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Comment by bestnameever | Hacker News Reader

The big difference between the two is that the film crew is likely tested each day before stepping on set and are also adhering to strict protocols. My best guess is that the seating is more separate.

> I work in film and can confirm that the cast and crew test 3x per week to be able to work. Only 2 people per 6 foot table while eating. Tables are actually 6 feet apart. Covid positive numbers in the LA film industry are about 1 out of every 3500 test. Also since filmmaker have to test negative to work most filmmakers, in their personal lives, don’t socialize with the outside world hence the very low positivity rate. from /u/Alexis-in-Texas, https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusCA/comments/k71v7w/outdo...

> My Roomate works on set for a network. He/everyone he works with are required to get rapid tested before they step on the set every single day. Anyone he comes in contact with on set has passed the same rapid test.

from /u/buffyscrims, https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/k6y5f5/bar_owne...

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This is about outdoor dining and it's been almost a year now. Where's the science showing that outdoor dining is such a problem?

We'll find out Tuesday, when the LA County Health Dept is required to present any such scientific studies/evidence in court to defend the restriction on outdoor dining.

(While Newsom has issued a statewide order that would theoretically lockdown all of SoCal and moot the county order, he doesn't actually have the authority to enforce those restrictions; that is handled at the county or city level by local law enforcement, nearly all of which have said they will not...even in Sacramento. Notably, even in CA local law enforcement for the most part has refused to enforce the lockdowns imposed by their own local governments.)

This is really not just about outdoor dining. Here, they are comparing outdoor dining that is open against outdoor dining that is closed. We already know the circumstances of how they operate and the precautions they are taking are likely not equal.

Alright, but why is it OK that TV and Film productions are allowed to operate and consume massive testing and PPE resources while other non-essential activities are prohibited?

Edit: I mean indoors in their own home rather than socializing indoors elsewhere. I’m a big advocate of walks.

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They produce shows that keep people inside?

The cost benefit is enormous. The same argument applies to things like vaccinations for sports. A fairly small number of people will keep millions of others indoors over the winter.

The virus dies almost immediately in sunlight. There's also a strong inverse correlation between Vitamin D levels and the severity of the illness. Keeping people indoors, breathing recirculated air with no sun all winter is practically the opposite of what we should be doing.

Everyone gotta sleep, they get exposed to whoever they're sleeping with. If everyone stays home, not just indoors, their extra exposure is very small.

You can’t get vitamin D from the sun in much of north america right now. And people generally don’t socialize outside of their household when watching TV.

Sunlight is great! But socializing indoors is what spreads the virus. America is not reknowned for being a land where everyone was outdoors in the sunshine in normal times: vitamin D deficiency was already rampant.

And going for a walk is not exclusionary to TV. In places where it is present you can get enough vitamin D with 30-60 min sun exposure.

> You can’t get vitamin D from the sun in much of north america right now.

Not even in LA?

> And going for a walk is not exclusionary to TV.

No, it's not. But the argument was that TV encourages people to stay inside, which it does. If it's ok for people to go for walks, maybe it is not vitally important that we produce new TV shows right now.

Probably not that much in LA right now. My vitamin D app isn’t letting me change locations, but anywhere north of the 37th parallel gets zero vitamin D in winter, and even places like LA would get much less.

Plus people watch TV in the evening. You can’t get vitamin D in the evening.

I’m a huge advocate of walks and getting outside! My point is TV is a substitute for socializing, and America needs less socializing now.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/time-for-more...

GP means going-to-other-indoors-places outside, not outside outside

Because the US has long ago decided that being a society wasn't something they were interested in, therefore the testing & PPE resources on the open market and handed out through the sole benevolence of the Invisible Hand of Having More Money than You, and TV and Film productions are able to acquire them, and operate.

"Other non-essential activities", not having the means to acquire these resources and implement these protocols, get to not operate.

Is that actually a fact? Are they outbidding everyone else - and potentially could be outbid themselves next time, by someone even richer? Or is someone allocating tests to them regardless of someone else's willingness to pay more? Is auctioning off tests even legal despite price-gouging laws?

Any links?

I would think because the organizers of these typical activities lack the resources or customer compliance to pull off as strict a regime as described above.

No, it's because Hollywood can pull strings in Sacramento.

