Second week under COVID-19 lock-down in Austria (28. March)

General Situation

The second week of lock-down has passed. The number of infections are growing, but the rate of new infections is decreasing. However, a small increase of large number is still a larger number and it is expected that we will see the peek in the next weeks. With a incubation time up to 10 or 14 days it looks like the lock down has a positive effect. The number of infections is only an approximation to reality, because only a small number of people are tested. The more tests, the more positive cases will be identifed. Thats why it was announced to use the number of people in hospital and in intensive care as more realisitc indicators.

The government is publishing actual data on regular basis: https://info.gesundheitsministerium.at/

Remote-, Home-, Distance- Everything

In week 2 almost everything possible has been switched to digital and remote work. Many courses at Johannes Kepler Universtity have been switched to distance learning via video streams. Whenever I prefer presence courses because it’s hard to say concentrated for an hour watch video streams.

Companies like SAP took the chance to offer free courses and certifications for students who now have time and stay at home. Not only SAP but many other companies use the forced timeout to gain new customers via free videos, tutorials, training, etc.

The Austrian Red Cross has developed a Stop Corona app to track social contacts. The app assings an anonymous number to the phone and you can do a handshake with other app users. If one person is tested positive on Covid-19 all other contacts get notified on their phone. The use of the app is (actually) optional. Other countries like chain also have tracking apps, but these apps are not anonymous and not optional.

Fight for Resources

The huge number of Microsoft Teams users (44 million now) forced Microsoft to increase the resources by x60 times. Microsoft also announced to reduce the functionallity of cloud services like Teams, SharePoint, Stream etc. There are also complaints that deploying new Azure resources in region West-Europe fails. I tried to deploy 2 servers (2 cores, 7 GB RAM) and indeed one deployment failed because no resources could be allocated.

More Cooking

I’ve used the time in lock-down to train my cooking skills. Fleischlaberl, Kaiserschamarrn, spinach, Apfelschlangerl, Noodle Gratin, Käsekreiner, Apple rings.