I now have an image of normally stolid Austrians rampaging through the streets earlier this week, desperately seeking … ferret litter.
But calm has now descended again over the ferret cages of Austria.
I think I have a cold too. I have a cough and a stuffy headache. At least I hope it’s a cold.
Just watching the news. They have pointed out that 150 million people in Europe are on lockdown right now. Totally incredible.
Fuck you, John Cornyn:
Well, for some reason all the ferret litter here is mislabelled as cat litter. Go figure. 
Just in: some statistics backing up the motivation for such a measure. The job centre of the Federal Ministry for Work, Family and Youth reports that, since the pandemic hit Austria, 3500 to 5000 people per day have been registering themselves as unemployed. By contrast, the usual rate for this time of year is 2800 applications per day.
In other news, Friday prayers at Vienna mosques have been cancelled, as have Saturday services at synagogues. Most churches will likewise forgo Sunday mass. The city’s cathedral, Stephansdom, and other Roman Catholic churches remain open, but only for private prayer, not for tourist visits or masses, and even then only 100 people are admitted at a time. (Given faltering church attendance in the last few decades, I doubt that they will be anywhere close to reaching this limit.)
The Methodist church that I attend (western suburbs of Chicago) announced today that it’ll be closed for at least the next two weeks. However, they’ve already announced two exceptions to this:
- We host a polling place, so the building will be open on Tuesday for the Illinois primary
- Once a month, we are a host for a homeless shelter group, so we’ll be open that night for the homeless.
Well, crises are difficult to manage. During the SARS coronavirus crisis, I was a member of the infection control committee of a Toronto area hospital. We knew far less that time around. It was scary.
Lessons need to be learned for later. The evidence suggests border closures and travel bans are less effective than they might seem. Putting qualified people in charge may inspire more confidence than a Vice President. Pandemic committees are not a bad idea. Getting tests to front line workers, and performing early screening is worth prioritizing. Isolating cruise ship passengers has difficulties. Striking the balance between concern and fear is hard. No one can see the future.
Based on what we know about transmission in different age cohorts, the jury is out on closing daycares and schools. Postponing sports events is easier to justify. I’ve never much liked parades, but this is a personal view.
Since a big package of toilet paper lasts me months, I am confused by the hoarding of this item.
Yeah, I had the “IDK throat” at bedtime last night, but dismissed it at the time as paranoia brought on by everybody everywhere talking virus. Virus. VIRUS! It’s like they’ve got virus fever, heh.
The dry cough is the most worrying sign for me, followed by the blahs, the lets-take-a-nap! feeling. I will look into getting tested. Now I have an excuse to take Sudafed, a nice little drug, but I am going to run out of it. My gf would surely pick up some more, only I’ve probably already exposed her 
I just bought all of this canned food, so I’m going on the Apocalypse Diet- so far I seem to prefer the canned stews, and the beef jerky is looking good. What I really want is tomato soup and a grilled cheddar cheese sandwich, but I don’t have that, alas. The canned pineapple, peas, peaches, beans, meh, tomorrow I guess. Since it is the end of the world, I got the cat a few tins of rabbit meat cat food. Never has my cat been more on board with one of my plans!
I just got an email from my usual grocery store that they will be closing an hour earlier each day for the present, to allow more time for the workers to be restocking shelves. Also suspending drive-up deliveries, though in truth I have never witnessed a single such delivery in all the years I’ve gone there.
Anyway. For your amusement: I did my usual Friday-after-leaving-work shopping trip yesterday. Except it was not at all as usual. My first clue was the bread aisle. There was a SINGLE loaf of bread on it. Literally, in the exact meaning of literally. It was cinnamon-raisin swirl, so I left it to someone more desperate than I. I did score one of just three remaining packs of English muffins.
The dairy section was mostly fine – plenty of milk and eggs and cheese, with a few varieties gone. Yogurt had been hit, though. I bought the last five cartons of regular yogurt they had. Not my usual brands or flavors, but oh well. Beggars <>choosers.
I’d planned on buying some pasta. Again the aisle was nearly denuded. All the regular pastas were gone, all brands and shapes. All that was left was a few boxes of gluten free spaghetti.
On to the baking aisle. Hey, no problem, I know how to bake bread… except there was no flour. Not white, not wheat, not rye, any size from any company. There were a few bags of spelt flour and a big heap of, wait for it, BANANA flour. I did not even know there was such a thing!
And that was how it went throughout the store. No paper good, obviously. No sanitizers/cleaning liquids. Maybe 5% of the usual amount of canned vegetables. Tuna and canned chicken and canned pastas…Gone. A few cans of soup, mostly weird ‘gourmet’ specials combos. The produce section was reduced to those little clamshell boxes of herbs and such. No lettuce, no tomatoes, no bananas, no apples, no oranges… no, no, no, no.
The deli seemed fully stocked though. I guess with schools canceled and people working from home they don’t need as much lunch meat for sandwiches?
