Reading this I was expecting the same knee-jerk, panic response that has become the "acceptable" public health response to the problem the pandemic places before us.
While I detect a hint of futility in this statement, I am nonetheless deeply heartened to know some public health officials are themselves questioning some of the simplistic premises that have been driving policy to this point at all levels of government. Really there at least three attributes that I see in this statement that I don't typically see in utterings of our bureaucrats:
1) I actually get the sense of outright honesty from this statement. Not some overly messsaged, PR driven/reviewed statement by some spokes-hole. I actually think this statement is really what this guy believes... a public statement that even expresses some vulnerability. Despite the subject, very refreshing and I'd be more likely to listen seriously to what he has to say in future.
2) Struggling with right and good uses of power and seeing not using one's power as itself a public good. Good heavens... this guy should run for President! I expect I'd disagree with much of his politics, but I'd vote for him just for having such thoughts and expect the nation would be better off no matter his other leanings.
3) Questioning the mandates, their effectiveness, and whether they might be causing more harm than good. And not doing so from some artificial posturing to show "the right politics", but honest, genuine questioning.
Whether you agree or not... I wish more of our public officials were this thoughtful on critical issues such as face us in this pandemic.
I agree wholeheartedly with all three of your points. I disagree strongly with one of his positions (I don't think we should be opening schools while the rest of us are locked down), but I too find it very, very encouraging to have a public official obviously using his brain and being honest about the fact that nobody really knows the right answer.
And especially in the context about the use of power, the acknowledgement that imposing a lockdown doesn't actually necessarily change people's behavior all that much is a really good point. We've definitely seen that there are some that will intentionally do the opposite if they feel their freedoms are being impinged upon, so if it's not going to actually make an improvement, the gesture could be a huge mistake.
It worked particularly well in Victoria, where a second lockdown turned a ~700 case per day nightmare into 38 straight days of no deaths or locally acquired cases.
The lockdowns were terrible for many people - for all the reasons you can imagine. On the other hand, I doubt anyone here would now argue that those crazy times were a mistake.
I think it's fairly clear that lockdowns that actually lock people down are undeniably effective. The question is really whether or not imposing a lockdown in any given population will actually result in people cooperating, which I think is debatable for a lot of parts of the US, where we are taught to take a lot of pride in our inability to be controlled. I think the acknowledgement that a lockdown doesn't necessarily have the effect you think it will is a recognition of that cultural phenomenon.
Yesterday there were some interesting stats shown for Germany. Before the 2nd soft lockdown in November the age bracket of 20 - 35 was the 2nd highest in terms of infections per 100k (within the last 7 days). Only topped by the age bracket 80+.
During our second lockdown the increase in cases did slow down a bit, but only a bit. One could argue, that the soft lockdown didn't really work that well, as it didn't turn the ship around.
The interesting part of the statistics was, that the age bracket of 20 - 35 was the only one with reduced infection numbers during the 2nd (soft) lockdown. So all positive effects from this age group were totally negated by every other age bracket - be it school children (massively increased numbers due to open schools), of kinder garden kids (same with open). Or also older people seemingly (no idea of the reasons) contracting Sars-CoV-2 at an increased rate during the soft lockdown.
I have no idea for why these other age brackets have increased numbers. Could be that these are also the age brackets were you find the most critics, but that is just a totally unproven hypothesis of mine.
Could be that behavior changed in regards to the first lockdown and people do not keep their social distancing as much as they did (that is just anecdotal evidence from encountering people not keeping their distance while grocery shopping).
At least in Berlin, it was the same during the first lockdown: infections among younger people peaked one or two weeks earlier than among older people.
Places like UK did a hard lockdown for 6 weeks and kept schools open. It completely worked. Yes, kids can transmit the virus, but it appears that as long as the ADULTS limit their interaction with other adults, kids have only a limited way of encountering infections.
Yes, but it doesn't really disprove the assertion that lockdown's work. It more proves that the other approaches they tried either dont work or weren't applied effectively.
There is plenty of evidence that lockdowns do work. Whether they make sense from an economic or overall quality of life perspective is a separate issue. But they work.
I think you're misinterpreting my comment. I'm not saying lockdowns don't work. I'm saying that there is no evidence that lockdowns that contain exceptions for school aren't significantly worse than lockdowns that include schools.
The UK's number of COVID-19 patients in hospital peaked at 19,500 in mid-April and fell to 800 by the start of September.
That's despite things like the 'eat out to help out' scheme that ran until the end of August.
Schools and colleges re-opened in September [1] and the government started "encouraging" workers back to offices [2] - and admittedly, by the end of September patients in hospital had only risen to 2,400.
But by mid-November we see the second wave peaking at 16,500 hospitalised. Today, as we come out of the second lockdown, there are still 15,000 patients in hospital.
The UK has not demonstrated that schools can safely be kept open.
Unfortunately, as the geniuses in government decided to reopen schools and universities and offices all at the same time, it's difficult to directly attribute the second wave to any single policy decision.
The Irish government kept schools open, moved almost all universities online, and encouraged/required workers to work from home.
From our data, it doesn't appear that schools were a massive driver of transmission.
We know that kids don't spread it as much as they do the flu, so on balance, keeping schools open seems like the better course of action as long as it's not a major driver of infection rates.
Hospitalised cases lag infections by weeks. For some reason you're completely ignoring the positive test results, which show a very clear correlation with lockdowns.
We shouldn't expect hospitalised cases to fall immediately - although they have been falling for the past week or so. Lockdowns - even excluding schools - clearly are effective at reducing transmission rates below 1. Unfortunately the lesser measures we're currently under don't seem to be - as cases have plateaued and are starting to rise again.
> For some reason you're completely ignoring the positive test results
For a good reason.
By almost all the statistics, the second wave hasn't been as bad as the first. Comparing peaks, measures like "Deaths within 28 days of positive test" (942 vs 486) and "Weekly deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate" (9,495 vs 3,371) and "Patients in hospital" (19,518 vs 16,421) and "Patients in mechanical ventilation beds" (3,252 vs 1,461) say the second peak was about half the height of the first one.
On the other hand, "Cases by date reported" peaked at 5,113 in the first lockdown and 25,329 in the second lockdown - making the second wave 5x higher than the first. Presumably due to a lack of test capacity.
If I'd chosen the one metric which makes the second wave look 5x the first instead of 0.5x, that'd be a pretty deceptive way of describing the results of government policy (although technically accurate).
'Works' is what happened to Ebola - near total containment outside of a rather poor part of the world.
