We can't possibly have enough overhead in our system to accommodate this, right? Eventually this is going to lead to shortages in grocery stores, right? This has to be our number one priority.
Not necessarily, since there’s not much overlap between processors for commercial clients like restaurants and consumer clients like grocery stores. The market for commercial food products has apparently cratered while demand for consumer food products remains high.
Not necessarily, people don't cook the same things they purchase at restaurants. Additionally, a fair number of people don't seem to be competent at cooking much past a scrambled egg, so a lot of people choose packaged/prepared foods versus raw ingredients.
Sure, but the type of food people consume at home typically differs greatly from the food they eat out.
Keep in mind that in this situation, the goal is to ensure that already-grown food isn’t wasted and is able to be processed, not necessarily meeting the perfect market demand that you’d see in normal economic conditions.
Not necessarily for the same products - people cooking at home aren't deep-frying everything.
"What I cook for myself at home" and "what I order in restaurants" are two pretty disjoint sets.
I'm not even sure the total number of calories will come out 1:1; are people eating less because they're not commuting or working? Eating better because they are cooking? Eating worse because they are depressed? I can't even guess.
According to the article about 1/3 of food is thrown away. I would guess that consumers are throwing away less food and producers who typically sell to restaurants are throwing away more.
Think fancy cheeses. Some dairy cows make excellent milk for cheese. The input into this market is raw milk. When that market disappears due to restaurants closing, it's a serious problem.
While overall consumption remains the same (or similar, people need to eat) there's different supply chains involved in commercial and consumer consumption.
Say you've got a bottling plant that sells exclusively to commercial suppliers. The cost to retool to produce consumer packaged products is non-zero. Your shipping is all geared to commercial suppliers as well.
If you decide to reorient to produce consumer packaged goods this takes some amount of time. The farmers that supply you have a batch of milk right now they're storing and a batch coming up next week. If you can't take delivery, you don't have infinite cold storage for milk after all, they need to dump their milk because they've for another batch on the way they'll need to store. You may also have milk stored in your refrigerated tanks waiting for you to be able to reorient for consumer packaging. If your tanks are full you're not going to get new supplies.
There's a lot of supply chains that have a lot of momentum and they've been optimized for throughput because that's what gives everyone involved the best margins. When demand drops it takes time and money to slow down or adjust the supply chain because of the momentum. Things like milk can be more difficult because they need not just storage but refrigerated storage and shipping.
You might have milk and I might want milk but we're far apart and if you can't get it to me (safely) I'm not going to buy it. That's not to say it's good farmers are dumping otherwise good food. Dealing with perishable things is not the same as dry goods. You can't just add more trucks or warehouses and problem solved.
Anyone have any insight in to why people shifting to eat at home would lead to less overall food demand though?
Presumably, if you have X food being produced by farms across the country, and people eating it, but split between restaurants (Y) and home (Z)... I would expect X to roughly equal Y + Z.
I would also expect Y + Z = total food eaten and not see any change in the value of Y + Z regardless of how food shifts between the two.
So how can you take away Y, but not increase Z at the same proportion?
Guesses:
1) Restaurants use a lot more ingredients? Seems unlikely since margins are so low.
2) Consumers reduce waste because they are not balancing getting food from two sources and are more likely to eat everything in their fridge? (My wife, son and I experienced this after we found out our son has food allergies to more than nuts and we basically only eat home cooked food), but I don't know if that is big enough.
3) Something else?
My gut tells me we are seeing a reduction in food waste which is due to less supplies, people being more careful. IDK.
I'd say there's some slack in the system due to how incredibly wasteful the HoReCa sector is, in particular hotels and event catering. But to the extent people shifted from eating out to eating in, that amount of extra demand isn't met by the consumer-oriented sector, and must be eventually reflected somewhere. I'm honestly surprised the food prices haven't gone up just yet, given the stories I hear saying that processing plants supplying HoReCa have a problem adjusting to providing to grocery stores.
> Anyone have any insight in to why people shifting to eat at home would lead to less overall food demand though?
If you're calculating demand based on ability to pay (which is how markets work), it might be helpful to take a look at the pictures of food bank lines across America[0]. Tens of millions of people have filed for unemployment in the last several weeks, and demand at the food banks have skyrocketed. But since food banks don't operate as typical market, we don't pay attention to them. With so many millions at risk of starvation, we need to rethink how we understand demand in the context of food consumption, because millions of people waiting for several hours in order to get a bag of food tells me that the demand is there.
Something has to fill the increased consumer food demand though which is what I think the parent comment was getting at originally - what will do that? One could argue reduction in waste but I'm not sure that'd be enough.
Have you seen the images of food bank lines in the last two months[0]? The problem with quantifying demand is that’s typically based on ability to pay, and we’re currently looking at what, 20% unemployment?
Millions upon millions of Americans are at risk of starvation, and a central goal of an initiative like this is to make food as available as possible so that people don’t starve.
Sure but that only goes to say demand is even higher not answer the question about how we're supposed to be able to source food for that demand if commercial food production isn't efficiently convertible to consumer food production.
I.e. the question isn't "do people still need to eat" it's "will the shift in food demand type from commercial to consumer good create shortages".
These disturbing images have stirred outrage around the world. But here’s the surprising part: the world may not actually be wasting more than normal, when a third of global food production ends up in landfills.
That may well be true. Perhaps those covering these kinds of phenomena aren’t explaining and giving this phenomenon enough context and would rather leave their audience in shock to ponder what.
Technically in a free market there wouldn't be any shortages because the prices will go through the roof. Food's still available, it's just that it costs a fortune. This is not what's happening right now because we don't have a free market, due to anti-price gouging laws.
Any price is illegal -
Too low - product dumping
Too high - price gouging
same as everyone else - price fixing
I don't know why you're being down voted, especially since you're right.
The best part is when prices sky-rocket, people don't horde, and others see a chance to make some good money, so they switch to the new market. Its simple market signals.
From my understanding, the shortages have already happened or are already happening. I was able to buy flour at my grocery store for first time in 2 months yesterady, I haven't seen a sale on meat since March, up till May we still had buying limits on milk and eggs.
From my understanding, the bottlenecks are in the processing plants due to massive shift in demand preferences. Restuarants take their orders differently than consumers, often buying whole sections of an animal or at different style cuts, or in the case of flour buying it in 25-50 lbs bags. Consumers widely prefer more processing of their meats (meaning boneless skinlesss chicken breast rather than a whole chicken) or smaller purchases sizes.
Honestly, I don't think this will get worse in the US in the short of mid term. The biggest issue is that the food prices being offered farmers/ranchers right now are terrible, so if we see a demand spike post recovery (due to restaurants reopening) we may not have the supply.
> I was able to buy flour at my grocery store for first time in 2 months yesterady
The experience for consumer-packaged flour differs a lot by region, but it seems it was mostly about the capacity of consumer flour packaging facilities than the capacity of flour mills or wheat farmers. Similar thing with toilet paper: people were pooping at home more, so they needed consumer-packaged toilet paper, thus there was a temporary shortage of consumer-packaged toilet paper while facilities adapted to demand.
RE flour: here in Hamilton, Ontario, flour in consumer packaging was a rare find for about a week, until retail prices rose slightly (10%?) and now things are basically back to normal in terms of availability.
It is still tough to find toilet paper at retail here (Reno, Nevada), but manageable. The lack of commercially packaged TP being sold at retail or alternative market mechanisms remains one of the greate mysteries of the crisis for me. I know plenty of people who would have bought the big rolls just have something.
There was a real demand issue on TP as well- lots of people who used to only buy 1-6 roles at a time started panic buying 4x the amount.
Part of problem with retooling for consumer TP is that a lot of commercial TP is lower grade than consumers are used to at home; often barely meeting the definition of “two ply”, not soft or doped with humectants.
It is not simple to retool a commercial bulk TP supplier into a consumer TP supplier, they at least need some different inputs.
All true, but I was surprised I never saw a guy selling bulk rolls of TP in the parking lot (or I guess never heard how to buy it on the internet via eBay). I'm sure it existed somewhere, but it wasn't prominent enough to supply my brother and his roommates when they ran out.
> I was able to buy flour at my grocery store for first time in 2 months
IME it has also varied greatly by location. I couldn't get any for months at my store, but I later found out a different location of the same chain had it in stock routinely. Also, restaurants near me are selling flour now. Presumably they had large quantities that they just need to repackage.
My experience is similar: the ready-to-cook stuff like boneless skinless chicken breasts have been near impossible to find. The last time I went to the grocery there were huge bags full of unprocessed parts like leg quarters and half-split breasts. Whole chickens are plentiful. I'm very thankful for my good set of knives and my knife skills. I recently split a 25-lbs bag of King Arthur flour with another person because that's all that was available, the 10-lbs bags were sighted recently and even that was gone.
To support the local economy, I started buying from a farm that used to supply restaurants and chefs. That has resulted in its own kind of headache. I can put together a decent meal, but I have few ideas how to go forward with nasturtium petals, begonia leaves, edible succulents. Micro-greens are very pretty scattered over a Michelin-star plate, but looks awfully stupid on a spatchcock roast chicken.
Wendy's is out of beef in some locations. Of the big chains they will be hit first because of their "fresh, never frozen" policy on beef. The others have some cushion in the form of warehouses of frozen product. Domino's is out of ham. Grocery stores everywhere are limiting purchases of meat, milk, and eggs. My favorite grocer's butcher counter is frequently 1/3 empty. I have a good relationship with the butcher and he told me when deliveries come and to show up early on those days because there is a rush to get product.
The shortages are here. So far they're not so bad that people will starve, they will just have to transition to alternative food choices. How far it will go is anyone's guess.
