It doesn’t make any sense, unless the true goal is enforcement through fear and propaganda. Disrupt people’s lives enough and they’ll start to think that the alternative must be truly terrible. That’s why you get articles claiming that even young people are susceptible where the simple math shows that the risk is low. Cherry-picked stories about the handful of children who died from the virus, instead of articles about the kids going hungry because they can’t get two free meals a day. It’s fear-mongering as public policy.

2) No public health professional has time to list and quantify all of the routine processes of every profession to create a complex matrix of risk. And 99% of the public would ignore that matrix if it was created and published. The simpler and more effective public health communication is "stay home."

3) Your hypothetical pair of gardeners might not see their clients that day, but they still get up, get breakfast, get supplies at the store, fuel up their truck and equipment at the gas station, drop off a check at the bank after work, etc., and they can interact with other people at each of those stops.

4) Articles about young people that die from the virus are not trying to hide "simple math that the risk is low." They are trying to convince young people that the risk is non-zero, to prevent them from spreading the virus while pre- or asymptomatic.

5) "Children dying from a virus" and "children going hungry because they can't get two free meals a day" are BOTH public policy issues. Dooming an extra hundred? thousand? ten thousand? people to severe illness and death to avoid having to deliver emergency rations and meals to a million people is a false dilemma. In my medium-sized US city, schools and other community agencies have been distributing meals and rations for seven weeks now and we have zero cases of death by starvation.

As to your point about selectively closing businesses being hard, isn’t that a good thing? We shouldn’t put tens of millions of people out of jobs because it’s easier than enumerating what can and can’t stay open. The burden should be on the experts to make their case; after all they have had more than a month now to figure out a plan of attack.

How many deaths due to coronavirus are too many? Right now it seems like public health experts are taking the view that any death is one too many. And they’re willing to present or skew the facts to get that point across. I would rather them be upfront about the benefits and risks, rather than take a paternalistic viewpoint. There are real costs to keeping the country closed, and we shouldn’t discount them.

Are you a real account? Essential is essential. Food. Gas. Home goods. Infrastructure. Anything that supports essential business.

Alcohol is certainly an outlier, but there are plenty of reasons for it to be essential. Alcoholics would die, for one. Black markets would spring up, for two.

Gardeners are not essential. No one is going to die because they can't get their gardening supplies. The cartel isn't going to get in the tulip business.

What about weed dispensaries, are they essential? More essential than dentists, pediatrician visits, and the accompanying vaccinations? Because the latter have all been closed. How are construction workers essential when gardeners aren’t?

‘Essential’ is in the eyes of the beholder, it seems.

In the bay area dentists and healthcare professionals are exempt from the order. My dentist is open for emergencies 7am-7pm. If your dentist is closed, you can certainly call and complain, but it's not part of the bay area order.

I'm not sure about vaccination schedules because it's hard to google it without talk about a coronavirus vaccine, so you should contact your pediatrician about that.

Construction is also essential only, except maybe the affordable housing exemption. You can report violations on sf.gov.

Weed has legitimate medical purposes, and keeping dispensaries open is probably a combination of that and preventing a black market.

Source for most of this: sf.gov

What exactly are you talking about?

I’m not sure why you think I’m arguing in bad faith just because I happen to disagree with you, but I’d appreciate you discussing the substance of my claims and not your interpretation of my intent.

I've been showing how, with limited exceptions, it's not just a magic word attached to activities.

I didn't think you were arguing in good faith because you brought up horrible counter examples (gardeners??) and started spewing conspiracy theories that the bay area has some nefarious reason to keep people from being productive other than public safety.

It doesn’t take a conspiracy theory to understand what’s going on. Essential has been defined narrowly enough to keep the public inconvenienced so that they stay vigilant. If you disagree with me on this go read the New Yorker article on Seattle’s response. Optics plays as large a part as science when it comes to public health.

Essential is also defined broadly enough so that big businesses and their lobbyists don’t complain. That’s capitalism, you can disagree if you want.

Not every argument has to resort to name-calling and accusations of being fake. Even on the internet.

My problem with your arguments is that instead of complaining to your public officials that non-essential construction is happening (the park), you assume there's some conspiracy going on. Big Park lobbying? I don't know what you think, and I'm not going to bother writing out all the reasons it's ridiculous.

There's thousands of flower shops and thousands upon thousands of other shops like flower-shops that have low amounts of foot traffic that make social distancing easy while supporting people's livelihoods.

Certainly pressure from groups representing hairdressers was a big part of it, but the justification they use is that contact tracing can be done reliably in such a situation.

Keep in mind that they also want to reopen schools, citing dubious claims about children not contributing much to the spread, staying silent about the likely true motivation (sending the parents back to work).

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/apr/06/school-clo...

"“While school closure as a measure on its own is predicted to have a limited effectiveness in controlling Covid-19 transmission, when combined with intense social distancing it plays an important role in severing remaining contacts between households and thus ensuring transmission declines.”"

