183 total nyc cases as of 10am. 29 new cases from the last update last evening. 19 of the new cases in the ICU.

I went to various stores here today and they were out of all that, plus soap, various shower gels, frozen pizzas, soup, pasta I literally found 3 packs left....people are buying shit like they plan to never leave home again.

The hoarding is really annoying, unnecessary and egocentric. Here a distribution center worker posted a video of him driving through one of their centers, literally filled with billions of rolls of toilet paper lol.

The Italian Civil Protection Department seems annoyed at the suggestions the crisis could have overwhelmed medical services in Lombardy. Mentions efforts to distribute masks, ventilators etc. Pointed out again their death rate, per age bracket, is comparable or lower than what China divulged in early February. Only four people under the age of 60 have died. But they've appeared to admit today's deaths refer to cases contracted weeks ago and real numbers were and are much higher.

New York State is now saying nyc is now at 213.

I sent my wife to do the shopping for the past few weeks but decided to aid her this time (I'm a gentleman, I know *wink*).

No eggs, flour and milk. They did have toilet paper but I didn't really check for other stuff such as canned food so maybe they were short on these items as well.

I guess some people need this, or most. Back to covering my house in toilet paper, just to be safe.

Look ma, we're prepared!

I have something for you: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3074988/coronavirus-some-recovered-patients-may-have

This coronavirus stuff is starting to get to me, honestly. It's making my anxiety worse. It's starting to have a painful and frightening impact on my daily life.

I'm a courtesy clerk at a grocery store. My job has gotten progressively more stressful and difficult over the course of the last week, but especially on Friday, which was my last day at work until Monday. Friday was, frankly, insane. It was as though it were the day before Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve and I'm not exaggerating. In fact, that may even be understating it. The line for every single check-out lane extended most of the way down the aisles behind them and that was before supper time when I got to leave. There were literally people shopping around others who were in line to check out. We were already out of a fair number of items (the obvious stuff like sanitizer, water, and...well I guess this makes sense to other people anyway, toilet paper). And mind you that it was fucking pouring down rain outside, which is a condition that normally holds traffic at bay a little. Not even that could slow down the rush.

Since the influx began so early, I didn't have time to do any of my normal morning chores besides cleaning and restocking the restrooms. Once. I spent the whole day running back and forth between bagging people's groceries and loading their purchases into their vehicles in the parking lot while it was pouring down rain. Nobody anticipated the massive, sudden uptick in traffic, so I was the only courtesy clerk scheduled for the whole time to handle all of it. People got fucking mean too, I'll tell you what! One customer pushed me into the sliding entryway door because he was apparently in that much of a hurry and there I was ahead of him. Another later slammed her cart into the left sliding door so hard that it broke the door, which blocked everyone from entering or leaving until management helped us figure out how to fix it. Just a couple of the standout examples.

Anyway, it was exhausting. I actually got physically tired, as in my arms started to hurt from speed bagging so much and and my back started to hurt from pushing so many carts back into the store at a time for so long. That doesn't usually happen to me at work. I had to stop and take water breaks at the fountain and a stress break too at one point because I was in tears after getting pushed into the door (like I mentioned a minute ago). This sort of thing happens around Thanksgiving and Christmas too, but the difference is that, you know, there are predictable end dates tied to those experiences. Thanksgiving happens and the Thanksgiving rush ends. Christmas happens and the Christmas rush ends. There's no end date to this and it's messing with my psyche. I don't know if I can go to work under conditions like Friday or worse than that every single day indefinitely. I don't know if I can do that. I don't know what alternative I've got, but I already struggle with anxiety as things are and have mental-emotional limits.

Really the more important thing though is this: ...we're running out of stuff to sell! Seriously. Not only myself personally, but also cashiers and managers I spoke to worried aloud about running out of all kinds of supplies before long if this keeps up, and maybe even everything! I mean seriously, what's everyone going to do when there's no more food left to buy?!?! We can plan for major rushes like this for special occasions like holidays or restock after a rush associated with a forecast major storm or something, but I don't think we're equipped for a sustained onslaught like this that never lets up. We may run out of everything and then the store will have to close. Seriously!

