The Covid-19 Thread: News, Preparation Tips, Etc

Phoenix

Well-Known Member
How are you dealing with the stress of your parents. My mom is 71, recently became legally blind and has been taking the bus in the Bay Area where there are many active cases and she's mad at me because I told her that the CDC said anyone over 60 needs to start distancing. I am so frustrated. Groan. Why do I have to wait for the government to shut things down instead of her taking the safety recommendations prescribed by the the CDC and WHO. Are you just letting it go?

I’m frustrated as well. I pointed out to my dad that he had lung surgery a few years back. He was like, no, I had a (insert title of surgery that was pulmonary right in the name). Sigh. He tried to argue that it was surgery to the heart and lung area, not the lungs. Whatever. He said they were being cautious, so all I can do is keep checking on them.
 

shelli4018

Well-Known Member
Spain is the next country getting hit and planes headed there have been turned around.

Here is a little humor for anyone like me who is tired of seeing these emails from everywhere I ever bought anything ever.

View attachment 456615
Just read about an airline turning 7 planes heading to Spain around mid flight. Still not sure exactly what’s going on there.

I’d look to Angela Merkel for reliable info in Europe. The UK government seems as dumb as the US at the moment. Pretty sure they’re relying on herd immunity at this point. They aren’t really trying to stop infection so much as manage it a bit. But if folk can become reinfected then the herd immunity gamble won’t work?
 

rayne

Well-Known Member
I saw an article about this and my coworkers were ready to fight me when I told them that getting the virus doesn’t give you immunity from getting it again. I’ll post the article when I get a chance but I’m sure it has the same details.

I had wondered if there was a possibility of getting reinfected. I wonder if the symptoms are milder the second time around.

This just occurred to me. Is it that people get reinfected or does the virus go dormant, like with herpes?
 

Black Ambrosia

Well-Known Member
This is why there's no hand sanitizer.

He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them

By Jack Nicas

March 14, 2020

An Amazon merchant, Matt Colvin, with an overflow stock of cleaning and sanitizing supplies in his garage in Hixson, Tenn.
Amazon cracked down on coronavirus price gouging. Now, while the rest of the world searches, some sellers are holding stockpiles of sanitizer and masks.

On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States was announced, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves.

Over the next three days, Noah Colvin took a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes, mostly from “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods,” his brother said. “The major metro areas were cleaned out.”

Matt Colvin stayed home near Chattanooga, preparing for pallets of even more wipes and sanitizer he had ordered, and starting to list them on Amazon. Mr. Colvin said he had posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer and immediately sold them all for between $8 and $70 each, multiples higher than what he had bought them for. To him, “it was crazy money.” To many others, it was profiteering from a pandemic.

The next day, Amazon pulled his items and thousands of other listings for sanitizer, wipes and face masks. The company suspended some of the sellers behind the listings and warned many others that if they kept running up prices, they’d lose their accounts. EBay soon followed with even stricter measures, prohibiting any U.S. sales of masks or sanitizer.

Now, while millions of people across the country search in vain for hand sanitizer to protect themselves from the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Colvin is sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff with little idea where to sell them.

“It’s been a huge amount of whiplash,” he said. “From being in a situation where what I’ve got coming and going could potentially put my family in a really good place financially to ‘What the heck am I going to do with all of this?’”


Mr. Colvin with his wife, Brittany, and son, Logan.
Mr. Colvin is one of probably thousands of sellers who have amassed stockpiles of hand sanitizer and crucial respirator masks that many hospitals are now rationing, according to interviews with eight Amazon sellers and posts in private Facebook and Telegram groups from dozens more. Amazon said it had recently removed hundreds of thousands of listings and suspended thousands of sellers’ accounts for price gouging related to the coronavirus.

Amazon, eBay, Walmart and other online-commerce platforms are trying to stop their sellers from making excessive profits from a public health crisis. While the companies aimed to discourage people from hoarding such products and jacking up their prices, many sellers had already cleared out their local stores and started selling the goods online.

Now both the physical and digital shelves are nearly empty.


Mikeala Kozlowski, a nurse in Dudley, Mass., has been searching for hand sanitizer since before she gave birth to her first child, Nora, on March 5. When she searched stores, which were sold out, she skipped getting gas to avoid handling the pump. And when she checked Amazon, she couldn’t find it for less than $50.

