This has brought back why I generally dislike working from home.
I did so from time to time back in the 1990s, and my experience then is being borne out now: I'm tireder at the end of the day and have less leisure. If I'm at the office the "work day" involves little breaks; at home I feel like I'm cheating during work hours if I'm not actually at work. Plus, as I work downtown, I usually have errands I can do which are just not available at home. (Nor, to be fair, would many of them be available at the office right now, except for food: the St. Lawrence Market is still open.)
The large banks have had plans for various disasters based on extensive work-from-home for years. That meant that I acquired, a few years ago, a notebook with reasonable capacity and a good-sized screen precisely to support that option, though I never used it for anything other than tests while I worked for TD. The model both there and at RBC is based on Citrix remote desktop/PC capability. In general, it works well, though sometimes glitches occur which require coordinating with tech support staff on site.
So it's not as big a contrast as it might be. I frequently spend days at the office where the only real contact I have is via WebEx meetings (some of our "team" is in London; there's a daily meeting, but it's by phone and shared screen in any case) and Skype (soon to be replaced by WebEx Groups, I understand) and Symphony. That's life in software development. (At TD, I sometimes had days with no conversations other than saying hello and goodbye; I feel a bit like the xkcd figure on self-isolation - "I've been studying for this all my life.")
Still, I was in the cadre of the last people on my floor to be going in to the office. This was because the default model of the banks was based on the idea of a primary site and a backup site - there really is a backup site for IT infrastructure and trading floors following general practice in the financial industry. (The TSX's primary site for servers is in Markham; the downtown location is actually a backup site. In the US some sectors have to have their backup site at least 500 miles from their primary site, a regulation left over from the days when nuclear war was seen as the primary threat.) These plans are not purely trying to protect their staff, but to stagger the impact of potential disruptions by avoiding all the workers at a given site being exposed at once. In our case the "backup site" was WFH, and staff was split between locations. So for a couple of weeks I was in the office group until policy changed to have everyone (in our reporting chain, at least going up to our VP) work from home. You now need special, exceptional permission to go into the office.
There were no risks at the office - it was echoingily empty, with nobody within thirty metres except for one other person who had been relocated from another floor and irritatingly placed at an empty desk relatively nearby. The only risks were taking transit to get there and back, and since transit vehicles were also broadly empty, the main concern there was to minimize touching surfaces. It is still true that reducing risk is reducing risk, and transit to a chair in the living room is safer than transit on the subway.
Social distancing rules repeat the mantra of separation by two metres. There are several wrinkles to this.
I've seen discussions about passing on the sidewalk, with the opinion being given that people should move off the sidewalk (if necessary - this doesn't apply to King and Bay) to provide adequate distance. This shows a suburban bias: there are many places in the city where the sidewalks are standard width and off-sidewalk means "in a traffic lane".
It's worth noting that this doesn't really translate the idea into a dynamic model. If you're passing someone at a fast walking pace, your concern should not just be distancing from that person's current location but from where they were before that; and both concerns should be less than if you're indoors, with no wind, moving slowly or not at all. Likewise, if you're on a sidewalk behind someone, the equivalent of two metres is probably about seven metres; you're occupying the space that person was occupying a few seconds ago.
Inside, I note that nowhere I shop has yet put in place the entirely sensible suggestion that aisles should be one-way only, obviating the need to pass in the aisles. The only place I shop that has wide enough spaces to pass while allowing six feet is the St. Lawrence Market. (There are also a lot of problematic customers in supermarkets who have obviously not internalised social distancing models; these have several implications while shopping, such as not spending a long time one in any one place browsing and not touching anything unless you really intend to buy it, although disposable bags are a help in the produce section.)
Speaking of shopping, there has been a surge in requests that people do grocery shopping once a week. This also displays a suburban bias, the assumption that you can buy a carload of groceries.
If you rely on transit, and especially if your household is more than one person, you shop for what you can carry - and that's less than a week's supply. (If you have a well-stocked pantry, you can buy less and eat into your reserves, but this is a long-term issue right now, not just hunkering down for a couple of weeks; sooner or later you need to replenish those supplies.) I make it a requirement for a grocery run every two or three days for two people if you're restricted to what you can carry. Perhaps less if you rely on frozen concentrated juice, otherwise drink only tap water, coffee, and tea, and bake instead of buying bread and have a strong back to carry dense but comparatively compact packages of flour (if you can find it). Again, the spotty reliability of finding what you want may require extra shopping. One store I went to several days ago was entirely out of any form of dried pulses; another on another day had a full supply.
Ordering online brings its own problems: different sources of potential contamination, timelines as the services are overloaded, substitutions, risks created for delivery services merely replacing those to shoppers. In many cases (Loblaws and Longo's, at least) I suspect purchases are sourced in-store rather than from warehouses; anything you get by delivery will have passed through more hands, and more recently, than what you buy in-store. If you are in a lower-risk group and take reasonable precautions, the trade-off is probably a wash. And, of course, many people without cars cannot afford the premium of paying for delivery.
My personal list of to-read books is 466 books (thanks, LibraryThing), counting neither possible rereads nor poetic works in foreign languages (Ariosto, Homer, Virgil, the Attic tragedians); plus I am taking the opportunity to learn a couple of new programming languages with personal projects (D and Go: I'm writing an automated breviary based on the Sarum Breviary (available easily in translation at archive.org); I plan to write the main program in D and any supplementary utilities in Go). And I'm doing more baking. I have no major need of additional amusements. However, a few general suggestions:
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timeasmymeasure
