Not a bad time to have a government job in Australia, my pay isn't going anywhere. Might have to postpone that discharge for a while though.
My wife found out she'll be working from home off and on starting next week, it just depends on what the needs are at her job. A lot of people think "it must be nice" to have all this time off, but let me tell you it kinda sucks. You can't really go anywhere because the bars and restaurants are closed. And more places are closing day to day. I'm trying to get all the materials I need for projects around here so if they do in fact make New York quarantine, I'll at least have stuff to do. Monday it kinda all caught up with me, and even as prepared as we are, it was too damned surreal. So I may have had an extra beer or two to help the anxiety. Yesterday I volunteered to make take out food for our Moose lodge and started away from the news as much as I could. When I got home we watched a Disney movie. After a trip to the store ( oh that'll be fun ) I'm gonna make myself a "to-do" list for the next several weeks. I think the thing that sucks the most is, this is our son's senior year. And now in addition to losing a month of what's supposed to be the best time before going off into the adult world, we don't know what will happen with prom, senior trips, graduation, etc. I sat him and his brother down the other day to make sure they're "good" and they are. A win for our parenting I guess. But I told them, "You know when you hear me or other people say they remember a historic moment in their life? This is one." Of course they're smart kids, so they already knew.
Thats basically what I've had to do. My wife and I are fortunate enough that we can both work from home. I was only going to the office one a day week at most anyway, so it wasnt a big shift in that regard. But with my kid's daycare closed, and everyone else being in the same boat, productivity is just crawling at this point. Ive already caught up on things Ive been putting off for a while and now my day is conference calls and just waiting for emails and then replying, and then waiting for replies to those. Ive been in the house without leaving since Sunday so now I just have to find things to tidy up and get done to kill the monotony. Yesterday I spent part of the afternoon cataloging and filing user manuals for things around the house while on a bunch of calls. If you really want to cheer your son up, you can just do so with a quote from Vladimir Lenin - "There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen."
I was on my fourth call with members of a White House task force in my career yesterday, and it...ain't good. I also got on a call with the Red Cross, and that shit isn't good either. Unofficial model says we're currently on pace for: 10k cases by COB tomorrow 100k by 3/27 1m by 4/8 10m by 4/20 100m by 5/1 We think the growth rate tapers off soon after that, but literally every one in North America exposed to this virus by August. This is simple exponential growth, and I have never wanted to be wrong about something more in my life. We have suspicions that as cases get to 250k-400k somewhere in that range the death rate will spike because the hospital systems will get overloaded at a local level. I can share the official parameters used to model this stuff, if any nerds want to swing at it.
I'd be more interested to know how effective all the quarantine measures are. If the projections say 100m will be infected, AND children aren't very likely to get infected AND, there are 50m kids age 10 and under . . . pretty much everybody will be infected that can be. So, what good are all the quarantine measures at this point?
Ok, since this seems to be the tone of tard: The quarantine is about SLOWING DOWN THE SPREAD. The way this thing spreads, and the duration it can spread are way too broad for a quarantine to just shut it down, especially in a place like the US. If we get 200k cases tomorrow, the healthcare system is overwhelmed. Point blank. Not enough beds. Not enough doctors/nurses. Not enough respirators. You will be sick, you will go to the doctor and you will NOT get care, because they are too overwhelmed. You will have a MUCH higher risk of dying because they are overwhelmed. Think the battlefield triage: red and black toe tags. This will happen.The rates we are operating on is a 20% hospitalization rate and a 3% death rate. That means one in five needs serious medical care and 3 in 100 die. If one in five can't get hospital care, they are far more likely to die. Will the quarantine prevent 100m people from getting the virus? We don't know. We hope so. We especially hope it prevents the young and the old, because their bodies are different, the care they need will be different and most importantly, they consume more healthcare resources than an average adult. We know you are infectious at Day 2, and will remain infectious for up to 27 days. So, you are contagious for a month. Has anyone been rigidly quarantined for a month yet? No. The notion that kids aren't likely to get infected is RISKY. I don't even have kids, and I wouldn't chance them getting exposed to it. Not worth it. Quarantine is not a cure. We know that. We know how dramatically unlikely it is that you can avoid spreading it for a month. No one is going to be completely isolated for that long, that's a fucking prison sentence. The quarantine is about buying time, and slowing the spread. People ignoring it are what will cause the exponential rate to speed up, which is what we're seeing now, to our abject horror. The faster this spreads, the more people die. We are on pace for 1.5 MILLION dead as a result of this virus, and it's not just the elderly. I think (someone please help me confirm) the average age for the dead is like 44. The critical thing right now for us is time. We need time to prepare hospitals. We need time to study the virus. We need time to arrange for emergency care facilities. The quarantine buys us time, before the onslaught of cases gets truly out of hand.
Thanks for the explanation. I especially appreciate you starting off with the insult. I thought I asked a reasonable question about the projections for how effective the quarantine was going to be in doing those things to slow the spread, since you gave other projections. I know you're on edge, but you should remain calm.
