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California imposing sweeping rollback of reopening plans amid case surges

nytimes.com

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Re: California imposing sweeping rollback of reopening plans amid case surges

#101

Post by refurb »

woeirua wrote: post #100
refurb wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this pass the sniff test (or am I misinterpreting it?). Assume 1% fatality rate for infections (it’s actually lower), you’re saying somewhere 19% to 60% (depending on overlap of those categories) have permanent damage? That’s clearly not what we’re seeing.

You're misinterpreting it. It says that for every 1 fatality there are 19 covid patients that have longlasting complications. It doesn't state though how many mild, uncomplicated cases there will be for every 1 hospitalized, i.e. what the denominator is. For example, if there are 1000 cases for every hospitalized case, then 19/1000 isn't that high.

I’m still confused. We know the fatality rate is ~1% (0.6% as per CDC’s latest).

So for every death there are 99 other cases. There is no way that 19 of those have permanent disabilities. That would means several million Americans are seriously disabled by the virus.

Re: California imposing sweeping rollback of reopening plans amid case surges

#102

Post by perl4ever »

blisseyGo wrote: post #97
perl4ever wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I literally shared multiple studies which state "There is limited evidence for their effectiveness in preventing influenza virus transmission either when worn by the infected person for source control or when worn by uninfected persons to reduce exposure." It's the first half that I would take issue with, and I don't see anything you quoted as convincingly supporting it. Garden variety masks are not suitable for hea…

As I mentioned to the other person, the first study I cited states: > There is limited evidence for their effectiveness in preventing influenza virus transmission either when worn by the infected person for source control or when worn by uninfected persons to reduce exposure. The later study also states non-N95 masks allow 97%. So basically useless.

I don't see the statement that there is "limited evidence" for something as providing information. Is there "unlimited evidence" for anything?

Re: California imposing sweeping rollback of reopening plans amid case surges

#103

Post by dragonwriter »

AlexandrB wrote: post #26
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Canada is currently at the stage of reopening that California is rolling back to, where gyms, indoor restaurants, and movie theaters are closed.

Yup, that's the case in Ontario. Mask wearing is also now mandatory indoors. I guess the question is why did California rush to re-open fully?

> I guess the question is why did California rush to re-open fully?

Because states have a higher cost of borrowing than the feds and usually also have constitutional balanced operating budget mandates, they tend to rely on federal aid to deal with major extended emergencies. With the feds not providing substantial state aid in this crisis, there’s significant financial pressure for economic reopening.

Re: California imposing sweeping rollback of reopening plans amid case surges

#104

Post by yodon »

blisseyGo wrote: post #95
yodon wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The studies you cite focus on the use of masks to protect the wearer of the mask. The purpose of masks is not to protect the wearer of the mask but to protect others. In simple hand-waving terms the mask diffuses the wearer's exhalation reducing the velocity of the air stream and its contained particles, thereby reducing the distance the particles can travel and increasing the odds that the particles drop out of the…

No, the first study I cited states: > There is limited evidence for their effectiveness in preventing influenza virus transmission either when worn by the infected person for source control or when worn by uninfected persons to reduce exposure. And the later study states non-N95 masks allow 97%.

The Xiao, et al study you refer to is a historical literature review of transmission of prior non-Covid-19 viruses.

It is unclear if the historical studies involved social distancing or close proximity (critical to current understanding of Covid-19 mask efficacy) and it is concerning that the paper reports "most studies were underpowered because of sample size and some studies also reported suboptimal adherence in the face mask group."

More importantly, Covid-19 appears to have different transmission characteristics than other influenza style viruses, making literature reviews such as the one you cite less predictive of Covid-19 behaviors than would often have been the case with other viruses.

The paper is interesting but it's definitely not supported by their data to say the paper shows masks worn by infected individuals are ineffective at reducing the spread of Covid-19 in a social distance context.

[edit: updated with additional detail from the cited paper]

Re: California imposing sweeping rollback of reopening plans amid case surges

#105

Post by dragonwriter »

DataWorker wrote: post #31
AlexandrB wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The effectiveness of a middle ground strategy is pure conjecture. Canada shut down fast and hard - like California - and is not seeing cases spike. Perhaps because we re-opened slowly and people are still generally cautious - wearing masks in public and maintaining social distance. Or perhaps because we have not been getting wildly mixed messages from local/provincial/national leaders about the severity of the situat…

It was all middle ground strategy from day one. The national lockdown was timed to the nyc wave and that was a probably a mistake depending on how you view the purpose of the lockdown. If it was to flatten the curve, outside of nyc, we did too much too soon and are now reaping the effects of “precaution fatigue.” It’s a marathon rather than a sprint, but each region, has its own race to run on it’s own timeline, it’s…

> The national lockdown was timed to the nyc wave

There was no “national lockdown”. The California lockdown was timed based on the Bay Area and Los Angeles surges.

