Just an anecdotal observance from the Twin Cities...
This morning on the express bus to downtown Minneapolis, I saw a guy wearing a mask. It looks like one of those surgical masks. He was a white guy perhaps in his early to mid 60’s.
Not sure if he was being overly cautious or perhaps he had a suppressed immune system and was thing “Better safe than sorry”. Maybe he works with a lot of Asian people at his job.
But other than seeing some shelves at my local Target looking a bit picked over (Clorox, disinfecting wipes, etc), this is the first really tangible evidence I’ve seen of anything happening here.
One week ago today I saw a woman at my local Safeway wearing a mask, which I thought was weird since I live in the mountains. HOWEVER, just yesterday we had a confirmed case a little over an hour away from here.
I just got back from wally world. On my way in, I saw a professional guy in a nice suit, crew cut, grab sanitizer wipes to clean the cart handle. Passed him later and didn’t think to look in his cart but I looked back and saw gator-ade 8 packs hanging on all sides of his cart. Plenty of Lysol on blue jugs but I got the last yellow. No food items low. Got up to checkout and didn’t even have to wait. Then the cashier coughed while facing the bag she was filling and didn’t cover so she basically coughed on our food. 60-65 y.o. woman. This is the one time I wish there wasn’t enough cashiers(usually the case) so I would have had to use self checkout.
The store is over 100 miles from the nearest city, St Louis, and 60 miles from the interstate. Rural. I think people here, that actually watch the news. Figure this is just going to be a city thing. UPS, FedEx, USPS and every distributor that serves this area, are all based out of St Louis.
I’ll be going out every morning this week to get something. Different direction each time. Got mostly canned goods at walmart. I don’t do produce or meat from walmart. New grocery ads come out tomorrow so I’ll be checking those for meat deals. Gonna try and fill the little chest freezer we just bought. I’ve got a generator I can run a couple of times a day. I doubt we’d lose electric but if so, we’ll use the freezer and a cooler. I do have an RV fridge that will run on propane so I can set that up if needed.
We’re supposed to take a trip to Virginia in May. We’ll see how things are going then. They people we’d be visiting go on missions to China once a year. If they go this year, I don’t think we’ll be visiting them.