December 1, 2020
Another This and That Tuesday Letter
I am going to start off with a somewhat odd compliment to all of us. I zeroed out all of my unopened email around 9:30 last Wednesday evening. I pretty much left my email alone over the Thanksgiving holiday, only opening those one or two that seemed critically important. This morning I zeroed out the other 250 new emails that came in over the holiday. The vast majority were advertisements. Only about a half dozen of those were work emails.
This leads me to conclude that you made the holiday weekend an actual holiday weekend. That is a good thing. We all need time to rest, recuperate from work, and spend time with our family and friends. Taking respites from work allow our bodies and minds to recover from work. They are especially needed during a stressful year. When taken appropriately, days off actually make us more productive. On behalf of your families, friends and colleagues, I give you all a well-deserved “Well done!”
Writing about email clutter also leads me to a reminder. If you are working with a formal or informal team, the preferred method for internal communications with your team is via our Microsoft Teams system. It offers you normal team-written communication, file storage, chat, and video meeting capabilities right in one package. You can even invite non-K-State Research and Extension team members to be on your team. If you use Microsoft Teams correctly, you do not have to waste time looking for that one file that was attached to that one email sent sometime in the recent or not-so-recent past. If you use Teams, it will be saved on your team's file. To all of you out there who are enjoying the advantages of Microsoft Teams and reducing our email clutter in the process, thanks. If you or your team are not using Microsoft teams, please give it a try. You will be glad you did.
This Friday we will have our December Extension Update via Zoom at 3 p.m. Please look for that calendar invitation. The last couple of updates have run a little long, but we had a lot to cover and several questions to answer. We will try to get this and future updates to conclude by as close to 4 p.m. as possible. In addition to the usual administrative update, we will have the Food Science Institute in the departmental spotlight. The Stress and Resiliency Transdisciplinary Team will be featured in the professional development spotlight, and our now digital Pesticide Applicator Training program will be featured in our programming spotlight.
On a more somber and ongoing note and reminder – on Friday, November 27, 2020 – the Kansas Department of Health and the Environment announced that the number of COVID-19 positives in Kansas had broken the 150,000 barrier at 153,021 cases. That number was up 18,488 cases from the previous Friday, November 20.
A lot of general comments have been made comparing COVID-19 to our typical seasonal flu. “The death rate isn’t that much different than the flu” is a common refrain. One of our colleagues re-shared a November 22 post from Facebook comparing some critical metrics of the typical seasonal flu with those of COVID-19. This post was originally made by Benton County Public Health in Minnesota. The national data came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
A person with the seasonal flu is likely to infect another 1.3 people. For COVID-19, this metric is running 1.5 to 1.9 times higher at between 2 and 2.5 people. The case fatality rate of the seasonal flu is 0.1% or less. The incubation time is 1-4 days for the seasonal flu, and the incubation time for COVID-19 is 1 to 14 days. The case fatality rate of COVID-19 is running 10 to 34 times higher at between 1 and 3.4%. What is most striking to me is the difference in the hospitalization rate. The seasonal flu has a hospitalization rate of 2%. COVID-19 has a hospitalization rate of 19%.
This isn’t like the flu. So, once again, please do your due diligence and take care of yourself, your colleagues, collaborators, and the public we serve. Only meet face-to-face when it is IMPERATIVE from a strategic or educational perspective to do so. Reasons such as “We don’t like virtual” or “We miss face-to-face programming and meetings,” while important reasons, are not imperative reasons to meet face to face.
And, as always, if you do have an imperative reason to meet face-to-face with your colleagues, remember to wear your masks, maintain social distancing at all times, wash and sanitize your hands frequently, and sanitize your work stations, reception areas, and meeting areas frequently.