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Comment by overthemoon | Hacker News Reader

Congress is currently considering liability shields for precisely this. https://www.wsj.com/articles/liability-shield-is-next-corona...

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> Congress is currently considering liability shields for precisely this. https://www.wsj.com/articles/liability-shield-is-next-corona....

I guess the real priority is to make sure the brunt of the costs of these decisions are borne by those towards the bottom...

Legal liability will incentivize business to take steps to contain the virus and reduce transmission. Take that away and in many businesses will just go "¯\_(ツ)_/¯, not my problem."

The priority is to make sure that businesses essential to our way of life keep operating. No attempt to reallocate the brunt of the costs will matter if meat stops showing up on the supermarket shelves.

Our current way of life is based on a system that ensures that those at the bottom bear the brunt of the costs, it always has

> The priority is to make sure that businesses essential to our way of life keep operating.

"Essential to our way of life" is actually a pretty expansive category, which encompasses a great deal of stuff that not actually essential by any reasonable definition.

Whether business are essential in some broad, cosmic sense isn't that important. The question is which things we can keep shut down for months and months without riots or economic collapse, and that's a pretty small list.

Liability shields would help. Not sure they would solve the public reputation problem? (I've seen the public reputation problem take down restaurants even when the restaurant did not poison the claimant.) But they would give restaurant owners confidence that there would be, at least, no legal liability.

On the balance of probabilities, I'd bet that many people will just eschew dine-in experiences. At least for a year or two. Can you survive the year or two with decreased dine-in traffic? That's the question owners should be trying to answer. If your footprint is small enough, I'd suspect the answer is yes. If you've got a larger footprint than is prudent in the new reality, you'll likely need to make some changes.

Don't get me wrong, it seems batty to me and you make a good point re reputation vs legal consequences. What's even more mind boggling is that Georgia, for example, is allowing restaurants to open but at half capacity. Given the razor thin margins at restaurants, I don't see how this could be seen as splitting the difference. It really seems like the worst of both worlds for the restaurant, its employees, and the customers.

Interesting. More splitting the baby than splitting the difference

To be frank I think liability shields will screw over the people they are trying to help. If there is liability the customers have reason to believe you'll at least try heavily to reduce the spread. With them it is "Nope, not my responsibility." That means anyone with sense (a sadly non-universal commodity) will nope out as it screams "No reason to trust me."

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