6 ms·

San Francisco flattened the curve early. Now, coronavirus cases are surging

13 points by mitchbob 6y ago

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
I definitely worry about this here in the Midwest, where we originally slayed the curve. But the key difference on these later spikes is testing infrastructure is better developed, so we should be able to isolate people more effectively.
foobarbazetc 6y ago
People stayed inside for 3 months to buy the feds time to do something. And the state ran out of money. Clearly, nothing is going to change at the federal level so people have quarantine fatigue.
- ponsin 6y ago
  the feds provided large quantities of ventilators and are funding multiple vaccine research. What else should they do? Every state has enough power to mandate mask wearing, quarantine, school closings without federal intervention
  - mindslight 6y ago
    The debt black hole pushing everyone to reopen is a direct product of the Federal Reserve. A real shut down would involve a moratorium on rent denominated in USD. (Never mind all of the little bits of discouragement the federal government has been feeding down to states, eg threatening to withhold school funding)
    - ponsin 6y ago
      1. I'm pretty sure that states can decide to not evict tenants (thereby severely hurting landlords who possibly have multiple mortgages to cover the rentals. 2. Did any other country uniformly cancel all rent?
      - malloryerik 6y ago
        Some like Germany safeguarded salaries instead by ensuring that workers remained employed. That's to say that they recompensed firms for salaries on condition workers remained employed during the lockdowns. The US should have more leeway because it has the world's reserve currency. I haven't worked it out but I'd like to hear why the Fed or Treasury (let's just say federal govt) couldn't simply replace lost real estate loan payments by adding to banks' balance sheets.
        ponsin 6y ago
        how is Germany's solution any different than giving unemployment benefits for furloughed employees? Regarding the Fed, they _could_ just print gobs of money, and probably nothing bad will happen in the near future. But if you want examples of why printing gobs of money is bad, just looks at the many other countries that tried that. Also, I would think that if the fed decides to print gobs of money, it would be bad for them to allocate all of it to repaying bank mortgages. I would much prefer the money gets distributed to the people (eg. $1,200 per person) or as loans to keep small businesses afloat until after the pandemic
      - mindslight 6y ago
        Suspending evictions means the debt is still piling up, so the threat of needing to eventually pay or becoming homeless does not go away. As for landlords, mortgage payments (another form of economic rent) would then be suspended. The freeze needs to actually travel up the debt chain, rather than it suffering some small hiccup while being generally expected to continue. Other countries have more of a safety net, and less of an inflationary treadmill. A better safety net (eg continuing direct subsidies for the unemployed, and expanding them to cover small business rent) is another option, and probably the more practical one. But there is this American tendency to characterize such things as deliberate meddling with some default state of affairs. So I am mainly pointing out that this needing to feed the debt black hole is itself a result of explicit federal policy.
      - jlokier 6y ago
        It doesn't hurt mortgaged landlords much if they don't have to pay the mortgage while rent is stopped. Non-mortgage landlords might hurt if they depend on the income. But that's not much different from other businesses whose income stream stopped, and the same rescue packages could be applied, e.g. furlough etc. In the UK, rent was not stopped, but landlords were allowed to stop paying their mortgages. That seems unfair to me.
    - solidsnack9000 6y ago
      What are some countries that had a real shutdown and a moratorium on rent?
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > the feds provided large quantities of ventilators The feds, early on, initially declined to provide PPE from stockpiles, and then obstructed states who located their own PPE supplies (and other resources) and commandeered them, directing both originally federal stocks and commandeered stocks that were secured according to political affiliation rather than need, oversupplying (even compared to state requests) states with governors that were politically allied with the President and denying supplies to hard hit states whose governor's were members of the opposite major party. The federal government also directly I referred with virus control effort by using the Defense Production Act tomorrow to meat plant closures as large outbreaks were occurring in such facilities. And, that's not the extent of the political game playing involved. https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/07/9942890/jared-kushner-testing-plan-coronavirus-task-force-trump https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/07/9942890/jared-kushn... On top of that the biggest failing is the failure of federal aid to states; states largely have constitutional and practical limits that make borrowing for even extraordinary operating costs impractical or impossible, relying on the federal government (which is much less limited, both legally and because of its low cost of borrowing, which is kept down by being the currency issuer) for emergency deficit spending. Among other things, that's amounted to economic coercion for reopening, and that's been fairly overtly the reasoning Republican officials in both political branches of the federal government have given for not including such aid in emergency spending packages.
anm89 6y ago
I'm really not being an apologist here but how did Europe avoid this? I mean let's say Paris did everything right. Isn't this still where you end up once people venture back out? Clearly not but I don't understand how.
- opportune 6y ago
  I found this data [0, 1] from the economist which does suggest that Western European countries really did mitigate the virus and continue to do so. Excess deaths are a more robust measure of the effects of the virus because they're unaffected by testing differences and idiosyncrasies between countries. I have no idea if there are any travel restrictions in place internally to the Schengen area right now but I wouldn't be surprised if the free movement in the US between areas with very good control over the virus and area where it went haywire was a factor in the current spikes. Hispanic people are greatly over represented in current coronavirus cases in SF [2], supposedly because they are more likely to be essential first-line workers, but I think also having to live in very cramped living situations (e.g. 5 people in a 2 bed apartment) is another factor. So in that case wealth inequality could be another contributing factor as to why cases are higher in the US than the rest of the world. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/18/health/coronavirus-hispanic-sf-spread/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/18/health/coronavirus-hispanic-s...
polygot 6y ago
http://archive.is/5kSVB http://archive.is/5kSVB

