Bolding mine.
There’s no shortage of these idiots. Today Dr. Oz showed his ass by saying we could re-open schools because there was only a 2-3% mortality rate and those lives would be an acceptable loss.
We’re going to hit 60K+ deaths on this, and that’s dramatically under-counted due to a lack of testing. Sure, let’s re-open. What’s the worse that could happen? :smack:
Are you not familiar with the Washington Choir cluster?
On March 6th, 60 people attended a choir practice, all of them were free from symptoms, all used hand sanitizer and refrained from touching one another at all. 45 people in the group got infected and 2 were dead as of March 29th.
Or the Bluff wedding cluster in New Zealand.
70 people attended a wedding on March 21st, nobody reported any symptoms, everyone used hand sanitizer and tried to stay as far away from each other as possible. A week later an air steward who attended the wedding came down with symptoms and was confirmed positive. Of the wedding party, 21 of the 23 members tested positive. As of now, 92 cases have been linked to the cluster (including secondary chains of transmission) and the father of the groom as well as one other person is dead.
I could continue to list clusters all day long, in South Korea, there are cases that are linked because two people rode in an elevator together for 1 minute. If you “don’t see how it’s dangerous” by now, you’re just not paying attention.
My point is that if the barbershops etc. are open, it is not an act of sabotage to go and get a haircut (or whatever). They’ve been closed for almost a month, people have been staying home for almost a month. If, after a month of isolation at home, people are still wildly contagious in public, then isolation has not worked. I think it’s pretty clear that we can’t go on like this forever.
There will still be some risk when things are open, and most people can assume that risk or not and stay home. Right? But if they don’t stay home, at that point, they are not risking other people any more than they’re risking their own health.
Well on March 24 four people attended a dance class, all used hand sanitizer and nobody touched anybody else. [Also the dance instructor noted that the studio had been cleaned and “how often does that happen?”] As of yesterday all four of us were still symptom free and attending the class via Zoom.
If I am out walking and I wave at someone across the street I am nowhere near hitting their nose with my fist.
If the R value for this stays below 1, the number of new cases steadily dwindles every day until there’s almost no risk. If the R value is above 1, the daily new cases rise until we reach the point where almost everyone has it. Every activity that creates a new infection path adds a little bit to the R value. Some activities are absolutely unavoidable like doctors going to the hospital to treat patients or going to the grocery store to get food. Every little thing adds to the R value until it inches up above that threshold.
But the crucial thing to understand is that if the true number of daily new cases drops far enough, then we can start implementing test & trace which takes a big whack to the R value. Once you roll out test & trace, you can relax a lot of the other restrictions without nudging R over 1. But for test & trace to work, we need somewhere around a 100:1 - 1000:1 test to true daily new cases ratio. Given we’re currently around 160,000 tests/day now, that means we need to get down to ~1600 - 160 new cases per day OR drastically increase testing capability and ideally both.
Uh, why do you think that the number of cases in the US continues to climb despite “people staying at home for almost a month?” Do you think that it everyone had not stayed at home, we would have a similar number of sick people as we do today?
Maybe I didn’t understand correctly, but on the Today show this morning I heard the word “must” associated with six conditions and California.
As to whether the US Constitution recognizes a state’s emergency override doctrines, I’ll grant that it probably would require a lot of “reading between the lines” to support, but that the Supreme Court would probably allow it.
We do, after all, live in a world where the Right to Free Speech goes away if you cry “fire!” in a crowded theater and where you are not allowed to purchase your very own nuclear missile, despite the second amendment.
The Framers didn’t expect people to follow the Bill of Rights right off the edge of a cliff. There are some places where things get sufficiently insane that the Supreme Court has decided that they’ll ignore the Bill of Rights. The invention of the concept of a Federal emergency power is just such an example.
It seems difficult for the Federal government to say that they’re allowed to have the concept but that the states aren’t and particularly when the Federal government is intended to leave domestic concerns to the states, where possible.
You believe the Today show to be an official government source?:dubious:
you know here’s what someone needs to figures out how to do … make every moron who thinks he’s above it all sign a wavier saying 2 thing :
2 the state has every right to use the laws that they use against people who knowingly pass on infectious/fatal diseases (like HIV ) against them meaning if you get someone sick its assault at the very least and manslaughter or negligent homicide at the most
If they have the balls to sign that I say Godspeed and good luck
People of California are free to do all sorts of stupid stuff and most likely won’t be noticed by LEOs unless flagrant. So don’t be flagrant unless dim-witted. Don’t post videos of doing flagrant stuff. Don’t brag. And don’t approach me too closely. You won’t like my response.
