Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020

my bestie is out of work with coronavirus symptoms, nobody will see her to test as she's not "high risk", but she's being responsible and not reporting to work. they snottily told her they won't pay her, that she has to use sick leave (she hasn't earned any yet, her company may have more than 500 people,and even if not, they have 15 days to implement the new rule).

Virginia just expanded unemployment claims temporarily to where they will literally allow you to apply even if you're gainfully employed and you can't report to work due to effects of the virus, even if you aren't diagnosed with it, but suspect you have it. my friend has been arguing with me that it's not true for 2 hours even though I have shared three newspaper articles and text from the website itself indicating this new change.

Hate being a nag but I think this is her only option to get paid (for right now) while she's out and each day she doesn't is a day she isn't getting paid.

Fuck them, KM. If they’re that big it should come out in the news?

what's especially dumb is that this is a bigass company with lots of contracts throughout the country - we're consultants and program implementers, funded by clients. and the client my program works for isn't withholding any money or saying they're not going to pay us. but even still, my company has decided to slash everyone's pay by 20%, regardless of the situation with their client. also being explained now that we are still expected to work the same amount of time, accomplish the same, etc

― Karl Malone, Thursday, March 19, 2020 4:58 PM bookmarkflaglink

I mean...not that there's ever a good reason to issue people pay cuts, but even giving benefit of the doubt and assuming there were, there's a way to massage that message and shitting on people by saying "lol btw u still gotta do the same but we give u less" is...not it.

I would def be calling out with coronavirus symptoms en masse at that point. 50 people a day.

shiter. sorry KM

My dad and his wife are late 70s in Saint Augustine FL. I've been trying to instill some paranoia in them and it seems to have been working.

But I was just on the phone with him and heard his doorbell ring, and he responded just as if it was last summer and a neighbor was dropping in to say hi. I told him not to answer it but to go out though the garage and see who it was. Turns out it's this guy my dad met in a hardware store last fall, who saw the For Sale sign in the window of his Chrysler Sebring, and has since been making payments of btw $100-$200/mo on it. The guy is broke and an ex-con and my dad is a retired minister who does things like this. He's coming to give my dad a hundred bucks.

So I tell my dad to just tell him to keep his distance, so he does that, and the guy responds by making a joke about the plague, and my dad is like it's no joke. And the guy says, well *we* don't have it! And my dad says no, we don't have any idea—I might, you might. And then the guy laughs—I can hear him getting closer and louder and then counting off the five twenties, handing them to my dad, and then saying "If you have faith you're not going to get it! Faith is stronger!"

I think my dad was being a little performative because he wants me to know that he gets it now, and he says, "Vance, this virus doesn't give a shit if you have faith." And the guy just laughs and drives away in this little silver convertible.

I'm so scared of my parents getting this. We stayed on the phone while he washed his hands.

nb my dad doesnt have "faith", he's long been agnostic at best

but this is how some ppl's brainz are working

why are there so many dicks that wanna infringe on other people's ability to self isolate. so many people just ask politely "hey, trying to keep six feet" only to have the assholes go "fuck that, you'll be fine, and invade their general space".

best wishes for your parents - totally get that worry. I worry about mine too, but mom has only been leaving to get groceries, and even then they've been pre-ordering them on Walmart so she doesn't have to go walking through the entire store.

like even if I had a friend that had a completely unfounded medical fear, like they were afraid of getting cancer from being around a microwave, even if I thought there was no basis in hell, I wouldn't hold a microwave up against their head and say "ENDURE THIS!".

people's own insecurities about the seriousness of this causing them to show their ass and put other people at risk.

xxp your dad sounds like a solid guy!

he is yeah. I wanna see him again, too.

xp yeah I am trying to get my mom in MI to start ordering groceries online, seems....unlikely

I've been trying to communicate to my parents that the thing they can do to help me the most is Just. Stay. Home.

And for my dad: find something to do that doesn't involve actively bugging my mom

xxpost yeah I like his response. it's what people don't get. the virus doesn't care if you need a day to unwind, or if you have faith in God or Odin, or if you've already had the flu this year, or if you live in a warm climate.

it doesn't care, it'll infect people, so fuckin' listen to the experts!

those friends I wanted to room with for everything, well, forgot that one of them works for a bar that serves food that's still open, sooooo they've both essentially been exposed to hundreds of people. guess that's out.

might hole up with my parents once we're sure I haven't had contact with anybody for 14 days but that'll be months of my mom asking me why I never go on dates and remembering the answer 5 seconds later each time.

for some reason I am still engagin and getting "likes" on 2 different dating apps which is all well and good but also....why, again?

conjugal distancing

my parents are in spain. full lockdown. can only go to the supermarket in 1s. no jogging, no cycling... at least it's warm and they can in the garden

sit*

So, my aunt is in the hospital in NYC recovering from a diagnostic procedure to determine whether she had lung cancer or not (thankfully, pre-cancerous growth only). She just told my Dad that a bunch of nurses/doctors came in to interact with her "roommate" in some type of masks, gear, etc. and then quickly moved my aunt out of the room. Now I believe she is getting tested for coronavirus before they try and release her ASAP. They said the safest place for her was at home.

