Episode 26 of the Class Re-Action Podcast, discussing coronavirus impacts on wage and hour cases, is now available

Episode 26 of the Class Re-Action podcast is now available for your listening pleasure. We did something a little different this time - no case discussions. This one is all about our pal coronavirus (and a little bit about my computer blowing up and podcasting setups).

The great pandemic?

Back in November, I came down with some respiratory bug that wiped me out pretty good for quite a while. It was a struggle for two months to find the energy to get my work done. Coupled with running my first archery tournament, I didn’t have any gas left in the tank to blog about big decisions. I’m hoping to have the time now to fix that, since I’m going to be working out of a home office for at least the next several weeks.

But my illness from November has given me something to think about. Nobody really cared that I was sick, aside from co-workers telling me to wash my hands and stay in my office, which I did. The world didn’t come to a halt because I caught one of last Winter’s circulating illnesses. So why is the Wuhan coronavirus so different? I have two theories, but I’ll spare you from them, since I’m not a virologist and this isn’t a biomedical blog. And because I have no way of ascertaining which, if either, theory is more likely true based on what information I can gather. But I do want to share a long article providing data analysis known to date. It updates frequently with new data. The end conclusion of the data analysis is that we’ve gone absolutely nuts.

If you’d like a dose of data-driven sanity, enjoy: Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19

UPDATE: So I find this troubling. The article that I linked was later pulled off of Medium and is either under “investigation” for supposedly violating Medium rules or yanked entirely. I read that entire article (it is very long) and found it to be seemingly reasonable and apparently well-supported by underlying data sets (but it does, for example, rely heavily on WHO data, and the accuracy of that data with respect to China has been questioned by many; and some comments on the original post argued that there were comparisons of non-equivalent data sets that led to inaccurate conclusions in the article). It sort of looks like people have a vested interest in perpetuation of hysteria rather than taking a non-emotional look at what all the world-wide data really shows or simply putting up a rebuttal data analysis that identifies any errors in the article. This whole business is starting to stink like rotten fish, where noise about who responded better when is drowning out an analysis of whether shutting down the economy for weeks is a rational strategy based on cost. Here is a link to a new host for the article: Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19 (As an aside, ZeroHedge is just hosting the article for the writer after it was pulled from Medium. I’m taking no position on ZeroHedge generally, given the very “loose” filter at ZeroHedge on what that site chooses to report or claim of its own volition. I view this as a simple repost rather than constituting original work.)