The Covid-19 Thread

[Maturin]

All the eggs have been nabbed in all 3 supermarkets we've checked down here. Maybe it's just a weird Cornish thing.

[Hatredsheart]

Newest and weirdest one I've seen (until I thought it through) was spectacle cleaning wipes.

[Mantis]

It's worse in the bigger supermarkets in my experience. I went to a local Tesco Express and the only empty shelves were the loo roll, pasta, rice and hand wash. The large store I went to the other day was even starting to run out of fresh veg alongside tins of tomatoes, beans, milk and eggs.

I was in the line at Tesco and I overheard one girl say on the phone "I'm just here to get some pasta sauce, I've got so much pasta at home I don't think I'll ever finish it." Bloody morons.

[Achtung Englander]

How are pot noodles doing

I am intrigued by products that do not shift no matter what

[Animalmother]

Hope you recover soon MM, can't be much fun I on the other hand feel fine again, I'm obviously not worth the effort for the flu, mildly insulted by that rebuttal...

[Sly Boots]

Nationwide school closure from Friday expected to be announced this evening.

[Wrathbone]

We've just had an alarming company-wide email to say they intend to move everyone to a 4 day week along with some limited redundancies just so they can survive the coming months. I'm already on a 4.5 day week, so financially I can cope with a 4 day week, but this is fucking scary. Our office is one of the smaller ones, so there's a chance they could just shut us entirely.

[Mogster]

Nationwide school closure from Friday expected to be announced this evening.

Great... Closing the schools in Italy seemed to coincide with infection rates going through the roof for the elderly. Hopefully it was a coincidence.

[Alan]

Grandparents are great babysitters

[Hatredsheart]

My grand-kids have been sent home until further notice, my 2 kids that still live at home have also been sent home today one working from home and one on paid leave.
On the good side at least the chance of them bringing infection in (if they haven't already) has dropped, great as both me and the missus are in one of the vulnerable groups.
It's all seemed a bit surreal, bit of a phantom event, until you go to supermarkets etc and see the shit starting to hit the fan. Getting a bit too close to home now, grand-kids are genuinely scared and hard to reassure them when every channel seems to be throwing messages of doom at them.

[Mantis]

Schools closed across the UK from Friday until further notice, barring for children of key workers.

You'd almost think that the government was being reactive and didn't really have a plan here.

[Rossell]

You might argue there hasn't been one for years.

[Snowy]

I haven't said much in this thread, but am pretty pissed with my employer. As soon as it broke how big this whole thing was going to be, immediate common sense was applied: All of you who can, work from home. Next day, the VPN falls over as it is so overloaded. Common sense instantly retracted: Only critical staff (of which I am not one) are allowed to work from home, anyone else tries it and you will be cut off from the VPN.

So I am now, every day, trekking 40 miles each way to a park and ride, where I ride a bus that is used by who know how many people all day every day into an office full of people who are mostly doing non-essesntial work.

My company has effectively stuck two fingers up to our health and wellbeing because heaven forfend they have to pay us for not working for a few days until the bolster the VPN network to support us working from home.

[Drarok]

In their defence, it wasn't their choice to live 40 miles away from work.

I don't know what you do, so no idea if a VPN is really even necessary, but it could well be that the internet connection isn't able to handle that many people accessing the office at once, and would require a new connection putting in to fix, so not something they could do in a small time-frame. What they could do as you say is just have the non-essential work wait for a bit.

I'm very glad my bosses are being super nice as usual, but I can't see us surviving as a company – we need investment by June or July else we're going to start having trouble paying bills.

[Achtung Englander]

on the flip side I have been working from home for 8 years now and I hate going out so...er..........nothing changed