Erik88

I missed it. What was it, and which group?

My mom called me recently. She voted for Trump once and likely will again. Her exact words were "Trump has been great for the economy, but he's the last person you want to guide us through a pandemic." I've since had a few Trump supporting friends text me and say they can't believe how much he's lied during these press conferences. As for your last sentence, let's not forget it's Trump's DOJ(the same one he demanded ban bump stocks) that has already asked for the ability to detain people indefinitely without trial. We'll never know what Hillary would or wouldn't do but we can see what Trump appointed Bill Barr is trying to do. Thankfully Rand Paul and a few others are trying to stop it.

You wait until 5? :nervous laughter:

We lose 1,300 Tennesseans a month to heart disease and another 1,300 a month to cancer.. I'm trying to keep things in perspective. If we make it through the first 6 months of a highly contagious pandemic and only lose 5,000 people I feel like it could have been a lot worse. It certainly appears other states are going to do a lot worse. Again, maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way.

5,000 deaths out of 6.8 million residents doesn't seem that bad. Am I wrong? The bed shortage seems more concerning. But this also assumes we continue social distancing measures until August which is a depressing thought.

I'm not proud of how many times I attempted to refresh TGO today.... Glad David was able to fix it. I enjoyed the computer smashing dude.

I had to go into work earlier today and you would hardly know anything was different. People were out and about everywhere. I'm not advocating for anything in particular but the list of "essential" businesses is too long to have any meaningful impact. Even liquor stores are open.

I'm on day 6 of employment and finally got my computer working. Also, I'm happy to report we put our house on the market Friday and had a full price offer accepted within 24 hours. We then disinfected anything people may have touched. I'm honestly shocked people are still buying houses but I guess the rates are too good for some to pass up..

I think I'm still in shock we just printed $2 trillion dollars, most of which is going to save corporations. Somehow, the rich will get richer in all this and we will get our $1,200... There is apparently no spending limit our government will not cross. The only rep that spoke out against it was Massie and he got raped by Trump and the press. Amazing times.

It appeared most of Knoxville ignored the social distancing rules yesterday. Cruz Farm on Gay St had a line out the door for people buying "essential" ice cream. Every park was full. People were hanging out in the parking lots in camping chairs. Does anyone feel like our numbers are accurate? We are reporting 1,512 total cases. It seems that even with people ignoring the rules TN isn't really seeing that many cases. I'm not sure what to conclude from that but Bill Lee is catching a ton of grief online for not doing more. Seems like a mandatory quarantine would almost be overkill for us at this point.

When I lived in Florida we could vote by mail and it was great. I wish that was an option here.

He did that a week ago. Is he actually going to use it now?

The job I just left was with a transportation provider and my customer was Kimberly Clark(Kleenex, Huggies, Cottonelle, etc) They were having pretty good luck in most places with truckload capacity. The real kink in their chain was on the loading side. Their DC's and production sites can't keep up with demand. They simply couldn't fulfill the orders being placed on them. They were doing mandatory OT. Demand for some products such as TP were 20x normal levels. In the 3 years I worked there this was the most chaos I've ever seen. 2nd worst time was the summer we had all those hurricanes. 2017? Another huge customer of ours was Kohl's but since they closed nationwide we actually have a lot of drivers without work right now. That's not something I expected. The safest driving jobs right now are the ones hauling food. Prior to all this, the Sysco DC in Nashville was destroyed by the Tornado and my old company was being asked to fill demand from their Knoxville DC. I'm curious if they are still doing that or not. My new job is with a beverage manufacturer. They are actually paying their hourly associates 20% more for coming into work right now and they are checking temperatures at the door. They are also making contingency plans to have all the office staff like me work out on the production floor if it comes down to it. So I could be running machines in a worst case scenario.

If you have an Aldi near you, they have TP each time I visit. Go in the morning for the best luck.

If you want to see a visual breakdown of where our money went, here it is.

