… they’ll get it while shopping at Whole Foods instead, according to my friends there.
Last night I managed to FaceTime with some friends who live in Greenwich Village. They’re locked down in a 19th floor 4BR apartment with a 20-year-old daughter home from college, a boy who is a high school junior, and a daughter in her last year of middle school.
Thus far, the online education efforts of New York Public Schools consist mostly of homework assignments. There is little attempt made to provide instruction via video.
The family leaves the apartment only every other day for a walk outside. The kids are on Zoom with their friends all day, but do not socialize with other children in person. The primary coronavirus exchange points in NYC right now seem to be grocery stores. Mask-wearing is not that common for either customers or staff. In this family’s opinion, at least, whatever spreading of the virus that would have happened if New York had kept the office buildings open is occurring just as effectively in the grocery stores. Whole Foods in their neighborhood is crowded enough for a disease to spread.
In their opinion, it would be much smarter in New York had kept its economy going, but given everyone a mask and gloves for use in public.
Related:
- “Mount Sinai hospital leaders holed up in Florida vacation homes during coronavirus crisis” (New York Post): Dr. Kenneth Davis, 72, the CEO of the Mount Sinai Health System who pulled down nearly $6 million in compensation in 2018, is ensconced in his waterfront mansion near Palm Beach. Davis has been in the Sunshine State for weeks and is joined by Dr. Arthur Klein, 72, president of the Mount Sinai Health Network, who owns an oceanfront condo in Palm Beach.
Perfectly understandable. If I had ocean-front property in Florida, I would shelter there as well.
Masks and gloves would be far cheaper than shutting down the economy, but we don’t have them because the MBA’s & politicians gave away our technology and sent our manufacturing base to our enemy.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/05/811387424/face-masks-not-enough-are-made-in-america-to-deal-with-coronavirus
I have a gut feeling that surgical n95 quality masks on everyone and hand washing would be roughly as effective as complete shutdown. Hard to tell though without a controlled experiment. And I don’t think we’re going to get one to look at except retrospectively after a the peak infection period.
At 50 cents per mask and each mask lasting about a week, that would have cost $150 million/week. After 13,333 weeks (256 years) we would have spent as much as the $2 trillion stimulus bill!