Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Oh, it's worse than that, aileesic. Millennials cavort and play because they know if they do get it they are very likely to survive it and be immune for the duration. They see people their grandparents' age as useless. Most of them have no idea who their grandparents are. They see this new flu that will kill millions as a the 'boomer remover". Some think they will be able to just move into an "abandoned" property. Some will get away with it. That happened in 1918 when my grandmother was alive. They would go in and pay the back taxes to the town and the town would give the freeloaders a release deed.
I am a Millennial (Pew definition 1981-1996 birth years). Millennials are hardly cavorting right now. Many have faced either job losses or stock market losses from Coronavirus, so many are feeling quite impoverished. For the older Millennials (1981-1988), this is a double beating, because the older Millennials graduated into the late 2000s/early 2010s recession and had their early careers significantly damaged. Many spent a good portion of the 2010s rebuilding from the damage of the last recession.
For older Millennials born in the 1980s, their grandparents were member of the GI Generation born in the 1910s or first half of the 1920s, possibly some early part of the Silent Generation (later 1920s-1945) grandparents. The first half of the Millennial generation has grandparents that are either dead or mostly dying. I'm in my mid 30s and an older Millennial, and my last grandparent died a few years before Coronavirus hit.
I don't know if Millennials consider this a "Boomer Remover". First, some of the vulnerable elderly are members of the Silent Generation. The Millennials and the Boomers have a complicated relationship. Boomers are often the parents of Millennials. For the older Millennials, during the last recession, a strangely entangled web formed. Boomers experienced 401k devastation and plummeting home prices but often kept their jobs. They stayed in the workforce longer, not clearing the way for Millennials to get their first post graduation jobs. Many older Millennials, due to a lack of employment, retreated to living at home with their Boomer parent(s).
Quote:
Originally Posted by NOLA101
The biggest issue with small towns and Covid-19 is that if you get sick, you're in the worst possible location. Of course, since small towns are more isolated, you're probably less likely to get the virus.
Eventually, though, most people will get it, over the next few years. Most won't even know it.
This is a perfect explanation. I'm in a large city right now, but I have thought about whether things would be better for me in a small town right now. I've also pondered small town/rural living in more normal times. There are appealing aspects, but my life as currently constructed couldn't fit it.
My freezers are full, we have all the seeds we need for Spring planting,
Maple flow is nearly done, and my radiation treatments [for my cancer] are over.
If we all avoid going into town we will be fine.
Now if we could just get that mentality to transfer over here. We are in ground zero here in Cook County and we are weeks behind New York, maybe ten days behind. I track the virus in each county and look for rural places to grocery shop that are not reporting cases. It seemed like a good strategy until the town chosen showed up on the list the next day. We drove an hour and a half a couple of days ago for supplies. I still wear an N95 mask and gloves in the store.
We have 102 counties in Illinois and 30 are reporting infections vs around 15 three weeks ago, and that's only from people getting sick. It is much more wide spread than we know, and the current news is already a week to two behind.
I had an appointment cancelled with my OBGYN oncologist in April and rescheduled for May 23rd, a month later instead. I'm guessing that they have a better pulse on what's going on and are deferring non emergency surgeries until after they feel confident that this virus will pass?
What I'm seeing in the grocery stores in these rural towns has me deeply concerned. These people are not getting it, and it will spread because of it.
No one is being "nervous Nellie" about this and the media is not hyping this. If anything, people are not taking this seriously enough.
I have a different perspective having worked through the H1N1 epidemic as a Respiratory Therapist. What I'm seeing with this virus is far more serious. This bizarre disconnect between political narrative and deadly serious reality is not helping the situation, and needs to stop.
I just finished texting with a fellow therapist friend working at the big box hospital and they are running short on PPE. The cases are just now starting to come in. Many health care workers are going to die because of this, and I'm not being a nervous Nellie when I say I'm deeply concerned and worried about my friends. She told me they are using the same N95 for the entire shift. It stays by the patient's room. It's a recipe for disaster. You could easily grab the wrong one and wear one that somebody else used.
Look, this pandemic started with one case and continues to grow case by case exponentially. This is not a political narrative, this is a deadly virus that is going o kill indiscriminately. Young,old, rich, poor, it doesn't care what your political beliefs are. It started with man, it will end with man. Take this very seriously.
Folks..with colleges closed and going online many students are returning home.
And sometimes "home" is in a rural setting.
The rural county I used to live in has 2 confirmed cases as of yesterday...college students returning home.
