I am very sorry to hear that. My condolences.
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Wow. Condolences to both of you.
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B & Hot, I’m so very sorry for losses.
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B and Hotbutton, my condolences on your loss.
I have a very what you might call fatalistic view on life on this planet.
I have a very hard time believing the numbers on this virus. With so many people in the broad age range of 10-50 years old that shake this thing with no more symptoms than the common flu, I believe the “confirmed” cases are far under-reported. Which would make the death rate lower than it actually appears.
Not that I’m not taking it seriously for those immuno-compromised or elderly.
What I am taking seriously is that we have had a LOT of work cancelled because of this. Events mostly, but the ripple effect of no travel/no vacation/no shopping is soon gonna take a toll.
We’ll see.
Weird things missing from the grocery store if you know where to look.
Shelf stable milk.
Flour
Sugar
TP of course
Clorox (there’s been some bad advice circulating the web about actually drinking clorox to stave this thing off.)
Hand sanitizer
Rubbing alcohol
alcohol prep pads
Rubber gloves
And a host of other things.
Steve-o, I had a physical a couple days ago and had x-rays. I’m more worried about the 3 kids with strep waiting for throat cultures in the lab area.
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Well this has taken a bit of a turn. 
I’m so sorry for your loss B and HB. You both have my deepest sympathies 
As for cancellations I live in a tourist area and folks from Lake George are already a bit panicky because people have already started cancelling reservations for the upcoming season. I live 500 feet from the Race Track. We are talking 100’s of thousands of people from all over the world descend to this area for July and August. Now maybe by then things will be well in hand by then but, everyone in tourism is very nervous.
Also my Niece who has finished her Bachelors Degree may not be able to graduate. She would still get her diploma of course . but they are talking of cancelling the celebration. My heart is hurting so for her right now. All that hard work and part of the greatness of it is getting to walk across that stage.
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Yeah, sorry about that, but maybe some news I just received moments ago will lighten it back up . . .
Remember this?
Well Haleigh again won her school and earned a spot in the regional bee. But a sponsorship change shifted our school district into a much larger “region,” where over 100 other school-level winners would have to be outspelled. So, like the Scripps National Bee, it was to be done in 2 phases; a written elimination round, and then a month later, a traditional oral bee with the survivers of the written test.
Well, the written test was 3 weeks ago, and the oral final round was just cancelled due to Coronavirus. the organizer just contacted us and explained that Scripps won’t allow the region to be without a champion, so if there was a single contestant who outscored all the others in the written round—and there was—they they would get the trip to Scripps. So we’re going again this year! 
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Congratulations to her! What a smarty pants!
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Weekend Update: No public gatherings over 250, all county buildings shut down, School districts are closing for an undetermined amount of time.
I’ll show you a little up close and personal of what’s going on here. This is just one of our markets. If the Zombie Apocalypse hits … we are never gonna survive it 
This is the store my Niece works at. She has been on overtime for the past 4 days working over night stocking to try to get the shelves filled back up for the next round of hoarders. There have already been incidents of people pulling items out of other peoples carts. Some have really gone F-ing nuts. This was from our conversation last night:
Me: I’m more scared of the people than the virus at this point. …be careful
Her: Same haha I don’t think I’ll perish in the event I get the virus but someone might kill me for some charmin 
Me: That’s what I mean !!! Lolol 
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btw … I’ve never seen shelves like this … even when they are predicting a Nor’easter and a good portion of the population hear that as … “go into panic mode, you will be snowed in for weeks”
Mrs. Steve O went to the grocery store this morning. She said it was very busy, but I didn’t ask if the aisles were wiped out like RKK’s photos. I’ll have to ask her. She brought home a couple of whole chickens to smoke for tomorrow night’s dinner. That was the main thing I was concerned about.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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