No doubt we've done that when the topics are separate, but that's not the case here. It doesn't make sense to have one front-page story about San Francisco banning public events, another about Denmark doing it, another about Italy doing it, three more about specific events that have been canceled, and so on. Front page space is the scarcest resource on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and the most important thing is that it not be spent too repetitively.
If you or anyone is interested in how we approach this, I recently wrote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527396 about it, and there are lots of links there to previous descriptions.
People who complain about the Rodeo being in cancelled in Houston should read that first, but the problem is precisely that they aren't reading things like that and complaining on social media as if their perspective were valid.
Part of me wonders: if this happened from one event, just how terrible must the odds be that the virus isn't spreading similarly under our noses from contacts that haven't been identified?
If we assume that the growth chart is similar everywhere, then with our 1,000 confirmed cases in the US, we probably have around 30,000 unconfirmed dark cases.
Also a really crazy fact is that South Korea did a good job of containing 30 out of 31 of their initial cases in the early days. But then the 31st was responsible for thousands of infections.
What's interesting is that it is containable: Taiwan and Singapore both have managed to avoid sustained community transmission, and they did this by rigorous contact tracing and travel regulation. And South Korea acted similarly! But one bad case got through (and the cult responsible is uniquely problematic), and that's costing South Korea many lives and billions of USD.
The learning here shouldn't be that mass coronavirus death is inevitable, but that good policy that takes it seriously can contain it and make it manageable.
Was thinking like dark matter, you can't measure it directly, but you can infer its size from other signals.
Also it's not just asymptomatic cases, it's also symptomatic but not tested. Some people ignore it since it can present as a minor cold. Some people want a test but can't get one.
Very likely true re dark cases. China had at least a million positive cases of the virus.
China has 23 times the population of Italy, but only saw eight times the cases (eventually that will narrow even further). It's obviously absurd, especially given China moved slow to stop the spread in the early going. Every day that goes by we're getting confirmation that China lied aggressively about how extremely infectious the virus is, how easily it is spread, how large of a population it could infect and how quickly. That information would have helped the world a lot.
Italy's mortality rate is extreme right now, at 6.6%. Most likely they have a lot more cases than have tested positive thus far, probably at least two to three times as many are infected vs the official tally. I expect this will be a common theme almost everywhere, including in the US.
Outside of Hubei, China's done extensive community testing of everyone who presents symptoms that would be associated with coronavirus. The vast majority are negative. This isn't consistent with the hypothesis that there are millions of undiagnosed cases.
That is what I have been wondering. My family all had what we thought was the flu a few weeks ago despite having gotten the flu vaccine.
I realize the flu vaccine is not always effective, but it seems possible to me that we and many others have contracted it and already recovered.
Since testing is very rare, there would be no way of knowing until someone gets a severe enough case to go to the hospital and then qualify for testing.
Anecdata but I also saw a bunch of adults with school going children becoming sick with flu like symptoms in December & January and recovering, incidentally the kids were either mildly sick or totally fine. In hindsight I also drew the same conclusion. Perhaps covid-19 was making the rounds in the US even before we officially declared it was here.
There's lots of other viruses making the rounds in winter. This timeline doesn't add up; December is way too early for COVID-19 anywhere except Wuhan. It was something else.
It's hard to tell without testing patients, of course.
But with unrestricted intercontinental flights spreading diseases requires bad luck, not time: in December (or earlier) the streets of Wuhan and any city in the world were only one cough in the street apart.
It's still doubtful though, since there was a small number of people infected, the odds of them in particular traveling while contagious are low, especially when you consider that the first people infected may have limited travel because of demographics.
For December time frame, this is the correct interpretation. We would already see a suspicious spike in 1st-2nd week Jan pneumonia death rates if COVID-19 were spreading in the US in December. Average time to death for those who do die is I believe 17 days from onset of symptoms.
Yeah, there's just no way there was a huge COVID-19 cluster here in the US in December, and then everyone just got better and it never turned identifiable. We know how insanely contagious this disease is. It couldn't have been circulating for months in a given area without sending enough people to the hospital/morgue to draw scrutiny.
> Perhaps covid-19 was making the rounds in the US even before we officially declared it was here.
Yes, highly possible, one reearcher believes it was circulating in Washington state since at least middle of January. The term of art is "cryptic transmission".
Part of the problem is that the CDC's definitions were so strict at the time that you could not be tested unless you had personally traveled to China, so all cases of domestic transmission were being discounted at that time.
> Part of the problem is that the CDC's definitions were so strict at the time
Do you think this problem will be rectified in future epidemics? Or is this just the nature of testing and/or the healthcare bureaucracy at the national/international level?
The amount of times the article mentions Biogen employees getting denied testing, days before the rest of the company would find out they had reached 70, really bothers me.
> Do you think this problem will be rectified in future epidemics? Or is this just the nature of testing and/or the healthcare bureaucracy at the national/international level?
I think this is such a broad question with so many factors it's not really possible to answer.
I think the fact that it was a flu-like disease contributed to an overall lax attitude towards this. If it had been Ebola, health authorities would have clamped down hard and fast.
I think the fact that it started in China was a contributing factor. China didn't want to look like a source of disease, China didn't want its reputation on the international stage damaged by criticism from CDC and WHO and so those authorities were possibly more mute than normal. And there is another potential dimension here if this ends up being a military weapon that accidentally escaped from Wuhan BSL-4 containment. That may be a reason they came down on those researchers who sounded the alarm - those researchers worked at that BSL-4 facility and may have been discussing something that was classified and the chinese government didn't want discussed. This also may have been one dimension behind the Trump administration classifying the early briefings (although more generally I think they just didn't want to spook the market).
Finally, it's also impossible to separate the response from the administration. The Trump administration cut the budget for the epidemic response teams that would have been our first defense against this, two years ago. And their overall administration has been petty at best and malicious at worst. Just like how he went after the NWS officials who corrected his (completely wrong) forecast predictions for the hurricane landfall, there has been a reluctance to countermand him or correct him even when he's doing something completely wrong lest he come back at CDC or WHO and further sabotage the response in revenge. He spent the first two months of this year arguing that it was a hoax being cooked up by the deep state CDC to damage the economy and hurt his re-election chances. Even the Bush administration would have been far more competent at responding to this, Trump's leadership is exceptionally bad. You can say that's tribalism but the reason people are so all-in on that is because it's true, the Trump administration's petty, childish behavior has significantly damaged the US response to this crisis, both actively and passively.
Most other crises eventually fade from the news. Puerto Rico still isn't rebuilt but nobody cares anymore. etc etc. He hoped it would be a tempest in a teapot that blew over and it didn't. He's reluctantly come to terms with that in the last week.
If this whole question was a trap to make me say something downvotable, oh well, so be it, but it's all factually true and that's my honest opinion.
> According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, nearly everything the president has said about the coronavirus is wrong.
/shrug
Why do you think that would happen? Why would the president just contradict his subject experts with literally multiple decades of experience in this field? Why would he literally impede the state agencies from doing the testing necessary to monitor and oversee the status of the disease?
Why would he say the hurricane is going to curve into an entirely different state from where the NWS says it's going to go? Why would he then threaten to fire anyone who refuses to cook the forecasts to comply with his incorrect claims?
Dude is an actual literal child who can't stand to not be the smartest guy in the room, and if anyone corrects him they're fired. He's a nightmare boss and the only reason anyone tolerates him is because he's "on their team" Anyone who does is going to end up like Romney: "not physically safe in our presence anymore".
Can't wait for the reversal in a couple years: "nobody ever supported this guy, everyone knew he was a crazy from day 1". But that's only going to be once he's out of office.
I was also wondering about that. I had a pretty bad cold the second week of February after going to a party where some of my friends, who travel abroad extensively, were sick. It was different than the usual colds I get -- normally I just have a really bad sore throat and muscle pain for a week and a half, this time it was a dry cough and fever, but I honestly didn't feel all that bad. Obviously this matches the symptoms of Coronavirus, but also matches the symptoms of 99 billion other types of cold and flu.
I would like to think that I already got it, but in the end it probably doesn't matter. It is pretty unlikely that I am going to die from it, but it is pretty likely that we go into a recession and people pay less for my labor, stocks will be worth less, and food will be in short supply... so I think in the end, getting sick is just an annoyance (to me personally, I know people are dying) and the real problems come from everyone else getting sick. So either way, I'm sure it doesn't matter.
