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COVID19/4 Keep calm and wash your hands


Which Tyler

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I dashed out at 11:00 pm to to the all-night grocery store to re-stock my isolation chocolate stash, since I’ve already eaten the two bars I bought earlier in the week (and the two I bought the week before, sigh) and to see how empty the shelves were. The fresh produce was fine, but some of the grocery shelves looked like hoards of locusts had passed through. All the aisles had piles of cartons lined up, though, ready for restocking the shelves.

The usual stuff was missing, pasta, rice, beans, pasta sauces, peanut butter, some jams, all the toilet paper. But also missing were frozen vegetables (I guess like me people are wondering about shipments of fresh veggies from the US), much of the flour, a lot of frozen meals that were on sale. What no one was buying was junk food like the dozens of varieties of potato chips and such stuff.

I came home driving along the Main Street instead of taking side streets, just to see how many people were out and about. The street had lots of young people walking along, and all the bars looked full. I guess the attitude of the young is still ‘it’s not going to hurt us, so party on!’

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My local supermarket was crazy this morning. But most things still seemed to be in stock. Only things I wanted but couldn't find were oats and rice. Might just have a drop in during the week to see if I could get them. Then every single checkout had a massive line up. Took 20mins to get out of there.

I've also annoyingly come down with a bit of a chesty cold over the weekend. I feel almost completely fine, but just have a persistent cough I can't shake. It's so mild I'd normally just be inclinded to go in, but given the nature of our major grant right now (spending a lot of time driving around to aged care facilities collecting samples atm), and the current health advice I've let people know I'll be trying to catch up on my desk work from home until it completely clears up.

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5 hours ago, Meera of Tarth said:

That's exactly what happened yesterday here. And a bunch of people going on holidays to other places like the beach.

The dogmatic believe in open borders is the cause of the spreading of this disease.  WHO probably thought it was like Ebola - regarding the spread to the rest of the whole world. In general, Ebola is still more dangerous than the Coronoa - , but it started to spread the whole world from China to Italy to the rest of Europe... and I really hope it will stop there. And all those countries are right to close the borders to Europeans. And the EU should close internal borders. And in France, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, ... people should just stay inside. 

You can say it might had been solved by just testing everyone, ... but we had to made decisions regarding tests already ages ago because we hadn't enough materials. We only test the ones very sick and health professionals - only when they have fever. When they don't have fever, they just need to work.

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Australia continues to follow the UK model (even citing it) in keeping schools open, with the two reasons being given that (1) kids are not as susceptible and (2) closing schools would be too much of a disruption including taking healthcare workers out of the workforce as they'd have to mind their kids.

Instead, the government has decided to implement a 1.5m social distancing initiative in schools. It doesn't take a genius to work that's destined for instant failure.

I think the federal government is hoping that the 14-day quarantine on all international arrivals is going to seal our borders, but there's some community transmission already and I think they're losing the initiative.

That being said, Australia does have a problem in that we're a southern hemisphere country and peak winter flu season is June/July/August, so this thing is going to get worse and if you shutdown now, we're not going to get out of it for possibly 6 months with no relief in sight. I think the government is hoping we can hang on a bit longer before we have to do the whole shutdown thing.

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7 hours ago, Zorral said:

Guess you know nothing jon snow about the vast working and studying and writing books, etc. in coffee shops culture that has long been a large portion of NYC behavior.  Going back at least to and even before 9/11.

I know about that, It's a big part of a subculture, but it's not the practice of vast numbers of people. But those aren't the people being considered here, because they are already doing it. It's the people being told not to come into the office and work from home instead during this pandemic. Those people will mostly work at home. So the transmission pattern won't be influenced by a whole bunch of people suddenly working in cafes.

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Some people started posting in our office chat that they’ll stay in home office after there has been a radio silence from all four managers (for the total of 14 people in our office) in the past week. About half an hour later our manager did post in the same chat asking everybody else who has not spoken up so far to stay in home office as well. I always knew our management’s communication strategy was a joke, per se, still it would have been nice to see them speak up a bit sooner. 

All the while, college students are moving out of the campus, there are a lot of cars with a lot of parents in the street picking them up. 

And we have two more infected since last night. 

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Re: school closures, I think it's time for society to reconsider the ages at which children need to be "minded". I'm not talking about kindergarten age of course, but most 7- and 8-year olds are perfectly capable of being on their own for several hours.

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9 hours ago, Meera of Tarth said:

That's exactly what happened yesterday here. And a bunch of people going on holidays to other places like the beach.

I have heard of two people who said it would be a good idea to go to the holiday house in a small village on a Croatian island now. It would be much easier to self-isolate there, as there are only a few people who live there and, well, it is on an island. But well, with the terrible traffic conditions on the Slovene-Croatian border, nobody wants to travel there now. It has been reported that for the last few days, truck drivers have had to wait for up to 18 hours to be processed at some of the border crossings.

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9 minutes ago, Buckwheat said:

I have heard of two people who said it would be a good idea to go to the holiday house in a small village on a Croatian island now. It would be much easier to self-isolate there, as there are only a few people who live there and, well, it is on an island. But well, with the terrible traffic conditions on the Slovene-Croatian border, nobody wants to travel there now. It has been reported that for the last few days, truck drivers have had to wait for up to 18 hours to be processed at some of the border crossings.

