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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

#731
post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s not sound science about separating people to slow down the spread? It’s the only real option for anything like a quarantine with such a long incubation time (and as recently discovered asymptomatic infections) and the absolute lack of tests we had at the beginning of this outbreak... It’s simple math that reducing the number of people in contact with each other would reduce the number of people that got infect…

> “ What’s not sound science about separating people to slow down the spread? It’s the only real option...” no, that’s the nuclear option, not a surgical strike, much less the only option, and based on an insufficiently precise perception of the problem. the mechanism of spread can be crudely described as spitting into each others’ mouths, not standing nearby, touching, or breathing in the same room. with the problem…

no one is locked in their abodes.

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

#732
post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only immoral to question the validity of a good cause on the pretense that there's something worse happening out there somewhere...

Hint: there is always something worse somewhere.

There are as many "worst things" as there are people.

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

#733
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend who works at the airport in the Galapagos (GPS) was telling me that no one has gotten paid since the tourism stopped. Luckily she can work on farm, but many can't. The local animal shelter there is now out of food, and the dogs will starve if they don't somehow raise money in the next 3 days or so (@patitasgalapaguenas on instagram, you can donate here [0]). The US is struggling in many ways, but I can't he…

Al Jazeera is always a good source for news ignored by the rest of the world. Here's social distancing in a prison in El Salvador -- not sure those masks will help much. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/el-salvador-inmates-c... In India in particular, the lockdown has so far caused more misery than the virus itself: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/india-covid-19-lockdo... ...although it's an impossible e…

Al Jazeera is simply Qatari government propaganda. If they're reporting it and it was 'ignored by the rest of the world', it's certainly only reported for the benefit of the Qatari government.

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

#734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rates staying flat rather than going up is already a success, not a sign that SIP has failed.

But if the rates stay the same, then all we're accomplishing is slowing the rate at which we reach herd immunity. If herd immunity is the strategy we're pursuing, then we should lift restrictions enough to meet hospital capacity, so we can get to herd immunity as quickly as possible and get the economy back to something approaching normal levels of activity. If the strategy is actually suppression and elimination, th…

The strategy is slowing the spread. Elimination was impossible the day the virus left wuhan. We can't lift restrictions to meet hospital capacity because that is an extremely dangerous gamble, especially when all our numbers on the spread of this disease are bound to be underestimates.

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

#735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to rely on an assumption that there's no variation in amount or quality of job searching effort, above the minimum required, which might be influenced. It also assumes inability to fake a job search, or sabotage an otherwise legitimate one, which might let an individual so intending to fall below the required minimum. The latter seems questionable, the first seems wrong.

I feel like there's a lot of pedantry in this thread and this topic in general. The point is that people not wanting to work is just so very far from our problem that it is ridiculous to see people harping on it so much. People aren't working because they were furloughed or laid off because aggregate demand is way down, it has nothing to do with the unemployment benefits they're getting. The vast vast majority of tho…

Of course we are all speculating on what people want or will do in this situation.

But take a hypothetical continuum of unemployment benefits. At which point will your thesis that "people want to work but are unable" switch to "people aren't working because they're being paid way more to not work? The switch will probably be binary at the individual level but will look like a continuum when looking at the population level.

Individuals will of course respond differently depend on the specific contexts of their life. I think in the end a quantity that will matter will be the ratio of unemployment benefits to old job salary. Other factors such as job satisfaction in previous job will contribute to the variance.

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

#736
post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the goal of slowing down and stalling in hopes of getting a vaccine, better treatments, production to catch up with supply shortages for healthcare facilities, and allowing healthcare facilities to increase capacity, etc.

Barring a miracle, mass production of a vaccine is at least 9 months away. Likely more like a year+ There's no better treatments coming. We've been fighting viral pneumonia since the dawn of medicine and the tool kit is pretty sparse. Finding anything nearing a cure or even a 20% improvement is wishful thinking. Our health care capacity is adequate. NYC got to ~30% infected and while I'm sure none of the medical work…

Antibody therapies and perhaps decent antiviral treatments could come before a vaccine.

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

#737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate how the idea of reopening has split down political party lines. This is definitely not the time for partisanship. Now that Democrats have come out in support of gradually tapering the quarantine, Republican mayors will be chomping at the bit to reopen their cities. 60,000 COVID-19 deaths will be too few.

Not all locales and politicians are equally activist.

I have confidence in the leadership of California. They have shown intelligence and restraint in the midst of this crisis, saving perhaps thousands of lives in the process. The federal government? Pure drivel, 24/7. The only policy they have is wishful thinking with a side of word salad.

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

#738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the rational calculus, yes. But humans have a really hard time balancing suffering today against hypothetical suffering tomorrow, especially when successful intervention makes it appear like the problem was never there in the first place.

That's an interesting presupposition, entirely unconfirmed by data.

I don't know enough about psychology to Google the exact term, but let's not be so pedantic as to pretend it is not at least a plausible assumption.

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

#739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any suggestions on which they do frequent?

Reddit. My state's subreddit has a massive discussion about how the unemployment system is failing, completely unable to handle the enormous number of people trying to file claims. There's a lot of desperation in those threads.

I'd say that Reddit's demographics still skew more towards the "young, white, middle class male".

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

#740
post #611
post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so you think 6-18 months of SIP is going to work? I think that could lead us to a dire situation. > robust contact tracing works Doesn't that rely on the individual opting in/using it? I have a feeling most people don't want the government tracing their every move (even though it already is geographically).

> so you think 6-18 months of SIP is going to work? I think that could lead us to a dire situation. No, I don't. I think it's implausible. But this is what those in local public health are calling for. Granted, there's the IMHE model, which somehow fantastically thinks the virus will mostly be gone in Santa Clara County in mid-May, but it's shown very little agreement with the actual data and is nearly as bad as sayi…

> Granted, there's the IMHE model, which somehow fantastically thinks the virus will mostly be gone in Santa Clara County in mid-May, but it's shown very little agreement with the actual data and is nearly as bad as saying the Easter Bunny will take the virus away.

Yeah, that IHME model.. It's unfortunate that it's become the model most people have become acquainted with. It has its uses, but the down-slope has previously generated critiques.

Good Carl Bergstrom thread: https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1250304069119275009

A few select quotes from that thread:

> 6. But this is a mix of two different processes, an acceleration phase prior to control, and a deceleration phase once controls are in place. Given that, why does the model predict symmetric death curves?

> 7. The answer is that this is a modeling assumption that the research team has made. They have chosen to fit a particular sigmoidal curve called the Gaussian Error Function (erf function, for short) to the data representing the cumulative number of deaths that have occurred.

> 13. The actual trajectory tracks the forecast pretty closely, but then starts to turn around. Once that happens, the back side of the curve is constrained to mirror the front side; the epidemic is predicted to wane quickly. By May 17, the uncertainty range collapses to 0 deaths.

> 14. This strikes me as unrealistic. Even ignoring the real-world coupling between states (this is not included in the model), I am not persuaded that the epidemic will necessarily be entirely finished in just over a month.

And a very important point he brings up:

> 16. In defense of the model, every model is a tool with a purpose. The primary purpose of their model is to predict peak health care need, not the endpoint of the outbreak. That said, people need to be aware of a model's purpose and be cautious when using it for anything else.

In other words, it's actually a pretty bad model* for predicting the down-slope. I fully expect that we'll hit 100k deaths for this first wave.

*unless the US were to have done a Wuhan-style lockdown.

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