It seems pretty clear at this point that there's not going to be a shortage of nonperishable goods. Everywhere that's been hit by coronavirus, food's still available and stores are still open - the only severe shortage so far has been ICU beds. People seem more receptive (although still not universally receptive) to more helpful advice like "start washing your hands a lot more" or "don't go to any big events".

The issue isn't food shortages.

It's that you should have enough to not go out and expose others if you get sick.

And inversely, if you're well, fewer trips out to common spaces where exposure is possible.

If there is an outbreak, you want to avoid going to places like stores - not just for yourself but to minimize your chances of contracting the virus and exposing others. It's the socially responsible thing to do.

I get almost all of my non-perishable items with Amazon and Amazon Fresh (left at my door without human interaction).

Not sure how much safer that is, but I imagine it's less exposure in total, if I'm careful about hand-washing.

Delivered by a robot? or minimum wage coughing worker?

It's about risk mitigation. It's not 100% guaranteed physically impossible to pick up the virus from a delivery package, but it's a very low risk, much lower than other infection vectors most people will be exposed to. Unless you're planning to hermetically seal yourself into your home for the next 8 weeks, the risk is probably so low it's not worth thinking about.

>Unless you're planning to hermetically seal yourself into your home for the next 8 weeks

Way ahead of you

Minimum wage coughing worker. I'm just figuring it's lower risk than going to a store with numerous coughing/breathing customers and employees everywhere. I believe the risk is higher when you're directly exposed to another person, compared to the virus being on an object's surface.

> It's really hard at this point not to feel like people deserve what's coming.

Please try harder. The people most harmed by this will not be the people making the dumb decisions. It'll be the people they infect. And of course their loved ones, some of whom will soon be watching caskets get lowered into the earth.

Read somewhere that funeral services are banned in Italy. Didn't see any exception for household relatives.

Wow. That's even worse!

> It's really hard at this point not to feel like people deserve what's coming. The vast majority of regular Joes still don't care and think I'm crazy for simply telling them to be responsible and buy some non perishable goods.

Because you have a lot of so-called authority figures (in the USofA at least) telling people it's all under control.

At what point will the lies become criminal?

Have officials in the US ever been prosecuted for telling voters lies that they want to hear in order to validate their own delusions?

We can draw a meandering line from this tweet back through at least 2000, when a US presidential candidate dismissed his opponent's quantitative reasoning about climate change as "fuzzy math".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_math_(politics)

> UK hospitals are running out of capacity.

What’s your source for this statement?

The UK was in that situation before the virus.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/25/hospital-be...

Thanks, that’s a helpful link.

You are not crazy you are simply overreacting like a typical american.

Please keep nationalistic flamebait off this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Meanwhile Mecca is shut down, Italy instituted a Nationwide lockdown overnight, UK hospitals are running out of capacity, China shut down it's entire industry for two months

Those countries are not American. They are reacting reasonably to a virus that has 20x the mortality rate of the flu, with no known vaccine.

Italy is reacting to overflown hospitals unable to deal with crises.

You're making a lot of inflammatory statements without providing any references to support your claims. Fearmongering does not benefit anyone.

Go here and click on your country: https://studylib.net/coronavirus

Then click on Italy. 2 weeks ago they had 320 cases. Compare that to your country now. Look at the trend line for your country.

I’ve yet to hear someone explain to me how most countries won’t end up like Italy. The ones that stand out are Korea and China, but nobody seems to be taking the same action as them.

It's all over the internet at this point. Major outlets are reporting on it. Why the hell do you think the stock market tanked into recession territory? They're already calling it "Black Monday" in the news.

Why would I bother continuing to post references when I only have downvotes to look forward to for my effort? Spend two minutes on Google. Do you know how many billions of dollars have been already lost to cancelled events? SXSW was cancelled. Japan has been talking about postponing the Olympics for months. What more do you need spoon-fed?

It's not like you even need to do anything drastic! Just stock up on some non perishables and be prepared to stay home for a while if you can. That's literally all a responsible adult needs to be doing right now.

But whatever. I'm not taking this personally. Everything will be clear in the next 1-4 weeks. We're lagging behind European countries by 10-20 days, and like a typical epidemic the growth is exponential. Things are about to get interesting locally. I certainly hope I'm wrong but the constant trickle of literature out of China since early January (in legit journals like Lancet and PubMed) paints a very dire picture.

> Why the hell do you think the stock market tanked into recession territory? They're already calling it "Black Monday" in the news.

There was a small matter of oil prices dipping as a result of negotiations breaking down between Saudi Arabia and Russia, which may have played a minor role in Monday’s events.

I don’t disagree with your general sentiment, but there was more to the events on Monday than a virus.

Why would a stock market tank because of low fuel price?

Insolvency for US producers, followed by cascading loan failures.