The article is about broken supply chains as the cause of waste, and covid outbreaks at processing plants is one example of problems in the supply chain. Pigs, for example, have a fairly short window during which they can be slaughtered for food sale. If there's a glitch in the supply chain, those pigs have to be killed as waste because the next batch is already coming into that window and it's too expensive to keep feeding the last batch for an unknown period into the future.
It has more to do with the supply chain. Farmers sell to organizations who target certain areas. they sell to grocers who sell in stores. They also sell to restaurants, schools, etc. The restaurants and schools closed, so did those supply chains. Those who normally ate at school and restaurants now wanted to eat at home. Grocers had to pick up the supply chain. They didn't want to invest because this uptick was only temporary. So we had demand shock. If they raised prices, they'd be harassed for price gouging. So, then people started hording because there was no incentive to not horde, so the supply chain got more stressed.
"Eventually?" Where were you? There already were and are shortages. Costco at the beginning of March and seeing 10 gallons of only whole milk and no eggs, when they usually had 4-500 gallons of milk and thousands of eggs out for sale. The place was empty and there was little stock for months.
Fresh Air recently interviewed a chef, Tom Colicchio (sp?) and he had what seemed like a novel solution to this problem.
Since suppliers to commercial kitchens aren’t able to easily switch production to support consumer-facing customers, he argued that the Federal Government should subsidize restaurants based on a percentage of typical revenue (say 80%), and then use the kitchen staff to make prepared meals that can be sold via takeout, or CSA-style boxes that customers can take home and cook themselves. This way, restaurants get to employ staff while using their commercial kitchens to process food that consumers/food pantries could actually use.
This would help stabilize the restaurant industry while we wait for a vaccine and keep at least some staff employed while performing an essential task (converting food for consumers)
I believe the difference is the government would subsidize the cost. So for example, instead of heading to the food bank, you'd get food from a restaurant.
Not all restaurants have menus that are able to easily translate to takeout, and restaurants don’t currently coordinate with producers on what food is backing up in the supply chain.
For example, say that the chicken supply has outgrown its demand. A coordinated food production effort between suppliers and restaurants could ensure that supply of chicken is sent to a restaurant to be processed and sold directly as a raw ingredient, which isn’t something you typically see in a takeout situation. Or the processed chicken could go to a community kitchen or something. Either way, the food is successfully processed and sold/donated instead of being wasted.
What is an example of a restaurant that can't do takeout? Even ice cream places around here are doing takeout, and I would have thought that something like ice cream would be the last thing that I would see available by takeout.
Fine dining doesn’t translate in the same way, yet their fixed costs don’t change. They also likely aren’t selling liquor which often is the big money maker that subsidizes everything else.
Lots of restaurants that are as much "experience" as they are food. Think of things like Korean BBQ, Benihanas and the like, etc. Also ramen's never stellar in take out mode (most of the great ramen places in my city did it even before the pandemic and it was lackluster in comparison to eating there). Many menus at restaurants depend on a serial eating experience.. drinks, appetizer, drinks, entree, desert, coffee. That doesn't translate well to take out either. Yes, you can work parts of it and make do - if survival and getting people fed is the ultimate goal - but remember that this entire eating out experience, with all its layers and ceremonies.. was barely in the black before covid, so shrinking it down to the minimum viable delivery order could still be operating at a loss financially.
My local restaurant: Norms in southern California has been offering bundles of mostly uncooked food to purchase since the lockdown began in plastic covered trays.
They have been making money off this to stay in business and employ people.
Lots of restaurants throughout the country aren’t currently able to stay afloat, even for takeout. And states are starting to reopen and expecting restaurants to open as well, but many in the industry fear that restaurants that reopen before a vaccine is found will be financial suicide.
Restaurants in communities that are financially healthy enough to support takeouts probably don’t need as much help, but this isn’t true for much of the country.
I find it ironic that restaurants fired most of their staff just in time for schools to close and charities to beg for volunteers to help make and deliver basic meals to children.
We need to end the lock downs. It's time we did what we should have done after two weeks of quarantine: open back up, encourage social distancing, sanitation, masks, temperature checks, and encourage the very old and ill to self-isolate (with financial help if needed).
Even before Covid-19, our health care system doesn't really provide much for these folks.
Additionally, seeing all the failures of getting money to small businesses during this crisis and all the deaths in nursing homes, I find it hard to believe we'd effectively care for these people as they are isolated at home.
In all seriousness, I've been really disappointed with people who I respect who have consistently belittled anyone who questions the prudence of the lockdown. "Covidiot" is thrown around indiscriminately.
The other thing that has surprised me is how many people use absolute numbers rather than per-capita numbers in order to prove their points. I even found Neil deGrasse Tyson doing this on Twitter.
Per-capita and absolute numbers are both incorrect. What matters is local concentrations. For example, If all of cases were contained to a few metro areas then there would be no problem outside those areas. This would not be reflected in per-capita numbers.
Well, a lot of people feel, I think accurately, that the lockdowns are what are or were keeping the case load relatively low.
Regarding absolute numbers, in the early phase when we had a 2-3 day doubling rate, per capita numbers didn't matter very much because you only needed ~2 days for it to double, so any difference in per capita cases saw that gap closed pretty quickly. So for instance, I saw people downplaying the danger by saying "sure Italy has it bad, but the US has 5x the population". That missed the point a bit. It didn't take that long for the US to become the leader in absolute number of cases, then a bit more for it to exceed per capita rates of Italy. Probably both would have happened sooner had there not been any intervention.
Sure, but certainly it's a complex enough scenario with enough variables that we should be able to at least have a conversation around what to do without resorting to name calling, yes?
Sure, and many are. Economists, Epidemiologist, and many in the science and political communities are having these conversations.
It's just that opening the economy has also become politicized and the armchair social media "experts" have begun chanting "OPEN UP!" without any sort of nuance repeatedly multiple times a day and overwhelming the conversations and suggestions of the reasonable folks with data. So, by default, the initial reaction is assume someone making that suggestion is they're more likely to be an emotional appeal than a rational discussion partner.
I think this accusation is equally applicable for politicians though. There has been precious little nuance in blanket lockdowns that don’t acknowledge how vastly different in risk different activities are (e.g. sunbathing in a park vs clubbing). Seems to me like the shouts of “OPEN UP!” are simply a response to the knee-jerk “SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING!” that everyone has had to live with for the last few months.
Except it's not "SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING". It's shut down all non-essential mass gatherings until we can get a handle on the situation. All of the governors who implemented strict shelter-in-place orders have also released detailed plans for re-opening safely.
Where I am (Scotland) it WAS pretty much everything. Only shops selling food, medicine, or maintenance products are allowed to open. All others have been shut for ~2 months now. Driving is strictly forbidden unless you’re travelling to one of these stores that have been ‘deemed essential’. We’re not allowed to meet anyone outside of our household, even in a socially-distanced outside context. I have friends unlucky enough to be living alone and single, and the lockdown is destroying them, to the point that they’re secretly meeting other single friends to stay sane. All of this is in spite of the fact that there are thousands of jobs and activities that can be EASILY done whilst also socially distancing. Of course, it requires vastly more thought and effort to come up with rational guidelines that take into consideration all of this nuance, and governments (mostly because of shortsightedness) haven’t had the time to create more humane lockdown solutions, hence the indiscriminate restrictions that have been brought in by countries the world over.
Personally I'd contend that leaders who choose not to take action to protect public health (or even try to deceive their constituents) are eroding the legitimacy and respect for their authority.
I was against starting the long term lockdown. I would think they would have mobilized field hospitals care at a national scale as a long term solution, since they say most people will get it no matter what.
Absolute numbers are important,those are facts. This isn't a routine disease society has accepted,it can be contained and prevented,per capita does not help guage resource needs.
But if you do start a lockdown you can't half-ass it because that would literally be the worst option. The markets are ok because the shutdown is intentional. The markets would not be ok if spending and revenue loss was a result of people being fearful and panicky.the goal know should be a smooth and quick recovery at the right time, not a rough,rushed and messy one.
No need to compartmentalise. People’s thoughts, sentiments and opinions change (sometimes) based on facts. You’re not belittling this person but you are poking fun the community by saying that it would not accept this opinion.
I'm tired of people pretending they're only "asking questions" when they're pushing for a full reopen. Acting like you're surprised there are unreasonable people saying things and using that to cast anyone who is more cautious as the same is dishonest and cowardly.
If someone actually has questions, they should ask them. Otherwise if they don't have the courage to own their political position, I don't consider them part of the conversation.
Locking down is the only current viable tactic the US has against C-19. We have:
- terrible testing coverage
- no contact tracing
- massively inefficient healthcare system
- massively inefficient supply lines for masks and gloves
- insufficient social programs to support the unemployed
Either we lock down, mitigate the effects of our already broken systems, or open up and accept that we will be killing citizens under "acceptable losses"
The problem with this strategy is that most restaurants cannot survive on reduced capacity or economic participation by the public. A huge percentage of people aren’t going to patronize restaurants until a vaccine is found, and if things open back up and people don’t show, we’re going to have a very different economic problem on our hands.
Do you think people would be more or less inclined to go to restaurants if the epidemic goes back to out of control exponential? [1]
South Korea recently reopened bars and clubs, and just shut them down again, because masks and voluntary social distancing aren't enough for this virus.
Do you think Americans are more, less, or equally capable of voluntary compliance to this sort of thing than Koreans?
[1] I'm comfortable enough to order takeout at the moment. If we go back to exponential spread, I'm going right back to bunkering down, and not spending a single dollar on anything but groceries.
It sure seems like the majority of the lockdown effect has been voluntary, across the world. Except for places where the police are actively beating people who refuse to comply, of course. I think it's likely that we could throw open the entire US and it wouldn't fundamentally change much, aside from an initial surge. As soon as the death count started to climb steeply again, people would voluntarily go right back indoors and stay there.
