Interestingly, there has been panic buying on toilet paper in Australia.
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Yeah, there’s going to be some weird, unanticipated impacts. The lack of domestic shipping containers hadn’t occurred to me, but at least it made sense - they originally ship things from China, and since China wasn’t shipping anything… But people being irrational are going to impact things that shouldn’t be impacted as well.
Yeah, that’s happened in the US, too. Also, last time I was at the store there was panic buying, and I overheard someone say that they were all out of bottled water. Like there was an earthquake or hurricane or something. I’m still baffled by that one… People are reacting to the wrong disaster, and nothing much has happened yet.
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These are many of the same people who feel compelled to make French Toast when a hurricane comes ashore, so let’s just be happy that they are staying hydrated without too much outside assistance.
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That happened in the department I worked for long ago - and I discovered why one night when I stayed late. The cleaning guy went through all the cubicles with the same dirty rag (dampened with water) wiping down the keyboards - so if one person had cold viruses on their hands one day, everyone else had the same cold viruses on their hands the next morning (cold and flu viruses can live for 48 hours or so on keyboards).
So - check how the cleaning staff works, and if they don’t disinfect keyboards, phones etc at night, get together with your fellow workers and insist that they change their ways. Or get bleach wipes and use them on everything in the morning.
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Yes, if TP runs out we may have to resort to a sponge on a stick, dipped in vinegar - the traditional Roman solution to the problem.
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Or switch over to mandatory bidets! Here’s a reminder that Boingboing sells one in its store!
https://store.boingboing.net/sales/slimglow
/S
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It is long known that the US has terribly expensive but ineffective healthcare, and labor laws that benefit the rich and fuck over everyone else. People are already dying from both prematurely in no small numbers.
Why should a virus make people see that?
That should be really good news if the number of deaths reported is accurate. Otherwise they’d have hidden about 30.000 additional deaths, too.
At the same shop where everyone was buying water, I overheard part of a conversation between a baffled customer, wondering why the store was so crowded, and someone who worked there, explaining that the news had shown images of people shopping and thus trigger panic buying. The customer started scoffing, saying something about how the “fake news” had created the story about the virus… ugh.
Because an epidemic makes it really clear that “personal responsibility” doesn’t do shit to keep one healthy when the cause of the illness one is potentially afflicted by is a result of someone else being forced to work because they can neither afford medical care nor time off.
Of course that relies on the population realizing that the virus is both real and deadly, something that a good percentage of them won’t figure out before it kills them.
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Do you share keyboards and phones? Because if not, there’s little need to disinfect them, it’s in fact not such a good idea to disinfect things that don’t need disinfecting on a regular basis. And bleach is an especially bad idea.
It also relies on the population realizing that it was not inevitable so many people died from that “real and deadly” virus. That requires a bit more reflection and insight.
That’s why I think the narrative should be less “the virus is deadly” than “we are especially vulnerable to that virus as a society”.
Even though the US is going to suffer more than Europe, and there will be solid research in the causes of that once the data is available, people will ignore that, just as they ignore the climate catastrophe.
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If we stopped isolating our healthy people from CoVID-19, would we get herd immunity as those people developed an immune response? Would that create a net benefit for vulnerable people?
I assumed it would get reallocated to the Wall
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That was the second nail in the ‘only males work’ coffin. The first was telephone operators. They tried boys first because they wouldn’t pay much for the service. But the equation is BOYS + SHINEY BRAND NEW TECH = HAVOC. That is why operators were mostly women. Suddenly, women could find (low paying) work.
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Well, yes, that too. Yup, that accounts for all of it. Moving on!
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Almost certainly not, because vulnerable people have healthy caregivers. The flu shot is, of course, different, because you can’t get or spread the flu from it. Whatever the antivaxxers say. It has no live virus in it.
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Pretty sure that would just create a lot more carriers to infect the vulnerable. Contracting a virus to which one is able to develop a resistance doesn’t transmit the resistance to others, but it does turn one into a contagious vector while one’s immune system is dealing with the virus.
I’m not a physician, but as a relatively healthy middle-aged person I definitely plan to continue taking precautions against contracting the virus as much for myself as for others.
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I’d place the downfall of ‘only males work’ even earlier, as weaving and spinning moved from the home to the textile mill. The ‘mill girls’ were women who were capable of earning a (poor) living outside the home, and could do so because one aspect of ‘women’s work’ had been industrialized. It’s no coincidence that the woman suffrage movement began in mill towns like Seneca Falls and Lowell.
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Umm, probably, after the deaths directly from the virus and the overwhelmingly larger number of deaths from tapped out medical resources (let us remember that covid patients are not the only ones in need of those resources) the remaining folks may be immune to covid-19. Yay? Nope, I think not.
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Also, that seems like it would be a very short-term effect. Urban smog has partially cleared up because people are avoiding using petrol for transit. Eventually the pandemic will be over and people will go back to using petrol. Even at the horrifying reported fatality rates, the difference in population seems unlikely to make any significant long-term impact of fossil fuel usage, but the economic impact could set back efforts to transition away from fossil fuels in time, negatively effecting human caused climate change. So setting aside the cold callousness of such eliminationist calculus, I strongly suspect it’s simply mathematically wrong.
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