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You walk by others while you are not at your table. What do you want to do? Hold your breath? Not to mention bathrooms and so forth. Presumably the tables a

• pcmoney 5y ago
  In an open air room, the difference between walking past and sitting in the same room as is negligible. Total theatre, does nothing besides allowing restaurants and patrons to feel ok/that they are “doing something” and stay open.
  • sleepybrett 5y ago
    Which is why indoor dining rooms should still be closed. Pretending we aren't living through a pandemic that is respiratory in nature is fucking madness. Maybe if we had locked down harder for longer and treated this thing seriously in the beginning we wouldn't be almost two years into this with no end in sight.
    • pcmoney 5y ago
      No, Covid is low risk if you are vaccinated and elderly/at risk and extremely low risk if you are younger (vaccinated or not) It’s endemic. Its not going away. We are all going to get it. (Me: triple vaxxed, had covid 2x) Getting vaccinated is a personal heath decision (which I encourage) Time to move on.
      • a_shovel 5y ago
        This plan would kill a large portion of immunocompromised people worldwide.
        • Closi 5y ago
          Why are the only deaths we seem to care about those that are Covid related? If we are worried about killing people worldwide, far more people die of hunger-related causes each day, but we aren't rebuilding our entire society to save those people. But I can't see a reason why deaths from Covid are more of a tragedy than those we left to starve. Or take smoking for instance - more people die each year from smoking than have died from Covid, but we seem more willing to ban human contact than to ban cigarettes? Seems backwards to me (especially considering c10% of smoking related deaths are from secondhand smoke in the USA!). I know these might seem like a silly point, but why are we so focused on one single cause of death right now? We lock down our entire society to 'protect unvaccinated people worldwide', but then have continually cut foreign aid? IMO - I think we have totally lost the plot and lost sight of what is important, but that's just my view.
          • sleepybrett 5y ago
            Smoking, at least where I live is heavily taxed and regulated. You can't smoke in any building open to the public or place of employment, you can't smoke within 25ft of any entrance to any of those buildings either. Cigarettes are taxed to hell and back as well. I guess we could do that to the people unwilling to get vaxxinated. Tax them for their status and bar them from any building open to the public or place of employment.
            • pcmoney 5y ago
              Why would we bar them? Getting vaccinated does not stop you from getting Covid and it does not stop the spread of Covid. I could see a tax break for being vaccinated as a viable incentive.
            • pcmoney 5y ago
              So we bar them because they are making individual choices that don’t impact us and we want to control them because we are afraid/disagree with those choices?
              • sleepybrett 5y ago
        • pcmoney 5y ago
          How? They can take whatever measures they need to keep themselves safe. I assume they are not going into restaurants now since the mask situation is just theater. Their unfortunate circumstances don’t mean they get to control others. If there was a concrete ask with end date that would be one thing but asking everyone else to live as if they are immunocompromised just because they are is not sustainable.
        • tagoregrtst 5y ago
          Im not willing to build society around a theoretical risk for a very small population that is alive only because of artificial means. Writ large, its immoral failing Kant’s categorical imperative. Massive utilitarian fail (you got to count the lockdown suicides and others too!). Aesthetically gross (life glued indoors is not really living). Reasonable accommodations are fine, and necessary and can include: wearing a mask if a known immunocompromised person is present. Setting up free grocery delivery for them. Ambulatory health care. Locking down society is not reasonable.
          • a_shovel 5y ago
            When you remark that they're "alive only because of artificial means", are you implying that your judgement might be different if they were, say, healthy and athletic young adults? Are you proposing that additional suicides due to lockdowns are comparable to the number of deaths prevented by social distancing and stay-at-home orders? Also, why are you telling me this? Find a housebound person to tell that they're "not really living". Find an immunocompromised person to assure that it's fine if you never wear a mask except when they're nearby. (Don't do either of those things.)
