Covid 19 - Updates from your zones

[Mebediel]

Illinois' shelter-in-place order got extended from April 7th to April 30th, but, if I had to guess, it'll get extended again a few more times. My university just made the decision that summer classes will be online instead of in person. My mom is still trying to convince my sister to drive down to where I am, and I still have no idea whether or not that'll actually happen. She seems pretty happy by herself in her Chicago apartment (all her roommates went to stay with their families in the suburbs), although my mom starts panicking whenever she steps outside to do laundry or buy veggies :/

[Jitter]

Life in the Uusimaa Exclusion continues. The Uusimaa region, which includes the capital area and is home to about 1,7 million Finns (out of the total of 5,5 million) is the infection hotspot and has therefore been restricted from the rest of the country. Crossing the border is allowed for work, official business or "important personal reasons" which includes e.g. meetings between parents and children who live on different sides, but not meetings between adult couples.

Other than that we have no movement restrictions, but the government strongly recommends everybody to stay home except for completely necessary reasons. Schools are closed since 2,5 half weeks, and the closure was just extended until mid-May. Libraries, museums etc are also closed. The government wants to order restaurants and bars to close too, but it has proven surprisingly difficult to forbid private business from operating. Most of them have been closed for a while now but some are open as long as they can. The closure will likely take effect on Saturday, but food takeout will be allowed. Based on how difficult this is despite the obvious need, I don't really expect there will be forced closure of all non-essential businesses. But then I didn't expect any of this in February, so only time will tell!

Going out for a walk (or run, hike etc) is allowed, but keeping distance of at least 2 m is strongly recommended. This hasn't been a problem for us as we live in a suburban area and have a forest right around the corner. However a colleague of mine who lives in central Helsinki says it's difficult to go out for fresh air as there are so many people around it's hard to maintain the distance on the pedestrian lanes (at least we have pedestrian lanes everywhere!). Also the National Parks in the capital area and the best known nature spots have been so busy especially on weekends, that the state agency responsible for them keeps sending notifications for people to go to their nearby forests because it's not possible to keep the distance in the popular parts of the National Parks.

We have no need to cross the border from Uusimaa, but it is really weird to think there is an internal border in Finland. Must be even weirder for the conscripts who are helping police at the checkpoints! We don't have a militia-type organisation, just the civilian police force and then the Defence Forces i.e. the Finnish Armed Forces. The controlling of crossing traffic is a police operation, but for reasons of manpower Defence Forces are helping. A handful of people have been fined for illegal crossing. My parents live outside of the Zone but my brother lives in the same city (well, actually you know it's Joensuu) so we not too worried about them. We wouldn't be allowed to visit anyways. People over 70 are again strongly recommended to consign themselves into self-isolation.

Stores are mostly back to normal. Delivery service and collect-packed-groceries services are inundated so my husband goes to the store a couple of times a week. The rest of us stay home, luckily we have enough room so that each one can be alone in one room. We have two teenagers studying from home, and two adults working. Teenagers are managing surprisingly well, as is husband, I have trouble concentrating but I'm more or less waddling through.

Finland as a whole has about 1500 confirmed cases, about 150 people hospitalized and 19 deaths. No hospitals are full yet, and the fairly strict measures are of course intended to keep the situation within the realms of capacity of the health services. I'm not really scared but I am mighty worried. There is a huge surge of lay-offs (suspension of employment, or temporary termination) going on and while this hasn't affected either mine or my husband's companies at least yet, it has society-wide repercussions. Especially as it's now starting to look like the unemployment services will not be able to cope with the flood and the benefits may be delayed for several months.

[Róisín]

Familiar problems, thorny! We at least were able to hold our meetings for Farmers Market and community garden/Natural Resource Centre on the internet, with the addition of a few phone calls. They are letting me sell vegetable seeds and perennial food plants as well as my usual food type produce. And yes, flowers, because it heartens people. Gardening is a good thing to do right now, both for exercise and food.

[thorny]

I got everybody on the phone today except one vendor (and one who's probably a no-show anyway) on whose voice mail I left a message.

