COVID-19, day spa, hair, Tips and Tricks
We stand in solidarity with Open Safe California
To take a stand with us, please sign the petition to SAVE OUR SALONS and help reopen salons and barbershops 👉🏼 Link below:
Over the course of the one month we were open, we served over 800 clients with 12 stylists and 0 reported cases of COVID-19 transmission. The salon industry has had similar success with no evidence pointing to it being a source of transmission. We are here today only, demonstrating that hair services can be SAFELY performed inside and should be permitted to do so in California, like the rest of the country.
“Closing personal care services has not stopped these services from happening, it’s stopping them from happening safely. The forced closure of businesses opens the door for unlicensed, untrained individuals to perform these services at clients’ homes in potentially unsanitary & unsafe environments, further increasing the COVID-19 risk exposure. To ensure the safety of the public, we need safe, clean spaces to offer services.” – Open Safe California
‼️WE NEED YOUR HELP‼️After months of closures, salons & barbershops across the state of California ask for your help in reopening. Sign the petition to SAVE OUR SALONS 👉🏼 https://tinyurl.com/y2k23qj8
Salons across the United States have reopened, aside from those in California which remains the ONLY state where salons are mandated to remain closed, or solely operate outdoors.
Salons have been opened in most states for over seven weeks and by aggressively implementing all requirements, it appears that the salon industry has not been identified as a source of transmission. Even in cases where employees may have tested positive for COVID-19, no transmission to customers has been documented.
It is a fact that all hair salons and all licensed hair professionals have been extensively trained in delivering safety and sanitation as an important aspect of their jobs. With added PPE and regulations, salon professionals only continue to have an intense focus and understanding of their personal health and safety, alongside that of their customers.
We ask that state leadership remove salons & barbers from the businesses required to close when a county is on the California Watchlist, and allow them to reopen following all state & county regulations.
Sign the Save our Salons petition and help hair salons thrive in a COVID world⚡
- Fall Into a New Self-Care Routine - October 6, 2021
- A Look Back at Changes in the Community - July 31, 2021
- What Your Esthetician Wants You to Know Before Your Brazilian Wax - April 10, 2021
This analysis shows that hairstyling salons and barbershops are more than 100,000 times safer than would be expected from a simple analysis of the probability of a client catching Covid19 on their premises if they did not take the protective measures they do. This underscores the extremely effective measures taken by them to protect members of the public.
To Whom It May Concern:
PLEASE ROUTE THIS EMAIL TO PEOPLE ACTIVELY ADVOCATING FOR THE REOPENING OF HAIRSTYLING SALONS AND BARBERSHOPS IN CALIFORNIA AND THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES.
I am a retired scientist living in Berkeley, California, and the dear friend of a hairstylist who is adversely impacted by public policies that have been adopted in response to the pandemic. I am writing to you to demonstrate by-the-use of current statistics about the pandemic and routine probability calculations the very high degree of safety of hairstyling salons and barbershops for members of the public. I hope that this analysis will be helpful to you in your efforts to get them reopened.
I disagree with the common knowledge that it is not safe for opening hair salons and barbershops at this time, which I believe is based on a misapplication of scientific findings concerning the health effects of the pandemic. In the text of a recent petition to reopen hairstyling salons, it stated that out of 139 clients who visited a hairstyling salon in the state of Missouri no one tested positive for Covid19 even though the hairstyling salon had two hairstylists that tested positive for Covid19.
Looking at these numbers from the standpoint of probability theory, I found an interesting result that leads me to my conclusion about the very high degree of safety of hairstyling salons and barbershops. From recent statistics on Worldometer for Covid19 in the United States, it is reported that there have been 4,371,839 active cases of Covid19 in the United States with 54,219,575 tests in the United States. From these numbers, I calculate that the probability of a test indicating an active case of Covid19 in the United States is 0.0806, the number of active cases divided by the number of tests.
Therefore, the probability of an active case of Covid19 not occurring is 1 – 0.0806 or 0.9194. Since 139 clients were exposed to an environment where Covid19 was present, it would be expected that (0.0806)x139 = 11.2034 clients would become infected with Covid19, (i.e. the probability of an active case of Covid19 occurring times the number of people exposed to someone with Covid19). In other words, it would be expected that approximately 11 clients would be infected with Covid19 from the group of 139 people who visited the hairstyling salon. The probability of none of them being infected with Covid19, which was the case, is (0.9194)^139 = 0.000008455, (0.9194 times itself 139 times, since each person has the same probability of not being infected with Covid19), or less than 1 in 100,000.
This probability, the probability of less than 1 in 100,000 of no one being infected with Covid19 from a group of 139 people, is more than 9,500 times lower than the probability of 0.0806 for an individual to be infected with Covid19 in the United States. Since not one of the 139 people who went to the Hairstyling Salon was infected with Covid19, which defies this very low probability calculated for no one being infected with Covid19, it shows that the protective measures that were taken in the hairstyling salon worked extremely well. This analysis shows that hairstyling salons and barbershops are among the safest places to be in the United States during the pandemic and are much safer than the public places that members of the public can now visit.
It should be noted that hairstylists, who are licensed cosmetologists, and licensed barbers receive extensive training for 1600 hours for cosmetologists and 1500 hours for barbers in maintaining clean, safe, sanitized, and disinfected tools and workspaces. Restaurant workers are not required to have such training. Likewise, it is uncertain if the people who process and handle the food that is delivered to the restaurants have had such training. Yet, restaurants in the United States, and-in-particular California have been open for takeout and outside dining while hairstyling salons and barbershops in many locales in the United States, and notably California have not been allowed to open.
Just recently the CDC, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the bedrock of scientific discourse on Covid19, ruled that schools could reopen in the Fall and children could return to their classes. If attending school is judged to be safe for children who may not always practice good social distancing or the wearing of face masks, why is the opening of hairstyling salons and barbershops not allowed, especially; in light of the probabilities I calculated above indicating the great unlikelihood of contracting Covid19 from being present in them?
Lastly, it should be noted that there is considerable concern about the number and severity of cases of mental illness arising from the social distancing and isolation policies enacted in response to the pandemic. I believe that hairstyling salons and barbershops are beneficial for the mental health of members of the public, in that the caring attention hairstylists and barbers provide in an amiable environment is uplifting, as is looking good with one’s hair styled in an attractive and complementary way. Likewise, the opportunity to return to work would be very uplifting and helpful to hairstylists and barbers who are currently under financial and emotional distress, as a result of policies being inappropriately applied to them that have been enacted in response to the pandemic.
I hope this analysis is helpful to you in your efforts to advocate for the reopening of hairstyling salons in California and throughout the United States. Please use it as you see fit. I am available to discuss my analysis and its implications with any interested parties.
I wish you every success in your efforts to advocate for the reopening of hairstyling salons and barbershops in California and throughout the United States.
Sincerely yours,
Mark Gottlieb