Covid 19 - Thoughts and feelings

[Gwenno]

We're all worried and stressed at the moment, and well, that's completely normal considering the times. This thread is for talking about your thoughts and feelings relating to the Covid 19 pandemic.

(A thread for updating people on Covid19 developments in your area is also available here)


While I highly doubt it will be a problem, there is a lot of misinformation circulating at the moment relating to the virus, so please be very careful if you want to share anything beyond your own personal thoughts and feelings - thank you!

Unless it is specifically to vent your frustrations, please refrain from discussing conspiracy theories (even when you disagree with them).

[Yastreb]

I'm keeping an occasional journal for these times, and my thoughts have included...

This afternoon, returning from a supply run (such as it was, given that the only convenient supermarket has a one-of-any-item limit), I suddenly became aware of something that must have been at the back of my mind since the morning when I woke up to the first full day of lockdown - the silence.
The usual background hum of the city was gone. It's as quiet as a country town.

I am not going to see anyone I know face to face for who knows how long. It’ll just be their voices, or words in texts and on Skype or on Forums (and, I have to admit it, Facebook).

Extracts from a semi-facetious Skype chat:

My GP thinks it likely that the lockdown and all that goes with it may well last six months.

After only four full days I'm having cabin fever moments.

I might well have overestimated my tolerance of my own company.

[A friend]  is reciting conspiracist trolling about supposed Chinese perfidy. It goes something like this.
The Chinese unleashed COVID-19 (whether deliberately or by accident isn’t important), and they're waiting for the right moment to reveal their vaccine and “save the world.” The “evidence” seems to be what he’s discussed with “people.” He's gone from "What if..." to "When are they going to do that?" without anything in between.

[Róisín]

That’s a scary idea, though I am unsure how likely it is. I have been hearing all kinds of stuff, from escaped bioweapon to chemtrails to an attempt to decrease the surplus population. I think most of it is ramlatch nonsense, and don’t think I know enough to posit a theory of my own, other than possibly a viral disease that has mutated and jumped species, whether by nature or by human tampering. Wouldn’t be the first time that has happened. I remain very sceptical about most of the theories. Wait and see, I guess.

For ourselves, we are okay so far, though I worry about how much time both of us have to spend at hospitals and other medical environments. And even with the continuation of weekly farmers markets, I am going to be taking a financial hit, especially since I just heard that the monthly markets I do have been cancelled for the foreseeable future. But folk still have to eat and buy vegetable seeds and perennial food plants, which is most of what I am selling at present. Oddly enough, also flowers - I sold out last Saturday, with people saying that it was lovely to be able to have a bit of colour and beauty and perfume among the general bleakness.

And I managed to organise with some young friends down in the city to do a shopping run for me, and to have the provisions delivered by another friend who had to come out this way to look after his horse, which is at a stable in our area. He couldn’t come in to say hello, more is the pity, because his wife is immunocompromised and he is being really serious about social distancing, but we managed to have a conversation from a couple of meters distance, which is good. And I now have a few things which I couldn’t get here, like a big bag of flour, tinned tomato soup, rice and three rolls of toilet paper, which I will probably save for husband since I am an old bushie and fine with leaves.

I worry about my family because they are scattered all around the world, but so far they survive. Alas, my nearest close relative is 600 miles away, and being a small farmer with a young family in a remote area he is unlikely to be going anywhere. But we survive.

[Yastreb]

Conspiracism is a default setting for so many folk in recent years. Just about every mass shooting or incident of domestic terror brings forth the reflex cry of "False flag!" Even natural disasters are conscripted into that way of thinking at times (cf. the one who could blame the Boxing Day Tsunami on a carefully-placed nuke). As I told my conspiracy-trolling friend, "Diseases can just break out. Humanity has had to cope with epidemics throughout its existence. "

[Purple Wyrm]

I've been working from home and self-isolating since Wednesday after coming down with what is probably just a cold. I'm finding it a bit difficult to get any work done because there are so many distractions and interesting things in my apartment! I'll have to knuckle down tomorrow I think though.

The main problem I'm running into is with time. I'm used to the rhythm of getting up and commuting into the office during the week, doing grocery shopping on Saturday, and relaxing for the rest of the weekend. Without that all the days are kind of running together. I'm not sure how that's going to work long term, but we'll see.

Last week's episode of the podcast Oh No Ross and Carrie has quite an entertaining survey of COVID-19 Conspiracy beliefs. A lot of people (myself included) have found it a bit of an amusing light in the current darkness.

[Solokov]

From a discussion about the US taking the top spot in covid19 infections:

Me: from my persepctive, it makes sense that this happened.

Friend: How does that make sense, the government should have done something sooner.

Me: What more could you want done?  We were working with incomplete data and didn't exactly know what the hell was going on in china until the situation more or less completely deteriorated and a few doctors started letting the international medical community know what was going on, their social credit rating be damned.

Friend: I dunno, the chinese government seems to be handling it fairly well.

Me: Welding your ****ing citizens into their own homes is not an answer that won't receive getting shot at in response. the US is not a country you can do that in, additionally the WHO and various national health administrations are doubting the number coming from china have been real since mid February. The outbreak started in november and was allowed to fester.

Friend logs off discord at this point.

We actually haven't talked since then.