The scary part about this to me lies in the knowledge that this isn't necessarily an overreaction on the part of the public either. I mean so many people who spoke to me in the line feel like it is one (even though they were participating! ), but think about the current rate of spread for coronavirus here in the U.S. There were 670 confirmed cases when I went to bed on Sunday night and now, less than six full days later, there are 2,340 even without widely-available testing. That's like tripling in less than a week! At anything even vaguely resembling that rate of spread, we'll seriously be looking at over a million cases in this country alone by the end of May, tens of millions by election day, and most of the population by this same time next year! The experts are predicting that between 160 and 214 million Americans will be infected with coronavirus over the next year and that about a million will die from it. For perspective, about 1.3 million Americans die annually from cancer and heart disease combined, so we're looking at coronavirus tying both of those two things combined in terms of human toll over the next year, easily becoming the leading causing death in this country. That's nothing to sneeze up blood at. And to the IDIOTS who compare this virus to the flu, you might also notice that these figures are quite a lot higher than say the 33,000 annual deaths in this country caused by the flu!

And don't let anyone reassure you with that "2% death rate that may drop as the virus spreads" stuff either: 15 to 20% of coronavirus cases require hospitalization, as in you require a respirator. And even beyond that, beyond those officially severe cases, have you ever looked up the official definitions of "mild cases" before? They include everything from having virtually no symptoms to winding up with pneumonia and coughing up blood! And we're not doing much about it in this country either. This stimulus package we're hearing about: where's the money for new hospital construction, for the hiring of additional doctors, for additional hospital beds and ventilators, for vaccine research and development?? Why is additional testing and two weeks of paid sick leave the best we can agree on here? Where is the interest in preventing our whole hospital system from collapsing under the weight of the forthcoming influx of additional patients combined with insufficient capacity? Why are we still flying? Why are half the schools still open? Why are we just "postponing" large public gatherings for a few weeks or a couple months when we know good and well there is no treatment or vaccine on the way for this for at least another year in the best case scenario? Why are we still having people quarantine at home with their families when we know that 75% of the transmissions in China were between family members?

So yeah, in the grand scheme of things, we're not overreacting. We're more like underreacting in the U.S. overall. But that fact doesn't stop the socio-economic ramifications of normal life shutting down for probably a solid year or two from being not just a pain in the ass, but frankly agonizing and a direct threat to the livelihoods of enormous numbers of people. What happens to all the teachers when the schools close? To the flight attendants and pilots and other airline and airport workers when travel gets banned? What happens to the jobs of everyone servicing athletic events and public gatherings of all kinds? What happens to working parents when their kids are home from school all day anymore; what do they do in response to keep providing for their families without leaving their kids home alone all day routinely? What happens to our policy response when the parliaments inevitably get shut down because a third of their members have the virus? What even can we do to escape this miserable reality when the museums and theaters and libraries get closed, maybe new console launches and games get delayed for a year or more or canceled possibly even? What will we have left to talk about here even but this virus and surviving it? What is there to look forward to for the foreseeable future?

I go to work, it's coronavirus stockpiling. I turn on the news, every story is the coronavirus. I check out my daily Digg email, half the stories (the more up-voted half) are the coronavirus. Can't go out and have fun because of the coronavirus. Everything, life itself, is canceled because of the coronavirus. Everywhere I turn it's the coronavirus! Knock knock. Who's there? Surprise, it's the coronavirus! Shocker. And worst of all, that's actually a good reason for it all, not hysteria, so I can't lash out at people for being lunatics! I HAVE to have a break from the coronavirus somewhere!

I'm sorry, but just thinking about the next year or two gets me scared and gets me down.

Hard for VGC users. We love numbers and stats after all. I can't live without checking numbers every now and then (especially about car sales in different countries, lol). It's like a stupid addiction.