Corona (COVID-19)- is it affecting you?

Went into the supermarket about 8 hours after it opened and the toiletpaper aisle was still looking good. Seems like the small group of panic hoarders in my area have been saturated.

@wollywoo: What is that from?

Stores were kind of low on Saturday, but last night a Jewel was pretty well-stocked.

Everything is eerie now, with Illinois restaurants closing tonight. Work is uncertain on how to handle things. Honestly, over the weekend things got a little... iffy.

@frustratedlnc: Sort of ruining the joke... but, not a real quote. Just, the kind of thing I would have left on a note somewhere I were a dead npc in a game like BioShock/Fallout etc.

In the UK, here, and things have got weird.

We are being told to work from home, not go to pubs, the theatre, clubs, restaurants or events... but nothing is being closed by law.

And the schools are being kept open, so people will have a hard time taking the rest of the advice seriously.

Boris's plan is either foolhardy or genius.

Re: the schools - at least in my state in the US (North Carolina) the schools are still open as well. The main point administrators have made is that a lot of childcare here is provided by grandparents. And the elderly are more at risk at this time than little kids, so that sending germ infested kids (kids are ok, but they do lack a certain sense of hygiene) to grandmas might not be a good idea . Also, relatively few cases here, so that is another main point.

Even if childcare isn't provided by family members, nurseries and such could close too. Something tells me Britain's gearing up for a lockdown. We're already softly locked down due to the EU states around us pulling up their borders but things are going to tighten up.

I can only assume the "I'm telling you but not forcing you." nature of Boris' language is because: a) people don't do what they're told - like Mason Mount having a kickabout whilst supposedly under quarantine - and b) it might take time to mobilise the police to enforce a curfew.

I'm pretty sure the UK schools will shut soon, one way or another.

With the advice to stay at home if anyone in the family has a cough, any parent or teacher has a free pass to stay away.

My wife works in a school, and got an email from the head after Boris's speech asking staff if they were intending to come in the next day... almost as if hoping for an excuse to shut up shop.

Checking in from Montgomery County, PA. The most infected county in Pennsylvania. Gov Wolf just shut down all of the state run liquor stores indefinitely, so I'm glad I stocked up last week along with food and other essentials. Stores still have most items, with the exception of sanitizer and TP, like most other areas of the country. Fresh chicken was scarce when I went to the store last weekend though.

Personally, I'm doing well. I work as an outside contractor for a company that makes conveyor belts and installs them in bakeries and other factories. So working from home is not an option. We're still going on installs, but we're definitely seeing business slowing down. One of our biggest customers makes pretzels for sports arenas and schools, which are now closed, so they're running less than usual.

I'm genuinely concerned that my job, which has me driving all over the Mid-Atlantic is going to take me into harms way. And I'm trying not to pat myself on the back too hard here, but if I get sick and have to self-quarantine my branch is going to grind to a halt.

Question: In a non-pandemic situation, how much food do you keep on hand? I almost always have a month of food in my house, along with a month or so of bottled water. Other friends admitted to me they have a week or less, with one saying he eats out almost every meal.

I personally haven't been affected much (beyond some mild shortages at supermarkets). I actually work in mail so its actually maybe a little more volume than usual. They're telling all of us that you can't contract Covid-19 from boxes but I'm almost positive that's just upper management not wanting employees to worry.

Honestly, I'm a pinch jealous of people whose jobs can be done from home, but also it'd be pretty bad if post offices closed so I'm not complaining.

My friends in school are having a lot more trouble, though. Universities are sending people home, online classes, even closing dorms in NYC and stuff. All the disruptions around housing might get some of them in dorms stranded. I know some folks bailing on school to go back home have fucked up rent for their roommates too, which seems shitty but idk their situation.

I live in Vancouver, WA and all our restaurants are in Take out or Drive Through only mode. Bars are shutdown and I think no gatherings over 50 people (but that could be Oregon and we usually only get Oregon news down here in Vancouver). Also all the schools have stopped their classes for the foreseeable future.

Over the past years I've had problems with panic attacks. Back in 2016 I had trouble with my apartment and worries about my elderly father's health. Amid some of the worst panic attacks of my life, I moved home to help care for him. Needless to say this historic outbreak has me out of my mind. Even when I first saw the news from China, I was already having awful panic attacks.

