I think the problem with our response to covid in the US was that all our policies were half-assed.
The result has been that we’ve had this 7 month period of semi-lockdown (can eat outside, but not indoors; we’re going to send a support check, but only 1, etc.) while China was able to have a full lockdown for a few weeks and mostly eradicate it.
Meanwhile people are still dying here because people don’t want to wear masks because freedom, or something.
Every response everywhere was half assed, including China.
That is, a lot of stuff didn't make sense, was contradictory, done at the wrong time, later turned out to be wrong, etc. This is part and parcel of putting together an immediate emergency response.
I live in Dublin, Ireland. There was a preemptive anti-vaxer protest here yesterday declaring the virus a hoax.
The key point of difference between places, IMO, is public and political tolerance for these things. Can you live with some policy being dumb, because you're inevitably going to think a lot of them are dumb.
New Zealand and Vietnam definitely half-assed some rather important parts of their response. For example, New Zealand's prime minister told everyone for two months that workers in their quarantine hotels were being tested weekly for Covid. She came under some criticism for the lack of testing of other potentially-exposed workers, like at ports, but insisted that at least the important ones were being monitored. Most of those workers had, in fact, never been tested. At least one of them was definitely infected, and this was only detected because an unrelated outbreak of unknown source finally prompted the government to test them all - it very nearly caused their attempt to keep out Covid to fail, if something else hadn't first.
As for Vietnam, if I remember rightly their run of no Covid cases was ended by a hospital outbreak that somehow went unnoticed until an elderly visitor to the hospital with no other plausible sources of infection happened to get infected, develop bad symptoms, and tested positive - and then so did several other people who'd been there. This does not suggest good things about their in-hospital testing. The amount of time it took for the existence of a new case to become public knowledge should also call into question just how forthright and honest the government was being.
I'm not saying that there were no good responses, better ones and worse ones.
I'm saying they were all somewhat chaotic, haphazard and wrong in places. That's what happens when rulesets with multiple, sometimes competing goals have to be put in place quickly.
There is evidence that exposure to other corona viruses gives some level of protection to covid. The Vietnamese have higher exposure to corona viruses that most other people which is one theory as to why they are less affected.
Thanks! I was hoping for an actual serology study showing that Vietnamese have more exposures to other coronaviruses than people in other countries, like you stated. Unfortunately, these links don’t offer any hard evidence at all to support that assertion, just speculation. The cross-reactivity study referenced in that NIH press release was conducted with samples from “USA, Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, and UK”, not Vietnam.
> I think the problem with our response to covid in the US was that all our policies were half-assed...China was able to have a full lockdown for a few weeks and mostly eradicate it
I see this view a lot from people--the US just needed a real lockdown. Spain also had a real lockdown, and their case count is surging right now. The difference in how China seemingly (you can't spell Xinhua without Xi) handled it is in aggressive contact tracing and tracking where everyone goes regardless of their covid status.
A few months ago there was a great write up called The Hammer And the Dance. The idea was to first "Hammer" down there numbers to something controllable with a tight lockdown and then use contact tracing and targeted quarantine to mostly keep it at the lower level. Countries like Spain, China and Italy nailed the hammer part, but are struggling with the dance. South Korea seems to have danced their way through the entire thing by never getting it escalate in the first place.
The US tried to do a hammer and failed. The numbers didn't really go down for the city as a whole. We never had a coordinated decision to transition to the dance either and don't have anything in place to be successful at that step. Tests taking over a week and high case numbers to begin with make contact tracing and targeted quarantine in outbreak areas impossible
South Korea seems to be stuck in an endless cycle of loosening restrictions, watching cases go up, and then having to tighten them up again and close businesses. It's not clear that it's even possible to use contact tracing to stop Covid-19 spreading (the evidence is very thin and dubious), but I'm not convinced they've got widespread enough testing to make it work if it is feasible - they don't seem to have expanded testing since about March, they've been doing a tenth of many tests a day in per-capita terms as the US, US, and the big EU states lately, and the way they seem to be managing this is by not routinely testing people with mild potential symptoms like other countries have been. Which means they have very limited ability to detect infections not linked to cases they know about, and contact tracing does nothing to stop those unknown, undetected infections from spreading. It just so happens the proportion of cases with no known ties to existing cases has been going up there lately.
This is, of course, not the impression you'd get from news coverage in the UK or US, which is still generally spinning South Korea as a test and trace success story that demonstrates how badly our governments have failed. Hilariously, the Guardian even turned the fact that they were doing less Covid-19 testing than the UK into a positive the other day, describing them as a demonstration of how important targeted testing was.
Contact tracing is going to be a serious problem for the US. While countries like Spain or the UK might fail to setup contact tracing due to incompetence or corruption, the US has the federalism issue to sort out too.
Who, exactly, is responsible for setting up contact tracing systems, and under what authority? If it’s devolved to the state level, how are we going to deal with people crossing state borders, or large population centers that are near or straddle borders (Kansas City will be a nightmare for that)? If it’s federal then we might as well give up hope, given how lackluster the federal governments response to the pandemic has been so far.
Other countries like Germany also have federal systems. They were able to coordinate successfully because they didn't politicise the entire thing, because their election system doesn't create was us-vs-them two-party system
China's response wasn't just "a full lockdown for a few weeks" - they've repeatedly imposed new full lockdowns in areas across the country where cases are detected. I can't find recent news, but as of last month millions of Chinese citizens were still under full lockdown.
No new cases outside quarantine or isolation, as assessed by a competent, evidenced-based governmental authority.
There have been four positive cases of Covid-19 outside of managed isolation or quarantine, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says.
After 102 days without community transmission they are the first cases acquired from an unknown source. New Zealand is now activating a resurgence plan.
NZ resumed level 3 on August 12, where level 4 is the most restrictive:
people are to work from home unless they are essential workers, and stay in their bubbles. Bars and restaurants will have to close, and restrictions come in place for funerals and weddings.
Conditions are regularly monitored, assessed, and adjusted. From September 4:
Cabinet has decided to keep the current alert levels and will review them again on Monday, September 14, when they will decide whether to adjust them at 11.59pm on Wednesday, September 16.
It comes as director general of health Ashley Bloomfield reveals five new cases of Covid-19. Three are in the community.
Not sure what to think about Japan - there was never any real lockdown, people were still riding crowded trains in rush hour to companies that wouldn’t let them work remote. But it nonetheless didn’t spread much. Perhaps it’s that people obediently wore masks all the time from the very beginning? But it’s all guessing still.
My guess is early and aggressive mask compliance. They both had the existing infrastructure for that, and the social expectation that everyone will mask up when they’re sick or as necessary during outbreaks of diseases like SARS or COVID.