There is a major complaint here against the lockdowns. They have positive and negative outcomes and there is very little evidence that the two sides have been weighed against each other. The scale of the damage done by our response is too great to accept best effort attempts to control the disease. The standard of the response needs to be excellence, not competence.
We also can't discount the possibility that there were easier, less invasive measures than lockdowns that captured a lot of the benefit without the costs. It has been a chaotic year but there is no natural law that says every time there is a pandemic the only option is to scuttle the economic ship.
On italy they only opened schools for children in age groups for which having them at home would be a major burden for working parents (either work from home or essential workers).
Arguably this reduced the pain, while also reducing the effectiveness of the lockdown measures. It's a fine balancing act. It's hard to compute precisely, we're not yet good at it as a society. That said, expecting people to work while having children at home and at the same expecting grandparents to stay isolated, puts people on a very tough spot. How do people cope with that in places that kindergartens are still closed?
Kid1->Kid2->Parents-of-kid2 transmission sounds like it would lead to a lot of orphans. Did it? What's the lag on the statistics on that subject?
Outcomes are also not binary (life or death). There is also the possibility of a gamut of lifelong health problems from, e.g. scarred lungs, for both kids and parents.
My daughter's school has 2000 kids. 4000 parents. In Santa Clara county the death rate for 40-60 is .5% [1] That would mean 20 parents dead if everyone gets it. Many of the households in immigrant families are multi generational. That will have a multiplying effect.
While it's still going to be a very real number, I think you are overestimating the number of deaths considerably. I appreciate that you provided a link, but I don't think that source includes the information you would need to make the estimate you are looking for.
First, I think that you are implicitly assuming that there are an equal number of people in each age category. In addition to the percentages you quote, you also need to know the percentage of the population per age range. Second, the "case" rate is the not the same as the "infection" rate, as it only includes confirmed cases. It's usually assumed that for each confirmed case, there is some unknown multiple of this number of infected individuals.
Eyeballing the chart here (and realizing that Santa Clara might not match these numbers, and guessing equal number in the relevant 5 year age ranges) a better estimate of the death rate for the 40-60 year old group is probably something around .15%: https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/11/18/covid-infection-fatalit...
I simply did percent_dead times num_dead/percent_cases times num_cases. That leads to ~0.5%. I agree with you that IFR is unknowable without very thorough sero-survey. So all we have is CFR to go on. The ratio depends on population age and test availability etc.
This is a great thread [1] that goes through the IFR estimation and relative risk of dying due to COVID for various age groups. Bad news for me (45-54 age group) my risk of dying goes up to 1.7x if I get covid.
If you go back and read his earlier statements, you can clearly see the evolution of his frustration. He's been a straight shooter on this from the start.
> I think people should stay at home, avoid all non-essential activities, wear masks, and not gather with anyone outside their households. I’ve been saying this for about 10 months now. If you didn’t listen to my (and many others) entreaties before, I don’t think you’ll likely change your behavior based on a new order.
I disagree with this wholeheartedly.
People are getting a LOT of pressure to see family right now. Strong messages from people in authority absolutely will cause some people to think more about this. It also gives them an external authority to appeal to when resisting peer pressure.
Yes, you're not going to get the dipshits.
However, being able to tell family, that you maybe didn't even want to see all that much anyway (a lot of people only do the extended family thing out of obligation at the holidays), that there is an "Official Order(tm)" to "Don't gather" helps.
This is similar to official "mask mandates". This helps because a store can now say "Sir, the city/county/state has issued official orders to wear masks and we will have to ask you to leave if you don't wear it." An official mandate gives the store political cover. It also gives the average citizen the ability to ask the store to kick someone out who is non-compliant.
I agree that there are difficult tradeoffs here. Essentially ever official has said that there will be no enforcement, so the order effectively only applies to the persuadable.
My kid's scout troop is still meeting, kinda sorta complying with the letter of the order. I have advocated multiple times with the leadership to stop the meetings or at a minimum restrict them to small, stable groups, but I am the only one who feels that way. Perhaps a more severe shutdown would persuade them, but perhaps not. I wonder if just a few token enforcement actions, such as pulling people over and asking if they are complying, or modest fines for the local megachurch with 95 cars in the parking lot on Sundays, would go a long way toward making people think twice. There's a common feeling that if something is legal, it's OK, and I find that's rarely true. It's legal to fart in an elevator, but that doesn't make it right.
Indeed. A very rare instance where a government official questions his own wisdom. Wish more california officials were like him.
Not only mandates are completely ineffective (compared to the other much better alternatives) some of the folks like me feel compelled to call BS on many of the "dictats" and make it an ideological issue. At that stage, states credibility reduces even further.
Okay, I’ll bite — what would be better (from a public health perspective) than government mandates for masks, social distancing, and reduced/restricted indoor gathering?
And, to be clear, what makes you say they are ineffective? Because literally everything I’ve seen everywhere says that those three things are basically the only things that have been effective.
Those actions are helpful. The question read to me as whether the mandate to do them was the maximally effective course.
Education, facts, and increasing public consciousness seem like they’d be more effective than mandates for private gatherings. People who would follow the mandate in private would likely also follow educational campaigns. Voluntary compliance based on understanding works everywhere. Mandates only work where you can be seen.
Wow. Lest anyone think that Dr. Morrow is some kind of anti-lockdown activist - back in the spring, San Mateo county had one of the most restrictive and prescriptive lockdowns of anywhere in the US (residents were ordered to limit outdoor recreation to within 5 miles of their home).
It takes a lot of guts to just look objectively at the data and do what you think is right, regardless of what pressure you’re getting from the media, the state, the governor, your peers in other counties, etc. Not to mention, publicly call out the defects and contradictions in the state level orders. Much respect for this man.
> “But what we have before us is a symbolic gesture, it appears to be style over substance, without any hint of enforcement, and I simply don’t believe it will do much good. I think people should stay at home, avoid all non-essential activities, wear masks, and not gather with anyone outside their households. I’ve been saying this for about 10 months now. If you didn’t listen to my (and many others) entreaties before, I don’t think you’ll likely change your behavior based on a new order.”
> “Being in the purple tier, the State has already put significant restrictions on businesses and the public space in San Mateo County. I am aware of no data that some of the business activities on which even greater restrictions are being put into place with this new order are the major drivers of transmission. In fact, I think these greater restrictions are likely to drive more activity indoors, a much riskier endeavor. While I don’t have scientific evidence to support this, I also believe these greater restrictions will result in more job loss, more hunger, more despair and desperation (...) and more death from causes other than COVID. And I wonder, are these premature deaths any less worrisome than COVID deaths?”