I mention this in particular here because I ordered a certain book online, one I've been meaning to read. Anxiety As An Ally by a certain Dan Rykert. In addition to talking to my doctor and a therapist, reading Dan's story about his struggles have helped me. It gave me some perspective and felt less alone to hear someone else dealing with similar problems. So as we stay home, I had some good reading material in addition to some GB streams to watch.

So...supposedly something big happened. Shelter in place was ordered in SF bay area, but personally it hardly matters to me, and honestly it doesn't seem too crazy at all...which is unsettling in itself honestly.

Long and short of it seems to be people are suppose to stay home unless they need essentials: going for groceries, doctors, care for family, and "essential" services still show up to work. Things like outdoor exercise, and walking the dog are still explicitly allow as long as social distance is followed.

Bar, clubs, gym are closed, so these businesses are definitely affected. Restaurants are limited to take out only; pour one out for the service industry. Hardware stores continue to operates, groceries stores stay open, banks also. Hospitals, doctors, and pharmacies stay open obviously; along with "health care" related field...which guess who somehow got rope in to that? This guy!

Basically got rope into this shit with all the bullshits and none of the benefit of being part of the "health care" industry. Straight up I am definitely not part of their so called essential service, but bullshitters gonna bullshit I guess. If I don't see the assholes making these decisions show up to work tomorrow, they can all go fuck themselves...more so than they usually deserve.

Also I already know there are businesses not following these orders, places are toying around with rotating shift for office work and the likes. You can see the "spirit" of the nation creeping itself all the way down...at this point I am convinced that perhaps we deserve this.

Honestly I don't mind showing up to work, hell I don't even care if I get infected, actually at this point I think I am better off catching it for timing and immunity reasons. But it is the hypocritical nature of it that gets me. Plus for the people who needs work to stay afloat they might even look at me with envy and I get that.

Will see what really happens tomorrow and the rest of the week. On the "bright" side I am legitimately someone who can be out and about for better or worse. Maybe I can become Norman Reedus and deliver packages around town.

I work retail in the U.S. in the state of Arizona. As of today, my place of employment went from restricting counter interaction with customers and shortening hours to closing down with no pay for the next 10 days or until the all clear is given to open up again. There is a rumor that all "non-essential" businesses are going to close down in the state of Arizona until further notice.

Shit just got real here and the announcement was pretty shocking.

Here in Sydney Australia

Most supermarkets low on stock of a lot of things (Toilet Paper, Flour, Rice, Pasta, Soap, Sanitiser etc) and have been for weeks.

I'm a teacher so we are preparing to teach classes online. The rhetoric is that schools will remain open, and our school (I'm at a private school, not a government run one) wants to remain open as long as reasonably and safely possible, but the expectation is that schools will close at some point.

Since we have a retail and delivery operation, my restaurant is remaining "open" in the sense that management and essential personnel still show up to work and, hopefully, answer phone calls for orders both food and liquor/wine related. We've never offered those services explicitly before so our fingers are just crossed at this point. Otherwise the city is following federal guidelines and requesting less than 10 people per establishment, which is a pretty absurd number for a restaurant to adhere to but certainly keeps the unemployment office armed with a few options to defer approval.

I'm a little lucky in that I manage the bar program so I'll still be going into work here and there (that is, assuming people take advantage of our selling of backstock liquors and wines) and I made the preemptive move to pay my next month's rent in advance so I really don't have any bills to pay since our local energy companies are forgiving fees for now I'm content to just let them lapse until the moratorium is lifted. I feel so awful for so many of my coworkers and those that are married with kids, have payments on houses/cars/credit cards/loans etc. Eater and The Takeout have already published excellent pieces on just how dire things are for the hospitality and entertainment industries, most of us have about a month's security at most before we find ourselves unable to afford basic necessities.

I'm barely sleeping, working off the pure adrenaline of having possibly already lived the most enjoyable part of my life and having no idea what lies ahead for me or my industry.

My work schedule has been reduced to 1 day out of the week to try to minimize the risk of the whole building coming down with the disease.

Thankfully I dont get paid by the hour or I'd be panicking right now. I feel for the people that dont have that advantage.

Nice. America just voided all valid ESTA applications for UK, Irish and EU applicants. $14 for a piece of paper that was only valid for a matter of weeks.

