I believe it was just one big one that had a lot of very old and very frail. Staff didn't pick up on what was going on and by the time they connected the dots people were dying.
Regardless of the number of nursing homes, the point stands that the figures are skewed by a few clear outliers.
The WSJ Editorial Board has suggested that the Fed create a new facility that gives very cheap loans to businesses that need them. These loans will not need to be repaid right away and should sustain any business that needs it during this period. It sounded workable.
Not an economist (just trying to understand all this) but wouldn’t this just be kicking the can down the road? I understand how loans and credit works in healthy markets/seasons but to me this feels like making a bet that these businesses would be able to take this infusion, weather out the storm, and then raise profits enough above what they were before to pay it all back.
It’s fundamentally different from me starting a small business and going to Chase saying, look here’s a healthy prospect and I’ll be able to pay it back within x years.
If you can kick the can down the road until the virus goes away, you just saved the whole economy. The ability of my local Chinese place to serve customers is undiminished, my desire to eat Chinese food is undiminished, and all that's in the way is an ultimately temporary law.
> The ability of my local Chinese place to serve customers is undiminished, my desire to eat Chinese food is undiminished, and all that's in the way is an ultimately temporary law.
Agreed on this. But the rent paid out during the period of reduced revenue coming in creates a delta that this loan is filling in. The loan still needs to be paid back (even assuming 0% interest). That extra money needs to come from somewhere: increased prices, increased traffic, or decreased expenditures.
A better way would be to suspend all debt collection and rent collection for x months. That will keep lots of small businesses alive, and employees on reduced salaries will still be able to feed their families if they don't have to worry about rent.
Throw in food stamps for the unemployed and you're most of the way to keeping a nation going.
> A better way would be to suspend all debt collection and rent collection for x months.
I know this would help for people I personally know in this industry.
Dine in has been reduced almost entirely but takeaway orders hasn't deviated too much from the standard.
The reality here is that a lot of small hospitality businesses don't actually make much profit at all so it's unlikely that they'd survive too long with this forced reduced business. And it's always unhelpful to hear (in general not from you) comments like "maybe they should have saved up more earlier" or "they shouldn't be opening up a restaurant then" because a lot of times they can't work in any other industry - this is all they know.
Imagine having reduced business through no fault of your own yet you're still liable for paying the commercial rent of $1.2k per week. You can't sell the business because no one is buying. You can't sell it because you lose all the goodwill which is bad especially if you've spent any money renovating the place up to standard.
Far, far, far better. In fact, it's the only thing that might actually work. All this talk of loans is just people refusing to admit that a capitalist system (I hate saying that word) simply doesn't function under these conditions. The economy needs to be paused.
The rental payment from a shop is income for the landlord. The income from the landlord is payment for his/her obligations - all the way up the chain.
If you force rental payments to stop, then who gets hit? The landlord is going to default on their obligations. So do you then bail them out? If the landlord defaults, the banks (presumably) will repossess the property. So it's just somebody else suffering, rather than the tenant.
The loans work, because the obligation to pay back this loan will come from a future where you have the capability. The govt is the eventual guarentor of this loan, and hence, they take the hit if the eventual future does not come to pass (e.g., the restaurant never regain their full business). The gov't can't take the full hit of all these defaults all at once, but they can if it is spread out. So a loan will spread them out into the future (even perhaps, far future), and the economy survives, even if a lot of the business that took the loan didn't.
> The income from the landlord is payment for his/her obligations
Read my post again. The rent holiday goes hand in hand with a debt holiday. That's the only way this works. Tenants don't have to pay rent, and landowners don't have to pay a mortgage.
Sure some businesses will fail as a result of this, but far more (on a massive scale) will fail if you don't do this.
I don't think you've thought this through. What are the banks going to do if they don't receive their payments? How are you going to bail them out? With a loan? Why not give that loan to those who need it instead of kicking the can down the road?
> What are the banks going to do if they don't receive their payments?
They'll be bailed out by the govt as usual. Which is the point.. the govt has to keep humans fed and housed through this. This is the best way to achieve that end. Kicking the can down the road is exactly what needs to be done. The economic problems and readjustments can happen later. The immediate problem is people fucking dying.
