Is Coronavirus affecting your travel plans?

Hmm...

What about travel? A lot of people have trips planned – is it advisable to cancel those?
I’m less and less worried about travel as the disease spreads more widely throughout the United States and the world. It’s not so much the travel that’s an issue, it’s what you’re traveling to do. If you’re traveling to be part of a large gathering, that’s not in keeping with social distancing in the mitigation phase we’re trying to enter right now. If you’re traveling to sit on a beach by yourself, it’s probably OK.

https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2...-mitigation-strategy-tufts-infectious-disease
 

One thing the country definitely needs to learn from this is that shorter supply chains for many items are an issue of national safety, I say safety instead of security because I don't mean it in a military defense way. What we need is to be able to make or medicines and other healthcare items.
Like masks and gloves for healthcare workers.
 
Rural communities are going to get crushed with their lack of hospitals and aging population. And if they do go to a hospital in a rural area, it’s most likely not staffed for a pandemic, and it most likely doesn’t have a lot of ventilators. This is where I see this virus being particularly nasty.

That's my biggest concern about my area. There are no "large gatherings" here to be concerned about, unless you want to talk about a thousand people at a high school football game 5-6 months from now, and social distancing is fairly easy when you have relatively low population density. But our "hospital" has been teetering on the brink of closure for quite some time, and after years of downsizing is basically just a 24/7 urgent care combined with an outpatient surgery center and a birthing center. Broken limbs and hernia repairs and biopsies they can handle, but serious issues like heart attack, stroke, pre-term labor, etc., they just stabilize and transport to an affiliated facility in the city. I would be absolutely shocked if they have enough ventilators for even a handful of patients. And while there's not a huge population in this area, there's certainly 20 or 30K people for whom that is the closest hospital... so if just 1% of them get sick enough to need supportive care at a particular point in time, that would likely exceed the hospital's capacity a hundred times over.
 
That's my biggest concern about my area. There are no "large gatherings" here to be concerned about, unless you want to talk about a thousand people at a high school football game 5-6 months from now, and social distancing is fairly easy when you have relatively low population density. But our "hospital" has been teetering on the brink of closure for quite some time, and after years of downsizing is basically just a 24/7 urgent care combined with an outpatient surgery center and a birthing center. Broken limbs and hernia repairs and biopsies they can handle, but serious issues like heart attack, stroke, pre-term labor, etc., they just stabilize and transport to an affiliated facility in the city. I would be absolutely shocked if they have enough ventilators for even a handful of patients. And while there's not a huge population in this area, there's certainly 20 or 30K people for whom that is the closest hospital... so if just 1% of them get sick enough to need supportive care at a particular point in time, that would likely exceed the hospital's capacity a hundred times over.

In rural communities, I think, churches and schools provide the easiest ways for this to spread. Then community festivals would be another along with sporting events.
 
Is Coronavirus affecting your travel plans?



Yes and no. Had no firm plans for this summer since DGD is going to a sleep-away camp.

The current health concerns allowed me to snag a much desired cabin at our fave campground in CT this coming M-Day weekend. Normally, it would be long gone by now.
Just have to hope it'll still be open when we get there, LOL.
 
I'm a nurse who has worked in isolation units and the ICU...This particular virus is causing severe pneumonia in a larger percentage of patients (people who normally do not get it with the "regular influzena") because more people are getting sick at once or around the same time and need extra care (oxygen support with possible mechanical ventilation (a machine.) That causes a problem because only so many ventilators are available, there is not one for every hospital bed (so if your hospital has 500 beds, they might only have 50-75 vents because that is what is usually have on hand). Some years during the flu all of our vents were in use and they couldn't get anymore as other hospital in the area were maxed out as well. Because people are taking so long (some weeks) to get better, the more people that fall ill needing help are aren't to get the support they need because someone else is still using (the ventilator) for sometimes weeks at a time. Sorry this is OT but I just wanted to explain how a medical system could overwhelmed from a mechanical support perspective.
One thing the country definitely needs to learn from this is that shorter supply chains for many items are an issue of national safety, I say safety instead of security because I don't mean it in a military defense way. What we need is to be able to make our medicines and other healthcare items.
Rural communities are going to get crushed with their lack of hospitals and aging population. And if they do go to a hospital in a rural area, it’s most likely not staffed for a pandemic, and it most likely doesn’t have a lot of ventilators. This is where I see this virus being particularly nasty.
Like masks and gloves for healthcare workers.

