Covid-19 Discussions and Stories

[aaronatthedoublef]

The New York Times reported no new deaths over night in their Thursday newsletter. That is the first time since March.

Here restaurants are open and doing about 50% of normal business but it is heavily weather dependent. They want to move inside before the scheduled June 20 date. When I spoke with my friend he figured they would be able to use about half of their space inside.

He has lots of flour and yeast so that appears to be back to normal too. I did not ask if I could start using his kitchen again. I don't want to even if he said yes. Even though the CDC says the risk of spreading through surfaces is low I do not want to risk my infecting one of his employees or customers.

I'm going to see if I can find some of the large equipment he has used locally.

[S_Wirth]

Finally, I received a gallon of 70% alcohol gel hand sanitizer yesterday. We were low on supply and I'd been cutting our supply with 70% isopropyl alcohol to stretch it. Very few places sold gallons and their prices were extreme plus high shipping.

I found a place in OH late last week that had 30% off on gallons. I had read bad reviews from back when companies had to switch to grain alcohol but this company said our old formula is back.

My UPS shipment had a delay of one day due to civil unrest in an area my package had to travel.

I am filling pumps part way full thru the house so we have it handy where we need it.

[skeptic7]

The local grocery store is now well stocked with toilet paper, there are no empty spaces on the shelves any more. There is flour in the flour section, and even 5 bags of KAF all purpose flour, and lots of more common brands of flour. No whole wheat flour unfortunately of any brand.

[Mike Nolan]

The specific type of toilet paper my wife prefers hasn't shown up in stores yet, and I don't find it online, either, I'm afraid the Cottonelle people may have discontinued several types to increase production on other types and I don't know if they'll resume making this one.

[BakerAunt]

Locally, there is not much TP on shelves at either the grocery or CVS. The local grocery also currently does not have unbleached flour, but their flour selection was limited even before the shortages caused by the pandemic. Fortunately, our stocks on both are adequate for now.

[kimbob]

Our town farmer's market opened today. Not many vendors but the bread guys were there and I bought a loaf of roasted garlic bread (big cloves of roasted garlic in it) and olive roasted red pepper ciabatta. Heaven! Was hoping to get some honey, syrup and apples but those 2 vendors weren't there. Other vendors were wood craft, solar energy, cookies, jellies and plants. Didn't want any of that. I'll go next Saturday again and hopefully they'll be there.

[Mike Nolan]

I would think it was a little early in the season for apples.

[kimbob]

Early to pick but the farmer has apple orchards and a huge cold storage bldg. The apples taste just as good as in September/October.

[cwcdesign]

Bakeraunt, your numbers sound like ours - they keep going up and lots of people think it’s “over.” We have so many out of state tourists . . .

I placed an online order to pick up at Sam’s. They won’t let you order TP or paper towels online. So we called and they put me through to the online people. I explained that I wanted to order in case they had them in when my order was filled. The nicest person said we have it in now, what do you want? We’ll hold it til you pick up your order! I have 24 mega rolls of Charmin and 12 double rolls of Bounty - that should last us a few months😁

[skeptic7]

I went grocery shopping at 7:00 am at Wegmans. They had plenty of flour including KAF All purpose flour. I bought a bag. They didn't have KAF WW flour of any sort, but they did have store brand whole wheat flour so I bought a bag of that too. I was tempted to stock up but I don't have much spare freezer space.

[Mike Nolan]

Most likely COVID-19 will never be 'over', the more appropriate question is: how well is it being dealt with?

In NYC and a number other places the answer was for a while "not very well". Conditions have improved in most of these places. But in places where the numbers weren't as bad, numbers can (and will) go up even if it is being dealt with about as well as can be expected at this point in our knowledge of the virus and with the arsenal of tools currently at our disposal.

Herd immunity, either from exposure to the virus or a vaccine, is not going to solve all our problems, and some of the control measures are likely to be around a LONG time. How our economic system adjusts to that is an ongoing challenge.

[BakerAunt]

We braved the next town to grocery shop at Aldi's and Kroger. Although 8:30-9:30 is supposed to be the "vulnerable" shopping time, 75% of the customers did NOT wear masks. Most of us who did are older. In Kroger, about 75% of customers wore masks. It was not as crowded as last time that we went, which might be because we were there by shortly after 9 a.m., but it might also be because people are back at work.

As we live in a small town in a rural area, grocery shopping in the larger town always had me thinking ahead for several weeks. Now when we go, I have a mentality of "What if we cannot get back here for a month or two?" I do not think that our county will close down again, but the increase in Covid-19 infections has been frightening. It went from 40 on May 15 to 305 on June 14, and it keeps increasing. I wish that people would be diligent about wearing masks.

Although a national new story states that cases in Indiana are going down--which the data do not show--the northern part of Indiana is now being hit particularly hard. However, the people in Indianapolis tend not to pay much attention to us, which is why we have such "rustic" road surfaces.

[aaronatthedoublef]

CT was just talking about the number of cases and, according to CDC guidelines it is not an increase in cases that should be concerning so much as an increase in cases in relation to the number of those tested. Our testing here has ramped up dramatically so of course the number of cases we find has risen. But the CDC's guidance is that 5% or less testing positive is acceptable for reopening.

Of course the percentage will go down some too because in March and even April tests were only available here to people who had good reason to be tested so most were coming back positive.

For example, our neighbor is an anesthesiologist at a local hospital and they now test EVERYONE before a procedure. They've setup their own testing lab and typically have results in four hours or less. And they are now performing elective procedures again. So they are testing more and seeing more infected people but as a percentage of the total tested the number is down.

[Italiancook]

Bloomberg has an article online today about KAF and its relationship with mills amid the flour shortage.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-06-16/how-king-arthur-dealt-with-a-flour-shortage-during-the-pandemic

[kimbob]

Thanks for posting that article, italiancook. Very interesting and I enjoyed reading it.

[Author]

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