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Comment by joegahona | Hacker News Reader

> - Dense city? Quarantine. - Moderately dense? High risk individuals quarantine, everyone else social distances, but works. - etc. Across the board, if your business is the sort that can WFH (such as software companies), then you do work from home. If not, then you're open, but with precautions. Restaurants are open, but pickup only, etc.

How is this _that_ much different from what's being done now?

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Well for example there's lots of non-essential business that can operate while enforcing social distancing. Closing bars and restaurants makes sense. But closing stores were you walk in and walk out does not make sense. Banning fishing doesn't make sense. Very broad strokes have been used to lock stuff down.

And at least in Michigan, they're not taking the time to open up low risk businesses now - instead they're filling in even more of the gaps that allowed life to continue. No golf courses, even without any staff contact. No landscaping. No landscaping supplies. No motorboats or jet skis. No travel between two residences you own.

But at least you can still buy lottery tickets!

Some of these can be explained at least. Landscaping is very non-essential, and it's hard to maintain social distancing while doing it because the way the crews operate is it's a bunch of guys riding together in one truck between each job sites (it's not a caravan of different vehicles, one per vehicle).

Additionally, my mom has been complaining about the landscapers where she lives and is angry that they're still allowed, because they flagrantly violate social distancing and get near her when she's trying to go on walks around her neighborhood.

Things are getting so bad in Detroit that bodies are piling up in unrefrigerated rooms in hospitals. Now's not really the time to be questioning if they're being too strict with the social distancing; at this point they really just do need everyone staying home, period, and not coming into contact with anyone. Motorboats and jet skis sure as hell aren't essential, and might tempt people into congregating with people they shouldn't be congregating with (boating is typically a social endeavor for example).

I'd say that landscaping is at least a field that has the possibility of operating while social distancing.

As for bodies piling up in Detroit... While that's true, additional restrictions added today won't have any impact there. Either the previous restrictions were sufficient, in which case Detroit should be peaking soon, or they weren't sufficient and there'll be several times that number of bodies before these restrictions start to have an effect.

My personal view is that low-risk activities should be allowed whenever possible to maximize the time period that people will willingly endure these restrictions. It looks like this won't be a sprint but a marathon, and people's willingness to comply is extremely relevant there.

I am in Tokyo and it's been going on longer here than many places.

Gradually increasing pressure has been the approach. It feels to me like you're right. I am willing to accept more pressure, though already burdened. It's because there's been time to adjust.

You're missing the point, which is that if you think the situation is bad now, just wait how bad it'll be in two weeks if we don't act even more stringently now. Letting up on the restrictions now would be exactly the wrong thing to do when the healthcare system is already bursting at the seams; it'd make things much much worse in the weeks to come.

The very earliest that it makes sense to even start considering reducing the restrictions is once the healthcare system is back to operating at under its maximum capacity. And you have to ease things back slowly, ready to clamp back down if necessary if the healthcare system seems ready to be overwhelmed again.

My reading is that either restrictions were sufficient before, or the new ones won't be enough either. And the more onerous the restrictions, the less likely it is that people will be willing to follow the important ones in the future.

It doesn't logically follow that just because mild restrictions weren't sufficient, that stricter restrictions won't be. China used very strict restrictions and they stopped the spread of the disease hard.

Every incremental improvement you can do to decrease the R_0 will have its effect. Progressively stricter social distancing measures as required absolutely will work, so long as they are being obeyed anyway.

> so long as they are being obeyed anyway.

And that's MY point. How long will people be willing to obey the current restrictions? How long would they be willing to obey even stricter ones, or more lenient ones?

I don't think obedience can be assumed forever. Even China had to weld people inside their apartment buildings. And I don't know if that would be practical here.

> it's hard to maintain social distancing while doing it because the way the crews operate

I have no idea how to quantify it, but social distancing at a grocery store, surrounded by an ever-rotating group of people, seems much more risky than a work-crew, which is composed of the same 6 people all day.

The work crews are hanging out all day every day, whereas you do your grocery shopping once a week maximum, for less than an hour, and everyone wears a mask to reduce the chance of spreading anything.

