I'm with ya and hope cruises come back as well. It's possible a cruise line or two will go under during all of this but I bet cruising in general comes back next year. I wouldn't be surprised if all self serve dining options are gone when they do return, will probably need to ask for items at a buffet versus taking them yourself. Maybe all the precautions to come will reduce the spread of germs on future cruises making them safer then before the pandemic.

Filters don't lose their filtering properties over time. They just become less efficient as the air resistance increases.

“What does harm reduction look like for the coronavirus? First, policy makers and health experts can help the public differentiate between lower-risk and higher-risk activities; these authorities can also offer support for the lower-risk ones when sustained abstinence isn’t an option. Scientists still have a lot to learn about this new virus, but early epidemiological studies suggest that not all activities or settings confer an equal risk for coronavirus transmission. Enclosed and crowded settings, especially with prolonged and close contact, have the highest risk of transmission, while casual interaction in outdoor settings seems to be much lower risk. A sustainable anti-coronavirus strategy would still advise against house parties. But it could also involve redesigning outdoor and indoor spaces to reduce crowding, increase ventilation, and promote physical distancing, thereby allowing people to live their lives while mitigating—but not eliminating—risk.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/quarantine-fatigue-real-and-shaming-people-wont-help/611482/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share&fbclid=IwAR34HwerIm4b1-Wo3OR9ACZNsae7wnHfqLkq3Qsi4sbs04_HymQ73hrzfMQ

I get that, but with a fresh filter installed and a lot of infected people is there a chance for recirculation of the finer particulate? Or if lets say the ducts are somewhat dirty, do they stick to the dirt . Just a thought....

Good times ahead for Carnival. Their bookings are now up 600% from last year.

https://www.wesh.com/article/cruise-bookings-up/32450902

From my experience, it was the buffets and salad bars that invented the original sneeze guard decades ago. - Food for thought.

Non Buffet story. Wife and I were at our local favorite pizza place. To our left a table with 4 moms and about 9 kids.
I notice one of the kids taking the parm shaker and licking the top of it, then passing it around to the others. The funny part was when they licked the red pepper shaker.
The worst part was when one of the moms caught the kids doing it and just put it back in the middle of the table w/o saying anything!
As soon as they left, I did advise our waitperson whom quickly snatched them up and brought out what I assume were new ones but I'm just saying, it ain't just the buffet that is an issue! Stuff can happen anywhere.

Certified commercial air filtration is going to be a really big deal.

I expect to see colorful window stickers soon: 5x Filtration Certified! (or whatever the guideline/expectation will be)

here is a positive side effect:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/york-city-breaks-record-58-straight-days-pedestrian/story?id=70654065

I have been trying to imagine the other positive and negative unforeseen side effects of this Quarentine/covid situation.
I guess I read "The World Without us" by Alan Weisman too many times.
i.e. domestic abuse issues and possibly the Quarantine Baby Boom
no more buffet restaurants (including my favorite Tibeten buffet)
a whole lot of PTSD sufferers. who will be ignored and marginalized and not given the treatment they need.

etc...

what do you think?

That's an off-set not real number. This is because of millions of vouchers issued do to cancellations, and Carnival is extending vouchers thru end of next year.
They will be modifying there whole food service operations to get up and running. Also discussing no shore excursions either for awhile.

We went there a couple years ago in Galveston. Went on the Duck boats also. Was wondering if they still had Duck boats there as what happened in Branson Missouri. We actually had the same guy piloting the Duck boat in Branson that sank and killed all those people later on.

They still operate the duck boats in Wisconsin Dells.

I doubt it but what do I know. I mean maybe? I’d have to see the science on it.

It’s just tough with all the people living on top of each other. Would be interesting to know what kind of Heat / ac these people have. Most people I know have window units and radiators unless they live in newer buildings.

I can see why that one sank. When they are floating there is only about a foot between the window and the water. Not very safe.

Man now you guys for me thinking about buffets.

Not my go to but sometimes there’s just nothing like pulling up to the trough.

They’ll be back!

Duck Boat tours shut down in Seattle a few years ago as a result of a deadly crash killing multiple people when a driver switched lanes into another vehicle. They seem to be plagued with bad safety records.

I wonder about the baby boom. I expect that unplanned (or at least those between non-committed partners) and teen pregnancies will be significantly down, but I don't know how those types typically contribute to birth numbers as a whole.

