I’m very confused here…are there not millions of people who cannot afford to just go home and not work? If we get to an Italy situation…wont the entire restaurant industry shut-down?? There’s got to be millions of people who live paycheck to paycheck .
Shouldn’t we be setting up some sort of financial aid deal like immediatly?
People were already idiots. Maybe this will have the opposite effect and those who spend 99% of their energy concerned with the races of fictional movie characters* will take a step back and reorder their priorities.
Now changed to 100% of my energy devoted to races of fictional movie characters.
Actually, as I just observed in responding to an article linked elsewhere, Italy allows restaurants and bars to be open for twelve hours a day. I do not understand the logic to this.
And yes, we should. I’m actually fairly confident one will come along, and fairly quickly, because it’ll almost have to by sheer numbers alone and politicians want to be re-elected, but uncertainty is never good.
I guess if everything was shut down but restaurants and bars…you’d still get good business.
I still don’t see how they’d stay open unless they have a True Fuck You Come To Work If You’re Sick Anyway and if You Get Sick Eating Here Too Fucking Bad Policy
In other words…how restaurants are today.
As opposed to what I’m hearing other industrys are doing. Don’t come to work if you have anything close to a symptom. If someone is positive, shut the whole building down and disinfect it. Isolate yourself if you come in contact with someone who might be sick.
I chose “General public health (folks you don’t know personally)” because my biggest fear at the moment is that the efforts to convince people to embrace social distancing, even if momentarily successful, will only delay the enviable for a couple weeks or a month and then it’s going to go back to spreading like wildfire. Closing schools and workplaces and quarantining is not a sustainable way to live long term and we cannot keep it up for a year while we wait for a vaccine without driving a lot of people into abject poverty because they can’t work.
Scared enough that I got my first flu shot then and have gotten one every single year since.
Perhaps, but I believe that the point is not to overload the medical system too much at the same time, so even those weeks or month could be extremely valuable and life-saving.
Or were you thinking infections would fall, then rise again to pre-fall levels as if the interruption never happened? I’ve never seen any scientific or media source address why this could or could not occur.
I’m worried about catching it, even though I’m not in any high risk groups. I’ve never even been to an ER in my life and the thought of potentially being admitted to a hospital is frightening. I’m also worried about infecting other people, particularly my parents (who are higher risk just by virtue of being almost 70 even though their health is good), and of being an early enough case that I wind up mentioned on the news, even if not by name.
And I worry about work. Schools just closed for 2 weeks. Trying to catch up on IEP meetings and assessments is going to be a nightmare, and that’s assuming that 2 weeks is all it is (which I’m not betting on). I also don’t want spring break messed up, or to be in school in July. And the general topsy-turvy and uncertain nature of everything is causing anxiety in and of itself. I hate change.
I am supposed to retire from Saudi Arabia on 30 March. Because of the virus, recruiting my replacement is on hold. They may ask me to stay for 30, 60, or 90 days more. I suppose I will stay for the money, but I feel as if my fate is not in my hands.
But of course my first-world problems are nothing compared to the scale of this event. All in all I will try to stay safe and help others.
Dad’s 87, and has COPD.
Mom’s 85, and just generally kinda frail.
I may well postpone an intended trip in August from here in Australia to Michigan on that basis. Damnit, I don’t know how much time they have left in any case, and I’m angry that I may miss my last chance to see them because of delay.
On the other hand, if I bring any sort of serious respiratory illness into their home, Dad’s toast. I won’t risk that.
sigh I’ll continue to hang loose, and see what develops. Nothing’s set in stone yet.
My mother passed away in January so in that respect, I no longer have any elderly family to worry about. Had she survived the lung cancer and pneumonia that took her, I would have been extremely worried for her given the way her health had deteriorated in the last few months.
