A journal of the plague times, March 16, 2020

All of the counties in the SF Bay area have issued “Shelter In Place” orders basically shutting everything down. Here is Alameda County’s.

HSSV (Humane Society Silicon Valley) has shut down all non-essential services. No adoption fairs. No spay/neuter/vaccination. My TNR of the local kitties is on hold for the duration.

Kaiser-Permanente called and said that all allergy department appointments have been cancelled for the next 30 days. Apparently they are preparing to re-shuffle personnel into COVID-19 treatments. So my allergy shots are cancelled.

I am working at home. Today a switch died at the office. I directed somneone in replacing it via a Skype video call. The replacement switch triggered a packet storm due to a loop, so I then directed him to remove the wires back to the old switch, and then slowly move them one by one. It was the wire in port 11, which he traced to a place it should not have been, so I had him remove it entirely.

I went out to buy some Sudafed because I noticed I was low. Sudafed has strict controls to keep people from buying large quantities, so they had plenty of it behind the pharmacy counter. But the shelves for flu/cold medications at CVS were emptied. I’m not sure why. It doesn’t really matter for me, I have plenty of antihistamines and decongestants now, but so it goes.

There was a large amount of traffic for a weekday afternoon. Everybody seems to be panic-buying. There was no distilled water for my CPAP machine at CVS, so I popped across the street to Sprouts, which usually has a lot. All checkouts were busy. Most shelves were stripped bare. A quick trip to the water aisle showed that they’d stripped even the distilled water clean. I have about 2.5 gallons so that’ll last me a week or so, we’ll see if they have some on Friday. If not I can use boiled water, but it’ll gum up the humidifier over time, so not really recommended.

I did an inventory of my pantry. Note *just* my pantry, not my bread basket or refrigerator or freezer. I have 37 canns of tuna. 22 cans of kippered herring. 5 lbs of pancake mix, 16 lb masa (corn tortilla) flour, 8 lb of general purpose wheat flour, and a bunch of other stuff I’m not listing here like rice, beans, spaghetti, mac’n’cheese, cream of mushroom soup, and of course 10 lbs of coffee beans. I think I’m fine, I’m not going to starve to death even if the stores never do restock. Note that all this isn’t a result of panic buying, it’s a result of me living down the street from an overstock grocer and buying in bulk whenever they get something in that I like. I wish I’d bought spam in bulk, they had spam coming out the wazoo before this panic buying started, but alas it’s not to be. No problem tho, I’m pretty well set.

The death rate in Italy has apparently hit 8% because their health care system, rated #2 in the world, was overwhelmed. Let’s hope that we’re not too late with the orders shutting everything down.

-BT