ER doctor: Stop indoor dining now, before we have to shut even more things down again

Doctors aren't supposed to care about saving lives, right?

Doctors should work for free, after all. His credentials, experience and salary should bar him from providing science-based advice about preventing death. That's why we have you.

Why don't you move to Florida?

I lost my job due to covid and I also think "reopening the economy" right now is a fucking stupid and deadly idea.

Were you always this moronically asinine or was that most recent head injury the final blow to your humanity? This guy may be wealthy, but he is also going to be one of the first ones to suffer extreme exposure and work 18 hour shifts if things go sour again.

And he knows this because he's already been through that hell.

In fact, he may be the one person who saves your sorry ass when your callous stupidity lands you in deep trouble.

Unless of course you can just promise to stay home and die because its all a hoax anyway. Yeah - please don't expose yourself to that evil science and just stay home.

You're making the argument that the impact of closing down indoor dining is worse than the impact of keeping indoor dining open.

That's not, on the face, a crazy argument at all.

But it's a quantitative argument, so you need to do what every math and science teacher says to do: show your work. Put a price on a COVID-19 fatality and on a nonfatal COVID-19 case. Model the number of cases with and without indoor restaurant dining. Estimate the economic damage from closing indoor restaurant dining. Compare.

As AI pioneer John McCarthy famously said, "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."

If you don't want to use actual numbers, all you're doing is shouting.

Hey, I hope this message finds you well. I am someone who works in community health as a social worker, and all through CoVID I have been having to support people who have been impacted by the social distancing measures, the loss of jobs, the bulwark of unemployment that became so bad that folks weren't hearing back for 3 months about their claims, with no one to answer their calls. My job has, quite literally, been to support the inordinate amount of stress that everyone has been under, primarily because of these measures.

That said, if it comes back and we return to where we were in March/April/May, it's going to be much much longer that shutdowns will have to occur.

Think on it: We are currently experiencing about 300-500 cases per day. Our overall case prevalence (active cases) is at 5700, which is about 2.5-3x higher than it was in July at it's lowest amount. Each person who is sick is a vector for transmission, which means that when the overall numbers are low, the number of possible people to transmit virus is minimal. As the number increases, that creates an exponential growth in transmissions.

Now - looking at places where people will transmit - the likelihood that one person amongst those going to eat is sick, is much higher now than it was in July, AND, a restaurant is more likely to have people without masks on because they are eating. These are all factors which we know will increase possible infection. If you go to the North End right now, and look at the restaurants that are running - they are getting as much business as they can before they have to close for the season in December, and realistically, it's going to be much earlier as people won't be going out to eat when it's 35 degrees nearly as much as when it's 75 degrees. There's a perverse incentive for restaurant owners to say "fuck it" and get the money while they can.

On the flip side, jobs and quality of life are impacted by shutdowns. If we get to a place where we have 10-20,000 active infections, it will take SUBSTANTIALLY longer for us to get it under control via a subsequent lockdown. If we lockdown now, reduce transmission while it's still at 5-6,000 cases, we are much more likely to be able to contain it within a couple of weeks, versus a couple of months.

Do we sacrifice a bit of time in the present to prevent an unknown but very likely risk in the future, or do we say fuck it, have fun now, and then deal with a lockdown for several months through the winter, likely losing more lives, causing more trauma, further overwhelming our already overwhelmed medical providers.

It's better for our economy to pre-empt things now before it's too late. The only reason we're at the low rate that we are is because we locked down effectively at the outset. Mind you, this is a mutating virus which is adapting to certain ways in which we try to prevent it. A major outbreak may not be able to be as well contained as it was in March/April. With all of the politics involved (which you are seeming to be manipulated by), people are thinking less rationally and more emotionally about something that gives zero fucks about what political party you belong to.

My $.02 - take what you will, call me a libtard, I could give a shit, I have bigger problems to deal with in supporting my patients who have it far worse than most of us.

In other news, it's a great day outside, take advantage of the weather before it's too late.

<3

-dh

Prohibiting indoor dining isn't a shutdown.

Person chooses "Republican" as username, tells others to stop being so political.

Get bent.

Your account.

...that red hat is on way too tight.

We are now testing more than before, with students back in college, people back at work, and people seeking out tests more. Of course rates were going to go up, since so many people have few or no symptoms.

Let's say for the sake of argument that the actual rate of infected people among the population is 1%. That means, everything else being equal, if you test 100 people you're likely to find 0, 1, or 2 positives. If you test 1000 people you'll get around 10 positives. If you test 1,000,000 people you'll get around 10,000 positives. The positivity rate is going to be right around 1% no matter how many people you test -- testing more people doesn't drive up the positivity rate.

Testing more does, of course, drive up the absolute number of reported cases, but that isn't a number that's generally used to make policy decisions without some level of adjustment to reflect the degree of testing.

This completely misses the point that the people who die of COVID spread via people going to bars and restaurants aren't necessarily the people who went to the bars and restaurants -- it'll be the others that they secondarily infect.

A compromise would be banning indoor dining for anyone over the age of 40 or 50. Card people at the door, and turn away people who are too old.

Oh, come off of it! Really, Refugee--how stupid can one get? Ban indoor dining for people over the age of 40 or 50, and you may as well ban indoor dining for everybody, regardless of age.

Indoor dining should be banned while the Covid-19 pandemic is still out of control, for everybody, regardless of age.

...or do you just think everyone else is?

Remember when they tried having smoking and non smoking sections in restaurants? None of the hvac adaptations made a difference with tobacco smoke either.

Living off tips from the unmasked must be as humiliating and risky now as it was back when waitstaff had to put up with smokers. If not more.