[SBU Board] Coronavirus discussion 2.0

[Scott Chupack]

So, I feel like things have changed a little bit since we met on Monday. A
large number of Seattle tech firms have asked their Seattle employees to
work from home, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Zulily, Facebook,
Oracle. University of Washington has now closed to all but remote learning.
A outbreak has happened in Santa Clara, CA and it has caused the Santa
Clara Bridge Center to close indefinitely. A leading Venture Capitalist
firm is calling this a "Black Swan" event and telling their companies to
prepare for the worst.

I am a little unclear as our role as a Unit Board here. If our primary role
is to run Sectional tournaments, we have no decisions to make in the next
month or so. If our role is to provide leadership on bridge in the Seattle
area, we may need to be proactive in protecting the community, our bridge
players and their clubs, especially considering the higher risk of Covid-19
to older

I haven't spoken to club managers personally, but I can imagine that it's
possible that they are struggling with the decision whether to close their
clubs temporarily for the good of the community and their members but also
am aware of what it would do from a viability perspective of their business
if they close. They may also not want to be the first to close and risk
losing their customers going to the location that decides to stay open.

I would like to suggest that we quickly start assessing our options. Should
we consider offer subsidies or loans to our clubs to offset the cost of
shutting down their clubs? Our cash reserves gives us a special opportunity
to help, at least for awhile. Would we just offer this to SBC and EBC who
has the most overhead or all of the clubs based on average tables in a
week? We can also use this as the impetus/justification to raise our
sectional fees to $11 to offset this cost to the unit. Decisions are
currently being made very quickly in the city. We may need to act before
our next scheduled board meeting.

To be clear, I don't think we should tell them to close, but we can tell
them what we can help out with if they need to close. I'm also aware that
with all of this working from home, there are some that will really want to
go to the club games to get out of the house, especially our under age 65
players, so it's a tricky call.

Thoughts?

https://paloaltobridge.org/games-and-other-unit-activities-suspended-at-the-bridge-center/?fbclid=IwAR0Pq_F2xcm0WOw9wFvGPNs3BD8TqdkDJ3wUOXRC1Q8C62qSOYeSjwNaO2Q#.XmCcwt3pFoM.facebook


https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812173963/coronavirus-amazon-facebook-google-microsoft-urge-seattle-workers-to-stay-home


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-05/sequoia-capital-warns-startups-of-coronavirus-black-swan-event
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.celestial.com/mailman/private/sbuboard/attachments/20200306/059b191f/attachment.html>