Coronavirus pandemic

[LM117]

The "trampling of rights"  is just people whining because they cant go to Applebee's.

No, it isn't.  It's partially because these folks who were working now can't feed their families and have a choice between opening up and maybe catching the virus, or keeping closed and definitely starving.  Have some empathy and consideration for the 25% suddenly thrown out of their lower-paying jobs and working paycheck-to-paycheck.  Not everyone is in an "essential" business or capable of working from home.

If the government did its job people wouldn't have to choose between safety and income.

Define how the government is to "do its job" here?  Even government income (at all levels) is way down due to the lack of incoming taxes.  As an example, there's some serious discussion about putting off road projects here in Illinois (a state which seriously needs to rebuild and upgrade its system) due to the lack of gas tax money coming in.

Shit is already hitting the fan for NCDOT.

https://www.ncdot.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/2020/2020-05-04-revenue-decline-depletes-ncdot-cash.aspx

[jeffandnicole]

Canada has been giving everyone $2000/month.  European countries have been giving people a high percentage of their salaries.  Meanwhile, the US can't be bothered to do more than throw a one-time $1200 check at people.

I'm not going to check every country, but stuff like this gets translated badly.

Per these stories: https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/trudeau-covid-19-emergency-response-benefit and https://www.news4jax.com/news/local/2020/04/17/canada-is-already-paying-its-unemployed-citizens-2000-per-month-for-coronavirus-relief/ , the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) gives $2,000 a month for the next four months for people who lost their job because of COVID-19. It would apply to people who are quarantined, helping a sick family member, have been laid off or have not received payment from their employer.

So, let's give this a little thought.  Everyone in Canada is NOT getting $2,000 a month. 

Canada is giving certain people who are laid off, can't work due to Coronovirus, or are working but not getting paid $2,000 a month for 4 months.

The US is giving certain people who are laid off or can't work due to Coronovirus, $600 per week.  I seriously doubt our rules would allow most people to work but not get paid.

Now, I may not be a very good accountant, but if I calculate for just 4 weeks per month, that equates to Americans getting $2,400 per month, whereas Canada is giving their citizens $2,000 per month.

My research took 1/4 of the time it took to write up this description.

So, people need to stop reading the stories from sources that intentionally deceive people.  The whole reason they stay in business is because they know everything people read on the internet is true.

[J N Winkler]

The US is giving certain people who are laid off or can't work due to Coronovirus, $600 per week.  I seriously doubt our rules would allow most people to work but not get paid.

We are also allowing "soft furloughs" where employees are kept on the payroll and paid for hours worked, but their hours are cut, and they qualify for the $600/week payment.  For many (perhaps most) employees covered by this provision in the law, this actually amounts to a temporary pay raise.  However, this program is not widely used because it requires employers to liaise with state unemployment insurance providers, who are overwhelmed.

What people and small businesses are eligible for on paper is just one part of the whole picture; another, and in the US context perhaps more critical, is how well the administrative machinery works to deliver these benefits.

[tradephoric]

Arizona has a slightly higher population than Massachusetts yet Massachusetts has seen 10x the number of COVID deaths.  Will Arizona be spared from this pandemic or is their spike in cases still coming?   


https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?scale=linear&data=deaths&region=US&location=Arizona&location=Massachusetts&doublingtime=3

I would include California in the list of states that haven't yet seen a big spike in cases.  California is twice the population of New York yet at their worst they were seeing 540 deaths per week compared to New York which at its worse was seeing 5318 deaths (and since then weekly deaths have dropped by 62%).  Today weekly deaths in California are 502 which is only an 8% reduction from its peak.  If California starts to see exponential growth in cases upon loosening restrictions they could quickly overtake New York in Covid deaths.


https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?scale=linear&data=deaths&region=US&location=California&location=New+York&doublingtime=3

[Brandon]

^^ It is suspected that there may be two different strains of the virus, one, less lethal, directly from China, and one, more lethal, from Europe.  California and Arizona seem to have gotten the Chinese strain.  New York and Massachusetts seem to have gotten the European strain.

