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

cool a local person who attended the AIPAC conference has tested positive

i have also chosen to stay home. other than walking my dog i've been home since sunday. i'm lucky that i CAN choose to do that.

I was kinda joking, nobody listen to me i’m not a doctor

maybe we should all sign a quick nda

maybe this is all a trick to 1) get us all into our homes, 2) cut off internet, 3) break us all from our internet addiction

and we've been addicted for so long that this is what it looks and feels like to try come out of it

*slo-mo shot of me crying out in anger while reading a book on day 11 of no internet*

The doc appointment I was at yesterday, the receptionist loudly greeted and HUGGED a lady I guess she knew personally. Then when the lady said "actually Im here cos Im sick" and said she had a fever they made her put on a mask.

AFTER THE RECEPTIONIST HAD JUST FULL BODY HUGGED HER.

Tbh I'm in major need of saving money so i am down with laying low anyway.

Other than the one excursion.

It would be nice if state and natl govt could agree on whether we have community spread, but since fuckin' Desantnis is the one denying it, I'm sure he's lying

I think my work's about to make us all work from home and I am totally down with it. We can all do our jerbs from home anyway.

Lol, just after I left work this afternoon, I saw a couple of business bros shake hands and their faces simultaneously fell once they realized that we're no longer inhabiting the world of casual hand contact with our work colleagues.

I had lots of awkward moments with handshakes today. I asked more than one person, "Are we still shaking hands?", and did elbow bumps instead.

We have no confirmed cases in our county, so I'm being overly cautious, but mostly trying to get into the mindset.

Cancelled gym, Criterion memberships tonight. Waiting til HBO Now renews tomorrow so I'll be able to finish the Outsider. Going to be up all night listing as much shit as I can on EBay and Reverb to hopefully build a little cash for a worst case scenario.

"there is no right or wrong amount of actions to take" somewhat at odds with "stay the fuck home"

Im having a little social soiree at a bar right by my house for my birthday on saturday. I'm trying to pretend nothings wrong at the moment and just let it go ahead, because I havent seen any of my mates in fnyears and I dont want to be The Piker Yet Again, for once. No one's expressed "ew germs" concerns, and yet...

Friday 13th. Full Moon. Coronavirus. Stock market crash.

What could possibligh go wrong?

"there is no right or wrong amount of actions to take" somewhat at odds with "stay the fuck home"

― like, I’m eating an elephant head (katherine), Wednesday, March 11, 2020 11:18 PM bookmarkflaglink

it's basically saying "hey we know not all of this is within your control". also it's an improvement over what's happening now where a large portion of the populace is doing this, another large chunk isn't paying attention to the news and is wiping their butt without washing hands and holding 40,000 people parties with sneezing people at it, another large chunk is paying attention and defying the conventional wisdom, and lots of big events happened instead of being cancelled where people likely got infected.

I read an article in Medium where the author pointed out China actually had 27 times the infections it thought it had during the initial outbreak, and that we probably do too.

I skimmed this quickly--I don't feel like reading it now, but looks to be pretty exhaustive. Maybe posted earlier, I don't know.

http://thewalrus.ca/anatomy-of-an-epidemic/

holding 40,000 people parties with sneezing people at it

oh you mean my pepper parties? but they're FABULOUS

it was a 40,000 people pepper party paroxysm!

tonight's Control Top gig was a first: a punk show where everyone in attendance was consciously making an effort to keep a tiny bit of physical distance from everyone else for the most part. could get used to this tbh

Overkill was so empty that it was ridiculous. my claustrophobic self was happy but i went into the bathroom to wash hands four times

Gobbing still allowed, though?

also got super drunk and apparently ordered Wawa hoagie via Uber Eats and then fell asleep so the driver showed up, gave up trying to wake me up, and hung the bag around my hotel door handle. woke up to find a bag with a sandwich and my name written on it waitign for me on the door, 9 hours later

haaaaa

Living the dream

i don't even remember placing the order. didn't eat the sandwich obv

Dang man, door sandwich is the best kind of sandwich

I am lucky enough to live walking distance from work but I am a lazy moron and run late every morning and this morning I was running extra late and it was raining quite hard so I got the bus, which was bad because it was v full (which on reflection was inevitable since it was raining quite hard) and so I was pressed into several other people, and then by the time I got to work a) there was nobody else here who would've noticed me being late and b) it had stopped raining anyway

I disinfected my hands with a wetwipe after getting off the bus, and then with hand sanitiser on arriving in my building, and then washed my hands when I reached the right floor of the building, but yeah, I need to 1. get better at mornings and 2. maybe talk to my boss who is a p. reasonable person and will almost certainly agree that it's better for me to be 20 minutes late (and stay 20 minutes late at the end of the day, which is fine as I walk home anyway) but at a lower risk of making the whole team ill

Boy oh boy is the train ever empty this morning.

