Nobody wants to eat outside now when it's cold, rainy and windy. If you enclose these outdoor seating areas enough to make people comfortable, they'll no longer be outside since you'll have enclosures on all four sides, or at least three. I'm guessing its not financially viable for many restaurants to have outdoor seating now anyway.

What actually needs to happen is the government needs to provide help to small businesses and people that actually need it rather than let big companies in on the grift. Keep as much as possible closed for a few more weeks and reevaluate.

4-6 months is very extreme and it won't be that long. They've rolled out one vaccine already, with others coming quickly. Officially, we're at around 17M having caught the virus but the general thought is at best, we've only caught half the cases with the more likely estimate being only 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 due to tests not being available early, people not getting tested, people not having symptoms severe enough to get tested or being asymptomatic. So realistically, at least 10% of the US has caught it, and we're probably looking at 15-20%. We're still at 200K per day officially, which is 1.4M per week. That's 0.5% of the population per week. Double that, and we're probably at 1% of the population getting it each week. So by the end of January, we'll be at 20-25% having caught it. And that's before people getting vaccinated.

The next major hurdle is Christmas. We didn't see as much of a Thanksgiving bump as expected. It was more of a continuation of the trend of cases skyrocketing. All of the trackers show the daily case 7 day average having leveled off. The last day or two has actually seen a slight downturn (we'll see if that's just a blip or a trend). Hopefully Christmas follows Thanksgiving in not having a noticeable bump, though we won't know until mid-January.

As more people get infected and people start getting the vaccine, there will be fewer and fewer people to catch and spread the virus. If I could bet on it, I'd bet on restaurants being open way sooner than 6 months. If you made that 4 months, I'd still bet the under and wouldn't think twice.

Maybe the overall numbers, but don't act like this isn't blowing up everywhere. Most cases per 1M people are North Dakota and South Dakota (those two are 4 and 9 in deaths per 1M people). We're at 16 states where over 1 in 1000 people have died from Covid.

This might be a foreign concept to you, but it's generally a good idea to get a complete count before finalizing it rather than stopping partway through.

July 1:

Deaths and hospitalizations consistently down in most areas. — movielover

LOL.

July 4:

New Covid19 graphs, now under 500 deaths per day (down from 2,000). — movielover

LOL

July 6:

Fantastic News.

Alleged Covid19 deaths per day drop from 2701 (May 6th) to 212 (yesterday). An over 90% drop. — movielover

LOL

July 20:

Covid mortality update (daily)

July 20 - 390
May 6 - 2701 — movielover

LOL

Not sure why Musk is getting a Covid test. He said it would be gone by the end of April.

I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this situation. No need discussing it further.

Condolences to you on your losses. To lose either a brother or your wife in a year is bad enough, let along both. Hope you're coping as best as possible under the circumstances.

I agree that the case numbers aren't super accurate. There's no way for them to be without literally testing everyone who hasn't gotten it yet every day.

I also agree that without a vaccine, there's no way to completely stamp this thing out unless people just stayed in their home everyday for like 3 weeks, which also isn't the least bit realistic. But there are ways to limit it and to contain it. Germany sure seemed to be able to contain it well. As did South Korea. But you need buy in from the people to do it and we don't have it here for a number of reasons.

It's tough to compare countries and even cities within the countries. Like you said, so many factors go into how quickly the virus spreads and how serious the consequences are when it spreads (not just deaths but hospitalizations as well). Maybe Sweden had the hospital capacity to withstand just letting the virus run its course. Or maybe they didn't and were just willing to take the risk. I have no idea. But at least some places in the US, we didn't/don't have that capacity.

There isn't and shouldn't be a one size fits all solution to this. Some small town in California shouldn't be forced into complete lockdown just because the virus is blowing up in SF or LA. But we do need people to be careful and not necessarily go about their daily lives like normal. Socially distance. Wear a mask. Avoid big gatherings. You can do these things and still have a relatively normal life. But too many people aren't doing this. They don't think it's bad. They're not worried about getting it or spreading it. They think "oh, this won't happen to me". They think it's dumb to socially distance or it's dumb to wear a mask. That's what's causing this thing to be as bad as it has been for this long. We saw the infection rates and death rates drop dramatically following the lockdowns. Then we eased up and people got tired of staying home, they saw deaths continuing to decrease and thought they wouldn't go back up, and big surprise, infections/deaths went right back up again.

