Looks like The Onion was right on with their reporting: "Study Finds Most Restaurants Fail Within First Year Of It Becoming Illegal To Go To Them"
Even without these laws, personal decisions would have decimated the business regardless. Even in places didn't shut down, patronage plummeted.
Give people and businesses a choice in the matter.
This is about letting individuals and businesses make their own decisions without the government forcing them to close.
You might be fine, but if you are asymptomatic, you can directly harm or kill others and not even know it.
That being said, I’m not sure what the best policy is. It doesn’t seem feasible to have a complete lockdown that extends for many months. So we have to be clever, keep learning, and find good solutions. We can minimize the risks and prioritize health while allowing society to function in an altered fashion.
Making decisions for ones self is exactly the principal that the USA was founded on.
> You might be fine, but if you are asymptomatic, you can directly harm or kill others and not even know it.
See also: Drinking, condom-less sex, smoking, and junk food. All of these things directly or indirectly harm others and if this is about public safety then it's time yourself and others start movements to ban them.
The "you may be hurting people indirectly" argument never worked and it's getting more brittle with time.
Have a good laugh with me this Sunday night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWhbUUE4ko
One million is 99.7% of the USA.
Multiple studies have shown that the fatality rate is about .3%.
False, confirmed cases have grown 4.4% since the start of September.
> Massachusetts is still mostly locked down and has 4x the death rate [of Sweden]
False, us/ma has 1.42‰ and se has 0.58‰. That's a ratio of only 2.45.
> "citations needed."
And yet they've more or less had zero deaths per day since the start of August. So yeah, they basically are done.
But at what cost? Its deaths per capita quotient is horrendous! The thirteen worst countries are:
|deaths 2020-09-21|pop in million|deaths/1000 capita
San Marino 42 0.0339 1.24
Peru 31369 32.5105 0.96
Belgium 9950 11.5393 0.86
Andorra 53 0.0771 0.69
Bolivia 7654 11.5131 0.66
Spain 30663 46.7368 0.66
Chile 12379 18.952 0.65
Brazil 137285 211.0495 0.65
Ecuador 11095 17.3737 0.64
United Kingdom 41877 67.5302 0.62
US 199862 329.0649 0.61
Italy 35724 60.5501 0.59
Sweden 5865 10.0364 0.58
I was just trying to push and get some clarity into how just-juan-post thinks about it, as clearly there is some obvious disagreement and I wondered what circumstances they think justify different interventions.
Regardless, the US has largely already decided to be on your side and let you make your own decision about how to act during a pandemic, and the results speak for themselves. A wholesale failure. Good job, you win, 200,000 people are dead, is that enough patriotism for you?
So is the point of banning alcohol, unprotected sex, smoking, and junk food.
Drunk people can fight me and kill me while drunk driving.
Unprotected sex may be more pleasurable but if we want to stop hurting others then condoms must be mandatory.
Smoking is an easy one, I can smell that from like 30 feet away. It's clearly getting into my lungs. Ban it completely.
It's been repeatedly shown that obesity is a social disease. What foods would be banned in your area of the country?
I'm having a good Sunday, enjoy this with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWhbUUE4ko
Note that I'm a leftie and I love the video so I hope you and others can get over them poking fun at Elizabeth
This is about choice. Stop the restrictions and let the people choose.
This is a once in a lifetime pandemic, it will pass, take it on the chin and accept that you might have to do something to help others. You will get your choice back soon enough. The choice to be a carrier during a pandemic affects everyone. Why is it individual liberty to choose to spread disease but public will when people die from it?
Yet it still happens and claims innocent victims.
> smoking is banned in many situations
Yet it still happens and claims innocent victims.
> Having sex doesn't affect passers by, just the active participants
By making protection mandatory we keep people safe and healthy.
> Junk food you choose to eat yourself
As stated earlier it has been repeatedly shown that obesity is a social disease.
I haven't even brought up second order effects.
How much police and health care costs would we need by banning alcohol? Can you think of other second order effects?
> This is a once in a lifetime pandemic
This is a once in a lifetime panicdemic.
Is it a pandemic if governments and organizations are begging people to get tested?
Is it a pandemic when less than 1% of populations are positive let alone in a hospital or morgue?
This isn't a pandemic. It's a panicdemic.
Please stop keeping us safe. I appreciate your effort but let me choose.
This is about choice.
So there should be no drunk driving laws "because choice"?
Your argument really does seem to be, "Laws are worthless, because people break them", because you repeat it several times.
> This isn't a pandemic. It's a panicdemic.
I would be ashamed if I had written what you had written.
