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

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.

the uprising is coming

Ban birds

Went to Target yesterday, as I mentioned upthread; went to Acme this morning. It was more crowded than I expected, but we were able to get pretty much everything we wanted with a few "they don't have the brand we want, so we'll take the brand they have" substitutions. And that's it for two weeks. Every time we go now, I'm wondering whether things will be "back to normal" (e.g., there will be paper towels available) next time, or it'll be much worse (half the shelves empty). It makes me very tense and irritable. Which is why I'm calming myself down by writing a long review of a death metal album.

out of coffee and beer today, I guess it's time for a store run. trying to keep them weekly.

our position is a little different since my wife works in a hospital and our assumption is generally that we've been exposed already and should assume we're infectious, so wearing masks when we go out is more for other people's benefit than ours :)

that being said, even though Oregon seems to be doing a great job flattening the curve, almost none of the idiots we see on the park paths are wearing masks. and even in the grocery stores it's 50/50 at best.

flamed some asshole on my sister's FB page who popped up with "the tests are all faked, it's a government control conspiracy" and wow am I glad I don't have to deal with that nonsense here.

also, as has been noted elsewhere, these joggers can fuck right off

the weirdest bit are the conservatives/Trumpers I've seen who believe such conspiracy nonsense. like.....that means you're indicating that either your pal Trump is in on it, or that he was 'strongarmed' into these measures (which in your eyes, should make him weak, or spineless). I expect this level of nonsense from libertarians (who no doubt are filling my wall with this shit).

now that the projected deaths have fallen below 100,000, looking forward to the daily posts of how this proved it was a nothingburger and how all of the officials in on the lie, including Fauci, should be locked up (ok, I'm aware that this is actually already happening, but don't let that get in the way of my rhetoric plz).

that being said, even though Oregon seems to be doing a great job flattening the curve, almost none of the idiots we see on the park paths are wearing masks. and even in the grocery stores it's 50/50 at best.

NJ's governor has mandated mask wearing - you can't even get inside a dollar store here unless you're wearing one.

here in FL, many people are having trouble acquiring them, though most people are realizing making their own is far easier.

my entire family has them as well as my crew of homies. i'm so proud.

unperson I believe that's also the case here in Oregon for stores and such, but out on the bike paths it's a madhouse

regarding conspiracy types, there's also the left-leaning chin-stroking type who is all "look how easily all you sheeple do what the government says, etc." and don't even get me started on the difference between "authority" and "expertise". grrr.

*sees sign warning to stop vehicle, cliff approaching*

"FUCK YOU I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!!!"

Where are y’all buying masks!? All I got is a t shirt

We've been using these for daily dog walks: https://toughtraveler.com/products/face-mask

I got a balaclava on Amazon, that was all I could find

Where are y’all buying masks!? All I got is a t shirt

I was able to get a box of masks from Amazon - they took a week to arrive, but they got here. Expensive - $60 for 50 masks. But I don't wear them - I prefer the black bandanna I've been wearing. My wife uses the masks and the gloves when we go out.

I’ve been holding my breath.

I shoot red dye into the air because then I can see the eyes, the nose, and the mouth of the virus, and then i can get away from it

My crafty cousin made and mailed us some but I tried one out on Friday and all it seemed to be doing was forcing my breath into my eyeballs and making me constantly fuss with the mask. As predicted.

On the subject of animals in these quieter times...

I saw two deer yesterday while I was out cycling just east of Glasgow (in the evening when it is especially quiet, on an hour long route I've worked out that almost entirely avoids areas with (m)any pedestrians). They retreated a little when I stopped, but stuck around at a distance munching some greenery and eyeing me slightly warily, so I was able to watch them for a few minutes, which was very cool. It's not strictly a covid-19 lockdown thing, as I do see them very occasionally even normally in those parts at the edge of the city, but I have been keeping an eye open as things have been quieter and joygoat's squirrel/bird post above made me think to mention it as a tiny sprinkle of covid-19 positivity (deer are awesome and I love that they're sneakily living out there so close to the big city, largely unseen).

The number of foxes I've seen has been impressive lately as well.

I've been treating my trips to the corner shop like a high stakes game of Kabaddi

I may have said this already but my grocery delivery runs (#11 is today) have felt like Supermarket Sweep with the added bonus of biohazard

went to Trader Joe’s in north beach yesterday. It was as busy as usual, mostly a 20s-30s crowd. I was really surprised at how few people were wearing masks or scarves, and there seemed to be no concern for any kind social distancing in the aisles.

Am I alone here in considering myself...relatively safe during my twice weekly supermarket trips? By law everyone must wear a mask; eight out of ten shoppers wear masks and gloves. There's enough space where I'm at least ten feet from the closest customer. On getting home I scrub the groceries and spend five minutes lathering my hands. I've been good about not touching my face.

that sounds about as safe as you can be. I wish my experience yesterday was like that. It was the first time I had been shopping in a month, and I’m not going to go back to that store

I consider going to the grocery store very low risk for me and I do self-checkout as usual to spare a clerk some face time. We can’t stock up more than fits in the bags on my partner’s cargo bike at best, so we’re still going to the store 2 or 3 times a week, that’s life.

We also have not been sanitizing our groceries. Being able to recover viable virus RNA from surfaces is not the same as surface contact being a high-risk transmission vector. For example, and not to draw a direct equivalence between then pathogens, you can recover viable HIV off a surface but there have been zero recorded cases of environmental transmission of HIV ever.

Which is not to say that any of these things present no risk of getting us infected, but it seems quite certain to be less risky than being in a small room with an infected person coughing or sneezing or talking to you or exercising.

silby, what style of mask did your cousin send you? I am not a fan of the pleated surgical style or with elastics and much prefer ones that have fabric ties and are a bit contoured. Those are a little easier to fit to your face.

Being able to recover viable virus RNA from surfaces is not the same as surface contact being a high-risk transmission vector.

Can you clarify? I'm not following you.

I started wiping groceries at the beginning of last week; I tend to think this step is excessive but *shrug*

(deer are awesome and I love that they're sneakily living out there so close to the big city, largely unseen)

My wife and I were talking about this in the car today. Anytime we see a deer or other unexpected animal - I once saw a fox tiptoe-running down the street - we always wonder where it's been hiding 99 percent of the time.

Alfred I just mean that studies that recover complete (potentially infectious) coronavirus genomes after X amount of time from various surfaces do not necessarily show that it’s likely or even possible to be infected by virus lurking on those surfaces. HIV is a quite different thing from CoV but the point is, while you can possibly collect viable HIV genomes off of a surface or from a discarded needle, nobody has ever contracted HIV that way.

Again I don’t mean to draw a direct analogy here. HIV is difficult to transmit, relatively speaking, and certainly isn’t transmissible vía fecal-oral route or respiratory aerosol. But catching the vid off a box of Wheaties hasn’t been shown to happen and one’s risk tolerance may reasonably allow for excluding that possibility from consideration.

wiping groceries is def excessive. just need to wash your hands.

and your ass

check and check!

ah, that makes sense, silby. Are you a scientist by profession? I haven't caught anyone explaining these subtleties in the news conferences.

I am not a scientist nor do I play one on TV but I worked for five years in an HIV research lab programming computers for science, for which I had to learn what was going on.

xp

Trump didn't mention them?

hands and asses?

time for that "ass and titties" remix

I swear the birds and squirrels are adapting and becoming weird....

― joygoat

the uprising is coming

― genital giant (Neanderthal)

Ban birds

― Joey Corona (Euler)

I, for one, welcome our new avian overlords.

But if this fucking thing takes Jackson Browne I will not be best pleased.