8 ms·

>"Given SF has been extremely heavy handed with the lockdowns" To great effect, mind you. SF County has the lowest rate of new cases per 100k of any major city

>"Given SF has been extremely heavy handed with the lockdowns" To great effect, mind you. SF County has the lowest rate of new cases per 100k of any major city in the country by a pretty significant margin [0]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-c...

kfarr 6y ago
Exactly. SF is one of the safest places to live in the US right now (as it relates to COVID)
- mrkstu 6y ago
  The problem, of course, is that you can replicate that level of safety, if it matters to you, anywhere, by locking yourself in your house. Since the US isn't an island, anytime SF loosens up, CV will immediately spike anyway, so no real advantage gained. You end up creating a backlash. If the vaccines live up to their advance billing some small number of lives will be saved, but it is very unclear whether, in the long run, more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it.
  - mkolodny 6y ago
    > it is very unclear whether, in the long run, more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it I have yet to see data that shows any evidence of this theory. If you are aware of any existing data that points to this conclusion, I'd love to see it.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago
      Did you know that the Spanish flu of 1918 wasn't really Spanish? Edit: Okay so maybe I skipped to the punchline. Just trying to say politics influences data or lack of data.
    - ponker 6y ago
      Of course there isn't data about the long-term societal effects of a global lockdown in a modern society. But there are huge numbers of kids being denied education and social interaction right now. There are people who have lost money and are not eating right or living in healthy conditions, etc. So there are clearly going to be massive negative impacts from the mitigation, and nobody will know the scale for decades to come.
    - zaroth 6y ago
      For example, just US children are on track to miss 9 million vaccinations in 2020. [1] Worldwide poverty and deferred healthcare for vaccines and cancer screenings will have a decade the rack up an order of magnitude more deaths than will ever be directly attributed to COVID. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/health/coronavirus-childhood-vaccines-immunizations.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/health/coronavirus-childh...
      - mkolodny 6y ago
        Children can, and, according to the CDC, should get vaccinations during lockdowns. "CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommend every child continues to receive routine vaccinations during the COVID-19 outbreak." [0] Personally, I'm hoping vaccinations against COVID are what ends the pandemic. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/visit/vaccination-during-COVID-19.html#:~:text=CDC%20and%20the%20American%20Academy,during%20the%20COVID-19%20outbreak https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/visit/vaccination-durin....
  - jnwatson 6y ago
    The only reasonable hypothesis I've heard for an increase in number of deaths due to lockdown is suicide and deferred medical care for non-COVID cases. The US is running at an average 1500 deaths a day now. We lost about 132 deaths per day from suicide in 2019. Even if that doubles, that leave a lot of room for additional deaths due to deferred medical care. The numbers just don't add up.
    - amscanne 6y ago
      Just to be a bit pedantic, these aren’t apples and oranges comparisons. It’s common to measure lives lost in quality-of-life adjusted years, since losing an 85-year old to COVID is a lot different than losing a 20-year old to suicide or due to deferred medical treatment. (The ages are exaggerated, but obviously COVID victims tend to be much older.)
      - mcguire 6y ago
        "Since April, 1.9 million excess years of life have been lost, 13% above historical average. Over the course of the pandemic, we found age and sex contributions to excess YLL have shifted. Deaths among adults 65 and older accounted for 80% of excess YLL in April but only 36% of excess YLL in June. Since April, working age adults 20-64 have accounted for 47% of excess YLL, and males 20 to 64 have contributed 34%." April, May, and June had around 10% excess YLL. July and August had 17.5% excess YLL. https://healthcostinstitute.org/hcci-research/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-years-of-life-lost https://healthcostinstitute.org/hcci-research/the-impact-of-...
        amscanne 6y ago
        And? The parent point was that lockdowns might cause other kinds of death (suicide, deferred medical treatment). All-cause mortality obviously encodes those non-COVID deaths, there is no way to tell them apart. Since the cited study lacks the necessary data (and openly states as much), using it to support any claims about the impact of COVID vs lockdowns is simply begging the question.
  - paxys 6y ago
    Doctors, nurses, EMTs, transit agency workers, taxi drivers, grocery workers, bank tellers, police, firemen, street cleaners, nursing home staff – none of them can lock themselves in their house and continue to get paychecks like the average tech worker. Creating a safe environment for essential workers, homeless, elderly and otherwise financially struggling folks is something most other cities are failing at, and I'm happy San Francisco is not prioritizing the feelings of bros who need to go out to bars.
    - hedora 6y ago
      Other than doctors, can any of those groups actually still afford to live in SF?
      - paxys 6y ago
        They still work in SF, whether they live there or not.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - outworlder 6y ago