[kphoger]

Using the logarithmic scale on that site, which is easier for me to process...

Massachusetts appears to have been on the downward trend for about a week now.

Arizona had begun to plateau but has now been on the upward trend again for the past two weeks straight, so I think its safe to say their peak is yet to come.

California looks pretty typical to me, with a gradual flattening of the curve but nothing to get excited about.  I'd say it totally remains to be seen which way it will go there.

New York is on a very clear downward trend.

[kphoger]

It was the mom who picked up the girls today, so I asked her what she heard during her recent time with family in southwestern Kansas.  She said her dad talks a lot about the shutdowns affecting agriculture, but not really any specifics.  It's all just speculation right now.  The only thing she mentioned specifically is that the price of beef is expected to increase (good for them, I suppose, considering they're in the cattle market).  Other than that, she just mentioned concern about perishable produce having to be binned.

Isn't this actually the opposite of a drought situation, though?  It's not that there isn't anyone to harvest the corn, wheat, and potatoes.  It's that there's too much produce being harvested.

I suspect the real impact will be similar to the toilet paper issue:  a glut of commercial-grade product and a dearth of residential-grade product.  This would be a direct result of shutdowns:  the faster people are allowed to get back into their "usual" routines, the sooner demand will more closely match the established supply chain, and thus the less disruption there will overall.

[kalvado]

It was the mom who picked up the girls today, so I asked her what she heard during her recent time with family in southwestern Kansas.  She said her dad talks a lot about the shutdowns affecting agriculture, but not really any specifics.  It's all just speculation right now.  The only thing she mentioned specifically is that the price of beef is expected to increase (good for them, I suppose, considering they're in the cattle market).  Other than that, she just mentioned concern about perishable produce having to be binned.

Isn't this actually the opposite of a drought situation, though?  It's not that there isn't anyone to harvest the corn, wheat, and potatoes.  It's that there's too much produce being harvested.

I suspect the real impact will be similar to the toilet paper issue:  a glut of commercial-grade product and a dearth of residential-grade product.  This would be a direct result of shutdowns:  the faster people are allowed to get back into their "usual" routines, the sooner demand will more closely match the established supply chain, and thus the less disruption there will overall.

for most places, the harvest is still a few months away.  I don't think crops are even planted here in NY.
As for the amount of food - I suspect the "number of calories" argument still holds. If some milk gets disposed, it is not because milk is not needed, it is because kids would have to go without their soft-serve icecream  and eat more other food to compensate - or... maybe... they will just be a bit slimmer?

[Max Rockatansky]

Using the logarithmic scale on that site, which is easier for me to process...

Massachusetts appears to have been on the downward trend for about a week now.

Arizona had begun to plateau but has now been on the upward trend again for the past two weeks straight, so I think its safe to say their peak is yet to come.

California looks pretty typical to me, with a gradual flattening of the curve but nothing to get excited about.  I'd say it totally remains to be seen which way it will go there.

New York is on a very clear downward trend.

California has been plateauing despite the virus hitting a huge hot spot in Los Angeles County.  Take that one county out of the picture and trends become far more positive.  San Francisco and the Bay Area are barely even registering any new cases.  That's a large reason why so many counties here are splitting from the Governor and doing their own thing with phased reopening.  The issue for many is 1/4 of the state population in a relatively small area has been driving healthy policy state wide.  Granted the entire top 5 counties with cases are all from SoCal now.

[webny99]

There have been a lot of tiring things during this pandemic, but trying to keep up with this thread has got to be nearing the top of the list...

[renegade]

As stressful as this whole coronavirus thing has been ... now I get to deal with the fast  and easy    Unemployment system for both my spouse and myself.  I've pulled most of my hair out over the past week, and I don't have that much to begin with!

[Duke87]

California has been plateauing despite the virus hitting a huge hot spot in Los Angeles County.  Take that one county out of the picture and trends become far more positive.  San Francisco and the Bay Area are barely even registering any new cases.  That's a large reason why so many counties here are splitting from the Governor and doing their own thing with phased reopening.  The issue for many is 1/4 of the state population in a relatively small area has been driving healthy policy state wide.  Granted the entire top 5 counties with cases are all from SoCal now.