> What makes you think that the initial surge will stop?
Same as the first -- voluntary social distancing. I think you missed my point, which is that I don't believe the government is really in control, at least not in western democracies. I think people are choosing for themselves to isolate, and I think they will continue to adjust that decision based on their perceived risk.
I think there would be a surge at first because there is some pent up demand for things people feel like they need, or they really want to do and they don't perceive a strong risk. So these people would cause a surge, it would hit the news, and most people would then panic themselves right back indoors, then a month or so later we'd do it all again.
Someone released a study a few days ago suggesting that if we could actually achieve nearly universal compliance with mask wearing in public indoor spaces (I think they said 80%) then a slight improvement over our current masks (better than the homemade cloth or disposable surgical masks, not necessarily N95 level though), we could push R0 below 1.0 without really doing anything else different from normal everyday activities. I don't think we can expect that compliance rate, though.
The reason people are choosing for themselves to isolate is because there's nothing open that they can leave their apartment for.
If your thing is going to bars, and all the bars are closed, you're not 'choosing' to self-isolate[1]. I mean, yes, you are choosing to stay home instead of aimlessly wandering the streets, but most people don't care to do that. If the reason they want to leave their home is not there, they won't leave the home.
Re-open the bars, and suddenly all those people who 'chose' to self-isolate will start 'choosing' to go out to drink and mingle.
Also, you are vastly underestimating the number of people who, for good reasons, or bad, don't give a shit about their personal risk. They will be actively getting people who are actively trying to minimize personal risk sick, because the latter can't avoid essential social interactions.
When your personal risk includes liability for anyone else you get sick, I'll be more than happy to let you frame this entire conversation as personal risk. Until then, what people taking 'personal risk' are doing is shirking personal responsibility.
[1] The bar owner is 'choosing' to comply with the shutdown order, but that's because his personal risk[2] profile is completely different to that of his patron. His personal risk profile has to account for externalities caused by operating his business. He can be fined, lose his liquor license, etc. His patron's doesn't care about those externalities, because when the patron's irresponsible behaviour gets someone else sick, nobody goes after the patron.
[2] The fact that you're even talking about personal risk is why re-opening can't work in America. This is, and has never been about personal risk. Personal risk isn't something that legislature needs to control. The problem with epidemics is social risk, and patrons are in no position to accurately access it.
One of the best things about American culture is "fuck you" attitude towards authority and high risk tolerance. Of course the downside of that is in cases like a pandemic some more people will die. There's very little chance, in my mind, that Americans will be as compliant as Koreans regarding lockdowns.
Our lockdowns were so badly done they didn't even decrease the daily case count. In Korea and many other places, they ended lockdowns after a few months because cases dropped orders of magnitude.
In the US, we're "opening back up" while many states are hitting daily records. Our lockdowns were a disaster and "opening back up" is going to cause an explosion in cases.
If our lockdowns had been done right we would be able to reopen the economy now with little risk
>Our lockdowns were so badly done they didn't even decrease the daily case count.
Is it any wonder? Look at the comments here. Look at guys like Elon Musk breaking quarantine for economic reasons and getting praised for it. Conspiracies abound.
This didn't happen in less partisan countries. Like absolutely everything else in the US, the lockdown became a political issue, for and against it.
Where I'm from, everyone took it seriously and in a matter of weeks we got down to ZERO active cases. Then again, we don't hate people who have different politics.
Lockdowns were not meant to stop people from getting sick, they were meant to prevent hospitals from getting overwhelmed.
NYC is about the only hospital system that came close to being overwhelmed and even they made almost no use of the temporary hospitals.
The record numbers of cases we see now coincides with record levels of testing- with such limited availability of testing prior to the lockdown, the majority of cases- those not needing hospitalization- were never counted.
maybe in the US, but lockdowns in many other countries have suppressed virus transmission completely. Why would our goal be different? Because we can't achieve that?
Meaningful comparisons require reasonably accurate data, and there is nothing like that to be found in any of these countries. Aside from the fact that testing has been minimal for a number of reasons, different areas have perverse incentives to either over or under count COVID fatalities.
In the US, any and every death of someone who had the virus, and many who did not, are still counted among the death tolls. The recent case of the guy who died from alcohol poisoning comes to mind, though I personally know of others who died from other causes, and were counted even though they hadnt been tested.
Conversely, there is good reason to be skeptical of China's accounting as well- both due to government interference and the simple fact that they were not able to reliably test the majority of cases.
You can look at the EU average, which is close to US population and still makes the US look bad. Test positive rates can tell you how roughly how much a country is undercounting.
If US has twice the test positive rate as another, they're only testing half the cases.
The fact is no matter what metric you look at, the US is doing worse with our response than almost anywhere else.
Population density, primarily. More dense means more close contact, and more contact overall comparing areas with public transit to those without.
Not to mention the human toll of quarantine- I live surrounded by a few hundred acres of forest, my cousin in a studio apartment. My daily life has hardly changed since I also work from home. She lives in or near paris, I think, and couldn't go 10 feet past her apartment door without a permit, and mostly got that only for groceries. Even still, she managed to catch it (or a similar disease, since she was refused testing).
Some people on HN love to hate on rural life, but I honestly wouldn't have it any other way.
As far as I saw from the start, predictions for Georgia were that they'd start to see an uptick in about 3-5 weeks. I think that window starts this week.
It has largely been within that consensus range at the low end: "579 and 2,292"; but that's splitting hairs, since the low end is not an increasing count.
With that said, my own reading prior to this point has suggested we'd see the uptick starting in this coming week, through the next two weeks.
Georgia is now backfilling based on date of first symptoms, rather than date of diagnosis. Numbers as far back as a week or two week could still increase.
The panel of experts estimated about 1k/day during the week ending May 16, ranging 579/day to 2292/day.
And while so far there aren't that many cases reported today, the data isn't complete due to the lag in testing results. In fact the lag is for 14 days. So we're still in a wait and see point.
The 579/day estimate is the low end of the 90% confidence interval. You can use the 7-day rolling average the NYT provides to eliminate the swings from reporting variance. Of course, the apocalypse will always be two weeks away.
90% confidence means anything within that range would validate their model. And even if their model was perfect, 10% chance the real value would fall outside that range. So as long as the real number (which we will will have in 2 weeks once the rolling average and final tallies are in) then, well, they're still right.
A lot of states are hitting daily records because they're ramping up testing. There isn't more sickness, there's more accurate numbers.
Basically by following absolute numbers, and commenting on them as if there's a failure on the state's part, you're punishing states for increasing testing.
This can be disproven by looking at daily death rates. Many states are also peaking in daily deaths vs average. There's undoubtedly more testing, but its not the main contributor to the lack of suppression
Deaths are a lagging indicator and shouldn't be used for this comparison. On average, in cases of death, it is about 18 - 23 days between diagnosis and death (compared to 12 - 17 days for recovery).
Which states are hitting records? AZ, one of the strongest reopenings as far as i know, has been on a downward trend on every relevant metric for about a month now.
I'm a broken record talking about how nytimes/etc. will always pick the more sensational data to sell ads, and how it doesn't matter for them if they're wrong (and how they actually have a financial incentive to be wrong). Maybe it is all just an accident though.
Yes, but that’s because Arizona is doing more testing. If you click the “lab testing” section on that site you’ll see that the testing positive rate is also down substantially (from 11% to 5%) from our peak over a month ago.
It’s one of the things that public health officials have been warning about pretty consistently: as testing increases, positive cases will go up, but that shouldn’t be looked at as a bad thing.
dude, click on "Confirmed COVID-19 Cases by Day". If you ignore the drop every weekend and greyed bar from last few days (incomplete data) its increased every single week.
Number of new cases per day is steadily increasing every week! A month ago the daily new cases were half what they are this week
Because we are testing more. The testing positive rate is less than half of what it was a month ago.
I said this elsewhere but this is something health officials have specifically warned against. Yes case counts are going up, but that is because testing is increasing. The metric that matters is the testing positive rate.
More tests would reveal more carriers, yes. But at the same time, the curve would be more accurate, no? If the curve isn't going down DESPITE more tests being done, wouldn't that indicate that the problem is not getting better at all?
The curve is more accurate going forward for sure, but it's possible to record an increase in new cases each day simply by doing more tests, even as the number of new cases per capita declines. This effect theoretically wouldn't stop until you were testing basically everyone, at which point the new cases per capita and the new cases would be the same.
This is sort of where I've ended up as well. Many other countries have taken incremental reopening steps already. Some states have as well, and despite it being over 2 weeks, there hasn't been a spike in cases in those areas yet (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa/so...). Some countries also never issued a strict shelter in place order in the first place. And I don't mean just Sweden. For example, per IHME data, none of the Scandanavian countries ever issued orders that met their definition for a "stay at home" order.
There is no avoiding reopening. General availability of vaccines will take a very long time, simply because manufacturing 1 billion of anything is nontrivial. It is simply not feasible to ask people to put aside their personal lives and business for 18-24 months. We can do so reasonably safely with clear common sense guidance, without vacillation on the effectiveness of masks or distance or precautions.
In the least we need to stop issuing blanket orders that apply over broad geographies like entire states. The risks are different for different people and different circumstances. For instance, the infection fatality rate (IFR) is so low (less than 0.1%) for those under 50 that they should be permitted to go about their business. I am very much in favor of individuals assessing the risks to themselves in choosing which activities they participate in. From https://reason.com/2020/04/15/people-not-politicians-will-de...:
> Who has the best information to weigh these risks, the costs and benefits of each trip out versus staying home? Not a governor or a president, but an individual. Different people may have different tolerances for risk. For some people that trip to a restaurant or a place of worship may be a risk worth taking. For others it is not. For sure, each individual decision can affect other people—one person who takes too much risk and gets sick means one fewer hospital slot available for someone else. But that is true in many areas of American life, and it hasn't until now caused the country or states to be locked down.
