Coronavirus Covid 19

As you've likely heard, we're being hit by a pandemic as defined by the World Health Organization. It's a Coronavirus by the name of Covid 19. Symptoms include feverishness, coughing, sore thoat, and runny nose. It started in China from, if my understanding is correct, poor food handling (specifically markets where livestock and freshly slaughtered meat are both managed). It has since branched out to most of the world. Italy and Iran have both been hit pretty hard.

The vast majority of people who develop Covid 19 survive, although it is more deadly to people who are elderly or who have compromised immune systems. As of this posting, there has been 169,149 cases reported worldwide. There have been 6.494 deaths, and 76,618 recoveries. There have been four cases of Covid 19 discovered in Waterloo Region, which is where I live.

(Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/)

Response has been significant. In the city where I live, schools will be closed for an extra two weeks after March Break (which kind of sucks, since there have been so many teacher strikes already this year). My organization plans to stay open, at least for the time being.

People are panic buying large quantities of supplies. I'm in Guelph right now, and both our local Zehrs and Food Basics were run out of toilet paper, water, and cleaning products. They had to put a limit on how much people can buy at a time as supplies come back.

I think it's really funny that the first thing everyone thought of when they decided to self-quarantine was toilet paper. It seems like such a First Worlder, last-minute Apocolypse-prepper thing to think. Like, "I'm going to have to hide from the world while this plague runs rampant. What's the most important thing I need to survive? Toilet paper! Can't have a poopy butt in the apocolypse!"

I hope this isn't TMI, but when I was in Mali, nobody used toilet paper, including me. You know what we did? We kept our fingernails short, we had a little tea pot that we would pour on ourselves while we did our business, we wiped with our left hand and washed thoroughly afterward. If you're expecting you'll have to self-isolate for a prolonged period, don't stock up on toilet peper. Buy a teapot.

I wonder if the bidet market is booming as well.

What should be flying off the shelves is beans and rice. Those are the staple foods of the world. They're a complete protein, they're cheap, and they can be stored for long periods of time. You just need water and a heat source to prep them. Canned goods will also stay good for well over a year.

If you're expecting to be sick, have some canned and dry soups on hand. Easy to prepare and light on the digestive system. This sickness isn't gastrointestinal at all, so I guess that's not too important, but I have heard that loss of apetite is reported by some people, and soup is easy to eat when you don't feel like eating. Chicken noodle and tomato are classic.

I really want to know what scale of disaster people are prepping for. The people buying cleaning products seem to be taking preventative measures. Like, they don't want to get sick, so they're going to keep their environment as clean as possible. The people buying water must be envisioning a world where they can't access tap water. Now that's an actual apocolypse. But if that's what you're expecting, honestly, the water you buy is less important than the containers they come in. You have tap water now, so take advantage of that and store up as much of it as you can while it's still good. C'mon, it's the apocolypse, you don't need bottled water.

I don't mean to sound callous, but is Covid 19 even worth this level of panic? It's symptoms, rate of recovery, and spread all sound kind of like influenza. It's like having a second flu season, but this one is a little weird. It sucks, but doesn't indicate an apocalypse.

That being said, my brother just came back from California, which is a bit of a hotspot for the virus. His work is requiring him to self-quarantine for 14 days, since it can be contagious before it's symptomatic. My mother had to cancel her visit to my granddad on the off chance that she gets it from Duncan and then infects a retirement community.

And even though I'm talking a big game about not being panicked, I am taking simple precautions, such as regularly washing my hands, not making direct contact with doorknobs, not using cash, and avoiding hand shakes and high fives, simply because I do work with a number of people who have compromised immune systems.

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....Actually, scratch what I said about my organization's response. I just got a text saying that my work is shut down until further notice.

Alright. I'm ready to panic. Glad I just wrote out this instructional. Time to invest in beans, rice, canned corn and peas, tomato and chicken noodle soup, and a teapot.