What all of this points to is a failure of proper government planning. The US is supposed to have a strategic stockpile of medical equipment (which makes perfect sense; better to have a large supply of backups warehoused in a few spots so that they can be sent where needed, just as with supplies for natural disasters. However, the stockpile was originally designed to respond to bioterror attacks, and a lot of what is in it is geared to that, like anthrax vaccine.

This is one of those things that bureaucrats are really needed for, to stay on top of the inventory and rotate it out as it ages, and to liaise with epidemiologists to keep up with projections of the most likely items that will be needed. (It really doesn't do to keep stocking supplies for treatment that would have been cutting-edge 20 years ago; we have to have up-to-date technology in it, and should be selling off the aging stuff gradually before it reaches obsolescence.)

The thing is, costs have risen, but tax levies to pay for it all have fallen. So, naturally, the agencies in charge have chosen to try to get more for our money by buying supplies from less expensive foreign suppliers. That's all well and good, but when you are talking about preparing for events that can punch large holes in your supply chain, you really need to make sure that there are backups on backups, even if it means paying a bit above market in order to keep domestic suppliers in business. It goes against current "Just In Time" supply chain management gospel, but every rule has exceptions, and this should be one of them. Unfortunately, the current situation seems to be revealing that it hasn't been.

We can get related manufacturers switched over to producing these things, but ramping up fast will cost us a lot more than it should have, both in time and in tax money, and we have to keep workplaces functional to make it happen.
 
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo unveiled a plan to deal with the coronavirus outbreak in New Rochelle, including deploying the National Guard to a containment area and setting up a satellite testing facility for the community.
The National Guard will help deliver food to homes and clean public spaces in the containment area, Cuomo said.


Holy cow. Never thought I would read that in an American news article.
 
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo unveiled a plan to deal with the coronavirus outbreak in New Rochelle, including deploying the National Guard to a containment area and setting up a satellite testing facility for the community.
The National Guard will help deliver food to homes and clean public spaces in the containment area, Cuomo said.


Holy cow. Never thought I would read that in an American news article.

It’s following the game Plague Inc. Creeps me out.
 
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo unveiled a plan to deal with the coronavirus outbreak in New Rochelle, including deploying the National Guard to a containment area and setting up a satellite testing facility for the community.
The National Guard will help deliver food to homes and clean public spaces in the containment area, Cuomo said.


Holy cow. Never thought I would read that in an American news article.

Why not? It's common after hurricanes.
 
What all of this points to is a failure of proper government planning. The US is supposed to have a strategic stockpile of medical equipment (which makes perfect sense; better to have a large supply of backups warehoused in a few spots so that they can be sent where needed, just as with supplies for natural disasters. However, the stockpile was originally designed to respond to bioterror attacks, and a lot of what is in it is geared to that, like anthrax vaccine.

This is one of those things that bureaucrats are really needed for, to stay on top of the inventory and rotate it out as it ages, and to liaise with epidemiologists to keep up with projections of the most likely items that will be needed. (It really doesn't do to keep stocking supplies for treatment that would have been cutting-edge 20 years ago; we have to have up-to-date technology in it, and should be selling off the aging stuff gradually before it reaches obsolescence.)

