Comment by compumike | Hacker News Reader

Comment by compumike | Hacker News Reader

If you're in the Bay Area and have a car, I'd recommend checking out Cheetah [1]. It's a startup that pivoted [2] from doing restaurant wholesale deliveries (from Restaurant Depot, which only sells to restaurants!) to doing drive-through pickup for consumers. You place an order by app, drive up to one of their parked refrigerated trucks at the scheduled time, and say your name. They load your trunk, and you're done. It's taken the majority of my grocery spend in the past few months and I hope the concept remains post-pandemic.

By doing pickup, you get pretty good convenience (almost as good as delivery), great pricing, and somewhat limited selection (but always reflected in-app at order time, rather than surprising you at pickup time). That's a tradeoff that works for me.

A few months ago you could only order restaurant-sized quantities of things (like minimum 25 lbs of bananas), but they've since started making more items available in "family friendly" sizes (3 lbs bananas, $1.80).

(They do have a $20-off your first order referral promotion I'll mention [3] in case you want to try it, but I'm just a happy customer who wants to see the concept take off.)

[1] https://www.gocheetah.com/

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/28/cheetah-a-restaurant-whole...

[3] Enter referral code "2EA2666F" at sign-up or https://cheetah.onelink.me/j187/7b49398d

Aren’t many local grocery stores doing curbside pickup? Locally Walmart and Kroger is.

They are, but they're just not very good at it in my experience. I tried my local store's curbside pickup and I got no butter plus salsa instead of pasta sauce.

Protip: store bought salsa makes a better pasta sauce than store bought pasta sauce.

(Controversial) protip: home made salsa makes a better pasta sauce than home made pasta sauce

It makes an acceptable pasta sauce with the right additions, but I have too much Mexican pride to disrespect salsa that way.

QFC in Seattle's U-District is doing a great job.

I tried Safeway and it would have been faster to do the shopping myself rather than wait in the car, so it's not something you do just for convenience.

At Walmart they bring your order out within five minutes of your arrival.

Sometimes I've waited half an hour and then gave up cause the kids needed to get to bed. Nobody else got their order either.

Only happened once, but still they have work to do.

That sounds worse than delivery? I don't know what it's like in North America, but in the UK grocery delivery is pretty ubiquitous, not all companies everywhere, but someone everywhere, before this year & the coronavirus.

The people that didn't use it didn't by preference, and the surge in demand is the (maybe partially but not entirely, or perhaps entirely, open for debate) change in preference in the current climate, not that there's suddenly an availability of this concept that didn't exist before.

Nobody's worried that Ocado, or the online divisions of the major supermarkets, might disappear when we're all innoculated.

If you have a pickup point on your way from work(or other places you go to) and the wait time is short , it's not much worse than delivery.

And you get lower prices.

> I hope the concept remains post-pandemic.

not sure if post-pandemic will be a thing

Not sure why so many think this way. In worst case scenario- we are never able to create a vaccine. So you expect the world to stay in lockdown mode for eternity?

It's easy to be post-lockdown but not post-pandemic. Many places in the United States have been doing this for weeks now, and we're seeing how that's going.

> It's easy to be post-lockdown but not post-pandemic

What's the difference?

A lockdown is a a government-issued stay-at-home order. The presence of such an order should be, but isn't necessarily, aligned with the presence of a prevalent disease.

Not asking for a literal definition of those words. I'm asking what's the difference in living in "post-lockdown" world vs "post-pandemic" world. Personally I think masks will become more prevalent in the west, like it is already in the east. And more remote jobs. In the grand scheme of things, these two changes seem minor to me.

So what is it that I'm missing here? What grand changes in the way we live are we expecting in "post-pandemic" world?

I think eliminating indoor activities that involve being around a lot of other people in a confined space would be a profound change to society.

Some bar owners seem very upset, to the point where they are equating closing bars with denying their right to exist and make a living and suing the government.

Here are 3 that popped into my mind after thinking about it for a minute. Maybe you can come up with others.

If social distancing remains in effect, post-pandemic world would have much lower density in offices/restaurants/other large gathering locations with seating, increasing real estate costs, which will be passed onto the consumer.

If social distancing is required on transportation as well, this would dramatically increase air travel costs. Not only would this require heavy rethinking in any locale which relies on tourism, but also for any conferences/conventions which have a large international attendee component, perhaps requiring a reduction in scope, or being cancelled completely as the economics no longer makes sense.

