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Who would have guessed that kneecapping the service industry would be bad for the service sector?
by war1025 6y ago
Who would have guessed that kneecapping the service industry would be bad for the service sector?
- t-writescode 6y agoMost reasonable people that asked for lockdowns also asked for stimulus packages to give those people who couldn't work money while they're out of work so they could survive.
- neuland 6y agoAnd yet they didn't stop the lockdowns once it was clear the stimulus was not going to happen.
- t-writescode 6y agoGiven a virus that requires hospitalization at a certain rate, there is a certain point where the hospitals end up overrun for all other activities. In an effort to stave off that danger, local governments enacted lockdowns with the intent of reducing the spread of the virus. The virus, in the United States, has an established death rate of around 1.5% and a hospitalization rate higher than that. It also experiences exponential growth. Our hospitals didn't have the capacity to handle all the _potential_ load; and, once they're approaching that capacity, it's already too late and they'll blow past it. That's the danger of exponential growth. Let's imagine doublings: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128. If total capacity is 100, the moment that capacity is less than 20% used up, we're 2-3 timesteps away from using over 100%. It is a very dangerous gamble, and controversial decisions are made or not made and the worst part is that, when you do the safe thing, you have no way of being certain or explaining that the bad thing would have or could have happened, because "it's only 20%" and that looks small.
- neuland 6y agoFlorida, Texas, and Sweden seem to be doing fine. Edit: also, the military, FEMA, and non-profits built temporary hospitals in spring, but they weren't needed.
- umvi 6y agoWe had months and months to build temporary hospitals... Why didn't we?
- matthewmacleod 6y agoWho were you planning to staff all of your temporary hospitals with?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- umvi 6y agoSo you are saying our hospital beds and staff are fixed immutable resources and that in an emergency all other variables must be sacrificed in order to not exceed those fixed immutable resources?
- matthewmacleod 6y agoI don't recall saying that, no. I'd wager that nobody would seriously say that, since it's obviously false.
- umvi 6y agoI interpreted the question as you implying temporary hospitals are absurd because there wouldn't be staff to man them.
- t-writescode 6y agoAt some point, you're experiencing runway problems. 9 women can't produce a baby in a month, after all. They can, however, collectively produce 9 babies, 9 months after the start date.
- umvi 6y agoIn an emergency situation, you make do. Train temporary workers to man the temporary hospitals. Teach them how to know when to defer to a medical professional. You can hire a bunch of boy scouts to do the repetitive stuff, and have them call in a real doctor or nurse if symptom progression isn't matching their training.
- nradov 6y agoThe established death rate in the US is nowhere near 1.5%. Best current population IFR estimate is somewhere in the 0.6% range. That's bad enough, no need to exaggerate. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.11.20209627v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.11.20209627v...
- t-writescode 6y agoI wasn’t. https://covidusa.net/ https://covidusa.net/
- nradov 6y agoNo, you were. Please stop spreading misinformation about a serious subject. You appear to have confused case fatality rate with the population infection fatality rate. CFR is largely meaningless because so many infections are never counted. Look at the results from antibody seroprevalence studies.
- uoaei 6y agoI don't see how that would be a reason to stop the lockdowns. Remember that there is a severe respiratory contagion going around that spreads from breathing the same air as infected folks.
- neuland 6y agoFlorida, Texas, and Sweden seem to be doing fine enough.
- bearjaws 6y agoTell that to the ICU nurses and doctors in Florida who have to code several people a day due to Covid...
- neuland 6y agoTell that to the family that lost their job and is now homeless. Tell that to the people who've lost love ones to suicide, overdose, alcoholism. (see I can be snarky and unhelpful, too) The broader point is that it's not clear that lockdowns are beneficial or necessary. They have real costs. Nobody is talking about how we weigh those costs and benefits. And despite the lockdowns, California still has a swamped medical system. To move the conversation forward: people will never give up their sacred cows. The lockdowns were never about COVID, they're about control and rewarding political allies. Texas tried to ban abortion. California tried to ban religion. And nobody cares if the lockdowns work or not.
- henrikschroder 6y agoHeart disease and cancer combined kill four times as many people every year, than what covid-19 has done this year. About 10% of all the people who died in the US this year will have died from covid-19. Why are those 10% of deaths so much more terrible, so unimaginably horrible, that we're focusing exclusively on those, and completely ignoring the remaining 90% of deaths?
- t-writescode 6y ago
- dragonwriter 6y agoThe lockdowns were more essential than the stimulus payments, though no sane government would fail to do both in the circumstances. (Our government failed on both the lockdowns, which were scattered, too late in many places, and too poorly enforced in most places, and stimulus, but then our government, at many levels, has not been sane.)
