OT - surviving pandemic from personal experience (no trolling, PLEASE)

[RMerlin]

I wonder if handshakes are gone for good. I hope fist-bumps and elbow-bumps never return. We should start practicing bowing in the Japanese tradition.

Good question. I'd say the two methods (handshake vs bowing) are slightly different in their intent:

A bow is typically a greeting and a sign of respect.
A handshake serves to establish a more direct "link" with the person in front of you, and you can also get a first impression about that person based on how they shake your hand (firm but controlled, strong and dominant, weak with the hand soft as a wet noodle, etc...)

 

[dave14305]

and you can also get a first impression about that person based on how they shake your hand (firm but controlled, strong and dominant, weak with the hand soft as a wet noodle, etc...)

Now your feet will convey your first impression in my future bowing society.
“Oh, he got a shoe shine!”
“Man, he should clip his toenails!”
“Ooh, she’s wearing spiked heels...”

 

[dosborne]

On the plus side, I wonder what other disease will start becoming much less common as a side effect of the current isolation measures we have in place (provided people do follow them)

STDs

On the other topic, I've read a lot from various experts (and I won't put that in quotes). As this virus hasn't been around long enough, the educated guess is a minimum of 4-6 months of immunity. Should in theory be long enough to protect from wave 2. Unlikely to be long enough to prevent a future reoccurrence, and that is were a vaccine, almost instantaneous detection, etc comes in.

Like 9/11, the world will be different for a while. Getting checked (results in seconds or minutes) at essentially all borders, boarding flights, etc, may become the norm.

 

[RMerlin]

On the other topic, I've read a lot from various experts (and I won't put that in quotes). As this virus hasn't been around long enough, the educated guess is a minimum of 4-6 months of immunity. Should in theory be long enough to protect from wave 2. Unlikely to be long enough to prevent a future reoccurrence, and that is were a vaccine, almost instantaneous detection, etc comes in.

If immunity is limited, then a vaccine will also provide only limited protection, since all a vaccine does is trigger the production of antibodies by using inert virus components that trigger the antibodies generation.

Fully getting rid of this will be quite tricky if it's truly the case.

 

[sfx2000]

But his employer might not be able to keep the business running for that long without any business income - I was referring to the businesses' ability to survive this quarantine without going under.

This is a very good point...

I have a close friend that runs a franchise of gas stations - his business is down 60 percent, and he's having to take a serious look at letting folks go...

As for me - I'm a tech-cofounder in a startup - we've lost a team member, and we have to fill that gap - this is a challenge to keep the business moving forward, and also keeping people safe.

 

[OzarkEdge]

Now your feet will convey your first impression in my future bowing society.
“Oh, he got a shoe shine!”
“Man, he should clip his toenails!”
“Ooh, she’s wearing spiked heels...”

"Eew, head lice!"

OE

 

[john9527]

Ran across this and thought it might be of interest....

Comcast on Monday said it has measured a 32 percent increase in peak traffic since March 1 and an increase of 60 percent in some parts of the US. VoIP and video conferencing is up 212 percent, VPN traffic is up 40 percent, gaming downloads are up 50 percent, and streaming video is up 38 percent.

 

[thelonelycoder]

Our ISP's increased the minimum down/upload speeds for free for the time being to make sure there are no bottlenecks.

 

[thelonelycoder]

And just now, my mobile provider added an extra free 50 GB data to my mobile plan.

 

[Mutzli]

I came down with "cold symptoms" about 10 days ago. I had a slight fever that lasted about 2 days and a burning in my lungs for about 4-5 days. I called the doctor and he directed me to go get tested at a drive-through testing site. As of today I haven't received any results yet and now I'm totally fine, but I'm still in the basement in self quarantine until I'll get the results. Don't want to infect anyone else in the family.

 

[Asad Ali]

I came down with "cold symptoms" about 10 days ago. I had a slight fever that lasted about 2 days and a burning in my lungs for about 4-5 days. I called the doctor and he directed me to go get tested at a drive-through testing site. As of today I haven't received any results yet and now I'm totally fine, but I'm still in the basement in self quarantine until I'll get the results. Don't want to infect anyone else in the family.

Best of luck for the results. Be safe!!

 

[RMerlin]

I came down with "cold symptoms" about 10 days ago. I had a slight fever that lasted about 2 days and a burning in my lungs for about 4-5 days. I called the doctor and he directed me to go get tested at a drive-through testing site. As of today I haven't received any results yet and now I'm totally fine, but I'm still in the basement in self quarantine until I'll get the results. Don't want to infect anyone else in the family.

Sounds likely that this was it. Fortunately, the majority of infected people can recover at home. I think it's about 10% of the cases that require hospitalization (based on local stats).

You're doing the right thing. I think you will need to self-quarantine for about 14 days following the disappearance of the symptoms. If you do get a positive result, they will probably give you the appropriate instructions regarding quarantine.

 

[RMerlin]

Ran across this and thought it might be of interest....

My ISP increased their capacity by 20% in recent weeks, expecting a usage spike. They also temporarily removed any monthly quota from their packages (quite a few still had a 400 GB limit).

They also had to increase all packages by 5$, and let go for about 130 employees But this is for a different reason (it's a long story involving incumbents, the CRTC, independent Internet providers, and the court dragging their feet in reviewing a case).

 

[john9527]

Assuming the Comcast stats are close to representative of the industry as a whole, I'm actually pleasantly surprised things are running as well as they are. Sure, I've seen occasional short periods when things went pretty bad, but overall everything has continued to be quite usable.

 

[RMerlin]

Assuming the Comcast stats are close to representative of the industry as a whole, I'm actually pleasantly surprised things are running as well as they are. Sure, I've seen occasional short periods when things went pretty bad, but overall everything has continued to be quite usable.

The only issue I noticed so far was yesterday for about two minutes, I was unable to reach any site behind Cloudflare (lost access while posting a reply here, local newspaper site and my own site also became unreachable).

What surprised me more was that TeamViewer (which I use extensively lately as I help customers get setup for remote work) and Zoom (which a lot of my customers now use) are handling the usage increase quite easily.

I wonder however if Amazon/Youtube/Netflix will decide to apply the same bandwidth reductions in North America that they applied in Europe, limiting the default video resolution. I bet that this step alone makes a significant difference for some ISPs, tho many ISPs probably host an edge cache on their network.

 

[L&LD]

@RMerlin you may want to give your customers that are using Zoom a heads up.

https://www.windowscentral.com/zoom...ivacy-issues-freezes-new-features-focus-fixes

https://www.imore.com/hacker-finds-...91.263218125.1585413910-1588389511.1583614754

https://www.windowscentral.com/zoom-being-sued-california-and-probed-new-yorks-top-prosecutor

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/31/zoom-meeting-encryption/

 

[Adamm]

Ran across this and thought it might be of interest....

Similar increase usage here in Australia, our wholesale provider had to increase retailers CVC capacity by 40% to prevent congestion.

 

[RMerlin]

As for Zoom, I just got this:

Yuan [their CEO] also revealed that the number of daily users has increased from 10 million in December to 200 million daily users, both free and paid, in March.

 

[Asad Ali]

ISP's should seriously consider capping PSN/Xbox game downloads and torrent traffic as well including streaming services to free up the load for essential services.

 

[RMerlin]

ISP's should seriously consider capping PSN/Xbox game downloads and torrent traffic as well including streaming services to free up the load for essential services.

I suspect a lot of ISPs have edge caches for these two networks. In XBox's case don't they use Akamai?