The 2.2 million figure came from the worst case scenario. The assumptions for that scenario are:
"In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour, we would expect a peak in mortality (daily deaths) to occur after approximately 3 months."
You don't get to claim a reduction from a baseline that assumes 0 intervention and 0 personal behavior change. That figure was used in the report as a baseline to compare various mitigation and suppression strategies.
That’s how exponential growth works. The NYTs article you cite is from March 16th and was based on the US continuing to operate as it had. So changes early can have a huge effect.
Of course the US still delayed at the federal level for another 2 weeks to do really anything of substance. The governments responsible for reducing the death toll from 2M To 200K are the state governments of NY and California. The US federal government largely delayed advocating a shutdown until 2 weeks later. Even on April 4th the President was still saying Covid-19 was “going away” [1].
I encourage everyone to go look at the new cases curve on the days proceeding and following April 4th to see what utter complete bullshit such a statement was. Worse, he knew it was bullshit even as he said it, as the conversations with Bob Woodward have revealed.
To give the US federal government a grade of “not too bad” is disingenuous. Their discordant and adversarial response is why we have 200K deaths.
I mean if you deployed the police and national guard to enforce a 24/7 curfew with police escort required to leave at all the virus would probably have been eradicated pretty swiftly.
The question is always how much freedom are we willing to exchange for increased effectiveness and in the US the answer was very little.
And we’re currently paying for that decision but as long as we understand and accept the consequences I don’t think it is an invalid choice. I might personally disagree but that’s the nature of collective decision making.
Until a safe vaccine is produced those total lockdown nations have to stay in lockdown. Even a minor outbreak can explode. Korea handled it the best with limited closures, aggressive tracking, and a responsible public, and they still had superspreader events when they loosened up rules on bars and risked having an outbreak. That said, a model like korea's would never work in the west and especially the US. If we're to believe Fauci literally none of the general populace acted responsibly, with even leftwing demographics like the young, urban dwellers, and minorities leading infections despite leftwing leaderships' advice. So its hardly a partisan issue, the basic culture of the US is incompatible with strategies that work in Asia. The spread of this virus was just an inevitability
New Zealand, has a four-stage alert and response level, and constantly monitors and adjusts that according to outbreak status, as I've noted elsewhere in this thread.
If I'm reading sources correctly, the country is currently at Level 2 (excepting Aukland at 2.5), and had bumped from Level 2 to 3 in August after community spread was detected.
This is what effective and appropriate response looks like.
A second reason is all gov were bad to solve novel problems 0 to 1, but good at solving 1 to 2, 2 to 3 problems. HK, Singapore, Korea Japan had experience to protect itself, swine flu, bird flu, SARS, etc. Western world had not.
But the truth of the matter, we're victims of geopolitics, media, and social media blaming thy neighbor. Go look at U.S. fatalities due to COVID which NYT posts at 200k as the time of this writing. Then go look at CDC U.S. registered deaths annually, which was last reported at 2.8M. While I am sympathetic for those who loved lost ones for whatever cause of death, quick maths show that in 0.8% of the population dies in a normal year, and COVID-19 blimp would increase it to 0.9 to 1.0%. We've grossly overreacted.
In Nashville, TN (USA) bars and restaurants are closed to stop the spread of the virus. In e-mails obtained by a local television station, and later confirmed authentic by legal council, the e-mails discussed how only 80 of the 20,000 positive cases could be traced to bars and restaurants.
> Tennessee Lookout reporter Nate Rau asks, “The figure you gave of 'more than 80' does lead to a natural question: If there have been over 20,000 positive cases of COVID-19 in Davidson and only 80 or so are traced to restaurants and bars, doesn’t that mean restaurants and bars aren’t a very big problem?"
A day after the story broke they allowed bars and restaurants to re-open:
What causes have the other 19,920 COVID cases been traced to? I read the articles you linked and this is the only other data I could find:
“The results showed that more than a thousand COVID-19 cases had been linked to construction and nursing homes - while bars and restaurants had just 22 cases.”
1,000 cases from construction and nursing homes brings the number to 18,920 cases we need data on. This is the problem. There is so little high confidence tracing data that we can’t make strong decisions on what quarantine actions are materially impactful. Whose to say a substantial amount of that remaining number isn’t caused by bars and restaurants? If that data is out there, please share it. If not, please support more rigorous contact tracing.
Grocery stores probably closer to zero. Reminds me of stranger danger.
You most likely will be infected by a family member or office coworker.
In march during the full lockdowns, something like 20% of the population was still meeting their friends and family behind closed doors like nothing was happening, and this is why the virus didn't die out in 2 weeks.
The reason why China welded apartment doors getting shut was not to prevent people getting out.
It was to block family and friends of the apartment house inhabitants from visiting.
In San Diego at peak outbreak season more than half of the outbreaks were traced to bar/restaurants. The point is what you put on the denominator to have a reasonable ratio. It should be the traceable cases not total cases. Most community spread cases can not be traced. And even traceable cases may not all be meaningful: a prison may contribute a large amount of cases but not much to community spread. Counting outbreaks is likely a better measure.
How many cases did they trace? Out of a much smaller number of cases in quebec, more than 80 have been traced to bars and restaurants. (The govt hasn’t been forthcoming with data, but in one week they disclosed at least that many from bars)
There is perhaps some factor unique to that town or their contact tracing isn’t extensive?
I'd find that more compelling in the presence of meaningful contact tracing, which in general seems to be lacking in the U.S.
I'm more inclined to trust an epidemiologist who says they'd rather fly in an airplane than eat at a bar, a quote I found today but regret I can't locate at the moment.
These words of CS Lewis seem appropriate in our time of COVID as well! Here’s what he said in 1948 about the mental shift required by living with the threat of the atomic bomb:
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
And are you certain that increasing cancer rates are (generally speaking) unaffected by (much) longer lifetimes and (much) better diagnosing/imaging means?
I mean, when on average people died at forty or fifty, with all the exceptions for the early age cases, and there were no real means to either diagnose cancer or even making autopsies, documented cases must have been sensibly less.
People with cancer survive for many more years now than even a few decades ago, let alone centuries ago. It depends a lot on the type of cancer but for some of them the prognosis now is literally several decades more lifetime on average than it was centuries ago.
I find it difficult to compare a discrete catastrophic event with an invisible plague.
Hiding under your desk around the clock made zero sense when the odds of being hit with an atomic bomb were fantastically small due to geopolitics.
Hiding in your house when there's no way of knowing who around you is infected, treatments are still primitive, and many people are not taking it seriously is a much more rational decision.
SARS-CoV-2 is ~ 100 nm, room air purifiers with HEPA filters and the filter technology in real N95 masks filter far below this amount. You can make the air cleaner than ever with modern technology to protect yourself.