The thing is, costs have risen, but tax levies to pay for it all have fallen. So, naturally, the agencies in charge have chosen to try to get more for our money by buying supplies from less expensive foreign suppliers. That's all well and good, but when you are talking about preparing for events that can punch large holes in your supply chain, you really need to make sure that there are backups on backups, even if it means paying a bit above market in order to keep domestic suppliers in business. It goes against current "Just In Time" supply chain management gospel, but every rule has exceptions, and this should be one of them. Unfortunately, the current situation seems to be revealing that it hasn't been.

We can get related manufacturers switched over to producing these things, but ramping up fast will cost us a lot more than it should have, both in time and in tax money, and we have to keep workplaces functional to make it happen.

I think we, as Americans, believe (sometimes naively) that in a time of national crisis, we will be taken care of & our needs will be met.

And, up to a certain point, that’s probably true, for the most part. But, after a certain point, it becomes not sustainable, & things start to fall apart quickly.

After things get really critical, the wealthy will, at first, have the means to pay extra for whatever they need (medical supplies, medical care, food, etc.), but the vast majority of people will find themselves at the mercy of a government who is not really all that prepared for a widespread national crisis.

Too, I think we rely on & demand our American freedoms & liberties which are great (I love America!), but, in some instances, our freedom could end up being our downfall when, unlike countries like Italy & China, we react too slowly when it comes to things like school closures, travel bans, border closures, etc.

COVID-19 will probably end up just like a really bad flu, as many experts say, & the over-hyping media has caused a lot of unnecessary panic. However, if it’s not ”just the flu” or if it had ended up being something else, I think, out of American optimism, we didn’t react quickly enough to really protect our citizens.

Edited to add: There was some TV show or movie DH & I watched a few years ago, & there was line that stuck out at me, even at the time - “When civilization falls, it falls quickly.”
 
I'm finding one of the most difficult things at the moment is parsing everyone around me's reactions and interpretations of what is going on. My roommate has a fair amount of health-related anxiety, so she's on edge, most of my coworkers and I are trying to take it seriously while also joking about it so we don't fall into pits of anxiety, and then there's the family friend who is pissed her son was sent home from college a few days early for Spring Break (but likely also would have been pissed if they had kept the kids there and he got sick). It's just a lot to sort through while also sorting through the actual info/media coverage/concern, etc.

That said, if flights for the fall go down significantly, I am going to jump on it!
 
That's my biggest concern about my area. There are no "large gatherings" here to be concerned about, unless you want to talk about a thousand people at a high school football game 5-6 months from now, and social distancing is fairly easy when you have relatively low population density. But our "hospital" has been teetering on the brink of closure for quite some time, and after years of downsizing is basically just a 24/7 urgent care combined with an outpatient surgery center and a birthing center. Broken limbs and hernia repairs and biopsies they can handle, but serious issues like heart attack, stroke, pre-term labor, etc., they just stabilize and transport to an affiliated facility in the city. I would be absolutely shocked if they have enough ventilators for even a handful of patients. And while there's not a huge population in this area, there's certainly 20 or 30K people for whom that is the closest hospital... so if just 1% of them get sick enough to need supportive care at a particular point in time, that would likely exceed the hospital's capacity a hundred times over.
I like those odds better than my own. This city has 4 hospitals for a population of 1.4 MILLION with another 100,000 in the surrounding rural areas. Health care in this province is extremely centralized; in an area larger than Texas, 1/3 of the population (total 4 million) lives further than 3 hours away from meaningful acute care.
 
In rural communities, I think, churches and schools provide the easiest ways for this to spread. Then community festivals would be another along with sporting events.

True, though even in rural areas (at least in mine), church attendance is way down so only the biggest remaining churches have more than a few dozen people on most Sundays. And fortunately it is winter, so none of our community festivals are likely to be impacted - if they are, it'll mean we're still in crisis mode 3-4 months from now, and a cancelled carnival would be the least of our concerns at that point. Schools are the big question mark. There are no cases in my state yet, but the archdiocese has offered guidance on when/how to make local decisions about closure or shifting to online learning. I'm sure the public schools are working on plans as well, since they're really the only place you'd find hundreds of people gathered in my area at this time of year.
 













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