>For instance, the infection fatality rate (IFR) is so low (less than 0.1%) for those under 50 that they should be permitted to go about their business.
Those people, unfortunately, are still able to spread to those who do have a much hight mortality rate.
Sure but those other folks can continue to isolate themselves to a greater degree, in line with their own risk assessment. I am not sure I understand the case to curtail one person's rights for another's benefit.
Please don’t post leading questions like this. It’s clear you don’t want the lockdown and subscribe to objectivism. Blanket philosophies always have edge cases and if you can’t accept that there’s no room for debate.
I didn't pose a question in my comment. I made the point that individuals who see a great risk and those who see a low risk can both make choices that fit their individual perception of the situation, without needing to impose undue constraints on each other. I don't see what's wrong with pointing that out. There is room for debate if you have an additional perspective to add to the mix - I'd love to hear and understand that view even if I don't ultimately agree with it.
Interesting idea, but if everyone between the ages of 17 and 35 goes out and gets sick it doesn't matter how isolated your 90 year old grandma tries to be, she's probably going to get sick too.
The point of having society, and of having governments, is that cooperation allows us all to lead longer, healthier, more fulfilling lives. You can't just discard the necessity of cooperation in specific instances where the benefit you personally receive is lower than the amount of effort you need to put in.
“But that is true in many areas of American life, and it hasn't until now caused the country or states to be locked down.”
Yes it has, in the 1918 pandemic. This is a false equivalency anyway, and can be made an anti-vaccination argument, where parents decide upon the lives of their children
And how does driving fit into your argument? It is both putting others and yourself at risk and yet we allow it... My point being that we can each sit here and pull out example after example that proves either side is correct. As such, is it not pointless to do so?
In this case you have the last word so you’re correct haha.
But seriously, there are unknown risks here. Why can’t we point out the extenuating circumstances to deviate from the rules?
Where are you that testing is still a problem? At least here in AZ there is no wait to get any sort of test, and actually doctors are now just including them in the standard blood panels they do.
Haha okay fair point. You do also have to “wait” in the office after you check into for a teeth cleaning, or “wait” after ordering your food at McDonald’s. That shouldn’t be used to indicate that these things are unavailable.
Also YMMV. I did not have to wait at all for my test. I made an appointment at sonoraquest labs (which I believe is part of lab corps) and I was the only person there at my slot other than the staff.
I did have to “wait” in the sense that I scheduled my appointment for the next day after calling them.
Can they test every employee at the start of work and every patron of every business. Can they do that in a fashion where those awaiting results are isolated such that they can't infect others if they are sick? Are people physically distancing themselves and properly wearing masks?
If the answer is no to any of those questions then there's not enough testing to help prevent the spread of disease. Seeing there's no meaningful herd immunity to the virus and no vaccine available if there's no controls on infections the hospitalization rate of the virus will overwhelm hospitals.
The reason for shutdown orders is to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. COVID-19 is really infectious and has a high hospitalization rate. These two factors combined can very quickly cause ICU resources to hit capacity. Once that happens people die at even higher rates than otherwise. A lot of people in Italy died because ICU resources hit capacity.
You can test a million people today but unless all of those people are quarantined from the rest of the population you'll need to test them again tomorrow as they may have become infected in the meantime. Even if COVID-19's mortality and hospitalization rate was low it's still a serious illness and mass infections would still shut businesses down. A majority of causes people are down for weeks with the disease. They're not going to be able to work so if you have a cluster at a meat packing plant it'll still be effectively shut down.
It's a major problem nationally in the US, and we've been lied to constantly about timelines on testing. Even if everybody on AZ who fits the current testing criteria can get a test, to be able to reopen safely we need to test lots of people who don't fit the current testing criteria. Wider testing criteria means more testing capacity required, which is an issue because we don't have that extra capacity and won't any time soon.
Deaths reported as COVID-19 in the US so far: 90,263
Deaths due to flu during the 2018-2019 flu season: 34,157
Deaths due to flu during the 2017-2018 flu season: 61,000
So with a particularly deadly flu season in 2017-2018, COVID-19 has already killed nearly as many people as 2 flu seasons combined.
There are also a lot of deaths that are likely caused by COVID-19 but haven't been attributed properly, for any number of reasons including not wanting to waste tests on people who are already dead. You can find a nice graphic here that expresses this phenomenon nicely using seasonal averages: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/cov...
The easiest way would be to hire inspectors to go around and inspect places during business hours and close them down if they're not in compliance.
That or a federal jobs program of "safety enforcer" paid for by the fed and placed in every business of X size or whatever. The former seems more likely.
>The easiest way would be to hire inspectors to go around and inspect places during business hours and close them down if they're not in compliance.
Literal tyranny for something that has killed far less people than the flu kills in a year. (Up to 650 000 btw.) Should we start mandating these lockdowns for the flu as well?
We are living in a time of mass hysteria that has been fuelled by the media and governments.
CDC: In the US, the flu has killed 12,000-61,000 per year over the last decade. According to the worldometer page, COVID19 has killed 91,000. Since January.
WHO: (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/influenza-(...) Worldwide, flu causes 290,000 to 650,000 respiratory deaths. Worldometer reports 316,000 COVID19 deaths. Since January. And I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that is off on the low side. But it's still early.
Many doctors think there's actually an undercount as they discover ways in which the disease can present differently than severe respiratory distress, or look at guidelines that may have led to incorrectly ruling out a case.
Of course, be sure to save some of that skepticism for ways in which a fee-for-service medical system can bend treatment large and small when this is all over.
California and Washington are both running massive deficits due to their harsh quarantine measures and will literally be out of money in a few months. Many cities are already running out of money.
Seattle, San Francisco, LA, NYC... all are heading towards bankruptcy or massive layoffs.
Many cops and teachers are about to be laid off. Prisons will be releasing prisoners to make budgets meet.
And here people are talking about a whole new squad of police that do nothing but enforce distancing and mask-wearing. With what money?
This is like the old line about education ("if you think it's expensive, try ignorance").
There isn't any such thing as "ending lockdown" without certain cooperative measures. Either we'll take the necessary collective steps to control spread and coordinate recovery behavior... or we won't, and we'll have both the uncontrolled spread and the second order uncoordinated responses including large portions of people sitting out economic participation in order to manage personal risk.
Maybe it'll take some kind of civil enforcement to do this. Maybe most people will cooperate.
Maybe the federal government will lend local governments money to help. Or it won't, or it will, but will come with stipulations designed to weaken the ability of local institutions to act counter to partisan ends of those in control of the Senate and executive.
But anyone on team "end lockdown" should hope there is cooperation, and enough enforcement to encourage it at the margins. And if funding is a problem, then private and public entities alike at least in theory have some incentive to come up with a way to solve the problems that need to be solved to support higher levels of activity.
It might get tricky when you have home grown terrorists walking around with long guns shouting that it violates some right they think they have to not wear them.
Why did't anyone schedule quarantines,like you would be allowed to drive or enter a business during certain times of the day of certain days. Using things like drivers license or license plate numbering,immune system vulnerability and other factors.
Especially when lifting the lockdown, I would have lifted lockdowns strictly for people who have no violations during the lock down. And prioritize scheduling based on age and medical exceptions. Maybe have hours of the day strictly for vulnerable people with hard restrictions and a separate time for people that have already recovered.
It seemed to me this was a great idea that never materialized beyond "old folks get to use the grocery store exclusively before 11am." If I could schedule an hour at a grocery store, or Home Depot, a few days before, rather than having to stand in a 6 foot spaced line that extenders literally around the building. Curb side pickup is nice, but its really just a worse Amazon.
This seems like a missed opportunity for a "service" business that everybody seems to be clamoring for.
We're still in quarantine in the Bay Area and I'm seeing _more_ people not wearing masks or social distancing.
The next thing people need to hear is "quarantine is over" when they're associating quarantine with COVID still being "around." Once that happens, it's game over; I think a majority of people will just go back to normal without being careful.
Not that I don't want quarantine over but I just don't think most people understand the message it would send.
If a medically-informed response to a pandemic creates economic hardship so serious that the impacts are more deadly than the virus, then you change your economic system, not your response to disease.
You mean change the entire world's economic systems? Who had a real lockdown and has upward economic indicators as a result? Even Germany isn't spared. China certainly isn't. There's a level of interdependence here as well - if consumption (goods or tourism or take-your-pick) in one country shuts down, another country can be heavily hit and layoffs result. But all that aside, what's the bullet-proof economic system that 300 years of economic philosophy and experience has missed that would help here?
So, we've had "encouragement" since the pandemic began, at least from state and local leaders. The very old and ill were already largely self-isolated with the exception of their caretakers, who they still need. That experiment ended sometime in March, though it's still playing out in nursing homes.
We've known about masks and temperature checks since the beginning of the pandemic, and every reasonable scenario requires them. We can check on the progress of thermometer production and mask availability.
I have a hunch that developing the capacity to implement your proposal will give us enough time -- a few months at least -- to see how voluntary self isolation is working in the regions that are already ending the lock down.
I am neither in favour of or against the lockdown. I consider myself ill-equipped to make this decision. I do not have the data, not the know-how. I hope that I can trust the people who have passed the job interviews in our institutions and have been elected to do their job properly or at least better then what I can do without know how or data.
So for every person who puts forth their strategy I get curious, why? So here's a few questions to you.
Can you explain your position?
