As of March 26 2020, almost everyone living in an urban city is under some type of stay-at-home or shelter-in-place order. Even if you are not, you probably shouldn’t be wandering around outside other essential errands and solo exercise.
Penalties and Fines Enforced?
Yes, governments are starting to hand out fines. In the most extreme case, Taiwan requires a one million dollar fine for those who violate the mandatory home quarantine (that’s twice the median annual salary in Taiwan). If that isn’t frightening enough, they will also publish your name hoping to shame you and your family!
Don’t be this guy – and his name is Chen Tse, who just couldn’t resist hanging out at an internet cafe for 72+ hours instead of staying home. I think they made him put on the bio suit after detaining him.
Playing lots of World of Warcraft or League of Legends in a cafe is already pretty bad. The hygiene situation can’t be great, no matter how high tech or fancy the place. However, even worse is going clubbing, another case of a million NT fine. The police used some fancy mobile app connected to their cloud database of recent arrivals under mandatory home quarantine (the video makes it look like they just enter your ID number). When they randomly checked some drunken clubbers, they found the guy.
Does It Work?
It’s too soon to tell whether these tactics help. But I don’t think anyone in NYC playing basketball in violation of the stay-at-home orders is expecting to get a fine more than their annual salary. Perhaps they should? It’s hard to practice social distancing in contact sports. Or perhaps we are simply fooled by randomness, and looking to mimic countries that simply haven’t had major confirmed outbreaks yet (they also haven’t done much testing, other than new arrivals for imported cases).
Either way, please follow whatever orders and social distancing your community is mandating. Perhaps you need to endure a few things – laggy internet, dancing alone, or NBA Jam on the emulator. But it keeps us all safer. The sooner we flatten the curve, the sooner we can explore returning to a semi-normal livelihood.