> "I also believe these greater restrictions will result in more job loss, more hunger, more despair and desperation (...) and more death from causes other than COVID. And I wonder, are these premature deaths any less worrisome than COVID deaths?”
There's been a total of 164 registered COVID-19 related deaths in San Francisco county, the vast majority of which had other comorbidities, assuming trend[1]. On the other hand, there has been nearly three times (~460) as many deaths in San Francisco related to overdoses between January and August alone[2].
San Francisco has so far had by far the best Covid health outcomes of any major US city. If the US on the whole were doing as well as SF, there would be at least 200,000 fewer deaths than there have been.
I really hope SF can keep it that way. The recent trend is pretty scary, but if we all hunker down for the next month or two, we can still turn it around.
Less than that. SF has had about 20.5 confirmed Covid deaths / 100k so far.
The USA overall has had about 86 confirmed Covid deaths / 100k.
And the USA total is likely a more significant underestimate than the SF total, as there are many places where there has been an abnormal spike of “pneumonia”, “stroke”, etc. deaths never attributed to Covid.
Not only did it have one of the most aggressive and immediate responses to the issue, but for a long time we were relatively sheltered as the virus raged across the nation because these measures were highly effective, and people to a large degree listened.
He has been a straight shooter from the get go, including a while back when he said the State's orders didn't make sense because they were all or nothing for opening up and he felt that many indoor spaces were not safe to reopen.
Unfortunately, it seems much of his frustration stems from the fact that humans suck at nuance with things like this but are absolutely amazing at rationalizing anything.
I wish I knew who he was referring to specifically when he says things like:
"I may have a different view of the power and authority I have, as a function of my position, than some of my colleagues."
If they are elected, I want them out.
Ultimately, it is disheartening that the people who need to hear his message the most will not read his post.
> I am aware of no data that some of the business activities [...] are the major drivers of transmission
This suggests he is aware of data indicating that some of the business activities being restricted drive transmission, just not all of them. (I'm guessing maybe, say, indoor dining?) So should those known to do this be restricted or not? Did restricting them previously help or not? Should we ignore them?
It seems to be fairly well established at this point that poor ventilation is an issue; spending time around others who may be carrying the virus is an issue; wearing a mask, whether inside or outside, significantly reduces the chance of spreading the virus if you're a carrier. So your guess seems pretty on point. Indoor dining/drinking means being around others without masks in areas where air is circulated rather than fully exchanged, so it's about as risky as you can get short of a church service or choir practice (which has all of those risks but adds "let's project particles from deep in our lungs while singing"). "Spreading events" under those conditions have been pretty well-documented, as far as I know.
So, I'd say Dr. Morrow is aware that some of the restricted business activities drive transmission and he's supporting those restrictions. There are other activities -- like outdoor dining, as long as you're not putting diners in circulation-restricting tents -- that seem to be lower risk, and could probably further mitigate risks by having limitations on group size, dining time, etc., rather than just a point-blank ban. And there are some other restrictions which just seem more like theatre, such as curfews. Do we think coronavirus is nocturnal?
> Should we ignore them, then?
I'm not sure how useful that question is for folks who don't run businesses facing that decision. If I was a restaurant operator, I wouldn't flagrantly flout the local regulations even if I disagreed with them. I'm not, though, and the restrictions that more directly apply to me as a citizen -- e.g., try to stay at home during this surge, don't gather in groups even with folks in your "quarantine bubble" -- don't seem that wildly unreasonable.
> And there are some other restrictions which just seem more like theatre, such as curfews. Do we think coronavirus is nocturnal?
The way I've heard some people explain it is that human behavior changes nocturnaly. After 10pm what are most people doing out? Nightlife and drinking overlap pretty heavily, social drinking and social distancing are kindof contradictory, and alcohol isn't known for increasing people's capacity for conscientious observance of safety practices.
As long as it’s an actual tent, with open sides, it’s a pretty huge improvement. I don’t have the link, but I read that basically anything outdoors with open sides might as well be totally outdoors, since the heat created in the tent will naturally cause the air to be exchanged constantly (plus, obviously, the breeze).
A significant number of people are going to restaurants outdoors with other people from outside their household. This is more common after 10pm. So in a vacuum these activities could be done safely, but in practice they contribute to the spread of covid
Gotta make sure people can make rent and eat and otherwise stay alive, or they're not going to stay home.
Even ignoring financial considerations, expecting people to have no in-person contact with anyone outside their homes for 9+ months is utterly unrealistic.
I live in San Mateo county, and am interested in knowing what to do to stay safe. This is the first I've heard about limiting outdoor recreation to within 5 miles of my home.
I haven't been notified about any of the details of any of the lockdowns. In the Spring, I encountered a group of people who had just been released from jail during one of my monthly shopping trips. Despite having just been in government custody, they didn't even know the basics about things like social distancing, much less any more specific restrictions.
How are these things supposed to be effective when it's so hard to learn about them?
What have you tried to stay notified about details? the SMCAlert system texts and emails me links to details as soon as any changes occur. It has been fantastic for this and other situations.
I tried a lot. I spent a good amount of time searching for what the restrictions were in my city. I found news articles describing restrictions, but I wasn't able to locate primary sources or a way to keep updated.
Even with the link you sent me, that site gives no indication that it's a way to get updates on pandemic-related news and restrictions. It seems to just be an emergency subscription. What other messages does it send that aren't described in the FAQs?
My wife just alerted me to new restrictions she heard about on Twitter. I went to https://www.smchealth.org/coronavirus to read more about it, and I don't see anything different from when you linked me to it 10 days ago.
You're confused because the county health information system is being mismanaged and misused as a blog by a crank. He doesn't allow anyone to send public information on his behalf and he requires all of his writings to be distributed verbatim[1]. That's why they all read like incoherent rambles. It's also why every one of his messages begins with the instructions to "reread my previous statements below", because he's top-quoting himself in Outlook! He just does not understand the impact his intentional aversion to clarity is having on the region.
Well, it's been demonstrated around the country that not locking down is considered perfectly acceptable.
The reason for the lock down is to prevent numbers from skyrocketing - the anemic response from the US ensures long term economic damage due to failure to control the outbreak - the question becomes one of what the numbers in Sean Mateo will do over the next few weeks compared to the surrounding cities. Ignoring of course infections spread to the surrounding areas by San Mateo remaining open.
This is a surprisingly coherent. I live in San Mateo County.
One thing I've noticed is that the cases are not evenly distributed.
California has 600/1M new cases, vs 1000/M in South Dakota.
