Yelp: Local Economic Impact Report
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The result has been that we’ve had this 7 month period of semi-lockdown (can eat outside, but not indoors; we’re going to send a support check, but only 1, etc.) while China was able to have a full lockdown for a few weeks and mostly eradicate it.
Meanwhile people are still dying here because people don’t want to wear masks because freedom, or something.
That is, a lot of stuff didn't make sense, was contradictory, done at the wrong time, later turned out to be wrong, etc. This is part and parcel of putting together an immediate emergency response.
I live in Dublin, Ireland. There was a preemptive anti-vaxer protest here yesterday declaring the virus a hoax.
The key point of difference between places, IMO, is public and political tolerance for these things. Can you live with some policy being dumb, because you're inevitably going to think a lot of them are dumb.
As for Vietnam, if I remember rightly their run of no Covid cases was ended by a hospital outbreak that somehow went unnoticed until an elderly visitor to the hospital with no other plausible sources of infection happened to get infected, develop bad symptoms, and tested positive - and then so did several other people who'd been there. This does not suggest good things about their in-hospital testing. The amount of time it took for the existence of a new case to become public knowledge should also call into question just how forthright and honest the government was being.
I'm saying they were all somewhat chaotic, haphazard and wrong in places. That's what happens when rulesets with multiple, sometimes competing goals have to be put in place quickly.
I see this view a lot from people--the US just needed a real lockdown. Spain also had a real lockdown, and their case count is surging right now. The difference in how China seemingly (you can't spell Xinhua without Xi) handled it is in aggressive contact tracing and tracking where everyone goes regardless of their covid status.
The US tried to do a hammer and failed. The numbers didn't really go down for the city as a whole. We never had a coordinated decision to transition to the dance either and don't have anything in place to be successful at that step. Tests taking over a week and high case numbers to begin with make contact tracing and targeted quarantine in outbreak areas impossible
This is, of course, not the impression you'd get from news coverage in the UK or US, which is still generally spinning South Korea as a test and trace success story that demonstrates how badly our governments have failed. Hilariously, the Guardian even turned the fact that they were doing less Covid-19 testing than the UK into a positive the other day, describing them as a demonstration of how important targeted testing was.
The Dance is still a distant hope.
Who, exactly, is responsible for setting up contact tracing systems, and under what authority? If it’s devolved to the state level, how are we going to deal with people crossing state borders, or large population centers that are near or straddle borders (Kansas City will be a nightmare for that)? If it’s federal then we might as well give up hope, given how lackluster the federal governments response to the pandemic has been so far.
There have been four positive cases of Covid-19 outside of managed isolation or quarantine, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says.
After 102 days without community transmission they are the first cases acquired from an unknown source. New Zealand is now activating a resurgence plan.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/423305/covid-19-new-case...
NZ resumed level 3 on August 12, where level 4 is the most restrictive:
people are to work from home unless they are essential workers, and stay in their bubbles. Bars and restaurants will have to close, and restrictions come in place for funerals and weddings.
Conditions are regularly monitored, assessed, and adjusted. From September 4:
Cabinet has decided to keep the current alert levels and will review them again on Monday, September 14, when they will decide whether to adjust them at 11.59pm on Wednesday, September 16.
It comes as director general of health Ashley Bloomfield reveals five new cases of Covid-19. Three are in the community.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/coronavirus-fatality-r...
Even with lack of leadership, we have had ~ 200k, a 90% reduction. Not too bad?
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...
The 2.2 million figure came from the worst case scenario. The assumptions for that scenario are:
"In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour, we would expect a peak in mortality (daily deaths) to occur after approximately 3 months."
You don't get to claim a reduction from a baseline that assumes 0 intervention and 0 personal behavior change. That figure was used in the report as a baseline to compare various mitigation and suppression strategies.
Of course the US still delayed at the federal level for another 2 weeks to do really anything of substance. The governments responsible for reducing the death toll from 2M To 200K are the state governments of NY and California. The US federal government largely delayed advocating a shutdown until 2 weeks later. Even on April 4th the President was still saying Covid-19 was “going away” [1].
I encourage everyone to go look at the new cases curve on the days proceeding and following April 4th to see what utter complete bullshit such a statement was. Worse, he knew it was bullshit even as he said it, as the conversations with Bob Woodward have revealed.
To give the US federal government a grade of “not too bad” is disingenuous. Their discordant and adversarial response is why we have 200K deaths.
1- https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/09/politics/coronavirus...
...New York has almost the worst death rate in the country (only New Jersey is higher).