Makes me think of Boccaccio's Decameron. Everyone out in the countryside to avoid the plague, telling stories.

Admittedly, it has gone through our heads that maybe we should just visit Linda's family's summer home early for a few weeks -- rural farmhouse further north in Sweden -- but it's not really that habitable until it gets warmer, so I don't think we'll do it. But we have the luxury of being able to work from home and set our own hours, making it even possible to consider it but also making it easy to not be too concerned since self-isolation is pretty much what we two introverts mostly do anyways. ;)

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@HelenaExMachina

Thanks for that article.  I’m especially anxious for news about effects for prior to 30 weeks.  My doctors are being pretty blasé about all of this, with the rationale that the devastation is typically for people much older and with underlying issues, which I’m luckily without.  But I’m still scared of something going terribly wrong in the worst case scenario.  And beyond, I’m just dreading the incredible discomfort for when I do invariably get this, since I can’t really take any of the good drugs (like pseudoephedrine) to alleviate symptoms.  I‘ve had pneumonia before, and I’m not eager to experience it (or at least the sensation of a lung infection) while pregnant.

And my office is still not wfh (I work for the City).  Though a fellow City worker did apparently leak that info to Politico last week, so now they are scrambling to set us up to work from home.  I wonder if it would have happened without the whistleblowing.  But we’re not set up, and will be charged time if we take days before then.   No word on how long that will take.  I’m undecided on whether I take the days- I don’t have a ton saved.

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Massive queus in supernarket at the moment. Must be a shock to the staff to actually have to open all checkouts rsther than rely on self-scan. Never seen this store so busy. Parscetamol for babies is gone. Stil some baby nurafen though. This is probably my main concern at moment due to only half a bottle of calpol left ,and 18month old baby teething at night.

Paracetamll tablets low too, though we have some, and can always use our lemsip at a pinch.

Tinned items now running low (not sure why tinned tomatoes so popular suddenly - to go with all the pasta?)

No soap, tho toilet paper is looking healthy. Plenty of frozen fish/chicken. 

My GP told me to stop my immune-suppressing meds on Friday, but the risk is I could now take ill with a still-weakened system - while suffering a Crohns Disease flare-up, with food and water going straight through me. Plus asthma.

 

Edit: found an unopened bottle of calpol in our cupboard - phew!

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Reuters reports that Trump offered large sums of money to a German company developing a vaccine so that the vaccine would be available exclusively to the US.

I'm not surprised at Trump's way of thinking, but he's a typical example of poisonous American exceptionalism at its worst.

I wonder whether the American media will report this embarrassing development!

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20 minutes ago, Jeor said:

Reuters reports that Trump offered large sums of money to a German company developing a vaccine so that the vaccine would be available exclusively to the US.

I'm not surprised at Trump's way of thinking, but he's a typical example of poisonous American exceptionalism at its worst.

I wonder whether the American media will report this embarrassing development!

We get most of our fruits and vegetables from the US in the winter and if things go the way of Italy and Spain over the next two weeks I can just see Trump declaring that food will not be exported, ‘America first’. Even though we have trade agreements that are meant to support each other. That would not be met with understanding up here, I suspect.

But if things go the way of Italy and Spain, there won’t be workers to pick and process produce and there won’t be truck drivers to drive stuff north anyway. I guess we have apples in cold storage, and warehouses of canned goods, but how many months worth I don’t know.

Of more concern is the fact that 90% is lots of over the counter meds are made in China, as we discussed a couple of threads ago.

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38 minutes ago, sologdin said:

what an asshole.  lynch mobs may form.

 

Makes me think of Boccaccio's Decameron.

very fitting, agreed.  i had to explain this text to philistines at work this week.

The State should size the items and and pay “fair market value” what the MSRP states for each item.  That keeps them out of 5th Amendment hot water.

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1 hour ago, Buckwheat said:

I have heard of two people who said it would be a good idea to go to the holiday house in a small village on a Croatian island now. It would be much easier to self-isolate there, as there are only a few people who live there and, well, it is on an island. But well, with the terrible traffic conditions on the Slovene-Croatian border, nobody wants to travel there now. It has been reported that for the last few days, truck drivers have had to wait for up to 18 hours to be processed at some of the border crossings.

The problem is that there are many more cases than we actually detect in all Spain. A Catalan epidemyologist th eother said that there were at least 3 times more cases than the ones we detected. And this is being a reality right now, The things is not isolated naymore, but we don't know. For instance, in Catalonia we thought that was the case and in three days we passed from around 100+ cases to more than 700. With the public transport in a big city like Barcelona, now I believe it's everywhere. 

Once it has spread (and by moving around it's spreading) there will be more cases everywhere. And some regions have less hospitals. They expeect more cases form people who have moved, for instance this is what happened in Italy when they closed certain borders last week. But we won't see that till next week because you need 15 days approx to see that. (Provided that tests are done......now I read it's not the case anymore in Catalonia and Madrid).

Thing is, people need hopsitals for other things. Yesterday the grandma of a friend of mine broke her hip, she needed surgery. We all might have an appendicitis. Etc, etc. Here students of medicine are volunteering for some things (for instance taking care of the children of meds who are on quarantene, phone calls....) and they are asking for the help of retired doctors.

So yes, wherever you are, the best thing as you say it is to self isolate. Now technically we are obligued to self isolate wherever we are in SPain, although The MP said we could still return (I guess that during today).

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