12 ms·

After 100K Covid-19 cases, it’s clearer where Californians are getting infected

98 points by MilnerRoute 6y ago

dehrmann 6y ago
I've been waiting for some analysis like this. There have been pushes for hazard pay for a lot of critical lobs, but there hasn't been much information show what's actually risky. A big takeaway from this is that the main part of the food supply that's at-risk is meat production, so while people might have to eat rice and beans, the food supply should otherwise hold up.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  ... and meat production is only at risk if you have working conditions of the sort Upton Sinclair wrote about in "The Jungle" (1906). Meatpacking here is a skilled trade that is done without conveyor belts, so our meat packers have had no problem keeping 2m distance. (Rice and beans are yummy, but the pastafarians have better comics: https://xkcd.com/2287/ https://xkcd.com/2287/ ) Edit: (please bear with me for replies, I hit the rate limit so it may be a while)
  - lazyasciiart 6y ago
    Where is "here" for you?
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      Switzerland. This is a safety publication of ours (not safe for vegetarians) https://www.ekas.ch/download.php?id=7869 https://www.ekas.ch/download.php?id=7869 Even if you don't read german, I think the pictures show why we haven't had the same problems (compare to an image search of conveyer-belt-driven meatpacking in, say, germany) with social distancing and meat. It probably helps that even though we are a politically third world country, we are an economically first world country: people are expensive and machines are cheap. For nerds: the slogan on the front page, «Unfall – kein Zufall!», means "Accidents are not happenstance", and the graph on p.8 shows the close relationship between improvement on safety assessments and accident rates. p.19 is also an interesting workplace safety observation, but that's a different topic.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    Since meatpacking plants are trouble spot in the US that would imply that meatpacking plants in the US have the same conditions as The Jungle but that seems somewhat counterintuitive as The Jungle is often pointed to as having changed the US meatpacking industry for the better.
    - labster 6y ago
      It’s back. As they say, if you got the money, honey, we got your disease. In The Jungle, welcome to The Jungle. Watch it bring you to your shun n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n knees, knees! Kind of a weird theme song for the book now that I think about it.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - hcknwscommenter 6y ago
      The Jungle was about a rendering plant no? It's been a while. In the Jungle, people died regularly. In meatpacking these days (pre-covid) it's a dirty/gross job with low pay and physically hard work but (pre-covid) there weren't a lot of deaths from meatpacking. OSHA kind of frowns on that sort of thing, at least during Democratic administrations.
    - Animats 6y ago
      Yes, it's back. US Immigration enforcement has been soft on the meat industry. Part of this was the political backlash after there was an ICE raid on a meat plant in Iowa in 2008, and a prominent Jew went to prison.[1] (Trump recently pardoned him.) ICE enforcement against employers has never been strong, and was even weaker after that. There hasn't been a big raid like that since. In countries without cheap labor, much meat processing is automated. The technology is available. Lamb: [2] Beef: [3] Chicken [4]. "Against Brazil, USA and Asia, we're a high cost manufacturer" - Australian plant manager putting in automation. Right now, lamb deboning can be totally automated, chicken deboning almost is, and beef is coming along. (This reflects the technology coming from Australia, where the sheep industry is huge.) Possible area for a startup. (Videos not safe for vegetarians.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postville_raid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postville_raid [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za2dsB0qrMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za2dsB0qrMg [3] https://youtu.be/jqs2PWmbuus https://youtu.be/jqs2PWmbuus [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isdKEo_qMqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isdKEo_qMqY
- TopHand 6y ago
  There is a perfect storm brewing in the food industry. Investments in the spring when crops are planted were down. There is a solar minimum occurring which will effect the yield of food grown. There is a locust plague going on in some parts of the world. A large number of countries, because of the pandemic have halted exports of food. Another aspect of the pandemic is that food is exported to be processed, then re-imported to be consumed, and this has slowed or stopped. There are some models that suggest large populations on the planet to be starving by the end of the year.
  - phreeza 6y ago
    Do you have further information on these models?
    - TopHand 6y ago
      https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/04/1062272 https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/04/1062272
m0zg 6y ago
CA, NY and NJ were the states that forced their nursing homes to take C19 patients. https://web.archive.org/web/20200430140410/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/us/nursing-homes-coronavirus.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200430140410/https://www.nytim... CA got off easy, relatively speaking. Probably fewer nursing homes. It's amazing how idiotic government officials can be.
- rdtsc 6y ago
  > “Whoever made this decision, whoever did this, I consider this a sentence of death for all the older patients, whoever is in a nursing home,” he said. Wonder what the justification was. Hindsight 20/20 as they say, but wasn’t it known the age and various conditions that older patients might have are risk factors early on?
