Old nurse here (I’m old and I have been a nurse for a long time).
Have you tried calling the medical supply company that you got your CPAP from and asking the respiratory equipment specialist there what a good-enough temporary substitute for distilled water might be?
WAG: maybe soft water filtered through a Brita? Or something similar.
They may also know of sources for CPAP water that grocery store supply chains don’t have access to. Also, pharmacist may know of sources for smaller quantities of distilled water for medical purposes. They use distilled water for compounding, they must be getting it from somewhere.
Might be my fault. I use tons of frozen peas. We always have an open bag in the freezer. One or two tablespoons added to an omelet, along with some frozen spinach, mmmmm.
Some people are talking about COVID babies, due to adults being cooped up together, and…you know. I disagreed from day one, because who would want to have a baby right now?
There was a post in some other thread here in the SDMB (maybe in this very forum) where someone followed up on a delivery from China that was taking a very long time, and was told that there was only one cargo flight a month out of that major Chinese airport. I’ve seen pictures of Air Canada jumbo jets with all the seats taken out so they could be used as additional emergency cargo jets to source PPE from China, and some of them indeed returned empty because the supplies just weren’t there when they should have been. So no, things are not normal, though may indeed be improving.
My order of surgical masks was another first-hand example (origin was Shenzhen). I got a shipping verification with a tracking number within hours of placing the order (around the beginning of May) and it stayed stuck in that state for over a month before the status changed to “arrived in Canada and cleared customs”.
YMMV, and as I said, things may (or may not) be improving.
I’ve seen similar, but those only applied to the US. I saw another more recent one that said that there will be a bump in India because the shutdown was sufficiently extreme that women can’t get refills of their birth control prescription. This may also apply to China and perhaps other countries.
Frozen veg has been a crapshoot here too. I frequently can’t get what I want. Fresh veg is fine, though, so I’ve taken to buying extra and freezing what I don’t use.
This might be another one of those items that is seeing a shift in buying patterns. I’d bet restaurants use a ton of eggs under normal conditions, and those have to go somewhere. Better to sell them cheap than not at all.
For months now we’ve seen reports of farmers dumping milk down the drain or letting crops rot in the field because the restaurant supply chain was shut down, even while grocery stores struggled with shortages. Apparently it’s not easy to suddenly find a new buyer for your produce. Some people and groups have been working to find solutions, but it takes time.
There is a restaurant supply store in this area, GFS, that also sells to the public.
And there was a local restaurant repackaging what they purchase into consumer-friendly boxes of different produce (maybe they called them “meal kits” to get around any regulation about selling to the consumer.) Drive up and the staff would deliver a box of choice restaurant-grade produce. A smart way to keep the restaurant staff employed, no?
So there could be ways to alleviate the supply chain concerns.
My church’s food pantry got a big donation of eggs in the 36-count restaurant flats, and they were wanting people to bring in egg cartons if they had them.
Some of the food dumping was done simply because the processing plants went to reduced-output status and the farmers had no place to store things in the meantime. Some farmers were also destroying livestock; independent butchers in this area are still booked into 2021.
FWIW, yesterday I was able to buy a gallon of distilled water from a local grocery store at a normal pre-pandemic price. So it’s out there; keep looking, you’ll find it eventually.
Not food, but I was finally able to buy hydrogen peroxide for the first time. Early on during this pandemic, I lacerated my foot and debated whether or not to go to the urgent care. I went to the Rite-Aid to get some hydrogen peroxide, but they were sold out. It’s taken until now for it to be back in stock. I thought this was an odd item to hoard. Are people having numerous injuries that they have to disinfect. They also still don’t have isopropyl alcohol which is baffling.
People are probably using both isopropyl alcohol and hydrogen peroxide as cleansing fluids for miscellaneous surfaces. As that isn’t ordinarily a common use for either, that would cause use to increase drastically.
Kraft Deluxe cheese, Chief Boyardee overstuffed ravioli, Campbell’s chili. None of these things make sense. My troll conspiracy theory is that all the workers escaped during the Covid panic.
They are all prime comfort foods (or so my housemate tells me), so in very high demand. Plus they are quick and convenient, so hard to keep on the shelves.
The overstuffed ravioli issue may be because many food processors have temporarily cut back on varieties of flavors so as to concentrate on packing and shipping a smaller range of things. Chef Boyardee announced that in April. Canned soup flavors, more exotic yogurt flavors, etc. But they will come back.
We got a gallon of 99.9% that I’m now diluting for kitchen sanitation purposes. It was about $45 and we found it through Amazon’s Industrial and Scientific section. I recommend searching that section for anything you are having trouble sourcing. I also got a 12-pack of 12" coreless commercial TP rolls for around $40 through them, back when TP simply could not be found.
