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Day 133: COVID-19 Can You Help Me Live Vicariously?
We have yet to see that first day, here in Contra Costa County. The grocery store, the drug store, and restaurant take-out are the main excursions excluding medical appointments. The television gives us a window on the world — but only that of the content producers’ choosing.
The internet gives more flexibility, including here at Ricochet. One can choose what to consume, assuming Google, YouTube, and Twitter approve.
The Rt number for the pandemic seems pretty stable to me. Georgia is rising, but I need help understanding the significance of 1.16 over 1.0. I am guessing that more people will get sick, but not a lot more than at 1.0.
Things are little worse, according to the Rt Covid-19 website, than they were back at the beginning of May.
But there is nothing here that the health care system can’t handle.
So how about some reports for where you live? What aspects of “normal” life are now available to you? What is the fear level where you live? What are the prospects for positive economic results for your area?
[Note: Links to all my COVID-19 posts can be found here.]
Published in General
Yup, normalcy returns.
Last week i did two road trips and visited a restaurant twice and a bar (Yay Guinness!) once. This is over and above all the other chores, shopping and so forth.
I do still wear a mask when i am going to be close to people. this is mostly for me since i have been known to cough and choke and sneeze like anyone my age might do. (I have already started telling an amusing vignette about needing to cough in a restaurant and trying to figure out how to hide it without my head exploding).
Hand sanitizer? You bet! Social distancing? Absolutely!
Bottom line: We can get back to normal if we just change a few practices to be safer.
We’re grocery shopping, but haven’t been to a restaurant yet. And a friend is coming over to visit on Weds. But tomorrow we’re going to the gun range!! I’m going to kill the heck out of the target in front of me. It will never survive!!
I don’t need to see peen on the member feed. I know that we all have different tastes but that’s my two tastes.
North Texas, modest town west of Fort Worth.
Many restaurants are open with large banners announcing that. I have restarted the Tuesday old men from church breakfast at one of the diners, but only about half the guys who used to come are willing to come right now. Our regular server reports that patronage has been very uneven, and is usually below the 50% capacity that is officially permitted. That restaurant does not bother with face masks. The server brings individual packets of salt, pepper, catsup, sugar, etc. so there are none of the usual condiment baskets sitting on the tables. The thus empty tabletops look odd in a diner setting. In a couple of other restaurants all or some staff are wearing masks. Several prominent restaurants in town remain closed, with no word on whether they intend ever to reopen. One owner has reopened one of his three restaurants in town, but announced that the other two are closed permanently. Since it’s not yet really hot here, several restaurants have converted parts of their parking lots into patio seating to increase dining capacity while maintaining spacing. One of our favorite restaurants has a large open dining room with freestanding tables and chairs, so they removed many of the tables for spacing. Looks weird to have so much empty floor space, but at least we can see other diners. Most restaurants hand each customer a single page paper menu that they toss after use. One restaurant has no printed menu – the customer is directed to the menu on the restaurant’s Facebook page.
Church has not resumed in person meetings, which is driving Mrs. Tabby even more nuts than it is me. Will not restart before August. Too many parishioners have expressed reluctance to be near others. But a few smaller groups have met in the parking lot to see each other while still keeping distance.
I took a car in for servicing at the dealership this morning. Everybody in the service department was behaving as they did in January, except now not shaking hands. No staff wore masks, and very few customers did either.
The supermarket still has a single entry/exit door and is metering people coming in. Walmart has an outside holding pen for use when inside occupancy reaches the governor-mandated limit, but the pen is small enough that I suspect the wait doesn’t get too long.
People are looking a little less scruffy as barber shops and hair salons opened a couple of weeks ago. Mrs. Tabby has cut my hair for almost two years, so that closure had no personal impact on me. Appointments are hard to come by, though (high demand).
The price of gasoline is rising from its trough about 3 weeks ago, which I consider a positive sign, as a rising price indicates rising demand. The price bottomed out locally at $1.18/gallon, but rose back to $1.54 ten days ago, and is about $1.64 today.
