Coronavirus

Covid19

Coronavirus

SARS-covid-2

Whatever name you associate with this virus, it has affected all of us. No one on this planet is going to go through this year without being touched by this in some sort of way.  If you manage to not become ill, you might know someone that does, you need to practice social distancing, wash your hands and use sanitizer more often, dealing with shortages in the stores because of panic buying and on and on and on.

If you have read this anytime within the past few posts, you know that my wife is a high risk person if she were to catch it.  I being a truck driver am at a high risk of not necessarily catching it but possibly carrying it home to my wife.  The plus for me is that I am a introvert naturally so keeping to myself is pretty easy, as I used to say in my younger days, "I hate everybody equally". (I could be a pleasure to be around as you could tell) So staying in my truck and not hanging out in truckstops or my companies operating centers comes second nature.  

The issue are with those that think this is no big deal and that do not practice keeping their distance.  People that are trying to infect others purposely by not self quarantining and still going out to stores or to work.  

This is larger than just me or you, it is larger than any of us will ever know.  We need to work together to keep each other safe and to keep those that are high risk safe by practicing social distancing, hygiene and staying home.

Now about glove wearing.  Just wash your hands and use sanitizer when you can't.  If you aren't changing gloves everytime that you touch something new, like when shopping, you are just possibly spreading the virus to everything you touch after.  Think about how medical personnel use gloves or food service workers, they change gloves after changing tasks.  For medical personnel that is after each patient and using sanitizer before and after wearing gloves.  My wife was in the hospital earlier this year and last week (I'll touch on last week shortly) so I was able to observe the earlier this year checkups by nurses and Drs during that time.  Food service workers are supposed to change gloves and wash hands after handling raw foods, ready to eat foods (think raw vegetables not being cooked before eating, cooked meats or cured meats, etc.) handling cleaning products or cleaning, handling money. For food service there is potentially lots of glove changing, this is why many restaurants do not allow moving between stations, i.e. a grill cook handling chicken then assembling the plate that cooked chicken then goes on.  Point is, don't wear gloves when out shopping.  Wipe down your stuff after you get home, is that really necessary?  Maybe not but considering the length of time that this survives on surfaces, I feel it is best to practice it.

Now about my wifes recent visit to the ER/hospital.  She had an event that her life vest was about to shock her.  She was awake and was able to stop it before she was shocked.  Her mother took her to the ER to get checked out, my wife was admitted for a couple days.  I had left out for the week that day and turned around and came right back home once I was notified of what happened.  Once I got home, I was not able to see my wife.  No visitors. Period.  If she needed anything, it was to be brought with her room number on the bag and dropped at the entrance.  Hospitals are on lockdown during this time.  It sucks if you have someone in the hospital or if you yourself need to be admitted because depending what the  visit is for it could be the difference in the length of stay and how well one will recover.

Also, stop with the posts about all our pork being processed in China and shipped back to the U.S.; it is not true.  Smithfield was purchased in 2013 by a Chinese conglomerate but the pigs are raised in the U.S., slaughtered in the U.S., processed in the U.S. and some is sold here in the U.S. but the lions share is shipped to China to be sold in China.  The reason is that China's swine population was decimated by Swine flu and they could not recover so they import most of their pork nowadays.  The United States of America is the largest producer of pork in the world, China is the largest consumer.  Kinda of like soy, China consumes it, U.S. is the largest seller of soy to China; we are the second largest producer in the world, Brazil is the largest.

Anyways, those are my thoughts about all of this, scattered brain and all.