LA county has 740/1M. San Mateo County has 313/1M.
Within San Mateo County, San Carlos is 119/1M, and East Palo Alto is 675/1M.
It's incredibly hard to set policy when everything is so different, down to towns with 30K people a few miles apart.
Aren't the latest California directives attempting to adapt to this at least at the county level by tying restrictions to hospital capacity in each county?
My county has about ~30 ICU beds left, yet hasn't triggered the magic state threshold. They are one mass causality incident (plane crash, roof collapsing, etc) from people going without care.
Even if things are OK in San Mateo, they don't have to deal with the cases of people who go there because there are less restrictions. That is the whole point of counties working together.
> The thresholds are by geographic area, not counties.
Which is why I highlighted the situation was quite bad in my county, yet the bay area as a whole hasn't triggered the state mandates. It should be both county and region based.
Other Bay Area counties are seeing numbers skyrocket over the past 6 weeks, and want to act decisively now while they have the best chance to prevent a catastrophic outcome.
In SF case counts have been doubling about every 2 weeks; we started from a low baseline (relative to most of the rest of the USA) but another few doublings and we’ll be in huge trouble.
The state-level mandates are timed to be reactive instead of proactive; if we assume the restrictions are successful at curbing spread, we should enact them ASAP, before our hospitals are on track to be completely overwhelmed. (For that matter we should have taken strong steps before Thanksgiving weekend.)
It is extremely unfortunate that this is hammering small businesses; if the US had responsible federal leadership (if the Senate & White House hadn’t just sat on their hands for 7 months) we could do something about this (fingers crossed for January), but counties and even states have limited ability to provide large-scale relief of the type required.
But waiting to impose the same restrictions until the state mandates kick in, if inaction results in cases continuing to rise along their current trajectory, will lead to even larger economic devastation than decisive action a few weeks sooner.
Stop putting it all on the federal government. It’s also state government’s fault. California only thinks in terms of lockdowns even after all these months. Also look at people’s personal behaviors. I saw more and more people walking around without masks recently. Downtown Burlingame was shockingly bad.
What are you thinking of? Personally I think we could do much better at hiring contact tracers, getting test sites into vulnerable neighborhoods, doing general community outreach, making sure public-facing workers have sufficient PPE, figuring out how to get infected people places to isolate away from their households, protecting incarcerated people, etc.
But historically the USA has been heavily reliant on the CDC and the federal government more generally to muster resources and coordinate responses. When leadership is entirely absent (and indeed, federal officials are out lying about the pandemic every day), states have a tough time picking up the slack.
> look at people’s personal behaviors. I saw more and more people walking around without masks recently
From what I understand, a major goal of shelter-in-place orders is to convince individual people to act more carefully.
I am not so much looking at what people are saying rather I am looking at how people are behaving. People are much more relaxed and take time to shop. Some downtowns are quite busy with foot traffic. Those areas have people walking around without masks (supposedly eating or drinking). It is hard to socially distance in those areas.
If doubling every 2 weeks is your standard, everyone in San Mateo County should stay home. Their case count has more than doubled in the last 1 week, from 137 a week ago to 343 most recently. It was their second-highest case count on record, second to yesterday which was 400 cases.
Of course. The real scandal is how bean counting has failed millions of Californians. Are that many people really eking out an existence so marginal, it has no impact on prices for homes, equities, goods and services? Or is there something wrong with what we’re measuring?
Depends substantially on how many people have to work face to face with strangers, and how large households are.
Everyone living in a multi-generational household with e.g. grocery store clerks is at significantly higher risk than a couple of childless yuppies working from home.
Nine months into this it would be nice if we had good data on the risk factors of transmission. I know it’s a tricky virus to trace but shouldn’t we have better info on which activities demographics, etc are the most risky by now?
We do know the risk factors. It's a respiratory disease that spreads when people who are breathing are near each other. We don't need a random control trial to tell us that practicing with your brass band can spread it. The solution is to stay very far from everyone until the disease is wiped out. Only very intelligent libertarian contrary Americans think we don't have the information we need.
That is not very helpful advice when you have to manage risk while trying to eat, work, live, and stay healthy. Stats certainly exist on where some of the 16,000+ cases in San Mateo were transmitted.
There's no way to get the information you desire without Big Brother level tracing. And even then the error bars are huge. Symptoms set in days after exposure, and transmission is uneven at best.
Full disclosure: I've had covid.
We assume we were exposed at the clinic, where our kid needed emergency medical treatment. But if so, only one of us was with the child indoors -- in a cleaned room with a doctor in full PPE and us in masks -- and treatment lasted less than 5 minutes.
But by the time we experienced onset of symptoms, days later, we had been in close proximity with my in-laws (they need care and were part of our bubble) for over 24 hours. Luckily, they developed no symptoms and tested negative.
So 5 minutes of exposure to an asymptomatic carrier at the clinic likely transmitted the virus to us, but 24 hours in close contact failed to transmit the virus to my in-laws.
The delay of onset and inconsistent transmission patterns make this virus exceedingly difficult and expensive to track. Your questions are unanswerable.
>There's no way to get the information you desire without Big Brother level tracing.
As I responded to the sibling comment, I don't think that is accurate. Of course many, if not most cases can not be traced, many certainly can be. Some people know exactly where they got covid, and who they exposed, and where.
The US has 50,000 full time contact tracers working to collect this information. Surely there is some data by now?
>Your questions are unanswerable.
IF the question is categorically unanswerable (which I don't believe), contact tracing programs should be disbanded.
Contract tracing != "gathering evidence of transmission in any particular location/context."
Instead, please think of it as "one of the most powerful, non-medicinal, mechanisms for interrupting disease transmission."
It accomplishes this through its overt actions: attempting to alter the behavior of potential and exposed contacts by encouraging quarantining for an appropriate length of time and to get tested if symptoms develop.
> Contract tracing != "gathering evidence of transmission in any particular location/context."
I disagree. Understanding how and where COVID spreads has been an essential part of contract tracing in all of the countries that have successfully implemented it. This data is absolutely collected by tracers.
It’s dangerous to not put much credence in where people think they got the virus. We have all kinds of biases that mean we are not going to be very good at this.
You log it as "unknown community transmission". While you obviously can't trace everyone, California has 10,000 contact tracing staff [1] and has spent most of the pandemic with less than 5,000 confirmed cases per day [2]. These individuals are working every day to collect data, so I am sure it exists.