Yeah, I think another line of thinking that has been gaining more prominence recently is that looking at things on a state-by-state basis is really not a sufficient level of granularity, especially for large states like California. When you take things apart further you see areas where there really haven't been many infections, areas where infections have been trending downward for a while, areas where infections have plateaued, and areas where infections are currently increasing.

Given this, it makes sense to take regional approaches to what is or isn't safe to permit, as a way of allowing more economic activity to resume while still focusing on curve flattening where needed. But... this comes with the pitfall that it creates an incentive for people to travel to regions with looser restrictions in order to do things not allowed where they live. So you need means of preventing people from doing this or you're just going to have people bringing the virus into places that had it more under control.

Still, it's worth stressing that at this time the majority of Americans still live in a region that would have to be classified as less safe. Indeed, there are some pretty staggering statistical realities currently about how much one area can dominate the numbers:
- cases in Texas are declining, but if you remove Houston (which had the state's largest early outbreak but is now past peak) the rest of the state is still trending upward
- cases in the US as a whole are declining, but if you remove New York City (which had the country's largest early outbreak but is now past peak) the rest of the country is still trending upward.

[Roadgeekteen]

There have been a lot of tiring things during this pandemic, but trying to keep up with this thread has got to be nearing the top of the list...

This is now the most replied to off topic thread by almost 2 times.

[bugo]

I can certainly tell you that for my sake... I will be staying the fuck away from anything that involves people congregating for a while after things start reopening. I'm not going to trust that it's safe just because the government says so - I will want to see the results empirically show this and will be looking hard for any canaries of a possible resurgence.
And I'm not really interested in purchasing any non-essential items or services right now, because while I am still employed currently I'd be foolish to not be preparing for the possibility that that may change.

Perhaps, then, there is a fundamental difference between the way you and I live our lives.

Staying safe is not the goal of my life.  Heck, staying alive isn't even the goal of my life.  I fully expect to die at some point in my life.  That doesn't mean I live recklessly, but it does mean that "is it safe?" isn't the guiding question that controls my decisions.

In 2008, my wife and I decided to take steps towards doing mission work in Mexico.  A couple of months later, escalating cartel violence started making US headlines, and everybody we knew told is it wasn't safe to go to Mexico.  The first year we went (March 2009), my wife's own mother called her "stupid" for taking our one-year-old son to Mexico.  Her grandparents told us that, with any future trips, we shouldn't even tell them we were going until we got back to the USA.  Even today, the US Department of State says of the state we travel to:  "Reconsider Travel ... due to crime.  Violent crime and unpredictable gang activity are common..."  For the first several years, I did research about the safety of travel there.  I obtained detailed data from the Mexican attorney-general's office, downloaded Harvard mathematician-published research papers, looked through FBI crime statistics, made charts and graphs based on my findings, etc.  But all of that was really for the sake of others traveling with us.  It wasn't for our own sake.  We had a call on our lives to serve in Mexico, and it's our belief that one is supposed to follow his or her calling whether it's safe or not.  (I'm trying to avoid overtly religious language.)  Our best friends recently moved to the town we serve in, with our full encouragement and support.  "Is it safe?" is a question that factors into their decisions and ours, but it is far from the most important factor.

When we do go to Mexico, we often do roof demolition.  We destroy the very surface we stand on, sometimes swinging mattocks while balancing on the edge of the wall because there's nowhere else to stand.  Is it safe?  Maybe, maybe not.  After the work is done, we take the children down the street to the swimming hole.  The water isn't treated, people dump all sorts of stuff into the canal that flows through it, my friend has even seen a turd floating by.  Is it safe?  Maybe, maybe not.  But we decide to do these things anyway, because they are acts of ministry to the children there.

2 million drivers in the USA suffer permanent injury or disability because of car accidents in any given year.  I personally see or hear car crashes every year, and major wrecks on the highway frequently affect my commute.  But this does not keep me from driving a car.  Is driving safe?  Maybe, maybe not.

