THIS WEEK IN ANXIETY: PANDEMIC UPDATES

As we head into the height of summer, within the United States and around the world, areas continue to struggle figuring out how to reopen their societies after the unprecedented shutdown of the global economy.
While some of the results are tragic, and we have been on record for months calling on citizens to stand up against flagrant attempts to rob them of their freedoms, it’s easy to see the missteps, contradictions, and clueless strategies as downright farce.
Chevron Corporate leaders have come up with a strategy to try to keep their workers safe when riding the high-rise elevators at their corporate offices: don’t talk.
As more employees return to work, the executive leaders of the company are concerned that limiting the number of people who can get into an elevator together will create crowded lobbies. So, they issued an advisory that workers should not talk until getting off at their designated floors, thereby reducing the chance of transmitting the virus in a relatively crowded elevator.
Additionally, fear is keeping many employees working at home rather than risk catching the virus by using public transportation.
Dell Technologies in Austin, TX, reports that only about half of its workforce will ever return to their offices, even after the viral crisis is over. “We are telling people they need to settle in. We are predicting within our company and, frankly, more broadly, that the future of work looks different and that more people will stay home permanently,” Jennifer “JJ” Davis, SVP of Global Communications, stated last week.
TREND FORECAST: As you know from the Trends Journal, when the COVID War was launched in February and Silicon Valley began to freak out, instructing their employees to work from home, we forecast the coming collapse of the commercial real estate market.
It will be most devastating to landlords and the numerous businesses… and all those who provide goods and services to them and rely on commuters working in cities.
A key indicator of what the future will bring regarding people working at home will arrive in America after Labor Day. We note this as the breakout date corporations will decide whether or not to bring employees back into the office to work.
TRENDPOST: As we have written in the Trends Journal and again noted, it was the San Francisco Geek Squad who was the first in America to tell its employees to work at home. Now, some five months later, in this city of 883,300 people, the grand total of 50 people have died from the virus or 0.0057 percent.
But, again, this fact is rarely reported in the mainstream media. Instead, the media is saturated with the amount of cases, not the number of deaths.