14 ms·

California judge says L.A. officials 'arbitrarily' set outdoor dining ban

108 points by sahin-boydas 6y ago

Rebelgecko 6y ago
It's weird because back in October the head of LA County Health Department gave a briefing where she said that contact tracing shows that 15% of COVID cases are due to outdoor dining. Then the the board of supervisors asked her more specific questions about the data when they were preparing the latest lockdown order. Instead of reiterating or expanding on what she said before, she walked back her claims and said there was no specific data about the spread of COVID due to outdoor dining.
- wesammikhail 6y ago
  There is no specific data because measuring is basically impossible. You´d need to control for all variables in a situation like that and that just cant be done or at least wont be doable any time soon. This is all just an emotional reaction based on what you consider to be probable. It isnt based in science or data, it´s based in hypotheticals.
  - danhak 6y ago
    That's absolutely not true. Contact tracing is a thing. Most of the restaurants I've patronized in L.A. this year required a contact name / number before being seated for tracing purposes.
    - nodesocket 6y ago
      That's insane. Here in Nashville, TN I have NEVER been required to give my personal information to visit to a restaurant or bar. At what point do the people of California start to wake up about big brother, destruction of freedoms, and government control? I am so happy I left San Francisco in 2018.
      - nitrogen 6y ago
        Utah bars scan the dotcode on dyrovers licenses, so even if you are just there for music or friends, a record might be kept. That was well before 2020.
        bigbubba 6y ago
        Utah loves laws that hassle drinkers, because they're a bunch of Mormons.
      - mixmastamyk 6y ago
        Calm down. It's BS, LA resident never even been asked for info.
      - TomSwirly 6y ago
        From outside the US, this attitude is impossible to understand when there's 9/11 worth of horrible, miserable, lonely deaths each and every day. It's so strange. After 9/11, Americans completely remade their society and started a series of pointless, losing wars. But COVID has killed a hundred times as many, seriously injured god knows how many more, and people just go on about "big brother, destruction of freedoms, and government control". That's what's "insane" to me - a major, deadly pandemic that the world's richest country refuses to deal with due to clinical paranoia.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      Contact tracing can work and NZ has had success, mostly meeting its “80% traced in 3 days” target. However the system cost is something like NZ$70m and can handle up to 1000 cases daily. Doing this for 225k cases per day seems almost insurmountable from way down here. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/122433365/coronavirus-contact-tracing-are-we-seeing-the-benefits-of-promised-improvements https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/122433365/... https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/oversight-contact-tracing-strengthened https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/oversight-contact-tracin...
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - hef19898 6y ago
      Which only tells you who was there at any given time. And I doubt that data is correct, we had multiple cases where people lied on the forms. And then you still don't know where they caught it. It only tells officials who to call. They is always a huge margin of error. And that is when contact tracing is working at scale. German authorities basically gave up on it because there are too many cases.
    - jayd16 6y ago
      After the initial outbreak we never got low enough in LA for tracing to actually be useful.
    - twblalock 6y ago
      I'm in the Bay Area and I have never been asked for contact info for outdoor dining. Apparently restaurants are supposed to ask people who dine indoors.
      - kelnos 6y ago
        I've dined outdoors at about 10 different restaurants in the past couple months, but only one has asked for contact details (they just immediately entered me into their reservations app). So agree that this does not seem to be a widespread practice.
- baxtr 6y ago
  It's really strange to me, that we have a vaccine, but we don't have real, deep insight into where transmission really do take place. What public transport for example where people usually don't talk. What about workplace meeting rooms. I would want money spent on researching transmission pathways in depth.
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    They do have such investigations in South Korea, Taiwan, and similar places with low spread and competent leadership. In the US community spread is far too out of control and contact tracing is far too underfunded to get anywhere close to comprehensive data about this. There have been some useful small case investigations published by the US CDC.
    - rasz 6y ago
      Its rather simple, fill out a form for every patient admitted to ICU. Were you wearing a mask? how diligently? were you going outside? how often? where? Add random check by scanning peoples social media profile photos to see if they lied. Instead we dont even know what percentage of hospitalized actually used masks, something super basic and easy to check.
      - TomSwirly 6y ago
        > Its rather simple, fill out a form for every patient admitted to ICU. With all due respect, it's like you've never met Americans. People wouldn't cooperate if asked to, and the hospitals can't afford to hire the people it would take to process the forms. The primary question to ask in America is always this: "Can an investor make money out of this?"
      - bluGill 6y ago
        Not worth checking if they were wearing a mask. You wouldn't learn much from that. People lie, stretch the truth, and mis remember all the time.
- zaroth 6y ago
