The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the state shutdowns were illegal. Bar traffic results vary widely.
Nicks Bar
Brown County
Fox News – Bars Flooded
Fox News reports Wisconsin Bars Flooded with Patrons hours after state Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order.
Nick’s Bar in Platteville, Wis., shared a photo on Twitter with the caption: “45 minutes after the bars open in Wisconsin” showing the establishment packed with mostly young people, none of whom were wearing masks or observing social distancing.
A photo taken by the Green Bay Press-Gazette showed that the State Street Pub in Green Bay had briefly reopened with about a dozen customers inside after the state Supreme Court ruling. Decorations for St. Patrick’s Day, the March 17 holiday, remained on display the first day of the reopening. Neither the bartender nor the customers had masks.
But that bar’s reopening was also short-lived. By Wednesday night, Brown County Health Officer Anna Destree issued a local safer-at-home order to replace the now resolute state rules, requiring all county residents to remain home until at least May 20.
Star Tribune – Rolling the Dice
The Star Tribune reports Bars and other businesses quickly reopen in Wisconsin — for now.
Ted Mosby couldn’t help but feel conflicted Thursday as he finished his drink at Jonesy’s Local Bar and Grill a day after the Wisconsin Supreme Court quashed Gov. Tony Evers’ stay-at-home order.
“The virus is real. … We supposedly haven’t reached our peak yet. That’s the scary part,” said Mosby, a carpenter and retired EMT worker. “We’ll reach it sooner now that we’re open.”
But it’s also good, he admitted, to once again sit at a bar and quench his thirst after work. “I’m rolling the dice. … People are getting antsy. They’re stir-crazy.”
At Hop and Barrel Brewing, half the tables had been removed and as well as half the seating at those tables that remained. No one will be allowed to sit at the bar when it reopens Friday. Workers will wear masks and gloves.
At Abigail Page Antique Mall, owner Linda Weiser is allowing only five customers in at a time. Everyone must wear a mask. She offers them a pump of hand sanitizer for free, a mask for a $1 and gloves for 50 cents.
CNN – New Rules
CNN Reports Wisconsin bars reopen after court throws out stay-at-home order — some with new rules
Seven customers showed up at BK’s Bar in Shullsburg, Abby Gilbertson-Cottington, who owns the bar with her husband, told CNN. Most patrons stayed at least 6 feet apart, except for one couple who she believed may have been married.
The owner of Limanski’s Pub, Kathy Goedde, was watching the news when she saw the order was overturned. “I was pretty happy about that,” she told WTMJ. She’s limiting capacity to a third of what the bar could hold and reminding patrons to keep social distance, WTMJ reported.
This is It!, an LGBTQ+ bar in Milwaukee, posted a note on its Facebook page telling customers it wasn’t ready to reopen just yet.
“We, like you, want life to return to normal, but we will not force any actions or decisions that compromise health and safety,” the post said.
Flood?
Perhaps there was a flood of traffic, if a dozen or so people at several bars constitutes a flood.
My concern is the complete lack of any attempts at social distancing at two of the bars. Those people are begging for another wave of infections and another crackdown.
Wisconsin Supreme Court Rules Lockdowns Are Illegal
Yesterday I noted Wisconsin Supreme Court Rules Lockdowns Are Illegal
Conservative justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ monthslong stay-at-home order in a ruling released Wednesday.
The 4-3 decision marked the first time a state’s highest court has overturned a stay-at-home order amid the coronavirus pandemic and sided with Republican leaders who argued the governor’s administration had overstepped its legal authority.
Bizarre Ruling
In a bizarre ruling the Supreme Court ruled that the State could not order closings because it constituted Tyranny, yet the court allowed local politicians to do the same.
As a result, Madison and Milwaukee immediately reimposed the lockdowns,
The result is 72 counties doing their own thing,
Partisan Judges
We can debate the case all day, without changings anyone’s mind on what should be done.
But this seems like a half-assed decision that will please no one, or perhaps half the people, half the time, depending on the county.
One question lingers: Why are there elected partisan judges in the first place?
