My pharmacist will refill before the due date if I ask her to. We just did this to try and get all my prescriptions to refill at the same time, in fact. She just told me “it’s not a bad thing to have extra in case you go out of town or drop a pill bottle or something.”
My pharmacy will allow me to refill, but my insurance won’t pay for it. Luckily, my medication is affordable to me without the insurance, so I went ahead and stocked up. If you can afford to, see if you can bypass your insurance carrier.
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Same. All of ours was gone by 10 am today. They found some more in the back around 1pm and restocked.
It occurs to me I have no idea where our hand sanitizers are sourced from - would it be ironic if it was China?
Stock up on soap instead!
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MrsRico and I, in our low 70s, spent a week on California’s central coast, including a full day at the very-jammed Monterey Bay Aquarium. No cases are reported in the area though we were close to international travelers. (Ed Ricketts’ lab next door is a trip!) We seem to have mild flu but no sweating or other major CoViD-19 symptoms. Back home now, our rural county east of Sacramento seems unlikely to panic - but the county seat’s WalMart has been stripped of masks, gloves, sanitizers, and OTC remedies. They said they’d restock today. I didn’t check other pharmacies in town.
We had work scheduled in the Sacramento area a couple weeks out. We moved that forward to 3 days from now because we’ve no idea if panic will spread and services close. We won’t assume ANYTHING is fixed time-wise until… until it’s over? Till the pandemic burns out? When will metropolitan California start shutting down?
You could ask your doctor to write another prescription.
I guess I’m a hoarder. When I started taking estrogen I had two different prescriptions for a while as i experimented with doses. I just kept filling both of them. It’s easy to cut the drugs to get the right amount from the “wrong” prescription. (I actually did this under my doctor’s advise at first to try to find the best dose.) So I’ve been using the oldest stuff first, and maintaining a few months of stock in my cupboard.
Maybe I should get some extra guifenesin? That comes in small bottles considering the usual dose. I feel like I have decent stock of all the other drugs I take when I catch a cold. Maybe I should also stock some extra herbal tea. If I’m stuck at home that would be nice to have.
Oh, but what I meant to stress was that my prescription drug insurance happily paid for two different prescriptions of the same medicine, through several refills. Yeah, I was a little surprised.
Okay, serious question: what is the fearsome thing about this virus? Is it lethality? Severity of symptoms? Virility? What I’ve read about it doesn’t really make it clear to me, especially since I really been concerned about it, and I don’t want to get myself paranoid.
What I guess I’m wondering is whether this thing really deserves the kind of media coverage and paranoia it seems to be engendering. I don’t particularly want to hunker down in a bunker or something or get all hypochondriac, not unless there’s an actual reason for it.
This now-four-page thread is filled with the latest information that anyone had at the time they posted. Have you read the thread, Leaper? :dubious: Or do you just want other people to read it to you? :rolleyes:
I already did, and I still don’t get it. It seems like a good majority of this thread is about who has it and how people are reacting, and that doesn’t tell me why they’re reacting that way. I’ve been treating this as another media-driven all-for-nothing hype fest. Like, I know bird flu and Ebola were serious diseases, but in retrospect, they didn’t deserve the panic they caused, especially in the media. The government reactions to this are the only thing that make me think it might not be the same thing all over again. Yeah, it’s spreading, and it’s killed some people; that sounds like flu season to me, and I know it’s not exactly the same, but nobody panics this much over a lot of other illnesses, and everything I’ve read just seems to assume you’re already panicked about it.
Businesses are cancelling activities and governments are treating this like plague, and what I’ve read so far hasn’t shown me this isn’t some kind of massive panicky overreaction. That’s what I feel like I’m missing. Should I actually be buying out masks and avoiding Chinese people or what? (Not really, but that’s another reason why it struck me as hype for nothing.)
