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

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

good singing. you should get a guitar in your size.

haha one of my oldest friends made a similar joke earlier

btw thank you all <3

god spare me from group texts i am SO OVER IT

neanderthal fantastic

Great voice, Neanderthal

otm, very nice!

aw ty all. will have plenty of time to dink around on instruments in coming weeks.

what's everybody up to tonight?

My weekly board game group is downloading the 7 Wonders app so we can do a virtual board game night! Small joys

watched Two-Lane Blacktop

it was good

grading papers : /

working my way through a pile of my more under-played folkways records and deciding which ones are keepers.

reading

mostly trying not to become sick with anxiety over the article morbs shared in the “outbreak” thread tbh

catching up on s5 of Hill Street Blues

ahhh budo jeru now i had to click on it. i didn't see anything surprising there? what particularly is worrying you about it?

would love to hear if you have any particular faves out of those folkways records!

otm, Neanderthal is a very very good singer. And a very good criss cross sitter.

catching up and Neanderthal performing at high levels!

so if you’re shut in and decide to order non-local, amazon’s fastest option is five days out now

I might have to put on my full plague doctor regalia, which would get a knowing nod from people and not panic/jokes, and go to my regular Target store mid-day