COVID-19

[Butterfree]

You might all be sick of talking about this, but!

How are you doing in these pandemic times? Are you infected? Quarantined? Worried? What’s the official response been like in your countries? Do the authorities seem to have a handle on it, or is it pure chaos? What should be done? What’s the discourse like?

The Icelandic authorities have handled it pretty well, I think. They’re quarantining and testing a lot of people, everyone coming into the country from highly infected areas, but haven’t put on any curfews or meeting bans or closed schools or the like - a couple individual schools etc. where someone has actually tested positive have closed, but others carry on as usual. There are new infections discovered every day, but a pretty steady number, rather than exponential growth, and crucially, they’ve managed to trace everyone found to be infected - mostly it’s people returning from ski trips in the Alps, their immediate families, and a couple who had close contact with them, but as of yet no unexplained cases (as far as I know).

The discourse has been terrible, though - people are seeing other countries do stuff like close down all schools or forbidding all travel from Europe and panicking and yelling that we’re not doing the same, even though we’re doing a good job containing it so far with what we’re doing. It’s a mess.

I’ve got theater tickets for both tonight and tomorrow, so I’m hoping at least if a meeting ban is instituted, it’s not for the next couple of days. :P

 

[Kung Fu Ferret]

One of my coworkers is currently in Germany, and we are all unsure when she'll be allowed to return stateside. Also a lot of people are buying craploads of toilet paper for some odd reason. Schools in my area are closed, numerous events postponed, and all I want is for this to end soon.

 

[Butterfree]

Looks like I spoke a bit too soon - Iceland is now putting on a ban on events including 100+ people starting Monday, and asking that people stay two meters apart at all events, after the most recent infections are getting harder to trace and involve longer chains of people. Closing higher school stages, but not daycares and primary schools, which’d have broader repercussions if they closed. People still insisting obviously we should close the entire country.

 

[kyeugh]

One of my coworkers is currently in Germany, and we are all unsure when she'll be allowed to return stateside.

this doesn't affect american citizens, does it? i'm pretty sure the travel ban only applies to foreign travelers.

tallahassee hasn't been hit yet, but there have been some cases in florida and one in a nearby georgia town, so it seems pretty inevitable that it'll get here sooner or later. my university is moving to online classes for at least the two weeks following spring break (which is next week), which is going to be interesting to say the least. not sure how this is going to affect finals and stuff, but at least there's a chance we'll return to physical instruction before the end of the semester. fortunately the university is still open for business, so i can still go to work, which is nice.

i don't really know what to make of the way the government is handling all this. i'm not sure what good a travel ban does for a country that's already got outbreaks, but i'm definitely no disease expert, so i guess i kind of just have to trust that the actual experts know what they're doing. the only development i really have strong feelings on is the fact that a bill to guarantee sick leave during national emergencies was blocked. kinda fucked up honestly.

i know this whole thing has to get worse before it gets better, but i hope it doesn't get too much worse... it seems we've done an okay-ish job containing it so far.

 

[qenya]

I'm in the north of England at the moment and not really sure how worried I ought to be. Certainly nobody around me seems to be taking it very seriously, and I don't have any factors in particular that would put me personally at greater risk from the disease, but all the same I can't help but feel a little insecure. There have already been confirmed cases (including one death not far from where I live) with unknown transmission chains, and yet the health service aren't performing widespread testing, so I don't really see how they can possibly know how many cases there are in the UK or what the risk is to the general public. If the epidemic gets as bad as it is in other countries where testing is not happening en masse (like the US, for example, as opposed to South Korea or Singapore), there's no way the hospital system will be able to cope with it.

My university have suspended overseas fieldwork, which is very disappointing because I was supposed to be working abroad next month, but they aren't (yet) making any changes to campus activities. (Granted, there aren't many of those at the moment because nearly the entire faculty is striking, but still.)

 

[storm]

my university just cancelled all in-person classes, which is a big relief - I have to take 2-3 forms of transit to reach campus, and I live and help care for a 98 year old who is currently sick, so bringing something back with me has been a very present fear

still, canada isn't doing too badly, and we have local testing centres open in my area. reading about what's going on in other countries, and how they've responded to it, has made me very conscious of my relative good fortune! (relative being key, my family's main contract is with a restaurant that is going to suffer greatly from this, so. that's another worry)

 

[Flora]

I suspect my workplace is gonna stay open until/unless a case pops up or the governor yells at us to close, because I work with Fun Chemicals and we can’t work from home. My sister’s bachelorette weekend has to be rescheduled because Disney’s closed, which like NEVER HAPPENS. It’s a bit chaotic on the grander scale, but not much is happening in my area specifically so far.