  - duckMuppet 6y ago
    Everyone followed a flawed IHME model, they shoved out elderly to make room for patients who would need ventilators because everyone blindly trusted the models and certainly didn't listen to anyone from Stanford. They didn't listen to the data later, which continued to show that over 80%of the time ventilators were ineffective for patients. Then again, the CDC still has listed fever as one of the main and certain symptoms of covid, yet JAMA published in late March/ early April that only 30%of patients actually exhibited fever, and concluded it wasn't a good indicator of infection. Or The WHO who just put a video out which says masks are ineffective meanwhile every governor in the USA is demanding masks be worn by everyone essentially to virtue signal who is who. But like all the above, this entire ordeal wasn't about a virus, it's about control.
    - duckMuppet 6y ago
      It Isn't just California, it's the entire USA. It wasn't about a virus it was about control. https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursing-homes-assisted-living-facilities-0-6-of-the-u-s-population-43-of-u-s-covid-19-deaths https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursin...
cperciva 6y ago
In Canada, the vast majority of cases have been associated with long term care facilities, hospitals, prisons, and meat packing facilities. The majority of deaths had been associated with long term care facilities -- because that's where the old (and thus highly vulnerable) people are. These all share in common the traits of having lots of people in close contact for extended periods -- and in many cases, have a steady influx of new people coming in. The most important health measure taken in British Columbia -- aside from providing workers with masks, of course -- has been to restrict long term care workers to working in a single facility. In other places, workers routinely work multiple part-time jobs and have spread the virus between facilities; fortunately that was stopped very early in BC, and our death toll so far is only around 150 (out of a population of over 5 million).
- AlexanderDhoore 6y ago
  It's the same in Belgium. At some point half of the deaths came from care homes. Here they even restrict workers to a certain floor or area in the care homes.
  - Tepix 6y ago
    Why are there so many deaths in Belgium? It‘s terrible!
    - jariel 6y ago
      Belgium is counting anyone who dies with covid-like symptoms as a covid death, even without a test. So while everyone else is probably underreporting, Belgium is overreporting.
      - NicoJuicy 6y ago
        Correct Our minister of health is a doctor ( although she is ridiculed in public media because of her weight), it led to overreporting Covid cases. A pure politician would probably want to underreport.
    - 6y ago
chris_va 6y ago
TLDR: The virus tends to get spread in confines spaces (presumably, though not confirmed, airborne with a low infectivity per virion). The more people in a confined space (meatpacking plant, prison, care facility, etc), the larger the outbreak.
- YZF 6y ago
  I thought the tl;dr was we don't know for sure and we need to collect more data. "But the question remains — beyond these known clusters, how did the tens of thousands of Californians who aren’t accounted for in publicized major outbreaks become infected?" ... "“We don’t know if people just going to parks or beaches, just sort of casual social gathering, contribute a whole lot to infections,” Riley said. Public health officials “really need to identify the high-transmission settings and then target those and not have these unfocused measures on social distancing.”"
  - kangaroozach 6y ago
    Good point
- bsder 6y ago
  The tl;dr is "groups in indoor spaces, including family gatherings, are known bad". Other things seem to be less important, but we haven't sorted them out yet and we still have a large chunk of cases whose transmission can't be accounted for. The real problem is that this means that schools and colleges are now proven known bad. What are we supposed to do come September?
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    One possibility is better ventilation. Open windows, install HEPA filters on the HVAC system, run the HVAC circulation fans continuously rather than intermittently, rejigger the HVAC system to pull air from outside rather than recirculate internal air.
    - 6y ago
zmmmmm 6y ago
The idea that it takes significant viral load to initiate infection makes it quite interesting to try and form a mental model of how transmission takes place. For example, you have a globule of viral particles that float through the air and lodge in the respiratory system. According to the "viral load" theory, this is unlikely to initiate infect by itself. We need repeated doses, possibly over a period of time. You could theorise that the inflation of risk is no more than that from the linear sum of the doses, ie: any given "dose" has the same probability of inducing infection. However the "viral load" idea suggests that multiple exposure is worse than just the sum of independent random events. It suggests there's some sort of interaction whereby multiple doses within a short period of time are especially potent, as if the viral products from independently replicating infections in the respiratory system are able in some way to reinforce each other and make it more likely than two independent chances that an overall infection will take hold. Curious if there is any work in this regard that would elucidate the underpinning process of infection.
- IAmEveryone 6y ago