  Back in October the LA County Health Department lied. Apparently the actual number is less than 4%. > The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health admitted during a Board of Supervisor's meeting Tuesday that there is no hard scientific evidence linking the recent COVID-19 surge to back up their move to shut down outdoor dining. https://abc7.com/covid-19-data-restaurants-outdoor-dining/8235279 https://abc7.com/covid-19-data-restaurants-outdoor-dining/82... https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/los-angeles-department-of-public-health-admits-no-science-to-back-up-link-between-outdoor-dining-and-covid-spike https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/los-angeles-department...
mehrdadn 6y ago
> California Health and Human Services Agency Secretary Mark Ghaly on Tuesday acknowledged the state’s regional prohibition on outdoor dining has more to do with preventing gatherings and limiting movement than the activity itself. “The decision to include among other sectors outdoor dining and limiting that — turning to restaurants to deliver and provide takeout options instead — really has to do with the goal of trying to keep people at home, not a comment on the relative safety of outdoor dining,” he said at a press briefing. > "By failing to weigh the benefits of an outdoor dining restriction against its costs, the County acted arbitrarily and its decision lacks a rational relationship to a legitimate end," wrote Judge James C. Chalfant. In what sense is there a lack of a rational relationship between "restricting outdoor activity" and "reducing mass gathering" here? Whether or not the approach is ultimately a good one, the reasoning behind it seems pretty rational and simple to understand: they're restricting outdoor activity to reduce people's incentives to gather and reduce COVID-19's chances of spreading (which seems like a pretty legitimate end). What am I missing?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  The judge only struck down the county's ban on outdoor dining. The state-determined ban Ghaly was commenting on, which prohibits outdoor dining in the county based on specific metrics indicating ICUs are at risk of overload, is separate and still in effect. (One might point out that this is a very strange legal technicality, and... yeah, kinda.)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    This seems strange at this moment, where one ban has been struck down but not the other. But within a few weeks the state ban will likely also be challenged. Even though the trial court judge's ruling in the first case isn't binding precedent in a subsequent case (only higher courts can create binding precedent), it will nonetheless carry some weight as the state decides whether to back down.
darawk 6y ago
Whether or not you agree with the judge's reasoning: > "By failing to weigh the benefits of an outdoor dining restriction against its costs, the County acted arbitrarily and its decision lacks a rational relationship to a legitimate end," wrote Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant in a tentative ruling issued Tuesday to a legal challenge from the California Restaurant Association. Why is the judge trying to evaluate the object-level claim by the state? Isn't the legal question here simply one of authority? Is there some kind of standard in the emergency powers law that says they have to meet some scientific-evidentiary threshold? Curious if anyone has more insight into this.
- calvinmorrison 6y ago
  Somewhere rubber meets the road. At what point are emergency powers "too far" so to speak?
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    And "arbitrary" is one limitation to emergency powers.
- zaroth 6y ago
  The authority cannot be exercised arbitrarily. The authority is for a specific emergency health purpose, therefore these (otherwise illegal) restrictions which are being imposed under that specific authority must be justified.
- googlryas 6y ago
  The law is written that basically emergency powers are granted during a public health emergency, but the emergency powers can only be exercised in relation to the actual emergency. IE Gov Newsom can't declare a state of emergency for COVID, and then force everyone to get TDAP shots (even though it would be beneficial to public health overall), and he can't force everyone to wear two left shoes if science and reason don't support that helping in the emergency(even if he is personally convinced wearing two left shoes will protect you from COVID). So I believe it is that language in the law that the judge is using to question if the measures are actually associated with the public health emergency. This doc goes into the details a bit in plain language: https://emsa.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/71/2019/03/New-EOM-Public-Health-and-Medical-Emergency-Powers-3-15-2019-002.pdf https://emsa.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/71/2019/03/New-...
twblalock 6y ago
These policies in California are analogous to abstinence-only sex education. Everyone knows California's policies are unrealistic -- people are going to gather. Instead of telling people how to do it safely, and how to minimize risk, the government is taking the impossible approach of telling people not to do it at all, and taking away venues where it is relatively low-risk to do so. Even though the government cannot ban highly risky gatherings in private homes (because law enforcement is not on board with that), it has decided to ban lower-risk gatherings such as outdoor dining anyway. This is not a rational scientific approach, but rather an attempt to stick to unrealistic abstinence-only messaging. That attempt to stay on message is costing people their jobs and their businesses despite having little public health benefit. When people see public health orders being unrealistic and inconsistent, they stop respecting them.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > Even though the government cannot ban highly risky gatherings in private homes (because law enforcement is not on board with that) It's also explicitly protected by the first amendment.
