For some inexplicable reason people have started stockpiling toilet paper in response to the Coronavirus. No-one is able to explain why they are doing the stockpiling and I have yet to meet anyone who owns up to doing it but there are reports that "entrepreneurs" are selling individual rolls on Ebay for ridiculous prices! We were lucky that I purchased my usual amount of toilet paper a couple of days before the panicking started and I was pretty sure that everything would have calmed down by the time I needed to replenish stocks. This however turned out not to be the case and so I found myself standing outside Coles last week at 7.50am waiting to be allowed in. Coles have introduced a policy of allowing only 60+ years olds to do their shop between 7 and 8 am every morning to protect them from the crazy crowds. As I stood waiting you could visibly feel the tension of the people around me rise every time an elderly person left the supermarket with a stash of toilet paper. People were clearly concerned that there wouldn't be any left by the time we were let in. When the doors were finally opened to us there was a sprint to the toilet paper aisle. I wasn't interested in sprinting and had a little chuckle to myself when I saw a stack of toilet paper at the end of a cash register which everyone else had run past as they were so focused on getting to it's normal location first!
On a far more serious note our next door neighbour, Geoff, is currently in hospital with the virus. He had been skiing in Italy and came home to discover he'd managed to pick up the virus. Luckily his wife, Frances, is a nurse and she employed very strict isolating techniques for him the minute he stepped off the plane so she was extremely relieved to get a negative test result for herself and the children. For Geoff the virus morphed into pneumonia and he was in a compression chamber for a couple of days but is now only on a ventilator - although still in isolation obviously. Frances believes he was lucky to get it so early on whilst we still have equipment and beds. I tend to agree with her.
Tess' school is implementing online learning from tomorrow and we're waiting to hear about Tom's. Tom's not doing too badly because luckily it's easy to socially isolate when you're surfing. Tess is finding it a bit more difficult and I wasn't entirely comfortable with having 4 teenagers at our house all day Saturday but I reasoned that the girls and boys are at the same schools so if any of them do have the virus they're keeping it within a "closed" group.
These are strange and unsettling times. Stay safe everyone!
No comments:
Post a Comment