Coronavirus / COVID-19

[Gilrandir]

Significant numbers of people are going to want do that once they sense that upheaval might be coming, regardless of what the government or media says.

And how did they start to sense anything? Perhaps because they have seen or heard something in the media or from the government (in the same media).

As long as the distribution and production of the relevant goods remains normal, the situation in the stores should quickly return to normal. The kind of people that would like to fill up their basement with canned food and bottled water have probably done so long ago.

Oh really? I refer you to

Panic buying in the UK is now reaching crisis levels, paracetamol is increasingly hard to find and thermometers are basically all sold out. I admit, I among many other idiots did not buy one when I left home - and indication of our poor attitude to disease.

I don't know that much about politics in the Ukraine, but elsewhere it's a double-edged sword.

This fact never prevented the foolhardy from attempts to play with the sword being sure it will cut the way they want it to.

And that's not even to consider the assumption (false, IMHO) you make that all students are basically lazy individuals who jump at any opportunity to get out of classes.

Having a 25-year experience of working with students and a daughter who finished high school two years ago and now is a University student I can claim that it is the way I described them. And the sutuation has been steadily exacerbating.

As to the problem in question: three days ago I informed my 35 some students of my skype and the manner of communicating with them during the quarantine. How many of them responded to say nothing of registering for distant classes? Take a guess.

Absolutely not the case. Sure they get a lot more viewers covering this pandemic which increase their advertising revenue, but I would venture that's not enough to offset the losses from events they cover being cancelled. Some of the largest media companies in the world are here in the US and they are going to lose billions (that's billions) because of the loss of revenue from cancelled sporting events. Taking just one cancelled event---the NCAA basketball tournament (know as March Madness) generated 1.32 BILLION last year. You think CBS and Turner Broadcasting (the two media companies that cover the majority of the games) are happy about all the media coverage of COVID-19?

There is such a thing as vantage theory. In general it boils down to the premise that all of us look at things from different perspectives and therefore see only things that are open to view from there. The same is in this case. You make conclusions looking at your environment and don't consider (and mostly are not aware of) things that remain unseen form the USA.

In Ukraine TV channels are free (you have to buy a digital TV converter and an antenna, but that done you don't pay anything). ALL OF THEM are commercially unprofitable and are financed by oligarchs 5-6 of them owning 95% of TV channels. So in Ukraine media don't think of losing money because someone else will pay for them anyway. And having a subject to talk about for the next month or more and lots of people obliged to stay at home and watch TV will certainly increase their ratings.

As for March madness, never shared it. Watching students while you have an opportunity to watch NBA is like buying small, upripe and sour appples when you have access to big sweet ones.

Shop owners and pharmacies? In the short term, yes they will probably be experiencing upticks in business. Outside of price-gouging, what's wrong with that? The outbreak is not their fault, and they don't even have a way to influence ongoing events. They are a passive player in all of this.

It is not their fault, but they benefit from it and they may whisper in their customers' ear that it is better to buy things now before they run out of everything/ before prices soar.

In the 1918 H1N1 outbreak, it wasn't the first wave of infections that had the high lethality. It was the second wave that came several months after the first wave started.

Is it 1920 now or am I missing something? I believe that a hundred years that has passed since then must have brought some progress into medicine, no?

I'm not sure why you think the posting here rises to the level of panic, but prevention mitigates threat.

So you believe that posting here facilitates prevention? As I can surmise it is an update on the number of the infected, comparison of mortality rates and description of what is happening in locations posters hail from. All taken together it may raise the level of imminent threat feeling and when all around you keep talking of it night and day panic is just around the corner.

There is not 1 case, there are many tens of thousands. Borders do not mediate viruses.

I meant Ukraine where quarantine was announced whith officially 1 person infected. As for borders, the whole world would be much safer now if all outgoing traffic from China had been cut the day they showed the footage of a man "falling dead in his tracks on the street". By the way it is what China itself has done to its province.

Russian foreign policy is "relatively harmless" to individual Ukrainians in a similar way...

23 Ukrainian individulas whose job was serving in the army were killed since the year started. Yet these consequences of relatively harmless Russian foreign policy didn't cause any panic in Ukraine.

And there will be an acute wave of panic hitting Ukraine at some point soon. (I'm assuming it hasn't yet.)

It has been sporadically spotted. As the saying goes, В любой непонятной ситуации покупай побольше гречки. And journalists broadcast live from supermarkets interviewing the anxious shoppers. Which surely doesn't redound to the panic level now does it?

When you see it, remind people to slow down and that any shortages are only temporary.

Do you think people will listen to cautionary voices trying to reason with them or will share in the general panic?

Tangentially, I remember what the USSR would do to people like this.

Depends on what USSR you mean. If Stalin's USSR then расстрел без суда и следствия по законам военного времени. In Brezhnev's USSR it was a typical modus operandi of the majority of population so if all the goods were legally acquired it wouldn't probably incur any drastic consequences.

Think about how it looks applied to Chernobyl:

The beneficiaries of the Chernobyl panic are quite numerous. In Ukraine they are:

1. Party apparatchiks: All of them try to score PR points using Chernobyl as a lever. Competing factions say when they were in power such things never happened and should they be elevated they would know how to combat the radiation. Those in power claim that the situation is so dangerous because their predecessors did nothing to anticipate it.

Wrong. There was no opposition in the Party among small fry. At the upper floors there might have been some surreptitious (and sometimes open) struggle especially by the end of the USSR but average aparatchiks ever attuned themselves to the official position and changed their attitude instantly when линия партии altered. And at the time of Chernobyl the party leaders were as monolith as ever to say nothing of their subordinates. At least outwardly it looked that way never revealing a crack in this monolith.

2. Media: Good opportunity to blame the Western capitalists.

4. Pharmacies: Purchases of iodine soared.

Media as well as pharmacies (and shops by the way) were all state-owned which means they would continue functioning they way they did whatever happens around them. So it didn't really matter to them what happened.

3. Future oligarchs: It's a great excuse to agitate for Ukrainian independence.

At that time agitating for Ukrainian independence was a crime so pursued by nationalistic romatic dissidents only. Any would-be oligarch is a money-calculating person so idealistic tenets didn't (and don't) beckon to them.

5. Scientists and doctors: The educated eggheads get to claim domain of expertise over the incident and increase their authority and prestige.

They were embedded into the party system so the blame for the accident was put on them in the same degree, and even greater. In the mass mentality it could be epitomized by the phrase
эти ученые доигрались.

6. Students. Both high school and university students rejoice at the cancellation of classes and the adventure of evacuation.

There was no cancellation, lessons proceded as usual, moreover the Первомайская демонстрация was held in Kyiv with lots of children and grown ups getting radiation doses. Although student ever rejoice at any class cancellation, it is true.

In general, quoting you

This is such a shallow insight into world USSR affairs.