In many places, the deaths due to covid per day are less than car crash deaths are normally, especially among younger people. So if you are a healthy relative young person in one of these areas I don't see how hiding at home is a smart decision. Isolation and loneliness kills too.
It's worth noting that this is a type of economic disaster very different than a hurricane, wildfire, or even the 2008 financial crisis.
No restaurants were physically destroyed by the pandemic. All the buildings, stoves, tables, signage, etc are still around.
The skills of the workers will likely fade only slightly during this pandemic time.
There's likely not much reason to think that in 2022 the dining habits of consumers will be drastically different than in 2019. There wasn't a restaurant bubble prior to 2020 necessitating a huge correction.
Also it's worth noting that government edicts likely aren't the primary cause of business closures at this point.
People (selfishly) don't want to catch the virus and also want to listen to public health advice.
Evidence:
-There were never any real government edicts banning air travel in the continental US (some few places had non-enforced quarantine advisories). Yet air travel has fallen substantially.
-Most large businesses have not returned to in-office work, regardless of no government edicts.
-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.
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.
LOL. Using "people" and "unselfishly" in the same sentence is deep. There may be perhaps one out of 100 who acts unselfishly, the rest only cares about themselves or their direct dependents. And usually that one out of 100 only thinks he is acting unselfishly, but just didn't yet honestly evaluate why he/she is caring about other people (to feel better?! Oops).
And fun fact: Even if you were right, and locally this would be true for some unfathomable reason... The lockdown has saved lives... Lives of the rich and well off. However it has cost much more lives than those few percent who would have died if we didn't do anything. And it has caused unimaginable economic hardship across the world. But since the people who die and suffer now, are people not included in the statistics, nobody really cares. I mean why would you care about the repercussions of lockdowns in the 3rd world? We have soo much to worry about here, and we are so unselfishly staying at home to help our fellow humans... What an euphemism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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
"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.
Agreed. I've noticed that the more someone has to lose by not being open and doing regular work, the less time they think this thing is gonna take.
I spent hours arguing with my commercial landlord about why we closed, and how we can't do business until we have birthday parties, corporate events, etc. His response was "Well, next month, you'll be open next month right?!" I'd say no, then he'd be like, "Well, what about September? October? This will all certainly be over by then!"
These people are arguing with reality. I really am starting to think that Trumpism is the first of a new generation of mental virii that just short circuit the human brain and turn it into mush. Or maybe that's just the greed inherent in the American way. Either way, it sure would have been nice to have some FUCKING LEADERSHIP here.
What exactly would be gained by FUCKING LEADERSHIP here?
The United States because of it's physical size (geography) and spread out population, which are interdependent on each other for a way of life, was going to have the cases and problems that it has now no matter what anyone did.
You can blame Trump, but if someone else was in there we'd be in the exact same place, with less media obsession, and people would just be saying "there's nothing we can do better" because, frankly, we can't. The makeup of the United States is incredibly vulnerable to events like this (JIT delivery, trucking as the primary means of goods distribution, long distances and disparate population centers, with different climates, etc., etc.), and the sheer population size makes it difficult to respond to anything en masse, especially when the people can't agree what that en masse response should be!
So yes, it's fucked right now, but it's America, not Trump.
Trump actively contradicted scientific guidance and told people not to wear masks, dramatically increasing spread. He refused to use the Defense Production Act to manufacture PPE, leading to shortages for both medical and civilian use for many months, increasing spread. His lack of central leadership and guidance forced states into adhoc responses, with people freely moving between areas with different restrictions and spreading the virus. His administration put states in bidding wars that raised prices and limited the ability of states to buy equipment, and then confiscated the equipment they tried to buy anyway. His administration has contradicted, insulted, and publicly questioned Dr. Fauci, the CDC, the WHO and all experts. Trump has personally down distrust in our most important institutions. The government's attempt to politicize case numbers and CDC guidance has broken decades of trust.
At every stage, Trump has done the worst thing possible. Hundreds of thousands of deaths are DIRECTLY attributed to him.
4 weeks of "everyone wear a mask and stay isolates, we'll pay your salary" would have dramatically dropped case numbers and R0. Instead we're still in our initial outbreak.
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.
One thing the article seems to miss: how much is "normal?" I'm aware that business closures are usually pretty high, but this article doesn't seem to provide that context. Specifically data of the same exact time period, perhaps aggregated over multiple years.
The Restaurant Brokers’ study, the only one to make a distinction between chain and independent restaurants, concluded that up to 90 percent of independent establishments close during the first year, and the remaining restaurants will have an average five-year life span.
The liberties protected by the Constitution are not fair-weather freedoms -- in place when times are good but able to be cast aside in times of trouble.
There is no question that this country has faced, and will face, emergencies of every sort, but the solution to a national crisis can never be permitted to supersede the commitment to individual liberty that stands as the foundation of the American experiment. The constitution cannot accept the concept of a 'new normal' where the basic liberties of the people can be subordinated to open-ended emergency mitigation measures
- U.S. District Judge William Stickman declaring PA's lockdown orders unconstitutional
Except he is wrong. The Supreme Court has ruled that such lockdowns are indeed constitutional and the States have the right to enforce them unless Congress intervenes.
And why the hell would Congress be able to overrule states on something like this? What torturous reading of the Commerce Clause gives Congress the power to forbid lockdowns?
"U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, in a similar case out of California related to pandemic restrictions on religious gatherings, wrote in May that elected officials should be allowed latitude when acting in areas “fraught with medical and scientific uncertainties” and should not be subject to second-guessing by an “unelected federal judiciary.”
And wasn't that addressed in Stickman's ruling? There's a difference between "something that we can allow in an emergency" and "something that has been going on for 6 months and legally continues forever", like the situation in PA.
Further, if there are medical and scientific uncertainties... Erring on the side of constitutional rights seems a LOT less potentially exploitable to me. If you think that something is so critical that you need to permanently remove rights to combat it... You should be able to back that up with incontrovertible evidence.
Can you explain why not wearing a mask is so important to you? I simply don’t understand this reaction. We already don’t let you go naked in the streets for a variety of reasons including public health, and masks are one of the major tools we have to combat this virus. We already require standards for restaurants otherwise they get shut down due to public health concerns (there’s no freedom allowed to serve rotting meat and make others sick). Countries with high mask compliance like S Korea and Hong Kong have had far fewer cases, and when they, they limit the spread better. We’ve already lost 200k Americans in roughly 6 months, with millions more to lose if we remove all restrictions and no one wears a mask. Why does public health get such a low priority for you? And why does your freedom allow you to spread a deadly virus to me, where I have no say in it?
- Let's ban alcohol due to all the harm it does in the world and plus I, a non-drinker, don't want get hit by a drunk driver. It's better we just ban it all together and everyone will be safe - what do you say?
