I was asking about restaurants, not gyms. It is easier to social distance in a gym. It is easier to work out in a gym. It is a bit tough to eat while masked in a restaurant, and even if the direction is to remask between bites I doubt anyone would do so.
I heard one of the medical experts from CBS News yesterday say that if one had to have Christmas dinner with a large group outside the pod, it would be better to eat spread out in a house.
But I’m curious what mechanism you think keeps the virus from spreading in a restaurant environment.
I don’t know what kind of restaurants you go to, but the neighborhood ones I went to when I stayed in NY for 3 weeks had tables really close to each other.
Unless that restaurant has a kick-ass ventilation system, spreading out won’t do anything but minimize the number of people in the space at one time. That minimizes the probability of having a covid person by whatever the factor is by reducing capacity.
The comment about the house is kind of interesting. If people were in different rooms and opened windows (or had a nice air filtration system), that would cut down on exposure.
I don’t think it can’t spread in a restaurant. I think it doesn’t spread there at near the level that would justify the closures, particularly relative to the other avenues for spread that are still quite readily available when restaurants are closed.
And that’s part of the point of mentioning the study with gyms. Both restaurants and gyms – as well as salons and parks and beaches and golf courses and on and on – were placed in the same bucket at the beginning. The experts seem to have been wrong on some of those things, which I take as good enough reason to be skeptical about the rest of them.
Comfortable? No.
Pandemics are horrible things and they take a horrible toll. But I’m going to put the blame on the pandemic, not on policy or Democratic governors. I think this idea that people wouldn’t have modified their habits without a mandate is wishful thinking.
It’s hard to accept that bad stuff just happens, especially when it’s caused by an entity with no agency. People want to blame someone or something they can get mad at.
The one thing that could have helped is if our government had sufficiently supported all the entities on the margins of this pandemic, instead of pitting them against each other in some sort of false equivalence death match.
That’s exactly what is appears like to me. I heard that refrain all spring “ Let everything open, if people are scared, they can stay home”. So places reopened and a lot of people made the calculation to stay home.
So what if you don’t agree with that calculation? Maybe there are people like me that just didn’t think eating in the dining room of a restaurant was that important. People that, even pre-pandemic, usually preferred take-out. The fear of getting sick wasn’t that overwhelming, but even a slight additional chance of illness is enough to change the equation for many people. Who gets to decide if a fear is justifiable if not the people making the risk/ reward calculation? And sometimes that calculation turns not on the strength of the risk but the weakness of the reward - maybe dining out just isn’t that big of a reward for most people.
Back in 2002, the DC economy took a huge hit for a couple of weeks because the Beltway Snipers were randomly killing people. Even though less than a dozen were ultimately killed, thousands of people changed their routines, enough to cause a multi-million dollar hit to the economy.
Well, I hear you and I don’t disagree with anything you say in principle, but my fear is that the answer to your question here includes, in significant part, media and agenda-driven government institutions. The term ‘fear mongering’ comes to mind. Some public health professionals will even admit that fear can be used constructively (from their point of view, of course).
In other words, it seems apparent to me that many people are making those calculations of their own – which, yes, I agree that they are fully entitled to – based not on the kind of analysis that might be done by intelligent people on this board.
But that said, I’m not sure I’m convinced that the kind of depression we’re seeing in entertainment, hospitality, and the arts is driven primarily by those kinds of individual calculations. Just as in the Beltway Snipers case you mentioned, I can’t imagine such a thing would last indefinitely. One wonders why such strict enforcement would be warranted if it were.
Of course. No one mandated toilet paper hoarding, for instance.
The “agenda” is to save lives, other less reliable media and some in government that rely on ignorance continue to advice people in a very poor way.
Still, there’s plenty of evidence that COVID-19 has and can spread at restaurants — and especially at those that let groups of people congregate indoors without masks.
“Modeling studies have indicated that restaurants are high-risk environments for COVID-19 transmission,” said Jason McDonald, a spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “In places like restaurants, people remove their masks to consume food and beverages, which increases the risk of transmission.”
One CDC report in September, based on a survey of 314 symptomatic people who got tested for the coronavirus in July, found a link between testing positive for the coronavirus and going to locations with on-site eating and drinking options, such as restaurants.
Could you show your work? How many super-spreader events due to restaurants would be acceptable to you? What increase in ICU utilization and what increase in the number of deaths?
If only those people who went to restaurants and bars and who didn’t wear masks got sick, I’d be more or less with you - except for the hospital problem. But they can and do infect people who have been responsible.
If you think that these people judge risk well, I can dig up some studies on how well people in general judge risk. (Spoiler: not very.) Just think of the preachers who were sure that Covid shouldn’t prevent them from having normal services - and then died or basically killed some of their congregations. Not to pick on preachers, but I don’t want to get political here.
While there are guidelines about not traveling by air, there are no restrictions. Yet air travel this season is down by about 50% ( Cite ) Still too many, and a bit more than expected by AAA.
