# Am I missing something here? (re: reopening of bars, etc... now) **URL:** \ **Category:** The Quarantine Zone\ **Tags:** covid-quarantine\ **Created:** [October 6, 2020, 5:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356 "2020-10-06T17:27:43Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 50
**Author:** ![SayTwo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e56c9b/32.png) [@SayTwo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SayTwo)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2020, 5:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/981 "2020-12-25T17:03:18Z")
> [@Irishman](#): > > This is hardly a determination of science. It’s a legal policy dispute. And I’ll be glad when everyone, meaning all the participants, call the entire debate what it is, which is one about public policy. It’s just not helping things, not at all, when people try to drown out any opinion that differs from their own by calling it ‘anti-science’. ---
**Author:** ![mistymage](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mistymage/32/459_2.png) [@mistymage](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mistymage)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2020, 6:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/982 "2020-12-25T18:11:21Z")
I hope in the New Year… we, here in the USA, get laws or at least strict guidelines across all 50 States and territories that enforce a few common sense ideas. Like wearing a mask, 12 feet apart\* (the 6’ has been shown to be not effective enough), and Stay The Eff Home unless … at work, buying food/supplies or going to the nearest hospital for whatever reason. Maybe sometime in 2021 those rules can be discarded and just be suggestions. They might have been by now but too many people just couldn’t/wouldn’t abide by them. - > **[CDC Acknowledges Threat of Indoor COVID-19 Spread Beyond 6 Feet](https://time.com/5896531/coronavirus-airborne-cdc/)** > > But the agency still says it's more common for the virus to spread through close contact with an infected person > **[Staying Six Feet Apart Often Isn't Enough During COVID-19 Pandemic](https://www.healthline.com/health-news/staying-6-feet-apart-often-isnt-enough-during-covid-19-pandemic)** > > Medical experts reported in the medical journal BMJ that there are many situations where 6 feet is not enough to keep your risk low during the COVID-19 pandemic. ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/983 "2020-12-26T16:30:19Z")
> [@SayTwo](#): > > What people dispute is whether it’s a _good idea_ , whether the gain is worth the cost. That’s a matter of judgment and policy. Science, and especially not ‘The Science’, doesn’t make those calls. People do. And it’s right about time that people, all over the country, start using better judgment. And quit hiding behind science and using it for cover. All this talk about the pain of closing down ruining businesses, but no discussion about the other option - paying businesses to be closed, paying workers to stay home, paying to keep people employed at their jobs with their benefits and keeping the companies from going under and people can pay their bills, and doing so for 6 to 8 weeks. Then being able to open everything back up with the economy ready to roll and people have their livelihoods and homes and insurance and everything intact. Remember, it’s the Republicans that wanted _less_ unemployment benefits because people were incentivized not to work - **at the time we were actively trying to get people not to work!** We could have tackled this head on with a hard fiscal hit for the country that would be much less painful for all the people and businesses. We wouldn’t have farmers throwing out food they can’t sell while people waiting in food distribution lines at food banks. We wouldn’t have people afraid they’re going to be evicted. We wouldn’t have people who have their life savings and all their energy tied up in a small business like a restaurant watching it wither and die. We had other options. But for some reason we chose the most economically destructive _and deadly_ approach to covid response. Well, maybe doing nothing at all would have been more deadly. After nearly a year of bungled response, it’s hard to say. > [@SayTwo](#): > > Yeah, I’ve long thought that kind of thing would be the case. Despite some of the arguments I’ve read to the contrary here on this board, I think people are generally well suited enough to broadly assess risk and observant enough to notice if bodies are stacking up on the streets. I’ve not heard of too many countries that have been able to mandate lockdown policies yet not need to police them. It’s not uncommon to read about countries, and not big ones at that, issuing hundreds of citations a day, if not thousands. As the scientist from UCSF put it, people just aren’t buying it. Wait, we have portable morgue trucks to keep bodies from piling up in the streets, and mortuaries running overtime, and yet somehow this is