Mish
Mish, when are you going to stop fear-mongering and acknowledge that infection rates ARE NOT the same as death rates. Especially if those infected are young and healthy. I’d wager $100 with you that of all those who are seen in those bars, without masks or social distancing we will see 0 fatalities. Data upto now shows that about 60-80% infected people remain asymptomatic. If infection rates were the criteria, the country should be shut down every flu season.
Yes, the next point will be “But they will pass it on to the elderly and at risk population.” The elderly and at-risk should self-isolate and take extra precautions. Just as they would do in flu season. Let the healthy population get on with life.
Mish had a model that predicted 100k deaths by april 21. He has been a doomer from the get go. Heck he predicted a recession every year since 2012.
Actually his model predicted 100k infections by April 21, but it didn’t happen until April 22. It was a major miss. Lol
I looked again. He had 120k deaths as his prediction by end of april. Im referring to a post he made referencing a easter peak.
As I recall, it was simply a linear projection (on a log chart). Since various mitigation strategies were employed, it slowed the case growth. Without those, his prediction probably would have been accurate. We’ll still hit 100k, but it took a few weeks longer. A more important question is what will happen this fall. Will it die out completely in the heat of August-September? Will it keep spreading at a slower pace through the summer, and then accelerate again with cold weather. It promises to be an interesting year.
Again, infections do NOT = death. Stop panicking just on infection numbers.
Umm, where did I say infections=death? Where did I panic? I just said it would take a few more weeks to 100k deaths. Of course, every estimate I have made so far has been low, with deaths exceeding them, so it might only take a week or two.
true fatality rate (not CFR) is somewhere between 0.15% and 1.2%
disease is highly contagious and people carry it without symptoms for over a week.
American diet means somewhere around 1/2 of us are obese and/or diabetic and/or have high blood pressure — all of those variables drive up the death rate.
makes sense to be afraid.
doesn’t mean fear leads to the right reaction (indefinite lock down orders spanning multiple months are a futile and damaging reaction). but fear is a reasonable emotion here.
And as is being discovered, even recovery from COVID-19 does not always mean there hasn’t been permanent damage to various internal organs. It’s not something to be utterly nonchalant about just to prove that you are one of “the free and the brave” and just “too tough to care about some stinkin’ virus”.
Fear is a reasonable emotion, but decisions based on fear are usually poor decisions.
If I read it wrong i will freely admit it. I made a note of it when he did it but I will find the post and check
It really isnt. If you read the state law its clear it was violated. It was also clear there was no justification during the arguments….
Some misinformation here.
Northern counties have been ignoring orders for weeks. Their bars have been open.
Counties in the middle to southern part of the state where 90 percent of the people live just made their own shutdown overnight.
The supreme court ruled correctly than the governor alone couldn’t make a shutdown order which violated the state law. It had to come from legislature. It was a technicality not some civil liberties win
Furthermore in northern wisconsin counties the total covid cases combined are under 100. The risk in those remote areas are vacationers bringing it from other parts of the state or from illinois.
I don’t think there is much point discussing what “should be done”, but rather we should try to project what will actually be done. My expectation is that enough people will crowd into bars or host parties, or other things in sufficient quantities to assure that the virus continues to spread at a slow pace all summer, and doesn’t die out. Then, come fall, with colder weather, it will start to explode again in October, and our economy will take well into 2021 before it recovers. Even then, the economy will be burdened for the next ten years with excess medical costs from people with permanent disabilities from Covid19.
Meanwhile, my expectation is that other countries, such as New Zealand, will squash it completely, and their economy will be back running full bore by October, and they will have few long term disabilities, so the economy will not bear that burden.
It’s just a cost of freedom. Most of the time it makes use more efficient, but at certain times, such as these, it causes the virus to have a longer lasting and deeper negative effect on the economy.
I think that a major reason for dissent is the creeping scope of restrictions and outright distortions of what to expect:
In purpose:
First, we were slowing the spread to allow treatment to ramp up.
Now, we’re waiting for a vaccine.
In duration:
Two weeks to stop the spread (and then this will be over)
Give us another month ( and then this will be over)
Give us a couple years ( until there is a vaccine, if ever…)
All of these were described with the general impression that if we wait 2 weeks or 6 weeks it would be over. Now it is New Normal without end.