“You’re being selfish, hoarding resources for your own personal gain,” she said of the sellers.

Sites like Amazon and eBay have given rise to a growing industry of independent sellers who snatch up discounted or hard-to-find items in stores to post online and sell around the world.

These sellers call it retail arbitrage, a 21st-century career that has adults buying up everything from limited-run cereals to Fingerling Monkeys, a once hot toy. The bargain hunters look for anything they can sell at a sharp markup. In recent weeks, they found perhaps their biggest opportunity: a pandemic.

As they watched the list of Amazon’s most popular searches crowd with terms like “Purell,” “N95 mask” and “Clorox wipes,” sellers said, they did what they had learned to do: Suck up supply and sell it for what the market would bear.

Initially, the strategy worked. For several weeks, prices soared for some of the top results to searches for sanitizer, masks and wipes on Amazon, according to a New York Times analysis of historical prices from Jungle Scout, which tracks data for Amazon sellers. The data shows that both Amazon and third-party sellers like Mr. Colvin increased their prices, which then mostly dropped when Amazon took action against price gouging this month.

Prices Have Spiked for Pandemic Supplies on Amazon


At the high prices, people still bought the products en masse, and Amazon took a cut of roughly 15 percent and eBay roughly 10 percent, depending on the price and the seller.

Then the companies, pressured by growing criticism from regulators and customers, cracked down. After the measures last week, Amazon went further on Wednesday, restricting sales of any coronavirus-related products from certain sellers.

“Price gouging is a clear violation of our policies, unethical, and in some areas, illegal,” Amazon said in a statement. “In addition to terminating these third party accounts, we welcome the opportunity to work directly with states attorneys general to prosecute bad actors.”

Mr. Colvin, 36, a former Air Force technical sergeant, said he started selling on Amazon in 2015, developing it into a six-figure career by selling Nike shoes and pet toys, and by following trends.

In early February, as headlines announced the coronavirus’s spread in China, Mr. Colvin spotted a chance to capitalize. A nearby liquidation firm was selling 2,000 “pandemic packs,” leftovers from a defunct company. Each came with 50 face masks, four small bottles of hand sanitizer and a thermometer. The price was $5 a pack. Mr. Colvin haggled it to $3.50 and bought them all.



Hand sanitizer that Mr. Colvin is keeping in a storage locker.
He quickly sold all 2,000 of the 50-packs of masks on eBay, pricing them from $40 to $50 each, and sometimes higher. He declined to disclose his profit on the record but said it was substantial.

The success stoked his appetite. When he saw the panicked public starting to pounce on sanitizer and wipes, he and his brother set out to stock up.

Elsewhere in the country, other Amazon sellers were doing the same.


Chris Anderson, an Amazon seller in central Pennsylvania, said he and a friend had driven around Ohio, buying about 10,000 masks from stores. He used coupons to buy packs of 10 for around $15 each and resold them for $40 to $50. After Amazon’s cut and other costs, he estimates, he made a $25,000 profit.

Mr. Anderson is now holding 500 packs of antibacterial wipes after Amazon blocked him from selling them for $19 each, up from $16 weeks earlier. He bought the packs for $3 each.

Eric, a truck driver from Ohio who spoke on the condition that his surname not be published because he feared Amazon would retaliate, said he had also collected about 10,000 masks at stores. He bought each 10-pack for about $20 and sold most for roughly $80 each, though some he priced at $125.

“Even at $125 a box, they were selling almost instantly,” he said. “It was mind-blowing as far as what you could charge.” He estimates he made $35,000 to $40,000 in profit.

Now he has 1,000 more masks on order, but he’s not sure what to do with them. He said Amazon had been vague about what constituted price gouging, scaring away sellers who don’t want to risk losing their ability to sell on its site.

To regulators and many others, the sellers are sitting on a stockpile of medical supplies during a pandemic. The attorney general’s offices in California, Washington and New York are all investigating price gouging related to the coronavirus. California’s price-gouging law bars sellers from increasing prices by more than 10 percent after officials declare an emergency. New York’s law prohibits sellers from charging an “unconscionably excessive price” during emergencies.

An official at the Washington attorney general’s office said the agency believed it could apply the state’s consumer-protection law to sue platforms or sellers, even if they aren’t in Washington, as long as they were trying to sell to Washington residents.


