California’s Roadmap to Modify the Stay-at-Home Order [pdf]

You do ask what billionaire funds that website you cite. No contact details usually indicate a Citizens United style slush fund.

Is there a cite for that? Because that's not the way the data looks.

Everywhere was growing with roughly the same exponent before lockdown. The numbers were bigger in NY because it grew longer pre-detection, but there's no reason to believe that everywhere else was any different. Really this disease's growth constant looks shockingly consistent almost everywhere in the world.

> It's unclear to me why we're making these policies at a federal level.

We... aren't. Literally every existing lockdown regime is being enforced at the state level or lower. For the Boise example you mention, the relevant regulation is a stay in place order from Gov. Little in late March.

Edit to show the point better: Go here (easily the best visualization site, FWIW), scroll to the bottom where you can see a log chart of per-capita infection rates normalized to a single "start time" metric, and compare the Idaho chart with the New York one.

https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/

They are almost exactly the same chart, modulo a vertical offset and a kink in NY data in the second week (which consensus says is the testing backlog finally catching up).

If Idaho's detached housing and automobile dependence was reducing its rate of infection spread, it should be visible in the slope of this line. And it clearly isn't.

It does not. The exponential curve, per the graph legend, is what would be expected without intervention.

> How prepared is our state to test everyone who is symptomatic?

Another view is that opening the economy should involve testing people who are NOT symptomatic.

Quoting from an MIT Technology Review article (https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/08/998785/stop-covi...):

> The key, says Romer, is repeatedly testing everyone without symptoms to identify who is infected. (People with symptoms should just be assumed to have covid-19 and treated accordingly.) All those who test positive should isolate themselves; those who test negative can return to work, traveling, and socializing, but they should be tested every two weeks or so.

...

> He calls the $2 trillion legislation passed by Congress “palliative care” for the economy. If you took $100 billion and put it into testing, he says, we would “be far better off.”

Obviously for medical intervention purposes, you need to sometimes test people with symptoms. But for epidemiological and economic ones, it may be more important to test those without. So maybe neither is wrong, just different purposes.

Incidentally, the same article presents a reasonable argument that while keeping the economy shut down causes damage, opening it too early might cause more long-term economic damage than it prevents in the short term. If so, choosing between the economy and saving lives might be a false choice.