If you get a positive test, contact tracers may ask you where you went and who you interacted with. They then call those people and ask them to get a covid test. IF the contact tests positive, then rinse and repeat. [3]
If I live alone and only leave my house to grocery shop, it is pretty clear where I got covid. Similarly, if Bob had covid, I had dinner with Bob, and now I have covid, it is pretty safe to assume I got at dinner.
Anecdotally, I had a friend who tested positive and the contact tracer told them that they had likely contracted while it shopping at a big 5 several days earlier.
I wonder how much those differences in close areas matter because of people traveling locally for work, coming into contact with people from other areas, etc.
What a delightful thing to read. It's so rare in this pandemic to see public health officials actually speaking frankly with a full command of the relevant facts, instead of either rottenly repeating the current consensus or sticking their head in the sand about the whole thing. I especially appreciated his points about "essential businesses" being a totally incoherent category, and his unwillingness to impose restrictions on the entire county based on that arbitrary categorisation.
Even aside from his particular recommendations, I can't remember the last time I heard a government official talk like an actual human being in this manner. A breath of fresh air.
This sends a much different and much more coherent message than what I’ve heard in LA County, which makes me believe the Bay Area has this more under control than SoCal even if San Mateo isn’t following in lockstep with the other Bay Area counties.
A mix of Mayor Garcetti’s (the city of LA) messaging mixed with the state and county orders, alongside two conflicting health department orders (Pasadena + LA County) have made navigating guidance totally confusing. There’s even infighting within the LA County Board of Supervisors, and talk of some cities to create their own health departments.
>14. The new State framework is rife with inexplicable inconsistencies of logic.
Not just that, you should read Garcetti’s stay at home orders last week, ordering people to stay home with 12 pages of exceptions.
>15. Beyond the basic human needs for air, water, food, shelter, and safety, it has, to date, been impossible for me to define what is “essential” to the 800,000 people who live here.
At this point, it seems like it’s up to the business owner to decide if they’re essential. Anecdotally I’ve heard of every small business owner here in LA call themselves essential simply because they “support essential infrastructure”.
I understand the sentiment, but I think it's pretty clear in retrospect hard lockdowns were the correct way to address this.
This half-assed "wear a mask and social distance if you want" stance just made the economy sputter for a whole a year. I've seen this in France twice, where they've oscillated between doing nothing and doing a lot, a couple brief lockdowns can reverse things quickly even after things have gotten worse than they ever gotten in the USA. In Asia they managed to control the whole thing by trying to squelch it.
Europe had hard lockdowns. Not China-hard, but pretty hard. Cases surged again.
You mentioned Asia. I saw this headline today:
"South Korea's Health Minister Describes Seoul As A 'COVID-19 War Zone'"
By US standards, their case count is still incredibly low. The point is they haven't actually been able to contain it, either; they're just acting sooner and more aggressively for the second wave. Apparently New Zealand still has single digit cases most days.
If "half-assed 'wear a mask and social distance if you want'" kept the r0 below 1, lockdown or not, new cases would drop.
What's scarier is that the Bay Area, with ubiquitous masks, good-ish weather, partial closures, and lower population wasn't even able to keep new cases down.
> Apparently New Zealand still has single digit cases most days.
NZ hasn't had any new cases in the general population for quite some time. The cases that NZ has been reporting are all recent arrivals undergoing the mandatory 14-day quarantine in an isolation facility.
Both Australia and New Zealand have shown (multiple times) that it is entirely possible to completely eradicate this virus using nothing more sophisticated than masks, social distancing, testing, and (targeted) strict lockdowns.
Australia and New Zealand are islands where the borders can be closed much more tightly than elsewhere and imported goods arrive mainly through container shipping. In the EU, the need to ensure regular freight truck traffic and move hundreds of thousands of seasonal agricultural workers from east to west means that a comparable lockdown could not have been achieved.
> Australia and New Zealand are islands where the borders can be closed much more tightly than elsewhere and imported goods arrive mainly through container shipping. In the EU, the need to ensure regular freight truck traffic and move hundreds of thousands of seasonal agricultural workers from east to west means that a comparable lockdown could not have been achieved.
I wonder about this. I'd expect freight truck traffic in China to play at least as big of a role in distribution there that it does in Europe. China is a giant connected piece of land, and if their numbers are to be believed even in the slightest, it's clear China was able to keep Covid under control to a much greater extent than the western world.
Australia never fully halted interstate freight truck traffic, as it was deemed essential. I've heard Covid tests were given to truckies at state borders, but that seems possible for US states or European countries to do, even with limited resources. Is freight truck traffic really to blame for Covid spread, then?
And although Australia largely shut itself off from foreign crop labor, and is struggling to harvest crops given this, there's not all that much appreciable damage that I can see. Perhaps this was really a good season to err on the side of going short handed. Prices will go up, but the juice is worth the squeeze, it seems.
Also, Hawaii is an island, as is the UK. Alaska would seem to have similar advantages to an island state. Yet these islands are doing very much more poorly compared to Australia and New Zealand.
> It's clear China was able to keep Covid under control
China's lockdown involved e.g. welding the doors of apartment blocks shut and forcing the populace to install a spyware app on their phones. Claiming that a Western country "could have just done like China" is basically saying that that Western country could have just junked all its civil liberties.
> And although Australia largely shut itself off from foreign crop labor, and is struggling to harvest crops given this, there's not all that much appreciable damage that I can see.
Things are different in the EU. After decades of the single market, keeping people fed absolutely relies on getting those harvests done with imported labour.
> I've heard Covid tests were given to truckies at state borders, but that seems possible for US states or European countries to do, even with limited resources.
Tests were in short supply for a long time. By the time they were available, it was too late to lock down as effectively as Oz or NZ. Again, you underestimate just how special those two countries are among Western nations.
Freight truck traffic definitely did play a role in spreading Covid within China - it's how they ended up with an outbreak in Beijing, the city they'd most aggressively protected against the spread of the disease. That outbreak in turn appears to have been seeded by another outbreak that went entirely undetected until it spread to Beijing. China's apparent success in keeping Covid under control is one of the biggest mysteries of the entire pandemic; their methods don't seem like they should work, and every so often there's a little sign that something isn't right like that undetected outbreak.
> Europe had hard lockdowns. Not China-hard, but pretty hard. Cases surged again.
In Australia, hard lockdown looks like the following:
1. International borders closed to all non-citizens, permanent residents or essential travelers
2. State borders closed per 1
3. City "borders" closed per 1 — happened in Melbourne
4. You can't leave your home for any reason not deemed essential
5. If you do leave your home for an essential reason, you must stay within 5km of your home, or have a job/emergency/essential imperative to travel further away
All of the above is enforced by police officers.
