I hired a team of shoppers to find out how businesses were opening in Dallas
blogmaverick.com
blogmaverick.com
I think this is the most important metric as far as “re-opening the economy” goes but it seems to be largely ignored by politicians.
Basically all metrics have been ignored. Two weeks ago it was all "We're going to do a phased reopening with checkpoints based on the data.". A few armed protests later and my state (NC) at least is going full YOLO reopening everything but bars, based on absolutely nothing but hopes and prayers. New infections here haven't even remotely peaked, and are still rising by the hundreds every day. This is going to be a catastrophe.
BTW, most all economists keep pointing the finger back at fixing the public health crisis to fix the economic problems, whatever their political stripes: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/05/sa...
But we have no coherent plans to do much about the public health crisis at a national level, and the president is busy tweeting out anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories.
It sucks it's come to this, but all of the states with lock-downs are desperately looking at states easing restrictions to see if these shelter in place orders are really worth it. We've heard that many of the people in NYC getting infected now are getting infected at home.
I'm really hoping that Texas and Georgia, as they slowly open up, do not go over hospital capacities. We already know a number of people haven't gone to hospitals when they needed to; as many cut off access in preparation for a surge that never came. It's equally likely these states may not see a surge at all, even post re-opening.
Yes, a lot of people may still die, but this virus is in the environment. A lot of those people would die either now, or six months from now. I don't understand how people can think complete eradication is even possible. You can't limit people's social contact forever. We are not laptops that can be placed on standby for a year or gears in a machine that can be stopped and oiled.
If we do test/trace/isolate, and start requiring masks in enclosed spaces, we could start opening up in a fairly safe way.
Mark Cuban's article indicates that masks are not as prevalent as they ought to be.
- At ~7:00am Sunday, May 3, I only saw one "customer" not wearing a mask at a grocery store inside the inner loop. (Quotes because this person got caught trying to walk out the front door with a 40 of something while I was still waiting outside for a cart; not inclined to count them.) All employees that I saw were masked, though I did see one pull their mask down under their chin for a minute or so to speak to a coworker standing next to them.
- Friday evening (May 9) we needed gas on the way back from bringing in a package for a relative who is out of town. The League City Buc-ees was bustling when we stopped by around 6:30pm; employees were masked, but I didn't see any masked customers. My spouse noticed an additional masked customer that I didn't see.
- On the way back in, I also noticed that the Twin Peaks in Webster had a pretty full parking lot. I saw a few people leaving who were not masked, but I wasn't close enough to get any sense of things like what fraction were wearing a mask, what fraction were seated outside, and how well-spaced the tables were.
Sample's too small to even try to reason from, but I've been wondering how much (if any) of the difference is accounted for by the type of establishment/patron demographics, proximity to downtown, and change over time.
This. It's hard to believe that a portion of the country is so anti-mask that they accept a 30% increased risk of a 50% chance of a multi day fever OVER a fashionable piece of homemade fabric or bandana.
If you want to reopen the economy - and we all do - masks are part of what makes that happen, and makes it "stick", without a second wave causing further stay at home orders as infections spike.
Eradication, to the point that contract tracing is a viable containment method, has been achieved by other countries. It is completely possible.
But we aren't doing this, we're instead bickering incessantly and fatalistically rationalizing a much worse outcome than necessary. It is a deep deep historical failure of leadership.
South Kora, New Zealand, etc where they are going for complete elimination. Now ask yourself this ... when will South Korea or NZ be able to reopen their borders? They will have little to no immunity, so possibly not for a year or more.
That last bit is a moot point. Herd immunity is not something we aspire to here in the United States. Even if infection results in immunity, which has not been proven yet, the number of people infected in the US that would be needed for herd immunity would involve millions of people dying.
> So we're seeing two different methods: Sweden (and I guess soon, the UK and the rest of the world) taking measures to slow the spread, but realizing it will spread to everyone.
I expect that's a pretty cartoonish reading of Sweden's public policy. (The UK's public policy is cartoonish lately, but they've definitely backed away from "let's all get sick.")
The US might not be able to do quite as well, but it feels like we're barely even trying.
Unfortunately, I think it's a bit too late for the USA to do that now.
Isn't New Zealand almost entirely free of it at this point?
I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at, but there is a recent study showing that COVID cases correlate well with commuting in NYC - it's not the case that people who stay at home are getting infected just as much:
https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42665370
(this site is down for me right now, but it was working earlier when i looked at the paper!)