In the MSM:
An neither is the network news anywhere near honest about the
relative dangers. Sick of seeing:
Hysterical women making cell phone videos.
Report: 84 year old man survives — how did he do it?
Doctors/Nurses lined up to wish the sole survivor good luck.
The morning news Graphic:
1,400,000 tested positive
120,000 recovered
(as if the rest are still on their death beds).
Clarity from the government and journalists would have lessened dissent. So sick of being worked by a bunch of grifters.
This stuff along with Fauci’s denial that there would be a problem in late January and his ear to ear grinning admission that he screwed up the first month of testing development make me wonder if other forces are at work here. You can’t fix a disaster unless you have one.
It certainly is true that there are some that take a very long time to recover. For example, there are still about 4 people in serious or critical condition from the Diamond Princess, and that was what, in February? It is equally true that a lot of people get lost in the system, and are never reported as recovered when they do in fact recover. It’s just very hard for any country to have completely accurate stats for a fast changing situation like this.
Exactly how did Fauci screw up the first month of testing development? He does not work for the CDC.
I don’t disagree. Consider that my state currently doesn’t track recovered at all because they openly admit that they have no way to do so.
345K cases in New York with over 27K deaths would suggest that this virus needs to be taken extremely seriously. The number of COVID deaths reported in Italy, Spain and the U.K. confirm that this is not “fake news” unless of course this is a world wide conspiracy aimed at our president. Spouting that this is all propaganda just shows that you are, to put it politely, grossly misinformed.
you are so right. Why legally empower lower level administrators in lieu of State level administrators? If they think it impinges on basic rights then no one can order people to stay at home.
politically appointed judges are a better answer?
Brown County – really BLUE COUNTY
said they issued local stay at home
I’d dare them to shut down bar
“Why are there elected partisan judges in the first place?”
Because we want the best judges that money can buy.
The decisions about lockdowns should be county by county. There are huge differences between counties. To use Washington as an example, King County (Seattle) and Stevens County (dry land wheat) are vastly different. In Wisconsin Clark county (farm and forest) is nothing like Dane county (Madison). One size fits all is one of the deficiencies in Liberalism, despite its rhetoric about tolerance and respecting diversity.
That only works if people stay in their counties. Is that what you’re proposing?
The court didn’t rule on that. A State level policy can easily allow some counties to open and others to not open. You misunderstand the Legal ruling completely. CA policy is already allowing counties to reopen when they meet criteria. The judges could have ruled that the State has authority but must set criteria that allow counties to open at different times just like California. They instead ruled that the State has zero authority. So one county can have no policy at all and let it rip so everyone gets the virus while the county next door can lock everyone up to protect them from the neighboring county. I certainly hope that won’t happen but it’s legally supported by this ruling.
There have been health emergencies in the past with quarantines. Just because we are in one does not mean that government should bulldoze the constitution into the dirt.
” Those people are begging for another wave of infections” Mish, you use logic for economic posts but throw it out the window for commentary on this situation.
A person goes to a bar>therefore they want a second wave of infections. Non sequitur. One statement is illogically tied to another statement.
You may bee a teensy bit to literal…
Isaiah217 was “just asking” / “just begging” for that reply …
A disturbing fact is infection rates are not down more sharply in the US after stay at home orders have been widely in place 6 weeks. Typical latency period was supposed to be 3-7 days. With few exceptions, it was not supposed to exceed 14 days. How is it we are still clocking about 23,000 new cases per day? Either: (1) social distancing is being ignored by many who are infected, or (2) SARS-Cov-2 is more contagious and more durable in the environment than has been suggested, or (3) there are many cases where the latent infectious period is 30+ days. It seems the first possibility is the likely explanation but if so, then the majority of newly infected should be people who have not been social distancing. Where is that information?
On the plus side, MATH+ may be a reasonably effective treatment protocol for those who need medical intervention (and thankfully, ventilators and ICU are not a big part of that). What are we going to do with the hundreds of thousands of ventilators ordered via the DPA? Can some of those be cancelled? Government is so bloody wasteful in everything it does.
