I agree with this. I sense local and state governments are waking up the fact that if they don’t open up, they’re still going to get a percentage of the covid cases (as folks will shuttle back and forth from neighboring areas with more relaxed rules), but they’ll get none of the economic benefits. Opening responsibly (with locally appropriate guidelines in place) will lessen the incentive for people to go further afield.
“The fact is…different folks have different points of view on this whole issue. Different state health departments different from one another on “the facts”.
Really?
I haven’t heard or read one public health official anywhere, on any level of government say we aren’t opening up too early and too quickly.
I must read and listen to different sources of news from most people.
We are reopening not based on the science or data. We are reopening too quickly because of political pressure.
@me29034 I guess what I don’t understand is people having different “beliefs” about the virus. I mean, as Dr. Fauci said, it’s the virus that will determine the timeline. The virus is what it is. People can listen to the epidemiologists or not and I guess that’s their choice but the problem is that their actions affect all of us.
I wish something magic would happen and those hanging at the bars won’t get sick but I don’t see that happening. Cuomo yesterday said something that I thought made sense. Protect yourself and your family. It’s the only part of this that you can control. I would add that, if people have the ability, support your local retailers in a big way. Order from your local restaurants and shop at local retailers if they have an online option. Most of the restaurants in our town say that they are doing ok. Take out business is crazy busy here. No one wants our town to be a ghost town after the pandemic passes. I know this is just our specific situation and not everyone lives in a little suburb where most people are following the rules. We do have 168 cases in our town of 18,000. 148 of them are in two nursing homes. So, the virus is here but most of us don’t know anyone who is sick.
Thank you!! I will listen to it. Perhaps while sewing masks with my new glow-in-the-dark science-themed fabric (from JoAnn’s online).
I’m not a person who ever liked the beach, but my concern with this decision is that inconsiderate people might relieve themselves in inappropriate places instead of taking the social cue to leave after a relatively short time.
My concern is that “common sense” is not so common after all, and is not consistent among different people with different base assumptions - which is why guidelines and laws are a good idea. We’ve had an unfortunate downturn in the respect for science in the US recently, with the bizarre conflation of scientific thinking with “the elite,” meant to be a disparaging term.
And finally, I actually agree that most people are good people, but even a minority of bad apples can cause a lot of collateral damage with an exponentially contagious virus.
Re: different beliefs about the virus.
I ran into this at work the other night. I should not have been surprised, but I was.
Obviously, these people are not listening to TWIV!
As of 2 days ago, 14 states have met the federal government’s guidelines for lifting measures aimed at fighting the pandemic, according to a Reuters analysis.
Some states (since they are so large) are going on a regional basis - like NY. So the regions that have met guidelines will ‘open up’ before the others. Seems reasonable to me.
Thanks for linking the Reuter’s article.
“Thank you!! I will listen to it. Perhaps while sewing masks with my new glow-in-the-dark science-themed fabric (from JoAnn’s online).”
@fretfulmother - please, please, please!!! Do NOT use any glow in the dark fabric for facial coverings. I would not even wear a garment made of such fabric. I have no idea what the exact pigment is made of, but I would not want to breathe in particles of that stuff. At best, it has Europium… not something I would want in my lungs.
Where are the studies that “show” spending 15 minutes on an open air beach with a typical breeze will increase “the odds that you will get it”? Where?
Name one expert or scientists that has "shown that spending 15 minutes with someone infected [on an open air beach] with the virus increases the odds that you will get it.
Federal guidelines. LOL.
CDC has been badly compromised.
The federal govt was forced to release them and they’ve removed and/or loosened guidelines that were in the original document that was leaked because they shelved the whole thing.
Any regions that open up in NYS will be shut down or regs tightened if any of the metrics change from the day of reopening. And phase 1 is very limited. Manufacturing and construction and non essential business can do curbside pickups. They must stay in Phase 1 got a minimum of two weeks. Only if the all metrics remain in the safe zone will a region be allowed to go to Phase 2.
