On my much-reduced in number trips to the grocery store I always take note of the status of the paper products and cleaning supplies aisles. Toilet paper, paper towels, and facial tissue remain in short supply as do bleach, disinfectant, and hand sanitizer. The explanations that have been proffered for these shortages include panic-buying, hoarding by profiteers, and a transition from the use of these products divided between places of work and home to at home only.
I think that last explanation is largely balderdash. For one thing most places of business in the U. S. don’t rely on commercial sources for TP; they buy the same products from the same places as home shoppers do.
The products I do see on the shelves are mostly off brands I’ve never heard of before.
I suspect that supply chain disruption is a major component of the shortages. Protestations of manufacturers to the contrary notwithstanding I believe that even the supply chain for the ingredients used in humble TP is very long indeed with wood pulp coming from Brazil, the components of bleach and scents and softening agents coming from China inter alia.
I walked into an ACE hardware today. I look to my left…………there are gallons of 70% alcohol hand sanitizer, in various bottle sizes. You can’t find it at Publix, Wags etc. I asked the clerk, “where’d you get this?”
He says, “the brewery right next to us.” (As I left, I looked at it…SOAB there’s a brewery.) They are making it hand over fist.
That’s the free market. Government? Good luck pal.
Separately, if you are asking about supply chains. All I can tell you is that in Naples/Bonita Springs, and now when we are in Bluffton SC, they wonder WTFAreYTAbout? No death star has hit. Product is plentiful. The moment they opened the coffee shops etc people were there. They are pissed. They understand.
Let’s get real, people. Its media and blue state hysteria right now. Why? To Federally bail their sorry asses out. Despicable.
Full of graphs, different viewpoint.
https://quillette.com/2020/05/08/enough-with-the-phoney-lockdown-debate/
“The Hong Kong flu (also known as 1968 flu pandemic) was a flu pandemic whose outbreak in 1968 and 1969 killed an estimated one million people all over the world. It was caused by an H3N2 strain of the influenza A virus, descended from H2N2 through antigenic shift, a genetic process in which genes from multiple subtypes reassorted to form a new virus.
The recorded instance of the outbreak appeared on 13 July 1968 in Hong Kong. (There is a possibility that this outbreak actually began in mainland China before spreading to Hong Kong, but this is unconfirmed.) By the end of July 1968, extensive outbreaks were reported in Vietnam and Singapore. The Times newspaper was the first source to sound alarm regarding this new possible pandemic.
By September 1968, the flu had reached India, the Philippines, northern Australia, and Europe. That same month, the virus entered California, carried by returning troops from the Vietnam War, but did not become widespread in the United States until December 1968. It reached Japan, Africa, and South America by 1969.
In the US, total fatalities were an estimated 175 thousand. In Berlin, the excessive number of deaths led to corpses being stored in subway tunnels, and in West Germany, garbage collectors had to bury the dead due to insufficient undertakers. In total, East and West Germany registered 60,000 estimated deaths. In some areas of France, half the workforce was bedridden, and manufacturing suffered large disruptions due to absenteeism. The British postal and train services were also severely disrupted.
The outbreak in Hong Kong, where population density was greater than 6,000 people per square kilometre, reached maximum intensity in two weeks; it lasted six months in total from July to December 1968. Worldwide deaths from this virus peaked in December 1968 and January 1969. By that time, public health warnings and virus descriptions were widely issued in the scientific and medical journals.
In comparison to other pandemics of the 20th century, the Hong Kong flu yielded a low death rate.â€
No one was called a racist for labeling it the Hong Kong flu. No one criticized the president for allowing US citizens back into the country. The US economy, or any world economy, was not forcibly shut down under the guise of Armageddon. Civil liberties were not violated. Social distancing was not practiced beyond pretty much what Sweden is doing today: common sense actions. The deaths were concentrated in those over 65 years of age, and those with co-morbidity.
The only thing I changed in this citation was to age adjust for increased US population size. Oh, and I forgot to mention, it didn’t stop a little concert from occurring. You know, the one we call Woodstock. This about politics, media hype and two cities: Washington and New York.
As steve has pointed out, just about everybody over the age of 65 has a comorbidity. However, the statistics presently available do not suggest that all comorbidities are equally relevant. Some (diabetes, COPD) are associated with greater risk; others are not.
You left out a few things.
“The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that in total, the virus killed one million people worldwide,[12] from its beginning in July 1968 until the outbreak faded during the winter of 1969-70.[13] The CDC estimated fewer than 100,000 people died in the U.S; most excess deaths were in those 65 and older.[”
I have no problem with adjusting for population size, but you need to account for the time period. That death number included deaths for over 1 1/2 years. It occurred in 1968 when many hospitals didn’t even have an ICU yet. We had ventilators, button on a large scale. Supportive care was pretty minimal. We didn’t have CT scans or MRIs. We didn’t have Hi-FLo oxygen, Bi-Pap, CPAP, any PAP. We didn’t know anything about proning. We have hundreds of thousands of people live with Covid who probably would have died in 1968. (Whenever you want to remember how far along we have come with critical care, just remember that the Kennedy’s may have been the richest family in the world in the early 60s. Their 36 week premie died. Today that is pretty much a routine birth.)
So put it all together and adjusting for population size and length of time recording deaths we have people dying at a lower rate during the Hong Kong flu without any intervention compared with Covid. Even with intervention hospitals couldn’t save any lives anyway. With a lower rate of death than Covid and not much possible help from intervention, I don’t think I would have seen much value in intervention in the form of mitigation (lockdowns).
Also, flu is easier to control absent a lockdown. It is most contagious when people are symptomatic. It looks like people can be infectious up to a day before they have symptoms, but they aren’t as infectious as when they have symptoms. They generally have symptoms within two days of exposure. With Covid people are probably most infectious the day before they have symptoms. They can be infectious at least 2 days before they have symptoms. It also looks like a higher percentage of Covid positives can be asymptomatic or have minimal symptoms than with the flu, though there is a lot of heterogeneity in the studies on flu.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4586318/
Steve
Oops, forgot. The other big difference with flu is that we knowhow to make vaccines that work against it. Fo many, many different reasons we dont need to take the same kind fo steps against flu that we would Covid. Very different diseases.
Steve