Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!
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@dcon said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Some bread left, but not much.
The only bread left on the shelves was gluten-free (lol) and tortillas.
But the bakery section had fresh (and day-old) bread in stock. I guess they didn't think to look there.
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@admiral_p said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@admiral_p said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@boomzilla I went by what Wikipedia says on the issue:
And somehow completely missed the "various experimental treatments are being developed" in the first sentence you quoted.
If the only software there is to do some task is at the alpha or beta stage, do you still take it seriously as a solution? Generally: no (it depends on how desperate you are). And when the fast-track solution comes up generally in a couple of years, six (I checked) years after the big outbreak seems awfully late.
JFC you're a tedious motherfucker.
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@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
I don't remember who, but someone on this forum said they preferred when diseases hit the wealthy western nations because then there would be a cure and coping medical treatments.
He's being proven right. Not that it's surprising.Correlation etc.
How so? It seems readily apparent that we spend more money on curing diseases that actually affect us.
Labs all around the world were hard at work even before the virus left China. That we're only getting results now that the virus spread to western countries is basically a coincident - it just so happens that both the development of cure and the global spread take about the same amount of time.
But "labs all around the world" wouldn't have been working on it without the prospective pandemic. At least not this much.
Expect normal approval process to be expedited, too. It's already happened in the US for test kits and labs. There was some serious bureaucratic resistance at first but a lot of red tape got cut. Hopefully that will continue.
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@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Also, farming will have to happen no matter if the tö death toll is in the 50% range, otherwise people will starve to death.
Farming is usually done in sparsely populated areas (although that's not necessarily true for fruits & veg which, in France at least, are often grown in close proximity to cities), and most farming activities don't require dense workforce (except, again, fruits & veg for picking/conditioning, but basic food supply e.g. wheat doesn't). So they could go on without too many social interactions.
Also, in France at least, the confinement has a lot of possible loopholes for people working in "essential" activities, so I think farmers are probably not affected, or only marginally (I mean, schools are closed for them like everyone else and so on, but they can still work).
So I'm not too worried about food stocks. If we were in this for years that'd be a different picture, but for a few months, it probably won't make a huge difference.
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@boomzilla I really hope that they find a way to really mass produce a test. So we can free up the people who already had that virus and didn't even realize it.
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Just got an email from Safeway (I'm enrolled in their loyalty program so I get stuff from them normally) saying that they're hiring both permanent and temp positions. First time I've seen that, so I assume they're trying to ramp up.
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And today deaths are up by 475 in Italy (largest increase ever). Today was peak day. We'll see if tomorrow (or the following days) the numbers stabilise.
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@boomzilla that's not moving the goalposts! Moving the goalposts would be "yeah, but it's expensive".
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@admiral_p said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Gąska nah, everybody knew from the start that this was going to be a probable pandemic. On the other hand, Ebola is, AFAIK, incurable and not much is ever done about it.
A staggering amount of work has gone into the Ebola vaccine:
‘Against all odds’: The inside story of how scientists across three continents produced an Ebola vaccine
The story of the Ebola vaccine is a story of scientific grit — and researchers on three continents who toiled to achieve what was once unthinkable.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Rhywden said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Inside the model that may be making US, UK rethink coronavirus control
An Imperial College report considers whether anything short of a vaccine will help.
I understand that. But I'm not sanguine about people's willingness to be contained. Edit: at least in the long term. Or their ability, once the economy completely goes sideways. I'm saying that there may not be any good solutions. Death, death and collapse, collapse. Miracle. Those seem to be our options. But I'm a pessimist.
It's really hard to say what a good strategy is right now, due to the lack of information. To me, it also appears to be a lose-lose situation.
Mathematically, you want to control the spread of the virus using different forms of mitigation to achieve a cost minimum, where you're balancing two costs: One is the very high economic cost of the prolonged mitigation, the other is the extremely high cost to both human health and the economy due to the spread of the virus. It seems apparent that neither is negligible, i.e. this optimum isn't at the extreme ends. In other words, neither "no measures at all, ignoring the health costs" nor "extreme shutdown" (theoretical version, much stronger than anything proposed, leading to complete collapse) create the best outcome. So far, so obvious. Of course, the problem is that we don't really have any idea about the true ratio of these costs over time (and dependent on other parameters), so finding the optimum strategy is very hard. And even with the missing information, there's no one objective measure of these costs, so deciding on it is a job for politics.
