5752

Still missing a bunch of FAQ’s. Stay-at-home is frustratingly vague and totally unenforced. My employer insists that since it has DoD contracts, it’s a member of an essential industry, even though my division has nothing to do with defense work. We should be having grocery store shifts (65+ from 7-9; surname A-F from 9-11, etc) and we should provide state money to stores, banks, laundromats, janitor services, truck drivers, delivery people, utilities etc to staff up and retain existing staff. We need remote learning for kids at home. How do we walk dogs? Can we hike by ourselves in remote places?

5753

I like this idea, tbh

5754

Generally speaking yes. Josh Sawyer was going over it in relation to biking. Basically as long as it’s alone and you stay 6 feet away from people it’s fine. But you’re right in that it’s information that isn’t out there and readily available. Also it could completely vary by locale, which makes it more confusing.

5755

Lovely

5756

Until you can’t get off work for your “grocery chance”. Or you work weird hours and are sleeping then, etc.

Now the “old people hours”, I can mostly get behind.

5757

Perhaps we need to go the China route and have groceries delivered instead of all of us going to the stores ourselves.

5758

There’s also the issue of stocking. If stores are stocked at night, then having the evening shift might suck. Maybe divide by day then. 7-9 always 65+; M, F for A-F; Tu, Sa for G-N; W, Su for O-Z, Thursday for handicapped people. I’m sure we could work out something rational to reduce crowding.

5759

If ever there was a time for those “Fuck Your Feelings” t-shirts…

5760

Then you have EBT/Food Stamp issues. Because this nation doesn’t want it to be easy for poor people to get food.

I mean, it’s a good idea. But the reality is that the system exists to prevent that sort of thing and mid-crisis is a tough time to fix a broken system. If we had leadership it might be possible, but yeah.

Even an executive order wouldn’t change the systems in place and how they work.

5761

Maybe, but what about people without IDs? What if your fridge breaks? Hell, what if you live day-to-day and can’t stock up? Lots of logistical issues involved and it would be on the stores to handle all of it. They’ve got enough to worry about, imo.

5762

Yeah, good point. I don’t think you’d make it something to enforce, but a general rule to avoid crowding. Most people would follow the rule.

5763

You have far more faith in people than me. :)

Stores around here are pretty calm, but Iowa so far as avoided getting hit and we locked down fairly early. I had to go get dog food and cat litter from Theisens and everyone was calm, kept their distance from everyone, wasn’t too crowded, etc. They had limits on paper towels, TP, etc.

But this is also mostly rural Iowa, where the idea of watching out for your neighbors and the like is considered part of who we are (or are supposed to be). I don’t think that extrapolates to say NYC where you’re expected to tell everyone to go fuck themselves too well.

Hell, I doubt it extrapolates to Waterloo or Cedar Falls very well.

5764

I was looking at the news for Iowa yesterday, and it looked like it was still doing pretty well. From what I saw no cases yet for Cedar Rapids, or Waterloo/Cedar Falls. Sounds like one was reported at U of Iowa today.

5765

I made a run to Shop Rite last night at 9:45pm right before they closed and grabbed $275 of groceries in 15 minutes. It was like that game show Supermarket Sweep but with even more apocalyptic dread. When I got back home, I discovered pretty much all I’d purchased was Lucky Charms, ice cream, and Pepperidge Farm cookies.

Then I spent half an hour in the garage wiping down every single item I bought with a bleach and water cleaning spray before it entered the house. Yesterday’s “oh, c’mon” is today’s “ok, I’ll do that too.”

5766

If you have any stats and modeling folk looking for ideas, I would love to see people dig into this hypothesis. If it’s true it’s an important aspect of social distancing nobody is really talking about. I have asked other experts as well, they think it’s plausible, though they say if they had to bet the effect is only really going to stand out at the margins. So a doctor intubating an infected patient gets absolutely covered in virus and has orders of magnitude higher viral load at infection time, versus someone who got coughed on 1 times instead of 19. Wonder if anything could be figured out from the data alone on this front.

5767

Since my wife and daughters have respiratory problems we’re switching to home delivery, and possibly drive up service if needed. Will be interesting to see how it works. Some stores do a good job of updating you on inventory, but others not great at all and you have to pretty much wait to see what shows up. My wife has a system in place on cleaning and quarantining everything.

5768

Reynolds did a good thing locking shit down early, imo.

She’s terrible in every other way, but on this one she wasn’t stupid at least.
We’ll see how it holds up if we start seeing a lot of cases roll in suddenly.

5769

Some days I long to move back home, and others days I read about King, Grassley, Ernst or read facebook posts from my sister, and I think maybe not. :)

5770

I recommend InstaCart. They do a great job substituting. They basically had to switch every single thing I ordered, but all the replacements were fine. (They text in real time as they shop to ask.) Also recommend leaving a giant tip, the default is only 5%.

Also arrived same day. They are independent shoppers, like Uber, so the service scales up with demand more than regular grocery delivery.

5771

Not sure how I’d get delivery. I spent an hour yesterday morning filling my Whole Foods cart on Amazon only to discover no delivery options for three days (not surprising) and absolutely no other options for store pick up or anything else (kind of surprising.)

I’ve made peace with the idea of weekly grocery runs being necessary. If I try to go every three weeks or something, it would mean spending longer in the store.