Closed again

[Dennis Benjamin]

If a person thinks that a business is responsible for someone getting sick from a virus, that same person would agree that if a person got into a car accident on the way to that business - that the same business is responsible for that person getting into the car accident? After all, if the business wasn't open, the person would be attempting to drive there?

We don't need to go down this slippery slope. Lawyers heads would explode.

[Leo Enticknap]

Agreed completely with Steve, and not just over cinemas. My mother came over from England to see us over Christmas. She had to get three tests in total (one immediately before leaving the UK, one immediately before leaving the USA, and another the day after she returned), the totality of which cost around $400 and 10-12 hours of her time. Her return flight was so empty that they upgraded everyone and closed the economy cabin. I have to go through a reduced form of that hassle for every service trip to Hawaii. The result will be a massive reduction in both leisure and business travel, killing jobs in the transportation and hospitality industries, and increasing the costs for businesses that need service providers to travel to them (e.g. we have to pass the cost of my covid tests to customers in HI). And all this for a bug that, as Steve points out, is now endemic, and with increasing evidence that it's now no more dangerous than driving to work, church, or the supermarket.

There has to come a time when the line is drawn, we accept that the emergency phase of this is over, and move on. Further discussion of that point would mean getting political. But yesterday, I would guess that the traffic to and from my service calls was around 30% lighter than I would expect for a typical Thursday throughout last year. There is talk of relocating the Superbowl to Dallas over fears that the last minute imposition of new restrictions by the city, county, or state, will cause people to stay away en masse. So we're back into job-killing, quality of life-killing extreme paranoia mode. It's starting to feel like the spring of 2020 again, and we can't go on like this forever.

[Steve Guttag]

Dennis, you left the low-hanging fruit on the table for cinemas. Each year, dietary health related issues contribute to approximately the same number of people that perished with the Alpha variant. If business are "responsible" for injuring people's health, then what you offer in the form of concessions would be there too or food (at places like a restaurant) would then be culpable too. There would be no end of it. No, if you go out in the world, there ARE ALWAYS RISKS. People should be informed of risks (or have the information be available so they can self-inform). But somewhere in life, there are thresholds were society has deemed it a part of life. I'd like us to be consistent with those thresholds.

[Bobby Henderson]

We're now at the point where it's now down to individual responsibility for each person to take steps to safeguard themselves and others around them. That means getting vaccinated and boosted. Here in the US the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines have been freely available for several months. Boosters have been available to all adults for around two months.

Most people who are not vaccinated have remained that way by choice. They have had plenty of time and plenty of chances to get vaccinated. Various businesses and institutions should not have to go out of their way to protect those people anymore. The anti-vax people are taking a gamble and they should live with whatever consequences come from that choice. It's tragic when someone dies from taking foolish chances, like getting thrown from a vehicle during a car accident because the seat belt wasn't used. Adults dying of COVID-19 is now entering the same territory.

So any more lock-downs and closures are pointless now. They made more sense when we didn't have any vaccines or a growing number of COVID-19 treatments to use in hospitals. Given how contagious the Omicron variant appears to be such mitigation steps like masks and shut-downs might not do any good. The only real defense is getting the damned shots.

[Frank Cox]

I think you guys are pushing the whataboutism a little too hard here.

There's an obvious difference between the covid situation and someone walking across the street to the theatre and getting run over by a car on the way.

I personally view it as irresponsible to pack a bunch of people into a room for several hours to watch a movie when the town is apparently being ravaged by an extremely contagious disease. At some point the ravaging will lessen and the risk will return to a more normal or acceptable level; it isn't going to continue like this forever.

As I posted above, our chief medical health officer is asking everyone nicely to not hold any gatherings at this time. Unlike other provinces, there's currently no law against holding gatherings here if you really must persist but it's not a good thing to do for yourself, your family or your community.

[Mike Blakesley]

As I posted above, our chief medical health officer is asking everyone nicely to not hold any gatherings at this time.

That is easy to say, though, for a person who has a government job and a guaranteed income.

I wonder how many more "variants" are waiting in the wings. We need to get to the point where the government says "live with it, get your shots if you want to, and here are the pills to combat the disease if you get it." (Which is what many experts said at the beginning would probably happen eventually.)

[Steve Guttag]

Frank, it isn't "whataboutism" at all. It is consistency applied across all risks. You seem to think, before COVID that the annual flu wasn't a contagious disease that swarms though every year (well all year but hits harder in the winter as people move indoors). And I wasn't referring to getting "hit by a car." I mean if you ride a car or bus, your odds of ending up in the hospital or morgue, if you are in a vaccinated population (and you, yourself are vaccinated) are many times higher than sitting in a crowded theatre...jammed pack.

And, to Bobby's point, and why I'm FOR vaccine mandates...the difference between a person's likelihood of having a bad C19 outcome (including death) if they are surrounded by non-vaccinated people is over 2000 times higher than if they are surrounded by vaccinated people. It is THAT big a difference.