In-patient hospital costs will also rise as patients can no longer be placed close to each other. Number of tele-medicine providers will rise, and how this will affect the quality of care will have to be seen.

This is all based on the assumption that the current medical tech will stay as it is. But in reality what we are seeing is much faster tests (we have already gone done from few days to get back results to couple of hours now) and much better medical care once you are infected. Which means it will become a lot easier to separate the infected from the rest of the population, rendering the healthy population to work and move freely like they used to.

You can do a quick test before boarding an international flight and permitted to enter the country only if you're healthy. Contact tracing apps can easily show Green-Red passes to prove whether you can enter any restaurant, shop, hospital, etc.

That's a good point. As testing technology advances, many of these will be mitigated. Although until the tests get to the point where they can give results within minutes, like the flu tests have progressed to, it will not be a complete mitigation. Another issue is cost, as once testing becomes common place, I would expect the fees to be passed onto the consumer. Also, people may not want to put up with constant testing, e.g. once every 2 weeks, unless it's a condition for employment, which might be the case for any job which requires high contact with the population.

Sadly, most of the tests with fast results are highly inaccurate. Their false positive rate is way, way too high. You’d get way too many people who are tagged as being positive and kept from traveling (or whatever), which would create another crisis of its own.

Contact tracing only works for you if every person you’ve been in contact with is willing to participate. And that assumes you actually know all of the people you’ve spent enough time around to be considered to have contacted them.

>> You can do a quick test before boarding an international flight

Just curious, how do anticipate this working from a business point of view? If boarding is denied due to a positive test, does the passenger get a refund? If that's the case, won't airlines overbook significantly more than they do today, which in turn will probably increase chaos? On the other hand, if tickets are non-refundable, who would gamble on purchasing an expensive ticket and then be subject to losing it due to a semi-inaccurate test?

Certain states are doing well post-lockdown. Illinois only report 614 new cases of COVID-19 and six deaths today (lowest numbers since March).

Aren’t we at the stage where you cannot even trust these numbers anymore - whether local or state data?

Extrapolate the rate of infection in the US (<100K) to get to herd immunity (0.6 * 328M ~= 200M).

It will take ~ 2000 days at the current pace.

New strains of the coronavirus come out once a year, so we should expect COVID-19[a-e] to arrive before we hit herd immunity on COVID-19.

Hopefully they won’t be as bad as the current strain, but history says they’ll be more transmissible and/or more deadly.

Also, it sounds like there are three distinct strains of COVID-19 already (Asian, European, and now one out of Texas), so my estimate of 5 strains in 5 years is probably wildly optimistic.

> Extrapolate the rate of infection in the US (<100K) to get to herd immunity (0.6 * 328M ~= 200M). It will take ~ 2000 days at the current pace.

That math assumes a linear infection rate. It's exponential. I wouldn't be surprised if we reached herd immunity about the time the vaccine becomes available.

Where do you see exponential infection rates at the current point in time?

Here, for instance: https://www.unacast.com/covid19/social-distancing-scoreboard...

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Still looks exponential to me

When I look at the dual graphs of infections and deaths, I think of how people say the death rate isn't rising, but wonder if it's that simple.

I wonder if it is a temporary effect, where at first the decreasing age of new cases compensates for the increasing number of cases, but in a week or two, the latter will overcome the former.

Kind of like how the decreasing cases in NY and western Europe countered the increasing cases in other places for a time, but it was temporary.

Wouldn't exponential be a straight line on the log scale? I'm not seeing that.

do you assume that the virus will not mutate?

Well, just look at how long flu/influenza ravaged humans until we got it down to a level where we hardly talk about it anymore (despite 6-digit global annual death tolls).

Depending on where you want to draw the line, you could say we never entered a post-pandemic period of the flu. But most of us act as if we did.

how long?

A quick google search says it's estimated to have started 6,000 years ago.

But this is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_influenza

My only point being (which I since added to my original comment) that we certainly never entered a post-pandemic state for influenza given that it's so far a seasonal passenger of the human condition. Look at the Hong Kong influenza outbreak not long ago.

I would expect the legacy of covid19 to be more similar to that going forward than some permanent emergency state.

A thing I think is interesting is I can never remember having the actual flu. We got the stomach flu all the time as kids, and have gotten it yearly since having kids, and for most of that time I assumed that's what people meant by the flu. I can't remember ever actually catching influenza.

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