Artblog.net

Consider this: many patrons don't feel safe going to restaurants if they are unsure about whom/what they might encounter while dining in. They might be caring for an elderly relative, or have kids too young for a vaccine, or may themselves be immune compromised. I know quite a few friends who have stated the above reasons as to why they haven't been dining out or seeing movies in theaters. For every customer who won't come in because of the mandate, there may well be four who will now. To wit:

I want to make sure that when customers are coming in here, I have to maybe worry less about the spread ... knowing that everyone who comes in here has valued their life enough to have some kind of protection over them." "It doesn't require a lot of heavy lifting for us. If it did, trust me, I would push back on that.

But beyond even that, there are plenty of other health related requirements for owning a restaurant. Remember the "good old days" when you were eating near a table of smokers? Anyone really miss that? And that's the thing: Once you are inside any space at all, air is very much shared resource. If it were food, the issue would be blatantly obvious: You probably wouldn't be happy to have your plate sampled by another table before it came to you, right? How about the sharing of utensils, or drinking glasses with a few random patrons too? Yet right now, depending on the space, we are sharing quite a bit of each other exhaled breath.

Doug:

For every customer who won't come in because of the mandate, there may well be four who will now.

I don't see the point of entertaining this hypothetical when the opposite is happening in practice.

Yet right now, depending on the space, we are sharing quite a bit of each other exhaled breath.

I can smell smoke. One might have attempted this argument in 2020. But now that Covid cases have uncoupled from hospitalizations and death, and in the meantime all-cause mortality for the bulk of the population has exploded for reasons that are hard to explain in isolation from the extraordinary interventions into American life over the last couple of years, it's past time to put a stop to them. Science demands that the mayor point to evidence that such intrusions create good outcomes, on net. She does not, because there isn't any. "Comfort" has come to require the rest of us to indulge a cult of hypochondriacs who have exaggerated the germane dangers and conflated their associated revulsion with that which they harbor for non-progressives. Enough already.