> If the landlord defaults, the banks (presumably) will repossess the property
As others have pointed out, this is not what any of us are saying. Those debts are paused too.
The loans DO NOT work, because most of these businesses are barely profitable at all. Now they have to recover to their previous levels of income AND pay back a loan? They can't. It's a ridiculous expectation.
why is it ridiculous to expect a business to not make any profit after a crisis? The alternative is to close down the business, which, imho, is worse. At least, with the loan, a business that's barely making any profit can continue to barely make any profit after the crisis (but even less profit for the loan repayment). That's a better outcome than losing the business entirely. The employees remain employed, and the economy doesn't grind to a screeching halt into a depression.
This has already been explained to you, over and over again. The alternative is not to close down the business. It's to make it so the business owner doesn't have to pay anything during the crisis, except supplies for himself, so that the business doesn't close permanently. The loan is a really, really stupid idea, because it burdens the business more during the recovery, which guaranteed will be less profitable than before this, so it just delays the bankruptcies. You might as well have them not pay it back at all, but then why single out just business owners for free money? Why not everyone else too? And worse, everyone else runs out of money too because debts weren't paused, because enough people are stupid enough to think that loans are the way out of this instead of realizing that the economy doesn't work when nobody's buying anything but food and toilet paper, and pause it to prevent it from destroying itself. If this doesn't get done by the end of the month we're looking at another Great Depression.
I see plenty of places that landlords just sit on waiting for some maximal amount of rent to be agreed to, only for the business to crumble under high rents, rinse, repeat.
You might want to read up on The Irish Potato Famine.
Some landlords were letting people stay rent free out of compassion because no one had money and it was tough all over and no one else was going to rent it. Then the government decided to bleed the landlords and insist it get paid if the unit was occupied, even if no rent was being paid.
Landlords had no choice but to begin evicting people. Things got ugly fast.
That was a fairly unusual scenario though, where the government actively disliked their citizens, many politicians explicitly happy to see the Irish suffer, others viewing it as the will of God, and none of them dependent on Irish votes.
It's an indication of how things can go wrong with the government working against you, but I don't know that it maps well to the current pandemic.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The Irish example is a real world example of the government tampering in some way with landlords and it having unintended consequences that were disastrous.
I don't think that's a reasonable reading of the event. Ascribing good intentions to Westminster with regard to the famine is unjustified. Some wanted to help, others distinctly didn't. It would be beyond charitable to suggest that all their actions were designed to minimise Irish suffering.
I don't think that's a reasonable reading of my comment. (Trying to be light-hearted here, not mocking.)
I wasn't ascribing good intentions to Westminster. I was saying that their intentions, good or bad, and the intentions of the current American government are irrelevant. What's relevant here is they did a thing and it got x result. So we should use that example to wonder what will really happen should we do a similar thing now.
> So we should use that example to wonder what will really happen should we do a similar thing now.
Except nobody is suggesting a similar thing. I started this thread by suggesting that the government do x, and you replied with the assumption that the government would do x+y.
If by “suspend” you mean cancel the debt due in the quarantine months than I definitely agree: in both moral and economic terms it would be best for the rent-seekers to take as much of the hit as possible.
But if it’s just a pause in collection, and you still owe that money, then it’s the same old margin problem: very few restaurants make enough money to repay that loan no matter who it comes from.
> The ability of my local Chinese place to serve customers is undiminished, my desire to eat Chinese food is undiminished, and all that's in the way is an ultimately temporary law.
Six months from now, when the quarantine ends, you aren't going to go to your local Teriyaki and Wok, and order six months wroth of Chinese food.
The restaurant will never recoup those six lost months of rent. The employees will never recoup those six lost months of wages. These loans will never be repaid.
That's not how margins work. God didn't descend down to earth and declared all restaurants to be low margin. Margin is a matter of competition. If there is lots of competition then the margin will shrink to barely cover costs of running the business. If suddenly every restaurant has a problem finding customers and a load of debt then restaurants are forced to increase their margins to cover their debt payments.
