Comment by in_cahoots | Hacker News Reader

Comment by in_cahoots | Hacker News Reader

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Shouldn’t the metric incorporate the risk each activity entails? A good example is gardeners. Gardeners work alone or in teams of two, can obey social distancing, and generally don’t even talk to their clients on a regular basis. What is the threat here? What is so magical about the word essential? On the flip side large alcohol stores like Bevmo can stay open and serve hundreds of customers a day because they sell cheese and crackers and somehow that makes them ‘essential’.

It doesn’t make any sense, unless the true goal is enforcement through fear and propaganda. Disrupt people’s lives enough and they’ll start to think that the alternative must be truly terrible. That’s why you get articles claiming that even young people are susceptible where the simple math shows that the risk is low. Cherry-picked stories about the handful of children who died from the virus, instead of articles about the kids going hungry because they can’t get two free meals a day. It’s fear-mongering as public policy.

1) Liquor stores are kept open because a (surprisingly high) percentage of the population are severe alcoholics and sudden withdrawal can kill them.

2) No public health professional has time to list and quantify all of the routine processes of every profession to create a complex matrix of risk. And 99% of the public would ignore that matrix if it was created and published. The simpler and more effective public health communication is "stay home."

3) Your hypothetical pair of gardeners might not see their clients that day, but they still get up, get breakfast, get supplies at the store, fuel up their truck and equipment at the gas station, drop off a check at the bank after work, etc., and they can interact with other people at each of those stops.

4) Articles about young people that die from the virus are not trying to hide "simple math that the risk is low." They are trying to convince young people that the risk is non-zero, to prevent them from spreading the virus while pre- or asymptomatic.

5) "Children dying from a virus" and "children going hungry because they can't get two free meals a day" are BOTH public policy issues. Dooming an extra hundred? thousand? ten thousand? people to severe illness and death to avoid having to deliver emergency rations and meals to a million people is a false dilemma. In my medium-sized US city, schools and other community agencies have been distributing meals and rations for seven weeks now and we have zero cases of death by starvation.

Alcoholics are a pretty resourceful bunch, I’m sure they can find their local Wal-Mart, Target, or 7/11. Nobody is going to die because Bevmo is closed.

As to your point about selectively closing businesses being hard, isn’t that a good thing? We shouldn’t put tens of millions of people out of jobs because it’s easier than enumerating what can and can’t stay open. The burden should be on the experts to make their case; after all they have had more than a month now to figure out a plan of attack.

How many deaths due to coronavirus are too many? Right now it seems like public health experts are taking the view that any death is one too many. And they’re willing to present or skew the facts to get that point across. I would rather them be upfront about the benefits and risks, rather than take a paternalistic viewpoint. There are real costs to keeping the country closed, and we shouldn’t discount them.

"What is so magical about the word essential?"

Are you a real account? Essential is essential. Food. Gas. Home goods. Infrastructure. Anything that supports essential business.

Alcohol is certainly an outlier, but there are plenty of reasons for it to be essential. Alcoholics would die, for one. Black markets would spring up, for two.

Gardeners are not essential. No one is going to die because they can't get their gardening supplies. The cartel isn't going to get in the tulip business.

Alcoholics can go to their local Wal-Mart, Target, or grocery store. They don’t need specialty liquor stores.

What about weed dispensaries, are they essential? More essential than dentists, pediatrician visits, and the accompanying vaccinations? Because the latter have all been closed. How are construction workers essential when gardeners aren’t?

‘Essential’ is in the eyes of the beholder, it seems.

I'm not convinced you're arguing in good faith, but I'll dispel the misinformation for others:

In the bay area dentists and healthcare professionals are exempt from the order. My dentist is open for emergencies 7am-7pm. If your dentist is closed, you can certainly call and complain, but it's not part of the bay area order.

I'm not sure about vaccination schedules because it's hard to google it without talk about a coronavirus vaccine, so you should contact your pediatrician about that.

Construction is also essential only, except maybe the affordable housing exemption. You can report violations on sf.gov.

Weed has legitimate medical purposes, and keeping dispensaries open is probably a combination of that and preventing a black market.

Source for most of this: sf.gov

What exactly are you talking about?

My source for this is my own life. My town (San Mateo county) is still bringing in construction workers to build a playground. My pediatrician and dentist have both closed for non-emergency purposes, as has my physical therapist. And you didn’t even address my point about liquor stores - read the order from San Mateo county and see if you think their rationale makes sense.

I’m not sure why you think I’m arguing in bad faith just because I happen to disagree with you, but I’d appreciate you discussing the substance of my claims and not your interpretation of my intent.

The original thing I was pushing against was your "What is so magical about the word essential?" comment.

I've been showing how, with limited exceptions, it's not just a magic word attached to activities.

I didn't think you were arguing in good faith because you brought up horrible counter examples (gardeners??) and started spewing conspiracy theories that the bay area has some nefarious reason to keep people from being productive other than public safety.

You don’t seem to be reading my posts carefully, so let me spell it out for you. My point is that essential is seemingly arbitrary. Constructing a playground is essential but gardening isn’t. I can drink away my pain or het high but I can’t get physical therapy.

It doesn’t take a conspiracy theory to understand what’s going on. Essential has been defined narrowly enough to keep the public inconvenienced so that they stay vigilant. If you disagree with me on this go read the New Yorker article on Seattle’s response. Optics plays as large a part as science when it comes to public health.

Essential is also defined broadly enough so that big businesses and their lobbyists don’t complain. That’s capitalism, you can disagree if you want.

Not every argument has to resort to name-calling and accusations of being fake. Even on the internet.

And my point is that it's mostly not arbitrary, with a few exceptions that should absolutely be called out. And you are right to do so.

My problem with your arguments is that instead of complaining to your public officials that non-essential construction is happening (the park), you assume there's some conspiracy going on. Big Park lobbying? I don't know what you think, and I'm not going to bother writing out all the reasons it's ridiculous.

I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. A reasonable person can read my posts with some nuance, but you seem determined to take the most absurd interpretation of my words while simultaneously putting words into my mouth. It’s not worth the effort to argue with someone like you.

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