How is Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) affecting your community?

[FABphones]

...My wife has just returned from Tesco's - had to queue for nearly 3 hours!
She got there at 8am as it was opening and there was bit of queue, which she assumed would move quite quickly, but no. She was told that as they have 85 delivery pickers in the shop and are only allowing 110 total, that only 25 from the queue can be in the shop at any time. Then when it got to 9am they opened for priority shoppers (vulnerable, NHS etc) and the main queue pretty much stopped. She finally entered the shop at 11am...

Yikes. Sounds like a folding stool, picnic and flask were needed. 

[countryman]

Delivery pickers in the shop? Good for those who made orders, not so good for the regular shoppers. Haven't heard about that here.
We were warned to do the easter shopping in time, because good friday and easter monday both are holidays here and the shops are closed. Saturday might get interesting in the shops. I'm stocked up already. I went early on tuesday and the queue just started to build up when I left.

[twocvbloke]

I've not tried getting to Tesco early myself, just through assuming others are doing the same causing queueing, so I've been going mid-afternoon to late evening when it's more peaceful, just being driven nuts by the one-way system they have now which goes in the exact opposite direction that I often walk through the store, broken my routine quite nicely there... 

[19and41]

Do they charge enough extra for delivery to warrant having to go through the queue, as opposed to having one of their people pick out the things you wanted in the first place?  That's something I'm debating doing here.

[TelePlay]

Delivery pickers in the shop?

How do they do that over there in Tesco stores?

My Walmart has employees that pick online orders to be picked up by the buyers outside the building but they have these carts that hold 16 baskets so one picker can handle 16 orders. Most I've seen in one visit was 3 pickers. That actually reduces the number of people in the store at one time if one person is taking the place of 16 others.

I tried online ordering once, just once. They got the order wrong and didn't have some stuff by the time they got around to filling my order. It was available when placed but the delivery slot they gave me was 4 days later and by then, some of the stuff was gone. Not at all happy with online ordering.

Picker charge was to add $5 to the order, which is waived at this time.

[tubaman]

Do they charge enough extra for delivery to warrant having to go through the queue, as opposed to having one of their people pick out the things you wanted in the first place?  That's something I'm debating doing here.

Delivery is free if you spend more than about £40. However, where I live it is next to impossible to get a delivery slot right now as they are all taken almost as quickly as they are released. I've just done a quick check as I write this and my local Tesco has no delivery slots available at all (and that is up to 30 April).

[19and41]

I did a little looking up and found the delivery service is free at a $35 or more order.  I checked Walmart for pickup of picked and bagged groceries.  It says that is just free.  Our 2 local walmarts do not provide the service.  the nearest is 12 miles away.  That still would be worth the trip for me.

[poplar1]

Here in the state of Georgia, it is illegal to wear *any* kind of mask in public! While this law may have been written to discourage KKK masks, it in fact applies as well to ski masks, Halloween masks....and masks to prevent the spread of Covid-19!

The gov'nuh is looking into the possibility of suspending (not repealing) this law for the duration of the emergency...stay tuned.

(Based on part of a story on Atlanta CBS 46 news at 11 PM Friday).

[TelePlay]

Is it time to open up the economy?

Total deaths in the US right now are about 17% of the deaths last year (490,000) due to the common, annual flu.

The "curve" seems to have been flattened nationwide and the only intent of that curve was to reduce infections so as to not overwhelm hospitals.

This stay at home stuff has to end sometime soon or bankruptcy will be the next epidemic. Is it time to go back to work using hard learned social distancing and personal hygiene practices?

[19and41]

I see they're working out what they are going to do.  It looks  like some of the larger businesses are suffering from high rates of illness absenteeism.  I see the food processors are being hit hard and constricting the flow of foodstuffs.

[TelePlay]

I see they're working out what they are going to do.

I guess I asked the question poorly.

What I was thinking was is it time for we the citizens to move on with our lives and start doing business with learned cautions to prevent irreparable harm to the economic web under which we all survived before being forces, with some good reason, to go into hiding. It's our decision.

The "theys" are driven by lucrative political forces and power, not needed in a time of crises, that are many times not in the interest of the citizens who depend on working for a living to survive and being able to profitably run their businesses to employ those who depend on work to survive.

Are we ready to take what we have learned and begin to live our lives with proper personal caution and responsibilities, to exercise out rights and freedoms as they were for centuries prior to the Wuhan release, regardless of what they say for reasons unknown to us.

Life's a risk. We are born, we live, we learn and we die one way or another. That's life.

So, are we individuals (some, none or all) ready to move forward with what we have learned, with our new found ability to do our own risk evaluations in conjunction with the cost/benefit analysis of actions based on those evaluations going forward, over the past few months? Is it time to come out of the panic cave give current virus statistics?

[19and41]

Seeing these events transpire, I remember when I was young in the early sixties and seeing the adults and their fears and concerns about contagious illnesses and their telling about when they had to exercise precautions against such illnesses.  I guess I was given some comfort inasmuch as many of the illnesses they feared were held in check by vaccines and antibiotics.  It just takes so very little for a new threat to take form.  Now we have several routes to take to develop vaccines.  Imagine when there were hardly any.  We have seen parallels from 9/11 to Pearl Harbor and now this outbreak to the 1918 pandemic.  It's quite sobering when all the chips are on the table.

[Key2871]

 I have to agree with John. If we don't start moving again then there's going to be a whole different problem that comes out of things shutting down.
Distancing, wearing masks and disinfecting surfaces should be top priority.
I realise it's a huge job, but a vaccine is months away at best. If we take reasonable precautions we should be safer. Only thing is to keep the panic people from getting into fist fights in stores because they insist on taking a stroll through the Isles in the stores.
I see that around here, people stand in the middle of the isle reading their shopping list and reading ingredients on labels then putting the stuff back.
I'm handicapped and it's very hard to stand and wait and wait for some people to go forward. And if you walk by them some get testy and mouthy.
I go in get what I want and leave, I don't linger reading ingredients on the darn package.

[twocvbloke]

At the moment I'm okay with things being somewhat reduced in services, but there is a limit to it and we will need to get things going again, but if we try to do so too soon it may cause a spike in infection cases (given that there are halfwitted deniers and naysayers who think autism comes from vaccines and all that!!!), I'd say wait 'til summer when the weather is more conducive to killing the virus off with environmental factors (higher temperatures, more daylight so more natural UV sterilising effects, drier so less places to linger, etc.)...

There are plenty of businesses going under which is sad, and of course people who have lost jobs from being laid off rather than put on furlough so they could apply for help elsewhere (E.G. in the UK the gov will pay up to 80% of wages for employees on furlough), but there are also multinational corporations holding out their hands because they're "losing profits", wanting government bail-outs while small family businesses get naff-all to sustain themselves, all the while the big corps have enough money to last if they actually do the smart thing and stop hoarding money...

[Greg G.]

LOTS of people walking their dogs!  I myself am fine.  My wife is retired and hangs out at home anyway.  I'm on a "covid-19 LOA" from work since I'm in the over 60 risk group.  I drive a city bus for King County Metro Transit (Seattle area).  What used to be rolling sardine cans of people have been reduced to just a handful of people each trip.  Fares have been suspended and passengers have to enter and exit through the rear door, plus the front area of the bus is barricaded so that there's no close contact with the driver.  They went from disinfecting the buses weekly to daily.