Can you tell me your social context, what state and city are you in? What is the opinion of your friends and family?
Did you weigh the numbers for predicted economic impact and predicted deaths and health issues and contrast them? Did you consider factors such as that even pre-lockdown the economy was slowing and restaurants closing because a lot of consumers voluntarily avoided putting themselves at risk?
Without you putting any answers to these, or specifying your qualifications, the amount of time you spent thinking about the problem, the edge cases, etc. I can't trust your judgement anymore then I'd trust a coin flip.
I imagine some of this comes from the waste of the restaurant system. So far in the lockdown, I've made every meal I've eaten and I have only wasted a couple of sweet potatoes and some onions that went bad. And seeing those ingredients go to waste really upset me. From my past experiences working at restaurants tons of food goes into the garbage every week.
I'm not sure the snark is warranted. If you're truly living in 400 sq ft apartment, you're probably already used to thinking of your space utilization in a manner akin to 3-dimensional tetris. If that's the case, I'm sure you can find space for a small vermicomposting bin and one of those vertical planters. Even better if you have a small balcony or patio that gets some sunlight. When I was living in an apartment, more than one unit in my building would set up a small garden on the patio using various planters to host tomatoes, peppers, herbs, etc. No, that won't replace your need to go to the grocery store for fruits and veggies, but it will compliment it.
My lease specifically forbids putting any plants outdoors (I don't have a patio to put them on, so they would be taking up space in shared walkways). And yes, space is limited, which is exactly why unless I want to start throwing away furniture I can't in fact find the space inside.
There was no "snark" intended. My response is just as serious and practical as "Compose [sic] them and grow new ones!".
Fair enough. It came across as snark to me on my first read. And if you're under tight restrictions on what you can or can't do in your apartment (been there, done that, don't envy you), and have already reached a high level of 3-d tetris in your current layout, then yes, composting food scraps and using the compost to grow herbs or vegetables is going to be impractical.
I fixed my comment to account for space (and to correct the typo -- thanks!). If your response was truly "serious and practical", GP has provided some excellent advice for you. Sad about the lease ):
Nothing wrong with snark, though! I upvoted your initial comment.
You probably know this, but for others, onion (and other veggies) freeze well. I'll usually chop up most of the bag and put all of it in freezer bags and freeze laying flat (breaking them up during the freezing process to they stay loose). It is then easy to pour out half cup or whatever the recipe calls for.
It's the same at grocery stores, packing places and the farms. Food is wasted at each step along the process. I know grocery throw out a ton of food. There'd always be at least a shopping cart full a week of expired stuff that got thrown out when I worked in one. Some stores around here will leave old produce outside for people to take as animal feed, but the one I worked at did not.
I imagine it's much the same at the packing and shipping places.
Wait, a shopping cart a week? And how many full shopping carts got sold in that week? 1000? This sounds like better than 99.9% efficiency. Where did I figure wrong?
That was just from general grocery. I'm not sure how much the meat and bakery threw out but their garbage bins were always full of food. The produce department threw out boxes of fruits and vegetables daily. The dairy department probably threw out the least just because they ordered the least stock at one time.
having worked at a large busy walmart in multiple fresh departments (bakery, deli and produce and a little in meats), there is a lot of waste in volume but compared to a through-put its not so bad. And a lot of it is because of customers. Anything that leaves cold chain is unsellable, so when a customer changes their mind and decides not to buy something it gets disposed of (meats are sent for rendering, produce an baked goods are composted.) I once sliced about $80 worth of a premium deli ham for a customer just to have them leave it on a shelf next to the refrigerator bunker that the presliced cheap hams were in. It was found by a grocery stocker and brought back warm a few hour later. I produce we threw away tons about half was out of dates the rest is damaged (distribution center put 50 lbs sack's of potatoes on top of berries, 40 boxes of onions on top of cardboard trays of tomatoes) or out of cold chain (customer leaves bagged salad laying around the store) the worst is when we would get sent "guac ready" avacados... (were ready to eat last week but are snot pods now)
This is a wild, myopic, borderline tinfoil hat opinion.
The government didn't decide to 'stop the economy', they decided to order shelter in place in the face of an exponentially growing pandemic. In March, the number of cases was doubling every two days in the US.
And it's especially weird to see you throw stones at the Chinese Government over their inability to stop the spread of this pandemic when many, many governments around the world are also struggling to stop its spread. I'm not a fan of the CCP, and they definitely made mistakes, but I don't think there's a leg to stand on that they could have just 'prevented the outbreak'.
We need to understand that this large scale economy is very fragile. We need to reinvest in antifragile local communities. And no, I'm not talking about of going back to dark ages just to reduce the scale, maybe to the levels of 30 years ago.
I'm picturing every community building their own cloud provider (AWS equivalent) and I don't see how it would be more sustainable than having Amazon do it. I think there would be a right balance between "every community does everything with full redundancy!" and "have economies of scale take care of everything!"
Honestly, maybe we do not have to move all the industries but they make sense at least in the current dimension.
For example, I found out that my country, Portugal has the highest number of houses per inhabitant (6 million houses for 10 million inhabitants). It's natural that now that large-scale tourism has collapsed it's not possible to make more houses.
We must therefore not only question whether we can change the means of production to a smaller scale, but whether these means of production make sense.
The problem is the creation of work but then we could think of other forms of wealth distribution such as universal basic income.
That optimization that makes everything fragile is why people can afford the quality of life that they do. You can't have a serious discussion about buying local at a macroeconomic level without an accompanying serious discussion about cost.
It would be inflationary, as less efficient local labor would also require more workers and higher wages. Food costs would go up but the money would be more contained locally as well. Net net I think it would decrease some consumptions, but perhaps leading to a more sustainable model overall.
I think the ultimate goal is to trade efficiency (and the resulting "quality of life") for sustainability. I also believe our civilization is at a point where we have to seriously consider trading off convenience and material wealth for increased sustainability anyway, due to the increasing impact of some wicked problems such as climate change.
I hear about the cost rising but I guess it still doesn't compute for me. My mom paid for college by having a side-job working at the phone company back in the 70s. There's no planet on which a student would make the money required to pay for college in-full with a part-time job.
Outside of the bubble that is HN tech workers - wages have stagnated. The wealth being generated is severely concentrated at the very top. I think your average person walking down the street would gladly exchange their $2 gallon of milk for a $4 gallon of milk if they had a $40k/year salary vs. their current $7/hr.
Part of this is that before the 1970s, the US minimum wage was set so that a full-time job would keep you above the poverty line. People could raise a family, pay a mortgage, etc. on a minimum wage job.
That relationship was broken, but not the assumption that if you are poor, you are lazy.
What this is really doing is providing welfare to all the companies paying below-poverty wages - the taxpayers pay for benefits to allow the workers in those positions to live, while simultaneously increasing corporate profits.
The portion of GDP going to wages has almost never been lower than it is now [1]
It is about corporate regulatory capture redesigning the economy for corporate wealth extraction and not for the benefit of the citizens.
I really hate when people do this. Those are totally different scales, and it's not obvious how they compare.
According to this converter [0] (and ignoring specific differences between wage and salary like overtime), using the defaults of 40-hour work week and 50-week year (to account for holidays):
Would it be so terrible to just sell food in commercial packaging to consumers?
I wish stores like Target and Walmart would stock pallets of 40lb flour sacks and just sell them like any other product.
Even things like 50lb sacks on onions could be sold, and let people figure out how to split it up with neighbors, etc. People are smart, they'll figure out what to do.
I expect people leave a lot of food uneaten at restaurants. The times I completely clear my plate, which should be the norm, I often get the same comment from the waiter, "Wow, you really liked that."
The problem isn't uneaten food on your plate. Just think about it, if you finish the food on your plate, how is that going to help someone that is going hungry and can't afford or access groceries?
True, this was just an observation that, as the article said, there probably is more waste when you eat at a restaurant as compared to eating at home. They have a one-size-fits all problem in portion serving.
40% of food in American homes lands in the trash? They only have themselves to blame.
The demand was artificially inflated and now that it's dropping due to lower waste at home, because people are afraid stores won't have what they need, what was made expecting inflated usage, can't be delivered and used.
We brought this upon ourselves. Even worse, we won't learn from it. Once things are back to normal, the rest of the world will copy / continue copying the american gluttony making us susceptible to another situation like this.
Why is this happening? Farmers dumping food at the same time that supermarkets are unable to supply basics like flour and chicken.
Does anyone know why this is happening in the US and whether it is also happening in other countries? It certainly isn't happening here in Norway. We had short term shortages of flour and yeast but that is over and now there seems to be no shortage of anything else.
I'm not sure it is really happening in most of the US anymore. Take your examples of flour and chicken. They were sometimes difficult to find at the beginning of the lock down but it has been weeks since I went to a grocery store that didn't have flour and chicken available. My friends in other parts of the US report the same.
Edit: By "really happening" I mean shortages of foods in the stores and not the dumping of food.
When people talk about food costs in America, an extremely crucial element is often overlooked.
For all the moral posturing about animal treatment in factory farms and sustainability, which I can sympathize with, there is a massive army of illegal migrant workers that are invisible both legally and socially.
These migrant workers grow and harvest the food that Americans survive on every day. Not to mention cleaning homes, landscaping, and even raising families.
This is a major factor in why food is so cheap and abundant in America. Illegal migrant workers who are paid sub-minimum slave wages to feed the citizens of the United States.
Until we take a hard look at this labor system and widely acknowledge its economic role, these debates are empty. If you know your history, you understand why this system exists.
I'm not sure this is accurate. The US H2-A seasonal farm worker visa program allows almost 200000 workers (mostly from Mexico) work in the US without needing to be illegal.
