In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak being declared a global pandemic and a national emergency here in the United States as well as many other countries around the world, it would be extremely difficult to have a serious conversation here on Brain Science that’s not colored by today’s very serious events. Mireille and Adam discuss the anxiety, fear, and panic that many may be facing. How do we navigate the unseeable unknown? How should we respond to change and the state of the world we are now living in?

Don’t panic. Prepare for change. Be adaptable. Be resilient.

I’m bracing for turbulence. To me, that doesn’t mean panic — it means prepare for change and potentially discomfort as a result of that change. Be adaptable.

This is the note the Sequoia Capital team sent to its founders and CEOs last week to provide guidance on how to ensure the health of their business while dealing with potential business consequences of the spreading effects of the Coronavirus.

Coronavirus is the black swan of 2020. Some of you (and some of us) have already been personally impacted by the virus. We know the stress you are under and are here to help. With lives at risk, we hope that conditions improve as quickly as possible. In the interim, we should brace ourselves for turbulence and have a prepared mindset for the scenarios that may play out.

It will take considerable time — perhaps several quarters — before we can be confident that the virus has been contained. It will take even longer for the global economy to recover its footing. Some of you may experience softening demand; some of you may face supply challenges. While The Fed and other central banks can cut interest rates, monetary policy may prove a blunt tool in alleviating the economic ramifications of a global health crisis.

We suggest you question every assumption about your business…

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Matt Mullenweg, on the potential industry-changing affect that Coronavirus is having:

This is not how I envisioned the distributed work revolution taking hold.

For those asking for tips, my Distributed Podcast has a wealth of advice and stories about how we operate. But here are four good ones to start with

TLDR: Minimize real-time meetings, invest in audio/video quality (yes!), your blog is your new office, and chat tools like Slack and Matrix are a must-have.

This interactive dashboard was created by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University to visualize and track reported cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in real time. The data collected and displayed are freely available on GitHub.

Below are a few notable pull-quotes from this correspondence on The Lancet’s Infectious Diseases journal.

The dashboard, first shared publicly on Jan 22, illustrates the location and number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, deaths, and recoveries for all affected countries. It was developed to provide researchers, public health authorities, and the general public with a user-friendly tool to track the outbreak as it unfolds.

The dashboard reports cases at the province level in China; at the city level in the USA, Australia, and Canada; and at the country level otherwise. During Jan 22–31, all data collection and processing were done manually, and updates were typically done twice a day, morning and night (US Eastern Time). As the outbreak evolved, the manual reporting process became unsustainable…

Given the popularity and impact of the dashboard to date, we plan to continue hosting and managing the tool throughout the entirety of the COVID-19 outbreak and to build out its capabilities to establish a standing tool to monitor and report on future outbreaks.

For more updates and resources follow Lauren Gardner on Twitter or read the readme.