:rolleyes:
Sure. The government of China just quarantined nearly 100 million people for 4+ weeks for no good reason. They just tanked their economy for no good reason. 3,000+ people are dead from a virus that’s no big deal. 85,000+ people are not really ill at all.
:rolleyes:
Do you think we’re holding back the real info and just providing misleading tidbits as a joke?
If all the information in this thread and at all the links provided isn’t enough for you to understand what’s going on, I humbly submit that you prolly need more help in this than you’ll find on the Straight Dope Message Board.
I’m not hunkering down in a bunker or something, but I am trying to get myself prepared. Personally I am not worried about dying. I am worried about being so sick that I want to die. I live alone. The last time I was sick enough to be driven to bed for multiple days, I had a roommate who–despite being sick herself–was able to care for me. We both had the flu, and it was an awful experience. So I’m not looking forward to going through days, potentially weeks of debilitating flu-like illness all by myself, and possibly being unable to get medical care because everyone and their mama is in the ER.
I am also concerned because I have two elderly parents who are indifferent about their health. I called my mother up a couple of days ago and asked if they had enough food and supplies in the house just in case the city is shut down. Or just in case they both fall ill and don’t have the strength to get to the store. My mother just chuckled. Alrighty then, I thought to myself. I guess if the worst happens, it happens. But I really hope it doesn’t. They live far away from me, so if they wind up getting sick right around the same time that I do, I may not be much help to them.
This is the kind of thing I’m asking about. Talking about cities being shut down. Corporations and government choosing to lose out on millions, if not billions, of dollars. This kind of thing makes me think people believe that this is an apocalypse-level event, and as far as I know, while it may be serious and people are dying, it doesn’t seem to be. People are buying stores out of masks and hand sanitizer. What I’m asking is, is this a rational, proportional reaction? Because if it is, I want to know, because that would be far FAR beyond my understanding of the situation.
Others are saying that coronavirus hasn’t been more deadly than far more common causes and disease so far. All I’m saying is that by the information I’ve gotten, I don’t have any reason to believe the people buying out the stores over them. They may be wrong, but I was saying that just seeing numbers of cases and public reaction are kind of out of context for me. That’s why I asked what I did: the reactions are making me think this virus is significantly more severe, more deadly, or more easily spread than most diseases, enough for drastic and severe measures to be taken. That wasn’t my understanding.
Don’t take this personally, Snowboarder Bo. I’m not criticizing you for posting this thread or calling you a fearmonger. If I’m under informed, that’s my fault, not yours.
People are acting like this because countries are shutting down cities to contain the spread of this thing. If there were no quarantines occurring, then yeah, people would bananas for worrying the way they have been. But fear is naturally going to strike people’s hearts when they see countries sacrificing their economies to protect public health. If the new coronavirus ain’t about nothing, then how do you explain this?
I don’t think this is a apocalpytic event, but you better believe I have three weeks of food stocked away just in case people do a run on the stores and supply chains can’t refill them fast enough. I’m not responding to hype. I’m just deciding that I’d rather be prepared and be mistaken for a “sheeple” instead of playing it cool and suffering needlessly if the worst should be happen.
I don’t know where you are getting your information. All experts seem to be in agreement that this thing is more dangerous than the seasonal flu and also much more contagious. Both of these things make it scarier. Not deserving of a panic response, but certainly extra concern. Especially if you are over the age of 50 and have other medical issues. Which includes a lot of Americans. Including Dopers and their family.
Since I don’t know where you are getting your information, I don’t really know what to tell you. I’ve been keeping tabs of this thing by following the live thread on r/worldnews. There’s a lot of doomers who post there, but there is also a shitload of insightful information from all around the world.
I don’t take it personally at all. If you’re under informed, I doubt it’s the fault of this thread. In fact, if you’ve read the thread, then you’re prolly close the same level of informed as everyone else who’s read thru the thread.
But you seem to want to discuss your opinion, and this is a Breaking News thread: it’s right there in the title. I do find that somewhat frustrating, I admit.
