COVID-19 Update

I think we should start with the encouraging news.  If you look at one of the hardest hit countries (Italy) a few days ago there was 17,660 cases and death toll of 1,266.  The population of Italy is 60.48 million people.  What that means is that in one of the worst hit countries only 0.029% of the population have gotten the disease.  To further ease your concern 0.0058% of the population of China is the amount who were sick with the disease.  Those killed in Canada each year in car crashes is 0.009% and most of us drive without even thinking of that reality.  I hope this helps calm some of the fear you might be facing.  

Having said that, I think one of the reasons these percentages are low is because countries like China and Italy essentially closed their entire countries for weeks to deal with the issue.  Canada is reacting by closing schools, mass gatherings and other events to try and make this very low percentage even lower than these countries with larger numbers of cases and deaths.  

Ever After Acres is a family business and our family consists of 8 people who live in our house.  We also have two sets of parents living in the greater Moncton area who are among the most vulnerable group when it comes to this virus.  Lisa's parents are amongst those heading home from southern USA and should arrive in the next few days.  

Our oldest daughter works in a pharmacy and will continue to work throughout this pandemic.  I am super proud of her for recognizing she isn't at high risk for serious illness and that people will still need their medicines.  Our health care workers are the true heroes during this global pandemic.  In conversation with our oldest daughter she is going to be temporarily residing at a friends house to protect the other 7 of us who live here.  We have experienced the flu and various bugs that have travelled in our house before and it is not pretty with so many of us.  While some already have seen our decision as extreme we have decided to do so because our lifestyle allows us to easily do this.  

We work from home other than almost weekly public events in one form or another to sell our products.  With most public events either cancelled or likely to soon be cancelled we will continue to work from home minus these weekly events.  That means for us to simply stay put and carry out social distancing is actually quite simple.   

We went grocery shopping several days ago before the stores got super busy.  You might think that for 7 people we bought an absurd amount of food and supplies, such as toilet paper.  The reality is we did not go overboard but took a reasonable approach.  We bought a total of two packages of Costco toilet paper so to those who bought absurd amounts, that's ridiculous.  Grocery stores will remain open throughout this pandemic. 

Our business will continue to run and have regular posts as we do normally.  We hope you will continue to engage with us through social media during this time.  We also will be continuing to fill orders and ship and deliver them to our amazing customers.  We don't run a factory with hundreds of people we are family that does all the various work so any concerns of illness transferred through our products is not a concern.  That is one reason we are self isolating is so that you our customers will not have to worry about our products having the virus on them.  

How it will work with orders during this time.  If you order a product from us we will get the order ready and have it shipped to you.  The other option is free local delivery as we usually do but we will message you and leave it on your doorstep.  During this time we prefer e-transfers or credit card online payments.  We aren't asking for people to buy just for the sake of buying but rather to simply continuing to use our products.  We may also have some live sales during this period of time to help our business make it through the missing markets we usually attend.  

Thank you so much everyone.  I hope we all can support our small local businesses.