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Please consider reaching out to your elderly neighbors and offering your time to gather groceries/supplies for them. Or posting a note near the entrance of your

by eezurr 7y ago

Please consider reaching out to your elderly neighbors and offering your time to gather groceries/supplies for them. Or posting a note near the entrance of your apartment complex with your number. This alone will have a huge impact. They have a very real chance of dying if they contract covid-19. Take a moment to imagine how you would feel if you could not safely leave your home. <rant> A lot of us have the amazing comfort of working from our own homes, isolated from the rest of the world. In roughly 2-3 weeks, the epicenter locations of this disease in the US are going to run out of hospital beds. If you are younger and healthy, please consider asking your boss if you need to be working full time right now. Watch your state governor's and mayor's press conferences. They will communicate to you where you can go to help volunteer. We are going to transition to "war time leadership". A time that will test everyone's true character. </rant>

brookside 7y ago
I joined a community group that is doing just this, and as an hour ago have a list of older neighbors to check in on, and possibly help with obtaining food and medications. I do wonder if at 39 i am in fact young enough to be in the most-likely-to-survive-if-exposed group.
- OakNinja 7y ago
  As long as you don’t have any other diseases, you’re statistically sort of “safe”. 0.2% risk of dying for your age group regardless of physical health according to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... Wash your hands, stay safe.
  - bronipstid 7y ago
    For comparison, the death rate across all age groups of flu is 0.1%. Extrapolating out, a failure to contain the virus will still mean tens of thousands of young healthy people dying in every country. That's why governments are finally admitting "Herd Immunity/Flatten the Curve" without total containment is not an option.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      Flat statements about what strategies are or aren't options don't seem helpful. It's not a good option, ideally we'll have total containment, but it's important that we not see it as a betrayal if it's decided in a couple weeks that total containment isn't feasible.
      - bronipstid 7y ago
        It absolutely would be a betrayal of the people you'd be giving up on to not do everything we can to help them while we still can. You can advocate for or against taking strong action but you can't tell people you're allowing to die to not be upset about it.
        SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
        You certainly can't tell people not to be upset! Every death is tragedy; people have a right to be upset even about rarer causes of death that are harder to mitigate. (From personal experience, I can tell you that anyone who's seen an alcoholic family member die learns to sympathize with the Prohibitionists.) But it's not a betrayal to acknowledge their pain while recognizing nothing feasible can be done.
    - ejstronge 7y ago
      > For comparison, the death rate across all age groups of flu is 0.1%. Extrapolating out, a failure to contain the virus will still mean tens of thousands of young healthy people dying in every country. I’m not sure why you’re comparing the all-age mortality of flu to the age-specific mortality of COVID-19. The relevant metric would be about 0.02% [1] 1. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html
      - bronipstid 7y ago
        Why not? It's just giving some context to people who may think .2% is a "low" mortality rate. Thanks for the age specific number. That shows my point even more.
  - guscost 7y ago
    > Death Rate = (number of deaths / number of cases) = probability of dying if infected by the virus (%). Nonsense! Unless we can count every death caused by the virus, and correctly diagnose every infection, then this is a ridiculous (and irresponsible) guess. The number for "all cases" comes from the CCDC paper: > A total of 72,314 patient records—44,672 (61.8%) confirmed cases, 16,186 (22.4%) suspected cases, 10,567 (14.6%) clinically diagnosed cases (Hubei Province only), and 889 asymptomatic cases (1.2%)—contributed data for the analysis. Another more recent study guesses that 86% of cases are asymptomatic and/or otherwise undocumented: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/13/science.abb3221 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/13/scie...
    - arcticbull 7y ago
