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San Mateo County Health Officer Statement on Bay Area Stay-at-Home Orders

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Re: San Mateo County Health Officer Statement on Bay Area Stay-at-Home Orders

#221
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In most places, hospital are not overloaded If you speak to any doctor or nurse they will disagree with you. While we might not be at a breaking point for number of beds, the staff that have to put themselves in harms way do have the option to just quit. When that starts happening in mass we are all screwed.

I spoke with a nurse while at gym I attend. She spoke about how the hospital she's at is not close to be overwhelmed. She also talked about she doesn't wear a mask outside of her job as they have training and n95 masks which work in a hospital setting. But outside of a hospital environment the masks provide little protection, especially cloth masks.

A nurse at a gym? Perhaps there is a bit of selection bias in your sample.

Meanwhile, here is a pretty good article about how healthcare workers are handling the pandemic: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/11/third-sur...

As additional anecdata, the sentiments expressed in the article are in line with what I have been hearing from healthcare professionals in my circle of friends.

Re: San Mateo County Health Officer Statement on Bay Area Stay-at-Home Orders

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly what information do you lack? If you are hungry eat at home. Work at home if possible. Exercise at home. "Live" is too vague to address.

You are substituting instructions for information. I lack information. For example: Has anyone in San Mateo caught covid eating at a restaurant? How many? Has anyone in San Mateo caught covid grocery shopping? How Many? Has anyone in San Mateo Caught covid exercising outside? How many? Has anyone in San Mateo Caught covid at school? How many?

There's no way to get the information you desire without Big Brother level tracing. And even then the error bars are huge. Symptoms set in days after exposure, and transmission is uneven at best.

Full disclosure: I've had covid.

We assume we were exposed at the clinic, where our kid needed emergency medical treatment. But if so, only one of us was with the child indoors -- in a cleaned room with a doctor in full PPE and us in masks -- and treatment lasted less than 5 minutes.

But by the time we experienced onset of symptoms, days later, we had been in close proximity with my in-laws (they need care and were part of our bubble) for over 24 hours. Luckily, they developed no symptoms and tested negative.

So 5 minutes of exposure to an asymptomatic carrier at the clinic likely transmitted the virus to us, but 24 hours in close contact failed to transmit the virus to my in-laws.

The delay of onset and inconsistent transmission patterns make this virus exceedingly difficult and expensive to track. Your questions are unanswerable.

Re: San Mateo County Health Officer Statement on Bay Area Stay-at-Home Orders

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said generations worth of damage. Come on. It might hurt a kid for her SAT if it was this or next year but to think she would have long term damage from a couple of shitty years of school, that’s preposterous. Kids are made of sterner stuff than this.

Yes, most kids can catch up after a missed year of content. Many won’t. There’s a lot of data about how students fall behind in a compounding way: they start to feel dumb compared to their peers; start to think school isn’t for them, or that they just aren’t smart enough to ‘get math’ — fast forward a few years and they’ve dropped out completely.

But if their peers are missing school, too, I'm not sure how that research is relevant. Is there research showing that, when the whole class misses in person school, there's appreciable damage done?

Allow me a counter example: My significant other was a war refugee and had severely disrupted schooling from the age of seven to about nine years of age.

Yet her generation had higher graduation and matriculation rates than their parents. Indeed, their achievement rates were in line with other countries in the region that didn't experience war.

I'll readily concede that, for children in an abusive home, less time at school is dangerous to their wellbeing. But the hand wringing about long term learning damage to all kids seems overwrought and unsupported by any evidence I've seen.

But I'm more interested in being informed than winning arguments on the internet, so if you can point me in the direction of studies, I'd much appreciate it.

Re: San Mateo County Health Officer Statement on Bay Area Stay-at-Home Orders

#224
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. A very rare instance where a government official questions his own wisdom. Wish more california officials were like him. Not only mandates are completely ineffective (compared to the other much better alternatives) some of the folks like me feel compelled to call BS on many of the "dictats" and make it an ideological issue. At that stage, states credibility reduces even further.

Okay, I’ll bite — what would be better (from a public health perspective) than government mandates for masks, social distancing, and reduced/restricted indoor gathering? And, to be clear, what makes you say they are ineffective? Because literally everything I’ve seen everywhere says that those three things are basically the only things that have been effective.

Those actions are helpful. The question read to me as whether the mandate to do them was the maximally effective course.

