Yet another Oregon business bites the dust, courtesy of not being able to open due to business restrictions prohibiting businesses from making money by opening (funny how that works, right?)

As reported by news station KOBI Longtime Ashland theater closes its doors for good:

ASHLAND, Ore. —Another business falls victim to the pandemic.

Actually, the correct writing of this sentence would be

ASHLAND, Ore. —Another business falls victim to the unreasonable, un-informed, paranoid, overreaching response of Kate Brown to the COVID-19 virus.

But I digress.

Ashland Street Cinema is closing its doors, for good.

After being closed since March, with nearly zero revenue and it’s lease coming to an end, the decision was ultimately made to close down for good.

The theater industry is one of many that have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic.

Yup, not much more to say - it's hard to stay open when you can't make money.

But this reminded me of a question posed back in September; Where Are All the Movie Theater COVID Cases?

Where are all the movie-theater COVID-19 cases?

As soon as the pandemic was on for real in March, movie theaters closed down totally. They were, experts warned us, super-spreading locations of the highest order. And even as they’ve been reopening, the warnings remain incredibly dire. Every publication has run an essay by a critic saying they didn’t feel safe going back to the movies right now. We ran just such a piece today.

When it became clear that Warner Brothers was going to dare to open Tenet in theaters, and that other movies would also dip a toe in the COVID-infested waters, the Onion’s AV club ran an interview with an epidemiologist headlined “Please don’t go to a movie theater: ‘It’s just about the last thing I’d do right now.'”

Well, that sounds very scary. People did it anyway. Studios have been dumping content into the theaters for a month, and some people have bought tickets. But not one reported outbreak. So the question remains:

Where are all the movie-theater COVID-19 cases?

I’ve been looking, very hard, for any reported evidence, because I don’t want even vaguely encourage people to make a deadly choice. But there hasn’t been one reported COVID-related death to movie theater attendance anywhere in the world. There hasn’t even been a reported case of COVID. Not a symptomatic case. Not an asymptomatic case. Nothing.

How can that be possible? Movie theaters aren’t open in Los Angeles or New York right now, but they are open most other places. Seventy percent of all screens in the United States are operating, not at full capacity, but available for customers. The coronavirus hasn’t gone away. So where are the cases? Not one case in six months. Nine months, really, when you consider that the plague started in China in December. Again, how can that be possible?

Maybe it's bad reporting?

It could be that there have been cases of movie-related COVID-19 infection, but we just don’t know about them. People could easily have caught coronavirus in theaters in New York or Italy in February, or Wuhan in December, or Los Angeles on March 1, but we weren’t tracking COVID-19 just yet. So there’s that, but you can’t really count that era. As late as March 2, the Mayor of New York was recommending that his citizens to go to the movies.

Since I’m encouraging New Yorkers to go on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus, I thought I would offer some suggestions. Here’s the first: thru Thurs 3/5 go see “The Traitor” @FilmLinc. If “The Wire” was a true story + set in Italy, it would be this film.

— Bill de Blasio (@BilldeBlasio) March 3, 2020

By the time theaters started reopening in May, we’d gotten a little better at tracing viral spread. I went to the movies in Kyle, Texas, on May 4. The theater down the street from me opened for business a few days later. Since then, the United States has had millions of Coronavirus cases. Not a single one has been traced to a movie theater. ? Well, you say, maybe they missed a case. After all, no one is required to tell doctors “I went to the movies last week.” That’s very true. But someone would have fessed up, at some point. I doubt that the media or the medical establishment would have kept that information from us. Stories pop up all the time of restaurants or groceries having to close for a deep clean after a staff member tests positive. Do you remember the story about the church group that died because they were singing? Or the stories about outbreaks at weddings and family parties? One guy died of COVID-19 after the Sturgis motorcycle rally and it was front-page news in the New York Times. These aren’t exactly state secrets. If there had been significant traceable movie-theater outbreaks, we would know.

Maybe they're in other countries? Nope...

But that’s just the United States, right? Other countries in the world have handled the virus better. Well, Asian countries that live and die by contact tracing have not reported a single outbreak related to moviegoing. Theaters are currently open in Taiwan, Singapore, mainland China, Vietnam, South Korea, and elsewhere. No cases reported, anywhere.

A friend of mine said, “right, because everyone is monitoring the viral loads of people at the 6:30 showing of Unhinged in Bratislava.” They’re not, but we certainly stand on guard. If anything virally bad happens anywhere in the world as a result of innocent consensual leisure activity, we know. It was a big story in the U.S. when a South Korean megachurch defied the laws of nature, and when a Seoul nightclub outbreak “showed the perils of reopening” .

The same goes for movie theaters in Europe, which doesn’t have the virus under as tight control as Asia. Theaters are open in Italy and in Amsterdam. They are open in France and the U.K. In Sweden, they never closed. In Barcelona, they opened for a bit, and then re-closed. Meanwhile, the King and Queen of Spain went to a movie in Madrid to show support for the much-maligned industry. Despite the fact that most film festivals worldwide have gone virtual out of fear of viral spread, the BCN festival in Catalonia happened in late July. More than 8000 people went to those movies, with zero COVID deaths–and zero cases–reported.

Or maybe, just maybe, theaters aren't a problem at all...

Maybe movie theaters aren’t as deadly as advertised. Or maybe the nature of movie-going has changed for the better. Popcorn-dispensing robots are now staffing movie theaters in South Korea. This entertaining report from the Guardian, published six weeks ago, describes a global cinema-going experience of small crowds, staggered seating, deep cleaning, mask wearing, and general isolation and privacy that would have been unthinkable a year ago. For the time being, at least, everything that was once unpleasant about going to the movies has vanished.

Or maybe we’ve just gotten lucky. But I don’t think so. I think we’re gonna make it! As an epidemiologist told Vulture last month, “Unless you’re being coughed or sneezed on by the person behind you, or the children next to you, I don’t see any major risk.”

Meanwhile, cinema-mad India is currently experiencing the world’s most severe COVID outbreak, with case counts nearing 100,000 per day, but you can’t blame that on people going to the movies.

All movie theaters in India are currently closed, and have been since March.

But remember, all of Oregon's business closings are based on alphabet bureaucrats sitting around spit-balling about what possibly could happen based on data models. Real data is not an option for our transparent Governor.