Anyway. The store was actually nearly empty of customers, too. I felt like I was in one of those post-Apocalypse movies with the tiny amount of dazed survivors wandering through the remains of civilization.
So I decided to stop off there at 8:15 a.m. on my way to a meeting – and they actually had some food! The overnight stockers had clearly put in heroic efforts. I was able to get bread and some other things I’d missed last night. Still big gaps everywhere – the produce department was still wiped out, and items stocked by manufacturers were still missing (like pretty much all breads except for the store brand) – but it was much better than last night.
Then after my meeting broke up a bit after noon, I decided to swing by again on my way home.
Yay! I got fruit! And lettuce! Even green peppers and tomatoes!
But then I walked past the bread aisle…and it was again completely empty! Yep, every single loaf that the workers had been able to put out overnight had been scooped up by noon.
I know this kind of desperation buying will have to taper off quickly – how much room do people have to store food, anyway? – but it’s genuinely starting to make me freak out.
Maybe they are right and I’m the foolish optimist? Why didn’t I buy three, no five loaves of bread this morning?? Maybe I could fit seven loaves into the freezer if I rearrange things…
Will I turn into a hoarder? Stay tuned.
Here’s an interesting twist–remember the pneumonia cases blamed on vaping last year? There are some Japanese and Taiwanese epidemiologists that think that was one of the earlier appearances of COVID-19, nothing to do with vaping at all. They tied that to another incident that led to the closure of the bio-lab at Fort Detrick–and there were military personnel who went to Wuhan to participate in some military games not long before the coronavirus outbreak began who were hospitalized in China with a mystery infection. So this could be an interesting case of chickens coming home to roost for the US.
So this claim that there are five distinct types of COVID-19 … I’ve seen reference in other places to two different strains, but not five. Apparently these are the only researchers saying so?
The “oh and also there were these cases in Hawaii which is US soil” bulletpoint just makes them look politically motivated to point blame - Hawaii is after all a thousand miles and an ocean away from Maryland.
At the moment I’m not seeing a big reason to take this research as good, though I’d be open to revising my opinion
Unless this was actually engineered in a lab and released via knowingly infected people ordered to go to China then the issue has nothing to do with “blame.” The fact is that our combination of high standard of living and mobility coupled with a captive service industry of low wage workers who don’t have access to health care or paid time off work is a perfect petri dish to develop new strains of virulent diseases because they’ll go unnoticed and untreated and unacknowledged here for months while privileged people on vacation or doing business transport large virus loads in airplanes and cruise ships all over the damned world. We don’t help people, we don’t heal people, we don’t even bother to track it when people get sick–we’re the world’s goddamned kindergarten full of snotty noses and viruses going everywhere to infect everyone. It’s a wonder we’ve not been quarantined yet–guess that’s what all that military hardware is for.
There was a great list I saw somewhere (but have now lost the link to) that laid out all the possible symptoms with “percentage of cases have this symptom”, starting off with “Fever - 88%”
I’d love to find it again. Does anyone know the list I’m talking about?
I certainly do remember, Aleq, and have a thread over on General Questions about it. If it was coronavirus back then, it has been spreading much longer than the main narrative says, and so I am not alarmed about this virus. I think the Chinese freaked out back around the new year because they were seeing a spike in pneumonia cases when people with vape lung hit the flu season. Read that thread and reply with your thoughts.
No I don’t care about ‘blame’ either, but I see that some people do, and I think that those researchers are among that group.
But really the initial red flag for me is that they build their argument on “there are five types of novel coronavirus, and only the US has all five types”. Where does this number five come from? Is it generally accepted? The day after that first article there was an article in New Scientist saying there were two … so apparently the number five wasn’t widely accepted then, and I can’t find any reference to it being generally accepted now. And without that the whole argument falls to pieces.
I don’t really have to care either way in any case, since I don’t come from either the US or China, and the research doesn’t seem to have any implications for health care delivery right now. But for those who do care, I just think it looks unreliable.
Spain is in lockdown.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-14/spain-declares-state-of-emergency-in-fight-against-coronavirus
Nitpick: 4,800 miles.
Certain entrepreneurial individuals are hitting up all the retails stores within their driving distance, buying up their entire stocks of sanitizers, masks, and all sorts of other supplies that are in high demand, which they are then re-selling on-line at Amazon, eBay, and other such venues for mega-markups. To read some of their interviews, they seem to not have a hint of a clue of a concept that this might be frowned upon.
More recently, the on-line platforms have been cracking down, suspending or banning these accounts, leaving these resellers with literally tens of thousands of units to sell and no venue to sell them. Meanwhile, the rest of us can’t get any of this stuff because the shelves are bare.
This is flat out illegal in at least some states, and some district attorneys are starting to take notice.
Story at New York Times: He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them, Jack Nicas, NYT, March 14, 2020.
Tom Tildrum linked to it in one of the other threads:
The number of confirmed cases in Hawaii doubled over night, to four. There were two on Oahu. Now a tourist couple on Kauai have tested positive and are in quarantine.