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

Ah, white people:

https://apple.news/AeYT3Z5mdTYis0-6Ml8TbFg

formula 1 grand prix in melbourne just got cancelled. our local park gets disrupted massively for this thing, and suddenly it’s off (they definitely made the right decision though).

Mandatory telework day tomorrow for everyone. This is as close to a serious COOP exercise as we’ve ever done in my 13 years working at this (very COOP-wary) agency.

Almost all the chicken, rice and pasta is sold out at local grocers, plus the other stuff people have already talked about to death. Funny to see what’s left - you could go for the Jordan Peterson 🍖 🥩 🥓 diet, easily. And anything organic, that shit costs too much to hoard, apparently.

I went to a local pizzeria for lunch and the three people in the front of the house (bartender, self, other customer) had a short rap session about mortality and how silly it is to take extreme measures to avoid death when you could get hit by a truck crossing the street

I was loling at the stuff left at TJ’s today — people turned up their noses at the fully stocked freezer of frozen carrot spirals and the only canned tomatoes left wee the ones w green chiles, of which there was an entire shelf.

I had some quality lols w students, fellow shoppers, and store clerks today. School finally announced a plan, I’m willing to admit that I’m going to miss being around people.

Might be time for me to be growing more food than I do now.

My face let me touch it

i like those TJ tomatoes with green chiles in the can.

and I would totally buy some local pizzeria pizzas to freeze if there was a decent one near me and it was that moment in time to hunker down.

vote by mail!

― Karl Malone, Thursday, March 12, 2020 11:49 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think it may be too late at this point, as you have to request a ballot which they then have to mail to you. Maybe, though. I'll look into it.

― Unparalleled Elegance (Old Lunch)

oh, dammit. the deadline was today, 5pm. :(

Writing shit down seems important to me right now, like it did on 9/11. Probably presumptuous to me to think any of this crap is going to be useful to posterity but I want it down for the record that I'm doing my best not to panic, but that I don't know what exactly is going on or what the "right thing" to do is. Today was a very bad day at work because I do have panic disorder and I'm not blind to what's going on around me. I know what my voice sounds like, it sounds like I'm having a hard time of it, and I probably am.

I don't want to be a downer. I don't want to be negative. It's not my style to dance around the possible negative outcomes, to pretend they won't happen. Because maybe they happen anyway, and I don't know if it's me, but a lot of people I know tend to blame themselves for everything bad that happens, and I feel like I need to tell them: Bad things might happen to people you love, and if they do, it's not your fault. A lot of my co-workers have living parents. I have a living parent who's over 70 years old and like many 70 year olds, has multiple health problems. I'm making sure to stay in contact with the people I know. There's so little I can do but right now at least I can still tell the people I care about that I care about them, and that feels important. I have two close relatives who are ER travel nurses. They are going to have it very hard so I want to at least support them as much as I can. Was very hard to talk to my brother because he was expecting the usual coronavirus bullshit - so many people are still apparently viewing "risk" purely in terms of individual risk of mortality. My brother said don't worry about me, worry about my patients. I had to tell him, I'm working on communicating this stuff to him, look, I know you're very unlikely to die from this, it's not about that. You're my brother, I care about you, you already don't have the resources you need to do your job, this is going to be hard, I just want you to know I love you and I care about you. And he accepted that, which is so hard to get to with him and so great.

But I am starting to deal with the possibility that people I care about will die, and everybody I talk to, whether they're at risk or not, is dealing with the same. And if they're not... most of my family is fine, but my other brother, he's had trouble with depression of late, works in the restaurant industry, already isn't getting enough hours, and how many millions of people like him are going to be hit by this? Saying "I'm lucky" isn't about diminishing my subjective experience.

I've cancelled everything, or rescheduled it so that I can do it over the phone. I'm working from home and will avoid leaving the house to the greatest extent possible.

But I am starting to deal with the possibility that people I care about will die

It's hard to conceive of. I wish my meditation teacher had more than one lung.

Two credit card companies have raised my limit this week. Too bad it's so hard to fake your death these days.

High school closed tomorrow, "e-learning" next week.

this is… not a great time to be unemployed

Unless you have kids sent home from school, I guess.