- stryker7001 6y ago
  The government has told people exactly what to do (stay away from large groups, don't have large gatherings for thanksgiving etc). People didn’t listen. Thats why they had to take the next step. It sounds like an opportunity to educate yourself about COVID.
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    As badly as people seem to want an authoritarian dictatorship, this is still a free country. If I want to gather with my friends, I will. Have you ever considered that people aren’t listening precisely because they have educated themselves on covid?
    - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
      That's a very antisocial attitude to take. Societies can't deal with crises like pandemics if enough people take that attitude, and the result will be large numbers of avoidable deaths.
kjakm 6y ago
This thread is an interesting read. A lot of nitpicking about the data to support various restrictions, complaints about freedom, and arguments about costs to business. These arguments happen everywhere of course but ITT they significantly outnumber any arguments in favour of restrictions. I wonder if that’s representative of the US as a whole and explains why COVID has been particularly bad there?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- logicchains 6y ago
  >I wonder if that’s representative of the US as a whole and explains why COVID has been particularly bad there? This is just misinformation. USA isn't even in the top 10 for deaths per capita (it's eleventh): https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat... . And the countries ahead of it all hard harsher lockdown measures than most of the US.
  - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
    #11 out of about 200 countries. What differentiates the US from the major countries in the top 10 is that the US has done very little to prevent spread of the virus in the past weeks, meaning that going forward, things will be far worse in the US. Compare the graphs of the major countries (i.e., not San Marino, Andorra, North Macedonia and other small countries) in the top 10, and then the US: 1. Belgium: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/belgium/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/belgium/#g... 4. Italy: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/#gra... 6. Spain: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/#gra... 10. UK: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/#graph-... 11. USA: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/#graph-... In contrast to Belgium, Italy, Spain and the UK, the US is letting the virus spread largely unchecked, and there has been massive resistance to even the most basic measures to control the spread. Finally, it's worth noting that individual US states have been worse hit than individual European countries listed above. New Jersey and Belgium have similar populations, but New Jersey has had more deaths/capita. As the number of new cases continues to fall in Belgium and rise in New Jersey, that difference will widen.
omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
On one hand, I don't disagree with the judge's reasoning. There hasn't been much evidence about the transmission rate. On the other hand, while the transmission rate from outdoor dining may be very low (4% per posts in this thread), if that difference happens to be enough to push R0 above 1, or worse, cause a decrease in the number of available ICU beds, then allowing it could be a big mistake. To put it another way, even if the evidence to close outdoor dining is weak, running an IRL experiment by leaving it open is very risky.
- twblalock 6y ago
  By that logic we ought to be closing all businesses. Why should outdoor dining be closed, yet indoor retail stores still be open? You have to evaluate the trade-offs. People's jobs matter too. Another trade-off is that by taking away relatively safe options like outdoor dining, we force people to gather in private homes which is much more dangerous -- and they will gather; it's the holidays, and nobody can prevent it.
  - djcapelis 6y ago
    > Why should outdoor dining be closed, yet indoor retail stores still be open? That’s easy. They shouldn’t. And yes, it is that simple. California is within days of running out of ICU capacity in whole areas of the state just given our current case progression rate even if you immediately found a way to freeze all transmission tomorrow. Additional human contact directly costs even more lives right now, in this specific time.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - IronRanger 6y ago
      Then why are they not massively ramping up ICU capacity? Surely the 'cost' of doing that is less than the 'cost' of shutting down huge sections of society? Why don't we have the same lockdowns when influenza threatens to overwhelm hospitals each year? Where is the focus on public health interventions such as mass Vitamin D, Vitamin C, Zinc supplemenation, as well as seriously dealing with obesity (banning or taxing added sugar) and air pollution (banning or taxing coal and oil)?
greendestiny_re 6y ago
In B&H, one court already dismissed a corona curfew fine. Just like in the US, government officials imposed knee-jerk restrictions that get thrown out in courts. Wherever you are, challenge a corona fine in a court and you're likely to win.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
neekburm 6y ago
This is not how rational basis review works.
mchusma 6y ago
I think the big takeaways from this pandemic are: (1) we need to limit "emergency powers" to some timeframe where the legislature cannot meet. Maybe 7 days or so. We are about 280 days into the crisis, so it's time for our normal political process to decide matters. (2) we need some way to allow people to voluntarily take vaccines faster. Like a special board that can override the FDA for individuals or groups who have over 1 in 1,000 chance of dying from a disease in the next year.