More than half a million Americans die from heart disease every year.  I have borderline cholesterol, and heart attacks run in the family.  But these things do not define how I choose what to eat.  I buy high-oleic sunflower oil for cooking applications I used to use lard for, for example, but I'm not about to switch to a raw diet.  Could I be healthier if I became religious about my diet?  Certainly.  But extending my life as long as possible isn't my goal.

If I drop food on the floor, I pick it up and eat it.  Might I get sick from that?  I suppose so.

Back when I didn't have a car, I used to hitchhike.  One week-end, I took Greyhound from Chicago to Menominee (MI), then hitchhiked for two days across and down through Michigan and back to Chicago.  Just for fun, because I wanted to see Michigan.  Was it safe?  Well, who knows? because there are almost no statistics on the safety of hitchhiking.

"Safety" is an illusion anyway.  What will you be looking for?  100% safety?  It doesn't exist.  There are always canaries, if you look hard enough.  When the government does tell us it's "safe", what will that mean anyway?  No risk of infection?  That we can go to the store with zero risk of catching any illness?  That's an impossibility.  We live our lives with a combination of myriad factors, each of which lies somewhere along a continuum of risk.  Focusing on that continuum will leave a person paralyzed, because it's impossible to eliminate all the risk factors.

I'm not about to give up spending time with my friends just because it might be risky.  I'm not about to stop going to the grocery store just because someone might have sneezed nearby at some point earlier in the day.  I'm not about to wear a mask to walk down the street just because I might pass by someone else.  If I determine that the risks are great enough to warrant a lifestyle change on my part, then I'll change my behavior.  But, until that time, I'm going to continue living my life as normally as possible under current government and corporate restrictions.  And when those restrictions are lifted, I'll be only too eager to return to normal life.

Nicely said. Some risks are a part of life.

But if you are selfish and go out anyway, it could cause others to lose their health or their lives. Think about others. Your right to go outside does not trump my right to not get sick. It's all about me me me me me and damn the collateral damage that can lead to death. How can you sleep with blood on your hands?

[02 Park Ave]

The weather forecast for Mother's Day around here is good but Phil Murphy will have ruined it as he did Easter.

I assume that he plans to continue punishing us over Memorial Day weekend too.

[Roadgeekteen]

I can certainly tell you that for my sake... I will be staying the fuck away from anything that involves people congregating for a while after things start reopening. I'm not going to trust that it's safe just because the government says so - I will want to see the results empirically show this and will be looking hard for any canaries of a possible resurgence.
And I'm not really interested in purchasing any non-essential items or services right now, because while I am still employed currently I'd be foolish to not be preparing for the possibility that that may change.

Perhaps, then, there is a fundamental difference between the way you and I live our lives.

Staying safe is not the goal of my life.  Heck, staying alive isn't even the goal of my life.  I fully expect to die at some point in my life.  That doesn't mean I live recklessly, but it does mean that "is it safe?" isn't the guiding question that controls my decisions.

In 2008, my wife and I decided to take steps towards doing mission work in Mexico.  A couple of months later, escalating cartel violence started making US headlines, and everybody we knew told is it wasn't safe to go to Mexico.  The first year we went (March 2009), my wife's own mother called her "stupid" for taking our one-year-old son to Mexico.  Her grandparents told us that, with any future trips, we shouldn't even tell them we were going until we got back to the USA.  Even today, the US Department of State says of the state we travel to:  "Reconsider Travel ... due to crime.  Violent crime and unpredictable gang activity are common..."  For the first several years, I did research about the safety of travel there.  I obtained detailed data from the Mexican attorney-general's office, downloaded Harvard mathematician-published research papers, looked through FBI crime statistics, made charts and graphs based on my findings, etc.  But all of that was really for the sake of others traveling with us.  It wasn't for our own sake.  We had a call on our lives to serve in Mexico, and it's our belief that one is supposed to follow his or her calling whether it's safe or not.  (I'm trying to avoid overtly religious language.)  Our best friends recently moved to the town we serve in, with our full encouragement and support.  "Is it safe?" is a question that factors into their decisions and ours, but it is far from the most important factor.