But, under the assumption that the spread can only be delayed, not stopped and the goal is only to flatten the parts where the curves are over the available critical care resources, this brings me to one (simplistic) conclusion: the cost of mitigation measures rises with duration of the measures, but the benefits (to ICU resources) only kicks in once we hit that limit. Stretching the left tail, i.e. delaying the point until we hit that limit, under this simple model, actually has no benefit. So instead of stretching the whole curve, we should wait with the extreme measures until (two weeks before) we hit capacity, everything before it only has cost without benefit. For the graphs in the article, that means the measures should only start two weeks from now.Now, that's just some arm-chair philosophizing and I don't necessarily believe this conclusion, for several reasons. On the one hand, there's still the very slim possibility we can keep it under control if extreme measures are effective. And also there's benefits to delaying I've ignored, e.g., if we manage to achieve the orange curve in the second graph, there's a chance for vaccines being rushed to market by then. On the other hand, even if that simplified model were strategically correct, it's probably not something you can communicate to the population. "Oh yeah, we'll wait a bit longer to take measures, don't worry. But after that everybody has to be extremely strict about it." People would be even less likely to cooperate, thus undermining the government's strategy. And even if nobody knows what the best strategy is and we might disagree with the strategy that gets decided upon, we should still cooperate with it.
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@error I really need to work on my backlog of games...
... though I think that Ori gets the biggest part of my attention currently. I also need to get over my "Need to murder all the enemies on the screen" fixation.
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@Rhywden And to expand on that: Not only free those people but also enable that now-immune part of humanity to freely care about the at-risk population without having to worry about infecting them. Which would lessen both the impact of social isolation and the need for isolation gear.
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@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
I don't remember who, but someone on this forum said they preferred when diseases hit the wealthy western nations because then there would be a cure and coping medical treatments.
He's being proven right. Not that it's surprising.Correlation etc.
How so? It seems readily apparent that we spend more money on curing diseases that actually affect us.
Labs all around the world were hard at work even before the virus left China. That we're only getting results now that the virus spread to western countries is basically a coincident - it just so happens that both the development of cure and the global spread take about the same amount of time.
But "labs all around the world" wouldn't have been working on it without the prospective pandemic. At least not this much.
Expect normal approval process to be expedited, too. It's already happened in the US for test kits and labs. There was some serious bureaucratic resistance at first but a lot of red tape got cut. Hopefully that will continue.
Usually that red tape is there for a reason. Obviously, sometimes people would rather decide to risk an unsafe treatment (Dallas Buyer's Club, anyone?) than to get none at all.
In this extraordinary case, it seems that anything that's effective and not completely unsafe will be beneficial and should get extreme fast tracked. Let's hope for the best.
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@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
It's really hard to say what a good strategy is right now, due to the lack of information. To me, it also appears to be a lose-lose situation.
But that changes a lot if effective treatment becomes available. Chloroquine (one of the drugs that might be effective) is an old drug. My wife takes hydroxychloroquine for RA. It's pretty cheap right now, but of course, who knows what happens if demand goes berserk.
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@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
precautions and panic and over reaction may actually work to prevent it from getting there, which could make you wonder why everyone panicked to begin with.
Y2K problem, anyone?
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@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
I don't remember who, but someone on this forum said they preferred when diseases hit the wealthy western nations because then there would be a cure and coping medical treatments.
He's being proven right. Not that it's surprising.Correlation etc.
How so? It seems readily apparent that we spend more money on curing diseases that actually affect us.
Labs all around the world were hard at work even before the virus left China. That we're only getting results now that the virus spread to western countries is basically a coincident - it just so happens that both the development of cure and the global spread take about the same amount of time.
But "labs all around the world" wouldn't have been working on it without the prospective pandemic. At least not this much.