- Next up is mandatory condoms! I mean there's no assurance that people won't spread AIDS so in the name of public health condoms are now mandatory. Enjoy!
- Time for our old friend "unhealthy" food. Obesity makes my insurance premiums go up and it's well established that obesity is a social disease. Time to put an end to this too.
- Ugh, smoking. All smoking will be banned because I can definitely smell that when the car ahead of me has a smoker in it. Ban this too.
I think first up we should do alcohol, what do you say?
Just come out and say you're a selfish person who doesn't care if they harm people instead of hiding behind all of the pretense that it's restricting you too much.
Given that the last time the U.S. banned alcohol it was a total disaster causing thousands of deaths, and we now live in a time where public sentiment towards many currently illegal drugs becoming legal is positive. I don't expect prohibition to come back any time soon.
Criminalising morality does tend to fare poorly. Setting responsibility at appropriate levels or behaviours (say, contributory negligence liability for drugs- or alcohol-based deaths or injury to the industry rather than individual users) might have merits.
Effective determination and points of control can be thorny.
Indefinitely such that it’s a new normal? No. Such is not constitutional.
Edit to respond to downvotes: Nor was it constitutional to institute sweeping metadata collection as a new normal in response to an emergency situation. Nor is it constitutional to make encryption illegal as the new normal because of an emergency. Etc.
People have the ability and technology to protect themselves now. E.g. if you are wearing an N95 mask properly, the net effect on your risk profile if someone is wearing a cloth mask is <5%.
Well, "I have the right to spread all the HIV I want" was recently added to California law...
(More specifically, legal penalties for intentionally/knowingly spreading it were r̵e̵m̵o̵v̵e̵d̵ reduced. CA was also the only state to have such penalties as far as I'm aware)
This is such an ignorant comment that I've seen perpetuated around the internet recently, that I made an account just to respond to this.
HIV positive people on medication, cannot spread HIV. It's factually safer to have sex with an HIV positive person on meds, than a person who doesn't get tested and doesn't know their status.
This law exists so that HIV positive people who cannot spread the virus are not legally obligated to tell others they have the virus.
Please learn more about what it means to be HIV positive, and the discrimination that comes with it before making these horrible disparaging comments.
Undetectable = Uninfectable (u=u) maybe a good thing for you to Google.
It's debatable. On the one hand, yes the most common case that the law applied to was "has HIV but virus loads are undetectable and thus risk of infection is nonexistent". On the other, removing that law means that someone who's off their meds with the intention of infecting others is now only guilty of a misdemeanor.
Personally, I'm still not sure how that doesn't count as rape by deception, but whatever.
In any case, I brought it up to compare to pandemic mask mandates. A "gay sex condom mandate" 30 or 40 years ago would have been incredibly effective at containing HIV (assuming it was actually followed), and HIV was at the time FAR more deadly than COVID-19. The fact that people consider one acceptable and one unthinkable is IMO interesting.
>HIV positive people on medication, cannot spread HIV
Absurdly false. Not everyone responds the same to medication, not everyone has the same health conditions, and not everyone begins treatment at the same time. Further to that, completely besides the point:
If you have a fatal disease that can only be kept at bay with powerful ARV's (that are often expensive and loaded with serious side effects), then you have the responsibility to inform those you potentially expose to it. Paramedics, doctors, dentists, sexual partners. Basic decency. You are KNOWINGLY making potentially life and death decisions for others by depriving them of information.
“ But a defendant only violates Penal Code 120290 when he or she intentionally tries to infect a partner. So people will usually not be liable under a theory of negligence per se.
This means that in most cases, a plaintiff would have to prove actual negligence by a preponderance of the evidence.”
The law does not require that someone be on HIV medication, you have to prove ill intent or negligence.
That’s a really good point. HIV is an interesting point, because we can not stop the spread, even after 50,000,000 deaths over the past few decades.
It’s objectively easier to stop HIV with coordinated effort than COVID, so therefore it is impossible to stop SARS-CoV-2 with the current population education/skill level.
Well, not surprising if you expect Trump to be a fairly standard if also incompetent and boorish Republican. VERY surprising if you think he's a Fascist, though - using emergencies to "temporarily" strip away freedoms is a key part of the playbook there.
Its important to note that the hardest hit sector had a closure rate of 5.7%. The top three worst hit were all restaurants or other food-serving businesses, a sector which has a relatively high failure rate in most years.
Yelp seems to be pushing the flashier numbers here on the 50-60% of closures that were permanent, but I'm not seeing a comparison to other years - I'd assume, in general, a business closing for any reason tends to be fairly fatal, pandemic or not.
If a company closes temporarily, it's usually not due to an ongoing pandemic. That's temporary and rather different from a regular "it's going so bad we need to close now".
There’s two halves of this: what percentage of “temporary” closures ended up being permanent, and what percentage of closures were temporary in more normal years?
It’s internally consistent to believe that most business survive temporary closures (or not! I don’t know), but also that temporary closures are more of the exception than the norm. If that turns out to be true, then fretting the rate of “temporary” closures that become permanent is probably not even a terribly interesting statistic.
I was wondering if we have the net loss of business in 2019, so we can gauge the damage caused by Covid. Another interesting number would be the median loss of business. To put the numbers in perspective, the US has nearly 20,000 cities. Therefore, 200K closed business over 20K cities means 10 closed business per city. Since the population of each city is different, it is interesting to see some descriptive stats on the closures over the cities.
Is this necessarily a bad thing? If people want to eat at home long term instead, the economy shifts. If people want to go back to restaurants, they will reopen with new owners.
I think it was Trump that (somewhat callously) said about restaurants "they'll reopen, but under new ownership." In some contexts, that's not the worst thing in the world. In most contexts, these businesses owners will be carrying a whole lot of debt. The debtors, meanwhile, are pretty thoroughly insulated from financial harm.
I'm rereading David Graeber's' "Debt." While I think the "history of" part got little weak as he described more modern systems, I have to admit that his definition of money has changed the way I think.
The nonexistence of effective bankruptcy is a terrible thing, and we have a pretty shallow well of ideas to draw from unless we look beyond modern economic constructs. It may not be a bad idea (besides being radical and scary) to declare a jubilee of some sort, at least for small businesses. They're bearing the full brunt of this pandemic while their debtors are mostly doing well.
Every airline in the world is essentially bankrupt without government intervention right now. Very few will go out of business, and those that do are at least protected by limited liability. It's only small businesses that are actually liable for losses.
Ultimately, the 2008 financial crisis issues were pretty abstract. This time it's a lot more visceral, intuitive.
When all the dust settles on COVID, the arbitrary and excessive restrictions on freedom, put in place before any science said it was a necessary precaution, will have been far worse than the disease itself. The amount of lives destroyed, businesses lost, suicides and overdoses, wealth given to the super rich through money printing and government purchases of corporate debt, and all for what? Such a god damn waste.
