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Jesuismieux412 t1_j5kblia wrote

I recently moved downtown. Something you quickly notice is that about 25% of the pedestrians down here are afflicted with something. However, there are still great restaurants. You just need to circumvent two schizophrenics and three teenagers armed with pistols to get to them. Keep it moving and act like you’re a foreigner when the bums ask for money.

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[deleted] t1_j5kk9up wrote

People downvoting this like it isn’t true…

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Jesuismieux412 t1_j5kq08q wrote

Then they don’t live down here. Ha. Simple as that. Or, they’re ignoring the reality of things.

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5l8vp0 wrote

I've worked downtown for twelve years. It's fine. I've never felt at risk down there, and prior to the pandemic I spent a lot of time after work there.

 
> Keep it moving and act like you’re a foreigner when the bums ask for money.

 
Saying "no" really isn't that hard, people on this sub act like they're being violated when a panhandler speaks to them.

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OnettNess t1_j5mklub wrote

I've worked Downtown for seven years and it's unquestionably the worst it's been since I've been working down there. I don't know how anyone can see it differently.

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5ml3mj wrote

Reminds me of the time everyone was complaining about "drug dealing" in Market Square so they took the chairs and tables away, which meant that a group of older black men who played chess down there every morning couldn't play chess anymore. Problem solved from the commuter point of view, I guess.

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WavingOrDrowning t1_j5zdgqt wrote

I worked downtown in the 90s and it was **exponentially worse** at the time. Homeless/mentally ill people taking a dump on the streets every day. Third and Fourth between Smithfield and Wood were so desolate back then, people would sleep on the street. Ppl would fall asleep and shit/piss themselves in the store I worked at on Smithfield every day.

Not to minimize at all that between the pandemic & lack of shelter/mental health services there's been a spike in people on the streets from who was there maybe 5-10 years ago. But downtown has never been a pristine experience. It may look prettier these days, filled with shiny places covered in white subway tile, but it's always been the messy, beating heart of the city.

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magentaapplesauce t1_j5nkdgo wrote

I've never really felt at risk downtown either, but walking around down there still feels like an obstacle course sometimes.

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Cohomology_ t1_j5ldtgh wrote

It's the worst it's been since I started working downtown 10 years ago. It declined very sharply after our overreaction to COVID, as expected.

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5leyfc wrote

We overreacted to a disease that killed over a million Americans and is the leading cause of death that isn't heart disease or cancer for three years running? News to me.

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Cohomology_ t1_j5lg424 wrote

Yes. That's the amazing thing.

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5lgdvs wrote

Hmm. Interesting. In what ways do you think we overreacted?

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Cohomology_ t1_j5lhxw3 wrote

Forcing businesses to close or limit their capacities (unless they are Walmart). Then spending billions in relief to fix the self imposed financial crisis. Requiring kids to have school remotely so parents might even have to resort to limiting their own work and income to support it. Requiring vaccine mandates for jobs outside of the medical field resulting in people quitting or being let go if they didn't want to get it. Media scaring the hell out of people with a death counter on screen 24/7 so that they continue to support any policy which might save literally one more life on Earth (at least from COVID).

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5lijda wrote

It looks like what you're saying here is that we shouldn't have mounted any sort of societal response to covid-19 at all, and just went about our lives as though nothing was happening.
 

Do you think things would have went better with a highly contagious respiratory pandemic if we completely ignored it and pretended it wasn't going around killing people? What's the end game with that sort of approach?

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Cohomology_ t1_j5ljfzt wrote

Just focus on protecting elderly and higher risk people. At that time we didn't even know if and when vaccines would be around. We basically had to rely on herd immunity. That would mean letting the young healthy people especially live as they wish and start building that immunity. The only time any draconian policy would be necessary is when hospitals are actually stressed. That period was very brief and concentrated in a select few areas. Like NYC where they had huge outbreaks in nursing homes

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5lk1tc wrote

So you're repeating the Great Barrington stuff, which postulated that we'd hit herd immunity within three months and the disease would fade from view.
 
We're going into the fourth year of this disease, it's still killing hundreds of thousands of people every year, and it should be quite clear at this point that herd immunity isn't going to happen.
 
> That would mean letting the young healthy people especially live as they wish and start building that immunity.