      Yeah, it's almost certainly way overblown. People are freaking out over a bad flu season. I could see a case made in a future retrospective that the exponential increase we're seeing in cases is actually an exponential increase in the number of available tests disseminated. Until we have antibody tests, the PCR-based tests we're using will only tell us if you actively have the disease not if you had it ages ago and already recovered. This disease could have easily spread unnoticed (due to the overwhelmingly mild flulike symptoms most people get) for months. Due to its highly-contageous nature, it probably did. Until we calm down and analyze what all actually happened my guess is just as good as anyone else.
      - mrtnmcc 7y ago
        Right now tests are being allocated to critically ill or dead people suspected of Covid-19. Ideally most cause of deaths are caught so the absolute number of deaths are a decent indicator of spread, but they are lagged by probably 7-14 days or the time until critical + testing and reporting time. Also I am 32yo male on day 5 of Covid-19 symptoms and have hopefully been through the worst part (immune response in lungs). AMA.
        arcticbull 7y ago
        AMA: Was it any different than a bad flu for you?
  - notahacker 7y ago
    This is one of the few cases where the raw data is so systematically flawed - many younger people are completely asymptomatic or not being tested because they don't need hospitalization - the anecdata might give you a better picture of the relative risk. The youngest of the UK's >100 confirmed COVID-19 fatalities was in his forties and already terminally ill. Young people aren't totally safe and should certainly avoid contracting it if possible with a view to protecting the people they come into contact with and not taking up a hospital bed if they're at the unlucky end of the spectrum, but relatively speaking they're a tiny fraction of the overall casualties, and probably have more exposure to the virus than the elderly due to more active social/work lives.
    - mikeyouse 7y ago
      Not to disagree with anything you said here, but there was recently a story comparing the fates of two young Chinese medical workers who both contracted the disease and who required medical care. The punchline is that a 29-year old physician with no co-morbidities died a terrible death. Be careful out there no matter your age or health status. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-death-life.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/13/world/asia/co...
      - _-___________-_ 7y ago
        This guy is pretty clearly an outlier (or there is some missing information). In Italy only 5 people under 40 have died, out of approx. 2500 deaths so far, and every one of the 5 had an existing serious illness.
        DanBC 7y ago
        "Didn't die" is not the same as "was not harmed". This relentless focus only on the people who died misses the point: covid-19 puts people in hospital, sometimes into intensive care, and many of those people end up with damaged lungs.
        7y ago
  - Vomzor 7y ago
    Survive yes. But half the patients in intensive care in Holland and France are in the 30 to 60 age bracket. And we don’t know yet what the longterm damage is after you survive.
    - Darkphibre 7y ago
      Not to mention that survival rates start to go down as the medical establishment succumbs to the strain. I'm isolating myself as much as possible and engaging in rather stringent protocols (N95 mask and gloves while out/ disrobe, wash clothes, and bathe on return), with the goal of staving off contraction until Fall if at all possible. Maybe the Chloroquine research will prove effective by then. I'm in Kirkland/Redmond, so the risk is higher here than elsewhere at the moment.
- tveita 7y ago
  Every group is "most-likely-to-survive-if-exposed". The numbers they seem to be working with is around 15% for ages 80+. That's not odds you want to take but it's by no means an automatic death sentence.
  - alkonaut 7y ago
    If I'm interpreting the news correctly it seems that even a lot of not-so-old people (30 and up) seem to be ending up in intensive care with some frequencey, but that aspect of it (bad pneumonia) just isn't deadly in healthy people under 50 if you are given quality care. Elderly people seem to suffer myocarditis or failure of other organs. What's worrying about that though, is that the high survival of healthy people under 50 seems to be conditional on the availability of ventilators and ecmo. Few countries can guarantee that in all scenarios.
- moultano 7y ago
  Along with being young and healthy, the people going out in public to do things should wear gloves and a mask if possible. You might be relatively safe, but you still might take up a hospital bed, and you still might transmit it.