Expect normal approval process to be expedited, too. It's already happened in the US for test kits and labs. There was some serious bureaucratic resistance at first but a lot of red tape got cut. Hopefully that will continue.
Usually that red tape is there for a reason.
But at least some of it tends to appear for the benefit of the agency requiring it. That's a big part, for instance, about why the US is so behind on testing. Originally, the CDC wouldn't let any private companies develop their own. And then the CDC flubbed on their first attempt.
Also, the flu researchers in Seattle who had a big database of swabs were denied the ability to test those swabs for anything but their already approved research. They started testing anyways and found a positive. Then they had a dilemma. They notified the kid who had it and eventually reason set in and the FDA was told to let them test their stuff.
Of course, the regulations in place probably had what seemed like really good justifications, but then again, maybe not...like, maybe commercial medical labs lobbied to not allow research labs to do testing like this to remove potential competition.
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@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
It's really hard to say what a good strategy is right now, due to the lack of information. To me, it also appears to be a lose-lose situation.
But that changes a lot if effective treatment becomes available. Chloroquine (one of the drugs that might be effective) is an old drug. My wife takes hydroxychloroquine for RA. It's pretty cheap right now, but of course, who knows what happens if demand goes berserk.
Yes, as always, predictions are hard. Especially about the future.
I'm still hoping beyond my own belief that the worst case scenarios will not materialize.@admiral_p said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
And today deaths are up by 475 in Italy (largest increase ever). Today was peak day. We'll see if tomorrow (or the following days) the numbers stabilise.
Despite what I just said, and not wanting to be too pessimistic, but this was almost certainly not the peak.
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@boomzilla Yeah, it stands to reason that at least some of those rules are there to protect the market / competition or some other reason unrelated to medical requirements.
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@Rhywden said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
I've got relatives in Boston. Well, they were on holiday in Aruba.
They're currently preparing for having to extend their "vacation" due to the fact that they missed the last plane.
A few of my relatives were lucky in that respect. They would have gone on vacation to the Netherlands Antilles last Saturday, except that all flights there were cancelled starting that day.
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@Rhywden said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@boomzilla Yeah, it stands to reason that at least some of those rules are there to protect the market / competition or some other reason unrelated to medical requirements.
One of the worst of those is the Certificate of Need thing. Basically, you can't open new medical facilities (and sometimes other businesses) in an area or even expand existing ones unless you get a sign-off that there's sufficient demand. From whom? Your competitors.
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@Rhywden said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Rhywden And to expand on that: Not only free those people but also enable that now-immune part of humanity to freely care about the at-risk population without having to worry about infecting them. Which would lessen both the impact of social isolation and the need for isolation gear.
And hope the rumors of this virus messing with the immune system aren't true.
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@mikehurley that would make the worst case scenarios even worse.
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@remi said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Also, farming will have to happen no matter if the tö death toll is in the 50% range, otherwise people will starve to death.
Farming is usually done in sparsely populated areas (although that's not necessarily true for fruits & veg which, in France at least, are often grown in close proximity to cities), and most farming activities don't require dense workforce (except, again, fruits & veg for picking/conditioning, but basic food supply e.g. wheat doesn't). So they could go on without too many social interactions.
Also, in France at least, the confinement has a lot of possible loopholes for people working in "essential" activities, so I think farmers are probably not affected, or only marginally (I mean, schools are closed for them like everyone else and so on, but they can still work).
So I'm not too worried about food stocks. If we were in this for years that'd be a different picture, but for a few months, it probably won't make a huge difference.
Thing is, farmers need mechanics, parts for machines, and consumables in fairly large extents. There is a surprisingly large need for other parts of the industrial beast for farming to keep trucking. Sure, you could do it with massive amounts of manpower as well, but well...
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@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Despite what I just said, and not wanting to be too pessimistic, but this was almost certainly not the peak.
I meant the peak in Italy. Of course not worldwide... We are a long way from the global peak.
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@admiral_p said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Despite what I just said, and not wanting to be too pessimistic, but this was almost certainly not the peak.
