But I believe the general public doesn't really notice it because orders are still being taken and delivered via, I suppose, distribution centers outside France.
Friend ordered multiple things last Saturday (supposed to be closed) and he received some packages the next Thursday and today too (Saturday).
Is this a general way to avoid regulations? (i.e., France only receives from Netherlands, and Netherlands only receives from France)
Is this really any less of a problem if French deliveries are packed by abused Belgian peons?
Beyond that, we all know that "vagueness" was just an Amazon pretext to force France to allow them to operate unchecked, i.e. without providing the demanded protection and deliver any item.
What about a kid’s “computer” toy, or a fart noise button?
What about a fidget spinner? A stress relief toy for autistic kids? A fidget spinner incorrectly marketed for autistic kids?
They have 10’s of millions of items, and for each one where their answer is different than the court’s, they get fined $100,000 * number of times they ship it.
Of course they can’t open the warehouse under these terms. Perhaps elected officials need to step in and pass a law that will invalidate this ruling.
> if item.category is not in authorized_categories then do not sell
Does not seem too hard to do.
Additionally, most goods sold are already classified as a certain type of item for regulatory purposes in the EU, so that work has already been done.
Now I understand why medical staff would need extra protection as 1) we badly need them healthy now, and 2) they are facing heavy viral exposure which apparently really increases the risks. I can understand why clerks in grocery stores, bus drivers, anyone with frequent contacts with the general public would also want extra protection, as they may have much greater exposures than anyone else. But employees in a warehouse? Really?
15,411 people have died of covid in NYC, though excess death numbers suggest that this is an undercount and it's more like 19,200. [1] The population of NYC is 8.4M. If everyone in NYC had been exposed this would give a death rate of ~0.18%, or ~0.23% after adjusting for excess deaths. Antibody tests say ~21% [2] of the population has had it, so multiply by 5 and it looks like if everyone got it about 1% of people would die. That's about 10x more deadly than the flu.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-anti...
[edit] also these rates are heavily skewed against 70+ years old and people with existing conditions. The risk to a random warehouse worker is really immaterial.
I didn't watch Cuomo's presentation, and don't generally consume news via video. The two links I gave were to the NYT.
How do you get a mortality rate of 0.5% when you think 0.2% of the city has already died and 20% of the city has been exposed?
The odd of dying from this virus for a warehouse employee worker under 40 with no serious medical condition is not something they should worry about.
A tiny proportion of a gigantic number is still a massive number.
Plus, most of the population has some level of immunity to the flu. Meanwhile, for coronavirus, every human being on the planet can be infected except the tiny number who have already survived it.
> The odd of dying from this virus for a warehouse employee worker under 40 with no serious medical condition is not something they should worry about.
Until we have longitudinal studies showing that there's nothing to worry about in the long term, this is a reckless assumption.
That's simply not true, and I don't understand how people keep repeating it. If you take the current New York study as the best available evidence, you get a symptomatic infection fatality rate of somewhere between 0.5% and 1.5%. That's an order of magnitude more dangerous than the flu.
Put simply, this is more contagious than the flu, likely due to it being novel. It is vastly more deadly than the flu for elderly. Probably more than just an order of magnitude. That is, if you take out the people under 40 from the case rate, the IFR shoots way up. At a frightening level.
That still sounds high enough and vague enough that I expect Amazon will keep their French distribution centers closed for now.