It's crazy how much weight Hollywood has in this country. Hollywood can open doors sometimes that even Apple and Google cannot, even though the entertainment industry is tiny compared to tech.

I believe it's because politicians get star-struck. Just look at how many celebrities visited the white house in years past. It's insane how much access they have to the highest levels of government.

I would count that access as part of their resources, which the poster above you mentioned

No, it has nothing to do with star power or celebrity.

It's because the studios are willing to spend lots of money and implement extremely strict protocols so that they can keep filming, because if they don't they will literally go bankrupt and die. And because the studios and the crew depend on filming for their economic survival, everyone involved is willing to do what it takes.

I have friends who work in Hollywood. They're not allowed to socialize when they're working on set, nor for the two week period before they start working on set. They can't use public transportation. They can't visit friends or families for Thanksgiving or Christmas. They must get tested multiple times a week: a rapid test nearly every day (or every day for some sets), and the regular test at least every two weeks. The stricter sets won't even let crew go to the groceries when they're off set; they must use Instacart or limit themselves to eating at the crew stations on set. When traveling, they must stay in lodging provided by the studios, usually AirBnbs because hotels are too risky.

Why is it important that Hollywood studios don't go bankrupt and die, but not restaurants and hair salons.

I can't think of a more "non-essential" business than Hollywood movie production.

For starters, Hollywood's combined impact on state finances exceeds that of the restaurant and hair salon industries.

Why is Hollywood essential? It's basically the piggy bank keeping LA alive right now.

Hollywood isn't just the actors and studio executives. Hollywood includes over a hundred thousand specialists, ranging from tradesmen like carpenters and electricians, to caterers, stylists, and landscapers. Those several hundred thousand individuals further support smaller local businesses like restaurants, hair salons, etc. There are dozens of restaurants in LA that are still alive right now because a Hollywood shoot used them for catering and that money has kept thousands of restaurant employees employed. There are hundreds of stylists still getting by because of the one week they worked on a set, which paid more than they would have made working at their local hair salon for several months.

Is economic impact how "essential" is defined, then?

Hollywood directly supports more than 2 million jobs and 400,000 U.S. businesses, and those 2 million jobs and 400,000 businesses in turn support several tens of millions of other jobs and hundreds of thousands of other U.S. businesses.

Do you honestly believe that the states or cities have the ability to take over supporting those 2 million jobs and 400,000 businesses if they ban film shooting?

(On another note: Film/TV shoots can be managed in ways that eliminate the possibility of spreader events, because Hollywood can and does require cast and crew to agree to all sorts of practices and behavioral restrictions far beyond the simple and unburdensome restrictions much of the general public has refused to do. Half of the country refuses to wear a mask when they go outdoors; Hollywood cast and crew have agreed to give up dating, socializing, traveling, and pretty much every thing outside of work just so that they can work this year.)

I'm not disputing economic impact.

I'm asking if that's how "essential" is defined.

Hollywood is not an "essential" business as defined for COVID restrictions, meaning that it is not automatically permitted to continue business operations during COVID lockdowns. (See https://covid19.ca.gov/essential-workforce/). Utilities, transportation workers, etc., are essential workers.

But that is also why Hollywood studios implemented such draconion covid procedures: they were necessary to get exemptions from the lockdown orders. They were the first industry to get these exemptions because of their outsized economic impact, and especially because of their importance to the LA area's finances.

> Hollywood directly supports more than 2 million jobs

16 million people work for restaurants. Many more are part of their supply chains.

And it's hard to argue that entertainment is more essential than food production.

Restaurants aren't food production. Farms are food production. Slaughterhouses and meat factories are food production. General Mills are food production. And all of these actual food production facilities and businesses are considered essential and remained open during the lockdowns.

16 million people work for restaurants. Many more are part of their supply chains.

True, in the entire United States, 16 million people work for restaurants, most of them in part-time positions. Hollywood employs more than 1 million people in California, and several hundred thousand in LA alone.

You may not consider Hollywood essential, but it absolutely is an essential industry in Los Angeles.

You should ask our politicians. They could have provided a means for non-essential businesses to have similar precautions but have yet to provide them relief.

Hollywood studios likely already has the means to implement this on their own.

> I believe it's because politicians get star-struck

Maybe that's part of it, but I believe it's because they know these filmmakers have incredible power to influence.

