I’m in Ca and some local stores have already been selling online or via phone order for local delivery. Some are allowing pickup. My sister ordered some plants from a floral nursery and while they originally said free delivery via UPS they were dropped on her porch via a nursery employee.
Very depressing.
“Zhang said it worries him that the rate of new cases is increasing at the same time some states are easing up: “We’re one country. If we’re not moving in the same step, we’re going to have a problem."
He said he is particularly concerned about Florida and Texas, places where cases have been rising steadily and the potential for explosions seems high.
While death rates in some places have been trending down, that could change as cases rise rapidly and hospitals become overwhelmed, he said.
Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, said Tuesday that she and her colleagues keep warning state governors against “skipping phases” in federal guidelines recommending that shuttered nonessential business and other institutions, like schools, be reopened in phases.
“We don’t want to see serious illness and mortality increase,” Birx said.
Thank you. I love those kids. They are so good. Another thing that made me smile today was one of my favorite students told me she is naming a stuffed animal after me. I’m a stuffed marakeet that is coming in the mail. 
I ordered a bunch of baking mixes for my friend who loves baking and ran out of flour. She made us masks so I wanted to thank her. Felt good to do.
Got delivery of things we will use to garden this summer. Have most of it but not all. I’m looking forward to gardening again. Darn deer have been a menace but not this year. We have a plan.
I like talking to “average” people too, which is why I’m friendly with many of the contractors I work with regularly. But I wouldn’t go out of my way to go to a gas station or convenience shop. I did have a very pleasant conversation with my favorite contractor today. (We get along great, but have to agree not to discuss politics.)
An awful lot of teen drivers in wisconsin have been driving farm vehicles, snowmobiles, go-carts, boats, motorcycles for years anyway. I went to high school with guys who would drive themselves to driver’s ed, park on the far side of the school and walk around back, take the lesson, and then driver themselves home.
@twoinanddone , the ones who have been driving for years are not the ones I’m concerned about. (Although the thought of children younger than 12 driving ATVs and farm vehicles is scary, too.) Fortunately, it appears that the “vacation” from road tests is scheduled to last only a few weeks.
And yet, the Texas governor "says he has confidence in the direction of his current phased plan, after the approval of medical professionals such as Dr. Deborah Birx. …
“Abbott says Dr. Birx mentioned a concern to him regarding education, saying she is wary of a spike in COVID-19 in tandem with flu during the fall school year, and schools may consider opening early to allow for a longer winter break.”
I bet she wouldn’t characterize her words as he did.
MA doesn’t open up until May 18th. Gov. Baker extended the time about a week ago.
Governor of CT’s briefing today: he said talked a lot about schools. ‘Covid is highly infections and there is not a lot of margin for error. And you probably saw the President of the United States where he sat at the Lincoln Memorial where he said, “I thought we were going to anticipate 60,000 fatalities and now it looks like it could be closer to 120,000 fatalities” and that just reminds us that we better be very cautious as we plan going forward…Yesterday the governor’s residence was very busy. We had dozens of cars driving around in circles, beeping horns, shouting give me liberty or give me death. Everyone was polite and socially distanced, which I appreciate but I was thinking, ‘give me liberty or give me death.’ I mean, we can all be libertarians and you should be free to be dumb in you want to but not if it endangers others and that is what is so deadly about Covid. You are not just endangering yourself, but by being lax and not taking the socially distancing seriously endangers everybody else. And when you wear a mask, it’s not necessarily to protect yourself, it’s to protect everybody about you. It’s a different way of thinking, what your obligations are, and that’s why I’ve continued to be strict about this and urge you to maintain the social distancing because that’s how we get this state going again and that’s how we keep to your May 20 date (date CT will start opening some businesses) and beyond.’
He also talked about a recent spike we had and said it is just one day and we have had a good strong downward trend so we are hopefully but looking at things closely. He talked about watching this very carefully to be sure we can still safely have things start opening May 20.
Schools will stay online/distance learning for the remaining of the school year. He did not approve the petition for one day of graduation for all schools across the state. The petition was for outdoor, socially distanced graduations. He said we will look at whether something could happen in the future but didn’t think we would be there yet in June.
He went into more details about school.
Don’t know about that, but the strain found in sequencing the genome from patients in New Orleans and Baton Rouge is entirely identical to the one from Washington State. They are still testing, and it takes time, and I don’t remember hearing about many other places being tested or what the outcomes were (except NYC being primarily from various parts of Europe).
Also, viruses are always mutating. It doesn’t mean we’ll suddenly have Mystique and Storm in our midst!
Re: post #1021:
I wonder where Dr. Zhang is getting his data. The article says “he is particularly concerned about Florida and Texas, places where cases have been rising steadily.” I don’t know about Texas, but I follow the Florida data very closely. I keep a five-day-running-average graph, and the rate of daily new cases in Florida has been dropping, even with increased testing. The percent positive has been under 10% for quite a while. Of course I wish the rate of daily new cases was dropping even faster, but the numbers just don’t support Dr. Zhang’s assertion.
ETA: source data (see page 2) https://floridadisaster.org/globalassets/covid19/dailies/covid-19-data—daily-report-2020-05-05-0941.pdf)
You might also say there’s a diametrically opposed group of activists and politicians that are resisting the loosening of restrictions. Won’t use absolute terms as to how long, since the time frames seem to be made up as we go along.
