Coronavirus prep

I started "buying ahead" staples a few weeks ago and so by the time this week's frenzy started we were in pretty good shape. My husband had a stroke last weekend (is home from the hospital and doing really well) so my focus now really is on staying as healthy as possible for as long as possible. This means that I am not planning to go out much and will avoid making any grocery runs at peak hours. I think that once the stocking up frenzy is over, this will be easier.

My city In Wisconsin, US is taking "social distancing" very seriously and various neighborhood groups have loosely organized so that folks can help each other out with errands, food, childcare and even cash as needed. This kind of community vs. individual focus is great ... it not only is beneficial in the larger social sense, it provides individuals with a way of being useful, which helps keep the panic down.

The # of confirmed cases has been steadily rising, and I expect that as testing becomes more widely available there will be an exponential increase. I expect the curve to continue rising for another 6-8 weeks, hopefully not sharply, and then begin to fall - if other countries' experience holds true here. An area of research that I am looking at is the stuff coming out on "virus shed" windows, or the # of days a person is still able to pass the virus on once they have recovered in terms of symptoms. I find stuff like this very interesting. As the data come out and reasonable conclusions can be drawn, it will help guide people who are in the most vulnerable populations to plan how long to be "careful" about moving around in the general population. The Lancet is my source for this info. Preliminary data from China suggests that the "shedding" window is the longest in patients who have been the most severely ill, which makes total sense.

Nony_Mouse wrote: »

We are actually sick (but I know what you mean). I'm not sure if we're at higher risk of more severe viral symptoms or not, but I imagine the potential for a prolonged worsening of ME symptoms, even with a non-severe case, is high. I've only recently gotten back to a level of 'wellness' that, if I don't recover any further, I'm okay with, I bloody well refuse to be set back. So I totally get you on the wanting to be able to continue to eat well thing. I guess squeeze as much frozen vege into that wee freezer as you can?

I'm glad I don't have to deal with the level of crazy panic other countries are seeing

I was able to get my hands on some frozen veggies so right now I have 2.5 bags of broccoli, .5 bag of diced peas and carrots, 1 bag of cauliflower, 1 bag of broccoli and cauliflower mix, 1 bag of sliced carrots, and 1 bag of a broccoli/cauliflower/carrot mix. Each bag can last me a few meals. I have some frozen fruit, but not much and it will mostly get used up in oatmeal this week for breakfast. I also froze a loaf of bread and some sauteed mushrooms so they wouldn't go bad. I have a chicken to roast tonight that will feed me all week for dinners. I have plenty of food and will be okay even if I do get sick, plus I have family and friends who I know will help out any way they can.

My anxiety just makes it hard to handle a change to my schedule (as does my OCD). I am doing the best I can right now and thankfully was able to get an early refill of my meds. I do worry about getting this virus and then having a flare up of my CFS. There is no way I can miss THAT much work.

MikePfirrman wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

kimny72 wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

MikePfirrman wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

mph323 wrote: »

Chinese billionaire Jack Ma is donating a million face masks and 500,000 coronavirus test kits to the US. I'm grateful for the support and hope that our government can work with people like him to tap into international sources for desperately needed medical supplies.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/14/tech/jack-ma-face-masks-us-donation/index.html

This is really out there and sounds like a bonkers conspiracy theory, but can anyone shoot down my thought that testing is being throttled not just for lack of resources but because the fewer people who get tested, the lower the number of confirmed cases and the better the numbers look politically?

It's dark and rainy here, and I've been sitting by myself all day recovering from trying to find tomato sauce for dinner and finding the apocalypse playing out at Safeway. My thoughts are dark.

I guess it's just me, but I think that would require a pretty large-scale, multi-participant conspiracy, a thing that humans are historically pretty bad at sustaining for very long.

And it would have to happen, now, in a leak-ridden political environment where plenty of journalists (and journalistic bottom-feeders besides) would be all too happy to find an break a well-documented version of that story . . . maybe even a poorly-documented one.

If that political conspiracy is happening, it can't hold, IMO.

There's already been reporting on it. And yes, it was reported that they decided not to test as a political hunch that warmer weather would kill it.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-reportedly-rejected-aggressive-coronavirus-121835790.html

Anonymous sources, but I for one, wouldn't doubt this one bit.

I never said certain people in the administration - maybe quite a few - wouldn't manipulate or lie. I said I thought a conspiracy to throttle testing would not hold, i.e., could not be sustained for long.

And it didn't hold.

Various entities started developing their own tests. Parts of the central bureaucracy, and bureaucrats/politicians in the states, pushed back. People leaked stuff. Etc.

