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

State of Washington tomorrow, King County immediately tonight

MA closed them excluding take-out

re communications infrastructure, I had my first work-from-home teleconference call today (voice only) and it took about 5 minutes of redialing to get through - not a great sign if their capability is that stretched at this early stage (i am in Sydney where the viral times are still in the process of kicking off but starting to gather stream alarmingly rapidly (pardon mixed metaphor))

Telephones are terrible for conferencing (or speaking to other humans), even if it's audio only the quality from Google hangouts, Zoom etc. is far superior. Also the infrastructure is much more scalable than the phone system.

just did the math; I didn't buy enough groceries because I was afraid of hoarding, and I'm going to run out of food probably before this all is over.

I have no idea what to do in this case since obviously even if I was allowed to go to restaurants they're closed as of tuesday, and as for groceries I'm not supposed to go out, let alone go to stores, let alone to crowded stores, and there's a chance the stores will close too.

like "hoarding makes you evil" and "this will last for months" and "don't go outside" are incompatible together, unless you starve

It is inconceivable that grocery stores will be ordered closed. Go get groceries when you need more.

Think more along the lines of "don't go outside unless absolutely necessary". Italy's on lockdown but people there can still go to the grocery store and make trips for which they have a good reason for needing to do so.

My wife’s University is going online only from the end of the month although it’s seems like events may overtake that decision. The NSW, ACT and Queensland unis all seem to be scrambling to go inline as quickly as possible.

Might be worth a separate thread for online teaching / learning and how that's going.

If we think that the UK situation is going to stretch into the next academic year, and it looks almost inevitable that it will, i can't begin to imagine the impact that's going to have on enrollments, particularly of overseas students.

My wife is well prepped for this they had to start with up to 40% of her students stuck in China. Part of the assessment for one of her classes is a group project and she made sure that each group had some overseas members (only one Edgelord in a different section complained about this). Online lectures won’t be as good as in person but the tech seems to work. Plus I’m booked as a guest speaker for a couple of classes and she’s trying to find more who will remote in.

i feel like a lot of the conflicting advice is because of the uncertainty, we don't know what will happen, and we can't prepare for every eventuality. the more severe the quarantine the more it will hurt people in economically and socially precarious situations, but the more likely it is to prevent an italy-type situation

in healthcare the overriding goal is to make sure as many people as possible have access to any sort of medical care they need to stay alive. hospitals are cancelling elective surgeries so they can better focus on giving people treatment they need.

differentiating between what's convenient and what's necessary isn't a decision a lot of people are used to making. hoarders buy things in quantities they are vanishingly unlikely to need or find useful, and by doing so prevent other people who need them more from getting them. "this could last for months", on the other hand, is sort of preparing people to deal with one possible way this could go down.

there are a lot of worst-case scenarios and it's literally impossible for them all to happen. everybody has different ways of coping with the uncertainty, and one of the ways some people do it is trying to imagine all the bad things that could happen and planning for every contingency. unfortunately other people hear about this and take this coping strategy as prediction. combine this with different people focusing on planning for different contingencies...

well, i ignore most of what i hear, and certain risks, like the risk of increased political instability for instance, i decide to define as out of scope, which is why i hang out in this thread and don't hang out in the other one.

Seems like either the guardian was wrong (whod’ve thunk it) or things are moving quickly because my wife’s classes are online from Wednesday as texted from the break in her current one.

A U.K.-based company, in collaboration with Senegalese research foundation Institut Pasteur de Dakar, holds out prospects of a 10-minute coronavirus test costing less than $1 https://t.co/VkjTOPbL37

— Bloomberg Africa (@BBGAfrica) March 16, 2020

I haven’t heard anything here about how they are planning to feed the students in the halls. My friends who work in the kitchens are clueless. If you can’t run the cafeteria that could be three meals a day for someone on full board to be replaced somehow.

St. Andrews has two sources of income, and both tourism and the university are going to be badly hit by this.

my company is telling everyone to work from home and I think is going to actually close the office at the end of this week.

in practice, this makes no difference to me, I'm already in isolation anyway, was working from home almost every day to begin with, and don't leave the house very often. I did go out on Saturday to visit some friends, perhaps not the best idea but there aren't a lot of cases around here... yet. I went to the supermarket yesterday - tbh it wasn't that bad, didn't really seem busier than usual, didn't notice any empty shelves but then I wasn't shopping for pasta or TP (when I got home I thought I probably should've bought some pasta).

Walked to work today and stopped off in about seven shops along the way trying to buy some paracetamol - I found one lonely packet hidden at the back of a shelf in the very shop I looked in.

...very LAST shop that is, no sign of any anywhere else.

Banal at this point but local Sainsbury's comprehensively depleted of canned stuff, porridge / muesli, regular soya milk, bog roll, cleaning stuff etc., for the first time. I was thinking they would have restocked overnight and Monday morning would be a good time to get a few bits in. Plenty of broccoli though and got the last jar of sauerkraut so all was not futile.

People are up at the crack of dawn to add 12 further rolls of toilet paper to the 64 they already have.

