Coronavirus prep

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  • T1DCarnivoreRunner
    T1DCarnivoreRunner Posts: 11,502 Member
    edited April 2020
    It may not be just a question of being able to afford food. I keep my diet pretty restrictive to help manage BG. It has been more and more difficult to find the food that I eat. I had been switching to just beef because I had the most success with that. Last time I went shopping, there was no beef, so I got some eggs, turkey, and cheese. Next time, there may be no animal products at all.

    A couple months ago, I transitioned my cat from canned to dry food. It worked faster than planned and I still have some canned food yet. I had been putting out a can for him every once in awhile, but have decided to stop doing that and will keep the canned food in case I run out completely. It is turkey and very low carb because no gravy. I had switched to this food back when I had a diabetic cat, but he died in Oct. 2018 and I just recently decided to switch my remaining cat back to dry for cost and convenience reasons.

    Wait... you're gonna stock cat food to eat yourself? :noway:

    No, I already have the cat food. Just going to keep feeding the cat dry food and hold back the wet canned food in case.
    It may not be just a question of being able to afford food. I keep my diet pretty restrictive to help manage BG. It has been more and more difficult to find the food that I eat. I had been switching to just beef because I had the most success with that. Last time I went shopping, there was no beef, so I got some eggs, turkey, and cheese. Next time, there may be no animal products at all.

    A couple months ago, I transitioned my cat from canned to dry food. It worked faster than planned and I still have some canned food yet. I had been putting out a can for him every once in awhile, but have decided to stop doing that and will keep the canned food in case I run out completely. It is turkey and very low carb because no gravy. I had switched to this food back when I had a diabetic cat, but he died in Oct. 2018 and I just recently decided to switch my remaining cat back to dry for cost and convenience reasons.

    Where do you live that you can't find meat?

    This was last Sat. in Dyersburg, TN. They had some meat, but almost no beef except for the roast beef lunchmeat. They had 4 dozen eggs (all medium), of which I bought 2. And I got some turkey lunchmeat as well as a block of cheese. I had started switching to beef at the beginning of 2020, and got to 90% beef by Feb... was 100% by Mar. until that happened. Hadn't eaten cheese at all this year until that.

    ETA: The roast beef lunchmeat, I was able to get 2 pack, I think 7 oz. each. That was the last of their beef.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 31,724 Member
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    lkpducky wrote: »
    AnnPT77 wrote: »

    I can't give you cites because my source was listening to NPR and BBC on radio, but I believe there's a new study out in just the last few days showing potentially-infecting particles from coughs/sneezes traveling much farther than previously thought (like twice as far), plus some fairly new information about the nature of virus shedding by people who are still asymptomatic.

    You are referring to this, I believe https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2763852?appId=scweb
    and this https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/31/824155179/cdc-director-on-models-for-the-months-to-come-this-virus-is-going-to-be-with-us

    Thank you. The JAMA paper sounds like it may be what I heard mentioned in passing, and while I don't think I heard the Redfield interview or a focused news item about it, that's consistent with what I did hear in the reports.

    Normally, if I hear something on NPR/BBC/other audio source, I can find the story in a text or audio snip on their web sites, and would include it in a post. In this case, I hadn't zeroed in on the radio items for follow up when it occurred, had the radio on all day, had no idea what service/program mentioned it. Appreciate you being a better researcher! :flowerforyou:

    Shifting gears:

    Throughout all of this rapidly evolving public-policy response, I'm aware that we (including me) sometimes aren't able to acknowledge in our guts that scientists and public officials are human beings, who, like us, can be confused, communicate poorly, change their minds (and should, BTW), and generally make mistakes. Keeping that in mind is especially difficult in a context where some officials clearly are negligent, willfully ill-informed or self-dealing actors. (I won't go further than the generality, avoiding the politics prohibition here - and my intent is not partisan anyway, as IMO all large-scale groups include a segment of idiots and scoundrels.)

    Of course, their mistakes are high-stakes and incredibly costly (in lives!) at a time like this. They've taken on the job (like doctors, or police, or others whose jobs routinely involve life and death matters), so we can hold them to high standards, but holding them to inhumanly high standards is just unrealistic. (Not saying we can't or shouldn't hold them accountable for even well-intended actions that turn out to have disastrous consequences. We can, and should. With some compassion, IMO. Any decent human who makes a deadly error, and realizes it, has a burden of conscience, as well, possibly life-long.)

    Just my dumb opinions, as usual.

    Thinking about what I've written on this subject, I hope I didn't come across as though I thought that those behind the messaging on masks were evil or even completely in the wrong. Sadly, I think that to the extent that they were trying to avoid hoarding of medical masks by the general public, they were probably right that there are too many people who would try to do so if given a message of "we need to save medical masks for health care professionals on the front lines, but the rest of you should cover your mouth and nose in public with whatever non-medical or makeshift mask you can find."

    Edited to try to fix the quote nesting. I'm seeing so much more of this problem lately that I'm wondering if it's an MFP glitch.

    To me, no, you didn't come across that way.

    Part of the reason I wrote what you just quoted (and frankly stupidly did so in a part of the thread where it didn't logically tie up ideally), was that I thought I'd not been clear. My basic point (in my post that I think started this subthread) was that I'm seeing a few people (mostly in my FB feed) quickly leaping to conspiracy theories and/or outrage over the shifts in mask recommendations. "Why didn't they tell us that before? Were they trying to kill us?" (<== cartoon level representation).