Where are your rational arguments? Where are your links to peer reviewed papers? Where is the moral, rational or intellectual integrity here?
Please don't explicitly state things like this, it only leads to more polarisation. Keep people guessing at your personal political preferences, they should not have any impact on whether what you say is deemed 'acceptable' or not.
Here comes some ethically questionable but effective advice to stay alive in the HN jungle: if you're low on karma points you just post a few karma-whoring replies to top up the counter. Once you can breathe again you can state your mind freely until that karma counter goes down towards the red zone again after which you need to top it up again. It is very unfortunate that this is needed to stay alive here for those who have not yet built up a sufficient buffer of points but things being the way they are there is no other way for those who like to speak their mind on the edge of the sometimes very narrow Overton window.
- Journalists and individuals need to use FOIA actions against their state and local governments to see e-mails to see what the true numbers are. That Nashville situation is absurd and we all know it's happening at a bunch of other places.
- Middle class / "regular people" need to start speaking openly and questioning and discussing the lifestyle restrictions and closures.
- A message of safety indirectly spreads a message of fear. Stop with all of the unnecessary post-Covid new normal "safety" things.
- It's about choice and we are pro choice.
However, I have a bunch of unpopular opinions, and have almost never been downvoted, because I avoid taking sides on political arguments.
I suspect most lockdown supporters live in a comfortable and spacious environment where they work from home. The cost of lockdown is huge for business owners, domestic abuse victims and those with mental illness. There is increasing research that points to the cost of lockdowns being greater than the benefit.
Widespread spread mask usage in Japan and South Korea has proven very effective as well at controlling the virus and allowing life to go back to normal
I agree. If nothing else it's a decent mix of freedom and virus control worth considering.
The cost of lockdown is high, I don't think anyone is disputing that. It's a tradeoff, but we don't really know what's going to be best long term. It's hard to measure without all the data, and who gets to choose the metric for success? Is it economic damage, or social damage, or damage to public health that we're aiming to minimize? I think the answer is that they are all competing goals, and everyone is going to be using a different metric to measure success.
How could anyone, including the government, have planned for or implemented a social safety net or bailout for something that has gone on literally 12 times longer than anyone said it would?
The United States has 25% of the world's COVID deaths and 5% of the population.
In fact, wilful ignorance DOES hurt people.
I don't dispute that the US has performed poorly here, but the 25%/5% stat needs to be contextualised by the fact that other countries who have done really poorly (e.g. Brazil), have much less testing than the US has.
"We can observe trends from the number of deaths reported each year, on a weekly basis. When we see large deviations in the numbers for a time period, we call that excess deaths. Looking at 2020 since March, the raw number of excess deaths is 200,000 more people than a normal year. When we try to understand that, COVID-19 is the most rational and likely explanation. If you don't believe it's COVID-19, try to pinpoint why this year has been so different than any other. Why would a new disease that kills people not be the cause?"
https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/09/01/comorbidities-and-coronavirus...
Graphs:
However, most Covid deaths are counted as deaths post a positive test. Therefore, the tests provide the denominator for potential deaths.
The US has lots of testing (though probably not enough) and an overall poor response to the pandemic, causing the 25%/5% statistic, and hence my point.
> Making decisions for ones self is exactly the principal that the USA was founded on.
You mis-understood that statement. It's saying its about making decisions for others, since you could be infecting them without knowing it.
I live in Sweden where similar mistakes were made in the beginning, in this case mostly caused by personnel in care facilities not following the mandated personal protection measures which caused them to spread the infection between infected and 'clean' departments, facilities and people. In contrast to NYC this has not led to more draconic lockdown measures, probably because the problems in those care facilities were recognised. Unfortunately they were not dealt with in time which has led to a large number of vulnerable people getting infected. Apart from these (grave) mistakes it now looks like the Swedish approach might start to show its merits given the low infection rates here compared to surrounding countries. Things can still change but currently the number of new infections in Sweden is lower than that in surrounding countries.
No, this is a rumour that was long since debunked.
Asymptomatic transmission does not exist. Basically no cases have been traced back to that and the WHO no longer supports the concept. WHO officials months ago pointed out this was "very rare" (read: doesn't happen, considering how noisy testing and contact tracing are). This story summarises:
https://bgr.com/2020/08/31/coronavirus-asymptomatic-spread-r...
They (the WHO) distinguish this from "pre-symptomatic transmission" which means you will develop symptoms in a day or two, but are infectious a bit before that happens. This happens with many viruses. It's entirely normal. In the UK right now flu is twice as deadly as COVID, same is true of many other places.