I'm not being directly affected (yet) by all this but the closer the news gets the more my "worry" turns into real anxiety and I should probably figure out how to deal with that before it gets any worse. Given the drastic actions our governments are now finally taking, I'm starting to accept there's an end to the pandemic. We will beat it, and hopefully relatively soon. But now the next storm cloud is starting to get very tangible in my mind. What the hell will happen to our economies? How many tens of thousands will have to leave their jobs or shut down their business? What can I do to help now? Will my company make it out okay? As I said, I will probably have to figure out how to stop getting stressed out, that wont help anyone.

@shindig: In the current circumstances it is for the best to limit international travel.

@shindig: It has to lockdown. The practical outcomes of the math make it necessary from a resource management and an ethical point of view. The US will follow over the coming days. The alternative would be tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dead. Here's the science behind the decision making happening right now.

They just announced a state of emergency today where I live (no nonessential public gatherings and restaraunts, bars etc are all closed except for deliveries). I was really afraid of the FOMO there for a second, but here we are.

@wollywoo: Yeah, i saw your post first then read backwards and saw the theme

I understand but to null and void a paper that has a two year lifespan is, well, dumb. There's a million other points of stoppage before I would even get to a passport control desk in the US. It's a formality that they have to follow, I guess.

Still no proper shutdown in the UK and it's as weird as hell. We are seeing people wearing face masks in the rest of the word and we are still marching our kids to school every morning like everything is fine.

We are told not to go to pubs, clubs or restaurants, but they have not been told to close.

I really don't know what our government thinks it is doing.

I work at a large grocery store and this virus has made working hell. I work more than ever because the store is far busier than it literally has ever been, and we have a small crew that often had to stay late to finish the job . Meanwhile all my friends are on vacation because their schools and jobs have sent them home. Let me tell you seeing dozens of people on my snap going to the beach while I'm stuck at a job I hate during normal circumstances is the worst feeling ever.

I'm in this very awkward place right now because of the virus. I recently finished off university, and after a vacation for a month or so was quite literally just about to start hunting for a new job when the virus started causing disruptions here. Most of the places I'm looking at for work are on the university campus, which is closed down right now for the most part. I might end up having to just wait or maybe look for remote work as a software developer or something for the time being I guess? It's pretty weird.

School related things are in disarray, as expected. It's going to be interesting to see if my internet persona will show when talking to my classmates over Zoom. And graduation is goign to be anticlimactic at best.

My room is already a prison, so being incentivized to stay at home certainly isn't going to help me out in the mood department.

Of course hay fever would start conveniently acting up and making me look reeeeeally suspect in public places. Fucking A.

And apparently most people don't shower after taking a shit, or use either wash cloths or three seashells, so getting toilet paper and paper towels might actually be an issue for me sooner rather than later.

welp- we're expecting a 'shelter-in-place' order from the state in nyc soon-ish (mayor says within 48hrs, but governor begs to differ).

helluva thing.

honestly it probably won't affect me too much as i've been pretty much doing that already- but whoo boy my heart goes out to everyone in the service industry who has had their life turned entirely upside down. and it goes without saying much love to anyone affected by the virus itself.

also i'm beginning to understand there's a big difference (psychologically) between being a homebody- and the notion of not being permitted to go wherever i please.

i'm gonna hit up a trader joe's tomorrow early- fully expect it to look like a scene out of the last of us. god bless all the grocery store workers out there who are holding down the other theatre-of-battle for this thing.

I really think they're trying to minimise disruption. Pubs can deliver food now so it might be that re-purposing restaurants and pubs can at least keep people in work. Food cannot stop. Utilities cannot stop. Schools will stop as staffing levels get low.

EDIT: Just been told pre-existing health condition folks are to stay away from work. That's me isolated for the foreseeable future. My parents previous care providers have just folded as well. They were shite (hence why they left and are currently trying to get into a care home) but that's going to really hit their other clients.

This is our Blitz.

I work in a school in the UK. Almost 95% of discussions this week have been "When are we closing?"

I read that just now, all schools in Wales and Scotland are closing, and the education minister is planning an announcement at 5pm.

If everything goes well, I'll be off for over 4 weeks.

In my quest to look for silver linings - my office building is officially creepy with almost no one here (usually ~4000 people, probably ~150 today), but also secretly kinda awesome?