It might be technically true that there are no restrictions on the actual flights, it’s a bit misleading to say so since many destinations do have restrictions like mandatory quarantine periods of two weeks or even complete closures. Those restrictions will obviously have a large effect on travel.
Indeed. And, at least in the case of international travel, the routes that are gone. For passenger numbers to be down only 50% if they include international travel in the measure would seem remarkably resilient.
I am pretty well versed in this literature, but I’d be more than happy to take a look at studies you find particularly convincing. I’ll tell you now, though, that I do not find anecdotal stories such as that one, or the ones with people saying “now I know it’s not a hoax” with their dying breaths, any more convincing than the one about the nurse with the allergic reaction after the vaccine injection or the one who fainted while talking to the press.
And for that matter, you can put the ones about stacking dead bodies in hospital corridors in that same bucket. I’m more convinced by data, such as the numbers from LA County that show December 2020 is no different on average than December 2019. But that said…
Are you up on the recent studies showing asymptomatic spread is relatively rare? What are your thoughts on those?
Theoretically true, but have you heard of any examples of the quarantine being enforced for domestic travel? I don’t know of any mechanism for enforcing it. It might be interesting to see how many of those who chose not to fly this season did so because of quarantines - I doubt very many did.
Do you mean the study here?
It goes on to say
Viral culture studies suggest that people with SARS-CoV-2 can become infectious one to two days before the onset of symptoms and continue to be infectious up to seven days thereafter; viable virus is relatively short lived.7 Symptomatic and presymptomatic transmission have a greater role in the spread of SARS-CoV-2 than truly asymptomatic transmission.
Which sounds reasonable. But it is kind of hard to tell if a person is truly asymptomatic or presymptomatic, isn’t it? However, I don’t understand how you could measure the infection rate from purely asymptomatic people, since unless you test a lot of contacts you’d never find them.
Have a better cite?
This is a study getting a fair amount of attention at the moment:
Results A total of 54 relevant studies with 77 758 participants reporting household secondary transmission were identified. Estimated household secondary attack rate was 16.6% (95% CI, 14.0%-19.3%), higher than secondary attack rates for SARS-CoV (7.5%; 95% CI, 4.8%-10.7%) and MERS-CoV (4.7%; 95% CI, 0.9%-10.7%). Household secondary attack rates were increased from symptomatic index cases (18.0%; 95% CI, 14.2%-22.1%) than from asymptomatic index cases (0.7%; 95% CI, 0%-4.9%), to adult contacts (28.3%; 95% CI, 20.2%-37.1%) than to child contacts (16.8%; 95% CI, 12.3%-21.7%), to spouses (37.8%; 95% CI, 25.8%-50.5%) than to other family contacts (17.8%; 95% CI, 11.7%-24.8%), and in households with 1 contact (41.5%; 95% CI, 31.7%-51.7%) than in households with 3 or more contacts (22.8%; 95% CI, 13.6%-33.5%).
Household secondary attack rate of 18% for symptomatic and 0.7% for asymptomatic. I’m curious what you make of that, as you’d figure sharing a home gives more opportunity for spread than being in the same public place for some amount of time. But I have not dug into the methodology, and I’m sure your questions are valid and relevant concerns.
After reading this fantastically entertaining story about the bucatini shortage, I stumbled upon this gem of flying saucer science gone bad:
The State Liquor Authorit’s directive that customers are “may not enter the inside of the establishment for any reason,” beyond making little rational sense (the problem with indoor dining is multiple maskless people breathing on each other, not a single masked patron using a toilet), left unclear what people were actually supposed to do when nature called — hold it? Go in the snow? Use a bottle? One could easily imagine perpetual nemeses Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo suggesting different impractical solutions just to undercut one another.
But as the headline indicates, the story doesn’t end there. Seems a bunch of people complained, perhaps at the pseudoscience of it all (and presumably not having been admonished by their internet friends that they had neither the degrees nor the expertise to ‘opine’ on such subjects), and the powers that be decided to let people pee.
Really, you cannot make this stuff up. You just have to watch it, jaw agape, slowly unfold.
Of course not, that mistakes are made by politicians is to be expected, but politicians are mostly listening to science, not misleaders out there in the right wing media.
BTW I did look at the attempts at making gyms to be safer, they can be safer when safety measures that are usually disparaged by contrarians are used, such as masks, social distancing and other measures (I remember seeing some gyms that added transparent shields between exerciser machines).
Still, cell phones, a tool that showed that UFOs are not real 
, continue to show that some studies like the one you cited later (I got an error when trying to access it BTW) still do miss places where less responsible gym owners are located.
The study, which used cellphone mobility data from 10 U.S. cities from March to May, also provides an explanation for why many low-income neighborhoods were hardest hit. The public venues in those communities were more crowded than in more affluent ones, and residents were more mobile on average, likely because of work demands, the authors said in the research published in the journal Nature on Tuesday.
