In Nashville they closed bars and restaurants for 6 months because .004% of the cases came from bars and restaurants.
We need to give people choice.
If we wait until we get a vaccine it will be Fall 2022 and many Americans won't get it. What then? No bar and gym re-openenings until X percent of the population is verified to be vaccinated? Mandatory vaccination checks on entrance? Punt again and find reasons not to re-open until 2022?
There are already areas of the country where "this" isn't going on, where businesses are open at full capacity and the public is happy to patronize them. Even in the most socially distanced areas, there's lots of people going on vacations and eating in restaurants and having house parties with their friends and family. So when you talk about reopening in Easter 2022, it's hard to connect that with the state of things today, much less the likely results when vaccines finish rolling out.
The problem with this strategy is that most restaurants cannot survive on reduced capacity or economic participation by the public. A huge percentage of people aren’t going to patronize restaurants until a vaccine is found, and if things open back up and people don’t show, we’re going to have a very different economic problem on our hands.
The real issue is the timeline and structure of work "until it is time to reopen".
Let's be clear, it will be time to fully reopen once we reach near-herd immunity or we have a vaccine with fairly widespread deployment — say 12 months out?
Until then, restaurant and bar demand seems like it will be weird: takeout should recover, social distancing and masks heavily affecting dine-in, and zero major social gatherings (crowded bars, concerts, festivals, sporting events, etc.).
So the question is: can the state support the workers serving the latter end of the food and drink service spectrum for 12 months? I think it's going to be ugly.
I think the major miscalculation you’re making here is that business will magically return to these places as soon as things open back up.
People are not going to patronize restaurants and bars as long as the risk of infection remains high. If half of people stay home due to Covid and the other half don’t care, most businesses won’t be able to sustain. A quick recovery is completely dependent on full economic participation, particularly by those lucky enough to still have jobs.
The US still has no scalable testing system, despite being promised one over a month ago, and we still don’t yet know if Covid can reinfect people. Opening back up without testing puts small businesses at risk by asking them to start spending money to open back up with no guarantee business will come back. If that happens, the government will have more people to bail out.
You're done because we both know the math is correct, my argument is sound, and you don't like that. I see it often in these types of debates. It's easier to walk away from a losing position than to defend it.
I'm not sure what you think I changed but the math is fairly straight forward.
Nashville metro is 2 million people. There were 80 cases confirmed traced to bars and restaurants. They were keeping bars and restaurants closed because they were "hotspots".
When you take 80 and divide by 2,000,000 you get .00004 or .004%. Therefore, the government was keeping bars and restaurants shut down because .004% of the infections came from bars and restaurants.
They restricted indoor recreation for 2 million because of 80 cases.
I agree with most of your points, but not some of the conclusions.
Re-opening schools is very high priority, and very very difficult (some say not possible until we have a cure, full stop). Re-opening a restaurant is fairly low priority, and very very easy.
This isn't a board game where a player can only make one decision every turn. Opening restaurants and bars now does not mean that schools open earlier, or later, or at all.
("re-opening will cause another spike, which is pushing out the epidemic longer" Re-opening is going fine in NYC, terribly in the sunbelt. It can be done safely or it can be done badly.)
IMO, a big issue is people forgetting or actively eschewing the customary precautions - going into social mode and stopping paying attention to distancing, or wearing their mask on their chin because nobody will call them out. In this regard, restaurants and bars are much worse than service businesses where participants remain specifically focused on the task at hand.
Opening restaurants and bars just seems to be pushing for some forced return to normality, so that the non-risk-adverse can pretend the epidemic is going away on its own. Restaurants themselves, like much of the economy, would be better served by a rent moratorium than this impatient rush to get the treadmill moving again.
Exactly. While things are closed, there's a reason for restaurants to demand support from the government. Everyone suffers, but homogeneously and less.
If we open up, support from the government zeroes out and bars and restaurants will find themselves in two circumstances: they will be partially full because people are scared to be in public (and will struggle to make ends meet and maybe fail), or they will be plenty full until someone brings in COVID-19, a bunch of folks get sick, contact-tracing tracks it back to the bar or restaurant, word gets around, and business at that place crashes because it's a plague vector. Some businesses will win in this circumstance. Most will lose.
20% are sick and can't work. Then a good chunk of other 80% are not needed because a good chunk of customers are gone. Then quite a bit of people are scared of getting virus, ain't in the mood because of their relatives dying and/or economic situation and don't consume. Demand goes even lower. More people loose their jobs and demand goes even lower. And the spiral continues.
