There's no need to freak out or change plans. Just wear masks if it will make her feel better, avail yourselves of the good weather and choose to dine al fresco, and do outdoorsy things. According to today's New York Times COVID hotspot map, this region's average rate of daily COVID infections per 100,000 is pretty low relative to places in the South and Midwest--29 per 100,000 in LA County, and 22 per 100,000 in Orange County. There's really not much to worry about.

A suit like that would be thrown out for lack of standing, because there are no 'damages' that the complainant could demonstrate for which the court could craft a remedy.

A private establishment's requirement that all potential customers must wear a mask on premises would not constitute illegally furnishing medical advice to any individual potential customer who subsequently showed up.

That term was used by local and state government to classify businesses that were allowed to stay open when others with different classifications were required to close. That classification did not, to my knowledge, strip private establishments from their longstanding right to set and enforce rules for potential customers on premises. You can visit essential businesses--but not if you also simultaneously flout their rules.

Smoking isn't illegal per se, but you can't do it in any supermarket I know of, and if you do, they can legally kick you out for breaking their rule against smoking inside the store--regardless of the nature of the goods they sell, or how much you insist you need those goods. You had the option to obtain those needed goods just like everyone else, as long as you chose to follow the store's rule against smoking, but when you chose to smoke inside the store, you voluntarily forfeited that option. Same with shoes, shirts--and masks.

The law will only usually get involved in private establishments' rules for customers on premises when they involve barring potential customers based on their inclusion in a protected class, such as rules that once barred African Americans from public accommodations.

I agree that a full life doesn’t mean a long life. There are people who fit much more living into 60 years than those who live until 90. That’s exactly my point.

And 70ish may or may not be old. For my father it’s pretty old, but he’s been “old” since his early 60s. Others are sailing or running at least half marathons at that age. But most people continue to live well beyond the point, at whatever age it comes, that they cease truly living, because the medical field is focused on prolonging life at any cost.

The indicative measure I’ve taken to telling people is that I don’t want to live much past the point when I can properly ski (on challenging slopes, not the bunny hill). It’s not about skiing per se, but about having the physical capacity to be active, and it’s a real sport (i.e., not golf) that people can do in old age. When the time comes that I’m just not physically capable of that any more, just let me say my goodbyes.

You’re full of crap

When you’re 65 I guarantee you’ll be singing a different tune. What are you gonna do, commit suicide? That’s the problem with too many of you money and finance people, you don’t have any insight about life

At least in a country like mine, with universal health care funded by all taxpayers, it makes sense to impose certain rules of this nature when we can clearly argue that the possible impact of one's silly temerity is a significant financial burden on everyone else.

In a sense, the debate over what to do with today's anti-vaxxers is at least somewhat analogous.

Sometimes I wish there was a "Like" button on this forum, so I could give a star to you on this. I really think 10023 is just trolling with his age comments. No one can be that lacking in introspection or foresight.

Not a particularly physically active guy. I mean, I like to ride my bike and go on long walks - and am reasonably fit - but no one would ever call me "sporty." As long as I have my wits, I can read in old age, and learn new things, which is far more important to me.

My general understanding though is that the average elderly person only gains around 4 years of life expectancy as a result of medical interventions. The vast majority of extension in life expectancy over the last century is more because we've prevented premature death due to accidents, infections, and other means. Meaning even centuries ago, it was entirely normal for a guy who reached the age of say 55 to live well into his 70s, even without any worthwhile doctoring.

Not at 65. Maybe at 75 though.

Do you want to hobble around with a walker?

my mom and dad are both turning 75 this fall, and neither one of them hobbles around with a walker.

they're both in reasonably good health for their age, they remain active and engaged with life, and they would both tell you with 100% certainty that their lives are absolutely still worth living, if for no other reason than the joy they get from being with their grandchildren (but there are lots of other reasons as well).

Conversely, my grandmother got polio at age 3, walked with a limp from an early age, was using a walker by her 50s...and lived to be 91. She was reasonably healthy up until the last 5 years or so aside from the mobility issues, and didn't have any signs of dementia until the last month.

My Dad is 85 and my Mom is 77

Both are independent, in good shape, take very little medication, walk without any assistance, and still do regular exercise. They still like to travel. Fingers crossed

Help me understand who gets to be the arbiter of determining value and quality of life past a certain age and why they're qualified to make that call for everyone else?

I know insurance actuarial risks play a factor but beyond that?

Sounds like if you don't look and feel 35 at 65 then life is over. You're in for a rude awakening because you can be The Rock at 50 and you're still not going to be 35. I guarantee you when the cameras aren't rolling, his ass is popping the ibuprofen. lol

Oh it’s entirely subjective. There are plenty of people who are much younger, in their 40s and 50s, who don’t live lives that I would consider worth living - but that’s their choice. If you’re a coach potato then I suppose not much changes with old age.

