Coronavirus contagion fears in Silicon Valley

Those concerned also pointed to the high rate of travel between the San Francisco Bay Area and China, the fact that people can be infected — and contagious — but show no symptoms for up to two weeks, and that government officials in China downplayed the virus’s initial impact. Some, however, said that a few of the industry restrictions — and the comments by some tech VCs on Twitter — have gone too far.Aside from the institutional precautions major tech companies like Apple and Google are taking by restricting employee travel and halting operations in China, some tech professionals are taking individual measures to protect themselves. “While the probability is low that any individual will have [coronavirus], the higher up you go in terms of a person’s wealth or socioeconomic status, the more likely they are to have interacted with someone who is much higher risk,” said Watson, who added that most people in the Bay Area are, to his dismay, “very relaxed right now.” Watson also said he sees an opportunity for tech companies to help diagnose the virus or come up with a vaccine — a problem he said he’s interested in solving. Deresinski said he doesn’t think the risk is “anywhere near sufficient” to warrant reduced contact with people in the Silicon Valley area, even given their relatively high level of travel to and from China.“The chances are astonishingly low that you would come into contact in a coronavirus infection” at work or in a public setting, Deresinki told Recode, but acknowledged that there’s “always a risk.” A spokesperson for the Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara County public health department said that reducing handshakes is recommended generally to prevent the spread of colds and flu, but not specifically for coronavirus.A public relations firm representing Andreessen Horowitz declined to respond to Recode’s request for comment about the no-handshake sign.Given the high volume of regular travel between Silicon Valley and areas most impacted by the coronavirus in China, there’s been a significant disruption to the normal flow of business. The companies told employees who have recently traveled to China not to work at the office for up to two weeks.Recode has also learned that the Stanford Graduate School of Business — arguably the world’s most elite training ground for budding tech executives and venture capitalists — has canceled its exchange program with students at Tsinghua University in China. In Santa Clara County, the public health officer, Dr. Sara Cody, said in a public video that “it’s disturbing to hear that discrimination is happening toward people of Asian descent.”And at UC Berkeley, another feeder school for the tech industry, school officials were criticized after its Department of Health Services published a now-deleted post on Instagram saying that bigotry and bias toward people from Asia are “normal” and “common” reactions to the coronavirus outbreak.