@nvk "If you said to me that short of a curfew you had to put more hours of restrictions on when you could get food, I would be perfectly comfortable with that,” he said"

WTF is this unscientific nonsense? How is making stores more crowded going to help?

They just can't admit that nothing they have the power to do will change much of anything.

@pete @nvk

> WTF is this unscientific nonsense? How is making stores more crowded going to help?

This has been grinding my gears so much when I hear about govs limiting opening hours or even introducing curfews... In some places they *extended* opening times to allow people to spread out when they were coming, that's the right idea! I can even respect places where they dedicated the first few hours of grocery stores opening hours to the elderly and immunocompromised.

@kekcoin @nvk Around here as far as I can tell they've literally released zero evidence or scientific explanations backing up what they're doing. The UK government actually did really early on - the initial herd immunity stuff. It's like that soured governments on doing that so they stopped.

@pete @nvk To be fair that came at a time when it was key to take more aggressive measures and slow the spread, and look where the UK is now. Govs in general (from China to Europe to the Americas) waited too long to take action, so now we are stuck with way more invasive measures that aren't nearly as effective.

@kekcoin @nvk That's just dumb. The scientific response was to _flatten_, not _crush_ the curve. ~Everyone is getting it eventually. The trick is to slow that rate enough to be sustainable. That's why Florida is doing so much better than California, in spite of having a much older population.

@kekcoin @nvk What screwed countries over was taking too much action. Not too little.

@pete I'd say it was taking too little action early on when it would have been more effective, and taking too much action later when it didn't help anymore anyway, just to appear not completely useless.

@kekcoin Again, that just doesn't make sense. Countries did in fact mostly crush it, fairly early. But they could not eliminate it. So by crushing it, they squandered a summer that could have been used to build up immunity.

Of course, all this assumes this currt covid wave is in fact real and we haven't fucked up testing with false positives... Unfortunately that is still a possibility. Certainly some meaningful minority are false positives.