Noah Colvin, Mr. Colvin’s brother, moving boxes of hand sanitizer from his brother’s storage locker on Thursday.
Mr. Colvin does not believe he was price gouging. While he charged $20 on Amazon for two bottles of Purell that retail for $1 each, he said people forget that his price includes his labor, Amazon’s fees and about $10 in shipping. (Alcohol-based sanitizer is pricey to ship because officials consider it a hazardous material.)

Current price-gouging laws “are not built for today’s day and age,” Mr. Colvin said. “They’re built for Billy Bob’s gas station doubling the amount he charges for gas during a hurricane.”

He added, “Just because it cost me $2 in the store doesn’t mean it’s not going to cost me $16 to get it to your door.”

But what about the morality of hoarding products that can prevent the spread of the virus, just to turn a profit?

Mr. Colvin said he was simply fixing “inefficiencies in the marketplace.” Some areas of the country need these products more than others, and he’s helping send the supply toward the demand.


“There’s a crushing overwhelming demand in certain cities right now,” he said. “The Dollar General in the middle of nowhere outside of Lexington, Ky., doesn’t have that.”

He thought about it more. “I honestly feel like it’s a public service,” he added. “I’m being paid for my public service.”

As for his stockpile, Mr. Colvin said he would now probably try to sell it locally. “If I can make a slight profit, that’s fine,” he said. “But I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me.”
 

Black Ambrosia

Well-Known Member
Apple says it will close most stores worldwide for two weeks


At Apple’s Regent Street store in London on Saturday, employees stood outside to explain the closure decision.
Apple said on Friday that it would temporarily close most of its stores worldwide, becoming one of the first major retailers to take such drastic measures.

The company’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, said that Apple would shutter all stores until March 27, excluding those in mainland China — where infections have significantly declined recently — and in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

“The most effective way to minimize risk of the virus’s transmission is to reduce density and maximize social distance,” Mr. Cook said in a statement posted to the company’s website.

Many firms around the world are contemplating similar measures. Patagonia, the outdoor-clothing retailer, said on Friday that it would shut its stores until late March. Starbucks has said it would consider closing stores temporarily as a “last resort.”

The virus has already taken a toll on many businesses, disrupting supply chains and hurting demand in critical markets.

Apple recently reopened all of its 42 stores in China, after closing them for more than a month. But the company has struggled to ramp up production of smartphones amid delays at its factories in China.
 

Lute

Well-Known Member
@Black Ambrosia he better do the smart thing and donate it to a nursing home or hospital. He just put a target on himself :(

He should've kept it quiet.. if you think about it. Even if he was selling it at a reasonable price. Would he have been able to send it out all on time. The logistics of it don't add up.

I wonder how NY times was able to convince him that this is good publicity... The article was a bit scathing
 
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Black Ambrosia

Well-Known Member
Yiiikes this is worrisome. So China already had cases of people being reinfected? Has anyone else heard about this before this article?
I saw an article about this and my coworkers were ready to fight me when I told them that getting the virus doesn’t give you immunity from getting it again. I’ll post the article when I get a chance but I’m sure it has the same details.

They survived the coronavirus. Then they tested positive again. Why?

The neighbors were free at last.

After weeks of confinement to their apartments because one person in the building had tested positive for coronavirus, they were throwing a party to celebrate his recovery and their release.

It was Feb. 24, and Mr. Wang, a resident of Xuzhou, in Jiangsu province, appeared to have emerged victorious from a monthlong battle with the illness. Sixty-five residents of his building gathered downstairs to greet Wang with bouquets of pink flowers, a cake with a flamingo on it, and a red banner that read: “With strong neighborly feelings, we welcome you home.”

They pressed in close around him for a group photo that was captured in a local news video.


A worker sprays disinfectant at an elementary school in preparation for the return of students in Donghai, in eastern China’s Jiangsu province.


Three days later, though, Wang tested positive for the coronavirus again. He was re-hospitalized and his neighbors were locked down once more. His current condition is unknown.

Wang, whose full name has not been disclosed for privacy reasons, is one of more than 100 reported cases of Chinese patients who have been released from hospitals as survivors of the new coronavirus — only to test positive for it a second time in the bewildering math of this mysterious illness.

The science surrounding these apparent reinfections is further complicated by China’s handling of the outbreak, which since January has been marred by faulty testing procedures and questionable case counting methods with shifting definitions. In addition, the overburdened healthcare system has put pressure on doctors to discharge people who may not have fully recovered to free up beds for newly infected patients.

