it has a strong whiff of tail wagging the dog. Can you put a price tag on serendipitous benefits? How does it compare to the known costs?

Adoption curves are a favorite thing for me to contemplate. Early adopters are ... not the kind of people you can build a stable business on. The next rank back is a great start, but if you are going to become an Iconic Brand in the 21st Century, you are going to need more than that elite few with the money to afford the more promising wild hares their crazy early adopter friends pursued and abandoned in favor of the Next New Thing. You need someone or something to force the vast middle to take the leap: FOMO, embarrassment of being the last person in their group to switch AGAIN, spousal / parental threats, the carrot of connection to grandkiddies.

I think we will be adding the pandemic to the list of things that force people over that hump. I watched my walking partner place order after order after order for books online. She had NEVER done that before May 2020. [ETA: And she is not shopping on the Zon, I might add.]