Yesterday the governor ordered all K-12 to be closed for two weeks. Other than that, just most of the colleges remaining open, but going to online classes for a few weeks. Only problem is obviously some classes you can’t just throw online and call it a day- like automotive or welding.
Now what’s terrifying is at one of the colleges(the one my girlfriend goes to), there’s a “presumptive positive” case… She’s alright though, and coming home next weekend.
Mrs. B also went to the store to buy some groceries. She said she was very careful about not using shopping carts, touching much of anything and avoiding close contact with people. She said others seemed to be doing the same too.
She said, some of the shelves where the long-lasting foods, like rice, pasta and dry beans are kept, looked low, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. She even came home with a few rolls of toilet paper, which she said was fully stocked. I think we’re seeing, as is usually the case in the news media, worst-case instances of stores that look more like something from Venezuela than the U.S.
I’ve taken to carrying doggy poop bags around with me. Whenever I need to open a public door by grabbing a doorknob, the poop bag goes on my hand and inverted while pulling it off — just like it was full of poo — then tossed into the nearest garbage can. As odd of an over-reaction as this seems, I’m in an age group that needs to be careful. I figure it’s best to over-react for awhile than to risk ending up in the hospital on a ventilator.
That second paragraph reminds me. I work at a grocery store, and when I went back today(wasn’t there last two days… food poisoning…) Some parts of dairy were empty, as were the bread, rice, etc.
They just announced more school closings. The district where my sisters kids go is closing for a month.
… a month.
I don’t know what people are going to do. It’s not like summer break when you ship them off to daycare or sitters or send older kids to hang out at the Library or playground. No one is to be going anywhere that isn’t essential and to be in contact with as few people as possible.
With our lovely ways of not supporting workers time off and giving paid sick time … how are people supposed to keep afloat? They won’t be able to take time off work and no one to watch kids. So they take time anyway and get fired? Or they go to work sick because they can’t afford not to?
These are all just the questions that run through my head right now.
As of this week, my job is fully online and from home now. Any meetings or one-on-one interactions are supposed to take place via phone, email, Skype and Zoom. We had our first online group meeting yesterday, and it went quite well.
I was listening to a podcast while walking the dog a couple of days ago. An epidemiologist was the guest. He said that it’s impossible, of course, to mandate something like this, but if close to 100% of people (aside from emergency responders) holed up in their houses without leaving for two or three weeks, disease transmission would stop and the epidemic would be over, then people could just resume normal life, jobs, school, etc.
It’ll never happen here, but in parts of China, they basically took this approach, but we’d never get compliance for this sort of shock therapy group sacrifice here, so we’ll likely suffer this thing out over months rather than weeks as it continues to spread.
Getting pretty serious here too (England). Looking like schools will be shutting next Friday. Teachers have been instructed to prepare home learning packs. Sporting events are being cancelled, and other concerts presumably.
Worse where my sister is though. She lives and works in Milan, and has been told not to leave her house. She is currently working from home.
Pasta and toilet rolls seem to be the most prized items here at the moment, with supermarket shelves being completely cleared out.
Pretty scary stuff all in all. I’ll be glad when it’s over. That is if I’m alive to be glad. Good luck everyone.
We got take-out food from a small, nearby Chinese restaurant tonight. The owners said their business had all but dried up over the past week. There were no customers in the restaurant at the time and the cashier made sure she stayed about ten feet away from us at all times. It’s going to be tough keeping up this distancing thing for weeks or, perhaps, months.
Wait, you’re worried about CoronaVirus and buying Chinese food where the cashier is staying 10 feet away from you? You know most of that food isn’t made on the premises either, right?
Gotta say I’m glad Dunks and Starbucks stopped refilling travel cups. Always thought that was kind of gross anyway. Same goes for the self-serve hot food and olive/pickle/salad bar at the local grocery store too.
This morning I went to the grocery store because we were all out of steak sauce (and I had to do the bottle/can recycling.) It wasn’t horribly busy but amongst all those people with full carts, it was fun just to pay for a bottle of steak sauce (while redeeming my recycle slips.)
Didn’t even need a bag. LOL.
I went spring clothes shopping yesterday.
This afternoon I got started on unwrapping the boat. About a month early.
If I gotta take two weeks off, I may as well be comfortable.
Looking at RKKs photos, I’m wondering if grocery stores will be cancelling orders for items they can’t even sell in a pandemic emergency. Cheerios better get a clue. LOL.
haha! OMG I thought the same thing! 
