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Comment by _skel | Hacker News Reader

You could pick any large company that reopened and find instances of employees who have the virus. Singling out Tesla is good for clickbait, but why should the Tesla factory stay closed when bars and restaurants in California are allowed to open?

This is the new normal. We can't stay in lockdown forever. Jobs deemed "non-essential" by white collar professionals comfortably working from home are pretty essential to the workers who have been stuck at home without an income.

Until a vaccine is developed, people will get sick even if they are social distancing and wearing masks and their workplaces are doing the right things. We shouldn't be shocked or outraged or self-righteous when that happens. Society needs to accept that or we will never recover from the lockdowns.

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I could not agree more. I do not understand why this is not more widely understood.

It's different if a company re-opened against guidelines and is not considered "essential." Is making a few more cars really that essential?

Different companies have different roles to play. And if shutting down non-essentials can reduce the rate of infection, it improve the outcome for _everyone_ afterwards.

> And if shutting down non-essentials can reduce the rate of infection, it improve the outcome for _everyone_ afterwards.

For how long? What if there is never a vaccine? Will we hide in our homes forever?

There is a reason California is reopening. Lockdowns just can't last forever. We have to move on and do the best we can to live with the virus as a normal part of life, even though it means more people are going to get sick.

We should also all be uncomfortable with the government deciding which companies deserve to survive. We are supposed to have a market economy. We can put up with those kinds of government controls as short-term emergency measures, but they would cause economic collapse in the long term.

> For how long? What if there is never a vaccine? Will we hide in our homes forever? [...] Lockdowns just can't last forever

Indeed. The purpose of the lockdown was to buy us time to build e.g. contract tracing infrastructure, massively expand testing, and develop other means to allow us to reopen safely.

Instead for the most part we've sat on our hands and done very little. Thus we're saying, well, sucks to be us, I guess we have to reopen and let people die.

It didn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way. There is plenty of evidence of this from around the world.

> It didn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way. There is plenty of evidence of this from around the world.

But it is this way, so what's your point?

We can wish all we want for things to be better, but we have to start reopening no matter what. The economy will collapse if we don't. We are out of time.

My point was to respond to your "what if there's never a vaccine? Will we hide in our homes forever?"

There's a middle ground between "no attempt made to mitigate the loss of human life" and "safe and effective vaccine readily available". We can and should be doing more.

It's also not too late to do more.

But instead, we seem to be adopting the nihilism that I read in your original post, that, (in a few ways) time's up.

I'm not advocating that we just forget about the virus. We are doing what we can to mitigate loss of life. There are social distancing policies for businesses, people are wearing masks, etc. -- but businesses are reopening.

> We are doing what we can to mitigate loss of life.

Some individuals/business-owners doing what they can to mitigate loss of life caused by the reopening of their businesses, yes. Some people are wearing masks.

This is by no means universal. You don't have to go far to see videos from Vegas, or of airlines not enforcing their own mask policies.

And also, as a society we absolutely are not doing what we can to mitigate loss of life even within the parameters of a fixed amount of economic activity.

All business are essential.

>it improve the outcome for _everyone_ afterwards

Certainly not for the people who are forced to shutdown.

A job might not be essential to society, but it is very essential for those who rely on that income.

Even if a vaccine is developed, is there much reason to think it will stop covid-19? Or will it be like influenza vaccines, where maybe it has some impact but certainly isn't anywhere close to eradicating the disease or even assuring the vaccine recipient of anything? (Apparently flu shots were only 29% effective in 2018.)

I think you're probably right; this is the new normal. Lockdowns will be lifted as people come to accept covid deaths as normalcy, as they already accept influenza deaths, car accidents, etc.

There may never be a vaccine. We should operate under the assumption that there is a good chance one will be ready in a year or so, but that timeline makes it clear that we can't remain in lockdown.

Restaurants and bars in specific areas with specific precautions are allowed to re-open. Musk re-opened his factory against the advice of local officials.

And yet the local officials decided not to forcibly close the factory. They could have looked good on TV taking Musk away in handcuffs, and it certainly would have made a lot of people happy, but they didn't. There is a reason for that.

Ultimately, local authorities couldn't make a compelling case that opening the Tesla factory was risky enough to justify intervening. They had already allowed a number of other businesses to open that were more dangerous in terms of covid transmission than the Tesla factory and could also be called "non-essential". Tesla was taking the same precautions that local authorities recommended for other businesses they allowed to open.

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