It feel’s bad to like your post, so I’m just going to say, that I concur.
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I agree with you. I worry about my parents who are both in their 70s. I also share @pixelpusher’s sentiment. I’m cutting down on my purchase because I think a recession is more likely than ever. My business is being affected by global supply chain issues, consumer confidence, etc. I have more keyboards than I know what to do with so I’ve dialed it way back in terms of new purchases. I have a lot to keep me busy.
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I honestly think the world is in for a rough time ahead. I’ve been thinking about the epidemiological situation a lot today, and I’ll give my read of the situation below, but first I want to say that, for many of us, keyboards are a happy escape from the cares of everyday life. To the extent possible, I don’t think we should give up our humanity, joys, or creativity merely because we’re faced with yet another one of life’s many risks and trials.
So I’m certainly not stopping my keyboard work–and that includes both investments in new projects but also buying keyboard components for personal projects as well. It just means too much to me and brings me too much joy, and in times of anxiety and uncertainty people need comforts and cherished escapes more than ever. My keypuller will have to be pried from my cold dead hands.
But perhaps this occasion will provide us a good excuse to reflect on how we relate to our hobby: to focus on making purchases that actually really make us happy and mean a lot to us rather than merely throwing all our disposable income to amass a huge pile of rarely-used keyboards for the sake of variety and a constant chase of novelty. It’s why the Stoics advocated fasting; sometimes a bit of austerity can help us appreciate what really matters (and un-blind us to luxuries that we’ve grown accustomed to.) Maybe a bit of pulling back in excessive spending might do many of us some good and cause us to focus our expenditures on stuff that we really care about. And this is as good an excuse as any, to be sure.
Anyway, onto the broader issues. I’ve seen a lot of distressing naive rationalism in the news lately around the virus. There is a certain type of person who loves to cite statistics but who can only think about numbers in static/linear terms–people who have no intuitive grasp either of exponential growth curves or non-Gaussian distributions and therefore tend to focus on all the wrong risks in life. I’m not talking about anyone here in this thread, but the folks who are currently on the news and Twitter scoffing at the idea of “panic” (as if there were some huge downside to erroneously taking precautions compared to erroneously underestimating a global pandemic.) Whenever you hear people comparing the number of current cases and deaths in the US to the yearly flu, or even to fatality rates for driving one’s car, roll your eyes and turn the channel.
First of all, the overall mortality rate is observed to be at least an order of magnitude greater than the flu, and while it does strongly skew older, healthy young people can and do die of it as well. While that’s true of the flu as well, that brings me to my second point: the R0 value for the Wuhan virus is around 3, compared to closer to 1 for the flu. (This is the number of people a single infected person also infects.) This leads to insanely compounding, exponential growth curves that look like this.
If you overlay the curves for each individual country currently affected, they all look almost exactly like this, but slightly staggered based on the timing and size of the initial outbreak in each respective nation.
On that same trajectory, we here in the US are trailing Italy by about 11 days, a country that is currently in a mandatory nationwide lockdown. There is no reason to suppose that the spread pattern will be any different in the US from countries like Italy, Germany, France, and Japan, all of which are developed countries with advanced health care systems. The prudent China travel ban bought us a bit of time, though I can’t say that we’ve necessarily spent it extremely well in terms of preparedness, from what I can tell. (We should have spent it scrambling to build a million ventilators rather than stockpiling toilet paper, bottled water, and hand sanitizer.) But this doesn’t mean we won’t end up in the same place as where Italy is now: effectively an economy that is entirely shut down. Indeed, you’d have to make a strong case to me about why the US is somehow epidemiological exceptional.
Also, incidentally, the infection numbers for the US are almost certainly drastically underestimated due to the limited availability of testing until recently, and as a result I suspect that the virus has been circulating for much longer here than is currently widely supposed. This is all you need to know:
Of course, the third related, and very problematic, aspect of the virus is the extremely long period during which infected carriers can be asymptomatic (up to 14 days, we’re told). Given this, combined with the fact that we’ve been flying blind without tests, there’s a chance that you reading this (or someone you know) got infected a week ago and have no clue, as you go about your daily life interacting with countless people.
You may be young and in a low-risk category, but if you care about inadvertently killing your fellow humans and/or loved ones, you should think about a bit of social distancing right now. Or purely selfishly if you’re in a low-risk category for this specific illness, have you thought about what will happen when you get into a car accident, have a heart attack, or discover you have cancer when hospitals ICUs are all filled well beyond capacity?
To that point (and/or if you want to not sleep well tonight), read this distressing analysis of the basic math of viral outbreaks as applied to Coronavirus. It concludes, based on pretty compelling and conservative numbers, that all hospital beds in the United States will be at capacity by May 10th given the current best data we have. Suddenly, people start dying from lots of things that aren’t directly attributable to the virus itself simply because they can’t get life-saving medical care that would be available in normal times.
This is why social distancing matters; it slows the spread of the disease and gives the system time to absorb and treat the severe cases.