Comparing across US states, it really does look like doing nothing would've resulted in less death.
The question is always how much freedom are we willing to exchange for increased effectiveness and in the US the answer was very little.
And we’re currently paying for that decision but as long as we understand and accept the consequences I don’t think it is an invalid choice. I might personally disagree but that’s the nature of collective decision making.
If I'm reading sources correctly, the country is currently at Level 2 (excepting Aukland at 2.5), and had bumped from Level 2 to 3 in August after community spread was detected.
This is what effective and appropriate response looks like.
https://medium.com/@georgetoparis/the-book-rage-on-china-f5d...
A second reason is all gov were bad to solve novel problems 0 to 1, but good at solving 1 to 2, 2 to 3 problems. HK, Singapore, Korea Japan had experience to protect itself, swine flu, bird flu, SARS, etc. Western world had not.
But the truth of the matter, we're victims of geopolitics, media, and social media blaming thy neighbor. Go look at U.S. fatalities due to COVID which NYT posts at 200k as the time of this writing. Then go look at CDC U.S. registered deaths annually, which was last reported at 2.8M. While I am sympathetic for those who loved lost ones for whatever cause of death, quick maths show that in 0.8% of the population dies in a normal year, and COVID-19 blimp would increase it to 0.9 to 1.0%. We've grossly overreacted.
In Nashville, TN (USA) bars and restaurants are closed to stop the spread of the virus. In e-mails obtained by a local television station, and later confirmed authentic by legal council, the e-mails discussed how only 80 of the 20,000 positive cases could be traced to bars and restaurants.
> Tennessee Lookout reporter Nate Rau asks, “The figure you gave of 'more than 80' does lead to a natural question: If there have been over 20,000 positive cases of COVID-19 in Davidson and only 80 or so are traced to restaurants and bars, doesn’t that mean restaurants and bars aren’t a very big problem?"
A day after the story broke they allowed bars and restaurants to re-open:
https://www.tennessean.com/story/money/2020/09/17/nashville-...
Indoor recreation was shut down in this city for 80 cases in a city of 2 million aka .004% of the population.
Point zero zero four percent.
“The results showed that more than a thousand COVID-19 cases had been linked to construction and nursing homes - while bars and restaurants had just 22 cases.”
1,000 cases from construction and nursing homes brings the number to 18,920 cases we need data on. This is the problem. There is so little high confidence tracing data that we can’t make strong decisions on what quarantine actions are materially impactful. Whose to say a substantial amount of that remaining number isn’t caused by bars and restaurants? If that data is out there, please share it. If not, please support more rigorous contact tracing.
You most likely will be infected by a family member or office coworker.
In march during the full lockdowns, something like 20% of the population was still meeting their friends and family behind closed doors like nothing was happening, and this is why the virus didn't die out in 2 weeks.
The reason why China welded apartment doors getting shut was not to prevent people getting out. It was to block family and friends of the apartment house inhabitants from visiting.
Restaurants and bars are very conducive to spread: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article
There is perhaps some factor unique to that town or their contact tracing isn’t extensive?
I'm more inclined to trust an epidemiologist who says they'd rather fly in an airplane than eat at a bar, a quote I found today but regret I can't locate at the moment.
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
Well that's just all of time.
I mean, when on average people died at forty or fifty, with all the exceptions for the early age cases, and there were no real means to either diagnose cancer or even making autopsies, documented cases must have been sensibly less.
When we talk of the past we should do more complete analyisis than simply applying our current metrics.
Hiding under your desk around the clock made zero sense when the odds of being hit with an atomic bomb were fantastically small due to geopolitics.
Hiding in your house when there's no way of knowing who around you is infected, treatments are still primitive, and many people are not taking it seriously is a much more rational decision.
SARS-CoV-2 is ~ 100 nm, room air purifiers with HEPA filters and the filter technology in real N95 masks filter far below this amount. You can make the air cleaner than ever with modern technology to protect yourself.
I'm not entirely hiding at home, but I absolutely don't blame anyone who is, and in fact I'd suggest they're smarter than me for doing so.
No restaurants were physically destroyed by the pandemic. All the buildings, stoves, tables, signage, etc are still around.
The skills of the workers will likely fade only slightly during this pandemic time.
There's likely not much reason to think that in 2022 the dining habits of consumers will be drastically different than in 2019. There wasn't a restaurant bubble prior to 2020 necessitating a huge correction.
Also it's worth noting that government edicts likely aren't the primary cause of business closures at this point.
People (selfishly) don't want to catch the virus and also want to listen to public health advice.