Low margins are the result of heavy competition. If there is less competition margins will be high again.
1. I didn't say one word about margins in my post.
2. The problem is that after the pandemic ends, the margins will remain low. Because new entrants, with no outstanding debts or obligation will eat the lunch of any of the restaurants that remained 'open' during the pandemic.
> he ability of my local Chinese place to serve customers is undiminished, my desire to eat Chinese food is undiminished, and all that's in the way is an ultimately temporary law.
I have thought quite a bit about whether this situation will cause long-term behavioral changes.
Do you expect the restaurant business to bounce back to where it was after the crisis ends? I would expect that to happen for a short-duration event. But what if this persists for months, or into next year?
I have searched for papers that explore this idea (say after the 1918 Spanish Flu), but haven't found anything relevant.
How would loans help? A lot of employees aren't currently needed so they will be laid off regardless of whether the business owner can take out cheap loans. I don't see how loans can make up for the much reduced economic activity.
I imagine the WSJ Editorial Board is focusing on a solution to keep businesses surviving, not employment. They may have other ideas to help with that later. Without businesses, there will be no employment.
The economy is an engine that isn't allowed to stop or it will break. The idea behind loans is that you force the engine to keep turning through external support. Yes this is obviously a money losing strategy but the value of the engine is much higher than the cost of keeping it running during the pandemic.
Loans may already be super cheap and expanding that option further will extend the current run but lead to a bigger crash once those loans come due given the economy continues to flat line after the pandemic ends.
It's going to be wiped out far beyond June. Based on the recent models run by UK, the same models that prompted the White House to warn against gatherings of greater than 10 people, the curve doesn't end even without intervention until August. With intervention what we are going through right now could last well into 2021.
This is not clear. Right now we need lockdown because:
a) We have a large number of infected people (> 10,000) and have no idea who or where they are, because testing sucks.
b) If exponential growth continues (and it would, because we can't isolate all the people who are sick right now), we'll overwhelm hospital facilities and the fatality rate will hit 5% instead of <1%.
BUT
As soon as we clear out a), that kills b) too -- in South Korea they're doing effective contact tracing, testing, and isolation because they have few enough cases. Once we bend the knee of the growth curve, once we get get R0 below 1, we'll have exponential drop-off instead of growth. In 8 weeks, with few enough active cases and robust testing infrastructure, we'll be able to do what China has started doing, and what SK has been doing all along.
Of course, that's assuming we get our act together on lockdown & testing infrastructure. But if we do, we could be out of lockdown by June.
All these folks saying "we need to flatten the curve so that everyone gets it over 41 years!" are extrapolating the wrong data points...
> "we need to flatten the curve so that everyone gets it over 41 years!"
Is this hyperbole, or is anyone actually saying 41 years?
I haven't done careful math, but eyeballing it, roughly a year (give or take some months) is the longest I'd come up with to keep peak simultaneous cases under 1.5mil.
5% of cases need hospitalization for ~2-3 weeks; 2% require an ICU; 1% a ventilator. We have 96k ICU beds (and 160k ventilators) in the USA. Most constrained means we can't have more than 4.8 million sick at a given time -- but that's over 2-3 weeks, which yields ~2-3 years for 200 million people.
I assume the "41 years" people are using some other constraint.
If this approach works (and it's a big if) you'll still be vulnerable as a society for any flare-ups of the virus. The only long-term solution is to build up herd-immunity and spread it out enough to 50-60% of the population until we have developed a vaccin.
Doomsday panic? Ill informed opinion? I'm literally looking at the chart used by the White House that comes from the data generated by the UK government. Look for yourself:
For that one paper you showed me you’ll find another dozen research papers that say something entirely different.
Until we know how many people have this or had it, suggesting multi-month lockdowns is ill informed, dangerous doomsday nonsense.
PS: while bitching about downvotes is lame, it is quite disappointing to see HN devolve into yet another panic fueled echo chamber where only “rooting for” the worst case scenario is tolerated.