Finally got into our work system and saw an email from the vp about rumors of everyone in the company defaulting to working from home over the next several weeks. So I wrote my boss and said, hey, looks like I'm connected to everything I need to be connected to, any way I can expedite this working from home thing so I don't have to unnecessarily expose myself to a viral outbreak? And he gave me some mealy-mouthed shit about, well, y'know, just plan on coming on in tomorrow and, well, y'know, we'll play it by ear from there.

Well, y'know, I believe I'm going to be 'contracting a fever' (or, after another day riding the dirty-ass train, contracting a legitimate and scare-quote-less fever) over the weekend, so either y'all get your mothafuckin ducks in a row or I'm going to be on an unplanned vaycay for the foreseeable future.

We're going to be testing work from home to test our call software on the laptop softphones next week. I'm looking forward to it, I love working from home. I guess I'm well placed in an industry that may do well out of all this, we sell/support VoIP, mobile and teleconferencing networks.

Universal Orlando closed. my brother is getting paid while closed though. that was my worry so I'm relieved.

oh, dammit. the deadline was today, 5pm. :(

― Karl Malone, Thursday, March 12, 2020 7:16 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Dunno if you'll see this, but:

We're extending Vote By Mail applications online through midnight tonight, Mar 12. You may also drop off a paper form at 69 W Washington on 1st Floor through midnight.
Online application and paper forms are here: https://t.co/L0RGQd0fGs

— ChicagoElection (@ChicagoElection) March 12, 2020

This is where we need the @ feature/notifications

@old lunch: vote or die!

Thank u for info and link but I am unfortunately just over the Chitown border so I think our vote by mail ship has sailed. I'll still rally on Tuesday even if my insides are on the outside of me at that point.

work is likely to close to the public tomorrow and suspend operations shortly thereafter. this is going to be hell on the backend when all our very tightly plotted deadlines unravel. COVID aside, this is a totally new and unpredictable workplace situation, very weird

things in australia are going down like dominoes today. grand prix cancelled, no public events of 500+ people, no international travel unless necessary, loads of events being cancelled all over the place. just suddenly happening today all at once.

yeah. i feel like the last couple days were like that here in the US. dominoes is a good analogy. take care. things are weird.

xp sparkle motion i feel very similarly. it's very strange, the work situation. a big thing our program does is energy assessments, and they all just got canceled until mid-may at the earliest. just a very strange thing to deal with, apart from everything else. i've had a lot of difficulty concentrating, too.

xpost I'm beginning to wonder how busy I will be soon. I'm a full time instructor, BUT clearly with today's infection in the San Juan office, it's only a matter of time before other offices have that same issue, and when one office closes, another has to step up, which means pulling people from the phones to put into training is....going to be discouraged?

There is a special training redesign project, and I'm assuming our third party is still working as I presume most of them don't actually work in an office, but....that ain't enough to keep me busy. wondering if they tell us to peace out for a bit and pay us. I would not mind that at all.

suffice it to say, when shit like this happens, it's unbelievable how I suddenly stop caring about performance issues. my company isn't gonna lay anybody off now, cos they know how optics look, but I am betting come like...November, suddenly it will be "hmm, do we really need 6 trainers? can we get by with 5? and coincidentally can the one that has an unusually high salary for this role?"

All schools and colleges in the area closed til end of month. So it's taken several talks and dance classes and things with it.
Also the library and community centres for same duration.
& art galleries in the middle of exhibitions which may or may not continue after that date. Not sure how concrete a reopening on that date is. Cos nobody does.
Just gingers crossed that things improve don't go further the other way.
Did get to ask what "total collapse of society" was in Irish before the classes were put in a forced break.
But still god what a drag.
Art festivals and events already had a bad start because of frequent storms. Now this.
Galway 2020 seems to have had bad luck since before it started. Didn't raise the funds it was intended to beforehand either. & has now presumably lost a load.
Grand opening was the night of Ciara so got shelved.