And with just those 2 cases the county went into lockdown mode with all the cities/towns taking precautions.
The county pop is only 24K and spread out..more cows than people.
The county has ZERO facilities to treat infectious diseases. Anyone who gets really sick will have to be transported to the nearest big city with the right hospital facilities.
We not only live in a rural town but on an island as well. However, we have had a steady stream of tourists from all over the planet streaming through here and almost no testing being done so even though we only (at this time) have 5 known cases on the island, we really don't know the actual number.
Town is kinda tense, it's very quiet and nobody is out and about. Yesterday, there were a few (three) folks who met at the local Buddhist temple yesterday and they were sewing masks and mask covers for hospitals. They had other folks (five of them) coming by to pick up packages of kits to make more masks but those folks are making them at home.
The local small grocery is mostly stocked as long as toilet paper isn't on your list. The other store in town has a table at the door, you tell them what you want, they go into the store and get it and pass it over the table.
It being a small town, everyone knows that someone in our household came back from the mainland just over a week ago. We've been isolating ourselves for ten days since then and no sign of symptoms, but we're still social pariahs and probably will be for at least one more week. Because our family member came back from an area on the mainland that had some cases of the virus, we did get a test done, but we are (eight days later) still waiting for the results.
Our state, Hawaii, has gone into a STATEWIDE quarantine until April 30th, starting today (3/25/20202). That includes tourists so hopefully this will stop the virus from spreading. A lot of airlines have cancelled a lot of flights to here, mostly due to lack of demand I'd guess since last week they had some insanely cheap fares from the mainland to bring people here.
As for healthcare, we have a small clinic in town, but no trauma unit and no ventilators in our town. The next town over (twenty minutes away) has a few of them, but not enough for any kind of outbreak. For any sort of semi-major to major health issues, we have to fly to Oahu.
We're pretty food secure, though, with locally sourced vegetables, fruits and a nearby slaughterhouse with lots of cattle around here.
Don't even really think about it, or in other words it hasn't impacted my life in any meaningful way.
I look at these kinds of events, and have since AIDS in the 80's when I was first old enough to think about these kinds of things and form meaningful opinions, as an auto-immune response from the Earth to the unchecked parasite that is Human. People die everyday, that a few more might go this month vs last month or next month isn't really a concern. Might actually be a good thing if the planet population were cut in half, and callous sounding as this will be, the population at highest risk in the US are the elderly ~ generally speaking, people who have lived a full life already (80% of ALL fatalities are aged 70 and up and 92% are 60 and up).
If you're under the age of 60 and wash your freaking hands a few times a day, this will be a non-event here in the US.
It is kinda fun/funny watching people freak out though. I can't recall so many posts on just one topic across so many different C-D forums since I've been active here. That's about the limit to my exposure though, no radio or TV in my house, no newpapers (or news sources of any sort) beyond me going to intentionally look online. Well, my mother-in-law calls every few days to talk about the hording she's doing and my wife, who's a healthcare worker, brings home some 'news' (she's still going to work and is mostly just annoyed by the whole thing, the best thing that's come of this mess is the cancellation of in-person meetings, which are always a waste of time with no upside).
Good to hear you live in a city and not likely to be my neighbor. Thank god
All I can say is that I live in a very small NC coastal town/island and we had so many
NY families arriving in the past few weeks to "ride it out" here that we had to
ban all short term rentals temporarily.
I prefer a small town, neighbors banning together to help everyone out.
This is the most appalling, selfish news I've heard.
Along with the moron who flew on the Jet Blue flight knowing he had Coronavirus and got confirmation on the plane.
People die everyday, that a few more might go this month vs last month or next month isn't really a concern. Might actually be a good thing if the planet population were cut in half, and callous sounding as this will be, the population at highest risk in the US are the elderly ~ generally speaking, people who have lived a full life already (80% of ALL fatalities are aged 70 and up and 92% are 60 and up).
.
I'm old, but I don't consider my life completely full yet, and you don't get to decide that for me, so bugger off, kid.
As for feeling safer in a small town these days, sure, the fewer people I run into, the better.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Now if we could just get that mentality to transfer over here. We are in ground zero here in Cook County and we are weeks behind New York, maybe ten days behind. I track the virus in each county and look for rural places to grocery shop that are not reporting cases. It seemed like a good strategy until the town chosen showed up on the list the next day. We drove an hour and a half a couple of days ago for supplies. I still wear an N95 mask and gloves in the store. 
