Mar 27, 2020 - Yet Another COVID-19 Update

The COVID-19 pandemic is on everybody's mind now and you've certainly
noticed that gopherspace is aflutter with reports from around the world.
Here's my report from the suburbs around Washington DC in the U.S.

But first: dgold[1], I hope you're back to 100% and that none of your family
caught the virus!

Currently, my state has less than 800 confirmed cases, but we are one of
the states with the lowest amount of testing, so that number is probably
a pretty big underestimate.

Panic shopping is happening and is likely just as you've heard about
elsewhere. Stores are out of hand sanitizer, bleach, dried beans, and some
stores are limiting sales to one per customer on items like milk, eggs, cases
of water bottles, and toilet paper.

I have shopped in a few different type of stores and seen varying types of
behavior from other shoppers.  The stores I have hit include Costco, Sams
Club, a local "ethnic" market, and a Harris Teeter.  By far, the craziest
shoppers are at Costco -- that's where the panic toilet paper hoarders can
be seen.  I kid you not, I overheard someone near the emptied out toilet
paper area saying, "why are we buying so much toilet paper?" to which his
companion shopper said "I don't know, but maybe it's because the coronavirus
causes GI symptoms."  I went across the street to Sams Club and they were
fully stocked with toilet paper.

The "ethnic market" (a Korean/Hispanic/Indian store) was fully stocked with
everything, including the typical dizzying array of dried beans, rices, and
other grains.  Traffic in the store was a little heavier than normal, but
no panic.

We're not exactly preppers in my house, but we have enough to keep us full
for several weeks.  We did top off with larger than normal purchases of
eggs, milk, flour and dried beans/rice/etc. --and from Costco, the glorious
1/2 mile (4/5 km) roll of saran wrap!

Two weeks ago (March 14-15) was when the local area was first gripped with 
unease about the growing threat and impending restrictions on social
interactions.  My home is along the flight path for several major airports
and it was interesting to see how few flights were crossing the sky.
Instead, we are now greeted by frequent military helicopters shuttling key
figures in the military and public health arenas in to DC for conferences
with the president or others around the Whitehouse.

I won't comment much about Dumball Trump's handling of this crisis, only 
mentioning that The Atlantic had it right when it said he has a ghostdown
of scientic expertise in the Whitehouse.

Personally, I have been teleworking for two weeks straight now.  I normally
telework no more than once a week, and I usually save up my non-social 
activities for those days -- training, writing, researching, etc.  Now I've
been thrust into making things work over Webex, phone conference bridges,
email, and other remote collaboration tools.  At first this was a real 
struggle for me.  I'm not exactly a "people person" but I like in person
interaction better because I take a lot from facial expressions and body
language.  But I'm adapting.

Another part of teleworking that has been a stress is the fact that my 
kids' school is closed so my wife and I are not only teleworking but 
"homeschooling" the kids.  In some ways, this is forcing us to become
better parents as we are solely responsible for the structure of the kids'
daily schedules; we can no longer rely on the school to do that.

So daily life is grinding into a new routine.  Although we do go outside
for walks, it is a little like prison (not that I would know) in that  I'm
mostly confined to a small area and I'm eating a lot.  A lot! And my home
squat rack and bench press are getting way more use than I have ever
otherwise had time for.

While I was hoping that this social distancing / teleworking period would
give me some time for a few hobby programming projects, the school
closures put an end to that dream.  Still, I have one project that I will
be phlogging about in the future; an email-based social platform that
is currently in working beta-ish form.  I call it friSBEe, where the SBE
stands for Service-by-Email.  If you would like to be one of the brave
few early beta testers, even before I make a thoroughly descriptive phlog
post about it, feel free.  Here's a project overview page [2]. I actually
have a *lot* of plans for friSBEe, but not enough time to do much with them.
So if any beta testers like coding Python and want to work on it, I'm
certainly open to collaborating.

Well, the most recent triad of military helicopters has just flown over
twice, which I will take as a signal that this post is getting way too
long.  I'll keep my next post short. 

[1] gopher://ascraeus.org/0/phlog/047.txt
[2] https://rawtext.club/~frisbee