Topic: Corona Virus Panic/Discussion Thread

@Gremio108 Nice one fella! I'll bet that was a relief.

Went to pharmacy for my daughter who has chosen the worse time to get an ear infection, and it was tragically british. Queue outside, everyone awkwardly dancing around each other but being awefully polite and making odd small talk. Felt quite patriotic.

Then had to queue for 30 minutes to get into a supermarket but well organised, spaced out and no one being difficult or grumpy. Food well stocked overall though a few shortages. The good news is I found more beer.

@Gremio108 Excellent news, buddy. Real pleased to read that!

Thanks folks. I am now free to concentrate on my family, listening to music and of course, gaming. I still think it's surely just a matter of time until the virus hits our household though. The speed these kids go through stuff is unbelievable. I'm having to go to the shop every other day.

My city has recorded it's first 3 cases today. I'll probably be able to last at least another week or two before having to go to the store myself, but that's partly because my mother works in a grocery store & can't help but buy a little something each day before coming home.

Good in the sense that we probably won't run out of supplies, but bad in that we'll probably get it eventually. My brother & father also both have to go in for work as well (my brother at Burger King, and my father works in billing for the hospital).

Bloomin heck, Italy can't catch a break. In reality there must be a million infected people there for the stats to keep pacing as is. Spain likewise is in a bad place.

We know about the US becoming the 'next epicentre' due to all of the news. However my money is on Turkey, those guys flew under the radar for quite some time, remember the stories about them having no cases a couple of weeks back?

The infections are really stamping their authority now. The world biggest harbinger of refugees, on the rails with crowded cities and an average health care system. That's a terrible triumvirate.

Glad to hear everyone is doing alright.

The hospital I work in hasn’t been hit too bad so far. It’s pretty weird though as so much outpatient/elective work has been cancelled so it’s actually pretty quiet in my department for the time being.

Loving the empty roads to get to work too! I also feel quite lucky to be able to go to work and maintain some semblance of normality and get to see/speak to other people (from a distance).

I am a teeny bit jealous of those who get to sit and game all day though

Just stopping by to let you guys know I'm still alive and well!

@TowaHerschel7 Good to see you.

Yeah, we ought to have a roll call to make sure all the Push Squarians are okay. Wonder what our infection and mortality rate is. Surely gaming boosts the immune system.

@TowaHerschel7 @Th3solution Gamers usually stay at home playing video games anyways.

@WanderingBullet you would actually be surprised, I'm finding isolation a doddle. My daughter thinks it's the best thing ever. My youngest sons absolutely love it.

My wife on the other hand hates it. Shes itching to go out. Nightmare she is.

My eldest son thinks he's missing out, I get that I was 19 once myself. But no one Is doing anything! May as well have a laugh at home or on the computer. But no, sits there with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Stats time

160,713
Cases which had an outcome:

133,358 (83%)
Recovered / Discharged

27,355 (17%)
Deaths

This was meant to be coming down by now. These are black plague type figures.

@themcnoisy Being the same age as your eldest son, I feel the same way! I had a few gigs I was going to, looking forward to summer and stuff but now I feel trapped inside without being able to see my pals. At least exams were cancelled, eh?

I went to Asda this morning and had my first experience of queuing to get in the shop. So, so weird. They had toilet roll though, so it was worth it

@LN78 Yeah, exactly. Once inside, it was fine. Although my slight guilt about the people queuing outside meant I felt compelled to rush, and I went a bit Supermarket Sweep as a result. Dale Winton would have been proud of me.

EDIT For American Push Squarers, Supermarket Sweep was (is) a game show where the objective is to leg it around a pretend supermarket as quickly as possible, grabbing certain items at the request of uber-tanned host Dale Winton, who is (was) clearly too lazy to do his own shopping, despite having a personal supermarket at his disposal. Is there an American equivalent of this show?

God knows who America's answer to Dale Winton is.

@Gremio108 Yeah we do have Supermarket Sweep over here but as for the host, beats me. I never really watched the show, but have seen it on cable guides and such.

@themcnoisy I think the reason the percentage of deaths among closed cases is so high thus far is because it's going to take a lot longer for people to recover than for vulnerable people to die. Also, critically ill people are being prioritized for testing, which is going to drive up the numbers as well. Only 5% of active cases are considered serious, and that's being massively inflated by the lack of mass testing in a lot of countries alongside the numerous people who are so mild/asymptomatic that they don't bother going to the hospital (there's a "cold" going around our household; could be the virus, I guess, but I'm not going to go to a hospital and beg for a test over cold symptoms. This virus sucking all the air out of the room doesn't change the fact that the flu/common cold are still out there and way more prevalent.). So, when things pan out, we'll likely see a 1% or 2% mortality rate at most.