When we do go to Mexico, we often do roof demolition.  We destroy the very surface we stand on, sometimes swinging mattocks while balancing on the edge of the wall because there's nowhere else to stand.  Is it safe?  Maybe, maybe not.  After the work is done, we take the children down the street to the swimming hole.  The water isn't treated, people dump all sorts of stuff into the canal that flows through it, my friend has even seen a turd floating by.  Is it safe?  Maybe, maybe not.  But we decide to do these things anyway, because they are acts of ministry to the children there.

2 million drivers in the USA suffer permanent injury or disability because of car accidents in any given year.  I personally see or hear car crashes every year, and major wrecks on the highway frequently affect my commute.  But this does not keep me from driving a car.  Is driving safe?  Maybe, maybe not.

More than half a million Americans die from heart disease every year.  I have borderline cholesterol, and heart attacks run in the family.  But these things do not define how I choose what to eat.  I buy high-oleic sunflower oil for cooking applications I used to use lard for, for example, but I'm not about to switch to a raw diet.  Could I be healthier if I became religious about my diet?  Certainly.  But extending my life as long as possible isn't my goal.

If I drop food on the floor, I pick it up and eat it.  Might I get sick from that?  I suppose so.

Back when I didn't have a car, I used to hitchhike.  One week-end, I took Greyhound from Chicago to Menominee (MI), then hitchhiked for two days across and down through Michigan and back to Chicago.  Just for fun, because I wanted to see Michigan.  Was it safe?  Well, who knows? because there are almost no statistics on the safety of hitchhiking.

"Safety" is an illusion anyway.  What will you be looking for?  100% safety?  It doesn't exist.  There are always canaries, if you look hard enough.  When the government does tell us it's "safe", what will that mean anyway?  No risk of infection?  That we can go to the store with zero risk of catching any illness?  That's an impossibility.  We live our lives with a combination of myriad factors, each of which lies somewhere along a continuum of risk.  Focusing on that continuum will leave a person paralyzed, because it's impossible to eliminate all the risk factors.

I'm not about to give up spending time with my friends just because it might be risky.  I'm not about to stop going to the grocery store just because someone might have sneezed nearby at some point earlier in the day.  I'm not about to wear a mask to walk down the street just because I might pass by someone else.  If I determine that the risks are great enough to warrant a lifestyle change on my part, then I'll change my behavior.  But, until that time, I'm going to continue living my life as normally as possible under current government and corporate restrictions.  And when those restrictions are lifted, I'll be only too eager to return to normal life.

Nicely said. Some risks are a part of life.

But if you are selfish and go out anyway, it could cause others to lose their health or their lives. Think about others. Your right to go outside does not trump my right to not get sick. It's all about me me me me me and damn the collateral damage that can lead to death. How can you sleep with blood on your hands?

Chill I'm not really going out yet. I just don't want to be stuck inside for like 6 months.

[bugo]

On the other hand, we had the bug guy come to our house yesterday because of an ant problem, and he didn't even wear a mask in our house.

I think you all can assume by now that it didn't bother me.

You might have contacted SARS-COV-2 from that very person. You might be doomed already, you just don't know it yet.

[bugo]

I can certainly tell you that for my sake... I will be staying the fuck away from anything that involves people congregating for a while after things start reopening. I'm not going to trust that it's safe just because the government says so - I will want to see the results empirically show this and will be looking hard for any canaries of a possible resurgence.
And I'm not really interested in purchasing any non-essential items or services right now, because while I am still employed currently I'd be foolish to not be preparing for the possibility that that may change.

Perhaps, then, there is a fundamental difference between the way you and I live our lives.

Staying safe is not the goal of my life.  Heck, staying alive isn't even the goal of my life.  I fully expect to die at some point in my life.  That doesn't mean I live recklessly, but it does mean that "is it safe?" isn't the guiding question that controls my decisions.