Maybe below are the reasons why.
-------------------------------------

From March 21;

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/travel/coronavirus-tourists-conflict.html

" On March 17, Hawaii’s governor, David Ige, asked travelers to postpone trips for 30 days. “The actions I’m announcing today may seem extreme to some of you, and we know that it will have negative effects to our economy. But we are confident that taking aggressive actions now will allow us to have a quicker recovery when this crisis is over,” Governor Ige said in a news release. "
=====================================

From April 9:

https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2020/04/09/lawmakers-want-changes-keep-visitors-out-hawaii-during-pandemic/

" State says ‘most’ visitors coming to Hawaii likely not following quarantine order."

" Two weeks after the state’s mandatory quarantine for travelers went into effect, state officials are now acknowledging that most visitors aren’t adhering to the order."

" Added state Sen. Michelle Kidani: “To me, asking local residents to lock down and allowing tourists in is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool. It makes no sense."

" I notice the visitors because to me, I think they stick out because we all know to wear our masks,” said Waikiki resident Stephen Danforth."

================================================

From May 8

Looks like Hawaii got fed up with those who don't want to play by the rules. And Hawaii's economy is hurting badly with 25%-35% unemployment.
---------------------------------------------------------

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2020/05/08/coronavirus-hawaii-arresting-tourist-who-break-quarantine-rules/3098049001/

" Hawaii is arresting tourists who don't abide by the state's quarantine rules. "

" HONOLULU — Hawaii authorities are cracking down on rogue tourists who are visiting beaches, riding personal watercraft, shopping and generally flouting strict requirements that they quarantine for 14 days after arriving.

" A newlywed California couple left their Waikiki hotel room repeatedly, despite being warned by hotel staff, and were arrested. Others have been arrested at a hotel pool, loading groceries into a vehicle outside a Costco and bringing take-out food back to a hotel room.

" The rules, the strictest in any U.S. state, have helped keep infections relatively low. As of Wednesday, Hawaii reported 626 coronavirus cases and 17 deaths.

" Hotels are being told to issue room keys that are only operable for checking in, so that when guests leave the room they have to go to the front desk to ask for a new one — a signal they have left their room in violation of the quarantine, ..."

=================================

From May 11

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/trapped-in-paradise-breaking-quarantine-could-mean-prison-time-for-tourists-in-hawaii-1.4933877

" Trapped in paradise: Breaking quarantine could mean prison time for tourists in Hawaii"

" Roving neighborhood police patrols. Uniformed soldiers manning checkpoints. A vast surveillance network of hotel staff and health department officials on the lookout for anyone breaking quarantine.

" This isn't an authoritarian dictatorship. It's the US state of Hawaii, where officials have been enforcing some of the strictest measures in the country aimed at stopping the spread of the coronavirus.

====================================

If these links can be believed, it sounds like Hawaii is not screwing around. While here in the 48, people are copping attitudes and in general making asses of theirselves and endangering others. And then taking their attitudes to Hawaii.

My state, Washington, had the first reported cases and deaths of the virus (although I think retro testing of deceased folks has found earlier cases now). We were at the top of the states for number of cases and the rate of infection. Eventually New York, California and New Jersey, with more dense populations passed us up. Now we are the 18th state in number of cases. We aren't an isolated island like Hawaii and New Zealand, what made the difference was we started shutting things down way earlier and tougher than most other states. We had a stay at home order and restaurants, bars and retail beyond essential businesses were closed when the beaches of Florida were still open, I remember seeing those pictures of Florida after stocking up weeks beforehand and starting to work from home and thinking, those people are crazy, just watch in a few weeks when their infection rate passes us up. I think it took about 10 days, it's over double our rate now. We had 174 new cases a day in our state yesterday, Florida had 941. Florida had more time to prepare, they should have known what was coming, but they had total disregard for their citizen's safety and lives and didn't lock things down early enough. I firmly believe the extent that states locked things down and how early they started to decreased infection rates. My state wasn't perfect, people still were out on sunny days too close to each other in parks, not wearing masks, etc. But we have done better than most states and were the first state to flatten the curve and start seeing decreasing daily cases. And we will reopen more slowly and have less cases and less of a second wave. This stuff isn't rocket science.

A good article on herd immunity and how while it may be a good talking point for politicians and the talking heads, the reality is it won't happen at all this year if ever and a lot of people will have to die and get very sick first:
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/from-our-experts/early-herd-immunity-against-covid-19-a-dangerous-misconception

An old lady wearing a mask just came in our office asking where the corona testing center is. I guess there's one in a different building near here.

