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> People (selfishly) don't want to catch the virus and also want to listen to public health advice.

People (unselfishly) don't want to spread the virus, understanding the public health advice that shows a high number of asymptomatic carriers.

Both motivations are likely present. The argument can be simplified by eliminating motivation, or balanced by listing both.

True, but at this point, you can protect yourself if you wish with a proper n95 mask and limiting contact.

A real N95 mask is not that easy to come buy, and that's assuming you can even afford what prices are for individual buyers

I ordered three 3M half mask respirators and 10 P100 cartridges for my family off Amazon a few weeks ago for less than $90 shipped - which is no more than 2x normal pricing IIRC. They're the kind used by construction workers and since I don't use them to put up drywall, each pair of cartridges lasts 3-12 months and the mask can be easily disinfected by unscrewing the cartridges and dunking the mask in alcohol.

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!

I have a half mask respirator from before COVID for working with chemicals.

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.

It's weird you keep repeating this comment on a thread about Yelp which is primarily about restaurants closing.

How are you eating and drinking with an n95 mask on?

Agree with everything. However, this might not be true:

> 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!).

A couple weeks ago I saw data that suggested that more home cooking and online grocery shopping were two of the behavioral changes for a lot of people that were most likely to remain in place long-term. (Online fitness was another one.)

I believe it, on both these counts. It rings true with my personal experience and what I'm seeing in my friends, co-workers, and family. It really does seem like some non-negligible percentage of restaurant patronizing isn't coming back, and if that's true, then there's gonna be fewer restaurants.

We’re never going to back to in-person grocery shopping. It’s much easier to avoid junk food when ordering on-line as compared to when you’re holding it in a grocery store.

Knowing how to cook has done nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for going out or ordering in. In fact, sometimes I order the very things I cook to see how a pro makes them.

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.

Totally on a tangent but my experience with restaurant cooking compared to my newfound cooking expertise is that the restaurant food is drenched in oil and salt and is cooked at much too high a temperature

Cooking at home is dramatically more time/cost effective for two people compared to eating out. Anyone this isn't true for just has very inefficient shopping, prep, cooking and cleaning habits. They probably also don't understand how inefficient they are in these areas, or know what the food budget of someone who knows what they are doing actually looks like. This is always abundantly clear when this gets discussed on HN.

I don't think that's the right way to conceptualize this. Efficient shopping, prep, cooking and cleaning habits are complex and practiced skills, which not everyone has the time or energy to learn. I've cooked ever since I was old enough to be trusted with a kitchen knife, and I still regularly find myself throwing out half-eaten packs of meat or whole cabbage heads unless I sit down and literally write out a meal plan.

I agree with all this, but a lot of the meals eaten by people who formerly couldn't cook weren't eaten in restaurants; they were picked up from a fast/casual place nearby or ordered in. I used to eat all my meals at work, which roughly approximates ordering delivery, and it took less time than I'm spending now cooking food for most meals.

The cheapest I've ever eaten was after I made conscious effort to only buy and eat healthy things.

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.

> It simply isn't time/cost effective to cook for one person, probably not even two.

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"

That's only true if the person making your food charges similar rates as you do. Usually not the case on HN.

Buying fresh ingredients isn't cheap - especially if you have to keep rebuying them to have them onhand.

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.

I can't disagree that your time may be better spent doing other things.

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.

No, cooking single meals for one person isn't time or cost effective. Make something like a big batch of beef stroganoff, refrigerate some, freeze some, and it will last a long time.

I dunno about you, but it takes me about 30 minutes to cook a decent meal, and about 10 for cleanup. My partner often helps with one part or the other, so it's around 20 minutes a day. Add an hour a week for grocery getting. Round trip to a restaurant, waiting for my food, for the wait staff, etc., takes upwards of an hour a day. When I cook, I usually have leftovers for the next day's lunch, which is rarely the case when I eat (ate) out. I don't agree with your statements on saving time or money, unless you're doing fast food, which has its own hidden costs to your health.

People eat out for a variety of reasons, like they don't want to cook, want to eat something new or because they want to go out. They're more or less being forced to cook right now, unless they want to put themselves into uncomfortable situations everyday where they might expose themselves to infected people.

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.

I'm not talking about those people though, I'm talking about people who were patronizing restaurants daily because they didn't know how to cook for themselves. Those people now do know how to cook for themselves, and might well not go back to only eating food from restaurants now that they have acquired the skill and as a bonus are seeing how much money they're saving.

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.

> There's likely not much reason to think that in 2022 the > dining habits of consumers will be drastically different > than in 2019.

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.

All job growth was concentrated in the service sector, and they tended to not be good jobs. The ethical issues with this were apparent well before 2019. There needed to be a change in individual preferences, as well as attention to lack of progress in things like education, daycare, and health care.

I think your take is far more charitable than what is going to happen. Getting back to normal after job cuts, housing uncertainty and healthcare uncertainty is going to be a challenge of it's own. This is compounded by the fact that the hospitality/restaurant industry never had the margins to begin with to survive a prolonged closure or slowdown.

> 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.

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.

What data do you have on the air treatment systems being normal to poor quality? I would have assumed the opposite - many casinos are trying to cater to smokers and nonsmokers (in the same way they're trying to make Vegas a family and party town) and have massive air treatment to pull the smoke from the air so the casinos don't stink

Memo to management: casinos stink.

> Also it's worth noting that government edicts likely aren't the primary cause of business closures at this point.

Ok, do you have any evidence for this besides your personal opinion?

I'm not sure how your decoupling the gov's various "public health" efforts from the results?

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 wasn't a restaurant bubble prior to 2020 necessitating a huge correction.

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 type of economic disaster very different than a hurricane, wildfire, or even the 2008 financial crisis."

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.

It’s not selfish to not want the virus, it’s rational. To call it selfish is to add a negative character assessment to this action, which I believe is unwarranted.

> People (selfishly) don't want to catch the virus and also want to listen to public health advice.

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.

Another thing worth noting, however insensitive, is that many (most?) restaurants are just not great businesses. Many of them have mediocre product. Many of them are barely profitable and have no working capital. Many of them are just undifferentiated franchises that anyone can step in and run poorly. It shouldn't be a huge surprise that already-shaky businesses are the first to go when a rare bad event happens. Warren Buffet: “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.“

The shitty franchises are the ones that are most likely to survive. Does anybody really think McDonalds or Subway is imperilled? They'll do fine. But the independent burger shop I used to enjoy will probably never come back.

I think you are mixing up 'good food' with 'good business'.

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.