I meant the peak in Italy. Of course not worldwide... We are a long way from the global peak.
Same prediction though. Unless your measures were incredibly effective, 36,000 cases in Italy won't be the peak.
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@topspin I think they mean that today will be the peak in new cases, or new deaths. Still, I too believe that it's a rather optimistic prediction.
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A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data
A fiasco in the making? As the #coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data.
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@admiral_p said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@topspin I think they mean that today will be the peak in new cases, or new deaths. Still, I too believe that it's a rather optimistic prediction.
meaning the inflection point, where the logistic curve goes from exponential increase to exponential decrease. Would be nice, because it says that a really bad case (Italy) wasn't the total worst case (millions dead).
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@cvi said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Carnage Yeah. I have a few rolls left in my home, part of one pack I bought some time ago. I figure if I can't buy more toilet paper by the time I start running out, the world's having bad enough problems that toilet paper isn't going to be top priority anyway.
We are Costco shoppers, and I both hate shopping and hate running out of things so I unintentionally hoarded long before any of this was a potential issue. I usually buy toilet paper and paper towels 2+ Costco cases at a time and keep it in the basement in our storage room.
Same for bottled water and other staple items. We just have always kept a fair amount on hand. So when all of this started we had no worries and didn't have to fight the crowds or anything. We were already stocked. The only real effect we have had was running out of some perishables. When I went to the grocery they were out of milk, eggs, bread, most meat, etc. I bought a couple of sirloin roasts and some yeast. We have plenty of flour so I baked bread for the boys and I ground the roasts in to ground beef, which they were out of.
The wife was particularly impressed with me grinding meat to make ground beef. She also used to give me a hard time about buying so much stuff at once. But since we have no immediate concerns about running out of toilet paper she said she won't give me any guff about having shelves in the basement stocked with stuff just because I don't like shopping (or running out of things).
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@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@remi said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Just to be safe I bought one sixpack of toiletpaper on Sunday
I suspect part of the empty aisles is due to that: toilet paper isn't something you buy every week so if everyone thinks at the same time "mmm, I don't have much left, better by one pack now", this is enough to create an unusual spike in demand. Add to that the fact that toilet paper is a very bulky item so it's likely that there are actually very few packs on a shelf at any given time (compared to other products), so a smaller spike in demand is enough to trigger a penury.
(the bulky part doesn't apply to many other items, but the buying now an item that is usually bought every now and then applies to many other products -- which is indirectly corroborated by the fact that I haven't heard much of a penury of items that people do buy every time such as milk, bacon, eggs or bread. Although I'm on the fence wrt to flour and pasta... it's an everyday item but otoh at least for me, I don't buy a pack every week either, so maybe the idea still works?)
Of course, once you've said that, you see assholes like the one mentioned by @topspin, and the whole argument above becomes irrelevant.
Bread, rice and pasta is sold out in the large food stores here, as well as toilet paper.
Why you'd buy fresh bread in bulk I don't quite understand. It goes bad pretty fast, and takes up massive amounts of freezer space for rather small amounts of sustenance. Hard bread sure, but that isn't what people are cleaning out the shelves of.I'm convinced that during winter storms and natural disasters people eat a lot of French toast.
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@Polygeekery said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
We are Costco shoppers, and I both hate shopping and hate running out of things so I unintentionally hoarded long before any of this was a potential issue. I usually buytoiket paper and paper towels 2+ Costco cases at a time and keep it in the basement in our storage room.
City-center apartment dweller here. If I were to buy two mid-sized packs of toilet paper at once, my apartment would likely start looking crowded.
Besides, the closest store is across the street. I basically carry everything by hand or with a small bag in a single go. Even a single pack makes things awkward to carry. The store also has limited space, so they don't even carry the really large packages.
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@error said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
The only bread left on the shelves was gluten-free (lol) and tortillas.
The meat sections around here are fairly bare, but all the vegetarian meat substitutes look to be fully stocked. I found that amusing.
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@admiral_p said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
And today deaths are up by 475 in Italy (largest increase ever). Today was peak day. We'll see if tomorrow (or the following days) the numbers stabilise.