Re: California imposing sweeping rollback of reopening plans amid case surges

#106

Post by TomVDB »

standardUser wrote: post #92
TomVDB wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re saying that maybe CA should have done some middle ground closure since that might have help a little more with increasing immunity. My point is that the goal of increasing immunity is pointless unless it can be raised to a very high percentage and without taking massive casualties. Without a vaccine, that’s simply not possible for COVID-19. And thus that suggestion doesn’t make a lot of I sense. The benefit of…

The point of raising immunity is to (speculatively) make it easier to keep the transmission rate low. So other measures become less necessary. Maybe we could open schools, for example. This seems to be what has happened in the places that have been hit hardest. But obviously partial immunity in the population is only one factor impacting the transmission rate. There's masks and lack of indoor gatherings, etc. Though…

Yes.

But increased immunity is only useful if it reduces transmission rates substantially, measurably.

And that requires a very high immunity rate.

It’s pointless to pursue an increase in immunity when the transmission rate only reduces by some negligible amount that’s in the noise.

In how many ways do I have to restate the same concept?

Re: California imposing sweeping rollback of reopening plans amid case surges

#107

Post by ScottBurson »

standardUser wrote: post #3

California shut down very hard and fast. When they reopened, nearly 100% of the population was still susceptible to the virus, so it spread like wildfire. Especially since the reopening was not exactly slow. Compare this to the Northeast and much of Western Europe where the virus spread too quickly until lockdowns reduced the spread. Now, keeping the transmission rate low in those areas has become comparatively easy,…

It's easy to be misled by the nature of exponential growth. In most people's vocabularies these days, the term seems to mean just "very fast", but correctly understood, it's more specific and more complex than that.

Exponential growth, in this context, means that the rate of new infections is proportional to the number of existing infections. This cuts both ways: when the number of existing infections is large, the rate of growth is also large -- which is why exponential growth is so dangerous -- but when the existing number is small, the growth rate is also small. If you look at a graph of an exponential curve, there's a long relatively flat region to the left, before the knee in the curve is hit and the thing takes off.

The point is, even though we here in CA started the lockdown relatively early, we've never gotten the case numbers down to a manageable level. I'm not sure why not. Although a lot of us have taken the virus seriously from the beginning, maybe there are still too many who don't. The sad truth is that a lot of people won't believe it until it affects someone they know -- and while it's well under control, that tends not to happen. So it looks like a bad outbreak in a region creates "mental herd immunity", where almost everyone cooperates with the lockdown; places that haven't had such an outbreak don't take it as seriously.

Re: California imposing sweeping rollback of reopening plans amid case surges

#108

Post by dang »

blisseyGo wrote: post #75
Agustus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enforcement is the state forcing its will on you eliminating the individual’s ability to evaluate risk. Eric Garner is dead because of government rule flexing you suggest. The government should buy ads showing the efficacy of face masks and use the ad council to pretty it up. If you have politically connected individuals flouting the rules, people will salami tactics their way to not wearing the masks. *edit: thanks…

It's amazing how HN is downvoting your comment for a pretty thoughtful point. I posted a comment with studies and got downvoted too. Seems like HN is turning into Reddit.

Please read and follow all of the site guidelines, but note particularly the last two: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Re: California imposing sweeping rollback of reopening plans amid case surges

#109

Post by AlexandrB »

jhowell wrote: post #74
CerealFounder wrote: post #28

I dont understand for the life of me why the state cant get tough on masks and distancing with the rule of law. All they do is put out suggestions and guildelines. Until they flex the guidlines with some muscle it's just theatre

Can you really imagine the police confronting and/or arresting someone for not wearing a mask only to take them to jail to contract the virus?

They're called fines. This is a total strawman.

Re: California imposing sweeping rollback of reopening plans amid case surges

#110

Post by hvac »

nostromo wrote: post #24
woeirua wrote: post #9

The only question now is, which state will win the race to be the first to reinstitute stay-at-home orders?

My guess is that no states will do that. Even as the number of cases goes up, deaths (the more important number) keeps coming down. https://i.imgur.com/LMVNbBD.png We keep hearing about how this trend will reverse soon, ("two weeks from now"), but that hasn't happened yet. It seems pretty clear now that even our low estimates of fatality were too high and that many people had Covid-19 in March/April/May and were neve…

I can't edit my comment now, but I also just noticed that the CDC recently revised the IFR upwards from 0.26% to 0.65% (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...), apparently as of a few days ago. Our death rate estimates were too low, if anything.
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