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

sfmayor.org

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

#231

Post by tptacek »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #215
tptacek wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point? Is there a statute you're thinking of that requires San Francisco to spell out specifically what their goals are? You said upthread that the lockdown is a violation of people's constitutional rights, but it seems clear that it isn't, at least not in our jurisprudence. You can find legal scholars debating the constitutionality of quarantine, but only in the context of hypothetical orders that haven'…

I require San Francisco to spell out what their goals are! I fundamentally reject the idea that it's our duty as citizens to shut up and do whatever London Breed thinks is best. If she's not willing to explain why these emergency restrictions are necessary and how we'll know when they aren't necessary, we shouldn't comply.

Is there a statute somewhere that requires London Breed to spell anything out to your satisfaction? I don't know what California's emergency management laws look like; maybe you're right.

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

#232

Post by CPLX »

arblify wrote: post #211
CPLX wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scien…

I'm not suggesting having no metrics, I'm talking about hard targets. Acknowledging that there are things we don't know about the problem and that we're not overcommitting to a course of action based on some specific target is reasonable. At the same time, to your point, I would like to see clear explanations of "these are the aspects of the disease we are trying to understand (virality, mortality, etc)," these are t…

I think that the government agency in charge of the shutdown should be able to answer each of three basic questions with clarity and some kind of numerical response:

1) What are you hoping this policy will accomplish?

2) What sequence of events, if any, would cause you to accelerate your timetable for easing restrictions?

3) What sequence of events, if any, would cause you to delay your timetable for easing restrictions?

I mean those should be the raw basic cost of even having this conversation. I am used to seeing magical thinking and emotional political arguments in many places but I am surprised to see such hostility to a basic quantitative approach on HN of all places.

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

#233

Post by bobthepanda »

akira2501 wrote: post #150
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 you think of as failure - hospitals currently low utilization - is in fact success. What bothers me is the contention that my rights are contingent upon reported capacity of already existing hospitals. If this is truly a concern, and our rights our primary, then we should be building more hospitals so that we no longer have to make this Faustian bargain. It seems impractical and short-sighted to continue these…

The last rounds of major public (or notionally public) buildouts of infrastructure where profits be damned were funded by the feds, because the states and localities do not have the financial resources to add this along to whatever else they are currently funding, and even if they did you'd see a patchwork that mostly fails the truly underserved.

This is extremely unlikely due to the current administration.

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

#234

Post by siglesias »

twomoretime wrote: post #220
siglesias wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple of flaws with this reply. 1. This doesn't appear to be a falsifiable position with respect to being overly conservative. Any action that results in the hospitals not being overwhelmed will be taken as somehow likely causing the hospitals not to be overwhelmed. It's not clear by this logic how hospital capacities are ever chosen given various uncertainties in the environment. 2. It commits a status…

> with fairly well understood vulnerabilities to various parts of the population. I don't think the virus is as well understood as you believe, which is why opening back up now may be premature. Regardless, the riskiest pre-existing conditions appear to be obesity and hypertension. 57-75% of Americans are obese according to the dedicated Wikipedia page. Also bear in mind there is considerable variance among obesity r…

Whatever the effects are, what do you think three months of lockdown and closed gyms will do to the obesity rate?

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

#235

Post by oppositelock »

bobthepanda wrote: post #222
walterbell wrote: post #162

People forget that there is no law which can put everyone under house arrest. This is all done voluntarily. Why is it ok for people to shop at Walmart and not at their local small business that sells the same goods and is better equipped to enforce social distancing, with customers explicitly opting in to visit the smaller store? If a small business can protect workers and customers, and a comparable large business i…

I'm not aware of any lockdowns which are specifically targeted at small retailers while competing large retailers are allowed to be open. Where I am the small coffee shops are closed for walk-in business, but so are the Starbucks; the difference is that small coffee shops are not able to pivot to a centralized delivery platform en masse the way Starbucks is.

I can speak to a few examples specifically. It's planting season now, and high business for nurseries. In Santa Clara County, they're closed by fiat. Lowe's, Home Depot, ACE hardware sell essential things (plumbing supplies, etc), so they get to remain open, in-store nurseries and all. So, if I want tomatoes, I have to brave the crowds at Lowe's instead of hopping out to my local nursery which is rarely densely populated even in good times.

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

#236

Post by Skunkleton »

walterbell wrote: post #162

People forget that there is no law which can put everyone under house arrest. This is all done voluntarily. Why is it ok for people to shop at Walmart and not at their local small business that sells the same goods and is better equipped to enforce social distancing, with customers explicitly opting in to visit the smaller store? If a small business can protect workers and customers, and a comparable large business i…

Almost none of what you said is true. This is not voluntary, there are laws which give these powers, essential businesses can stay open regardless of their size, recording breaking the law while conducting non essential business won’t help you in the supreme court, the federal government is saying lots and doing very little.

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

#237

Post by jshevek »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #212
jshevek wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In New Zealand, South Korea and Australia coronaplague is on the way out thanks to testing and contact tracing. Why can't the US muster the political will to do the same? When it comes to complete elimination, you leave out the most important ingredient: all three countries have fantastic border control, thanks to geography in two cases, and an extremist neighbor in the third.

Compared to some Western European countries, the US are looking pitiful. Italy went from 5000 cases/day in early April to 2000 now and Germany from 7000 cases/day to 1500 now. The US continues with 25000 new cases every day and no downward trajectory in sight. This is community transmission, not imported cases.

This is in no way relevant to my point. You brought up three countries that have nearly eliminated the virus from their land, while overlooking the single most important prerequisite in all three cases.

Edit: In other words, we can strive to reduce community transmission, but achieving the specific results found in the three you mentioned would also require a radical change in how we handle our borders.

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

#238

Post by nradov »

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?

The lockdown restrictions are a faith based policy, not evidence based. There is no hard evidence that they will reduce total deaths over the full span of the pandemic.

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

#239

Post by usaar333 »

killion wrote: post #213
usaar333 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rt of .88 according to https://rt.live I agree some restrictions could be relaxed. Hospitals were a good first step. More of the outdoors could be a good next one.

Note that is CA as a whole. LA is skewing it upward.

e.g. CA was around 1250 new cases 2nd week of April and maybe 1200 now (4% lower). With test capacity increasing, rt.live is giving 0.88, which on a 4 day serial interval implies a 33% actual reduction

Bay Area went from about 200 to about 140 now (30% lower). Factoring the reduction from testing (if same for all of CA), we're actually at a 53% reduction. That's an R of 0.81.

Santa Clara (which I admittedly originally mis-used for all Bay Area) went from 62 to 25. That's an crude R of 0.77 -- 0.7 factoring the test increases.

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

#240

Post by Skunkleton »

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 .

People should remember that the mortality rate for COVID-19 is under 3% _with_ medical care. If it isn’t available the mortality rate goes way up to around 20%.
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