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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

>Sure as hell beats a bunch of people in the same supermarket breathing all over the produce and right on the cashier.

going to macdonalds twice a day is definitely riskier than getting groceries at the supermarket once a week. most of the food is packaged, and the stuff that isn't can be thoroughly washed before eating it. even for the stuff that isn't packaged and can't be washed, coronavirus isn't known to last longer than three days, so you can just buy it and let it sit.

contrast that to the multiple different staff preparing your food, which you then immediately stick in your mouth.

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The trouble is that realistically, it's not possible to get by with a single weekly shop in the UK right now. A lot of supermarket shelves are empty due to everyone buying more than they usually would, and even when they're not there are purchase quantity restrictions that make it hard to get a full week's shopping in.

And Europe as a whole tends to buy groceries every other day, so I'd suspect stores aren't prepared to provide for any degree of bulk buying. Maybe it'll catch on more after this debacle - grocery stores are generally running fine in the US besides toilet paper and the odd other thing being sold out sometimes.

It’s not the stores, imho. From my experience of UK supermarkets in the last week, they’ve basically caught up with most stuff they are directly responsible for or that is produced very close to their needs. Bread is now there, vegetables are there, milk is there. What is dramatically lacking is processed food. I expect that’s because those items have much lower elasticity in their production: if you know you’ll sell X cans of tuna per year, you’ll build a plant that makes X * 1.3 or thereabout; when demand suddenly spikes to 3X or more, there is no time to build another plant (and even if there were, you might not want to invest into something that is probably temporary). Same for meat: you cannot grow extra cows in a couple of weeks.

There is a lot of pressure on supermarkets at the moment which should probably be directed at the larger food industry.

Presumably cows are already being grown at reasonable rates though, they are just redirected to the restaurants. How does that work at the moment in the food industry when the wholesalers can't sell to their customers but still have the products manufactured?

If they have problems placing existing product, they typically ask for public intervention. It’s Europe, the whole agri business is regulated pretty tightly and subsidized to avoid overcapacity issues. Which is just fine, in most years, as it prevents a bunch of unsavory debates between close countries with a history of armed conflict spurred by industrial tensions. It’s the sort of thing that the Brexit saga brought to the surface.

The fact that the sector has not complained in the last month or so, to me says that they are unlikely to have overcapacity issues. This said, most UK restaurants and cafes have shut down only just today, so things might be different in a week.

"which you then immediately stick in your mouth."

Sticking the food into your mouth isn't much of a concern, there's no evidence that covid-19 can transmit "foodborne".

The actual issue is an infected food prep worker contaminating the wrapper or the food itself, you touching the wrapper or the food, then touching your eyes or nose prior to washing your hands.

If covid isnt foodborne, then the produce sitting out at the grocery store is also safe.

But it seems really unlikely that it immediately disappears when it comes in contact with food. "Not food borne" usually just means that food isn't a better conductor of the virus that the average surface is.

In theory, so long as one does not make contact with their nose or eyes, except in a shower (after washing hands), all infections can be prevented, besides airborne-based intake? Has it been established that infection cannot be caught by consumption of contaminated food?

You can't prove a negative.

There's not been any documented occurrences of it. But most people probably don't know how they got infected either.

There are definitely foodborne pathogens, this just isn’t one of them (probably).

That’s true. Really, the ideal solution would be repurposing existing drive through setups for grocery purchases. Best of both worlds.

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