Yes, I should be walking to work, laziness + shit weather is my excuse.

This is so true..... @rivm #COVID2019NL #Corona pic.twitter.com/0tfcWnPmJl

— Lisette Paap (@Mama_Liset) March 12, 2020

This is indeed otm. Dutch gov not bothering with any real measures up till now, and it's beyond irresponsible at this point. It's mostly pointing to regional govs, science and health institutions and individual schools to come up with things. So it's p much left to everyone individual's judgement. Which will of course be totally fine, because people are sensible and logical beings erring on the side of caution amirite?

I would happily have walked to work, but I would've needed to get up an extra (checks) 3.5 hours early.

Yet another argument for switching jobs and ending this ridic commute.

The messaging (across the globe, tbh) has been a mess. It's everywhere. It could be everywhere. Limit exposure. You're already exposed. You may have it. You may have already had it. Stay inside. Avoid crowds. Avoid big crowds. Avoid everybody. And for how long? Each and every one of these things alters my personal daily calculations.

For example, our in-the-balance trip to Hawaii. Do we need to go? Of course not. What is gained by not going? Well, maybe we won't get exposed, on the plane, in the airport, in Maui. Or maybe we'll stay and get exposed here. Or maybe we've been exposed and we might bring it to Maui. Maybe we've been exposed, might go to Maui, come back, and *then* exhibit symptoms. Maybe we've been exposed, go to Maui, and then exhibit symptoms there. Maybe we stay and nothing happens. Maybe we go and nothing happens. Maybe it's all over Maui. Maybe it's all over Chicago. Maybe it's not all over both places but is by the time the trip comes around in a week. Maybe it all happens midway through the trip.

It feels like the *right* thing to do is not to go, but I'm also having trouble pinpointing exactly who that helps, or at least how it helps them.

I'm going to meet a newborn baby tonight and I'm very nervous about this.

It helps everyone. Very interaction is a chance you could pick it up or pass it on. So the fewer interactions the slower it spreads, the less chance someone vulnerable gets it and the more chance there is to find a vaccine before more vulnerable people get and the more able the healthcare system is able to cope with acute cases that do arise.

Babies and children have been ok so far haven’t they? They’re not getting it as much and I don’t think I’ve seen reports of fatalities.

xpost I can't remember when your trip is or if it's direct, through Honolulu, but if the airline(s)/accommodation loosened up the cancel policy, I would probably take it. If you are already having these thoughts you will be too stressed to enjoy it properly. Like IS THIS SNORKEL PROPERLY SANITIZED!?!?!

P sure I heard some casual Sinophobia on my way into the building this morning. Something akin to 'Asian people get it more easily! It started over there!'

I've heard a LOT of that.

heh, someone actually told my friend on the ny subway to get away from her (he's from singapore). Relatively pretty mild, he was so upset.

Heh, good point re: sanitizing snorkels. No, we're direct to Maui, and yes, they loosened up the cancellation policy, so I don't think we would lose *too* much money. It's more a thought experiment. Yeah, I know limiting exposure is the right idea, but there is no indication that, let alone self quarantine, is happening on anything sort of a large scale in this country. Yeah, the reason we wouldn't want to travel is, in the off chance we have it, we don't want to spread it. But in the off chance we have it or get it here, we don't want to spread it here, either. And that is a consideration every time we leave the house. Yet the messaging has not been clear or consistent on that point. Even Italy, they imposed quarantine .... with a bunch of loopholes, incl. closing restaurants early but not entirely. And they since seriously tightened restrictions, because half measures might as well be no measures. It seems if America is seriously about stopping this early, we all have to stay home. But America is rarely serious about anything, and I doubt that would happen.

and maui is not dense at all comparatively. We've driven all over that island and you could totally hide out on some beaches and not see people.

there was a recent article though about a canadian doctor who just returned from HI and tested positive, but they don't know when she got it (she had still been seeing patients).

Yeah. I wish we could drive there! A couple of our friends, driving is their compromise. One has a sick mother in Milwaukee, but may drive to visit rather than train it. Another was going to NY, but may drive instead of fly. Not that either ultimately may help. Just perhaps slow. By, like, a couple of hours.