Something really nasty swept through my office (in the US) at the end of January, and one employee actually died. Some of us were speculating that it could have been early cases of COVID-19, but symptoms only lasted for about 5 days for most of us. From what I can find online, COVID symptoms tend to last about 10-14 days.
And, see my other post, but some researchers suspect that COVID was circulating in Washington (likely elsewhere as well) since about mid-january, so very possible.
Interesting. I suppose it's possible. Whatever went around was incredibly contagious compared to the usual flu. Almost the entire office, including myself, came down with it over the course of 1-2 weeks.
I'd like to think you're right. It'd be nice to know that I and the people I'm in regular contact with already have some immunity.
I got extremely sick with the flu (confirmed influenza type A by test) at the end of January/early February this year in San Francisco despite being vaccinated. I've had the flu once or twice before but I don't remember it being this bad.
It lasted about 5-7 days and came with a high fever, full body pain and soreness to the extent that any type of movement was difficult, delirium and confusion, difficulty eating, and vomiting for 1-2 days (which isn't typical of the flu as I understand it).
I'm 24 and generally in very good health and felt that without modern medicine and sanitation I could have easily died from this. I lost about 5% of my body weight and a lot of muscle.
The reaction to COVID-19 makes me wish we, as a society, took preventative health more seriously in general as the common diseases can be extremely nasty too.
In fact from everything I've heard about COVID-19, it sounds like it wouldn't have been nearly as bad for someone my age as the flu was for me this year.
if they had flu-like symptoms, it's unlikely covid-19, because you typically have a lot of mucus in your cough, and covid-19's symptoms are principally (1) high fever and (2) dry cough.
Nothing will stop the spread. The goal of government and health organizations is only to slow it down so that the number of critical cases at any one time doesn't exceed the capacity of our hospitals.
Minor correction, China REPORTS making rather good progress.
While I am neither a tinfoil hat wearer nor have anything against China, the fact that they were silencing a Wuhan doctor who was trying to alert people and authorities to the virus all the way back in December makes me skeptical of their reported status.
China isn't an information blackhole nor do they have perfect censorship. If the outbreak were still accelerating in an exponential fashion it'd be impossible to hide it from the world. They have successfully hit the inflection point on their logistics curve of viral spread (for now, anyway).
And China is reportedly sending equipment to Italy - not something they would do if the infections were still growing. Their actions seem to align with their message.
Genuine question, do you happen to have a source? Not that I don't believe you, I am just curious about the details, such as how many units, for how much (is it free?), etc.
> Wang assured Di Maio that Italian orders for the ventilators would be made a priority by Chinese firms after similar requests were made by other European countries.
Thanks for sharing, I really appreciate it.
Please correct me if I misunderstood, but the wording makes it sound like they were ordering them from China, i.e., buying, not receiving it as a donation. Which is exactly what I was afraid of. Money is money, and I can totally see some governments, especially the PRC one, prioritizing that over the actual help for their own citizens. Especially in the scenario where they know they are screwed no matter what, so might as well make some quick bucks.
Yeah, it's a story of failed censorship and the truth coming out anyway, not successful censorship hiding the scale of the problem. That's impossible so long as China is on the Internet.
They cannot stop all of it, so things will definitely leak out. However, they can stop a giant majority of it, so while we still get the leaks, the magnitude of the prevented leaks is probably still significant enough that the censorship can be considered as "working".
Do not underestimate the Great Firewall. But anyways, from a manufacturing and distribution of basic essential health supplies, and more, China is probably best positioned to help save the world.
The Wuhan authorities tried to silence her. There's no real reason to disbelieve their numbers now, beyond the problems of getting good numbers in a large country.
Read the WHO/China report. Or look at South Korea.
Many people here are conflating "stop" with "make it non-exponential". "Stop" just ain't going to happen, and hasn't happened anywhere (Vietnam reports they have, but come on). China reports bending the curve away from exponential. That is the goal. It is a very important one.
It's not just no longer exponential. The number of active cases is China is in decline. How long they can keep that going is debatable. But as of right now they are effectively stopping it.
That is not stopping. Extrapolating your trend to infinity suggests stopping is plausible. Latest data I see is 134 new cases per day in China. Let's take those numbers at face value and believe them (no sarcasm intended). However, these are just known cases. China is not testing everyone. As managing the spread becomes more successful it becomes cost and manpower prohibitive to test enough people to catch them before they spread significantly.
China has moved the R0 below 1 through some combination of behavior changes, else the number of active cases wouldn't be going down.
If they can keep it below 1, it will die out. It's possible there are many more unknown cases, but if unknown cases are increasing, confirmed cases should be too.
What I would encourage people to consider is whether this virus is at the level that we would all be happy to allow military enforced city-wide quarantines or travel restrictions...
I understand that this is NOT the flu, but it seems like the best data we have puts the most pessimistic CFR at about 0.6% if you look at the South Korean data (who have done, by far, the best job testing en masse).
I agree that slowing the spread of the virus to help our health care workers avoid being inundated with admissions to the ICU is worth while, but I'm extremely skeptical of embracing what China has done.
> but it seems like the best data we have puts the most pessimistic CFR at about 0.6% if you look at the South Korean data
Check your stats. 0.77% of South Koreans who tested positive for the virus have died already, and more of them will die in the future. The CFR is likely to be above 1%.
Right now the best information I've heard from several epidemiologists who study pandemics is that we are still seeing the results of severity bias, in that people with absolutely no symptoms will be far less likely to get tested. Also, South Korea is not seeing anything close to an exponential increase in cases.
When those same experts see numbers coming out of Italy, they believe very strongly that the number of infected is far higher than being reported because testing is not as widespread.
~0.5% is a very reasonable estimate of the initial CFR when an epidemic starts. It's bad, around 5x as much as the flu, but probably not worth a national China-style quarantine.
But it has a key context: that's the CFR for when all patients are treated. In most of China, there were never enough infections to trigger a healthcare system collapse: that's why in all but one province, the CFR was indeed ~0.4%.
In one province, Hubei, the medical system did collapse.
Its CFR jumped to 3-4%. That is worth going to extreme measures to prevent. In the USA, that would amount to ~10M dead.
That is not a seasonal flu.
I think a superior approach for most of the world is one along the lines of Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea: extensive testing and contact tracing and limited but real quarantine measures. But, yes, everything should be on the table to prevent the nightmare healthcare system collapse scenario.
CFR of 0.6% is a very optimistic figure. It is a naive calculation based on current # deaths / # infections.
1) But # infections were growing exponentially, we need to use numbers from the same cohort, which implies much lower # infections & higher CFR. Naive CFR will go up once infections grow more slowly. (It already is higher than 0.6%).
2) South Korean confirmed cases are much younger than their median age, mainly between 20-29 years old (perhaps because of where superspreading events happen—that church). This age group has a much lower fatality rate from Covid-19.
3) # hospital beds per capita in South Korea is second highest among OECD countries (1st is Japan) and ~4 times that of the US. They already have patients waiting for beds. Most countries will do much worse if they reach the same # infections per capita.
We can embrace what China has done, or what S. Korea has done, or what Singapore has done, or what Italy has finally started doing. Any of those would have a dramatically positive effect. Right now, we (U.S.) haven't done any of that. That is the problem.
China is now seeing a wave of secondary infections as they relax travel restrictions and as people enter the country from elsewhere. They have not stopped the spread, they simply slowed it down.
That's the whole point. If you slow it down you can avoid the rapid spike in severe cases that overwhelm the system. It's like traffic -- once you surpass a certain volume, the system locks up and throughput drops.
I think the point was to do a controlled restart while making sure the rate of secondary infections remains low enough that the impact of the coronavirus remains less than the flu.
How do we know that the numbers are trustworthy? They weren't for the first two months and China has clamped down on any information leakage. Meanwhile as of last week their factories were still at around 50% capacity or less (check pollution maps online) and now I'm hearing rumors that they're forcing uighurs to work the factories that migrants are refusing to go back to.
I'm not convinced yet. This would not be the first time a communist authoritarian regime lied about a bad situation - far from it, it's standard if you look at history in the Soviet Union for example. Authoritarian regimes cannot work without being respected and/or feared by the people, so they are incentivesed to lie to save face and simultaneously punish anyone who questions the lies.
Especially considering that the longer this drags on, the more likely nations and corporations alike are to pull production from China permanently.
