I just talked to my parents. On one hand, I do think they are taking this seriously. But on another, I still don’t think they are taking it seriously enough. My mother just came back from shopping. I demanded to know what the hell she’d been shopping for.
Toilet paper.
I asked my mother if they were out of toilet paper. No, they have enough. But she wants to get some more since everyone is hoarding it. And of course, none of the stores has any.
She’s been to driving around to multiple places today, looking for got-damn toilet paper and god-knows-what else she doesn’t need!!!
I yelled at her. I started to cry. She laughed like she always does when her kids are in pain (she can’t help it), and I yelled at her again to let her know I’m fucking serious. She grew quiet and eventually promised she’d be more careful. I told her that all she has to do is tell me what she wants and I will order it online for her. She poo-pooed that idea (“You don’t know what brands I like!!”) but I insisted. Thing is, I have never ordered groceries online. I don’t even know if that’s an option in her area. But I’m going to figure out something. Apparently it is too hard for her to write up a fucking shopping list and buy enough groceries to last a week. No, she’s still think it’s perfectly fine to go to the store (or multiple stores) whenever she gets a wild hare to go shopping. Which is every freakin’ day.
People like my mother need a shelter-in-place order. When left to their own devices, they will revert to deeply engrained habits and bullshit rationalizations (“I’m going to wash my hands when I get home! I’m safe!”)
I wish your mother were a rare case. She’s not. I don’t know why people don’t get this. It reminds me of the time I was in the pre-surgical unit at a California hospital. They settled a new patient into the next bed. “And you’ve had nothing to eat or drink since midnight, right?” they asked.
“Nothing,” she said firmly. “Only a few bites of a breakfast burrito.” They had to cancel her surgery.
I don’t get it. I don’t know what we have to do so THEY get it. Sorry you’re having such a hard time with your mom.
Did you read the link? The study indicates that cloth masks may increase the chance of infection.
No really, the CDC told healthcare workers to use them as a last resort. There are some drives happening. Some may be with appropriate materials. Some are not, and it is unclear what the plans for those masks are.
To be fair, nelliebly, I have to remind myself that COVID-19 has altered my life a lot more than it has my parents, who are retired. I’ve been telecommuting for the past week–something I would have never imagined I’d ever do just a few weeks ago. All the public meetings I had scheduled through the next two months have been canceled. I’m thinking it will be weeks, maybe months, when I get to sit in face-to-face staff meeting again. In contrast, my parents have only had to give up their casino habit and figure out how to do Sunday School online. They also aren’t news junkies like me. For the past month, I’ve been living and breathing COVID-19. My parents watch the news, but the news about the virus didn’t really hit them until a couple of weeks ago. They don’t know how high the death toll is in Italy. They don’t even know how many Americans have died. So this thing is abstract to them in a way it isn’t for me. And it is abstract for me.
So I can’t really blame them for not really getting it. I know they are trying their best with what they do know. So I’m going to try to be more patient with them.
I’m beyond frustrated with companies responses. I work with several dozen vendors, and all but one of them has convinced themselves that they are essential and so are ok to ignore shelter in place orders. Look, I know you have bills and employees to pay. I know that closing things down for weeks if not months will cause lots of problems, up to causing your business to fail. But no, Company that Sells a Variety of Screw and Bolts, you are not essential. Wisconsin’s shelter in place order should apply to you. And no, Company that makes specialty fittings, you are also no essential, and the California bay area orders apply to you too. Thank you for sending me letters explaining how you are all concerned for the well being of your employees, and you will be washing hard surfaces 3 times a day.
Gah… Keeping your offices and warehouses and manufacturing plants full of employees is going to spread this disease, and if you are lucky, no one will have more than a case similar to the flu. I hope you are all lucky.
I’d tell all you CEOs to go give your kids a hug, but seriously, I hope you don’t. They don’t need to catch this from you.
Are those screws and bolts used to keep the nation’s trains and trucks running? What about farm equipment? Are the specialty fittings used in sewage treatment plants? What about drug manufacturing?
Asahi, we get you fucking hate China and the Chinese Communist Party.
Could you puh-leese set that aside this for the time being and focus on what might actually be productive in the US of A to stop Covid-19? It’s obvious from your posts that you take the threat seriously. There is plenty to learn from China, and there is plenty for the US to gain from cooperating with China in this time of global crisis versus exasperating xenophobic right wing talking points.
Honestly, I’m not trying to bust your balls. Let’s be a Americans, let’s be a global village, and pull together.
*Are *China saying that they haven’t been having any new cases at all?
Because I downloaded an official Corona-cases datafile from the ECDC and that says infection is still puttering along at a low rate like the other successfully-suppressing Asian countries - a hundred or so a day at the moment, so a little bit up from earlier this month. Well-controlled, but not gone.
