TrickstaPriest

My school is providing box lunches (and breakfasts). Student comes in, gives their code, takes the box and leaves. In and out in under a minute.
 
It's not ideal, but it's better than kids not eating.

You can't have a complete lockdown.  That's not even happening in Italy;  essential stores are still open, like grocery stores.  You also have to deal with public reaction.  The hammer blow we're feeling in the US is that...this bloody well feels like an Infinity Gauntlet finger snap.  Wednesay noon...normal-ish. at least in many places.  Wednesday night...20 foot waves crashing onshore.  Thursday noon...tidal wave hits.  It was that fast, that sudden, and that complete a change.  We couldn't, and still in many places, shouldn't go to a complete lockdown yet.  There are some serious consequences...shutting down public schools creates a BIG problem for kids who rely on that school lunch, and for working parents, for example.
 
The goal, BTW, isn't to stop new cases.  It's to keep the case load from spiking past the point where health care can deal with it.  That's when death rates start rising rather higher.  Plus, it offers more time for research for a vaccine or drug to take the virus out.  Because...figure.  With this many cases known, even if things quiet down as the weather warms...the risk of round 2, come November or December, is significant.

Disney's not the only one.  Many companies that executed stock buybacks in the past few years are too heavily leveraged.  It's one of the recession indicators that was flashing red even before the virus popped up.  We have a massive drop in consumer demand, an oil price war, two months of no manufacturing in China, and a possible seven digit death toll on the horizon.  Tomorrow will be another interesting day on Wall Street.

H1N1 and SARS were contained on the Far East so the effects of Coronavirus are more widespread and show what a really deadly disease like Ebola might be capable of if not contained. After medical science and knowledge reduced the effects of Cholera, Dysentery, Malaria and Smallpox nature found to find new ways to kill us off en masse. So we had Legionnaire's Disease.
The mortality rate is not as bad as the really lethal diseases like Ebola and Smallpox, and despite the extreme restrictions, life is continuing on as normal. Because something like flu is not that scary 

Dry cough, fever of 102-104, and shortness of breath are the major symptoms.  If you have a persistent fever(lasts more than a day), see a doctor.  Shortness of breath and high fever are definitely "red flag" symptoms in any event, even if it's not COVID.  

Hey guys. Guess who has a dry cough, fatigue, and just got a fever!
 
Just that though. No body aches, so probably not the flu. And no shortness of breath. My wife is in full panic mode, but I doubt it is even Covid19. Just a normal boring cold. But hey, if they ever get me tested, I'll show you what the result paper looks like.
 

IIRC, you live in Sacramento.  I live a short way away in Modesto and work in a hospital lab.  At our hospital we have about a dozen rule out coronavirus cases.  Of the cases that we have sent out for testing, none have come back positive.  But here is the stinger, only three have come back so far.  We have been forced to send them to the health department for testing, and the health department has been incredibly slow getting back results.
 
I suspect that Sacramento is in the same boat we are, full of hospitals with lots of possible coronavirus cases and waiting on slow to come test results.  IOW, don't be surprised if the number goes from zero to a lot very quickly once testing ramps up.

Yeah, I have to admit I am disgusted with the media attempts at creating hysteria on this.  But, that has nothing to do with Trump's mismanagement.  I've got more than enough disgust to go around on this issue. 

Yeah, I wasn't a fan of Obama.  But, yeah, he made good decisions, he made bad decisions.  It is what it is.  I tried to be as fair as possible during those 8 years, and hope I was.  I dislike the all-or-nothing extreme political crap-fest.

THE buzzwords of the moment...
 
 
Social Distancing.
 
Didn't mention...shopped yesterday as usual.  The store had big honkin' bottles of hand sanitizer prominently positioned by the produce.  That's in addition to wipes by the cart areas.

2500 new cases and 250 new deaths in Italy today.  The mortality rate there is like 8%.

Not like they like it in Hawaii.
 