Don’t let this place turn into an echo chamber people. There are plenty of subreddits and social media groups where you can get your fill of doomsday scenarios. This place bills itself as full of rational thinking people, let’s put on our critical thinking caps and consider the problem from all angles.
Ps: /r/corvid19 seems to be one of the few places on the internet where people are discussing this stuff rationally and not immediately jumping to the worst case scenario.
FYI You're not alone in observing the echo chamber effect. Those of us who agree with you that some skepticism of the cost/benefit of the intervention is merited have largely avoided posting on our main accounts because of the massive backlash against anything counter-panic-dogma, or our posts have been flagged/deaded with worrying rapidity.
There were posts threatening _physical harm_ to individuals questioning the level of intervention (I believe the words were "I want to throttle the next person who says this isn't a catastrophe") and from typically well-respected users as well.
It's stunning to me to watch this community devolve in this fashion. I take it as a sign of the times, in terms of groupthink and fear-as-contagion, downvote-if-you-don't-agree behavior on the internet, and a broader eternal september effect on this forum.
I only wish individuals showed this much concern surrounding the massive cost in human life we incurred far more willfully via the opioid epidemic, the wars in the middle east, our prison system, etc; I'd go so far as to say I would be more willing to go along with the current overreaction if we didn't seem so hypocritical and self-serving in where and how we assign value to human life.
Makes you wonder if the real “virus” is a mental one? Society got infected with one hell of a meme.
It is like everybody has that X-Files “I want to believe” poster on their wall when they repeat some of this doomsday stuff.
We are all stuck inside all day, bouncing around with nothing better to do than read doomsday porn. And around and around that stuff goes into people’s head until you get where we are now.
People should be much less concerned about this virus and way more concerned about social unrest. Humans are social creatures. You can’t just “lock” people in their homes for an indeterminate amount of time and expect good things to happen.
Those toilet paper memes and work from home memes are funny at first, but once the novelty wears off over the next week or so, shit is going to get very real. It ain’t funny to see empty shelves of toilet paper or baby wipes when you actually need them.... it ain’t funny to have absolutely nothing to do but sit around and obsess about this virus.
You live a very sheltered life if you think all humans need is video conferencing and stocked grocery shelves.
There is a huge world of stuff that cannot be done remote. Sporting events, construction, weddings, restaurants, building maintenance, manufacturing, and millions of other stuff. Stuff that is critical to keeping our global economy happy. Healthy economy == healthy people.
Ps: have any of the doomsayers spouting nonsense stoped to consider what bullshit it is that all the white collar people can remain “safe” at home while all the blue collar grocery workers and the entire supply chain that feeds it gets to go out each day and expose themselves to a virus so deadly we took these extreme measures? Kind of bullshit, ain’t it?
Thanks a lot. My point was that you're being hyperbolic and panicky, and that doesn't help at all. Being stuck at home sucks, but it isn't as bad as you're saying. Talking with friends and family helps a lot.
People staying home don't just protect themselves; the more distancing is done by everyone, the better the outlook. I do agree with you that it's possible extreme lockdown measures won't have to last more than a month or two, but we really don't know at this point. Over the coming weeks we will continue to learn more about the virus and how it spreads, and testing infrastructure will continue to scale up. If the distancing measures work to get control of the outbreaks, and this can be confirmed through more extensive testing, then it should be possible to ease up and to try to find a balance between minimizing risk of spread and maintaining daily activities. Until an effective treatment/vaccine is found though, there is likely to be some level of continuing disruption.
Yes it's all crazed conspiracy and you happen to be one of the few people to see through it all. Your medical pedigree must be amazing. Your scientific prowess beyond imagination. You're not helping.
You may not have intended it, but this level of ad-hominem and dismissive response is exactly what I'm referring to. Ignoring the fact that my post had nothing to do with statements requiring Expert background, (which you know absolutely nothing about whether I have or not) I can assure you the majority of individuals here encouraging panic have what you seek. Once again, the hypocrisy here is laughable.
HackerNews used to pride itself in being better than this. YOU are not helping.
What research papers have you seen with more optimistic projections? You're calling the projections that two governments are relying on as ill informed based on what credentials?