Evidence:
-There were never any real government edicts banning air travel in the continental US (some few places had non-enforced quarantine advisories). Yet air travel has fallen substantially.
-Most large businesses have not returned to in-office work, regardless of no government edicts.
-Las Vegas is Open! You can fly there, stay in a hotel, gamble, eat, etc... but yet Vegas has tons of closures. People just don't want to go there right now for business or pleasure.
People (unselfishly) don't want to spread the virus, understanding the public health advice that shows a high number of asymptomatic carriers.
How are you eating and drinking with an n95 mask on?
I've been recommending this path for anyone in a vulnerable group since March and not one person has had trouble acquiring non-disposable respirators or cartridges. My only concern in recommending this widely is that 3M doesn't really sell the masks to consumers - construction companies buy them by the box and they come in ziplock bags with instruction booklets that you'd hand out to everyone on a worksite to follow OSHA regulations. Since the masks are reusable and construction companies have lots of stock unused due to the economic slowdown, they're much more practical for non-healthcare workers who can afford to disinfect it each trip out without impacting supply for healthcare workers. They're also much easier for a novice to fit correctly, form a better seal thanks to all rubber (silicone?) interface, and breathe easier.
Get a half mask respirator! Do not buy disposable N95/N100/P95/P100 - leave those for healthcare workers!
It doesn't protect anyone but you unless you add an additional filter over the vent (affecting breathability), and the recommended lifetimes for cartridges aren't just based on it filling up with drywall.
The electrostatic charge expires even as plain air and moisture go through the cartridge. I don't have the packaging for mine, but I don't remember the recommended lifetime being anywhere near 12 months.
(Edit: Checking 3M's site, 6 months from the moment it's unsealed even if not used at all. Lifetime goes down from there with use, and when not used it should be in an air-tight container)
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Additionally, those were sold out for a very long time from most common sources.
There are people who need those to do their jobs just like any other mask, and I have no idea where you're getting the idea they're not hard to come by. Home Depot for example, no longer ships them here in the Northeast, and in-store stock is heavily limited.
Actually it looks like Amazon has them back in stock, but every style I see will exhaust what you exhale (so it makes sense there's plenty to go around)
If you're in a vulnerable population and cannot in any way avoid coming into contact with others I guess a respirator is better than nothing for your personal safety?
But going out of your way to get respirators that people need to safely do their jobs just like the healthcare workers do if you don't actually need to is ill-advised.
> There's likely not much reason to think that in 2022 the dining habits of consumers will be drastically different than in 2019.
I know plenty of people who basically never learned how to cook and who always ate out or ordered delivery. A lot of them have been forced by present circumstances to finally learn how to cook. They might continue doing so more often going forward rather than returning to pre-pandemic levels of restaurant consumption. I wonder how widespread this will continue to be. I for sure am cooking at home a lot more than I used to, and this won't change till I go back to the office full time (if that ever even happens!).
This is similar to saying that if everyone has a bedroom or kitchen, they'll never want to stay at a hotel or a bed and breakfast. People travel because they don't want to be at home, or because they want to visit somewhere else. Similarly, people are, in general, being forced to stay put or they'll put themselves into uncomfortable situations where they might expose themselves to infected people.
In other words, there may well be noticeable long term trends in restaurant-patronizing frequency that persist even after the pandemic is over and restaurants are back to 100% capacity.
The trend propelling eating out is atomization. It simply isn't time/cost effective to cook for one person, probably not even two. Shopping, prep, cooking, and cleaning take so much time that even gourmet restaurants have completely reasonable prices.
Unless people start having big families and living in the exurbs, restaurants should be fine.
Since then, the only time I've ever seen something that's sold in a box be cheaper than produce is when whatever's in that box is made out of mostly sugar or flour.
I'm under the impression that many people choose to shop at places like Whole Foods and pay a premium for it when they can get much cheaper, but same quality or better, food elsewhere. The markup on produce (besides bananas) at Whole Foods is typically 2x-4x more than the price of organic produce from a farmer's market, or other grocery stores.
That, or they're under the impression that what they pay for meal-kits is how much food costs at the store. You're paying restaurant prices for food when you buy meal-kits.
Paying someone else to source and make your food is a luxury. It saves you time, but you're definitely not saving money. Far from it.
Rarely is a financial advisor going to say: "Get your food from restaurants instead of a grocery store"
If you're cooking for a family, you can buy things and consume them quickly, but many things are sold in quantities that are way too much for one or two people, and even leftovers only go so far.
