Interesting, since others have speculated above that this could lead to governments falling and being replaced by nationalists. I wonder if that situation is actually less polarized as well…?
If/when a vaccine is offered, how will the antivaxers respond?
Hypocritically, no doubt. THIS time the vaccine will be ok and won’t cause autism, blah blah blah, handwave, handwave, handwave… Some might stay the course, and those will, as always, put the rest of the population at increased risk. I think the government should put out a notification that if someone chooses not to get the vaccine for (stupid) voluntary reasons, they aren’t eligible for any assistance from the government AND they are required to self quarantine until the crisis is over or until are safely cremated…
Those responding negatively can be taken out and shot, right? For public safety?
Oh, if that’s the case, my bad.
I can’t because we have two vulnerable people in our house and I don’t trust her father to keep proper procedures. He himself has some health issues so for HIS sake he should be at a distance from a silent carrier, as so many children are. And his family has a lot of vulnerable people and I don’t know if they’re distancing. We’ve worked out a “shout from a window” and skype solution for the time being and hope as this drags out, there can be resources and ideas so they can be closer without endangering anyone. It’s a little severe, but I also don’t want to get it and die (am young enough that I should be ok but how do I know I don’t have an invisible condition that is risky?).
When we have some things retrofitted with Pushing Daisies Pieman and Chuck technology, I’ll be all for it.
Makes sense (except I didn’t get your last sentence).
That, and also why the child is confined to the house.
This is the best scenario I have heard in a long time. I for one welcome our future penguin overlords.
It’s a good read - The Story of Earth, by Robert Hazen. 
My kids are confined to our apartment because we have no way of getting outside without passing through common areas. If we had a door leaving directly outside, OTOH, we would take them out for walks and stuff.
There was a cute cartoon on the New Yorker magazine this week. It shows a business manager at home in his
pyjamas, sitting at a desk with his computer,and saying
“Wow, it really IS possible to do those meetings with a couple of emails.”
If you can maintain distance from others (six feet is recommended), there’s no reason to confine the children to the house.
My daughter and SIL moved with their kids from a San Francisco house to a Sierra Nevada property a year ago. With COVID flowing, my grandkids (9 and 11) would have been stuck in a small house on a pedestrian-hostile SF hill. Now they’re on mountain acreage with pond, forest, new puppy, plenty of snow, and work-at-home parents who home-school the wee beasties. School and scout sessions are canceled but the scouts are assembling supply packages for the needy. Their situation is pretty stable for now.
I wonder what is going to happen with crime statistics. Fewer robberies and burglaries, more domestic violence? Not sure where that would leave homicides.
Sure there is. Research is increasingly showing that the virus gets into the air just from breathing, not only from coughing, and from asymptomatic individuals–and remains in the air for anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours, depending on what source you cite. For us to go outside requires that we go out our apartment door, walk down the hall, go down one of two stairwells in the building, and then through a narrow corridor and small entryway between the secure buzzer door and the outer door. Dozens of people may have passed through that area in the past hour, unless it’s in the middle of the night which is obviously not when we’re going to take our kids out to play.
ETA: If we still lived in an apartment with our own door directly to the outdoors, like we did until 2017, I’d be taking the kids outside every day for sure.
In the mid 2000s there was a cute show on ABC called Pushing Daisies where the main couple couldn’t touch or the lady would immediately die (magic!) and they had all these really quirky and adorable workarounds. So I’m waiting for someone to mass produce some of them.
I don’t understand why everyone is assuming children inside are locked up Flowers in the Attic style. Some people don’t have yards. Some people live in crappy weather zones. Unsafe neighborhoods. Too young/poorly behaved to be unsupervised. There are lots of factors why a kid isn’t outside and hasn’t been that much for the last week or two. As people settle in and northern hemisphere weather starts to get nice, it’ll be different. We might not be done snowing so just throwing a blanket in the yard and having a picnic isn’t really something we’re going to be doing probably till May.
And honestly, around here I wish more people kept their kids locked up. They’re gathering in large groups about town, going to beaches in other places. Some are adults, but the teens hanging out in my city’s square fewer than six feet apart are a terrible idea.
Now we have Elon Musk reportedly getting away with disinfo tweets that children were “essentially immune” to CV. Youngsters think they’re immortal anyway, or fear they won’t live to age thirty because the world’s so fucked, so why bother trying to be safe? Next step will be Ethical Suicide Parlors. Check in to check out. Discounts with school ID.
I have not seen a plane in the sky for a week.
I have, but the flight route for the airport is close by.
This is a deeply engaging article. Thank you.