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

I said potentially, was wondering how much of a threat it would be seen as. Cos I thought it might just have the immediate response of we they won't really will they?
The fines might be more real though.

Lockdown having legal teeth is welcome, perhaps inevitable, and complicated. The mechanics of enforcing lockdowns seem to necessitate close physical contact. Are police going stop, people and interact with them to determine if they're flouting lockdown orders - then detain, arrest, and bring someplace for processing? Would they then have a trial in a courtroom? Even a citation or ticket or fine would involve getting close. And then what if you ignore the ticket, fine? Presumably you would, like, have to go to court or something. I can't imagine all of that happening without getting close to people... when avoiding that was kinda the whole point in the first place.

One has to assume that part of the intent is to deter, or to use enforcement/prosecutorial discretion only for egregious violations (like a frat party or church service or - ahem - political rally). They're not frisking grannies to see if they're really on the way to/from the grocery store - it's more for jerks on a beach. One hopes. But "trust the police to not be assholes" does not inspire optimism.

The Queen should never have worn green pic.twitter.com/A71vse3Uvq

— Olaf Falafel (@OFalafel) April 7, 2020

Does anyone know if there is data available on daily UK deaths once they have been attributed to the day of death? The death toll reported daily isn't reflective of deaths that day, and data gets backdated weekly from care homes etc. So there should be accurate data by now for up to a couple of weeks or so ago...?

A good friend's mother just succumbed to cancer today. My friend got to say goodbye, but it's doubtful they'll be able to have a memorial service before summer.

Different but equally heartbreaking was my wife's co-worker, who, if I heard correctly, had to have his 20-year old cat put down during a curbside visit from a vet whose rules kept him at a distance as it happened.

is anyone else just compulsively taking their temperature every few hours?

don't have a thermometer.

I seem to always know when I'm febrile, even low grade, but wouldn't mind actually having one.

haha I realized a month ago I don't have one

Yeah, we don't have one either - on the occasion when I've gotten into a pharmacy and asked for one they've basically laughed in my face :) But that was a few weeks ago.

Neither do I, just have to guess!

In the early stages of this, my sister-in-law was quarantined for a few weeks because of possible exposure to covid (she tested negative). She and her kids also came down with some bug during this time so she asked to borrow a thermometer. Like, how do you not have a thermometer if you have kids? But she's a flaky hippie who loses things all the time, so I took her one because we have a few, thinking I could go to CVS and replace it easily. All thermometers were gone at every store I went to! This was back when you could still find maybe a little toilet paper on the shelves. It was weird.

i ain't borrowin' no thermometer unless i'm assured it was sanitized first and that it was in nobody's butthole

I had a thermometer that didn't work; sister mailed me a new one, along with an N95 mask. She's richer than I am.

We have a couple digital thermometers for temple or forehead use, one with batteries and one without. I can never get the hang of them. There's one button, and an inscrutable screen. You're supposed to push the button and it will flash and beep to tell you it's ready.

Unless it's flashing and beeping to tell you it's not ready. Or it's flashing and beeping to tell you it's not ready. Or it's flashing and beeping to tell you it got a good reading, which is indistinguishable from the flashing and beeping it does to tell you that it wasn't able to get a good reading. Low battery? There's a specific flash and beep. Then there's the flashing and beeping it does when it shows you the last five readings in its "memory," as if I had any idea what that meant.

I even saved the instructions, which somehow make it worse. There's a chart showing its vocabulary of messages, and after looking at the chart you come away even less certain of how it relates to the flashes and beeps that one actually sees.

Maybe it would work better if I put it in my butt, I dunno.

Or maybe I could put the instruction booklet in my butt

In NJ you can no longer enter a store unless you're wearing a face mask. At Target this morning an employee was not wearing a mask and the other employees were yelling at him. "Put a mask on or go home!"

Same here.

I saw three cops in a park yesterday hassling someone from a safe distance.

re: temps, I think if you had a temperature over, say, 100, you'd know it. One (ironically) helpful thing about having kids is you get a better sense what high fevers feel and act like and what they do to you: they get absolutely wiped out and wiggy, even the teen. But in terms of thermometer usage, they provide a good baseline of expected equipment behavior. That is, when I take my temperature (which I am doing more than usual these days, just because) it takes the full (still fast) amount of time to creep up to 98.4 or whatever. But that last time a kid of mine was sick, I gave her the thermometer and it more or less instantly read 100 and flashed red, and then crept up a little from there.

