For those who don’t want to have to wear a mask to the grocery store this might be the option for them.
It seems like a win-win for me. Does anyone have a counter to that?
It's also furthering the trend towards isolation, the segregation into precarious low-wage service jobs vs a feudal class mostly busy with co-ordinating this personal army of theirs. The latter can afford this because they have institutionalised power structures that have kept lower incomes flat for half a century while the tax structure was turned on its head, with the highest incomes now paying lower rates than day labourers.
One would assume that high-paying jobs somehow correlate with value generation. But when shit hit the fan, they were the first to be sent home for half a year and economists are still trying to find anyone who actually noticed that regional key-account managers were mostly just busy with creating funny zoom backgrounds.
Online sales obviously kill brick-and-mortar retail, which leads to whatever the opposite of a liveable city is.
Large companies tend to run more efficiently. Or, more accurately, they are wasteful in ways that do not have the side benefits of, say, a single-proprietor sponsoring some small-town event because that's "how it's done", or continuing to employ someone even when it's a bad business decision, because they have worked with them for a decade and feel a sense of responsibility.
They also heavily favour concentration of market share with just one or very few companies, who are more powerful in relation to customers, employees, and the state. While gains in efficiencies have so far dominated, the beneficiaries of this shift in power will at some point try to cash it in.
Other than that, it's pretty cool.
I don't get it. You think people were useless because when they went home, it didn't affect the economy. But you're talking about people who were and are theoretically working from home. So you seem to be begging the question. Am I missing something?
Also their produce choices were limited.
Instacart shoppers take much more care but they are very expensive and their lack of knowledge of in-store inventory means they make poor substitutions, requiring me to baby-sit the order while they pick it to veto substitutions.
I have returned to in-store shopping.
We're making up the delivery fee and tip by not eating out or going to the movies, and we see it as a small way to put some money into the hands of the essential workers keeping society afloat right now.
It’s like they’re not even trying. Or they are being completely oblivious to the dangers that they are the ones spreading this virus.
And since the spread has continued to rise, I’m wondering if the source of the spread is indeed inside of supermarkets. You have a relatively contained environment, where the air conditioning system can pick up the virus molecules in the air, and spread it around.
WHO say there is no evidence that asymptomatic carriers can spread the virus, and if you have the disease, people should stay indoors. Therefore the mask is redundant.
But wait, the CDC recommend (and where I live TfL have it mandatory) wearing a face mask, otherwise you're "killing grandma".
I've even seen plenty of articles suggesting that wearing the mask is making things worse, or that lockdowns are making things worse, etc.. The information overload is getting extreme.
So which is it?
I wouldn't be surprised if mixed messaging is the reason why people have given up caring.
Example: "Young people aren't affected.. wait, yes they are, wait.. umm wait no they're not"
Our global institutions having fundamental disagreements is so dangerous. I spend hours every day reading into this stuff and I don't have a clue what I'm supposed to do, so how is the Average Joe who just wants to get along with life supposed to know what the correct course of action is?
What if you're in the incubation period? AFAIK that doesn't count as being an "asymptomatic carrier" because you eventually show symptoms.
>I've even seen plenty of articles suggesting that wearing the mask is making things worse [...] The information overload is getting extreme.
Source for this? I've only heard of mask wearing making things worse by proxy (ie. you're depriving healthcare workers of masks). If that's the basis of those claims, it's totally consistent that masks are good and that masks are bad.
1) Are people correctly using masks - e.g. taking higher risks than the relative protection given by type of mask being used - just because you wear a bandana doesn't mean you should be hanging out in large crowds; properly wearing/fitting masks; properly disposing/sanitizing masks.
2) comparison of infection rates for other airborne/aerosol-transmitted diseases in countries/cultures where mask use is traditionally higher than the US, e.g. higher influenza infection rates in countries where mask use is traditionally much higher than US despite their success in containing COVID (taiwan, s. korea); comparison of sick rates of professionals who wear masks at work some of the time vs all day (Australian study of nurses, I think??); comparison of sick rates of people who wear veils when in public vs those that don't in same society.
Sorry for lack of source material, but armed with above one might be able to google it out if interested.
