Government Response to Coronavirus: With Pence in Charge, We're Doomed

[GreyhoundFan]

"The first U.S. layoffs from the coronavirus are here"

Spoiler

The coronavirus outbreak is taking a deep toll on the U.S. economy, prompting hundreds of layoffs over the past week alone and halting a historic 11-year bull market in stocks.

Strong job growth and soaring financial markets have fueled the U.S. economic expansion over the past decade. Now the rapid market decline and initial layoffs are heightening fears that the longest economic expansion in U.S. history could come to a sudden end, just a month after unemployment stood at a half-century low.

The Dow Jones industrial average lost 1,465 points, or 5.9 percent, Wednesday with every sector slumping after the World Health Organization designated the coronavirus a pandemic. The Dow closed in bear market territory, meaning it had shed more than 20 percent from its high less than a month ago.

Airlines, hotels, travel agencies and event companies have all been suffering, but interviews with more than two dozen firms and workers reveal that the pain is now translating into layoffs in a wider circle of industries, including a bakery and a chain restaurant.

At the Port of Los Angeles, 145 drivers have been laid off and others have been sent home without pay as massive ships from China stopped arriving and work dried up. At travel agencies in Atlanta and Los Angeles, several workers lost their jobs as bookings evaporated. Christie Lites, a stage-lighting company in Orlando, laid off more than 100 of its 500 workers nationwide this past week and likely will lay off 150 more, according to chief executive Huntly Christie. Meanwhile a hotel in Seattle is closing an entire department, a former employee said, and as many as 50 people lost their jobs after the South by Southwest festival in Austin got canceled.

Economists fear more layoffs in the coming weeks as supply chains come to a halt and people stay home and spend less.

“We will definitely see an effect on jobs from the coronavirus, and it could be pretty large in leisure and hospitality,” said Julia Pollak, labor economist at ZipRecruiter. “The first thing we’ll see is a reduction in hours. We hear many reports of employers canceling staff everywhere except in health care.”

Monday in Los Angeles, Sam Creighton and about 20 colleagues were fired from the China Visa Service Center. Creighton helped Americans get travel documents to China, but business plummeted as groups and individuals canceled trips to Asia out of virus fear. The company processed around 400 visas a month; in February, that number fell to 22. The visa center did not return a request for comment.

“This job was my paycheck,” said Creighton, 27, who worked at the company for about three years. “I really don’t know what to do next."

Baiden King lost her job at Carson’s Cookie Fix bakery in Omaha on Tuesday because online sales and customer traffic dried up dramatically — especially after the state’s first case of covid-19 was reported nearby. The company didn’t return a request for comment. King said her manager told her when she showed up for her shift that morning she had no choice. King made $11 an hour.

“If my job’s laying off people, I can only imagine other employers are as well,” said King, who is preparing to move back in with her parents. “I’m not sure anyone will be hiring.”

These early coronavirus-related jobs cuts appear to have mostly affected younger, entry-level employees and gig workers. Workers receiving pink slips said they have no idea whether these layoffs will be permanent and that it is nearly impossible to look for another job right now, with many companies instituting hiring freezes. Uncertainty is high, and as people lose jobs — or fear losing jobs — they typically scale back spending even more, which has a ripple effect on local economies.

For example, the Port of Los Angeles, the busiest port in the United States, has become a “ghost town,” four workers said. They said the port has never been this quiet, not even during the Great Recession.

The ongoing lack of cargo prompted Shippers Transport Express to send layoff notices at the end of February to 145 drivers who transport containers from the port to corporate warehouse hubs. The company told workers there is a “near shutdown” of its operations at the port “for the foreseeable future.” Many factories closed in China, stunting shipments to the United States.

“I’ve been working the ports for 13 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Randy L. Williams, a trucker for Shippers Transport Express. “I’m glad I didn’t buy a house yet.”

He said the port typically handles over 1,000 containers a night at his part of the operation, including some Walmart products, but is down to 200. He didn’t work at all last week and it’s been spotty this week.

