[objectivetruth]

1) Liquor stores are kept open because a (surprisingly high) percentage of the population are severe alcoholics and sudden withdrawal can kill them.

2) No public health professional has time to list and quantify all of the routine processes of every profession to create a complex matrix of risk. And 99% of the public would ignore that matrix if it was created and published. The simpler and more effective public health communication is "stay home."

3) Your hypothetical pair of gardeners might not see their clients that day, but they still get up, get breakfast, get supplies at the store, fuel up their truck and equipment at the gas station, drop off a check at the bank after work, etc., and they can interact with other people at each of those stops.

4) Articles about young people that die from the virus are not trying to hide "simple math that the risk is low." They are trying to convince young people that the risk is non-zero, to prevent them from spreading the virus while pre- or asymptomatic.

5) "Children dying from a virus" and "children going hungry because they can't get two free meals a day" are BOTH public policy issues. Dooming an extra hundred? thousand? ten thousand? people to severe illness and death to avoid having to deliver emergency rations and meals to a million people is a false dilemma. In my medium-sized US city, schools and other community agencies have been distributing meals and rations for seven weeks now and we have zero cases of death by starvation.

[in_cahoots]

Alcoholics are a pretty resourceful bunch, I’m sure they can find their local Wal-Mart, Target, or 7/11. Nobody is going to die because Bevmo is closed.

As to your point about selectively closing businesses being hard, isn’t that a good thing? We shouldn’t put tens of millions of people out of jobs because it’s easier than enumerating what can and can’t stay open. The burden should be on the experts to make their case; after all they have had more than a month now to figure out a plan of attack.

How many deaths due to coronavirus are too many? Right now it seems like public health experts are taking the view that any death is one too many. And they’re willing to present or skew the facts to get that point across. I would rather them be upfront about the benefits and risks, rather than take a paternalistic viewpoint. There are real costs to keeping the country closed, and we shouldn’t discount them.