  I don't quite understand your logic, but the more common view is rather the opposite: repeated small exposures are the best way to get exposed, if you cannot avoid it completely. The mechanism is essentially variolation: giving your immune system some exposure so the adaptive immune system can start the process of building immunity, but so little that the innate immune system still has a good chance of winning this first round. Then, of course, there's basic mathematics: viruses multiply exponentially. Assuming a single virus particle can theoretically infect you and, at the other side of the spectrum, that getting full-on sneezed on can deliver a billion virus particles, the time difference is enormous: that one virus particle would take 30 viral life cycles to grow to a billion, even if unchecked. At a few hours per generation, this could provide your immune system with a few days to a week of head start.
  - JamesBarney 6y ago
    The confusion between you an OP is what you mean by short. He means over minutes, I assume you mean over days.
- 6y ago
remote_phone 6y ago
LA times has an excellent dashboard on coronavirus. The most stark thing that I saw besides the overwhelming number of cases in health care facilities, jails and Meat plants was the outsized infection rate of Latinos vs other races. The rate was almost double the demographics if I remember correctly which was shocking
- puranjay 6y ago
  Is there a genetic factor to it or just different social norms among Latinos (say, extended families)?
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  My understanding is that there are a large number of Latinos working in meat packing ad healthcare facilities, and also in jail
- jacquesc 6y ago
  I suspect getting Covid is related to how closely people live together. But better to stay focused on keeping people out of parks and beaches.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
apatters 6y ago
How are people able to read this? I get a screen that demands I disable my ad blocker. The exact same article is available without demands here (at least when I accessed it through Google): https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/30/after-100000-coronavirus-cases-its-clearer-where-californians-are-getting-infected/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/30/after-100000-coronavi...
rmason 6y ago
In Michigan they've been very stingy with data but this tracks well in our state as well. However densely populated poor neighborhoods have created a lot of cases as well, especially in Detroit. In Detroit over a thousand police attended a pancake breakfast in mid-March including the top brass. Nearly all the cases in the police department stem from this single event. The police chief was infected and the chief of homicide died.
gnicholas 6y ago
Apparently 42% of the covid deaths in the US have been in nursing homes, which house .62% of the population. In some states, the share is as high as 70% of the deaths. https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursing-homes-assisted-living-facilities-0-6-of-the-u-s-population-43-of-u-s-covid-19-deaths/#4adf6d2b74cd https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursin...
- ReticentVole 6y ago
  Based on that, it doesn't really make sense to shutdown all of society. Measures focused purely on the vulnerable would achieve the same result for significantly less cost.
  - blueboo 6y ago
    Does it? If we'd had 330k deaths, and 70% were coming from nursing homes, focusing on care homes would still be more efficient, but we'd be left with 100k that weren't. I realize there is some (necessarily vague) policy threshold past which the resultant damage to the economy is not "worth it", but the fact that there is a particularly vulnerable segment doesn't obviate the need for less efficient mitigation measures.
Tepix 6y ago
I heard about a study mentioned on the german NDR coronavirus podcast. You‘re 19 times as likely to get infected indoors. Go outside! If you are in a closed room with others, open the windows! If you can‘t due to bad weather, cancel the gathering/school lesson/restaurant visit/whatever if possible.
rv-de 6y ago
> Why meat plants? The CDC said it’s hard for those workers to stay separated and wear masks on the job, and there are “sociocultural and economic challenges” with a diverse, low-wage workforce, including language barriers and employees living in crowded settings and sharing rides to work. "An important factor could also be the ambient temperature at the workplace. Cold temperatures prevailed in the rooms, some of which were the size of a hall. "I have been asking myself more and more whether these high transmission activities in slaughterhouses do not indicate something that we will otherwise experience over a large area in winter, namely this temperature effect. In other words: When it gets colder, the coronavirus will probably be better transmitted." Prof. Drosten Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) https://www.rnd.de/gesundheit/drosten-zu-corona-in-schlachtbetrieben-moglicher-hinweis-auf-schnellere-ubertragung-bei-kalten-temperaturen-ZKMI34M52VBFDM7EORCE5Y63GM.html https://www.rnd.de/gesundheit/drosten-zu-corona-in-schlachtb...
- oh-well-111 6y ago
  I was downvoted and criticized in a hilariously condescending manner for suggesting that warmer temperatures are slowing down the spread a couple for weeks ago. But it seems that the infinite lockdown proponents are getting a littler quieter now.
  - atomi 6y ago
    My theory is that it may not be the heat exactly, but the way in which heat rises that may cause the viral particles to disperse away from people.
cardiffspaceman 6y ago
Is this particular article the only possible vehicle for obtaining the information? It has an ad-blocker screen and if you comply you get an auto-playing video. And after apparently 24 hours no alternatives seem to have been posted.