My understanding of illegal immigrant jobs was that they were centered more in the restaurant and construction/landscaping fields (and many others, I'm sure).
You call is slave labor, but I'm willing to be many in those jobs could not view it as further from the truth. The know they life they left behind and are ex exceptionally grateful to have an opportunity to make what most Americans would see as peanuts. It's all perspective. Americans demand a lot.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadKeep in mind that in this situation, the goal is to ensure that already-grown food isn’t wasted and is able to be processed, not necessarily meeting the perfect market demand that you’d see in normal economic conditions.
"What I cook for myself at home" and "what I order in restaurants" are two pretty disjoint sets.
I'm not even sure the total number of calories will come out 1:1; are people eating less because they're not commuting or working? Eating better because they are cooking? Eating worse because they are depressed? I can't even guess.
Think fancy cheeses. Some dairy cows make excellent milk for cheese. The input into this market is raw milk. When that market disappears due to restaurants closing, it's a serious problem.
Say you've got a bottling plant that sells exclusively to commercial suppliers. The cost to retool to produce consumer packaged products is non-zero. Your shipping is all geared to commercial suppliers as well.
If you decide to reorient to produce consumer packaged goods this takes some amount of time. The farmers that supply you have a batch of milk right now they're storing and a batch coming up next week. If you can't take delivery, you don't have infinite cold storage for milk after all, they need to dump their milk because they've for another batch on the way they'll need to store. You may also have milk stored in your refrigerated tanks waiting for you to be able to reorient for consumer packaging. If your tanks are full you're not going to get new supplies.
There's a lot of supply chains that have a lot of momentum and they've been optimized for throughput because that's what gives everyone involved the best margins. When demand drops it takes time and money to slow down or adjust the supply chain because of the momentum. Things like milk can be more difficult because they need not just storage but refrigerated storage and shipping.
You might have milk and I might want milk but we're far apart and if you can't get it to me (safely) I'm not going to buy it. That's not to say it's good farmers are dumping otherwise good food. Dealing with perishable things is not the same as dry goods. You can't just add more trucks or warehouses and problem solved.
Presumably, if you have X food being produced by farms across the country, and people eating it, but split between restaurants (Y) and home (Z)... I would expect X to roughly equal Y + Z.
I would also expect Y + Z = total food eaten and not see any change in the value of Y + Z regardless of how food shifts between the two.
So how can you take away Y, but not increase Z at the same proportion?
Guesses: 1) Restaurants use a lot more ingredients? Seems unlikely since margins are so low.
2) Consumers reduce waste because they are not balancing getting food from two sources and are more likely to eat everything in their fridge? (My wife, son and I experienced this after we found out our son has food allergies to more than nuts and we basically only eat home cooked food), but I don't know if that is big enough.
3) Something else?
My gut tells me we are seeing a reduction in food waste which is due to less supplies, people being more careful. IDK.
If you're calculating demand based on ability to pay (which is how markets work), it might be helpful to take a look at the pictures of food bank lines across America[0]. Tens of millions of people have filed for unemployment in the last several weeks, and demand at the food banks have skyrocketed. But since food banks don't operate as typical market, we don't pay attention to them. With so many millions at risk of starvation, we need to rethink how we understand demand in the context of food consumption, because millions of people waiting for several hours in order to get a bag of food tells me that the demand is there.
0: https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/04/these-photos-show-t...
Based on the emptyness of my local store shelves over the past couple months, demand isn't the problem. Supply chain capacity is.
Millions upon millions of Americans are at risk of starvation, and a central goal of an initiative like this is to make food as available as possible so that people don’t starve.
0: https://www.npr.org/2020/04/17/837141457/thousands-of-cars-l...
I.e. the question isn't "do people still need to eat" it's "will the shift in food demand type from commercial to consumer good create shortages".
These disturbing images have stirred outrage around the world. But here’s the surprising part: the world may not actually be wasting more than normal, when a third of global food production ends up in landfills.
I don't know why you're being down voted, especially since you're right.
The best part is when prices sky-rocket, people don't horde, and others see a chance to make some good money, so they switch to the new market. Its simple market signals.
producers > stores > consumers.
The same waste would happen in the system. but now it moved all to the first step.
This is not saying that this is OK. This is just highlighting a problem that was always there and nobody cared/cares :(
From my understanding, the bottlenecks are in the processing plants due to massive shift in demand preferences. Restuarants take their orders differently than consumers, often buying whole sections of an animal or at different style cuts, or in the case of flour buying it in 25-50 lbs bags. Consumers widely prefer more processing of their meats (meaning boneless skinlesss chicken breast rather than a whole chicken) or smaller purchases sizes.
Honestly, I don't think this will get worse in the US in the short of mid term. The biggest issue is that the food prices being offered farmers/ranchers right now are terrible, so if we see a demand spike post recovery (due to restaurants reopening) we may not have the supply.
The experience for consumer-packaged flour differs a lot by region, but it seems it was mostly about the capacity of consumer flour packaging facilities than the capacity of flour mills or wheat farmers. Similar thing with toilet paper: people were pooping at home more, so they needed consumer-packaged toilet paper, thus there was a temporary shortage of consumer-packaged toilet paper while facilities adapted to demand.
RE flour: here in Hamilton, Ontario, flour in consumer packaging was a rare find for about a week, until retail prices rose slightly (10%?) and now things are basically back to normal in terms of availability.
There was a real demand issue on TP as well- lots of people who used to only buy 1-6 roles at a time started panic buying 4x the amount.
It is not simple to retool a commercial bulk TP supplier into a consumer TP supplier, they at least need some different inputs.
IME it has also varied greatly by location. I couldn't get any for months at my store, but I later found out a different location of the same chain had it in stock routinely. Also, restaurants near me are selling flour now. Presumably they had large quantities that they just need to repackage.
To support the local economy, I started buying from a farm that used to supply restaurants and chefs. That has resulted in its own kind of headache. I can put together a decent meal, but I have few ideas how to go forward with nasturtium petals, begonia leaves, edible succulents. Micro-greens are very pretty scattered over a Michelin-star plate, but looks awfully stupid on a spatchcock roast chicken.
The shortages are here. So far they're not so bad that people will starve, they will just have to transition to alternative food choices. How far it will go is anyone's guess.
Here's another interesting example with flour.
King Arthur flour sales increased by 2,000% in March. > https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/king-arthur-flour-sal... leading to problems like retail flour manufacturers running out of packaging to put flour in. https://www.businessinsider.com/flour-shortage-baking-quaran...
Since suppliers to commercial kitchens aren’t able to easily switch production to support consumer-facing customers, he argued that the Federal Government should subsidize restaurants based on a percentage of typical revenue (say 80%), and then use the kitchen staff to make prepared meals that can be sold via takeout, or CSA-style boxes that customers can take home and cook themselves. This way, restaurants get to employ staff while using their commercial kitchens to process food that consumers/food pantries could actually use.
This would help stabilize the restaurant industry while we wait for a vaccine and keep at least some staff employed while performing an essential task (converting food for consumers)
For example, say that the chicken supply has outgrown its demand. A coordinated food production effort between suppliers and restaurants could ensure that supply of chicken is sent to a restaurant to be processed and sold directly as a raw ingredient, which isn’t something you typically see in a takeout situation. Or the processed chicken could go to a community kitchen or something. Either way, the food is successfully processed and sold/donated instead of being wasted.
Demand generation is needed because people aren't going out, because government told them not to.
Now the government needs to do it's part to keep the economy going - massive stimulus.
My local restaurant: Norms in southern California has been offering bundles of mostly uncooked food to purchase since the lockdown began in plastic covered trays.
They have been making money off this to stay in business and employ people.
Restaurants in communities that are financially healthy enough to support takeouts probably don’t need as much help, but this isn’t true for much of the country.
I find it ironic that restaurants fired most of their staff just in time for schools to close and charities to beg for volunteers to help make and deliver basic meals to children.
In all seriousness, I've been really disappointed with people who I respect who have consistently belittled anyone who questions the prudence of the lockdown. "Covidiot" is thrown around indiscriminately.
The other thing that has surprised me is how many people use absolute numbers rather than per-capita numbers in order to prove their points. I even found Neil deGrasse Tyson doing this on Twitter.
Regarding absolute numbers, in the early phase when we had a 2-3 day doubling rate, per capita numbers didn't matter very much because you only needed ~2 days for it to double, so any difference in per capita cases saw that gap closed pretty quickly. So for instance, I saw people downplaying the danger by saying "sure Italy has it bad, but the US has 5x the population". That missed the point a bit. It didn't take that long for the US to become the leader in absolute number of cases, then a bit more for it to exceed per capita rates of Italy. Probably both would have happened sooner had there not been any intervention.
It's just that opening the economy has also become politicized and the armchair social media "experts" have begun chanting "OPEN UP!" without any sort of nuance repeatedly multiple times a day and overwhelming the conversations and suggestions of the reasonable folks with data. So, by default, the initial reaction is assume someone making that suggestion is they're more likely to be an emotional appeal than a rational discussion partner.
I think this accusation is equally applicable for politicians though. There has been precious little nuance in blanket lockdowns that don’t acknowledge how vastly different in risk different activities are (e.g. sunbathing in a park vs clubbing). Seems to me like the shouts of “OPEN UP!” are simply a response to the knee-jerk “SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING!” that everyone has had to live with for the last few months.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_used_by_Dona...
Instead of leading the people, the authorities are fighting with them.
Absolute numbers are important,those are facts. This isn't a routine disease society has accepted,it can be contained and prevented,per capita does not help guage resource needs.
But if you do start a lockdown you can't half-ass it because that would literally be the worst option. The markets are ok because the shutdown is intentional. The markets would not be ok if spending and revenue loss was a result of people being fearful and panicky.the goal know should be a smooth and quick recovery at the right time, not a rough,rushed and messy one.
