Over 60 dopers, are you staying home??

[RTFirefly]

@Ulfreida

It sounds like being proactive isn’t much of a thing among Dopers.

And yet, many of the posts in this thread read very similarly to the rest of your post, below.

The point of ‘social distancing’ (unfortunate term) is also to keep asymptomatic carriers (which could be any of the posters going about their business) from spreading the virus. My daughter was at a party in Boston last week and yesterday found out that one of the attendees has been diagnosed. Her partner who was also at the party has diabetes. Now they are … waiting. They were going to come over for the weekend but we all decided, nope.

We are already pretty well socially distant here in the backwoods anyway, and are trying to be more so, although we are not much past sixty and are in good health. We keep hand cleaner in the cars now.

My guess is that things are going to get much worse much faster than most people imagine. I am not pretending life is normal now.

Outside the GOP/FauxNews/evangelical/Trumpist borg, few are, as best as I can tell.

But I think that’s just been a change that’s happened this week. By Thursday afternoon, this country was in a very different place with respect to taking COVID-19 seriously than it was Wednesday morning.

Wednesday morning, for instance, it seemed like a bad idea for the NCAA basketball tournament to go forward like usual, but there didn’t seem to be any likelihood that they’d make more than minor concessions to public health. By Thursday afternoon, the NCAA tournament was called off, the NBA and NHL had ceased play, MLB had canceled the rest of its preseason and postponed opening day, the handful of colleges that had announced closures by Wednesday morning had turned into an avalanche by the end of Thursday, five states shut down K-12 public schools followed by several more on Friday…you get the idea.

We clearly had some sort of inflection point just now, and people’s attitudes have changed a lot, and are still changing fast. If you’re reaching conclusions about Dopers based on posts from Wednesday, calm down. People are ready to do more to keep the virus from spreading now than they were three days ago, and their attitudes will likely change further over the coming days.