98 points by MilnerRoute 6y ago

I've been waiting for some analysis like this. There have been pushes for hazard pay for a lot of critical lobs, but there hasn't been much information show what's actually risky. A big takeaway from this is that the main part of the food supply that's at-risk is meat production, so while people might have to eat rice and beans, the food supply should otherwise hold up.

082349872349872 6y ago
... and meat production is only at risk if you have working conditions of the sort Upton Sinclair wrote about in "The Jungle" (1906). Meatpacking here is a skilled trade that is done without conveyor belts, so our meat packers have had no problem keeping 2m distance. (Rice and beans are yummy, but the pastafarians have better comics: https://xkcd.com/2287/ https://xkcd.com/2287/ ) Edit: (please bear with me for replies, I hit the rate limit so it may be a while)
- lazyasciiart 6y ago
  Where is "here" for you?
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Switzerland. This is a safety publication of ours (not safe for vegetarians) https://www.ekas.ch/download.php?id=7869 https://www.ekas.ch/download.php?id=7869 Even if you don't read german, I think the pictures show why we haven't had the same problems (compare to an image search of conveyer-belt-driven meatpacking in, say, germany) with social distancing and meat. It probably helps that even though we are a politically third world country, we are an economically first world country: people are expensive and machines are cheap. For nerds: the slogan on the front page, «Unfall – kein Zufall!», means "Accidents are not happenstance", and the graph on p.8 shows the close relationship between improvement on safety assessments and accident rates. p.19 is also an interesting workplace safety observation, but that's a different topic.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  Since meatpacking plants are trouble spot in the US that would imply that meatpacking plants in the US have the same conditions as The Jungle but that seems somewhat counterintuitive as The Jungle is often pointed to as having changed the US meatpacking industry for the better.
  - labster 6y ago
    It’s back. As they say, if you got the money, honey, we got your disease. In The Jungle, welcome to The Jungle. Watch it bring you to your shun n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n knees, knees! Kind of a weird theme song for the book now that I think about it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - hcknwscommenter 6y ago
    The Jungle was about a rendering plant no? It's been a while. In the Jungle, people died regularly. In meatpacking these days (pre-covid) it's a dirty/gross job with low pay and physically hard work but (pre-covid) there weren't a lot of deaths from meatpacking. OSHA kind of frowns on that sort of thing, at least during Democratic administrations.
  - Animats 6y ago
    Yes, it's back. US Immigration enforcement has been soft on the meat industry. Part of this was the political backlash after there was an ICE raid on a meat plant in Iowa in 2008, and a prominent Jew went to prison.[1] (Trump recently pardoned him.) ICE enforcement against employers has never been strong, and was even weaker after that. There hasn't been a big raid like that since. In countries without cheap labor, much meat processing is automated. The technology is available. Lamb: [2] Beef: [3] Chicken [4]. "Against Brazil, USA and Asia, we're a high cost manufacturer" - Australian plant manager putting in automation. Right now, lamb deboning can be totally automated, chicken deboning almost is, and beef is coming along. (This reflects the technology coming from Australia, where the sheep industry is huge.) Possible area for a startup. (Videos not safe for vegetarians.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postville_raid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postville_raid [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za2dsB0qrMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za2dsB0qrMg [3] https://youtu.be/jqs2PWmbuus https://youtu.be/jqs2PWmbuus [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isdKEo_qMqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isdKEo_qMqY
