To my friend,
First and foremost let me give you a link to a short, humorous, and scientifically-validated video on hand-washing. Share it with everyone you know, you’d be surprised at how many people don’t understand what it takes to kill a virus on your hands. 🙁
This turned into quite a lot of links and info.
Please make sure to care for yourself so that you are healthy enough to help your loved ones, and thank goodness we have such an awesome community to help everyone get through this crisis!
So, here are some reliable COVID-19 tracking maps. These are also tracking recoveries and fatalities:
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 and here: http://nssac.bii.virginia.edu/covid-19/dashboard/
PLEASE NOTE: There is at least one confirmed fake tracking map spreading malware, I’m sure there are more but have people be cautious about where they click. Here’s a link to the story about it: https://thehackernews.com/2020/03/coronavirus-maps-covid-19.html
There are also several phishing campaigns live right now that are using the Coronavirus/COVID-19 to entice people to click.
SANS actually published a whole “work-from-home deployment kit” to help organizations teach their end-users how to be safe while working from home, that’s here: https://www.sans.org/security-awareness-training/sans-security-awareness-work-home-deployment-kit
Here’s a live list of companies and organizations who are going “Remote” as well as events that have been cancelled due to COVID-19: https://stayinghome.club/
Here’s a map of down and outages for Internet Service Providers. Expect that there *will* be some outages and backbone slowdowns due to the unprecedented amount of traffic: https://livemap.pingdom.com/
Expect to have some cell phone coverage outages as well – this is again just to be expected because of the large amount of extra traffic.
Both the company I work for and the University I teach at are using Teams to coordinate internally (lucky me). I’m not sure what’s in use for you guys and the rest of your people but here’s a link to keyboard shortcuts for Teams that can make life easier: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/keyboard-shortcuts-for-microsoft-teams-2e8e2a70-e8d8-4a19-949b-4c36dd5292d2
If you’re using Slack and/or Zoom as tools, Stanford published several helpful videos on how to transition from in-person to online meetings and collaboration effectively, that’s here: https://uit.stanford.edu/guide/telecommuting
Here’s a blog post from a local resource about transitioning to remote work: https://www.accidentalciso.net/post/ac-s-guide-to-remote-work
Long time work from home company Ars Technica posted this advice:
https://arstechnica.com/staff/2020/03/suddenly-working-at-home-weve-done-it-for-22-years-and-have-advice/
If you’ve got people who are switching to having to use a VPN for the first time here’s an article that explains what a VPN is, what it can do, what it can’t do, goes into pretty fair detail: coworker.com/mag/vpns-for-remote-workers-a-beginners-guide-for-2019
If you have any folks who are extroverts working from home may be an extreme challenge for them. Here’s a blog post from another extrovert about some of the challenges they’ve experienced: https://www.imore.com/how-be-social-when-working-home
Advice for leaders and just for good team players in general – Check in with people, and talk to them about life in general, not just about work. Everyone is tense and a little scared right now and need to be able to think about something else. Ask them about their kids/pets/spouse/whatever, or tell them your latest funny pet story of your own. Give them a chance to talk, and let them know that although “social distancing” is a thing they shouldn’t feel alone. We’re all alone together out here right now. 🙂
More serious note: Most sources (local stores and online) are running low on essentials like toilet paper, hand sanitizer, bleach, rice, beans, bread. Advise people to take stock of what they have around the house and make a *safe* effort to obtain any critical supplies that they may not have. First aid equipment in case of incidents around the house is a good thing to have as well as a backstock of non-perishables. Restaurants here in Denver will continue to deliver as of now, it sounds like. Amazon has some items available online and those deliveries are continuing as well.