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

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.

Anyway who here still wears underwear

if I weren't doing those deliveries I'd probably have given em up 20 or so days ago

Honestly all I know about Jackson Browne is the song from Fast Times at Ridgemont High and him getting arrested for domestic violence and the latter rendered him dead to me so I never bothered looking further into his oeuvre

NPR has weighed in on the great grocery wiping controversy:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/12/832269202/no-you-dont-need-to-disinfect-your-groceries-but-here-s-to-shop-safely

i was in mcarran park yesterday and saw a stupid amount of people doing pull-ups on public exercise equipment, jogging around a track fewer than three feet away from each other, etc.. like peering into the past

i did something comparably stupid last night though so i'm gonna refrain from shaming those people

I have had dozens of conversations now, as I'm sure we all have, about surface contamination, wiping down groceries, etc.

I guess the thing that bothers me about all this is how we calculate risk. Something like this, for example, is not going to discourage me from taking the extra, probably unnecessary precaution:

"While it is possible to contract the virus [from contaminated surfaces], the majority of transmission is probably going to be from respiratory droplets, which you're exposed to when you're around other people," says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

9https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/12/832269202/no-you-dont-need-to-disinfect-your-groceries-but-here-s-to-shop-safely)

Oh, so there's just a *small chance* that I will contract this from a box of cereal and end up suffocating and dying alone? I mean, we're all gonna do but what we're comfortable doing and obv. ymmv, but I'm not going to take a 1-1,000 chance when those are the stakes, much less "minority of transmissions"

sorry, that link: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/12/832269202/no-you-dont-need-to-disinfect-your-groceries-but-here-s-to-shop-safely

My general feeling about this is that my life has already been radically altered, it seems wise to err on the side of over-the-top for just a couple months while I'm at it

That NPR piece is good. I started doing that a couple of weeks ago, putting whatever I buy (except for a packaged salad) away for at least three days rather than cleaning everything.

NPR has weighed in on the great grocery wiping controversy:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/12/832269202/no-you-dont-need-to-disinfect-your-groceries-but-here-s-to-shop-safely

― Larry Elleison (rogermexico.),

Thanks, this helps.

I find the very low surface contamination risk hard to square with the amount of transmission that's still happening in places with serious distancing measures in place.

who knows if those people contracted the virus from other people, though? It may not be from grabbing that box of Cheerios and picking your nose.

Yeah I come down strongly on the side of leaving things sitting around until I need them or 2-3 days, which ever comes first. It's a lot less work, and we're going go run out of disinfecting wipes eventually (we buy them in bulk at BJs so happened to have a lot when this started).

Going back out to store today; also down to last bottle of wine so have to fix that.

luckily most food products have an excess of packaging, so it's pretty easy to toss the box and keep the inside packaging. that's why my freezer is full of loose tater tots.

ooh I hadn't thought of that

I was wondering if the problem with grocery packaging would be avoided if the customer went several packages back . Or if this would just mean that everything was exposed to whatever. Just occured to me that if the front packet was exposed to people sneezing/coughing /breathing whatever if that would be avoided by going back wherever one could.
But can also see it being self defeating.

If the virus is on an object does it automatically transfer to any other objects around it or is it only to the person around them. I mean are inaninamte objects playing virus tags behind our backs, like.

From what I understand, there has to be enough of the virus in droplets on that surface and you gotta touch it and bring it your face.

left a bag of bagels in the 'decontamination zone' aka utility room and next morning a rat or something had nibbled a hole through the bag and nibbled a bagel.
bastards

xpost For sure. There are cooties everywhere, but you need cooties in significant amounts to catch anything.

I think I heard the NPR grocery thing on the radio, but is that the one where the doctor or scientist points out how disinfecting packaging could actually be worse, since there's a risk of contaminating the content with disinfecting chemicals?

I find the very low surface contamination risk hard to square with the amount of transmission that's still happening in places with serious distancing measures in place.

Occam's Razor would suggest people are still catching it from other people. Not everyone is as or can be as diligent at washing their hands, not touching their face, etc. It's amazing how much face touching or coughing into nothing I've seen at the stores the few times I've poked my head in. A lot of people do these suddenly potentially dangerous things unconsciously.

i did see a theory floating amongst the various experts that the severity of the disease you get might depend on how much of the viral load you are infected with. suggesting that the person to person transfers are usually the worst.

but again...."not confirmed", just a theory.

lots of people out there still having conversations with others in spitting distance

xp
enjoy covid, rat

oooh i get it! the rat symbolizes INFECTION

https://sites.google.com/site/pasletempsdelirefr/_/rsrc/1414267566840/auteur/albert-camus/la-peste/La%20peste.jpg

which in English is of course

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/The-Plague-by-Albert-Camus.jpg

I had that exact French edition at one point.

yeah, you don't have to wipe your groceries

and a month ago, you didn't have to wear a mask unless you were sick...

I can tell my acid reflux has been acting up (I generally don't medicate it, bcz with all the other pills I have to stop pissing at some point every morning).

Then last night I spat up a trivial amount of... blood. Not comforting. I don't feel like going to a doctor for that in the middle of all this, so I just skipped coffee today and feel better. So much for the beer a friend brought me last night. Not sure what to do about all the frozen Indian and Mexican food I have either...