  - nsxwolf 7y ago
    We're being told by the medical establishment, quite angrily, that masks are useless - unless you work in the medical establishment, then they're essential. Who is right?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - T-hawk 7y ago
      A mask doesn't "work" in the sense of preventing you from catching the virus, because airborne is not its transmission method. A mask does work in the sense of reducing your transmission to others if you are infected (and may not know it), by keeping your moisture-laden exhalations confined. A mask can reduce your risk by reminding you not to touch your face after having contacted potentially infectious surfaces. And there are different types of masks. Simple cotton patches aren't what the medical establishment needs, they don't filter micron-size virus particles. There are surgical-grade masks that do, and that's what medical workers need.
      - ardy42 7y ago
        We really need to start distinguishing between masks and respirators. Surgical masks are useless for protecting the wearer from infected people, however they help protect others from an infected wearer. If used properly, a respirator will help protect the wearer from infected people, as it will block them from inhaling virus-containing droplets.
        hawaiianbrah 7y ago
        I don’t see how they’re completely useless for protecting the wearer. If someone infected sneezes in my face, would I not be better off with a physical barrier over a point of entry into my system?
- davidgl 7y ago
  https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/covid-19-coronavirus-infographic-datapack/ https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/covid-19-c...
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  Some numbers from Italy: - 48.5% of people who died had three or more other illnesses - 25.6% of people who died had two other illnesses - 25.1% of people who died had one other illness - Overall, 99.2% of people who died had at least one other illness - Average age of those that died was 79.5 Of the 2500 or so people that have died: - only 17 people were under 50 - only 5 people were under 40 and all 5 had an existing serious illness https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID-2019_17_marzo-v2.pdf https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-C...
lnsru 7y ago
Buying recently for 3 groups. My cart is always full and that causes extreme anger of other shoppers. And supermarket personnel complains about my volumes. Getting tired of explaining why I am buying this way. I am afraid, that grocery shopping will be limited anyway soon. Edit: printing missing equipment parts with 3D printer would be easier for me.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- aaron_m04 7y ago
  Print out a sign and stick it on your cart.
  - mikorym 7y ago
    I agree with this 100%. People in South Africa are panic buying. So these people think you are taking the groceries to your cave. Get a sign and people can read for themselves.
  - BookmarkSaver 7y ago
    Double benefit in that it might encourage others to help too.
  - allannienhuis 7y ago
    Sadly, as soon as this becomes common, the hoarders will do the same to avoid the shame/consequences. Fear makes people very very irrational. :(
    - rkagerer 7y ago
      One up them and include pictures on your sign of the people you are shopping for! (Yeah, it's a cat / mouse game...)
    - aaron_m04 7y ago
      Well it is a temporary solution at least.
dominotw 7y ago
> please consider reaching out to your elderly neighbors I live in a densely packed city. I have no idea who lives in my neighborhood. I would be glad to help anyone at anytime though. I am just not clear how to go about it.
- baddox 7y ago
  Have you tried Nextdoor?
  - jpindar 7y ago
    My Nextdoor is also a great source of information about which local stores still have things in stock, which businesses are changing their hours, etc.
  - dominotw 7y ago
    yeah i was on there in the past but it was too noisy with some people dominating every topic. there were lots of negative vibes and was ruining my mood.
- idoby 7y ago
  > I live in a densely packed city. I have no idea who lives in my neighborhood. This is ironic, but I hear it a lot from people living in big cities. I live in a sparsely packed city, but mostly know who lives in my neighborhood. We were unhappy with the last city government, so we replaced them, and it took a lot less people to do so, in absolute terms (which matters because the relative size of your movement only comes into play if you can manage to have a movement at all, and that depends on the absolute size of the movement (1000 people are easier to convince and coordinate than 10K)). My metropolis-dwelling friends keep sharing how lonely they are all the time. I never got the logic behind living in the perpetual cocktail party/high school that is a big city.
