To wade in here with something other than flippancy for once, my grandparents are in either their late 70s or mid 80s, with my grandmother being 84. She doesn't keep that well in general these days and at the beginning of last year she spent a solid month in hospital due to fluid in her lungs, and some associated disorientation/delirium she seems to get these days if she's physically ill. She's only got one surviving sibling out of about 9 so I'm well aware she's not going to be around forever. I fully expect the majority of people to catch this thing at some point and I'd imagine I'd personally be fine, but in all honesty in some ways it terrifies me.

We genuinely told our children that their grandma will probably die within a year. With her it's more or less the same situation. She has been hospitalized last year because of the flu and hasn't been feeling well ever since. Her stupid husband still insists on going to play ping pong with his friends. Around here it seems to be that the old people are the least concerned.

A friend of mine is currently in Cuba and I'm begging him to reschedule his return flight (which is currently offered for free by his airline) before the situation escalates over there as well. Only 5 infected at the moment, but we all know how quickly that can change.

I've been pretty busy with my new job as a welding instructor this week. Since I'm pretty computer literate I have been the one spearheading getting our curriculum online. This is a requirement for us. Our students were already scheduled to be off last week but they extended that through this week. The expectation for all of the students that fall under the Tennessee Colleges of Applied Technology is that they will be able to work online from home or wherever for the next two weeks. I've been working my normal six hours per day at different times but I think I will be allowed to work more hours this week and potentially more during the course of this pandemic. I mean over my normal 24 hours per week. Hopefully by the end of tomorrow we are all set and then the next hurdle will be getting all of our students actually logging in and getting things done.

Last week my Grandad decided that the two of them are staying in the house for the forseeable, with us giving them supply drops so I suppose that's at least a small plus.

Most of the people I know are taking this pretty seriously, but we still have pubs and whatnot trying to get people in the door because despite the government stating they'd like people to stay away from these places, they haven't actually ordered any of them to shut their doors so none of the businesses can claim on their insurance.

I am very concerned about my parents and will be staying with them (who because of farm family+mormons should be fine) unless the governor does some **** to get anyone with an EMS certification to work which I wouldn't blame him doing in a few weeks. Because judging from what I can tell, people are STRAIGHT ****ING CHILDREN to a level I had underestimated and I am a deep misanthrope. Completely unable to do due diligence and understand the severity of a problem. Lets ignore the people who think this is government overreach. It's going to be government overreach soon BECAUSE YOU CAN'T JUST ****ING DO THE RIGHT THING YOURSELF. ****. I mean god damn dude this is ****ing ridiculous. And they're all reinforcing each other with ****ing social media.

Hmm. I bet future generations will look at the advent of social media as a stupidity-inducing seizure of our collective mind.

its a ****ing crime scene

I don't completely understand Spook's rant above. Is there some local level of disregard for this crisis that has set you off? We're definitely not in a quarantine state. I'm going to work but the school is closed for students except that today was the start day for our move to online so I'm actually doing some amount of work from home now. I'll have to see what the need is so I learn how to adjust my schedule. My wife is going to work, she's at a dermatology clinic, but the have cut their patients down to only the most necessary. My son is the one most fully in quarantine with max XBox time. We did some of our routine shopping on Saturday and we'll make trips to pick-up takeout or pick up stuff at other stores as necessary. We're not lounging around inside places though.

I'm guessing you don't live in a densely populated area?

Here near Seattle people are definitely not Taking It Seriously(tm). They are using this as more of a vacation and are gathering at beaches and trails. Normally you wouldn't think of "hiking tails" as places to see a lot of people but the popular ones close to the city have hundreds or thousands of parking spots and the trails are wide and full of zillions of people. Especially up at any popular viewpoint you'll see people gathering like nothing is going on.

My wife and I went out mountain biking yesterday around noon and the trailhead we go to was almost full, but nobody was sitting around talking to each other and you don't really see people on the actual trails. We crossed paths with about 4 or 5 groups (usually 2 people, like husband and wife, or single person) during ~2h of riding. Even that wasn't very comfortable, we will seek out somewhere even more secluded next time.