It's fascinating to me how the supermarkets have been utterly denuded but the local shops have everything - toilet roll, rice, bread, etc. A woman in front of me at the cornershop yesterday was like 'now everybody's got to use the local shops - like they should have been doing anyway!' and I'm like go off king

suggests it's a car problem - if people have cars there's a temptation to load them right up

yes my Big Saturday Shop™ was limited by wheezy old me hauling the fkn shopping bags on foot, so i will have to go out again and get a bunch of smaller back-up stuff

otoh cars are great for social distancing, maybe supermarkets will just eveolve into drive thru bog rog roll depots

One thing noticed yesterday at Tesco - there was a queue of about 25 people for self-checkout, while there were still cashiers free.

Yes this is a very good time to be using local shops, still loads of pasta, rice, painkillers in the standard Food & Wine type shop down the road from me. We have a butcher and a fishmonger and a few other things within walking distance as well which is hopefully going to be better than relying on the supermarkets as well.

The delivery system is really fucked though, they're going to have to find some way of getting deliveries to over 70s as priority rather than letting all the slots be taken up with panic-buyers.

there are groups organising like this - https://covidmutualaid.org/local-groups/ - but, incredibly imo, it's all on fkn facebook

I, or my neighbours, will die in a ditch because I’m not on fkn facebook.

My supervisor said I should stay home and wait for the phone delivery that would enable remote work login.

Talked my sister off the ledge re my survival here last night. Just got a message from my best friend encouraging me to go live with sis in CT. :/

I can't stand this.

xp our local fb groups are coordinating people to go out and put flyers through letterboxes offering aid & with phone numbers.

Sending best wishes and strength morbs

DC-area Metrobus has reduced itself to "Saturday Supplemental" service on weekdays for now.

I had a dentist's appointment for Tuesday morning, but the office just announced that they are closing for at least the next two weeks.

One thing noticed yesterday at Tesco - there was a queue of about 25 people for self-checkout, while there were still cashiers free.

Bit weird given all the prodding of those touchscreens that self-checkout involves.

perhaps I now appreciate why my bf was annoyed at me worrying at the weekend (which felt unfair as I felt like I was recently walking on eggshells re certain things he gets anxious about and then when I'm anxious I just get told I'm overreacting and to stop complaining), since I am in the office and a coworker has spent all morning monologuing eeyorishly about how bad things are/will get, and a wave of doom has settled upon me

it's not that she's wrong in any of her assessments, it's just the added layers of despair which are now crushing my poor defeated brain, ho hum

No fewer than three people I know in TO have told me "a reliable source" informs me the city is about to "shut down", whatever precisely that means. Very strange.

There is a Fairway supermarket in the upper west side that always has a long ass line winding through the store to use the self check outs, but the staffed registers have maybe 2 people in line. I think people just see the line and get in it.

I guess you can control what you touch at self-check-in, then wash your hands - a cashier otoh will touch all of your shopping.

I never use self-checkout, in the spirit of "I don't fucking work here"

my man

I phoned my parents last night and felt a bit better that they are at least taking things seriously, cutting down on social activities and considering the risks to them and to more vulnerable attendees. some will say they should lock down more but there's a tradeoff and maybe in the end preserving some chipper-ness and quality of life is as important as taking every last fallible measure to keep it at the door

(totally patronising paragraph considering that out of a) staying as safe as possible in the circumstances vs b) staying as sane and cheerful as possible in the circumstances, it has to be said I'm falling well short of either)

I had thought they were safer there than my area might be and had worried about bringing germs to them, but the family 2 doors down have something bad and flu-like but couldn't get tested even though the daughter goes to school in an area with a known outbreak. fingers crossed for the family, but also worrying how long/strictly people who haven't been formally diagnosed will quarantine themselves once symptoms reduce...

I don't use the self check out because people have meltdowns in front of them and I don't like that.

(xp, sorry for monologuing to myself here after complaining about my colleague's monologue, ha)

meanwhile the o/h's dad + his new wife are still planning to go ahead with trips to Europe over the next few months, which seems... not great? the ferry for trip #1 was cancelled because it would've gone on from France to Spain and Spain isn't accepting ferries - so he just rebooked a different one even though we told him France was going into lockdown too and maybe he should leave it and claim on the insurance!

<grumbling about the generation which can afford to go on holiday constantly not wanting to be kept from its constant holidaying> <ok, not fair, stop it spacecadet>

I can't use the self checkout at Target because those cameras make me look like a cadaver

No, under the circumstances that's very fair!

A bit of 'levity':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcr83km7m5U

lol the joys of working from home... trying to set up a call with multiple colleagues, one said he'd call us using teams, the other said teams didn't work on his laptop so could we use skype, to which a third said the same about skype, so how about we do the call on whatsapp

I'm already dreading negotiating the VPN at home, especially as my internet connection fluctuates in speed a lot

done a big shop at the local cornerstore. if there's one thing I went a bit ham on it wasn't toilet paper, it was Oreos

Very glad I'm on fibre optic cable rather than some flaky DSL connection.

Also utterly blessed in having a back garden as spring arrives.