Remember "Sideways"? A fictional character in a fictional movie said one negative line about merlot and wiped out the market for that varietal[1]. People who liked the wine suddenly didn't like it, because a character in a movie didn't like it.

Now consider all of the semi-fictional movies that are made, like Citizen Kane was about Hearst (which destroyed Marion Davies' reputation as collateral damage). Or all of the movies glamorizing war, soldiers, FBI/CIA/police or politicians. This is something our government has needed and continues to need people to embrace.

[1] - I asked some winemakers about this and they said merlot in Napa "was being ripped up like crazy" after the movie came out. And that merlot often ends up in red blends because selling it as a single varietal still doesn't fly. It's only coming back in the last few years.

Because they pay for the testing. A restaurant will not (it would serve no purpose to find out 1-3 days later that someone had covid.) Furthermore the people working on films are employees of a studio that are contractually required to uphold the measures they agree to or they can lose their jobs. A restaurant has no such agreement with their customers.

I think we would be in a different situation if we saw people consuming massive testing and ppe resources while operating other non-essential activities.

As far as I know, there is nothing preventing them from doing that beyond cost and time.

Right, people put effort into figuring out how to keep film going.

What a lot of us are asking is why don't we do something analogous for small businesses? There does not seem to be political will to figure out how to get them through this as well. At the very least it shows a profound lack of imagination.

It costs a lot of money. The studios are willing to spend that money. Most small businesses aren't and probably couldn't afford to even if they did.

Let's stipulate that studios have money and are willing to spend it. That just raises the question why the state of California--or more generally we the citizens--are not compensating businesses that end up taking one for the team. Studios lose 0.5% off the bottom line but other businesses lose 100% or shut down fully.

There simply isn't any way to do what you suggest. Hollywood can do it because they exert a level of control over all participants in their business activities that no other businesses can outside of the military, and this minimizes the potential covid risks and makes the financial costs of dealing with covid feasible.

To achieve the same level of risk for restaurants or other businesses would cost billions, and that's assuming that the customers would go along with the safety procedures required, but half of this country won't even wear a $1 mask when they go into a store because they think that covid is a conspiracy and they'll be damned if they agree to a minor personal inconvenience.

That does not answer the question why other businesses don't receive compensation for their sacrifice. This is grossly unfair and will have long-term consequences for the economy as well as the welfare of individual citizens.

That's leaving aside the question of what the actual health risks are from the businesses California is forcing to shut down. Newsom has been very evasive on that topic.

That raises the issue of why should businesses receive compensation for their "sacrifice"? Businesses aren't people. I fully support and understand why employees should receive assistance, but you'll need to explain the logic of why noncorporeal legal constructs should receive assistance.

The film industry has participants that are willingly abiding by strict safety protocols. You couldn’t get the shopping crowds that serve small businesses to do the same.

Might be a market opportunity there for someone to familiarize themselves with all the latest best practices, pitch to the local health department "I'll be accountable for ensuring that restaurants follow all these best practices, will you let them open if they can produce a certificate showing current inspections from me?", then charge restaurants to produce such a certificate (and educate them on the best practices, and ensure that they follow them). Basically it's an outsourced compliance officer. Do the same job as the person on the movie set, follow the same regulations, and the business can open.

I think customers may be part of the problem, though. No business has an incentive to say "You're not following the COVID protocols, I'm going to have to ask you to leave", and businesses that have actually done that get all sorts of abuse from the general public. Movie sets have a lot more leverage over their employees: if they don't follow the rules, they lose their income.

You could probably do something analogous for any business that satisfies these conditions:

1. The workers at the business only interact in person with other workers. Members of the general public are not present.

2. The business conducts frequent testing, which should include tests that give a rapid answer.

3. The workers agree to take steps outside of work to limit their risk, such as not going places where they can't maintain social distancing or where mask wearing is not near universal.

You could probably even open that up a little, relaxing #1 to:

1'. There are only a small number of members of the general public present throughout the day, only one or two at a time.

This relaxed rule would allow for things like dentists offices, barbers, salons, and similar as long as they kept the number of simultaneous customers down.

Even if she could only open her restaurant for production companies whose employees are tested daily, it'd be a better situation. She probably can offer way better food than a trucked in catering can provide which is probably the alternative. The catering company probably suffers a lot as well from covid, so let both have their venues open, and make the people decide whose food they like best. As a benefit, the people would distribute between the two venues and would thus be further apart than if they used one venue.