 
I know people on their fourth infection. If you can keep getting it over and over, what immunity are they building?

 
Do you own a restaurant or something? Your approach here seems to be "don't hinder businesses in any way, let all the weak die, and if we ignore it maybe it'll go away eventually."

 
We've basically been doing that for the past twenty months, and it isn't working.

 
"If we stop looking at the monster maybe it'll go away" isn't a public health policy, it's just magical thinking. This idea that society, schools, businesses, etc could have just carried on as normal during the largest mass death event in American history is just more magical thinking.

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Cohomology_ t1_j5lm00c wrote

Yes we've had considerable immunity for a long time at this point. Sweden did a largely hands off approach which the world should have followed. People are going to get COVID forever but it's never going to be killing people to any degree which is worth worrying about. We have plenty of tools to help elderly and at risk people. I don't own a business but am good friends with multiple who do.

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5lpa8j wrote

> Yes we've had considerable immunity for a long time at this point.

 
Obviously not, since hundreds of thousands of people are dying every year and people are contracting covid-19 multiple times.
 
If you can keep catching it, you don't have immunity to it. Fuck's sake.

 
> ut it's never going to be killing people to any degree which is worth worrying about.

 
It has been the leading cause of death in America besides cancer and heart disease for three years running, what are you talking about? It killed ~268K Americans in 2022. It's knocked nearly three years off the American life expectancy since 2020. That is insanely dire and usually only happens in collapsing societies, like Russia in the early nineties.

 
You are engaging in magical thinking. This pandemic isn't going to get better until we do something to make it better. Pretending it's 2019 and ignoring the monster in the room while it eats people is not making anything better.

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Cohomology_ t1_j5mwbb3 wrote

Sure I should have said resistance not immunity.

My main point is that our reaction to COVID was poor. No matter what we did, many people were going to die. Look at California vs. the worst state in the USA for COVID deaths per capita. CA has about half the mortality after all their absurd COVID policies. Meanwhile some states did almost nothing and probably had a lot of old and at risk people avoiding vaccines, but the end result wasn't much different. While this was impossible to predict in early 2020, we didn't amend our approach to be commensurate with the actual risk as we knew more even later that same year.

The long term consequences of how we and the majority of the western world reacted to COVID are still being felt and will be for a long time. It's not just economic loss. Excess deaths are still elevated, but those attributed to COVID cannot explain all of the excess.

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5mwojo wrote

> Sure I should have said resistance not immunity.

Once again, what kind of resistance actually exists if you're just going to catch it over and over at all? Which infection will infer 'resistance'? The fifth? The tenth?

 
> CA has about half the mortality after all their absurd COVID policies

 
What absurd policies?

 
> The long term consequences of how we and the majority of the western world reacted to COVID are still being felt and will be for a long time.

 
You are assigning the negative outcomes of the pandemic to the reaction to the pandemic and not to the disease that we've permitted to run wild. You are implying that had we done nothing at all and just pretended there wasn't a pandemic raging, things would have turned out better. That is an utterly insane idea.

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ellipses1 t1_j5lzows wrote

The government should provide the data they have available and let people do whatever they are comfortable with. It was 100% an overreaction

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5m7dgi wrote

An accepted government function, going back thousands of years, is public health.
 
Distilling public health down to a personal consumer decision is completely apeshit.

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ellipses1 t1_j5m97e7 wrote

Cool, and if it doesn’t work, just keep doing it?

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5mi8c5 wrote

There have been zero Covid restrictions in Pennsylvania for about twenty months now. What are you even on about?

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ellipses1 t1_j5misbb wrote

I’m talking about when there were restrictions, obviously

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5mja4l wrote

There were no hard lockdowns anywhere in the United States at any point. Even at the depth of what few restrictions there were, you were free to go hang out at Home Depot all day and lots of people did.
 
There have been zero restrictions on bars and restaurants in PA since early 2021. Florida reopened their beaches in April of 2020.

 
You people have made up an alternate reality where the government closed everything down and locked you inside for three years. It never happened.

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ellipses1 t1_j5mopok wrote

Hey, if you want to minimize an unprecedented overreach of the government in the face of mild adversity, be my guest

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5mov4a wrote

...What unprecedented overreach? The US government has used state power to control disease outbreaks many, many times in the history of this country. Many times within your lifetime, as a matter of fact.