taken as a sign that there’s no worry, because there aren’t enough dead bodies? And you argue people are smart enough to broadly assess risk, yet take as evidence that people are not complying with health recommendations? > [@SayTwo](#): > > There seems to be a widely accepted notion that people wouldn’t be getting sick if there were perfect compliance to the NPIs. But the NPIs have never aimed to keep everyone at home. In fact, I think everyone, as in every single person, can find a legitimate reason/allowance to still get out and interact with others under even the most stringent NPIs. To me that seems like a major weakness in the theory. Like, the people who don’t get infected because they weren’t out after 10 pm, it’s not like that guarantees they won’t get infected before 10 pm. It’s just really, really incomplete, or shallow, reasoning. And it’s not backed by any data of any kind. First off, that’s an invalid assumption. I don’t think anyone believes perfect compliance with anything less than a full shut down would prevent all cases. Rather, the goal is to reduce exposure to reduce the spread and limit cases. Second, nobody is saying that 10 pm is a magic time that prevents covid before and lets it run rampant after. That’s a strawman characterization of curfews, their intent, and their mechanism. So if that reasoning is incomplete or shallow, it’s not the reasoning being used by proponents of curfews. > [@GIGObuster](#): > > Sorry, that is missing a “not” it should be: “the US is advanced enough to **not** have people dying in hospitals.” No, you were right the first time. People _are_ dying in hospitals from covid. We send the sick there, and the ones who can’t recover die there. That we can get many to recover doesn’t negate that hospitals are a horrible place to go if you look at deaths. How many people die in hospitals every day, from any cause? What percentage of deaths are in hospitals? I bet that number is freaky, if you don’t stop to consider why. > [@SayTwo](#): > > Now, you can go [here](http://file.lacounty.gov/SDSInter/dhs/1070348_DHSCOVID-19Dashboard.pdf) to look at the LA County COVID-19 Dashboard. You can see that in the week of June 28 - July 4 they had 10,274 non-COVID patients in hospital beds, looks like about 1600 confirmed or suspected with the virus, and about 700 beds free, for something like 12,500 beds in total. You can see that from December 13-19 they had 6291 non-COVID patients in hospital beds, 3633 confirmed or suspected with the virus, and 301 free for, what’s that, about 10,200 beds in all. > > Now, I don’t know why their why their number of staffed beds, used or available, went down so much from July to now, but I feel like that’s some sort of piece to this puzzle. I just don’t know. You are looking at the Non-ICU bed count table. That week, the total number is 12,565 non-ICU beds in use, 13% for covid cases. December 13-19 there are 10,225 non-ICU beds in use, with 36% filled with covid cases. That’s an increase from 1,599 covid cases to 3,633 covid cases - in non-ICU beds. But you are ignoring the table right below for ICU beds. The week of June 28 - July 4, there were 2,021 ICU beds in use, 29% covid, or 585 cases. Dec 13-19 has 2,660 ICU beds in use, 37% covid, or 996 cases. Okay, so what are you missing? Well, (1) Covid cases are up as a percentage of hospital use and as a number of cases in both ICU and non-ICU. (2) The number of staffed beds available did not go down. The top table lists number of non-ICU beds at “~17,000”. The fact that the total in use is down is a reaction to the expectation that the number of covid cases is going up rapidly, so hospitals have cut elective and other procedures to save room for the spike of covid cases. Apparently they have more room than needed at this moment. (3) The ICU bed usage is up, from about 81% use (29% of that covid) to about 106% full (37% of that covid). That’s right, there are more ICU beds full now than the total number of licensed beds normally available. How? Well, didn’t they set up emergency hospitals to deal with the covid surge? Didn’t that increase capacity over normal? > [@SayTwo](#): > > I just don’t know. When you look at the trends on that dashboard, you get the feeling that maybe things weren’t as dire as they were made out to be at the time. I do not know. I wonder what their number of staffed beds was in December of 2019. Let’s just say that it would not surprise me much to learn that LA County normally has about this many patients in their beds this time of year. Doesn’t feel like a stretch. Uh, hospitals reacted to the expectation of a surge in covid cases. They reduced other hospital usage to make room. So now the surge hasn’t hit as bad - that means they have room for other things like bad flu cases, people in car accidents, cancer treatments, etc. Or more covid that is likely coming. > [@Banquet\_Bear](#): > > …are you surprised that the US has been unable to control the pandemic? > > I mean, you’ve