Williams has dipped into his savings, and money is tight with a son in college. But he has union benefits and is applying for unemployment insurance. He also saved from years of $29-an-hour pay. Not everyone at the port has that situation.

Josue Alvarez drives for another company operating at the port, XPO Logistics, but is classified as an independent contractor, meaning he gets no vacation, sick days or health insurance. He pays for his truck and all related expenses. He typically makes $2,000 a week, but since mid-February has made $300 a week, an income he cannot survive on for long.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty right now. My dispatchers say it will get worse before it gets better,” said Alvarez, who is 26 and lives with his parents. His father is also a trucker at the port. They show up early every day hoping for work but in the past two weeks almost always get sent home with no pay.

“The disruption to trade will be felt well beyond the dock workers,” said Stephen Levy, senior economist at the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. “Half of China’s goods come to the Port of Los Angeles. That will be felt by warehouse workers, truckers and people in the wholesale trade.”

The slowdown of goods moving across the country is hitting United Parcel Services hard, as drivers in Los Angeles have had their hours and pay scaled back. Ron Herrera, director of the Teamsters Port Division, the union representing UPS drivers, cited a decline in shipments because of coronavirus. A UPS spokesman said it was a “routine” staffing adjustment and that those drivers “are allowed to work at either a full- or a part-time” UPS facility.

Major airlines, weathering a massive decline in travelers, have not started layoffs, but nearly all have canceled routes and many have put on a hiring freeze, said Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, which represents about 50,000 flight attendants at 20 airlines.

“It’s just like a factory,” Nelson said. “When it slows down, and they cut all of the overtime hours, that is a massive pay cut for people right off the top.”

As consumers and businesses begin to pull back on spending, gig workers and independent contractors are having a particularly tough time. They are caught in limbo: Work is drying up, meaning they are effectively laid off, but they do not get to collect unemployment insurance. A payroll tax cut President Trump has proposed would not help them.

“It’s kind of like I’m laid off but I’m not,” said Chad Denick, 35, who was told Monday he no longer needed to report to his job as a catering contractor for a tech company because employees would be working from home for the rest of the month. “But this is what I know: I don’t have a job at least until April.”

Denick stopped going out to restaurants and scaled back on purchases, like the $20 phone-charging mat he picked up a few days ago.

Spending behavior changes like that are one of the reasons, restaurant chains are starting to feel the crunch. Buca di Beppo, the Italian restaurant chain owned by Planet Hollywood, has begun laying off sales managers around the country, according to a former employee. Neither Buca di Beppo nor Planet Hollywood responded to a request for comment.

The cancellation of major conferences, including South by Southwest, Austin’s annual tech, music and film festival, also has created ripple effects of lost gigs. For Elle Mahoney, a freelance stage manager and producer, the South by Southwest cancellation knocked out 10 percent of her income. She just got engaged but is not planning or picking a wedding date.

“Everything is just on hold,” said Mahoney, 35, who is reaching out to people she used to nanny for to help make up lost pay. “It’s just really hard for us to depend on money from gig to gig.”

The economic strain is also starting to slow down and even freeze hiring that was in the works. In Kansas City, Mo., Sherry Caserta owns Travel Employment Agency, and she’s fielding a flood of phone calls, telling potential applicants their chances of landing a new job “are limited right now” as job postings are evaporating.

“The layoffs are already happening,” she said. “Most of these are last-hired, first-fired situations, but I’m really seeing it pick up this week in big cities: Atlanta, New York, Chicago.”

The travel industry layoffs reached Alex Brown, who was shocked at how quickly it all happened. Brown made $12 an hour overseeing marketing for a boutique travel agency in Atlanta. She learned on Monday she was being laid off because of nosediving sales and a falling stock market. Her boss told her he would get in touch “when this all blows over.”

“Even with that, I really wasn’t expecting to get laid off so soon,” she said.

