Ask HN: What to do when company takes Covid-19 as a joke?

If the official recommendation is that each company decides on their own, then there is not much you can do and you'll have to follow the company guideline. If the company insists on not doing anything, then their leadership is dangerously irrational. In that case, I'd seriously consider looking for another job now rather than waiting until the economic crisis hits. (It will likely hit hard, world-wide.)

If you're asking about the personal risk of going to the company versus staying at home, that cannot be answered in general. Are you going with public transport/the tube? That's a very high infection risk. Otherwise, going there and working there might not be a high risk, depending on the office layout and facilities for sanitizing. Does the building have air conditioning? That's probably a very high risk. How old are you? The younger, the less of a personal risk you have.

Without more information, it's impossible to judge or even attempt to quantify the personal risk.

I'm reasonably senior in a large global company (I'm based in the UK) and what we are doing, versus what we are officially allowed to say that we are doing, differ pretty widely.

We are also, largely, asking most folk to keep working as usual unless there are specific reasons not too. And we are tracking all those decisions centrally.

And, although I disagree with some of what we are doing, most of it is for very good reason. We have a duty of care, both legally and morally, and, as with the government, public safety sometimes clashes with individual wishes.

Having said that, I'd be pretty surprised if we get through next week without a much larger contingent working from home, but there's an awful lot of wood to chop before that will occur.