Yes, you can probably make a pot of pasta with a minimal amount of prep time (though "a watched pot never boils" is a saying for a reason), but unless you want to eat pasta for a week that doesn't scale indefinitely. If you want to eat healthy and have a mix of vegetables in your diet, you'll be buying more of them all the time.
Time is a finite resource - for many of us in the tech industry, one of the scarcest. In the best case, I'm working 8-9 hours a day and sleeping 8-9 hours a day, which leaves 6-8 hours of living. If I spend 1-2 hours of those cooking and cleaning dishes, that's a significant chunk of my life.
But you can definitely cook with fresh, healthy ingredients and still be way cheaper than eating out. It takes some planning, but it is minimal planning.
Especially if you make common sense alterations to recipes. Many times, online and cookbook recipes are created for the visual wow factor. There are usually expensive ingredients that are not necessary for the dish.
For example, if the dish calls for a teaspoon of capers or fresh parsley or whatever and you don't already have some, you can generally skip it.
And you can also make larger quantities like what you might make for a family and refrigerate or freeze leftovers. Things last a lot longer in the fridge and freezer than many people think.
As do ingredients like milk and eggs. If you keep your fridge adjusted cold enough, milk generally lasts me more than a month. Yogurt and sour cream more than 2 months, usually. Dryer cheeses basically indefinitely if you cut off any mold before eating.
Lettuce and leafy greens are the shortest shelf life for me, but they can be bought in rather small quantities so I just buy as needed.
I supplement that with flash frozen vegetables like frozen vegetable medley mixes or bags of frozen brussel sprouts that will last about as long as you like if they stay frozen.
I also buy large quantities of high quality meats at Costco and simply portion it up and freeze it. I use a vacuum sealer for best results, but ziploc bags are fine. I recently found a steak that had fallen to the back of the freezer. It had to have been there for at least 18 months. I cooked it up and it was delicious.
Big disagree there. 2019 was already starting to see a trend towards an economic bubble bursting with a big near miss in the market that was somewhat corrected by government overreach, and people were already overextended before mass layoffs nation-wide. Many of these jobs are not coming back, and people's perspective on what matters to them has changed dramatically.
It will take a generation to see things recover.
Singling out these re-openings misses the math of the problem. In 2019, casinos were operating at a certain capacity. Every Xth slot machine was occupied.
The gambling floors tend to have a LOT of vertical space. I don't doubt that their air treatment system is normal to poor quality (aside from whatever features tend to erode your ability to judge risks). As occupancy decreases, particularly for voluminous entertainment spaces, transmission risk declines.
The best antidote to COVID risk in public buildings is to decrease the density of people there. This rule applies as much to cherished public institutions as it does to sin industries.
Sure there's some occupancy rate where every Yth slot machine is being used, where the risks drop low enough to counteract the fun of gambling for someone. At some lower Zth slow machine occupancy, risks would be nil. Should the acceptable risk be higher for public education of essential employees? Yes, but the physical reality is that there is LOT of gambling floor space, and disproportionately a lot of air volume for that floor space.
The people going there are probably going to catch COVID from going out to eat (or other highly direct interactions), which they were going to at home anyway if we're being honest with ourselves.
Ok, do you have any evidence for this besides your personal opinion?
Stay home! Translates to "not going to my fave lunch spot." And so on.
Large companies are dependent on the pre-school and K to 12 edu system.
On what legal grounds would the gov ban air travel? Again. Stay home! Vagas ain't home baby.
Furthermore, there's consumer confidence. You don't go on holiday or make frilly expenses when the air is saturated with uncertainty.
There kind of was. It’s obscene how much people are charging for sandwiches and even a chicken/sauce/rice meal these days.
Delivery made the bubble bigger. $10 in addition to your already overpriced butter chicken or “street tacos”
This is a point worth noting. It is like a wildfire in the sense that because of the pandemic, fewer salads were made and served. But, there isn't any destruction to physical capital like buildings or whatnot.
This kind of gets to some economic debate questions, moreso from past generations. Economies, at least modern ones, often deal with physical losses better than money/debt problems.
So the invisible hand of Adam Smith is only relevant when it's making the capitalists fat and happy, but not when it's keeping individuals alive?
People start businesses out of self interest. People don't want to catch COVID and die or kill their relatives out of self interest.
Even if we grant that McDonalds or Subway are bad food, they are often good business because they have a value proposition. For me, it's consistency, low price, a basic degree of hygiene and food safety, which is important when visiting developing countries, and occasionally food that I like to eat.
