Eyeballing the data I have in front of me, I’m guessing the US new cases/day will peak around 70,000-80,000 in 2-3 weeks. Last week I said we’ll hit 1 million in the US by 4/15; from the model I have, it looks like that might not happen til 4/17 now. That tells me the curve is flattening, but it’s taking its sweet fucking time.
The US stats are being driven almost entirely by NY and NJ right now. Meanwhile, the Houston area (where I live) is barely even getting going. So I started looking at county data from the NYT database (free to access covid-19-data/us-counties.csv at master · nytimes/covid-19-data · GitHub), but it’s limited because we didn’t even top 100 cases until 3/21. 12 data points isn’t enough to base a model off of.
Also, my celebration of not getting furloughed proved to be short-lived when I found out some of the people that were today. A single mom with 5 kids. A dad with 5 kids, wife doesn’t work. Fucking shit.
Almost makes me want to go back and volunteer for it because at least my wife has a very secure job (tangentially related to healthcare) that pays pretty decent. We could make it work if I had to go do something else for a while.
I have no idea how these people are going to get by.
This stuff is really going to be brutal in my estimation. I am lucky enough to be currently employed, and no signs of anything else.
I am not sure what you could do to help these families. I think donating to a food shelf is pretty efficient.
Some companies are handling this pretty ethically, others not so much. I heard of a few CEOs working for free and suggesting that their high up colleagues work for a fraction of what they were making. I think that is admirable. Then you have very rich business owners who are being very selfish.
Hobby Lobby just gave it’s employees a huge turd of a deal. No prior notice, sent a large portion them away without pay, benefits or severance, but with the mention that God will take care of them. The owner is worth 6.4 billion. They have around 30K employees. The math on these numbers shows that he is motivated by only greed. What a POS human IMO.
Maybe this is already known but does weather affect this? I’d imagine you guys are having warmer temps. You certainly have a lot of people, not as much as NY but it’s not rural or anything.
Pretty sure my state has had 131 cases with 50 or so recovering, and I think less than 10 deaths.
Guess what guys - if the warmer weather killed it, it wouldn’t be popping up in Australia. The scariest thing about the entire issue is that nobody knows anything about it because of how new it is. Hot weather killing it was a theory. It’ll take the summer and fall to reduce the caseload to 0 in this country, the only things that work are social distancing measures and not being a fucking idiot (for example - disinfect your shit, the virus lives on phones and laptops and clothes and anything else you could imagine). People wash their hands before they eat, but while they eat they’re on their infected phone. Little shit like that in addition to people being overwhelmingly stupid and unwilling to listen is going to lead to a lot of unnecessary deaths.
My older parents aren’t taking this seriously (they are 60 and 57). They both have pre-existing health conditions and idk. They might die soon, literally. NYC has tens of thousands (30,000 yesterday, 50,000 right now) of confirmed cases and millions of unconfirmed ones, my dad is an essential worker and he’s been around 3-4 people who have had the virus already inadvertently. So, the next few weeks will probably be very bad for a lot of people in NYC who have parents forced to work in order to make money (plus he’ll get fired if he takes off), and that’s just what the world is nowadays. No control over anything and everything is getting worse, literally everything.
I don’t think it’s possible to grant a silver lining to a pandemic, sorry
I’m a firefighter/EMT. We’re almost out of PPE. It hasn’t really gotten started in my area yet, we’ve only got a few confirmed cases. Probably the first of many. In a week or two tops our PPE will consist of welding goggles, a bandana around our face, a kitchen apron (it’s machine washable!) and a pair of those big yellow rubber dishwashing gloves.
Yeah, we’re kind of angry, but we’re laughing our asses off at the same time. We’re not out of N95’s yet, but guys are already getting cloth masks sewed up with Star Wars and Iron Man shit on them. I haven’t talked to anyone who is afraid for themselves, but we’re all afraid for somebody; elderly parents, wives who are battling cancer, the citizens we serve everyday, some of whom we’ve gotten to know really well.
Why are we facing a critical shortage, before it even gets rolling? The chief officer in charge of supplies and logistics is an imbecile. He was promoted beyond his level of competence the day he was hired as a firefighter, then he got promoted four or five times. Hopefully he’ll be forced into retirement after this debacle, but we’re probably not that lucky. Whatever, we’ll get by.
Honestly not a lot of impact here for me other than the stores being cleaned out. I work from home anyway so I’m still working and have no reason to go out save for the occasional trip to the grocery or pharmacy. A little over a year ago in November of 2018 my wife suggested we build a gym in the basement which we did so I can keep working out too. Got plenty of food and plenty of ammo. Now if I could just find some toilet paper…
Six figures a year or a week? I know the answer, I’m just joking. Maybe after all of this we’ll rethink the whole essential and nonessential employee thing.
Haha, well our pay isn’t six figures, but isn’t bad for our part of the country.
There is actually a facebook debate on the Firefighter pages about hazard duty pay for first responders that I think is absolute bullshit. This is our fucking job. This is what we were always paid to do, when we didn’t have to do it. Now that it’s the big game people are asking for more money.
I hear some municipalities are giving first responders hazard duty pay, which, if it was the idea of the city manager or council, then good for them. But to have a hand out at a time like this is disgraceful. We have job security at a time when tens of millions of Americans are out of work.
So if you see some first responders on the news or social media asking for more pay, THEY DO NOT SPEAK FOR THE MAJORITY OF US.
