Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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Every store I have been in has had red tape on the floor; you WILL be told to keep inside the tape lines when lining up for the cash registers and you WILL stand on the tape markers when in line and when paying; keeping people 6 feet apart.
All cashiers are wearing gloves when bagging groceries/purchases.
I bought a case ( a CASE!) of paper towels through eBay; I am not trusting washing/sterilizing cleaning rags.

Stimulus agreement reached between white house and Senate leadership.

No formal vote has been taken,vote will likely include a few people being many congressman are out of town.

Woo hoo! The government cranking out money it doesn't have.

THE SAGA OF MAKING FACE MASK

If you followed this thread you are probably aware that my wife is contributing to the war effort for fighting the scourge of the coronavirus by making ordinary face mask.

Now it turns out that there is currently a shortage of the elastic to make face mask in the U.S. This is probably due to the fact that most of our plants that produced fabrics were shipped overseas a couple decades ago.

So I went on Amazon and tried to order them. Well most of them had a 2 month lead time. I found one company that was less than a month, so I ordered from them.

I was surprised that in 6 hours and 12 minutes, I received notification by Amazon that the package was already in transit. I looked at the estimated arrival date and it was unchanged. So I dug a little deeper and found out that it was being shipped from China. Since items shipped out of China is experiencing significant problems, it makes sense that delivery schedules can be effected and that Amazon is pushing back the delivery dates in order to give them some wiggle room. So I expect the package will arrive much sooner that the dates they quoted. This is probably good news because my wife has cut up the material to make 100 face masks and is out of the elastic so she cannot finish the job without it.

So I gave my wife the good news and she gave me some bad news.

******** Caution***** Warning*****Caution*****Warning******

She told me that in the news this morning there was an article about people becoming infected at Amazon plants.

I looked it up and found the following article from NPR news: Workers In 8 Amazon Warehouses Test Positive For Coronavirus

Workers in at least eight Amazon warehouses across the country have tested positive for coronavirus, just as the e-commerce giant ramps up hiring to meet surging online sales.

In recent days, warehouse workers at two separate sites in New York City, in Staten Island and Queens, in addition to employees at warehouses in Jacksonville, Fla., Oklahoma City, Brownstown, Mich., Katy, Tex., Wallingford, Conn. and Shepherdsville, Ky., have tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, according to media reports and Amazon officials.

Why is this of concern. Well we are operating under the assumption that items being shipped from coronavirus hot spots (such as China) will be virus free by the time we received the package. This is because the life of the virus is short. But maybe this will not be a good assumption. But if that assumption is false, then workers at Amazon will become infected with the coronavirus. Now some of the items being shipped are traveling directly from the manufacture/distributer directly to the customers scattered around the world. Therefore in a few days I will receive a package from China and I need to plan for it. Now I am not one to put my hands up in the air and wave them about screaming - Oh Noooooooo! What am I to do? [I only save that for a shortage of marshmallow peeps]. It is just that I need a plan. But it has to be a better plan than most because this elastic will be used to make face mask that will be distributed to health care workers and hospital patients. And the last persons I wish to infect are the people on the front lines of this pandemic.

So this is the plan I formulated. When the package arrives I will retrieve it wearing gloves. I will not bring it into the house. Instead I will leave it outside. I will unpack it outside and immediately dispose of the box and packing material. Then I will expose the contents (spool of elastic) to the sun for several hours. The UV rays of the sun is a natural disinfectant. But because of the intended use of the elastic, I felt a need to go one step further and chemically disinfect the elastic. So I will place some 91% Isopropyl alcohol in a small bowl and run the entire spool of elastic through the bowl and then let it air dry in the sun. [I gave this a quick test on a piece of scrap elastic and the approach looked good.]

The UV rays of the sun are a natural disinfectant, but not really a great one because most of the UV-C rays in the spectrum are filtered out by the atmosphere before they reach the surface of the planet. They are feeble rays. It would be better if I had a UV-C sanitizer to disinfect items. Some hospitals have begun using UV-emitting machines to disinfect rooms. It looks like someone is making small versions of sanitizer boxes. For example "Beutii Professional UV Sterilizer Box With Ozone Sanitizing for Baby, Cell Phone, Beauty Tools, Underwear, Nail Salon, Equipment, Eyeglasses, Jewelry". It has an 8 minute disinfectant cycle. Since due to the shortage of face mask, doctors and nurses are being forced to reuse their mask, this might be a good product to sterilize them before reuse.

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloa ... idance.pdf

omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg

My nephew has tested positive for COVID-19 in Australia, 10 hours before his flight home.

He can't come home.

He is very ill. His travel insurance won't even cover it.

Someone please help me not go insane.

Jimmy, a one easy way to know whether a mask is effective or not: put the mask on, turn on a lighter in front of you, and try to blow hard on it.

If you extinguish it then that mask is no good.

Prince Charles tests positive but 'remains in good health'