China has been praised in recent weeks by the World Health Organization for containing the virus. But the Communist Party’s early moves to suppress public knowledge on the extent of infections prompt concerns over the accuracy of information about recovered patients who retest positive but may have been misdiagnosed in the first place.

Such cases account for less than 0.2% of China’s total infections — not enough to cause alarm. But they are raising questions in China about the reliability of diagnostic tests, the possibility of reinfection and whether patients are wrongly designated as “recovered” and released too early from hospitals.


Medical staffers speak with a COVID-19 patient in Wuhan, China, on March 10, 2020.


Although most patients who retest positive do not display clinical symptoms, some have developed fevers and other signs of the virus. One such patient, a 36-year-old man, died in Wuhan on March 2, five days after being declared recovered.

His diagnosis, according to hospital reports published in local media before they were censored, was respiratory tract obstruction, respiratory failure and COVID-19, the official name for the illness caused by the coronavirus.

China’s National Health Commission says 64,216 out of 80,991 confirmed COVID-19 patients have recovered, and 3,179 have died. There is no official record of how many recovered patients have retested positive and returned to hospitals, but such cases have been reported in the provinces of Hubei, Guangdong, Hainan, Sichuan and Jiangsu, and the cities of Tianjin and Chongqing.

In Guangdong, officials responsible for the coronavirus response announced Feb. 25 that 14% of declared recoveries in the province had later retested positive.

The dynamic is also playing out in other countries: Two such cases have emerged in Japan and South Korea, though the Korean patient has been released from hospital after retesting negative five times.


Scientists in and outside China agree that reinfection is a highly unlikely explanation for the patients who retest positive. They say testing errors are more likely to blame — either false negatives that resulted in patients being discharged too early, or false positives when they retested and were taken back into hospital.

Those errors could be attributed to contaminated test samples, human error while taking swabs, or an oversensitive nucleic acid test that detects strands of virus. When a person gets sick with any kind of viral infection, their immune system naturally develops antibodies that should protect them from contracting the illness again after they’ve recovered.

Even in cases where that immunity wears off, it shouldn’t be as quick as within a few days or weeks, said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, director of Hong Kong University’s School of Public Health.

“If you get an infection, your immune system is revved up against that virus,” he said. “To get reinfected again when you’re in that situation would be quite unusual unless your immune system was not functioning right.”


Chinese President Xi Jinping talks by video with patients and medical workers at a hospital in Wuhan on March 10, 2020.


What’s more likely is that people are being released from hospitals while still carrying dormant fragments of the disease that are not infectious but resemble the virus when put through a nucleic acid test, he said.

“The test may be positive, but the infection is not there,” he said.

Another possibility is that the level of virus fell below the threshold that tests could detect but then resurfaced, said Dr. Clifford Lane, deputy director for Clinical Research and Special Projects at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.


“So it looks like they cleared the virus and then the virus came back,” Lane said. “But they never really cleared it and they had a more prolonged course of infection.”

Lane was one of only two U.S. experts in a World Health Organization delegation that visited China in February. He said Chinese experts told the visitors that there were no examples of people who became “reinfected.”

The best way to prove reinfection, Lane said, would be to sequence the genomes of the initial and subsequent viruses that circulated in a patient. If there is a difference between the two, that would suggest that the virus had mutated enough to evade the patient’s antibodies and prompt a second infection.

Developing a vaccine would be significantly more difficult if the virus is changing fast enough to cause true reinfections. It would undermine the immunity patients develop from natural infections.

It’s too early to know the true cause of these apparent reinfections, Lane said, especially because cases are so rare.

“These are exceptions,” he added. “These are not the rule.”

Another potential explanation is that some patients may also have been discharged too early because of pressure on hospitals to free up beds for new patients.

“If you don’t discharge them, who’s going to save the other patients? You need to make trade-offs,” one unnamed doctor said in a report by the Paper, a Shanghai-based news outlet.

A doctor at a Wuhan hospital told the Paper that he’d seen discharged patients still using oxygen tanks, having trouble walking and displaying obvious clinical symptoms, including serious lung infections, in February. Some of the recovered patients had worse clinical symptoms than the new, mild cases entering the hospitals, he said.

But the situation improved in late February, when fewer patients turned up at Wuhan’s hospitals, enabling them to keep patients longer.

