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Daily coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - March 31
This thread is posted daily, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!
I'm working on starting a "Victory Garden" (AKA my "Anxiety Garden"). Anyone else?
I feel like my sense of danger is all out of whack because I had a "bad feeling" about COVID-19 back in mid February, and now I've got kind of a "bad feeling" about food supply chains that I can't shake as a result of that first thing being more-or-less validated.
I've always wanted to start a vegetable garden anyway, I guess. My thinking is even if there's no interruption I'm learning a valuable skill and engaging in a soothing and productive hobby. I'm planning on:
I have no idea what I'm doing so I guess I'll just see what sticks. 😬
Sounds like you're going to deal with stress in a productive manner. Seeing your garden bloom would probably be a big relief.
Besides, it seems like you're setting yourself up for a good bit of self-sustainance. Only need a little to add to the bowl after this garden comes of age.
It's kind of an old wives tale, but supposedly tomatoes and basil do better when co-located. Regardless of the truth of that or not, it looks too good to pass up on, you can get a real Italian/mediterranean vibe with a setup like that. The tomatoes are generally climbers and won't shade the basil too much.
We are too. It will honestly not be even close to enough sustenance ever but it’s a good distraction for the family.
Yeah... for sure it's not enough to live off of in a real catastrophe, but it might help to supplement if we start rationing.
Having it in the family is a nice feeling, I have a lot of fond childhood memories of gardening with my grandpas on both sides of the family. (Mostly I picked bugs off of plants.) My paternal grandfather had an entire large homestead and he was enormously self-sufficient; his last hunting trip was at age 86 (!) and he lived to be 90. He was even a butcher so he did all the preparation himself. My dad's been working on his own homestead for the last couple years and now I'm getting started too so we're bonding a lot over it.
Got any space for potatoes? Hard to beat from a sustenance point of view.
I was going to make the same suggestion. They keep well in a cool dark place.
You should also do some butternut squash and some beans.
I will take the chance to talk about Chile 'cause I'm fairly sure most people here haven't hear of my country in a while.
I know that these numbers are far below many of you have in your countries, yet it is enough to cause havoc in my populace. Quarantine has not been national nor by region, but by certain town, districts and areas, yet most people and companies have taken the iniciative by themselves anyway.
The fact that there isn't a widespread quarantine has made some serious critics from associations of medics and mayors alike, however the goverment has already set up sanity controls in all mayors routes as well as establishing some economic relief programs. The fight between mayors and government still continues, though, last week we had a new chapter where the mayor of one of the most popular commune, Maipú directly critized in the media the minister of health because supposely somebody was confirmed to have COVID-19, but later didn't.
Moscow has entered quarantine. It was apparently supposed to last through April 14th, but the statement about that has been deleted.
Multiple places enacted similar measures. Where I live, most public places have been closed, and people were recommended to only leave their houses to: buy food and medications, walk house animals, go to work, go to hospital (for severe problems), and take out the trash. This is very similar to the Moscow and Saint-Petersburg quarantine orders.
Also, if you ever needed it, here is Vladimir Putin in protective gear visiting coronavirus patients a few days ago.
Welp, that was probably quite a blunder for someone. I can only wonder if any journalists will escape with a horror story about censorship after this.
Censorship? What do you mean?
I wonder if anyone might face a 'special' quarantine or whatever for 'reasons'. In China they killed the guy who blew the whistle on COVID in the first place and censored the virus until Xi suddenly put Wuhan and a few other provinces in full lockdown so I'd probably be expecting something like that (at least for opposition groups or individual dissidents) in Russia. Why wouldn't they?
As much as I despise Putin's regime and what it's done to the country, I don't think his government would operate in such a crude fashion. (I say this while fully aware of the circumstances of Boris Nemtsov's death.) Xi's government is much more brash than Putin's, it would seem.
Not saying I would be shocked to find something like that out, but that doesn't seem to be the rules of engagement here.
Information is important, but information overload can make you stressed and paranoid. I only read corona news once a day and never before sleeping. Do not spend your entire day thinking about the virus.
Totally agree.
I've rationed my news intake to reading articles for one hour in the morning, and watching the evening television news. Outside of those times, I avoid news. News still pops up during my day - I listen to the radio, and I'm on the internet - but I don't seek it out.
This isn't a thing limited to Germany, or any other country where people are going through quarantine this severe.
In a neighboring city, a man was ordered to self-isolate until the end of the week after coming back from Thailand. He broke the protocol twice. One of the first Russian quarantined patients snuck out of Italy when it was already in lockdown, thinking "Nah, this is fine".
Last Week Tonight even had a video of Italian politicians shouting at those breaking isolation protocols on Facebook (timestamp: 1m58s):
I've never been behind an outrage so much.
There are dumb people everywhere but it's good to remember that compliance doesn't need to be perfect to succeed. Effectiveness is based on what most people in the area do.
Bad news on our front today. My wife got news of a significant pay cut, and her employer furloughed 50 employees. I thought our industries were both well insulated from the crisis, but I guess it goes to show how unprecedented and fucked up this situation is.
As someone who doesn't fully understand the new coronavirus bill: are people who get laid off completely better off than your wife who got a significant pay cut? My (possibly flawed) understanding is that the new unemployment benefits essentially make people whole, whereas if you just get a pay cut I'm assuming you can't get those benefits? Would it be advantageous for her to try to get laid off completely?
This may be a stupid question if I've entirely misunderstood how these benefits work.
I'm a CPA, not in tax though, and I honestly don't know what would be better. Her firm is saying they plan to make everyone whole, but there's no guarantee. Given the overall job market and the fact that it was already competitive in the legal field to begin with (she's an attorney), it's probably best to hold on to the good job that she has and hope for the best.
