8 ms·

I'm surprised we're not seeing plans for some businesses to reopen with restrictions. I think it will be a while before we allow haircuts and manicures again,

I'm surprised we're not seeing plans for some businesses to reopen with restrictions. I think it will be a while before we allow haircuts and manicures again, but I see no reason why we can't increase the types of businesses allowed open. Limiting occupancy, requiring PPE, and enforcing social distancing appear to be reasonable requirements. I hope the politicians and government workers are busy trying to find a middle-ground and not just playing it safe to cover their asses.

abfan1127 7y ago
why haircuts and manicures? Its a low population setting (1:1). If there is proper hand washing between clients, each new client gets a squirt of sanitizer, and both clients and stylists wear a mask? Require every haircut to start with a shampoo for mechanical disinfection.
- 01100011 7y ago
  That's a decision for those in government, but personally I see it as a balance of risk vs reward. There is a high risk of infection and relatively little benefit. It is probably better, for society as a whole, to pay the unemployment payments and have long hair for a while. Shampoo doesn't remove the virus from one's lungs or exhalations. I'm not sure what benefit shampoo would have over, say, gloves. PPE is good but hairstylists aren't usually trained in its proper use. I would hope dentists' offices reopen before hairstylists. Dentists are presumably more able to properly use PPE and disinfectants.
  - irq11 7y ago
    ” There is a high risk of infection and relatively little benefit. It is probably better, for society as a whole, to pay the unemployment payments and have long hair for a while.” Citation absolutely required. We’re talking about people’s lives here, and there’s zero evidence for this kind of intervention. Everyone says they’re “listening to the science” to make these kinds of decisions, but where is it? Why can’t we be letting people get haircuts while wearing masks? Particularly in a place like San Francisco, where there have been 1,400 cases total and 23 deaths. It’s simply irrational now, and a lot closer to virtue signaling than anything with a scientific basis. Don’t just downvote: provide affirmative evidence.
    - the_watcher 7y ago
      > there’s zero evidence for this kind of intervention. Citation absolutely required. While there is definitely a ton of uncertainty around what causes spread, the one thing that there seems to be broad agreement on is that sustained time in a shared pocket of air with an infected person is the most likely transmission vector.
      - irq11 7y ago
        No, that’s not the way it works. If you want to take people’s livelihoods away from them, you have to justify the seizure, not the other way around. Hypotheses don’t count. Provide actual scientific proof. You’re ruining people’s lives.
        esoterica 7y ago
        The virus is tanking the economy, not the lockdown. Air travel is down 97% even though they are no laws against flying places. You can lift the lockdown if you want, but if people are too afraid to board planes and go to restaurants and bars, you are not going to magically bounce back to 4% unemployment and 2% GDP growth overnight. > If you want to take people’s livelihoods away from them, you have to justify the seizure, not the other way around. Conversely, you could argue that if you want to take actions that risk killing hundreds of thousands of people, then the onus is on you to prove that your actions won't cost hundreds of thousands of lives. You can't claim that enacting a lockdown requires scientific proof but lifting one does not, when the potential consequences for the latter are even higher than the former.
        icelancer 7y ago
        >> Air travel is down 97% even though they are no laws against flying places Sure there is. It's called mass unemployment and closure of non-essential businesses. Why would people fly to branch offices if they're closed? >> Conversely, you could argue that if you want to take actions that risk killing hundreds of thousands of people You don't know this to be true. There is plenty of evidence showing lockdowns have limited impact, no impact, or even worse, exacerbate the problem. https://www.wsj.com/articles/lockdowns-wont-stop-the-spread-11586474560 https://www.wsj.com/articles/lockdowns-wont-stop-the-spread-...