In 2008, my wife and I decided to take steps towards doing mission work in Mexico.  A couple of months later, escalating cartel violence started making US headlines, and everybody we knew told is it wasn't safe to go to Mexico.  The first year we went (March 2009), my wife's own mother called her "stupid" for taking our one-year-old son to Mexico.  Her grandparents told us that, with any future trips, we shouldn't even tell them we were going until we got back to the USA.  Even today, the US Department of State says of the state we travel to:  "Reconsider Travel ... due to crime.  Violent crime and unpredictable gang activity are common..."  For the first several years, I did research about the safety of travel there.  I obtained detailed data from the Mexican attorney-general's office, downloaded Harvard mathematician-published research papers, looked through FBI crime statistics, made charts and graphs based on my findings, etc.  But all of that was really for the sake of others traveling with us.  It wasn't for our own sake.  We had a call on our lives to serve in Mexico, and it's our belief that one is supposed to follow his or her calling whether it's safe or not.  (I'm trying to avoid overtly religious language.)  Our best friends recently moved to the town we serve in, with our full encouragement and support.  "Is it safe?" is a question that factors into their decisions and ours, but it is far from the most important factor.

When we do go to Mexico, we often do roof demolition.  We destroy the very surface we stand on, sometimes swinging mattocks while balancing on the edge of the wall because there's nowhere else to stand.  Is it safe?  Maybe, maybe not.  After the work is done, we take the children down the street to the swimming hole.  The water isn't treated, people dump all sorts of stuff into the canal that flows through it, my friend has even seen a turd floating by.  Is it safe?  Maybe, maybe not.  But we decide to do these things anyway, because they are acts of ministry to the children there.

2 million drivers in the USA suffer permanent injury or disability because of car accidents in any given year.  I personally see or hear car crashes every year, and major wrecks on the highway frequently affect my commute.  But this does not keep me from driving a car.  Is driving safe?  Maybe, maybe not.

More than half a million Americans die from heart disease every year.  I have borderline cholesterol, and heart attacks run in the family.  But these things do not define how I choose what to eat.  I buy high-oleic sunflower oil for cooking applications I used to use lard for, for example, but I'm not about to switch to a raw diet.  Could I be healthier if I became religious about my diet?  Certainly.  But extending my life as long as possible isn't my goal.

If I drop food on the floor, I pick it up and eat it.  Might I get sick from that?  I suppose so.

Back when I didn't have a car, I used to hitchhike.  One week-end, I took Greyhound from Chicago to Menominee (MI), then hitchhiked for two days across and down through Michigan and back to Chicago.  Just for fun, because I wanted to see Michigan.  Was it safe?  Well, who knows? because there are almost no statistics on the safety of hitchhiking.

"Safety" is an illusion anyway.  What will you be looking for?  100% safety?  It doesn't exist.  There are always canaries, if you look hard enough.  When the government does tell us it's "safe", what will that mean anyway?  No risk of infection?  That we can go to the store with zero risk of catching any illness?  That's an impossibility.  We live our lives with a combination of myriad factors, each of which lies somewhere along a continuum of risk.  Focusing on that continuum will leave a person paralyzed, because it's impossible to eliminate all the risk factors.

I'm not about to give up spending time with my friends just because it might be risky.  I'm not about to stop going to the grocery store just because someone might have sneezed nearby at some point earlier in the day.  I'm not about to wear a mask to walk down the street just because I might pass by someone else.  If I determine that the risks are great enough to warrant a lifestyle change on my part, then I'll change my behavior.  But, until that time, I'm going to continue living my life as normally as possible under current government and corporate restrictions.  And when those restrictions are lifted, I'll be only too eager to return to normal life.

Nicely said. Some risks are a part of life.

But if you are selfish and go out anyway, it could cause others to lose their health or their lives. Think about others. Your right to go outside does not trump my right to not get sick. It's all about me me me me me and damn the collateral damage that can lead to death. How can you sleep with blood on your hands?

Chill I'm not really going out yet. I just don't want to be stuck inside for like 6 months.