Oh, and our housing development’s homeowners’ association opened the (outdoor) community pool on Friday! A mother and her small children were in there having a good time when I drove by this morning. We’re just expected to self-police the number of people inside the fence to fewer than twenty. But I have not in almost two years of the pool’s existence ever seen twenty people in the pool area, so that should not be a problem.
In the country, we have the feed stores. Which have always been one of my favorite entertainments. Where else can you go in to get the 20 lb sac of dog food, only to see someone strolling around with an heirloom chicken perched on their shoulders? Or a guy dressed in motorcycle leathers, who looks fierce enough to be a body guard for some drug cartel overlord, on his knees before a sweet, multi-toned pygmy goat. He is in tears.
He’s talking to Martha, the local pygmy goat purveyor.
(Between sobs) “But Martha, you promised me one of the kids. Wh-wh-hat happened?”
Martha hands him her very lacy handkerchief.
“Samuel,I know what I promised you. And you need to realize I am so-o sorry. Only I had to go back East to take care of my mother, and my daughter sold two of the goats to her teen-aged friends before I got back.” She lets him finish washing the tears away. “I’ll figure out where you can get your baby kid, even if it means a trip up to Ukiah.”
“Is your mom doing better?” the biker dude asks, concern in his voice.
I turn away from him as a gaggle of kids, ages 3 to 8 or so, are pulling on my elbow. “Can we pet your dog.” asks the oldest of the pack.
“Yes, but go ask your mom first.” The girl runs off to get her mom. At once I recognize the mom as someone who helped me find a home for a puppy I was fostering. While Nessie and I catch up on our lives under COVID, the three kids semi-maul Bella, who is eating it up. The dog may be scared of her own shoulder, but her devotion to all children, whether kind and gentle or reckless little ear tuggers, has made her a priceless addition to my pack.
In many other places, life has changed a little bit in Lake County.
But in the feed store, except for a few signs upon entry reminding customers to use the sanitized carts, and to try and keep the masks on, life is pretty much the same. People who are around animals tend to be less germ-phobic than other people.
Plus we are too busy trying to find pygmy goats for our biker dude friends, or helping to find a home for some fostered dog or cat, to watch TV and hear that we might all be dead in a week or two, now that the county is opening back up.
More people going to parks. Sandy Point near Annapolis was fairly crowded this weekend. My sister- and brother-in-law were blue to open the outdoor patio of their restaurant today in Glen Echo.
Rodin wrote:
The Rt number for the pandemic seems pretty stable to me. Georgia is rising, but I need help understanding the significance of 1.16 over 1.0. I am guessing that more people will get sick, but not a lot more than at 1.0.
Every time I see those Rt graphs about what the rate is in each State, I can’t help but wonder if this is just a total guess. If I’m not mistaken, you need to know pretty accurately the total number of people infected in the past or present in order to get an accurate Rt rate, especially since they are calculating this out to the hundredths column. The real number of infected people cannot be known until they conduct randomized antibody testing, or even randomized Covid testing, which has been done only in a few isolated spots so far.
Ah, but no one in the leftist media cohort EVER shares that detail.
Do those graphs track percentage of positives to tests? Or do they track confirmed case increases relative to previous days?
It couldn’t possibly be percentage of positives to tests because that would be a ludicrously low number. It could be confirmed case increases relative to previous days, but that would be highly inaccurate also. That increase or decrease can be predicated on multiple factors other than the real Rt. They could be testing more people simply because tests are more widely available now. More people show up for testing on weekdays than on Sundays and Holidays. There has also been a new surge of testing done on hospital inpatients who have just shown up for surgery after waiting three months.
I am still baffled by how they can possibly measure this.
I phoned the barber today, Iam cleared for my semi-annual haircut this week.
Congratulations! When our barbers reopened a couple of weeks ago, several of them noted that it would take at least a month to six weeks to get every one of their regular customers a first haircut. They also said that if you weren’t a regular customer, don’t bother trying to call for a while, as they’d be giving priority to their regular customers.
Yea, barbers opened up last week here. My barber shop is relatively new, its only been open less than 2 years, so it maybe serviced all their long term customers quite quickly.
