I think there's an interesting discussion there! I got curious and read the order and it says food and agriculture is essential work along with hardware stores. But it explicitly says to block off garden, paint and furniture in stores with more than 50k square feet. I would say it should be open and think she should explain how that got in there.
Really, it's madness that the federal government isn't providing better guidelines both on what should stay open but also what conditions trigger different levels of closure and social distancing at the state or local level. IMO the state shouldn't be expected (or maybe allowed) to create new special guidelines unless it involves a very specific regional need.
Regardless, I don't think it's a leftist dream scenario.
Interesting take. This is more of a philosophical comment than a political comment, but we would have never formed the U.S.A. were this thinking part of the pact. Policies directed at the health, safety, and welfare of individuals have historically been the province of the States. I find it unthinkable that the federal government could tell a state that it cannot enact measures stricter than those mandated by the federal government to protect its citizens.
What do you think of Trump's EPA telling California that it must roll back its environmental regulations that sweep more broadly than federal regulations? Because that's a real thing that happened, and I have a feeling you aren't a fan of that.
yeah I'd be OK with them being allowed to create stricter regulations, but I'd prefer to see some sort of science backed reasoning. I put "allowed" in parentheses because hadn't thought much about it and it would require competence at the federal level. But I don't think a state should be allowed to do something like say "church is now OK without any restrictions".
I was really thinking more about use of expert resources, though. I don't think it's a good system to have 50 different expert departments creating guidelines from scratch. Like someone at the CDC should be able to tell all 50 states whether or not closing down the garden department at home depot will reduce the spread in a meaningful way - it won't spread differently in Michigan or Alabama or California and you shouldn't need different people scrambling to solve this problem in parallel.
Basically I think the system should be like this:
1) CDC coordinates with other federal departments to create general guidelines for different stages of distancing - like if you are seeing x growth rate, implement this, y growth rate implement that, etc. It would include details like crowd density in different settings - parks, factories, stores, etc, best practices for PPE in those locations and whatever
2) States/counties municipalities closely monitor local patterns and execute the federal guidelines once they hit or are very close to certain thresholds
2a) States adjust needs specifically to their needs. The environmental regulations example is a good one! Like if states are seeing parks used in unique ways that leads to damage, they could take independent actions to protect them. Deciding that hardware stores are unessential is a bad example.
3) Then reverse it for opening back up. Scott Gottlieb had something that laid it out pretty well.