This situation is incredibly unfair to her. She has to pay the rent but can't open. She has to pay no rent and gets customers.

She probably can offer way better food than a trucked in catering can provide which is probably the alternative.

This is in fact what a number of studios already do: they use local restaurants for catering or on-site meals. However, as a result of COVID procedures, in order for a local restaurant to be eligible for this, they would to adhere to the same restrictions as Hollywood crews do, meaning: daily/near-daily testing, quarantining outside of work, and importantly, no interaction with non-household members.

Hollywood has the guilds to help it enforce the covid procedures (and also pays very well). The same cannot be said of restaurants.

This story is based on this video from Twitter:

https://twitter.com/SpencerKlavan/status/1335007535070253057

You can see the tables. They're about the same distance apart. There's also like 10x more of them for the film set than for the restaurant.

The risk profiles are completely different.

Every single person eating on the film set has been tested regularly and continuously and is not permitted on set if they have an ambiguous or positive result. In the event of a positive result, they're not even permitted on set for at least a week until after the last positive result, even when followup tests suggest that the positive result may have been false positive. When on set, all crew and cast must wear masks at all times except when filming, in which case cast but not crew may remove their masks for the duration of the take.

How often are the restaurant employees being tested? How often of the customers being tested? (For both questions, the answer is "not regularly, if at all".)

Testing is great, but that's not a measure of risk.

For every 100 people who eat at a restaurant, how many get the virus? For every 100 people working on a film set how many get the virus? These are the numbers we should look at to compare one vs. the other.

For the first one, it depends on the local population and the type of restaurant. There is documented evidence that dining in bars in the South have resulted in hundreds of cases of COVID transmission, while at the same time there are few documented cases of COVID transmission related to outdoor dining in CA over the summer.

For the second one: 0. There have been 0 known instances of cast or crew getting COVID while on set, because upon reporting a single instance of a positive result, they require the cast/crew member to quarantine. In some cases, they have even shut down production for the quarantine period to prevent spread, see, e.g., The Batman.

If there are reports of people testing positive on the set, how do you know it wasn't transmitted on the set?

People are saying they get tested every 3-4 days. If you get a positive test, that means there were up to 4 days the person was on set, potentially positive. 0, like absolutely no instances of anyone every contracting the virus on a set does not make sense with those circumstances.

Yes, if you start with the premise that everyone is only getting tested every 4 days, you would theoretically have that problem.

I have several dozen friends in Hollywood working in broadcast, cable, streaming, and film. They are all being tested at least every other day using the rapid test (results within minutes), with a second rapid test within minutes if the first test is positive for covid. The last time any of them was tested as infrequently as every 3-4 days was back in September before cases started surging again. Right now, almost all of them are being tested daily. Compared to the costs of shutting down production for 2 weeks or more, daily testing is cheap.

So, for someone to have caught COVID on set, someone else on set would have had to have (a) been infected, (b) been asymptomatic, (c) received multiple false negatives from the rapid-result test without any positives,(d) and received a negative on their most recent slow test.

Can that happen? Sure. Has it happened? No. There are no reported incidents yet of multiple cast or crew members developing covid once they started working on set. While there have been incidents of multiple cast/crew members testing positive for covid, in all situations to date this involved cast or crew traveling to non-local filming locations, with symptoms showing up during the mandatory quarantine period for traveling cast/crew.

The tables may be the same distance apart but is the seating? In the video I can only see one chair per table. It is also possible they don't allow people to sit at adjacent tables. I'm not saying this is the case, I'm just pointing out that a picture may not tell the entire story.

In other words, the rules shouldn't apply to the elite because they're being safe unlike the dirty plebs?

Have you just discovered that the one true religion of america is the sacrosanct dollar?

Movie productions are big money, they have the money to implement strict protocol and the money to acquire the relevant resources. Therefore they can do the thing which requires the strict protocol and relevant resources.

Yes like in the UK where high-worth individuals are not subject to quarantine.

Situation which will increase the disparity between the elite and the "dirty plebs". Since poor people have more risky jobs and lack the extra-care elites can afford, we will be the first ones to lose our jobs and go into debt in case we get sick. Unfortunately, inequality will only rise with COVID, especially in countries with poor social welfare models, like the U.S..

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