Coronavirus

My game-group-Dad-thread blew up on my phone after the welcome news that Trump was out on his ass... but after a few celebratory exchanges someone just had to do it: "Let's celebrate by having a board game night!" (in person). Yep, most of us noped the fuck out of that suggestion and the thread has been silent ever since.

I get that people really *want* this to be over, but it simply isn't. Be safe out there.

Over here in sunny Southern Englandshire the situation with schools is starting to become comical. The grammar (fancy high school) that my wife counsels at have eight members of faculty in isolation and have sent away two entire year groups to home learning as they cannot find adequate replacement teachers. They are already making preparations to have other year groups only come in on alternate weeks in order to reduce the school population. She now sits behind a plastic screen which makes her job almost impossible despite being busier than ever because the students are understandably freaking out.

Our kids go to a different more local school and it is a similar story there although they are existing mostly on supply teachers which results in disruptive lessons where little of merit is being taught - my spawn were literally covering more ground on the syllabus when they were learning from home than they are from temporary staff who aren't able to instill order and don't care about student progress. A few students have also gone into isolation and the school have been doing half-day IT stress tests on remote learning. It's pretty clear that schools will start closing themselves down regardless of the waffling truculence of the Blonde Muppet and his creepy cohort.

Since February I've been into our office on a total of six occasions. Although I'm grateful that I have the luxury of being able to work remotely, my working day is now getting out of hand as we are merging our US team into our London office whilst at the same time renovating our IT platforms and trying to align processes with our Asia office. Having a long packed day sandwiched between an early morning call with Hong Kong and a late evening call with Miami is piling on the stress. I feel like I have a lot to moan about but keep reminding myself how freaking lucky I am to have the luxury of staying at home and away from crowds. I'm grateful that the company I work for took the decision to close all it's global offices long before local lockdowns started to come into effect.

Minnesota is bad, but surrounded by worse states. North Dakota for example, has no mask requirement for their hospitals, which are now at 100% capacity. Due to staffing shortages at ND hospitals, the governor has now authorized asymptomatic hospital workers who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 to continue working at the hospitals.

www.governor.nd.gov/news/burgum-announce...dakotans-take-action

Space Ghost wrote: Masks seem to provide a false sense of security -- really the key is "masks when you can't socially distance", but people treat it as "if you're wearing a mask you don't need to socially distance". I about lose it when I'm in the store and people encroach on my space just because they are wearing a mask -- enraging.

The CDC is now saying that masks help protect both the wearer and other people nearby. But they are not foolproof, because medical personnel have been wearing masks and yet they make up a high percentage of cases. Still, it seems like the superspreader events tend to be occasions with both an absence of social distancing and masks. Bars, restaurants, gyms, churches, funerals, weddings, and parties. I get that it isn't practical to wear a mask while eating food or drinking beverages, but why must people put themselves in those situations? I understand that the deceased has no choice but to attend the funeral, but the living should be more careful.

I should have noted social distancing in my earlier post as well, but I take that as a given. It is core to my being. My trips from this house are to our pod’s house, to the grocery store, and to the games store, noted above, and only to pop in to buy my Marvel Champions scrips. I apologize if I need to go within 6 feet of someone passing them in an aisle. I’ll wait half the time to avoid it. I cross the street if it’s no big deal on walks to get away from someone walking the other way. And I do all this with a mask on. All the customers and clerks at these places have masks on. Some walkers don’t and I will definitely be crossing to avoid their breathing ass.

That reminds me of a metaphor Katie Noutopolis came up with. Imagine your mouth is your asshole. How quickly would you hide your naked ass if you saw someone on the street? That’s how fast you should be putting a mask on. Don’t wait until they threaten your 6’ radius. As soon as you see them, put that thing away.

So, first really close exposure to the virus. Our daughter (note: I say "our" because my girlfriend and I, while not married, have been together for six years with no end in sight and that's how long I've been around the kids, too. It's just easier.) lives with us, full-time, because she and her father don't really mesh. Our son, OTOH, is a lifelong attempted peacemaker and basically decided to live with his dad (just a few miles away) as a way to create a balance, even though he'd been rotating between houses regularly for a few years. His dad, while mindful of things like science and the easy transmission of the virus, is also pretty convinced that whatever he wants is what should happen, regardless of consequences. Apparently, he's been going places and gathering with people without heeding the protocols and has now tested positive for COVID-19.