Aside from that, my main concern would be for the economy as I can see this virus will have far-reaching impacts on so much of the world that it can’t help but affect our economy. Already our annual budget in the UK has been amended to reflect the emerging needs of our health service, and the Chancellor is about to make money appear from nowhere in order to keep up with the mysterious funds his party told us we would get back from no longer paying it to the EU…
We are due to be going on holiday to Thailand at easter, travelling via Stockholm to Bangkok and then on to our holiday destination. I don’t know whether this will go ahead or not, if it doesn’t (based on travel restrictions, government and FCO advice), I hope we will get refunds on the expense or at least the option to take the trip at a later date. That doesn’t bother me much, it’s a holiday and we can travel anywhere else at a time when there’s no virus to complicate matters.
Yes, that they’d fall and then rise again immediately afterwards.
I’m not really worried about much at all. Though I have been planning a Spring Break vacation for almost a year now to Orlando. I’ve already spent a good amount of money that I’m not sure I will get back. I do wonder what the theme parks will do if they are closed and my tickets are said to be non-refundable.
Yes, but this is America where the rich and powerful value money and profit over human life, where they monitor the stock market intensely but don’t want to to test the population for this virus because they don’t want to know.
The oligarchs have forgotten that if the peasants are unhappy enough or oppressed enough you get a revolution.
I remember. Lots of people remember. Lots of people were very relieved that a vaccine came faster than predicted. Lots of people were fretting over the economy… granted, it’s hard to say how much economic destruction that virus destroyed because the economy was already destroyed.
This virus is very different from that virus in terms of its effects, composition, and ability to spread.
I’ve so had it with these “whistle past the graveyard” types. It encourages complacency to gradually rise until we’re unprepared for the times when that’s exactly the wrong answer.
I don’t see this happening because America was a uniquely reactionary revolution. The peasants think they are the oligarchs because, in a stroke of brilliance, America was made pre-packaged with a labor class to hate (slaves). The colonial rebels weren’t fighting for the rights of the lower class; they were fighting for the right of their own upper and middle class to govern themselves while still oppressing their own poor. They were rising up because the Crown was obstructing the colonists from plundering “free stuff” from the unspoiled new continent (native-inhabited lands, and the untaxed fruits thereof).
Ronald Wright said it better: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”.
This.
ETA: And now, I’m also worried about BigT. 
I’m not sure if I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying, but are you saying that the fact that you’ve had pneumonia makes you more susceptible to being killed by the virus? Because – if you’re the sort of person who is more susceptible to pneumonia, due to some sort of underlying respiratory issue, then I understand. Or if you’re saying that the 8 days in the hospital revealed that your body is unusually poor at fighting off respiratory infections, then I understand. But I don’t understand how you would be in the “high-risk” population simply because you had a serious respiratory disease at one point in time but don’t have it any longer.
Personally, my main worry is that my son is at such a wonderful age right now (nine), with such a wonderful third-grade classroom experience…I’d hate for that to be compromised (so far our state is keeping public schools open, but Ohio has set a precedent by closing theirs).
Besides the potential school issue, I’m trying to be careful to do all I can to not “miss” this great time in his life. My wife and I have to avoid being unnecessarily distracted by this epidemic. We must stay focused on the here and now, on him, on our daily routines, on getting good sleep, on enjoying all the great things we’re blessed with. (Thank goodness we did our European travel fun LAST year…and our NBA game, too). He’ll only be nine once.
ETA: After reading through this thread, I’ll add my concern is especially for Dopers (and others) whose livelihoods depend strongly on things that MUST happen in March-April—(May?), and can’t be done digitally. Mainly, things like farming that are tied to the inevitability of the Earth’s seasons.
Concerns? You mean other than the world now feels like something out of the early chapters of The Stand or every outbreak / zombie apocalypses film where people are kind of sort of going about their normal lives while news footage of ineffectual half-measures play in the background? Except those of us in the audience watching know that soon everyone is going to be killing each other over the last can of baked beans while soldiers in MOPP suits burn the bodies of the infected with flamethrowers?
I guess we will find out in November. Fortunately we have a mechanism for revolution in this country that doesn’t require tearing it down.