The repercussions are gonna be Wild, though; with stocks falling because of COVID-19, it’s making a lot of people who buy them reevaluate their life choices. For my workplace and that industry, it means people may be less likely to buy pools or possibly even maintain the ones they got, and since my company is coming off of a rough year, this is Less Than Ideal.

 

[serimachi]

The university I work in just shut down in-person classes, and are sending students home for the semester. I'm not responsible for IT in my college, but my team is, so it feels like all anyone's been talking about for two weeks now. It still feels a bit unbelievable! I feel especially bad for my friends who are in their senior year, who must now just unceremoniously say goodbye to all their university friends and go home--forever.

Our office is staying open for now, though. So the only way it's affecting me personally is that my roommate is moving out this weekend. Our lease is just till May, though, and he's paid his last month's already. He's just a student who's being hit a lot harder by this, so I told him I'd take over utilities and his portion of April's rent.

Personally I'm most nervous about the impending economic effects. It reassures me that I have savings and two separate streams of income, either of which could keep me afloat (if only barely) if the other failed. I've been planning to job hunt, and a recession may throw a wrench in the works. But hey, I'm lucky that all my problems are merely abstract at this point.

Today I got mildly annoyed at my coworker who legitimately didn't want to meet with our other colleague, who just came back from Russia. (He's the type of person who asks me to escort him to his car when the office closes on the days that he drives to the city, because it just feels so unsafe to him.) I got more annoyed at my older sister, with a master's in nursing, who posted a meme today that said something along the lines of "You wanna hear a joke about coronavirus? Nevermind, you won't get it." Both cases of Failure To Math, I guess, but at least my coworker's attitude wouldn't kill my grandpa if everyone shared it.

 

[I liek Squirtles]

My uni shut down and so did my sister's. She still hasn't come home because the NCAA (college sports basically) took a little bit to fall in line on this. She's coming on Sunday with a bunch of her other friends.

The Puerto Rican government is kinda crapping the bed with this. There was a suspected case of an Italian woman who came on a cruise on Sunday, but the test results still have not arrived. Disappointing, but not surprising.

 

[Kung Fu Ferret]

People are coming in to buy coffee beans in bulk where I work.

 

[Eifie]

I've been following the news about the outbreak pretty closely since January, so everything I read about it these days is basically old news and I had a chance to build up an emergency stash before things got/get too hectic. (I'm not sure if things are actually hectic now because I haven't been going places much this week.) I hope I won't actually end up quarantined and having to use any of it.

My manager made plans and gave us permission to start working from home this week, a few days before the rest of the company started doing so. I'm really glad to have a great manager who's been proactive, etc. We've been turning on webcam for all our meetings and one of my coworkers has a chatroom where people just hang out during the day, which is cute. My friends are mostly on different teams from me but one of them set up a "meeting" for lunch every day where we video chat and play various online games together. That's also cute.

I'm mostly worried for my parents, especially since they still insist on going to our version of church every day. There are measures like not shaking hands anymore and stuff but I really wish they would just stay home. They're all "[church] is a place of power and cleansing" or something. I'm a little scared because my parents are actually getting into the category of "old" now, my dad is over 60 and not really what I would call "in great health". I hope they don't get unlucky. :(

 

[kyeugh]

so it turns out that i leave town for any reason in the next three weeks, i can't set foot on campus (my place of employment) until the beginning of april. so i'm already kind of feeling the effects of this, and it's sort of just begun and i'm not even really particularly vulnerable here...

i read this thread this morning that really changed my perspective on the issue. i can't really vouch for how accurate it is, but it honestly sounds about right?

Spoiler: a lot of text embedded

https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalTalk/comments/fhkwpz

i hope you guys and your loved ones are staying safe.

 

[Keldeo]

My college also canceled in-person classes. I was going to start a new job on campus after the spring break, but I don't know how that'll pan out now.

I'm not particularly worried for my own health or daily life - I'm lucky to be young and healthy, have a safe place to take online classes/work from home, and the like - but my area's been hit harder than most of the US and it's pretty scary for a lot of people. I don't think I have a great perspective on how authorities have been handling this, but I do hope that these measures help.

I hope everyone stays healthy and safe!

