- Coronavirus has come to the city of Austin, even without the cancelled South by Southwest festival.
- None of the cases of coronavirus in the city are employees at the area's largest tech employer, Dell Technologies, the company confirmed to Business Insider.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Although Austin cancelled SxSW, its major tech and arts event that was supposed to be taking place now, the city of Austin says that as of Monday, it has six confirmed cases of Coronavirus.
The city's largest tech employer, Dell Technologies, tells Business Insider that none of the Austin cases are its employees.
Rumors have been raging for weeks that someone in the Austin tech community had the illness, although rumors that circulated the first week in March about an IBM employee were not true, Business Insider confirmed.
Unlike Cisco, Dell's competitor in San Jose, California, Dell has not instituted a mandatory work-from-home policy. Dell has told all employees globally to work from home if their jobs do not require them to be onsite. It says it has advised its onsite employees to practice "social distancing" and is doing sanitation cleaning at its facilities several times a day.
To minimize visitors coming to its headquarters, Dell has also created virtual events for its Executive Briefing Centers. As we previously reported, earlier this month Microsoft told its salespeople that they should proceed with customer visits to its customer demonstration centers at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft did, however, shut down its open-to-the public visitor centers.
Dell also has significant operations in several areas in China, although none of them are near the epicenter for Coronavirus in Wuhan. Dell would not comment on if any of its Chinese employees were confirmed to have coronavirus. The company says it has donated millions of dollars in cash and technologyto various efforts to help combat the disease.