    > The problem, of course, is that you can replicate that level of safety, if it matters to you, anywhere, by locking yourself in your house. Yeah. But this idea breaks down as soon as one needs to leave the house for basic necessities. In that case, you would be much better off in a community which takes the issue seriously. > more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it Not many lives should be lost by lockdowns, if at all. Perhaps if this issue wasn't so politicized, governments could intervene (and some have, in Europe) to help those in need.
  - oblio 6y ago
    > If the vaccines live up to their advance billing some small number of lives will be saved, but it is very unclear whether, in the long run, more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it. https://youtu.be/bzh6HwN0gbw?t=398 https://youtu.be/bzh6HwN0gbw?t=398 Better yet, watch the whole thing. And check the public numbers. Stop spreading misinformation.
hnrodey 6y ago
In the past 14 days, 99.798% of residents in San Francisco County have NOT received a positive COVID-19 test. See for yourself at https://thecovidcomplex.com/state/california/san%20francisco/summary https://thecovidcomplex.com/state/california/san%20francisco... Full disclosure, I built this website. Data is sourced from the New York Times. It’s the same dataset they use to power the interactive map that was linked. And I just discovered I have an error sharing links to counties with spaces. Go figure lol Edit: 4 minutes since posting and a downvote. At least explain yourself.
- lhorie 6y ago
  Didn't downvote you, but that 99.7% number is a bit meaningless unless you also state the number of people who were tested at all. Not receiving a positive result due to not being tested in the first place means nothing.
  - hnrodey 6y ago
    Hi, I appreciate the comment and discussion. I disagree with the statement that the number is meaningless. Media outlets are free to singularly report the number of positive cases. I see it all over mainstream media (CNN being the worst offender), Twitter, etc. What's the issue with simply reversing that metric to show many people are COVID negative? Final note, I'm happy to make updates based on additional data but public datasets are slim pickings. And I'm not in to tapping individual state/county datasets. NYT publishes daily case counts and death counts across the United States by county. edit: COVID negative is unequivocally the incorrect term to use. That was a mental mistake on my part. The specific term I use is “did not get a positive COVID test”.
    - site-packages1 6y ago
      First, just because some entity does it, "The Media", doesn't mean it's good. Second, the number of positive cases is an affirmative result from people that have taken, and failed, covid tests. Your metric takes people who have never taken a test and lumps them into "COVID negative," which is pretty self-evidently extremely misleading.
dcolkitt 6y ago
Don't be so quick to assume that this is due to policy. SF county also has one of the lowest marriage and birth rates in the country. Large households, multi-generational households, are one the biggest contributors to the rate of spread.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  SF has plenty of those. Marriage and birth rates are low but immigrant populations are high. There are plenty of crowded multi-generational households in SF, it's just that they're largely immigrants rather than native-born San Franciscans starting families. (This is also born out in the racial COVID statistics, where infection rates are much higher for Hispanics and lower-income Asians than for whites and high-income Asians.)
toomim 6y ago
And now there are 4x as many deaths due to drug overdoses (by fentanyl alone) than Covid! [1] If you really care about public safety, you should pay attention to homelessness, drug addiction, and the problems in the streets! It's killing people 4x as fast as Covid, and yet nobody cares! This is exactly the problem that GP was talking about, and you come back with a smug "well our Covid rates are really low" comment. You're ignoring the point by looking only at Covid. Look at the rest of the data. A city is more than its covid rate. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Two-deaths-a-day-S-F-drug-overdoses-fueled-by-15635199.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Tw... > Older Black men living alone in residential hotels are dying at rates far higher than their portion of the city population. And yet most of us will see these statistics, think they’re a shame, and quickly move on. > Even as [we] devote tremendous time and attention to quashing COVID-19, another public health epidemic that has killed far fewer San Franciscans. As of Saturday, that tally was 123. > We’re a city that freaks out about a jogger running past without a mask, but doesn’t blink at someone injecting themselves in the neck on a Tenderloin sidewalk.
- lhorie 6y ago
  > That puts San Francisco on track to lose more than 700 people to drugs in 2020 — or nearly two every day. That’s a shocking rise from the 441 people who died of drug overdoses in 2019 and the 259 who died the year before that. The article suggests the number was already growing at an alarming rate even before covid. While this is tragic, I'm not sure we can attribute these deaths solely to covid lockdowns. It also behooves us to consider the practicality of public health measures. It's extremely easy for a californian mayor to tell people to stay home/wear masks and get a relatively high level of compliance. Getting people to stop using drugs is a much taller order.
  - zaroth 6y ago
    I’m pretty sure the solution to fentanyl overdose deaths has almost nothing to do with getting people to stop using drugs.
- bsder 6y ago
nradov 6y ago
For comparison, San Francisco has about the same COVID-19 death rate as Zimbabwe or Uzbekistan.

