Cashiers here wear gloves, spray down the debit machine after each customer, don't do the bagging for customers who bring reuseable bags, everyone is to observe the 6 foot rule.
Reusable bags are a fairly high risk, according to the local advisors here. They are forbidden inside most stores, by policy.
COVID-19 usually doesn't kill people. It's the secondary infections (like pneumonia) that kills them.
The people dying of this corona virus are mostly being killed by the virus itself, by my sources.
The pneumonia they get, for example, is usually viral pneumonia caused by this corona virus.
The secondary infections apparently don't have time to set up shop, in the severe cases that end in death.
The testing in Seattle is better than in many other places.
It's better than in many US places. Most of the First World has better testing than anywhere in the US - so does a lot of the Second.
What that means, among other consequences, is that nowhere in the US will have enough information to make evidence backed and soundly reasoned decisions regarding lockdowns, etc, for a few months yet. Neither will the US be able to solidly evaluate different safety precautions such as masks, gloves, closing of different kinds of gathering places, different levels of isolation, travel, etc, until too late. Officials will have to choose pretty much blind, both in imposing restrictions and in lifting them, and that reduces the effectiveness of precautions while greatly increasing their costs and introducing wider variability (read: unpredictability) in their use. (Just the other day somebody put together some circumstantial evidence and concluded that airport screening for fever and symptoms was probably useless and a very large waste of critical resources - but it's hard to quit that kind of thing on that kind of evidence, and afaik nobody is canceling airport screening. Without testing and tracing, the resources will just have to be wasted).
Note that the lack of testing and tracing opens the door to politically motivated decisions - and we see stark, obvious, and seriously influential differences among official responses that appear to reflect ideological affiliation.
On a Partisan note, for example, the difference between the Democratic State governors and the Republican ones is worth remembering. Comparing the performances of Jay Inslee, Gavin Newsome, Tim Walz, even Andrew Cuomo, with those of the governors of Texas, Louisiana, Florida, et al, just takes a couple of minutes - an easy lesson.
Continuing on that track: The difference between the Republicans and everyone else in Congress is of course the same as it's been for thirty, forty years now. The Republican contribution to the bailout bill currently being shoved through Congress for the pandemic harms, for example, is to have shifted the bulk of the trillions of government pandemic response into the pockets of the corporate and privately wealthy, propping up FIRE and multinational corporate interests with few strings attached, while the rest of the country gets scraps now and the burden of the extra debt in the future - just as in W's bailout bill after the Republican Crash of 2008.
The Republican contribution to the pandemic response has been to delay public recognition of the incoming plague (they had good info by January, from volunteer watchdogs who have been trying to fill in for the dismissed and defunded government agencies as a public service) long enough to allow a few Republican politicians to inside trade before the crash, refuse all offers of tests, masks, etc, from WHO and other better prepared foreign entities, and lie about the US public health preparations while their friends protected themselves, until it was too late to do anything in time to protect the public - whereupon the line became "this is not the time to point fingers, to look back, - - " and "nobody could have seen this coming" (my local official in charge of handling fire and ambulance and other emergency services in my county repeated that last, in front of the county government officials at an official meeting. She also said that "the media" was "overreporting" the issue, making her job harder - she proved it by displaying a graph showing more State citizens had died of flu than corona virus this year).
This is actually a good time to point fingers - and subpoenas - in the right directions: beats sitting around twiddling one's thumbs while Trump threatens to withhold appropriated Federal money and legislated Federal services from anyone who doesn't say nice things about him on TV. (It worked on the Ukrainian guy - why not use it on Americans?) The Senate is taking a vacation - they obviously have nothing better to do. The Dems in the House are looking straight at the latest flagrantly corrupt Republican bailout of Wall Street while Republicans lie about them on TV - they might be in the right mood.
It's going to be possible to estimate, fairly accurately, the number of additional Americans killed in this wave of the virus due to Trump's lies and delays, and Republican lies and delays generally - why not hold them accountable for once? At least we might get them off the street for a while, where they are a bigger threat to public health and safety than, say, any but the most common cancers, any but the highest level organized criminals.