Same, Manda Jo. Banquet Bear, I understand the supermarket is operating as though everyone is infected. I also don’t believe for a second you’d leave a hospital with a positive diagnosis in hand and pop in at the Piggly-Wiggly on the way home.
Somewhat relevant to our discussion here: I read an interview with Joe Biden in which he said his grandkids, who live nearby, walk over and sit on the lawn as he sits on the porch and visits with him. Do some people here think that sets a bad example?
Yes, it’s irksome to have every discussion of our personal actions be met with a holier-than-thou lecture about how bad our leaders are, especially given that this forum is not supposed to be about politics.
Yes. If I had it, or thought there was a good chance I did, I would get food delivered (in a “contactless” way) before I would go into a grocery store. Which is why I wondered why, according to Banquet Bear, New Zealand advice was to “shop as you normally do” but that local restaurants and mail-order companies were all closed.
Per Banquet Bear’s link, Siouxsie Wiles also says, "[you can have a chat with your neighbour, but not a long one.] Keep it brief – just a few minutes – and maintain that two metre distance.” I cannot imagine anyone having a chat with their neighbor at a 2 meter distance where one of them says, “I just got back from the hospital, I have COVID-19.” That seems… horrendously irresponsible.
…have you been tested? Can you guarantee right now you don’t have Corvid-19? Most people in America right now who have it don’t know that they do. By the time you get a positive diagnosis in America it will probably be too late.
In America there isn’t enough testing. There certainly isn’t the capacity to trace in ways that will identify clusters and mitigate community transmission across state boundaries. We have all of that here. We have universal healthcare. I run a small business and a day after I applied for relief the government paid me enough money to help keep my business and my crew afloat for the next few months. I know I’ve got it lucky.
But I will continue to take precautions. Of course if I knew I had Corvid-19 that would probably change my calculus and I probably wouldn’t stop at the supermarket on the way home. But that really misses the point. I wouldn’t do it not because my behaviour would be any more or less riskier if I did. It would because my status would change from “stay at home unless I had to” to “quarantined, the doctors in PPE are coming to get you.”
This isn’t a “gotcha” exercise and I have no idea what the point of all of this is now. You both asked for advice, Manda JO even explicitly has asked us to help derive the principles by which they will live their lives for the next few months. The advice to “pretend you have Corvid-19” isn’t a rule. It isn’t a law. Its barely a guideline. It was a bit of advice because Manda JO was worried that by pretending somebody else had Corvid-19 we would risk stigmatising them, so I offered an alternative paradigm. Its the paradigm that I’ve adopted. That’s all. I can’t set the rules that you live by. You do whatever it is you want to do.
…because the entire point of the lockdown is to break the chain of transmission. Its a 30 day lockdown, designed to outlast the incubation period of Corvid-19. Over the next couple of weeks we should see cases of community transmission start to pop up. By limiting the possible points of transmission if a cluster forms it will be easier to trace all of those that were exposed. So supermarkets are allowed to open because people need to eat, small local dairies are allowed to open (because they are closer for people with mobility issues to access) but butchers and grocers and restaurants are **not **allowed to open. We want as many people as possible to stay home and having more shops open defeats that goal.
…it isn’t “politics” to say that the President of the United States is unfit to lead America in this crisis, and has already made decisions that are going to get thousands of people killed. This crisis is going to hit America harder than anywhere else in the world because of Trump and his administration. Hospitals are already overloaded. You’ve got clusters in prisons, you are starting to get clusters in Amazon warehouses, we have no idea what is happening in your immigration detention camps. To effectively fight the pandemic you need to act quickly but America hasn’t done that. It isn’t outside the bounds of this forum to point this fact out.
That’s essentially what Polis, Colorado’s governor, said. Some people will obey an order, some people will rebel, so he advises staying home if you need an order, but if you’re the kind who will rebel against an order, there isn’t any order. A day or so later he had to just give an order to stay home.
…Siouxsie Wiles is a microbiologist specialising in infectious diseases and bioluminescence. She is head of the Bioluminescent Superbugs Lab at the University of Auckland and has spent the last 20 years studying infectious microbes. I’ll trust her judgement over yours over what is and isn’t “responsible”.
I’m just going to say that these sorts of “Whatever, I can’t tell you how to live your life” jabs ARE irksome. I DO appreciate you posting a link to someone in a position of authority weighing in on lengthy social interactions, because nobody I follow has gotten into the weeds like that. But Dr. Amy Acton, the director of the Ohio Health Department, has been telling us to “act like we all already have it” for close to 2 weeks now. All of the guidance you’re getting in NZ is the exact same guidance we’re getting (and heeding) here in Ohio – or at least my family is heeding it. You and I, we’re doing essentially the same things from the sound of it, even down to changing our behavior if we had a no-shit positive diagnosis in hand. The only difference is I’m stuck in a country where far too many people aren’t doing the same things, under a government (federal, state, and local) that is not implementing the same restrictions as yours. I can’t help that.
Where we’re talking past each other is that it’s possible to understand the seriousness of this and still want to know what’s an acceptable risk. Siouxsie Wiles says that short conversations at 2 meters are OK. Why? That’s not a scientific proclamation. Coronavirus doesn’t care if the conversation is 2 minutes or 2 hours. The only difference is that the longer conversation has 60x the potential for a virus to jump the air gap. That’s it. Any conversation carries some risk, but Siouxsie Wiles has determine that a short conversation is an acceptable risk.