We could conceivably stop the spread in the US: Cancel school, declare a national quarantine, provide temporary basic income to workers without WFH ability, start mass testing, deploy the military, and more.
It would require very drastic measures but would undoubtedly save a huge number of lives. Amazingly, leaders in all democratic countries seem to be too cowardly, too dumb, or too short-sighted to take the action required.
They want to exchange lives for money. And it might not even be a good trade. Letting 70% of a country get infected, even over time, might end up costing more lives and more money.
I get what you're saying, but realize many people will go without wages in these scenarios, so that has to be accounted for. Also, I've seen experts warn that however long things are shut down, once this is ended, the spread will continue. There's no conceivable span of time things will be "shut down" such that the disease will completely stop spreading.
All this to say, yes, of course shut downs must occur to stop acute problems in healthcare systems and try best to protect elderly. And this should absolutely be prioritized over financial markets (though risks here still matter). But it is going to spread.
So when China removes all quarantines, what is going to stop the virus from spreading once again? It will spread (of course at a reduced rate since there is some immunity) until one of the following scenarios occurs:
- Virus has exhausted itself with the majority of the population.
- Vaccine is developed and universally available.
- Virus is eradicated from quarantine (so incredibly unlikely).
I am not an epidemiologist, just writing based off of common sense.
> what is going to stop the virus from spreading once again?
If the quarantines last long enough, the virus will be dead. The hosts will either be dead or will have successfully fought the infection and destroyed the virus. Unless it happens to behave like some viruses that can hide in the nervous system and similar – but there's no indication that that's the case.
A series of staged quarantines, combined with mass testing, should be able to keep it contained until a vaccine is (hopefully) ready in 18 months.
There's really no great alternative to attempting to contain it. We will most likely trade lives for money and then lose the money anyway. Better to just lose the money by paying a big price early on with a radical containment strategy.
> "...deploy the military...save a huge number of lives..."
really, that's the best solution to saving lives?
if you were really worried about preventable deaths, why don't you direct your fear-mongering and authoritarianism toward eradicating distracted driving, since car accidents kill a million people a year?
otherwise, wash your hands and keep a little distance from coughers/sneezers. if you get sick with (1) a high fever and (2) a dry cough, don't go out for 14 days after you feel better, unless you're so sick you need to go see a doctor.
Your proposed alternative is woefully inadequate and doesn't stop the exponential spread of the disease anytime short of most people getting it.
You flat out do need to shut down most things to get the spread rate below 1.0. Cancel all gatherings of people, shut down non-essential businesses, etc. That's all that works.
that's presuming the need to stop the virus at all costs. if we were dealing with the black plague, or even the 1918 flu, that would be entirely reasonable. but with covid-19, that's still debatable, especially given the costs of doing so.
we're apparently collectively ok with 30K americans dying of flu (or alternatively, auto accidents) every year, so it doesn't make sense to go nuts on stopping this virus that's looking more and more like it's a little worse than the yearly flu.
the point being risks need to be properly assessed and proportionately addressed, without hysteria.
the underlying question about whether we value human lives enough is another matter we certainly should continue to discuss (for the record, i think we should value human lives a little more relative to economic considerations, and the response to something like covid-19 would correspondingly be a little more proactive, but still not hasty and panicked).
"this virus that's looking more and more like it's a little worse than the yearly flu."
You're spreading ignorance.
Every medical expert is saying it is 5-20x deadlier than the seasonal flu, because that's what the data says. They're predicting 40-70% infection rates.
A low estimate of 0.05% mortality rate with 40% infected is: 640,000 dead in the US alone. It could end up being a 1.5% mortality rate with 70% infected: 3,360,000 dead in the US alone.
It would likely be >1% mortality rate even with adequate healthcare. If it hit 40-70% of the population though, people would be basically on their own, so mortality rate would be 5-10%. Tens of millions of deaths.
Of course, this would never happen, since we as a society would enact major policies to slow the spread long before it got anywhere near that bad, just as Italy is doing for example. It just doesn't make any sense to wait for things to get worse to start enacting policies to slow its spread; if we're going to have to do it at some point, might as well do it early and reduce the spread.
70% of the country will get infected. No matter what we do. The only difference is how long it will take. Even with the most drastic measures imaginable, 70% will get infected. If they all get infected in the next month, the death rate skyrockets. If it takes 6-12 months, the death rate will be ~0.5%. Heck, we might even have reliable clinical results indicating a useful treatment by then. Right now on that front all we have is a very small amount of anecdata, but we should expect some decent data on Remdesivir from China soon, and I guarantee you that every pharma/biotech in the world with a nucleotide analogue is doing testing/screening today.
> 70% of the country will get infected. No matter what we do.
That's not really true. South Korea and China have proven that this thing can be stopped and R0 can be driven below 1. It just requires decisive action by the state (either heavy quarantining or mass testing coupled with behavioral changes by the population).
Stopped has not been proven anywhere. Maybe my conviction was a little too strongly worded, but we shall learn in a few years via serological testing regardless. My guess is that when final numbers come out we will find that about 50-70% of the global people are seropositive (meaning they have been exposed). That's about what we get for most endemic viruses. Check back in a few years and we shall see.
Let me put it this way: symptomatic cases as a percent of the population in China and South Korea are multiple orders of magnitude lower than what we saw on the cruise ship, and the growth of cases testing positive (or showing symptoms) is slowing (in absolute not just relative terms).
Rather than calling out the troops, who after all are also humans who can spread disease, why not think about money the government could spend in less destructive ways? They could pass a law that allowed CDC to designate particular counties "at-risk" for particular periods. Any resident of such counties whose cell phone records document that she or he didn't leave her or his home for a whole week during the period could get paid say $1000 tax-free for that week. Sure, it wouldn't be 100% effective, but it would be more effective and probably cheaper in the long run than violent national guard police actions.
It might, but if the measures are drastic enough people will start shooting. (Please don't construe that as an endorsement or advocacy; it's a comment on the complex socio-political mores in the USA.) Pick your poison.
This scenario does not shut down grocery stores, and allows you out of the home in scheduled slots solely for the purposes of going to a grocery store or pharmacy/doctor/hospital. All other trips are banned. This is what China and Italy are doing.
There is no country on Earth that is gonna lock up all its citizens indoors and starve them to death. Governments aren't that stupid.
So you can absolutely "stop" the spread with an absolute quarantine. I don't think you can absolutely "stop" the spread if everyone is using enough infrastructure to go register for a brand new basic income program that might work better than say, public options for healthcare, or alternately keep going to work, if they keep going to the grocery store, including any public transportation required, keep working at required services like fire, police, medical, etc. and if they keep doing any number of other essential things we're forgetting here.
And were there not videos of government agents welding bars on windows and destroying food to punish quarantine breakers recently?
I think you're dramatically oversimplifying how this all works.
Let me tell you how the grocery stores in Italy are operating (I have relatives there):
First of all, you have to schedule a specific time slot to go shopping, to ensure that the store never gets too crowded. Secondly, you aren't allowed within two meters of anyone at any point. All of the store employees are wearing protective gear (gloves, masks, etc.). When you checkout, you push your cart up to them, they ring everything up, set it back down, and then you pack your bags yourself while they go away (to maintain a distance of two meters). They might be changing gloves with every checkout, too.
I have less knowledge of China, but I think it's similar. I saw a video of a ranged thermometer being used on every person before being allowed inside. Maybe Italy is doing similar. If and only if you have a fever or a confirmed infection then are you not allowed to leave your dwelling at all (unless it's to go to a hospital); that's when you get your food delivered.
With containment measures this drastic, you can definitely keep the infection rate below 1, which is all you need to stop an infection. And it's exactly these kinds of measures that need to be taken, because food is essential. You cannot have people starving to death en masse. Grocery stores are essential, and it's possible to allow grocery shipping while largely mitigating the spread of disease. Needless to say, all gatherings are banned, most stores are shut, and restaurants are to-go/delivery only (if they're even still open).
And I'm not drastically over-simplifying things, unless you somehow think that "shut down almost everything except for grocery stores and healthcare" is "over-simplified". This is working in China. They are stopping the spread of the disease while simultaneously maintaining access to food and healthcare.
Italy is already working on doing exactly that. They've closed everything except the food stores -- most of which are running out of food with no prospects towards resupply, since roads are closed and workers aren't permitted to work at the plants that are necessary parts of the food supply chain.