The intervention in the United States was haphazard and underfunded by the government. There was no reason for any business to go bankrupt while a proper lockdown was implemented. Instead there was a spotty, inconsistent response with very little help for people. Like, one 1200 check for people and two loans for businesses?
It was the worst of all worlds and you're blaming it on the wrong people.
> There was no reason for any business to go bankrupt while a proper lockdown was implemented
What does this mean? That the Fed will just print money to cover every business expense of every business during "proper" lockdowns? That seems like a terrible idea.
Isn't that exactly what the fed is doing for the wealthy right now by buying up the bond market? They are creating a furious amount of money currently with no end in sight.
But if you are a smaller business you are just going to be left to rot.
Yeah maybe they will have to buy less hundred dollar toilet cover for the military, or less last generation missiles, I think that should be more than enough to pay for it. Or maybe less subsidies for the oil industry.
It's amusing that you think $100 for a toilet is wasteful, when that's about as much as a cheap toilet would cost at Home Depot. I don't think you've ever bought a toilet if you think that's too much to spend on one. Toilets that cost 2-3 times that are not uncommon.
That's really dishonest. The unemployment insurance boost ($600/wk for many months), continuing in a limited fashion, was huge and expensive. And the PPP (even if there were execution problems) was a forgivable loan, basically a grant. A huge amount of money was pumped into maintaining employment.
That’ll require a lot of public amnesia, as restaurant bookings dropped before official lockdown orders arrived in most areas. Huge swaths of the population voluntarily locked down before it became mandatory, blaming the government for the lockdowns would be extremely weird.
It's a combination of voluntary and mandatory. The question is whether the mandatory part overstepped. It's a fair question. Did it do more harm than good in some cases? Did it prevent businesses from being able to adapt to the situation? Like what some ended up doing with moving seating outside, or converting to a different model, etc. But if there's a mandate that "all X must close", you're blocking adaptations and any chance of them figuring out a way to survive.
That’s a nuanced opinion that wasn’t expressed by the parent comment.
As far as “was the mandatory enforcement an overstep”, based on public polling the answer is an emphatic no. More Americans remain concerned that we opened too soon rather than too late, and large majorities remain voluntarily locked down (depending on vocation of course) despite the lifting of official bans.
Good luck keeping restaurants in business at 20% or even 50% regular volume. In a pandemic, restaurant visits drop sharply regardless of what official government policy is. They would have gone out of business anyway. Even now in places that have been open for months, restaurants are still struggling and/or failing.
I think most of the restaurants that are thriving in my area are ones that were able to adapt to the new reality quickly. Many just completely transformed their menu's for takeout centric foods. The city here shut down roads and creating large social distanced out door seating. Enhanced all the alcohol permits for takeout, etc.
Restaurants can survive this. But what they were doing in 2019 is not going to work.
Ah yes, let’s criticize a once in a hundred year event which evolved in real time and affected the entire globe. Plenty of blame to go around but you can’t just have a global pandemic and expect a world which was obviously under prepared to have no collateral damage. Have some perspective.
I don't think they're expecting "no collateral damage," but especially in the US state responses varied widely (not necessarily a bad thing), and some governors grossly overstepped their authority, as evidenced by courts calling some of the measures taken unconstitutional.
It sure hasn't stopped the Biden campaign from blaming every..single..death on Trump.
Yes, it was a lifetime event. But the failed responses of many leaders shows they shouldn't really have the power in the first place.
Democrats were still bickering about Trump's impeachment until the end of January (which turned out to be a big nothing, which we all knew). Trump started the ball rolling when it comes to Covid and started banning flights from China early on. He was called a racist and a bigot for doing the right thing.
The Mayor of New York put the elderly back into retirement homes, even after testing positive for Covid. This contributed to many deaths and we still don't know to what extent, because data on it won't be released until the totally random time of the day after the November election. Many other Democrat governors followed suit.
The Governor of Michigan has made herself the dictator of the state. She overrules anything she doesn't like with executive orders, essentially making the local government void.
Covid has shown us the true colors of our local leaders: they really just want to be petty dictators and aren't really trying to help the people at all. Democrats have pounced on the opportunity to destroy the economy and blame Trump, all in the hopes to win the next election.
They've even become anti-vaxxors, trying to put the seeds of doubt into the minds of anything that will listen that if a Vaccine comes out and Trump is president, it's bad and you shouldn't take it.
Even big tech is doing the dirty work of the Democrats by censoring all opposing opinions which directly results in election interference.
With what we're learning about Trump's response - including re-writing CDC guidelines, no organized Federal response, and an outward positioning of COVID as "it'll go away on it's own" while saying privately that it was deadly, I think it's safe to say that a significant amount of unnecessary deaths are caused by Trump's actions or lack of action. Can't claim them all certainly, but that's politics.
Its not a 1 in 100 year event, its a once a decade event exaggerated by a hysterical media and exacerbated by an aged and unhealthy population, and weak regular flu seasons for the past two years leaving a lot of 'dry tinder'.
That's a really shallow analysis though. It doesn't consider how many of those people would have survived without a pandemic, and it doesn't count suicides and degraded quality of life costs due to the lockdown rather than the disease.
Excess deaths can and have been tracked based on overall mortality and deviation from previous years. The estimate is greater than official COVID-19 statistics for the US, being 248,000 as of 11 September. Worldwide, excess mortality exceeds COVID-19 statistcs (presently nearing 1 million) by 263,000.
Obviously -- we're living through a pandemic, and people are out congregating in large protests and other gatherings. The point is that the numbers thrown around like 200k deaths are not reduced by the natural mortality rate of that population. On top of which, never is it considered the cost in lives and quality of life of the response, only its supposed benefits. The number of people who have not gone for regular doctor check-ups which would have detected cancer at the early stages.. are yet to be tallied in the deaths caused by our overreaction.
Even if we suppose that you're right that the costs of forced intervention outweighed the costs without such intervention, without a control group (the analogy with Sweden is limited), the counterargument is simply that it would have been worse with minimal forced action.
> Abstract: Political actors, including voters, activists, and leaders, are often ignorant of basic facts relevant to policy choices. Even experts have little understanding of the working of society and little ability to predict future outcomes. Only the most simple and uncontroversial political claims can be counted on. This is partly because political knowledge is very difficult to attain, and partly because individuals are not sufficiently motivated to attain it. As a result, the best advice for political actors is very often to simply stop trying to solve social problems, since interventions not based on precise understanding are likely to do more harm than good.
The result has been that we’ve had this 7 month period of semi-lockdown (can eat outside, but not indoors; we’re going to send a support check, but only 1, etc.) while China was able to have a full lockdown for a few weeks and mostly eradicate it.