The data came from the metro areas of Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
Infectious disease models had provided similar estimates of the risk posed by crowded indoor spaces, going back to February; all such models are subject to uncertainties, due largely to unforeseen changes in community behavior. The new analysis provides more precise estimates for how much each kind of venue contributed to urban outbreaks, by tracking hourly movements and taking into account the reductions in mobility from lockdown restrictions or other changes that occurred during those first crucial months. It did not model infection in schools or office workplaces.
“Restaurants were by far the riskiest places, about four times riskier than gyms and coffee shops, followed by hotels” in terms of new infections, said Jure Leskovec, a computer scientist at Stanford University and senior author of the new report, in a conference call with reporters. The study was a collaboration between scientists at Stanford, Northwestern University, Microsoft Research and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.
In any case, while gyms are safer that restaurants, they are safer thanks to the measures some continue to disparage recklessly.
But you’re perfectly willing to deal in a hypothetical about what would happen in an alternate reality where the government does nothing and (supposedly) nothing happens.
From what I’ve read, there doesn’t seem to be a widely accepted notion that people wouldn’t be getting sick if there were perfect compliance to mandates. There is some buy-in that doing nothing would lead to a worse situation.
You dug all the way back to June to try to obfuscate the issue. You could have just googled the issue and found the answer in the last day or the last week.
The likely answer is here…
I would doubt that the demand for hospitalized care is the same as it is for every other year since I haven’t seen headlines that have doctors begging for people to stay at home to avoid overcapacity every year. I also don’t read about ambulances that have wait times of hours to get someone admitted to ERs or ambulances that are constantly diverted to other hospitals.
This is the same dashboard that you’re using to try to obfuscate about hospital capacity. Under the hospitalization icon, it shows a graph of the number of hospitalizations. On July 20, 2020 on one of the highest points of the curve, the hospitalizations were 2207. On Dec. 27, 2020 the hospitalizations were 7181.
On July 20, 2020, the ICU hospitalizations were 596. On Dec. 27, 2020 the hospitalizations were 1436.
http://dashboard.publichealth.lacounty.gov/covid19_surveillance_dashboard
I tried clicking on the link to that study (survey) and got a 403 error from Google. So I did a search on it. From what I can tell based on the details in the article since I couldn’t see the study, that study was questioned and pretty much debunked as using poor methodology. They basically asked gym members if they got sick from going to the gyms they chose. Since gym members are unlikely to self-report as sick from going to the gym or may not even be aware of it, that doesn’t show much of anything.
SayTwo, it’s interesting (in a bad way) that when it suits your narrative, you’re willing to use surveys and debunked studies, but then persistently insist that all other studies are not using “science”. It’s one thing to be skeptical of a particular study or report. It’s another thing to say that all studies and reports are not “science” . . . unless they agree with your agenda.
Could you show that data please? In one of your previous posts, you noted that you wondered about this. If you found data to confirm, please post it. Having seen the hospitalizations rates, the only way it would be possible is if hospitals are beyond capacity every year at this time, which I doubt.
Are you up on those studies? Please cite them. I have read that the WHO walked back their communication that asymptomatic transmission is rare, but this happened a while ago.
I had not read the gym study, and didn’t know anything more about it than the article I saw. (I imagine that sort of phenomenon is true for a great many people, in a great many cases, which is really part of the point. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if the study were not robust, or if it had significant bias. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least. In fact, I think that such a thing, in this year 2020 and regarding the studies that make the media or sometimes government websites, is true more often than it’s not.)
But if it’s important nonetheless, here’s a link that appears to get to something:
Here’s a report from that Oregon Consulting Group:
It appears to merely try to ‘debunk’ (is that the word you like?) the assertion from Andrew Cuomo that gyms are “one of three primary settings that are responsible for surges in cases” by showing that there are no data to indicate that gym visits and covid cases are statistically correlated at all. Make of that what you will. But I guess it’s a decent starting point, to expect that if one thing is a primary cause of another then we ought to be able to see evidence that it’s so. (And not just, you know, muse that people breathe deeply a lot when they exert themselves physically.)
Finally, here’s something on LinkedIn about that OCC. I haven’t watched it, and don’t feel particularly compelled to, but just in case you might be interested.
It’s for Department of Health Services hospitals in LA County, so I guess make of it what you will. You can click here:
http://file.lacounty.gov/SDSInter/dhs/1070348_DHSCOVID-19Dashboard.pdf
Then look at the box in the lower right. They have included a dashed line showing the “December 2019 Average Daily Census,” which looks to be around 1140 or so. You tell me if you’d guess the average thus far in 2020 is higher. Looks to me like it might be a smidge below, actually. But certainly doesn’t look significantly higher, in any case.
Of course you don’t. Of…course…you don’t.
I wasn’t reaching back to June to obfuscate. I simply typed ‘LA County hospitals overflowing’ and that’s what popped up. You know, the last time the sky was falling.