108 points by sahin-boydas 6y ago

It's weird because back in October the head of LA County Health Department gave a briefing where she said that contact tracing shows that 15% of COVID cases are due to outdoor dining. Then the the board of supervisors asked her more specific questions about the data when they were preparing the latest lockdown order. Instead of reiterating or expanding on what she said before, she walked back her claims and said there was no specific data about the spread of COVID due to outdoor dining.

wesammikhail 6y ago
There is no specific data because measuring is basically impossible. You´d need to control for all variables in a situation like that and that just cant be done or at least wont be doable any time soon. This is all just an emotional reaction based on what you consider to be probable. It isnt based in science or data, it´s based in hypotheticals.
- danhak 6y ago
  That's absolutely not true. Contact tracing is a thing. Most of the restaurants I've patronized in L.A. this year required a contact name / number before being seated for tracing purposes.
  - nodesocket 6y ago
    That's insane. Here in Nashville, TN I have NEVER been required to give my personal information to visit to a restaurant or bar. At what point do the people of California start to wake up about big brother, destruction of freedoms, and government control? I am so happy I left San Francisco in 2018.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      Utah bars scan the dotcode on dyrovers licenses, so even if you are just there for music or friends, a record might be kept. That was well before 2020.
      - bigbubba 6y ago
        Utah loves laws that hassle drinkers, because they're a bunch of Mormons.
    - mixmastamyk 6y ago
      Calm down. It's BS, LA resident never even been asked for info.
    - TomSwirly 6y ago
      From outside the US, this attitude is impossible to understand when there's 9/11 worth of horrible, miserable, lonely deaths each and every day. It's so strange. After 9/11, Americans completely remade their society and started a series of pointless, losing wars. But COVID has killed a hundred times as many, seriously injured god knows how many more, and people just go on about "big brother, destruction of freedoms, and government control". That's what's "insane" to me - a major, deadly pandemic that the world's richest country refuses to deal with due to clinical paranoia.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    Contact tracing can work and NZ has had success, mostly meeting its “80% traced in 3 days” target. However the system cost is something like NZ$70m and can handle up to 1000 cases daily. Doing this for 225k cases per day seems almost insurmountable from way down here. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/122433365/coronavirus-contact-tracing-are-we-seeing-the-benefits-of-promised-improvements https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/122433365/... https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/oversight-contact-tracing-strengthened https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/oversight-contact-tracin...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - hef19898 6y ago
    Which only tells you who was there at any given time. And I doubt that data is correct, we had multiple cases where people lied on the forms. And then you still don't know where they caught it. It only tells officials who to call. They is always a huge margin of error. And that is when contact tracing is working at scale. German authorities basically gave up on it because there are too many cases.
  - jayd16 6y ago
    After the initial outbreak we never got low enough in LA for tracing to actually be useful.
  - twblalock 6y ago