Here; I’ll try and help you out again: IMHO thread: How concerned are you about this Coronavirus? Perhaps you’ll find the information and conversation you’re looking for there.
I think that the biggest goal is to prevent it from being another infection that humans will have to deal with forever, or at least as long as we survive as a species. I don’t think anyone is predicting an apocalyptic event. Higher death rates won’t kill off humanity. But measures that individuals, corporations and governments take could lead to local and global supply chain disruptions. For this reason, folks need to be prepared. There”s also the chance of areas of widespread panic around the globe, which could further complicate getting access to supplies that we need. As usual, The Times gives a great up-to-date “compare and contrast” summary versus the flu…
Seriously? I mean, you’re serious, but that seems extreme to me. If we’re at the point you can’t buy food, things have devolved entirely worse than your next meal.
In what way? What are you recommending? Stockpiling Spam?
Let’s try some context. The 1918 influenza pandemic (aka the Spanish Flu) is estimated to have infected some 500 million people, or nearly a quarter of the global population. The mortality rate was somewhere in the vicinity of 3%, and estimates of total deaths vary significantly - 17 to 55 million. (All numbers taken from wikipedia.)
Multiply all that by 4 to account for the much larger current total global population, drop the mortality rate by about half, and you have some idea of what a worst case outcome for COVID-19 could look like. Now, we’re not going to see 100 million deaths - medical science has advanced a bit in the last 100 years, and we don’t have most of the world’s most prosperous nations dealing with the most destructive war in human history to date. Plus, the mortality patterns of COVID-19 look different from the Spanish Flu, which tended to kill young adults in disproportionate numbers. However, even a small fraction of infection rate of 1918 could result in hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths.
We won’t likely see that, but a significant part of why we won’t is because governments are taking it seriously. If they are successful, when this is over many people will pooh-pooh the pandemic as no big deal, and how stupid was it to overreact, etc. Those people don’t know their history very well.
Three weeks? My very Mormon mother would laugh at such a pittance. She has “followed the prophet” and has had a two-year supply of food every since I can remember.
We have maybe a couple of weeks of food. I always make sure we have some because we were there in Tokyo when the Fukushima earthquake and then nuclear power accident happened. All the instant ramen immediately sells out after an earthquake or when a typhoon approaches, but this made everything go off the shelves, except a few bottles of ketchup.
Things got restored, but it took a week or so for everything to settle down. Restaurants were OK, IIRC, and things picked up quickly.
I don’t see how COVID 19 could cause the same kind of panic buying, but I obviously see value in having some sort of supply since I had that experience once.
Leaper
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COVID19 seems to have a fatality rate of 1-3% (with higher fatality in places like Italy and Iran). Thats much lower than SARS or MERS but higher than your average influenza virus (about 0.01%).
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Unlike most influenza outbreaks which disproportionately kill the very young and the very old, the Spanish flu affected young adults disproportionately. In this, thus far, at least, COVID19 is not like the Spanish flu, but ordinary influenza.
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COVID19 is significantly more infectious than either SARS or MERS, on par with ordinary influenza.
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It also seems to have a much higher rate of severe infections than ordinary influenza, which means that resources become stretched. Already there is an issue of availability of mechanical ventilation (needed for advanced cases). If you have systems becoming stretched due to a paucity of resources, then we have bad outcomes for ostensibly “survivable” cases. We have seen that in Iran, whose medical system is already been decimated thanks to US sanctions. If a medical system budgets for twice the number of expected “serious” cases and gets 20 times that, well you can see what might happen.
Yes, it’s bad. Very bad. Just because it’s not the Black Death, or 1918 pandemic or Plague of Justinian, it should not make us think instead that “oh its nothing”.
Yes. But, unlike before, there is little recent public experience of mass quarantines and people ae much more likely not to follow directions.
Quarantines, are not pleasent.