States and the country have stages they are, somewhat
arbitrarily, defining as we open back up. While Illinois went on full shutdown
for two months to really limit the impact on hospitals’ ICUs, some states did
not take the same tact or do it for as long. Now, two weeks after Memorial Day,
those states are having a significant influx of new cases of Covid 19 and their
ICUs are near capacity. From what I’ve read, there is some number of people who
are going to get infected and be hospitalized (and die). Our goal has always
been, just don’t overwhelm the hospital system and make doctors choose who gets
a chance at living and who is not "worth" treatment, much like a triage unit in
war time. New York and Detroit early on had to basically take this tact.
Fortunately we did not in Illinois.
On a more personal note, since this is my blog, I thought it
would be interesting to “track” the impact of the virus based on what I can and
can’t buy at the grocery store. First it was toilet paper and paper towels,
followed by tissue. If you find yourself at the start of something that will
cause sheltering in place, you want to get some of these and I would recommend
hitting your secondary stores (for me, Meijer and Jewel are level one and
Berkotts is secondary) as well as the hardware stores (which also usually have
cleaning supplies. The latter might have a supply for a few days after the
others run out. And the smart stores should have really put an immediate limit
on the high demand items to prevent hoarding as much as possible.
After the paper products (which people use more of at home
when not going into the office), yeast was almost impossible to find. People
are staying home and they need projects to work on with their kids and don’t
want to go to the grocery stores, so they bake at home. Makes sense. Milk never
seemed to run too low, but eggs ran out more than one day. Along with these,
cleaning supplies and laundry detergent start to run out. As meat processing
plants started to shut down, there was some shortages in pork, beef and
chicken, but now there seems to be a fair amount of all of them and very few
times have I been unable to purchase these items.
Eventually you get to where the random stuff starts to run
out: Brummel and Brown butter spread made with Yogurt was the poster child of
these products. You couldn’t find it anywhere until just about a week ago. I’m
not sure what the supply chain looks like for it, but it was out for almost
three months.
Other things on my shopping list that we could not find: 2% Swiss
cheese singles and more recently, shelled edamame has been gone (even shelled
has been tough to find). Obviously things like Clorox wipes are still
non-existent as are large bottles of hand sanitizer (which I fortunately had
bought two of last year).
So now that we are about three months into the shelter in
place order and four months into when the hoarding started, you’re finally
seeing a CHOICE in toilet paper and facial tissue available at larger stores. Yeast
became available more readily in the last few weeks. And interestingly, fruits
and vegetables, which have a shorter shelf life and different supply chain,
never seemed to really be unavailable completely.