Education, facts, and increasing public consciousness seem like they’d be more effective than mandates for private gatherings. People who would follow the mandate in private would likely also follow educational campaigns. Voluntary compliance based on understanding works everywhere. Mandates only work where you can be seen.

Re: San Mateo County Health Officer Statement on Bay Area Stay-at-Home Orders

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I also believe these greater restrictions will result in more job loss, more hunger, more despair and desperation (...) and more death from causes other than COVID. And I wonder, are these premature deaths any less worrisome than COVID deaths?” There's been a total of 164 registered COVID-19 related deaths in San Francisco county, the vast majority of which had other comorbidities, assuming trend[1]. On the other…

San Francisco has so far had by far the best Covid health outcomes of any major US city. If the US on the whole were doing as well as SF, there would be at least 200,000 fewer deaths than there have been. I really hope SF can keep it that way. The recent trend is pretty scary, but if we all hunker down for the next month or two, we can still turn it around.

SF has had 30% of the deaths per 100K as the US average? That is shockingly good and worthy of deeper study if true.

Re: San Mateo County Health Officer Statement on Bay Area Stay-at-Home Orders

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't UK have either the worst or second-worst outcome among all European nations?

Yes, but it doesn't really disprove the assertion that lockdown's work. It more proves that the other approaches they tried either dont work or weren't applied effectively.

I suppose, but it also means that the conclusion above (that lockdowns excluding schools works) isn't based on any evidence.

Re: San Mateo County Health Officer Statement on Bay Area Stay-at-Home Orders

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Places like UK did a hard lockdown for 6 weeks and kept schools open. It completely worked. Yes, kids can transmit the virus, but it appears that as long as the ADULTS limit their interaction with other adults, kids have only a limited way of encountering infections.

Take a look at the data here: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare - for example, the "Patients in hospital" data. The UK's number of COVID-19 patients in hospital peaked at 19,500 in mid-April and fell to 800 by the start of September. That's despite things like the 'eat out to help out' scheme that ran until the end of August. Schools and colleges re-opened in September [1] and the government started…

The Irish government kept schools open, moved almost all universities online, and encouraged/required workers to work from home.

From our data, it doesn't appear that schools were a massive driver of transmission.

We know that kids don't spread it as much as they do the flu, so on balance, keeping schools open seems like the better course of action as long as it's not a major driver of infection rates.

Re: San Mateo County Health Officer Statement on Bay Area Stay-at-Home Orders

#228
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In most places, hospital are not overloaded If you speak to any doctor or nurse they will disagree with you. While we might not be at a breaking point for number of beds, the staff that have to put themselves in harms way do have the option to just quit. When that starts happening in mass we are all screwed.

I spoke with a nurse while at gym I attend. She spoke about how the hospital she's at is not close to be overwhelmed. She also talked about she doesn't wear a mask outside of her job as they have training and n95 masks which work in a hospital setting. But outside of a hospital environment the masks provide little protection, especially cloth masks.

Fox News watching nurse?

Re: San Mateo County Health Officer Statement on Bay Area Stay-at-Home Orders

#229
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I do have couple of nurse friend and doctor, they all thought lockdown measure is way overkill and all this has been greatly overblown. Not to mention the excessive ppe measure/protocol they now have to adopt, its only made their job harder.

I know many doctors and nurses and they are exhausted, over worked and thankful it didn’t get worse than it was To say that lock down was needless because the worst case scenario isn’t proof the lock down wasn’t needed. It is evidence (not proof mind) that the lockdowns worked. It’s like saying you didn’t need to save money because you never ran out of money so you didn’t need the savings in the first place

If the healthcare worker is overworked, then the hospital should hire more worker.

Its not like there is not enough healthcare worker looking for employment all over the country.

The lockdown was needless because it is worse than the risk if covid.

Re: San Mateo County Health Officer Statement on Bay Area Stay-at-Home Orders

#230
post #95
post #61

I understand the sentiment, but I think it's pretty clear in retrospect hard lockdowns were the correct way to address this. This half-assed "wear a mask and social distance if you want" stance just made the economy sputter for a whole a year. I've seen this in France twice, where they've oscillated between doing nothing and doing a lot, a couple brief lockdowns can reverse things quickly even after things have gotte…

That's exactly right. The harm to the economy is not caused by the countermeasures, it is caused by the disease. If you don't beat the disease, you wreck the economy.

No beating it in a porous country of 330 million people.
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