  - randycupertino 7y ago
    > PPE is good but hairstylists aren't usually trained in its proper use. Higher end salons use PPE for keratin treatments and offer them to their clients due to the straightening chemicals (allegedly not formaldehyde but many products still contain). Also, nail salon techs had been starting to wear masks and even face shields due to powder coating and dust from dremeling gel coating and acrylics. I don't think there would be a high barrier to entry to transition wider PPE rollout across the field, because it's already implemented among some of the treatments.
- cylinder 7y ago
  Salons/barbers have stayed open in Australia the entire time, which has perplexed many but there have been no cases traced back to a salon.
cloudwizard 7y ago
The local public health departments need time to get testing and tracing working. It is the only way to open up safely. We are way behind the Asian countries that learned the lessons of SARS.
wpietri 7y ago
From what the SF and CA governments have been saying, that's definitely next. Part of the goal of having mask orders now is to get people used to it. But until our test-and-trace capacity exceeds the rate of new infections, putting more people on the streets is only digging the hole deeper.
adrr 7y ago
You can start opening things up, it doesn't mean people will go out to eat, get haircuts, visit movie theaters, workout at a gym or travel. As long as the virus is out there and actively spreading, people will voluntarily shelter. Businesses will still go bankrupt as most retail stores and restaurants run at around breakeven in net income. Also there is the liability issue. If we want to get back to normal getting community spread to 0 should be the goal and we need to keep everything locked down to achieve that.
- _se 7y ago
  That is ridiculous and impossible. Don't kid yourself thinking that it will go away. It's not going to happen.
  - adrr 7y ago
    Other countries have achieved it. Why can’t the US do it?
    - cavisne 7y ago
      Which ones, other than SK the other good example (japan, china, singapore) all turned out to not be testing.
      - thamer 7y ago
        https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/27/asia/new-zealand-elimination-coronavirus-jacinda-ardern-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/27/asia/new-zealand-elimination-...
      - tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
        Vietnam. Contacts put in hard quarantine (hotel/camp with guards), _contacts of contacts_ put in home quarantine.
        pests 7y ago
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
especially for the businesses who are struggling. At least let the most desperate ones open up and get some income. Gov should have some compassion on the small businesses that depend on monthly incomes.
NineStarPoint 7y ago
We don’t even have enough PPE for current use levels yet do we? I hope people are trying to solve issues like that too, but I feel we’ve got quite a ways to go.
jwlake 7y ago
The thing I'm confused by is why a costco is open that has like 1000 people per day and a flower shop that has 20 customers per day isn't open. Is the flower shop dangerous? Is it less essential on the yearly timeframe? This lockdown isn't measured in days right now, it's measured in months. What's "essential" in days is not what's "essential" in months.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- urban_strike 7y ago
  Flowers aren't consumed for survival, i.e. "essential". I'm not sure how intervals of time has any effect on that.
  - in_cahoots 7y ago
