Coronavirus: Working From Home

Everyone from the CDC to the WHO (Won’t get fooled again), from the airlines to OSHA, from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal, from the AMA to the ADA, from the American Heart Association to the Red Cross, from the Mayo Clinic to your Uncle Louie has published guidelines for safely contending with and protecting ourselves from exposure to the coronavirus in the workplace. But what about those of us who work from home?

2019 data

According to Global Workplace Analytics, five million employees — or 3.6 percent of the workforce — worked at home half-time or more prior to the coronavirus outbreak. Since the outbreak, that number has more than quintupled, particularly among healthcare providers, sanitation workers, sex therapists, Ujjayi breathing instructors, and professional Patty Cake players.

Regardless of the dramatically increasing numbers, however, we’ve yet to see guidelines for those who choose to perform their job-related duties from home. Accordingly, as a public service, we offer this list of life-saving tips.

Start Here

While this list doesn’t purport to be exhaustive, adherence to all or most of the items herein will prevent most coronavirus infections among the work-from-home crowd:

• Don’t leave the house.
• Wear a military-grade gas mask.
• Wear gloves that extend to at least the shoulder.
• Replace all of your household furniture daily.
• Seal all of your doors and windows with Italian storm windows and steam clean them every morning and evening. (In addition to keeping them clean, the steam will ensure they remain stretched with appropriate tightness over the sealed surfaces.)
• Shower every 10 minutes, scrubbing yourself vigorously with 40- to 60-grit sandpaper and Hibiclens or some other anti-microbial soap. If you don’t have suitably heavy sandpaper, a wire brush will do nicely.
• Between showers, wash your hands for at least 20 seconds using scalding-hot water and a solution of rubbing alcohol and kerosene. Put on a new pair of gloves after every hand-washing. Do NOT play with matches.
• Do not share glasses, cups, dishes, or eating utensils with yourself. Make sure all such items are sterilized in an autoclave at least twice a day.

Try this at home.

• If you’re in a union, make sure to restrict your use of cups to paper for each of your hourly 45-minute coffee breaks. After every break, burn the cup you’ve just used on each break with a welding torch. If you don’t have a torch handy, make sure the fire in which you incinerate your used cups reaches a temperature of at least 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,204.44 degrees Celsius).
• Every time you even think about eating something, brush your teeth with an abrasive paste or a valve-grinding compound and gargle with ammonia.
• If you have dentures, mix a two-percent sulfuric acid solution, drop your choppers in there, and leave them there.
• If you start to manifest symptoms of nasal congestion, some people suggest citrus will help. While grapefruits and oranges have been shown to provide relief in some cases, most people — particularly those who work from home and may not have another person present to perform a Proboscidal Heimlich Maneuver in the event of catastrophe — should avoid stuffing anything larger than moderate-size lemons up their snoots.
• If you work on a laptop computer, immerse it in liquid nitrogen every time you take a shower.
• If you work on a desktop computer, immerse your keyboard in liquid nitrogen every time you take a shower and sandblast your monitor. The silica crystals in the sand, sprayed at your monitor at a minimum of 100 psi, will disintegrate the protein capsid of the virus, allowing its nucleic acid genome to be effectively obliterated.
• Be sure to wear clean underwear in case you get in an accident.
• And, of course, after diligently adhering to the previous 15 items in this list, don’t panic.

Forewarned is Forearmed

The old adage, “It’s better to be safe than sorry,” was coined for a reason. Since no one remembers what the hell that reason is anymore, we need periodic panics like the coronavirus to whip us into good, old-fashioned over-reactive frenzies now and then. But it needn’t come to that.

In all seriousness, here are the only things you really need to do, in this order, regardless of where you work:

Keep calm and get a grip o’ your knickers.

1. Avoid large crowds.
2. Stay out of others’ bubbles.
3. Practice the kind of hygiene you should probably have been practicing anyway.
4. Take special care of older family members and friends, especially those whose immune systems are compromised already.

Granted, the coronavirus is likely to get worse before it gets better. But all of us can help all of the rest of us by keeping our heads up, cool, and collected.

We’re all in this together.