I'm easily getting at least 50% more work done. All the bullshit meetings that take up 1/4 of my day have been canceled and none of my co-workers are around to bug me. Plus, I'm way more isolated from other people here during the day than I would be at my apartment building.

Im in the bay area. I'm a flight instructor, so my lessons are all cancelled. To make it worse, Ive been short of breath for a few days now, and have a slight scratchiness in my chest. I asked my doctor what he thought, and basically said I wasn't qualified for testing, but i should stay home just in case.

So now I get to stay home, feeling mildly sick, with no way of knowing if I have the virus or its just a cold/allergies or even anxiety. And with the coming recession, my job is probably in doubt, and my future career in the airlines next year is probably shot for a while. What a great time to be alive... :(

All the major auto manufacturers just closed down for a while so my dad, a trucker, is not going to be working either. He pays over $4000 a month for a new truck he bought in 2018, so hopefully his financier will also defer payments. As for me, I've probably lost a lot of money in my mutual funds. I'm too afraid to look into the damage.

Also my cousin visiting Canada from Europe will probably not be able to get home for the foreseeable future.

Good luck, everyone.

The decision to shut schools has finally taken place in the UK. I'm a journalist and have been working from home all week, which was actually quite useful today as I could pick the kids up from school, get a quote from the headteacher and a pic of my kids doing the elbow bump as they left school for the front page.

So I'm now working from home and the schools are out for the indefinite future. My wife works in a school, so she's probably grounded too.

Thank god for video games!

Settle in folks. UK set for lockdown on Friday. Or at least London is gearing up for it.

An update from Melbourne, Australia.

We were told to work from home this week, with yesterday being my first day. It's crazy how unproductive I am but I feel like I was getting into a groove today so hopefully tomorrow is better.

Got my haircut today and my hairdresser was telling me how her husband is basically out of a job with not much in terms of a safety net because the stadium he was a cook at has pretty much shut down (full time casually employed for 8 years now which is illegal I'm pretty sure, but they're French so maybe there's a loophole for foreigners). Was really sobering, and I could tell she was also worried about her job too as apparently all the salons are closed in France right now.

Our banks at the moment are planning to freeze mortgages, which hopefully means rent relief for everyone else.

We'll soon see how glorious our capitalist western social democracies really are. Our governments should be well setup to look after us at these times. If they don't, god help them. I'd link to that Slate piece but I'm sure everyones read it by now.

Edit: One unexpected benefit is I've been trying to lose 5kg for a couple months now. I eat better / less when I'm at home so I probably have that to look forward to at least.

Not surprised at all, but still really troubled that the White House administration now insists on calling it the Chinese virus. They seem genuinely determined to make this as incendiary as possible.

@sethmode: Yeah, its troubling how much they go out of their way to pass the buck elsewhere. China has a lot of horrible stuff that they do to their people and on the national stage, but viruses are viruses and China seemed to have done a decent job taking care of it within their borders. Its illogical to blame it on them. As for the US, a lot of the stuff they are doing now should have been done three months ago.

In my state, all the schools are closed, and it sounds like class won't be in session until the Fall. I have a young son and a wife who is a teacher, so yeah, it's pretty different for us. Everyone's home all the time. The only thing that's making us sweat a little bit is if my wife's district is going to choose to pay teachers.

Me, I work from home anyway. I used to go out into the field maybe 1-3 times a month and now even that has got the kibosh. All things told, it's pretty sick. I already miss being able to go out and eat or go to the movies, though.

I'm a PhD student doing VR research. All face-to-face user studies are cancelled indefinitely which is a problem because that's what I need to do before my end of year review "exam". So my guess is that I'm probably going to have to go on hiatus until further notice. My guess is August before things start to look more normal again.

Well, I'm on my second day of WoH in Vegas. I'm bouncing between my house and my in-laws. We're very lucky in this regard: 1) not only can we stand them, we actually enjoy being with them!, 2) we have an 8-month-old they've been helping us care for and we've been in regular contact with them this whole time, so exposure doesn't really change here, and 3) they live very close to us, a very short drive from home. The only hiccups here are one person works in university but it's transitioned into online courses only, and another person is still working the job normally, meeting *new* people around the city to make contacts. The latter case seems to be due to their boss having just getting off a two-week cruise yesterday and only discovering what the state of the world is now (some Jared Leto shit here; hell, I didn't realize there were cruises still going). It's been really nice to take a short break here and there to make faces at my son and listen to his laugh during the work day, I can't believe how fortunate I am in this regard.

