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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

That's a reasonable definition of "essential", but at least in the US the term isn't used this way. Takeout restaurants, Starbucks, etc. have always remained open as "essential businesses".

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The wording was problematic from the start. It probably would have been better to classify businesses into "risky" and "not-risky" or some sliding scale of risk, rather than using the "essential" label that comes with moral baggage. Close or restrict risky businesses (indoor, large crowds, etc.), keep open not-risky ones.

It made more sense at the very start, when many people expected that we'd spend 2-4 weeks doing only "essential" things and then we'd return to mostly normal life. But yeah, it became clear pretty quickly that wasn't the trajectory, and the required messaging shift never ended up happening.

Those people were under informed. Everybody "in the know" knew mid-March, before the lockdowns, that health officials wanted AT LEAST 8 weeks of shutdown to be able to have an impact and measure it.

The information was out there..

I'm pretty sure that, much like with Prohibition, the moral baggage is the entire point. The idea is that for this disease - and only this disease - we have the absolute moral obligation to minimize the number of deaths no matter what, and that anyone who suggests there are tradeoffs is a monster who literally wants to sacrifice people.

in the US the term isn't used this way. Takeout restaurants, Starbucks, etc. have always remained open as "essential businesses".

Not where I live. All restaurants were shut down, even for take-out. They were only allowed to offer take-out food when restrictions started being lifted.

Interesting, I'd only heard of that happening in other countries.

50 states, and 50 different sets of rules.

Just curious, which state is this? (you don't have to respond if you don't want to -- I don't want to violate your privacy, I just want to know)

It just seems to me shutting down takeout makes it harder to enforce a lockdown. It assumes everyone is able to cook, which doesn't seem like a reasonable assumption.

Yep. Dairy Queen, for instance, had lines of cars wrapping around the building and lining up in the street during the height of our "lockdown". Tons of things were still open in-person, too, like grocery stores, and there was no mask order and maybe 1/4 of people were wearing masks, at best, and almost no employees anywhere. Only exception is that a couple weeks in (IIRC) Costco started requiring them. We didn't get a mask order until a couple weeks after we ended our joke of a "lockdown". The police don't follow the order (sigh) but almost everyone else is, at least. But now everything's back open, more-or-less entirely.

It's no wonder we're still muddling along with this problem, months into it.

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