 

[Eifie]

I'm mostly worried for my parents, especially since they still insist on going to our version of church every day. There are measures like not shaking hands anymore and stuff but I really wish they would just stay home. They're all "[church] is a place of power and cleansing" or something. I'm a little scared because my parents are actually getting into the category of "old" now, my dad is over 60 and not really what I would call "in great health". I hope they don't get unlucky. :(

Apparently their church has now closed, effective immediately, which is a pretty big relief for me. My mom is also saying the grocery stores are cleaned out and they can't get any fresh vegetables, though. Yikes.

 

[RNP]

all k-12 schools in michigan are closed by command of governor whitmer. cept the command was given just last night, so we only had one single day to prepare for school being off for an entire month. kind of a cluster atm

 

[Kung Fu Ferret]

My state (Massachusetts) banned any gatherings of 250 or more people.

 

[Flora]

My college performing arts department shut down like all of its shows in the recent future, including the kids show the seniors put on every year.

it's a HUGE deal, they work on it for like a year and a half. all of that down the drain. holy shit.

 

[Negrek]

Where I live hasn't been hit badly yet, and overall I've been pleased with how the government has handled it--generally very aggressively, schools started closing Wednesday, large gatherings have been banned since around then, state employees are being told to telework wherever possible, etc. Some people grumble about overreactions, but the point is kind of if you wait until there's actually a fair amount of virus circulating in the population, it is already too late. Hopefully taking precautions will slow things down a bit. The primary issue is the much-discussed lack of testing kits, which is in fact a BIG problem; supposedly there were only 600 for the entire state, and they've already used over 100 of them, and they really should have burned way more at this point but can't because they're afraid of running out. The state is collaborating with local universities to try and develop its own test, but obviously that takes time, and if we start seeing real community transmission those remaining kits are not going to last long.

My company is VERY anti-telework, and some people here can't work remotely and 100% do have to keep coming in to do their jobs, but on Monday we're doing a telework load test where everyone who can stay home is supposed to and will connect over the VPN. After that we're supposed to be returning to the office on Tuesday at least, though we'll see how that goes. Hopefully they'll totally release people to telework once there are confirmed cases in this city if not earlier... Certainly I'm not going in once that happens, heh.

I'm very fortunate in that I don't have to worry much about my own health or that of my family, and my job won't be badly impacted, either. Pretty much all this means for me is that I might be working from home a lot for an indefinite amount of time and that I'm not going to get to do a lot of the things I wanted to do in the coming months... like the Star Wars concert I've been looking forward to isn't officially canceled as far as I know, but I don't see that lasting, for example. What's really hard to grasp at this point is that we're most likely in for months of this, unless maybe the warmer weather slows things down a bit; this is only the very beginning (unless maybe we have people signing on from somewhere in mainland China or something, heh), and it hasn't even gotten bad yet.

Anyhow, hope everyone here stays safe, along with your loved ones, and that all the knock-on economic shit doesn't burn you too hard, either. And please do be smart, take appropriate precautions, and avoid large gatherings. It probably feels like no big deal, especially because most people here are probably not going to die if they catch the bug, but there's a big gap between "not dying" and "being totally fine," and this virus has a fairly high hospitalization rate. I'm not worried about dying, but I don't feel like rolling the dice on hospital-grade pneumonia, so I'm erring more on the side of caution than I ordinarily would.

...literally just saw that the local library closed, guess I'm never getting that book I requested through ILL now. ;-;

 

[M&F]

You might all be sick of talking about this, but!

dohohohohohohohoho,

oh, post something other than acknowledgement of that pun? fiiiine. social contact is starting lock up in my city. my university is basically the only one around that hasn't shut down for the virus yet, but they claim to be "monitoring the situation on a day-to-day basis" and they just cancelled next monday specifically, so maybe they'll end up on proper lockdown, just... one day at a time, apparently

 

[Stryke]

all k-12 schools in michigan are closed by command of governor whitmer. cept the command was given just last night, so we only had one single day to prepare for school being off for an entire month. kind of a cluster atm

I live in the same state as Phoenix, so essentially what he said. When I came in for my last day on Friday, none of the teachers had any clue what they were gonna do. I assume we'll get more information in the coming days, but who knows. I've also had numerous things get cancelled, like a state band competition and my regional Science Olympiad tournament, which blows because I've spent a good deal of my year preparing for those. In addition, there's also a band trip to New Orleans next month that's on thin ice, as well as a junior research project that I was supposed to start, not to mention the SATs. Lots of uncertainty atm, but I'm managing.