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How has COVID-19 affected you personally?

Discussion in 'Zoo Cafe' started by DelacoursLangur, 6 Mar 2020.

  1. Imperator Furiosa

    Imperator Furiosa Well-Known Member

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    I do appreciate the concern but I've been trying to keep up with the research. And you're right, we're uncertain if there is lasting immunity. We have to do more longitudinal studies to study if immunity is possible. We're about 12-18 months at the very least from a vaccine. It could be longer. But I hate not being able to do anything when some of my friends are facing homelessness and people in my community are going to die.
     
  2. AmbikaFan

    AmbikaFan Well-Known Member

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    With your unusual skill-set, you will be of far more benefit if you keep yourself alive, something that sounds as if it's going to be harder and harder for all of us to do. If DMV, means DE/MD/VA as locals know it, welcome back to the East--but stay far away from NY and NJ.
     
  3. Zooplantman

    Zooplantman Well-Known Member

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    I resent that! :p
    OK perhaps stay away from the NYC region and especially urban areas. But NY is a large state (as you know!), NJ has large rural areas with less chance of contagion than Detroit or Baltimore. Details matter.
     
  4. AmbikaFan

    AmbikaFan Well-Known Member

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    Are you going to come to NJ's border and cough in my direction now, the way you threatened to do with Thylo in CT!?:p:p

    There's no doubt that NYS is a huge state and that I was primarily talking NYC. But NYC is part of what is called megalapolus, the heavy swath of urbanity stretching from Washington to Boston that gets its density also from heavily-populated suburbs. NJ's statistics prove without doubt that New York City now means the "greater New York area," including all of northern New Jersey. Coming from the south, I urged her to stop at NJ to avoid this huge area of high, high risk. I'm right in the middle of it, living 40 miles west of the city and teaching in Brooklyn, now online. Deaths are increasing at such startling rate that it's probably statistically likely that I will lose at least one of my 45 students in the 2.5 months.until our semester ends. That hits home on a very personal, granular level. With her high-risk conditions, I openly warn against visiting my very own state. We need to actively find ways to save everyone we can.
     
  5. Yoshistar888

    Yoshistar888 Well-Known Member

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    Breaking news about COVID 19

     
  6. birdsandbats

    birdsandbats Well-Known Member 5+ year member

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    I knew what it was going to be but I clicked on it anyway. :p
     
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  7. dt644

    dt644 Well-Known Member

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    Bad news for me. A COVID-19 Infected came out of my apartment yesterday. Today is April 1st, but this is not a joke.

    Everyone is like that, but especially those living in apartment buildings like me, please be careful.
     
  8. KevinB

    KevinB Well-Known Member 5+ year member

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    That is freaking scary, I hope you are able to keep yourself safe and healthy. My best wishes.

    Apartment buildings are probably at a high risk of being hotbeds for the spread of viruses with lots of people living in a small area and relatively narrow common areas. Also I believe I have read that virus droplets can sometimes be spread through ventilation system ducts.

    I hope that all ZooChatters will be able to keep themselves safe and healthy. My best wishes to all in these difficult times. And please follow the rules of your governments and take the necessary precautions to keep yourself and your loved ones as safe as possible from this scary virus.

    For myself there hasn't really been any change. I have not left our premises (we live in a free-standing house with a garden) for over two weeks now. I do go outside to take care of my chicken flock (3 roosters and 10 chickens) and to read on our backyard terrace if possible. However I can very easily avoid contact with anyone when outside. Other than my parents whom I live with I can easily avoid contact with others. My mother goes to the supermarket once a week but that is our household's only outside contact at the moment.

    Mentally I'm still doing my balancing act with regards to healthy news consumption, and trying to stave off anxiety and despair through seeking interesting and relaxing materials to watch and read.
     
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  9. Yoshistar888

    Yoshistar888 Well-Known Member

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    My advice would be, enjoy yourself, feel sorry for those in peril but keep your mind away, think about all the zoos you may visit afterward or research about animals.

    As long as you stay in your house and only go out for essential purposes it dosent matter what country you live in as long as you follow those measures you won’t contract the virus. Both my parents are particularly vulnerable to the virus (one has liver issues,type B diabetes and low level Thalasemia, and the other had a pneumonic infection a few years ago)

    I have anxiety and other mental and neurological disorders too and I completely understand some of the stress you may be going through.

    If you are trying to find information I would recommend only to look at pure statistics which is the data without all the news drama.
     
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  10. KevinB

    KevinB Well-Known Member 5+ year member

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    I hope your parents will get through this okay, my best wishes.

    My personal issues are mostly related to autism spectrum disorder and associated anxiety and depression. These are trying times for everyone but people like me have a harder time with the rapid change, the lack of normality and the uncertainty.

