Major employers scrap plans to cut back on offices - KPMG

Just 17% of chief executives plan to cut back on offices, down from 69% in the last survey in August.

Most chief executives said they wanted vaccination rates to exceed half the population before they started to encourage staff back to the office

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We still don’t know how much this will reduce office capacity. 6ft spacing could reduce office capacity by 25-50%.

its 3ft spacing for schools as per the CDC. So guessing similiar for offices

Hopefully people will go back to taking public transport, otherwise freeways/roads will become worse than it was during pre-pandemic commute hours.

yeah…that is going to take a while. I am so skeeved right now to ride BART and I have a HIGH germ tolerance (we never disinfected every thing we got from the grocery store from the beginning, etc, socialized outdoor with masks from the beginning of this thing)

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Things will look very different once we reach herd immunity. We should be there before Labor Day.

how about the new strain?

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Airline and cruise stocks ranked today as Europe is implementing more lockdowns.

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We don’t know how well the current vaccines will tackle the new strains. But my bet is that they won’t be completely useless. They work well against the British strain, looking at data from Britain. The Israeli data also suggests some protection against the SA strain.

Maybe we will need a booster shot once a year or something. As long as we got most people inoculated, to get the base covered, life should return to largely normal.

Europe fumbled their vaccine rollout very badly. The recent drama on AZ vaccine certainly doesn’t help.

Chile is a curious case. They have a high vaccination rate, but they mostly used vaccines developed by China. The Chinese pharmas never submitted their trial data to peer-reviewed journals, and there are large discrepancies among efficacy data reported in different countries. Looks like these vaccines are useless, but those are the ones used inside China and most developing countries. Keep an eye on those countries.

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Not gonna happen. Pandemic driving reverse behavior. Folks who were comfortable taking public transport, aren’t comfortable anymore. Used car sales saw an increase during pandemic for the same reasons even when multiple car households were offloading one car.

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I think net impact of office capacity will be a wash. Most workers will move to 1-3 day in office flex working style while offices will no longer be packed.

Northbound traffic(towards SF) in the morning and vice versa should be affected most.

people are driving faster when they see empty roads. people dont take this into consideration. even two days if they go to office. driving more than 1 hour each way more chance of accident and hence higher insurance.