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Comment by worker767424 | Hacker News Reader

Throwing this out there, too: assorted government restrictions and lockdowns imposed by regional public health officials. The early ones were more justified because we knew less, but as the pandemic drug on, the burden of proof justifying closures needed to increase, and legislators needed to step up and legitimize the policies. It's like how the president can wage war for 90 days, but then has to get approval from congress.

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Especially in states like California. My rich friends can and continue to travel. My friends in the service sector are at home collecting a meager unemployment. It doesn’t jibe well with the ethos CA proudly proclaims. They shutdown outdoor dining and even playgrounds while Costco, Amazon warehouses and Best Buy can be packed. We also know and have data that masks work but salons were closed. (A case in Texas comes to mind where a barber had covid but didn’t pass it to any of the 45 clients because they wore masks). What was way more important was good ventilation and indoor masking.

In general social psychology have to be factored in as well. Anecdotally speaking, shutting down outdoor dining pushed more people to party at home.

No, we don't have data that masks are protective in a salon situation where people are in close contact for a long time. I wouldn't trust the masks that most people are using (surgical masks with half-inch gaps on either side and quarter-inch gaps around the nose, or single-layer cloth masks) to protect me in that scenario.

Agreed. An important thing to remember about the salon story mentioned above is that it is not 45 independent exposure experiments. Some people never shed much virus, or the stylist might not have been shedding very much on that particular day. If you tracked 45 different infected stylists, each working with one client, you might get very different results. This one story definitely does not prove you are safe at a salon as long as you are wearing a mask! (Although please do wear one if you must go).

For clarity here, the barber wearing the mask protects others. This stops larger droplets, spittle, etc from easily reaching others.

Non-n95 masks / etc don't filter much when breathing in. We wear masks to protect others...

I'm with you on this. It's shameful that Congress and State Legislatures have abdicated power to executive functionaries indefinitely. We're closing in on D-Day+1 year and our deliberative bodies have yet to deliberate our public health policies (although Congress has proven they can stimulate demand for consumer goods, from time to time).

The closures were tied to ICU overflow capacity which seems a reasonable policy to me.

Unfortunately what and how things were closed seemed haphazard and not entirely justified or communicated effectively.

There should have been more contact tracing and a focus to close only areas prone to spreading Covid-19.

It's not about reasonableness as much as it's about officials enacting the policy unilaterally. Twitter disabling Trump's account might be reasonable, but it was a pretty unilateral decision.

We needed to put more people at risk because we couldn’t prove that they would get sick?

It's worse then that.

We need to put more people at risk, because we can't meet some nebulous, ever-shifting standard that asks us to trade human lives for dollars of economic activity. Nobody wants to pin down exactly how many dollars they think a human life is worth, though.

On the one hand, we've got every special interest group under the sun loudly shouting that their business is special, and must be allowed to operate as if nothing has changed over the past year.

On the other hand, we've got public health - a communal good, that everyone is responsible for, but nobody gets held responsible for.

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