    I have developed some routines that allow me to have some sense of normality in these abnormal times and I am seeking out relaxing activities. Something that has helped me is researching for posts in the Fantasy Zoos section here on ZooChat, exploring specific species and their habitats or certain countries or ecological regions and their diversity.

    I have also been paying some attention to wildlife in and around our garden. Our garden definitely isn't very ecologically designed or wildlife-friendly, but nonetheless I have so far seen about a dozen bird species on or from our premises, as well as a handful species of invertebrates. All of those are common species, but nonetheless it is still nice.

    With regards to news sources I try to limit myself to our national public broadcaster (TV and website) and just a few newspapers that are somewhat trustworthy. Now I just have to learn to get better at filtering which articles I should and should not read, and at avoiding the panicky ones with dire predictions of some sort.
     
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  11. AmbikaFan

    AmbikaFan Well-Known Member

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    Instructors at my school--and every college all over the country--have been putting up a yeoman's fight to conquer the technical challenges of online learning so that we can get down to caring for our students. Today, a professor in my school posted the following email message:

    "Cure found. Lockdown over!. See news." It was an April Fool's joke.

    Never have you seen such a barrage of responses from instructors college-wide who were all online working; the email alert sound was ringing every second with new expressions of outrage, from those who had relatives sick with the virus, to those whose families were in high-risk situations, to those who were missing funerals of departed loved ones because of the virus. Both our Outlook email system and BlackBoard slowed noticeably as this huge volume of responses exploded throughout faculty and administration. Finally, someone suggested that we all block this individual, and I--of all people because of my lack of aptitude for things electronic--figured out how to override a rule preventing us from blocking someone from within our own organization. It's still appalling to me that the workings of nearly an entire faculty ground to a screeching halt as we reacted angrily and actively worked to make sure that we would never see the musings of a man who should have been as focused on helping his students as he was making the most insensitive joke in history.
     
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  12. FunkyGibbon

    FunkyGibbon Well-Known Member

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    At the risk of being a little controversial myself:

    It probably took, from conception to execution, about one minute to deliver such an ill-conceived and insensitive joke.

    How many minutes, collectively, did the entire faculty spend in reacting to this? It's easy to imagine it was more than 1000. Furthermore, if indeed this professor can no longer contact his colleagues, it's his students who will ultimately suffer.

    Whilst understandable in the circumstances, this seems to be an example of how not to react to this kind of thing.
     
  13. AmbikaFan

    AmbikaFan Well-Known Member

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    While you're right about this in theory, we are deep down in the trenches right now in New York City. WE are the EPICENTER of the virus in the US, we have students with the virus who may not ever be coming back to our classes; everyone has family members who have the virus, some in quarantine alone so they won't infect their families. Within two weeks, it's expected that 50% will have the virus in the NY/NJ region. At the same time, we are working round the clock to keep the electronic class management tool BlackBoard from collapsing under the use; one night, the entire system went down because the UC (University of CA system, one of only two larger than ours) logged in. This morning at 4 AM, I discovered from a student that our class had been locked, made unavailable to students, like classes from years ago that had concluded. After five hours working to reverse this and then notify all my students, I STILL had not yet had a moment today to spend any actual time on or with students or their work--and then this joker froths from the pen with this appalling joke.

    You know as a teacher the responsibility we feel to our students, so the combination of struggling to even remotely give what we want to be giving AND the colossal medical crisis going on in our very midst, in our classes and families, made it impossible for us as human beings not to be outraged by this. People can only stretch so far in their devotion in stressful times before they snap. In a regular semester, only small numbers would be logged in at any given time, but right now, our very MO is to be online, and we're spending so many hours trying to make it work that we were literally all on--and just ripe for an explosive reaction. Of course, you're right that logically it doesn't help to react, but we're very stressed, very caring humans hearing a cavalier joke mocking the crisis we are in. I think this reaction would be universal in similar circumstances.

    We all received this fine message, because there's a way to send it to the entire faculty and admin, so deans, vice-presidents, and even the president herself were among this responses creating the minutes-long series of alert-beeps that was the straw that broke the camel's back. Individuals would have to write his email address in the sequence I discovered to block his emails, so he undoubtedly he has some colleagues like his chair, friends, the president who can not block him. In any case, I don't feel any worry at all for his students regarding their professors' curtailed list of email colleagues; I'm much more concerned about how flippant his attitude is about the grave issues surrounding his students right now, both in and out of the virtual classroom.
     
    Last edited: 2 Apr 2020
  14. KevinB

    KevinB Well-Known Member 5+ year member

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    All I can say about that situation, @AmbikaFan , is that the appalling "joke" that professor made is in my opinion criminally insensitive and unethical. Not only should this man I think be fired and publicly shamed in the media, he should also be sent to rot in jail for a really long time for this. Someone demonstrating such an outrageously and disgustingly flippant disregard for common sense and humanity does not deserve to continue being a part of society, let alone academia.

