Americans widely oppose reopening most businesses | Hacker News Reader

Americans widely oppose reopening most businesses

washingtonpost.com

25 pointslaurex25 comments

I wonder how the opposition correlates with people who still have jobs vs people who have seen their jobs vanish and their businesses bankrupted.

people in general have been bombarded with scaremongering for two months now, no wonder they are scared witless,

had they been shown this graph on who is at risk they would support different scenarios

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105061/coronavirus-deat...

and even for old people the majority of death are for those in nursing homes - old and very frail

the overwhelming majority of the rest of the population is has an extremely low risk. Our focus should be on protecting the nursing homes not locking up everyone.

It really is unsettling how much control the media exerts. None of the lockdowns make any sense whatsoever.

Seriously? It’s not like we have the shelter in place orders just because of some media influence. These policies are driven by state governments working closely with medical and epidemiological experts. The countries that took these policies seriously and implemented them early have been much less impacted than e.g. the US, so why do you think the shelter in place policies don’t make sense?

I haven't been bombarded with scaremongering. In fact, I barely even consume news except for forums like these. Yet, I've been concerned about this virus since day one - mostly because I have friends who work in virus research and biology, and they're all like, "This is a very serious virus, so do whatever it takes to not get it."

So, I'm curious what is extremely low risk to you? And, what is the currently known mortality rate for someone aged 40? Because I'm having a hard time finding answers.

I linked the image with official stats right there, look at it. what do you see? about 300 deaths for ages under 50

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105061/coronavirus-deat...

out of more than 200K official (and most likely millions of actual) cases.

Clearly, you did. But, it didn’t answer my specific question. If I’m a 40 year old with diabetes, whats my expected mortality rate?

https://archive.is/wBr8b

Which Americans? All the ones I know IRL want them ended immediately, regardless of their political positions otherwise.

Per the article, a random national sample of 1,005 adult, resulting in ±3.5% margin of error.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they give you a ton of information about the survey and analysis (here: https://context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/do...)

Along with crosstabs for each question here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1u7j63YU7FSYsUXxvSMpH...

I guess the poll questions are useful in terms of unrestricted reopening but say nothing about support for partial reopening / reopening with conditions - which in of itself is a bias by omission.

That's a little harsh, IMO.

In the half sample, they asked about eight different kinds of businesses (Question 4a-4h) and with the exception of movie theatres (18%) and golf courses (41%), they were all in the 20s to 30s.

As for reopening with conditions, I don't know that there are concrete plans that would be easy to poll. I think you'd lose a lot of people if you had to describe a series of possible schemes in great detail.

When my observation of the universe is in stark contrast to mathematically correct analyses, I go with my lyin' eyes.

Your lyin' eyes have a pretty small sample size, though. And not of a random sample.

> Your lyin' eyes have a pretty small sample size, though. And not of a random sample.

What I vaguely recall from stats is that even a small sample size that is really far off from the larger sample is statistically nearly impossible. This means something is amiss, so I defer to my lyin' eyes. I know my eyes, don't know the authors.

“The thing I have noticed is that when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There is something wrong with the way that you are measuring it.”

— Jeff Bezos

Trusting your eyes over people with replication rates in the 20-50% range (ie, social scientists) is probably a rational choice.

There’s plenty of evidence that polls have systemic inaccuracies — question phrasing, people giving “right” answers, etc.

I don’t see where it mentions rural/urban demographics. Otherwise this is just city folks.

From the methods (the first link, 4th para under "Methodological Details"):

The overall adult sample is weighted using a raking procedure to match the demographic makeup of the population by sex, region, age, education, race/ethnicity, marital status, and population density according to Census Bureau estimates.

And everyone I know IRL is saying they won't go out yet even as restrictions are lifted.

As someone who had the bug and recovered.... these people that say this is no big deal are nuts. Even if you don’t end up on a ventilator it is horrifying. Getting your significant other sick is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Our world has changed, we can adjust quick or slow. The techy “libertarians” that wanna shake hands and go to a hackathons are nihilists and it sucks that those decisions are going to kill someone I know.

The “techy libertarians” were the first hanging signs agains hand shaking and warning everybody willing to listen back in January.

With the current lockdowns in place, the other problem of mass starvation is eventually going to crop up, though before that happens it will be crowds with pitch forks and torches.

Life is suffering.

I don't think that binary is helpful. We can make graduated steps to get a new normal. While I do agree that food shortages would be likely, they are still likely. We could be focusing on initiatives to get food to people in their communities that aren't restaurants. I think the nihilist perspective of "make it how it was before and damn the cost" is a failure of imagination. We need to adapt and focus on taking care of our neighbors. There are ways to do that to weather a storm. Apparently we have chosen not to.

> And everyone I know IRL is saying they won't go out yet even as restrictions are lifted.

Which supports the point that the lockdowns do not need to be in place because people can take care of themselves.

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