If someone actually has questions, they should ask them. Otherwise if they don't have the courage to own their political position, I don't consider them part of the conversation.
"I don't believe this long video I just posted. But it does make you think." No, I'm pretty sure you believe and are promoting said video.
"I'm just asking questions here." No, you clearly have an agenda and opinion and want to bait others who are unsure into a discussion with you.
For the rare folks with honest questions, we can have a real explanation. For honest people who want to discuss, we can have a discussion.
But being coy and "asking" when you already have a position you won't actually change seems extremely disingenuous.
Either we lock down, mitigate the effects of our already broken systems, or open up and accept that we will be killing citizens under "acceptable losses"
No shit, but 100% of restaurants would fail with zero capacity. A partial open is better than nothing.
> "and if things open back up and people don’t show, we’re going to have a very different economic problem on our hands."
What would that be?
South Korea recently reopened bars and clubs, and just shut them down again, because masks and voluntary social distancing aren't enough for this virus.
Do you think Americans are more, less, or equally capable of voluntary compliance to this sort of thing than Koreans?
[1] I'm comfortable enough to order takeout at the moment. If we go back to exponential spread, I'm going right back to bunkering down, and not spending a single dollar on anything but groceries.
What makes you think that the initial surge will stop? The reason the initial surge in March stopped was because we closed everything down.
What mechanism is going to stop the surge from lifting lockdown? What has changed since March, and why is it enough to bring R to 1?
Why didn't South Korea think the same way that you did, and just decided to let infections surge, and see if they stop on their own?
Same as the first -- voluntary social distancing. I think you missed my point, which is that I don't believe the government is really in control, at least not in western democracies. I think people are choosing for themselves to isolate, and I think they will continue to adjust that decision based on their perceived risk.
I think there would be a surge at first because there is some pent up demand for things people feel like they need, or they really want to do and they don't perceive a strong risk. So these people would cause a surge, it would hit the news, and most people would then panic themselves right back indoors, then a month or so later we'd do it all again.
Someone released a study a few days ago suggesting that if we could actually achieve nearly universal compliance with mask wearing in public indoor spaces (I think they said 80%) then a slight improvement over our current masks (better than the homemade cloth or disposable surgical masks, not necessarily N95 level though), we could push R0 below 1.0 without really doing anything else different from normal everyday activities. I don't think we can expect that compliance rate, though.
If your thing is going to bars, and all the bars are closed, you're not 'choosing' to self-isolate[1]. I mean, yes, you are choosing to stay home instead of aimlessly wandering the streets, but most people don't care to do that. If the reason they want to leave their home is not there, they won't leave the home.
Re-open the bars, and suddenly all those people who 'chose' to self-isolate will start 'choosing' to go out to drink and mingle.
Also, you are vastly underestimating the number of people who, for good reasons, or bad, don't give a shit about their personal risk. They will be actively getting people who are actively trying to minimize personal risk sick, because the latter can't avoid essential social interactions.
When your personal risk includes liability for anyone else you get sick, I'll be more than happy to let you frame this entire conversation as personal risk. Until then, what people taking 'personal risk' are doing is shirking personal responsibility.
[1] The bar owner is 'choosing' to comply with the shutdown order, but that's because his personal risk[2] profile is completely different to that of his patron. His personal risk profile has to account for externalities caused by operating his business. He can be fined, lose his liquor license, etc. His patron's doesn't care about those externalities, because when the patron's irresponsible behaviour gets someone else sick, nobody goes after the patron.
[2] The fact that you're even talking about personal risk is why re-opening can't work in America. This is, and has never been about personal risk. Personal risk isn't something that legislature needs to control. The problem with epidemics is social risk, and patrons are in no position to accurately access it.
This is not a good faith argument, why are you trying to frame it as some kind of moral good vs evil dichotomy?
In the US, we're "opening back up" while many states are hitting daily records. Our lockdowns were a disaster and "opening back up" is going to cause an explosion in cases.
If our lockdowns had been done right we would be able to reopen the economy now with little risk
Is it any wonder? Look at the comments here. Look at guys like Elon Musk breaking quarantine for economic reasons and getting praised for it. Conspiracies abound.
This didn't happen in less partisan countries. Like absolutely everything else in the US, the lockdown became a political issue, for and against it.
Where I'm from, everyone took it seriously and in a matter of weeks we got down to ZERO active cases. Then again, we don't hate people who have different politics.
When your president is one of the richest men in the world its hard to convince leadership to shut down the economy.
And the US is pretty much unique with the whole "corporation is a person" nonsense
NYC is about the only hospital system that came close to being overwhelmed and even they made almost no use of the temporary hospitals.
The record numbers of cases we see now coincides with record levels of testing- with such limited availability of testing prior to the lockdown, the majority of cases- those not needing hospitalization- were never counted.
Comparing it to someplace like Taiwan or Singapore doesn't make any sense.
Comparing to those countries doesn't make much sense either because US is much wealthier. We should be doing far better than both, and we're not.
In the US, any and every death of someone who had the virus, and many who did not, are still counted among the death tolls. The recent case of the guy who died from alcohol poisoning comes to mind, though I personally know of others who died from other causes, and were counted even though they hadnt been tested.
Conversely, there is good reason to be skeptical of China's accounting as well- both due to government interference and the simple fact that they were not able to reliably test the majority of cases.
If US has twice the test positive rate as another, they're only testing half the cases.
The fact is no matter what metric you look at, the US is doing worse with our response than almost anywhere else.
And we don’t know how China is really ever doing about anything. We need to stop confusing statements from China with transparency.
Not to mention the human toll of quarantine- I live surrounded by a few hundred acres of forest, my cousin in a studio apartment. My daily life has hardly changed since I also work from home. She lives in or near paris, I think, and couldn't go 10 feet past her apartment door without a permit, and mostly got that only for groceries. Even still, she managed to catch it (or a similar disease, since she was refused testing).
Some people on HN love to hate on rural life, but I honestly wouldn't have it any other way.
That was in fact the prediction for Georgia, see for example the expert predictions here: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/infectious-disease-expe...
Of course it turns out not to have actually happened: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/georgia-coronavi...
With that said, my own reading prior to this point has suggested we'd see the uptick starting in this coming week, through the next two weeks.
The panel of experts estimated about 1k/day during the week ending May 16, ranging 579/day to 2292/day.
And while so far there aren't that many cases reported today, the data isn't complete due to the lag in testing results. In fact the lag is for 14 days. So we're still in a wait and see point.
Basically by following absolute numbers, and commenting on them as if there's a failure on the state's part, you're punishing states for increasing testing.
I'm a broken record talking about how nytimes/etc. will always pick the more sensational data to sell ads, and how it doesn't matter for them if they're wrong (and how they actually have a financial incentive to be wrong). Maybe it is all just an accident though.
It’s one of the things that public health officials have been warning about pretty consistently: as testing increases, positive cases will go up, but that shouldn’t be looked at as a bad thing.
Number of new cases per day is steadily increasing every week! A month ago the daily new cases were half what they are this week
I said this elsewhere but this is something health officials have specifically warned against. Yes case counts are going up, but that is because testing is increasing. The metric that matters is the testing positive rate.
There is no avoiding reopening. General availability of vaccines will take a very long time, simply because manufacturing 1 billion of anything is nontrivial. It is simply not feasible to ask people to put aside their personal lives and business for 18-24 months. We can do so reasonably safely with clear common sense guidance, without vacillation on the effectiveness of masks or distance or precautions.
In the least we need to stop issuing blanket orders that apply over broad geographies like entire states. The risks are different for different people and different circumstances. For instance, the infection fatality rate (IFR) is so low (less than 0.1%) for those under 50 that they should be permitted to go about their business. I am very much in favor of individuals assessing the risks to themselves in choosing which activities they participate in. From https://reason.com/2020/04/15/people-not-politicians-will-de...:
> Who has the best information to weigh these risks, the costs and benefits of each trip out versus staying home? Not a governor or a president, but an individual. Different people may have different tolerances for risk. For some people that trip to a restaurant or a place of worship may be a risk worth taking. For others it is not. For sure, each individual decision can affect other people—one person who takes too much risk and gets sick means one fewer hospital slot available for someone else. But that is true in many areas of American life, and it hasn't until now caused the country or states to be locked down.
Those people, unfortunately, are still able to spread to those who do have a much hight mortality rate.
The point of having society, and of having governments, is that cooperation allows us all to lead longer, healthier, more fulfilling lives. You can't just discard the necessity of cooperation in specific instances where the benefit you personally receive is lower than the amount of effort you need to put in.
Thats pretty much the entirety of laws that involve safety. My right to drive 150 mph is curtailed for the benefit of people I might kill.
Yes it has, in the 1918 pandemic. This is a false equivalency anyway, and can be made an anti-vaccination argument, where parents decide upon the lives of their children
We NEED contact tracing so we can dynamically quarantine.
We NEED enforcement of the new rules(6ft, masks) because they're not being followed where I'm at.
We NEED financial support for those who are immuno compromised or those who have to take care of the immuno compromised.
I have one of these and have sanity checked it against another mouth thermometer I have from CVS and the readings agree with one another.
(There have been reports of Chinese-made thermometers lying about their readings)
Looks like there are also a bunch on amazon that will arrive to me anywhere between two days from now and a week from now.
False. People in AZ are waiting in their cars for hours to get tested.
Also YMMV. I did not have to wait at all for my test. I made an appointment at sonoraquest labs (which I believe is part of lab corps) and I was the only person there at my slot other than the staff.
I did have to “wait” in the sense that I scheduled my appointment for the next day after calling them.
