Mine won't take any precautions. None of the people I know over 65 are taking this seriously, which is so alarming because they are more likely to suffer severely from this virus.

Yep, and they went to a shopping mall for 2 hours after being released. Probably did some clothes shopping, went to the food court, walked around. But we shouldn't worry! Officials say there's low risk! 😡

There definitely was panic and worry about polio. My grandparents talked about the enormous relief they felt when the polio vaccine came out, because they no longer had to worry about their kids possibly contracting it and becoming paralyzed, spending their life in an iron lung, or dying. Polio outbreaks happened during the summer, and anyone that had the means would get out of the city for elbow room and fresh air to avoid the disease. During an outbreak, people were quarantined and had a sign put on their house to alert people. Francis Ford Copolla was quarantined for a year (!!!) because he caught polio. Mia Farrow, Alan Alda, and Neil Young also had polio as kids and spent months recovering. I do agree that we are spoiled. Most of us have never had to face something like that. If you've never seen how very, very bad a contagious illness can be, then it's easy to dismiss today's situation as a lot of hysteria and media hype.

That guy is a jerk. I hope he loses a ton of money on that. Shame on him.

I don't know if this will make anyone feel better, but hand sanitizer is probably being bought up because people are trying to flip it for profit on eBay. There are a lot of new listings on eBay for hand sanitizer at crazy high prices, ($25 for a 30oz bottle that would have cost $4 or $5 yesterday). Some of the shortages being seen may be due to opportunists.

So typical. I don't even try to give away things locally anymore because it's such a headache.

Honestly, no, I don't think the US will see quarantines like in China or what's happening in Italy. I could see the government ordering the closing of schools, libraries, all non-essential government buildings, etc to force social distancing, but not like in Italy where no one's allowed in or out of certain areas. I think it would lead to too much civil unrest and fear to basically lock-down a city or town for 2+ weeks. IMO, if the virus has already been in the US since mid January, then the horse is out of the barn.

There's a lot of attention on not hoarding masks, but around me, masks have been out of stock for weeks. You can't hoard them because you can't buy them. As soon as Wuhan was locked down, people here started buying masks to send to China. There was also a lot of people buying masks to flip for profit on eBay and Amazon. There's over 30k listings for N95 masks on eBay. Most of what I'm seeing are the kind you'd buy at Home Depot for wood working or painting projects, not the ear-loop medical style masks. They seem to be selling for about $25 PER MASK. If masks are being produced anywhere in the US, they aren't hitting the shelves near me, so there isn't an opportunity for people to panic-buy them.

True, there are likely many more cases that do not require any sort of medical care. And who knows if we'll ever get real numbers from China or Iran. I'm not an infectious disease expert, so I have no idea of the methods they use to estimate how many potential cases we could be looking at. I'm just going off the numbers for influenza off the CDC website and the current stats on COVID-19 from worldometers.info. Current info is that 18% of the cases that have been officially diagnosed are considered serious/critical. Even if there are thousands more cases that are very minor and never receive a formal diagnosis, 18% of the ones that do get a diagnosis end up very, very sick.

Benzethonium chloride will kill enveloped viruses. Coronavirus is an enveloped virus, so it should kill it, (provided there is enough contact time with the skin).

It's not the number of deaths that has me concerned. It's that 18% of the currently infected people are considered serious/critical and need hospitalization. You don't see those sort of numbers with the flu. Less than 2% of diagnosed flu cases require hospitalization. I've read infectious disease experts saying that 40-70% of the population will get this virus over the next year. If 40% of my town gets this virus, that's 10,000 people. If 18% of them need hospitalization, that's 1,800 people. My local hospital has 125 beds. Even if the 1,800 critical patients are distributed evenly over a year, (unlikely to happen), that's still 150 patients needing significant medical support every month for a year, on top of all the "routine emergencies" that the hospital sees. Most of those patients would live, yes, but they'd also place an enormous demand on the medical establishment. Patients and staff all do better when there are adequate supplies and staff coverage. It would be a huge challenge to meet the needs of the community in this situation.

No, you are not being unreasonable. I would not want to take a trip like that, and if my husband said "I'm going to take a 'boys trip' to the Bahamas for a week, spend all our vacation money, and no you can't come", I'd be really hurt and angry. I'd also raise an eyebrow over a "friend" saying my family was being jealous. Not cool.