  - dominotw 7y ago
    not sure about others but i live in the city because i can't drive due to some personal health reasons. I've tried to live out in the burbs but it was really hard for me without a car.
im3w1l 7y ago
I'm not a practiced germ-o-phobe. There is certainly a risk that I will mess up and touch my face without disinfecting my hands. Given this, would shopping for my neighbors even be helpful? I'd hate to be the one doing them in..
- azinman2 7y ago
  You should assume everything you get at the grocery store has been touched by someone with it, including the bag they hand you. Whoever you give it to should be sanitizing it, or you could help them with that with fresh gloves and distance.
orblivion 7y ago
Are there good tips for doing this safely? Should I wipe down all the items? Ideally they could do so themselves.
- fsckboy 7y ago
  to wipe down and disinfect (if the bleach is 2.75% strength, otherwise adjust accordingly) use 1 gallon water with 1 tablespoon unscented laundry bleach for eating utensils or 1 gallon water with 6 tablespoons bleach for surfaces like tables. a gallon is 213 tablespoons so your ratio is about 200 to 1 for eating utensils vs 30 to one for surfaces, so that's metric-ish. This is "child safe" (like for nursery schools), I got it from here https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/8340/970-216-Disinfect-en-L.pdf https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/8340/970-216-Disi... I just looked at a generic bottle of bleach I bought at a chain pharmacy to see if they listed the concentration, and even better, they listed various measures as above for different uses as above, so if you look there it might be the most convenient system. source: in normal times, the board of health requires restaurants in new york city (but probably everywhere) to keep a bucket of chlorinated water (essentially diluted laundry bleach) around with rags in it to wipe off tables with bare hands in between customers. I infer from this factoid that it must be a good, safe way to disinfect things, so I mention it if you were looking for a way to wipe things down simply and reliably. obviously, you want to get the concentration right so the chlorine doesn't become a health risk itself (or bleach your jeans) so I'll try to look that up now, and I found the above link from the State of Washington.
  - orblivion 7y ago
    Well I do have some isopropyl alcohol. I've been using it sparingly but it's lasting me longer than I expected.
    - fsckboy 7y ago
      nothing wrong with the disinfectant property of strong concentrations of alcohol, but I assume institutional food service type places are told to use diluted bleach because it is not flammable and is safe and stable (not evaporatey) to sit for periods of time in an open bucket.
dr_orpheus 7y ago
Look around for programs in your area that already coordinate efforts like grocery delivery for the elderly on a daily basis. Volunteering through these programs may be an easier way to find who needs help and do it in a coordinated way. Example in Colorado: https://cultivate.ngo/programs/carry-out-caravan https://cultivate.ngo/programs/carry-out-caravan
coronavolunteer 7y ago
People have been setting up mutual aid and volunteer groups to do just this. If you’d like to find one in your local area we’ve built a directory for them: https://coronavolunteer.org https://coronavolunteer.org Helping in your local community (safely) will be one of the most important things you can do in the coming months.
- ISNIT 7y ago
  Have you seen https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/volunteering https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/volunteering?
  - carapace 7y ago
    Both of those links are blank pages with JS disabled. It's a minor thing, but still a thing.
Fej 7y ago
> In roughly 2-3 weeks, the epicenter locations of this disease in the US are going to run out of hospital beds. This sounds right, but do you have a source on the 2-3 weeks number? I found a source regarding hospital bed shortages, but it does not specify a number that concrete. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/17/upshot/hospital-bed-shortages-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/17/upshot/hospit...
- throwaway4787 7y ago
  You just need to follow the curves in Italy and France - the US follows closely
perl4ever 7y ago
Everybody seems to be announcing special hours at grocery stores for seniors today. It seems like people are acting rapidly.
boycaught 7y ago
Well said, @eezurr!

