Coronavirus

In my inbox --

We will be out of town this weekend, our normal third Saturday of the month to meet. For those available to meet, would you be able to meet at Dean’s? Dean and Joyce, would you be available to host? Who might be available for games this weekend and where?

59 recipients.

Shellhead wrote: Lately, I have noticed that people tend to seem more attractive when wearing a mask on their face. I can't see their nose or mouth, and somehow my mind automatically sketches in pleasant and symmetrical features.

Very much this. I have employees and co-workers brought on post lockdown that i have NEVER seen without a mask. And others where my impression of their face is so different from the reality that I don't even recognize them.

I don't now how anyone in the dating world is doing it. Do you hit on a person wearing a mask and hope for the best or just stick to the internet dating sites with full face pics?

Anyone seen any post mask media? Any tv shows/movies depicting it yet?

ubarose wrote: The other new business is remote-learning nannies.

A friend of mine is a teacher and is desperate to get out of teaching in school; I sent him an article on in person at home pod teachers being a booming industry all of a sudden . Anyone have any idea the best way to sniff out these opportunities ?

My best friend was finally going to start dating again in 2020, and then the pandemic arrived. He hasn't even tried dating at all, and instead decided to switch careers and put all his focus into his online classes. He is currently resigned to the idea of maybe no dating until late 2021.

jason10mm wrote: Anyone seen any post mask media? Any tv shows/movies depicting it yet?

I suspected filming on a lot of projects just stopped for months. I imagine there will be a lack of quality content for a few months after we finish working through all the stuff that was ready for post production in January/February.

Huh, even game show type stuff? I don't really watch that stuff but I'd imagine a season of Survivor or Top Chef could go on as planned. Are the soaps on hiatus as well?

Maybe this will lead to a surge in foreign content on mainstream american tv. Go grab an acclaimed french show from a few years back, slap a good dub on it, would folks even notice? I suppose Netflix and the like have taken a lot of the good ones though.

We are what, 3 months out from any post covid/lockdown baby boom or bust? I wonder how that all going to shake out. I expect an early surge from lockdown couples, then a big drop as there were presumably a lot fewer new relationships and folks didn't get pregnant in an uncertain time.

Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune are "live" again. They've moved the contestants apart to maintain social distance. I'm not sure how long ago they were taped; it used to be three months between taping and viewing.

My wife told me that the current Amazing Race was taped two years ago, but didn't know why.

Thank goodness some people still go for personality or I would have never been married.

Just writing here so that some people see a different perspective on how to handle these things.

Everyone talks about how good the Australian response is but doesn't really know the reality. Like many slightly isolated nations we got on top of things quickly and apart from a few slight mistakes were easing our way out of a 2 month lockdown, where we were in our homes and only allowed out for work in essential industries, buying food, 1 hour of exercise or essential caregiving. All kids were home schooled.

I missed my friends and family, but in June got to see a few, had a brief weekend away in a small town, and ate at a couple of restaurants. All of Australia was doing great, but then the shit hit the fan. A policy was set up to quarantine all returned travelers in hotels for 2 weeks in March, and in mid to late June the quarantine was breached. Unfortunately a decision was made in my city to staff the hotels with private security guards, which is a problematic industry, and the guards weren't properly trained and the work was insecure and poorly paid so they couldn't afford to quarantine if sick. And they tended to live with other people in insecure and poorly paid work, most notably cleaners who worked in multiple locations. So once it was out it spread rapidly.

And what did we do? As the rest of the country slowly eased restrictions and has been getting freer and freer, after a months reprieve my city has been back in lockdown since July. And even harsher. Compulsory masks outside the home. Curfew at 8pm-5am. No going for more than 5km (3Mi) from your home unless for work or caregiving. All shops apart from food and medicine completely shut down. All non emergency surgery cancelled. Payments are made to many people and workplaces badly affected to keep us going.

I have spent 6 of the last 7 months only seeing my daughters and my girlfriend, homeschooling 2 kids, working remotely, having lost my cleaner and gardener. I am so tired. I am depressed. My kids were fragile enough from having lost their mother 2 years ago to cancer cry most days, being unable to see their friends, and unable to handle the depression of never leaving the house (I think one of my daughters who hates exercise managed 8 weeks at one point without leaving the house). This is really tough and I wouldn't want anyone else to ever have to go through this.

We watch the daily case number with excitement and trepidation. We are so close to freedom right now with our average cases at 9 per day. And if it wasn't for 2 people who lied to contact tracers and created a 50 person outbreak, we would probably be on our first big step out of lockdown on Sunday. The fact that my city is just now looking angrily at 2 people goes to show what we have achieved from having 700 cases a day in August. I am hurting so much, but I know I just have to hang on that little bit longer. I have allowed one breach of the rules in that I allow my daughter and her cousin who live literally around the corner to start hanging out at each other's houses in the last 2 weeks. And I have finally relented and allowed my 72 year old mother to visit in the last week to help out with school work, which is basically for caregiving purposes.