            • tagoregrtst 5y ago
              No, my judegement wouldn't be different if a similar number of “healthy, athletic” were somehow pegged as high COVID risk (perhaps a genetic marker?). What forms my opinion are their small numbers. Its easy to cater to the exception, but exceptions make bad generalities. The “artificial” refers to point that immunocompromised people already (justly!) have greatly extended lives because society has expanded a lot of resources on research and development for their care. These people are our sisters and brothers and should be taken care of, and have been to a large extent (otherwise they’d be dead). They do have a claim to our assistance, and Ill gladly pay more taxes for better programs, but they don't have a claim to have society turned upside down on their behalf Lockdowns are not reasonable accommodation. “ Are you proposing that additional suicides due to lockdowns are comparable to the number of deaths prevented by social distancing and stay-at-home orders?” Your original point was about immunocompromised, a small group. I gave one example of people that are being killed by lockdowns. Add deferred cancer patients, etc. Anyway, today if you’re not immunocompromised and you’re still dying of COVID you probably made the choice not to get vaccinated. Which is fine, btw. “ Also, why are you telling me this? ” You want to lock me up in my room like a truant schoolboy. “ Find a housebound person to tell that they're "not really living".” They’d agree with the general sentiment. Certainly its harder to grasp at life’s meaning when your only companion is TV. My very independent 95 year old grandma who has been housebound for two years due to COVID is uncharacteristically depressed. Which is why instead of a pseudo-philosophical talk like we’re having she’d probably appreciate it more if I took her for a walk in the mountainside (alas, she lives 10 000 km away). Perhaps because I cant be there for my grandma, next week we’re planning on taking my housebound ex-neighbors for a trip outside the city. They’re very lovely but they’re too old to drive and housebound to a large extent. I’m sure they agree with me about lockdowns. “Find an immunocompromised person to assure that it's fine if you never wear a mask except when they're nearby.” Does telling a friend with a kidney transplant that my kid goes to school without a mask count?
      • sjg007 5y ago
        Polio used to be endemic in the USA and now it has been eradicated.
        • pcmoney 5y ago
          This is VERY different than polio/small pox. We have no chance with current medical tech of eliminating a highly mutagenic coronavirus. Even if we did the cost/benefit of doing so would not be adequate.
          • sjg007 5y ago
            Mutagenic describes a mutagen which is something that mutates DNA.
            • pcmoney 5y ago
              https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4934755/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4934755/
              • sjg007 5y ago
                Just look up what the words mean scientifically if you are going to use them. Hell even read the article you cite. Mutagenic describes a mutagen which causes mutagenesis. https://www.nature.com/subjects/mutagenesis https://www.nature.com/subjects/mutagenesis Covid19 is not mutagenic. However, it is highly and continually mutated.
        • dahfizz 5y ago
          Yeah. It was eradicated by a vaccine that actually granted immunity.
        • tagoregrtst 5y ago
          Polio doesn't require boosters every three months and a redesigned vaccine every 18 (as they’re developing now)
    • gherkinnn 5y ago
      No. At some point you've got to ask if these measures are worth living for. It's winter in the northern hemisphere. It'd dark and it's cold. Keeping people locked up at home for a third season is absurd.
      • sleepybrett 5y ago
        I live in seattle. It's dark and cold. Hell the mask helps, it's great for keeping my face warm. I don't consider myself locked up. I miss in person game nights the most, i miss dinner with friends (in a private home or restaurant) somewhat. We do gamenights online using videochat and products like roll20 and boardgame arena. It's not super awesome but it works for us for now. I leave the house, go on walks go shopping etc. But I take very reasonable precautions. I shop during low traffic times, get up early and hit the grocery store before work, I order food for pickup and wait outside for it. During the more temperate months we'd set up a few tables in the backyard and have friends over for meals, each 'pod' got their own table nicely distanced, we were probably a little louder than most dinner parties but it was nice just to have them around. For a friends birthday we wanted to go see spiderman, we rented a theater (it was actually not especially expensive) invited about 20 people who we knew were supervaxxed and responsible enough not to come if they though they might be exposed and had a grand, masked and distanced, time. I'm just trying to be responsible, I know several people that are immunocompromised and they can't even do half that stuff. I'm trying to be responsible so that they can. When some asshole declares that 'covid is over' I just realize how fucking narcissistic they are.
        • pcmoney 5y ago
          You and your friends are well off and it looks like you dont have children and can work remote. Thats great! Unfortunately most are living under wildly different and much more difficult circumstances that they are being asked to bear month after month with no end and with dubious effect.