Chinese authorities claim that none of the patients who tested positive again have infected others. If true, it’s an encouraging sign that even if some discharged patients are still carrying low levels of the virus, they are not contagious.

But one study by Chinese scientists published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. raised questions about testing. The study examined four medical workers in Wuhan, all infected with coronavirus and then declared recovered according to national criteria. But five to 13 days after the four were released from quarantine, they all tested positive again. They were then each given three repeat tests over the next four to five days. All were positive.

Dr. Dale Fisher, professor of medicine at the National University of Singapore and another participant in the WHO’s China delegation, said the apparent reappearance of coronavirus in recovered patients was probably because of “excessive” testing and follow-up on discharged cases in China.

“The outbreak is being driven by people who are spreading it in those first five days while they’re symptomatic and before they’re isolated ... when people are going around coughing and undiagnosed, infecting people,” he said. “The things to worry about are at the other end of the illness.”
 

Black Ambrosia

Well-Known Member
@Black Ambrosia he better do the smart thing and donate it to a nursing home or hospital. He just put a target on himself :(

He should've kept it quiet.. if you think about it. Even if he was selling it at a reasonable price. Would he have been able to send it out all on time. The logistics of it don't add up.

I wonder how NY times was able to convince him that this is good publicity... The article was a bit scathing
This right here! Someone reading this article knows who he is and the word will get out.
 

OmbreLune

Well-Known Member
Why can't Amazon set price limits on the gougers? Say if you post x item above this certain price than your account will be shut down. It's such a waste for all those supplies to be sitting in someone's garage. I agree with @Lute though that it should be donated to hospitals and nursing homes. They need it more than anybody.
 

rayne

Well-Known Member
My how the tables have turned lol.


This reminds me of some movie. There was a nationwide/worldwide emergency so americans were trying to flock to Mexico but they closed their borders to us. They said they would only allow us in if we wiped away their debt or something like that. Ugh, I wish I could remember the movie. I want to say that it was The Day After Tomorrow but I'm not sure.
 

Black Ambrosia

Well-Known Member
This reminds me of some movie. There was a nationwide/worldwide emergency so americans were trying to flock to Mexico but they closed their borders to us. They said they would only allow us in if we wiped away their debt or something like that. Ugh, I wish I could remember the movie. I want to say that it was The Day After Tomorrow but I'm not sure.
You got it right.
 

starfish

Well-Known Member
I have asthma and right now my lungs are still very inflamed from a horrible flu I had almost 2 months ago. I started practicing not touching my face when I heard about the virus in mid January and now I don’t at all. Constantly washing my hands and staying indoors. Wiping things I touch in my home down with Clorox bleach spray all the time. I have to be extra careful. Social distancing is very important to me right now. Stay safe ladies.
 

Theresamonet

Well-Known Member
This is why there's no hand sanitizer.

He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them

By Jack Nicas

March 14, 2020

An Amazon merchant, Matt Colvin, with an overflow stock of cleaning and sanitizing supplies in his garage in Hixson, Tenn.
Amazon cracked down on coronavirus price gouging. Now, while the rest of the world searches, some sellers are holding stockpiles of sanitizer and masks.

On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States was announced, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves.

Over the next three days, Noah Colvin took a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes, mostly from “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods,” his brother said. “The major metro areas were cleaned out.”

Matt Colvin stayed home near Chattanooga, preparing for pallets of even more wipes and sanitizer he had ordered, and starting to list them on Amazon. Mr. Colvin said he had posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer and immediately sold them all for between $8 and $70 each, multiples higher than what he had bought them for. To him, “it was crazy money.” To many others, it was profiteering from a pandemic.

The next day, Amazon pulled his items and thousands of other listings for sanitizer, wipes and face masks. The company suspended some of the sellers behind the listings and warned many others that if they kept running up prices, they’d lose their accounts. EBay soon followed with even stricter measures, prohibiting any U.S. sales of masks or sanitizer.

Now, while millions of people across the country search in vain for hand sanitizer to protect themselves from the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Colvin is sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff with little idea where to sell them.

“It’s been a huge amount of whiplash,” he said. “From being in a situation where what I’ve got coming and going could potentially put my family in a really good place financially to ‘What the heck am I going to do with all of this?’”


