It’s even worse than that – there are problems getting cargo to the airport in the first place. The Canadian government has been sourcing PPE and other supplies from Chinese manufacturing plants and sending dedicated cargo planes to bring them back. Recently two of the planes had to come back empty because the supplies didn’t make it on time and there was a strictly imposed ground time limit in Shanghai.
Nevertheless the airlift continues, and domestic manufacturing is being ramped up. The GM auto assembly plant in Oshawa is now making millions of face masks.
That’s true around here (Brooklyn, NY) in one surprising way.
The supermarket where I do most of my shopping is the local food. They’re doing all the expected things – requiring masks, limiting the number of people in the store at one time, and keeping the line outside pretty separated and orderly.
There’s a sign (several, actually) outside saying that people over 60 are permitted to go to the front of the line.
Whenever someone actually does this, the chorus of groaning and muttering and protesting and occasional shouting at anyone going to the front of the line from the twenty- and thirty-somethings on line is really shocking. Apparently this is really, really unfair, and shouldn’t be allowed.
Aye, me boyo, and that’s why I get pissed when the bloody aides and nurses leave my door open. Before it was because I didn’t want to give the old dears what I had. Now I don’t want to get what they have.
Can someone explain why a package would take 2 months to arrive in shipping? I bought facemasks on Amazon weeks ago and was told they would arrive in June - which I took to mean that they were so swamped in orders that they couldn’t ship until June. OK, no problem. But now I see on Amazon tracking that the package was shipped on April 15, but still says arrival in June. Even if traveling on horseback it couldn’t take that long to go from a U.S. location to another U.S. location.
Shipping direct from China? Even under normal circumstances, that takes a few weeks. (I found this out when I ordered a kitchen timer that I thought had been backordered until it arrived in its little envelope direct from the manufacturer.)
Check out Post #520. From Beijing, there is only one cargo flight per month to America now. The other major cities (aka shipping hubs) in China are facing the same issue.
Well, my beard was making my mask pretty useless, and my hair was beyond needing cut. So, yesterday I went into our garage and shaved everything off (actually, I left my eyebrows and lashes). After using my clippers, I washed my head, lathered up, and got the remaining 1/16 inch.
Well, no more going to the library, no getting hired, been income free for a year. I go to the grocery store once a week, church Sunday’s, Bible study Wednesday. I live in Lake county, next to Cuyahoga, 250,000 people. 160 sick, 7 died. Walmart is always packed. Just want to work so I can have clothes etc and not have to have my pastor supply me with toilet paper and rent.
Take care, honey. It will be well. I’m much younger (in my 30s) and not worried much about the virus as I believe if I catch it I will fight it off. I feel for you. My dad is almost your age and anxious about what will happen if he catches it. All I hope is that it doesn’t get there.
I’m still working full-time and feeling very pleased that I scored a twelve pack of toilet paper at Walgreens on Friday.
My big thing is buying enough Sheba wet food for Her Royal Little Pickiness to tide us over - she won’t eat the salmon or tuna flavors and most of the boxes have at least one of those flavors.
The nursing home where my wife’s grandmother resides has had 3 covid-19 cases in the past few days: one staff member and two residents. Like any such place, there’s no way for staff to do their jobs while preserving social distancing from the patients, so we fully expect that that there may be many more cases than that. Grandma’s 96 and in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, but this still isn’t how we would want her to go.
Today was a good day, relatively speaking. My excess of empty wine bottles has been reduced almost in half by the fact that more beer stores including my local one (the official and only deposit-return centers) have re-instated the returns program, but with limited amounts per person per visit. I was negligent in letting a large number accumulate over many months before this crisis hit, but it’s now manageable.
Then I visited the liquor store, fearing the worst in terms of lineups, but there was none at all – just a nice cheery lady at the door wiping down shopping carts and saying “come on in!” No crowds, and ample stocks of everything. I’ll remember that the next time someone tries to tell me that governments can’t run anything efficiently.