          • sleepybrett 5y ago
            If half our population hadn't decided covid was a hoax and didn't take even the simplest precautions from the beginning we probably wouldn't be in the situation we are in now.
    • Closi 5y ago
      > Which is why indoor dining rooms should still be closed. Pretending we aren't living through a pandemic that is respiratory in nature is fucking madness. Maybe if we had locked down harder for longer and treated this thing seriously in the beginning we wouldn't be almost two years into this with no end in sight. We aren't living through a pandemic anymore, we are now living in an endemic. Omicron isn't going away anytime soon - and we can't lock down businesses forever. Omicron can't be stopped by lockdown anyway (see challenges of containing it within China). Secondly, it is highly unlikely that we would have got rid of Covid-19 even harsher lockdown measures earlier (e.g. see Omicron which happened because the original virus jumped to mice and back to humans - just humans locking down wouldn't have stopped this variant, we would have had to lock down all the rodents too). My personal view - we have to stop viewing life as nothing but a vector for disease, and stop re-architecting our entire society and culture to avoid Covid infections (at huge societal costs to education, standards of living etc).
      • sjg007 5y ago
        You need to look up the definitions of pandemic, epidemic and endemic.
        • pcmoney 5y ago
          An endemic disease is a disease that is always present in a particular population/region. Ex. Flu, malaria, HIV, syphilis, and… COVID Am I missing something?
          • sjg007 5y ago
            Go look up the definitions of these words and then read what Closi wrote again.
            • tagoregrtst 5y ago
              Endemic also means, particularly in the context of disease, widely present in the area. Endemic for COVID, therefore, means that theres no locking it out because its everywhere. And since COVID can jump species, its done. Game over. It will be with us forever.
    • ericd 5y ago
      People over here in France are generally living pretty normally. Far from madness, it's pretty nice. Sure, everyone masks up and whips out their phone for constant QR scanning, but restaurants are still pretty full, trams busses and trains as well, and people are getting together. Schools are in person. It probably helps that home tests are cheap ($25 for 5) and super easy to get. It's frankly pretty weird that these comment threads are always so ragey and judgey, let alone the ones on Twitter. Everyone should chill a bit and stop reading the news stories stoking fears - at some point the mental effects are riskier than the physical ones, and I'd say that many in this thread are well past this point.
      • pcmoney 5y ago
        Jealous of your tests. Pretty sad we printed a couple trillion and didnt get testing etc with it.
      • Zanneth 5y ago
        Wearing masks and having to endure "constant QR scanning" doesn't sound like normal life to me.
        • ericd 5y ago
          The masks are if you want to go into mass transit or peoples’ businesses, and it’s mostly theater in restaurants - they come off and stay off almost immediately. It’s just common courtesy to others to wear them in public places while omicron is raging. The QR code scanning is just for dining at the place (not takeout), and for things like long trains and planes. It’s not a big deal, except for the privacy implications. My point was mostly that people aren’t holding back from going out, despite very high infection rates, and things appear to be mostly fine.
      • caddemon 5y ago
        People bitching about restrictions in the US just want something to be mad about, because there really aren't any life-altering ones. Masks on public transit and in healthcare facilities, and in some schools (it is very variable by district). Some cities require proof of vaccination for indoor dining or large events. That's basically it, just as you describe it in France. The only things that have been cancelled lately have been due to staffing issues (e.g. concerts happen unless performers get COVID, schools are open except where the absence rate is very high there may be a brief shutdown, etc.). I'm in the northeast, and it has been this way for at least 9 months now. Just imagine how little life was impacted by restrictions in some other areas of the US. So IMO it's the people mad about "restrictions" that should calm down with the hyperbole. Yes there are also some hyper anxious pro-lockdown people, but reality doesn't reflect their opinion anyway. I don't get what there is to be upset about. For those that are so angry about US-based restrictions, what have you been prevented from doing in the last 9 months?
    • skillpass 5y ago
      Covid spread throughout the entire world very quickly. "Locking down harder" in any region simply delays the inevitable spike in cases once those lockdowns end.
    • krferriter 5y ago
      I mean if you want to argue to close all indoor dining rooms, that's a case you could try to make. I disagree, but at least it'd be a consistent thing to argue for. Opening dining rooms, but then requiring everyone to wear a mask while they walk from the door to the table is pure theater that does nothing at all.