In Melbourne, they even closed off a high-risk, high density building for a while, just because the health authorities deemed it a risk.
Could you expand more on what these European "hard lockdowns" mean? Because at no point during this pandemic has any of the above happened in any American state or city, at least not to my knowledge.
The Australian federal government also enacted Job Keeper to suspend work hours yet keep working people employed, and took additional steps to ensure as many people as possible could remain on lockdown without a source of income. This was as important as — if not more important than — the hard lockdown enforcement measures themselves.
The article says there was no secret sauce, which isn't quite right. Some factors that played a role:
- Australia had had an unusually bad fire season and an associated scandal about the government response: our PM was on holiday in Hawaii while an unprecedented area of land was burning. The framework for state/federal cooperation on disaster management was being revised right as 2020 started, and there was political will for strong measures, such as ignoring WHO recommendations to let international borders stay open.
- Victoria had strong state of emergency/disaster powers, including the right to impose movement restrictions, and clear conditions and precedent for imposing them.
- The states had the power to close their borders, and did so, isolating the second wave to one state. Victoria was the odd one out - the other states set the bar at near-total suppression.
- The lockdown really, really sucked. The Victorian state government relied heavily on the support of the federal government, support from the general populace, and federal spending on income supplements. They still came under enormous pressure to end the lockdown early, even with more federal and individual support than states in the US would have gotten.
This virus has put on bare display just how selfish, unintelligent, and tribalistic we are as a species. Like you say, there is no mystery at this point. We have to face the cold, depressing truth about who we are.
> What's scarier is that the Bay Area, with ubiquitous masks, good-ish weather, partial closures, and lower population wasn't even able to keep new cases down.
I’d contest that characterization of the Bay Area - even in Santa Clara County where I live, I’ve not seen ubiquitous mask wearing.
I live in the bay area and it is 100% of every single person I've seen outside. I still haven't spotted anyone without a mask besides a runner or someone on a bicycle.
Also, by current US and European standards South Korea is carrying out very few Covid-19 tests, which makes it hard to make a meaningful comparison of case numbers. Well over an order of magnitude less in per-capita terms. I believe they're still not routinely offering testing to people with mild potential symptoms unless they've had recent contact with a known case, and there's evidence that it's in increasingly widespread circulation outside of the network of cases known to contact tracing.
Plus, you've got to remember that disease outbreaks grows exponentially, and exponential growth always has low numbers at the start until it doesn't.
That's exactly right. The harm to the economy is not caused by the countermeasures, it is caused by the disease. If you don't beat the disease, you wreck the economy.
"Roughly 30,000 restaurants have already closed for good across the country, with more than 110,000 expected to shutter in the next month, according to estimates by the National Restaurant Association. ".
How did a virus cause businesses to close permanently? This doesn't happen during flu season or even with the h1n1 pandemic.
H1N1 2009 only killed 12000 Americans. COVID-19 killed 12000 Americans last week. People are avoiding restaurants because their own self-interest keeps them away. They don't want to get a fatal disease that's already killed 1‰ of the country. This aversion has little or nothing to do with government directives.
People are not avoiding restaurants. After each temporary lockdown has been lifted in my country, restaurants and pubs immediately went back to full capacity. Also, this summer I found that overlander hotspots -- the places where elderly Europeans go in their camping cars -- were as packed as in any other year with little distancing observed. Certainly some are worried about the virus, but many others are not.
not in Bay Area. These new nice outdoor areas with heaters etc. have been packed all these months.
> This aversion has little or nothing to do with government directives.
the businesses closure is direct result of the government orders. It is evidenced by how people flocked back to businesses when they [partially] opened. A well beyond middle age neighbor drove to San Mateo county for a gym and only 1 hour long line prevented her from going there more.
In Russia they came up with a new word - Coronoia, ie. "Corona + Paranoia", and your post is typical Coronoia style in that it ignores the straight reality and facts which are staring right into the face.
This is simply illustrative of the fact people are driven by self-interest, and virtually never take group outcomes into consideration when making choices unless forced to under the threat of violence.
Or they simply have a different level of risk tolerance than you. I'm comfortable going out to eat. I live alone, the only people I physically interact with these days are all under the age of 28, anyone in a risk group that I would interact with is back home a thousand or so miles away.
> virtually never take group outcomes into consideration when making choices unless forced to under the threat of violence.
Group outcomes are effectively a moot point. That presumes that the group, as a whole, has an agreed upon preferential outcome, and an agreed upon means of getting there. We do not (and basically never do, when it comes to the group). Some people want more stringent lockdowns, some people just want the lockdowns to be lifted. People who want more stringent lockdowns are averse to the risk of COVID, and are willing to sacrifice some of the joy of life to avoid it. People who want to lift the lockdowns are unperturbed by the risk, or are okay with allowing people to assume that risk to be able to go on with their lives. I don't see a clear winner from a utilitarian perspective; either really bad things happen to a small ratio of people, or mildly bad things happen to everyone. I certainly don't think the gap in net happiness is wide enough to warrant condescension about people ignoring group outcomes.
I think it's fair to say the Covid-free world of 2019 is preferable to the Covid-endemic world of 2020.
Melbourne AU — which is comparable to many European and American cities — eradicated Covid after 4 months of hard lockdown [1] combined with federal financial support.
Covid is the "endemic malaria problem" of 2020: just like malaria can be eradicated through water management, Covid can be eradicated through Australian-style government intervention. Today, both diseases are problems with clear and proven solutions.
you have to show what is specific self-interest here and how it conflicts with specific group outcome. Otherwise it is just an old Soviet style propaganda where people were coerced into doing senseless things because of supposed great common good.
The virus caused businesses to close permanently by causing would-be customers to stay at home due to fears about the virus. And, of course, other details, like businesses having extremely high rents and operating with very low margin opportunities which contributed to an already high baseline expectation of failure long before COVID.
Yes, undoubtedly government lockdowns cause some additional compliance from businesses and customers, but from what I saw in SF during the early days of the virus, a huge portion of the economical damage to local businesses was done due to the actions of individuals and businesses before the government even got involved with lockdowns.
The Czech Republic and Bulgaria had harder/more restrictive lockdowns during the entire year compared to my country (Romania) and yet they have a death-rate higher than ours. Indeed, they managed to ride the first wave pretty much unscathed, but the second one looks like it hit both of them comparatively harder than it hit us.
it may as well happen that lockdowns put selective pressure on the virus for higher virulence.