My husband's Grandmother turned 92 a couple weeks ago. She insisted on Chinese food for dinner, and See's candy for dessert (no cake, thanks!). She has a circle of friends who regularly visit (mostly extended family and friends from her church). She is sharp as a tack--with a better memory than people half her age--and still reads a lot. Her sense of humor is surprisingly salty for such a gracious lady--she blurted out that she was thinking about buying a vibrator from a shopping catalogue, which is as ridiculous as it is reassuring that she's still enjoying life. The look on her youngest son's face was just priceless. He's such a square, and she always teases him like that.

I have a friend who is 75 and still skis probably better then 80% of the people on the slopes. Just not better than me at 51. My nephew's friend had a very bad ski accident at 18 and will never ski again.

And your brain changes and adapts as you age and with what life throws at you. You think now you can't live without skiing but that likely will change if you find you can't do it anymore. This is why people in terrible accidents who may now suffer from a handicap generally most often become happy and content again in their new reality. Their brain adapts.

You’re not making a strong case for old age.

This isn't true. The virus has killed people without underlying conditions at every age group. Yes, it's less lethal for younger than older. Yes, you're more likely than not to survive it at any age. But the risk is not zero at any age group or physical condition.

Also... Keep in mind that the virus has disproportionately infected adults, especially in the U.S., and most likely this is because schools were closed for a year. I don't think we have a good idea of what the virus looks like burning through large cross section of the under 18 population.

Yeah we don't know that, so I wouldn't say that the virus has disproportionately infected adults. It's entirely probably that it has infected kids at the same rate, but they don't have symptoms and therefore they haven't been tested to the same degree as adults.

Kids haven't been tested because they haven't been doing things (going to school) that adults did during the pandemic (work related travel, work mandates, jobs site requirements etc).

It's possible that children were infected at the same rate as adults. But it's likely that they weren't. Either way, we don't have nearly the same amount of data for how children respond to the virus that we do for adults.

Why do you think it's unlikely.

Infected adults go home (indoor setting), help their kids with homework (no social distancing), feed them (some breast feed), drive their friends around, watch tv together, tuck them into bed.

Was the population of adults that were infected early on likely to be in the same household as kids? The early pandemic disproportionately affected people that lived in communal settings like nursing homes, prisons, halfway houses, etc. You wouldn't find a lot of kids in those settings. And since kids were sent home from school, they didn't have a lot of interaction with the general public, either. So, it doesn't seem likely to me at all that kids were exposed to the same degree as adults.

Early on? Did you just move the goal posts?

We're talking about whether kids were exposed to the same degree as adults. So of course it matters that they weren't in a situation to be exposed to the same degree as adults for an extended period of time.

Again, you don't know, we don't know.

However, you've come to a conclusion that kids haven't been exposed and infected to the same degree that adults have.

Maybe, maybe not because we don't know. And we don't know because this particular disease hits older people much harder than it does kids.

331 deaths out of 75 million kids in America. All other deaths in the same age group is around 49,000.

I now change the channel immediately whenever any news network talks about Covid (don’t feed the troll, after all).

No better term applies than “toxic” and “manipulative” when evaluating the media’s treatment of this disease

So what's the responsible course of action if we don't know how it affects kids? Throw them out there and see what happens?

What do you mean when you say “throw them out there”?

Do you have children?

What else are children to do but experience the world around them? Are we to lock them in their homes?

My two nephews had Covid like millions of others. Cough cough, fever, sick for a few days, then normal. It’s called life you germaphobic buffoon..

:haha:

We do have a good idea what happens, so yes, let's throw them out there to a classroom to learn math in person (lol) and see what happens.

All of these kids have been swapping spit with each other no matter if the schools are closed or not. Well maybe not the nerdy kids that won't get it in until they're 30, but you get my point.

Why would you say that?

I do because I've posted the tables and you keep saying something different.

For Americans, here it is again. At 80, for example, your life expectancy isn't 1 year or even a couple--it's over 8. It doesn't get below 2 years until you are 102 for men or 104 for women.

Because he's a nasty person. I just can't imagine his "bedside manner".

Do you refuse to read professional literature on the subject either?

No, but you do.

You are a toxic, germaphobic buffoon. You are dangerous. Go hide in your basement, where you belong.

Just to be clear, the difference between my position and yours is that you belittle the damage Covid has done outright. I don’t.

I firmly oppose and condemn the morons who can’t see the difference between pre-vaccine and post-vaccine Covid. It’s like night and day. But some people are too obtuse, and perhaps have a vested interest in, keeping everybody timid and afraid.