We used to eat spam musubi (imagine a bit of sushi, replace the fish with spam) and a bajillion other variants of replacing real food with spam and we LOVED it.  People would walk around in SPAM t-shirts.
 
Spam in Hawaii is like the Dallas Cowboys in Dallas.  It's a big deal.  In a Fantasy HERO setting SPAM would have become a minor deity due to the widespread and long term worship. 

The GOP has controlled all three branches of government for four years and yet everything is still Obama's fault.  It would be funny if it weren't actually getting people killed.

I have family that includes Trump's cult. No they don't blame him one whit for bad handling of this.

His incompetence was on display again with his horrific 'reassure the country' national address the other night.  Most of what he said vacillated between blaming Europe and China, utter lies or just flat-out incorrect statements that he had to fix later on twitter.

There is a HUGE difference between the controlled movement of a known carrier within a controlled environment to the wild spread of a disease.  We often think too much on movies like Outbreak where one breach of safety protocol launches a disaster, real life does not usually pan out that way.
 
🙂
 
Doc

You apparently didn't read about my grocery store adventure tonight.  

It doesn't matter because it's too late.  The virus is in at least 47 states now.  The focus needs to be on widespread testing (which is impossible due to earlier mistakes by the administration) and preparing hospitals to deal with the influx of pneumonia patients.  Even nebulizers and CPAP machines may be useful if we run out of ventilators and oxygen.

In a vain effort to prop up the economy, the Fed pumped $1.5T into the financial sector today.  For scale, that's what a year of M4A would cost.
 
No word yet on any bailouts or assistance for regular Americans.

Pardon me using only the partial quote here... but see this? THIS, was something I was proud about for my country. I know it probably sounds hollow, but given a world history of corrupt global powers, empires, and tyrannies, being considered the least bad option is something I could be patriotic about
 
Heck, even some foreign politicians who screamed and ranted about us as the source of all evil in the world kind of needed us as a scape goat and didn't really want us to vanish from the face of the Earth because that would take a way a lot of excuses for the problems in the countries that they were leading. 
 
I guess I'm old, I'm nostalgic for the days of "What have the Americans ever done for us... " Insert Monty Python skit. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I wouldn't just blame the President.
 
I also blame his advisers and those in the GOP who are deathly afraid that public health services might work or at least help and thus  makes folks realize some aspects of free health care aren't the end of the republic but rather part of the rescue of it.
Why then, the public might insist it stick around or at least be more seriously considered.
 

So the big policy decision from the president's speech? Stop travel to and from Europe for the next month.
 
Translation: Build wall between America and Europe to keep coronavirus out.
 
Man, sometimes I hate it when I'm right.

Oh boy, if you think Canada has its act together, it's clear you don't follow Canadian news.   Ongoing nationwide rail blockades by aboriginal Canadians protesting a natural gas pipeline through native land on our west coast have significantly impacted travel and trade. Separatist sentiments in the country's western prairie provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, are on the rise over the federal government's attempted environment-based regulation of their oil and gas industries. The government has been criticized for dragging its feet over dealing with the coronavirus outbreak, especially evacuating our citizens quarantined overseas. Our relations with China have severely soured over our restraining Huawei's CEO in Canada over charges (from the US) of breaking the trade embargo against Iran -- extradition hearings are ongoing. The Liberal government under Justin Trudeau -- reduced from a majority to a minority in the last federal election, over a series of scandals and PR gaffs by Trudeau -- is perceived as weak and ineffectual in dealing with all those issues.
 
And you think we want to take on the sh__storm you've got going on down south?!

Trying to remember if there are event cards in Pandemic, and if so, whether included in them is "Governmental response is purely CYA."

I read somewhere that when the Soviet Union collapsed, historians expected the rest of the world to band together in opposition to the one remaining superpower.  That didn't happen, because the rest of the world was actually pretty okay with America as the dominant presence on the world stage.
 
Then 2016 happened.  That'll teach 'em.
 
 
If you're watching the news at all, you're watching too much negative news.  Things are pretty sh___y right now.