I think commuter traffic is way down and apparently the city is very quiet, but out here where I live there was way more traffic on the roads than I would have expected. It's supposed to rain this week I think so maybe more people will stay inside?

https://www.fox13now.com/news/coronavirus/lt-governor-spencer-cox-blasts-the-public-homecoming-of-1500-latter-day-saint-missionaries

And like Brian said, people are treating it like a vacation. Heading down to southern utah where they are overwhelming what services do need to stay open and if anyone gets sick down there, there are like 5 beds in some of the clinics around there. It would be one thing if just people with apartments and no yards or whatever were going to parks and keeping distance or going hiking, but people with a ****ing quarter acre are going out and making a day of it. It's ****ing absurd.

Well, not like big city densely populated but definitely dense enough that people complain incessantly about traffic. They say were the fifth largest city in Tennessee which makes us what I would describe as the biggest small city in Tennessee. We are mostly shut down and I don't know about others but my travels are less and more deliberate but I'm still able to accomplish all normal activities.



Okay, got it.

Although I only really skimmed Brian's post but it seems like he's suggesting a lot of people are going to the places he's going to.

No, I don't live that close to seattle. The place I went is way out and there's not enough parking to "saturate" it like is happening to the beaches and places near seattle. But the idea is the same, yes. Like I said, even with minimal/no contact (but seeing other people), it was too much for me, so I'm not doing that again. It was more crowded than a typical Sunday :-|

Man, New York is just really out there. California and Washington have approximately 2,000 cases, while New York has 23,000! That's like half the reported cases for the whole country!

Either things are crazy there, or the other states aren't testing enough people. (both scenarios being pretty freaky)

We watched Outbreak (movie) last night. The scene where the infected dude coughed in the theater.... urgh. Netflix says it's the #4 most popular movie right now. Or right then.

Haha, why would you do that to yourself?

Contagion is good too I've been watching clips

Outbreak was enough for me. I think I'm going to watch a disney movie or something ...

In local news: multiple women arrested for spitting on others
Other local news: WA now has a stay-home order unless you're a critical business... guess what is included as critical: Recreational marijuana shops. ...

yeah theres all sorts of not essential businesses getting included

I haven't watched Outbreak in probably over 20 years but I remember generally liking it. I'll probably give it another go.

My wife has been asking to watch, I think it was, Lady and the Tramp or something. A couple months back we picked up the animated Beauty and the Beast but haven't watched it yet (of course we have seen it before). We watched the live action version in the theater. I thought it was terrible.

Anyway, I guess I've transitioned to a mostly working from home state for at least through next week. I went in for a short time today. On the way home I made a few stops. It's business as usual at the liquor store. I picked up a 1.75 bottle of Stolichnaya and a can of some apple cidery thing. I don't understand why the 1.75 bottle sells for $26.99 and the 1 liter bottle next to it sells for $28.99. Then I went to Kroger, a grocery store. I needed to buy some milk. Normally I would have picked up 2 gallons but I bought 3 which was the limit. I've really not seen any shortage of milk. I bought a dozen eggs, also the limit, because I couldn't remember how much we had on hand. ****, we already had two 18 packs. Oh well. I also bought a flat iron steak for tonight. The meat department was relatively bare but still had plenty of hamburger and steak. Didn't pay attention to the rest. Lastly I stopped by Sam's Club. The cleaning section was still mostly bare, I assume the toilet paper was gone too but I didn't actually look. I didn't even bother to check for hand sanitizer. They did have some frozen sirloin patties and fruit I wanted but the frozen section was quite bare. I also picked up some frozen raw breaded chicken tenderloins. I'd thought about getting those in the past and now seemed like as good time as any.

I'll probably head back out this evening to fill up my wife's car and gas cans since I've got a big discount on fuel coming at Kroger due to fuel points. She's still commuting her normal approximately 100 miles per day. Poor thing. Funny, she had been offered a couple better paying local jobs here recently before this crisis but turned them down. They were nurse positions in nursing homes.