Personally, I'm starting to like wearing my largely ineffective-but-anonymizing sheer cloth mask in public. I wear a tight N95 on the plane, which sucks (effective PPE is NEVER comfortable to wear for hours), then junk it, but just try and tell me it doesn't help. I think smart monkeys should be staying home unless they have to be in public space. Strongly disagree with threatening jail time for mask noncompliance tho.
It also feels like you're happy to use some inconsistencies (real or imagined) as license to do whatever you feel like. Considering that only the most deranged lunatics would suggest that health care workers and scientists are actively trying to harm people for some reason, it's odd to pound on any opening they may give you, instead of engaging in a good-faith effort to understand the issues involved and do the bare minimum to protect yourself and your community.
Definitely not - my comment was written from a frustrated perspective. The mental exhaustion of keeping up with the latest guidelines, ingesting all these differing opinions and trying to work out what to do, is far more exhausting than reverting to our default state of not giving a fuck (or more accurately: hoping for the best).
It's _easier_ to stop caring, and given the virus isn't hurting young people as much, no wonder they're doing the calculus and choosing to go to the pub and get back to normal. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't tempting.
So, it's true that the WHO said that, although they've since clarified that by 'no evidence' they mean "we don't know", not "it doesn't happen". ('no evidence' is one of those phrases that people misunderstand). However, _pre-symptomatic_ cases are contagious, and there's no way to know if you're negative, asymptomatic, or pre-symptomatic, so as public health advice "asymptomatic people may not be contagious" is not useful (it's somewhat useful from and epidemiological standpoint).
> I've even seen plenty of articles suggesting that wearing the mask is making things worse
There were some early concerns that masks would make people act more riskily, but this doesn't seem to be the case.
> or that lockdowns are making things worse
Who claimed that?!
Look, in any emerging situation, there's a lot of confusion and uncertainty. But it now seems pretty clear that masks don't make things worse, and there's some reason to hope that they make things better. And they're cheap. So people should wear them.
I understand this, but curbing on fundamental freedoms based on "no evidence" is a hard sell for many of us. I have the luxury of playing it safe because I'm a remote working software engineer, but if I still worked in a shop like I did a few years ago I could be homeless now.
> Who claimed that?!
There was "reasonable" (reasonable looking) evidence that locked down states did worse numbers-wise, but this obviously doesn't control for population density. My point is that nobody knows what's going on anymore.
It sounds like you glided right over the difference between asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic. This seems crucial to the whole cloud of confusion that exists and is being promoted here.
Trying to be as charitable as possible, if you were sincere in saying
>The information overload is getting extreme. So which is it?
The contradiction appears to be directly due to misunderstanding of "asymptomatic" and the follow up comment tried to explain it.
I don't doubt this misunderstanding is widespread, but I don't know how to rectify it and it often seems as though people might be deliberately obtuse.
To be clear, right now, today, there is no way for you to know if you're asymptomatic, presymtomatic, or negative (unless you've had literally no human contact for a couple of weeks, in which case you can be confident that you're negative).
Risk of spreading the disease in this state:
Negative: None
Asymptomatic: Unknown
Presymptomatic: High
So for the average person in the street, it is essentially _irrelevant_ that we don't know what the risk is for asymptomatic spread; there is no practical way for them to know if they're asymptomatic or presymptomatic. It is an interesting question from an epidemiological point of view; if asymptomatic people can spread it easily, then that makes things worse. But as an individual, considering your risk of spreading it, it is irrelevant.
The risk to people working in grocery stores increases linearly (or faster) with the number of in-person grocery-store visits. The risk to the community is probably roughly quadratic in the number of in-person grocery-store visits.
Curbside pickup is a really responsible thing to do.
When I originally checked, there were a limited number of slots available at my local stores and they seemed to be all filled all the time. At one time at least, they were even queueing people up to shop on a website.
So telling me it is or isn't something I should do is irrelevant; I would need to think it was something I could do.
Today though it's amazing. I put together a grocery order at my convenience and place and pay via the app, and it just magically shows up at my door within a convenient time-frame. I don't have to answer the door, I don't have to talk to anyone, I don't have to sign a receipt. It just shows up.