Meanwhile people are still dying here because people don’t want to wear masks because freedom, or something.
That is, a lot of stuff didn't make sense, was contradictory, done at the wrong time, later turned out to be wrong, etc. This is part and parcel of putting together an immediate emergency response.
I live in Dublin, Ireland. There was a preemptive anti-vaxer protest here yesterday declaring the virus a hoax.
The key point of difference between places, IMO, is public and political tolerance for these things. Can you live with some policy being dumb, because you're inevitably going to think a lot of them are dumb.
As for Vietnam, if I remember rightly their run of no Covid cases was ended by a hospital outbreak that somehow went unnoticed until an elderly visitor to the hospital with no other plausible sources of infection happened to get infected, develop bad symptoms, and tested positive - and then so did several other people who'd been there. This does not suggest good things about their in-hospital testing. The amount of time it took for the existence of a new case to become public knowledge should also call into question just how forthright and honest the government was being.
I'm saying they were all somewhat chaotic, haphazard and wrong in places. That's what happens when rulesets with multiple, sometimes competing goals have to be put in place quickly.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/immune-...
I see this view a lot from people--the US just needed a real lockdown. Spain also had a real lockdown, and their case count is surging right now. The difference in how China seemingly (you can't spell Xinhua without Xi) handled it is in aggressive contact tracing and tracking where everyone goes regardless of their covid status.
The US tried to do a hammer and failed. The numbers didn't really go down for the city as a whole. We never had a coordinated decision to transition to the dance either and don't have anything in place to be successful at that step. Tests taking over a week and high case numbers to begin with make contact tracing and targeted quarantine in outbreak areas impossible
This is, of course, not the impression you'd get from news coverage in the UK or US, which is still generally spinning South Korea as a test and trace success story that demonstrates how badly our governments have failed. Hilariously, the Guardian even turned the fact that they were doing less Covid-19 testing than the UK into a positive the other day, describing them as a demonstration of how important targeted testing was.
The Dance is still a distant hope.
Who, exactly, is responsible for setting up contact tracing systems, and under what authority? If it’s devolved to the state level, how are we going to deal with people crossing state borders, or large population centers that are near or straddle borders (Kansas City will be a nightmare for that)? If it’s federal then we might as well give up hope, given how lackluster the federal governments response to the pandemic has been so far.
There have been four positive cases of Covid-19 outside of managed isolation or quarantine, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says.
After 102 days without community transmission they are the first cases acquired from an unknown source. New Zealand is now activating a resurgence plan.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/423305/covid-19-new-case...
NZ resumed level 3 on August 12, where level 4 is the most restrictive:
people are to work from home unless they are essential workers, and stay in their bubbles. Bars and restaurants will have to close, and restrictions come in place for funerals and weddings.
Conditions are regularly monitored, assessed, and adjusted. From September 4:
Cabinet has decided to keep the current alert levels and will review them again on Monday, September 14, when they will decide whether to adjust them at 11.59pm on Wednesday, September 16.
It comes as director general of health Ashley Bloomfield reveals five new cases of Covid-19. Three are in the community.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/coronavirus-fatality-r...
Even with lack of leadership, we have had ~ 200k, a 90% reduction. Not too bad?
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...
The 2.2 million figure came from the worst case scenario. The assumptions for that scenario are:
"In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour, we would expect a peak in mortality (daily deaths) to occur after approximately 3 months."
You don't get to claim a reduction from a baseline that assumes 0 intervention and 0 personal behavior change. That figure was used in the report as a baseline to compare various mitigation and suppression strategies.
Of course the US still delayed at the federal level for another 2 weeks to do really anything of substance. The governments responsible for reducing the death toll from 2M To 200K are the state governments of NY and California. The US federal government largely delayed advocating a shutdown until 2 weeks later. Even on April 4th the President was still saying Covid-19 was “going away” [1].
I encourage everyone to go look at the new cases curve on the days proceeding and following April 4th to see what utter complete bullshit such a statement was. Worse, he knew it was bullshit even as he said it, as the conversations with Bob Woodward have revealed.
To give the US federal government a grade of “not too bad” is disingenuous. Their discordant and adversarial response is why we have 200K deaths.
1- https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/09/politics/coronavirus...
...New York has almost the worst death rate in the country (only New Jersey is higher).
Comparing across US states, it really does look like doing nothing would've resulted in less death.
The question is always how much freedom are we willing to exchange for increased effectiveness and in the US the answer was very little.
And we’re currently paying for that decision but as long as we understand and accept the consequences I don’t think it is an invalid choice. I might personally disagree but that’s the nature of collective decision making.
If I'm reading sources correctly, the country is currently at Level 2 (excepting Aukland at 2.5), and had bumped from Level 2 to 3 in August after community spread was detected.
This is what effective and appropriate response looks like.
https://medium.com/@georgetoparis/the-book-rage-on-china-f5d...
A second reason is all gov were bad to solve novel problems 0 to 1, but good at solving 1 to 2, 2 to 3 problems. HK, Singapore, Korea Japan had experience to protect itself, swine flu, bird flu, SARS, etc. Western world had not.
But the truth of the matter, we're victims of geopolitics, media, and social media blaming thy neighbor. Go look at U.S. fatalities due to COVID which NYT posts at 200k as the time of this writing. Then go look at CDC U.S. registered deaths annually, which was last reported at 2.8M. While I am sympathetic for those who loved lost ones for whatever cause of death, quick maths show that in 0.8% of the population dies in a normal year, and COVID-19 blimp would increase it to 0.9 to 1.0%. We've grossly overreacted.
In Nashville, TN (USA) bars and restaurants are closed to stop the spread of the virus. In e-mails obtained by a local television station, and later confirmed authentic by legal council, the e-mails discussed how only 80 of the 20,000 positive cases could be traced to bars and restaurants.
> Tennessee Lookout reporter Nate Rau asks, “The figure you gave of 'more than 80' does lead to a natural question: If there have been over 20,000 positive cases of COVID-19 in Davidson and only 80 or so are traced to restaurants and bars, doesn’t that mean restaurants and bars aren’t a very big problem?"
A day after the story broke they allowed bars and restaurants to re-open:
https://www.tennessean.com/story/money/2020/09/17/nashville-...
Indoor recreation was shut down in this city for 80 cases in a city of 2 million aka .004% of the population.
Point zero zero four percent.
“The results showed that more than a thousand COVID-19 cases had been linked to construction and nursing homes - while bars and restaurants had just 22 cases.”
1,000 cases from construction and nursing homes brings the number to 18,920 cases we need data on. This is the problem. There is so little high confidence tracing data that we can’t make strong decisions on what quarantine actions are materially impactful. Whose to say a substantial amount of that remaining number isn’t caused by bars and restaurants? If that data is out there, please share it. If not, please support more rigorous contact tracing.