Oh and in other news I ventured out today in the dark of night to the store before it closed. I was actually able to get pretty much everything we need. I couldn’t get the potatoes I wanted … but that might have been because they were on special this week. The only bare shelves were in the toilet paper aisle. The bread was low but still bread to choose from. I couldn’t get spaghetti or angel hair but I did get two boxes of spiral… it’s all just pasta anyway right? 
I had such anxiety about going out … but we were careful anyway. We opened doors with our sleeves and had Lysol wipes with us for cart handles and such. Washed up when we got home. etc. Wiped down the groceries and put them away. We are all set for another week or so.
I said over on FB I just don’t understand this fascination with panic buying of TP. I can’t figure out why and said I hope they are at least doing something fun with it … then I posted this
Yeah, I don’t get the toilet paper thing. It might be a necessity, but stocking up on two year’s worth seems silly. I wasn’t sure if it was a real problem or just an internet thing people were laughing about.
I’ve always been wary of shopping carts, door knobs, railings and pens at check-out counters. Anything that lots of people grab hold of is covered with whatever was stuck to the hands whomever grabbed hold of it earlier. Next time I need to go to the store, I think I’ll skip the shopping basket and take my own couple of bags to put things in.
This place advertises that it’s all freshly made, but who knows. Anyway, I haven’t heard any warnings about this virus being transferred via cooked food. I did, however, carefully avoid touching much of anything other than the take-out food itself, though.
There was also a part of me wanting to intentionally do business with this place since I’ve read stories of Chinese restaurants being avoided. These people might have just gotten back from visiting sick relatives in Wuhan, but I sort of doubt it.
A neighbour 2 doors down from us has tested positive. She’s young and healthy but works with kids which is probably where she got it. She’s self isolating for a while. We went shopping and while there were some gaps on the shelves the staff were filling up as quick as they could. Hopefully the panic only lasts a week or so and the shops are able to restock. Where can I buy shares in Andrex?
Did you ask your shut in neighbor if she needed anything while you were out?
My sister has been picking up things for some of the elderly folks at her church so that they don’t have to go out.
Businesses like Peapod and drive-thru grocery pickup are gonna make a killing (pardon the expression.)
One of our industrial suppliers where we get our organic filters for paint masks told us they can’t possibly fill the orders they have, which is now decades worth of their usual stock. They are currently focusing on fulfilling only medical and first-responder orders.
They just banned eating-in at restaurants here in MA, effective tomorrow, I think. Or maybe it’s no more than 25 in the venue at any one time. What the governor said was kinda vague. Take out still works.
There are going to be a lot of bored, scared people around. Expect crime to go up. And if you think the hospitals are going to be overtaxed now, wait until 9 months from now.
I ran to the grocery store yesterday afternoon. It was a typical experience – other than the fact that they were out of TP.
My daughter-in-law teaches at a montessori school. They are closing for at least two weeks. The tough part of that is that going to one income will be a hardship for them. I suspect that’s the case with many of the workers at business that are closing down.
i git sick yesterday, slight fever, chills and could not draw people as i normally do.
a good might of rest i am feeling better, as the cartoon i was drawing is much better!
but still all this hype puts weird thoughts in one’s brain of survival.
Until John’s Hopkins or Mayo or the CDC says something other than avoid by washing hands, not touching face, and keeping a 6 foot distance from people who are sneezing or coughing, it’s the flu. Remember H1N1?
They are not even recommending masks to avoid it (the spew droplets can still get in your eyes…hello.)
Too many people are panicking. We should be doing what we can to protect those more susceptible to this virus, but there is no need to be emptying the grocery stores. The power isn’t going to go out. The water isn’t being shut off. The zombies are not over the next hill.
I’d tend to agree with you. Unfortunately, there’s a snowball effect going on.
I would agree completely that the overall reaction of the general public is so overblown it’s pretty silly.
However, Steve is right about the snowball effect; people who are trying to stay sensible about it see the supply of essential goods depleted by hoarding and can’t help reacting by seeking out more of those items too. As widespread as the panic looks, it’s not hard to imagine factories and freight terminals shutting down, disrupting the supply chains even further.
I’d rarely err on the side of the alarmists, but if you really consider everything, life as we know it is quite precarious, and suscptible to disruption by adverse weather, food issues, epidemic, etc. When you have the lives of a couple of more family members in the balance, the line between justifyable complacency and prudent caution can get kind of blurry in a situation like this.
In my house, we’re trying to balance between calmness and slightly heightened preparedness.
How about adding “taking sensible precautions, but not panicking” between non-beleiveres and panic shopper/hoarder?