Just my opinion but the group that believes there’s there’s not going to be an enormous bill paid for the economic costs of slowing the spread past what won’t exceed medical capacity is… deluded.
The government workers may continue getting paid, regardless, but those fortunate enough to be able to work at home will eventually get hit, too. Good jobs, techy enough they can do it, won’t matter when there’s simply not enough economic activity to keep their employer in the green. Retirees like myself (assuming the earnings we hoped to live on don’t evaporate more than they have) will have the pain of watching our children inherit a world much meaner and poorer than what they were raised in.
As I said… only my opinion and YMMV.
@MaineLonghorn: “It’s always so sad to look back at family history. Multiple kids in the same family dying of diphtheria. “Mary” died in 1882, and then another child was born in 1886 who was also named “Mary!” I’ve seen that repeatedly. Odd custom.”
There was just a ton more deaths and suffering back then. Especially of infants. My maternal grandfather was a general (so not exactly low SES). 4 of his 6 children lived to childhood. I asked my mom what the other 2 were called and she says they didn’t have names. Chinese didn’t even bother naming infants until they were 1 month old (because it didn’t make sense to get emotionally attached until an infant had managed to survive a little while). Then again, at that time, millions were getting butchered on the battlefield or dying from disease/malnutrition/famine from war, so what were a few infant deaths by comparison. My dad, when he was about 5, one winter morning went outside and found a whole extended family of refugees (fleeing the Communists) frozen to death on the steps of his apartment in Shanghai from the grandparents in their 60’s to little babies. Obviously that image has stayed with him his whole life. All of his dad’s older siblings had died in infancy before my great-grandfather was born (hence why he was spoiled).
I think it depends on the amount of time it will take. If you have 20 items and each has to be selected and weighed (produce), that’s a lot different than 20 things that are easy to find in the dairy section (eggs, milk, cheese) or regular groceries that we all know where they are in the store (canned tomatoes, pasta, even toilet paper). ‘One’ of the things on my list was spaghetti, and she wanted 10 boxes. That took me a few seconds. Some weird potsticker thing took me two trips up and down the aisle (it was on a endcap freezer).
If you think it will take 1.5 hours, then $30 might be a good fee. I’d have been happy with that. I really only signed up because people seemed so desperate for shopping times and couldn’t get them. I wanted to be helpful. I’d really rather just do it as a volunteer. We have a friend who is doing that through the Knights of Columbus, just to help out his fellow members (who are all old!) but he shops for 4-5 families at the same time and takes his time since he’s not paid and I don’t think they get a lot of choices on brands.
Instacart gives priority to their ‘preferred shoppers’, so those who have done 5+ shopping trips and have high scores get the first crack at the orders as they come up. They might take the ones from Whole Foods that have a pre-paid $20 tip on it, or they might take the chance that there will be a big tip at delivery. Since I was new, I only got the less popular orders, and I wasn’t aware that the tip was part of the ‘$13.56’ payment that was posted. I thought I’d get that PLUS the tip. Live and learn. I don’t think I’ll do any more. I will say that Instacart hasn’t been very clear on what you are supposed to do or how use their app so i’m sure others are making more. Maybe I just hit a difficult time to shop and a weird order, but I don’t think so and there is no way to see what the order is or where is needs to be delivered before you have to ‘grab’ it from the order list. They are snapped up in seconds.
@catahoula: “will have the pain of watching our children inherit a world much meaner and poorer than what they were raised in.”
Disagree. I’m with Warren Buffett and would bet on America over the (medium) long-term. Ultimately, productivity increases are what drives wealth and standard of living increases, and shutting down for a while isn’t going to stop Americans from striving, innovating, and figuring out how to make money from making the world better.
BTW, most people wear rose-colored glasses (and are blindered too). You remember the high inflation and oil shocks of the '70’s? The race riots of the '60’s? The high and rising crime rate during those decades? Not to mention that if you’re non-white, you’re probably not nostalgic for separate but equal, miscegenation laws, and the greater racism in general of that era.
West coast of Florida. Our beaches opened yesterday. My dh walked about 2 miles on the beach today. During that time he saw five individuals from the sheriff’s office - one on foot, two in vehicles on the beach, a sheriff’s boat in the gulf, and a sheriff’s helicopter. There are signs at all public entrances to keep six feet apart.
We both went over for sunset. Plenty of people but certainly not crowded. Plenty of room to spread out. No one on the beach was wearing a mask - we weren’t either. Rightly or wrongly, I feel “safer” being outside. We were probably 8 feet from our friends we met down there and nowhere near anyone else. However, I know that there are only locals at the beach right now. I will probably abstain from going over on the weekend when I anticipate there will be more people.
I try to make a point of not interacting with “average” people. I am hoping it would prevent me from getting infected. I just need to figure out who are those “average” people.
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Oof! I meant OH and MS, not MA. I live in MA. Can I blame autocorrect? 
I agree. And who really believes that Florida is going to spike now that they are testing and the weather is getting hotter by the day? If Florida didn’t get a huge influx of cases in April (it didn’t) then why would it now? I’m pretty sure that social distancing state wide is not worse now than it was in March and April - people are probably in a similar place as before, Florida didn’t implement stay at home until 4/1 - so why is “Dr Zhang particularly concerned about Florida and Texas, places where cases have been rising steadily and the potential for explosions seems high”. Doesn’t pass the sniff test.