Maybe. But probably not. The fact that this decision is being made with zero preparation is terrifying. There is no PPE generally available. There are no contact tracing programs in place. There has been effectively zero federal response or any form of coherent strategy released. Hell, you can't even buy hand sanitizer in the stores again yet. Of course we can't live in isolation forever. But absolutely nothing has been done to make reopening any safer than we were two months ago. And saying "welp, let's hope it just goes away", with no safety measures in place, is going to mean hundreds of thousands of deaths.
My country (India) had one of the strictest lockdowns, but the economic fallout from it is too severe. The message now is that we will have to learn to live with the virus.
TL;DR If you don't fix the biology, you will not get the economy sorted. This will just make everything worse. Totally backfire.
This is unnecessarily insulting. Many places have peaked, especially if you look at new cases and not deaths.
There's a difference between a peak and a halfway point. We could have reached the peak but only 10% of deaths if there's a long plateau slightly lower than the peak.
We have the example of successful responses in places like South Korea and Taiwan, none of whose standard the US seems intent, or maybe even capable, of meeting. Instead, people in the US cling to phony performances of leadership by their various authoritarians, whether it be Andrew Cuomo for Democrats or Trump for Republicans.
This is not fair to people that have spent their lifetimes building businesses and are watching them go bust, or people that derive satisfaction from their employment.
Worse, for those that would rather not go back to work and are suffering, your comment comes across as "shame on them for not asking for more". This crisis is hurting so many people, and its impact will be felt for a long time. We don't need comments like this.
What is actually unfair to them is their businesses going bust, but here we are. We can either acknowledge the underlying reasons for why this is happening, or keep ignoring the elephant in the room of the ever-growing debt spiral.
You're shooting the messenger with grandstanding empathy, and that style of comment helps nobody. Indeed, people should be asking for more, rather than letting themselves be disenfranchised by fatalistic propaganda. People should be demanding a competent public health response. People should be demanding timely unemployment benefits that don't hinge on the whims of states forcing businesses to close. People should be demanding loans and disaster payments for small businesses that aren't stacked to benefit large connected companies. People should be demanding the right for workers to walk out over negligent conditions. People should be demanding a commercial rent stoppage. And people should be demanding an end to trickle-up economics so we aren't in these same inflexible overleveraged positions for the next crisis.
This will primarily be true of businesses with strong brick and mortar services (but especially those renting brick and mortar); the result will be that, in the future,
1. Owners will divest earnings as much possible rather than investing in growth in order to jump into bankruptcy protection more rapidly next time
2. Accountants will recommend accounting for 4 weeks of paid leave classified as sick leave that will be used up during a quarantine.
Your child is much more likely to be adversely affected (in the long term) by sustained economic stagnation than by this virus.
I will never be going to those restaurants. I may never return to Walgreens.
The simple fact is we cannot continue in the shut down state we have and the rules of the shut down need to be heavily revised so as not to appear as arbitrary and unneeded. It gets worse because there does not seem to be any acceptable date and that is unreasonable in an extreme. The line in the sand will have to be drawn and efforts put towards protecting the most at risk.
We also have to recognize just how much person to person interaction that many businesses truly are. From actual touching to handing items back and forth if not handling items in shared environments. Social distancing really cannot work in some businesses and this needs to be accounted for because they cannot be kept shut down without accepting some risk; namely hair care, massage, hair care, but not to be ignored the biggest one, medical care. If it safe for a dentist or optometrist to work on you then a hair dresser can follow similar but appropriate restrictions.
Besides telling people how to protect themselves they need to tell people how to be polite in this new world we face and how to protect yourself from people who don't take the same caution you do without aggravating the situation.
Even though I am at risk (old age and damaged lungs from pulmonary embolisms), I am for reasoned reopening of our economy, but only if we do it with I would call “smart style”: adopt safety measures and make them mandated by law.
I wish more people would look at the covid-19 crisis as something that is serious but that we have to adapt to long term. If restaurants limit seating, use discardable menus, all employees wear masks, disinfect as appropriate, etc., etc. then we achieve Cuban’s feel safe to take the family criterion.
I saw a comment the other day where somebody said that we can't open anything up until a vaccine is developed. That is one extreme. then you have the other crowd who says just open it up and let me go see football and baseball games.
I think the worst part about all of this has been the fact that it's happened in a election year. We have a habit in this country of turning every election into an existential crisis, which is a recipe for creating radicalized viewpoints. Our media has now turned this into a partisan issue and now it's being treated as such.
It's like only spraying enough water on a fire to keep it from spreading out of control but not enough to put it out. When you're house is on fire there really is only two sensible options. Let it burn down your house or put it out.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to get the R down to ~1. This is a partial lockdown that last until the vaccine comes out and kills 1600 people a day.