Wow! All hail Phil McAvity, the only goddamned person on the fucking planet who's figured out that COVID is nothing to fear!

:worship::worship::worship:

Oh brother. Between you and 10023 I've pretty much lost all faith in the humanity of SSPers. TUP, while I don't necessarily agree with his overall perspective of the seriousness of COVID, has displayed a lot of common sense with regards to getting vaccinated and at least taking things seriously.

Sorry, I know I should never feed the trolls, but I simply couldn't let this snark go uncontested.

Aaron (Glowrock)

Meh, you've got to keep up with the times. This is how people link to off-site sources now.

well UChicago reinstated its mask mandate on Monday... about 3 weeks after the original mask mandate was removed. Fortunately, as of last week, I have my own office :).

Umm, what?

And we shouldn’t be looking for “zero risk”. That’s ridiculous. Most things in life entail risk.

The question becomes how much risk is low enough, and the only practical answer to that is how ever much risk remains after vaccination. That’s all we can do. Whatever risk remains to vaccinated people has to be accepted. There is no other way.

One thing I’ve noticed walking around London is that people seem to have put on a LOT of weight during the year of lockdowns.

The Brits have long been the fattest people in Europe, and maybe my perspective shifted during all that time in Miami, but it seems almost everyone is at least overweight if not obese. It’s like being in the Midwest.

That it almost certainly going to have a more detrimental effect on public health over time than Covid itself.

I put on about 30 pounds during the pandemic. Been working on losing it, and around halfway there now.

It's really hard when you're stuck with your first-grader all day in online classes not to snack, since there's not really an ability to do much of anything else.

Maybe COVID causes us to see things that are not there. There is context that you missed but, when read, it makes it pretty clear that I never said anything about us achieving "zero risk".

You made a point of saying that “the risk is not zero at any age group”.

This is obvious. My point in response is that it doesn’t need to be, and obviously never will be.

When someone says “young people aren’t at risk from Covid”, they probably don’t mean that no young person ever will suffer long term consequences or death. They probably mean (or at least I mean) that the risk faced by young people is well within the bounds of acceptable, part of the general risk that one must accept in life, and therefore does not merit any special precautions.

If I wanted to avoid any risk that I could, then sure, I would wear a mask indoors like Pedestrian even though I’m vaccinated. I also wouldn’t cycle in London traffic (sometimes without a helmet), or snowboard or surf ever again, or drink alcohol, or take an occasional legal or illegal drug, or ride in a car with a friend who’s had a few beers, or eat street food in Africa, or rent a Vespa in Rome, or…

Hopefully that clears up the point.

I don't think there's a lot of disagreement here, but there's a part of the risk that you're not accounting for: we don't know the longterm effects of COVID yet. It could be nothing and hopefully that is the case. It could also be something that will burden people who were infected for years.

I'm vaccinated and I do agree that most people in rich countries have been presented with a solution, the vaccine, and beyond that we can't really expect more to be done. But that isn't an option for a lot of children because they're not yet eligible to be vaccinated.

We can make a very educated guess that they are usually negligible. This isn’t the first virus of its type to infect humans, and while it has its unique characteristics it’s really just a tiger with different stripes.

“Long Covid” is a great attempt at re-branding but generally sounds like it is variously post-virus syndrome and/or the usual after effects of pneumonia (which Covid causes if it hits the lungs badly, though I would think this would result in hospitalisation and not normally affect young people). So yeah, bad viral infections can cause fatigue and body aches for weeks of months, and if you have inflammation in your lungs it can take a period of time to heal and become 100%.

Young or youngish people tend to heal eventually. I almost certainly did more lasting damage to my lungs by smoking (usually when I drank) for 10 years than even a bad Covid infection (at least relative to my asymptomatic one).

So yes, there is what I would consider a tail risk that there is something really different about this virus compared to others, but I wouldn’t bet on it, and I still don’t think that all of the panic, lockdowns and continuing disruption was worth it.

I've been able to lose fat and gain muscle (my body fat % is at an all time low), and maintain my total body weight thanks to my shelter in place home gym build. Makes it easy to work out at home in between meetings.

So is this not true?

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-die-flu/

In what way does this refute his point?

Wondering what it might be like if you get "breakthrough covid"? These are among the first unslanted descriptions I've read and, all in all, are pretty reassuring:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/a...a-16369775.php

I got in better shape too, but that’s because I made a point of it. And there wasn’t much else to do (like when Mike Tyson went to prison and got jacked). But most people didn’t do that, they watched Netflix, ordered delivery and drank on their sofa.

So… nothing.

But let’s lock down again just to be safe, so this 78 year old lady doesn’t miss a wedding.