But... lockdowns aren't happening in New York City right now? They're on Phase 4 reopening. The problem isn't lockdowns. The problem is that people don't want to suffer or die from a horrible lung disease, or have their friends and family die from it. Pretending that the disease is harmless and gone doesn't actually make it so.
And the only reason lockdowns are so difficult in the US is because most people in the US don't have meaningful savings and are in debt, and there isn't an adequate social welfare system in place to smooth out this very rough patch.
>But... lockdowns aren't happening in New York City right now?
Yes, they are. Today is the first day in seven months that NYC is allowing indoor dining, but it is at 25% capacity. Gyms, salons, and other similar industries are operating at similar capacity. Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio are already, this week, talking about rolling it back.
87% of the entire hospitality industry is unable to pay rent.
>The problem is that people don't want to suffer or die from a horrible lung disease, or have their friends and family die from it. Pretending that the disease is harmless and gone doesn't actually make it so.
Adults are capable of making that decision for themselves. This is a free country. If what you are saying is true, indoor dining today should be relatively empty. I'll walk by a few restaurants and let you know how crowded they are.
The problem is that "people can make that decision for themselves" only works if they themselves pay the price for their actions. If you're in the age range that is likely to get an asymptomatic or mild development, the price of you getting infected and walking around infecting others are paid for mostly by others.
"Let everyone decide for themselves" rewards the selfish and makes people that restrain themselves jealous of the selfish people. If that's the kind of society you want to live in, well, that's your choice. But I think a lot of people don't.
First off, it's hard to call anything that was done in the US an actual "lockdown" - see Wuhan where they welded people into their apartments, that was a lockdown.
> 87% of the entire hospitality industry is unable to pay rent.
And would it be much different if there weren't restrictions in place? People being afraid of catching a disease that could possibly kill them or leave them with long term disability will tend to not eat out or go to theaters. So maybe instead of 87% the number would be 77% unable to pay rent. Still, as it passes around in a non-restricted environment people will become wary.
Where I'm at (Oregon) people can eat in restaurants (with distancing, so lower capacity) but most seem to be choosing takeout or to eat outside. This seems to be keeping restaurants in my neighborhood going at near normal levels (the proprietor of a nearby pizza place says he's pretty much at normal levels of business with takeout only and there have actually been some new restaurants that have opened recently). Of course when the weather changes... we'll see, but takeout will still be an option.
I'm sorry, but if you can walk across the street and buy a dollar slice, then it's not really a "lockdown" except in the loosest definition of the term.
I'm glad to hear that New York City finally got the virus in control such that they can start to safely open things back up. Hopefully the adults you speak of make decisions not just for themselves but their communities as well, lest the virus spike again and kill thousands of New Yorkers again.
There was never a lockdown. People were never restricted from leaving their houses or visiting family. Public, enclosed spaces were restricted, but nobody was ever locked inside. There have been attempts at imposing quarantines on interstate travelers but it's been almost entirely voluntary in practice.
(this is in contrast with western Europe, where there were and are actual lockdowns that made it illegal to leave home without a permit, etc)
edit: NYC did impose a curfew for a few days, but not as a coronavirus measure
I could keep listing stories that clearly say "lockdown". You seem to have a different definition of that word than any other English speaker, including the NYTimes and CNN.
I dunno, you can't really have it both ways. Either a lockdown is something stricter than how people would behave in the presence of COVID, or it's not. If the argument is that the lockdown itself has a societal cost, then it's the strict version. If you go by the headlines that refer to lockdowns in the colloquial sense describe the very loose policies of "walk around, order food, wear a mask, sit outside, social distancing, but hey, indoor dining is closed so it's a lockdown", then most if not all of that cost is what would be happening anyway due to human behavior.
This is all really dumb. We need to societally backspace and come up with a couple of popular words that have clearer meanings for this stuff. Lockdown has close to zero semantic meaning.
In my original parent comment, I was more thinking of strict lockdowns. The type where - given sufficient test capacity and responsible contact tracing - a region could limit its borders and strictly lock down for four weeks, and obliterate COVID to the point they could test and trace - and dine indoors.
Data is useless without theory, and theoreticians like Paul Krugman have long argued that lockdowns are better for the economy. A recent science paper also showed that countries that utilized lockdowns showed stronger economic recovery. Cite the science, not the NYC hospitality alliance rent report. These other sources do not argue that the point of lockdowns was to help hospitals, but rather to help the economy itself.
So what? Krugman is also a Nobelist, if you're merely content with regurgitating decades-old ad hominem promulgated by conservative economists who are in denial about their own partisanship. It is factually true that Krugman early on advocated for lockdowns using an economic argument. Either that's useful to know and look into, or not. But the level of your response to this fact was purely vacuous anti-intellectualism, a kind of partisanship of its own.
> We're on month seven of the lockdown in NYC. 87% of restaurants can't pay rent.
You think that's from the lockdown and not from the pandemic? I'm in the one of the red states, and restaurants have been open for awhile. I don't know anyone who is planning to go out to eat, and we all used to eat out a lot. Sure, some people don't care and will carry on like normal, but the pandemic crushed hospitality regardless of a lockdown.
Where I live, well over 50% of all new community cases have been associated with bars and restaurants. The bars have been ordered closed until there's an effective vaccine. The restaurants are open, but patronage is far below pre-pandemic levels because, even without a government order, most people don't want to risk dying for a restaurant meal.
The reality is that bars and restaurants aren't safe to operate as long as SARS-CoV-2 is spreading in the population. This is a catastrophe for their owners and employees, but it is the epidemiological reality.
Most countries don't allow businesses to stockpile explosives in residential areas because the risks of an unintended mass casualty event is too high. During this pandemic, operating a bar or restaurant is similarly unacceptably dangerous and cannot be permitted any more than residential storage of explosives can be permitted.
No amount of bleating about 'muh rent payments' or 'muh rights' will change this, or make patrons decide to risk their own lives for the benefit of the industry.
A substantial amount of people did not shelter in place until they were ordered to do so, and they stopped doing so as soon as the order was lifted.
Bars and restaurants and malls were packed until the day the lockdowns started. In places that have allowed them to reopen, they are packed again.
Given that some customers are better than no customers, and that a lot of the customers never would have left and are back now, and given how many businesses failed because it was literally illegal to enter them, how can anyone believe that businesses would be better off with longer lockdowns? It flies in the face of logic and requires some very convincing data to be believed.
We shut down businesses that pollute the water so that people living downstream won't get sick. It's not clear why businesses that pollute the air (that's bars, to be clear, you catch covid in closed environments where people are tslking) should be permitted to operate, they are a risk to public health. And you don't need them. You can make a case that you need teflon, but you don't need indoor drinking establishments or basketball arenas.
Running a restaurant at 10% capacity is probably not much more sustainable than remaining closed. At least if you're closed you don't have to pay employees to show up.
Given how razor thin restaurant margins are, even running at 70% capacity during what usually would have been peak hours will kill the business. That's why restaurants try to squeeze as many tables in as possible and turn over tables quickly