It seems better to lock down and test and trace harder until r gets to .5 then wait for it to mostly extinguish then cautiously open up. Or let it rip through the populous until we have herd immunity.
This is obviously the right measure to take but I don't think any states have the infrastructure to do that currently. You need massive testing tracing capacity and we don't seem to be close to that at all. Yet all the states are reopening while cases and deaths increase almost everywhere outside NYC
That said, it seems that America is just flailing about and hoping for the best. and not even expecting the worst if the comment section is to be believed.
I can go months without ever seeing any reference to the Stasi and, in this single comment section, I see dozens of references? There have been plenty of similar programs through history but a bunch of "Americans" point to the same German group to illustrate their point? It doesn't add up at all.
Has anything like that happened in any other country?
We had one notable protest in Australia in which a few were arrested and a policeman injured, but no, people here don't walk around showing off guns thankfully.
Even if they had publicly made themselves known, which they should have, you can't seriously argue that what Cuban did wasn't invasive.
Cuban didn’t call out any businesses by name; it was a completely anonymous survey. But if your business is flouting safety expectations you should expect that eventually some customers are going to call you out publicly, with photos, videos etc as supporting evidence.
Mark Cuban did these businesses a favor, if they listen.
Restaurants NOT opening when the restrictions were lifted is actually a good sign if you are interested in small government: it tells that the restrictions were most probably non-binding as a constraint.
Ie they were telling people to do stuff that they would have done anyway.
(Compare to eg a 0.1 dollar/h minimum wage: almost no-one would actually be at that minimum wage, so it's 'non-binding' in the same sense.)
Government constraints that are non-binding or almost non-binding aren't too bad. Since they don't change market outcomes (too much).
Two of the comments post the same CDC 2017 list, and both come from twitter accounts with 0 posts (one is 100% retweets of anti-"liberal" content). I'm never sure how plausible it is for someone to have the time to sit on twitter all day just to RT these things and then jump onto rando blogs to leave long comments like these.
1) Stop the health care system from being slammed.
2) Buy time for testing/tracing/isolation, and get enough PPE for health care workers.
The fact that we are squandering that time is a travesty that has a cost measured in lives, and billions of dollars as the economy worsens.
I completely disagree. Places are very likely to be shutdown regardless, whether due to government authority or the virus rampaging the workforce. One of those is more permanent than the other.
We could send people back to work, but doing so safely requires effective testing & equipment. The USA bungled their response to the crisis, and so it has neither of those things. Which means reopening the economy at this point is probably going to sacrifice a lot more lives.
The entire point of the lockdown was to buy enough time to put into place the stuff we need to safely reopen. And clearly that didn't happen.
That sounds like a pretty good argument supporting the idea that lockdowns as implemented are likely to do more harm than good?
Imagine how traumatic it will be if the death toll spikes up. We have fear because the virus is still active and deadly. If those fears are found to be justified than I suspect even smaller more sane opening up steps will be unpopular.
From recently memory though, I don't think there was cases of this in the States https://apnews.com/4ac3679b6f39e8bd2561c1c8eeafd855
(But we're definitely more radical in other areas like protesters with guns).
Let me tell you about what is happening in New York. On Saturday I saw a line three blocks long. Not tiny blocks. New York sized long blocks. That was a line filled with mostly blacks and latinos, some with children. It was barely moving. At the end of the line there was national guard giving out small shopping bags on onions, carrots and potatoes. Based on me timing it I estimate it took ~3 hours for someone joining at the end of the line to get what is, objectively, $10 worth of vegetables if bought in one of the supermarkets targeting poor Hispanic community. The only reason why they are standing in that line for three hours is because that $10 to them is money. Oh and if your state unemployment claim is "pending" then you do not get the fed $600/week unemployment either.
There's a very popular Bar/restaurant in Bushwick ran by a great but rather odd dude. 191 Knickerbocker. I guess he is relatively well off or he is good enterprising guy who manages to raise a lot of money. It provides free meals a couple of times a week. No questions asked. They are not much but they would certainly get you through the day. It has a half a block long line, split relatively evenly between latinos and whites. Initially the latter group did not want to be seen in the line, hiding their faces when others whom they thought were in the same socio-economic demographics went by. Occasionally you would see people crying. By now they don't care -- just avoid eye contact.
About a week ago on Saturday one of the chefy driven relief trucks showed up. The went around the entire block by the middle of the day. When the people got there, they got two small paper bags of vegetables. The lines was mostly latinos. From talking to a couple of people who were volunteering they estimated about 4 hour wait between the time one joined the line and the time to get those bags.