On the other hand, the generic mom-and-pop burger shop might sell a decent burger, but they might still be fundamentally undifferentiated businesses perpetually operating at the brink of bankruptcy. It's no surprise that the restaurant business is Peter Thiel's classic example of a very likely to fail business.
The Restaurant Brokers’ study, the only one to make a distinction between chain and independent restaurants, concluded that up to 90 percent of independent establishments close during the first year, and the remaining restaurants will have an average five-year life span.
https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/average-life-span-restaur...
I'm not finding breakouts for other categories yet, but for all new businesses, broken out by year, pre-Covid:
- First year: 21.5%
- Second year: 30%
- Fifth year: 50%
- 10th year: 70%
https://www.national.biz/2019-small-business-failure-rate-st...
- U.S. District Judge William Stickman declaring PA's lockdown orders unconstitutional
And why the hell would Congress be able to overrule states on something like this? What torturous reading of the Commerce Clause gives Congress the power to forbid lockdowns?
"U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, in a similar case out of California related to pandemic restrictions on religious gatherings, wrote in May that elected officials should be allowed latitude when acting in areas “fraught with medical and scientific uncertainties” and should not be subject to second-guessing by an “unelected federal judiciary.”
Further, if there are medical and scientific uncertainties... Erring on the side of constitutional rights seems a LOT less potentially exploitable to me. If you think that something is so critical that you need to permanently remove rights to combat it... You should be able to back that up with incontrovertible evidence.
If this is true it may change my congress and senate votes from blue to red.
I won't vote in a presidential candidate that supports lockdowns "if the science supports it" and will make me wear a mask.
Can his party truly make my state do these things?
If so that's terrifying to me and there's no way I'm giving blue, the people I voted for all my life until this year, this type of power.
Edit to respond to downvotes: Nor was it constitutional to institute sweeping metadata collection as a new normal in response to an emergency situation. Nor is it constitutional to make encryption illegal as the new normal because of an emergency. Etc.
Yelp seems to be pushing the flashier numbers here on the 50-60% of closures that were permanent, but I'm not seeing a comparison to other years - I'd assume, in general, a business closing for any reason tends to be fairly fatal, pandemic or not.
It’s internally consistent to believe that most business survive temporary closures (or not! I don’t know), but also that temporary closures are more of the exception than the norm. If that turns out to be true, then fretting the rate of “temporary” closures that become permanent is probably not even a terribly interesting statistic.
I'm rereading David Graeber's' "Debt." While I think the "history of" part got little weak as he described more modern systems, I have to admit that his definition of money has changed the way I think.
The nonexistence of effective bankruptcy is a terrible thing, and we have a pretty shallow well of ideas to draw from unless we look beyond modern economic constructs. It may not be a bad idea (besides being radical and scary) to declare a jubilee of some sort, at least for small businesses. They're bearing the full brunt of this pandemic while their debtors are mostly doing well.
Every airline in the world is essentially bankrupt without government intervention right now. Very few will go out of business, and those that do are at least protected by limited liability. It's only small businesses that are actually liable for losses.
Ultimately, the 2008 financial crisis issues were pretty abstract. This time it's a lot more visceral, intuitive.
It was the worst of all worlds and you're blaming it on the wrong people.
What does this mean? That the Fed will just print money to cover every business expense of every business during "proper" lockdowns? That seems like a terrible idea.
But if you are a smaller business you are just going to be left to rot.
Yeah maybe they will have to buy less hundred dollar toilet cover for the military, or less last generation missiles, I think that should be more than enough to pay for it. Or maybe less subsidies for the oil industry.
That's really dishonest. The unemployment insurance boost ($600/wk for many months), continuing in a limited fashion, was huge and expensive. And the PPP (even if there were execution problems) was a forgivable loan, basically a grant. A huge amount of money was pumped into maintaining employment.
As far as “was the mandatory enforcement an overstep”, based on public polling the answer is an emphatic no. More Americans remain concerned that we opened too soon rather than too late, and large majorities remain voluntarily locked down (depending on vocation of course) despite the lifting of official bans.
Restaurants can survive this. But what they were doing in 2019 is not going to work.
My preference is a more Bayesian argument a la Huemer's In Praise of Passivity: https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm
> Abstract: Political actors, including voters, activists, and leaders, are often ignorant of basic facts relevant to policy choices. Even experts have little understanding of the working of society and little ability to predict future outcomes. Only the most simple and uncontroversial political claims can be counted on. This is partly because political knowledge is very difficult to attain, and partly because individuals are not sufficiently motivated to attain it. As a result, the best advice for political actors is very often to simply stop trying to solve social problems, since interventions not based on precise understanding are likely to do more harm than good.