    Shouldn’t the metric incorporate the risk each activity entails? A good example is gardeners. Gardeners work alone or in teams of two, can obey social distancing, and generally don’t even talk to their clients on a regular basis. What is the threat here? What is so magical about the word essential? On the flip side large alcohol stores like Bevmo can stay open and serve hundreds of customers a day because they sell cheese and crackers and somehow that makes them ‘essential’. It doesn’t make any sense, unless the true goal is enforcement through fear and propaganda. Disrupt people’s lives enough and they’ll start to think that the alternative must be truly terrible. That’s why you get articles claiming that even young people are susceptible where the simple math shows that the risk is low. Cherry-picked stories about the handful of children who died from the virus, instead of articles about the kids going hungry because they can’t get two free meals a day. It’s fear-mongering as public policy.
    - objectivetruth 7y ago
      1) Liquor stores are kept open because a (surprisingly high) percentage of the population are severe alcoholics and sudden withdrawal can kill them. 2) No public health professional has time to list and quantify all of the routine processes of every profession to create a complex matrix of risk. And 99% of the public would ignore that matrix if it was created and published. The simpler and more effective public health communication is "stay home." 3) Your hypothetical pair of gardeners might not see their clients that day, but they still get up, get breakfast, get supplies at the store, fuel up their truck and equipment at the gas station, drop off a check at the bank after work, etc., and they can interact with other people at each of those stops. 4) Articles about young people that die from the virus are not trying to hide "simple math that the risk is low." They are trying to convince young people that the risk is non-zero, to prevent them from spreading the virus while pre- or asymptomatic. 5) "Children dying from a virus" and "children going hungry because they can't get two free meals a day" are BOTH public policy issues. Dooming an extra hundred? thousand? ten thousand? people to severe illness and death to avoid having to deliver emergency rations and meals to a million people is a false dilemma. In my medium-sized US city, schools and other community agencies have been distributing meals and rations for seven weeks now and we have zero cases of death by starvation.
tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
Switzerland actually started reopening with haircuts and manicures. Certainly pressure from groups representing hairdressers was a big part of it, but the justification they use is that contact tracing can be done reliably in such a situation. Keep in mind that they also want to reopen schools, citing dubious claims about children not contributing much to the spread, staying silent about the likely true motivation (sending the parents back to work).
- randycupertino 7y ago
  > Switzerland actually started reopening with haircuts and manicures. I've been saving a ton of money without going for dye jobs, highlights, root melt and cut every other month, monthly esthetician and biweekly manicures. I'm almost considering growing out my greys during this, although would be subject to ageism in my industry so sort of on the fence for now.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  The science on children not being significant vectors of COVID (and, by extension, school closures not being very effective) is actually reasonably well established: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/apr/06/school-closures-have-little-impact-on-spread-of-coronavirus-study https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/apr/06/school-clo...
  - sjg007 7y ago
    I don’t believe that.
  - greedo 7y ago
    That's not quite accurate, according to the article: "“While school closure as a measure on its own is predicted to have a limited effectiveness in controlling Covid-19 transmission, when combined with intense social distancing it plays an important role in severing remaining contacts between households and thus ensuring transmission declines.”"
azernik 7y ago
We are seeing them, they're just in early phases; e.g. Italy has already announced its plans, and CA/OR/WA are talking about very specific goals before opening back up (https://abc7news.com/when-is-california-opening-up-reopening-plan-reopen-newsom/6120230/ https://abc7news.com/when-is-california-opening-up-reopening...)
jrnichols 7y ago
Texas is about to start opening up some businesses. the flower shop example we see below would fall under that. time will tell, though.