I wish you luck. Be well.
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@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Thing is, farmers need mechanics, parts for machines, and consumables in fairly large extents. There is a surprisingly large need for other parts of the industrial beast for farming to keep trucking. Sure, you could do it with massive amounts of manpower as well, but well...
Not on a daily, or even weekly, basis. Farmers are surprisingly self-sufficient over the shorter terms. The farmers I know all keep a fuel tank with several hundred gallons on premises, they keep a small stock of common repair and maintenance items, etc.
Farmers don't like having everything come to a halt over frequently needed and cheap things. They're like me, they don't like going to the store if they don't have to. I bet most of them could probably keep on for a month or so barring any major breakages.
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A coworker's girlfriend tested positive. The coworker hasn't been in the office since the 9th.
Hearsay:
I've heard someone said they knew someone who was symptomatic, immuno-compromised, and had lung disease have a week to wait to get a hospital bed.New York is definitely being hit hard. Not unexpectedly.
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@cvi said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
City-center apartment dweller here. If I were to buy two mid-sized packs of toilet paper at once, my apartment would likely start looking crowded.
Yeah, it's not feasible for everyone. We have a large basement, so we are lucky. One corner has shelves that may have as much stuff as some small bodega like places would have.
Don't start thinking I am some sort of "prepper". I tend to try to keep us at a point where we could reasonably go a month before it would cause any real hardship. I'm not stockpiling years worth of food and water or anything like that.
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@Karla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
New York is definitely being hit hard. Not unexpectedly.
Densely populated areas are ideal breeding grounds for things like this. I wish you luck.
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@Polygeekery aren’t you wasting good beef turning sirloin into ground beef?
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@Polygeekery said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Karla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
New York is definitely being hit hard. Not unexpectedly.
Densely populated areas are ideal breeding grounds for things like this. I wish you luck.
That's why I said not unexpectedly.
My boss said she hoped knowing about my coworker's girlfriend freaked me out. Not anymore than taking the subway.
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@topspin said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Polygeekery aren’t you wasting good beef turning sirloin into ground beef?
It was a sirloin roast. I bought several of them. Some got turned in to ground beef to be easy meals for the boys (tacos, sloppy joes, etc). Some will be made in to an Insta-Pot version of barbacoa for the wife and I to eat.
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I had a deployment to kick off this morning. I left the house around 9am. The city I live in was.....creepy as fuck. That's the only way I can describe it.
Like a scene form The Walking Dead, but with semis still running. I drove across town and except for the normal semi traffic I only had maybe a dozen cars in my 15-20 mile trip across our 1 million plus population metropolitan area. It was pretty creepy, to be honest. The gloomy skies didn't help.
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@Polygeekery said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Don't start thinking I am some sort of "prepper". I tend to try to keep us at a point where we could reasonably go a month before it would cause any real hardship.
I think that sounds quite reasonable, especially given that you have the space.
I essentially lack space for perishables (no basement that stays cool, and only a small fridge). Means that I end up going to the store quite often for that. As a consequence, it's easy to just buy the stuff I need on a almost day-to-day basis, including items that I could keep stocks of. Likely a bad habit (and, yes, like bad habits, this one is hard to get rid off).
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@Polygeekery said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Insta-Pot version of barbacoa
I would ask for a recipe, but finding a decent piece of roast in this country is bloody impossible even under normal circumstances. (Would probably have to go to a real-life butcher; dunno if those are even open at the moment.)
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@Polygeekery the weird thing is that in my neck of the (Italian) woods the weather we're having is gorgeous. Yay for global warming? Warm, sunny days, temperatures more befitting of May than March, trees blossoming, birds happily chirping, cats fucking like rabbits... er, maybe not the last one? They're fucking gross and better described as "violent gang rape" than mating.
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@PleegWat said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
No measures will be lifted before the new infection rate goes to the single digits, if not has been zero for several days. Assume that moment won't be till the summer vacations.
It's summer down here, and this thing is spreading exponentially
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@cvi said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Polygeekery said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
We are Costco shoppers, and I both hate shopping and hate running out of things so I unintentionally hoarded long before any of this was a potential issue. I usually buytoiket paper and paper towels 2+ Costco cases at a time and keep it in the basement in our storage room.
