I have to disagree with your opinion on voluntary layoffs.
Here in the UK an employer has to inform the government and go through a mandatory redundancy process when laying off more than a given number of employees (I think it's 100 off the top of my head). At my last role I was put at risk of redundancy and went through the process. One of the first steps of that process was offering voluntary redundancy which had a higher redundancy package than if you received compulsory redundancy.
If someone was considering leaving, or was close to retirement leaving voluntarily gave them the opportunity to leave early and with a nice payout. Or if you had skills high in demand it gave you the opportunity to get a lump sum and walk into a new job.
This significantly reduced the need for the company to make compulsory redundancies.
If they're cutting staff at that quantity it's almost certainly to save money, and the money saved from laying off employees shouldn't be going towards funding new hires.
I would love to be able to filter results to remove articles written purely for affiliate links - if I'm looking for a new washing machine, I want an impartial article from someone with industry knowledge, not someone who has taken the five most popular machines from amazon to post with Amazon Associates links
I caught it in September when numbers here in the UK were quite low.
I'm not sure how I caught it. I had left my car into the garage a few days before I showed symptoms and had to get an Uber home, then back to the garage to pick it up, so my strongest suspicion is one of the Uber drivers or previous passengers had it or potentially a mechanic had it and it remained in the car.
The strangest thing is my girlfriend and I had spent the day before I showed symptoms together and she slept over that night but she didn't seem to catch it off me. She even had an antibody test about a month after which was negative suggesting she hadn't already had asymptomatic Covid.
The thing that stikes me about the naming of variants, is that to your standard person on the street, referring to the variants by the place they were first identified is going to be considerably more meaningful than calling them a greek letter, especially with the less common letters. It's also easier to mentally track the variant's progress if you know where it "originated".
Here in the UK an employer has to inform the government and go through a mandatory redundancy process when laying off more than a given number of employees (I think it's 100 off the top of my head). At my last role I was put at risk of redundancy and went through the process. One of the first steps of that process was offering voluntary redundancy which had a higher redundancy package than if you received compulsory redundancy.
If someone was considering leaving, or was close to retirement leaving voluntarily gave them the opportunity to leave early and with a nice payout. Or if you had skills high in demand it gave you the opportunity to get a lump sum and walk into a new job.
This significantly reduced the need for the company to make compulsory redundancies.