Latest supermarket rationing limits

[richtea]

The latest purchase limits placed on UK shops in light of the coronavirus, due to panic buying:

> ASDA - 2 hand sanitisers, one 4 pack of loo rolls
> TESCO - 1 hand sanitiser, 500gm rice and an 8 pack of loo rolls
> WAITROSE - 1 lobster, 6 quails eggs, 100gm foie gras
> ALDI - 1 MIG welder, 1 pink sports bra, 2 trumpets, 1 wetsuit

If we can't laugh now, all bets are off.


The one small bonus that motorbikes offer is excellent isolation from the rest of the world.
A pleasant ride out can give you a good mental break.

Hope you're all OK out there.

[TomK1300s]

Very good,

Some good runs planned for this weekend around Wales middle and North, both Sat and Sunday.

All keep well. Tom

[Phmode]

As one who is both senile and ill as well as at risk (over 70 with Asthma and living alone with no living relatives that I speak to) and is therefore about to be escorted to the local clink for the foreseeable future I am somewhat invested in the rest of you taking it seriously. But I agree about the laughing 

My survival protocol is as follows:

Did all my panic buying last week in the wine aisle in Tesco and Waitrose...it's got alcohol in it so I can wash me hands with it.

Bought a box of 100 disposable gloves in Tesco, (a bit like diesel gloves on steroids) which I will put on every time I have to get out of the car or off the bike and then bin before I get back in - petrol pumps, late night supermarket dashes etc.

Stripped the canned soup shelves in Tesco and now have four months supply of Heinz Big Soup.

Topped up the freezer, obviously.

Discovered you can still buy those plastic bags for making ice cubes and now have a week's supply of frozen milk cubes for my tea (I 'could' live without the wine and the whisky but not the tea) in case I run out of the fresh stuff.

Being 'sensible', I intend to have the Honda parked outside Tesco by five to seven in the morning or quarter to eleven at night (mine is not a 24 hour jobbie) and will do a dash round only empty aisles with my credit card in my glove to buy anything I am desperate for, ensuring it comes to less than £30 and using only the self-checkout tills. Credit card goes into shopping bag with flowers and Polo mints and right hand glove is discarded on the way out of the store. The left hand glove which won't have touched anything other than the handles of my bag, gets ditched once the bag is in the boot/topbox which will only have been touched by my naked right hand (it's the ancient Middle Eastern habit of not eating with the hand you use to wipe your backside). Once home, the bag is carried indoors and the contents tipped out and the credit card is washed along with my hands before I put everything away and then I wash them again afterwards as the spotty oik who stacked the shelves could easily have been drinking Corona and not washed his.

Hours of mindless fun and the thrill of never quite knowing whether this particular can of Big Soup was indeed touched by a shelf-stacker who now has the lurgy.

Incredibly, while almost every local company is doing something positive to help the public and their staff, Royal Mail are not even providing their staff with gloves or sanitiser at work or on their rounds. 30 folks in the local sorting office all in close contact, handling letters and parcels from all over the world and which have already been pre-sorted in the Birmingham office, with no protection and then travelling round the countryside handing out 'has it/hasn't it' mail to one and all. Unbelievable!

[chriscanning]

The latest purchase limits placed on UK shops in light of the coronavirus, due to panic buying:

> ASDA - 2 hand sanitisers, one 4 pack of loo rolls
> TESCO - 1 hand sanitiser, 500gm rice and an 8 pack of loo rolls
> WAITROSE - 1 lobster, 6 quails eggs, 100gm foie gras
> ALDI - 1 MIG welder, 1 pink sports bra, 2 trumpets, 1 wetsuit

If we can't laugh now, all bets are off.

The one small bonus that motorbikes offer is excellent isolation from the rest of the world.
A pleasant ride out can give you a good mental break.

Hope you're all OK out there.

Could hardly read it out to my wife for the tears rolling down my face for laughing 


On a more serious note,wife is at a super market old boy gets out of a taxi coughing his lungs up security wouldn’t let him....

[Matt]

Brian, if anything in your plan fails or you find any gaps give me a shout and I can make a supply run and throw things through your windows .

I'm pretty well stocked, but then I made a 'fin del mundo' collection a couple of years ago when I moved here. After all, what else is the utility room for?

Anybody have any spare claymore mines?

[richtea]

... and throw things through your windows .

Do let Brian open them first, eh.

[richtea]

In all seriousness, you've got it about right, Brian.
With that detailed approach, you'll be fine.

> Hours of mindless fun and the thrill of never quite knowing whether this particular can of Big Soup was indeed touched by a shelf-stacker who now has the lurgy.

Virus survival time can be short or long. Stack them dry, and not too cold, and leave them for several days:
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/coronaviruses-how-long-can-they-survive-on-surfaces#How-to-inactivate-coronavirus
(I'm sure there's other research out there too, if anyone knows of it.)

<grandma-sucking-eggs-mode>

To anyone who thinks it's a bit overkill, and you'll be alright, don't under-estimate the horror of exponential growth.
It's not necessarily going to kill you, but by being slack and passing it on, you will kill others down the line, take up beds, and generally put your own life in danger should you need the NHS for some other reason.

Here's a example of 20% growth, day by day, if no action is taken, up to 1st May:
(20% means 1 in 5 infected people pass it on to 2 others, rather than just 1, which about the rate we were running at last week)

Which is why the UK Gov & others have jumped.

Self-isolation will nip this in the bud, so it should start to level off in 14 days or so - the incubation period (if people adhere to it).
Then the decision to make is how much (or little) do you ease off the restrictions, so that enough beds will be free for those still catching it.