I wish I could in a garden. (xp)

Also, someone in my wife's office apparently tested positive. My wife has been working from home since Friday.

Xps to Karl

Last week my husband warned his boss and the money person that this pandemic was going to have a big impact on their small business and they needed to start figuring out countermeasures, and they both were like nah we’ll be fine.

Yesterday the money person suggested the three of them take a 20% salary cut to subsidize the business - a v successful small business that always has a cash reserve of at least $100k (and still does) and has never used a line of credit (and still hasnt).

The fucking nerve.

ugh. i'm sorry to hear that.

so wait, was there a national business assholes conference where they all decided to go with a 20% cut?

That sucks, guys. If I got a 20% pay cut it'd be damn close to the NY unemployment weekly rate, so i'd probably move into my sister's.

This seems to be a consensus? cuz i'm not cooking all my fruits and vegetables:

Experimental studies with a bovine coronavirus have shown that the virus can be stable on the surface of lettuce, said Linda Saif, a scientist and coronavirus researcher at CFAES and Ohio State’s College of Veterinary Medicine.

“Coronaviral RNA was detectable on the lettuce surface for 30 days, and infectious bovine coronavirus was detected on the lettuce surface for at least 14 days after inoculation,” said Saif, who is a world-renowned expert on coronaviruses. “However, from experience with previous outbreaks of SARS and MERS, the transmission through food consumption is not likely to occur.”

https://www.ocj.com/2020/03/food-safety-and-coronavirus/

definitely boiling my lettuce from now on

meh wash in hot water

all the food deliveries from the major supermarkets round here are totally booked for march and all of april, just no slots at all, so i'm going to have to run the gauntlet at the local shop at some stage. we did get a leaflet through our door from neighbours who are organising whatever they can for people stranded in their own homes, but i'll see if we can get through this by ourselves first before calling in the cavalry. or alternatively we just live on mailorder health food shite and vitamin c pills, which wouldn't be too bad tbh - maybe i might look into that

also going to have to start growing lettuce on our window sills and get some good microherbs going too

The only upside of this lasting months is that eventually we can start growing things, at least up north.

So how seriously should we be taking this "significant shortages" business? Any thoughts?

holy christ, 1 litre of alpro soya milk is £15 on amazon uk at the moment plus delivery

that'll teach those poxy vegans

Local pubs and restaurants here are starting to deliver food and one is delivering farm shop goods (slighty eyewatering prices, but still)

and the booze shop

We started our windowsill herbs on Sunday
Chives, Sage and Thyme

The other half was listening to Radio 4 today, some expert with a really stress-inducing voice was discussing the very real possibility of nearly every small to medium airline company going out of business and huge portions of the global network shutting down, new age of isolationism and so on. Damn.

thanks to deregulation and lack of antitrust enforcement there are no small or medium airlines in the US so uh…good news?

I'm sure the large airlines will jump at the chance to get larger by buying up equipment, runway slots, and routes at cut rates

i will be very interested once we come out the other side of the acute phase of the crisis to know which companies are doing right by their employees and which companies are doing things like karl's employer are doing. i hope somebody is keeping fairly reliable publically accessible documentation of this for future reference.

they'll be goners too at this rate, absent quite radical government intervention

I love the ongoing positivity from a friend:

An optimist’s take: from the New York Times, “When Cambridge University in England closed in 1665 because of the bubonic plague, a young man named Isaac Newton went home to the countryside. And there he sat under the famous apple tree and realized that the same gravity worked on the apple and the Moon. Let us hope that the current situation leads one of today’s scholars to make a breakthrough that will help future generations. Jay M. Pasachoff, Williamstown, Mass., The writer is a professor of astronomy at Williams College.”

The number infected in Austin has doubled each of the last few days, but outside of schools, restaurants, bars, and gyms, most businesses are allowed to be open. Many are closing anyway, but I don't really see why they aren't pushing more stringent measures. On the plus side, we can now get alcoholic beverages with our pick up and delivery orders, so we got that going for us, which is nice.

i will be very interested once we come out the other side of the acute phase of the crisis to know which companies are doing right by their employees and which companies are doing things like karl's employer are doing. i hope somebody is keeping fairly reliable publically accessible documentation of this for future reference.

No fucking way. I know an employment attorney (management side) and her phone has been ringing off the hook all week: first part of the week was, we want to pay our employees that choose to WFH; more recently, how do we furlough/layoff our employees without liability?

i mean you can ask lawyers "how do i screw over my employees while making sure i got mine" but at a certain point that question ceases to be a legal question

i promise i don't have any lit memes to share with you but my sense is that certain powerful people are perhaps overly confident in their ability to control the potential outcomes of this thing and lack a certain amount of creative imagination when it comes to envisioning the bounds of those possible outcomes

So you're saying they haven't found out about the pitchforks yet.

Was bummed about my show being cancelled but felt better when I found a good acoustic room and recorded a version of a song I was gonna do in it on uke. Therapeutic.

Neanderthal is Hooked on a Feeling

nice!

Great job man! Great voice!

Dayum, Neanderthal can SING. Props.

Bruh got pipes!

correct