Coronavirus

I'll be staying away from the local game club for a while. Playing boardgames with strangers might be a little too risky right now.

Excellent, Jeb.

I’ll also mention that you shouldn’t buy all your store’s stock of soap, since you need other people to wash their hands too.

Also, what’s with all those people buying up all the Costco bottled water and toilet paper? This isn’t an environment-related natural disaster where infrastructure no longer works. The virus isn’t going to stop water from coming out of the faucets.

I thought I'd poke in and mention that it doesn't have to go as bad as China or Italy, though the US appears to be on track to. Look to South Korea's extremely assertive but not authoritarian response which seems to have peaked the virus's impact very quickly.

I'm pretty worried about my (70s) parents.

I was hoping we wouldn't discuss this on TWBG as it's the one place I hadn't seen it brought up yet. Inevitable I suppose.

I've been a little obsessed with this for the past two weeks as we're leaving for Disney World Sunday. Honestly, I'm full of anxiety and have had trouble sleeping. My wife doesn't want to cancel and my 63 year old mom is also going with us.

At least we're driving but I'm pretty sure I won't enjoy a moment of it.

We were leaving for Rome 3/31 but that’s a bust now! Apparently it’s just a total shitshow there right now.

I’ve seen the panic buying. WTF, are people like “now it’s time for me to start wiping my ass and washing my hands”? It’s fucking stupid. This is a serious situation that could get way out of control...but here we have a president who has a “hunch” it will go away or whatever...

My theory regarding all the toilet paper: people don’t want to get butt hurt over this.

One of my local gaming groups is talking about avoiding the Fantasy Flight Event Center in the near future, due to coronavirus. There are a lot of people there every day, but they have the cleanest bathrooms that I've ever seen in a gaming venue, competitive with many restaurants. On the other hand, some gamers are notably indifferent to hygiene, so that's a potential issue.

I hate that nearly every aspect of life in the United States is becoming politically divided, including response to potential contagion. A few years ago, some liberals decided that any sort of quarantine of Ebola victims was morally wrong, and then idea spread like wildfire thru social media. Ebola is legitimately a very scary and lethal disease that has ravaged some parts of Africa, so it takes an extraordinary degree of ignorance to oppose an Ebola quarantine. Now there are some conservatives who are claiming that coronavirus is not as bad as the flu, or just the same thing as the common cold, or some fake crisis made up by mainstream media. And the underlying motive for their denial is that they would rather pretend that the coronavirus is harmless than see their stock portfolios take a hit.

Hey - don't think the toilet paper thing is just a few wacky people, over here in the UK where it hasn't hit properly yet - BUT IT WILL IN THE NEXT FEW WEEKS - my supermarket has been sold out constantly of toilet paper, soap and pasta for the past four days and this is quite common throughout the country. People are just getting scared, selfish and stupid and I'm bloody sick of it.
This thing is not going away soon and our countries are going to see a lot more unbelievable days in the next few months, Italy may be (I hope) the nadir of a country being hit but we are not going to get off lightly, hopefully a lot fewer deaths but we will be shutting down to some extent and the economy (people) will take financial hits.
Well that's enough of me bringing gloom to the site, you all be safe out there folks and follow all sensible advice you're given

I wonder when the Pandemic expansion for this will be announced.

I was only going to make it for one day this year, but I’m skipping ConnCon this year due to what’s going on. I feel like holding cons at all are irresponsible right now.