(xposts) They do something I find odd where I am: make you remove any gloves you're wearing before entering the store. They're polite about it, I'm just not sure how that's more dangerous than not wearing gloves. Anyway, I put my winter gloves in my pocket and proceed.

did someone here -- or maybe on another covid thread -- mention an app which you could explore and compare symptoms on? as a 59-yr old asthmatic with minor heart issues who lives alone i feel like i want to put a bit of early prep work in, esp. re what i shd look out for and also what i shd do.

e.g. i am feeling more tired than usual today, plus quite dizzy when i stand, plus i've had a mysterious aching neck for three days

tiredness = ok but i went out and did a shop after taking double my beta blockers (full daily dose bcz i forgot to take em last night) which generally leave me physically tired.
dizziness = i suffer from intermittent labyrinthitis anyway so not especially concerned abt dizziness beyond wanting not to topple over and bang my head.
aches = lol i'm 59, every fkn part of my body mildly aches all the time ur welcome. my neck is almost certainly sitting badly at the laptop for too long in sloppy position then sleeping in a draft.
no fever no cough (except first thing in the morning). no sneezing no tummy upsets. the weird taste i was getting a couple of weeks back was v mild allergy to an unusual brand of coffee. i'm fine.

but i do want to get ahead of things all the same

Got furloughed this week but only for a month *and* on full pay so not exactly that disappointed tbh

Although already regretting the decision to tell my wife...

Mark the app is just called “covid symptom tracker”

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/covid-symptom-tracker-app-coronavirus-uk

(xpost) Somewhat similar (I'm 58). I'm at a point now where I've stopped stressing over every potential red flag and am taking things more in stride. I think there's a 90-95% chance all of the following is coincidental, and a very small chance--because I have a strong immune system (as I mentioned elsewhere, zero sick days in 20 years of teaching) and because, possibly, I started preemptively medicating three weeks ago--that I contracted it in its very mildest form.

- my tinnitus has been non-stop for three weeks, which is normally something that comes and goes. This could be because of the unnatural amount of silence that has been the norm lately, but both stet and Tracer Hand mentioned tinnitus as one of their symptoms.

- a somewhat (but persistent) scratchy throat for the past three weeks. Never a cough. I feel like this is nothing, the kind of thing I normally wouldn't give a second thought to.

- fatigue above and beyond my normal I'm-retired-and-who-gives-a-fuck lethargy. I'll get up after a decent night's sleep, start watching a movie or something, and I almost immediately start to drift off. Countering this, though, I'm walking twice a day, sometimes long walks--I have the energy for that.

- same kinds of aches and pains, easily attributable to the amount of time I spend sitting in front of the computer every day.

The tinnitus might be a good indicator. If it's still bad two weeks from now, then I'll conclude I never had it; my tinnitus has just gotten worse for some reason. If that returns to normal, though, I might take that a sign that I possibly contracted it and was as close to being asymptomatic as possible without actually being asymptomatic.

(In which case I'd follow-up with an antibody test whenever that becomes widely available. I assume antibodies are detectable long after the fact, maybe even forever?)

> my tinnitus has been non-stop for three weeks, which is normally something that comes and goes. This could be because of the unnatural amount of silence that has been the norm lately, but both stet and Tracer Hand mentioned tinnitus as one of their symptoms.

yes, this worried me too, but i think you're right about it just being the quiet. normally at work i've headphones in. listening to the stereo or the tv doesn't mask it as much so i notice it more.

Was listening to a podcast interview with a medical person who was separated from her elderly father, also a doctor, and she preemptively diagnosed him over the phone and made her parents go to the ER because he was napping a lot more than usual, and she predicted it was because he was under-oxygenated even though he had no other symptoms. So they went and he got tested and he WAS positive, and he's in an ICU in, idk, I think Texas right now.

So that's great because now I gotta second-guess taking naps on the sofa (not really--but I still think about it).

don't second guess that m'dear

but i do want to get ahead of things all the same

I perfectly understand why it would be much better mentally and emotionally to have clarity about the presence or absence of the virus, but I'm not sure what 'getting ahead of things' would look like in terms of changing your actions.