My wife, who worked a white collar medicine related field was laid off and filed for unemployment in mid-march. Her unemployment claim is still pending. She's not alone. There are people who lost their jobs around beginning of March who are in the same boat. The NYS unemployment system does not have real time status. It does not have messaging. Its call system does not support queuing! People redial hundreds of times a day through the maze of prompts just to be disconnected because there are too many people calling. She legitimately lost it a couple of times. If I was not still making money, we would have been eating through the savings to cover rent. We rent our apartment from a family who lives in the same building. Both of them have been laid off. Neither of them have been able to get unemployment -- their claims are "pending". Every week they look more and more terrified as the only thing that lets them to put food on a table is me paying rent. And there's an eviction moratorium now until August, which means I can , at the cost of ruining a relationship with the landlord to whom I'm paying market rent, stop paying them. Oh and NYS unemployment fund is running out of money.
Last week the first of my wife's friends who used to only worry about when they would be able to go out to do "girl's brunch" have been laid off. The laid off person is shell shocked. At the end of April their company was absolutely convinced there were no layoffs coming.
We are only in the first act. This economic showdown only started at the end of March. Unless you own your own company and you can cut 90% of your expenses and still get enough revenue to pay yourself your white collar job is not safe. People working for companies in layoffs.fyi are the example.
If that's the case, can you script out the needed phone tree selections to make it less frustrating? This still works on android:
https://www.androidpolice.com/2010/05/10/how-to-add-hard-wai...
People used to do this when calling cards were more frequently used. You could setup a speed dial with all the pauses to dial the calling card, wait, enter the account number, wait, and dial your contact number. I think it'd probably work to repeatedly navigate a phone tree menu.
As for the actual topic, it's almost as if "closed" or "open" isn't the entirety of the subject? It seems like we could be dealing with some kind of underlying meatspace problem that needs to be addressed before things can go back to "normal". Who knew?! (/s)
Months ago it was apparent that this virus was going to cause an absolute clusterfuck in the US due to decrepit infrastructure and a failed society ethos. What I couldn't imagine was just how slow the train wreck would be. I guess we're all stuck generally inside and washing groceries for the next year while the idiots cheerlead their simplistic ignorance, and expendable employees are put through the meat grinder to keep the economy simulating.
Fun fact, the last stimulus bill also had legislature in it that removes all liability from businesses so employees can't sue them for making them work in unsafe conditions pertaining to covid such as if they make a bunch of people work in room with close contact and no air circulation.
There is value in exposing and making it very, very hard to miss the level of brainworms with which we are dealing.
The way I see it, everything coming into the house gets disinfected. This way, home can remain home, without eg needing to constantly over-worry about touching my face.
I agree it's likely overboard, which is why I threw it out as an example of ridiculous things we are doing. But the advice on TV is, at best, meant to probabilistically keep most people from spreading the infection. I'm aiming to definitively keep myself clear for the sake of my older family.
I think I agree with you, but the conversation about the personal protective value of masks has become so confused that it's very difficult to discuss. You've got people counting N95 respirators as "masks," it's almost always unclear what statistic a commentator is focusing on, and then there's anger (justified or unjustified) about the evolution of the CDC recommendations for the general public.
Could you clarify your position a bit?
In my view public wearing masks is social signaling. I find it disappointing that CDC decided to change its message on masks under pressure from "do something!" crowd.
What contributed to the crazy spread of COVID in NYC initially and what continued to contribute the spread after the stay at home order was NYC mass transit, especially the subway. The number of people using the subway now dropped but the trains are still fairly packed early in the mornings and late in the evenings as MTA has been cutting the frequency of trains.
I would think however that placing any physical barrier in the path of an airflow is going to have an effect regardless of direction, as some non zero portion of particles are always going to impact the barrier.
Edit: It appears from other comments you may in fact be referring to improper use of masks that are also not specifically designed to maximize filtration ability. I would still submit that some degree of mitigation is better than none, but I can see how a false sense of safety could outweigh the benefits of the mask.
There are many that are depressed and sitting at home.
These are the people we need to help.
Instead of trying to find violations, look for people that are hurting and help them out
Say you loose your job, your unemployment is stuck in bureaucratic hell, and you just want to have a beer with your two best friends to forgot about how fucked things are. Then you get helicopters and megaphones and a $1k fine. That's insane.
This entire ordeal has been a tragic example of people turning other people in and judging them for all their decisions, without offering people any real help or relief:
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/this-is-not-a-time-of-hon...
This time has really brought out the worst in society and government and we should never look back upon this time with any sense of honor.
From a quick Google it appears he has in fact contributed to efforts for food donation, as well as childcare for healthcare workers.