The Coronavirus

[Bob Butler 54]

(04-27-2020, 11:45 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(04-27-2020, 11:26 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: There ought to be some ground between business as used to be usual and shutting it all down.  We may be spending too much effort on one or the other impossible extreme, and not enough on trying to find a middle ground.

So now you're the one valuing green more than grandma.

It's a false dichotomy.  We don't have to look for middle ground.  The statistics say that shutdowns don't do anything.

Extremists seek extreme solutions.  In this case, you can shut down everything or shut down nothing.  What I am saying is that more effort should be put into a safe middle ground.  The objectives of both parties can sometimes be met.

Most of my life I was a software developer working government contracts which were often classified.  The software teams were fairly small, less than the 10 or fewer limit you commonly hear about.  Most often we worked alone on our own piece of the puzzle.  Occasionally the group had a meeting, but there were enough large conference rooms to do distancing.  You would have to have cans of spray cleaner available in the rest rooms.  You might ask people to bring their own lunch.  Sometimes you could work at home without doing more than bringing a few PC sized components home.  Sometimes you couldn’t, as the prototypes were too large or the project too classified.  As the workers were mostly engineers, and used to following the odd security rules, adding a few more extra rules would be no problem.

Another job back in my early college days involved taking newly injected plastic parts out of a molding machine.  Said machine was bigger than a breadbox, (understatement) with only one operator, so we had social distancing whether we wanted it or not.  Only the operator and the supervisor (when something went wrong) touched the machine, usually to turn a valve if parts were over or under filled.  There was one memorable shift when the mold stuck together with a greater strength than the hydraulic press that usually moved half the mold.  The machine eventually tore itself apart.  We decided this was a problem for the day shift.  It would have taken minimal effort to have COVID 19 safety in that plant.  The closest one would have to a problem would be the mid shift break to visit the rest room and cafeteria, and the cafeteria could be replaced with a paper bag.

Another job I worked was cleaning telephone offices and mowing the lawns of such places.  Few places are as free of people as a telephone central office.  It is all automated.  (Can you guess how much battery it takes to drive a town’s phone system though the average hurricane?  Dusting the floor next to the battery, how prudent is it to avoid contacting the ganged batteries?)  Another easy job to get production with isolation.

These are all something where a low level manager, a labor representative, a senior worker, could get together, suggest solutions, and come up with a set of rules which everyone could agree on.  I could see bringing such a set of rules to a local health official and getting blessed to reopen.  It beats promising to test the full population of a meat packaging plant, only to renege on that promise when a large fraction of the managers and supervisors test positive.  Mass murder to gain a few bucks is questionable ethically.

Some places, like the meat packing plants that have been so much on the news, seem to have few good safe affordable policies.  Making those places safe would take a significant effort and considerable expense.  The answer is not to close one’s eyes and murder people.  Neither is it an answer to totally eliminate meat from society’s menu.

But there are more options than the two unacceptable extremes.