I don't want to be stuck inside either, but I don't want to get sick a lot more. It can would make me very angry if some punk kid gave me COVID-19 because he or she is selfish and careless.

[Roadgeekteen]

I can certainly tell you that for my sake... I will be staying the fuck away from anything that involves people congregating for a while after things start reopening. I'm not going to trust that it's safe just because the government says so - I will want to see the results empirically show this and will be looking hard for any canaries of a possible resurgence.
And I'm not really interested in purchasing any non-essential items or services right now, because while I am still employed currently I'd be foolish to not be preparing for the possibility that that may change.

Perhaps, then, there is a fundamental difference between the way you and I live our lives.

Staying safe is not the goal of my life.  Heck, staying alive isn't even the goal of my life.  I fully expect to die at some point in my life.  That doesn't mean I live recklessly, but it does mean that "is it safe?" isn't the guiding question that controls my decisions.

In 2008, my wife and I decided to take steps towards doing mission work in Mexico.  A couple of months later, escalating cartel violence started making US headlines, and everybody we knew told is it wasn't safe to go to Mexico.  The first year we went (March 2009), my wife's own mother called her "stupid" for taking our one-year-old son to Mexico.  Her grandparents told us that, with any future trips, we shouldn't even tell them we were going until we got back to the USA.  Even today, the US Department of State says of the state we travel to:  "Reconsider Travel ... due to crime.  Violent crime and unpredictable gang activity are common..."  For the first several years, I did research about the safety of travel there.  I obtained detailed data from the Mexican attorney-general's office, downloaded Harvard mathematician-published research papers, looked through FBI crime statistics, made charts and graphs based on my findings, etc.  But all of that was really for the sake of others traveling with us.  It wasn't for our own sake.  We had a call on our lives to serve in Mexico, and it's our belief that one is supposed to follow his or her calling whether it's safe or not.  (I'm trying to avoid overtly religious language.)  Our best friends recently moved to the town we serve in, with our full encouragement and support.  "Is it safe?" is a question that factors into their decisions and ours, but it is far from the most important factor.

When we do go to Mexico, we often do roof demolition.  We destroy the very surface we stand on, sometimes swinging mattocks while balancing on the edge of the wall because there's nowhere else to stand.  Is it safe?  Maybe, maybe not.  After the work is done, we take the children down the street to the swimming hole.  The water isn't treated, people dump all sorts of stuff into the canal that flows through it, my friend has even seen a turd floating by.  Is it safe?  Maybe, maybe not.  But we decide to do these things anyway, because they are acts of ministry to the children there.

2 million drivers in the USA suffer permanent injury or disability because of car accidents in any given year.  I personally see or hear car crashes every year, and major wrecks on the highway frequently affect my commute.  But this does not keep me from driving a car.  Is driving safe?  Maybe, maybe not.

More than half a million Americans die from heart disease every year.  I have borderline cholesterol, and heart attacks run in the family.  But these things do not define how I choose what to eat.  I buy high-oleic sunflower oil for cooking applications I used to use lard for, for example, but I'm not about to switch to a raw diet.  Could I be healthier if I became religious about my diet?  Certainly.  But extending my life as long as possible isn't my goal.

If I drop food on the floor, I pick it up and eat it.  Might I get sick from that?  I suppose so.

Back when I didn't have a car, I used to hitchhike.  One week-end, I took Greyhound from Chicago to Menominee (MI), then hitchhiked for two days across and down through Michigan and back to Chicago.  Just for fun, because I wanted to see Michigan.  Was it safe?  Well, who knows? because there are almost no statistics on the safety of hitchhiking.

"Safety" is an illusion anyway.  What will you be looking for?  100% safety?  It doesn't exist.  There are always canaries, if you look hard enough.  When the government does tell us it's "safe", what will that mean anyway?  No risk of infection?  That we can go to the store with zero risk of catching any illness?  That's an impossibility.  We live our lives with a combination of myriad factors, each of which lies somewhere along a continuum of risk.  Focusing on that continuum will leave a person paralyzed, because it's impossible to eliminate all the risk factors.

