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Boston-area hotels have heart

Hyatt Regency in Cambridge with heart reflecting off Charles River

617 Images photographed several Boston-area hotels that are lit up to show support for healthcare and other essential workers during the Covid-19 crisis, including the Hyatt Regency on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, which reflected off the Charles River tonight.

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Had shown the same compassion for their housekeepers whom they fired after unwittingly having them train their replacements.

Those jerkoffs don't deserve your publicity. I'm glad I stay in AirBnbs and independent motels instead of giving these people business. There's the next boomer thing that's gone after Applebee's and Macy's. Corporate arrogance in the form of unnecessary business travel has kept them in business this whole time.

What have I kept saying? This is the Great Societal Reset of 2020. We're all finally learning what a useless waste so many activities were, and how much we were overspending.

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In the next few weeks, the restrictions will lift (or be modified enough so we don't have to feel choked off) and we will either (a) go back to our usual habits, and even more so because we've been cooped up for the past several weeks, or (b) take into consideration what we've been doing and change it.

People will be reluctant at first to go back to their usual routines because this virus has forced us to review and change our habits. Others will welcome the lifting as a signal to go back to their old habits - for them, all this lockdown was just an inconvenience, something that they could dismiss wouldn't happen to them, and they chafe at the bit to be normal again. Still others will have seen this as an opportunity to go on power trips, but when the crisis is over, they can't do it anymore.

Will business, tourism and everything else survive? It will - it'll just take a little longer than normal. And it will be gradual, not instantaneous.

The biggest thing of all? People will finally realize it takes being apart, even forcibly, to realize what being together really is. Physical distancing over the past few weeks has yielded desirable (actually, expected and even better results than we imagined), but it can't continue forever. Once we're released from this quarantine, we'll slowly but surely gather together and finally have those parties and celebrations we've been putting off. And, we all get to breathe a huge sigh of relief.

(One side note, and this is my personal opinion: If politicians, the media, and so-called experts are hoping for a perpetual panic to change society for good, I've got one word for them: rebellion. Keep up with the guilt trips and the fear porn, keep on reneging on when we can relax our rules, and I will guarantee you that the pent-up frustration and anger will manifest itself in far worse ways than a virus ever could. It's understandable you don't want to have this virus spread, but it's also foolish to think that the state of alert can be extended forever.)

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Within a year things will be mostly back to normal. If people aren't traveling or socializing in big groups, it's because the economy sucks and they can't afford it.

This shutdown has made people realize how much they enjoyed all the things they previously took for granted and will be eager to return.

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You are correct - I'm one of the people who is looking forward to going back to restaurants, riding the T, and taking vacations once these restrictions are lifted. I've edited my post.

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In the next few weeks, the restrictions will lift (or be modified enough so we don't have to feel choked off) and we will either (a) go back to our usual habits, and even more so because we've been cooped up for the past several weeks, or (b) take into consideration what we've been doing and change it.

I am not expecting restrictions to be lifted in the next few weeks. Should that actually occur, we WILL see another spike in cases and we already know what that is doing. Unlike others, the Governor isn't stupid.

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There's a quite well researched and humanized "American Experience" episode which originally aired in 2018 [100th Anniversary of the beginning of the Pandemic called the "Spanish Flu"]*1

After it ended in the fall of 2018 [there was a minor return in the Spring of 1919 in the U.S. and it even re-surged in 1920 in a few places] -- people rapidly exiled the experience and tried to pick-up the pieces and resume everyday life. Of course one major factor was the sheer scale of the 1918 Pandemic -- it killed over 550,000 Americans [population at the time was 103 million. In Boston it killed more than 4,000 in just the city in two months [population

From many recent studies of the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic -- its profound impact on the US and the rest of the world is starting to be recognized
for example just one study by Andrew Noymer and Michel Garenne*2
a few excerpts [with my highlights in Bold]:

Crosby (1989) cites estimates that one-quarter of the American population had clinically recognizable cases of flu during the epidemic...estimates that it took the lives of 550,000 Americans, a figure that he deems conservative. The estimated population of the United States on 1 July 1918 was some 103 million (Linder and Grove 1943), so approximately 0.5 percent of the US population died as a result of the epidemic....

Normally, influenza kills only the very young and the very old.... In 1917, death rates are high at the very youngest ages, drop to near zero later in childhood, then show a gradual increase throughout younger adulthood and a steeper increase above age 60.

At the youngest ages, influenza death rates in 1918 are about the same as in 1917. At the oldest ages, influenza death rates in 1918 are less than in 1917. In contrast, the middle ages, the age groups 15–24, 25–34, and 35–44, show a drastic departure from the norm. The death rates have a local maximum at these ages, such that adults in the prime of their lives experienced death rates from influenza comparable to those experienced by the elderly.

Refs:

*1
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/influenza/
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/influenza/#transcript
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/influenza-boston/

*2
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2740912/#R4
Popul Dev Rev. 2000; 26(3): 565–581.
PMCID: PMC2740912
NIHMSID: NIHMS126348
PMID: 19530360
The 1918 Influenza Epidemic's Effects on Sex Differentials in Mortality in the United States
Andrew Noymer and Michel Garenne

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...keep on reneging on when we can relax our rules...

I'm curious. There's a lot to question and/or criticize in gov't performance in this, but when do you think they renenged on anything so far?

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But there's definitely an element of "let's do this for two more weeks" and then "OK two more weeks" and then "OK maybe another month", which from a short-term perspective gives people an element of hope (I suppose?), and most importantly buys them 24 hours til their next press conference, when being honest - which I am now assuming is "prepare to live like this for three years with occasional breaks of a couple weeks, maybe" - would just bring everything to a terrible conclusion right away.

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You are truly a friend of the working person. Except for the ones priced out of buying a place for themselves because it's been gobbled up by some capitalist to be used as an AirBnb. Nothing says "ok boomer" like avoiding hotel taxes, right?

Fight the power, Will.

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Least I believe they do in CA, where I use the service. And working folks rent instead of owning, so your argument is disingenuous.

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And working folks rent instead of owning, so your argument is disingenuous.

The AirBnB market displaces working people who rent wherever property owners can make more money by renting out their apartments short-term to travelers than they can by renting them out long-term to working people.

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Sky's the limit. Markets work. And what do you think is going to happen to failed hotels if they fail as hotels?

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Maybe they will be razed and turned into a parking lot. Or something that isn't shelter at all. Maybe they will be turned into more AirBnbs.

And who says,outside of the current situation, they are failing?

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That’s why people build hotels and rent rooms. The market isn’t telling Hyatt to close, but it is telling Hyatt to lay off workers. Can’t go both ways Will

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To trick the incumbent workers. That's the grievance.

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Hyatt/employee labor relations. But in the end Hyatt deals with the consequences of those decisions based on market principles. And they aren’t that far off other American corporations right now and what they’re doing.

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How does AirBnb gobbling up a place help renters? Pretty hard for the working class to rent a place when the entire building is unavailable. Plenty of people use hotels because they are regulated in ways that airBnbs aren't, and aren't open to easy scams like some "airBnbs" are.

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"Corporate arrogance in the form of unnecessary business travel"

I love this. I live in East Boston adjacent to the airport and it always seemed to me that a big percentage of all the coming and going was unnecessary. Even before Zoom and Facetime and the rest.

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