We don’t have enough data or understanding to project anything. Many countries stupidly aren’t doing pervasive testing.
Places that do have pervasive testing (some town in Italy, South Korea, and Singapore) suggest this virus is widespread and has a >1% death rate. But this data is early and subject to change.
Suggesting we are going to be locked for months or years is irresponsible fear mongering at best.
A few times in my career, I have been in a meeting that I didn't want to be in. One of the meeting-runners hinted that the meeting could be shorter than scheduled. Failure to deliver on that was not well received.
If you're going to say anything, you're better off overestimate how long it's going to be.
2 weeks tops. Calling it now. 2 months of this will result in rioting and all kinds of crazy shit. And for what? The data based in SK and Singapore doesn’t suggest this virus is worth risking compete societal collapse. Testing there is showing a >1% death rate and because of how those tests work, it is provably about a half to a full order of magnitude lower.
Sorry doomsayers, you better have some good evidence to suggest a 2 month lockup is worth the massive damage to our society. Better also outline what “lockup” means. Is that in big cities? The whole country? The planet?
What is your exit criteria? Who will have to go out into the world to keep shelves stocked and your Uber eats meals delivered? Who is going to be manufacturing your heart medicine? Who will clean that plugged drain? Who will repair that drain unplugger persons tool when it breaks?
2 weeks tops. Perhaps slightly longer for very small isolated hotspot areas. Any more than that and shit is gonna go down.
Assuming you have a perfect lock down now. People will continue for 7 days to get infected from asymptomatic cases (much longer for some). At the end of that week it will be one week until most symptoms have appeared (but again much longer for some). Now you have hospitalisations of the infected, or home care (as hospitals won't be able to cope). In UK you have to test negative from 3 tests on two subsequent days in order to be cleared for release (report on BBC Radio 4 from an infected patient); assuming a similar standard then we're looking at 7+7+17 days, 31 days until people are starting to be safe to associate with ...
I don't share your "2 weeks top" blind faith.
>Testing there is showing a >1% death rate and because of how those tests work, it is provably about a half to a full order of magnitude lower.
You seem like you're panicking. If you need evidence for the necessity, go read literally anything about what Italy is facing. China locked down cities with 0 infections pretty completely for ~4 weeks, and they still have isolation measures going. I believe the heavily hit cities are still totally locked down. This is what it took to get numbers under control once it had spread, and because of the US' late reaction, it's what's necessary now.
And because China reacted with extreme measures, they got the virus under control, and are now starting to reduce the restrictions, and commerce is starting back up. It's nowhere near normal, but by reacting quickly and decisively you reduce the likelihood of longer lockdowns being required in the future (as well as the likelihood of significant loss of life).
America is not even close to Italy. Not demographically, not density, not medically. Nothing is the same between us. And it isn't "Italy" it is a region in Italy with the problem. Same with china. China isn't locking down "China". Just a small part of it. You cannot take those two datapoints and apply them to the rest of the world. Not even close.
And I'm not panicking, I'm just tired of people running around doomsaying. There is so much trash information out there and people have completely shut down their ability to think rationally. It kinda ticks me off.
You're comparing America to Italy and saying they're different (which I don't fully agree with). You should also be comparing our response to Italy's and seeing they're the same. We're both under poor leadership who downplay and deny basic scientific facts. The spread here will be the same. The timeline will be the same. Our shortage of hospital beds will be here within a week. The interruption to life is not going to be measured in weeks; it'll be months. I'm not trying to stress you out more, but you keep saying "two weeks" without any actual reason for saying so. I'd put $100 that in two weeks all we see is the very well understood and predicted 2-4x in infection rates.
Last point: I live in Seattle. You have previously mentioned how people won't stand for this and there will be riots. What you're failing to grasp is that when people are scared, 90% of them stop going out on their own. Yes, there were some young people still going to bars, but Seattle shut down FAR before any kind of order to do so. People chose to stay in once it became apparent their choice was either staying in or risking needing a hospital that is oversubscribed. That will happen in many, many other places in our country, and there won't be riots because people don't want to be around enough people to riot.