Vegetable seeds and food plants whether annual or perennial are OK here, they're both food production. And the flowers will probably be OK also -- while they're not in charge of interpretation, one of the people who sent out the NYS guidance for farm markets pointed out that the rules don't address specific items being sold, but only the type of vendor: food and soap vendors only. Our flower vendor is also a food vendor; they bring a good bit of produce and expect to bring more this year. So that should be OK even if restrictions aren't eased -- the groceries are still selling flowers and other miscellaneous, after all.

[wavewright62]

I found out that even though the hardware / home improvement retail shops are closed during lockdown, registered tradies doing essential emergency repairs can access their local hardware supplier, with accepted itemised quote for materials in hand; they have enough employees in-store for that.
Other than that, there is widespread speculation that the lockdown will last longer than 4 weeks in NZ, based on the 12-week wage support, mortgage holiday, and rent mitigation packages all put through in the last week.

[RanVor]

Yeah, so apparently, the number of cases in Poland is the fastest growing in Europe. We have 2500+ confirmed cases now, among which 500+ is just hospital personnel, and over 50 deaths. At least four hospitals in Warsaw alone are completely defunct and many more operate at minimum efficiency, with much of their staff in quarantine. And still the government refuses to introduce compulsory tests for doctors and nurses, preferring to spend money on an educational show on TV instead, which is already a laughing stock and getting more embarrassing by the day. I swear, the way this country handles the pandemic is almost as disastrous as the virus itself.

[Kyara]

It must be extremely frustrating. The medical staff is the frontline against the virus and the most exposed, It should be a priority to test them. I do not know what governments are thinking sometimes... Can patients be discharged in other countries? That is what is done currently here. We send patients by train or plane to peripherical hospitals or other countries.
In any case, I hope you are doing well.

[RanVor]

Honestly, the scariest part is that none of this surprises me the slightest. It's just the natural consequence of how things have always been done around here. Incompetence, greed and using major crises for personal/political advantage is just how the Polish elites roll.

[Mariiii]

Honestly, the scariest part is that none of this surprises me the slightest. It's just the natural consequence of how things have always been done around here. Incompetence, greed and using major crises for personal/political advantage is just how the Polish elites roll.

Yes, in France it is the same, the government decided a few years ago to stop having a stock of ffp2 masks, to make savings. And now, to hide the fact that there were not enough masks for the medical staff, they lied and said that these masks were not useful, and that they couldn't stop the contamination. It is a shame, I am really pissed off about it. And it's the same with the health system, in the past few years, a lot of people asked for more money in the hospital and the government did nothing. Today they say that after this crisis things will change but honestly I don't think it will and that makes me really sad and angry.

[RanVor]

they lied

Yes, that sounds so very, very familiar.

[Joe Steele]

Here in Missouri, our governor has yet to order any sort of travel restriction or lockdown. My county decided to shut down everything anyway, but we still have the most cases(492 as of April 1st), out of the state's 1,300. Life continues.

[Grade E cat]

Yes, in France it is the same, the government decided a few years ago to stop having a stock of ffp2 masks, to make savings. And now, to hide the fact that there were not enough masks for the medical staff, they lied and said that these masks were not useful, and that they couldn't stop the contamination. It is a shame, I am really pissed off about it.

According to my own fact-checking, while it's true they reduced stocks to save money and they didn't manage the end result of that lack of stock in the best way possible, the claim about ffp2 masks was actually that they weren't useful to the general public. I didn't see anything about them saying they weren't useful to medical staff. Now, it my have been an omission on your part and/or my fact-checking may have lacked depth, but the statement as you had written it was kind of misleading and we're trying to keep misinformation out of the Covid-19 threads. Many mistakes were made by various decision-makers, and being pissed off at them is completely understandable. But let's be pissed off at things that actually happened, of which there is unfortunately plenty.
[PS:I know that last part is more of a "thoughts and feelings" thing, but it felt more pertienent here]

On the subject of masks, now they're recommending the general public to wear "alternative" masks, which boils down to a "better have a mask you made yourself than nothing at all" stance.