On the work crew, if one person gets it, basically everyone else on the crew is guaranteed to get it too. In the grocery store, a single visit, especially with proper precautions taken, is unlikely to spread it.

But the grocery store workers are there all the time, and interacting with a wide variety of people. Sure, the chance per person is lower - but overall?

And the spread on a work crew is limited - there's only 6 people there. But that grocery store worker? Can you define super spreading event?

The talking point the anti-governor folks are repeating is that landscaping companies can’t even deliver mulch to your driveway. Which, sure, I guess that’s overly draconian but in the grand scheme of things I can’t bring myself to be angry about it.

There's inevitably the potential for person-to-person contact in business anyway, yes, even running a mulch yard, delivering mulch, getting a receipt signed on delivery, etc. It's not unreasonable at all to shut down all non-essential businesses until our healthcare system starts operating under its maximum capacity again, and to define "essential" strictly.

Given that we're in the early stages of the worst pandemic to hit the world in over a century, like you, I too can't bring myself to be angry about landscaping being shuttered, or jet skis, or whatever other silly unnecessary things people are complaining about. If even one more person dies because a landscaping company opened back up a month earlier, then it wasn't worth it. And that's easily a possibility we're looking at here.

What you're not thinking of is that restrictions such as this also cost lives. Suicides will be up and there will be much more economic stress afterwards.

Seriously, how is allowing kayaking/sailing but banning motor boats, even when alone, anything but taking advantage of the crisis to push through an environmental agenda?

People wonder why others are afraid to give the government more power, this is one of the best examples of why.

It could depend on the store.

Over here in The Netherlands, most supermarkets have, to various degrees, implemented measures to protect workers (plexiglass, timed restocking, etc.) and measures to encourage social distancing (reminders and lines on the floors, a maximum number of customers via a set number of carts and having an employee wipe down the carts and handing them out manually at the entrance, old-people-hour in the morning, etc.).

The psychology behind this is fascinating. It's not just the measures that help, but the fact that simply being handed a cart after passing through the turnstile puts me (and I suspect everyone else) in 'awareness' mode. I've noticed that I myself generally pay more attention to not hover around employees, and take a detour via a quiet aisle whenever I can.

This stands in contrast to all the non-supermarket stores I occasionally visit. aisles are narrower, they don't have a designated entrance-employee, and at best there's some A4 glued somewhere asking me to pay by card if I can. Not only is it more difficult to practice 'social distancing', I don't notice a similar change in 'mindset' and have caught myself more than once leaning over an employee or passing close by other shoppers. And interestingly, both myself and said shopper seemed to notice this less (in the supermarket I've noticed many more older customers wait intentionally for me to pass at an appropriate distance).

And that's not even considering weird situations like our local HEMA (a very popular convenience store) implementing a bunch of measures, but then if you want to go and pay for your stuff you have to pick up an unclean scanner gun for the self-checkout, essentially undoing any measures they implemented. Out of curiosity I stuck around to see if these 'guns' are cleaned. They're not.

I guess my point is that stores are trying to implement sensible measures but so far it's mostly been supermarkets that seem to do a decent job (even if there's quite a bit of variation between stores from even the same company). I imagine it's much easier for these chain-stores to both get expert advice /and/ implement measures nation-wide. For those who have serious concerns it's a good reason to avoid 'mom and pop' stores though.

I guess what I’d like is for the gov to provide methods that would allow business to remain open if they complied with certain measures. They shouldn’t need their own expert, the gov should be able to provide measures.

Agreed! I'm kind of expecting that something like that will happen over here eventually.

I agree... they closed access to waterways here because they were seeing some boats too close together. That makes a lot of sense if you don't think about it, and clearly should not have happened.

Michigan has banned selling seeds.

Governors are forcing businesses closed or no seating allowed.

Those guidelines are good ones to maintain for perpetuity. Would decrease the thousands of flu deaths we see each year too but today's situation is closer to a nationwide lockdown than a PSA about washing hands

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