Brown, 22, is not sure where to find new work. She emailed her former manager at an upscale restaurant and plans to talk to her boss at a gelato shop, where she works one shift a week, to see whether she can get more hours. She is afraid those places will be struggling soon, too.

“I don’t even know where I should be looking,” Brown said. “Which businesses are actually going to be hiring long-term for this strange year ahead of us? Everyone is cutting back.”

 

[apple1]

Travel ban now (such as it is) = closing the barn door after the cows got out.

The virus is already in most US states, including examples of community spread.

No answers on testing. Sanjay Gupta (CNN) said last night that within the previous 24 hours, the CDC did 0 tests and public health labs across the nation did 8 tests. (Yes, you read those numbers right). He could not access testing that might have been done by commercial labs.

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘Italy has abandoned us’: People are being trapped at home with their loved ones’ bodies amid coronavirus lockdown"

Spoiler

When his sister died after contracting the novel coronavirus, Luca Franzese thought that things couldn’t get much worse.

Then, for more than 36 hours, the Italian actor and mixed martial arts trainer was trapped at home with Teresa Franzese’s decaying body, unable to find a funeral home that would bury her.

“I have my sister in bed, dead, I don’t know what to do,” Franzese said in a Facebook video over the weekend, pleading for help. “I cannot give her the honor she deserves because the institutions have abandoned me. I contacted everyone, but nobody was able to give me an answer.”

In Italy, which has the second-highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the world, 827 deaths have been attributed to covid-19. The government has taken extraordinary measures to contain the pandemic, restricting the movements of nearly 16 million people as the entire country has gone on lockdown.

But attempts to slow the spread of the disease have led to unintended consequences, including several instances where funeral homes reportedly refused to collect the bodies of those infected with the virus.

According to Al Jazeera, Teresa Franzese, 47, suffered from epilepsy but was healthy up until last week, when she began showing symptoms of coronavirus. She died on Saturday evening, in her Naples home.

In a series of videos posted to Facebook the following afternoon, Luca Franzese said that his sister had been tested for the virus only after her death. The results came back positive, and he and several other relatives were placed under quarantine. That left a dilemma: What to do with Teresa’s body?

After various authorities failed to come up with an answer, Franzese said, the city of Naples finally referred him to a funeral home. But the funeral home refused, telling him it wasn’t equipped to deal with the situation.

“It was the first case in Italy in which a person with the virus dies at home, so there was some confusion on what to do,” Francesco Emilio Borrelli, a local councilor who also serves as a member of Campania’s Regional Health Commission, told Al Jazeera.

On Sunday evening, Franzese posted an emotional appeal to his followers on Facebook, urging them to take the virus seriously as he stood in the same room where his sister lay dead in the background.

“We are ruined,” he said. “Italy has abandoned us."

The video, which had been viewed about 9.5 million times by Thursday, got the attention that Franzese was seeking. On Monday morning, a local funeral home finally agreed to take Teresa’s body, sending a crew outfitted in masks, goggles and hazmat suits to collect her corpse.

No family members were able to attend the funeral. Pasquale Pernice, one of the workers at Aprea Funeral Home, told Al Jazeera that the experience had been “surreal.”

Efi Campania, the association representing funeral home directors in the area, told local reporters that the delay in collecting Teresa’s body was due to administrative hurdles, not any reluctance on their part. “Our heartfelt and sincere condolences to the Franzese family,” the group said in a statement.

But the same situation appears to have played out elsewhere. The Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata news agency reported Wednesday that prosecutors in the province of Savona were opening a probe into an incident where funeral homes refused to transport the body of an elderly woman who died Feb. 29 after contracting coronavirus.

Yet another disturbing scenario played out this week when a woman was quarantined alongside the body of her dead husband. Giancarlo Canepa, the mayor of Borghetto Santo Spirito in northern Italy, told CNN that the man died at 2 a.m. Monday, but that nobody would be allowed to remove his body until Wednesday morning.