You most likely will be infected by a family member or office coworker.
In march during the full lockdowns, something like 20% of the population was still meeting their friends and family behind closed doors like nothing was happening, and this is why the virus didn't die out in 2 weeks.
The reason why China welded apartment doors getting shut was not to prevent people getting out. It was to block family and friends of the apartment house inhabitants from visiting.
Restaurants and bars are very conducive to spread: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article
There is perhaps some factor unique to that town or their contact tracing isn’t extensive?
I'm more inclined to trust an epidemiologist who says they'd rather fly in an airplane than eat at a bar, a quote I found today but regret I can't locate at the moment.
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
Well that's just all of time.
I mean, when on average people died at forty or fifty, with all the exceptions for the early age cases, and there were no real means to either diagnose cancer or even making autopsies, documented cases must have been sensibly less.
When we talk of the past we should do more complete analyisis than simply applying our current metrics.
Hiding under your desk around the clock made zero sense when the odds of being hit with an atomic bomb were fantastically small due to geopolitics.
Hiding in your house when there's no way of knowing who around you is infected, treatments are still primitive, and many people are not taking it seriously is a much more rational decision.
SARS-CoV-2 is ~ 100 nm, room air purifiers with HEPA filters and the filter technology in real N95 masks filter far below this amount. You can make the air cleaner than ever with modern technology to protect yourself.
I'm not entirely hiding at home, but I absolutely don't blame anyone who is, and in fact I'd suggest they're smarter than me for doing so.
No restaurants were physically destroyed by the pandemic. All the buildings, stoves, tables, signage, etc are still around.
The skills of the workers will likely fade only slightly during this pandemic time.
There's likely not much reason to think that in 2022 the dining habits of consumers will be drastically different than in 2019. There wasn't a restaurant bubble prior to 2020 necessitating a huge correction.
Also it's worth noting that government edicts likely aren't the primary cause of business closures at this point.
People (selfishly) don't want to catch the virus and also want to listen to public health advice.
Evidence:
-There were never any real government edicts banning air travel in the continental US (some few places had non-enforced quarantine advisories). Yet air travel has fallen substantially.
-Most large businesses have not returned to in-office work, regardless of no government edicts.
-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.
People (unselfishly) don't want to spread the virus, understanding the public health advice that shows a high number of asymptomatic carriers.
How are you eating and drinking with an n95 mask on?
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!
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.
And fun fact: Even if you were right, and locally this would be true for some unfathomable reason... The lockdown has saved lives... Lives of the rich and well off. However it has cost much more lives than those few percent who would have died if we didn't do anything. And it has caused unimaginable economic hardship across the world. But since the people who die and suffer now, are people not included in the statistics, nobody really cares. I mean why would you care about the repercussions of lockdowns in the 3rd world? We have soo much to worry about here, and we are so unselfishly staying at home to help our fellow humans... What an euphemism.
> 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!).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ok, do you have any evidence for this besides your personal opinion?
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 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 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.
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.
People aren’t flying because what will they do at their destination city?
Large business haven’t returned to office because employees are productive and even more satisfied working from home
Vegas is not really “open”. For example when you’re playing cards and having a drink, the mask must stay on except when you sip.
I spent hours arguing with my commercial landlord about why we closed, and how we can't do business until we have birthday parties, corporate events, etc. His response was "Well, next month, you'll be open next month right?!" I'd say no, then he'd be like, "Well, what about September? October? This will all certainly be over by then!"
These people are arguing with reality. I really am starting to think that Trumpism is the first of a new generation of mental virii that just short circuit the human brain and turn it into mush. Or maybe that's just the greed inherent in the American way. Either way, it sure would have been nice to have some FUCKING LEADERSHIP here.
The United States because of it's physical size (geography) and spread out population, which are interdependent on each other for a way of life, was going to have the cases and problems that it has now no matter what anyone did.
You can blame Trump, but if someone else was in there we'd be in the exact same place, with less media obsession, and people would just be saying "there's nothing we can do better" because, frankly, we can't. The makeup of the United States is incredibly vulnerable to events like this (JIT delivery, trucking as the primary means of goods distribution, long distances and disparate population centers, with different climates, etc., etc.), and the sheer population size makes it difficult to respond to anything en masse, especially when the people can't agree what that en masse response should be!
So yes, it's fucked right now, but it's America, not Trump.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/18/politics/postal-service-face-...
At every stage, Trump has done the worst thing possible. Hundreds of thousands of deaths are DIRECTLY attributed to him.
4 weeks of "everyone wear a mask and stay isolates, we'll pay your salary" would have dramatically dropped case numbers and R0. Instead we're still in our initial outbreak.
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.
The Restaurant Brokers’ study, the only one to make a distinction between chain and independent restaurants, concluded that up to 90 percent of independent establishments close during the first year, and the remaining restaurants will have an average five-year life span.
https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/average-life-span-restaur...
I'm not finding breakouts for other categories yet, but for all new businesses, broken out by year, pre-Covid:
- First year: 21.5%
- Second year: 30%
- Fifth year: 50%
- 10th year: 70%
https://www.national.biz/2019-small-business-failure-rate-st...
- U.S. District Judge William Stickman declaring PA's lockdown orders unconstitutional
And why the hell would Congress be able to overrule states on something like this? What torturous reading of the Commerce Clause gives Congress the power to forbid lockdowns?
"U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, in a similar case out of California related to pandemic restrictions on religious gatherings, wrote in May that elected officials should be allowed latitude when acting in areas “fraught with medical and scientific uncertainties” and should not be subject to second-guessing by an “unelected federal judiciary.”
Further, if there are medical and scientific uncertainties... Erring on the side of constitutional rights seems a LOT less potentially exploitable to me. If you think that something is so critical that you need to permanently remove rights to combat it... You should be able to back that up with incontrovertible evidence.
If this is true it may change my congress and senate votes from blue to red.
I won't vote in a presidential candidate that supports lockdowns "if the science supports it" and will make me wear a mask.
Can his party truly make my state do these things?
If so that's terrifying to me and there's no way I'm giving blue, the people I voted for all my life until this year, this type of power.
- Let's ban alcohol due to all the harm it does in the world and plus I, a non-drinker, don't want get hit by a drunk driver. It's better we just ban it all together and everyone will be safe - what do you say?
- Next up is mandatory condoms! I mean there's no assurance that people won't spread AIDS so in the name of public health condoms are now mandatory. Enjoy!
- Time for our old friend "unhealthy" food. Obesity makes my insurance premiums go up and it's well established that obesity is a social disease. Time to put an end to this too.
- Ugh, smoking. All smoking will be banned because I can definitely smell that when the car ahead of me has a smoker in it. Ban this too.
