Fifth week under COVID-19 reduced lock-down in Austria (20. April)

General Situation

Staring from 14. April shops with less than 400 m² were allowed to open up, not including restaurants or bars. Home supply and garden center were also alowed to open. Using masks is now mandatory not only for grocery stores, but for shopping and public transport.

The number of infections is stalling and the increase rate is stable under 5% for a long time now. The big question is how much will the infections increase the next days. With a median of 5 days plus weekend delay will see in the middle of next week. The plan is to allow sport activities like tennis, golf, etc. at 1st May and allow restaurants to open on 15. May, under the assumption that corona infections will not dramatically raise.

Remote Assist and Augmented Reality Apps

At work we are promoting remote assist apps like Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and Dynamics 365 Product Visualize for a long time. But from my experience for most people augmented reality was something between cool and useless but definitve not usefull or business enabler.

Now, with all the restrictions some folks start to understand that remote assiting tools can help them to operate their business, e.g. to provide technical support for customers from employees at their home office.

Office 365 and Teams retroperspective

More than a month has passed since the lock-down started. Thankfully we were already using remote and collaboration tools for a while now. We were using SharePoint almost 10 years from now. Long before Skype for Business and Teams was released we had Lync On-Premises but switched quickely to Skype and Teams.

In the last weeks the active Teams applications used became a little more diverse. Windows apps are still mostly used but mobile and web clients are also present. For example, I’m working with my private Laptop and have my own Office 365 Tenant, therefor I’m not using the Teams application from the company but preferr the web application.

Statistics show that chats are the most widely used way to communicate. One to one discussions are done via chats, like we’d talk to the colleagues at work. For what would be a meeting at work, calls are arranged to discuss a specific and very certain topic.

Microsoft once reported a 775 % increase in team usage sind the lock-down in most european countries. On a smaller grain size, we see a very similar increase in our usage. While Mail, SharePoint and Onedrive are not more affected than before, our Teams usage has increased by 540%.

Apps and APIs

Some think tracing apps can help to reduce the spread of corona, by tracking contacts and informing endangered persons. At the beginning there was the proprietary Closed-Source Stopp Corona tracking app, promoted by the Red Cross and developed by Accenture. After a few weeks the PEPP-PT (Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity-Tracing) approach was announced which should make apps from different venders interoperable. Last week Apple and Goolge announced to provide interoperatble APIs for the same purpose. Questions are (1) will Apple and Goole implement PEPP-PT standards or build their own proprietary solution (2) which one will the developers in europe choose? From my perspective it is not very likely that Apple and Google will give a damn about european data privacy concerns and flood the world with their solution.

Another very concerning development is that the Austrian State Printing House (Staatsdruckerei) is working an app called Restart.ID to proof a persons immunity status. The idea is to link a persons immunity state with the persons passport. This is practically the same surveillance and discrimination approach like authoritarian regimes like China have implemented. Only if you have the app installed, obeyed the rules and have a green marker you may pass the border, access the subway, etc.

I’d expect that these development will have a negative effect on the acceptance and backfire. An Austrian proprietary closed-source app like Stopp-Corona is somewhat excepted. An app based the US companies Apple and Google, which regulary parise themself on how much they know about their users and actively use this information to make profit will have much less acceptance. An app that links a persons ID, passport, medical history and vaccination state is in my oppinion not acceptable.

BTW: Climate crisis is still here

Warm weather and COVID-19 lock-down is bad combination. Last week Wolfsberg, Frantschach St. Gertraud, St. Andrä and St. Paul had to limit the usage of water. This week another district is running out of water. Neuhofen a.d. Krems announced that it running out of water, because peoples’ excessive use for swimming pools and car washing. It looks like we will not be able to go abroad this summer, and the climate crisis will came back with a blast this summer.

Repetitive cooking

After five weeks of cooking on my own, it’s time to repeat good recipies and improve others: Geschnetzeltes, Pork, Spagehtti, Noodle Gratin, Spicy meat with rice, Toast

#stayhealthy