Stay at home orders are in effect until April 10th. Classes start April 6th. Looks like I’ll be teaching from home. Good thing I already have a lot of material already in place for students to do stuff from home. It made it a lot easier to allow students to do and submit homework at home so I could have assignments due over the weekend. Who knew it would come in so handy now?
PA hasn’t mandated stay-at-home yet, but they did order the closures of all non-essential businesses’ physical locations. Some places are trying to loophole like crazy to deem themselves “essential”, and restaurants are limited to takeout and delivery only.
My team is entirely working from home and some of them hate it already (while I’m loving the hell out of it, the less time I have to be actually in the office the better). They’re still trying to figure out what they’re doing with our Hardware facility (where we process/build/ship the laptops we send out to the clients’ field users) since they might get to count as essential since we’re supporting pharma companies…
First fatality in my county, and the number of cases doubled today.
No fatalities yet, but our number of cases is going up rapidly and we have now had a couple of community transmitted cases. New Zealand is basically on lock-down now to try to contain it.
So apparently my brother is showing symptoms and is under quarantine, along with my two nieces, until he gets his test results back. My younger niece turns 9 on Sunday. What a crap birthday present.
Rumours hath it that we will be going into lockdown soon.
Ramaphosa’s announcement will not be welcome by most.
That’s awful. Luckily the younger you are, the less it seems to affect you. Take care of yourself and the wife too!
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I wish this had never been discovered. These invincible idiots running around partying at colleges and Spring Break are going to extend this by weeks.
“It’s ok, if I get it I’ll just stay home a couple days”, yeah, with your Dad who has COPD, and your Grandmother who is 85 comes and visits she can just die.
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Tax filing in the US has been extended to July 15.
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Be sure to check your state tax authority, just because federal got moved doesn’t necessarily mean your state did.
Also: the IRS delaying their demand for your money is how you know shit just got real.
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My daughter hits double digits Monday and we had to cancel her bowling party and she won’t get a family party either. It finally hit her in the last couple days.
Once everything settles down (if it happens), we’ll just do a big BBQ in the backyard for her and her friends since no one will be going anywhere for big vacations this summer.
At worst we’re looking at 2%, it will get better, and most of us will see it.
Boggles my mind, really.
People are idiots.
There’s an article on Insider that explains panic buying. It’s four reasons: We go into survival mode and it can overcome logic and reason, we view things as valuable when they’re scarce, we engage in herd behavior (other people are doing it, so we should to, with a few lapses into mob behavior), and we’re trying to get control. Since toilet paper is often sold out, sales of bidets are increasing.
Over in Australia, a woman accidentally ordered 48 boxes of TP instead of 48 rolls. She first got laughed at and called the “toilet paper queen” for the mistake, but she’s been reselling the rolls as a fundraiser for a school trip. One article said “at the same price” and another article said “at a slight markup”, but neither one sounds like profiteering and price gouging was the intent.
I sort of prepared for this a while ago due to things at work being rough enough that having extra food on hand seemed like a good idea. There’s a couple of items I bought extras of that would normally fit the buy it because it’s scarce profile. In my case, it was the result of being annoyed at the normal manufacturers’ method of not making products forever if they don’t sell well, so I bought the ones I liked before I couldn’t get them any more. Two of them did go off the market about two years ago and can serve me well during this time.
There’s people reminding everyone self-isolation or social distancing doesn’t mean stay in your house and don’t go outside at all. But going to areas that would attract crowds under normal circumstances, even if you can spread out a bit? Oooh boy. Ron White once said, “You can’t fix stupid.”
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New Zealand is looking increasingly bad. We went from no cases to our current 66 cases faster than Italy did.
The government has actually done a really good job so far, but unless they ramp things up even more than they have done, we could be in a lot of trouble. On Saturday they introduced a 4 level alert system where level 1 was “no problem, no disease” and level 4 is “the disease is out there and uncontained”. At level 4 the country will basically be in lock-down with everything cancelled and everyone has to stay home.
We started at level 2 and are still there, but there has been a petition of about 3000 doctors requesting that we go to level 4 immediately to try and head off an Italy situation.
I hope that petition is successful.
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