6 ms·

Seems kind of silly to tell people who have been working at customer facing jobs this entire time that 8 hours at work is ok, but a few hours at dinner isn't. I

• akiselev 6y ago
  Healthcare personnel get COVID as such higher rates than most other fields because of the rate of exposure. Being in a small room with someone with COVID for a few hours is far riskier than passing 100 people with COVID on the street or in a big box store over the course of eight hours, where your exposure would be measured in seconds or minutes. Most jobs outside of transportation also limit exposure to a relatively small group of regulars like a neighborhood grocery store, so we're already in the range of acceptable consequences (since most people need to work to eat). Creating transmission links between disparate regions is outside the range of acceptable consequences (IMO, and for the first year at least)
• thelean12 6y ago
  You seem to be under the impression that things are fair during a pandemic. It's not, and shouldn't be.
• giarc 6y ago
  Depending on where you live or work, you might be wearing a mask and other PPE during your working hours. You wouldn't be wearing a mask or PPE during dinner (and likely any other time during the visit).
  • jmckib 6y ago
    In addition to that, Thanksgiving often requires traveling to another area (which is what the headline is specifically about). You also don't need to attend Thanksgiving, but you do need to work. We are probably going to have vaccines for everyone by summer or possibly as early as April, with those who are at risk getting vaccinated by next month. It would be extra unfortunate to die right now when a vaccine is right around the bend.
    • thn-gap 6y ago
      I'm conflicted about this. We need to work, because we made it in such way. Where I live, the subway is packed with people that go to work, many of them, to office jobs that are not needed. You claim that people do not need to attend Thanksgiving. I guess the same goes for Christmas, or most family and friends gathering during the worst times of the pandemic. But this incurs a huge toil on mental health. People suffer. I'm not saying to ignore restrictions and put people's will to meet above everything. But I think it's important to see what are we prioritizing. How we are considering that 40h of work are irreplaceable, but we must avoid seeing family and friends. And how long can you sustain this? Imagine this needs to last one more year. A position where I'm forced to work undesired jobs during 40h per week under the threat of unemployment, poverty and starving, at the same time that I'm refused many social activities it's one where I'd rather kill myself.
  • lhorie 6y ago
    In addition to mask mandates, I've also seen copious amounts of hand sanitizers at store entrances, 6ft floor stickers and large plastic shields at checkout stations, and even thermometer checks in some store entrances.
• vmception 6y ago
  It's more about the communal traveling, or even isolated traveling, and mixing diagnosis from different areas, exacerbating local transmission. Not silly at all.
  • rixrax 6y ago
    Exactly this. It’s one thing for local people to spread it from one to the other. But now you have a country wide super spreader event where you mix people from all over - either spreading virus to their relatives and their communities when visiting somewhere, or taking it back to their own communities after the thanksgiving. Just in time to do it all over again during Xmas, and then New Years.
• jczhang 6y ago
  Not a comparable situation because you are now potentially spreading it to people in your family whom you have not seen since.
• shredprez 6y ago
  Aren't people stuck working out in public exactly the people who should think carefully about passing that risk on to others in their extended family? It's a horrible position to be in, but I don't think it's silly.
• sp332 6y ago
  Spending a small amount of time around an infected person where you're both wearing masks is much less likely to spread the disease than sharing an enclosed space for an extended period of time with no masks. Edit: source https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7362827/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7362827/
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• core-questions 6y ago
  > the government for being unwilling to pay people to stay home The difficulty here is that there are some truly essential services, and there are some businesses that will die if not attended to, and we can't simply just let that all fall apart or people will starve. The government does actually have to grapple with questions like that, and even the best government will necessarily accept medical deaths to prevent a larger number of starvation deaths in the short term, or mass poverty in the long term. The trick is adequately figuring out what is an 'essential service'. Really, it's more like figuring out what's inessential.... I'm lucky enough to be a Canadian and the CERB benefit has helped family members and friends who work in inessential industries like tourism that have been hurt badly by this. I support programs to help with that so those folks don't become poor. But no amount of money is going to let us close grocery stores, at least not without some other food logistics system in place.
• bhandziuk 6y ago
  At work you might be in a large space, you probably don't have long contact with any one person (when contact tracing it seems they ask who you've been in contact with for >15 minutes, not sure if they're still doing that), and you're wearing a mask. None of that might be true for a family gathering.
• bsder 6y ago
  Your interaction with an infected customer is probably less than 5 minutes--and you are probably both wearing masks. Your interaction with an infected family member is hours in a close setting with poor ventilation without masks. See: "56 coronavirus cases were linked to a Starbucks in South Korea. But employees who were wearing masks didn't get infected." https://www.businessinsider.com/56-got-coronavirus-south-korea-starbucks-mask-wearers-did-not-2020-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/56-got-coronavirus-south-kor...
• _jal 6y ago
  It may seem that way. But they are talking to the populace as a whole, not just people who work customer-facing jobs. And who is "blaming working people"?