by eezurr 7y ago

brookside 7y ago

I joined a community group that is doing just this, and as an hour ago have a list of older neighbors to check in on, and possibly help with obtaining food and medications. I do wonder if at 39 i am in fact young enough to be in the most-likely-to-survive-if-exposed group.

OakNinja 7y ago
As long as you don’t have any other diseases, you’re statistically sort of “safe”. 0.2% risk of dying for your age group regardless of physical health according to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... Wash your hands, stay safe.
- bronipstid 7y ago
  For comparison, the death rate across all age groups of flu is 0.1%. Extrapolating out, a failure to contain the virus will still mean tens of thousands of young healthy people dying in every country. That's why governments are finally admitting "Herd Immunity/Flatten the Curve" without total containment is not an option.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    Flat statements about what strategies are or aren't options don't seem helpful. It's not a good option, ideally we'll have total containment, but it's important that we not see it as a betrayal if it's decided in a couple weeks that total containment isn't feasible.
    - bronipstid 7y ago
      It absolutely would be a betrayal of the people you'd be giving up on to not do everything we can to help them while we still can. You can advocate for or against taking strong action but you can't tell people you're allowing to die to not be upset about it.
      - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
        You certainly can't tell people not to be upset! Every death is tragedy; people have a right to be upset even about rarer causes of death that are harder to mitigate. (From personal experience, I can tell you that anyone who's seen an alcoholic family member die learns to sympathize with the Prohibitionists.) But it's not a betrayal to acknowledge their pain while recognizing nothing feasible can be done.
  - ejstronge 7y ago
    > For comparison, the death rate across all age groups of flu is 0.1%. Extrapolating out, a failure to contain the virus will still mean tens of thousands of young healthy people dying in every country. I’m not sure why you’re comparing the all-age mortality of flu to the age-specific mortality of COVID-19. The relevant metric would be about 0.02% [1] 1. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html
    - bronipstid 7y ago
      Why not? It's just giving some context to people who may think .2% is a "low" mortality rate. Thanks for the age specific number. That shows my point even more.
- guscost 7y ago
  > Death Rate = (number of deaths / number of cases) = probability of dying if infected by the virus (%). Nonsense! Unless we can count every death caused by the virus, and correctly diagnose every infection, then this is a ridiculous (and irresponsible) guess. The number for "all cases" comes from the CCDC paper: > A total of 72,314 patient records—44,672 (61.8%) confirmed cases, 16,186 (22.4%) suspected cases, 10,567 (14.6%) clinically diagnosed cases (Hubei Province only), and 889 asymptomatic cases (1.2%)—contributed data for the analysis. Another more recent study guesses that 86% of cases are asymptomatic and/or otherwise undocumented: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/13/science.abb3221 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/13/scie...
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    Yeah, it's almost certainly way overblown. People are freaking out over a bad flu season. I could see a case made in a future retrospective that the exponential increase we're seeing in cases is actually an exponential increase in the number of available tests disseminated. Until we have antibody tests, the PCR-based tests we're using will only tell us if you actively have the disease not if you had it ages ago and already recovered. This disease could have easily spread unnoticed (due to the overwhelmingly mild flulike symptoms most people get) for months. Due to its highly-contageous nature, it probably did. Until we calm down and analyze what all actually happened my guess is just as good as anyone else.
    - mrtnmcc 7y ago
      Right now tests are being allocated to critically ill or dead people suspected of Covid-19. Ideally most cause of deaths are caught so the absolute number of deaths are a decent indicator of spread, but they are lagged by probably 7-14 days or the time until critical + testing and reporting time. Also I am 32yo male on day 5 of Covid-19 symptoms and have hopefully been through the worst part (immune response in lungs). AMA.
      - arcticbull 7y ago
        AMA: Was it any different than a bad flu for you?
- notahacker 7y ago
  This is one of the few cases where the raw data is so systematically flawed - many younger people are completely asymptomatic or not being tested because they don't need hospitalization - the anecdata might give you a better picture of the relative risk. The youngest of the UK's >100 confirmed COVID-19 fatalities was in his forties and already terminally ill. Young people aren't totally safe and should certainly avoid contracting it if possible with a view to protecting the people they come into contact with and not taking up a hospital bed if they're at the unlucky end of the spectrum, but relatively speaking they're a tiny fraction of the overall casualties, and probably have more exposure to the virus than the elderly due to more active social/work lives.