“Unfortunately, we have a security protocol we must follow,” Canepa said.

The man, who has not been publicly identified, tested positive for coronavirus before he died, but refused to be taken to the hospital, Canepa told CNN. After he passed away, quarantine measures prevented anyone from entering the house and collecting his body.

The decision prompted an uproar, with neighbors telling television news station IVG.it that it was painful to know that the grieving widow was alone with her deceased husband’s body. The woman had been standing on her balcony and crying for help, they said, and the man’s relatives were desperately pleading for someone to interfere.

“We are treated worse than garbage,” one of the man’s family members told IVG.it.

After telling CNN on Tuesday that there was nothing they could do, authorities removed the man’s body that same morning. IVG.it reported that officials had been waiting for further testing to be completed. But given the circumstances, officials agreed that his corpse should be transferred to a morgue instead.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

In the midst of all the grim news, this made me laugh:

 

[clueliss]

This 'travel ban' is a week and a half too late.  

As someone who has been following this since January - I found it interesting last night that my twitter and Facebook feeds blew up.  Was it the Moron in Chief's speech?  No.  It was Tom Hanks in Australia testing positive and then the NBA/Utah Jazz player testing positive and the plug being pulled on pro ball play.  Yup - now you have mainstream 'Merica's attention.  

Heck - Kansas City finally decided to cancel St. Patrick's Day parade next week (after everything else that went on yesterday happened).  However as far as I know the Big 12 tournament continues (everyone is already there).  SEC tourney is now no crowd except family members/staff.  

[GreyhoundFan]

"MGM halts its Vegas buffets amid the coronavirus outbreak, and others are doing the same"

Spoiler

By now, the steps for helping to slow the spread of the coronavirus are familiar: Wash your hands. Don’t touch your face. Now, restaurants are adding another item to their own list: Nix the buffets.

The big daddy of such self-serve smorgasbords, MGM Resorts International, which operates hotels along the Vegas strip famous for their generous spreads, this week announced it will temporarily close buffets at seven of its properties: ARIA, Bellagio, MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay, the Mirage, Luxor and Excalibur.

And as the threat of the virus looms, restaurants and other food-service outlets across the country are shuttering or at least casting a germ-wary eye on their own buffets, where communal utensils and boxes offer opportunities for the virus to spread.

Dan Henroid, director of nutrition and food services for the University of California at San Francisco’s teaching hospital, says he’s eliminating all the self-serve stations in the three campus cafes he oversees — which includes salad bars and serve-yourself cereals and soups, within the next two days. They’ll either be converted into served counters or be discontinued, he said.

His goal is twofold: first, to reduce the number of shared touched surfaces, and second, to move customers rather than having them congregate. “The goal is to get them through quickly and encourage them to get things to go,” he says.

The Centers for Disease Control has not yet recommended “social distancing” for the general population, but some public-health advocates are suggesting avoiding crowds as a way of slowing the virus.

Crowds haven’t been a problem at Masala Art in Washington’s Tenleytown neighborhood, general manager Himanshu Kakkar says, but the restaurant stopped offering its daily lunch buffet on Wednesday. Instead, many of the dishes previously available from the communal copper pots will be offered as stand-alone lunch specials. “Things had slowed down,” Kakkar says. “We had barely anyone at lunch. People were concerned about the buffets, and it was also a waste of food.” 

He says the restaurant has been hit particularly hard because many of the weekday clientele are older people who are staying home on the advice of health officials. High-risk people — older people and those with underlying conditions — in areas where the virus is spreading are being advised to “take extra measures to put distance between yourself and other people,” according to the CDC, and “stay home as much as possible.”

Even fine-dining venues are taking the precaution: The Lafayette, the elegant restaurant atop the Hay-Adams Hotel with sweeping views of the White House, is replacing its regular Sunday brunch buffet with an a-la-carte-only menu, a representative says.