been subject to a disinformation campaign from the highest levels of the executive branch since the start of the pandemic. Trump and co were literally stealing PPE from the states, essentially gifting them to private corporations who then onsold them for massive profits back to the states that they were stolen from. The President of the United States of America has been lying about the pandemic every day. Heck: Ivanka Trump was one of many unqualified people was screening advice from the CDC on schools. This isn’t a political statement. Its an objective observation of things that actually happened, that contributed to the disaster that is the American response to a pandemic. > > The pandemic has been mismanaged at both the Federal and the State level by pretty much everyone. Point to any state or federal response and I could probably point out to you exactly where they went wrong. Where you are at now is pretty much where I expected America to be right now. > > This doesn’t mean that lockdowns, social distancing, managed isolation, masks, this doesn’t mean that those things don’t work. Its just that you can’t look at the effectiveness of this outside of the context of the mismanagement, the disinformation, the outright corruption and blatant disregard for peoples lives. This all matters. Well said. ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/984 "2020-12-26T17:05:57Z")
> [@SayTwo](#): > > What I think it would take is not so much the number of deaths, as a number in that range can look very large or even pretty small depending on the context. For example, I ask again to consider the number of hospitals in the US, which I’m told is around 6000. So if you think about it as 60 deaths per hospital, over the course of nine months, it’s less than two deaths a week a hospital on average. I don’t think people would get especially alarmed if they looked at it that way. Wow. I mean, fishing for a way to minimize the severity of the disease goes to new levels. Covid-19 has become the [number 3](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm) cause of death in the United States. > [@](#): > > Number of deaths for leading causes of death > > - Heart disease: 655,381 > - Cancer: 599,274 > - Accidents (unintentional injuries): 167,127 > - Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 159,486 > - Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 147,810 > - Alzheimer’s disease: 122,019 > - Diabetes: 84,946 > - Influenza and pneumonia: 59,120 > - Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 51,386 > - Intentional self-harm (suicide): 48,344 Covid-19 has killed about as many people as Suicide, Nephritis, Influenza and pneumonia, Diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease _combined_ - 365,815. (Those numbers are from 2018.) Covid killed twice what Accidents did. Covid killed over half of what died by heart disease. You are correct, people aren’t good with large numbers. > [@SayTwo](#): > > So to answer your question, what it would take in this case is for people to start dying in a _distribution_ that differs markedly from that of ‘natural’ rates of death, meaning that which we have observed for some time and come to expect. What seems to be the case with COVID is that a given person’s chances of dying if they contract it are not markedly different from their (statistical, I mean, at a population level) chances of dying if they don’t. (To see this you can look at an age stratum and observe the percentage who die from COVID with the percentage who die of any cause in a given year.) Interesting assertion. Do you have that data, or are you just speculating? Also, I dispute that the _distribution_ of deaths is the issue. Let’s look at hypothetical numbers. Let’s take a population of 1,000,000 people. Assume for a moment that the distribution is roughly 30% at high risk (e.g. elderly, over 70), 30% at low risk (e.g. young, under 20), and 40% at moderate risk (the ones in between). Let’s further assume the normal distribution of deaths is 1,000 high risk deaths, 100 moderate risk deaths, and 10 low risk deaths a year. Again, made up numbers purely to show comparison. Now along comes deathpocalypse, whatever new source of death we want to envision. Let’s say that deathpocalypse attacks in exactly the same distribution of 30%, 40%, 30%. So now we suddenly have 10,000 high risk deaths, 1,000 moderate risk deaths, and 100 low risk deaths. That’s a 10-fold increase in the number of deaths, but the distribution is exactly the same as before. A person’s statistical chances of dying has gone up markedly, even if their risk is still the same percentage as it was before. The high risk person’s chances have increased from 1,000/1,000,000 (i.e. 0.1%) to 10,000/1,000,000 (i.e. 1%). > [@SayTwo](#): > > The number of cumulative deaths itself, though? Naturally it will go up over time. Is it any more shocking now, at 330,000 or whatever it is, than it was at 100,000 far earlier on? Would 500,000 be more