Your health professionals, as well as the ones here in Ohio, have determined that grocery shopping and walking outside are also acceptable risks. I don’t take it as a given that grocery stores need to remain open in order for people not to starve to death, as several cities in China closed all grocery stores (and some in SK, I think). That’s a judgement call that can and has been made, that grocery shopping is too much of a risk. But our experts (yours and mine) are saying it’s acceptable.
That’s really all I wanted to know. If a 2 minute conversation with social distancing in place is OK, can we do that 60 times? The consensus seems to be that no, that small risk multiplied by 60 becomes an unacceptable risk. Great. I’m fine with that.
How is it that a brief chat won’t infect anyone but a long one will? 
Even in terms of playing the probabilities, it would make more sense to me if the advice were to restrict the *number *of people you chat with rather than talking about the length of time you chat with them.
I wouldn’t crow about it.
…I’m sorry, but what is it you want me to do now?
You said you didn’t believe me. When I gave you a binary answer to your binary question you complained that “Christ, this is exhausting.” When I give you a lengthy, detailed and nuanced answer you complain that my jabs are irksome.
I’m not making any jabs. I’m not trying to be personal. I can’t tell you what to do. I’ve given the best advice and guidance from sources I know and I trust because I know in America things are very confused now. But I can’t tell you what to do. I don’t know your situation, I don’t know what guidance you are following or what is best for you to do. I’ve told you what I’m doing and you tell me you don’t believe me. Okay. What now?
And I can’t help that you can’t help that. For the lockdown to work you need buy in from as many people as you can and a lockdown that isn’t a lockdown simply isn’t really a lockdown. If you don’t get that buy in from people the odds of community transmission increase, the odds of stamping out clusters increase. That is what you need to be personally preparing for.
Siouxsie Wiles hasn’t determined that a short conversation is an “acceptable risk”. She would much rather you didn’t have that conversation at all. She might think personally its an unacceptable risk, but she is also well aware that that conversation is going to happen anyway so she recommends that you keep it as short as possible.
The only person who is in the position to determine whether or not a risk is acceptable is you. So we are back to “what is it you want from me?” I can’t tell you what risks to take. So if you don’t want the same answer out of me because it “irks you” then perhaps stop asking the exact same question.
If it were logistically possible to close all grocery stores here they would have. But it would have been impossible to implement what they did there. The supermarkets are open here because that is the only way logistically to distribute the food to the masses. Its probably a given for any Western culture that the supermarkets are going to have to remain open.
I’ve been crystal clear I don’t know the answer to this. All I can do is offer the advice from our experts. If you are fine with that, then be fine with that. I don’t get why you have to say stuff like “you don’t believe me.”
For anyone interested: this is the latest update from here:
We’ve had our first death. 
…you are welcome to ignore the advice. If you want to have long and lengthy chats to your neighbours I’m not going to stop you.
Nothing. Have a good one and stay safe.
…and same to you. Kia kahato you and to all in this thread.
:rolleyes: This is exactly what **steronz **was calling tiresome. FFS, I haven’t even left my apartment in two weeks! (15 days, actually.) During that time, my wife has gone out twice, to pick up groceries and a prescription, wearing a mask when anywhere indoors outside our apartment including the common areas of the building. Neither of us have had any chats with anyone (except online) and aren’t contemplating any. Wait, that’s not true: on her way back from the most recent grocery/pharmacy trip, she also went to her 84-year-old grandmother’s nursing home and talked to her through the glass.
So one of my best friends is single and lives alone. He’s also prone to boughts of melancholy, though I don’t think he had depression but I really don’t know. We’ve both been working from home for 2 weeks. We talk daily. He does Zoom calls with friends, etc. He also goes for walks in the park daily. When it rained for a couple days and he couldn’t walk our conversations made me fearful for his mental health. In the last 2 weeks he has said at least 3 times “At least you have your wife”, mentioning he hasn’t had physical contact with anyone in 2+ weeks (not that he’s planning on it).
So it’s all well and good to say you shouldn’t go out at all, even for walks, but if we are to shelter that way for 2 more months, I’m really scared my friend will not be there at the end of the it.
Listen, a lot of folks may not have mental illness now, but a lot of folks who live alone, especially those that tend to be extroverted are starting to lose it. You have to have some leeway in terms of walking, or talking to people over 10ft away (which imo, physiologically feels different than a Zoom call) or else you are going to see a drastic increase in suicides as well as COVID 19 deaths.
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…but what is it you want me to do? A question was asked, I shared the opinion of an expert, you are skeptical of that opinion, so okay then? Do what you want. I really hope you keep safe and that we all get through this. But if you think there is something wrong with the advice then don’t follow it.
I suspect the advice is in place because people want to “bend the rules” so if we make “the rules” just bendy enough to probably mitigate most risk then people will be more likely to follow them. But that’s just a guess.
This isn’t about “well, then don’t follow it”. Not on this site. We’re supposed to be truth-seekers here, regardless of where the chips fall or what propaganda value it may or may not have to give this advice or that. Facts, evidence, logical arguments. The “straight dope”.