kfarr 6y ago

Exactly. SF is one of the safest places to live in the US right now (as it relates to COVID)

mrkstu 6y ago
The problem, of course, is that you can replicate that level of safety, if it matters to you, anywhere, by locking yourself in your house. Since the US isn't an island, anytime SF loosens up, CV will immediately spike anyway, so no real advantage gained. You end up creating a backlash. If the vaccines live up to their advance billing some small number of lives will be saved, but it is very unclear whether, in the long run, more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it.
- mkolodny 6y ago
  > it is very unclear whether, in the long run, more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it I have yet to see data that shows any evidence of this theory. If you are aware of any existing data that points to this conclusion, I'd love to see it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago
    Did you know that the Spanish flu of 1918 wasn't really Spanish? Edit: Okay so maybe I skipped to the punchline. Just trying to say politics influences data or lack of data.
  - ponker 6y ago
    Of course there isn't data about the long-term societal effects of a global lockdown in a modern society. But there are huge numbers of kids being denied education and social interaction right now. There are people who have lost money and are not eating right or living in healthy conditions, etc. So there are clearly going to be massive negative impacts from the mitigation, and nobody will know the scale for decades to come.
  - zaroth 6y ago
    For example, just US children are on track to miss 9 million vaccinations in 2020. [1] Worldwide poverty and deferred healthcare for vaccines and cancer screenings will have a decade the rack up an order of magnitude more deaths than will ever be directly attributed to COVID. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/health/coronavirus-childhood-vaccines-immunizations.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/health/coronavirus-childh...
    - mkolodny 6y ago
      Children can, and, according to the CDC, should get vaccinations during lockdowns. "CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommend every child continues to receive routine vaccinations during the COVID-19 outbreak." [0] Personally, I'm hoping vaccinations against COVID are what ends the pandemic. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/visit/vaccination-during-COVID-19.html#:~:text=CDC%20and%20the%20American%20Academy,during%20the%20COVID-19%20outbreak https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/visit/vaccination-durin....
- jnwatson 6y ago
  The only reasonable hypothesis I've heard for an increase in number of deaths due to lockdown is suicide and deferred medical care for non-COVID cases. The US is running at an average 1500 deaths a day now. We lost about 132 deaths per day from suicide in 2019. Even if that doubles, that leave a lot of room for additional deaths due to deferred medical care. The numbers just don't add up.
  - amscanne 6y ago
    Just to be a bit pedantic, these aren’t apples and oranges comparisons. It’s common to measure lives lost in quality-of-life adjusted years, since losing an 85-year old to COVID is a lot different than losing a 20-year old to suicide or due to deferred medical treatment. (The ages are exaggerated, but obviously COVID victims tend to be much older.)
    - mcguire 6y ago
      "Since April, 1.9 million excess years of life have been lost, 13% above historical average. Over the course of the pandemic, we found age and sex contributions to excess YLL have shifted. Deaths among adults 65 and older accounted for 80% of excess YLL in April but only 36% of excess YLL in June. Since April, working age adults 20-64 have accounted for 47% of excess YLL, and males 20 to 64 have contributed 34%." April, May, and June had around 10% excess YLL. July and August had 17.5% excess YLL. https://healthcostinstitute.org/hcci-research/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-years-of-life-lost https://healthcostinstitute.org/hcci-research/the-impact-of-...
      - amscanne 6y ago
        And? The parent point was that lockdowns might cause other kinds of death (suicide, deferred medical treatment). All-cause mortality obviously encodes those non-COVID deaths, there is no way to tell them apart. Since the cited study lacks the necessary data (and openly states as much), using it to support any claims about the impact of COVID vs lockdowns is simply begging the question.
- paxys 6y ago
  Doctors, nurses, EMTs, transit agency workers, taxi drivers, grocery workers, bank tellers, police, firemen, street cleaners, nursing home staff – none of them can lock themselves in their house and continue to get paychecks like the average tech worker. Creating a safe environment for essential workers, homeless, elderly and otherwise financially struggling folks is something most other cities are failing at, and I'm happy San Francisco is not prioritizing the feelings of bros who need to go out to bars.
  - hedora 6y ago
    Other than doctors, can any of those groups actually still afford to live in SF?
    - paxys 6y ago
      They still work in SF, whether they live there or not.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- outworlder 6y ago
  > The problem, of course, is that you can replicate that level of safety, if it matters to you, anywhere, by locking yourself in your house. Yeah. But this idea breaks down as soon as one needs to leave the house for basic necessities. In that case, you would be much better off in a community which takes the issue seriously. > more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it Not many lives should be lost by lockdowns, if at all. Perhaps if this issue wasn't so politicized, governments could intervene (and some have, in Europe) to help those in need.
- oblio 6y ago
  > If the vaccines live up to their advance billing some small number of lives will be saved, but it is very unclear whether, in the long run, more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it. https://youtu.be/bzh6HwN0gbw?t=398 https://youtu.be/bzh6HwN0gbw?t=398 Better yet, watch the whole thing. And check the public numbers. Stop spreading misinformation.