What I heard is that roads have checkpoints on them, but aren't closed for necessary trips, which would include food transport. A solo operator of a vehicle driving food to a warehouse or grocery store isn't a big infection risk, especially with appropriate precautions being taken like social distancing, wearing masks, washing hands frequently, etc.
The food production aspect though is more problematic; it can involved larger groups of people and more human contact.
Yeah, there may be one more delivery to the typical store before the end, but without workers, warehouses will empty, and without an economy, generally everything will collapse.
Economies aren't just playthings for little pieces of multicolored paper -- they're the process by which we live a life different from that of a wild animal.
Life without an economy would be smelly, brutal, and short.
Personally, I pray that the US won't try this idiocy, and further pray that people won't stand for it if they try.
I don't think it'll get that bad in Italy. It wouldn't make sense to allow that to happen, as the cure would be worse than the disease. China has managed somehow.
> Many don't have more than a few days of food in-house
At this point if you don't have at least a week's supply of rice on hand you're just being careless. It's dirt cheap and large sacks are readily available everywhere.
Which still leaves the toilet paper problem unsolved, all the rice needs to go somewhere!
But in all seriousness, general guidelines are already that, even without stuff like Corona or not.
One advice from the supply chain perspective, so. If you have to stock up, do so in small quantities across multiple stores. reducing the number of stock-outs at the point-of-sale has an unbelievable efeect in stabilizing supply chains. and the last thing we want is unstable supply chains right now. As rediculous as it is, if something like th toilet paper scare happens to more life-ciritical stuff things turn a lot less funny rather quickly.
The spread is not being stopped. It is being slowed down. Huge difference. Slowed down is still very good and a very good goal for us, but the opportunity to "stop" COVID-19 has passed in the U.S. and EU.
The number of active cases is down from the peak China. If it continued like this without imported cases the virus would die out as each new infection infects fewer than 1 other person.
China is still testing aggressively. If the number of active cases were expanding, much less expanding exponentially, the number of reported cases would be more than a handful per day.
If it survives for 12 hours on surfaces, you only need 1 person to have poor hygiene to expose a LOT of people. And "normal" hygiene levels pass infection around plenty. I wash my hands when I go to the bathroom or before I prepare food. The rest of the time I'm just passing whatever I touch to whatever else I touch. I've given up on not touching my face. I'm sure I'm not the worst in these areas.
As I understand it, you'd have this sort of infection rate with the seasonal flu if there wasn't some level of herd immunity, and you certainly have roughly this level of infection with the common cold - "Con crud" is a thing - it's just not much remarked upon as unexpected.
It's annoying, there's conflicting information on this front, like this article about the CDC changing its recommendation on the type of face masks hospital personnel should use [0].
They're claiming you can't get it by simply breathing the same air, and saying surgical masks are sufficient.
It opened with breakfast, at 7 a.m., in the Harbor View Ballroom of the Boston Marriott Long Wharf hotel, where a wide bank of windows offers a sublime view across the inner harbor, steel gray on a cloudy morning, to Logan Airport in the distance.
About 175 executives were expected at the Biogen leadership conference on Feb. 26. Employees from Biogen locations around the United States and the world reunited with colleagues they don’t often get to see.
They greeted each other enthusiastically, with handshakes and hugs, and then caught up over breakfast, picking from plates of pastries and the self-serve hot food bar. They were there for two days of discussions and presentations about the future of the Cambridge-based, multinational biotech firm, which develops therapies for neurological diseases. It was the kind of under-the-radar gathering that happens in this region just about every week.
When I go to industry conferences I have non-stop meetings with current customers, potential customers and partners. Every meal is some sort of meeting. Given the distributed nature of business today, when you do get everyone in the same place, you want to get some face to face meetings setup.
I was hoping they'd limit it to 100, or even 50. I don't see what 200+ gatherings they believe are safe to the public at this point.
There's little downside to decisions like this- healthcare is most likely going to be overwhelmed even with these changes, may as well do everything you can.
changed text because asking a simple question about how similar numbers of people does not impose the risk is met with down votes. it is bullshit dancing around the obvious, no matter how you assemble the number the threat is near the same.
employer, school, rock concert, or tech conference. which do you think would exercise more care over the other?
It doesn't affect large employers or schools because those things aren't "public events".
The idea here is to reduce, not eliminate, large numbers of people coming together, especially cases where it's going to be a one-off grouping of people who may not normally be in the same place at one time. Depending on the event, it could also involve people traveling from somewhere else, which is also useful to reduce. (Corporate campuses and schools don't fall into that bucket.)
It's a trade off. Saying "no more large employers and no more schools" just isn't feasible from an economic or public education standpoint. Individual organizations can decide for themselves whether or not they want to shut down.
It's a continuum. On one end there's "everyone is hereby confined to their homes and may not leave", and on the other it's "we're making no changes; everyone just do what they usually do". The first one is way too restrictive, and the second one ignores the reality of the situation. The sweet spot is somewhere in between. Picking and choosing what types of gatherings of large numbers of people to allow can help slow spread. Could they restrict more? Sure, but a lot of people (myself included) might consider that unreasonable.
> Gatherings of 250 people or more for social, spiritual and recreational activities including, but not limited to, community, civic, public, leisure, faith-based, or sporting events; parades; concerts; festivals; conventions; fundraisers; and similar activities
Spiritual is a good point. One such event in France is the reason the region I visited family roughly two weeks ago got declared high risk today. So quarantine at home until Sunday, turning our house into a co-working space with attached school and day care (my wife, our two kids and myself)!
School districts of families that cannot afford internet also are school districts that are so poorly funded that subsidized internet and cheap chromebooks are not an option. Additionally, schools may be the only time these kids are able to get real food.
Then stream classes and let kids who do have access to internet and technology do their courses online while still keeping the classes running in person, so you can limit the amount of people who need to congregate. No need to go Harrison Bergeron on the haves to make the have-nots feel less shitty.
Also, the state has emergency funds that would more than cover something like Chromebook purchases and subsidizing internet for a few months. Still wouldn't help the homeless students, but it would still make a sizeable dent in the amount of kids congregating and getting each other sick.
EDIT: Also poor schools and districts have HIGHER per pupil funding than wealthier ones
Classes may not be equipped for streaming at all. Additionally, chromebook and internet may not be helpful for children living in dangerous housing where their chromebooks may be stolen or pawned for food (after which internet means nothing) or in cases where internet may take days or weeks to be installed.
Additionally, this does not address that schools are often a major source of food for children. Or safety for children.
Just cancel school for the rest of the year and give the kids the curriculum that would have been taught. The ones that want to learn and keep up will study, the others, probably wouldn't have gotten much out of it anyways.
N italy here: cops can now stop individuals for 'being out without good reason'. and even going to work, or medical visits, needs printed (self) permission that can be vetted by patrols. I saw a group of three people outside a gelateria, today - morons. Any authority that allows any groups to gather is being wrong. Hate to say it, but the italian government is doing the right thing - minimize the risks. I do expect panics and social unrests early next week, though, especially when the cops and carbs start getting sick.
It is kind of crazy that declaring martial law and forcibly quarantining people is still a more politically acceptable move that the more organized, scientific, and transparent approach of South Korea.
If they tried that in the US, the outcry would be deafening. (Especially with the current president. There would certainly be people accusing him of nefarious intent.)
I think it is probably a good way to decrease human interaction. But it's not politically feasible everywhere.
Everything becomes politically feasible once the public appetite is changed by events. All the post 9/11 events in the US (Patriot act, Iraq war) would not have been politically feasible pre 9/11.
Man, I would have said the same about Italy two months ago. Even last weekend people were still carelessly going out. But the tide has turned, the numbers now are too big to ignore.
That’s not the stated reason at least. It’s to deliver food and run a mobile test station. A reporter asked the governor if he had the authority to ban gatherings in that containment zone and he sidestepped it and said that thus far all parties have been in agreement.
Wow, I would not have figured governor Andrew Cuomo (Democrat) would take such an action. He would know it would expose him to criticisim-- aside from the action itself, I respect that he took strong action without regard for the blowback.
To all those responding that "if they didn't want 999, they should have set a lower number:"
Whenever you make rules, you define some region of acceptability that's recommended and then if people go too far from that region, you say that's against the rules. The boundary is set some distance from what's recommended. You don't set the number at exactly recommended because people working in good faith still sometimes have honest reasons they need to go past that. But then you get bad faith actors going to the limit too.
