California judge says L.A. officials 'arbitrarily' set outdoor dining ban

I'm actually not sure they're "very" different risk profiles, though it isn't unreasonable to assume that before you analyze the situation further. My reason is that contagiousness peaks around 2-3 days before symptoms appear, and the false negative rate for a test is 100% just 4 days before symptoms appear. [1]

Now consider that tests themselves normally take around 3 days to come back. That means if you find out your test results just 1 day before symptoms appear, they'll be based on your viral load from three days prior, where (as mentioned above) the test would've had a ~100% chance of producing a false negative! (Things improve a little for a 2-day turnaround, not that much.) In other news, the only time you can really expect useful results is on (or after) the day of symptoms... at which point you would already be staying home.

I do see 2 places where this argument breaks down:

- For asymptomatic carriers. I don't know what the rates are like, but asymptomatic people won't know to stay home without a test, so tests would seem to have some value there for the purpose of making public gathering safer. However, intuitively, I wouldn't expect it to be a game-changer—I'd only expect it to stretch the runway a little bit (say, get you a few extra days/weeks), but you'd still be back at square 1 having to shut things down afterward.

- For people who aren't cautious and would go out to dine even amidst symptoms, but wouldn't go if they test positive. Which seems ironic because you could say reckless behavior here would (in some sense) seem to create a positive feedback loop justifying more reckless behavior. That not only seems like a questionable way to justify public policy, but it also seems to suffer from the same problem as the last item: it'd only delay the inevitable by a few days/weeks.

- For rapid tests (< 1 day, preferably < 1 hour). I don't expect rapid tests will be available to the masses for everyday activities.

So, at least on my end, with traditional testing that takes 2-3 days to come back, it's entirely plausible (and moreover, likely) to me that testing has low utility for these particular purposes. But I would love to hear an expert's explanation that takes all these factors (and more) into account.

[1] https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2020/07/when-should...

Are diners in American restaurants required to register name and contact details before entering? We have that in South Australia (takes a few seconds via QR code), and we currently have no active cases state-wide.

Last time, they showed a list of particular hot spots (bus stops, shopping centres, schools) and asked if we'd been at any of those locations recently. Though I imagine there wouldn't be much of the US right now that isn't some level of hot spot!

Gyms, shops, shopping malls are open. No testing and no limits.

States have a legal and ethical pubic health obligation. They're also on the hook financially via lost sales taxes and medicaid costs. Each covid case is bad for states. But they can't pay businesses to close. And they federal government won't pay even though they could.

A 10 minute spit test would make this allot more doable.

Young people will be hit the hardest, if there's an economic recession in the coming years. It will be especially hard for young people to find jobs.

It's so strange. After 9/11, Americans completely remade their society and started a series of pointless, losing wars. But COVID has killed a hundred times as many, seriously injured god knows how many more, and people just go on about "big brother, destruction of freedoms, and government control".

That's what's "insane" to me - a major, deadly pandemic that the world's richest country refuses to deal with due to clinical paranoia.

With all due respect, it's like you've never met Americans. People wouldn't cooperate if asked to, and the hospitals can't afford to hire the people it would take to process the forms.

The primary question to ask in America is always this: "Can an investor make money out of this?"

Because you cannot. Even if you have the space and the materials, you do not have the qualified and experienced personel to run it.

People keep making comparisons to flu, so it's useful to talk a bit about how covid-19 is much more lethal than flu.

I know the numbers for the UK. Official numbers for flu are about 10,000 to 20,000 deaths each year. Official numbers for covid-19 are currently about 60,000.

Already we can see covid-19 is much more lethal. But this ignores differences in counting.

If we count flu using the same methods we're currently using for covid we see only a couple of hundred, fewer than 1000, deaths to flu each year.

If we count covid using the same methods we use to count flu deaths we'd see at least 140,000 covid deaths.

> Where is the focus on public health interventions

We have internationally coordinated programmes of work to monitor which flu strains are active, then develop vaccines to target these, then to vaccinate as many vulnerable people as possible.

Overall, your idea, which seems to be, "Let's not admit people who have serious COVID-19 symptoms to the hospital and just let me them die," shows a complete disregard both for science and for human life.

What is the number of deaths it takes for you to think the government should take whatever action necessary to prevent it? Is it 1? 100? 1000? When does reduction in deaths become more important than other considerations?

Neither is shutting down economic activity for a significant period of time.

> people would rather see hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens die than close down restaurants for a month

What a ridiculously dishonest way to frame it. This is just political punditry at work. Restaurants closing for a month also has real people attached to it. People who lose their livelihood and don't have an ample safety net to keep them afloat. And of course it's not just restaurants, shutdowns impact many businesses in many ways, and those impact people in many other ways. And, as pointed out in the article here, it's highly questionable whether an action like this would save significant life.

> Your elected government telling you that you can't go to a restaurant during a pandemic isn't "turn-key totalitarianism."

But it is. I certainly agree it's not full-scale totalitarianism, but it is an authoritarian action in the face of a threat (which like I said reminds me of the kind of turn-key totalitarianism Bostrom mentions in the vulnerable world hypothesis). China was as successful as it was in such measures because it is inherently authoritarian, the US has been less successful because it isn't, and has deep-rooted propaganda against it. Should we wish the US was more ready to allow the government to take authoritarian action? What if the virus was 20x more deadly? What if it was 0.5x as deadly? Where do we say it's ok for the government to exert control? This is of course not a new, nor a readily decided or agreed upon, question.

Look, all told I'm not really sure what the right answer is here. Maybe we actually should be less hostile toward authoritarian actions in general for the good of society as a whole. Maybe China is actually closer to the optimal model, I don't know, I could make some compelling points (to those open to hear them) in either direction.

My main point here is just that the calculus shouldn't just be which actions reduce new cases and deaths the most, and indeed that isn't the calculus for many people, hence the resistance and difficulty in implementation. In reality the equation is and should be very complicated and nuanced, taking actions and reactions of various actors into account.

There is no evidence that closing outdoor dining would save that many lives. If such evidence existed, LA surely would have shown it to the court.

People aren't mad that they can't go to restaurants anymore -- they are mad that they are losing their jobs and their businesses as a direct result of government action for which the government cannot provide any public health justification, while they watch the government allow far riskier activities to continue.

Also, while there is "free speech" to a degree, you do not have the freedom in China to criticize the government in the same way you do in the western world. So most non-state media won't say anything bad in regards to how the government has handled the situation for fear of reprisal.

I wear a mask in public, and that's about all that I think is legally reasonable.