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

sfmayor.org

181–190 of 893 posts

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

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are not showing up in the ER unable to breathe because they know someone who holds their Cellphone to their ear. Covid-19 is not a theoretical threat.

Many people die in traffic accidents every day, but we don’t ban cars. Everything we do involves some risk. There needs to be a rational discussion on how much lock down is appropriate. We need to look at other countries like Sweden and Austria and learn from them. We need to look at the real costs of a depression. What we have now is “People are dying so let’s lock down everything”.

You can mitigate the risk of dying in a traffic accident unilaterally in ways you can't with a virus, and C19 is probably already killing more people than car accidents by a significant margin.

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

I'm not an expert. I'd lean towards loosening restrictions on non-essential businesses, imposing strict capacity guidelines, and adjusting the strictness of the guidelines by region at fixed intervals with a fixed lead time. Add some worker protections so people who don't feel comfortable working don't lose their jobs during when they reopen, and don't exempt them from receiving unemployment so reopening doesn't turn them into a burden for the nonessential employer.

I'm lucky right now, to be an 'essential' employee making roughly twice minimum wage, working for an employer with deep pockets. I'm not coming from a place of personal inconvenience, because my job's gotten exponentially easier since people became afraid to go out. Most of our part time staff is gone, and I'm worried that SMBs will soon start dropping like flies.

We've proven that lockdowns work, really well. now we need to find a balance in order to prevent the economy we as a society return to from being a small collection of megacorps wandering through a graveyard of small businesses and unemployment.

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

#183
If I am reading the data correctly, considering total number of cases, and current rates of growth, the Bay Area is doing really well compared to the rest of the USA in terms of preventing the spread. [1] There will inevitably be areas that will recover sooner than others, and I could see the Bay Area being one of those places. How is the Bay Area going to handle that? Are these places going to station cops on county lines and screen people wanting to come into a "recovered" region?

[1] https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-case...

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

#184
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 .

What is your evidence that hospitals in America in general, and in California, are anywhere near being overwhelmed? I've cited evidence which shows the opposite--they are very far from being overwhelmed.

I live in a county of little over 100K residents, one death occurred over the outbreak, a 91 year old person died of COVID19. Over the weeks we had a total about 65 known cases, all sent to recuperate at home, with a single patient in the hospital.

The hospital has an entire wing dedicated to COVID patients that did not actually materialize. No care is provided to other patients that might need it (unless it is an emergency). Every appointment was rescheduled months into the future.

Everyone must stay home on the account of better erring on the side of caution.

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

#185
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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's the only way to know? You think it's reasonable to take away the civil liberties of seven million people indefinitely without at least trying to come up with a better performance metric than that? You have literally no interest in setting up any kind of plan to assess how the policy is w…

I think you're right, we do need a plan, but we need trained epidemiologists and other public health figures to define that plan. Many features of disease spread are counterintuitive and we need people with training to help us, the public, understand the problem and reasonable solutions. When people like Michael Osterholm tell me that it is possible one or two million people will die in the United States, I believe h…

I mean, it's not like this crisis started an hour ago. What's their plan? Like can someone write it down and post in on a government website?

We're all commenting on what appears to be an official government press release that is announcing an entire month of some of the most serious restrictions on the public ever put in place, that does not appear to even try to take any kind of quantitative approach to explaining why that policy was put in to place, and how its effectiveness is being assessed.

Broad, destructive public policy not tied to success metrics is fucking insane and I think the strong negative reactions to it are completely warranted.

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

#186
post #145
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…

> Blanket lockdown has to end. What's different now vs before the lockdown started regarding flattening the curve? R0 is a little under 1 right now, but what will it be when most things reopen? The goal of the lockdown is to keep R0 under 1 until we have measures in place to permanently mitigate the spread [1]. This means lots of testing and contact tracing, which is not even possible right now with case numbers bein…

Multiple counties have already confirmed they are contact tracing every case. The Bay Area has a lower per capita daily case rate than Germany who is opening schools. This should be manageable.

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

#187
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

What is the logic behind restricting driving? (See my other comment here as well).

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

#188

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…

> This is not the time for egocentric defiance of the recommendations from our leaders. This is not a fair representation of the alternative and contrary viewpoints.

I understand you feel my characterization is unfair. But the focus on our own personal interaction with the virus without acknowledging how ignoring shelter at home orders can spread the virus to others, is selfish and egocentric.

I do not believe there is room for an alternative viewpoint to that.

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

#189
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…

> Blanket lockdown has to end. I tend to agree. Why is nobody focusing on Sweden's COVID numbers? Sweden didn't institute city-wide shutdown measures. Yet, there hospitals are not overwhelmed. And, their COVID case counts and death counts are plateauing. Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52395866

Sweden is taking a lot of death though.

I prefer looking at Norway or Germany, countries that haven't taken high death hits and opening up with higher daily case counts per capita than us.

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

#190
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK I'll take your bait. What if we have enough tests, then what's the rule?

When you have enough tests, you know who has the virus and who doesn't. All those infected (and all the people they've contacted) can quarantine or seek the care they need, and those who aren't infected can all go get haircuts.

So the shelter in place order should be in effect until we have conducted approximately seven million tests, after which we will institute a voluntary program where people who test positive are asked to quarantine and seek care?
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