    I'm in the Bay Area and I have never been asked for contact info for outdoor dining. Apparently restaurants are supposed to ask people who dine indoors.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      I've dined outdoors at about 10 different restaurants in the past couple months, but only one has asked for contact details (they just immediately entered me into their reservations app). So agree that this does not seem to be a widespread practice.
baxtr 6y ago
It's really strange to me, that we have a vaccine, but we don't have real, deep insight into where transmission really do take place. What public transport for example where people usually don't talk. What about workplace meeting rooms. I would want money spent on researching transmission pathways in depth.
- jacobolus 6y ago
  They do have such investigations in South Korea, Taiwan, and similar places with low spread and competent leadership. In the US community spread is far too out of control and contact tracing is far too underfunded to get anywhere close to comprehensive data about this. There have been some useful small case investigations published by the US CDC.
  - rasz 6y ago
    Its rather simple, fill out a form for every patient admitted to ICU. Were you wearing a mask? how diligently? were you going outside? how often? where? Add random check by scanning peoples social media profile photos to see if they lied. Instead we dont even know what percentage of hospitalized actually used masks, something super basic and easy to check.
    - TomSwirly 6y ago
      > Its rather simple, fill out a form for every patient admitted to ICU. With all due respect, it's like you've never met Americans. People wouldn't cooperate if asked to, and the hospitals can't afford to hire the people it would take to process the forms. The primary question to ask in America is always this: "Can an investor make money out of this?"
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Not worth checking if they were wearing a mask. You wouldn't learn much from that. People lie, stretch the truth, and mis remember all the time.
zaroth 6y ago
Back in October the LA County Health Department lied. Apparently the actual number is less than 4%. > The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health admitted during a Board of Supervisor's meeting Tuesday that there is no hard scientific evidence linking the recent COVID-19 surge to back up their move to shut down outdoor dining. https://abc7.com/covid-19-data-restaurants-outdoor-dining/8235279 https://abc7.com/covid-19-data-restaurants-outdoor-dining/82... https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/los-angeles-department-of-public-health-admits-no-science-to-back-up-link-between-outdoor-dining-and-covid-spike https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/los-angeles-department...

mehrdadn 6y ago

> California Health and Human Services Agency Secretary Mark Ghaly on Tuesday acknowledged the state’s regional prohibition on outdoor dining has more to do with preventing gatherings and limiting movement than the activity itself. “The decision to include among other sectors outdoor dining and limiting that — turning to restaurants to deliver and provide takeout options instead — really has to do with the goal of trying to keep people at home, not a comment on the relative safety of outdoor dining,” he said at a press briefing. > "By failing to weigh the benefits of an outdoor dining restriction against its costs, the County acted arbitrarily and its decision lacks a rational relationship to a legitimate end," wrote Judge James C. Chalfant. In what sense is there a lack of a rational relationship between "restricting outdoor activity" and "reducing mass gathering" here? Whether or not the approach is ultimately a good one, the reasoning behind it seems pretty rational and simple to understand: they're restricting outdoor activity to reduce people's incentives to gather and reduce COVID-19's chances of spreading (which seems like a pretty legitimate end). What am I missing?

