What We’re Reading
For the first day in months, New York City witnessed zero confirmed deaths due to coronavirus, current records show.
The first confirmed COVID-19 death in the Big Apple occurred on March 11 with the death toll reaching its horrible peak at 590 on April 7, according to records put out by the city.
Facebook has joined companies including Twitter and Square in saying it will begin allowing select employees to work remotely full time, expecting 50% of its workforce to be remote within five to 10 years. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said about 75% of his employees expressed some interest in moving to a different city if they could work remotely.
Paul Davies, a respected physicist who teaches at Arizona State University, spent years bouncing around to science conferences and lectures. But when the pandemic hit, he was in Sydney, Australia, where he used to live — and that is where he was quite happy to remain.
He noted that during World War II, when travel was severely constricted, great discoveries occurred as the world’s sharpest minds stayed home and mulled the universe.
“Many of us have been saying for years that we have too many committees, far too many meetings and not nearly enough quiet thinking time,” Professor Davies said.
WFH:
According to a recent Federal Reserve survey, 62% of workers with a college degree said they worked from home in March, whereas just 20% of those with only a high-school diploma did.
The provisional number of births for the United States in 2019 was 3,745,540, down 1% from the number in 2018 (3,791,712). This is the fifth year that the number of births has declined after the increase in 2014, down an average of 1% per year, and the lowest number of births since 1985.
Have a good weekend, stay safe.