Bars and restaurants are great for spreading the virus. Once people learn it the hard way, remaining people won't go there that much.
In my country patronising of bars and restaurants fell down the cliff in a couple days mid-march. Closing them down due to quarantine was just a formality in many cases. Sure, some people would still go. But they wouldn't have enough traffic to cover fixed costs.
COVID is still killing hundreds of people per day in the United States (450/day currently), and hospitals are still running very close to capacity with extended delays for treatment in many cases. The numbers are slowly trending better but wishful thinking doesn’t mean it’s over.
> And it's not just business that needs to be open. People do too, for their mental state and livelihoods. If China couldn't make it happen we certainly can't.
There’s quite a range of options between lockdowns and doing nothing. The restaurant and bar industry favor the latter because their businesses are the highest risk and the owners didn’t want to spend money on air quality upgrades but that doesn’t mean that those are the only possible options.
I don't follow. I'm not ignoring that. We locked down to prevent a spike, and in many places the spike has been successfully prevented, so those places are now figuring out how to open up. Some people say that this is irresponsible - that nobody should open up until the coronavirus can be eradicated - but this isn't realistic and isn't what public health officials think should happen.
Where I live, well over 50% of all new community cases have been associated with bars and restaurants. The bars have been ordered closed until there's an effective vaccine. The restaurants are open, but patronage is far below pre-pandemic levels because, even without a government order, most people don't want to risk dying for a restaurant meal.
The reality is that bars and restaurants aren't safe to operate as long as SARS-CoV-2 is spreading in the population. This is a catastrophe for their owners and employees, but it is the epidemiological reality.
Most countries don't allow businesses to stockpile explosives in residential areas because the risks of an unintended mass casualty event is too high. During this pandemic, operating a bar or restaurant is similarly unacceptably dangerous and cannot be permitted any more than residential storage of explosives can be permitted.
No amount of bleating about 'muh rent payments' or 'muh rights' will change this, or make patrons decide to risk their own lives for the benefit of the industry.
People are protecting themselves. Most are avoiding restaurants, bars, and gyms completely. It doesn't matter that they're open.
Trump has the right idea, that people need to be made less afraid of the virus. But his execution is backwards, people aren't idiots.
The priority should have been relaxing laws to allow existing businesses to do delivery. Allowing stores to sell goods outdoors in the parking lot. Getting a couple good masks to every citizen, even though it meant reusing them. Actually useful things, instead of telling everyone not to worry about it.
The constant surprised_pikachu.jpg is what really gets me. We know what happens when you re-open businesses. More people get sick. It's totally predictable! Yet the media breathlessly reports how shocked everyone is at the "surge" or "second wave" every time a region tries to re-open. And, regions keep trying it! "We're going to carefully re-open bars and nail salons and see what happens..." says the government. Without mask use and social distancing, it is totally predictable what is going to happen, morons!
[For some unknown reason, HN doesn't let me post any more today, so replying as an edit]
Excellent point about having exit criteria. Just to pick a state at random, Pennsylvania [1] explains their criteria pretty well. They're looking for less than 50 new confirmed cases per 100,000 population reported in the previous 14 days. Which seems way too many to me, but what do I know, I'm not an epidemiologist. These criteria need to be open to change if they're wrong, though. If they notice cases increasing after re-opening, they need to 1. close back down, and 2. adjust their criteria downward so not to make the same mistake again.
> But in September, we opened bars and restaurants and gyms, inviting pandemic spread even as we knew the seasonality of the disease would make everything much riskier in the fall.
In California, things were pretty restricted for the most part, with bars and restaurants limited to take-out or outside service and gyms either closed or drastically limited in capacity.
The current spread doesn't seem to be from businesses, and indeed retail stores are still open.
A "concrete plan" in this situation would include milestones (based on infection rates and the like) for easing restrictions and for re-imposing them if things regress, rather than specific dates, which can't really be forecast.
In Nashville they closed bars and restaurants for 6 months because .004% of the cases came from bars and restaurants.
We need to give people choice.
If we wait until we get a vaccine it will be Fall 2022 and many Americans won't get it. What then? No bar and gym re-openenings until X percent of the population is verified to be vaccinated? Mandatory vaccination checks on entrance? Punt again and find reasons not to re-open until 2022?
Let people and businesses make their own choices.
Allow all re-openings and let people choose.
reply