The world has been in a frenzy since the spread of the Coronavirus also known as COVID-19 leaving millions to fight over toilet paper and empty shelves of canned goods. I’d like to just start off by stating some stats from MarketWatch.com. Byotrol’s industrial stock value has risen 6.8% as of March 13th, International Paper’s rose 5.6% and is slowly growing in after hours, Kimberly-Clark rose 7.6% in consumer goods leaving it at a flat $134 per stock with Campbell Soup Co also sharing the same consumer goods percentage. My point with these stocks is as people prepare for a Mad Max type apocalypse we are blindly feeding these corporations money from a mass hysteria of yet another deadly disease that we seem to have arise nearly every year.
As reported by by CNN we are currently at around 152,000 confirmed cases of the disease with nearly 70,000 cases in which the ill has recovered while around 6000 people have passed away. Now many who have passed away are elderly or people with respiratory issues, COVID-19 symptoms are similar to pneumonia, fever, shortness of breath and a dry cough are the most common symptoms. Now let’s also keep in mind that again around 70,000 cases have in fact recovered and yet we are also still in flu season. Now I am in Bakersfield, CA, the closest case we have to this city is in Fresno, CA yet that has caused people in a out pour of fear to buy in the event that the city shuts down which is what it seems they are planning into, slowly but surely if you’re like me and work at a mall or stand alone retail spot the likely hood of your store closing for an extended period of time due to the virus is real, my store recently cut payroll and hours by nearly 20 hours alone, leaving us closing a whole hour early. The fact of the matter is people are the real problem here, we seem to simply not understand or correlate how a simple disease can be handled by washing your stinky hands for 20 seconds or just keeping environments clean, instead of coughing in ya hand cover your peephole with that elbow, but rather we choose as a society to feed these corporations our money as they slowly take away hours, close down stores and eventually send employees on leave with little compensation which will have many scrabbling for ways to cover their monthly bills. Schools have already taken initiative in shutting down, with some cases of kids not going back till mid April. As a parent what do you do when your child who is to young to be left alone now has almost a whole month and a half off from school, who will pay for the babysitting? Another note I’d like to add that I find comical is how many of these businesses and companies are speculating by April things will be over, deadly disease handled in only 2 months seems unlikely to me.
Now my wrap up is mainly this, people seem to be mainly buying the basics, hand sanitizer, disinfecting wipes, red meats, canned goods and for a odd reason toilet paper. Now if you really think about it, this is where we are gonna fail as a community, when my folks went grocery shopping all I saw was shelves stocked with overpriced water bottles and ridiculous quantities of meat that were more expensive, instead of being able to get maybe just a half a pound of ground beef we had to buy a 5 pound tube of ground beef which cost around $12 average compared to a half a pound that can retail for around $3 to $4. Now while you may get your best buck by buying the 5 pounds for $12 my house doesn’t eat much red meat primarily due to our vegetarian diet, leaving us to have to buy and proportion 5 pounds all due to people over stocking on said product, same can be said about tampons, toilet paper, filtered water, plastic bags and much more. I for one am not fearful of a virus but rather the people who sheep into the concept that this will kill them and leave the world in the apocalypse, if we survived “2012”, Ebola, Chicken Pox and all the other yearly disasters that seem to come then I think we shall be fine, but just open your eyes and realize that at the end of the day who will be there for you when the hours are cut and you gave all these corporations your money from fear of the unknown. We shall see what fruition comes from this disease, I for one am more fearful of people then COVID-19.
The Musical Hippie 