Day   Infections   Date
1   1,391   16-Mar
2   1,669   17-Mar
3   2,003   18-Mar
4   2,404   19-Mar
5   2,884   20-Mar
6   3,461   21-Mar
7   4,154   22-Mar
8   4,984   23-Mar
9   5,981   24-Mar
10   7,177   25-Mar
11   8,613   26-Mar
12   10,335   27-Mar
13   12,402   28-Mar
14   14,883   29-Mar
------- growth should start to level off here, but if not....
15   17,859   30-Mar
16   21,431   31-Mar
17   25,717   01-Apr
18   30,861   02-Apr
19   37,033   03-Apr
20   44,440   04-Apr
21   53,328   05-Apr
22   63,993   06-Apr
23   76,792   07-Apr
24   92,150   08-Apr
25   110,580   09-Apr
26   132,696   10-Apr
27   159,235   11-Apr
28   191,082   12-Apr
29   229,299   13-Apr
30   275,159   14-Apr
31   330,190   15-Apr
32   396,229   16-Apr
33   475,474   17-Apr
34   570,569   18-Apr
35   684,683   19-Apr
36   821,620   20-Apr
37   985,943   21-Apr
38   1,183,132   22-Apr
39   1,419,759   23-Apr
40   1,703,710   24-Apr
41   2,044,452   25-Apr
42   2,453,343   26-Apr
43   2,944,011   27-Apr
44   3,532,813   28-Apr
45   4,239,376   29-Apr
46   5,087,251   30-Apr
47   6,104,702   01-May

</grandma-dead-no-sucking-eggs-mode-required>

[black-k1]

The issue that is causing all the "panic" is not actually the numbers it will kill. At a mortality rate of around 3% the numbers will be big but not catastrophic. Very sad for the families involved but not a huge issue to the country/world.

The problem is the time it takes for the virus to either kill or be cured in each individual and the demands on health care while that's happening. If just 40% of the population get the virus and just 5% need hospitalisation, that's still over a million people needing a hospital bed in the UK alone. NHS England only has about 110,000 acute/general hospital beds (with associated staff and equipment) so a million will "make a bit of a difference"!!!!! That means hospitals will be doing a military style triage and leaving some people to just die in there homes because there isn't the capacity to look after them.

[chriscanning]

Talking about mortality rate on a motorcycle forum..........

Normal conversation when I am at the doctors...

Do you smoke NO

Do you drink Very Little

I ride a motorcycle that’ll kill me quick enough i’ve Had some interesting responses over the years 

[Phmode]

S'funny Chris! A few years ago I had a swollen bollock (the other one remained about the size of a mango) and was sent for scans and to see a consultant (all within about 2 days, all on the NHS).

The consultant said that he was sure I was relieved to hear that it was non cancerous and merely a 'normal' 'anomaly'!

I told him that when you ride a 170bhp, 170mph motorbike (and I went to see him, in some discomfort, on the bike) then something as slow moving as cancer didn't even show up on my risk horizon.

The tears were still rolling down his cheeks as I bade him a good day and rode off into the sunset, painfully 

[fjtwelve]

Having travelled to the secret phmode towers location, offhand I'd say he could live completely as normal and be regarded as self isolated by Boris and his cronies. In fact I doubt they would even know where it is if he told them. Having stayed in south shropshire, the scottish borders,  the cairngorms, and the peak district over the last 10 days with no problem or panic buying,  falmouth feels like a metropolis and we returned today to find largely empty supermarkets.  I amembarassed that my generation has singularly failed to pass common  sense to the following generations

[Matt]

Haha each generation has, does, and will make its own mistakes. Otherwise the history books might be boring :p. And don't forget everyone likes a bit of blaming and gloating! (Insert link to the appropriate Blackadder episode, "can we come in for a gloat")

[Belco100]

... At a mortality rate of around 3% the numbers will be big but not catastrophic...

Some genuine numbers from this morning as we hit 200,000 recorded cases worldwide (probably lots more not recorded): 82,813 now recovered and discharged (91%) and 8,010 now dead (9%) 

[Phmode]

One of the things that you 'workers' don't appreciate unless you always or regulalarly work from home is that when you retire or get made redundant, your consumption of tea and coffee, food, therms, kWatts, water and loo rolls goes through the roof. Well, not literally of course unless your loo is broken...

All the things you normally use and benefit from at work like light, heat, lunch venues and ablution facilities are suddenly down to you and in the winter months that can be a considerable cost.

Step daughter is still working but has her two kids working from home as from yesterday and already the stash of loo rolls is getting slim. When you put it in the light of a family of four being indoors permanently, the rush on loo rolls does seem rather more understandable.

As I have discovered on more than one occasion, if you use Plenty kitchen rolls, you can wash sheets of that and it comes out of the machine just like new, if not quite ironed flat (as opposed to cheaper stuff that comes out in a gazillion bits of paper fluff) and one sheet can last for months.

Just sayin', in case you run out of loo paper...

[richtea]

But for gods sake don't put it down the loo.

The average person doesn't understand that loo roll is carefully designed to disintegrate after 20s or so, whereas as tissues and kitchen roll are designed to stay in one piece - thus clogging the drains.

I'm just off to buy bidet maker shares. Turns out the French aren't quite as crazy as some Brits like make out. 
Followed closely by drain/rodding shares - those drains won't unblock themselves.


https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/06/cope-without-toilet-paper-case-coronavirus-related-shortage-12358036/