    It pains me to see and read the reports on what is happening in New York/New Jersey and other parts of the United States, and to think about how bad it unfortunately likely will get. I want to wish all of you in that area courage and strength in these very hard times. And I hope that something can be done to make this very bad situation not become the absolute worst.
     
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  15. Mr. Zootycoon

    Mr. Zootycoon Well-Known Member 5+ year member

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    Let me start with saying that I absolutely agree that this joke was distasteful, insensitive and by all means, should never have been made.

    Yet, speaking as someone who is prone to making "insensitive" jokes myself (though never on this level), I disagree with the statement that this person should be fired, "publicly shamed" and even sent to jail. No-one should ever be put in jail because of a joke. This one was a grossly insensitive and ill-conceived, but nevertheless it was a joke.
     
  16. AmbikaFan

    AmbikaFan Well-Known Member

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    I don't think anyone involved thinks he should be so punished either. He was simply oblivious to the very dangerous and high-anxiety situation all around him and the effect his "joke" would have on others. Obliviousness is not a great trait in a teacher, so, as I said, I worry most for his students, who probably got this email as well. Interestingly, the President's reply--things are so stressful that even she jumped right on--revealed that she has warned him before about emailing the entire faculty and admin with in appropriate material. On the day before the governor closed all colleges in the system and announced the transition to online learning, this man had begun a lengthy debate about whose job it is to erase whiteboards in classrooms. If you're polite enough to always erase your own mess, he opined that students entering for the next class are being deprived of something they might have benefitted from. Thus, the best way is for each instructor to erase the boards at the beginning of class and not the end. Tensions were running high even then, and he kept this completely unimportant matter going on and on and on until a dean ordered him to stop and free up our inboxes for the glut of truly essential reading that was already starting. I guess I was just trying to point out that there will always be people--even people who should know better--who will act in inappropriate ways that will inevitably make circumstances more difficult for everyone. For my part, I'm really glad I spent however many minutes figuring out how to block him, because now I know I will not have my time taken or my emotions twisted with again while I'm trying to focus on what's really important. Funky Gibbon was totally right, of course, but only in situations that are not fraught with this much life/death import.
     
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  17. Hipporex

    Hipporex Well-Known Member 5+ year member

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    I am indeed now gonna be out of school for the rest of the year. :( (and this is coming from someone who isn't particularly fond on high school)
     
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  18. AmbikaFan

    AmbikaFan Well-Known Member

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    With NYC the epicenter of the worst-hit COVID-19 region of the country, I continue to post updates about what's happening here if it helps everyone else see what may happen to their region as things worsen.

    Tonight, the CUNY Chancellor just announced that all 26 colleges of the City University of NY will conduct all Summer 2020 classes in the distance-learning format, online. This effectively means there will be no classes on our campuses until the Fall 2020 semester begins in September, five months from now, at the earliest.

    This decision, made upon consultation with Governor Cuomo and health officials, offers the most recent indication of how long COVID-19 is expected to keep citizens sheltering in place and practicing safe distancing.
     
  19. ThylacineAlive

    ThylacineAlive Well-Known Member 10+ year member

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    Four cases of COVID-19 have been identified at my workplace as of today. Despite this, my job remains open due to them strictly enforcing 6ft of distance between employees at all times as well as regular cleaning of the building multiple times a day. I'm conflicted because I would like to continue working and saving up money, but I also really don't need to come into contact with the virus...

    In additional news, my bestfriend's uncle died yesterday due to the virus. He was a perfectly healthy police officer.

    ~Thylo
     
  20. Batto

    Batto Well-Known Member 10+ year member

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    Why not stone him to death or lynch him? Geez... I understand that the current situation has you on the edge, but you are a "tad" bit overreacting with your call for mob justice...As already mentioned by Mr. Zootycoon - it was a (bad) joke; no more, no less. Maybe spreading internal job affairs to scold colleagues in secret online might not be the best way to calm down other people who are already edgy. Just my 2 cents...

    Speaking of calming down: I'm using this as a opportunity to improve more and more of WdG; shifting animals, improving enclosure conditions, cleaning and decorating. I stopped by a quarry yesterday to look for suitable decorative stones. A couple of hours later, I looked like a paleontologist who had made the discovery of a lifetime, and at the same time finished decorating several tanks. The inland taipan and the cape cobra in particular are probably sore today after exploring all those new features in their enclosure. ^^
    The still rather cool weather is great for transporting amphibians; my rough-skinned newt is ready to move to the exhibit today.
    Stay positive & productive!
     
    Last edited: 5 Apr 2020