shocking if it came next summer? YES! 330,000 deaths is MORE SHOCKING than 100,000 deaths far earlier on. 500,000 deaths coming by next summer will be MORE SHOCKING. You know what would be more shocking than that? 1,000,000 deaths by next summer. Yes, it would be horrendous if we had 500,000 deaths now as opposed to just 330,000. But that does not make those 330,000 deaths less severe. > [@](#): > > I don’t know what a cumulative deaths-per-day graph would look like, but that’s the proper way to look at your question, not with an absolute number alone. Um, here. [CDC COVID Data Tracker](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailytrendsdeaths) If it doesn’t link directly, set “United States”, Views = “deaths”, Metric = “daily trends”. Also select “7-Day moving average”. Or you can set Metric = “Total and rate”. The slope now is steeper than it was in April. ---
**Author:** ![Ann\_Hedonia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ann_hedonia/32/319_2.png) [@Ann\_Hedonia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ann_Hedonia)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/985 "2020-12-26T17:15:54Z")
Very good post. You know, there has been a lot of conversation about how the virus, for the most part, isn’t killing healthy people, isn’t killing young people. We hear how it’s only affecting people with pre-existing conditions, people that might not have long to live anyway. But a lot of the businesses that are going under weren’t healthy, either. A lot of them would have gone under shortly, COVID or no COVID. The country is full of businesses that are struggling at the best of times, vulnerable to the vagaries of one bad holiday weekend. If you owned a vibrant healthy successful business with a loyal following, you were probably able to transition to a COVID model and survive - maybe even thrive. And while a lot of people in confinement might be suffering from increased mental health issues, they probably weren’t the most mentally stable individuals on the block to begin with. They question that’s been put out there by a lot of people is “Why are we putting our economy at risk in order to save a bunch of people that probably would’ve died soon anyway? But I might turn it around and ask “Why are we risking our health in order to save a bunch of businesses that probably would’ve gone under anyway?” “Why are we risking our physical health for the mental health of people that are already halfway to crazy?” But these aren’t the right questions, either. The entire debate is based on a false dichotomy, the idea that there’s a binary choice between saving lives and saving the economy. The virus is a culling event. It’s attacking the vulnerable and taking out those on the margins. People with vulnerable physical health, people with vulnerable finances, struggling businesses, people with pre-existing mental health issues. We needed a response that recognized this dynamic. Instead, we chose to pit these vulnerable groups against each other, while those of us tucked safely away from the margins took sides and placed our bets and turned it into a political slugfest. (I came to this realization after seeing a long mournful Facebook post from a friend blaming lockdowns for destroying the “business she dedicated her whole life to building” But she sold that business in January **2019**. She unloaded it in a questionable last minute deal after another buyer backed out, simply because she couldn’t afford to close it (it was a yoga/fitness studio and she had recently sold lot of expensive annual memberships she lacked the capital to refund). She had “taken a break” from the business in 2017 and had been traveling for 2 years, using the business as a piggy bank while it was slowly dying from inattention and attrition. So she unloaded the remnants in January 2019 and the new owner closed it April 1st, 2020, without even making an attempt to transfer to an on-line model. I’m sure blaming the whole fiasco on COVID has helped my former friend sleep better, but it’s not …you know…true.) ---
**Author:** ![Trom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/958977/32.png) [@Trom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trom)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/986 "2020-12-26T18:09:12Z")
> [@Ann\_Hedonia](#): > > A lot of them would have gone under shortly, COVID or no COVID. This is not borne out by data. > **[Half of NYC restaurants, bars may close for good due to COVID-19: audit](https://nypost.com/2020/10/01/half-of-nyc-restaurants-bars-may-close-for-good-due-to-covid-19/)** > > As many as half of all New York City bars and restaurants could shutter permanently within the next six months due to the coronavirus, according to a stunning new audit released Thursday by state C… 50% of New York restaurants and bars would not have gone under shortly in a normal year. > **[Restaurant Industry in Free Fall; 10,000 Close in Three Months](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/restaurant-industry-in-free-fall-10-000-close-in-three-months-301187291.html)** > > /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the National Restaurant Association sent a letter to Congressional leadership, sharing new survey findings that illustrate continued... - As of today, 17% of restaurants—more than 110,000 establishments—are closed permanently or long-term. - The vast majority of permanently closed restaurants were well-established businesses, and fixtures in their communities. On average these restaurants had been in business for 16 years, and 16% had been open for at least 30 years. ---