 
You people have made up an alternate reality in your head that you live in full time.

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ellipses1 t1_j5mqjpm wrote

They also interred Japanese Americans during WWII. Just because the government did it before doesn't make it right, then, nor does it make it right, now.

Kinda says a lot about "state power" when millions of us just ignored them.

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5mr707 wrote

Yes, the government interring Japanese Americans during WW2 is exactly the same thing as you not being allowed to eat in the Applebee's dining room for three months. 🙄

 
Listen to how absurd you are.
 
Public health is a basic function of government going back millennia. If you sincerely believe that the government has no place guarding the public health, you're the crackpot here.

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ellipses1 t1_j5msk7x wrote

I'm perfectly content being the crackpot.

Shutting down businesses, fining business owners who stayed open, requiring an emergency vaccination that did not go through the standard channels for approval, limiting travel based on vaccination status, requiring PPE that was proven to not work, printing trillions of dollars to smooth over the damage done by the previously listed policies... yep, totally the same as not eating at Applebees.

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5mtrhd wrote

> Shutting down businesses, fining business owners who stayed open,

 

Repeat after me: "No business carries a guarantee of a return regardless of market conditions."
 
If a business causes a threat to public health, it's well within the rights of state government to shut them down for the duration of an emergency.

 
> requiring an emergency vaccination that did not go through the standard channels for approval,

 
Both Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been approved through regular channels at this point. You're just crying over something the government has had the power to do for over a century now, mandate vaccination.

 

> limiting travel based on vaccination status,
 

If you've ever flown out of the country you'd know this happens all the time, pandemic or no.

 
> requiring PPE that was proven to not work,

 
This is the sort of crackpot shit I'm talking about.

 
> printing trillions of dollars to smooth over the damage done by the previously listed policies..

 
"It wasn't the pandemic that caused the problem, it was the response!" is more crackpot shit that rests on the assumption that had we just ignored the pandemic and done nothing at all, things would have turned out better. Magical thinking with no basis in reality.
 
> yep, totally the same as not eating at Applebees

 
The great majority of Pennsylvanians saw no more onerous government restrictions than restaurants being closed for a few months and kids learning from home. Comparing your "plight" to interment is some incredible self-satire.

 
You people live in an oppositional defiance fantasy world where you're always the victims.

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ellipses1 t1_j5mv3r5 wrote

Repeat after me: The government arbitrarily classifying your business as essential or non-essential is the DEFINITION of a non-market condition.

And guess what? The government, at least in PA, only targeted or enforced their mandates on businesses granted special licenses to operate by the state. Bars, restaurants, salons - if you didn't need a license to operate from the health department, you could say "fuck off" to Tom Wolf. The hardware store in the town near me never closed, never required masks, and never limited occupancy. The hair salon next door? Closed for months under threat of losing their license.

>Both Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been approved through regular channels at this point.

At this point? how about in 2021 when the government was trying to mandate them? And if your answer is yes, then why aren't ALL vaccines approved and rolled out in under a year?

>This is the sort of crackpot shit I'm talking about.

Are you giving information contradictory to the PA department of health or the CDC? Are you saying a bandana, gator, or steelers-print cloth mask prevent you from catching or transmitting covid?

>had we just ignored the pandemic and done nothing at all, things would have turned out better.

Uh, yeah... they would have turned out better because the things the government did didn't work. So doing nothing would have had the same results without the drawbacks of the government interference.

>The great majority of Pennsylvanians saw no more onerous government restrictions than restaurants being closed for a few months and kids learning from home. Comparing your "plight" to interment is some incredible self-satire.

If it was so hands-off and reasonable, why have they stopped? Why are there no mask mandates? Why did they change "fully vaccinated" from the first two shots, to the first two shots plus up to date on boosters, back to just the first two shots? Why, with only about a 20% uptake of the bi-valent booster aren't there vaccine and booster mandates, today? According to google, 569 people have died in the US from covid in the past 7 days. At this rate, it'll be another 9/11 before Easter!

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5mvztl wrote

> Repeat after me: The government arbitrarily classifying your business as essential or non-essential is the DEFINITION of a non-market condition

 
Shit happens and businesses fail all the time. Sorry you were open during a pandemic, but the government doesn't owe you jack shit and they certainly don't need to let you stay open when you're a threat to public health.
 