I should, er, stress that I'm not particularly stressed. I and my family are healthy, and there is no one in our lives (here) at particular risk. Our older parents, who recently traveled, are out of the incubation range and doing well. Our families overseas in the UK and Australia are doing well. We are in a position to weather things for a while. For that we are quite thankful. My biggest issue these days is getting over a cold (yes, a boring cold, nothing but the sniffles) that my kid gave me that has somehow reduced my sense of taste to next to nothing.

so it's 5 am and i just wrote this up, hope it's not inappropriate to c&p, i don't have anywhere else to say this shit

Everybody wants to be judgemental now. Monday morning quarterbacks, looking to assign blame, whose FAULT is this. Honestly? Honestly I don't see how things could have gone down any differently. No, we didn't immediately recognize the scale of the threat or understand how best to respond. It's something that we've never faced in our lifetimes! Learning through experience, this is a necessary expedient. You can make all sorts of plans for whatever might possibly happen, but shit is happening now and it took us some time to figure out what, exactly, it is, and what we need to do about it.

So this "If we'd implemented a global quarantine two weeks ago we could have saved so many lives", it fails to recognize that underlying reality. I'm not an expert, but what I believe and how I react matters, what I'm willing to accept matters. The Overton Window has to move and it doesn't do that instantaneously. Last week I was focused entirely on two statistics - the mortality rate and the infectiousness of COVID-19. And I was reassured because everybody else was "OH MY GOD WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE" and I did not see that as an immediate outcome. I assumed that I already had the coronavirus and that I was going to live.

Well, now we're starting to understand the actual fucking problem of this epidemic. Which is not mortality, but the number of people who are going to get seriously ill. For 80% of the population COVID-19 is mild, we were told. The implication of that is obvious and I chose not to think about it, chose to focus on the positive. There are going to be a lot of people who are going to be very sick, and the number of them who are going to die is directly dependent on our healthcare systems' capacity to treat those people. That is why this is a crisis. For a quarantine to have started two weeks ago, you would have had to convince the global population that what appeared to be a minor inconvenience was a major crisis, that everybody needed to stop leaving their house immediately despite nobody being sick, and more importantly to do that without having the entire populace completely overtaken by mass panic.

I've lived through a few hurricanes. People are capable of being convinced. People are capable of preparing for this shit. As long as, you know, it's happened in living memory. Which it hasn't, and all we can do is make pointless comparisons to the Spanish Flu which are about as valuable and useful as talking about the Antonine Plague as far as I can tell.

This is going to be difficult. People are going to die unnecessarily. A lot of things are going to go down that are outside anybody's control. My personal priority isn't pointing the finger right now, it's surviving and learning as much as I can from the experience.

xp I think my calculus in a situation like yours Josh, if indeed the factors seem to be too numerous and contradictory, would be to err on the side of caution and just not go.

The only certainty is that by not traveling you reduce the odds of becoming a vector. Yes, it's impossible to know by how much, but if it's the welfare of others we're talking about you may decide that doesn't matter.

xp Kate otm. Speaking of pointing fingers: I heard your presidetn referred to COVID19 as "the foreign virus"...

Not my presidetn.

xxpost I tend to agree. But I just got my first real world example of personal calculation. My daughter just asked me for a ride to school, and I said ok. Then she asked if we could give her friend a ride, since I prefer to carpool. OK. Then she added that her friend needed a ride because her friend's mom was sick. Whoa, wait a second. Sick how? She had to write her back for me to make sure it wasn't bad, and indeed no fever or vomiting, just doesn't feel well (turns out it was a UTI, which my wife knew). But if her mom *was* exhibiting ay flu-like symptoms, I guess I would have said ... no?

xpost kate: Modern people are very reactive instead of proactive (ex: their health) and that really needs to change. And the idealized/fetishization of separateness and individual freedom means people don't have an understanding of how everything is connected and what could be impacted.

I'm pretty much as lucky as I can be w/r/t risk to others or myself - I'm young, no risk factors, and in Canada where so far the confirmed infection rate is not very high (knock on wood); more importantly neither work nor life puts me in contact with elderly folks except in briefest passing via public transit; I did have US travel plans this summer but it seems like it'll be possible to get refunded on most if not all of that so all I'll experience is mild disappointment; I can work from home as needed so there's no financial risk.

Mostly I just wish there was something useful I could actually DO rather than just avoid doing. (I expect there will be no shortage of Gofundmes etc to help keep ppl afloat when they inevitably lose their jobs or risk eviction so I guess there's that.)

I'm uncertain who the we/us is in Kate's post?