We’re working from home Thursday — and others should be thinking the same

This is a trial run. We’ve seen no evidence of COVID-19 in our newsroom or in the places we send reporters. But we want to make sure we can keep our employees safe and continue to provide you with the news, 24 hours a day.

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Lizzie Schiffman Tufano, director of Audience Engagement at the Chicago Sun-Times, works on Chorus in the newsroom, Friday morning, Jan. 31, 2020. | Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times

Lizzie Schiffman Tufano, Sun-Times director of audience engagement, works in the newsroom in January.

Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times

In Italy, it’s chaos. The number of coronavirus cases has increased from three to upward of 12,000 in less than three weeks, overwhelming hospitals and forcing the government to close all stores except pharmacies and grocery stores.

In Iran, things are almost as bad. The number of coronavirus deaths stands at more than 350, behind only Italy and China, where COVID-19 began its quiet march toward becoming a pandemic.

Our own country has now counted more than 1,000 cases, with the virus claiming at least 38 lives.

Will the United States join Italy and Iran?

We don’t know, but we had better be prepared.

That’s why Thursday — in the wake of the NBA suspending its season, Chicago canceling its fabled St. Patrick’s Day and South Side Irish parades and the NCAA prohibiting fans from March Madness basketball games — all but a handful of our Sun-Times journalists and support staff, including this entire editorial board, will be working from home.

Let’s be clear: This is a trial run. We have seen no evidence of COVID-19 in our newsroom or in the places we send reporters.

But given the way things are going, we want to make sure we can keep our employees safe and continue to provide you with the news, 24 hours a day. We would be foolish not to prepare for a day when we might not be able to come to work at our West Loop headquarters.

If all goes well with our one-day test — and we have every reason to believe it will — our print edition will arrive on your doorstep on Friday morning looking no differently than it does on any other Friday, and the news we will provide all through the day on Thursday at suntimes.com will come to you with the same frequency and high quality you’ve come to expect.

We’re far from alone in taking precautions. The Washington Post is encouraging its staff to work at home and the Los Angeles Times is restricting employee travel.

We understand that some readers might think we’re going overboard with all this virus stuff; our staff on Wednesday produced roughly the same number of online stories about COVID-19 as there were confirmed cases in Illinois: 25. President Donald Trump, for one, apparently is still of the view that the virus will fade soon enough, even as the number of U.S. cases escalates and the stock market tumbles.

That said, it is undeniable that events have hit a tipping point. German Chancellor Angela Merkel predicted Wednesday that 7 of 10 Germans could be afflicted by coronavirus if it isn’t slowed by vaccines or a cure. The World Health Organization on Wednesday declared coronavirus a pandemic.

Hitting closer to home, CBS News shut down its New York City headquarters to disinfect the place after two employees tested positive for coronavirus. CME Group, owner of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, said Wednesday that it will temporarily shut its trading floor at the close of business Friday as a precaution.

Naysayers continue to make the argument that the seasonal flu is a bigger threat to the general public. But those naysayers, as we pointed out in an editorial this week, do not include the world’s most prominent epidemiologists. The coronavirus, they warn, is more contagious than the flu, more deadly and possibly just getting started.

According to one estimate, each person with the coronavirus infects, on average, 2.2 other people; each person with the flu infects, on average, just 1.3 other people. The mortality rate for coronavirus is estimated to be between 1% and 3.4%. The mortality rate for the typical flu bug is a fraction of that, about 0.1%.

Will these numbers bear out over the next few weeks and months? We don’t know.

Is the number of coronavirus cases rising here? Yes.

Is a rejection of the best estimates of the potential danger worth the risk? Certainly not.

As disruptive to our lives and plans as they are — as well as to the economy — the decisions by the NBA, NCAA, and City Hall and parade organizers were the right ones. Every school, college, business and local government should have contingency plans of their own.

We’ll be back in the newsroom on Friday. At least that’s the plan. We are living in enormously consequential times for a news organization.

But if we have to work from home, we’ll be ready.

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