If you don't have a good reason not to play it safe during a pandemic, then play it safe. Otherwise, screw you. Just because the law lets you be a dick, doesn't mean it's okay.
It's unclear to me from your comment whether you advocate over or under specifying the norm. "some distance" is ambiguous.
In order to say "that's against the rules" but allow some leeway, you need it to be under-specified so you can enforce it selectively.
But the next part suggest you over-set the norm, so people with honest reasons can go beyond the ideal without breaking the rules and everyone has an moral duty to stay well within the specified norms.
To give depth here: limiting people isn't the only relevant dimension. You could argue cities are a gather of more than 1000 people. More important is density, how many people each person is expected to interact with, is there a buffet, etc. If you're running an event with 999 people, hopefully you're organizing to be less bulging at the seams with these other dimensions
Or, instead of issuing unclear vision, the state should just be issuing a blanket state ban on events larger than the x they want. If they don't want 999, clearly they choose the wrong number. Many large events across the country still aren't being cancelled, and they're being cancelled in an overly ad-hoc manner.
Those without sufficient information shouldn't be making these moral gambles to begin with.
Do you care for common sense for social policy on viral epidemics? Common sense in many places means toughing it out is professionally normal, even if you're getting your coworkers sick. The same applies for kids in school.
These kinds of medical judgments on viral epidemics are exactly where we want the government to communicate clear vision and leadership on emergency medical policy...
What's wrong with that? It's literally adapting to the regulation, and scaling down events down to the legal size. 0% risk doesn't exist, and smaller crowds is a measure to reduce risk.
Gosh I hope the hammer comes down hard on folks trying to make a buck this way if they even briefly creep over 1000 - since 1000+ events are banned maybe target events in the 100s range.
I suspect that if it looks like a crowd close to a thousand the police will shut it down - additionally you need to count those who aren't being admitted, because everyone gathering outside of the dude with the clicker (and the dude themselves) will be in close contact as a result of the event.
The clicker is effective for fire code issues (since you want to make sure X people aren't in the building) but for disease related issues you don't want those people gathering anywhere, and now 1000+ people will have been gathering (at various times of the night) just outside the venue because of the event.
This makes me think of airports and terrorism. I remember standing in a crowd of 1000+ people trying to get through security theater at JFK, and thinking "Anyone could just walk a giant suitcase bomb into this crowd".
That not even one follow-up attack like that—assuredly crippling air travel for months, at least, and increasing the cost of it probably permanently, aside from easily killing dozens per occurrence—happened in the months after 9/11 was when I started wondering whether this Al Qaeda thing was half as well-resourced in the US, and half as well-coordinated, as officials were saying at the time.
Sure, I think the limit is too high too. I just don't think there's going to be any exercising of these rules except against absolutely brazen cases of going over limit.
Specifically, ensuring compliance is as easy as proving non-compliance. Unless the cops are there with a clicker, employee with a clicker wins every time.
If city officials didn't want 999-person events, they should have set the number lower.
At the end of the day you have to set the threshold somewhere. One could argue that a 500-person event is still risky, but a balance has to be struck between attempting to slow the spread of the disease, and not unreasonably restricting people's activities.
In this case, what's reasonable is certainly up for debate. No measure will be perfect, unless we want to start advocating for no gatherings whatsoever (public or private) and effectively putting people under house arrest. While that would stop transmission of the disease, I think it's fairly uncontroversial to say that would be an overreaction. But certainly it's up for debate as to, say, whether a 100-person ban would be appropriate, vs. 1,000, 10,000, etc. They chose 1,000. It won't be a perfect number, but it will help.
Jesus, what are you looking at that makes you so sure of this viewpoint?
I think it's fairly uncontroversial to say that we absolutely do need a quarantine that keeps almost everyone in their homes, except for those providing critical services (medical staff, police, national guard, plus some needed amount of infrastructure for groceries, pharmacies, electricity, water, etc.). For the next 2 or 3 months, I fully expect to only leave home maybe every few days or week to go to the grocery store or pharmacy, like you see today in most of South Korea. It's just a question of when at this point, and the sooner we start it, the less disruptive it'll be in the long term and the fewer people will die.
Determining the exact number seems like interesting math.
I imagine a function using things like transmission vector diffusion rate, windspeed, incubation period, critical care percentage, number of ICU beds, and such as parameters, and outputs the maximum allowable gathering size that will keep the spread slow enough that everyone who requires hospital recovery can get admitted. Public officials could then ban public gatherings greater than 80% of that number.
Seems like a paper describing it could be worth some academia brownie points.
If they don't want to ban all public activity, they have to pick some number. I suppose they don't want to shut a small concerts at bars with 50 people or a local comedy club (yet).
Banning large conferences or sport events with people likely coming from further away seems like a good start.
> Banning large conferences or sport events with people likely coming from further away seems like a good start.
I think you nailed it. Banning large meetings basically shuts down travel, but lets local events continue. This make things easier to handle without a large influx of people coming in from the outside for a show/conference/event/etc...
How will people put food on the table if they're dead, invalided with crippling lung damage, or bankrupted by healthcare costs after a spell in ICU?
It's hard to imagine a better demonstration of how our economic systems are utterly unable to deal with real-world challenges, because they have no mechanisms for pricing non-trivial real-world consequences of externalities of all kinds, and provide no incentives for intelligent collective behaviour.
Remember the coronavirus mostly affects elderly people. At about a ~3% rate it’s not insanely deadly. Sure lots of people get flu and they eventually recover.
The reason of social isolation is to ensure the 3% that do get serious don’t overwhelm the healthcare system. The virus will spread, we just want to slow the spread.
It is sad but inevitable that economic activity will be disrupted by shutdowns. But delaying the shutdown will only lead to longer shutdown down the lane.
> Till when?
For as long as the disease outbreak is contained (it is not going to be forever)
> How will people put food on the table if economic activity stops?
No idea! Maybe something like UBI will help? But the question will remain and will be more troublesome if the outbreak is not contained for sure.
I agree that Goods still have to be produced. I didn't say UBI is a substitute for economic activity. I didn't say UBI was all that you need. You are attacking a straw man here.
To expand a bit more, UBI might help service workers and others other hourly wage workers to take care of themselves. The service workers are the people who interact with other people the most, so an infected service worker who doesn't have an option but to work will end up spreading the disease. UBI might be the answer to temporarily keep them alive.
All of us have to live on reserves if there's a shutdown. Just like China did. It is not going to be great. But the alternative is much worse. And I am not claiming this is a permanent solution.
The government doesn't remotely have mechanisms in place to directly feed millions of civilians for a long period of time. It would make much more sense to give out money (like EBT cards) that can be redeemed to purchase food through the existing private sector food distribution network of grocery stores and restaurants.
While everything is shut down? Including the food distribution network? What good will money do in that scenario?
Shutting everything down isn't an option. The economy isn't some nice-to-have thing you can turn on and off on a whim. It's an essential part of providing the basic necessities that people need to live—which includes much more than just food.
The government is not going to shut everything down. Obviously grocery stores, pharmacies, hospitals, doctor offices, etc., need to stay open. They've all remained open even in Wuhan and Milan.
No one is saying to shut down everything, because of course you don't want to starve everyone (starvation has a mortality rate much worse than COVID-19).
It's shutting down most things that is being suggested. Healthcare and food stay open.
I OBVIOUSLY refer to non vital things like offices, all public places that aren't pharmacies and grocery stores, and even those should have access strictly regulated like in Italy and probably cut to a minimum public transport and put checkpoints on the major bridges to make sure people move only if strictly necessary. Essentially what's being done in Europe already.
Only a person in bad faith would think something different.
for a while it doesn't, we have ample strategic reserves. This is exactly the job FEMA was invented to do even if in this country it's not funded properly and it would be a problem for sure.
But this thing is going to be a huge fucking problem no matter what, if we keep doing what we're doing about 17M people are going to die.
> the warriors will play tomorrow night with no fans in attendance.
To be fair, after being the first team in the NBA to be eliminated from playoff contention last night, they probably weren't going to draw very large crowds anyway.
Edit: Geez it was just a joke about how poorly the Warriors are doing.
> Also is there something significant about a limit of 1000 people? Why that number?
>To be fair, after being the first team in the NBA to be eliminated from playoff contention last night, they probably weren't going to draw very large crowds anyway.
it would be shocking if several thousand people at the least weren't going to show up. the warriors are insanely popular even during this down period.
you ever catch a knicks game on TV? they've been terrible for like an entire decade and there are definitely plenty of people in the seats...