Mr. Colvin with his wife, Brittany, and son, Logan.
Mr. Colvin is one of probably thousands of sellers who have amassed stockpiles of hand sanitizer and crucial respirator masks that many hospitals are now rationing, according to interviews with eight Amazon sellers and posts in private Facebook and Telegram groups from dozens more. Amazon said it had recently removed hundreds of thousands of listings and suspended thousands of sellers’ accounts for price gouging related to the coronavirus.

Amazon, eBay, Walmart and other online-commerce platforms are trying to stop their sellers from making excessive profits from a public health crisis. While the companies aimed to discourage people from hoarding such products and jacking up their prices, many sellers had already cleared out their local stores and started selling the goods online.

Now both the physical and digital shelves are nearly empty.


Mikeala Kozlowski, a nurse in Dudley, Mass., has been searching for hand sanitizer since before she gave birth to her first child, Nora, on March 5. When she searched stores, which were sold out, she skipped getting gas to avoid handling the pump. And when she checked Amazon, she couldn’t find it for less than $50.

“You’re being selfish, hoarding resources for your own personal gain,” she said of the sellers.

Sites like Amazon and eBay have given rise to a growing industry of independent sellers who snatch up discounted or hard-to-find items in stores to post online and sell around the world.

These sellers call it retail arbitrage, a 21st-century career that has adults buying up everything from limited-run cereals to Fingerling Monkeys, a once hot toy. The bargain hunters look for anything they can sell at a sharp markup. In recent weeks, they found perhaps their biggest opportunity: a pandemic.

As they watched the list of Amazon’s most popular searches crowd with terms like “Purell,” “N95 mask” and “Clorox wipes,” sellers said, they did what they had learned to do: Suck up supply and sell it for what the market would bear.

Initially, the strategy worked. For several weeks, prices soared for some of the top results to searches for sanitizer, masks and wipes on Amazon, according to a New York Times analysis of historical prices from Jungle Scout, which tracks data for Amazon sellers. The data shows that both Amazon and third-party sellers like Mr. Colvin increased their prices, which then mostly dropped when Amazon took action against price gouging this month.

Prices Have Spiked for Pandemic Supplies on Amazon


At the high prices, people still bought the products en masse, and Amazon took a cut of roughly 15 percent and eBay roughly 10 percent, depending on the price and the seller.

Then the companies, pressured by growing criticism from regulators and customers, cracked down. After the measures last week, Amazon went further on Wednesday, restricting sales of any coronavirus-related products from certain sellers.

“Price gouging is a clear violation of our policies, unethical, and in some areas, illegal,” Amazon said in a statement. “In addition to terminating these third party accounts, we welcome the opportunity to work directly with states attorneys general to prosecute bad actors.”

Mr. Colvin, 36, a former Air Force technical sergeant, said he started selling on Amazon in 2015, developing it into a six-figure career by selling Nike shoes and pet toys, and by following trends.

In early February, as headlines announced the coronavirus’s spread in China, Mr. Colvin spotted a chance to capitalize. A nearby liquidation firm was selling 2,000 “pandemic packs,” leftovers from a defunct company. Each came with 50 face masks, four small bottles of hand sanitizer and a thermometer. The price was $5 a pack. Mr. Colvin haggled it to $3.50 and bought them all.



Hand sanitizer that Mr. Colvin is keeping in a storage locker.
He quickly sold all 2,000 of the 50-packs of masks on eBay, pricing them from $40 to $50 each, and sometimes higher. He declined to disclose his profit on the record but said it was substantial.

The success stoked his appetite. When he saw the panicked public starting to pounce on sanitizer and wipes, he and his brother set out to stock up.

Elsewhere in the country, other Amazon sellers were doing the same.


Chris Anderson, an Amazon seller in central Pennsylvania, said he and a friend had driven around Ohio, buying about 10,000 masks from stores. He used coupons to buy packs of 10 for around $15 each and resold them for $40 to $50. After Amazon’s cut and other costs, he estimates, he made a $25,000 profit.

Mr. Anderson is now holding 500 packs of antibacterial wipes after Amazon blocked him from selling them for $19 each, up from $16 weeks earlier. He bought the packs for $3 each.

Eric, a truck driver from Ohio who spoke on the condition that his surname not be published because he feared Amazon would retaliate, said he had also collected about 10,000 masks at stores. He bought each 10-pack for about $20 and sold most for roughly $80 each, though some he priced at $125.