[Bobby Henderson]

I understand there is a percentage of the population who can't receive SARS-CoV-2 vaccines because of legit medical reasons. But that is a small percentage. If everyone else who was medically able to get vaccinated and boosted did so the United States would go well beyond the threshold of herd immunity. The people who truly couldn't get vaccinated would still have a high degree of protection due to the high percentage of vaccinated individuals around them. The SARS-CoV-2 virus would be far less of a problem and new variants would have a harder time establishing a foot-hold. Maybe some people would still end up dying of COVID-19, but fatality rates would be far lower than what we've been seeing.

Here in Oklahoma we have a lot of people who have no intentions at all of ever getting vaccinated. They have all kinds of pre-packaged excuses ready to sell to anyone. Those will be the people who help new variants of SARS-CoV-2 spread. Our state is now reporting over 6000 new cases per day. That is as much as any previous peak in Oklahoma during this pandemic. Since Omicron is so much more contagious yet doesn't cause nearly as much severe COVID-19 disease I'm kind of hoping it will spread thru the unvaccinated like fire thru dried Christmas Trees before another variant can take hold. Then everyone will have at least some level of immunity. And we might be done with the worst of this crap.

[Steve Guttag]

And that is just it. With a relatively mild variant that spreads fast...why slow it down? Those vaccinated have a high degree of probability of a good outcome. Those unvaccinated are no worse off than they were and can develop natural antibodies (presuming they survive)...and once the wave is over, if herd immunity is possible, we should be there. With a highly contagious variant, the lock-down for those medically at risk would be relatively short. But the current "plans" are no plans at all and no end, ever. They don't even have thresholds for when they think masking or anything else should/shouldn't be necessary.

[Leo Enticknap]

I'd be interested to read a deep dive article or book on the political processes that led to the ending of emergency mandates and restrictions related to the 1918-20 Spanish 'flu pandemic. Wikipedia merely states that "by 1920, the virus that caused the pandemic became much less deadly and caused only ordinary seasonal flu." Presumably the decisions made by various governmental agencies, from federal to local, to end emergency measures, were themselves subject to controversy and debate, with some states (and countries) ending them more quickly than others, and both data-driven and political factors driving the process. I'd also be interested to know, in more broadly general terms, if that pandemic became as heavily politicized as this one has (especially given the backdrop of WWI: apparently allegations were made in some, shall we say more colorful news publications, that the bug was a German biological weapon).

Eventually we're going to have to move on from this. I'm wondering if the last comparable pandemic has any lessons for how this one will end.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Nothing here has closed Frank, and Biden is taking a manage approach to the Omnicron rather than shutting down everything again..

[Steve Guttag]

I'd say it is by locale as to what "approach" is being used. Federally, we just have the CDC scaring people without providing actual thresholds for their recommendations. Some areas are in virtual lockdowns while other areas are at no precautions other than "recommendations via CDC." There are the various states (legal challenges) of vaccine mandates from the federal level. I, seriously, want the CDC to provide a risk level as compared to other daily activities as well as publish what their thresholds are for when they recommend a level of precaution (e.g. masking). I don't think, statistically, they have the justification for their current recommendations.

[Leo Enticknap]

It's not just federal government agencies that are refusing to provide objective criteria for the imposition and removal of "mandates" (a euphemism for rules and restrictions). I seem to remember that in the beginning, the State of California and some counties used R numbers and/or hospitalizations as the threshold, as in Newsom's now defunct DEFCON-style color system. But that's long since been abandoned, here at any rate. The statewide mask requirement (i.e. you have to wear them in all indoor public spaces) has just been extended from an original expiration date of mid-January to mid-February, and just before Christmas, Newsom extended the state of emergency (the legal framework that allows all these restrictions to be imposed without approval by the legislature) until mid-March. In neither case were any thresholds or criteria published for determining when they would go away. This is more than just a technicality: for example, the state of emergency allows the governor to award no-bid state government contracts without monetary limit, and unilaterally. "Emergency" implies a short-term time limit, i.e. a condition that has just emerged, and is therefore not fully understood. California's state of emergency has existed for almost two years now.

[Bobby Henderson]

I have a strong feeling that America's very large population of attorneys is a GIANT reason why there is so much blurry messaging going on. No one can make a clear, declarative statement without a bunch of conditional cover-your-ass phrasing included. The mass media is not helping at all in this regard because they're always relentlessly trying to hone in on anything they can blow up into a giant, emotionally manipulating controversy. It's almost funny to watch the dance public officials have to do to take all that crap into account.

That nonsense is one of the big reasons why I think we're all on our own for the remainder of this pandemic and going on into its long term endemic phase. I'm not looking forward to getting annual flu and covid shots. But then again I donate platelets and plasma about once a month. Being IV-connected to an apheresis machine for 1-2 hours is a lot more hardcore than getting a vaccination. Frankly I think the anti-vax people are a bunch of pussies.

[Mike Blakesley]

Possible, but I think they just hate to admit they were wrong. Nobody ever likes to admit that.

I think the number of people who are genuinely "scared" of the vaccine is really pretty small. The majority of anti-vaxers don't want to get themselves (or their kids) vaxed at all for anything. This is a been a problem in schools for years. It's not due to fear, it just not wanting to be told what to do.