**Author:** ![SayTwo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e56c9b/32.png) [@SayTwo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SayTwo)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 6:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/987 "2020-12-26T18:15:28Z")
> [@Irishman](#): > > Now along comes deathpocalypse, whatever new source of death we want to envision. Let’s say that deathpocalypse attacks in exactly the same distribution of 30%, 40%, 30%. So now we suddenly have 10,000 high risk deaths, 1,000 moderate risk deaths, and 100 low risk deaths. That’s a 10-fold increase in the number of deaths, but the distribution is exactly the same as before. Yes, you are exactly right. But that’s not the situation we are dealing with. It’s not an ‘apocalyptic’ situation where natural deaths are increased by some integer multiplier. I guess it might be a little while before we have solid data about how many Americans will have died in 2020, but it’s still in the range of ten percent, give or take, above whatever trendline can be extrapolated from prior years. In that case, both distributions are more or less going to hold: deaths of all causes by age group, and age groups by virus deaths. > [@Irishman](#): > > Um, here. > [CDC COVID Data Tracker](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailytrendsdeaths) What I mean, and I know it would be easy to produce, is a graph with dates on the x-axis and deaths to date per day on the y-axis, with the date of the first observed death as day one. ---
**Author:** ![FigNorton](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fignorton/32/5619_2.png) [@FigNorton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FigNorton)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 6:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/988 "2020-12-26T18:35:26Z")
Deaths to date per day? Here’s one for new deaths per day, other axis being days since 10 deaths: > **[An interactive visualization of COVID-19 | 91-DIVOC](http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countries&highlight=United%20States&show=highlight-only&y=highlight&scale=linear&data=deaths-daily&data-source=jhu&xaxis=left#countries)** > > An interactive, data-forward visualization of COVID-19 data by Prof. Wade at The University of Illinois. Updated daily. If you meant something else, there’s drop down menus to select. ---
**Author:** ![SayTwo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e56c9b/32.png) [@SayTwo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SayTwo)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/989 "2020-12-26T18:59:47Z")
I meant something a bit different, and I don’t know if there is much to take from it or not. I just downloaded a CSV from your link and made one of my own. Just simply the day of the sequence on the x-axis and the cumulative deaths on that date divided by the day value on the y-axis, with the curve showing how the measure ‘cumulative deaths divided by cumulative days’ has varied over time. It peaks somewhere around day 75 at 1241 or so deaths per day in the cumulative (meaning 90,000+ deaths to date at that point), and then seems to have a local minimum around day 250 at 950 or so deaths per day in the cumulative to that point, and is now back up over 1100. Again, I’m not sure what to take away from that, if there’s even anything at all. ---
**Author:** ![FigNorton](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fignorton/32/5619_2.png) [@FigNorton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FigNorton)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/990 "2020-12-26T19:19:58Z")
Me neither. I have no idea what you were even hoping for it to show. ---
**Author:** ![SayTwo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e56c9b/32.png) [@SayTwo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SayTwo)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/991 "2020-12-26T19:25:07Z")
I think one fair takeaway is that the only reason for panic, as the death total increases while the calendar inexorably moves on, is that the thing isn’t disappearing. In other words, that’s the only sense in which it’s getting worse. That seems to have been the case since the end of May. Not sure that’s the sense you’d get, though, from hearing the talk about it. ---