Large-scale conspiracies tend to fall apart, especially in relatively non-authoritarian, relatively open societies. When there are too many people involved, they have competing interests, opposing political views, motivations like jealousy/old grudges/revenge/financial benefit, and sometimes a few intended conspirators even turn out to have ethics. It's not that I think no one tries to conspire in nefarious ways; of course they do. Arrogance and hubris mean some startling things are attempted. Big conspiracies are just really hard to sustain.

ETA: Not trying to pick on you here, Mike, even though I'm replying to your post. There have been a few posts replying to mine that seemed to me to be disagreeing with something I didn't think I said (didn't intend to say, anyway), or something tangent to my PP. I'm sure that's because I was unclear, so trying to clarify . . . which will probably make it worse. :drinker:

It sounded to me like you were saying that there was no way that testing was limited in the US on purpose for political gain, because it would require a wide ranging conspiracy that wouldn't be possible. I do disagree with that, because I don't think it would require much of a conspiracy.

I totally agree that wide ranging conspiracies are damn near impossible to carry out and even more impossible to sustain for long even if you can get them started, because humans gonna human.

This little version of the telephone game brought to you by the coronavirus


I have been watching a few episodes of the Leftovers every time there is a free HBO preview weekend and I should be able to finish it this weekend. Not quite post apocalyptic but kinda sorta. Not sure I could watch Contagion or Pandemic right now, this is as close as I get

To the bolded: Maybe the difference here is between attempting a conspiracy, and succeeding at one. (One can think of a conspiracy more as an event, or more as a process in a context. I'm talking process.)

Would a limited number of people in the administration be able to make such a plan, attempt such a conspiracy? Sure.

But in order for it to ultimately succeed, thousands of people would have to, at minimum, ignore events in the rest of the world and STFU, which isn't likely at all. Which thousands? Civil service types at CDC, opposing politicians, state/local government health officials, epidemiologists and infectious disease experts employed outside the government, researchers in related fields, health informatics people with access to world health data and news . . . and generally anyone with intelligence, knowledge of what's happened/happening in the rest of the world, access to information about the 1918 pandemic or even to information about smaller-scale more recent epidemics, etc. Plus, then, the journalists (or social media influencers, or whomever) that those people will start talking to.

Under current circumstances, such a conspiracy is highly, highly unlikely to succeed for very long at all. Too many people have reasons not to STFU.

Death threats without Secret Service protection are a pretty solid reason for STFU and being an anonymous source. The threats of lawsuits and Bill Barr prosecuting you don't help for political vendettas.

I don't honestly believe Trump suppressed tests, but I do think his underestimating it and calling it a flu/cold helped immensely to influence our ineptitude. Our arrogance, thinking the US always should "go it on our own" is stubborn and idiotic. The world all needs each other right now, whether anyone likes it or not.

I also think that shutting down the CDC's Pandemic response team was an attack on anything Obama did (Obama helped set it up from what we learned on SARS and MERS). That Pandemic response team's role was to be the early warning for us about potential pandemics.

Regardless, we're finally taking it serious and, for that, I'm happy. I just hope that Summer will slow it some. It looks like it will, but I think the next two months will be very rough.

I'm speaking pretty theoretically here, on this subject in this thread, about the structure of, and conditions needed for, major important conspiracies to succeed.

I will not be drawn into current cases in any specific, detailed way. I'm talking about a sort of corollary to Occam's razor, for assessing conspiracy allegations: One criterion IMO is the believability of what would take in order for a conspiracy to be sustained to success at its intended goal. Of course, we as individuals may differ on the believability in any specific case.

That said:

Sure, credible death threats are an excellent suppression tool, to get people to STFU. (Implausible but scary death threats will suppress a meeker few, or can be adequate to smallish, relatively low-stakes conspiracies.)

At some scale of conspiracy (some very large number of rquired collaborators or STFU-ers), the death threats need to be pretty open/public, and the conspirators need actual effective collaborating death squads at their disposal, army sized, for large scale suppression to work. If the context lacks those, death threats are just hot air, discourage only the meek, and the conspiracy breaks.

What exactly is that scale? Situational.

From the beginning of this sub-topic, I've been trying (imperfectly, obviously) to suggest that the original person (or others) who feared a conspiracy in this case (or others) use this kind of analysis to decide whether those fears were realistic, in his/her own mind.

How many people would need to be in on the conspiracy, as actual conspirators?
How many people, some potentially in positions with some authority but not at the core of the conspiracy, would need to actively cooperate in making it happen?
How many knowledgeable, expert people in academe/industry related to the conspiracy's goals, but not under its direct control, would know about it and need to at minimum STFU?
How many people in the legion of lower-level clerks and functionaries that would need to know and carry out details of the conspiracy, and also STFU?
What mechanisms of control and coercion do the conspirators have?
What motivations might the collaborators, cooperators, and STFU-ers (or even core conspirators) have to break ranks and out the conspiracy?
What mechanisms would those who break ranks have to publicize, counter in other ways, etc.? Would those be effective?
Etc.