You keep saying people don't think rationally, but you do not make any rational argument.
You say: "lock-down 2 weeks tops", when the incubation period is known to be around that or even more, and we have clearly seen that a 2 weeks period does not have any appreciable effect. You say the situation is different than in Italy, even when the number of people in ICUs and deaths is growing exactly in the same way in every other part of the world, with the only exception of countries who took measures earlier. You say it won't be so bad when you admit it will kill a 1% of the infected and all studies talk about at least ~50% of the population catching it at some point. You are not being rational.
I am also tired of the doomsaying but I have not seen any serious study that is minimally optimistic, and I've seen many pessimistic ones.
I never said "years", 2021 is in less than a year. I think you're contrarian, misinformed and in deep denial. Anyway, facts are what they are and we'll see in due time.
People will start dropping dead from social unrest, addiction, substance abuse, suicide, etc. this “lockdown” isn’t free. It has massive health impacts that could easily outweight any lives saved by the lockdown.
People need to put on their critical thinking caps around here. What is the end game of this lockdown? What data is it based on? How will we know when to end it—given all factors, which include vastly more than slowing the spread of the virus.
Also stop downvoting people asking questions. Asking questions and thinking critically and rationally is what this forum is supposed to be about.
Yup, my gut feeling is that follow on effects from rampant unemployment and financial insecurity will have a much larger effect (via stress-induced heart attacks, suicide, etc.) than the 3.4% mortality rate among reported cases (WHO numbers, not all infected, maybe not even most infected.)
I would love to see an actual statistical comparison. spookthesunset is making an excellent point. Unless we know that deaths from the virus are greater than the deaths caused by the second-and-third-order effects of panicking, you can't say for sure that the lockdown is the best thing to do right now.
>Unless we know that deaths from the virus are greater than the deaths caused by the second-and-third-order effects of panicking
Do you believe that when the death toll raises from non-panicking and not imposing a lockdown (not to mention the total saturation of the healthcare system), that wont create even more panic and self-lockdown -- and have their own second and third order effects?
Yes, and this is why - the population of investors is honestly not all that panicky. If people start dying, investors will watch the death rate, and companies' share prices will reflect some instability but it will be somewhat in line with the actual economic impact, which traders are smart enough to price it at the small level it would actually be given the mortality rate.
By imposing lockdown, we have created a real economic slowdown, that traders are smart enough to deem catastrophic (because a month or restauranteurs going without wages is actually catastrophic and represents a much larger loss of future incomes that the still-small-but-blown-up-in-the-media death rate from the unchecked coronavirus.) Unlike the non-lockdown option, there is no optimistic case. You can't say, "earnings are slow, but people will be sorry if they panic sell because when the media frenzy dies down things will settle." You have to say, "earnings are slow, and might not actually pick up again because the lockdown lost a bunch of people their job."
The end game of the lockdown is the disease burning out over the course of 9 months instead of 1 month, giving more time to find a treatment or vaccine and fewer people dying untreated because hospitals are full.
The alternative is to let 2 million Americans die this summer.
I feel for the industry, but I'm having a hard time seeing myself buying gift cards at a moment when I'm wondering if I will have a job or food for my family.
Just FYI, if you're lying to get out of paying for something, or to get reimbursed on false pretenses that is called fraud and is illegal. It's also wrong to do, it is an action taken in bad faith.
So is a hotel denying you a refund during an epidemic. There is an obvious power differential here between Joe Blow and some billion dollar hotel chain. You need the money for basic survival far more than they need it to pad their quarterly earnings.
By booking a non-refundable rate, which is generally cheaper, you took that risk. So long as the hotel is open, it's not really their problem. The fact that they have more money than you doesn't give you the right to steal from them.
If you really need the money for basic survival, fine, we can argue about the morality of it. But even with a possible recession looming, it's unlikely that the price of a hotel stay is going to be the difference between life and death for you.
It's unlikely you are in basic survival mode yet, unless you've already lost your job and are living paycheck to paycheck and there are no available government programs to help you right now and no friends or family to turn to.