**Author:** ![FigNorton](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fignorton/32/5619_2.png) [@FigNorton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FigNorton)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/992 "2020-12-26T19:28:10Z")
Because you’ve now decided this metric shows how bad things are best? Despite no one at all using it before you? ---
**Author:** ![SayTwo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e56c9b/32.png) [@SayTwo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SayTwo)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/993 "2020-12-26T19:29:41Z")
Shows how bad things are best? I’m afraid I don’t follow you. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/994 "2020-12-26T19:33:18Z")
> [@Trom](#): > > - As of today, 17% of restaurants—more than 110,000 establishments—are closed permanently or long-term. > - The vast majority of permanently closed restaurants were well-established businesses, and fixtures in their communities. On average these restaurants had been in business for 16 years, and 16% had been open for at least 30 years. Being around for a long time is not necessarily an indicator of health. However, neither diabetes nor obesity is an immediately fatal condition, so those with them who die of Covid had their deaths accelerated just like the death of the restaurants. So I think the analogy is an excellent one. ---
**Author:** ![Trom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/958977/32.png) [@Trom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trom)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 7:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/995 "2020-12-26T19:53:40Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Being around for a long time is not necessarily an indicator of health. I’d say it’s a pretty good one for a restaurant. You argue that these restaurants that have gone under if COVID hadn’t occurred? ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 7:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/996 "2020-12-26T19:59:45Z")
The thing is, a lot of those restaurants will come back. Maybe under a different name. Maybe different owners (but maybe not. Knowing the restaurant business is a huge edge.) But the employees will be rehired. The suppliers will get new orders. Creative destruction is a natural part of a free market, and if demand returns, support will return to meet it. We aren’t going to have a permanent 20% drop in restaurant capacity, unless it’s permanently unsafe to eat out. We may have fewer, larger restaurants and some may have new names, but if the virus is controlled, the industry will rebound. But the people won’t come back. Killing actual consumers (and producers) is actually reducing productive capacity and market size. ---
**Author:** ![Trom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/958977/32.png) [@Trom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trom)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/997 "2020-12-26T20:08:46Z")
Sure, it will likely fill back in over time (probably a lot more large corporate chains, less small owners, if I had to guess). What I’m saying is that it is silly to say that the majority of restaurants that have gone under were on the verge of failure or about to close anyway. That just isn’t true. ---
**Author:** ![FigNorton](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fignorton/32/5619_2.png) [@FigNorton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FigNorton)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/998 "2020-12-26T21:04:47Z")
The majority of deaths is people over 70. That’s not analogous to diabetes or a restaurant that can’t handle months of closure. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/999 "2020-12-26T21:14:46Z")
> [@Trom](#): > > I’d say it’s a pretty good one for a restaurant. You argue that these restaurants that have gone under if COVID hadn’t occurred? Only in the same sense that someone who had diabetes is about to go under. I wonder if there is a life expectancy table for restaurants given their age. Age is not a sign of decrepitude, but it might not be a sign of health either. The place can get stale, the owner might be on the verge of retirement etc. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356/1000 "2020-12-26T21:19:18Z")
Some one who has made it to age 70 can expect to live 15 more years. At 75 it is 10 more years for men. So the stress of Covid is accelerating the deaths of people who might have expected a lot more years - just like the stress of Covid is accelerating the deaths of restaurants who might have expected to survive a lot longer. @MandaJo is right - restaurants come back, people don’t, so sacrificing people to keep restaurants open doesn’t seem like a good idea. Especially for those of us near 70. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356.md?page=49) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/am-i-missing-something-here-re-reopening-of-bars-etc-now/922356.md?page=51)