But for some reason the media likes to focus on the couple of thousand vocal people who are the only ones complaining. The right is trying to declare we need to open up more, and that our path out of lockdown is too slow. But you know what. Me and the bulk of the 4 million people in my city are just getting on with it. Our lives revolve around deciding which 2 restaurants we get delivered twice a week. It's a mind numbing tedium. Most of my female friends just want to go to a hairdresser, but put up with shabby hair. As a city we are hurting so badly, but we understand the sacrifice that we are making and we can only watch on with envy as other cities get to go to sports and eagerly anticipate the ability to stand up in bars.

I see people fighting in other countries for the stupidest rights that you just don't need. You can fucking sit at home for 6 months. It hurts so badly, but if you can see the big picture, you can do it. It's hard but it's worth it. I look with so much envy at the rest of the country having so much fun, but I understand what I need to do. Just stay at home. It isn't difficult. And soon I will be able to hug a friend or go to a bar.

We’re so frayed by it all that a hammy montage of empty streets set to a choirboy singing made people blubber. That shouldn’t have worked! As a city we are like Batman at the end of The Dark Knight. We have to suffer, but we can take it. It's what the country needs right now and we understand that.

RobertB wrote: Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune are "live" again. They've moved the contestants apart to maintain social distance. I'm not sure how long ago they were taped; it used to be three months between taping and viewing.

My wife told me that the current Amazing Race was taped two years ago, but didn't know why.

I believe that both Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune are still taping three months out. Mainly I think this because Wheel has instituted a new "wheel spinning device" which just looks like a white rubber toilet paper tube. They must be in the time of the pandemic when people were really worried about touching surfaces. Ah, the good old days.

Jeopardy has been interesting because all of their contestants are from L.A. I guess they can't fly people in for the show? Anyway, they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Yesterday, only the champ made it to final Jeopardy. All alone on the stage for the last question, and yet he still didn't bet it all! What a wasted opportunity.

My guess for the Amazing Race is that they have so much footage of each of the teams that it probably takes them at least a year to edit it all down into compelling & suspenseful narratives for the season. I mean, they've got to have hundreds of hours for each one hour episode.

The big news where I work is that one of the branches that serves the public has a five-person cluster, including one dead and one in the ICU. This news got out to employees via the Union rep dumping the story into the press.

The administration spokeswoman told the Post "the agency was notified of the first case on Oct. 5. Officials were also told about the most recent case of an employee testing positive on Oct. 10." So it gives the appearance that they were silently contact-tracing and trying to minimize the information flow. If that's the case it's kind of damning. I appreciate it is sensitive medical information and all, but as it stands that branch is open today and seeing customers, presumably with people that are two or three degrees of contact away from the five infected people, some that were Covid-positive at least nine days back.

Nothing has come out through from the administration regarding this issue yet, so the rest of us are reading news reports and getting word of mouth that is very likely of varying levels of quality and precision. "No masks in the break room" is the kind of rumor being passed, true or not, the entire staff or three people. It seems to me there will have to be a global announcement on the issue before the end of the day.

So . . . when the administration calls us back into the office, what's the word on how they'll handle a positive case? Quietly do contact tracing without informing the staff? There's hundreds of us in the main building, and I believe about 100 are reporting there for work everyday right now.

Question to the rest of you -- is this standard operating procedure? In a situation like this is the entire staff of the building notified of potential exposure, or is it limited to direct contact tracing?

Our administration basically tried to pull what yours did, which is give 0 information and claim federal law. Our faculty senate and the city pressured them enough to at least give us numbers on how many are sick on campus and quarantined at any given time. That's all we get.

In terms of someone actually reporting illness, in real life the students tend to report it to me informally via e-mail because they're scared and worried about their work. I've had 6-7 of my ~80 tell me they have it and we've had to make arrangements which generally consist of "tell me when you're better."

By contrast, the administration tells us that we will only be notified about students with coronavirus in our classes if it is required during contract tracing. Of course, the administration falsely says that that means that if somoene is literally in a room with you they will not tell you because they are "at least 6 feet away and masked" which does not qualify for notification for contact tracing for them. Which is a joke, since by their guidelines on room capacity (long story), no one is 6 feet away.

Luckily, for my and their sake, my students are smart enough not to come to their assigned half day of class---we're on hybrid classes so I'm handling in person and zoom simultaneously---so I typically don't have more than 1-3 students who can stay quite far away from me (in a small enclosed room). Though technically that number *could* be up to 20 which would just be a comically unsafe environment, especially given the active outbreak among students that is subsiding finally a little bit. Needless to say, I take a coronavirus test every week. Still negative. Thank god for students being reasonable and realizing the danger. My employer sure doesn't give a fuck and it's all hush hush like yours, Sag.

My informal sense is that most employers are handling it like yours, Sag. Giving as little information as possible and narrowly defining who has to be contact traced and informed to keep people coming into work every day. Love American worker protections and capitalism.