The rest of my work is ignoring the Governor's "order" for non-essential businesses to close, which really upsets me. I get it, it's a small engineering firm (relatively low exposure to the outside) and we all have partial ownership of it, no boss but ourselves to be accountable to. We all have the option to work from home though, and they don't seem to realize they're picking the convenience of working in the office over the health of friends, family, co-workers, and the community in general. One co-worker in particular, his SO runs a friggin' daycare, and those're considered essential businesses. The dominoes are falling....

What really kills me though is my family. Like a good Filipino family, my sisters and mother are all in the medical field. We decided last week to completely quarantine ourselves from each other, but when my Mom asked if he and Dad could see our son last weekend, I decided we should stick to the quarantine. Now, with the Governor's order, it feels like I took away their last chance to see their grandson for who knows how long.

Honestly, it's been easy to set these few negatives aside when I have my wife and son with me, but things really have shaken up around here. Seeing the queue of people outside the supermarket waiting for their turn to enter, cars darting between parking lots desperately trying to pick up what little may be left, the amount of traffic that is somehow on the roads, it's an experience, to be sure.

I wanted to end my little mini-blog with a phone video I shot of the Strip, but I'm not sure how to. Can anyone spot me here? It's surreal, being able to drive down the majority of the Strip in under 10 minutes, I thought people would be interested in seeing it.

I can still work, but the place I work is closed down now for at least this month. That does mean that while I can work, it'll be a lot less work. Looking at the bright side of things though, I am okay with it for now honestly. I am waiting for a new soundbar that'll come Saturday so I can play with that, test games and watch films in Dolby Atmos. Finally play a Nintendo console with surround sound (I've been wanting to play Breath of the Wild with actual surround).

Store report from NC: Bread and paper products all but empty at multiple stores. Canned goods low, but still available. Decent amount of milk available, but cheese was getting scarce. Fresh meat was hit and miss, with some stores running low on certain items that others had plenty of stock in. Most other items still well stocked, including plenty of produce. Stopping at two stores, I was able to get everything on my list, though I did sometimes have to take a higher priced version of an item I would normally buy cheaper. Had to hit a third store to pick up some additional items for my in-laws.

My work has closed and made anyone on the 'new' (zero hours) contract redundant. Because I'm on the older contract they've offered me 40% pay until this blows over so I'm one of the lucky few who don't have to find an income in a pandemic, but most of my friends are gone and I feel guilty for them. I also don't see the company reopening again, to be honest, so I see it as a matter of time until the income stops.

My university is also shut and the course has switched to online learning with undisclosed changes to the final assignments for my modules. Was originally meant to be looking for a work placement for it right now but I don't see that happening in this climate. So, it kinda feels like my whole life is being uprooted suddenly and it's pretty frightening.

They sent all my workplace floor to work from home. I’m little fortunate I think in the type of department we’re in, we always sorta are the supply to the demand of sick customers.. Not a nice thing to say but.. I mean, some people gotta do burger jobs.. Luckily I get to sit at home play games for an hour or whatever during lunch. We don’t actually start until this weekend, though. We were supposed to start this Monday but reports got to 29 cases or something in the city. So our site managers just pushed full steam ahead, deployed us one by one out the door with these giant boxes. IT guy told me that come Saturday, no one is supposed to be there at all. So yeah, it just got a bit more weird for me now..

I got informed all students on my campus need to leave school housing by Wednesday and go home "for the safety of the campus community" with no exceptions. I live in graduate housing, far away from main campus, in an apartment building that has no common areas and all the rooms are accessed from the exterior. Since remote learning kicked in, I basically haven't seen or interacted with anyone in real life except my roommate for a week. In order to get home, my roommate would need to fly across the country, to a house where a 91 year old and a leukemia patient live. I live closer, but my parents are in their 60s and 70s and my mother is recovering from major surgery. Fortunately we both found housing locally so we don't need to pointlessly put our families at risk but this is such a ridiculous liability-mitigating, ass-covering move by the administration wrapped up in the guise of "safety of the community" that puts so many more people at risk than if they'd expressed any modicum of intelligence and at the very least let people apply to stay on campus.