As to children missing vaccines – technically my granddaughter is in that group. She had a 15-month well-child appointment scheduled for mid-April in a highly impacted area. When my daughter called the doctor they arranged for a tele-visit where they discussed the needed shots and THE DOCTOR suggested waiting until her 18-month checkup to catch up. The health system is now doing drive-thru vaccines in some areas and my daughter is looking into that. So yes, she’s out of compliance. Is it a public health risk? The pediatrician didn’t think so. There must be many others in this situation. (My take was if it’s not an MMR she’s missing don’t worry about it yet. And they are super cautious about social distancing so not likely the babe is exposed to anything right now.)
People should have long ago come to that conclusion. I know I have. I have been watching a lot of webinars for our company, and something said in one of the earlier ones has stayed with me. And that is that the “we are all in this together!” mantra will not last long. And it hasn’t.
Oh!! Thank you I had no idea!!
And yet science shows it makes a difference. If you want to find a rock and sit, do it. Just not on the beach. This whining about regulations trying to keep people healthy is self indulgent and very entitled-sounding. Americans have been lucky. We haven’t suffered much as a society. Our shores haven’t seen war or devastation in a long time. Look at this as a test or our national character. Can we withstand a crisis? I would like to believe we can. I’m disappointed and embarrassed by those who refuse to. Talk about demanding privilege. Is that what American exceptionalism really is: the desire to live in a bubble, reality be damned?
That’s true, and how it should be IMO. The health docs will always be conservative and their ONLY job is to assess the virus; they do not and cannot opine on the economic costs. That is our leaders’ jobs, and those leaders are politicians, so they’ll be making political decisions.
Many economists do. Many representatives in Congress do. They’re trying to help. While others – millionaires all – are blocking their efforts. Having a sick society is dangerous. We can’t have a healthy economy if the people aren’t. They go hand in hand.
The only problem with that approach is that you will invariably get people from regions that haven’t opened up yet travelling to the regions that have.
I thought this article was helpful – 3 different public health people talking about their own behavior in the days ahead. Some more cautious than others. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/wondering-whats-safe-as-states-start-to-reopen-heres-what-some-public-health-experts-say/2020/05/14/9e684e3c-949d-11ea-91d7-cf4423d47683_story.html
Moral foundations as described by Haidt may be related.
https://righteousmind.com/about-the-book/
For example, someone who values authority highly may be more likely to accept what medical experts say about COVID-19 than someone who does not value authority much.
Another example is that someone with high value for liberty and low value for care may disagree with someone with high value for care and low value for liberty when it comes to actions which impose cost and/or risk on others (especially with risk, since many people have difficulty with judging risk, especially when information is incomplete, as with COVID-19).
However, people can also differ in how they define a moral foundation. For example, two people who value liberty highly may differ in consideration of short or long term effects. Someone mostly concerned about liberty in the short term may disagree with someone who thinks that limiting his/her actions now will increase liberty in the long term (the latter analogous to putting up with a military draft in 1942 to avoid the long term loss of freedom that losing the war to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan would have caused). Another difference of definition can exist for loyalty, in that different people who value it highly may be loyal to different things (e.g. local community, state, nation, world; or other groupings like race, ethnicity, religion, or sports team fans; or sometimes individual persons including politicians).
Here’s the problem. You open up the beaches with no restrictions and you get thousands of people flocking to the beach from 30 miles away (because there is not a lot of other things to do right now) We saw that last month in southern CA orange county beaches. You can’t open public bathrooms on the beach because its a confined space for hundreds of people that will need to go to the bathroom being at the beach for 4 or 5+ hours. In addition, people need to park their cars and frequently congregate at the beach access points (one of the reasons they closed popular hiking trails). Too many people in too confined a space, even outdoors can be a problem.
The whole point is to limit the amount of people that congregate in large groups, limiting their exposure of other people giving them the virus. For example, Ventura County beaches have allowed access to these beaches with these same precautions (only walking, surfing, boating ok) as discussed above and they have not had the huge crowds we saw at other beaches.
Nothing wrong with taking precautions for an activity that is really non-essential and inconsequential like sunbathing for hours on the beach. For now, let’s keep the large gathering of people to a minimum. It’s going to be ok, you will survive if you cannot sit of the beach for hours at a time.