If the answer is no to any of those questions then there's not enough testing to help prevent the spread of disease. Seeing there's no meaningful herd immunity to the virus and no vaccine available if there's no controls on infections the hospitalization rate of the virus will overwhelm hospitals.
The reason for shutdown orders is to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. COVID-19 is really infectious and has a high hospitalization rate. These two factors combined can very quickly cause ICU resources to hit capacity. Once that happens people die at even higher rates than otherwise. A lot of people in Italy died because ICU resources hit capacity.
You can test a million people today but unless all of those people are quarantined from the rest of the population you'll need to test them again tomorrow as they may have become infected in the meantime. Even if COVID-19's mortality and hospitalization rate was low it's still a serious illness and mass infections would still shut businesses down. A majority of causes people are down for weeks with the disease. They're not going to be able to work so if you have a cluster at a meat packing plant it'll still be effectively shut down.
How should those things be enforced in your opinion?
Deaths due to flu during the 2018-2019 flu season: 34,157
Deaths due to flu during the 2017-2018 flu season: 61,000
So with a particularly deadly flu season in 2017-2018, COVID-19 has already killed nearly as many people as 2 flu seasons combined.
There are also a lot of deaths that are likely caused by COVID-19 but haven't been attributed properly, for any number of reasons including not wanting to waste tests on people who are already dead. You can find a nice graphic here that expresses this phenomenon nicely using seasonal averages: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/cov...
The easiest way would be to hire inspectors to go around and inspect places during business hours and close them down if they're not in compliance.
That or a federal jobs program of "safety enforcer" paid for by the fed and placed in every business of X size or whatever. The former seems more likely.
Literal tyranny for something that has killed far less people than the flu kills in a year. (Up to 650 000 btw.) Should we start mandating these lockdowns for the flu as well?
We are living in a time of mass hysteria that has been fuelled by the media and governments.
WHO: (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/influenza-(...) Worldwide, flu causes 290,000 to 650,000 respiratory deaths. Worldometer reports 316,000 COVID19 deaths. Since January. And I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that is off on the low side. But it's still early.
Not quite. The first death in the US was Feb 29. On March 31, it was only 5151.
So ~91k deaths over 2.5 months, or ~86k deaths over 1.5 months. (...I'd probably go with the first just to encompass infection time)
Many doctors think there's actually an undercount as they discover ways in which the disease can present differently than severe respiratory distress, or look at guidelines that may have led to incorrectly ruling out a case.
Of course, be sure to save some of that skepticism for ways in which a fee-for-service medical system can bend treatment large and small when this is all over.
California and Washington are both running massive deficits due to their harsh quarantine measures and will literally be out of money in a few months. Many cities are already running out of money.
Seattle, San Francisco, LA, NYC... all are heading towards bankruptcy or massive layoffs.
Many cops and teachers are about to be laid off. Prisons will be releasing prisoners to make budgets meet.
And here people are talking about a whole new squad of police that do nothing but enforce distancing and mask-wearing. With what money?
https://www.usmayors.org/2020/04/14/cities-report-pandemic-c...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-cities-...
https://www.dailybreeze.com/2020/05/12/coronavirus-la-cities...
This is like the old line about education ("if you think it's expensive, try ignorance").
There isn't any such thing as "ending lockdown" without certain cooperative measures. Either we'll take the necessary collective steps to control spread and coordinate recovery behavior... or we won't, and we'll have both the uncontrolled spread and the second order uncoordinated responses including large portions of people sitting out economic participation in order to manage personal risk.
Maybe it'll take some kind of civil enforcement to do this. Maybe most people will cooperate.
Maybe the federal government will lend local governments money to help. Or it won't, or it will, but will come with stipulations designed to weaken the ability of local institutions to act counter to partisan ends of those in control of the Senate and executive.
But anyone on team "end lockdown" should hope there is cooperation, and enough enforcement to encourage it at the margins. And if funding is a problem, then private and public entities alike at least in theory have some incentive to come up with a way to solve the problems that need to be solved to support higher levels of activity.
Especially when lifting the lockdown, I would have lifted lockdowns strictly for people who have no violations during the lock down. And prioritize scheduling based on age and medical exceptions. Maybe have hours of the day strictly for vulnerable people with hard restrictions and a separate time for people that have already recovered.
This seems like a missed opportunity for a "service" business that everybody seems to be clamoring for.
We're still in quarantine in the Bay Area and I'm seeing _more_ people not wearing masks or social distancing.
The next thing people need to hear is "quarantine is over" when they're associating quarantine with COVID still being "around." Once that happens, it's game over; I think a majority of people will just go back to normal without being careful.
Not that I don't want quarantine over but I just don't think most people understand the message it would send.
We've known about masks and temperature checks since the beginning of the pandemic, and every reasonable scenario requires them. We can check on the progress of thermometer production and mask availability.
I have a hunch that developing the capacity to implement your proposal will give us enough time -- a few months at least -- to see how voluntary self isolation is working in the regions that are already ending the lock down.
So for every person who puts forth their strategy I get curious, why? So here's a few questions to you.
Can you explain your position?
Can you tell me your social context, what state and city are you in? What is the opinion of your friends and family?
Did you weigh the numbers for predicted economic impact and predicted deaths and health issues and contrast them? Did you consider factors such as that even pre-lockdown the economy was slowing and restaurants closing because a lot of consumers voluntarily avoided putting themselves at risk?
Without you putting any answers to these, or specifying your qualifications, the amount of time you spent thinking about the problem, the edge cases, etc. I can't trust your judgement anymore then I'd trust a coin flip.
You seem to know better than the experts.. not sure what qualifies you to believe that.
There was no "snark" intended. My response is just as serious and practical as "Compose [sic] them and grow new ones!".
Nothing wrong with snark, though! I upvoted your initial comment.
I imagine it's much the same at the packing and shipping places.
should be
"Government deciding to stop the economy wastes more food than ever"
or maybe
"Failure of Chinese government to prevent outbreak wastes more food than ever"
The government didn't decide to 'stop the economy', they decided to order shelter in place in the face of an exponentially growing pandemic. In March, the number of cases was doubling every two days in the US.
And it's especially weird to see you throw stones at the Chinese Government over their inability to stop the spread of this pandemic when many, many governments around the world are also struggling to stop its spread. I'm not a fan of the CCP, and they definitely made mistakes, but I don't think there's a leg to stand on that they could have just 'prevented the outbreak'.
I agree, they did things that probably made things worse. I disagree that they could have easily stopped it from occurring.
Which ones could we not?
For example, I found out that my country, Portugal has the highest number of houses per inhabitant (6 million houses for 10 million inhabitants). It's natural that now that large-scale tourism has collapsed it's not possible to make more houses.
We must therefore not only question whether we can change the means of production to a smaller scale, but whether these means of production make sense.
The problem is the creation of work but then we could think of other forms of wealth distribution such as universal basic income.
we should not put all the eggs in the same basket even if our quality of life changes.
Regarding quality of life, this economy based on material wealth can only give a sense of well being up to a point.
Outside of the bubble that is HN tech workers - wages have stagnated. The wealth being generated is severely concentrated at the very top. I think your average person walking down the street would gladly exchange their $2 gallon of milk for a $4 gallon of milk if they had a $40k/year salary vs. their current $7/hr.
Cost rising isn't the fault here. It's costs rising faster than wages (especially minimum wage).
That relationship was broken, but not the assumption that if you are poor, you are lazy.
What this is really doing is providing welfare to all the companies paying below-poverty wages - the taxpayers pay for benefits to allow the workers in those positions to live, while simultaneously increasing corporate profits.
The portion of GDP going to wages has almost never been lower than it is now [1]
It is about corporate regulatory capture redesigning the economy for corporate wealth extraction and not for the benefit of the citizens.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA
I swear I've heard this before.
I really hate when people do this. Those are totally different scales, and it's not obvious how they compare.
According to this converter [0] (and ignoring specific differences between wage and salary like overtime), using the defaults of 40-hour work week and 50-week year (to account for holidays):
* $40k/year is about $20/hour
* $7/hour is about $14k/year
[0] https://www.calculators.org/savings/wage-conversion.php
I wish stores like Target and Walmart would stock pallets of 40lb flour sacks and just sell them like any other product.
Even things like 50lb sacks on onions could be sold, and let people figure out how to split it up with neighbors, etc. People are smart, they'll figure out what to do.
The demand was artificially inflated and now that it's dropping due to lower waste at home, because people are afraid stores won't have what they need, what was made expecting inflated usage, can't be delivered and used.
We brought this upon ourselves. Even worse, we won't learn from it. Once things are back to normal, the rest of the world will copy / continue copying the american gluttony making us susceptible to another situation like this.
Does anyone know why this is happening in the US and whether it is also happening in other countries? It certainly isn't happening here in Norway. We had short term shortages of flour and yeast but that is over and now there seems to be no shortage of anything else.
Edit: By "really happening" I mean shortages of foods in the stores and not the dumping of food.
For all the moral posturing about animal treatment in factory farms and sustainability, which I can sympathize with, there is a massive army of illegal migrant workers that are invisible both legally and socially.
These migrant workers grow and harvest the food that Americans survive on every day. Not to mention cleaning homes, landscaping, and even raising families.
This is a major factor in why food is so cheap and abundant in America. Illegal migrant workers who are paid sub-minimum slave wages to feed the citizens of the United States.
Until we take a hard look at this labor system and widely acknowledge its economic role, these debates are empty. If you know your history, you understand why this system exists.
My understanding of illegal immigrant jobs was that they were centered more in the restaurant and construction/landscaping fields (and many others, I'm sure).
source: https://cis.org/Report/Unlimited-Cheap-Farm-Labor-Evaluating...