Candid Journal Entry #3
On Friday, Utah governor Gary Herbert announced the Stay Safe, Stay Home initiative. It is a list of recommendations for residents of the state to follow. You can read in greater details over at the state's website.
For the most part, I am not seeing the hysteria at the store or pumps. It snowed here for a bit as well. While the scenery looked beautiful, I couldn't help but feel a Silent Hill vibe to it.
The gas stations now offer paper towels for those who might not want to touch the keypads and pumps. It does make one wonder how long before the toilet paper bandits decide to raid them.
The grocery stores are still out of paper towels and toilet paper. Good thing I have bought some since before the hysteria. I only go there for fresh food items now. The idea is to not dig into the storage supplies until the family has to.
In the stores, there are stickers on the ground that tell how far people should stay from each other while in queue. In fact, there's a sign outside saying that only 25 customers inside at a time. How are they enforcing it? I have no idea.
Rising Numbers
For some people, they look at the numbers and see no end in sight, even in Utah. The cases keep on rising despite the social distancing efforts.
For one, the labs are still catching up on all the pending tests. When I left work on Wednesday morning, I heard there were still over a thousand tests pending. Even if the people have managed to flatten to the spread, it would not show in the near future.
Don't believe me? Go check out @suesa's post about her experience working in the lab. This is also complicated by the fact that my state doesn't test people who do not display symptoms. In essence, we don't even know how many asymptomatic carriers are there among us.
Hive Stuff
I have seen a few initiatives around on Hive. Kudos to @theycallmedan and @anomadsoul for announcing them. I'm sure a lot of people will participate in them.
For me, I'm undecided on those. I'm not super big on introducing myself again or recycling a post about my feelings for Steem, but in Hive. But, I'm all for community engagement. There are definitely people I have seen who were quiet on Steem breaking out to say hello.
Anyways, time will tell if this was worth the time and effort people put in. This time, no one will have STINC to blame. I do hope the consensus witnesses and people will give in their A effort for this fork. There's always something to blame, but there's no excuse for inaction.
Take care and stay where you are.
I think some of the witnesses are doing a lot, and the amount of work the dev's have put in this week is astronomical. I know things will slow down a bit for them, it is hard to keep the pace up that they have set, but things are moving along pretty good right now. First week down, hopefully many more to come.
The virus really is nothing to sneeze at, but I still feel it is not as bad as they are making out. After it dies down and we have real numbers to compare with it with the flu, and then to compare the normal flu reported numbers to a previous year we will see if it really was as bad as they are making it out to be. For now, taking a few extra precautions is a good idea, but most of all do not let panic mode set in like it has with so many.
I know they are doing a lot. I guess I meant it as I hope it's not a rush of inspiration. Then, that inspiration dies as quickly as Steem become a thing of the past.
As for the outbreak, I think many of us would be interested in the data later as well.