Public health experts say the potentially problematic part of a buffet isn’t the food. Officials say coronavirus is not thought to be transmitted through food, but rather through droplets — from a cough or sneeze — that may be transferred from a hard surface to another person’s nose or eyes. Restaurants themselves don’t pose any more of a risk than other similarly public venues, they say.

But Aubree Gordon, an associate professor in the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, notes that buffets offer plenty of surfaces where the virus could lurk. “There is a risk of you touching things and then touching your face, and particularly with a buffet you will be handling a lot of utensils that other people have touched,” she said. 

Restaurants have been scrambling to step up their sanitation practices, mandating more frequent wipe-downs of commonly touched surfaces and monitoring employees for signs of illness.

MGM said in a statement the closures of its buffets would be temporary and that the company would be evaluating them weekly. Not all the Las Vegas casinos are following suit: Local CBS affiliate 8 News Now reported that Caesars Entertainment, among others, is continuing its buffets.

Kakkar says he thinks Masala Art will bring back the buffet when the coronavirus threat dies down. “We will see in 10 or 15 days how people are responding — whether they are coming out or not, and what’s happening.”

Buffet shuttering is just one step restaurateurs and others are taking. Henroid this week plans to reduce the number of seats in the cafes to encourage less lingering — and to make room for a greater distance between tables.

Henroid says the move comes with challenges, including getting customers — most of whom are faculty, staff and students who dine at the cafes every day and are used to their routines — to adjust to the new setup. And he says he’s aware more challenges could lie ahead. For instance, if schools close, child care could become a problem for some of his employees. But he says all he can do is adapt.

“We’ll just have to roll with the punches,” he says.

 

[clueliss]

Princess Cruises are suspended for 60 days.  (in extended family news - the cousin once removed who was planning a family cruise for spring break has cancelled but only because she's a nurse and the hospitals are starting to impose 14 day quarantines for staff members that leave the country when they return)

[laPapessaGiovanna]

Science Mag is PISSED at tRump

Spoiler

"Do me a favor, speed it up, speed it up.” This is what U.S. President Donald Trump told the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference, recounting what he said to pharmaceutical executives about the progress toward a vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Anthony Fauci, the long-time leader of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been telling the president repeatedly that developing the vaccine will take at least a year and a half—the same message conveyed by pharmaceutical executives. Apparently, Trump thought that simply repeating his request would change the outcome. China has rightfully taken criticism for squelching attempts by scientists to report information during the outbreak. Now, the United States government is doing similar things. Informing Fauci and other government scientists that they must clear all public comments with Vice President Mike Pence is unacceptable. This is not a time for someone who denies evolution, climate change, and the dangers of smoking to shape the public message. Thank goodness Fauci, Francis Collins [director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)], and their colleagues across federal agencies are willing to soldier on and are gradually getting the message out.

While scientists are trying to share facts about the epidemic, the administration either blocks those facts or restates them with contradictions. Transmission rates and death rates are not measurements that can be changed with will and an extroverted presentation. The administration has repeatedly said—as it did last week—that virus spread in the United States is contained, when it is clear from genomic evidence that community spread is occurring in Washington state and beyond. That kind of distortion and denial is dangerous and almost certainly contributed to the federal government’s sluggish response. After 3 years of debating whether the words of this administration matter, the words are now clearly a matter of life and death.

And although the steps required to produce a vaccine could possibly be made more efficient, many of them depend on biological and chemical processes that are essential. So the president might just as well have said, “Do me a favor, hurry up that warp drive.”

I don’t expect politicians to know Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism or the Diels-Alder chemical reaction (although I can dream). But you can’t insult science when you don’t like it and then suddenly insist on something that science can’t give on demand. For the past 4 years, President Trump’s budgets have made deep cuts to science, including cuts to funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the NIH. With this administration’s disregard for science of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the stalled naming of a director for the Office of Science and Technology Policy—all to support political goals—the nation has had nearly 4 years of harming and ignoring science.