Here in North Carolina, there are still a few categories of businesses that are closed (such as gyms and bars), but most are open, or are at least allowed to open. Restaurants are limited to 50% capacity, and some have reopened only their outdoor seating areas. Malls and retail stores are, as far as I know, largely open for business.
I say “as far as I know” because I find that I have no particular desire — yet — to get back out there. I am comfortable at home, and I have gotten used to this voluntary agoraphobia. I make one weekly outing to buy groceries, and maybe get takeout a couple of times a week, but that’s it. Even if the risk is tiny, the risk is even smaller if I stay home, and there is basically no cost associated with doing so. At least, no cost to me.
And that does worry me a bit, because I’m sure there are a lot of people who feel the same way I do. The governor could declare an end to all restrictions tomorrow, and I don’t think my patterns would change anytime soon.
Yeah, that’s basically what I’m saying. The Rt would be highest in places with the most testing… which seems grossly misleading.
I have no idea how the virus is going and have lost interest in checking. I can tell you how society is going, though. Places are opening up. Fewer people are wearing masks. They have had enough. We have been dining inside our old haunts, all except the Chinese buffet. Toilet paper is no longer limited to 1-2 rolls per, if stocked. Now there are many boxes of 24 count, commercially wrapped rolls, I took a pass, confident they will be there next week. The pool is open but limiting capacity, so I haven’t gone…letting parents with kids have the spots. Leagues are cancelling summer baseball, but not ours. Practice starts soon with first game July 1. They might have to limit capacity for social distancing, meaning season ticket holders might not get to go every game and sit in their regular seats. The all-you-can-eat buffet might be gone. Who cares. Play ball. Fauci et all can do their thing. We are done. If covid gets me, at least I will go out a free person.
Today at our favorite coffee shop the condiment baskets were back on the tables! No more naked tabletops. Individual packets are available on request for those who don’t want to handle the communal catsup bottle or salt and pepper shakers. But the owner told me that all the customers who spoke to him since he put them out yesterday loved seeing the tabletop condiment baskets as another sign of normal.
Sporting goods store almost completely out of guns and ammunition this morning. I understand from my shooting buddies that ammunition has been very hard to get for several weeks (I had purchased a supply about two months ago). They also say that the shortage is due to very high demand, and the manufacturers are supplying all they can. Also oddly the bicycle section of the sporting goods store was completely empty. I suppose that may be a manufacturing supply problem.
Another manufacturing supply problem that is becoming evident is the lack of new cars and trucks. The lot at the Honda car dealership behind my house is almost as empty as it was when they first completed construction 18 months ago – a few dozen cars sitting on acres of concrete normally full of about 300 cars. Similarly the very large Ford and GM dealers in town who normally each have about a thousand new cars and trucks in inventory are down to a couple hundred new vehicles each. So if you need a new car or truck right now your selection may be limited.
Yay! I never understood why they had to be taken off in the first place. I mean, the tables are wiped down between each visitor; how difficult would it be to wipe down the condiment containers as well?
I believe the CDC waffled on the whole ketchup bottle as vector issue. There is no peer-reviewed work on that issue. It is also complicated by the fact that a lot countries don’t use ketchup so there is little Or no useful data data out there. So probably we should not re-open restaurants until there is a vaccine.
Condiments: not in the People’s Republic of Oregon, where the governor has decreed packets only.
Bicycle sales are up nationally, supposedly due to fear of mass transit. Could be supply problems as well.
Cars: besides the supply problem, sales during the lockdown didn’t drop as much as originally feared.
So many things in life are not that hard, and so often they are ignored anyway.
I have started my year-long effort to buy a car with my first step, making a list of dealer inventory by VIN and price, noting how long it takes for a car in the model and trim I want to move, when discounts happen, and what is the lowest price before being sold and exiting the list. I noticed two things, no new cars and price increases, not decreases.
COVID is a corona virus. It has already mutated. The likelihood of this vaccine, that is being rushed into market, without legit testing and expected to be the first RNA vaccine ever, actually working well enough to justify the risk is very low.
Probably half the people in Calif are aware of this. Which is why it will be mandated. And which is why Bill Gates spoke so energetically about his need to be protected by law from any and all liability.