I wonder if Trump will be stubborn enough to hold one of his rallies...

oh please do.
Book a tour even

'gingers crossed'

I am enjoying this typo

trying to persuade my 68 year old mum who had a p bad case of pneumonia a couple of years ago to give the bingo a miss tomorrow night. not having much luck so far.

suffice it to say, when shit like this happens, it's unbelievable how I suddenly stop caring about performance issues. my company isn't gonna lay anybody off now, cos they know how optics look, but I am betting come like...November, suddenly it will be "hmm, do we really need 6 trainers? can we get by with 5? and coincidentally can the one that has an unusually high salary for this role?"

― sorry for butt rockin (Neanderthal)

my wife has the same worries. trying to stay "mostly apolitical" because i've already had my hand smacked once but when it comes to this i tend to think of it in terms of how many people are uncertain and worried about how they're going to keep the lights on for the next month, not in the sense of guilt or privilege or whatever but in the sense of... if stuff like that starts happening on a wide scale, you or i probably aren't the first or the most likely people to be hit with that. 2020 was already going to be a super unpredictable year. worrying about my long-term financial health isn't a priority for me because i can't do anything about it, can't predict what's going to happen, can't take any reasonable or meaningful steps to prepare for whatever that is. it's more important for me to work on being flexible and capable of adapting to whatever happens, that's a lot of what i mean when i say i want to learn as much as i can from this crisis. controlling panic for me is declaring certain concerns arbitrarily "out of scope" and putting them on a shelf until later.

trying to persuade my 68 year old mum who had a p bad case of pneumonia a couple of years ago to give the bingo a miss tomorrow night. not having much luck so far.

The bingo was packed on Wednesday! I thought i could roll into an empty hall and win all the money, but alas.

My mother's asthmatic and a former nurse / radiographer and currently won't stay at home, despite me offering to do all her shopping for the next few weeks. My dad, who had a severe respiratory issue two years ago, is just getting off a twelve-hour flight, trading a country with no coronavirus and lousy hospitals for one with decent hospitals but a growing outbreak. Might just weld their locks shut and pipe in soup through a window.

Wanted to link this quickly while I'm still thinking about it - one question that has been vexing me was determining how long a surface can be contaminated. There are basic advisories on avoiding shaking hands, touching door handles, sharing phones and other common items but little on whether or not you should scrub down the last remaining bags of rice on the shelf at Whole Foods. I'm working under the assumption that all of Pasadena has been coughing on them.

This article is new (March 9), hasn't been peer reviewed yet, but builds off another paper from January.

Aerosol and surface stability of HCoV-19 (SARS-CoV-2) compared to SARS-CoV-1

We found that viable virus could be detected in aerosols up to 3 hours post aerosolization, up to 4 hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to 2-3 days on plastic and stainless steel. HCoV-19 and SARS-CoV-1 exhibited similar half-lives in aerosols, with median estimates around 2.7 hours. Both viruses show relatively long viability on stainless steel and polypropylene compared to copper or cardboard: the median half-life estimate for HCoV-19 is around 13 hours on steel and around 16 hours on polypropylene. Our results indicate the aerosol and fomite transmission of HCoV-19 is plausible, as the virus can remain viable in aerosols for multiple hours and on surfaces up to days.

So our best friends flew to New Orleans for her Mom's 80th Birthday Party . . . with her Mom. I told my friend they are insane. Surprise Mom . . . we got you coronavirus for your birthday!

From January (HCoV-19 specifics aren't fully listed here yet).

Persistence of coronaviruses on inanimate surfaces and their inactivation with biocidal agents

Most data were described with the endemic human coronavirus strain (HCoV-) 229E. On different types of materials it can remain infectious for from 2 hours up to 9 days. A higher temperature such as 30°C or 40°C reduced the duration of persistence of highly pathogenic MERS-CoV, TGEV and MHV. However, at 4°C persistence of TGEV and MHV can be increased to ≥ 28 days. Few comparative data obtained with SARS-CoV indicate that persistence was longer with higher inocula (Table I). In addition it was shown at room temperature that HCoV-229E persists better at 50% compared to 30% relative humidity.

A guy I know at work, who is supposed to be going to the pub with us tonight, just tested positive. He's been disinvited. Also, apparently he was in work yesterday when he was ill.