I don’t have the numbers at my fingertips, but when I saw them broken down in detail by relatively small age ranges (10-20 years IIRC), what I found interesting that is not being widely reported is that, relative to the flu, this virus is actually proportionately MORE deadly for the relatively young vs. the very old. The important caveat there is “relative to the flu”. Covid-19 definitely has a much higher death rate for the elderly than for the young. But the ratio between the flu’s death rate for the elderly and the young is actually much higher in the case of the flu.
The University of Minnesota’s Center Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) published an editorial last week expressing some skepticism about this public health messaging that we don’t have to worry about aerosol transmission:
I wonder if a lot of this has to do with the propaganda coming from that sector telling people that masks are ineffectual except when used by healthcare workers. This is to my mind pretty obviously bullshit (and look at the Asian countries who have been most successful in curbing their caseload, where masks are ubiquitous), intended to keep laypeople from buying up all the masks and causing a shortage for doctors and nurses.
It all seems murky at best, and I’m just going to operate under the assumption that any indoor area where people have been breathing recently could have aerosol particles that could infect me–so I’m going to wear my N95 mask.
First, where did you get your info that masks have been ubiquitous in Asia during the COVID pandemic? Second, you’re using post hoc reasoning when you assume the Asian countries who curbed their caseload did so because people were wearing masks. If the masks were effective, there wouldn’t have been a need for lockdowns.
The surgical masks were first created not to keep surgeons from inhaling patients’ germs but to keep him from sneezing, coughing, or letting his nose drip into the surgical field. As has been conclusively established repeatedly, the masks are NOT very effective in preventing the wearer from inhaling the COVID-19 virus, though they’re better than nothing. The n95 masks are effective, but there was no stockpile, and almost all of them are made in China, which stopped shipping masks during the pandemic there.
And for the record, it’s more important that doctors and nurses have whatever protection is available than that you and I do. How many COVID-19 patients have you treated today?
I saw mention of the shelter in place order in the Bay Area. I just saw an article about the effectiveness of that order. It’s still early days, but the Shelter in Place order appears to be flattening the curve of the spread of infection.
The Shelter in place order was placed on March 17, 2020 right around the time this thread started.
The author compared the number of infections from the Bay Area which had one of the highest rates of infection at that time to the rate of deaths and infection in New York.
Then the author compared the rate of new cases in the Bay Area versus all of California.
Then the author compared the Santa Clara County’s (one of the shelter in place counties) stats to LA County.
The graphs are stark and easier to see the picture than reading these numbers. If the trend continues in the same way for the next several weeks, it will show that the shelter in place order had a positive effect on containing the spread of the virus.
While it’s true that New York and LA have different factors affecting their population such as more public transportation and the population density is higher in those areas in some parts, there’s still a case to be made that the shelter in place order made a difference given the original spread of infection and the current rate of infection in those places.
Part of the problem there is everything is inter-connected in some way and and if some one doesn’t make a decision the majority of the businesses in the country will decided they are “essential” and remain open.
We’ll see how it shakes out in the next couple of months, but yes, basic education regarding public hygiene and social distancing goes a long way to blunting the spread of even a highly transmissible contagion. If this had been done at a Federal level starting back in January when the NIAID raised an alert about the potential for pandemic outbreak, we might have had more time to prepare businesses, acquire and allocate medical supplies and PPE, and develop and deploy testing kits and guidance to local and state governments and health officials.
Instead, the “do nothing and hope it all goes away by spring” is going to result in tens or hundreds of thousands of totally avoidable deaths among the millions who will eventually succumb in this country, and those deaths are the direct result of criminal negligence on the part of Trump and his political advisors who ignored and obstructed public health experts while spreading misinformation.
Once this crisis has passed, there needs to be an investigation into what could have been done and an explanation of why no effective action was taken, as well as the effects if Trump decides to cancel the national emergency by April as he has pledged to do. The people in charge of leading the nation and making decisions based upon fact and guidance from public health experts should be held to account for not performing the rational and responsible duties that they with which they have been entrusted.
But note what I have bolded… that pesky passive voice. WHO is going to do this if trump (GOD FORBID!) gets reelected? He will bury it all along with the bodies and rewrite history. The whole thing never happened. It was nothing but a double cheese nothingberder. And he’s the short order cook who saved the bacon. Excuse my foodie metaphor festival. Must eat something soon. Been up since 4 am.
If it’s Biden, by all means, an investigation and report, probably to be conducted over a period of months in the background, because there will be critical emergent issues to deal with moment to moment. But yeah, a new administration needs to hang this one out to dry.
That Kentucky/Tennessee graph really is something!
My masks are N95: I’m grateful to whomever it was on MSNBC who mentioned that this was the necessary standard back in February and I got some of the last ones available on Amazon.
The medical community should have their own stockpile of these masks. I shouldn’t be expected to refrain from buying them to protect me and my family so they can have them instead.