Also, my response to the conspiracy theories on it being a bio-weapon that got out of containment (especially say it came from the long rumored blacksite bio-weapon research site alleged to be in the Wuhan province of china): If that had happened the chinese government would have rolled into wuhan in November 2019 with a military containment unit and quietly purged everyone/everything that was potentially infected contaminated.

[Jitter]

Is there any chance we could just drop the conspirqcy theories once and for all and focus on the topic i.e. how does the situation make us personally feel?

I’m alternating between peaceful and panic, although less panic lately. The idea of living in an Exclusion Zone (at the moment the Uusimaa Region has a border towards rest of Finland) is so weird that it probably hasn’t really hit me yet. I have no need to cross in the foreseeable future, but the fact that I couldn’t if I wanted to is surreal.

[Gwenno]

Is there any chance we could just drop the conspirqcy theories once and for all and focus on the topic i.e. how does the situation make us personally feel?

Unless it is specifically to vent your frustrations, best to keep the discussion of conspiracy theories away from here (even when you disagree with them). If you guys' social media is anything like mine then you get enough of that already, and it is easy to let discussions get out of hand. To set some specific guidelines, I'll say that mentioning that you are upset about specific misinformation is okay as I expect this will be a contributing facet of people's overall stress (will edit the original post to add this as well as any other amendments that pop up over time).

[Mebediel]

I’m alternating between peaceful and panic, although less panic lately. The idea of living in an Exclusion Zone (at the moment the Uusimaa Region has a border towards rest of Finland) is so weird that it probably hasn’t really hit me yet. I have no need to cross in the foreseeable future, but the fact that I couldn’t if I wanted to is surreal.

It sounds pretty surreal. Do people have any idea of when the region will stop being an exclusion zone, or is it that way indefinitely?
Also *hugs*

[RanVor]

Is there any chance we could just drop the conspirqcy theories once and for all and focus on the topic i.e. how does the situation make us personally feel?

Seconding. I personally hate conspiracy theorism (is that even a word?) with burning passion and merely hearing about it is enough to make me instantly angry at the entire world, so the less of it, the better for me and everybody in close proximity.

I don't really spend much time thinking about the pandemic, I'm mostly concerned with how it's making my already disastrous situation at the university exponentially worse. Objectively though, the circumstances are pretty awful, and my parents are very worried about everything that's going on, so the general atmosphere at my home is pretty tense. One side effect of the isolation is that my sleep schedule got completely devastated since I don't really have a reason to get up at regular hours anymore.

[Róisín]

Another small bright spot: our private health fund, which was due to put up its prices steeply on April 1, has postponed the rise for six months. This is useful, because we had expected to be unable to afford it and like many older Australians, to have to drop out of having health cover altogether. We now have another six months to try raising the money.

[euseevius]

I’m alternating between peaceful and panic, although less panic lately. The idea of living in an Exclusion Zone (at the moment the Uusimaa Region has a border towards rest of Finland) is so weird that it probably hasn’t really hit me yet. I have no need to cross in the foreseeable future, but the fact that I couldn’t if I wanted to is surreal.

Uggh, it really does sound so surreal. All the hugs and stregth to you & lets hope people follow the government's orders, so that y'all don't have to stay as an Exclusion Zone longer than absolutely necessary.

I'm in a happy position where neither me nor any of my close relatives are living in Uusimaa, and I'm partially employed by my university, so I'm not at the risk of losing my income either. But what's taking a real toll on me is in fact the remote work. I hadn't realised how well I had learned to work at the office and rly not bring work home until now.

[Lenny]

One thing in all this that I'm trying not to think of but am anyway, is that I likely won't see my fiance until almost a year has passed since the last time we saw each other (August). Everything in government has gone a bit slow due to everything, and getting fiance in on a partner visa will take a few months (and I can't start on that until mid-April - I finally found a studio, only for six months though, but that should be enough to get fiance here). By that time it'll be July at least. We were originally planning on getting them here this Thursday, and then married the 18th. Feels a bit sour.

I'm trying to focus on all the things I can do right now, rather on what might have been, but it's difficult, especially at night. We've been waiting a very long time for this, we can stack on a few months on top of the years, but it's not fun.

[Róisín]

**Offers Lenny a safe long-distance hug** I do hope things sort out. Good luck to both of you! I am treating this situation as if it were wartime, and living through things as I can.

 Having myself lived through the situation of long-distance matrimony long delayed, I most heartily sympathise (at least we managed the first  wedding ceremony before our respective work required us to be on opposite sides of the planet for many months - being of very different faiths we actually had two entirely separate wedding ceremonies, several years apart). Something seems to have worked, because we are still married and still speaking to one another and glad of it after what is now nearer forty years than thirty. At the time people around us gave the marriage a week, since I was a young widow with five kids, he was a divorced man who had never had children and was still good mates with his first wife and her new partner, and our lifestyles, faiths, family backgrounds and preferences in where to live were about as different as it was possible to be. But we still smile to see one another when we wake in the morning.

May you two be as blessed as we have been.

[wavewright62]

I'm a reasonably solitary person, and have not been feeling socially deprived at all over this last week in lockdown.  After all, I'm in almost daily contact with my daughter, I have you all in the fandom, and I'm very busy working, putting 9-10 hours a day at my dining table desk.
Then my brass band manager called me this arvo to see how I'm doing & chat for a minute, and I swear I unleashed a half-hour barrage of yakkity-yak at the poor woman.  I guess I'm more socially deprived than I thought.