Christ, that sucks.

It looks like a) basically only people from my department are in the office so far today (read: other people with sensible managers are sensibly working from home), b) only a handful of my department is actually coming in at all today, and c) all of the management in my department are spending the day cozily ensconced in their comfy comfy beds instead of deigning to come into our germ-ridden office. The handful of us here atm are getting increasingly grumbly and 'fuck this'-ish.

I don't directly work with him and I haven't been in his company for well over a month, so it could be worse.

Haven't been for a few days, but apparently the freezer aisle at our local Trader Joe's was literally cleared out. We know someone who works there, and their usual average daily sales are around $65,000, but they doubled that yesterday. We popped in to a different store yesterday, just to check it out, and they were out of TP and some cleaning stuff, but mostly seemed stocked. A Target I was at wasn't that bad (yet) either.

Oh, I just heard through the grapevine that the manager in the department directly behind me, who was here at least through like Wednesday, was sent home sick at some point in the last day or so. Don't know what 'sick' means but can't wait to find out. Caaaaaaaaan't wait. Caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan't wait.

All employees (about 30k) at my company advised to work from home for the foreseeable.

In keeping with my company's general state of bumblefuckery, they're apparently making decisions here on a department-by-department basis. So a department on the other side of our floor has already been told that they'll be working from home starting Monday and for at least the next three weeks. Whereas our department is sharing the dribs and drabs of information that each of us has learned from our respective managers, as we're each apparently only privy to certain information pertaining to the near future of our work situation. It's fun! Like a scavenger hunt!

same here at my job. a bunch of vague emails about preparing to shift to offsite operations, documents about how to work from offsite, but no communication about who is going to be working from home or when it will start

Apart from anything else, presumably there's no work getting done in this situation?

i am working from home (and hence posting) as i normally do, very extremely unsure when and how i'm going to get paid for much of it and thus ardently wishing my various editors and their finance departments the best of all possible health wherever they may end up doing what they do, and swift communications to all inc.uninterrupted BACS activity

5:30am email: Normal operations; everyone report to work
6:48am email: The university is closed; stay home

After 36 hours of searing chest pain, shortness of breath, and a battery of tests, a friend was just told by her doctors she "probably" has it, but no COVID tests are available in our area and no likelihood of getting them soon, and no likelihood of her even being allowed to take one since she hasnt left the country or had a proven contact with a confirmed case. She is recovering from a splenectomy a couple months ago and freaking out.

Just had a jolly-hockeysticks email from the higher-ups saying in v rallying-the-troops tones that nothing has changed but we're all ~thinking very hard~ about the serious changes that we may eventually get round to deciding on.

Apart from anything else, presumably there's no work getting done in this situation?

Aargh, I spent months refreshing Brexit news constantly and having it fill up all my available brain space that I was supposed to be using for other things and now I'm back in that place. I don't really understand how anyone else is not, and one colleague made tentative noises re similar earlier, but apparently everyone else was happy to Just (Let Someone) Get On With It re Brexit, so maybe it's just me...

(and this thread. Thank you, this thread)

The most popular route to Mount Everest is shutting down as Nepal seeks to check the spread of the pandemic.

Priorities!

Wanted to link this quickly while I'm still thinking about it - one question that has been vexing me was determining how long a surface can be contaminated.

― Elvis Telecom

This is one of the things that frustrates me most about COVID response. While I understand wanting to avoid panic, a lot of people recommended - and in fact are still recommending - measures to prevent COVID despite not knowing how, exactly, COVID spreads, and in some cases directly counter to the emerging knowledge of how COVID spreads. If COVID can remain viable on a plastic surface for up to 72 hours, how on earth are we supposed to believe moving to shift work will be an effective means of containment?

There are costs to well-intentioned falsehoods. I feel like the best thing I can do here is not assume people's intentions and to not map my assumptions about panic and social dynamics onto other people's actions, so I will just say that whatever the reason, when supposed experts recommend measures to prevent the spread of disease that turn out to be utterly inadequate, it erodes the level of trust in those experts, erodes anybody's attempts to keep people from panicking. I am suspending any further judgements on the topic for the present moment.