Coronavirus photo thread

One of the biggest effects of COVID has been business closures and layoffs. A lot of businesses that've been around for a long time, and which have managed to survive past recessions are now closing their doors forever. Larry has posted a few pictures of these closed businesses but there aren't that many in this thread. It would be good to document more, for future generations to see... pictures of closed shops and factories and also the people who've run them and worked there. Just a suggestion. I'll try to keep an eye out in my area but I don't get around all that often.
 
Just some inconclusive observations, as it is obvious that things keep changing everywhere, and things not really the same anywhere as regards to people being locked up. Also, a tourist advisory of sorts and how it relates to the local situation here.

As mentioned earlier, our tourist town, as well as the rest of the state has been pretty much free of anything resembling medical devastation from the pandemic, due no doubt to the sparsely populated nature of the area, no subways, etc. Up until May, my assumption had been that with pandemic panic, and people being locked down to a greater or lesser extent everywhere, there would be not much of an influx of tourists here this summer season, and we would remain pretty much virus-free. Ah, so very wrong about that.
Town council passed an ordinance about a month ago requiring masks in town, yet made no effort to stem the tourism industry, thinking, well, probably not thinking.

As it turns out, there are more tourists here from assorted locked down states all over the country, more tourists period, than I have ever seen before in any tourist season. Apparently, since Americans more or less can't go to Canada or anywhere else, they are just vacationing in the States, getting the heck out of L.A. and Philadelphia and NYC, and bringing with them whatever diseases they might be harboring. Sweet!

Every hotel in town has been fully booked up for the entire summer since Memorial Day.
Official National Park Service numbers are not out yet, but the unofficial Park Service numbers are that Grand Teton NP next door is seeing the highest number of visitor days ever. Ever. And possibly Yellowstone as well. And that's without the Chinese and Korean tourists who have made up around 40% of all visitors to those two parks over the last 4 years or so.
So, if you are feeling isolated in a large metropolitan area that limits your movements, it's interesting to note that it's not the same everywhere. Because here, it's a free for all.

There are electronic signs at the entrances to town mandating mask wearing in all public places in town. Obviously, given the numbers disparity between the influx of tourists and the 12 or so police here, that's unenforceable. So, this is the now normal scene here a couple of days ago:


Contax IIIa + 21mm f4 SC Skopar



Contax IIIa + 21mm f4 SC Skopar


Apparently even Weight Watchers has sent a tour group


Contax IIIa + 21mm f4 SC Skopar

Town has become a huge lab experiment. Virtually disease free until now, zero deaths. Will see if any of the current goings on changes that. But locals not particularly amused.
 
And, for what it is worth.......



Entire article is available online, as well as later author responses. There are provisos to this introductory comment, but reading the entire Journal entry provides an even handed understanding of exactly what masks can and cannot do, as well as where they are advisable and where they are likely pointless.
 

Linhof 4x5 Tmax 100
Huge crowd of people waiting for Old Faithful to go off, a couple of days ago. Some even wearing masks. If not a 1,000 it was pretty close. Different 1,000 every 90 minutes.
1. They are all going to die
2. Some are going to die
3. Nobody is going to die
Tell me what channel you watch and I can tell you what your answer is.
But, seriously, Yellowstone NP is more crowded than I have seen it before. Masks are mandatory. Anti-social distancing is mandatory. Whatever.
 
Larry Cloetta said:
Huge crowd of people waiting for Old Faithful to go off, a couple of days ago. Some even wearing masks. If not a 1,000 it was pretty close. Different 1,000 every 90 minutes.
1. They are all going to die
2. Some are going to die
3. Nobody is going to die
Tell me what channel you watch and I can tell you what your answer is.
But, seriously, Yellowstone NP is more crowded than I have seen it before. Masks are mandatory. Anti-social distancing is mandatory. Whatever.
Click to expand...

They are all going to die... but maybe not all from COVID-19. 😉
 
Safeway is pretty much out of toilet paper... March 2020
U77I1602387606.SEQ.3.jpg

Leica M-D262, 35mm Summilux ASPH
 
Larry Cloetta said:
And, for what it is worth.......



Entire article is available online, as well as later author responses. There are provisos to this introductory comment, but reading the entire Journal entry provides an even handed understanding of exactly what masks can and cannot do, as well as where they are advisable and where they are likely pointless.
Click to expand...

May 2020. We have learned a lot meanwhile.
 
Thanks Kent for noting that the article in question was from May. With such a fast moving situation as Covid, a 5 month old article is like ancient history. Multiple studies have since shown the efficacy of masks in experimental studies. While not perfect, they’re all we’ve got at present (plus common sense).
 
