Sign of the Times

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.