  - mikeyouse 7y ago
    Not to disagree with anything you said here, but there was recently a story comparing the fates of two young Chinese medical workers who both contracted the disease and who required medical care. The punchline is that a 29-year old physician with no co-morbidities died a terrible death. Be careful out there no matter your age or health status. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-death-life.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/13/world/asia/co...
    - _-___________-_ 7y ago
      This guy is pretty clearly an outlier (or there is some missing information). In Italy only 5 people under 40 have died, out of approx. 2500 deaths so far, and every one of the 5 had an existing serious illness.
      - DanBC 7y ago
        "Didn't die" is not the same as "was not harmed". This relentless focus only on the people who died misses the point: covid-19 puts people in hospital, sometimes into intensive care, and many of those people end up with damaged lungs.
        7y ago
- Vomzor 7y ago
  Survive yes. But half the patients in intensive care in Holland and France are in the 30 to 60 age bracket. And we don’t know yet what the longterm damage is after you survive.
  - Darkphibre 7y ago
    Not to mention that survival rates start to go down as the medical establishment succumbs to the strain. I'm isolating myself as much as possible and engaging in rather stringent protocols (N95 mask and gloves while out/ disrobe, wash clothes, and bathe on return), with the goal of staving off contraction until Fall if at all possible. Maybe the Chloroquine research will prove effective by then. I'm in Kirkland/Redmond, so the risk is higher here than elsewhere at the moment.
tveita 7y ago
Every group is "most-likely-to-survive-if-exposed". The numbers they seem to be working with is around 15% for ages 80+. That's not odds you want to take but it's by no means an automatic death sentence.
- alkonaut 7y ago
  If I'm interpreting the news correctly it seems that even a lot of not-so-old people (30 and up) seem to be ending up in intensive care with some frequencey, but that aspect of it (bad pneumonia) just isn't deadly in healthy people under 50 if you are given quality care. Elderly people seem to suffer myocarditis or failure of other organs. What's worrying about that though, is that the high survival of healthy people under 50 seems to be conditional on the availability of ventilators and ecmo. Few countries can guarantee that in all scenarios.
moultano 7y ago
Along with being young and healthy, the people going out in public to do things should wear gloves and a mask if possible. You might be relatively safe, but you still might take up a hospital bed, and you still might transmit it.
- nsxwolf 7y ago
  We're being told by the medical establishment, quite angrily, that masks are useless - unless you work in the medical establishment, then they're essential. Who is right?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - T-hawk 7y ago
    A mask doesn't "work" in the sense of preventing you from catching the virus, because airborne is not its transmission method. A mask does work in the sense of reducing your transmission to others if you are infected (and may not know it), by keeping your moisture-laden exhalations confined. A mask can reduce your risk by reminding you not to touch your face after having contacted potentially infectious surfaces. And there are different types of masks. Simple cotton patches aren't what the medical establishment needs, they don't filter micron-size virus particles. There are surgical-grade masks that do, and that's what medical workers need.
    - ardy42 7y ago
      We really need to start distinguishing between masks and respirators. Surgical masks are useless for protecting the wearer from infected people, however they help protect others from an infected wearer. If used properly, a respirator will help protect the wearer from infected people, as it will block them from inhaling virus-containing droplets.
      - hawaiianbrah 7y ago
        I don’t see how they’re completely useless for protecting the wearer. If someone infected sneezes in my face, would I not be better off with a physical barrier over a point of entry into my system?
davidgl 7y ago
https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/covid-19-coronavirus-infographic-datapack/ https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/covid-19-c...
_-___________-_ 7y ago
Some numbers from Italy: - 48.5% of people who died had three or more other illnesses - 25.6% of people who died had two other illnesses - 25.1% of people who died had one other illness - Overall, 99.2% of people who died had at least one other illness - Average age of those that died was 79.5 Of the 2500 or so people that have died: - only 17 people were under 50 - only 5 people were under 40 and all 5 had an existing serious illness https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID-2019_17_marzo-v2.pdf https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-C...

