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Good move by Newsom considering there were photos of people in socal still going to bars. Judging by how long the shelter in place has lasted and affected curv
by hkmurakami 7y ago
Good move by Newsom considering there were photos of people in socal still going to bars.
Judging by how long the shelter in place has lasted and affected curves in Asia, we should be prepared for ~2 months as a baseline. From what we're hearing from friends, life is starting to return to normalcy in Hong Kong, with no new domestic cases reported (though now they're contending with new imported cases from overseas travelers returning home). They have a really effective screening/tracking quarantine system in place where they'll give you a location tracking wristband for remote monitoring.
Our family has been affected by this since late January, and there's a big mental challenge aspect to this. Being able to walk outside (unlike in Wuhan) is really big.
It's truly unfortunate that the the country's health services bungled their initial testing and screening ramp up.
- wy3yebdudu 7y agoCalifornia probably has a month tops, nobody is going to accept completely halting their lives for two months let alone anything longer.
- Danieru 7y agoEven the most short sighted of society will recognize a need when their family starts dieing. Trouble that takes two weeks. Sadly many Americans have trouble planning several days ahead.
- scollet 7y agoSimilar to the airlines?
- scruple 7y agoAnd international hotel chains, and... the list grows so quickly, who can possibly keep up?
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y agoIf you look at the fear --in the supermarkets, in general lack of presence in public-- there are more people taking this seriously than not, with or without an official order.
- standardUser 7y agoPeople are in shock. Shock doesn't last two months. And don't forget all the people you don't see at the supermarkets.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y agoAs long as shelves remain empty, people will panic. You can not be panicked, see other people panicking, and then become panicked yourself. So it's going to be difficult for supermarkets to reverse what's happened unless they implement quantity limits.
- standardUser 7y agoThe shelves are only empty because everyone is stockpiling at the same time. There are no food or toiler paper shortages. But the toilet paper truck doesn't come every 2 hours, so if people buy up all the stock they need to wait until the next regularly scheduled shipment arrives. It's really not much of a problem, beyond the problem people have created by stockpiling too aggressively.
- vanniv 7y agoIf we all just stay in our houses forever, we all die anyway. Might as well risk living before we die.
- xenospn 7y agoJust wait until the first few celebrities die. That'll change everyone's mind very, very quickly.
- Animats 7y agoWe'll probably lose many members of Congress. They're the worst case - old, meet with many people, not social distancing.
- in_cahoots 7y agoThey have access to better healthcare than you or I, though.
- outside1234 7y agoWait until 100,000 people die, which would only be 0.2% of the population.
- jodrellblank 7y agoThat's about 14 days of people dying at normal USA death rate. Do you think people notice that happening and adjust for it?
- surewhynat 7y agohospitals will be overcrowded so your "normal" USA death rate will actually increase because the people who would normally receive medical attention will no longer receive it.
- jodrellblank 7y ago"my" death rate? My "normal" death rate? What are you saying? There will be overlap between people who die of diseases routinely (the elderly, the immuno-compromised, and those with underlying conditions, and the unlucky) and those who die of this disease. No matter, the point still stands - if 100,000 people dying is what it takes to change people's behaviour significantly, that ought to happen every month, and it doesn't.
- standardUser 7y agoThe truth is most deaths are going to be people near or beyond average life expectancy. I don't want to minimize the impact of any person's death, but I think people in general are willing to accept a fairly high death rate among the elderly, especially considering the most likely to perish are those who were already the most likely to perish. The death rate among the under-70 population is a different matter. If the medical system is overloaded and working-age people start dying en masse, I imagine that would change public consciousness quickly.
- throwaway4797 7y ago
- omar_a1 7y agoI'm more concerned about whether or not we can keep food, utilities, and housing running that long. If the front-line workers in the essential jobs are the most vulnerable to exposure, and the economy has screeched to a hault, can we keep everyone fed that long, keep the lights and sanitation going, while also not infecting everyone?
- xenospn 7y agoMy Chinese suppliers in Shenzhen have been back to work for a while now.
- ttul 7y agoThis is why their stock market is the best performing in the world this year...
- Vomzor 7y agoWithout contact tracing and isolation of positive cases a lockdown won’t work. Since no system like this is in place I reckon it will take a lot longer than 2 months.
- robocat 7y ago> contact tracing and isolation of positive cases That works if there is a relatively low number of cases, or you have enough testing capability to carpet bomb everyone with tests. Once the number of cases gets too high, contact tracing has lost, because you have too many unknown cases in the community. If you can’t test a large percentage of your population, you can’t detect pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic people that are spreading the virus.