• ebg13 6y ago
  > 8 hours at work is ok, but a few hours at dinner isn't Large, well-ventilated space vs close poorly-ventilated space. Not sharing food vs sharing food. Not yelling at each other vs yelling at each other. Everyone wearing a mask vs not wearing masks. There are some important differences between workplaces and dinner tables.
  • collias 6y ago
    I assure you customer-facing retail employees experience plenty of yelling at work.
  • beamatronic 6y ago
    Yelling at each other??
    • ebg13 6y ago
      Have you never been to a large family dinner?
      • beamatronic 6y ago
        I've never seen family members yell at each other. Is that a thing?
        • hckrnrd 6y ago
          You’ve never seen The Simpsons?
          • beamatronic 6y ago
            D'oh!
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
• klmadfejno 6y ago
  A gathering of many people from diverse areas in an inadequately ventilated home is a bad idea. If you imagine transmission rates as a punch of particles bumping around with a chance of infecting nearby nodes that haven't been previously infected, run the additional mental model where you decide to first randomize every node's position.
• NicoJuicy 6y ago
  In January 2020 China blocked Chinese New year travel for 1 billion people. To this day, it amazes me that some people don't get that a nationwide travel and dine with a lot of people, could exponentially spread the virus. We are almost 1 year later... And I think most people are here are well educated. This saddens me deeply.
  • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Actually, the real problem is that they didn't shut Wuhan before Chinese New Year. If they had done that, the Chinese lockdown probably wouldn't have needed to be nationwide.
    • NicoJuicy 6y ago
      Why would that be the real problem? I'm talking about smart people not realizing consequences from their own actions.
    • Ancapistani 6y ago
      The Chinese did in fact shutdown Wuhan on January 22, three days prior to the Chinese New Year. https://www.foxnews.com/health/china-quarantines-wuhan-coronavirus-outbreak-reports https://www.foxnews.com/health/china-quarantines-wuhan-coron...
• JohnTHaller 6y ago
  8 hours in a large, ventilated space, everyone wearing masks, limited/no physical contact, generally brief interactions usually from a safe distance vs Thanksgiving aka the exact opposite of all of the above
• Dumblydorr 6y ago
  It's not silly at all. At work, They are wearing masks, staying socially distant, have shields and blocks in many cases,and keeping the economy afloat. Contrast that to crowding within 6 feet of 5+ family members unmasked for hours, traveling and spreading virus everywhere for a holiday that celebrates native americans giving food resources to ill prepared settlers? What IS silly is that this is a holiday, it's a fun but nonessential day. Do you think Turkey day or Jesus's "birthday" (aka coopted Pagan winter solstice day) is worth the 1000s of deaths that they will certainly cause? The pandemic that has killed 250,000 Americans in just 8 months is far, far more important than a couple family meals.
• mumblemumble 6y ago
  Anecdotally: I got to spend a week making daily visits to a hospital this summer, and of course ended up spending a lot of time chatting with the care team about the pandemic. For context, the room we were in was next door to the space set aside for the COVID-19 isolation cohort, and the some folks were back and forth between both areas throughout the day. As far as customer-facing jobs go this year, having your customers be, not just anyone, but specifically people who are a known SARS-CoV-2 infection risk, seems like a pretty singular situation. They all felt pretty safe, though, and, at least up to that point, hadn't had a single staff member test positive. They attributed this to everyone on the team being very scrupulous about masks and hand washing. Somewhat similarly, and less anecdotally, my state recently released some information about their contact tracing efforts, and, while they didn't give any specific numbers, they indicated that workplaces did not seem to be a significant source of transmission as long as mask policies are being followed. The bulk of the transmission was from social gatherings, both in home and in public. There were some case studies of super-spreader events at public gatherings, and the general story is that, as long as the staff is sticking to the policy of wearing masks while at work, they are generally not getting caught up in these events. So, I suspect it would be fine as long as everyone involved kept a mask on at all times. The problem with getting together for a Thanksgiving dinner, then, is that you simply can't share a meal and (properly) wear a mask at the same time. Heck, you can't even offer your guests light refreshments and have them properly wear a mask at the same time.
  • raverbashing 6y ago
    The isolation room probably has negative air pressure
    • mumblemumble 6y ago
      Fair point. Given where we were, I wouldn't be surprised if the whole floor had negative air pressure.
    • majewsky 6y ago
      Nitpick: It may have had lower air pressure. It certainly did not have negative air pressure.
• gentleman11 6y ago
  Our society considers those people in “essential services” to be sacrificial animals. They really don’t matter as long as we keep benefiting from their work. It’s brutal but it’s always been like this, just less obvious.
  • thelean12 6y ago
    Sorry, are you saying we're capable of not having essential services run? Because we're not. There's no choice for society to make when it comes to essential services.
    • xsmasher 6y ago
      There is the dictionary definition of essential services - power, water, etc. But somehow Burger King is being called an essential service as well.
