Coronavirus Thread
- Thread starter blotsfan
- Start date
Florida dooms the nation? That's unpossible!
If there is a silver lining, it's that the growth rates in Arizona are relatively flat compared to the worst that we've seen. If my data is correct, the "hottest" county in AZ, Pima, has cases doubling slightly slower than once a week right now. Still scary news, but considering last week doubling faster than every 3 days was pretty common across the US, it's a reason to have hope.
Being LGBTQ does not confer any measure of immunity. People are still made of people.
--Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
So why should it be
They think they can't come down with SARS-COV? (2)
So, Boris made it, and he even thanked some foreign workers: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-52262012
Wonder if he'll remember that when it comes to not kicking them out of the UK.
Wonder if he'll remember that when it comes to not kicking them out of the UK.
Dave
Staff member
It's behind a soft paywall but fuck if it isn't worth a read.
They just released COVID cases by ZIP code in Arizona.
The ZIP code area with the third largest number of cases in the state happens to be the one immediately to the east of my location. (This, of course, is because Banner Baywood Hospital is located within this ZIP code.)
The most number of cases is in Tucson, in the ZIP code that includes the Banner University Medical Center (south Tucson, U of A campus). The next largest is up in Sun City and Peoria (around the Seattle Mariners' spring training complex... insert joke here).
EDIT: Oh, and my particular ZIP code has 28 confirmed cases.
The ZIP code area with the third largest number of cases in the state happens to be the one immediately to the east of my location. (This, of course, is because Banner Baywood Hospital is located within this ZIP code.)
The most number of cases is in Tucson, in the ZIP code that includes the Banner University Medical Center (south Tucson, U of A campus). The next largest is up in Sun City and Peoria (around the Seattle Mariners' spring training complex... insert joke here).
EDIT: Oh, and my particular ZIP code has 28 confirmed cases.
You know, I can joke about it a lot, and I'm kinda mad my employer still makes me come into work to do remote support, and I can point and laugh at oh those darn wacky Americans, but when all is said and done, Belgium may be a dysfunctional country where the unions run things and taxes are way too fucking high, and all that stuff, but that kind of stories would be very, very rare here ( as in, they'd make national news).
The USA is no longer the Land of Opportunity, it's lost that status long ago. It's a bit unreal how history is happening in front of us. Maybe that's because I'm just still fairly young - I barely remember the Wall coming down and I was in Germany when it happened! - but compared to the 90s, the loss of belief in hope, progress, democracy, etc is just...I dunno. It's not just Trump. Obviously he accelerates things, but it's everywhere. The U.N. isn't what it was, the whole world is shifting towards strongmen and plutocracy and punishing the weak, and there's no longer the feeling that the Superpower is good and in the end evening'll work out fine.
Same. Checked last night and saw it sitting there. Will probably all go straight to debt, one way or another.
--Patrick
Same, except its $2400 towards $2500.
Dave
Staff member
I'm continually thankful at how lucky my wife and I are. Although she lost her job my two jobs are more than enough to make up for it and my son is now working as well. I'm worried about him because his job is at a Menards so he's constantly exposed to morons.
But we have money in savings for a potential emergency and income. Which is more than a whole lot of people can say. Frankly, with this stimulus, we're in better shape now than we were before the virus.
But we have money in savings for a potential emergency and income. Which is more than a whole lot of people can say. Frankly, with this stimulus, we're in better shape now than we were before the virus.
Dave
Staff member
In other news, go buy pork NOW & freeze it. It's about to get expensive as fuck.
www.cnn.com
Oh and people are starving and can't get food? Turns out producers have way too much and are destroying massive amounts of food at alarming rates.
www.yahoo.com
One of the largest pork processing facilities in the US is closing until further notice
One of the country's largest pork processing facilities is closing until further notice as employees fall ill with Covid-19. The closure puts the country's meat supply at risk, said the CEO of Smithfield, which operates the plant.
www.cnn.com
Oh and people are starving and can't get food? Turns out producers have way too much and are destroying massive amounts of food at alarming rates.
Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: Food Waste of the Pandemic
In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors...
www.yahoo.com
To expand a little on this, this is actively hurting the farmers themselves as well, as the majority of the bottleneck issue lies within the steps that convert the raw material from the farmers to a format that is provided to the consumer.Oh and people are starving and can't get food? Turns out producers have way too much and are destroying massive amounts of food at alarming rates.
Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: Food Waste of the Pandemic
In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors...
Using milk as an example, as the article states, with large-scale operations - predominately schools, and megachain restaurants like Starbucks - no longer purchasing (or even accepting) the shipments from milk processing/bottling operations, there is nowhere for the extra supply to easily go. On a dairy farm, the cows can't simply "shut off" producing milk (tweaking the feeding regimen can happen to reduce milk production slightly, but not by a huge margin) so the actual milk supply remains relatively unchanged. However, this milk isn't "ready for the consumer" by any stretch of the imagination - it must go to the processing facilities, wherein it can be tested, pasteurized, and put into the format that can then go to the final consumer. With schools no longer in session, it takes a (likely prohibitively) large amount of money as well as time to convert facilities from producing little cartons of school milk to grocery-store containers, so the processors don't want to do that, and thus don't need to buy that particular supply from the milk producers, hence the dumping of milk. [As a little bit of an aside (from doing veterinary work on dairy farms), dairy farms themselves run on basically no profit margin, so there is no ability for the farms to shoulder increased cost burdens to "send shipments of milk"/etc. if the processing facilities aren't buying their product. Similarly, milk wastage is not an uncommon solution to having too much product relative to the amount being purchased for processing, so my reaction was perhaps muted to the news that milk was being dumped/eggs being smashed, as that happens with some regularity, though of course with greater frequency now due to the massive interruptions in the normal supply chain demands.]
Back to topic, most critically, at least within the dairy industry, there hasn't been any reduction in the amount of supply going to the grocery stores (i.e. they're still processing the same amounts that the facilities will allow to go to supermarkets), but with increased demand to stock up and replace milk from other usual sources (school lunches, your daily Starbucks runs), there may be less product availability at the grocery store. Same general setup with other perishable agricultural products.
Would it be beneficial to continue to use some of the (physical/business/political) machinery to continue to produce products as they had been? Probably, but it is an expensive and difficult problem to solve in the (relatively) short term of several months of social distancing/isolation/quarantine. Theoretically, for example, processors could continue to produce "school lunch milk cartons" but instead of providing it to the schools, send it to grocery stores? Perhaps lots of people would be OK with buying little cartons of milk! Maybe they will get around to trying this, but would it violate whatever pricing/contracts they have in place with the government/public school systems, and how would that affect future pricing? How would that affect shipment of other supplies from processing plants/warehouses to grocery retailers, when there are already strains on ground transportation, and would this force developments of new shipment schedules? Should the federal government simply commandeer a few dairy processing plants and convert them to all producing dehydrated milk products, to try to "save" the supplies for potential current and future use, or is it actually more cost effective to simply waste the raw material, since more will be made every day, and the funds used to temporarily convert the above processing methods could be better spent elsewhere?
I also find it interesting to see what is available and not, depending on timing and where you live. I took my first trip to the grocery store in (literally) a month this past Friday, and there was plenty of milk available, at usual prices (totally full shelves, not even a dent in the apparent supply). However, stores were pretty much barren of eggs (likely due to Easter happening imminently, along with the increased demand in general). One month ago, there were no paper products, and commercially produced bread was totally gone, but baking supplies were available everywhere. This Friday, there were tons of bread products available, and paper products were low but present, but the baking section was totally wiped out. So trying to predict which regions need what supplies sufficiently ahead of demand is yet another obstacle.
We won't be getting a stimulus check. But we don't really need it, either, so I'm glad for the reports that folks who do are getting theirs.
GasBandit
Staff member
Well, that only makes sense, given that the former makes toilet paper and the latter hits sandpaper with a rubber furniture mallet and and then rolls it onto cardboard tubes.
I'm not seeing the stimulus check pending for us, but hopefully soon. Julie has zero hours now, and since I'm the insurance holder, we're down to less than half our income.
I'd offer my thoughts and prayers, but, honestly, even if I prayed, I'd keep them for people who don't deliberately flaunt the rules there to protect them.