I really hope so. I griped a few pages back in this thread about a little kid who's grandma brought him to a library program, sick as a dog and wiping his nose on the furniture. Grandma knew he was sick and brought him out anyway because they were bored. Guess what? Now my kid is sick, despite washing hands, using hand sanitizer, and trying to stay away from this kid. Thankfully, my family is not medically fragile. This will just be an annoyance for us. But boy am I annoyed! We were supposed to visit with kiddo's great grandpa this weekend, and now we can't. Gr. grandpa is 86 and his wife isn't in good health. I can't bring a sick kid over there. I get so frustrated when people act amazed or indignant when told they should stay home when they are sick.

I use it after leaving the store. I could wash my hands in the store bathroom, but I still have to touch a zillion things of questionable cleanliness before I get in my car. Store grocery carts gross me out. I look at the little kid seat on them and wonder how many diaper blow outs have happened in that seat. Ick. Also, we're getting close to the time of year when tortoises start to cross the roads here. I pick them up and move them across the road so they don't get hit. Need hand sanitizer for afterwards, (hello, salmonella!).

I live in a rural area in a hot climate. Most people walk around with a bottle of water to avoid dehydration. The water here is very hard, too. We run ours through a softener, but that makes it taste salty. 😛 We get a monthly bottled water delivery, (the big 5 gallon bottles). A lot of other people do the same. I'm guessing the people in my area that are buying water are following the advice of "Get some extra now". Although now that I think about it, we've got a water bottling plant in town, so there shouldn't be any supply chain issues here for bottled water. I can fill bottles from the outside spigot if need be, because it bypasses the softener, but hauling water to the house is a bit more "Little House on the Prairie" than I want to go.

Central. Big bags of rice are not typical shopping purchases here for Friday. Bottled water can go either way, although I usually see that more later in the spring and summer, when it's crazy hot.

Just got back from the local Walmart. Hand Sanitizer is completely out of stock. Rubbing alcohol is completely out of stock. There is very little Advil on the shelf, but the Equate brand is fully stocked. Hand soap seemed a little sparse. I noticed some empty shelves in the pet food aisle. I hope that means people are stocking up for their pets, too. Saw a lot of people buying big bags of rice and bottles of water.

Our art teacher has made a firm statement about "keep your sick kids home" recently, after a nasty gi bug, strep, and the flu ripped through the local groups. We know a boy that had to be hospitalized because of strep. And still people are like "LoL, wUt gErMz?!"

I was just at a local event. There was a grandma with 2 kids there. Youngest kiddo was 3 or 4 and had a wet cough and green snot running down his face. He was all over the place, rubbing his face on the furniture, the glass door, and periodically crying for grandma to wipe his nose. This was an optional, social event, not something like school or work where it's mandatory and you could argue "well, they are in a tough spot because of attendance policies". The local event wasn't even geared towards little kids. It was geared toward older kids, so grandma could have dropped off the older sibling and kept the young, sick one out. Or sat in the car with the younger. Or just said "I'm sorry, but your brother is sick, so we'll stay home and play today". The kicker? Grandma was watching the younger because he was TOO SICK FOR DAYCARE. Daycare wouldn't let him come, but she just "had to get him out of the house for awhile!" 😖 I don't expect to live in a perfect, germ-free bubble. But holy cats, there's no reason for this.

Come to my town. Come to my homeschool group. They are casual about it. You see sick kids at events all.the.time. I see sick parents at events, often handling food. I have pulled waaaay back from hanging out with homeschool families here because of the casual attitude toward illness. No one here stays home if they have a cold. When I say kiddo and I can't come because one of us is sick, I get "oh that's ok! We aren't germaphobes!" What? No!

Every single person in my friend group is saying this virus is "no big deal" and all of this news is fear mongering. They aren't going to change a single thing they do, because it is no worse than a cold or the flu. This is so disheartening and why I worry about when this virus gets to this area. No one here will take it seriously. This is weighing very hard on me right now.

I realized I was overthinking this. Lysol spray would probably be fine and it's readily available.

Oh no, really? That's a testing method? No wonder people don't want to get tested. 😲

I've been trying to find some sort of spray that works on enveloped viruses like COVID-19, but the only thing that comes up that is readily available to the general public is bleach. Of course, people aren't going to want to spray their clothes with bleach. So either you wear raggedly clothes out to the store that you don't care if they get bleached, (lol), or you could wear blue farmer coveralls and leave them outside to hang in the sunlight. Or...? I don't know. You can make yourself crazy thinking about all this.