- Marsymars 7y agoYeah, my jurisdiction has a pretty high test rate (3800/million people), but there's community spread, and they've explicitly stated they will not have the test capacity to test everyone who's symptomatic in at least the short to medium term.
- T-hawk 7y agoThis is correct. This is how South Korea stopped it - early testing and isolation followed by contact tracing to test them too. Think about it this way. The Ro spread factor is somewhere between 2.2 and 3.0 by most reports. People are contagious for 7 to 14 days before they know it. Therefore every infected person spreads a new case only once every 2 to 5 days on average. The problem isn't that the virus is explosively contagious per-interaction (measles is higher), it's that the incubation period is so long across so many interactions. Cut that recognition time from that 7-14 days to 2, cut off those interactions, and that's how you get Ro below 1 to stop it. That's what South Korea did, by way of both rapid testing and contact tracing to test them too. Reports are that their rapid test gives false positives of up to 10%, but that's okay, a false positive is much less consequential than a false negative. What jurisdictions in the Western world have the means and will to implement that remains to be seen.
- apatters 7y agoI don't understand how we get to Newsom's claim that 25 million Californians will get infected in 8 weeks. The math doesn't check out. The best data we have at this point is from China. They have 81,000 confirmed cases to date, most of them happened over an 8 week period. Obviously not all cases of the virus were confirmed but people were hospitalized and tested aggressively. Even if only 10% of the cases in China were confirmed (and 10% is a low guess at the percentage that might need to go to the hospital with serious symptoms, and thus be confirmed), that means under a million cases in a population of 1.4 billion. California's population is 35x smaller than China's but Newsom is predicting California will have over 25x more cases. Sure you can argue that China is lying about their cases (WHO disagrees). Or that they are authoritarian superhumans with a superior response. Or whatever. But this discrepancy is just too big to make sense. I don't think CA will have 25 million cases in 8 weeks. I think he is trying to scare people into staying home. Staying home is still a good idea, because the health care system will collapse at a lot fewer than 25M cases in 8 weeks. But I think it's fearmongering.
- hkmurakami 7y agoChina's response in Wuhan in February was indeed superhuman, wrt quarantine, travel bans, medical personnel influx, infrastructure build outs, etc. They built 2000 isolation hospital bed capacity in something like 6 days.
- klipt 7y agoI assume the 25 million number is assuming we don't stay at home and go about business as normal. 81k is what China got after instituting lockdown as soon as they saw 400 new cases in one day.
- manigandham 7y agoAll of these shutdowns are weeks late and the US does not currently have the authority and means to lock down the way eastern countries did. There are still millions of people going about their day here in LA and nobody will stop them.
- kilroy123 7y agoI would disagree. If the national guard gets deployed, they will say otherwise.
- chasd00 7y agoforcing it means armed rebellion, Americans don't handle freedom taken away by force very well.
- firstimeluser 7y agoNo it doesn't. 99.999% of Americans aren't going to respond with violence if the national guard enforces a quarantine. This is the most ridiculous fantasy a subset of HN users love to bring up, but there is just absolutely no chance that this happens in any meaningful way.
- grnkj43t 7y agoFuck You! Go back to your piece of shit communistic state you asshole!
- lend000 7y agoIt seems like less extreme measures may have fewer unintended consequences. For example, by closing down all restaurants, local grocery stores have been packed all day. I expect there is more cross contamination in your local supermarket than there would be in normal supermarket conditions plus one smaller restaurant setting per day.
- standardUser 7y agoPeople will never abide by a two month quarantine in this country. The number of people who say "I'll just get sick and risk spreading it" starts at much greater than zero and will rise every single everyday. There will need to be back-and-forth quarantines, or targeted quarantines, or some other creative method of allowing people to live roughly normal lives after a few weeks.
- chasd00 7y agoyeah, i'm actually impressed the general public has been as accommodating as they have. It won't last forever though, I think the government knows they can only keep people in their homes for so long. Eventually, the people will be like eff this and start re-engaging their lives.
- PikachuEXE 7y agoI live in Hong Kong and there are many failures like - Unable to activate the location tracking wristband (activation code sent by SMS not received) - Quarantine is done by people themselves, traveling from port to staying places = no monitor & unprotected Many people (medical people) have experienced SARS in 2003 and they stay on alert this time. Except there are still enough people (especially the government personnel) not learning from / haven't experienced SARS. If the current measure can eliminate the spread, I will feel lucky. But if the virus keeps spreading, I won't be surprised.