13 points by mitchbob 6y ago

I definitely worry about this here in the Midwest, where we originally slayed the curve. But the key difference on these later spikes is testing infrastructure is better developed, so we should be able to isolate people more effectively.

foobarbazetc 6y ago

People stayed inside for 3 months to buy the feds time to do something. And the state ran out of money. Clearly, nothing is going to change at the federal level so people have quarantine fatigue.

ponsin 6y ago
the feds provided large quantities of ventilators and are funding multiple vaccine research. What else should they do? Every state has enough power to mandate mask wearing, quarantine, school closings without federal intervention
- mindslight 6y ago
  The debt black hole pushing everyone to reopen is a direct product of the Federal Reserve. A real shut down would involve a moratorium on rent denominated in USD. (Never mind all of the little bits of discouragement the federal government has been feeding down to states, eg threatening to withhold school funding)
  - ponsin 6y ago
    1. I'm pretty sure that states can decide to not evict tenants (thereby severely hurting landlords who possibly have multiple mortgages to cover the rentals. 2. Did any other country uniformly cancel all rent?
    - malloryerik 6y ago
      Some like Germany safeguarded salaries instead by ensuring that workers remained employed. That's to say that they recompensed firms for salaries on condition workers remained employed during the lockdowns. The US should have more leeway because it has the world's reserve currency. I haven't worked it out but I'd like to hear why the Fed or Treasury (let's just say federal govt) couldn't simply replace lost real estate loan payments by adding to banks' balance sheets.
      - ponsin 6y ago
        how is Germany's solution any different than giving unemployment benefits for furloughed employees? Regarding the Fed, they _could_ just print gobs of money, and probably nothing bad will happen in the near future. But if you want examples of why printing gobs of money is bad, just looks at the many other countries that tried that. Also, I would think that if the fed decides to print gobs of money, it would be bad for them to allocate all of it to repaying bank mortgages. I would much prefer the money gets distributed to the people (eg. $1,200 per person) or as loans to keep small businesses afloat until after the pandemic
    - mindslight 6y ago
      Suspending evictions means the debt is still piling up, so the threat of needing to eventually pay or becoming homeless does not go away. As for landlords, mortgage payments (another form of economic rent) would then be suspended. The freeze needs to actually travel up the debt chain, rather than it suffering some small hiccup while being generally expected to continue. Other countries have more of a safety net, and less of an inflationary treadmill. A better safety net (eg continuing direct subsidies for the unemployed, and expanding them to cover small business rent) is another option, and probably the more practical one. But there is this American tendency to characterize such things as deliberate meddling with some default state of affairs. So I am mainly pointing out that this needing to feed the debt black hole is itself a result of explicit federal policy.
    - jlokier 6y ago
      It doesn't hurt mortgaged landlords much if they don't have to pay the mortgage while rent is stopped. Non-mortgage landlords might hurt if they depend on the income. But that's not much different from other businesses whose income stream stopped, and the same rescue packages could be applied, e.g. furlough etc. In the UK, rent was not stopped, but landlords were allowed to stop paying their mortgages. That seems unfair to me.
  - solidsnack9000 6y ago
    What are some countries that had a real shutdown and a moratorium on rent?
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > the feds provided large quantities of ventilators The feds, early on, initially declined to provide PPE from stockpiles, and then obstructed states who located their own PPE supplies (and other resources) and commandeered them, directing both originally federal stocks and commandeered stocks that were secured according to political affiliation rather than need, oversupplying (even compared to state requests) states with governors that were politically allied with the President and denying supplies to hard hit states whose governor's were members of the opposite major party. The federal government also directly I referred with virus control effort by using the Defense Production Act tomorrow to meat plant closures as large outbreaks were occurring in such facilities. And, that's not the extent of the political game playing involved. https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/07/9942890/jared-kushner-testing-plan-coronavirus-task-force-trump https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/07/9942890/jared-kushn... On top of that the biggest failing is the failure of federal aid to states; states largely have constitutional and practical limits that make borrowing for even extraordinary operating costs impractical or impossible, relying on the federal government (which is much less limited, both legally and because of its low cost of borrowing, which is kept down by being the currency issuer) for emergency deficit spending. Among other things, that's amounted to economic coercion for reopening, and that's been fairly overtly the reasoning Republican officials in both political branches of the federal government have given for not including such aid in emergency spending packages.

anm89 6y ago

I'm really not being an apologist here but how did Europe avoid this? I mean let's say Paris did everything right. Isn't this still where you end up once people venture back out? Clearly not but I don't understand how.

opportune 6y ago
I found this data [0, 1] from the economist which does suggest that Western European countries really did mitigate the virus and continue to do so. Excess deaths are a more robust measure of the effects of the virus because they're unaffected by testing differences and idiosyncrasies between countries. I have no idea if there are any travel restrictions in place internally to the Schengen area right now but I wouldn't be surprised if the free movement in the US between areas with very good control over the virus and area where it went haywire was a factor in the current spikes. Hispanic people are greatly over represented in current coronavirus cases in SF [2], supposedly because they are more likely to be essential first-line workers, but I think also having to live in very cramped living situations (e.g. 5 people in a 2 bed apartment) is another factor. So in that case wealth inequality could be another contributing factor as to why cases are higher in the US than the rest of the world. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/18/health/coronavirus-hispanic-sf-spread/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/18/health/coronavirus-hispanic-s...

polygot 6y ago

http://archive.is/5kSVB http://archive.is/5kSVB