Vitamin D?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200507121353.htm

iCR8iLa (resized).jpg

To be fair, companies like Google and Amazon are already setup to let tech employees work from home, it's the nature of being a tech company because things like remote access and cloud support, especially for those two particular companies, are just normal.

Real world example, my wife who is a brilliant tech nerd currently works at a non tech company that has a typical old dude ceo that is clueless and firmly believes people must commute to a job and work in an office, 1950's thinking basically. Of course with this pandemic they were thrown for a loop, but lucky for them my wife who is in their tech department has been helping migrating everything to Azure (Microsoft's cloud) and now magically she is getting all kinds of kudos because people are now successfully working from home, so the company is no longer in stasis. In fact she may work from home the rest of the year.

The problem with most companies, and yes I will generalize here, is they have old out of touch people at the top that do not embrace a modern work environment and hence stick to legacy methods of getting things done. These are the companies that will fail in the current type of situation.

Herd immunity is accomplished through vaccination, not everyone getting infected and playing survival of the fittest and luckiest. Herd immunity via infection would kill 2-5 million in the US alone.

I think a vaccine will not take 12-18 months which has been stated since the beginning. My guess is there will be a couple ready and available for those willing to accept the risk of lacking longer term data as early as mid to late fall.

15 to 20 minutes in the sun daily !

This article is a couple weeks old but pretty interesting. Americans are saving cash at the highest rate since 1981. Seems like a lot of people are in wait and see mode regarding non discretionary spending. I was just talking to my neighbor who is getting called back to work after being furloughed for 2 months. He wants to buy a new truck but is going to hold off as he's worried he will be laid off again in the fall as he doesn't see business returning anywhere close to pre pandemic levels for a while.

I can see businesses recalling only a portion of staff as consumer demand that was there before the pandemic may not exist for 6 months, a year, or longer.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/30/investing/savings-rate-federal-reserve/index.html

I'm in Dallas and we are literally peaking right now. 250+ new cases identified every day for the last 7 days, down to 236 yesterday. Texas was under 1000 new cases per day when we started to re-open. We’ve been over 1000 and now 1100 every day but two since.

But we as a state are 49th or 50th in the country in tests conducted, so the numbers are clearly hampered by the lack of available testing. You still have to have a fever or be a front line worker exposed to get approved for testing here. Governor Abbott promised a phased re-opening, starting with the first phase which hasn't changed much in my area because no one wants to go to restaurants. But he jumped the gun on rolling out the next phase, and intends to bump up on the 18th to the next phase. There has been no increase in testing like he promised there would be before we moved forward into the next phases. And in fact, the Fed intends to close shop on two large testing locations locally that provide 1,000 of the currently 1,950 tests available per day to the county. The plan is quite clearly to avoid finding new cases by reducing the number of tests performed, thus avoiding identifying any surges in new cases. And they are coming. The second that we "re-opened" everyone got called back to work and a good segment of people dropped the masks and bothering to distance. Mother's Day was an amazing display of letting the guard down. We are going to spike to high holy hell starting the week of the 24th. June is going to be gnarly.

It's more than just population and density. Both Aussie and NZ have dense cities and lots of public transport. While we are a lot smaller, my city has more bars/restaurants per capita than NYC. Yes we both have lots of open space too.

There are areas in the USA that have gotten things under control (Washington) so it can be done. The big difference is that both Aussie and NZ took consistent national approaches from the beginning and we both have international travel restrictions in place to stop importing new cases.

In the USA things are all over the place so if one place gets it under control in only takes one person visiting to mess things up. Inconsistent approaches will result in inconsistent results. It's too late now I think and it's going to be a long hard slog, its not going to go back to normal when things open back up or any time soon.

The comment on most people getting it at home in NYC just means people get it from family members. Seems pretty obvious to me. That is why we did a long lockdown here to let it burn it self out in households as its hard to stop a highly contagious virus from spreading if you live in the same residence as someone else.

Book 'em Danno....

Book em Danno (resized).jpg

https://seattle.eater.com/2020/5/12/21255614/washington-state-requiring-contact-tracing-at-restaurants-logging-phones-emails

Our freedom level is off the charts.

We don’t feel the need to crap on about it all the time though. I do have a little smile when I see those morons protesting at your town halls with guns yelling “freedoooooom!!”

In fact, if they did any research, they should be shouting “our freeeedooomm is lagging somewhat behind some other countriessss!!” - but I guess that doesn’t quite have the same ring to it!

“The jurisdictions that took the top 10 places, in order, were New Zealand, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, Denmark and Luxembourg (tied in 6th place), Finland and Germany (tied in 8th place), and Ireland. Selected countries rank as follows: Sweden (11), United Kingdom (14), United States (15)”

https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index-new

rd

Funny, I was thinking about you and your love of boats the other day!

