| Hiku said: Sorry to hear that people are mean and getting physical. Shouldn't have to put up with that. And it's not on you, but if you can try to maintain your distance from certain things to prevent situations like that from happening, it might be worth thinking of. On one hand it may add to the stress having yet another thing to worry about. But it probably beats getting pushed into a door, etc. One thing I'm wondering is if stores shouldn't have a limit per household on items that people commonly hoard? I feel like a lot of these shortages are created because people think they're going to run out. So they're the ones creating the problem by hoarding them for no reason. A lot of countries are certainly very unprepared for situations like this. Even if they have the money for it, supplies can still be hard to come by. China, in spite of handling this poorly at the start (trying to cover it up, misrepresenting figures, etc) have seemingly handled this incredibly well.
While the richest country in the history of the world has done very little considering their standing. |
Avoiding people from coming up behind one in a place as crowded as work was on Friday is tough. I shall do my best at defensive walking, but it's also not like I try to get hit.
Concerning the idea of limiting the number of a given item that people can purchase, yeah, the store already did that vis-a-vis the top-selling items like water and toilet paper (e.g. no more than four water cases per customer) and we ran out anyway because we had that many customers. There's nothing that can stop this outside of maybe some truly epic mark-ups, like raising the price of everything by over 1,000% maybe to slow down people's rate of buy. I can't imagine anything short of drastic and highly unpopular steps like that being effective.
You're right about the Chinese example though, they've done a pretty good job of containing the spread of coronavirus and there are lots of lessons that we SHOULD be learning from their experience here that we simply don't seem to want to. Here's an obvious for-example: the CDC guidelines here in the U.S. suggesting that people who believe they have coronavirus should quarantine themselves at home with family is a strategy that we should already know, based on the Chinese experience, doesn't work because 75% of their transmissions were between family members! The government there found it much more effective to temporarily take the sick away from their families and into a more actual isolation. Harsh, but it worked. Just as an obvious example. Our current CDC guidelines are asinine and reflect the attitude of an administration that just simply doesn't care.
I would also highlight the success story of South Korea, which I've found to be even more remarkable because they left their borders open and everything and have still managed to contain the virus spread with striking efficacy.
The single most important step to be taking is one that we should've taken weeks ago, which is widely testing the population to get a sense of where and how widespread the problem is. Without that, we're fighting it blind and inevitably falling way behind the curve. Our response so far has been slower and worse than Iran's, slower and worse even than Italy's, and we're going to have a more severe problem than those countries wind up with in the end as a result.
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