Quarantine Diaries: Day 14
I’ve now been semi-quarantined for two weeks. It’s open-ended, so for all I know, it might go on months longer. My wife’s now working from home and both or my step kids have had their college campuses shut so our driveway is spending a lot of time full of cars:
I drove my car for the first time in two weeks, to go to a drive-thru ATM. At least in my part of America, gasoline has dropped below two dollars a gallon. In part because of reduced demand as fewer people are commuting to jobs, in part because of the petroleum production spat between Russia and the Saudis.
More and more of us are relying on home deliveries but that supply chain has its own set of problems.
There’s lots of crazy stuff going on:
India’s prime minister decrees 21-day lockdown to curb virus.
The announcement set off panic in many neighborhoods as people rushed to markets to stock up on supplies. At many places, police tried to disperse crowds outside stores.
Granted, lockdowns do appear to slow the rate of transmission. But how would lockdowns be enforced in a country of 1.3 billion people? And if lockdowns spread in America, how would they be enforced here? In the supposed “land of liberty” would people accept the idea of needing travel papers at all, let alone needing them for something as mundane as grocery shopping?
Some doctors are stockpiling potential coronavirus meds for for themselves. It can certainly be argued that that’s selfish, but if the docs get sick, who’s going to treat you? Ideally, they’ll be setting aside some meds for nurses too, in that nurses are the backbone of the healthcare system.
Best way to track coronavirus severity? Hospitalizations. Oregon stopped reporting them.
The Federal Reserve has thrown off all restraint. QE to infinity. Yeah, maybe right now they have no choice. But down the road, this all but guarantees inflation. Want to buy gold to protect yourself from inflation? Good luck with that.
Been nearly 10 days for us in semi quarantine. Each day runs over to the next and it becomes hard to remember what day it is. Very bizarre times