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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

#301
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does there have to be a statute to advocate for a rational, numerical based approach to public policy? You're a super smart, analytical guy. You don't see any problem with imposing extremely restrictive rules on a population of millions without even a basic attempt to quantify what your desired outcome is?

Why do you want this to be a simple problem? It isn't a simple problem, not by a long shot and erring on the side of caution seems to be the right way to play this because you are at most 4 weeks away from a serious disaster if you fuck it up. The fact that SF does ok is a result of the shelter-in-place order, without it SF would look like NYC or worse.

Nobody said it was going to be simple. I'm just advocating that it not be completely and totally lacking in stated goals when it's such a severe policy intervention.

Those goals could be complex, or detailed, or multivariate, or subject to contingencies and caveats. But they can't be non-existent and they can't be secret. This is a democracy.

> The fact that SF does ok is a result of the shelter-in-place order, without it SF would look like NYC or worse.

Your sentence here is making a quantitative assessment that the result is worse than NYC, without stating the metric you're using to arrive at that assessment, or hinting at the means by which it was arrived at. It's just "worse".

That's fine for an forum comment. But it's a disaster as a government policy almost six weeks into this crisis.

What's being criticized here is the parent story, which is a press release by the actual government, and appears to make no mention of the criteria used to arrive at this drastic and staggeringly expensive policy decision, and contains nary a hint of what metrics they'll use to evaluate it, or critically, determine if the schedule should be delayed or accelerated. That's crazy.

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

#302
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…

+1. Continuing a lockdown of this severity makes no sense. San Francisco has only had 22 Covid deaths. A city the size of SF would be expected to see 5x as many cancer deaths as that in a normal month [1] and 7x as many heart disease deaths [2]. Instead, we're maintaining a policy that discourages people from seeking preventative treatment for these diseases on the basis that we don't want them contracting a less dea…

I'm starting to see these arguments take startling similarity with the anti-vaccine arguments.

Which is that vaccines aren't necessary because people are no longer dying from said vaccinated diseases. Perhaps it's important to consider that one of the reasons why the doomsday predictions haven't came true is because places took action early.

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

#303
post #221

The reddit hive mind has become terrifying. It has seriously had a tangible effect on my faith in humanity. I never got onto Twitter but I assume it's about the same.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22999983.

Edit: Nothing particularly wrong with it! It's just a meta-fire which should be allowed to burn in some scrub somewhere.

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

#304
post #273
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a class divide, unfortunately. The people who are getting hit hardest are the people who were already getting hit hardest. Most of those don't frequent the same internet forums we do.

Some politicians have pointed out that some lower income people are getting paid more to _not_ work now, due to unemployment benefits and the CARES Act. I'm not saying that I agree with those politicians. It seems like the concern for lower income people runs the gamut from them not being able to make it to them living high on the benefits hog. Edit: It's not just politicians-- similar stories are on CNBC: https://ww…

Well, there's a very real systems level concern there. There are anecdotes - just anecdotes, but it'll already be a disaster if we start getting data - of workers yelling at business owners for securing the PPP funds to save their jobs.

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

#305
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…

> 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].

This matters if the end game is herd immunity, but not if the end game is to wait out a vaccine, or a sophisticated testing infrastructure. Unfortunately, I don’t think we know what the end game is going to look like now.

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

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ease up how? I mean, what's the specific proposal? The lockdown isn't "total" anyway -- very large numbers of people are still working at full salary (including, it must be pointed out, probably more than half the readers of this very site). There's little to no low hanging fruit of safe jobs that can be reopened. Just go look at the California list of "essential" jobs and tell us what needs to be added. Fundamentall…

I'm not an expert. I'd lean towards loosening restrictions on non-essential businesses, imposing strict capacity guidelines, and adjusting the strictness of the guidelines by region at fixed intervals with a fixed lead time. Add some worker protections so people who don't feel comfortable working don't lose their jobs during when they reopen, and don't exempt them from receiving unemployment so reopening doesn't turn…

[deleted]

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

#307
post #266

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…

If nothing else, at least we'll come out of this pandemic with some clear Supreme Court decisions to clarify what emergency powers state and local governments actually have. One nuance that people seem to miss is that timing matters. So a very short restriction on Constitutional rights may be acceptable, but the court places increasing scrutiny on those restrictions the longer they remain in place.

From https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/494892-barr-tell...

> Attorney General William Barr on Monday directed federal prosecutors to “be on the lookout” for public health measures put in place amid the coronavirus pandemic that might be running afoul of constitutional rights. In a two-page memorandum to the 93 U.S. attorneys, Barr cautioned that some state and local directives could be infringing on protected religious, speech and economic rights. “If a state or local ordinance crosses the line from an appropriate exercise of authority to stop the spread of COVID-19 into an overbearing infringement of constitutional and statutory protections, the Department of Justice may have an obligation to address that overreach in federal court,” Barr wrote.

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

#308
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 restricti…

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.

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

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it wouldn't. You ignored his point entirely, which is that even if we did manage to further lock down our borders, it does nothing to stop community transmissions. Those countries you listed weren't able to control the virus through strong border control, they did so through strong controls over community transmission.

Which should've been obvious, considering the initial transmissions in South Korea came from a cult.

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

#310
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…

Since my wife is on my health insurance plan, COBRA is going to be very expensive.

Instead of COBRA, can you get on an Obamacare ACA plan? That might be much cheaper.

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