The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May • Hacker News Board

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#131

Post by chasd00 » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

glofish wrote: post #87

primeradical wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To anyone reading the comment above, it is extremely poor advice and should not be followed. Stay at home and shelter in place orders are not solely for the purpose of protecting ones-self from contracting the virus. They also serve to limit the spread from unsuspecting carriers. You can carry and spread the virus unknowingly and this will result in susceptible people contracting it and dying. The only way we know th…

> The only way we know that shelter in place orders worked is if they feel like an overreaction after this is all over with. That makes no sense whatsoever. Millions of children are not vaccinated because of the lockdown. Will the mayor take responsibility for his share of deaths that will occur? Will there be a counter for that, that ticks up every day? And for all the pain and suffering of those that can't afford g…

"forget it Jake, it's Chinatown"

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#132

Post by newacct583 » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 9:38 PM UTC

CPLX wrote: post #111

newacct583 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ease up how? I mean, what's the specific proposal? The lockdown isn't "total" anyway -- very large numbers of people are still working at full salary (including, it must be pointed out, probably more than half the readers of this very site). There's little to no low hanging fruit of safe jobs that can be reopened. Just go look at the California list of "essential" jobs and tell us what needs to be added. Fundamentall…

> Ease up how? I mean, what's the specific proposal? Not sure how to put this but if you're advocating for the side that wants to confine seven million people to their homes and shut down nearly all commerce you're the one that has to come up with the specific proposal. The objection is that there doesn't seem to be any kind of numerical metric to determine the success of this shelter in place policy. It's public pol…

> shut down nearly all commerce

That doesn't seem right. I got tacos from down the street last night. I got paid a week ago. I bought some home office related junk from Amazon yesterday. I need to go shopping tonight.

That's the problem with not being specific, you find yourself spouting silly hyperbole instead of argument. No, "almost all commerce" isn't shutdown, that's not remotely true. We're looking, depending on how pessimistic you want to be, at like a 20-30% drop in GDP. And that's big, but it's simply not almost all.

So I ask again: who do you want to go back to work before the virus case load drops? Be specific.

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#133

Post by Gibbon1 » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 9:38 PM UTC

djrogers wrote: post #46

tptacek wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We in fact know very little about the consequences of serious C19 infections in people under 50, and people in their 40s apparently make up a substantial cohort of ICU C19 patients. We also don't know the long-term health implications of a severe C19 case, and there's some evidence to suggest permanent lung damage is one possible outcome. And, even if we didn't know any of those things, avoiding the deaths of people…

Long term health implications have nothing to do with the lockdowns, and extending them has no impact on those theoretical boogey-men. Lockdowns were intended to 'flatten the curve' so that hospitals aren't overwhelmed. The same number of people will get sick but over a longer period of time. Keeping the lockdowns in full effect will only ensure that those who get disproportionately sick are the ones in critical serv…

> The same number of people will get sick but over a longer period of time.

Fewer people get sick for two reasons.

Flattening the curve reduces the amount of epidemic overshoot. People assume you reach herd immunity levels and the epidemic then dies out. Reality you overshoot herd immunity.

At some point you can reestablish contact tracing and isolation. That by itself reduces the required level of immunity and containment needed to keep the infection in check. Except for a few countries we don't have that now.

My bet at this point is within a few months. Rapid RNA tests will start being produced in large numbers. Synthetic anti-bodies for covid19 will become available. Contact tracing and isolation containment will be reestablished. Rapid RNA tests make contact tracing possible at scale. Antibody therapy increases the effectiveness of contact tracing. Basically you test everyone with symptoms. You then dose all their contacts with anti-SARS-COV2 antibodies.

Not the end of the world.

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#134

Post by rbritton » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

abadaba wrote: post #55

jamroom wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our society includes people who are over 50 - how do ensure that YOU do not transmit coronavirus to them if you are under 50 and asymptomatic? I know a lot of people are pretty upset but it's not just about YOU. It's about everyone you come in contact with.

Just a thought, but it seems like there can be a middle ground where people belonging to certain risk groups (age, preexisting conditions, etc) are encouraged to take stronger shelter in place measures, and in exchange are granted larger amounts of financial aid to compensate. People not belonging to risk groups can resume working, still taking extra precautions to prevent transmission. The economy can gradually reop…

I'd truly love to hear a good counterargument to this. I've argued much the same thing only to have the same opposing talking points restated verbatim.

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#135

Post by throwlaplace » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #114

throwlaplace wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If it's strictly about money, we should cease shutdowns immediately. But, it's not. People are dying. it's not about money in my opinion and is about deaths. i could've said "everyone advocating for this has to lose a digit for every person that dies" but i thought people would downvote. guess i was wrong since they downvoted anyway.