TopHand 6y ago
There is a perfect storm brewing in the food industry. Investments in the spring when crops are planted were down. There is a solar minimum occurring which will effect the yield of food grown. There is a locust plague going on in some parts of the world. A large number of countries, because of the pandemic have halted exports of food. Another aspect of the pandemic is that food is exported to be processed, then re-imported to be consumed, and this has slowed or stopped. There are some models that suggest large populations on the planet to be starving by the end of the year.
- phreeza 6y ago
  Do you have further information on these models?
  - TopHand 6y ago
    https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/04/1062272 https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/04/1062272

m0zg 6y ago

CA, NY and NJ were the states that forced their nursing homes to take C19 patients. https://web.archive.org/web/20200430140410/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/us/nursing-homes-coronavirus.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200430140410/https://www.nytim... CA got off easy, relatively speaking. Probably fewer nursing homes. It's amazing how idiotic government officials can be.

rdtsc 6y ago
> “Whoever made this decision, whoever did this, I consider this a sentence of death for all the older patients, whoever is in a nursing home,” he said. Wonder what the justification was. Hindsight 20/20 as they say, but wasn’t it known the age and various conditions that older patients might have are risk factors early on?
- duckMuppet 6y ago
  Everyone followed a flawed IHME model, they shoved out elderly to make room for patients who would need ventilators because everyone blindly trusted the models and certainly didn't listen to anyone from Stanford. They didn't listen to the data later, which continued to show that over 80%of the time ventilators were ineffective for patients. Then again, the CDC still has listed fever as one of the main and certain symptoms of covid, yet JAMA published in late March/ early April that only 30%of patients actually exhibited fever, and concluded it wasn't a good indicator of infection. Or The WHO who just put a video out which says masks are ineffective meanwhile every governor in the USA is demanding masks be worn by everyone essentially to virtue signal who is who. But like all the above, this entire ordeal wasn't about a virus, it's about control.
  - duckMuppet 6y ago
    It Isn't just California, it's the entire USA. It wasn't about a virus it was about control. https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursing-homes-assisted-living-facilities-0-6-of-the-u-s-population-43-of-u-s-covid-19-deaths https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursin...

cperciva 6y ago

In Canada, the vast majority of cases have been associated with long term care facilities, hospitals, prisons, and meat packing facilities. The majority of deaths had been associated with long term care facilities -- because that's where the old (and thus highly vulnerable) people are. These all share in common the traits of having lots of people in close contact for extended periods -- and in many cases, have a steady influx of new people coming in. The most important health measure taken in British Columbia -- aside from providing workers with masks, of course -- has been to restrict long term care workers to working in a single facility. In other places, workers routinely work multiple part-time jobs and have spread the virus between facilities; fortunately that was stopped very early in BC, and our death toll so far is only around 150 (out of a population of over 5 million).