I've been saving a ton of money without going for dye jobs, highlights, root melt and cut every other month, monthly esthetician and biweekly manicures.

I'm almost considering growing out my greys during this, although would be subject to ageism in my industry so sort of on the fence for now.

Shampoo doesn't remove the virus from one's lungs or exhalations. I'm not sure what benefit shampoo would have over, say, gloves. PPE is good but hairstylists aren't usually trained in its proper use.

I would hope dentists' offices reopen before hairstylists. Dentists are presumably more able to properly use PPE and disinfectants.

Higher end salons use PPE for keratin treatments and offer them to their clients due to the straightening chemicals (allegedly not formaldehyde but many products still contain).

Also, nail salon techs had been starting to wear masks and even face shields due to powder coating and dust from dremeling gel coating and acrylics.

I don't think there would be a high barrier to entry to transition wider PPE rollout across the field, because it's already implemented among some of the treatments.

Citation absolutely required. We’re talking about people’s lives here, and there’s zero evidence for this kind of intervention.

Everyone says they’re “listening to the science” to make these kinds of decisions, but where is it? Why can’t we be letting people get haircuts while wearing masks?

Particularly in a place like San Francisco, where there have been 1,400 cases total and 23 deaths. It’s simply irrational now, and a lot closer to virtue signaling than anything with a scientific basis.

Don’t just downvote: provide affirmative evidence.

Citation absolutely required. While there is definitely a ton of uncertainty around what causes spread, the one thing that there seems to be broad agreement on is that sustained time in a shared pocket of air with an infected person is the most likely transmission vector.

Hypotheses don’t count. Provide actual scientific proof. You’re ruining people’s lives.

> If you want to take people’s livelihoods away from them, you have to justify the seizure, not the other way around.

Conversely, you could argue that if you want to take actions that risk killing hundreds of thousands of people, then the onus is on you to prove that your actions won't cost hundreds of thousands of lives. You can't claim that enacting a lockdown requires scientific proof but lifting one does not, when the potential consequences for the latter are even higher than the former.

Sure there is. It's called mass unemployment and closure of non-essential businesses. Why would people fly to branch offices if they're closed?

>> Conversely, you could argue that if you want to take actions that risk killing hundreds of thousands of people

You don't know this to be true. There is plenty of evidence showing lockdowns have limited impact, no impact, or even worse, exacerbate the problem.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lockdowns-wont-stop-the-spread-...

Sweden didn't "lock down" (as people often point out), but travel is down 90% from normal [1]:

> "The biggest myth and misconception is that life goes on as normal in Sweden," she said. "It absolutely does not."

> "We have seen Easter travel decrease by 90 percent, we have businesses going bankrupt, a record number of temporary layoffs, and a lot of unemployed people."

I agree that lockdowns seem to have limited or no impact, but not for the reason you think. Where I am, restaurants and retail shops were already in dire straits before the lockdowns came into force. I think the lock downs have limited impact because they aren't very different from the way most people would be behaving anyways, given the information they have.

1. https://www.thelocal.se/20200424/interview-isabella-lovin-co...

I live in a state with a very low number of cases and deaths, much less than SF. We began the process of reopening today. Which would be fine if our borders were sealed, if quarantine for travelers was enforced, if our systems for contact tracing and testing were adequate. However, none of these requirements have been met. It is only a matter of time before this state, which relies heavily on tourism, sees a rebound of cases and we are once back in the situation we were in a month ago.

time will tell, though.

Consider two cases:

- On May 15 SF has had no new cases since May 1st. It decides to reopen.

- On May 15 SF has had 150 new cases (ten a day) since May 1st. It decides to reopen.

By June 15th, is the total number of cases any different under these scenarios? In either case, has the city been able to function without having to reclose?

I'm not sure the answer to these - but my instinct is that the situations would be virtually the same.

White collar jobs will keep telecommuting if there’s a risk of community spread. No hr/leg department wants the liability. The secondary effects are decrease in demand on automobile related businesses like gas stations, servicing. Also decrease in car sales. Also the company ban on business travel which hits airlines, hotels, conferences etc.

Do you know what that will cost both in an acute USD fashion as well as the geopolitical and economic chronic fashion? I'm legitimately interested if you've thought through the externalities of this plan.

>Economy will crash even if we open up

This invites us to think of economic crashes as a do-or-don't function. This oversimplifies, and prevents us from thinking through the various degrees of "opening up" we might attempt, and the various kinds of economic harm we will suffer in different scenarios.

>People will continue to voluntarily shelter.

Some people will. Some people already were, for other medical reasons. The question is how many, and how much of an impact this will have (both in terms of controlling the disease spread, and harming people's physical health, emotional health, financial health).

Well, not completely eliminated, but it will be eliminated soon enough based on current trends.

That is no one's goal at this point. To imagine it is would be to completely misunderstand this pandemic and how it is being addressed. The one and only goal is to reduce the rate of the spread, and it has seemingly worked very well.