I have a sneaking suspicion that more and more people are gonna try to move to the country once this is all over. We’re sitting pretty on at least a month of food (checked it last night; could easily go several months if we rationed and our family didn’t eat like kings each day). And if that runs out we can fish and hunt and do whatever. it stresses my wife and I the fuck out to think if we were stuck in an apartment, or even a neighborhood which I imagine makes up the vast majority of this board. It’s literally just your yard. If you have one. Fuck. That. starting day 2 of self quarantine. The virus won’t kill me, she will.
That's not what you asked, though. You said, "everyone will be infected anyway, so what good are quarantine measures?" I'm pretty sure the answer would have been different if you had asked, "do you have projections on how effective the quarantine is at slowing down the infection rate?" Given the number of people who distrust or ignore medical advice, the tone and phrasing of questions is pretty important to whether someone is going to react negatively.
It's astounding the number of people who distrust actual experts. I've heard multiple times versions of "the CDC is covering this up" and "the CDC is in bed with china." Yet they go off what conspiracy theorists say. This will literally mean the difference between life and death for a lot of those people who, not coincidentally, happen to be in vulnerable populations. A few days ago my wife would take every rumor as fact and it wasn't until I did "reply all" to a hoax E-mail sent by a respected family member to basically everyone she knew with articles from experts debunking it and showing the dangerous practices behind it, that she finally got the picture.(y'all might have seen the E-mail, the one with the stanford scientists recommending drinking water ever 15 minutes to flush the virus from your mouth to your stomach where it is killed by stomach acid). I go by what the WHO says. I go by the CDC. I go by the Health Department and local government officials and scientists, though I cross reference what they say against the newest recommendations from the health dept, cdc and who. Weirdly enough, I also trust a lot of people on this board, and generally take it as truth provided I can find sources to back it up. And I never take something as fact until it has been reported by the cdc, who, health dept. etc. Phrases like "are going to," "have developed," "will roll out," "are closing," basically anything in the passive voice is not to be trusted right now. Past tense or active voice. We've closed [this]. We're doing [this] right effective immediately. Stay fluid and flexible. Be able to react to what's happening at the moment as best you can.
Living in the country is great, so long as you have internet and are able to work from home. We're just on the edge of the 4G signal ( if I move the box so much as a foot, forget it ) but there are a lot of people further up in the nearest town who have nothing. Or shitty services with low data caps. One major advantage is being able to have livestock. We have chickens, turkeys, and ducks as well as goats. The goats are pets, so eating them would be heartbreaking but not out of the question. The damn chickens aged out and aren't laying, new chicks arriving next week ) but they're still perfectly good for the stewpot. I'm rather amazed at how people who live up here react to us having animals. Christ, when I was a kid it was odd not to. Anyway, I went shopping today for some bulk groceries Ive had on the list for a while as well as some materials for projects around here. And while the meat department and several other areas of the store were completely bare, people seemed generally more friendly than normal. It actually made me a little more friendly and patient as I went about my errands. They all had HUGE packages of toilet paper, which amused me as well.
My experiences as well. People are generally more friendly than normal. I know that could change at the drop of a hat, but this area is big on community. Seems like the further away you live from each other, the closer you act when you run into strangers. Our local grocery story, HEB, has been phenomenal. Meat and seafood always had plenty, they're doing the best they can and in the experiences I've had there people are understanding and allowing employees to restock and thanking them for what they're doing. More of taking what you need rather than want. They're also offering free curbside delivery in order to make it easier for those who are especially vulnerable to limit outside exposure. I feel very fortunate that my fallback plan is to utilize the hunting and fishing opportunities available to me. Our employees have been incredible and we've been able to remain open, through a combination of aboveboard safety measures and completely understanding and adaptable co-workers and customers. I doubt at this point that we will have to close, though of course we are following CDC, and State and Health Code guidelines and recommendations. Taking this day by day. Nothing like this has ever happened, so there's no real blueprint.
I've never heard of HEB before, but I do tend to appreciate their sense of humour... (at least one of their locations)
Went out to the liquor store today and it was about 2/3 empty... most liquor only had the smaller sizes left, so I said "fuck it" and bought a few of the super-sized Texas Mickeys of Rye and Rum. I now have some comically large bottles of booze to see me through the panic.
Interesting AMA with Bill Gates on his Foundation's work with COVID-19 https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronaviru...bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/
I said "tone of tard". If you feel like that applies to you..... The quarantine measures are just barely better than "doing nothing". If we do absolutely nothing, we're looking at between 2-5 million dead, and this peaking in the next 7 weeks, according to CDC models. Extending it is one of the best things we can do to prevent unnecessary death. We can't quantify it precisely with so many unknowns, especially around virus transmission, nor do we really want to. How do we judge the cost of the quarantine, except for economic impact? We can't really even do that, because so many private companies would be closed anyway due to liability concerns. POTUS is in FEMA HQ within the next 36 hours, to my knowledge only the 2nd time that's happened in this administration. Leaked plan here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-plan.html General Public webinar from CDC: https://emergency.cdc.gov/epic/learn/2020/webinar_20200318.asp