So this thread gave me a few ideas, since we’ve seen similar behaviors here, really proves people are people regardless of geography.
A couple points that might be useful:
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you’ll probably want to keep working out and that’s great, I think many here have some home equipment or managed to buy some for the occasion. As a generic rule, err on the side of caution. Hospitals are the last place you want to be right now, they’ve been proven to be a vehicle of infection, so you don’t want to injure yourself right now. In general, you don’t want to have an accident, break something, even ruin a tooth or something else. Healthcare workers are going to be focused on treating coronavirus, so their attention to other stuff is going to be reduced, care is going to be reduced, going to the hospital or the dentits or else is risky;
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old people and their habits. We’ve seen the same here, I guess old people are old people in the whole world. They have all their habits and rituals and don’t want to give them up since in a normal situation, it’s harmless stuff. Waking up early, taking coffe always at the same bar and have a chat with other old fellas about the good ol’ times, going to the grocery store just to pick up one or two things every day instead of doing shopping once a week and so forth. In this situation, these habits ARE NOT harmless, for many reasons. You have to pound this notion into their brains.
Older people are the most at risk for severe complications and deaths, if we take the whole human side out of the equation, this means that they’re the most responsible for overloading hospitals and ICU units. It’s brutal, but from a strictly practical standpoint, that’s the first reason they can’t reason like “I’m old, if I die, I die”.
Fuck nope, even in that scenario, before death comes a timeframe in which they take up hospital beds, occupy ICU units and machines and workforce from the hospital staff, reducing their effectiveness for everyone else.
This notion really needs to be hammered into everyone’s head, really. It’s not just “I live/I die”, it’s that you infect other people that might live or die, and indirectly become a burden as you contribute in exhausting medical resoruces, that right now are not a commodity at all; -
I read people are still going outside, doing bike rides, throwing parties at home. If people are still gathering, even in small numbers, you’re not distancing and you’re not isolating, basically you have yet to start the real quarantine. Can’t figure out if people realized the rate of spread of this virus, being in contact with a couple people every day, and they’re in contact with a couple other people every day, and so forth, is a damn fine strategy to make social distancing useless. It’s enough to keep it spreading big time. You have to either make a serious kind of isolation, or avoid it at all. We know something about half measures here and they’re damaging, no two ways around it;
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tied to the previous point, a point of worry. Social distancing and isolation become alienating, quickly. Talking about staying at home, going out once a week for essential goods shopping, in and out, no going around and chatting and strolling or else. No parties, no happy hours, no gathering of any kind, no going to the park and so forth. People might have to stay completely alone at home, or they might avoid killing each other with their spouses, or might need to stay in the same house with someone who’s compromised and keep distance at home too. There are A LOT of possible scenario that might really build up pressure at home, while already feeling pressured by the reduction in personal freedom and sudden change of habits. People here are developing insomnia, depression, paranoia and mental health is taking a hit on some.
This is something to consider seriously in the US, given the gun culture there. If a real lockdown is enforced, things might get ugly, quickly.
Talking about home arguments turning to homicide or homicide/suicide over futile reasons, people pulling the trigger too easily on others if they feel threatened (i.e. they start expecting food supplies are going to drop significantly, I can imagine the rumble at the stores), withchunts looking for the spreader.
Anectodal fact based on current real life: people here have been going out jogging until last week. On their own, on desert streets or isolated parts of their towns for most part. The numbers here weren’t dropping, so the government took harsher measures and kept repeating to people to stay at home. Doesn’t matter if they didn’t stop production and people HAD to go to work, and they were the bulk of people still going out. People started looking for a scapegoat, and it was the runners. It has passed the notion here that runner = spreader and source of all evil. That’s where the masses are brought to by isolation and building paranoia, which is unavoidable in this situation.
I can tell that if people here had guns, they would have shot runners on sight, and they weren’t even the source of the problem. There’s an imitation scheme into these things, people are locked at home, spend all their time on socials, fake news and rage flow like wine.
I’d seriously seriously take all these factors into account there in the US, violence at home and in the streets has a much higher chance to concretize.