AlexanderDhoore 6y ago
It's the same in Belgium. At some point half of the deaths came from care homes. Here they even restrict workers to a certain floor or area in the care homes.
- Tepix 6y ago
  Why are there so many deaths in Belgium? It‘s terrible!
  - jariel 6y ago
    Belgium is counting anyone who dies with covid-like symptoms as a covid death, even without a test. So while everyone else is probably underreporting, Belgium is overreporting.
    - NicoJuicy 6y ago
      Correct Our minister of health is a doctor ( although she is ridiculed in public media because of her weight), it led to overreporting Covid cases. A pure politician would probably want to underreport.
  - 6y ago

chris_va 6y ago

TLDR: The virus tends to get spread in confines spaces (presumably, though not confirmed, airborne with a low infectivity per virion). The more people in a confined space (meatpacking plant, prison, care facility, etc), the larger the outbreak.

YZF 6y ago
I thought the tl;dr was we don't know for sure and we need to collect more data. "But the question remains — beyond these known clusters, how did the tens of thousands of Californians who aren’t accounted for in publicized major outbreaks become infected?" ... "“We don’t know if people just going to parks or beaches, just sort of casual social gathering, contribute a whole lot to infections,” Riley said. Public health officials “really need to identify the high-transmission settings and then target those and not have these unfocused measures on social distancing.”"
- kangaroozach 6y ago
  Good point
bsder 6y ago
The tl;dr is "groups in indoor spaces, including family gatherings, are known bad". Other things seem to be less important, but we haven't sorted them out yet and we still have a large chunk of cases whose transmission can't be accounted for. The real problem is that this means that schools and colleges are now proven known bad. What are we supposed to do come September?
- WalterBright 6y ago
  One possibility is better ventilation. Open windows, install HEPA filters on the HVAC system, run the HVAC circulation fans continuously rather than intermittently, rejigger the HVAC system to pull air from outside rather than recirculate internal air.
  - 6y ago

zmmmmm 6y ago

The idea that it takes significant viral load to initiate infection makes it quite interesting to try and form a mental model of how transmission takes place. For example, you have a globule of viral particles that float through the air and lodge in the respiratory system. According to the "viral load" theory, this is unlikely to initiate infect by itself. We need repeated doses, possibly over a period of time. You could theorise that the inflation of risk is no more than that from the linear sum of the doses, ie: any given "dose" has the same probability of inducing infection. However the "viral load" idea suggests that multiple exposure is worse than just the sum of independent random events. It suggests there's some sort of interaction whereby multiple doses within a short period of time are especially potent, as if the viral products from independently replicating infections in the respiratory system are able in some way to reinforce each other and make it more likely than two independent chances that an overall infection will take hold. Curious if there is any work in this regard that would elucidate the underpinning process of infection.

IAmEveryone 6y ago
I don't quite understand your logic, but the more common view is rather the opposite: repeated small exposures are the best way to get exposed, if you cannot avoid it completely. The mechanism is essentially variolation: giving your immune system some exposure so the adaptive immune system can start the process of building immunity, but so little that the innate immune system still has a good chance of winning this first round. Then, of course, there's basic mathematics: viruses multiply exponentially. Assuming a single virus particle can theoretically infect you and, at the other side of the spectrum, that getting full-on sneezed on can deliver a billion virus particles, the time difference is enormous: that one virus particle would take 30 viral life cycles to grow to a billion, even if unchecked. At a few hours per generation, this could provide your immune system with a few days to a week of head start.
- JamesBarney 6y ago
  The confusion between you an OP is what you mean by short. He means over minutes, I assume you mean over days.
6y ago