Which is still really bad. If you're one of 100 people in a room and told someone will be randomly selected to die, even if your individual likelihood of dying is fairly low, you'll still feel nervous when you realize literally everyone, including the person who is going to eat the bullet, has that same low likelihood of dying.

This sucks, but it's not the black plague. It just... wears on one's mental health when you constantly hear about people who weren't on death's door before suddenly croaking a day or two after being diagnosed. My sleep was not restful last night. In fairness, eating a large meal at 1 in the morning will also contribute to that.

Perhaps overall death rates in the country are actually down during this pandemic. With the lock downs, no one is on the highways and roads.

But then again... everyone is stuck at home with their families, so violent crime might be on the rise.

A friend did say to me the other day, “Well the entire world now at least has a common enemy to unite us.”
Not sure how much good it will do, but there’s a silver lining for you.

@Gremio108 I think Dale Winton died.

@Ralizah or it could be higher than we can fathom (unlikely). The lack of testing kits is an issue though, the lacking of planning for this current eventuality is staggering. When I was in the RN we had plans for everything. We then had backup plans for those plans. Sometimes we had a backup plan for a backup plan.

@Th3solution the current crop of political talent has more in common with 1938 than the 1990s. That commonn enemy can easily be repurposed for extremist ends.

@Arugula

I was just telling my sister this when she complained about Trump people saying "tests are readily available." Tests ARE readily available... for politicians, celebrities, Wall Street people, and other cultural elites. Meanwhile, health care workers throughout the States are still struggling to get tested when they have symptoms, despite being the people who should have highest-priority access to them.

But, like our legal system, our test kit distribution is two-tiered. You take care of the important people first, and then maybe you toss a few to the unwashed 98% of the country that exists purely to keep the engine of capitalism running.

And it's pretty clear we did almost nothing to keep this out. How many people have gone online and talked about how they just waltzed into the U.S. from Italy and other countries with almost no intervention now? No wonder our growth in cases every day is outstripping total cases in half the countries around the world.

China still doesn't get any points from me. The government, specifically. They knew about this for weeks. Doctors were warning them about how dangerous this could become, and they were muzzled. China only acted when it became impossible to ignore.

Also, I don't trust their numbers one bit. Censorship has been incredibly high during this entire process (which, unfortunately, is par for the course with pandemics, if the so-called "Spanish Flu" is any indication). China is shutting down their theaters again, so it'll be interesting to see what stories are coming out of there.

As angering as the Chinese response was, though, at least they are likely keeping semi-accurate internal numbers. That beats the U.S. strategy, which is no strategy at all.

@Ralizah Yeah, China may have sorta contained it but I guess that’s probably through nefarious means. Reports of doctors being silenced and infected being dragged off to containment facilities were ten-a-penny a couple of months ago. It’s almost as if authoritarianism is far better at containing viruses than so called freedom.

@nessisonett Depends.

One could argue the corruption inherent to a totalitarian state is what got this ball rolling in the first place. Free societies don't muzzle doctors who are trying to warn the world about a dangerous new threat.

On the other hand, it probably would have gotten out of control regardless. Democracies and free-ish republics are notoriously slow to adopt any sort of large scale action, which would've been needed to nip this pandemic in the bud. Especially ones that violate civil liberties.

Totaliarian societies have the "feature" of being able to take swift, decisive, and probably cruel steps to keep problems from spiraling out of control like this if they respond early enough. But, as pointed out, the people calling the shots in those countries usually aren't sober of judgment and concerned primarily with the public welfare.

The ideal arrangement would be for all countries to have wise philosopher kings who were able to step in during moments of national emergency and dictatorially marshal the resources of the state to drown something like this of oxygen, and then, once the problem vanished, step back from their thrones and allow normal democratic society to operate as usual.

But that's not the world we live in. The people attracted to power are neither wise nor trustworthy, and once they assume power, they'll do anything and everything within their means to keep it. And it's a lot easier to surrender civil liberties than it is to regain them afterward (something I do think we'll see after this pandemic resolves itself, one way or another). This is why democracy is so lauded in the first place: theoretically, it spits in the eye of the despot.

Now, of course, any half-way sober assessment of late stage capitalism demonstrates this naive notion to be at least partially false. "Free" societies today are still corrupted by kings and masters. Instead of obvious political power by divine mandate, they oppress the populace and secure excess means for themselves through the machinery of capital.