- umvi 6y agoAnd other reasonable people are concerned with the side effects of printing 3+ trillion dollars
- t-writescode 6y agoA very frustrating thing with this statement is that it's very arguable that financing the survival of this country's citizens during a lockdown is _exactly_ the sort of thing the government should be doing, as well as minimizing the duration of the lockdown. It enables the status quo to return quickly and minimizes the change to the social fabric. Those are things I would have imagined conservatives would want: stability. It's very strange that we couldn't move money around and hadn't been saving money "for a rainy day" exactly like this one.
- umvi 6y agoAs I understand it, we have no saved money, we are just going deeper into debt. In 2020 alone we took on at least 4T of debt when in past years we only take on ~1T debt per year. And all we have to show for 2T was a "woefully inadequate" $1000 check. In order to pay everyone's rent for a year, we would need at least 12x as much, in other words a cool 24 Trillion which would more than double the entire debt the US current has. And for what? To save a few lives, the majority of whom will be dead before 2030 anyway? Mask and social distancing are huge low cost public health wins, no doubt, but suggesting going 24 trillion dollars into debt to save more lives is a huge red flag to me and I would push back.
- t-writescode 6y agoIn a very real sense, what more have the "lockdowns" in the US been than "masks and social distancing"? In places where "social distancing" minimums have been impossible, the places have closed. I'm in one of the most strict places in the entire United States, but I can still go to most every store I want, including hair salons. I'm only barred from places where there's a LOT of breathing (gym, church with singing), tight confines where social distancing can't be done (bars, restaurants) or staying in a singular location for a long time (church, clubs, sporting events).
- dopylitty 6y agoThe issue is that the US government has refused to help people during a time when they should absolutely not be forced to work face to face jobs to pay the bills. Instead Republicans have held aid hostage in exchange for legislation allowing businesses to force employees to work in unsafe environments with no recourse[1]. Even so far as a measure that would allow the US attorney general to penalized employees up to $50k for having the audacity to sue businesses for creating unsafe environments.[2] 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/15/disturbing-values-driving-gops-handling-covid-relief/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/15/disturbin... 2. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/covid-liability-shield-lawsuits-legislation https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/covid-liability-shield-la...
- treeman79 6y agoLoad of crap. Republicans were willing to negotiate on a smaller package. It was held up by the speaker because it made Trump look bad.
- HenryKissinger 6y agoRepublicans refused to remove a liability shield for companies from the bill. That's a good reason to refuse to pass the bill.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoIs it? Why is that so important that it's worth not aiding millions of people who are dropping into poverty?
- uoaei 6y agoI can't tell if this is a question posed in earnest, because I wouldn't expect a reaction like that to "corporations are designing and feeding Congress a liability shield so that they don't have to spend money protecting their workers." The "aid" is a red herring if you are setting up those same people for dangerous situations with zero accountability from the people who are forcing them to put themselves in hazard's way. It is myopic to think that a smaller stimulus bill (that would barely cover 1 month's expenses for the average American -- recall that it's been 8 months since the first stimulus) would be proposed for anything except to stave off the fervor of mass civil unrest for a short while longer.
- OminousWeapons 6y agoThe blame for the situation lies squarely at the feet of the federal government. If you are going to shutter businesses and put people out of work, you need to pay the business owners and the employees who you have affected. Staying economically viable vs staying medically viable should have never been a tradeoff people had to make here, and Americans should all remember that when the next election rolls around.
- war1025 6y ago> Americans should all remember that when the next election rolls around Unfortunately, for most people the truth is that they "like their representatives, it's all the rest that are corrupt" Plus Washington is close enough to a 50/50 split right now that you can always just say it was the other party holding everything up.
- djsumdog 6y agoOur election processes have never been fair. Big money has typically been the largest factor. This year solidifies it .. at least for half the population. The American psyche has been split in two by a corrupt and runaway media.
- TheBlight 6y agoBut the federal government didn't shutter any businesses. You can thank the state governors, county officials and big city mayors for that.
- OminousWeapons 6y agoMy point is that the governors and mayors always had to weigh the economic damage they were doing to people whenever they made a shutdown decision, which resulted in erratic, complicated, and somewhat nonsensical shutdown orders. If the federal government had backstopped the economy properly and compensated any business or person directly affected by a shutdown, then the governors / mayors would have been able to take more coordinated, effective action. You can't maintain aggressive shutdowns if every day of your shutdown is destroying peoples' bank accounts.
- kergonath 6y agoDead customers aren’t that much better for the service industry.