First mission is to get our son out of there. We've been really careful since this began, not only because it's the right thing to do, but also because both my girlfriend and our daughter are asthmatic. So, our place is much safer, even if bringing him over increases the risk for everyone else. He's getting tested tomorrow and, in the meantime, we'll just keep him cooped up in his room and keep our distance whenever he has to come out. It won't be a serious change for him, since he's taking a full slate of classes and filling a teaching assistant role at his university, and is otherwise a hardcore PC gamer. When he was rotating between our place and his dad's, we rarely saw him when he was here because he was usually tied to his keyboard. The key will just be making sure that everyone is careful about moving around the house when he's actually out of his room. If the test results come back negative, all good. If he's positive, then we'll have to make a new choice.

Sorry to hear that, Jackwraith. That's the biggest issue facing the US right now, I think. The folks that don't see this as serious and worth changing behavior over. They keep the disease spreading and then point how the continual spread is evidence that changing behaviors doesn't work.

That's a diplomatic way of putting it. I see a broad section of our society displaying a childish mentality about a deadly pandemic. They think that if they ignore the virus for long enough, it will just go away. That is the perfect strategy for spreading the virus, and it appears to be mutating quickly enough to re-infect some people who already survived it once, within mere months. And there are plenty of people who sort of take the virus seriously, but are quick to rationalize why they can still participate in activities that help spread the virus, like dining out or going to weddings.

A part of my gaming group is from the local Nazarene church and they're just rolling right along. The most recent email asked if someone else can host because the guy that usually does will be getting ready for their live Nativity scene at the church. He asked "Dean" to host, who's 80 and in bad health.

So as best I can tell these people simply aren't being inconvenienced by any of this. These people aren't reachable. As Maryland goes into tighter lockdown (which it is right now) I'll be interested to hear if the tenor of these emails changes any.

Informed my parents today that I will not be attending Thanksgiving. My mother understood and said she had been thinking of canceling it anyway. Nobody in my inner circle is actually going to any Thanksgiving celebrations this year.

We're heading up to the mountains with our pod for Thanksgiving. The biggest concerns are bathroom breaks on the trips and the decon plan once we get to the rental. And obviously eating.

Thanksgiving is my thing. It's so much my thing that I do it twice a year, with Juneteenth/My Mom's Bday getting the other one. But I keep a kosher kitchen, so I can't just plop down in someone's house and cook dinner. I need to stage and prep everything here and pack it up, and kasher the microwaves, and keep everything going in the oven double-wrapped, and bring my own pots and make sure we have the right knives, turines, and paper goods that can withstand a turkey dinner.

To be frank, I don't want to go. But my wife VERY MUCH wants to go and so we are GOING baby! It will be nice to be in a different place.

The current stance of several Republican governors, including three of the four states adjacent to Minnesota, is that masks should be a matter of personal responsibility. (Except that South Dakota's Governor Kristi Noem continues to express skepticism that masks accomplish anything.) In practical terms, that makes masks a matter of personal irresponsibility, allowing the most irresponsible and ignorant people to endanger everyone around them without facing any consequences.

ubarose wrote: Gosh, Sag, that blows my mind. Our game group suspended itself two weeks before there was even any guidance being offered just based on news reports of the first outbreak in Boston.

The guy that hosts the Monday-night gaming did want to start up in-person gaming again back in September when things were looking a little better. He's part of that Nazarene church as well, but has been far more rational. I speak to him diplomatically, but firmly -- I have people that depend on me, I can't take this risk; I can't pass this risk on to them. So I didn't attend his one, maybe two in-person sessions which likely were six or eight people. He went back to virtual shortly afterwards.

My biggest concern is the guy I mentioned above that clearly isn't taking any real precautions at all, who usually attends. He cheats at cards, so I don't trust him to be honest on his level of exposure.

Other people in the group are working from home and staying safe, but I'm likely two degrees of separation away from about 1000 parishioners in a church that clearly is not assessing the risk in anywhere near the same way I am.

To put a cherry on top, the pastor joined our group online and was a bit of an asshole about people taking too long on their turns. I'd just as soon not sit down to a table with this guy. I don't want to be someplace where I need to watch my every word and be diplomatic the whole time. That's not a night off.

Here is a post from my facebook feed, an old graduate student (probably ~30) at my previous institution that was in a bunch of my classes, etc:

"Today was supposed to be my wedding day. Instead [fiance's name] is in the hospital getting her oxygen levels up and I haven't seen her in two days. This really sucks and I just want everything to not be this way."