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

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.

Mt Everest is closed??

Went to Target this morning. It opened at 8 and at 7:45 there was a line forming at the door. Not full-on Black Friday, but surprising. As we all shuffled in the door, one employee said jokingly to his manager, "Maybe they're all here for Animal Crossing!" Later, as I was in the (largely empty) toilet paper aisle, a different employee said to another, "It's like a Prada boutique."

We got everything we needed except for Clorox disinfecting wipes, which were completely gone, and honestly it wasn't that crowded or frantic inside. Now I'm wondering how it will be when I go to my regular grocery store on Sunday morning.

Man, you got my hopes up that Animal Crossing released early, would have made my kid so happy while she's stuck at home.

I was planning mt everest as my quarantine location :(

Speaking of which, just because we'll be stuck together for a while, more or less, we did some meal planning last night and absolutely no one in my household was the least bit helpful.

Me: Since who knows what's up and when it won't be, we should probably think of some practical staples we need.
Family member one: we should get the cereal with red berries.
FM#2: Ugh, I hate that one, get the one with green berries.
FM#3: Why don't you get one of each?
Me: OK. Will you eat either of those?
FM#3: No, get me the one with blueberries.

And so on across all categories.

I dunno, sounds like they have their priorities in order to me. Whereas I failed to get any berry-adorned cereal whatsoever.

Since I'm back downtown again today anyway, I'm thinking: fuckit, another Target trip wouldn't hurt. When I finally batten down the hatches, I'm just planning to not leave my building at all for the foreseeable future (except for going to vote, which is probably when the bug will likely strike me down).

I still had some stuff left over from the no-deal Brexit prepping so the biggest immediate expense has been loading up on cat food / cat litter.

I went to the doctor this morning to get my asthma prescriptions refilled so I will be set for the year and he also prescribed me a flu shot ( so I can jump the queue) because I guess they are going to make an announcement on Monday that tit's mandatory (chile)? I don't know how they make it mandatory. But my spanish is also trash. ( I feel kind of bad about this but I think this will be the first flu shot I have gotten in ??? I don't recall my last primary physician ever giving me the flu shot, unless she snuck it in. I am sorry).

I have not left the house since Tuesday for any reason other than going to work or the grocery store or pharmacy. I stocked up on staples, and paid out-of-pocket for a prescription refill my insurer would not cover, so that I can avoid the stores for the next couple of weeks -- as I see it, the risk is only going to increase as the infection spreads, while the reward decreases with the many predictable out-of-stock goods.

I am also a single man, living alone, with some money in the bank, no dependents, and a job I can do remotely. I don't expect everyone to do what I am doing; I do it because I'm one of the ones who can.

The hardest part is going to be missing the 3 or 4 AA meetings per week I usually go to. But my sponsor has been able to stay sober for the past 10 years despite being partially paralyzed and unable to attend meetings, so I have a good example to follow.

I am also a single man, living alone, with some money in the bank, no dependents, and a job I can do remotely. I don't expect everyone to do what I am doing; I do it because I'm one of the ones who can.

Yup this is gonna be me in a week or two I suspect, depending on how fast it ends up spreading here in Toronto. I'm not ruling out some very limited (4-5 person) hangouts just to break up the isolation / ward off insanity, though.

Xposts to rusho

This is what enraged me so much about de blasios statement earlier this week that HIS scientists have found it only persists on surfaces for minutes.

my spouse's university sent out an email that they have 5 liter cans of alcohol gel that faculty can buy. I told him to find people to split it with because there are only so many places you can put that.

my friend tried to ask me if I was busy and wanted to hang out last night and I made up an excuse because I just was feeling too miserable to hang out. i told him maybe on the weekend.

i'm in a similar place of privilege and tbh now that pretty much any concerts I had tickets for are cancelled, I was only going to leave the house to go to the movies anyway, and tehre's plenty of that I can watch at home.

Has anyone grappled with how much to walk the dog/whether to let the dog play with other dogs

NB he is a puppy but big (6 months 55 lbs) and while he could probably ‘remember’ how to pee inside on pads, it’d be hard from a sheer volume perspective

Went ahead w/ meeting a friend I hadn't seen for a long time yesterday, and am still having dinner out tonight w/ my bro. But after that I don't have a lot of one-on-one's planned, and the bigger meetings (some book presentations etc) will be cancelled anyway.

jon not jon where are you? I remember walking my dog during Katrina for what ended up being 10 times because I stayed up all night to make sure there was no flooding and any break in the wind/rain I ran him outside because I was so worried we would be cooped up (he was 75lbs).

I would totally not let my dog (if he was still around) socialize with other dogs right now. Because that means you will also be socializing.

ugh, I meant Hurricane Sandy in ny.

I still had some stuff left over from the no-deal Brexit prepping so the biggest immediate expense has been loading up on cat food / cat litter.

Cat food and cat litter is a worry as it's so damn bulky/heavy and there isn't really room to stockpile much of it.

The other half told me off for Brexit prepping and is still in "everything will be fine" mode so we just have a couple of extra kgs of rice and cereal (not actually sure how long those would last if they were the only food left) and a lot of extra soap. Will try to sneak some tinned goods home if there are any left - beans, soup, some tinned milk wouldn't go amiss for the cereal. Local shop is already empty of loo roll so not sure if there'll be tins left.

We have a small fridge/freezer which is permanently almost full despite having basically nothing useful in, so not much use stockpiling anything not canned or dry.

Sent a message to my dad to see how they're doing and if they curtailed their travel plans, and he responded "Mea culpa...we're in Israel". Coming back today I think.

Still having to go into work, but on the upside, traffic is great??

Seat to yourself on the bus *thumbs up*