“Even at $125 a box, they were selling almost instantly,” he said. “It was mind-blowing as far as what you could charge.” He estimates he made $35,000 to $40,000 in profit.

Now he has 1,000 more masks on order, but he’s not sure what to do with them. He said Amazon had been vague about what constituted price gouging, scaring away sellers who don’t want to risk losing their ability to sell on its site.

To regulators and many others, the sellers are sitting on a stockpile of medical supplies during a pandemic. The attorney general’s offices in California, Washington and New York are all investigating price gouging related to the coronavirus. California’s price-gouging law bars sellers from increasing prices by more than 10 percent after officials declare an emergency. New York’s law prohibits sellers from charging an “unconscionably excessive price” during emergencies.

An official at the Washington attorney general’s office said the agency believed it could apply the state’s consumer-protection law to sue platforms or sellers, even if they aren’t in Washington, as long as they were trying to sell to Washington residents.


Noah Colvin, Mr. Colvin’s brother, moving boxes of hand sanitizer from his brother’s storage locker on Thursday.
Mr. Colvin does not believe he was price gouging. While he charged $20 on Amazon for two bottles of Purell that retail for $1 each, he said people forget that his price includes his labor, Amazon’s fees and about $10 in shipping. (Alcohol-based sanitizer is pricey to ship because officials consider it a hazardous material.)

Current price-gouging laws “are not built for today’s day and age,” Mr. Colvin said. “They’re built for Billy Bob’s gas station doubling the amount he charges for gas during a hurricane.”

He added, “Just because it cost me $2 in the store doesn’t mean it’s not going to cost me $16 to get it to your door.”

But what about the morality of hoarding products that can prevent the spread of the virus, just to turn a profit?

Mr. Colvin said he was simply fixing “inefficiencies in the marketplace.” Some areas of the country need these products more than others, and he’s helping send the supply toward the demand.


“There’s a crushing overwhelming demand in certain cities right now,” he said. “The Dollar General in the middle of nowhere outside of Lexington, Ky., doesn’t have that.”

He thought about it more. “I honestly feel like it’s a public service,” he added. “I’m being paid for my public service.”

As for his stockpile, Mr. Colvin said he would now probably try to sell it locally. “If I can make a slight profit, that’s fine,” he said. “But I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me.”

They should be ashamed of themselves, but I know they aren’t. This type of sociopathic behavior during a pandemic should be illegal. Also, stores should be imposing purchase limits at times like these.
 

rayne

Well-Known Member
I have asthma and right now my lungs are still very inflamed from a horrible flu I had almost 2 months ago. I started practicing not touching my face when I heard about the virus in mid January and now I don’t at all. Constantly washing my hands and staying indoors. Wiping things I touch in my home down with Clorox bleach spray all the time. I have to be extra careful. Social distancing is very important to me right now. Stay safe ladies.

Please take it easy on the bleach, I'd hate for you to irritate your lungs even further. As an fyi, putting vics vapor rub on your chest can help to alleviate any tightness, provided your asthma isn't too bad.
 

Chromia

Well-Known Member
This reminds me of some movie. There was a nationwide/worldwide emergency so americans were trying to flock to Mexico but they closed their borders to us. They said they would only allow us in if we wiped away their debt or something like that. Ugh, I wish I could remember the movie. I want to say that it was The Day After Tomorrow but I'm not sure.
Reminds me of the movie too.
 

starfish

Well-Known Member
Please take it easy on the bleach, I'd hate for you to irritate your lungs even further. As an fyi, putting vics vapor rub on your chest can help to alleviate any tightness, provided your asthma isn't too bad.
Thanks @rayne. I open my windows and try and get fresh air but you’re right, bleach is very hard on the lungs. Good idea about vics too. I have tubs of it!
 

Dposh167

Well-Known Member
The person who teased me about my stocking up two weeks ago called me all upset because she is out of TP and the grocery stores didn’t even have meat left. :lol:
My boss stocked up weeeeeks ago before US even had it's 1st confirmed case. She said yall are gonna be sorry. And a lot of us are. Waiting until the last minute to buy stuff.
She said she bought everything so early because of "people's hysteria". Not because she is afraid of running out of things to eat or staying bunker-ed in for weeks at a time. She was right. As I said earlier....they bought all the damn frozen fruit:(. Wasn't nobody interested in frozen cherries in my area and now they're all gone lol
 
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