> it's not about money in my opinion and is about deaths Are you aware of the fact that people die every day to e.g. deliver groceries to your store, harvest plants, build houses etc pp? Do we shut down all activity that will lead to somebody somewhere losing their life?

>deliver groceries to your store, harvest plants, build houses

As I saw somewhere on Twitter: I didn't realize workplace deaths were contagious? I mean they are now but not how you meant it.

>Do we shut down all activity that will lead to somebody somewhere losing their life?

I think it's so funny that people don't know any history. In the early 20th century workers had almost no rights and labor activists had to argue for workplace safety that was controversial for the same reasons: economic inefficiency. So in a very real and exact sense yes we as a society have stopped certain activities because people were dying every day doing them.

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#136

Post by tptacek » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

cobookman wrote: post #80

primeradical wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To anyone reading the comment above, it is extremely poor advice and should not be followed. Stay at home and shelter in place orders are not solely for the purpose of protecting ones-self from contracting the virus. They also serve to limit the spread from unsuspecting carriers. You can carry and spread the virus unknowingly and this will result in susceptible people contracting it and dying. The only way we know th…

So when do you lift the stay in place? When there's 0 cases? If so, what if that never happens?

Nearly uniform testing levels among the states sufficient to indicate that we're getting a real sample of the population, and not the biased sick sample we're getting with PCR testing, would be a start. If you want to be angry about something, be angry that we can't get our act together to get this data collected.

It's going to be a lot easier to win arguments about lockdown when we're confident in our testing data. Right now, nobody is.

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#137

Post by trhway » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

crocodiletears wrote: post #59

scott_s wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen you say similar things in a few other threads, and myself and others have said, every time: the risk to everyone is that the hospitals become overwhelmed. They are not right now because of stay-at-home orders. What you think of as failure - hospitals currently low utilization - is in fact success .

You can ease up on the lockdown without ending it. That's what I read the parent to be implying.

The one-size-fit-all lockdown was a reasonable first knee-jerk reaction given the situation. It isn't a tool to fight pandemic, it is just a breather to prepare the long-term sustainable tools and system - like production of tests, certified masks, etc., identifying/quarantining vulnerable population, putting contact tracing in place, adjusting various social distancing rules to be tighter/looser where it possible and makes sense, etc. - to actually fight pandemic. Yet it seems that the lockdown time has so far been almost wasted in that regard and the lockdown itself seems to be taken as the main tool to fight the pandemic (probably also coupled with the naive idea that this virus can be made to go away completely). That doesn't look good. We may get temporarily lucky - the hot and dry weather will slow down the spread until of course October/November when with such an approach we would be back to square 1.5 at best, and that if the virus doesn't mutate to become more virulent and/or deadly (the 2nd wave of the Spanish flu for example was more deadly than the first)

For example - the construction was stopped at near by site. It is a huge 3 acre site where you can easily set social distance of say 10-20ft and have the clad in PPE crew working without any risk of virus spreading.

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#138

Post by MrGando » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

akozak wrote: post #89

cpncrunch wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in BC we don't have such restrictive conditions, and yet we still have very few cases. Vancouver has about 76% of the population of SF, but has half the number of cases. Restricting people to be at home has no benefit, no logic behind it, but has significant repercussions on mental health.

Seriously? No benefit, no logic?

I mean, his argument has very little logic. He's just using numbers to tell the story that he wants to hear. "Correlation doesn't imply causation"

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#139

Post by mattkrause » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

scott_s wrote: post #29

marcell wrote: post #5

Blanket lockdown has to end. This policy has outlived its usefulness, and is harming people's quality of life without a clear goal. The initial premise of the "flatten the curve" memes was to avoid overwhelming hospitals. The shelter-in-place has not only had this effect, it's been too effective. Hospital utilization in the bay area is at around 10% when you count surge capacity that has been added [1]. Meanwhile, da…

I've seen you say similar things in a few other threads, and myself and others have said, every time: the risk to everyone is that the hospitals become overwhelmed. They are not right now because of stay-at-home orders. What you think of as failure - hospitals currently low utilization - is in fact success .

Exponential growth also means that 10% utilization isn't a ridiculous amount of headroom: it's new patients.

An R0 of 2 is towards the low end of estimates without social distancing. Zhang et al. estimate it as [2.06, 2.52] from the Diamond Princess data; Sanche et al. reported [3.8, 8.9] from data from Wuhan.

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#140

Post by nickysielicki » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 9:40 PM UTC

Everyone in here is arguing about data and forgetting the context -- we entered this whole mess in a country that has never been so divided. Of course that's relevant. Of course that doesn't go away. The only question that you have to ask is whether you're on Team Fauci or Team Trump.

Why the hell would anyone ever expect the SF local government to ever find themselves on Team Trump, if given the option?