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
The judge only struck down the county's ban on outdoor dining. The state-determined ban Ghaly was commenting on, which prohibits outdoor dining in the county based on specific metrics indicating ICUs are at risk of overload, is separate and still in effect. (One might point out that this is a very strange legal technicality, and... yeah, kinda.)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gnicholas 6y ago
  This seems strange at this moment, where one ban has been struck down but not the other. But within a few weeks the state ban will likely also be challenged. Even though the trial court judge's ruling in the first case isn't binding precedent in a subsequent case (only higher courts can create binding precedent), it will nonetheless carry some weight as the state decides whether to back down.

darawk 6y ago

Whether or not you agree with the judge's reasoning: > "By failing to weigh the benefits of an outdoor dining restriction against its costs, the County acted arbitrarily and its decision lacks a rational relationship to a legitimate end," wrote Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant in a tentative ruling issued Tuesday to a legal challenge from the California Restaurant Association. Why is the judge trying to evaluate the object-level claim by the state? Isn't the legal question here simply one of authority? Is there some kind of standard in the emergency powers law that says they have to meet some scientific-evidentiary threshold? Curious if anyone has more insight into this.

calvinmorrison 6y ago
Somewhere rubber meets the road. At what point are emergency powers "too far" so to speak?
- dehrmann 6y ago
  And "arbitrary" is one limitation to emergency powers.
zaroth 6y ago
The authority cannot be exercised arbitrarily. The authority is for a specific emergency health purpose, therefore these (otherwise illegal) restrictions which are being imposed under that specific authority must be justified.
googlryas 6y ago
The law is written that basically emergency powers are granted during a public health emergency, but the emergency powers can only be exercised in relation to the actual emergency. IE Gov Newsom can't declare a state of emergency for COVID, and then force everyone to get TDAP shots (even though it would be beneficial to public health overall), and he can't force everyone to wear two left shoes if science and reason don't support that helping in the emergency(even if he is personally convinced wearing two left shoes will protect you from COVID). So I believe it is that language in the law that the judge is using to question if the measures are actually associated with the public health emergency. This doc goes into the details a bit in plain language: https://emsa.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/71/2019/03/New-EOM-Public-Health-and-Medical-Emergency-Powers-3-15-2019-002.pdf https://emsa.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/71/2019/03/New-...

twblalock 6y ago

These policies in California are analogous to abstinence-only sex education. Everyone knows California's policies are unrealistic -- people are going to gather. Instead of telling people how to do it safely, and how to minimize risk, the government is taking the impossible approach of telling people not to do it at all, and taking away venues where it is relatively low-risk to do so. Even though the government cannot ban highly risky gatherings in private homes (because law enforcement is not on board with that), it has decided to ban lower-risk gatherings such as outdoor dining anyway. This is not a rational scientific approach, but rather an attempt to stick to unrealistic abstinence-only messaging. That attempt to stay on message is costing people their jobs and their businesses despite having little public health benefit. When people see public health orders being unrealistic and inconsistent, they stop respecting them.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
> Even though the government cannot ban highly risky gatherings in private homes (because law enforcement is not on board with that) It's also explicitly protected by the first amendment.
stryker7001 6y ago
The government has told people exactly what to do (stay away from large groups, don't have large gatherings for thanksgiving etc). People didn’t listen. Thats why they had to take the next step. It sounds like an opportunity to educate yourself about COVID.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  As badly as people seem to want an authoritarian dictatorship, this is still a free country. If I want to gather with my friends, I will. Have you ever considered that people aren’t listening precisely because they have educated themselves on covid?
  - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
    That's a very antisocial attitude to take. Societies can't deal with crises like pandemics if enough people take that attitude, and the result will be large numbers of avoidable deaths.

