[BostonCard]

The article speaks to a correlation, not causation. PResumably greater restaurant spending signals more social interaction of all sorts of kinds.


But EVERY social interaction increases the chance of infection - obviously. But they can't all be banned. Better to leave restaurants open, insisting on appropriate social distance, and continue to refine regulatory practice. At the dumb prosaic level, you can't even get data if you don't have some interactions.

Yup, mechanistically, it makes intuitive sense that opening restaurants up could be increasing cases, but "opening restaurants up" is a proxy for opening a whole bunch of activities, and people collectively engaging in a bunch of activities that increase risk.

I had hoped that we would be able to relax restrictions without losing control over the virus.  My hope is that the increase in cases will wake people up on the need to social distance and that this will be self-correcting (supplemented by instituting a couple of targeted measures).

The problem, however, is that what we are seeing now actually happened two weeks ago.  Since in the intervening two weeks, if anything states relaxed further, things are sadly going to get much worse before they get better.  July is going to be tough.

BC

[BostonCard]

The article speaks to a correlation, not causation. PResumably greater restaurant spending signals more social interaction of all sorts of kinds.


But EVERY social interaction increases the chance of infection - obviously. But they can't all be banned. Better to leave restaurants open, insisting on appropriate social distance, and continue to refine regulatory practice. At the dumb prosaic level, you can't even get data if you don't have some interactions.

Yup, mechanistically, it makes intuitive sense that opening restaurants up could be increasing cases, but "opening restaurants up" is a proxy for opening a whole bunch of activities, and people collectively engaging in a bunch of activities that increase risk.

I had hoped that we would be able to relax restrictions without losing control over the virus.  My hope is that the increase in cases will wake people up on the need to social distance and that this will be self-correcting (supplemented by instituting a couple of targeted measures).

The problem, however, is that what we are seeing now actually happened two weeks ago.  Since in the intervening two weeks, if anything states relaxed further, things are sadly going to get much worse before they get better.  July is going to be tough.

BC