Next visit was a grocery store a little farther away than my normal one, which has a variety of specialty goodies. Again, not crowded and amply stocked. The only downside is that they’ve closed down the deli department, but in its stead they’ve prepackaged and vacuum-packed many of the more popular products, which is actually a bonus because the vac-packed stuff lasts a long time. I picked up a couple of vac-packs of my favorite garlic sausage that are good until the end of May.
The bad news, in the larger scheme of things, is that there’s been an uptick in new COVID cases in Ontario, several hundred new ones, up 3% over the day before.
Minneapolis/Saint Paul: highest number of diagnosed cases per day yet. And the total number of cases is still low enough that unless there have been a huge number of asymptomatic cases, herd immunity is probably zilch. No peak here yet.
On the plus side, thanks to being officially furloughed due to the virus and a special federal subsidy to state unemployment insurance, I’m receiving three times my part-time job’s weekly salary. So far this is the longest paid vacation I’ve had in my life. If this lasts long enough I may buy a used car.
If you’re “income free”, can’t you qualify for government assistance? For the library, check online to see if your library is doing the same thing the libraries where my family in the US live: they have an E-book collection which can be borrowed, read, and returned online.
I get that going to the grocery store is essential, of course.* But how is physically going to church two days a week essential when it is an activity that risks exposing yourself or others to the current plague? Quite a lot of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, etc. are now conducting services and other activities online. My church, for example, has closed all its chapels worldwide until further notice and services are conducted via various means, depending on the location (some teleconference, some live streaming on YouTube, others via Zoom, etc.).
Quite some time ago, when I was job hunting, I signed up for a few head hunter sites. I get daily E-mail notifications still. So many of them now announce that interviews are to be conducted online and the job ads announce that the job can be done as work at home. While you’re stuck at home, look into some free online courses to improve your skills (i.e., buff up your résumé).
*Your post now has me wondering something about the food delivery services in the US. Do they accept the food stamp cards in payment?
My father’s recovering from COVID-19, which is definitely pretty amazing, considering that he’s elderly, immobile, diabetic, has Parkinson’s, and had a recurrence of a different infection severe enough to put him in the hospital on its own. But being a bit Rasputin-like and living through stuff that might kill other people seems to run in his side of the family, so maybe it’s par for the course.
Otherwise, the only impacts are having to work at home and see my wife and kids constantly, which has its ups and downs, and having to be kind of aggressive and creative with online ordering/pick-up grocery ordering to eat how we’d like.
Adventures in observing stay-at-home orders with an aging parent…
Mom had been doing fine with online grocery shopping; although she still hasn’t received a delivery window notification from her beloved Whole Foods, she’s gotten the hang of ordering and pickup from Harris Teeter. Yesterday, she wasn’t satisfied with the number of items that were out of stock when she picked up her order, so she took it upon herself to drive across town to another Harris Teeter to see what they had on the shelves. (Yes, she wore a mask.) There were no crowds, but there were enough empty shelves that she left very shaken up. She was anxious all afternoon, and then finally went off before dinner when a rice pouch I was heating in the microwave (yes, I’m that lazy) tipped over and spilled some rice. (This was entirely my fault; I vented the pouch a bit too much, so the pouch became unstable.) When I opened the door to remove the rice, some fell on the stovetop and the floor. She immediately ran to the pantry in search of another rice bag, demanding that I throw out what I had heated and start over. I pointed out that only a spoonful of rice was lost, and that the microwave itself was clean enough that I was comfortable eating the little bit that had spilled onto the glass plate. She then took it upon herself to try “salvaging” the spilled rice by collecting what had fallen on the not-so-clean stovetop and trying to place it in the rice bowl. She became enraged when I stopped her, and then switched her focus to pushing the rice grains that had fallen to the floor under the oven. When I pointed out that this may be the reason we’re having an ant problem now, she went off about how horrible everything is now, and how hard it is, and how awful I was for thinking that the spilled rice pouch was funny, and what’s the point of anything anymore, and she’ll never get to travel anywhere in her lifetime again, and we’re running out of food, and we don’t have anything to eat (really?)…
TLDR: My mom is so stressed out that she thinks we’re running out of food, despite an impressively-packed pantry and freezer, because she can’t get exactly what she wants from the grocery store.