I'm not about to give up spending time with my friends just because it might be risky.  I'm not about to stop going to the grocery store just because someone might have sneezed nearby at some point earlier in the day.  I'm not about to wear a mask to walk down the street just because I might pass by someone else.  If I determine that the risks are great enough to warrant a lifestyle change on my part, then I'll change my behavior.  But, until that time, I'm going to continue living my life as normally as possible under current government and corporate restrictions.  And when those restrictions are lifted, I'll be only too eager to return to normal life.

Nicely said. Some risks are a part of life.

But if you are selfish and go out anyway, it could cause others to lose their health or their lives. Think about others. Your right to go outside does not trump my right to not get sick. It's all about me me me me me and damn the collateral damage that can lead to death. How can you sleep with blood on your hands?

Chill I'm not really going out yet. I just don't want to be stuck inside for like 6 months.

I don't want to be stuck inside either, but I don't want to get sick a lot more. It can would make me very angry if some punk kid gave me COVID-19 because he or she is selfish and careless.

So you suggest staying inside until we have a vaccine?

[bugo]

And if it was caused by stress, was it stress over the lockdown?  Or stress over COVID itself?

It was over the lockdown. I actually wasn't that afraid of the virus until the lockdown created all the panic.

I've been struggling with crippling anxiety all my life, but I've never heard of anxiety causing blood clots in the lungs. However, blood clots in the lungs is one of the major symptoms of COVID-19. 

[oscar]

But... this comes with the pitfall that it creates an incentive for people to travel to regions with looser restrictions in order to do things not allowed where they live. So you need means of preventing people from doing this or you're just going to have people bringing the virus into places that had it more under control.

Sometimes raw distance will do the trick, especially out west. For example, in South Dakota it takes several hours of driving on I-90 (most of which has an 80 mph speed limit) to travel from the state's current meat processing outbreak and related state and local restrictions, to the northwestern counties with no cases at all.

[Scott5114]

The weather forecast for Mother's Day around here is good but Phil Murphy will have ruined it as he did Easter.

This sounds like Phil Murphy is going to, like, personally cause a rainstorm or something.

[Brandon]

On the other hand, we had the bug guy come to our house yesterday because of an ant problem, and he didn't even wear a mask in our house.

I think you all can assume by now that it didn't bother me.

You might have contacted SARS-COV-2 from that very person. You might be doomed already, you just don't know it yet.

At a possible chance you might have gotten it, and even then, you'll more likely be among the 75-80% who have no to few symptoms, never even realizing you had it.  If you're among the 20% when get symptoms you can feel, then odds are, you'll stay out of the hospital anyway.  Only if you're among the 0.5-0.8% (and that number may be high, given some of the more recent serology tests), you perish.  It's a number below the 1918 H1N1 flu, and vastly lower than the 1348 Black Plague (which some folks seem to act like this is).

[jeffandnicole]

The weather forecast for Mother's Day around here is good but Phil Murphy will have ruined it as he did Easter.

I assume that he plans to continue punishing us over Memorial Day weekend too.

You're not going to be able to take mom out to a restaurant for Mother's Day, but otherwise you can drive around, go to many shore towns, go to most parks, etc.  Cooking for mom is permitted also.

[Roadgeekteen]

On the other hand, we had the bug guy come to our house yesterday because of an ant problem, and he didn't even wear a mask in our house.

I think you all can assume by now that it didn't bother me.

You might have contacted SARS-COV-2 from that very person. You might be doomed already, you just don't know it yet.

At a possible chance you might have gotten it, and even then, you'll more likely be among the 75-80% who have no to few symptoms, never even realizing you had it.  If you're among the 20% when get symptoms you can feel, then odds are, you'll stay out of the hospital anyway.  Only if you're among the 0.5-0.8% (and that number may be high, given some of the more recent serology tests), you perish.  It's a number below the 1918 H1N1 flu, and vastly lower than the 1348 Black Plague (which some folks seem to act like this is).

75% have no symptoms? Thought it was 40.