Now, the president suddenly needs science. But the centuries spent elucidating fundamental principles that govern the natural world—evolution, gravity, quantum mechanics—involved laying the groundwork for knowing what we can and cannot do. The ways that scientists accumulate and analyze evidence, apply inductive reasoning, and subject findings to scrutiny by peers have been proven over the years to give rise to robust knowledge. These processes are being applied to the COVID-19 crisis through international collaboration at breakneck, unprecedented speed; Sciencepublished two new papers earlier this month on SARS-CoV-2, and more are on the way. But the same concepts that are used to describe nature are used to create new tools. So, asking for a vaccine and distorting the science at the same time are shockingly dissonant.

A vaccine has to have a fundamental scientific basis. It has to be manufacturable. It has to be safe. This could take a year and a half—or much longer. Pharmaceutical executives have every incentive to get there quickly— they will be selling the vaccine after all—but thankfully they also know that you can’t break the laws of nature to get there.

Maybe we should be happy. Three years ago, the president declared his skepticism of vaccines and tried to launch an antivaccine task force. Now he suddenly loves vaccines.

But do us a favor, Mr. President. If you want something, start treating science and its principles with respect.

 

[Ticklish]

If anyone else is a podcast nerd (which aside from this thread is where I get most of my news), NPR's Up First has been following this since it started in China months ago and talks about it almost daily. Bill Nye's Science Rules podcast has an episode out today about coronavirus (recorded yesterday). And his guest was a doctor who has a podcast called Epidemic about the coronavirus that I'm listening to now. There have been other podcasts here and there on the subject as well. No new information, but I thought I'd share in case anyone else is interested.

I agree that all of this is too little, too late and it's depressing to think that we're only at the beginning of this in the US. My anxiety is ridiculously high right now. 

[clueliss]

Public access to the Capitol Complex has been suspended

From CNN's Phil Mattingly 

On the floor just now, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell officially announced the suspension of public access to the Capitol Complex through the end of March.

[thoughtful]

10 hours ago, ADoyle90815 said:

the Manchurian Cantaloupe

The only thing I don't love about this is that I didn't think of it years ago!

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, clueliss said:

Princess Cruises are suspended for 60 days.  (in extended family news - the cousin once removed who was planning a family cruise for spring break has cancelled but only because she's a nurse and the hospitals are starting to impose 14 day quarantines for staff members that leave the country when they return)

Viking has suspended as well.

 

 

No big surprise here:

 

[clueliss]

I tweet yelled at both senators and my representative earlier.  One of the senators was babbling (again) about our medical supply chain & China. And while I agree with him I'm more concerned about our current inability to test folks.  

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Interesting article:

 

[clueliss]

Another Utah Jazz player with a positive

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

My son will spend the day trying to get someone on the phone from the airlines to refund his tickets as he's cancelled his trip to the Netherlands...he was to leave next week.

His college is closed and doing online classes until further notice.  My other son is on spring break now and waiting to hear if they will allow students back after.

The roads today were like a holiday...so empty.  I don't love traffic on my long commute but knowing why it's not there was  eerie.  

I'm not in a high risk area or job … but my youngest works at Whole Foods and the idea of him being with the public and handling money makes me nervous.

 

[Ali]

1 hour ago, HerNameIsBuffy said:

My son will spend the day trying to get someone on the phone from the airlines to refund his tickets as he's cancelled his trip to the Netherlands...he was to leave next week.

His college is closed and doing online classes until further notice.  My other son is on spring break now and waiting to hear if they will allow students back after.

The roads today were like a holiday...so empty.  I don't love traffic on my long commute but knowing why it's not there was  eerie.  

I'm not in a high risk area or job … but my youngest works at Whole Foods and the idea of him being with the public and handling money makes me nervous.