  • goatherders 6y ago
    I agree with your point but don't think it's any less obvious at all. Our country has long treated essential service personnel as fungible.
• rv-de 6y ago
  reducing contact is a statistical method. But it's ethically questionable to allocate the stochastic social activity budget primarily to work.
• syshum 6y ago
  It is also silly to believe the issue is simply unwillingness of the government to pay people to stay home Do you honestly believe that everyone can just stay home until we have wide scale vaccine? Who will make the vaccine, who will keep the water flowing, the power, the food, everything else we need for daily life Lockdown has never, and will never be a reasonable strategy for a pandemic, this one or future ones
  • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    You don't need a lockdown forever, just to reduce transmission enough that contact tracing can be effective. This worked in Europe for a few months, although all the tourism over the summer probably seeded the current outbreaks.
    • syshum 6y ago
      There is a huge part of the population that is advocating for a total lockdown until wide scale vaccine distibution is complete and "worked" in EU is an oversimplification of what has happened with out taking into account 100's of other variables You can not simply do a base comparison of cases and say "nation X locked down, and Nation Y did not and that is why they have different outcomes" there is no factual basis for that statement
      • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        Can you point me to some evidence for this huge portion of the population wanting lockdown until vaccines are distributed? Should be pretty easy, given that so many people believe it. Well, it didn't work forever, but one can clearly see that most countries of the EU locked down in March/April, which reduced cases massively. They then held cases at a low level until September/October. This is much better performance than the US, where on a country basis, the numbers basically never went down, and are now increasing massively from a much higher base. Sure, it's not causality but it's suggestive evidence.
• permo-w 6y ago
  People who work customer-facing jobs aren’t travelling cross-country, and are probably behind Perspex or wearing masks
• oliwarner 6y ago
  Except that every family that takes notice is potentially a dozen fewer direct infections. Two fewer hospitalisations. Every little helps when it comes to public health messages.
• yalogin 6y ago
  I don't understand why. If one works with customers there are two possibilities. One, their company has strict protocols that keeps them safe and so they should still be worried about getting it from guests. Two, their company is lax on protocols and so they are the ones risking the lives of their guests. Either way, I am surprised to see this comment on HN, I would expect people here to not look at it at the individual level, and think in terms of probabilities.
• tshaddox 6y ago
  I think the obvious response is that working customer-facing jobs isn't safe, but is necessary for many people to pay for important things like food and shelter. This criticism seems similar to the common one of "why are grocery stores okay but not concert venues: surely the virus doesn't know the difference?" Of course not, but buying food is, at least in the short term, more vital.
• jcranmer 6y ago
  For many people (especially those who travel), Thanksgiving isn't "a few hours at dinner" but "stay with relatives at least overnight and maybe an entire long weekend".
• craftinator 6y ago
  Equivocation and blame games. COVID is bad, passing it to people is bad, wearing masks and distancing almost guarantees it won't transmit, masks and social distancing are nearly impossible at social gatherings where people eat or drink, so halt social gatherings so we don't overload our hospitals and get a bunch of people killed a few months before a vaccine is available. Really not much more to it than that.
• usrusr 6y ago
  In my observation it's much easier to maintain a certain level of carefulness around strangers than it is around family. It's as if we were biologically wired to trust family more (we might actually be). On paper, Covid precautions are supposed to be as much to protect the other as to protect the self, but much of the relevant behaviour is so little controlled by rational though that we can only control it by tapping into self preservation instincts. And those simply don't fire as reliable with family as they do with strangers. I claim that if they have the same risk of being infected, n hours with m strangers is less dangerous than n hours with m family members. It sure looks a bit weird to ask this of people who don't work in isolation, but on the other hand it's not worse for them than for the WFH crowd. It could even be argued that it's worse for the WFH because the customer facing at least still get to interact with humans on a regular basis.
• heavymark 6y ago
  I imagine the difference is at those customer facing jobs they are wearing masks all day, where is at dinner everyone will have their masks off (at least while eating/drinking but in reality most will probably end up leaving them off after eating or even before eating because unlike at work where they maybe surrounded by strangers at home they will feel more comfortable maskless around extended family).
• stjohnswarts 6y ago
  It's not tho. Families won't be wearing masks or social distancing because of familiarity and alcohol (and probably some weed). Also they'll be eating and talking loudly without a mask which also spraying just tons and tons of germs into the air, often in a relatively small dining room or living room with most likely very limited ventilation. It's a perfect recipe for spreading the disease.
• spandrew 6y ago
  This is caricatured thinking though. You need to work because you want $$$ for rent, and you need to go to the grocery store (or wherever) to eat so you don't die. That's a sunk cost every person generally must assume. But the point isn't that people have some risk, so adding more is OK. No — the goal is to not take unnecessary risk when avoiable. Eating turkey with family is something that you can postpone or even do over a video call if you have the means and still want some level of connection.
• d6e 6y ago
  I find family to be far more dangerous than strangers. With family people let their guard down and hug and take off their masks in doors. Family are where 70% of infections come from.