St. Louis on Covid Lockdown

I had already decided that I would quarantine for two weeks after returning from Kenya before I had left, mainly for the safety of my coworkers. St. Louis was now on lockdown with only "essential" businesses operating and so staying at home made a lot of sense anyway.

Peter the Kenyan safari guide checked in to make sure we got home safely. What a pal.

There's a new word for what I now do all day: doomscrolling.

"Doomscrolling (also known as doomsurfing) is the act of consuming a large quantity of negative online news at once. Mental health experts have stated that the practice can be detrimental to mental health."

Out of desperation I masked up and entered a supermarket. Toilet paper was nowhere to be found via online grocery ordering, but my main concern was that we needed a cleaning agent of some sort to keep the virus cooties off of our things and all the food we bought. 

The shelves were bare when I got to the cleaning product section of the aisle. There were some products remaining that were ammonia based but it was unclear whether that would kill the coronavirus. I found conflicting reports but after more research I settled in my mind that the answer was no. I've lost some trust in the WHO, CDC, and other health organizations during this time. They seemed to be much less competent than I had thought and many of the things they were saying didn't seem to make sense. Whether or not to wear a mask is a big subject that they seem to flip flop on often and I would think that that would be established science at this point.

I found ONE little bottle of green, mint scented rubbing alcohol hidden behind some other items on a little shelf in the pharmacy section. It was like finding a treasure and it made the entire trip to the store worthwhile in our eyes. We put the alcohol in a spray bottle back at the apartment and use it to disinfect our groceries.

I bought a lot of soup and we got some grocery orders delivered that contained even more. We were planning on really not leaving the apartment for two weeks so we needed to stock up. Plus there were a lot of reports of issues with the food supply chain so we didn't want to have to resort to snaring rats and pigeons to survive.

On a positive note I added some pictures from the Kenya trip to cycle through my watch wallpaper. It's soothing to think of the African plains while navigating the postapocalyptic urban hellscape I call home.