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

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

#91
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is dated data (from 1981) showing a 37,000 increase in deaths for each percentage-point rise in the unemployment rate. It comes from a book called “Corporate Flight: The Causes and Consequences of Economic Dislocation” by Barry Bluestone, Bennett Harrison and Lawrence Baker. From the article citation below: > Here’s the paragraph from Thomas’ book that applies: “According to one study [the one by Bluestone et a…

Then what's happening right now is a refutation of that data, right? Because we have sky-high unemployment and nothing resembling those numbers. It's almost as if unemployment in ordinary circumstances is not the same as unemployment caused by a discrete, universally-applicable crisis.

I will not dispute that you could be right. We'll only know for sure looking back from the future (lagging indicators and such).

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

#92
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…

In New Zealand, South Korea and Australia coronaplague is on the way out thanks to testing and contact tracing. Why can't the US muster the political will to do the same?

We are already seeing the damage because a number of meatpacking plants had to go off-line when a substantial part of their workforce was ill and could not report to work, yet many citizens advocate for even lighter restrictions. Nothing of this makes any sense.

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

#93
post #29
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…

I've seen you say similar things in a few other threads, and myself and others have said, every time: the risk to everyone is that the hospitals become overwhelmed. They are not right now because of stay-at-home orders. What you think of as failure - hospitals currently low utilization - is in fact success .

I don't know about San Francsico, but, in much of the less population dense US West, the deaths from denial of so-called "non-critical" procedures are getting out of control, and hospitals and medical facilities are losing way too many employees.

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

#94
post #12

I just noticed that it’s 75 days between March 17 and May 31. Wuhan’s lockdown was 76 days long.

The Wuhan lockdown was also far more strict.

Wuhan was also the biggest epicenter in China and that is where it originated with lot more cases than in the Bay Area.

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

#95
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen you say similar things in a few other threads, and myself and others have said, every time: the risk to everyone is that the hospitals become overwhelmed. They are not right now because of stay-at-home orders. What you think of as failure - hospitals currently low utilization - is in fact success .

Here in BC we don't have such restrictive conditions, and yet we still have very few cases. Vancouver has about 76% of the population of SF, but has half the number of cases. Restricting people to be at home has no benefit, no logic behind it, but has significant repercussions on mental health.

My understanding is that the Vancouver lockdown is largely identical to the California one, no? What is open there that isn't in CA? I know restaurants, theaters, large gatherings, etc... are all closed, which is the economic activity most of the "reopen" people are concerned about.

Edit to note: two responses "disagreeing" with me by pointing out that the BC lockdown is effectively the same thing as the California one from the perspective of economic impact. This is why I asked the question! People are being fooled into arguing with a strawman idea of "lockdown" that isn't what is actually implemented.

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

#96
post #29
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…

I've seen you say similar things in a few other threads, and myself and others have said, every time: the risk to everyone is that the hospitals become overwhelmed. They are not right now because of stay-at-home orders. What you think of as failure - hospitals currently low utilization - is in fact success .

The problem I see with that statement is that it's difficult, if not impossible to falsify.

Hospitals are nowhere near being overwhelmed, in general, which means that they have some capacity to handle an outbreak if we lift restrictions gradually. I know people who work at hospitals in places like LA, and they've reported that activity is relatively slow. (of course in part because fewer people are going to the ER for other issues)

Lives are being ruined by furthering a draconian lockdown. I know several people who have not only been laid off, but had their businesses destroyed and their dreams crushed. Someone in my neighborhood spent their life savings on starting a gourmet burgers and brews joint next to a movie theater, which would have undoubtedly succeeded in normal conditions. They're getting very few curbside orders because they opened after the pandemic started and nobody is familiar with the brand. They're almost certainly screwed, especially if some semblance of foot traffic doesn't begin coming back in the next month.

I, too, was in the early stage of starting a brick and mortar business before the lockdown. Fortunately, I hadn't opened up anywhere yet. Because my business relied on the existence of gyms, I would have been massively screwed. If there is a god, I'll thank him now for not putting me through the ordeal of owing tens of thousands of dollars to the bank. Now I'm not even going to bother opening up because there may not be any appreciable business in the next year or so, which also means people whom I would have employed have to look elsewhere and may be out of work.

Low hospital utilization seems to have become our only metric for success. I think that's crap, especially now that it's coming out that way more people have had this virus than the numbers suggested.

We can put on masks, wash our hands, and all that, but this idea that "the new normal" is to have little to no proximity with other human beings is demoralizing and wrong. Life isn't just about staying alive.

EDIT: To bring up anecdotes is not a fallacy, and I won't apologize for it.

Some ignorant boob happened to bring up NYC, and their comment to mine got flagged, but I still want to reply to that point.

You can't focus in on a particular city and then claim that, without draconian intervention, that NYC will be coming to a neighborhood near you. It's more complicated than that, and the more data we are getting, the more it's looking like we could begin to take measures to ease the restrictions in a reasonable way in parts of the world where it makes sense. But people like to point at the raw numbers rather than looking at the science or the per-capita numbers.

By using the logic of "but look at NYC!", we should keep the entire world closed until every city on the planet has no more cases, which is highly improbable and destructive.

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

#97
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 more month will probably put a huge number of businesses out of business. Is there a reason why they'd do something like this, where anyone who looks will see that it's not at all needed?

Opening too early would be the end of a political career. A ruined economy isn't, you can always point to "the virus" that did it.

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

#98
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…

Let's wait and hear what they say this week, hopefully there will be more ease in the current shelter in place guidelines.

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

#99
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…

To anyone reading the comment above, it is extremely poor advice and should not be followed. Stay at home and shelter in place orders are not solely for the purpose of protecting ones-self from contracting the virus. They also serve to limit the spread from unsuspecting carriers. You can carry and spread the virus unknowingly and this will result in susceptible people contracting it and dying. The only way we know th…

fascist

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

#100
post #42
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…

You sound far more confident about a number of those details than I think anyone with expertise are. > are being fearful This is a conclusion you can only reach retrospectively. I'm not arguing that the extension is correct; I'm arguing that your assertions do not provide reason to think it is incorrect.

You are aware that this is Hacker News, aren't you? These are Great Minds who have accomplishments like "made a one page app" and "talk about Rust a lot".

Only on HN can you read a group that is so absolutely sure that they are experts on any topic.

An enormous number of users on here are outright liars as well, carefully molding themselves into whatever persona they think carries the most powerful position. I pointing out one such case (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22981613), had +5...flagged. LOL.

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