abfan1127 7y ago

why haircuts and manicures? Its a low population setting (1:1). If there is proper hand washing between clients, each new client gets a squirt of sanitizer, and both clients and stylists wear a mask? Require every haircut to start with a shampoo for mechanical disinfection.

01100011 7y ago
That's a decision for those in government, but personally I see it as a balance of risk vs reward. There is a high risk of infection and relatively little benefit. It is probably better, for society as a whole, to pay the unemployment payments and have long hair for a while. Shampoo doesn't remove the virus from one's lungs or exhalations. I'm not sure what benefit shampoo would have over, say, gloves. PPE is good but hairstylists aren't usually trained in its proper use. I would hope dentists' offices reopen before hairstylists. Dentists are presumably more able to properly use PPE and disinfectants.
- irq11 7y ago
  ” There is a high risk of infection and relatively little benefit. It is probably better, for society as a whole, to pay the unemployment payments and have long hair for a while.” Citation absolutely required. We’re talking about people’s lives here, and there’s zero evidence for this kind of intervention. Everyone says they’re “listening to the science” to make these kinds of decisions, but where is it? Why can’t we be letting people get haircuts while wearing masks? Particularly in a place like San Francisco, where there have been 1,400 cases total and 23 deaths. It’s simply irrational now, and a lot closer to virtue signaling than anything with a scientific basis. Don’t just downvote: provide affirmative evidence.
  - the_watcher 7y ago
    > there’s zero evidence for this kind of intervention. Citation absolutely required. While there is definitely a ton of uncertainty around what causes spread, the one thing that there seems to be broad agreement on is that sustained time in a shared pocket of air with an infected person is the most likely transmission vector.
    - irq11 7y ago
      No, that’s not the way it works. If you want to take people’s livelihoods away from them, you have to justify the seizure, not the other way around. Hypotheses don’t count. Provide actual scientific proof. You’re ruining people’s lives.
      - esoterica 7y ago
        The virus is tanking the economy, not the lockdown. Air travel is down 97% even though they are no laws against flying places. You can lift the lockdown if you want, but if people are too afraid to board planes and go to restaurants and bars, you are not going to magically bounce back to 4% unemployment and 2% GDP growth overnight. > If you want to take people’s livelihoods away from them, you have to justify the seizure, not the other way around. Conversely, you could argue that if you want to take actions that risk killing hundreds of thousands of people, then the onus is on you to prove that your actions won't cost hundreds of thousands of lives. You can't claim that enacting a lockdown requires scientific proof but lifting one does not, when the potential consequences for the latter are even higher than the former.
        icelancer 7y ago
        >> Air travel is down 97% even though they are no laws against flying places Sure there is. It's called mass unemployment and closure of non-essential businesses. Why would people fly to branch offices if they're closed? >> Conversely, you could argue that if you want to take actions that risk killing hundreds of thousands of people You don't know this to be true. There is plenty of evidence showing lockdowns have limited impact, no impact, or even worse, exacerbate the problem. https://www.wsj.com/articles/lockdowns-wont-stop-the-spread-11586474560 https://www.wsj.com/articles/lockdowns-wont-stop-the-spread-...
- randycupertino 7y ago
  > PPE is good but hairstylists aren't usually trained in its proper use. Higher end salons use PPE for keratin treatments and offer them to their clients due to the straightening chemicals (allegedly not formaldehyde but many products still contain). Also, nail salon techs had been starting to wear masks and even face shields due to powder coating and dust from dremeling gel coating and acrylics. I don't think there would be a high barrier to entry to transition wider PPE rollout across the field, because it's already implemented among some of the treatments.
cylinder 7y ago
Salons/barbers have stayed open in Australia the entire time, which has perplexed many but there have been no cases traced back to a salon.

cloudwizard 7y ago

The local public health departments need time to get testing and tracing working. It is the only way to open up safely. We are way behind the Asian countries that learned the lessons of SARS.

wpietri 7y ago

From what the SF and CA governments have been saying, that's definitely next. Part of the goal of having mask orders now is to get people used to it. But until our test-and-trace capacity exceeds the rate of new infections, putting more people on the streets is only digging the hole deeper.

adrr 7y ago

You can start opening things up, it doesn't mean people will go out to eat, get haircuts, visit movie theaters, workout at a gym or travel. As long as the virus is out there and actively spreading, people will voluntarily shelter. Businesses will still go bankrupt as most retail stores and restaurants run at around breakeven in net income. Also there is the liability issue. If we want to get back to normal getting community spread to 0 should be the goal and we need to keep everything locked down to achieve that.

_se 7y ago
That is ridiculous and impossible. Don't kid yourself thinking that it will go away. It's not going to happen.
- adrr 7y ago
  Other countries have achieved it. Why can’t the US do it?
  - cavisne 7y ago
    Which ones, other than SK the other good example (japan, china, singapore) all turned out to not be testing.
    - thamer 7y ago
      https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/27/asia/new-zealand-elimination-coronavirus-jacinda-ardern-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/27/asia/new-zealand-elimination-...
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
      Vietnam. Contacts put in hard quarantine (hotel/camp with guards), _contacts of contacts_ put in home quarantine.
      - pests 7y ago

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago

especially for the businesses who are struggling. At least let the most desperate ones open up and get some income. Gov should have some compassion on the small businesses that depend on monthly incomes.

