My preference, in the other thread at least, is to accept quotes from anywhere reputable (where "reputable" is a wide-cast from Fox News, Mother Jones, or Huffington Post). Most decent websites and articles will make it clear that they're an opinion piece or a fact-based article. But you'll find that most of my personal arguments are 100% focused on the data. Opinions aren't bad, but it needs to be clear where these opinions "came" from.

EDIT: I don't think "opinion" pieces are the best material to quote from though, not if you're trying to build consensus. Opinion pieces are great if you want to say "Republicans think X", or "Democrats think Y". But I'm not sure that's the current discussion. At best, you can say "Republicans think X and X is kind of an interesting point", which I think would be an acceptable argument...

Anyway, so what's the data say right now?




In many parts of the country, we are well over 100% ICU capacity. No, not all diseases right now are COVID19. There's flu out there. There's also babies getting born (which uses up an ICU bed initially, then a hospital bed in the long term if there were complications, like a C-section involved). Its not like babies stopped getting born during the pandemic, we rely upon our hospital system.

EDIT: Adding "Hospital Beds" as a secondary data source:



We can see that non-ICU hospital-beds are similarly overcapacity right now. Our hospital systems are incredibly stressed at the moment, no matter what measurement you use.

Now look at the data more carefully: Last Updated Dec. 20, 2021. All statistics are obsolete the moment they're published, but this one even more so because its a week old, and Omicron has done this to our case numbers:



Wash-Po's formatting by the way, but this above data is just taken from John's Hopkins and I really like the state-by-state analysis. (The county-level analysis doesn't seem to update very often from that other website, but Wash. Po updates this state-by-state case count daily). What this Wash. Po data makes clear is that across the country, this Omicron surge is clearly steeper and faster-spreading than Delta, Alpha, and the original strain. This Omicron "bump" is very evident in the graph in all locations. (The left-most point in all of these graphs is Feb 29, 2020, the start of the pandemic in the USA at least as Mardi Gras celibrations kicked off our first super spreader events)

So, we can see what Omicron does to the case numbers. Furthermore, the biggest "surges" we've had in 2020 were from the Dec / January period before Omicron. But today, Omicron counts have skyrocketed far past the worst points of the last 2 years of this pandemic.

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What does the data say? We are going to run out of hospital beds, in many counties across the county, at least for some period of time. This surge will not stop until mid-January at the earliest, maybe February if we're unlucky. The huge influx of COVID19 / Omicron cases is evident already, stressing everyone's testing network.

I can make this prediction because we have already run out of hospital beds last week in many counties, and the numbers this week are worse than last week. And the numbers next week probably are going to be worse again and again until the surge subsides (If history repeats, then the surge will subside sometime in January).

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Now. Lets say you're a technology company getting ready to send a team of engineers onto an airplane, to Las Vegas for a convention. What's the calculus here? What's the chance that someone gets sick from Omicron on the visit, and is hospitalized by the time they get back? Are you willing to lose that productivity over the convention? Will your local area even have a hospital bed (or ICU bed) for them to stay if they get sick?

Some tech firms are willing to take the risk. Others are not. If hospitals are expected to be full, why take the risk right now?

EDIT: Technology / Engineering is not like a job at the supermarket or even a skilled job like nursing/doctors. Many engineers are straight up irreplaceable: when you build $10-million+ computer systems (such as AWS), the engineers who know the ins-and-outs of the system are worth their weight in gold. Not because of their skill, but simply institutional knowledge... the knowledge that comes from building such a system in the first place. To get a new engineer who understands the system, you practically have to rebuild the system from scratch, or spend months (or years) training them back up to understand the whys and hows the system was built. The economics are completely different, you can't afford to lose anybody.