KenR said:
Thanks Kent for noting that the article in question was from May. With such a fast moving situation as Covid, a 5 month old article is like ancient history. Multiple studies have since shown the efficacy of masks in experimental studies. While not perfect, they’re all we’ve got at present (plus common sense).
Click to expand...

There is a reason that the New England Journal of Medicine has not retracted that article. The article in question read in its entirety was a little more nuanced and laid out a few more guidelines than were spelled out in that first paragraph, but as a simple statement of fact the first paragraph has not been contradicted by any actual research. There are not”multiple studies” that have shown the efficacy of masks, per se, in stopping the transmission of this disease in normal everyday situations. There are not multiple studies, there are zero peer reviewed studies in scientific journals which have demonstrated this. Because it’s mostly false. Go ahead, link a legitimate journal article with a rigorous methodology and solid statistical analysis which concludes that masks are effective in preventing the transfer of this particular coronavirus in general human activity, and making people sick. Actual research, not something reported in the newspaper written by the “science editor”.

Transfer of a viral load large enough to cause the disease generally takes close contact for 30 minutes or longer, closed quarters, close proximity, eyes mostly. Hands to eyes. Hospital situations, nursing homes, sick people next to susceptible, compromised people for extended times, the family home, that’s the nexus. That’s where the cases are. That’s where masks are justified as part of an overall regimen. Wash your hands, don’t touch your eyes, wash your hands some more, use hand sanitizer. People getting sick out in public, just walking past other people, even in crowds, mask or no mask, just isn’t happening, because that’s not how this works. The virus will go right through anything short of an N95 mask, and only an N100 mask would stop most of it, and the eyes are still uncovered. But, people on the street, or in the grocery store just passing by others for a couple of minutes, that’s not how it is transmitted, and masks there do nothing, even Fauci has admitted as much.
Medically, they way they are being used, with the general mandates, they do nothing at all, but, non-medically, by providing some level of constant, visible, psychological awareness that keeps people on their toes, there may be some benefit there, but the masks themselves are not doing anything except window dressing and keeping people on edge.
If people want to wear a mask because it makes them feel better, that’s fine.
Not only are there no actual studies showing that masks themselves are generally useful at preventing spread, none of the epidemiological data, who gets sick and who doesn’t, supports this. And yes, we do know much more than we did in March.
I know this will raise some hackles, because I know where most people get their information, and I know how widespread the misinformation is. An abundance of caution is one thing, but this seems to have gone well past that at this point.
I spent several years conducting a weekly seminar at the post doctoral level on how to evaluate medical scientific literature, which studies are done correctly and which have obvious procedural or statistical flaws, and am tired of hearing things repeated over and over, things that “everybody knows”, that are simply false. There is a great deal of fear mongering out there, and I do not know exactly why that is happening as it seems to be more than “if it bleeds, it leads”.
 
And thats so important to you, that you posted it twice in five minutes... 🙄

Anyway: AFAIK the reasoning is (at least here in Germany, where the situation is serious, but much less than in the US, and where people probably don‘t behave much better than in the US except for a general rule to wear masks in defined situations like when shopping in the supermarket) that the mask might not protect you fully against infection, but it protects other from you, spreading it, when you are unknowingly carrying it. Even then it is not perfect, but it slows particles, aerosols and such down. And that then seems to have a measurable effect: Respiratory virus shedding in exhaled breath and efficacy of face masks

There are many more of such studies and similar results, but of course, one has to find them instead of ignore them.

I see it this way: when you really do lectures about correctness of medical studies, then you‘ve heard about risk analysis ( sorry if I use the wrong term, as I‘m not a native speaker). And since neither studies are 100% conclusive if even normal masks help lowering the risk of infecting others in specific situations or not, then just because of the risk to infect people with a currently very dangerous virus would be a good reason to wear one and educate people how to do it correctly instead of outright rejecting the idea completely.

It‘s not a big thing, IMHO, to do that for your fellow citizens.

(This post is way too long about a topic where people usually stop talking with reason after two or three replies to each other, and it contains no pictures, so I apologize for that. Maybe later, I have plenty of related pictures.)
 
krötenblender said:
...

I see it this way: when you really do lectures about correctness of medical studies, then you‘ve heard about risk analysis ( sorry if I use the wrong term, as I‘m not a native speaker). And since neither studies are 100% conclusive if even normal masks help lowering the risk of infecting others in specific situations or not, then just because of the risk to infect people with a currently very dangerous virus would be a good reason to wear one and educate people how to do it correctly instead of outright rejecting the idea completely.

It‘s not a big thing, IMHO, to do that for your fellow citizens.
Click to expand...

Well said, I fully agree.
 
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