We are now entering the crisis phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. It did not have to be that way, but the Trump team's preparedness delays appear to have damaged the U.S. response to the outbreak so severely, in the still-ongoing inability to test patients even in known outbreak centers, that we still have no idea what the true number of exposed and infected Americans truly is. This renders "containment" impossible. At the moment it seems likely that the path of the pandemic in America will be following that of Italy, where hospitals are overwhelmed, rather than the effective, test-heavy slow-and-contain strategy of South Korea.
That means we can now expect major institutional shutdowns across America. This includes the federal government; The Washington Post reports the Trump administration is now (just now?) "racing to develop contingency plans" allowing hundreds of thousands of federal workers to work remotely rather than in federal buildings. The plan does not seem to be robust.
As is usual for every damn thing about this incompetent Republican maladministration, the Post notes that the Trump team actually reversed federal work-from-home practices when they took office, with multiple agencies scaling back existing programs because Team Trump did not believe workers could be trusted to work hard enough from home. Now, yet again, they are scrambling to redo something they pompously disassembled.
Also as usual for Team Trump, this is almost certain to become a rapid clusterf--k. Swiftly moving hundreds of thousands of workers to telecommuting status is likely to require substantial technological fiddling. Are there enough computers? What network security measures need to be altered, in what ways, to allow remote data access? How many workers need to take calls during their workdays, and how will each office keep track of new, private numbers?
But it's also going to be necessary. We are about to enter a new phase in attempts to slow coronavirus spread to "flatten the curve" enough for hospitals to not be absolutely overwhelmed with critical patients. It is likely that large public gatherings nationwide will be cancelled. Ordering businesses to provide paid sick leave, rather than obliging symptom-having workers to come in instead of losing pay, is absolutely essential, but any company that can have a sizable number of workers do their work from home needs to have those plans finalized immediately.
Again, the goal here is to slow the virus down, not stop it. We need to slow the number of patients entering hospitals ten days from now, and twenty. Nobody should be complaining if their interactions with federal agencies seem even more sluggish in the coming weeks; this is what a pandemic does. Plan for it, but don't panic over it.