Work from home if you can. Avoid large public gatherings. Try to keep your distance. Wash wash wash your hands. Etc.
Yes, and for the reasons I mentioned above, this may well soon include factories in Germany and the USA, not just the ones in China. Bear in mind that our friends up at Signature Plastics are just a short drive from Kirkland, which is ground zero for the outbreak in America. (I read today that Gov. Inslee in Washington is considering mandatory quarantine/lockdown measures in that state.) And Germany, where GMK is, is already in a more advanced crisis than we are.
I think we should be prepared to see similar lockdowns and new cordons sanitaire (vocabulary word of the day) established in the US over the coming weeks; we saw the first one as of today in NY.
I think our best hope is to stretch things out until the weather warms up and potentially inherently slows the spread rate, which is also thought to be the cause of the seasonality of normal influenza. That’s just a hope, however and remains to be tested with this specific virus. (Though encouraging data from hot-and-humid Singapore is perhaps suggestive.)
Here is the current guidance from the CDC:
There is still a lot that is unknown about the newly emerged COVID-19 and how it spreads. Two other coronaviruses have emerged previously to cause severe illness in people (MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV). The virus that causes COVID-19 is more genetically related to SARS-CoV than MERS-CoV, but both are betacoronaviruses with their origins in bats. While we don’t know for sure that this virus will behave the same way as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, we can use the information gained from both of these earlier coronaviruses to guide us. In general, because of poor survivability of these coronaviruses on surfaces, there is likely very low risk of spread from products or packaging that are shipped over a period of days or weeks at ambient temperatures. Coronaviruses are generally thought to be spread most often by respiratory droplets. Currently there is no evidence to support transmission of COVID-19 associated with imported goods and there have not been any cases of COVID-19 in the United States associated with imported goods. Information will be provided on the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) website as it becomes available.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so that isn’t exactly reassuring, but the general consensus among people who seem to know things about virology (which I don’t) seems to be that the transit time for a product from China is more than adequate for any of the virus on a surface to have been long dead. Keyboard people aren’t the only folks worrying about this issue, and I’ve seen articles to this effect in a few publications over the last few days, all concluding that this shouldn’t be a concern. 
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Words of wisdom from a very smart dude indeed. Thanks Ryan. Again, it’s hard to see how we avoid a recession.
Also, to add to this:
Iran is another example of a country where warm weather has apparently done little to prevent the spread rate of the virus, and therefor led people to believe we won’t have a reprieve as the weather warms up.
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I’m not counting on warm weather to help a lot, but it looks like Iran has only been around 60-75F for a while now. It gets to be 95-105F where I live in the summer on average. Maybe hotter will do more?
Still curious what will happen. I’ve got a few unbuilt boards, and I managed to buy several sets of stabilizers before US vendors started shutting down. What I really need is a project. Keyboards are not much of a project anymore, since they are more well known and routine to me. I don’t feel like hand-wiring.
Maybe something else altogether. I’m thinking about popping open illustrator and trying to create something beautiful with no other purpose than… to be beautiful.
I recently spent a lot of time and money creating a new office. New sit/stand desk, SFF pc with dual monitors. All top notch stuff. Welp, I haven’t been able to use it at all.
My wife has been using that space for 14 hours a day working at home. I’ve been cleaning for a week and watching Youtube.
This won’t do 
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Got only 4 keyboards left, 2 at home and 2 at work and I’m missing my work boards and regret from not taking them home.
Got some extra keycap sets to try @ but the boards at home allready feel and look perfect to me, so nothing to tinker with 
I can’t buy more stuff and I can’t sell (because no post office trips) So yea, time to just take a break 
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Huh. I wasnt aware SP was near Kirlkland. I wonder if I can get reduced pricing by driving there when things settle down.
I work in healthcare and I’m not concerned about getting the virus since I am young with no comorbidities. It could also be that healthcare workers tend to be more resistant to fear around disease since we encounter it on a daily basis. I am concerned about spreading it to those who are susceptible so I agree that social distancing should be followed. I agree that the US medical system can not handle the burden so we do need to flatten the curve. Theres a shortage of necessary medical supplies. I suspect this crisis will continue for a year at least with intermittent lockdowns as flareup strangle the medical system until a vaccine is found which will be a couple of years to produce enough of it.
In conclusion, I agree with everything you said.
Additionally, the entire luxury goods (by which I not only mean expensive but also nonessential) segment is going to be hit hard. I’m in the watch hobby as well and already steep discounts are appearing all over the place. So if you have a lot of money already, it’s going to be a buyer’s market.
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So you’re another one of our community members that work in health care & are still at work. I gotta say a big thank you to you guys for doing what must be done! I just praised @CosmicKira in another thread about the same thing. Seriously to me you guys are heros! No matter if you’re working in the lowliest position or are a highly accomplished doctor, the world needs you all right now & you guys have stepped up to challenge! Be safe out there man! 
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Thank you! I’m not a doctor but I can say that in my job, I’ve used my keyboard to save lives. Maybe that’s part of why I’m so enamored with this hobby. Its a critical tool without which I cant perform my duties. And trust me, the company Dell keyboards suck. Lol.