Anyway, the government bureaucrats are naturally go for simple short-term game like lockdowns without doing any complex long-term thinking (which for example would be the things like efficient preparation for the second wave and achieving herd immunity with minimal losses and minimizing the total losses).
Unfortunately i'm about 160 years too late - the zest was added by Darwin.
Covid itself is a result of such accelerated selection performed in that Wuhan lab - what is called "gain of function" experiments.
A natural example of a global virus evolution phenomenon was observed in the 2nd wave of Spanish flu - that strain was mostly killing by causing hyper-reaction of immune system and especially in the healthy 20-50 years old individuals, as the strains normally killable by immune system were cleaned in the first wave.
While all that is obvious, if you need a reference to authority there is a virus evolution discussion by a Harward guy:
"Let’s assume that every propagule generated from the quarantined individuals has a very small chance of escaping isolation and infecting someone. Just because the virulent ones can make more propagules, they have a higher chance of surviving than the milder varieties. This means we are giving a selective advantage to the more virulent ones over the milder ones and as a result virus will evolve for increased virulence."
> Covid itself is a result of such accelerated selection performed in that Wuhan lab - what is called "gain of function" experiments.
Are you saying this form of the virus was created in a Wuhan lab? As far as I know, that's 100% dead red conspiracy theory, but I'm open to learn more from reputable sources.
it wasnt created, i.e. it isnt synthetic - in that regard those "debunking" articles are almost correct. The point here is that the "creation" is a red herring. The virus wasn't "created", it was selectively bred for higher virulence among mammals (as a way of getting closer to humans - "gain of function" experiments) like you'd do to get a new apple or corn breed. At some point either an employee got infected (or may be some limited human testing of a "flu" on some easy volunteer-able population like say prisoners as part of the experiments) or a carcass of a lab animal was sold at the market ...
I'd like to see actual evidence that Covid does in fact come from "gain of function" experiments in the Wuhan lab. So far as I could see, your reference doesn't do that.
Considering 1. the concerns that had been raised about that research in general (and so such a research was halted in US, and US granted funds to that research in Wuhan instead) as well as about safety specifically in those Wuhan labs and 2. exceptional coincidence in time and space I think the onus in on the labs to prove it isn't their virus or at least come maximally open about their situation. If anything we've so far observed completely opposite - there is absolutely no credible information nor about the labs and the related research nor about virus origination investigation.
You made the claim that "Covid itself is a result of such accelerated selection performed in that Wuhan lab - what is called 'gain of function' experiments." Not "might be". You said "is".
When I asked you for evidence, you try to reverse the burden of proof. No, you made the claim, you're the one who's supposed to prove something.
What do you mean by "correct" ? It is correct if you assume the hard lockdown doesn't have any downside.
The lockdown is not necessary in the first place.
In most places, hospital are not overloaded. Even in the event of overload, the correct measure should be to increase capacity, do not admit people with mild symptoms, etc.
Case number are misleading, vast majority of the case are not actually sick or only have mild symptoms.
Better test needed to be identify people who actually sick and need intervention.
If anything the lockdown could cause hospital overloaded due to delayed treatment and nurses being furloughed.
If you speak to any doctor or nurse they will disagree with you. While we might not be at a breaking point for number of beds, the staff that have to put themselves in harms way do have the option to just quit. When that starts happening in mass we are all screwed.
I spoke with a nurse while at gym I attend. She spoke about how the hospital she's at is not close to be overwhelmed. She also talked about she doesn't wear a mask outside of her job as they have training and n95 masks which work in a hospital setting. But outside of a hospital environment the masks provide little protection, especially cloth masks.
> But outside of a hospital environment the masks provide little protection, especially cloth masks.
My experience of talking to medical professionals is that they consider a number like 50% reduction in infections "very little protection", because they (correctly) would use a mask providing 99% protection or whatever in any situation where real protection was needed. But outside of a hospital setting, epidemiologically, a 50% or even 20% reduction in reproduction number makes a big difference to the overall dynamics of an outbreak.
As additional anecdata, the sentiments expressed in the article are in line with what I have been hearing from healthcare professionals in my circle of friends.
Yes I do have couple of nurse friend and doctor, they all thought lockdown measure is way overkill and all this has been greatly overblown. Not to mention the excessive ppe measure/protocol they now have to adopt, its only made their job harder.
I know many doctors and nurses and they are exhausted, over worked and thankful it didn’t get worse than it was
To say that lock down was needless because the worst case scenario isn’t proof the lock down wasn’t needed. It is evidence (not proof mind) that the lockdowns worked.
It’s like saying you didn’t need to save money because you never ran out of money so you didn’t need the savings in the first place
They are paying nurses up to $10k per week to travel and work in covid wards. Let me assure you, in America, we have a great shortage of skilled healthcare workers.
Perhaps your country has a wash of unemployed healthcare workers just waiting in reserve for “their moment” but in the UK there is a shortage of skilled healthcare professionals and we can’t train them as fast as we need them.
In Asia hard lockdowns aren’t seen as a silver bullet, and some countries like Korea never really had one. Centralized quarantine and mandatory symptom checks are believed to be comparably important.
South Korea did have a near perfect compliance in wearing masks outside of your home. I think that’s what helped them keep it fairly under control for such a populous country.
Just to be clear - it was near perfect and not 100%
Seoul, a city of 10+ million, had 214 new cases today. The health minister's rhetoric only serves to show how well South Korea dealt with the first wave.
True, but they haven't been able to control it entirely; cases are definitely rising. Either their measures were effectively enough for summer, but not winter, or people are getting lax in their behavior because of lockdown fatigue.
I may not agree with Dr. Morrow, but I definitely salute his willingness to buck consensus. We need civil discourse and robust dissent in our lives, and not in the form of “alternative facts”. I think most of the facts he lists are true, just that his judgements are not quite where mine are.
Because he keeps saying there are not problems "yet" and trajectories / forecasts are clearly indicating a region-wide hospitalization crisis. He admits that a crisis will come, and just wants to wait; I believe it is wiser to preempt the crisis, particularly with a rapidly-growing epidemic and two-week latency between infection and hospitalization.
If the sum of regional policies are effective at maneuvering the neighboring counties toward a rate of acceptable and manageable outcomes, then San Mateo is turning the dial in the other direction for the benefit of their businesses and on the backs of surrounding counties.
If the consensus of the region is net wrong, then we are irrationally sacrificing our regional economic health, and we are certainly also trading lives in the other direction as well. All policy choices from here have the price of blood.