Just realized an obvious and strong reason to want to stay employed rather than collect unemployment: health insurance. So yeah, definitely the right call to hold onto the job.
That's a good point! The furloughed employees at my wife's firm will continue to have health insurance coverage even though they don't get regular pay.
At least in California they're explicitly extending unemployment to cover people who have had reduced hours because of this. So it wouldn't be as big an issue to just have your hours or salary cut.
I'll keep an eye out, but I doubt our state would do that. Pretty sure we didn't even take the Medicaid expansion here. In trying to find positive news in the wake of the pay cut, we also learned yesterday that our son's daycare would stop billing people beginning today for the month of April, so that softens the blow.
What industry, if you don't mind me asking? I'm a bookkeeper with clients across a number of industries, and I'm trying to get a sense of who's affected.
She's an attorney.
California had it's first glimmer of hope yesterday. 12 days after the bay area shut down, the number of deaths grew only 10%. As of March 29, 2020, 2 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, there are a total of 135 deaths in California.
California's death rate has been growing daily at a consistent rate of 25% for the last week (doubling every three days), so the lockdown is finally starting to help.
I just want to thank @skybrian.
His constant posts on COVID helped me realize I needed to prepare for an extended period of working from home.
This whole ordeal, feels like normal life to me. I'm at home all day, just doing whatever for the past 20 some years. I don't really talk to people aside from my family and my one friend from high school.
I quit alcohol today just in case worst comes to worse and liquor stores are no longer essential. I've been tapering myself over the past week. People are saying they have cabin fever, but I am doing just fine.
I've been playing breath of the wild on cemu for the past few days. It runs unbelievably well. But I do have a beefy system. Not one crash in 55 hours play time.
We had a company-wide phone-based briefing yesterday (all 12 of us!), for management to present their contingency plans in light of Australia's new JobKeeper wage subsidy. Management explained their intention to keep as many people employed as long as possible. The wage subsidy will help (which is why they delayed this briefing until after the government announcement). They've also asked everyone to "volunteer" to reduce their hours. There's less work to do, and this will reduce the wages cost. Management explained that the alternative would be to stand people down (this was not presented as a threat, just a bad outcome that we can work together to avoid).
Half an hour later, I received a phone call from the general manager. He asked me if I could increase my hours. Yep: everyone in the company is being asked to work less except me.
I work the fewest hours per week of any employee, and I'm the cheapest employee per hour. The wage subsidy is effectively a huge pay rise for me. Meanwhile, I have some skills from a previous career that I'm not using in my current job, but which they want me to utilise now. As I said to him, "You want to get the government's money's worth!"
So, everyone else gets to slack off, and I have to work more. Hm.
something tells me they don't value you as an employee
They do value me. They're very focussed on supporting and valuing all their employees. I'm not going to list everything they've done for me in the couple of years I've worked for them but, to give just one example: 18 months ago, they offered for me to work from home two days per week, to save myself a 2-hour commute each way.
But thank you for your concern.
Day 12 of working from home for me. Really starting to miss seeing my coworkers and having spontaneous conversations.
My city & county have had a stay-at-home ordinance in place since last Thursday. I've had to go to the store a few times since then, everything seems pretty normal except they installed sneeze guards at my local supermarket.
New Zealand appears to be nationally out of yeast, flour, and pizza bases thanks to rampant panic buying and stock shortages; so I've embarked on an adventure to create my own sourdough starter using rainwater and the remaining flour I have left at home, following this King Arthur Flour recipe, along with the help of a friend.
Now all I need to find is some ceramic oven tiles or a dedicated pizza cooker.
In their press briefing today, the White House showed some of their projections, which predict 100,000 - 240,000 deaths in the US, but could have been 1.5 million - 2.2 million without intervention. (They currently have about 3,900 deaths)
and you know they are low balling because of that whole "restart everything on easter" walk back
Grim prognosis from professor of epidemiology at Harvard.
Exceedingly grim economic prognosis from Bank of New Zealand's head researcher..
The US aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt is docked in Guam and has over 100 sailors infected with coronavirus.
My mother is in the kitchen applying bleach on everything I brought for her from the grocery store. Has she gone mental or I’m just misinformed and that’s what people should do now?
I’m feeling more and more like James Caan in the film Misery.
I think the virus can in fact survive on surfaces, but it can't really survive that long outside of a host - in "perfect" conditions, I think the longest was like nine days on non-porous plastic, but in the real world it's probably much less, more along the lines of ~48h max. Feasibly someone could cough on a product in the store, then you could touch it and then touch your face.
I give things a little wipe with a Clorox wipe if I use them within a couple days of bringing them home. I also have a little "product quarantine" area for new deliveries. I dunno, it's stressful times, makes me feel better at least.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/new-coronavirus-stable-hours-surfaces
https://tildes.net/~health.coronavirus/n7z/dont_panic_about_shopping_getting_delivery_or_accepting_packages
I hope that doesn't include the produce, based on a short tweetstorm from a microbiologist.
No, just the packing :P
This video went around social media a week ago, telling everyone to disinfect their groceries.
This article turned up a couple of days later, telling people not to panic about groceries and delivery packages.
Guess which one went viral and which one didn't? ;)
Quick numbers update:
The madmen at my school have done it: they have sent me a text file containing activities for me and my classroom to do via Whatsapp. I have 99 compaints, none of which worth hearing /s
On a more serious note that's probably better than recovering months of lost classes later.
YouTube: Marsh family from Faversham go viral with lockdown adaptation of Les Misérables song One Day More
Louisiana pastor charged with defying coronavirus order against large gatherings