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Ditto, I work in the IT side of the medical field. We host and support PACS, Dictation, RIS, and Billing Systems, along with all the end points, required to use the systems.
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Thanks for your support! I work in primary care and more than once I’ve used ITs help.
I’m allowed a modest amount of personalization at my workstation for mental health in a stressful environment. I’m going for a peaceful blue theme. If anyone’s got any Mizu deskmats they want to part with let me know! I’m looking for the darker blue Groupbuy versions.
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Not even remotely in the medical field myself but at work none the less… We manufacture media that goes into N95 respirators so we’re flat out at some of our plants right now.
I’m actually travelling for work this week and its like a ghost town everywhere… Hotel is taking things fairly seriously by not providing room service daily to limit/reduce the likelihood of transmission. Obviously no communal facilities available, but hey they have toilet paper!
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Just making me cautious about spending money right now. Things I want out there but do I want to spend the cash?
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I feel ya, I’m personally worried about being able to pay the bills. in the event that prices rise or employment becomes an issue.
I already know of people who have lost their jobs. Do you have 6-9 months of earnings saved for rent, bill’s, ect?
It’s up to you to decide what is best for you. I have no idea what your situation is. I’m saving for now, but I know this storm wont pass quickly. I suspect ppl wont be going back to work for a month at least in washington. And then there will be layoffs to think about as companies need to recoup their losses.
Oh and trust me people, now is NOT THE TIME to get your spouse pregnant. I’m sure with all of the enforced isolation we will have a covid baby boom but use common sense. The middle of an epidemic isnt the best time.
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Thinking out loud here. Wonder what happens if Drop goes under? And Oco, Kono, Dixie, TKC and more. I figure Drop has the most invested and the highest overhead in non essential luxury goods. Maybe smaller one and two man operations will be able to better acclimate to the change.
I’m sure these places have resources for a few weeks with our group buy money, but don’t you guys imagination a lot of these new group buys won’t come to fruition? Even if SP and GMK make it, will the vendors be around to ship?
Am I overreacting? I think the world sees the US as overreacting, and I’d be happy to be proven wrong in the end.
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That is a valid concern. I think the little guys have a better chance of coming out of this unscathed, just because of the lack of overhead, but that all depends on how long this lasts. Personally I have been trying to support the little guys even more than I regularly do through this. Although I have limited my purchases to only instock products since the whole COVID-19 thing hit the fan because of this same line of thinking. It is highly possible IMO that a vendor or manufacturer could go out of business, leaving anyone who had money with them for GBs SOL. Especially the longer this drags on.
I think the best we can as a community is support the businesses that we buy from as best as we can right now. I’m not telling anyone to go join a GB, but buying in stock products will go a long way to keeping them around, especially the little guys.
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“Big” companies like Drop are likely to be fine. They’ll have to somewhat comply with stay@home orders, but a lot of the work the actual company employees do is gonna be stuff they can do from home, mostly “desk” work. Their supply chain and warehouses are more likely to be hit with slowdown/stops in business, which will eventually creep up to Drop themselves but likely not heavily enough to be an issue for some time.
Likewise, super small companies are likely to be mostly fine as well, ie someone that is doing keeb work only part time. They’ve more than likely got the income of a proper job to fall on as well as unemployment benefits.
I’m thinking those that will be most susceptible will be those sorta in the middle, the ones doing keeb-related work fulltime as self-employment. They’ll have the least to fall back on for benefits related to being out of or having reduced(though unemployment benefits are supposedly being extended to the self-employed) and will also be lacking the income from another job that would ideally help them through lapses in activity. But even then, I think they’ll still be relatively fine given that they’re the least likely to be affected by shutdowns of “proper” businesses if they’re working out of their home and doing primarily “mail order” work. The higher end of this group, those with their own employees, are the point where I’d expect perhaps the most possibility of issue, but at the same time they may have more options available to them than just those working by themselves.
Even as this is currently ongoing people are still spending on luxury goods as they’re aiming to stave off their cabin fever, with potentially more incentive to do so once the CoronaCheck™ arrives. Yes, large producers like SP and GMK(both located in countries with human rights oddly enough) are currently stopped and will be until who-knows-when, but some stuff like PCB fab seems to still be going on, thanks to China’s, uh, handling of the situation in current.
Of note, I wasn’t sure anyone except people here in the US thought we were overreacting. Seems like most think we’re super underreacting based on our most prominent examples(NYC spread and Florida doing Florida stuff) and everyone is definitely thinking something about [insert those in charge] and how they happen to be (not) dealing with the situation.
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what happens if Drop goes under? And Oco, Kono, Dixie, TKC and more.
I think Drop will either close its doors or bought out at very low valuation. It was failing even before Coronavirus because, instead of using the traffic to build a market, they built a store selling their own products.
Others with little or no employees other than owners and family will survive because they don’t need a lot of capital to remain in business.
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