You had to explain what “non-refundable” should be interpreted as. I think we can agree different people will have different interpretations.
I’d also expect any terms in the actual ToS defining “non-refundble” to get void in front of a judge in this specific cases if this was really pushed that far.
I don't think you understand what "bad faith" means. Bad faith refers to signalling that they will act in one way without any intention of following through.
When a non-refundable booking is made, both sides understand that the correct way to follow through is to not have a refund, should circumstances (not caused by the hotel) arise where the customer could not end up staying in the hotel. Hence there was no bad faith on the part of the hotel.
Not all policies are fair and there should be exceptions during times of crisis. Hotels do questionable advertising practices all the time to lure in customers and then hit them with arbitrary fees during checkout which seems like bad faith to me.
Pointing out the type of argument doesn't negate that argument. While I don't think it's ok to simply commit fraud because I think the company is committing general fraud in most areas... If someone runs up and steals my phone but drops their own, I'll be keeping their phone until they make things right.
The same goes especially for multi-billion dollar corporations.
You cheat me out of something, I will first attempt to right that wrong through the proper channels. If I am unsuccessful, I will right that wrong through unofficial channels. Within reason, of course.
Nobody prices in a once in a century, global pandemic when looking for a hotel room: not the customer and not the hotel. If the room was booked more than 3 months ago, the agreement was based on false information and should be able to be renegotiated in light of the current state of the world.
OT but I wish we would stop refering to this as a once-in-a-century event. It appeared from a combo of coincidences that can reproduce very easily in the years and decades to come.
You say it's not, but it actually is. Many hospitality industries are allowing coronavirus related exceptions to their cancellation and refund policies.
That might benefit them in the short term but could hurt them in the long term if more cases break out because of contaminated customers and have to close the entire building down.
That's a question of morality. Canceling a hotel stay by giving them an acceptable reason doesn't feel wrong to me. They can use that reason to claim government to rebuild money after all of this.
Lying is a legal sense is very different to just lying or not telling the truth. Not sure many judges would side with the hotel. Not sure the hotel could prove bad faith. I'm very sure the cost of a suit would be higher than the cost of the refund.
Thank you so much for this information. I'll be sure to do whatever I can to continue bleeding money on pointless expenses after I get laid off instead of doing what I can to get by.
It doesn’t really matter. With this simplistic view the hotel is breaching the contract. There is a mutuality of obligation. If the customer is obligated to pay for a room then the hotel is obligated to provide the service.
It's unlikely that other countries can do what China has done. As an example, China is able to do 200 CT scans a day at each fever station throughout the affected regions. In the US we can maybe do what 10 CT scans a day with a single machine? In China they were able to figure out within a short duration if someone needed to be quarantined. They built hospitals in days. It's not just about locking down. China has people taking temperatures of people entering their apartments or when they show up at work. There are drones patrolling the streets that detect people with a high temperature. I have a hard time seeing us in the US build out what China did in just a few days.
They're an effective diagnostic, faster than testing for the virus directly. At least they seem to be effective at these fever clinics. NYTimes Daily podcast had a good explanation of how these fever clinics work.
It's like artificially inflated GDP numbers from producing bad steel that nobody will buy. It does something, but in the end it's really nothing, and actually quite wasteful.
Everyone who is going to has already made their mind about Trump. Nothing that happens in the next few months is going to change that after the last 3 years. If he botches the coronavirus response his detractors will yell about it and his defenders will blame someone else.
I'm guessing trying to face away from people's faces probably helps somewhat, too? If someone breathes, sneezes, or coughs viroids in your general direction, I would naively guess it's riskier if it's in the direction of their face to your face. If it touches your back and neck, I'd imagine you're still at risk, but not to the same degree.
Can anyone verify if this logic makes sense? Or does it not really make a difference because it'll just float through the air and reach your face anyway?
The comment you're responding to (which is flagged and dead) doesn't belong on HN, but unless you've invented some genetic basis to tell apart Anatolian Turks and Greeks (good luck with that) try to be more precise about what irks you.