They've been bad all season, there's no reason for the attendance numbers to change now. The more interesting thing is that they're the top team in the league for revenue per home game.
As a fan, Curry's return, had a full house the other day, and every single person in attendance knew we wouldn't make the playoffs.
The new people on the team are insanely fun to watch. Yeah, getting walloped by the Clippers last night wasn't fun to watch, but there are plenty of games which are really fun.
Different countries are not so much a matter of "handling it well / poorly" (with a few exceptions), but "earlier / later in the game".
Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are the notable exceptions. They've controlled the epidemic well.
For other countries, the number of cases, or quite probably consistently, the number of deaths noted, is a more accurate measure of overall surveillance and spread.
At a ~1% mortality rate, each death corresponds to roughly 100 cases, two weeks ago. Growth over 14 days, based on confirmed cases has been increasing at about 100x, though that likely indicates increased monitoring and detection of previously cryptic (undetected) cases, not the actual ground-truth growth rate.
Adam Kucharski, author of The Rules of Contagion offers a similar logic.
I'd though of noting the cumulative deaths per day after 100 cases are noted as more uniform and reliable metric of spread. Bodies are harder to hide than viruses, though countries with poorly-developed medical infrastructure will still lag.
I also suspect we now have a case of countries with known COVID-19 epidemics, and countries with unknown epidemics, rather than countries with no actual epidemic.
Update:
Graph showing cases by country, days after reaching 100 confirmed cases. Note that this only looks at 16 days' cumulative history, China's curve HAS now flattened out.
Indeed, I wanted to point out that all countries seem to go through the same process over time.
It's somehow like all countries are adopting the limitations gradually, like a bit of denial that it will really happen. Wouldn't it make sense to skip some steps and be proactive? At the end we all seem to take the direction of Italy [1], maybe we should consider quarantine directly. It may be a bit more brutal, but it will cost less lives and be over sooner.
The federal council is meeting on Friday morning if I'm not mistaken, I would not be surprised to see new measures during Friday lunch.
The risk increases as the fraction of infected people increases. For example, if you have 200 people on an airplane from SFO today, there is a good chance that nobody will be infected. Next week, when there are many more cases, a gathering of 100 people might be as risky as one of 200 today.
So it plausibly makes sense to reduce the limits over time. I don't know how much science is actually going into determining these limits, though.
The issue is that this wont be contained anymore, it wont be over, we fucked up.
Lets say that a country, for example Sweden with its 500 known cases and 10M population goes into a total lockdown for. A few new cases emerge and after a few weeks of no new infections they open up everything again. But since other countries are still infected, they will be reinfected within days.
The only way to stop it would be if the whole world goes into lockdown for a month or so, but that wont happen.
We will have to live with no mass gatherings for 1-2 years, until someone comes up with a good vaccine
I don't think it's that dire. All we really need to do is get R0 below 1.0.
In Wuhan, they got it down to 0.3 with the huge lockdown and also aggressive testing and out-of-home quarantine. We will need a period of that to get the case count down to near zero.
Then it's possible to let up, but just a bit. People will need to wear masks and wash their hands a lot, but if R0 is say, 0.8, each new case leads to just a few more cases and then it dies out instead of exponentially growing. That's the flip side of an exponential function.
In Norway/Oslo every event over 100 have to apply a form and is banned up on approval, and over 500 will not be approved. 1m distance in restaurants. The tram don’t open the front door to avoid the driver from getting sick. In the hospital all operations are cancelled the next weeks.
Michigan State University is banning all meetings of over a hundred. Today they joined most universities in Michigan to go totally remote with no in person classes. The stated reason was because the first two coronavirus cases in the state were discovered last night.
Jury duty's a pretty important function. It's not a particularly large gathering and keeping people detained for longer without trial (as would be a necessary consequence of stopping jury duty) is a considerable imposition.
It's not an inconceivable measure, but it's not one to be taken remotely lightly - probably not until you ban all gatherings altogether.
Agreed and clearly we start infringing on pretty basic american rights if we wait until summer to stop convening jury's.
That said, reasonable people are avoiding being in closer quarters with sub-1000 people, and it seems like some assurance besides "call if you're so symptomatic you should see a doctor" might be prudent until a little more is known about the virus.
Maybe I'm just salty that I have jury duty this week (:
Israel just banned gatherings of 100 people or more. No fans in sport events. I also wonder what would fill the vacuum of all the canceled parties and nightlife, since it's pretty popular here.
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/rkOV11s8B8
I know the Constitution is already pretty much dead, but I'm still saddened that nobody in these threads is bringing up the potentially disturbing precedent of this sort of thing yet. This is literally abridging the right of the people to peacefully assemble.
It's not during times of crisis that we should be more willing to accept abridging of our civil rights. It's during times of crisis where the state's ability to continue respecting the civil rights of its citizens is most important. Pandemic or not, we need to hold politicians accountable when they erode civil rights like this.
I'm glad they're being this assertive now. I've been concerned that many jurisdictions in the US would wait for aggressive social distancing until the case load was already into the thousands.
It's amazing we had so much lead time, but American exceptionalism and the belief that ugly things only happen in other parts of the world caused us to squander it all.
There's so much we could have done, but we aren't going to fully wake up until the critically ill are packed in hospital hallways.
It may be the best way to deal with this pandemic but it's questionable if western culture is compatible with these measures. People are way more openly critical in the democracies. Protests are often infectious.
The solution to poor leadership in crisis planning and action is not to give those same leaders unprecedented power.
This sort of outbreak is exactly the type of crisis for which we rely on governments to plan. Here we are facing an oncoming hurricane and proposing draconian, untested, and unplanned solutions and people driven by fear are willing to give up any rights they have for un-guaranteed safety.
We are in March. China has been already almost 3 months in thus situation and still everything is going on. So count 3 months from now at least, and you get June easily.
How often do people attend public events of 1,000 or more people? From a public health perspective, I'm sure the safest number is 0. But along the curve of 0 to 1,000 -- is the risk increase linear? Exponential? It's hard to say how effective of a measure this is in reducing spread.
Not often - and that's why it's so risky. Events like concerts draw random folks from diverse workplaces and communities with a shared interest that otherwise wouldn't interact, as such it tends to be a good way for the disease to break out into new communities.
At around the 700 mark, the probability is > 0.5. So if you are in a crowd of 700+ people, someone's likely sick. Of course, you need to have some reasonable estimate of how many are carrying the virus in a given population to do this calculation.
I read this as mostly targeting sporting events and big concerts. Where groups with high numbers of infrequent attendees and a high number of events (basketball, baseball, soccer) are in close contact in the stands for several hours at a time.
As an individual, not that often. Collectively, a lot.
Not counting the 2 outdoor amphitheatres, I can name 8 theatres in my area with capacity >1000. Several more in the 800-999 range, and I'm not sure if these thresholds would apply to "audience in the house" or "total souls in the building".
Seattle's gathering limit is much lower (250) than SF's, and includes "social distancing" and other limitations, which essentially shuts down all concerts, plays, musicals, conventions, and lectures.
For example, I see the 5th Avenue Theatre here (capacity: 2100) just cancelled their entire run of a show that opens this Friday (8 performances/week for 3 weeks). That would have potentially been >50,000 people.
I estimate bans like this will prevent the intermingling of at least several hundred thousand people each month, in each metropolitan area which enacts it. I'm no expert on the spread of disease but that seems pretty significant.
Conferences, concerts, sporting events, expos etc. They're just trying to slow down the rate at which it spreads. All of these types events also typically involve some amount of travel (whether on the part of the organizers, entertainers/presenters and attendees)
It's not only the fact that it's a large number of people gathering, but also that it's a large number of people in close proximity to people they wouldn't otherwise be from out of town who are at higher risk of having been exposed to the virus. They pass it on to a few people at the event, who in turn take it home and give it to family members and in a few weeks the city has a big problem.
Obviously this is the simplest possible way to look at it, not modeling how many of those people actually come in contact with one another, the probability of transmission, etc.
People are going to be working home in one way or another. I suppose that some people will be staying home to care for children. In the speech the Prime Minister said obviously some people would end up losing their jobs based on the current situation.
