To those who have been enjoying my stick-fingers-in-ears and sing LALALA approach to the coronavirus, no worries! Your daily dose of pretty (with no mention of scary) will resume tomorrow!
But – if I don’t at least mention SOMETHING in the midst of this national emergency, I’m kinda out of touch with reality!
So here’s my coronavirus update. First: if you place an order anytime from now thru the next few weeks, please give me a few extra days to ship! Next week they’re having early spring break in Rhode Island, which will be followed by tele-school. So I’ll be effectively home-schooling my first grader, and my special needs 6th grader. I expect to be very busy!
Most events around the country are being cancelled – so my orders have shrunk to only a few wedding customers, which is scary financially, but will help me keep up! I do still need to keep posting listings on my website (if I stop it will hurt my search engine rankings), and I don’t want to disappear on social media either.
Luckily, we just took a ton of pretty photos, and I have a few of last year’s shoots that aren’t edited yet, that will be ready to share soon. Here’s a sneak peek!
I also have a completely irrational fear of being one of those people who have it, but feel perfectly good, and therefore don’t know and spread it to others! It’s silly because I really don’t leave my house much, and my friends tend to be of similar ilk (no globe-trotting wanderers here!)
But it led to me doing some research that I wanted to share. In addition to being an online vendor myself, I do a lot of online shopping! So I set out to answer the following question:
Coronavirus: Is it safe to shop online?
It comes down to this: How long can coronavirus live on a surface? AKA, on an item in a box, that is being shipped in the mail. For a while people weren’t completely sure – there weren’t any Covid-19 specific studies, and other strains of coronavirus can last up to 9 days on surfaces! But finally we have a Covid-19 specific study.
The scientists found that coronavirus can live for up to 3 days (72 hours) on plastic and stainless steel. They tested other surfaces too – 24 hours on cardboard, and only 4 hours on copper. The study has yet to be peer-reviewed, but I’m assuming they’ll get to that quickly! I’ll update this blog post when they do.
So we should all be safe shopping online. If you want to be extra extra safe – check when the package was shipped, and if it’s one of those super-fast Amazon packages, and it contains something that can’t be washed or disinfected, disinfect the outside once it comes into the house, and let it sit until the 3 day point.
I’m young and healthy, so if I caught it, I’d be fine. But I very much agree with the sentiment of trying to be responsible and not spread it to those less healthy than me! So I’ll be extra extra careful over the next few weeks – disinfecting EVERYTHING, and doing that thing they call “social distancing”, just to be safe. I prefer relaxing in beautiful, wide open natural spaces over crowds anyway!
