it’ll be the family things, like ‘Nerds has been talking about. “Look, we haven’t gotten sick. Let’s all get together this weekend at my place.” Aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents. Especially when the weather is consistently warmer, people will want their cookouts.
I think it'd be more like a bar or something opens for business and people go enjoy a beer. Another bar down the street follows suit.
If the stay at home order is being enforced, the bar will be fined into the stone age. Los Angeles threatened to cut the water and power from any non-essential business that defied the order. It won't be worth it to try to open until the state government actually gives the go ahead.
Had to run to walmart to get a water hose, spigot splitter, a few odds and ends. Heard the local one was doing a really good job of sanitizing and everything so decided to give it a shot over the tractor supply which has also been really well-run. Yeah people are behaving themselves. It was weird to see. Employees were sanitizing every cart, there were managers at the entrances to limit the number of people shopping at once (wasn't needed though), groceries were all fully stocked and no item limits anymore. People were taking 6 feet to mean like 20. I've never seen so many tortillas in my life. There were literally pallets setup. Weird. Hospital level sanitary, eerily quiet except for strangers wishing each other well, the ratio of customers to employees must have been 2:1 or less. The average joe is starting to take this very serious, which is great. At least in this area we're in a very good spot as far as a ton of medical resources and a population spread out over a massive area. For the first time in about two months I'm cautiously optimistic.
One bar decides to open? Yes. But, if the bar is about to go out of business anyways, it might be worth the risk to them. 80% of bars decide to open? Hmmmm... Will they fine them all? Cut power/water to them all? If people get restless and decide to defy shelter in place orders, either the state/county is going to have to let it go or get draconian in their measures.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map Updated version of JHU map, searchable by county. This is still a solid source for daily updates: https://covidtracking.com/data/us-daily
I've already seen it start. At this point, I'm done worrying about other people. I can only control what happens to me and my family. If someone else fucks up and gets sick, that's on them. I've taken some very calculated risks, like going to walmart, but done so in a very controlled manner, in a controlled environment, and took all the necessary steps with hand sanitation, properly fitted mask, etc. My step father, who's recovering from cancer, chemo, pneumonia and a recent chest infection, was taking fucking tennis lessons yesterday. If this was a few weeks ago I would have given him a measuring tape and said "look up how far 6 feet is." Now? Man if you get sick, that's on you buddy. You've had a long ass time to learn best practices and you still refuse to follow them.
I wish I saw the same today. I had to stop at Walmart as well, only half of employees and customers were wearing masks. Many people did not seem to know what 6’ is, passing each other closely. My dispensary, on the other hand, has a good set-up. All recreational customers wait outside and two are served at a time. I’m a medical customer and they only serve one at a time in that room, which is honestly huge. All employees wore masks and gloves. It seems like a mask should be mandatory for employees at this point.
It's not just the bar that's going to get fined though. Anyone caught patronizing the bar is also subject to being fined as well. So, you might get people that take the risk once, but how many are going to want to try it multiple times knowing that it could cost them hundreds of dollars?
What if they refuse to pay the fine? Lock everyone up in jail? That's pretty far counter to shelter-in-place avoidance.
Same thing the government does with any other unpaid fines/taxes/etc: garnish wages, refuse renewal of driver's license until it's paid, etc.
Anyone else looking at nature a bit differently now? There’s some turkey doing the mating dance in my yard and they’re cute now but in the back of my head I’m like alright fucker if the grocery store goes bottoms up so do you
Michigan is turning into a clusterfuck. The governor decided to double down on shutting down non-essential business by closing the non-essential sections of the big box stores. The stores seemingly tried to make a point by closing off more in the non-essential sections than completely necessary. It's been a week of people freaking out that car seats are not purchasable, hoses, gardening supplies, paint, etc. Then they shut down boating with a motor. You can take a kayak out but you can't take your fishing boat on... and that's when people really started to get nuts. Apparently there's a few thousand people driving around Lansing right now protesting. I've taken no less than seven calls from people on the phone at the shop today that wanted to tell me about how it's all Bill Gate's fault and that if I don't worship the devil I'll open the store tomorrow and stand up for their constitutional rights. It's really hard to maintain my professional "I'm very concerned about my business, but in a responsible fashion" voice and not start giggling like a school girl when they get to the second or third youtube video they want to recommend to me.
The endless comparisons to 9/11 are tiring. As if the heavy handed unmitigated disaster of a response to that crisis is something we should emulate because more people are dying. Two wars, only one arguably necessary, trillions of dollars spent for no discernible positive outcome, 10k soldiers dead, 3-4 times that wounded, hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, area still hates us, a surveillance state Orwell couldn’t dream up, and.....no end in sight 19 years later. That type of all out balls to the wall response is what we want to replicate? Maybe something measured so the after effects aren’t as disastrous? If the same people worried about the spread of ethnonationalism here and in Europe the past few years should be insanely worried about this causing an economic depression. It is the exact recipe we saw before the last world war.
The point is that 9/11 added 3,000 deaths above what one would normally expect in a given month in New York City, and was the highest number on record. Coronavirus has beaten that excess by 2x. There is no world in which we're merely redefining normal deaths as COVID deaths but there isn't actually a problem.
Have we no sympathy? People can't get lawn fertilizer and hair dye: https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1250491829155500032
I stopped at a sports bar to get carry out, trying to spend some money in a place that's hurting. They are just letting folks drink in the parking lot. So there was a gaggle of Harley riders in the parking lot smoking and drinking, until one of them decided to ride off. Apparently, they do private Facebook specials to get people to come have happy hour in the parking lot. It ain't much, but it kept the fake-titted bartender busy.