I think first up we should do alcohol, what do you say?
Enjoy your Sunday
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Lockdown protects the public health and has long standing precedent. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/197/11
Just come out and say you're a selfish person who doesn't care if they harm people instead of hiding behind all of the pretense that it's restricting you too much.
Effective determination and points of control can be thorny.
Ah I love the "selfish" card.
Perhaps the pro-lockdown crowd is so selfish they helped 60% of businesses close.
Perhaps the pro-lockdown crowd is so selfish that they helped tens of millions become unemployed.
Perhaps the anti-choice crowd is so selfish that they restricted the choices of others due to their own fears.
Perhaps.
Perhaps my side is simply pro-choice.
Edit to respond to downvotes: Nor was it constitutional to institute sweeping metadata collection as a new normal in response to an emergency situation. Nor is it constitutional to make encryption illegal as the new normal because of an emergency. Etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(More specifically, legal penalties for intentionally/knowingly spreading it were r̵e̵m̵o̵v̵e̵d̵ reduced. CA was also the only state to have such penalties as far as I'm aware)
HIV positive people on medication, cannot spread HIV. It's factually safer to have sex with an HIV positive person on meds, than a person who doesn't get tested and doesn't know their status.
This law exists so that HIV positive people who cannot spread the virus are not legally obligated to tell others they have the virus.
Please learn more about what it means to be HIV positive, and the discrimination that comes with it before making these horrible disparaging comments.
Undetectable = Uninfectable (u=u) maybe a good thing for you to Google.
Personally, I'm still not sure how that doesn't count as rape by deception, but whatever.
In any case, I brought it up to compare to pandemic mask mandates. A "gay sex condom mandate" 30 or 40 years ago would have been incredibly effective at containing HIV (assuming it was actually followed), and HIV was at the time FAR more deadly than COVID-19. The fact that people consider one acceptable and one unthinkable is IMO interesting.
Absurdly false. Not everyone responds the same to medication, not everyone has the same health conditions, and not everyone begins treatment at the same time. Further to that, completely besides the point:
If you have a fatal disease that can only be kept at bay with powerful ARV's (that are often expensive and loaded with serious side effects), then you have the responsibility to inform those you potentially expose to it. Paramedics, doctors, dentists, sexual partners. Basic decency. You are KNOWINGLY making potentially life and death decisions for others by depriving them of information.
This means that in most cases, a plaintiff would have to prove actual negligence by a preponderance of the evidence.”
The law does not require that someone be on HIV medication, you have to prove ill intent or negligence.
It’s objectively easier to stop HIV with coordinated effort than COVID, so therefore it is impossible to stop SARS-CoV-2 with the current population education/skill level.
Yelp seems to be pushing the flashier numbers here on the 50-60% of closures that were permanent, but I'm not seeing a comparison to other years - I'd assume, in general, a business closing for any reason tends to be fairly fatal, pandemic or not.
It’s internally consistent to believe that most business survive temporary closures (or not! I don’t know), but also that temporary closures are more of the exception than the norm. If that turns out to be true, then fretting the rate of “temporary” closures that become permanent is probably not even a terribly interesting statistic.
I'm rereading David Graeber's' "Debt." While I think the "history of" part got little weak as he described more modern systems, I have to admit that his definition of money has changed the way I think.
The nonexistence of effective bankruptcy is a terrible thing, and we have a pretty shallow well of ideas to draw from unless we look beyond modern economic constructs. It may not be a bad idea (besides being radical and scary) to declare a jubilee of some sort, at least for small businesses. They're bearing the full brunt of this pandemic while their debtors are mostly doing well.
Every airline in the world is essentially bankrupt without government intervention right now. Very few will go out of business, and those that do are at least protected by limited liability. It's only small businesses that are actually liable for losses.
Ultimately, the 2008 financial crisis issues were pretty abstract. This time it's a lot more visceral, intuitive.
It was the worst of all worlds and you're blaming it on the wrong people.
What does this mean? That the Fed will just print money to cover every business expense of every business during "proper" lockdowns? That seems like a terrible idea.
But if you are a smaller business you are just going to be left to rot.
Yeah maybe they will have to buy less hundred dollar toilet cover for the military, or less last generation missiles, I think that should be more than enough to pay for it. Or maybe less subsidies for the oil industry.
That's really dishonest. The unemployment insurance boost ($600/wk for many months), continuing in a limited fashion, was huge and expensive. And the PPP (even if there were execution problems) was a forgivable loan, basically a grant. A huge amount of money was pumped into maintaining employment.
As far as “was the mandatory enforcement an overstep”, based on public polling the answer is an emphatic no. More Americans remain concerned that we opened too soon rather than too late, and large majorities remain voluntarily locked down (depending on vocation of course) despite the lifting of official bans.
Restaurants can survive this. But what they were doing in 2019 is not going to work.
Yes, it was a lifetime event. But the failed responses of many leaders shows they shouldn't really have the power in the first place.
Democrats were still bickering about Trump's impeachment until the end of January (which turned out to be a big nothing, which we all knew). Trump started the ball rolling when it comes to Covid and started banning flights from China early on. He was called a racist and a bigot for doing the right thing.
The Mayor of New York put the elderly back into retirement homes, even after testing positive for Covid. This contributed to many deaths and we still don't know to what extent, because data on it won't be released until the totally random time of the day after the November election. Many other Democrat governors followed suit.
The Governor of Michigan has made herself the dictator of the state. She overrules anything she doesn't like with executive orders, essentially making the local government void.
Covid has shown us the true colors of our local leaders: they really just want to be petty dictators and aren't really trying to help the people at all. Democrats have pounced on the opportunity to destroy the economy and blame Trump, all in the hopes to win the next election.
They've even become anti-vaxxors, trying to put the seeds of doubt into the minds of anything that will listen that if a Vaccine comes out and Trump is president, it's bad and you shouldn't take it.
Even big tech is doing the dirty work of the Democrats by censoring all opposing opinions which directly results in election interference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957%E2%80%931958_influenza_pa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic
Sweden's deaths in 2020 are at the highest since 1993. What happened in 1993? A flu pandemic, that no one has ever heard of.
We may be undercounting the number of deaths.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
My preference is a more Bayesian argument a la Huemer's In Praise of Passivity: https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm
> Abstract: Political actors, including voters, activists, and leaders, are often ignorant of basic facts relevant to policy choices. Even experts have little understanding of the working of society and little ability to predict future outcomes. Only the most simple and uncontroversial political claims can be counted on. This is partly because political knowledge is very difficult to attain, and partly because individuals are not sufficiently motivated to attain it. As a result, the best advice for political actors is very often to simply stop trying to solve social problems, since interventions not based on precise understanding are likely to do more harm than good.