My Life During COVID-19 dot livejournal dot &c. &c.

Thanks for asking. So, yes, I went to Kroger, as you'll recall I said a few hour ago I was going to do, and used my fuel points to purchase nearly 34 gallons of fuel at $0.019 per gallon. Pretty good deal. Um, the steak turned out well. It was a little spicy. Haven't had to open the new bottle yet, the previous one is holding out fine. Online students are even more annoying than in class students. And I've acquired the most recent episode of The Walking Dead in the time it took me to post this. Don't worry, I'll check back in soon. Bye for now!

It takes a while for symptoms to develop. I'd bet that the majority of people will go home if they start to see symptoms rather than risking it at a local hospital in bug-tussle nowhere. If people grocery shop before they leave, and camp it would be easy to go to sparsely populated areas and have zero impact on any locals.

You're giving the people of Utah way more credit than they deserve here. Most of these people don't know what dispersed camping is anyway, the parks and camping areas were slammed before they were closed and people are definitely shopping down there.

I don't understand why you wouldn't use dispersed camping if it's an option. Being away from people is what makes camping a fun experience. Otherwise, it's just saving money on a hotel at the cost of still being in a suburb.

But theres no bathroom

Friend of mine is stuck in Cuba because he wouldn't listen to me a week ago when I urged him to leave as soon as possible.
Fortunately for him, now that all flights in Cuba are canceled, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is stepping in and organising return flights. Hopefully soon.

And he has absolutely no internet access at the moment and is relying on me to communicate with the Ministry, until they contact him via SMS themselves. His girlfriend could at least send and receive the e-mails through her state-issued address (which works over the cell network in Cuba), but her smartphone is broken.

I don't mean to sound hodophobic but things have been so relatively unstable in so many places that I really haven't been overly interested in international travel for some time. The exception being Panama, of course, but over the years I have not previously been able to afford to go there very often.

This seems like a good sub for COVID-19 information, since it only allows discussion about academic work.

Reading that NYC hospitals are hitting their capacity.

Well, my wife just called me and told me she's being sent home to self-quarantine for 7 days with pay because she was with a patient on Tuesday that has tested positive. We're looking into self-testing because if she ends up having it most likely all of us will and it will be better to know for sure rather than just collect a free paycheck.

Never mind. Her manager was not following the correct protocol and she is going back to work tomorrow. Jeez, not even a long weekend out of the deal!

we got a stay at home order going on here... just went to get groceries and gas and the difference in traffic... ZERO

it's made very little impact in my life... i work in an essential business, my days off for the past few months have involved me staying home most of the time anyway...

and now i need to make another run because i forgot something i need for tomorrow

I don't think the stay at home orders are doing much, because everything's been pretty much shut down anyway. I think maybe it just gives a little extra motivation for some businesses to shut down. My dad works at Stantec in KY, and they finally forced everyone home rather than just making it optional.

I bet it's another two weeks before we see the results in the numbers. The expansion in testing capability is going push case counts up in the short term, and the deaths are probably still from patients that contracted the virus over two weeks ago.

I'm sure that when this is all over, we'll be super prepared for this specific problem and go back to ignoring the many other potential issues until they actually hit us.

The vast majority of people I know have been working from home for the past week, and a lot of general businesses closed.

I work nights in what's been deemed an essential position so I've genuinely not noticed any difference.

I'm Defense, so we're still at work also, but we've split the company into two teams based on role. There's multiple schedules based on if you can do your job from home or not and if you need to interface with the outside world (supply chain, or only have a desktop, etc), but I'm working 0600-1800 Sun-Tue and 0600-1000 Wed now, and the other half of the engineering team is 1400-1800 Wed and 0600-1800 Thu-Sat. There's a full sanitation of the facility that occurs between shift changes. We're not allowed to go to other buildings and we're completely locked out of the security badge access while the other shift is active. Still have to work from the office, even though my job can completely occur from home. Other schedules have a mix of office and WFH time.

Have you been given a specific reason behind not working from home entirely even though you can?