[Mebediel]

On the subject of masks, now they're recommending the general public to wear "alternative" masks, which boils down to a "better have mask you made yourself than nothing at all" stance.

The US seems to be shifting to a similar stance. One of my friends who works at a hospital in NYC has talked about how frustrating it is to see people on the subway wearing N95s when her hospital is constantly on the brink of running out. The message surrounding masks has been very confusing over here, especially since different countries are saying different things about them.

[Gwenno]

Well, the UK has been in lockdown for nearly two weeks now. You can leave the house once a day for exercise, but you need to keep 2 meters away from other people the whole time. This is easy for us, as we live very rurally and can go out and walk in the middle of nowhere on a daily basis, but it's much harder in the cities. The shops have been out of flour and pasta for a few weeks now, but I think the toilet roll shortage is over  Honestly, I was so glad when a full lockdown was announced. Every day was just watching cases rise and get closer and closer, and at least now it feels like there's more of an element of control (especially considering that the government gave up on testing non-serious cases almost immediately).

One thing that's been really frustrating here, is that people from the cities (mostly English) have been rushing here to hide away from the virus and have a nice little holiday while they're at it. Before the lockdown, the caravan places (that were still open) were heaving with people. We had an unseasonably warm week, and the local beauty spots broke all records for number of visitors. When the lockdown came into effect, these people were forced to go back home, but some have been sneaking back in at night time. There have even been online advice forums on the best ways of sneaking into Wales to avoid the police. Our village (very small) has two sets of squatters in their caravans who have decided not to leave - one in a car park on the side of the mountain (you can smell these ones, they haven't made a good job at managing their toilet waste), and another next to a public footpath who had the audacity to put a sign up on the footpath saying it was closed due to Covid 19!!! The population here is pretty elderly, with lots of retired people, and our hospitals aren't equiped to dealing with all the extra people coming in. Just this week, two people died in a care home in the village next to ours from Covid-19.

On the bright side, the local community has been super supportive. Vulnerable people are getting food delivered to them by volunteers and there's been a community effort to create protective equiptment for our hospital with any 3D printers people may have, which has been really successful and has printed a tonne. The villagers have been taking social distancing very seriously, and even the group of yobs who usually hang out at the bus shelter and cause trouble haven't been meeting up. I'm actually very impressed, and might give the yobs a bit more slack when this is all over 

[Vulpes]

Other than the avalanche of vague and/or self-contradictory emails from the uni admin about how best to finish the academic year online, I've not suffered much from all this. I live outside of the city, so getting outside is easy - I walk out my back door and into the woods, or along the road, where I rarely meet anyone else on foot.

Here in Newfoundland there are still relatively few cases, although on a per capita basis I think we're comparable to the rest of the country. At just over 200 confirmed cases, we're at the beginning of the curve. Currently under-testing, as far as I can gather from the numbers, so I'm expecting a big jump soon when a bunch of people get symptoms or they test more widely. Sadly the low numbers lead to complacency, especially here on the west coast of the island. Most of the cases are 700 km away in St John's and area. In a very sad irony, 153 of the current 203 cases and the only know covid-related death can be connected to two funerals at a single funeral home. Someone came home from outside the province just days before there were recommendations about self-isolating. It seems they were asymptomatic, too.

There was the obligatory toilet paper frenzy (still waiting patiently for septic-safe TP to be re-stocked) and various other things sold out, like flour, tinned beans, and of course cleaning products. All non-essential businesses closed, and the rest have the sorts of restrictions that others have described - only letting so many people in, tape on the floors to enforce distancing, and in one grocery store, they have one-way arrows on the aisles (which people ignore...) to reduce the number of encounters.

People are being urged to limit car trips (risk of accidents) and to send one person per household to shop weekly, but there are no formal restrictions. It's hard to tell just popping into town, but it seems like most are following the guidelines. I'm hopeful that we've learned from the experiences in other areas, but the pessimist in me fears that human nature guarantees we haven't!