I'm mostly suggesting an orientation to analyzing alleged conspiracies, and thinking about whether they're (first) likely to be happening, and (finally) likely to succeed. At some scale, in some contexts, certain alleged conspiracies become implausible candidates to happen, or to succeed.

It's an analytic framework, primarily . . . and all just my opinion. The actual analysis is for the person who's deciding what to believe.

My dad is in a nursing home that is already understaffed. He has had his watch stolen twice as well as a wedding ring. He also has to wait 30-45 minutes for help getting to the bathroom. His wife visits daily, which helps a lot. If they close off access to her, I don't know what will happen to him. He's 95.

The info about the Elder Orphans is something I will want to keep in mind. My husband is much older than I, so odds are I will end up alone. I have no children. My stepchildren are good people, but have no responsibility for my well being and aren't close to their father in any case. We talk to them every few months, at best. My siblings are far away and in bad health and I only talk to them once or twice a year. DH and I are both basically hermits, so although we have a lot of online 'friends' we don't have anybody who would notice if we disappeared for a while. BTDT - nobody cared. The only one who might notice is the postal carrier, and I don't know that she would do anything.

spiriteagle99 wrote: »

My dad is in a nursing home that is already understaffed. He has had his watch stolen twice as well as a wedding ring. He also has to wait 30-45 minutes for help getting to the bathroom. His wife visits daily, which helps a lot. If they close off access to her, I don't know what will happen to him. He's 95.

The info about the Elder Orphans is something I will want to keep in mind. My husband is much older than I, so odds are I will end up alone. I have no children. My stepchildren are good people, but have no responsibility for my well being and aren't close to their father in any case. We talk to them every few months, at best. My siblings are far away and in bad health and I only talk to them once or twice a year. DH and I are both basically hermits, so although we have a lot of online 'friends' we don't have anybody who would notice if we disappeared for a while. BTDT - nobody cared. The only one who might notice is the postal carrier, and I don't know that she would do anything.

FYI, there is a program that you can register for with the USPS. I'm providing the link below. It's a volunteer program so you can check to see if it's available in your area. If not, you can check with your local government for senior programs available in your area that will send out people to check on you if you don't respond to either email, texts, or phone calls regularly set up to monitor your health. Of course, I'm assuming you're in the United States. You may not be, but I'd guess most countries would have senior programs available that would be similar?

programsforelderly.com/safety-carrier-alert-usps.php

I hope this helps at least a little bit.

cmriverside wrote: »

lynn_glenmont wrote: »

PAV8888 wrote: »

Nice, not

https://www.businessinsider.com/wuhan-coronavirus-risk-of-reinfection-2020-2

I had been hearing and reading statements from medical authorities saying they hoped, based on other viruses, that those who recover from covid 19 would have immunity for some period of time, but that so far they didn't have any idea how long that immunity might last. Lay questioners on talk shows seemed to assume that it was a question of whether immunity would last for just a few years (like vaccines that you need boosters for) or for essentially your whole life. but I noticed the experts' responses didn't seem to commit to even "a few years." I guess they were right.

ETA: on the other hand, from the article PAV8888 posted, it appears they've only seen one case of presumed reinfection so far, and it's not clear that this individual ever tested negative. just that they were discharged from the hospital after "showing signs of recovery." I don't know how they decide whether it's a (so-far) rare case of reinfection, or a (rare?) case of an individual who has remained infected for a long time without fully recovering, just going through ups and downs as their body fights the disease.

EATA: Unlike the headline and the paraphrasing by the writer, the actual quotes from medical experts in the story PAV8888 linked seem to be speaking about relapse, not reinfection from another individual.

Thanks for posting this...I feel the same way about the scare-mongering "news" articles but I'm tired and when I started posting a rebuttal to that, "You will re-catch it!!!!!!!!" article I was so tired yesterday...you said it all. That article was badly written and had zero science behind the known facts we have about how virus immunity works.




@MikePfirrman
Maybe you missed Just Em (moderator) who came in on the last page telling us to keep politics out of this.


I'm going to make an attempt today to not get into the "discussion" about it. Seattle continues to be scared. I have enough food and TP for a month.

Yeah. I need to stay out of this thread.

I'm actually pretty independent. Governor Dewine (a Republican) believed the scientists. I thought DeBlasio and Cuomo (both Dems) reacted too slow to shut things down in NYC. I was appauled that the subways weren't shut down. I'm for science, not party.

Dewine has taken the lead for response among governors and I've been impressed. What I'm against is saying "it's just the flu". Anyone that says that, regardless of party, is a moron.