Yes - still planned to go ahead. Our guys are still training for it.

If anyone arrives from overseas for it, including other teams, they need to be quarantined in a hotel for two weeks before they’re let loose in our lovely corona virus free (mostly) country.

rd

Looks like someone's attempt to pour an Orval. She is a fickle mistress, but when done properly you get to experience what may be the greatest beer on the planet.

This is a great in depth article about transmission, it's clear where most people are going to get infected is at work, in a restaurant, at a party, or any other place they spend a couple hours around someone who's infected and doesn't yet have symptoms. The other main place is at home, from someone that brought it home from one of these places. This is precisely why I think restaurants, bars, and inside workspaces should remain closed for at least a few more weeks.
https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them

(pinball)

That's crazy, my entire state has a lower rate than that and we were once the epicenter of the virus.

As a fun example of supply chain hiccups, if we had a vaccine ready to go today, we still couldn’t distribute it because there is a shortage of glass bottles right now. Can’t just put it in a mason jar. Takes a special kind of river sand and there isn’t enough of it in the supply chain right now to make the shit ton of bottles needed.

Also, there is to a lesser degree a supply chain bottleneck on the membranes and plastic caps that go on the bottles.

My worry is that the shortages will still exist when the vaccine is ready to go and so they will pull vials from other medicine supply chain (vaccines, Insulin, etc) which will then create ANOTHER problem.

I went to my cardiologist’s office today for a treadmill test. They made me keep my mask on while I was on the treadmill, but half of the people who worked there were maskless. My doctor came in and stood 3 feet from me with a mask on...but it was pushed down below his nose. Ridiculousness.

No worries. The government has already prepared for that by saying it/they expect to see 140,000 deaths by August. As long as we stay below that number we are on cruise control.

Good lord now they want your phone number, email address just so you can get a bite to eat?!? I get the gist of it, don't get me wrong . How many unwanted calls and spam email to be expected.
$100 billion to keep even more close tabs on you.

I’m a huge fan of vitamin D—I’ve gotten way healthier since I added it to my diet, and even when I get sick, my colds are milder and go away faster (hmm, like my super mild Covid experience??).

That said, it’s important to note that this study was specifically looking for correlations to test, which is why they’re warning people not to run off and down lots of Vit D. The example I’ve heard is that you can look at data and see that 75% of men who eat margarine in Maine are divorced. So there’s a correlation between margarine and divorce. However, if you tested it in a double blind study, eating margarine doesn’t *cause* divorce. (Ie correlation =\= causation). The connection with vitamin D *might* be direct, or it might be that both Vit D deficiency and Covid-19 are correlated to a third unknown influence. So more testing to come, to see what it all means.

But *independent* of the study and purely anecdotal, I highly recommend adding in vitamin D to your diet!!

Do you realy want to know what I think?
I am a pessimist, I think there will be no vaccine in the next 4-5 years, perhaps never. And almost every economy will collapse in the near future.
I hope that they will find treatment methods so not so many will die. Perhaps with early thrombosis treatments, or something else the death rate will go down. But then over time we will see, more often than we want, heavy long-term damage to health for people who survived it and that could be even worse. And three years or less after you got covid you can get it again, perhaps like the flu, wave to wave, again and again.

Social distancing will be the new normality. No more pubs, concerts, sport events. No more hugs!
The gap between rich and poor will become bigger, with way more poor than rich and nothing between. Chaos and violence on the street. People or countrys will not stand together, it will be everybody against everybody, nation against nation. Perhaps the conflict between China and the USA will become the next big war. After the spanish flu we got 2 world wars. And even if we survive the third, the european union will drift apart for sure. No more globalism will hit the people in the third world even more. Hunger, refugees and war everywhere. We will see many nations with totalitarian systems rising up in europe and everywhere else in the world, I hope not my country again. And when we think it will be getting better again, there will be the next virus even worth than covid was.
That's what I think for the future, and that is why I can't get sleep at night anymore, I said it before, I am a pessimist. I will never show this view of the future to the people around me cause there is still a chance that I am wrong. And so every day I try to prevent the bad future I see with small things that are possible for me. Even if I personally don't see any light. I will not go out without a fight.

Some people want to fight wearing a mask while I'm gonna have fun with it. This new one arrived yesterday and I have some other stylish masks coming soon. Wear your mask and show you care.

z20200513_160145 (resized).jpg