Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

sfmayor.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 893 posts

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

#201

Post by rajup »

tptacek wrote: post #181
guygurari wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure you don't wear seatbelts and install airbags to mitigate the risk of COVID-19, but the point is that you can take measures to reduce the risk of contracting the virus to a socially acceptable level and not have to destroy people's livelihoods. We have after all not waited for the perfectly safe car before allowing millions of cars on the road. The lockdown in its current form seems more like waiting for the perfectly safe car.

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

#202

Post by [deleted] »

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 .

[deleted]

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

#203

Post by CPLX »

arblify wrote: post #196
CPLX wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Once you commit to some success metric, you're going to be stuck with it even it proves to be a bad metric. Let's say we all agree the "2 weeks with decreasing number of deaths" is a good target. Then we go back to work, and we discover that going back triggers a rapid spread and kills a bunch of people and starts to overwhelm hospitals. Now we need a new metric. This is a novel scientific problem. Caution and study…

People's lives are always at stake. That's how public policy works. Like 100% of the time. Try painting lines on the highway or administering a school lunch program without putting people's lives at stake.

The only thing novel here is completely abandoning the concept of public policy goals. There's nothing scientific about setting your public policy without any metrics at all. This is kind of the opposite of a scientific approach.

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

#204

Post by cpncrunch »

ac29 wrote: post #199
cpncrunch wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. We are allowed to drive. All workplaces are open except for places like restaurants, personal service businesses, gyms and theatres. Other businesses just have to ensure distancing.

We're allowed to drive in California too - its supposed be for "essential" travel only, but that is pretty broad. I'd estimate in the Bay Area, traffic is only down by 50% or so (though certain commute routes are more dramatically impacted).

I'm referring to SF's stay at home order:

https://sf.gov/stay-home-except-essential-needs

"Everyone is required to stay home except to get food, care for a relative or friend, get necessary health care, or go to an essential job... If you need to get into a car or on public transportation to go for a walk or run, you’re going too far."

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

#205

Post by forgotmylogin2 »

mindslight wrote: post #105
code_chimp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am over 50 and asthmatic - if I feel that I am in danger I am free to self-quarantine. There is no need to impinge on everyone else's freedoms to ensure my safety - I am a big boy and able to take care of my own health decisions.

You can only choose to self isolate if you have the means to give up income. Needing to come up with necessary expenses like food and utilities would be understandable, but the largest bill is rent which is a mostly product of our financial system rather than an intrinsic requirement of existence. I could be in favor of lifting shutdown orders if there were a corresponding federal push to either halt such payments or…

People aren't going to be able to pay their bills regardless of whether they're locked down by mandate or by choice. However, if we allow the low-risk population to continue working, they will generate tax revenue that can be used to provide for the high-risk population. From that perspective, lifting the lockdown for low-risk persons is strictly better for the high-risk population than maintaining a blanket lockdown.

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

#206

Post by MrGando »

usaar333 wrote: post #179
mattkrause wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Without social distancing or contact tracing. The Bay Area's r is probably around 0.8 at this point with Santa Clara even lower (EDITED - see notes below). Some restrictions can be relaxed.

> The Bay Area's r is probably under 0.8 at this point

Could you tell me where are you getting this magic number ballpark estimate from? (somewhere concrete, not just your gut and imagination)

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

#207

Post by nathanaldensr »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #50
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…

> Meanwhile, data is coming out to show that coronavirus has a very low fatality risk to anyone under the age of 50, and to anyone without pre-existing health conditions. 34% of America is aged 50 and over[1]. Almost 40% of America is obese[2], which is a risk factor for COVID-19 complications[3]. > A blanket shutdown does not make any sense when the vulnerable demographic has been clearly identified. When the "vulne…

Personal responsibility must enter the equation; otherwise, you're consigning those of us who have made good decisions about our health to pay the price for those who haven't.

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

#208

Post by scott_s »

marcell wrote: post #110
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 .

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.

They’re not near being overwhelmed. That’s the point of we are currently living in success. But what we know from Italy and NYC is that the margin between situation-normal and patients-are-dying-in-hallways is less than a month.

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

#209

Post by yongjik »

marcell wrote: post #110
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 .

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.

On 3/16 San Francisco and some other cities issued the shelter-in-place order, and CA had 472 patients. Two weeks later, on 3/30, CA had 6,932 patients. That's 21% average daily increase, with an existing shelter-in-place order.

With 21% daily increase, it takes 12 days to go from 10% to 100% hospital utilization. And change of policy usually takes a week or more to affect the curve. Which means, we are ~5 days away from an invisible deadline, after which hospitals will be overrun no matter what.

That's not nearly far enough for my liking.

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

#210

Post by hysan »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #4

I'm lucky enough to have remote work. And I'm sure many HNers have a nice buffer of savings from their tech jobs to weather the storm or are getting paid time off. But can anyone share what it's like to not be in either of these situations? How are your rent lords handling things? I live abroad in a cheap country so I can handle zero income, but I wouldn't be able to last long if rent was $2000+/mo instead of the Yet…

It's scary. I was laid-off this month due to COVID-19. Luckily, I am getting paid for one more month because of the WARN Act. I've been looking, but it has been difficult since I'm competing with all the more senior co-workers and peers who were also laid-off.

So how is my budget?

* I know that there will be a time gap between being able to apply for unemployment and receiving it. The unemployment systems in the US are still overwhelmed.

* Since my wife is on my health insurance plan, COBRA is going to be very expensive.

* We moved recently for my job, so a lot of the savings we had are already gone.

We have some runway, but no where near enough to feel safe. We are one of those edge cases where we took a risk, it paid off and life was great, but it didn't last long enough for us save up again so things are looking grim. So finally...

> Yet when I read Redditors talk about quarantine, you'd think everyone in the world was getting paid time off to play Animal Crossing at home or they live at mom's house rent-free. And it seems like it's this crowd that's likely to be pushing for staying in lockdown with no end in sight.

We both still are 100% for maintaining the quarantine. No we are not living some relaxing lifestyle at home. I've been quite stressed out. However, I also know that I would never forgive myself if I contributed to breaking quarantine early and that caused a chain reaction of hospitals to be overrun again and leading to my parents, a relative, or an old friend to die because they could not get the proper treatment.

There is a lot I want to rant about, but rather than that, I would like to leave these thoughts:

Stop thinking of the solution as being so black and white. Lifting the quarantine isn't the only way to help everyone who has been impacted. For example, why not have the same government bodies that enacted the quarantine do something just as drastic to save those who were impacted? What other solutions are out there?

Also, if lifting the quarantine leads to more deaths, then remember that there is an economic impact there too. Have you ever paid for a funeral? I have and at a young age too. It burned a hole in my savings. That set me back several years in saving and investing in myself. Imagine doing the same to the generation of young adults whose parents are in the risk factor group. Far too many of the comments I read, even on HN, are seeing things only through the lens of what politicians say. Outside of compiling raw statistics, I've seen very little independent thought on how to solve the current problems in society.

Post reply on HN