Unfortunately, that clarity about whether or not one has COVID-19 or just a heterogeneous bunch of symptoms is out of reach for most of us. Just take care of yourself, and establish in your mind what you'd need to do to address your symptoms if they reached a level where hospital care was indicated. All the rest is waiting and watching and trying not to stress out.

otm

don't encourage him

i encourage all ilxors

hm

just read a bunch of worrying symptoms on this thread hmmmm

So not only did I lose my job of seven years, but they are now fucking around with me with paying out my severance etc and I’ve had to get a lawyer.
Like all this isn’t stressful enough. I’d like to vent on Facebook, but obv I have a bunch of friends who are still there and many others that are in the industry - so I probably shouldn’t. But I really want to vent about how gross my (and others) treatment has been.

My company is about to go under, pretty sure. I'm on 80% furlough pay, but as soon as it goes under that's done, isn't it? How does severance work if the company declares bankruptcy?

damn TT, that sucks badly.

no clue Cam, i'm sure it depends on the fine print in yr jurisdiction

Don't want to have to hire a lawyer, but the boss has screwed me over enough times in the past.

Maybe it would work better if I put it in my butt, I dunno.

― cuomo money, cuomo problems (Ye Mad Puffin)

words to live by

Lol Kate

Pounded In The Butt By The Instruction Manual For My Digital Thermometer

My wife's closest law partner who she had worked with for 18 years died last night of this shit. He was 50 years old with two kids (college and high school). Terrible; his wife couldn't even be with him when he died.

My wife had been having issues with him for the last year or so and she is kind of torn up about the whole situation, not getting to say goodbye and (probably) beating herself up about their relationship. Fuck Covid-19.

that's fucking terrible :(

damn, I'm so sorry.

Just been out for the first time in a week - it's fucking hot out there, or it was, sun's just gone in. Skipping past the discarded gloves and face masks littering the streets, still quite a lot of people about. Can't say I appreciated having to walk in the road to avoid the 5 or 6 guys standing on the pavement outside a takeaway joint, laughing and joking - are people still actually ordering takeaways? Also all sorts of building work still going on - the guys in the house next to mine are still merrily drilling and hammering away, quite the thing. Maybe they're right and we're all wrong.

house near me had a little gathering yesterday. looked like a family had friends/relatives over, there was loud music, I looked outside, and a grownup and kids playing on a trampoline, no gloves/masks etc.

i haven't seen a live person in a while because i started having groceries delivered. not due to fear of contracting as much as laziness.

feel like my training for the eventual Twilight Zone episode is complete.

I tell you what, the kids just along from me are enjoying this little holiday, what a racket they made all day yesterday.

Today's looking grey. Probably a bit better than if the weather had been as good as yesterday.

wore a mask for teh first time yesterday. But need t work out best way of having walkman on at the same time. or not.
Went up to get a paper cos I thought yeah sounds like a nice temptation. NOt sure why they're still laying teh papers out the way they used to have to shift another publication to get to the one I'm after.
But looks like tehre might be some possibility of getting hold of 2000AD without having to do it mailorder every few weeks.
They had teh Cor/Buster special in. So life goes on.

I need 3 hands for when I'm trying to get the gloves on in the supermarket cos i need to get a basket /trolley moved atthe same time.

Then bought some stuff there , trying to avoidf other customers.
Down to LIDl afterwards.
They have changed teh way people enter since my last trip and made it more difficult to get their basket/trolleys because of something at the cashier. They now inisst you take your goods and put them in a basket.after they've been past the cashier. NOt sure if taht is precisely why there are now none at the door as you come in but think it contributes greatly. Cashier is now more firmly surrounded by a little plexiglass booth thing.
& they're no longer offering gloves as you go in. So using my own and then having to dispose of them as i leave but have to cross back across entrance to throw away. Not ideal set up.

read a really clickbaity article on the economy which drew a lot of spurious conclusions, left out context, and was outright wrong in other places.

perhaps I should have read that it was written by "umair haque" before I opened it, that woulda saved me the trouble.

I live half a mile from one of the biggest universities in the country, which has been shut down for a month now so there are many tens of thousands of people who are no longer around.

Other than the surreal ghost town feeling, I swear the birds and squirrels are adapting and becoming weird. There have always been tons of squirrels but now I’ll see groups of them everywhere, just hanging out in the middle of the street. And they don’t seem to be afraid of humans any more, even when I’m walking the dog. They just glare at me as I walk past like a gang of surly teens. Similar with the birds but there just seem to be twice as many around compared to last spring.