Far more people are getting tested, so you will find more, though the % positive goes down. Bill McBride has a good graph, I think Mish has used it.
That sounds like a plausible explanation, but the COVID hospitalization numbers should not be skewed so much by the increased testing. Hospitalizations in the US appear to be increasing at a pretty significant rate still:
I totally agree. Our new infections are way too high. We are paying a huge price and not getting results. We don’t have data because no one is doing contact tracing which would tell us why we are failing. California is hiring 20000 contact tracers now but is that even enough? There is no Federal program for contact tracing so are there States who have no plans for contact tracing? I can’t follow them all but I hope every State is hiring contact tracers.
Stated more accurately, 399 people who were sick enough to get tested? So maybe 20x or 50x or 100x that many people have contracted the virus?
Multiple cases of COVID-19 in Rochester appear linked to a single house party in recent weeks, according to Olmsted County’s top public health official.
Through testing and contact tracing, health officials believe that a single person at the party spread the virus to multiple other individuals, who further spread the virus in the community, said Graham Briggs, Olmsted County public health director.
“We’ve been tracking this and working on interrupting this transmission that originally started at one house party, and have been working very hard to stop this from transmitting further out from where it originally did,” he said. “One person really can lead to dozens of other infections.”
The news comes as Gov. Tim Walz prepares to lift the state’s stay-at-home order and relax other social distancing guidelines.
“It goes to show that if you put 30 or 40 other people in a room together, and let this virus move around, it goes so quickly,” Briggs said.
Public health officials say they will release more details about the situation Friday.
To date, Rochester has 399 cases of COVID-19 and nine deaths.
Briggs said that Olmsted County has been able to find the source of 85 percent of the area’s cases through contact tracing, a process in which health staffers interview patients who have tested positive for COVID-19 to find out who else they’ve been in contact with.
What? sick people infecting others? unheard of.
It’s pretty predictable, really.
Not much different from playing a Russian roulette variant where you’re pointing the gun at random passersby.
Monstrous Cruelty: As Hunger Soars, Trump USDA Resumes Effort to Take Nutrition Benefits From More Than a Million People
“The administration has decided that now—amid the most pervasive need in a century—is a great time to crack down on Americans who rely on food stamps.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/14/150000-americans-sacrificed-stock-market-kushner-reportedly-advised-less-covid-19
Fake News
The cruelty is the point.
If Congress can vote about Tr$3 packages, why cannot Congress or State Legislatures adopt laws about what is going on now? Judges shouldn’t be deciding, and neither should the executive. If constitutional rights are being temporarily infringed, it should be the legislature that is taking responsibility, setting the stipulations, implementation guidelines, penalties, and enforcement priorities.
Surely it’s still better to have the authority to lock down be more decentralized? It’s far more likely that a group of citizens could hold their mayor to account than the governor. Still though, seeing people rush into a bar without practicing social distancing or wearing any kind of protective gear is very indicative of why authorities want to shut things down in the first place. As Jordan Peterson says, rights are only half of the equation. People need to accept the responsibilities that come with those rights.
And who gets to decide if they are acting responsibly? The government?
“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of legislators are always good?Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind”
A government of, by, for the people might get to decide if people are acting responsibly in some cases. In other cases it might be the family, friends, community, and on up the government ladder.
Of course we do not have a government of, by, for the people so that little bit of theory goes out the window.
But anyone who believes that each and every person is to be the sole determiner of whether they are acting responsibly or not, is espousing just as bogus a theory.
Classic judicial overreach. Talk about legislating from the bench.
So, the governor is the legislature in your mind? OK!
Since when have judges not been hyperpartisan? Seems like most want to ignore the constitution and write their own law. Like fining a baker $50k for refusing to bake a cake. Or overturning a ban on immigration from countries we like to bomb. First make them really angry at us, then import them and put them on the public dole. Now there’s some real fine public policy by our wise overlords. Is it any wonder this country is circling down the drain.
Just because the other side does it doesn’t make it ok. Acceptance of the “lesser” evil is what got us in this situation.
“Fox News reports Wisconsin Bars Flooded with Patrons “
What’s Pat Robertson got to say about all this public debauchery? Doesn’t seem very churchy at all.