On a positive note, I've seen more people and kids outside the past few days than I have seen in the last 5 years combined. My neighbors are outside checking on one another but mostly keeping a safe distance. Kids are out playing instead of being glued to the TV's. I've seen parents slowly drive around with their kids in the bed of their truck. They are getting creative on entertainment.

Is it possible China lied about the death rate? We know they aren't know to be the most honest.

Bingo. The amount of daily deaths is doubling every 48 hours. If people aren't understanding the numbers they will soon enough. Chart below shows confirmes cases/total deaths/daily deaths.

No kidding. That article I posted was extremely long but eye opening. Apparently our experts run scenarios where we determine how we handle various pandemics. We actually had not even envisioned a scenario where we couldnt even get the testing right. Other countries had no issues testing their population. Iceland is testing nearly everyone and they have found 50% of patients that test positive are not showing symptoms. Prior to this it was believed the US would handle a pandemic better than any other nation. Now we look idiots. I imagine some people at the CDC will be looking for new jobs soon. "On the Global Health Security Index, a report card that grades every country on its pandemic preparedness, the United States has a score of 83.5—the world’s highest. Rich, strong, developed, America is supposed to be the readiest of nations. That illusion has been shattered. Despite months of advance warning as the virus spread in other countries, when America was finally tested by COVID-19, it failed."

That's not really accurate. The CDC was already rolling out a test at that point but screwed it up. "As my colleagues Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer have reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed and distributed a faulty test in February. Independent labs created alternatives, but were mired in bureaucracy from the FDA. In a crucial month when the American caseload shot into the tens of thousands, only hundreds of people were tested. That a biomedical powerhouse like the U.S. should so thoroughly fail to create a very simple diagnostic test was, quite literally, unimaginable. “I’m not aware of any simulations that I or others have run where we [considered] a failure of testing,” says Alexandra Phelan of Georgetown University, who works on legal and policy issues related to infectious diseases." https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/608719/

I really thing a big issue right now is that faith in the media is exceptionally low and they(the media) deserve that. But I'll say this, if you don't trust the media perhaps you can at least trust the medical professionals. This was posted on another forum I visit and the author is a nurse in NY. I tend to beleive him.

Greg every time I've been to church I shake no less than 10 hands. I'm not sure the virus knows any difference between the beach and the church. Have you guys at least tried to spread people out in the pews and stop shaking hands? I think God would understand worshipping from the house. My mom's church has switched to an online service where the congregation watches from at home.

It seems fairly clear to me what our choices are. 1) we pretend there isn't a problem and we go back to our daily lives. Millions will get sick. The majority of people will have minor symptoms and recover at home. 200k to 1.7M will die according to the CDC. During this time period the healthcare system will become completely overwhelmed. Unclear what impact this has on the economy. It might spare us from a depression. 2) we continue down the path that we're on. Millions will likely still get sick but it shouldn't be at the same levels we would see if we didn't isolate. The economy will suffer greatly and the full extent won't be known until it's over. Lives will be saved if we go this route but we likely won't even know how many. Careers and businesses will be ruined. I don't see option 1 being likely because even if Trump tries to tell us to go back to work a lot of states aren't going to do this. They will put more faith in the medical experts over a man who has no medical expertise and routinely contradicts his own medical staff. People aren't going to start traveling and spending until this is over. I do think the public may get burned out by this though. Eventually, people will just start ignoring the shelter in place rules and will get tired of watching it on the news. And I'm curious how this will impact the elections. Are we all gonna have to wear gloves and masks to go vote while standing 6 feet apart? Despite what Trump says, this thing seems to be just getting started and it has exposed just how poorly prepared our government is at fighting this. God help us if we ever have a pandemic with a high mortality rate.

I'm considered essential. I got 1 day of HR orientation. They gave me a laptop and sent me home after saying they would "train me the best they can"... And I can't even log into the laptop they gave me. At least I'm getting paid though.

The Lt Gov of Texas says older people might be willing to die if it means saving the economy.. And Trump is still struggling to make up his mind. Now he's saying he's going to "reopen" the country soon to save the economy. A week ago this was going to last until August. I'm starting to understand why they call him Donnie Pump.