I didn't follow the speech very well myself because my daughter thought it was fun to throw a one person party celebrating not going to school for two weeks, my wife started yelling she couldn't understand what was being said because my daughter was being too loud (wife being Italian has sometimes difficulties following Danish language)
But anyway there are a variety of child care options in Denmark, one is thing were a person watched 3 or 4 children during the day at their house, I don't know how that is affected. I suppose it is affected the same as other services but on the other hand it might be reasonable if that was left open because I am expecting that to make the tedium somewhat manageable there will be a lot of play dates for the next couple weeks - so essentially people will have 3-4 kids at their houses they just won't be getting paid for it.
To all the folk talking ‘quarantine the states’ here - that’s the definition of a band-aid, not a solution. Especially since COVID is already in the states.
IMHO we will be exposed to this virus no matter what.
No offense, but please educate yourself. The point is to slow the spread of it so hospitals don't get completely overwhelmed and people who need care can get it, unlike what is happening right now in Italy.
Is this really changing anything? I suppose with over 1000 people there is more chance of an infected person being there, and more people to be interacted with.
But if that infected person is walking around anyway, is it really better for them to wander the streets going to other random locations, infecting other people?
If you have 1001 people in your friend group then meeting up with your friends in a park would qualify as a public event that is now restricted.
Honestly, this sort of large gatherings restriction is just par for the course for epidemics, we just haven't had one that could potentially get this bad in quite a while.
To quote justice Robert H Jackson 'The constitution is not a suicide pact.' In sufficiently bad circumstances (wars, emergencies) governments will tend to enforce first and worry about legalities later.
And in cases like this, where the emergency is biological rather than political in nature, pedantic legalism is going to lose to common sense and pragmatism.
yes, you shouldn't meet anyone. Stores should be all closed except for pharmacies and grocery stores. Restaurants should be closed. Bars should be closed. Offices should be closed. For about 4 weeks. This is the only way we'll avoid hundreds of casualties.
Then we’re going to have hundreds of casualties, man. I dunno, I’m very much on the side of acting quickly and decisively, but “nobody meet anyone or do anything until April” isn’t a real option.
I don't think that's going to happen on the scale you describe, or that you've taken the cost to human life of the economic fallout into account.
But however we slice it, this is going to be bad. One professor from the University of Nebraska estimates it might result in 480,000 deaths in the US. That's a guess, but one made with conservative inputs, not from a harebrained or cranky analyst, and not out of line with the the guesses of others in this field. It's not the end of the world, but it will be quite socially and economically disruptive.
Not that I disagree, but how many stores, restaurants, and bars can afford to close for four weeks? And are they paying their employees during this time?
In Germany we currently have 28,000 beds in ICU (I expect we will try to increase this number ASAP). If (as expected) we have say 10% of the populace infected and 10% of them require intensive care we need 800,000 beds.
What happens to people who don't get proper care when they desperately need it? A lot of them will die.
If the measures result in less simultaneous infections it will save lifes for sure. The more of a delay we can achieve the better.
Banning all public events has some tricky 1st amendment problems. Permitting larger events and controlling them is something that's relatively inside the bounds of the understanding of first amendment protections.
Mathematicians know the "hat check" problem: If N people get hats back at random, what are the odds that no one gets their own hat back? It's the nearest fraction with N! denominator to 1/e, a beautiful counting problem. Very close to 1/e (off by about 1/6!) even for _FIVE_ people.
It's the Mayor-from-Jaws problem. No politician wants to be the one who puts a bunch of local businesses into bankruptcy and makes a bunch of employed people unemployed. Even when the circumstances mean not doing so will cost lives, it's still really, really hard for a politician to do that. It pushes against every instinct in their nature.
This appears to be an attempt to split that particular baby, Solomon-style. I suspect it will work out less well for them than it did for Solomon.
Yes, many small business owners are freaking out about how much time they have before they go under. There are, however, ways of addressing those problems that elected officials are considering -- for just a singular example, loans.
As far as I know SF was the first city to declare a state of emergency a few weeks ago to begin preparing for this, and was widely mocked in political forums for panic. I am not a fan of the city administration and think the 1000 person limit is over-optimistic but it's unfair to suggest the city is trying to ignore or minimize the problem.
I wonder if anyone is trying to weaponize this to reach the GOP. Get infected, go to a Trump event, shake hands with and cough on as many people as possible.
I know you're mad, I am too, but that kind of gloating will just push people away and worsen the political divisions that are tearing the country apart.
I don't think that's the implication, they just have to draw the line somewhere. I would think starting with 1000 is meant to have less dramatic impact on things like schools and workplaces with ~500 people, giving them more time to prepare before the limit goes down further.
I do some convention work. Most labor is hired specifically for the event itself. We won't be "laid off". We'll never be offered work in the first place.
Side note: apparently this makes getting unemployment benefits a little trickier (but not impossible), since I don't have "an employer" and I wasn't let go from a job. I have "those 4 or 5 companies that do all the conventions and who hired me in the past but aren't hiring anyone this year".
It has. About a third of the full-time SXSW staff has been laid off. (And of course, countless local servers, security, caterers, registration desk people, event hall setup, etc. etc. are simply not going to get much in the way of hours over the next number of months.)
It wasn't going to be happening anyways. Those types of programs need to come from Congress, and there was zero coalition built to make them actually happen.
Look at how nationalized healthcare works in other countries (and how the ACA rolled out here) - initially sure, lots of fearmongering about how there will be death panels and super long lines... then everything gets into the hands of semi-competent people that actually build and maintain the system and the public cries foul whenever major cutbacks to the system are proposed.
Once we've overcome the knee-jerk reactionary "Don't change anything" response, then the system becomes popular and untouchable, much like Social Security and Medicare.
1. Under a single payor system (as I outlined in reasons above) Trump would not have a monopolist style of control over healthcare - systems like that become resistant to the impulses of specific administration through their popularity.
2. Oh, the whitehouse is running around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off - state and local officials are doing pretty well and I am pretty convinced the CDC is doing a lot of work to make sure we accelerate the vaccine development.
I really really dislike the Trump administration, but it hasn't caused my to lose faith in the idea of governance. Also, to clarify, I'm not suggesting that I'd love to see Trump establish a single payor system - I assume such a system would be immeasurably damaged by intent and exist solely to damage the concept of single payor healthcare.
We just watched Trump completely change our immigration situation in a series of moves that were far from popular. We saw him change leadership in the DOJ until he got the outcomes he wanted regarding investigations. Those Supreme Court appointments are going to be with us for decades. By what criteria do you suggest that the healthcare system would be immune to this?
Once the CDC "allowed" private clinics to develop COVID tests it took a private Cleveland clinic 9 days to create a test that takes 8 hours, as opposed to the previously used test which took 2-3 days. The Cleveland hospitals are developing drive-thru testing. The best thing the CDC did was get out of the way and stop prohibiting the private clinics from developing tests. The private systems are more agile and more capable of adjusting to demand.
One thing I see often is people are unwilling or unable to freely state the trade-offs. Things like immigration or socialized medicine are discussed as either wholly good or wholly bad. The truth is that there are costs and benefits. I freely admit by advocating for a free market, a much more free market than we have currently in medicine, I'm making a trade. I'm trading short term universality for two benefits: short term agility and long term technological progress. I recognize that in the short term some treatments might be unavailable to the poor, but in the long term more and better treatments will be available at commodity pricing. I'm sacrificing some today for a better tomorrow. What do you believe are the real costs vs benefit analysis for single payer?
You say that like it's a bad thing. This kind of situation is the only real justification for it, and it's actually a pretty good temporary measure. Key word being temporary.
To make things worse, most of the homeless already have chronic health issues which will make it even more difficult for them to fight off or deal with the symptoms of an infection.
Why not ban events holding more than 10 people? Or even 5? Setting the bar at 1000 seems like a massive lapse of judgement in preventing exponential growth.
There's a reason behind it. It depends on how what percentage of people of the population are infected. As long as the number is quite low (say 0.005%) having a meeting of 20 people will not be a great risk.
That's exactly the mentality that got Italy into their current situation. I see people downvoting me here, but I guess that's America in a nutshell. Those downvoters will be sorry in 2 weeks.
Churches can (and should, voluntarily) continue to operate without meeting in person. Many already stream their services online for the convenience of any members who can't be there due to sickness, travel, etc.
In the US, there is precedent against the government telling churches what rituals they can and cannot perform. See: Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah (1993) [0]. I would not bank on the constitutionality the government telling Christians that they can't gather / must stream. Sure, they "should," but I doubt the government will go so far as to demand it through banning gathers >250.