kjakm 6y ago

This thread is an interesting read. A lot of nitpicking about the data to support various restrictions, complaints about freedom, and arguments about costs to business. These arguments happen everywhere of course but ITT they significantly outnumber any arguments in favour of restrictions. I wonder if that’s representative of the US as a whole and explains why COVID has been particularly bad there?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
logicchains 6y ago
>I wonder if that’s representative of the US as a whole and explains why COVID has been particularly bad there? This is just misinformation. USA isn't even in the top 10 for deaths per capita (it's eleventh): https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat... . And the countries ahead of it all hard harsher lockdown measures than most of the US.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
  #11 out of about 200 countries. What differentiates the US from the major countries in the top 10 is that the US has done very little to prevent spread of the virus in the past weeks, meaning that going forward, things will be far worse in the US. Compare the graphs of the major countries (i.e., not San Marino, Andorra, North Macedonia and other small countries) in the top 10, and then the US: 1. Belgium: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/belgium/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/belgium/#g... 4. Italy: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/#gra... 6. Spain: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/#gra... 10. UK: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/#graph-... 11. USA: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/#graph-... In contrast to Belgium, Italy, Spain and the UK, the US is letting the virus spread largely unchecked, and there has been massive resistance to even the most basic measures to control the spread. Finally, it's worth noting that individual US states have been worse hit than individual European countries listed above. New Jersey and Belgium have similar populations, but New Jersey has had more deaths/capita. As the number of new cases continues to fall in Belgium and rise in New Jersey, that difference will widen.

omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago

On one hand, I don't disagree with the judge's reasoning. There hasn't been much evidence about the transmission rate. On the other hand, while the transmission rate from outdoor dining may be very low (4% per posts in this thread), if that difference happens to be enough to push R0 above 1, or worse, cause a decrease in the number of available ICU beds, then allowing it could be a big mistake. To put it another way, even if the evidence to close outdoor dining is weak, running an IRL experiment by leaving it open is very risky.

twblalock 6y ago
By that logic we ought to be closing all businesses. Why should outdoor dining be closed, yet indoor retail stores still be open? You have to evaluate the trade-offs. People's jobs matter too. Another trade-off is that by taking away relatively safe options like outdoor dining, we force people to gather in private homes which is much more dangerous -- and they will gather; it's the holidays, and nobody can prevent it.
- djcapelis 6y ago
  > Why should outdoor dining be closed, yet indoor retail stores still be open? That’s easy. They shouldn’t. And yes, it is that simple. California is within days of running out of ICU capacity in whole areas of the state just given our current case progression rate even if you immediately found a way to freeze all transmission tomorrow. Additional human contact directly costs even more lives right now, in this specific time.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - IronRanger 6y ago
    Then why are they not massively ramping up ICU capacity? Surely the 'cost' of doing that is less than the 'cost' of shutting down huge sections of society? Why don't we have the same lockdowns when influenza threatens to overwhelm hospitals each year? Where is the focus on public health interventions such as mass Vitamin D, Vitamin C, Zinc supplemenation, as well as seriously dealing with obesity (banning or taxing added sugar) and air pollution (banning or taxing coal and oil)?

greendestiny_re 6y ago

In B&H, one court already dismissed a corona curfew fine. Just like in the US, government officials imposed knee-jerk restrictions that get thrown out in courts. Wherever you are, challenge a corona fine in a court and you're likely to win.

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neekburm 6y ago

This is not how rational basis review works.

mchusma 6y ago

I think the big takeaways from this pandemic are: (1) we need to limit "emergency powers" to some timeframe where the legislature cannot meet. Maybe 7 days or so. We are about 280 days into the crisis, so it's time for our normal political process to decide matters. (2) we need some way to allow people to voluntarily take vaccines faster. Like a special board that can override the FDA for individuals or groups who have over 1 in 1,000 chance of dying from a disease in the next year.