remote_phone 6y ago

LA times has an excellent dashboard on coronavirus. The most stark thing that I saw besides the overwhelming number of cases in health care facilities, jails and Meat plants was the outsized infection rate of Latinos vs other races. The rate was almost double the demographics if I remember correctly which was shocking

puranjay 6y ago
Is there a genetic factor to it or just different social norms among Latinos (say, extended families)?
s1artibartfast 6y ago
My understanding is that there are a large number of Latinos working in meat packing ad healthcare facilities, and also in jail
jacquesc 6y ago
I suspect getting Covid is related to how closely people live together. But better to stay focused on keeping people out of parks and beaches.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

apatters 6y ago

How are people able to read this? I get a screen that demands I disable my ad blocker. The exact same article is available without demands here (at least when I accessed it through Google): https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/30/after-100000-coronavirus-cases-its-clearer-where-californians-are-getting-infected/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/30/after-100000-coronavi...

rmason 6y ago

In Michigan they've been very stingy with data but this tracks well in our state as well. However densely populated poor neighborhoods have created a lot of cases as well, especially in Detroit. In Detroit over a thousand police attended a pancake breakfast in mid-March including the top brass. Nearly all the cases in the police department stem from this single event. The police chief was infected and the chief of homicide died.

gnicholas 6y ago

Apparently 42% of the covid deaths in the US have been in nursing homes, which house .62% of the population. In some states, the share is as high as 70% of the deaths. https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursing-homes-assisted-living-facilities-0-6-of-the-u-s-population-43-of-u-s-covid-19-deaths/#4adf6d2b74cd https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursin...

ReticentVole 6y ago
Based on that, it doesn't really make sense to shutdown all of society. Measures focused purely on the vulnerable would achieve the same result for significantly less cost.
- blueboo 6y ago
  Does it? If we'd had 330k deaths, and 70% were coming from nursing homes, focusing on care homes would still be more efficient, but we'd be left with 100k that weren't. I realize there is some (necessarily vague) policy threshold past which the resultant damage to the economy is not "worth it", but the fact that there is a particularly vulnerable segment doesn't obviate the need for less efficient mitigation measures.

Tepix 6y ago

I heard about a study mentioned on the german NDR coronavirus podcast. You‘re 19 times as likely to get infected indoors. Go outside! If you are in a closed room with others, open the windows! If you can‘t due to bad weather, cancel the gathering/school lesson/restaurant visit/whatever if possible.

rv-de 6y ago

> Why meat plants? The CDC said it’s hard for those workers to stay separated and wear masks on the job, and there are “sociocultural and economic challenges” with a diverse, low-wage workforce, including language barriers and employees living in crowded settings and sharing rides to work. "An important factor could also be the ambient temperature at the workplace. Cold temperatures prevailed in the rooms, some of which were the size of a hall. "I have been asking myself more and more whether these high transmission activities in slaughterhouses do not indicate something that we will otherwise experience over a large area in winter, namely this temperature effect. In other words: When it gets colder, the coronavirus will probably be better transmitted." Prof. Drosten Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) https://www.rnd.de/gesundheit/drosten-zu-corona-in-schlachtbetrieben-moglicher-hinweis-auf-schnellere-ubertragung-bei-kalten-temperaturen-ZKMI34M52VBFDM7EORCE5Y63GM.html https://www.rnd.de/gesundheit/drosten-zu-corona-in-schlachtb...

oh-well-111 6y ago
I was downvoted and criticized in a hilariously condescending manner for suggesting that warmer temperatures are slowing down the spread a couple for weeks ago. But it seems that the infinite lockdown proponents are getting a littler quieter now.
- atomi 6y ago
  My theory is that it may not be the heat exactly, but the way in which heat rises that may cause the viral particles to disperse away from people.

cardiffspaceman 6y ago

Is this particular article the only possible vehicle for obtaining the information? It has an ad-blocker screen and if you comply you get an auto-playing video. And after apparently 24 hours no alternatives seem to have been posted.