Not at all. How about the SF Chronicle… are they? Are you dubious that I heard correctly?
This is the debate forum, so it’s assumed you’re debating. In a deabte, there is no reason for you to bring up such a claim unless you are arguing that something previously stated is incorrect. Colibri brought up a proper government source, so you must believe what you heard on the Today Show would trump that source.
If you’re not arguing something previously stated is incorrect, and thus are not debating, then you need to clarify why you think what the Today Show said is relevant to the conversation. Are you explaining why someone might have misunderstood, as a “news” type show like the Today Show (or that SF Chronicle) might have spread the false information?
The fact is, we have deniers here who are claiming we’re being persecuted because we’re doing what you have to do to contain a pandemic when there is no treatment, vaccine, or cure. In a state of emergency same as any War, they’re complaining that they’re not allowed to be out there in the trenches dying and spreading death to others.
Any post that looks like it might be agreeing with these people is going to be met with opposition. In short, Colibri saw your post as confronting his post.
[size=1](BTW, this was a post I debated posting, as it could come off as butting in. But I like my metaphor too much to not post it. As far as I know, it’s entirely original to me.[)/size]
With respect, that seems to be the argument every time the government is accused of overreaching, (along with the popular “your rights end where my nose begins”) always without a nexus to what is being argued.
Rights are not absolute, I agree. But this argument handwaives away nearly any claim to a right for that reason, which I believe is unsupported.
IOW, why is gathering in public at this time, a plain text right contained in the First Amendment, an example of shouting fire in a crowded theater or owning a nuclear weapon? Because it might cost lives? All freedoms cost lives. We would be safer from crime, for example, if we didn’t have the pesky 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments. Summary executions would mean fewer rapes, robberies, and murders, but we don’t do that because of freedom.
And throughout history, it is how freedom dies. It is not usually from an outside source but the populace agreeing to give up their own freedoms due to fleeting and passing “emergency” situations. Disease, terrorism, general crime, drugs, drunk driving, and sexual assault have all been cited in my own lifetime as a reason why we must give up certain freedoms.
This goes far beyond any common law quarantine power. Quarantine is used to isolate sick people and those exposed to sick people. This lockdown isolates everyone on the theory that they might expose themselves to sick people and then might transmit it. It is virtually nationwide and does not confine itself to any particular area.
I think we will come to regret the precedent this has set. What happens ten years from now and drunk driving deaths increase and the government alleges the power to stop every motorist and perform sobriety tests? After all, it is an emergency and people are dying.
hit reply too soon
Since this thread has gone on for over 50 posts and no-one has actually tried to respond to mangosteen’s questions, I’ll give it a crack.
First, here’s the link to Governor Newsom’s initial declation of a public emergency, dated March 4, 2020. It states what his constitutional and legal authority is for issuing the proclamation, at the bottom of p. 2, where he refers to the state Constitution (which I assume is Article V, s. 1, the provision which requires the Governor to see that the laws of the state “are faithfully administered”).
He also cites the various provisions of the *California Emergency Services Act *(Government Code, Title 2, Division 1, Chapter 7), enacted by the Legislature, which authorise the Governor to take various actions:
[ul]the conditions for a public emergency, as set out in s. 8558(b) have been met; [/ul]
[ul]under s. 8625(c), the resources of local authorities will not be likely to be able to deal with the emergency; [/ul][ul]he therefore proclaims a public emergency under s. 8625.[/ul]
Having cited his authority under the Constitution and the state laws, he then makes a series of orders, mainly directed at ensuring state officials will be able to take to try to remedy the situation. However, that early order does not impose restrictions on businesses; it’s all aimed at state and municipal responses to the pandemic.
Then, on March 19, 2020, the Governor issued another order, Executive Order N-33-20. This is the “Stay-at-Home” order, requiring Californians to stay at home, unless they are involved in an essential business, as defined in the order. That was the order that shut down the non-essential businesses, as near as I can tell. He again cites the California Constitution, and then three sections of the Emergency Services Act, enacted by the State Legislature: 8567, 8627, and 8665.
The key one is s. 8567(a):
The rest of the section qualifies how the Governor is to use that power.
Then there’s s. 8627, which adds to the Governor’s powers under s. 8567:
And finally, s. 8665, which is the offence provision:
The Order then quotes and adopts an order made that same day by the State Public Health Officer, which I gather is the real details of the extent of the Order. The State Public Health Officer’s order quotes several sections from the State Health and Safety Code, Division 105: Communicable Disease Prevention and Control. I’m not going to go through all those sections, but they’re there for anyone who wants to review them.
Overall, however, it looks to me like the state Government Code, and the state Health and Safety Code, which are both laws passed by the Legislature of California, provide a considerable amount of legal power to the Governor to deal with an emergency that cannot be handled by the normal powers of the local authorities. That responds to mangosteen’s assertion that this is all being done by dictatorial powers that have no basis in law. Whether you like it or not, the Legislature of California has conferred these statutory powers on the Governor.
And the six conditions which the Governor has mentioned as necessary to start lifting these restrictions? The whole point of the emergency powers, enacted into law by the state Legislature, is to give the Governor considerable discretion in dealing with a public health emergency. However, any time there are discretionary powers given by statute, it is implied that the discretion is to be used in a way consistent with the statute. By setting out these conditions, the Governor has made a public statement of the factors, based on public health, which he will use to guide his discretion to lift the restrictions he has imposed. He is being transparent to the public about the factors he is relying on in the exercise of his discretion given to him by state law. That’s not dictatorial. It’s explaining to the public how he is using his statutory powers. If at some point there are applications for judicial review of the Governor’s exercise of his statutory powers, those conditions will help to explain to the court what factors, connected to public health and safety, which the Governor used to guide his discretion under the statutes.
Ya know, I was taught as a college freshman that a slippery slope argument is fallacious.
Since then, every time I see an argument so earnestly and blatantly phrased as a slippery slope, I just have to laugh.
Shouting fire in a crowded theater is not allowed because it directly leads to the possibility of injury and death. So does unrestricted public activity today.
Given that the crime rate has gone down despite restrictions on police, perhaps we are maximizing freedom, by reducing the number of innocent people made unfree by unrestricted police power. If you want a slippery slope, here’s one: you can really minimize the crime rate by killing everyone. The crime rate in Pompeii after the eruption was very low.
We must distinguish real threats (airplane bombers) and false threats (Poland.) We gave up lots of freedom during WW II - was that a bad thing? Is Covid-19 a false threat?
A Stanford study (very preliminary) of antibody tests show a 2.5% - 4% rate of antibodies detected in Santa Clara county, which is 50 - 80x the number of reported cases. Way below herd immunity levels, but it shows that the number of asymptomatic people might be much higher than thought. How are you going to keep these people from infecting those at risk without the current policies. Traditional quarantines work okay after symptoms are discovered. That doesn’t work here.
Government can stop everyone now at sobriety checkpoints. And out of curiosity - which freedoms have been threatened to reduce sexual assault?
In the current situation, conservatism is killing people, by encouraging behavior that can harm others, and by hollowing out government to make it less able to respond to a crisis like this.
Yeah, and I laugh when I see this argument as well. The slippery slope is an informal logical fallacy because it does not necessarily have to happen.
People argue “slippery slope fallacy!” as if because the slippery slope is a logical fallacy that means that slippery slopes never happen. That is, well, a fallacy in and of itself.
When you have documented history that shows a progression down the slope, that is a pretty good indication that it will continue. Not that it will or must, that part is the fallacy, but that it is very likely.
I am not saying that people shouldn’t follow the guidelines. But as a student of history, I fear a government that can arrest pastors for holding church services far more than I fear a passing virus.
Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus. The Japanese were rounded up and interred. Those were both held as Constitutional.
It’s not handwaving. Emergency powers are accepted national doctrine and precedent. There’s no ambiguity on that front.
That said, the specific precedent is that it’s allowed so long as the Executive and Legislative branches are both in agreement on the matter. And that’s made easy if Congress has already created legislation for emergencies that give strict rules about what all sorts of things are allowed, and for how long the emergency can last (generally, until Congress calls it quits).
There is the National Emergencies Act and California, at least, already has emergency power laws on the books. Precedent would hold that this all completely copacetic so long as the laws are being followed by the executive and the legislators haven’t pulled the plug.