    I don't think that's reasonable. Personally, I think the situation should be interpreted mainly as human beings, who happen to be officials, trying to make sense of a mountain of information that keeps growing and changing. Some people I know bizarrely seem to think that pretty much all officials know everything all at once at the start (including a bunch of secret stuff), and manipulate it cynically (or at least officials from "those other parties" do). That's bizarre thinking, to me. (JMO) Officials are regular humans no different from us, mostly.

    I don't want to try to imagine what you're thinking behind the limited interpretation I can make from what you do write, but do have the impression that you may feel that the impulse to avoid a public run on masks loomed larger, in officials' initial thinking, than I do.

    I think that I'm giving relatively more weight to the officials being humans trying to sort out a lot of conflicting advice, in a context where most politicians/deciders are not subject-matter specialists; and I'm thinking that there was initial belief that (near-)universal mask wearing by the general public was not going to have a major helpful effect, and had some potential negatives (such as a run on supply more urgently needed elsewhere).

    Recently, more information seems to be coming out (various ways: studies, clear expert consensus emerging from what was previously a less-clear diversity of expert statements, etc.), and shifting the apparent weight of masks' importance. That's just my inexpert impression, nothing more.

    If this perception about your/my opinions is even true, I don't particularly want to chase it down between us to the Nth degree. I respect your intelligence and opinions over a long period of posts here. I don't consider the opinion I've perhaps mistakenly attributed to you to be an irrational one. I haven't seen you say anything that's (IMO) irrational about this topic. Some of your posts have seemed to me to be asking me to defend my opinon, focusing on a sub-part of my (intended, maybe unclear) thesis, so I've responded.

    I'm not an expert on what the experts (such as researchers) are saying. I wasn't trying to pile up a mountain of evidence (specific studies and their timing) to support the the idea that calm, rational people could/couldn't have or should/shouldn't have made a "general public should wear masks" recommendation earlier, or not. The people acting haven't had the luxury of calm rationality: I think most are thinking on their feet as best they can, under tremendous stress, with such expert advice (from many quarters, needing to balance many competing factors of various weights) as they can find.

    Thank you for fixing the quote nesting. I'm the one who broke it, and didn't notice until too late to edit. I don't know how it happened, but assume it was my typo, since I haven't had that problem with any frequency.
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,899 Member
    I was at the store yesterday and there was a full supply of everything, especially meat (of course, it was a meat market). I felt compelled to avoid a few parts of the store (I'd intended to get some more frozen berries and veg, but someone was always hanging out at that area so it was hard to avoid). From what I've heard, the mainstream groceries and TJs are pretty normal but that TP still tends to be low later in the day (I really don't get why that is continuing to be an issue).
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 31,724 Member
    It may not be just a question of being able to afford food. I keep my diet pretty restrictive to help manage BG. It has been more and more difficult to find the food that I eat. I had been switching to just beef because I had the most success with that. Last time I went shopping, there was no beef, so I got some eggs, turkey, and cheese. Next time, there may be no animal products at all.

    A couple months ago, I transitioned my cat from canned to dry food. It worked faster than planned and I still have some canned food yet. I had been putting out a can for him every once in awhile, but have decided to stop doing that and will keep the canned food in case I run out completely. It is turkey and very low carb because no gravy. I had switched to this food back when I had a diabetic cat, but he died in Oct. 2018 and I just recently decided to switch my remaining cat back to dry for cost and convenience reasons.

    Where do you live that you can't find meat?

    I’m a little to the south of him, in Memphis, and meat is hard to find here too. We can get SOME kind of meat now that the worst hoarding is over, but we are having to substitute for things like my husband’s breakfast sausage, no ground turkey, my mom asked for stew meat and there were no cheap cuts of beef, only one package of bacon in the entire store, found one pack of chicken thighs but had to throw them away because the next day the package was swollen like a bowling ball, apparently the only reason they were available was because they had been sitting out unrefrigerated and then put back. A couple of weeks ago there was no meat, period, empty cases.

    We ate a lot of salmon. Apparently hoarders don’t eat salmon.

    People keep telling us to sanitize our groceries. WITH WHAT? There are no cleaning products or bleach or wipes or alcohol available. I have dish soap, and that’s it.

    Soap works, for products it can be used on. Heat works, for products that can be heated. Aging in quarantine zones in home/garage works, for foods that don't need refrigeration (or for those with garage refrigerators). I've even seen some sources saying that in-refrigerator isolation (isolated section for newly-acquired products) can work.

    I hear your concern, though, and empathize. :flowerforyou:
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 31,724 Member
    edited April 2020
    lemurcat2 wrote: »
    I was at the store yesterday and there was a full supply of everything, especially meat (of course, it was a meat market). I felt compelled to avoid a few parts of the store (I'd intended to get some more frozen berries and veg, but someone was always hanging out at that area so it was hard to avoid). From what I've heard, the mainstream groceries and TJs are pretty normal but that TP still tends to be low later in the day (I really don't get why that is continuing to be an issue).

    When I briefly went to MBA school, it was a marketing platitude that typically 20% of your customers use 80% of your product, generally.

    Now, huge numbers of people who normally go out to workplaces daily are staying home. Substantial numbers of the 20% of people who've used 80% of the supply are now using home TP instead of industrial-roll TP.

    When I was last at Costco (3 weeks?) home TP was out of stock, but there were still cases of the bigger industrial rolls. Coincidence?

    ( :lol::lol::lol: <== please note LOLs, and refrain from arguing the point logically. I'm joking. Mostly.)

    ETA, with some extra :lol: : Not two minutes after I typed the above, I heard an NPR story (on All Things Considered) in which they mentioned that the shift from workplace to home TP was probably one (small) factor in the TP demand, though far from the most important one. Weird coincidence!