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

sfmayor.org

381–390 of 893 posts

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

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That (1) driving is a pre-cursor to contact with others and (2) driving requires contact with others (gassing up, toll booths, parking attendants, snacks, LE and so on) and (3) driving could lead to accidents which might in turn lead to you ending up in the ER or requiring ambulance transport.

Walking or driving can be a precursor to contact, but as mentioned in my previous comment, if you live in a large city it is difficult to physically distance yourself when walking outside. You are probably better driving to a more remote location for exercise.

Generally there is sufficient distance from other people when gassing up, so that seems like a very low risk for a short period of time, compared to walking in a city.

You are also at risk of requiring ambulance transport if you do DIY work at home. So best just sit in a dark room because you don't want electricity workers to have to go to work, or Netflix employees to have to go into work, etc.

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

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are laws which give these powers IANAL, but I know some of you are so I'm asking here. I've read that challenges to these orders will not succeed because of emergency declarations. The emergency declarations are supposedly backed by some law, correct? Don't we have a document in the national archives that guarantees things like peaceable assembly and not prohibiting exercise of religion? Yet we have people be…

Freedom of assembly (and to a lesser extent, at least by precise Constitutional language, freedom to exercise religion) have Constitutional protections (that may or may not be unlimited, depending on the justice you're asking). There is no Constitutional protection for running a business or being able to patronize a given business. So protests in public and worship may be protected, but your neighborhood bar is not.

Fortunately for lawyers seeking good test cases, there's a rather long list of businesses which have been shut down. California may have more religions per capita than most places.

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

#383
post #210

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 a…

If you enroll in COBRA within 60 days, you can retroactively claim coverage. If you have current cashflow issues but have only minor healthcare expenses, you can wait to see if you need it.

Of course before going this route, check with a reputable source.

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

#384
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The pandemic isn't going to stop anytime soon. Miracle cures are highly unlikely, and a safe vaccine is probably more than a year away. So I hope that anyone with obesity is taking this opportunity to lose weight at a safe and sustainable rate.

Anecdotally, what I see happening right now:

1. A lot of people are gaining weight at a prodigious rate.

2. Newly minted alcoholics are being created before our very eyes.

3. There are already a bunch of seriously bad haircuts.

And this is just among people that I know who have the luxury of sitting around the house working from home. I imagine the real life consequences for the less fortunate are significantly more serious.

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

#385
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you don't have to pay for cobra until you need it though, so you could get out spending $0, iirc.

At least in CA, if you opt out of COBRA, you can't opt back in later.

Hum. In IL and IN you have either 45 or 60 days to accept or decline coverage (don’t quote me on exact number, do the research). It made the optimal short term insurance policy to be:

Don’t fill out cobra paperwork to day 59

If not sick or total bills less than 2 months cobra payments, decline cobra.

If sick and total bills > 2 months cobra payments, decide to accept coverage.

Used this for like 5 job hops. Never had to opt in, but it seemed fine. Confirmed with HR several times that it would work as I said.

After 2 months it starts to get gross. Likely want to get an emergency only plan.

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

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to believe that comes from a genuine appreciation of civil liberties and not from an election-year attempt to pander to the current executive's voting base.

Or that lockdowns are free of political calculus.

There is already overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

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

#387
post #71

If many people get very sick simultaneously, they would not only overwhelm hospitals, they would also inflict a disorderly, involuntary shutdown of large swaths of the economy, driven by fear -- instead of the orderly, voluntary shutdown we have at present, driven by government mandate. We all want to avoid that .

There seem to be lots of people that think actual chaos is the only sufficient justification for a shutdown. No averting anything, let it get bad and mop up afterwords.

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

#388
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your questions are all reasonable. I'm not personally opposed to quantitative decision-making, but I'm also painfully aware of the limitations of quantitative methods, especially when applied under pressure. I would argue that a blind faith in mathematics is just as wrongheaded as the magical thinking you're describing. To give a clear example of why I'm skeptical, look at the use of quantitative methods to conduct g…

Yeah but this is like setting monetary policy without using interest rates or something. Or coming up with a government spending program and not even trying to do a quick analysis of how much it will cost. It's fucking insane. Public policy requires metrics and stated goals, and requires that they not be secret. Without those it's not democracy.

We're half-aligned. The decision-making process and the data used to inform it should be public, but I don't think we should be saying at this point "when we see these targets hit we will remove these measures." I think our knowledge is still too incomplete to set that target intelligently.

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

#389

The problem is that the shelter-in-place rule is already limited in effectiveness due to a very lengthy list of exceptions plus many people not observing the spirit of the rule. Compliance will only drop over time as people see that 1) Their actions are having no obvious impact and 2) There is no clear end in sight. If the primary goal of extending the order is to give local governments time to build out infrastructu…

What evidence is there that the SIP is limited in effectiveness? The existing evidence I am aware of is starkly contra that assertion. Anecdotes of seeing people too close together in the park are not evidence of an ineffective SIP.

It's not that SIP does nothing - it's that past a certain point, the rates are what they are. San Mateo and Santa Clara counties have seen a slight increase in the number of cases last week over the previous week. Other Bay Area counties have seen a slight decrease [1].

I don't see how increased traffic/travel as we're starting to see [2] will do anything other than increase transmissions.

[1] https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2020/coronavirus-map/ [2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/Bay-A...

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of the lockdown is not to prevent everyone from getting the disease, or to hide in our homes until it magically goes away. The stated purpose of the lockdown was to 'flatten the curve'. Don't go moving goalposts on us all now that we've flattened the curve, especially when we're talking about people's constitutional rights.

The only thing that is going to keep the curve flat (this is kind of a mind-numbing terminology) is human behavior. Exponential growth is still a thing, and we aren't anywhere near achieving herd immunity. (a physician friend mentioned the other day that we're not truly certain yet that COVID 19 sufferers cannot be reinfected, although that's the popular assumption. So there's also that)

How about WHO's current stance...

https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/immunity-p...

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