So you have a choice. You can never go out again in case you are about to come down with flu and un-knowingly, via a long and complex chain of events, kill a disabled child. Or you can accept that there's nothing unusual currently happening beyond media and government hysteria, and go to a restaurant before they're all gone.
If people are responsible and won't go to restaurants ...
Or long form: If people know there is infectious disease around with asymptomatic transmission and rationally decide not to go to restaurant to ...
Framing does a lot.
See here's the thing: Just because you and others like you have a certain definition of "responsible" doesn't mean it should or does apply to everyone.
Should we ban skydiving because it's irresponsible? Condom-less sex?
This is about choice. Re-open and let people and businesses choose.
Have a laugh with me tonight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWhbUUE4ko
Since that isn't the case, your comparison is patently absurd. Skydiving isn't contagious.
I don't care if you don't care about getting infected or not, I do care if you get infected and spread that to others that don't hold your values.
Society and populations don't work well with personal responsibility when their actions' impacts are too far removed from their personal sphere, if you kill someone 3rd hand because you infected someone who worked in a care facility: how are you going to know and act accordingly?
This bullshit about personal freedoms and responsibility in the middle of a pandemic tells me more about the people who don't have a holistic view of society but this ideologue monologue about personal freedom, this is your value, this isn't how society work yet.
Disagreement over what is responsible is something entirely different then "your fear".
So far we have failed. The reasons for that failure are many, but it has become clear over this 6+ months that a coordinated top-down plan is what we’re lacking.
The “libertarian” approach like you mentioned has been tried- every relaxation of covid restrictions has been followed by acceleration in the case count. Turns out prayers and positive thinking were unsuccessful in limiting virus transmission.
Be honest Juan, when was the last time you really made your own decision anyhow?
As we have already seen, what actually happens is that a small number of people with vocal delusional beliefs do wildly risky things that endangers everyone else.
People do get a choice in the matter but part of that is people get a choice whether they want to act independently or enforce a choice (to some level) as a group.
You're framing this the wrong way. It's not about being scared, its about being careful.
Not true of where I live in San Francisco
> they were pretty packed in NYC until literally the day the lockdowns started
That's before people got scared because NYC was literally the first place for this to happen and most people had no idea what was going on. You can see how restaurants performed in countries that remained open, like Sweden, where you can find lots of people talking about how their sales dropped 80% despite no lockdown. For a low margin business, that kills.
most restaurants could have employed some modest measures and stayed open at 80-90% capacity (which may be below break-even for some, but probably enough to ride out the pandemic with price hikes and/or modest gov loans), as risk is isolated between tables (no, that one hypothesized case of down-blower transmission is not proof of significant risk) and you shouldn't be sharing breathing space with people you don't trust. people who would eat at a restaurant together likely ate together in private anyway when restaurants were shuttered.
bars, on the other hand, by their very nature make it very difficult to contain transmission risk, because the whole point of a bar is to lower your guard to promote mixed socialization. distancing, talking gently, limiting respiratory ejections, and/or wearing a mask just don't go together with drinking and carousing. (private parties then likely became a primary transmission vector, but there's no way to stop private parties without truly draconian measures.)
we could have let restaurants save themselves by remaining open, and tackled the remaining, more manageable issue of closed bars with supplemental programs.
Except for the prices, maybe? While it is true that most restaurants make most (or even all) of their profits with drinks, customers probably realize that they are paying 200% markup for a zero-effort service if they ordered beers from a restaurant instead of getting them themselves...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6936a5.htm?s_cid=mm...
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/88543
At what point do we fully re-open? Winter 2022 after everyone has had a mandatory vaccine?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-cdc-ai...
> "'Implementing safe practices to reduce exposures to SARS-CoV-2 during on-site eating and drinking should be considered to protect customers, employees, and communities and slow the spread of COVID-19,' Fisher and colleagues concluded."
which is exactly in line with opening restaurants with modest measures.
the study only provided impetus to look closer at restaurants as potentially not insignificant localities of spread due to self-reports citing slightly higher restaurant patronage in the 2 weeks prior. they declined to put forth any conclusions on prevalence or mechanisms for spread in restaurants because they didn't study those things. they only presented some statistics on the self-reports. that's it.
If a restaurant hikes the price, I am never going back there.
Paying £15-£20 with service charge for a steak or burger is already insane. They can't ask for more, especially at the peak of a crisis where there is no money to pay for it.
HN don't get but it but every young graduate is desperate and might not get a job for years while the rest of the workforce got laid off or is under reduced salary.