Thanks for publishing my photograph, @Popville.
It’s of a shuttered gym on U Street, NW in Washington, DC (of course).
The comments on the post are mostly (all) about how gyms have closed, not about how they would open.
I think this is a place for health professionals and public health professionals to engage in a conversation about the future, not the past, based on data.
It’s time to have a different conversation, which is, what is needed to re-open the gyms. I would not support anything that worsens the epidemic or exposes more people. After that is assured:
- We have to decide the public health interest in having people throw weights around their living rooms unsupervised. Or everyone buying their own gym sets at all. This is why we have gyms in the first place.
- We’re on the verge of having coordinated antibody testing which could maybe (maybe) separate the immune from the non-immune. This would in turn allow for a test-and-release approach for some. Many many articles about this are emerging.
- A mental health pandemic on top of a coronavirus one doesn’t help.
- As a prelude to this, NYC is piloting opening parks and streets, not closing them, to manage density intelligently. Closing everything simply crowds people into smaller and smaller spaces. We can’t say NYC is being reckless, they have to get this right.
Again, not advocating for putting people in harms way. We need data to guide our decisions, however/and we should start to look into the future, though, and evaluate carefully what an essential business is.
Happy to entertain a conversation about this in the comments, or if that’s not the way you want to go, send me an email.
Links to relevant articles
Photo by PoPville flickr user Ted Eytan I’ve been getting tons of messages about folks concerned about what’s happening with their gyms. So let me just dedicate this post to it. Since gyms have now been ordered closed – what is your gym doing regarding your memberships?
Source: PoPville » Let’s Talk Gyms