Many conversations about our fight against the Coronavirus imply that combating the virus is unnecessarily destroying the economy. Or, said another way, to preserve the economy, we need to relax our fight against the virus.

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How long are we going to be physically distant?

I don't know the future but since so many people ask me, I would like to give you my thoughts on how this is going to play out eventually. If you haven't had a chance to read about the Hammer and the Dance yet, I recommend you go read this first. I really like that terminology and visualization, and it is a model that we are hopefully starting to follow in this country.

We are not going to be physically distant forever. At one point the cost-benefit ratio of distancing will no longer be in balance. There are costs of remaining 100% distance forever (for instance, the economy will go from a recession into a depression, and there will eventually be wide scale social/mental collapse).

On the other hand, there is a cost to remaining 100% social (lots of people dying unnecessarily because our healthcare system will collapse). We are going to end up somewhere in the middle. I personally think the Hammer will be in terms of weeks, and The Dance will be in terms of months - if we can get our act together.

We’ve been writing a lot about physical distancing lately, as this has proven to be the most effective way to slow the spread of COVID-19. Without limiting social contact, we don’t have a chance at slowing the spread of the infection - which means an overloaded healthcare system and a lot of unnecessary deaths.

Last Updated On: March 26, 2020

With so much information available online, it's hard to know what's true and what isn't. We tried to find a list of good sources to share with you, and couldn't - so we put our heads together with the smartest people we know, and made our own. Share yours in the comments!

COUNTERS

Want an accurate count of the status of COVID-19 cases around the world? These trackers are easy to read and are updated frequently. There’s a slight variation in numbers between the sites, but this is likely due to small delays in reporting and updating the pages.

• Worldometer
• Bing
• nCoV2019
• New York Times
• Social Distancing Scoreboard

This one from Johns Hopkins University looks like it’s going to be awesome, though not all of the modules are built out yet as of this writing.

Today I wanted to share with you a message that I just got from my friend, a pediatrician.

"It’s time to ‘name and shame’ the people who are putting others at risk. Name and shame the businesses that are hosting public events. Name and shame those who attend them. Leaving the house right now is like driving drunk through a school zone of old people. You will kill someone, but in this case, you won’t even realize it.”

In this time of crisis, we have an ethical duty and responsibility to stay home and stay physically distant. Every day you choose to run an errand, go out to dinner, or meet up for a playdate with your stir-crazy kids, you are contributing to the exponential spread of this virus. Every day, every hour, every minute that it spreads, real people will die.

Check out this blog post about what exponential growth means and why you should care.

The thing about exponential growth is that it’s not exciting, until it is. 

The growth rate looks slow at first. 

It’s been 24 hours since my last post, and I’ve come to see that part of the problem is that people don’t understand what the word “exponential” means.

The word exponential has been floating around a lot lately as concern about COVID-19 grows and spreads around the world. It’s perhaps the most important word in understanding all of this, and since it’s been a while since most of us took a math class, I thought this would be a good time to review the concept and how it relates to the current pandemic.

So first. What does exponential growth mean? It means that the growth is increasing at a faster and faster rate. When it comes to the spread of a virus, an exponential growth rate means that as we go from one day to the next, the number of cases multiplies by some constant number that’s greater than one. I’ll also explain how physical distance plays into the equation and why that will save the life of your grandmother (and mine).

I awoke this morning (3/15/20) and thought every rational and caring person that I know understood the importance of social distancing. I spent yesterday talking to dozens of people and getting dozens of small social events canceled. I thought my job was done. This morning I spoke to my close friend - a smart and compassionate person - and found that he was heading with his family to a bike shop and the Container Store... I realize my job had just begun. 

With more new cases of COVID-19 diagnosed every day and the recognition that we’re only at the beginning of this pandemic, the health and safety of employees is a top priority of companies around the globe. Our hearts go out to the many people around the world who will be affected by this development. In an effort to do our own small part, on Thursday, March 12 our company transitioned into a virtual company with all staff working from home indefinitely. Our system is hosted on Google servers, which are state-of-the-art, and we don’t anticipate there being any issues in continuing to provide our platform.

Eliminating waste is at the heart of the Lean Business methodology.  The goal of Lean is to spend more of your time creating value for customers by reducing or eliminating everything else - the waste. Several common types of waste have been identified and together represent the “7 Wastes of Lean” (sometimes expressed as "8 types of waste, including the additional "waste of human potential" or "waste of talent").

Some types of waste are fairly self-explanatory, but others can be a bit difficult to grasp. Here are some practical examples of each.

Has your organization started a quality improvement program with great fanfare and a ton of enthusiasm only to see it peter out over time? If so, you are not alone. Starting down the path to continuous improvement is easy. Sustaining momentum is not.

This post examines some of the most common reasons that CI programs go off the rails and how you can avoid or recover from them.