Life ain't fair. Deal.

 

> Are you giving information contradictory to the PA department of health or the CDC? Are you saying a bandana, gator, or steelers-print cloth mask prevent you from catching or transmitting covid?

 
Recommending gaiters, cloth masks, etc was a stopgap measure meant to prevent runs on N95 and surgical masks and the CDC was quite open about that.

 
> If it was so hands-off and reasonable, why have they stopped? Why are there no mask mandates?

 
Because people like you wouldn't stop throwing massive fucking tantrums. So the government gave in. You guys won. There are zero covid restrictions anywhere in the United States and 250K+ people are going to die from Covid-19 every year for the foreseeable future. The very concept of public health in America is dead going forward, and we're going to continue to see precipitous declines in life expectancy of the sort you usually only see in failing societies.

 
Despite winning, you're still all pissed off about imaginary lockdowns that never happened. Just take your victory lap and move on.

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ellipses1 t1_j5mxv4s wrote

Finally, someone gave me the W. We’re going to run with that for as long as possible

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Zealousideal-Ad-2546 t1_j5mklu2 wrote

That's not quite accurate, at all.

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5mkxkx wrote

That's extremely accurate. Can you tell me when the government forced you to stay in your house under the threat of law in Pittsburgh or in PA? You can't, because it didn't happen.
 
The dining room at Applebee's closed for a few months and schools went remote. That's about it.

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Zealousideal-Ad-2546 t1_j5p5pk8 wrote

No reason for the downvotes buddy. I got downtown a week before they put mandatory curfews down and pulled out the bullhorns. They barely even did that for the riots. And by got down there I mean living on the streets. I saw everything. It was very real. So take your downvotes and shove it up your ass. Your just arguing that nothing was done like a backtrodding coward. Plenty was done and people for the most part of what I consider civil lived up to that.

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j5p6d3b wrote

Ain't me downvoting you, but I added mine just in case.
 
Nobody in Pennsylvania was locked inside their house at any point. Period. Applebee's going to takeout only for a few months isn't a lockdown.

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Zealousideal-Ad-2546 t1_j66diub wrote

I don't know where you were at but in Pitt they pulled out curfew squads for weeks and there were three days in the beginning that were full lockdown. Here goes the downvote

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69FunnyNumberGuy420 t1_j697xsn wrote

I live in the city. At no point in time was there ever a full lockdown. They even kept the liquor stores open. Everything was "essential."

 
Being forced to get takeout instead of eating in the dining room is not a "lockdown," no matter how much idiots claim it was.

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burritoace t1_j5m0cbn wrote

This is demented garbage

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ellipses1 t1_j5m7gq5 wrote

You can call it garbage, but look at how well their tactics worked. Poorly. In my area, covid was over in may of 2020

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Zealousideal-Ad-2546 t1_j5ml9l9 wrote

I will give you that, I wanted to discontinue CNN after the blatant scare tactics, but really though, fox was allowed to spew vitriol nonetheless so where is there a winning situation there? People were great, sans maga attention seeking idiots. But I think the average citizen rose above their respective situations and began to prioritize their perspective a bit better. What's not spoken of is mass starvation or true epidemic conditions of disease spread because restrictions were placed. We didn't quite know what mutation was coming from China Europe Asia or Africa and we found out in a matter of months so if anything things weren't emphasized quickly enough, which I believe to be the case.

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Cohomology_ t1_j5my3ev wrote

Yep people did largely step up to the plate in my experience. We could reasonably handle things without, say, forcing bars and restaurants to close or limit capacity when both the patrons and employees want to be there and are willing to take their own risk. Lost a bunch of local businesses. One friend had to sell their house just to keep the business going.

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burritoace t1_j5m0b35 wrote

Damn it must be frustrating to be so consistently wrong about this for almost three years now. And it doesn't even reflect actual concern for the people who are harmed by the disease! An awful double whammy

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Zealousideal-Ad-2546 t1_j5mk99k wrote

Overreaction, we barely made it through if you ask me. If it wasn't for people's decency at the beginning of it we might have been fucked. Really should be complimenting ourselves, those of us that truly live by the city. Fuckin yuppies

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