NineStarPoint 7y ago

We don’t even have enough PPE for current use levels yet do we? I hope people are trying to solve issues like that too, but I feel we’ve got quite a ways to go.

jwlake 7y ago

The thing I'm confused by is why a costco is open that has like 1000 people per day and a flower shop that has 20 customers per day isn't open. Is the flower shop dangerous? Is it less essential on the yearly timeframe? This lockdown isn't measured in days right now, it's measured in months. What's "essential" in days is not what's "essential" in months.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
urban_strike 7y ago
Flowers aren't consumed for survival, i.e. "essential". I'm not sure how intervals of time has any effect on that.
- in_cahoots 7y ago
  Shouldn’t the metric incorporate the risk each activity entails? A good example is gardeners. Gardeners work alone or in teams of two, can obey social distancing, and generally don’t even talk to their clients on a regular basis. What is the threat here? What is so magical about the word essential? On the flip side large alcohol stores like Bevmo can stay open and serve hundreds of customers a day because they sell cheese and crackers and somehow that makes them ‘essential’. It doesn’t make any sense, unless the true goal is enforcement through fear and propaganda. Disrupt people’s lives enough and they’ll start to think that the alternative must be truly terrible. That’s why you get articles claiming that even young people are susceptible where the simple math shows that the risk is low. Cherry-picked stories about the handful of children who died from the virus, instead of articles about the kids going hungry because they can’t get two free meals a day. It’s fear-mongering as public policy.
  - objectivetruth 7y ago
    1) Liquor stores are kept open because a (surprisingly high) percentage of the population are severe alcoholics and sudden withdrawal can kill them. 2) No public health professional has time to list and quantify all of the routine processes of every profession to create a complex matrix of risk. And 99% of the public would ignore that matrix if it was created and published. The simpler and more effective public health communication is "stay home." 3) Your hypothetical pair of gardeners might not see their clients that day, but they still get up, get breakfast, get supplies at the store, fuel up their truck and equipment at the gas station, drop off a check at the bank after work, etc., and they can interact with other people at each of those stops. 4) Articles about young people that die from the virus are not trying to hide "simple math that the risk is low." They are trying to convince young people that the risk is non-zero, to prevent them from spreading the virus while pre- or asymptomatic. 5) "Children dying from a virus" and "children going hungry because they can't get two free meals a day" are BOTH public policy issues. Dooming an extra hundred? thousand? ten thousand? people to severe illness and death to avoid having to deliver emergency rations and meals to a million people is a false dilemma. In my medium-sized US city, schools and other community agencies have been distributing meals and rations for seven weeks now and we have zero cases of death by starvation.

tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago

Switzerland actually started reopening with haircuts and manicures. Certainly pressure from groups representing hairdressers was a big part of it, but the justification they use is that contact tracing can be done reliably in such a situation. Keep in mind that they also want to reopen schools, citing dubious claims about children not contributing much to the spread, staying silent about the likely true motivation (sending the parents back to work).

randycupertino 7y ago
> Switzerland actually started reopening with haircuts and manicures. I've been saving a ton of money without going for dye jobs, highlights, root melt and cut every other month, monthly esthetician and biweekly manicures. I'm almost considering growing out my greys during this, although would be subject to ageism in my industry so sort of on the fence for now.
9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
The science on children not being significant vectors of COVID (and, by extension, school closures not being very effective) is actually reasonably well established: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/apr/06/school-closures-have-little-impact-on-spread-of-coronavirus-study https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/apr/06/school-clo...
- sjg007 7y ago
  I don’t believe that.
- greedo 7y ago
  That's not quite accurate, according to the article: "“While school closure as a measure on its own is predicted to have a limited effectiveness in controlling Covid-19 transmission, when combined with intense social distancing it plays an important role in severing remaining contacts between households and thus ensuring transmission declines.”"

azernik 7y ago

We are seeing them, they're just in early phases; e.g. Italy has already announced its plans, and CA/OR/WA are talking about very specific goals before opening back up (https://abc7news.com/when-is-california-opening-up-reopening-plan-reopen-newsom/6120230/ https://abc7news.com/when-is-california-opening-up-reopening...)

jrnichols 7y ago

Texas is about to start opening up some businesses. the flower shop example we see below would fall under that. time will tell, though.