There are also lasting health issues that won't show up in the death numbers. And these are happening in people who don't necessarily have severe symptoms or need hospital stays to recover from Covid. They're happening to young healthy people. That's something that can't be ignored either.

So just opening everything up and letting the virus run it's course is the only way to deal with this?

Spain, Italy, France and UK all have death rates per 1M people similar to ours. We're at 551 and they range from 468 to 619. They've also had way fewer announced cases then us. We're at 17997 per 1M and they range from 3800-9000. That's a big enough gap that I think we can safely assume they've had way fewer people infected. Yet those four countries had 7800 new cases and 88 deaths combined yesterday while we were at 48000 new cases and 1300 deaths. Add in Germany and you get 9200 new cases and 97 deaths for the five countries total. We've got roughly the same population as those five countries combined. They didn't just let the virus run it's course. They locked down just like we did. They were just wildly more successful than we have been.

I don't think there's one way to deal with the virus and every other choice is wrong. Maybe not doing anything worked fine for Sweden. Those other 5 countries didn't and that seems to have worked well for them also. The problem is we're not really picking either path.

Sweden has almost twice as many deaths per 1M people as California does (575 vs 308). Lockdowns work, people here just aren't taking them seriously or following the rules. I've got my theories as to why, you might have different ones. It doesn't really matter why at this point.

We as a country have essentially chosen Sweden's route of just letting people die while also severely harming the economy because people aren't taking this thing seriously enough.

It's almost as if there was a reason that the NBA and NHL are doing a bubble.

It certainly seems like MLB is going to try and power through, positive tests be damned. The problem becomes if things get delayed. Are they going to tack on these games at the end of the season? They've already added on a few extra days to the postseason with the added round. You know they don't want to go any farther into November with the World Series than is absolutely necessary.

This also doesn't bode well for the NFL since there's obviously much more close contact than in MLB. As for college, I'm not entirely sure how they go about having any sort of a season. You've got the money issue for one. The players aren't getting paid. Then there's the issue of them being college students, most of whom are probably living at home right now. So you're going to move them back to college just to play sports. Major conference football I'm sure they'll push through because there's so much money involved. Smaller conference football and lesser sports are way less likely to be played. Just push things to the spring and see where we're at then. This thing didn't really blow up here until April. So in four months we've seen deaths and cases skyrocket, then cases leveled off/dropped a bit while deaths dropped dramatically, and now cases and deaths are increasing again, all in a four month span. So who knows where we'll be on Jan 1.

I said this a couple months ago and couldn't follow my own advice. I fully intend to now though.

Posted a response but decided to edit it out because it's not worth it.

Personally, I find bigotry, racism and sexism extremely objectionable. The TOS also states:

Aggie Sports Talk has the right (though not the obligation) to, at the sole discretion of Aggie Sports Talk ... terminate or deny access to and use of the Website to any individual or entity for any reason, at the sole discretion of Aggie Sports Talk.

That being said, I don't think he should be banned, but rather given a warning that posting something like that again could lead to a banning. He can post whatever he wants about Trump or COVID, however true or untrue and we can disagree with him (and he can disagree with us). But he definitely crossed a line with that post.

It's not tinged with racism. It straight up is racist. And it's homophobic. And it's sexist.

Trump's not quitting the race. If he loses, he'll just claim all sorts of election fraud and say the election was rigged. He's already been planting the seeds by ranting about mail in ballots. That's only going to increase as we get closer to the election.

Those charts are from April 15, genius. 100,000 more Americans have died since then.

Deaths per 100K with over 100 confirmed deaths:

Belgium: 84.4
UK: 66
Spain: 60.8
Italy: 57.8
Sweden: 54.8
France: 46
US: 41.8

Of course, our numbers continue to go up while theirs don't. The six countries ahead of us recorded 54 deaths today and 34 deaths on Sunday. We recorded 465 on Monday and 380 on Sunday. We averaged 2.5 deaths per 1M people the last two days. Those countries combined averaged 0.3 deaths per 1M people. So people are currently dying here at 8x the rate that they are in those six countries combined.

Best joke I saw was they were going to change the name to the DC Redskins.

More deaths each of the last three days than any day since June 11. I was hoping Tuesday's jump was just due to a delay in reporting from the holiday weekend but it doesn't appear that way. The next few days will be very interesting to see where we're headed considering that deaths generally lag behind cases.

Once again, it’s almost as if there are outcomes from getting Covid other than either dying or being asymptomatic.