hnrodey 6y ago

In the past 14 days, 99.798% of residents in San Francisco County have NOT received a positive COVID-19 test. See for yourself at https://thecovidcomplex.com/state/california/san%20francisco/summary https://thecovidcomplex.com/state/california/san%20francisco... Full disclosure, I built this website. Data is sourced from the New York Times. It’s the same dataset they use to power the interactive map that was linked. And I just discovered I have an error sharing links to counties with spaces. Go figure lol Edit: 4 minutes since posting and a downvote. At least explain yourself.

lhorie 6y ago
Didn't downvote you, but that 99.7% number is a bit meaningless unless you also state the number of people who were tested at all. Not receiving a positive result due to not being tested in the first place means nothing.
- hnrodey 6y ago
  Hi, I appreciate the comment and discussion. I disagree with the statement that the number is meaningless. Media outlets are free to singularly report the number of positive cases. I see it all over mainstream media (CNN being the worst offender), Twitter, etc. What's the issue with simply reversing that metric to show many people are COVID negative? Final note, I'm happy to make updates based on additional data but public datasets are slim pickings. And I'm not in to tapping individual state/county datasets. NYT publishes daily case counts and death counts across the United States by county. edit: COVID negative is unequivocally the incorrect term to use. That was a mental mistake on my part. The specific term I use is “did not get a positive COVID test”.
  - site-packages1 6y ago
    First, just because some entity does it, "The Media", doesn't mean it's good. Second, the number of positive cases is an affirmative result from people that have taken, and failed, covid tests. Your metric takes people who have never taken a test and lumps them into "COVID negative," which is pretty self-evidently extremely misleading.

dcolkitt 6y ago

Don't be so quick to assume that this is due to policy. SF county also has one of the lowest marriage and birth rates in the country. Large households, multi-generational households, are one the biggest contributors to the rate of spread.

nostrademons 6y ago
SF has plenty of those. Marriage and birth rates are low but immigrant populations are high. There are plenty of crowded multi-generational households in SF, it's just that they're largely immigrants rather than native-born San Franciscans starting families. (This is also born out in the racial COVID statistics, where infection rates are much higher for Hispanics and lower-income Asians than for whites and high-income Asians.)

toomim 6y ago

And now there are 4x as many deaths due to drug overdoses (by fentanyl alone) than Covid! [1] If you really care about public safety, you should pay attention to homelessness, drug addiction, and the problems in the streets! It's killing people 4x as fast as Covid, and yet nobody cares! This is exactly the problem that GP was talking about, and you come back with a smug "well our Covid rates are really low" comment. You're ignoring the point by looking only at Covid. Look at the rest of the data. A city is more than its covid rate. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Two-deaths-a-day-S-F-drug-overdoses-fueled-by-15635199.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Tw... > Older Black men living alone in residential hotels are dying at rates far higher than their portion of the city population. And yet most of us will see these statistics, think they’re a shame, and quickly move on. > Even as [we] devote tremendous time and attention to quashing COVID-19, another public health epidemic that has killed far fewer San Franciscans. As of Saturday, that tally was 123. > We’re a city that freaks out about a jogger running past without a mask, but doesn’t blink at someone injecting themselves in the neck on a Tenderloin sidewalk.

lhorie 6y ago
> That puts San Francisco on track to lose more than 700 people to drugs in 2020 — or nearly two every day. That’s a shocking rise from the 441 people who died of drug overdoses in 2019 and the 259 who died the year before that. The article suggests the number was already growing at an alarming rate even before covid. While this is tragic, I'm not sure we can attribute these deaths solely to covid lockdowns. It also behooves us to consider the practicality of public health measures. It's extremely easy for a californian mayor to tell people to stay home/wear masks and get a relatively high level of compliance. Getting people to stop using drugs is a much taller order.
- zaroth 6y ago
  I’m pretty sure the solution to fentanyl overdose deaths has almost nothing to do with getting people to stop using drugs.
bsder 6y ago

nradov 6y ago

For comparison, San Francisco has about the same COVID-19 death rate as Zimbabwe or Uzbekistan.