Schools are reopening in Holland today (Reuters), but not in a Swedish business-as-usual manner. Children will be separated by walls of plastic.
Shops and businesses in the Netherlands never closed and my Dutch friend said that the general population hadn’t wanted schools to close, but “the teachers are in a union and they knew they’d get paid even if they didn’t work, so of course they immediately refused to work.”
What was his take on the continued lockdown in the U.S.? “All of the rights that Americans fought and died in multiple wars to defend, they gave up in one governor’s press conference.”
Where does Holland fit into the death-rate-so-far competition? About the same as Sweden, which continued to run schools and restaurants, and therefore less than half the death rate of my home state of Massachusetts (but more than the U.S. overall):
How about a moving average of recent deaths?
What about other businesses? From Bloomberg:
Restaurants, bars and movie theaters will be allowed reopen starting June 1, with restrictions to comply with the “1.5 meter society” which will remain in place for the foreseeable future, Prime Minister Mark Rutte told reporters at a televised briefing in The Hague on Wednesday. Prostitution, which is legal in the Netherlands, is allowed restart on Sept. 1 according to the current time line.
(Due to the border closure, workers in the Dutch sex industry cannot simply spend the summer in the U.S. and return home with a developing annuity (see “American Child Support Profits Without an American Child”))
Given that the Dutch continued to meet in shops, in public squares, and at work, how is it possible that the coronavirus hasn’t already reached nearly everyone who is susceptible? Presumably they are expecting a second wave if they reopen restaurants tomorrow, but why is June 1 any better?
Related:
- May 2: “Wear a mask if you want to, says Dutch prime minister”: ‘Everyone can do what they like, this is a free country,’ he said. ‘But there are risks and if you use them incorrectly, they can actually help spread the virus.’
- starting June 1: “Since public transport will probably become busier around 1 June, it will be more difficult to stay 1.5 metres apart. It will also be impossible to carry out a preliminary risk check. That is why everyone travelling on public transport will be required to wear a non-medical face mask to protect others.”
How are the hookers going to comply with the alleged “1.5 metre society”? Asking for a friend.
Phil,
Some restaurants in the Denver area can’t seem to wait to get going. CoronaDepression having quite the impact when things open up.
https://denver.cbslocal.com/2020/05/11/health-department-closes-castle-rock-opened-dining-room/
The video is interesting. Maybe what it is like in Sweden every day!
> Children will be separated by walls of plastic.
They’re just not going to be able to let go of this, are they? The Coronapanic dial has been turned to 11 for so long with such determination, how can the authors of the disaster ever admit they got it horribly wrong? So among other things they want silly plastic screens for corona-invincible children. Another flavor of insanity from the UK is worse. In addition to pointless “protection” for the healthy, they systematically spread coronavirus among those actually vulnerable to it, i.e. the elderly in care homes.
One aspect of the Great Coronahysteria of 2020-? is safe to predict. The unpreparedness and disastrous overreaction by governments require the obvious remedy: governments must have more power over us, for our own good!
@Lord Palmerston: House Resolution 6666. “COVID–19 Testing, Reaching, And Contacting Everyone (TRACE) Act” Bobby Rush (D-Black Panthers) is the primary sponsor.
$100 billion dollars to send people knocking to make sure you’re quarantined. Here are the co-sponsors: Mr. Rush (for himself, Ms. Barragán, Ms. Bass, Mr. Beyer, Mr. Brown of Maryland, Mr. Butterfield, Mr. Cárdenas, Mr. Carson of Indiana, Mr. Cohen, Mr. Correa, Mr. Cuellar, Ms. DeGette, Mrs. Demings, Mr. Gonzalez of Texas, Mr. Grijalva, Mr. Hastings, Mrs. Hayes, Mr. Higgins of New York, Ms. Kaptur, Mr. Khanna, Ms. Kuster of New Hampshire, Mr. Larson of Connecticut, Mr. Lynch, Ms. McCollum, Ms. Moore, Ms. Norton, Mr. Payne, Mr. Raskin, Mr. Rouda, Mr. Ryan, Mr. Sarbanes, Ms. Sewell of Alabama, Mr. Sires, Mr. Soto, Ms. Tlaib, Mr. Thompson of Mississippi, Mr. Van Drew, Ms. Velázquez, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, and Mrs. Napolitano) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce
What possible good could it do to put the plastic around the desks and have the kids sitting at the edge of the plastic in their chairs, not wearing masks, so they can back up six inches and sneeze all over each other? This isn’t even as helpful as installing plastic shields directly in front of cashiers at supermarkets! Prediction: there will be absolutely 0 children prevented from getting/spreading the virus due to the plastic-encased desks, but at least 100 people infected at plastic manufacturing and installing firms.
“For look how your hard plodding students, by a close sedentary confinement to their books, grow mopish, pale, and meagre, as if, by a continual wrack of brains, and torture of invention, their veins were pumped dry, and their whole body squeezed sapless;.” – Erasmus, In Praise of Folly
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30201/30201-h/30201-h.htm
Their computers are a lot better than what we had in government school, 30 years ago. We had Apple II’s & then Apple IIGS’s by the time most businesses had 386’s.