lnsru 7y ago

Buying recently for 3 groups. My cart is always full and that causes extreme anger of other shoppers. And supermarket personnel complains about my volumes. Getting tired of explaining why I am buying this way. I am afraid, that grocery shopping will be limited anyway soon. Edit: printing missing equipment parts with 3D printer would be easier for me.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
aaron_m04 7y ago
Print out a sign and stick it on your cart.
- mikorym 7y ago
  I agree with this 100%. People in South Africa are panic buying. So these people think you are taking the groceries to your cave. Get a sign and people can read for themselves.
- BookmarkSaver 7y ago
  Double benefit in that it might encourage others to help too.
- allannienhuis 7y ago
  Sadly, as soon as this becomes common, the hoarders will do the same to avoid the shame/consequences. Fear makes people very very irrational. :(
  - rkagerer 7y ago
    One up them and include pictures on your sign of the people you are shopping for! (Yeah, it's a cat / mouse game...)
  - aaron_m04 7y ago
    Well it is a temporary solution at least.

dominotw 7y ago

> please consider reaching out to your elderly neighbors I live in a densely packed city. I have no idea who lives in my neighborhood. I would be glad to help anyone at anytime though. I am just not clear how to go about it.

baddox 7y ago
Have you tried Nextdoor?
- jpindar 7y ago
  My Nextdoor is also a great source of information about which local stores still have things in stock, which businesses are changing their hours, etc.
- dominotw 7y ago
  yeah i was on there in the past but it was too noisy with some people dominating every topic. there were lots of negative vibes and was ruining my mood.
idoby 7y ago
> I live in a densely packed city. I have no idea who lives in my neighborhood. This is ironic, but I hear it a lot from people living in big cities. I live in a sparsely packed city, but mostly know who lives in my neighborhood. We were unhappy with the last city government, so we replaced them, and it took a lot less people to do so, in absolute terms (which matters because the relative size of your movement only comes into play if you can manage to have a movement at all, and that depends on the absolute size of the movement (1000 people are easier to convince and coordinate than 10K)). My metropolis-dwelling friends keep sharing how lonely they are all the time. I never got the logic behind living in the perpetual cocktail party/high school that is a big city.
- dominotw 7y ago
  not sure about others but i live in the city because i can't drive due to some personal health reasons. I've tried to live out in the burbs but it was really hard for me without a car.

im3w1l 7y ago

I'm not a practiced germ-o-phobe. There is certainly a risk that I will mess up and touch my face without disinfecting my hands. Given this, would shopping for my neighbors even be helpful? I'd hate to be the one doing them in..

azinman2 7y ago
You should assume everything you get at the grocery store has been touched by someone with it, including the bag they hand you. Whoever you give it to should be sanitizing it, or you could help them with that with fresh gloves and distance.

orblivion 7y ago

Are there good tips for doing this safely? Should I wipe down all the items? Ideally they could do so themselves.

fsckboy 7y ago
to wipe down and disinfect (if the bleach is 2.75% strength, otherwise adjust accordingly) use 1 gallon water with 1 tablespoon unscented laundry bleach for eating utensils or 1 gallon water with 6 tablespoons bleach for surfaces like tables. a gallon is 213 tablespoons so your ratio is about 200 to 1 for eating utensils vs 30 to one for surfaces, so that's metric-ish. This is "child safe" (like for nursery schools), I got it from here https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/8340/970-216-Disinfect-en-L.pdf https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/8340/970-216-Disi... I just looked at a generic bottle of bleach I bought at a chain pharmacy to see if they listed the concentration, and even better, they listed various measures as above for different uses as above, so if you look there it might be the most convenient system. source: in normal times, the board of health requires restaurants in new york city (but probably everywhere) to keep a bucket of chlorinated water (essentially diluted laundry bleach) around with rags in it to wipe off tables with bare hands in between customers. I infer from this factoid that it must be a good, safe way to disinfect things, so I mention it if you were looking for a way to wipe things down simply and reliably. obviously, you want to get the concentration right so the chlorine doesn't become a health risk itself (or bleach your jeans) so I'll try to look that up now, and I found the above link from the State of Washington.
- orblivion 7y ago
  Well I do have some isopropyl alcohol. I've been using it sparingly but it's lasting me longer than I expected.
  - fsckboy 7y ago
    nothing wrong with the disinfectant property of strong concentrations of alcohol, but I assume institutional food service type places are told to use diluted bleach because it is not flammable and is safe and stable (not evaporatey) to sit for periods of time in an open bucket.

dr_orpheus 7y ago

Look around for programs in your area that already coordinate efforts like grocery delivery for the elderly on a daily basis. Volunteering through these programs may be an easier way to find who needs help and do it in a coordinated way. Example in Colorado: https://cultivate.ngo/programs/carry-out-caravan https://cultivate.ngo/programs/carry-out-caravan

coronavolunteer 7y ago

People have been setting up mutual aid and volunteer groups to do just this. If you’d like to find one in your local area we’ve built a directory for them: https://coronavolunteer.org https://coronavolunteer.org Helping in your local community (safely) will be one of the most important things you can do in the coming months.

ISNIT 7y ago
Have you seen https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/volunteering https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/volunteering?
- carapace 7y ago
  Both of those links are blank pages with JS disabled. It's a minor thing, but still a thing.

Fej 7y ago

> In roughly 2-3 weeks, the epicenter locations of this disease in the US are going to run out of hospital beds. This sounds right, but do you have a source on the 2-3 weeks number? I found a source regarding hospital bed shortages, but it does not specify a number that concrete. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/17/upshot/hospital-bed-shortages-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/17/upshot/hospit...

throwaway4787 7y ago
You just need to follow the curves in Italy and France - the US follows closely

perl4ever 7y ago

Everybody seems to be announcing special hours at grocery stores for seniors today. It seems like people are acting rapidly.

boycaught 7y ago

Well said, @eezurr!