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As rich flee to their Nantucket hidey-holes, island reports first coronavirus case
By adamg on Sun, 03/22/2020 - 2:06pm
The rich, of course, have been fleeing plagues for centuries, but the plagues often catch up to them anyway. Officials on Nantucket have issued the state's first shelter-in-place order following the island's first diagnosed case of Covid-19.
A bit late, Gov. Baker today asked people with second homes on Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard to stay away.
Nantucket Cottage Hospital has one bed that can be used for intensive care. The hospital pleads with rich people:
We are also advising anyone traveling to the island, or anyone who has come here to shelter from other cities or towns, that Nantucket has limited medical resources and a surge of cases could quickly overwhelm our hospital. If you have a choice to be on Nantucket or not, we are requesting that you make the decision to stay off the island to avoid a potentially dire scenario for our community and our hospital.
The official order - bans people who are not full-time residents from coming to the island except in certain emergency categories, but lets people who are not full-time residents leave the island. Any off-islander who does not have an emergency reason to be on the island but who shows up anyway will be required to self quarantine for 14 days.
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Comments
Martha's Vineyard, too
A Tisbury resident was diagnosed a couple of days ago. Of course, Martha's Vineyard Hospital has three ICU beds.
Wow.
That many?
All them old people and no
All them old people and no beds????
Could be wrong
but i think Med-Evac helicopters are pretty standard procedure when they evaluate on island patients.
They'll determine the level of care needed and if a private heli is unavailable the Coast Guard steps in.
All the rich people get helicoptered to Boston.
The local hospitals are for their serfs.
The people there now
are the service workers.
I think the phrase you're
I think the phrase you're looking for is "Island residents."
Same thing now.
Same thing now.
Really?
The teachers, accountants, town administrators, hospital staff, fishermen, and DPW workers I know would all find themselves surprised to be classified as "service workers." And that's just my immediate family.
i love when
people who know nothing about the vineyard, it's history, or inhabitants and still maintain that it's akin to the Hamptons.
Rufus Gifford?
Oh no, poor Sandpiper
Poor Joe, Brian, Helen, and Faye
(who cares about Roy, he can sink)
Loved That Show!
Totally underrated.
No love for Antonio, the
No love for Antonio, the islands seemingly sole cab driver? Definitely high risk job right there. And loveable oaf Lowell too... I can't believe how many names I remember from a show I havnt seen in twenty years.
It doesn't spread geographically.
It spreads socially. You get it from people you have been in contact with. So, if you flee, you might just be bringing it with you.
Like Alien, kinda.
We will see more of this in rural areas...
...as rich people from cities and rich suburbs flee to what they think of as safety. I'm hearing a lot of reports from friends in Vermont that there are an awful lot of NY/NJ/CT license plates given that the ski season is officially order and the golf season isn't gonna start and you can't eat in restaurants or drink in bars (and in a lot of places there's no internet). I don't think it'll end well.
It goes to show that fleeing the city isn't necessarily wise.
Stay pickled, if one gets the drift.
There are people in middle
There are people in middle class suburbs who have had 2nd 'homes' in VT for decades before it was a trendy yuppy NY'er thing to do... cottages, fishing shack type getaways; it doesn't mean they're necessarily rich.
Middle class people with summer homes
Yeah, there are a few. Not so many nowadays as the middle class can't afford to purchase these homes or even pay taxes on them. It's a drop in the bucket compared to the condo people.
Nowadays: that's true. But
Nowadays: that's true. But the point was that some families have had a 2nd place, like a small cottage in
a rural area, in the family for a generation or more. Don't assume they're all rich elitists.
A lot more than a few
Not everybody has a big house on Lake Winnie. Lots of middle class folks have a cabin, condo, small house, etc. as a second home. Instead of a pricier car, expensive vacations, big home or otherwise more upper scale lifestyle, these ordinary people decide they want a second home and figure out a way to do it.
For over 30 years, I went up to VT every weekend to go skiing. A bunch of us rented a house for the season making it very affordable. Over those years I met a lot of working stiffs - teachers, nurses, car mechanics, cops, and geeky engineers like me - that decided to buy a place and figured out a way to do it. Everybody sees the million dollar houses. Spend time at a ski area and you'll find lots of dirtbag skiers who love skiing and figure out how to do it.
Can Confirm in VT
My work has had me working temporarily in VT since January. When COVID-19 hit, we decided to stay up here rather than go back to Boston.
We took a drive through downtown BTV on Saturday and were surprised at the amount of CT plates on the road (scarier were the amount of groups of people hanging out by Lake Champlain). Yesterday, I drove to Winooski to get takeout and saw 4 NJ plates.
The things I'm worried about here are:
A) The lack of hospital beds
B) Age of the population
If COVID-19 hits VT anywhere near the capacity of what I'm hearing in MA, doctors will have to make some tough decisions.
dont worry
the rich will get med evac lifts to NYC or Boston while the bodies of the locals rot in their root cellars
Yes, it's been happening
Yes, it's been happening Jersey shore and eastern LI, too.
I can see both sides of it.
On the one hand, there are people (yes, middle-class, some of them!) who live/work primarily closer to the cities most of the year but do own homes in typically summer communities. They pay taxes on them, just like the year-round residents. They're moving to THEIR houses for a variety of reasons (degree of "well-thought out" definitely varies). It's not as if they're renting a place (or worse yet- profit-renting out their place to corona refugees)
On the other hand, the year-round residents point out that the supply chain and workforce during the off-season in a place like that simply isn't up to any significant increase in population.
...and yeah, the lady who knew she was potentially exposed, took the LIRR to her summer place, and called the small hospital there is a complete ass.
This is so
Masque of the Red Death I could almost cry.
Yeah, just came to leave this here....
https://www.poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death
And then...
...there's the Vincent Price movie from that eternal purveyor of quality entertainment, American International.
Escape from New York
The rich and shameless can flee to their island but the poor and powerless can't flee to Long Island.