City-center apartment dweller here. If I were to buy two mid-sized packs of toilet paper at once, my apartment would likely start looking crowded.
Besides, the closest store is across the street. I basically carry everything by hand or with a small bag in a single go. Even a single pack makes things awkward to carry. The store also has limited space, so they don't even carry the really large packages.
I used to live in a similar situation (crappy small apartment next door to a couple giant grocery stores) but I always had loads of toilet paper, shampoo, soap etc. The stores would always have sales, and living alone I didn't use very much
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@Polygeekery said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
I wish you luck.May the odds be ever in your favor.HGTFY
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@Polygeekery said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Thing is, farmers need mechanics, parts for machines, and consumables in fairly large extents. There is a surprisingly large need for other parts of the industrial beast for farming to keep trucking. Sure, you could do it with massive amounts of manpower as well, but well...
Not on a daily, or even weekly, basis. Farmers are surprisingly self-sufficient over the shorter terms. The farmers I know all keep a fuel tank with several hundred gallons on premises, they keep a small stock of common repair and maintenance items, etc.
Farmers don't like having everything come to a halt over frequently needed and cheap things. They're like me, they don't like going to the store if they don't have to. I bet most of them could probably keep on for a month or so barring any major breakages.
Yeah, and most farmers can fabricobble up new spare parts in a pinch as well, but a month isn't much when growing crops really. And the season in Sweden is about to start. Not that Sweden is in any way self sufficient with regards to food production. I think we cover about 20% of what's needed for the population to not starve.
And there is also the transport, factories and warehouses in the food production, even if the farmers keep shit running (hoping they don't have John Deere machinery) the rest of the chain also need to be working.
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@Rhywden said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Why you'd buy fresh bread in bulk I don't quite understand. It goes bad pretty fast, and takes up massive amounts of freezer space for rather small amounts of sustenance. Hard bread sure, but that isn't what people are cleaning out the shelves of.
The real weird part is that flour was completely sold out - but the "ready-made bread baking mixtures" were still all there.
Y'know, the ones where you only have to add water and which keep for several months.
The mixtures are still not commonly used around here. So people go for what they know. (Or learned from home-ec class.)
Also, it's the odd duck between the flour (cheapest) and bread (easiest). If someone has a job, they won't have time to bake anyway. If someone doesn't, the mix is too expensive and probably not as good as just doing it themselves.Plus, there's the old poor people (pensioners are about as poor as students here) that can't get pasta anymore, since that's all sold out. So they go for the flour instead. Because they can't afford the ready mixes.
Last week, the nearest grocery store was out of pasta, btw. This week, they're out of canned pasta sauces. I guess people finally tried to actually do something with their stockpiled pasta.
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@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Polygeekery said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Thing is, farmers need mechanics, parts for machines, and consumables in fairly large extents. There is a surprisingly large need for other parts of the industrial beast for farming to keep trucking. Sure, you could do it with massive amounts of manpower as well, but well...
Not on a daily, or even weekly, basis. Farmers are surprisingly self-sufficient over the shorter terms. The farmers I know all keep a fuel tank with several hundred gallons on premises, they keep a small stock of common repair and maintenance items, etc.
Farmers don't like having everything come to a halt over frequently needed and cheap things. They're like me, they don't like going to the store if they don't have to. I bet most of them could probably keep on for a month or so barring any major breakages.
Yeah, and most farmers can fabricobble up new spare parts in a pinch as well, but a month isn't much when growing crops really. And the season in Sweden is about to start. Not that Sweden is in any way self sufficient with regards to food production. I think we cover about 20% of what's needed for the population to not starve.
And there is also the transport, factories and warehouses in the food production, even if the farmers keep shit running (hoping they don't have John Deere machinery) the rest of the chain also need to be working.
And on this topic, I just finished reading a newspaper article in Swedish about how the meat production may crawl to a halt if/when the schools closes, since then the workers will have to stay home and deal with kids instead of working.