That article literally says to start practicing social distancing ASAP. How does this directive challenge that notion?
The article assures us this will be bad, but it doesn't say "fuck it all, go make out with everyone". It says to take precautions, like the one SF has done.
Correct. How is having gatherings of 1k people a good idea during a pandemic? The internal meeting that generated 70 cases in Boston had 170 attendants.
It's constitutional as an exercise of California's power under the 10th Amendment. This is a pretty well settled area of Constitutional law, as the US has had plenty of epidemics of various diseases (cholera, typhus, yellow fever, influenza, and even bubonic plague) in the 19th and early 20th centuries that provided opportunity to litigate these issues.
It will be interesting to see when this inevitably does affect political mobilization, or even just voting. There's a decent chance that we'll see some of this before the end of the year (and very possibly on Election Day).
IME, it's somewhat common for those in positions of authority (employers, municipalities, etc.) to simply assert a legal position that benefits their leadership, without mentioning that courts may disagree. In most cases there are no repercussions for being misleading in that way, aside from eroding the trust of those lied to.
The legal system is explicitly set up to encourage this. Laws don't actually spell out in detail every situation to which they might apply - there's no way a legislator can foresee this. Rather, the laws provide general guidelines of legislative intent, and then if two firms disagree on what that means, they take it to court, where the judge and often jury look at the specifics of the case, the text of the laws, how similar past cases were decided, and the general principle that similar situations should be decided in similar ways. Then they come down with a decision, which becomes case law by which future cases are decided.
If you want to succeed in Western countries it's worth internalizing this. In the absence of legal advice to the contrary, just assume that what you're doing is legal and assert it confidently, and most people won't challenge you. If they do, it helps to have lots of money to afford lawyers on retainer, so that a.) you're more likely to actually be right when you assert that what you're doing is legal and b.) you can craft very good arguments to persuade the judge and jury if it turns out you're wrong.
Can you explain? The second paragraph of the majority decision quotes the Louisiana law which it upholds:
"In case that any parish, town, or city, or any portion thereof, shall become infected with any contagious or infectious disease, to such an extent as to threaten the spread of such disease to the other portions of the state, the state board of health shall issue its proclamation declaring the facts and ordering it in quarantine, and shall order the local boards of health in other parishes, towns, and cities to quarantine against said locality"
That sure sounds like it's talking about local quarantines to me.
No judge is going to sign off on an injunction when an epidemic is raging nationwide, with a large number of confirmed cases on the west coast [1]. I'll eat crow if you find one with that much chutzpa.
They may in extreme circumstances - the courts still will function and I'm sure we're going to hear a lot of BS challenges to this restriction - but if authorities step over the line and, for instance, close down a small political rally of 300 while an opponent's rally of 500 is unaffected, then injunctions will happen.
They only say that there is power to prevent movement between states or coming into the USA. And they provide no proof that states have the power to quarentine.
At least on its surface, I'm kinda okay with this 1000-person rule for several reasons:
- I've already accepted that fire codes can legitimately limit the number of people in a building.
- The rule is agnostic with respect to the purpose of the meeting. E.g., it's not obviously being used to suppress political or cultural movements.
- It has a real, plausible purpose for public safety.
That being said, I can also see some valid reasons against it:
- It sets precedent, which is a powerful factor in the U.S. court system.
- The 1000-person rule seems a bit arbitrary. I would think the number needs to be much smaller for the effect to be meaningful. And I'm guessing something more nuanced is what's really needed, for example spacing between persons, air recirculation / flow rates, frequency of surface cleaning vs. # persons present, etc.
- It implicitly discriminates what kinds of groups can meet as before. One salient example would be that Christian mega-churches and really large Roman Catholic parishes couldn't meet as before.
- It also potentially prevents mass protest marches, depending on the wording of the ordinance, and how willing protestors are to ignore the ordinance.
> One salient example would be that Christian mega-churches and really large Roman Catholic parishes couldn't meet as before.
This is one scenario where I wouldn't be surprised if there are groups that refuse to uphold the order and file lawsuits over it infringing on their right to practice their religion (and assemble, of course).
Reminds me that the church shooting in Texas was literally live streamed. The church I grew up with recorded mp3s of sermons at put them on their website, and that was way back in the very early 2000s.
Catholic churches will just add more masses. The schedules are flexible (any time from Saturday afternoon to Sunday evening counts as Sunday mass) and masses can be made much shorter than they usually are.
(I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. Consult an licensed attorney in your jurisdiction if you need legal advice.)
I do not believe this is unconstitutional. It is not meant to keep people from exercising their First Amendment rights. It's speech neutral (time/place/manner restrictions are subject to a much lower level of judicial scrutiny than content-based restrictions).
It only applies to events in facilities owned or managed by the City of San Francisco. It does not prevent people from gathering in public spaces, nor prevent private venue operators who want to hold large gatherings from doing so (not that anyone with a modicum of liability insurance wants to take such risks).
If your interpretation were correct then there could be no regulation of assembly at all. This is not correct and SCOTUS has already supported content-neutral time/place/manner restrictions on assembly, for more than a century iirc.
Saying "no gatherings of more than 1000" is facially legal. Plenty of protests have been told it's time to disperse before.
Furthermore, SCOTUS typically grants even wider powers in extigent circumstances. It is probably also legal to say "no gatherings at all, everyone back to your houses for the duration of this crisis". An example would be something like the boston bomber crisis, although I don't think it was litigated, that probably would have been found to be legal as well.
Freedom of speech is freedom of speech until you yell fire in a crowded theater. Pandemic related quarantines have been established as being constitutional in past rulings.
Actually, it is completely legal to yell fire in a crowded theater. What you are not allowed to I am not sure why people continue to use this tired excuse. What is illegal is wanting to harm people by yelling fire in a crowded theater that is not actually on fire, although it is also illegal to knowingly hide that the theater is on fire.
Nevertheless the reference itself comes from a really terrible case where the supreme court wrongly infringed on the rights of a war dissenter. It is not a concept that ought to be continued to be parroted.
> It only applies to events in facilities owned or managed by the City of San Francisco. It does not prevent people from gathering in public spaces or prevent private venue operators who want to hold large gatherings from doing so (not that anyone with a modicum of liability insurance wants to take such risks).
I'm almost certain you're incorrect due to the fact that basketball games will be effected and those aren't run by the city - teams remain private entities.
This does effect intentional private gatherings in public spaces, so if you have an extended family with more than 1000 people in it then your family reunion would be effected.
That said, this is absolutely legal and constitutional and that clarity lies on the backs of many historical disease outbreaks in the US that have resulted in similar restrictions.
I thought I read something the other day that said Chase Center was at least partially owned/operated by the City/County, but I could be mistaken. I might have mixed it up with Moscone Center.
The metaphorical "lizard hindbrain" of common law, the basis of US law, has a lot of powers the governments can enact in cases of public health, both de facto and de jure. While they are not allowed to extend it past that point, they have a lot of existing power in this space.
And... honestly... not a lot of sensible people are going to complain. Only the very fringes are going to object. The vast "middle" majority, in this case 98%+, is going to agree, conform, and be upset at the people objecting to the quarantine and who break it, not at the government. That counts for a lot too, in practice.
This site leans incredibly libertarian and most people are not going to have a problem with this at all. I've seen people objecting to CDC existing on the basis of federalism and the right of assembly and all kinds of other stuff and that's just so far off the reservation of well-decided legal doctrine that it might as well be freemen on the land.
It's frankly a very good idea. I'd even say to lower the number to 50 or maybe 100 at most. Some of the gatherings in South Korea that are believed to have been super-spreading events have been less than that (that church group).
Governments have a lot more power in the immediate moment than we like to confront; it isn’t until weeks or months later that courts (sometimes) get around to stopping them.
Wait till you read about what will happen to you if you decide to get TB and not take your meds. You'll be sovereign citizening your way into DOT before you make a new XDR strain for us.
In America, in most states, you do have the right to refuse treatment. Although mostly seen as a right to die for those who are terminal, cases have be brought up and gone either way for Christian Science followers depending on the situation/court.
> Some jurisdictions have resolved this tension through compromise: TB patients cannot be forced to undergo treatment, but they may be isolated or detained if they refuse treatment.
Denmark: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22550108
Italy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22550623 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22545430
E3 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22546931
U of Dayton: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22547457
Warriors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22548770