 

My husband works from home. I am a teacher, so I am exposed to everything. I work part time and am off today. I am dreading exposing myself tomorrow. Districts in my area are preparing for possible closures. I worry about what would happen to my students if my district were to close. Most of my students are low income. What are they going to eat? Do they even have internet  access and a home environment that will allow distance learning? Some them are seniors who will likely graduate this spring and have overcome so many setbacks to get to the point in life where they are now. It would be wonderful to have a Secretary of Education and a President who would care about these issues instead of padding their pockets.

I am frustrated that me and my family cannot be easily tested for the virus.  I wonder if I make the right decision putting my daughter  on the bus this morning. The road we live on was significantly less busy this morning. I kept waiting for a car to pass. It almost made me tell my daughter we are doing school at home today. 

Edited March 12, 2020 by Ali

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[SassyPants]

T-2 and counting for our international trip to So America. My husband is currently traveling from the East Coast to our home in CA. If anyone has been exposed it is my husband. He has traveled extensively through the US in the last 2 months. The closest school to our home is now closed due to outbreak. We live in a small(7,000) people beach enclave. Our church has canceled services for the next 2 weeks, following new guidelines released  this week by our county. 
 

There are 12 cases of this virus (same family that traveled to Italy) in my daughter’s large city home in SoAmerica. I am familiar with the health care system in that country as my daughter has been hospitalized and has had several surgeries. I have also had personal experience with less critical care and was treated well. I am less worried about getting tested/treated there vs in US. Pretty sad, really.

[Ticklish]

7 minutes ago, Ali said:

My husband works from home. I am a teacher, so I am exposed to everything. I work part time and am off today. I am dreading exposing myself tomorrow. Districts in my area are preparing for possible closures. I worry about what would happen to my students if my district were to close. Most of my students are low income. What are they going to eat? Do they even have internet  access and a home environment that will allow distance learning? Some them are seniors who will likely graduate this spring and have overcome so many setbacks to get to the point in life where they are now. It would be wonderful to have a Secretary of Education and a President who would care about these issues instead of padding their pockets.

I am frustrated that me and my family cannot be easily tested for the virus.  I wondered if I was making the right decision putting my daughter  on the bus this morning. The road we live on was significantly less busy this morning. I kept waiting for a car to pass. It almost made me tell my daughter we are doing school at home today. 

My husband is a teacher. He shares your concerns. Our high school students all have school provided iPads, but not all have internet. Not all will have regular meals if schools close. This all breaks my heart. Our district has said nothing beyond "we're monitoring the situation". We start Spring Break tomorrow, and are still waiting to hear what happens next. My husband and I have talked about pulling the girls from their spring sports enrollments and I don't know the consequences of keeping them home for a few weeks if the schools choose to do nothing, so we have some decisions to make over break. I've mentioned I work from home, but even if the we keep the kids home, my husband would still have to work if schools are open so we're all exposed anyway. I'm starting to feel really defeated by this whole situation, and it's barely begun here. 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[SassyPants]

4 minutes ago, Ticklish said:

My husband is a teacher. He shares your concerns. Our high school students all have school provided iPads, but not all have internet. Not all will have regular meals if schools close. This all breaks my heart. Our district has said nothing beyond "we're monitoring the situation". We start Spring Break tomorrow, and are still waiting to hear what happens next. My husband and I have talked about pulling the girls from their spring sports enrollments and I don't know the consequences of keeping them home for a few weeks if the schools choose to do nothing, so we have some decisions to make over break. I've mentioned I work from home, but even if the we keep the kids home, my husband would still have to work if schools are open so we're all exposed anyway. I'm starting to feel really defeated by this whole situation, and it's barely begun here. 

I agree. Unless everyone is quarantined (China), it makes no difference if some are and some aren’t in terms of your family. That’s why my husband and I are still planning on taking our trip. We know that since he has traveled extensively since the beginning of the year, he very likely has been exposed somewhere along the way. I was considering wearing a mask during our travel, but then I realized that unless I wore it from my home to my daughter’s, there would still be a chance of exposure. If it was a 3-4 trip it would be doable, but not for a 13 hour door to door trip. 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

No surprise: