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Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

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Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#411
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the wrong comment for this post - you cite 'misinformation' as problem, and then go on to mislead/misinform with a misrepresentative anecdote. 1) Your anecdote is not consistent with the national concern - it's local to your area. My father is currently in a hospital for an unrelated reason and it's almost empty -> they are 'prepared for war' and there isn't a single COVID patient in the entire area, let alon…

>> My father is currently in a hospital for an unrelated reason and it's almost empty -> they are 'prepared for war' and there isn't a single COVID patient in the entire area, let alone hospital. They are all empty. Which is just as anecdotal. The virus doesn't spread everywhere at once, and there are a lot of places in the country/world that aren't NYC/North Jersey yet. If they have similar population density and do…

Yet?

Recall that the outbreak started in central Europe weeks before the USA locked down. Even in the harder hit countries, there are quiet hospitals almost everywhere. Look at Switzerland - it shares a huge land border with northern Italy and has large numbers of people who move across the borders, it volunteered to take Italian patients in. Swiss hospitals are receiving financial bailouts because they're so quiet, it's on the downcurve for a long time now yet it has never implemented house arrest (just closing shops and other gathering places). Even the Italians didn't need to send Ticino patients in the end.

There's a lot of experience with this right now. There are a few cities or local hotspots where for unclear reasons the disease hits harder than the vast majority of places. But even in those harder hit places field hospitals are hardly used.

It is incredibly bad news that Facebook is attempting to interfere with the social processes of figuring out when lockdown should end right now - and yes, that includes protests. There's no evidence lawmakers have any better insight into what's going on than anyone else, and quite a bit of evidence they may have worse insight. Silicon Valley needs to butt out or see its reputation sink the journalism-like lows.

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#412
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We'll figure the rest out later. When? As far as I know, no one has provided any quantifiable goal post for when it’s safe to stop lockdown.

When we have a plan that doesn't involve the likely death of thousands of people. I get it's frustrating to not have a timeline and that the stakes are high. But as shitty as it's gonna sound, life's not fair. But in terms of metric, people are actually talking about what stats to look at, mainly the reproduction rate (Cuomo refers to it as infection rate in his watch the dial slide) vs. hospital capacity. Angela Mer…

There's been some testing. It generally shows that _way_ more people have (or had) COVID-19 than we thought, and that most of the cases are so mild that people never even knew they were sick.

NYC Hospitals find that 15% of pregnant women have COVID-19: https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2020/04/20/new... That particular article doesn't mention it, but other reports I've heard of said only about 1 in 8 of that 15% were symptomatic.

In Chelsea, MA, 30% of 200 random people tested positive, 1/2 reported no symptoms at all: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/17/business/nearly-third...

Here's a general article pointing out that this is very likely to not be as big of a deal as we thought it'd be: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-many-people-h...

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#413
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's been a month. We can absolutely make it through a few months if we have to, while they do their work. You and I can. Many of my friends have missed a rent or car payment, and may soon miss another. Most people cannot work from home.

And that's why government action to shut down businesses, should absolutely be coupled with action to protect workers salaries. In the UK, government is paying 80% of furloughed workers pay up to a certain amount, and there is relief on property taxes etc for businesses. In my opinion the two (shutdown and relief) go hand in hand.

Some people think the richest country in the history of the world could figure something like this out, but those people don’t seem to understand how it became the richest country to begin with. The United States was built on laissez faire exploitation and that is not going to change overnight.

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#414
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's been a month. We can absolutely make it through a few months if we have to, while they do their work. You and I can. Many of my friends have missed a rent or car payment, and may soon miss another. Most people cannot work from home.

And that's why government action to shut down businesses, should absolutely be coupled with action to protect workers salaries. In the UK, government is paying 80% of furloughed workers pay up to a certain amount, and there is relief on property taxes etc for businesses. In my opinion the two (shutdown and relief) go hand in hand.

You can't simply "protect the salaries", government isn't some omnipotent god who simply needs to do some hand-waving to fix things. There isn't a fountain of wealth that the government is hiding from us! You can print more money (often bad), or make businesses pay salaries while taking no revenue (also bad)

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#415
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hyperbole much? People do take calculated risks with the lives of others - again driving is a dangerous activity, you take the lives of everyone in your car and those around you in your hands while driving. Even chefs are responsible for not giving people food poisoning. Because of our hyperconnected world, we depend on people taking risks around us constantly. Additionally, NYC had 500 deaths because its approaching…

> you take the lives of everyone in your car and those around you in your hands while driving. The key point there is that you do that with their consent . Also you are required to be insured to cover you in the case that you screw up and hurt or kill people. Please show me the insurance company that will cover you if you recklessly spread COVID-19 to someone who then dies. I don't consent to you risking my life and…

What about the lives lost to the increased rates of suicide and drug/alcohol abuse that will accompany an economic collapse?

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's why government action to shut down businesses, should absolutely be coupled with action to protect workers salaries. In the UK, government is paying 80% of furloughed workers pay up to a certain amount, and there is relief on property taxes etc for businesses. In my opinion the two (shutdown and relief) go hand in hand.

Except for self employed people. Except for businesses that are supposedly just weeks away from running out of cash on a huge scale. The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.

>The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.

Funny you say that because it seems to be no problem when it comes to bailing out corporate investors. Of course, near-zero federal interest rates didn’t make “economic sense” either, but yet here we are.

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everything just starts up with rent due and evictions happening to a significant population you just have a second wave of recession and a collapse of the rental market. I’d assume most people, particularly landlords and local government would want to avoid that.

> I’d assume most people, particularly landlords and local government would want to avoid that. This seems like a “prisoner’s dilemma” situation. It’s rational for an individual landlord to evict a delinquent tenant and seek a new one. However, if everyone does this the entire market collapses. It’s better for everyone if the landlord takes a short term haircut to preserve the market. Since cooperation is expected to…

... or maybe this "landlord" is a parent who just rents out their old small house, and is now unable to make the rent or car payments

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#418
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's been a month. We can absolutely make it through a few months if we have to, while they do their work. You and I can. Many of my friends have missed a rent or car payment, and may soon miss another. Most people cannot work from home.

And that's why government action to shut down businesses, should absolutely be coupled with action to protect workers salaries. In the UK, government is paying 80% of furloughed workers pay up to a certain amount, and there is relief on property taxes etc for businesses. In my opinion the two (shutdown and relief) go hand in hand.

Here in NZ the govt hasn't sent people $1200, nor have they given large amounts of money to businesses to stay alive while we're all locked up.

What they have done is: - allowed companies who's income has dropped by 30% to claim $600/employee/week of salary support - negotiated with all the banks to allow mortgage holidays

Think of it as trickle up stimulus and trickle down rent subsidies to keep people connected to companies and as many companies as possible still viable

We're getting close to having Covid beat(only 5 new cases today, all from known sources), next week we slowly start dropping out of lockdown

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#419
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People should be able to take a calculated risk. That is not at all what we're talking about here. People should not be able to take a calculated risk with the lives of others . Let me tell you why it's not like driving: the NHTSA reports 102 car fatalities a day in 2016. NYC just got under 500 COVID deaths a day. One city. 5x the fatalities. Compared to a country of 300 million people. This is, by far , the most o…

> NYC just got under 500 COVID deaths a day. Important to remember what led up to that. High risk people were going about their daily activities, no one was social distancing. It’s disingenuous to imply that anyone who is anti-lockdown is talking about a complete return to pre-pandemic behavior that caused the numbers we are seeing in NYC.

NYC is also a giant, dense city where public transport is incredibly popular.

When you see photos of the people protesting lockdowns, it's clear that they're not city metro living yuppies. They're suburbanites and rural.

Any argument that cites NYC results for restrictions on non-NYC behaviour is ignorant at best and most likely disingenuous imo.

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#420

I guess it is easy to dismiss the message from ordinary people, since they do not express themselves as well as the professional speakers we are used to listen to. If instead of saying "I want a haircut.", they would say like Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." would they be taken more seriously? In the movie versio…

> People should be able to take a calculated risk. That is not at all what we're talking about here. People should not be able to take a calculated risk with the lives of others . Let me tell you why it's not like driving: the NHTSA reports 102 car fatalities a day in 2016. NYC just got under 500 COVID deaths a day. One city. 5x the fatalities. Compared to a country of 300 million people. This is, by far , the most o…

Those numbers are really damning for public transportation. If just one of the many diseases being spread around on the NYC subway system kills 5x as many as an entire nation of cars, it clearly isn't acceptable to operate public transportation.
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