I don't accept the position that a policy without robust enforcement is a non-policy, as I think government largely works by a compliant population that trusts their leadership; however, as it becomes increasingly apparent that some wins are purchased by the losses of others, the disparity will brew acute resentment.
San Mateo was the first Bay Area county to reopen and did not have transmission rates that were higher than nearby counties. The real point of his message is that it’s possible the higher levels of restriction aren’t working.
Isn't the only solution here to escape the dichotomy, and say that it's just not anyone's fault if the government doesn't land on an optimal solution to a deadly new disease?
> the structure of our economy is, for the most part, if you don’t work, you don’t eat or have a roof over your head
I like that this is raised explicitly. There's lots of space for "lockdown with proper support" that the US is extremely unlikely to execute. But I don't think it's mentioned often enough that that's a possible direction.
100% this. There's a huge subtext of "I'd be comfortable with more stringent measures if I knew the welfare of my population would be assured, but sadly it's not."
As this goes on, I'm starting to believe that the only way the US (in it's current state of cohesion) is to make decisions that are less effective than the "optimal" total lockdown, but are able to get a larger percent of the population acting in better ways. The human brain can't function at max threat level over time, and more and more people are chafing at the correct (but impractical and toothless) policies.
I feel like those type of good value decisions are hampered by the lack of federal response. A cohesive "wear your mask", massive PPE manufacturing mobilization, and benefits would have really driven home the seriousness of the situation and provided people the tools to weather the storm. Bars are open because owners don't have many other options to support themselves. If the government provided support, that would surely reduce the overall amount of places where masks and social distancing aren't enforced, which in turn would allow for better enforcement of existing policies. All this results in a negative feedback cycle where the reduced cases improve contact tracing, reduce waits for tests, etc.
> what we have before us is a symbolic gesture, it appears to be style over substance
I think the problem with being idealistic is people will see this leader,(especially in liberal mecca that is the sf bay area or how ever those people talk now) will latch on to this as a reason to do keep acting irresponsibly and justify their behavior.
> Less overall mobility, means less spread. The take home message here is: STOP MOVING!
This is why all the counties should act together, otherwise people just go to the open place to do what they want. The adults act like children and need to be treated that way.
> I continue to strongly believe our schools need to be open. The adverse effects for some of our kids will likely last for generations.
This comes off as dramatic. Like is missing a year of 4th grade going to be a problem for anyone? I barely remember school up until 11th grade at this point. Generations? Why is he saying that?
I agree with this though
> That the State considers pro sports a critical infrastructure (essential) activity undermines this whole rubric in my mind.
> Like is missing a year of 4th grade going to be a problem for anyone?
Yes definitely. I've been tutoring students in 5-7th grade for about two years, most of them benefit from tutoring because they have knowledge gaps missing from previous school years (for whatever reason). Before March this year, all the tutoring was in-person and it was relatively easy to keep them engaged and they made good progress. Now that I'm doing this over video calls, their attention wanders much more easily. Motivating them to do work is very challenging nowadays.
He said generations worth of damage. Come on. It might hurt a kid for her SAT if it was this or next year but to think she would have long term damage from a couple of shitty years of school, that’s preposterous. Kids are made of sterner stuff than this.
Yes, most kids can catch up after a missed year of content.
Many won’t. There’s a lot of data about how students fall behind in a compounding way: they start to feel dumb compared to their peers; start to think school isn’t for them, or that they just aren’t smart enough to ‘get math’ — fast forward a few years and they’ve dropped out completely.
But if their peers are missing school, too, I'm not sure how that research is relevant. Is there research showing that, when the whole class misses in person school, there's appreciable damage done?
Allow me a counter example: My significant other was a war refugee and had severely disrupted schooling from the age of seven to about nine years of age.
Yet her generation had higher graduation and matriculation rates than their parents. Indeed, their achievement rates were in line with other countries in the region that didn't experience war.
I'll readily concede that, for children in an abusive home, less time at school is dangerous to their wellbeing. But the hand wringing about long term learning damage to all kids seems overwrought and unsupported by any evidence I've seen.
But I'm more interested in being informed than winning arguments on the internet, so if you can point me in the direction of studies, I'd much appreciate it.
I benefited from my parents’ achievements (scholastic, work ethic, and financial support). My kids will benefit from mine in the same way. It’s not hard to imagine that a year of subpar schooling could cast a multi-generational shadow on the most vulnerable.
Do we really think missing 8% of required schooling is that dramatic? I can’t be the only person who thinks the education being afforded the folks hit hardest is minimally valuable.
School sucks fir the vast majority of kids. It’s a warehousing system so parents can both work.
I don't have much doubt that this will increase educational inequality and it being only 8% of compulsory education might understate things, given the "stacking" nature of each year building on the foundations set in prior years.
If you miss learning addition well, subtraction and multiplication is going to be hard. If you can't subtract and multiply, then learning division is going to be hard. If you can't multiply and divide, algebra will be impossible, but many life tasks will also be more difficult.
Isn't it possible that it's the elite students who will be hurt the most? Suppose they are getting 100% value from education. If a less privileged student is only getting 20% value from education, a 10% relative decrease only makes them 2% worse off.
My point is not that this is the right interpretation, it's just that I don't think it's settled about how much it will impact students, and which groups will be impacted disproportionately. Points about nutrition, getting out of abusive homes, etc., are all interesting and relevant and outside the scope of what I mean, which is purely focused on education outcomes.
Elite students from lower socioeconomic strata will likely be harmed. Elite students from upper strata will probably pull farther away (though may or may not suffer as compared to the counterfactual non-pandemic case).
To use your model, what you say is possible, but I think it's equally possible that the delta is additive rather than multiplicative. A 20% student and a 100% student might both lose 10% or 20% to [10%, 90%] or [0%, 80%] without intervention by involved parents.
My kids (grade 4 and 6) are getting a ton of dedicated 1:1 time including more coding time, paid math programs they enjoy playing, white-boarding problems with us, watching Nova/Nasa/other science content with us, and a lot more reading than if they were chained to a desk learning 2 hours of material in 6.5 hours. They might do better in this half school, half home school situation.
>This comes off as dramatic. Like is missing a year of 4th grade going to be a problem for anyone? I barely remember school up until 11th grade at this point. Generations? Why is he saying that?
A year off probably won't have much impact on children with families with the capability to care for and educate them at home. This is not the case for all demographics. For some students, a year off school literally means nutritional insecurity during a time when brains are developing and the only stable environment they have is gone.
My friend is a first grade teacher and has about 5 students who are homeless. It shouldn't be a shock that they are not attending class via zoom.
> Like is missing a year of 4th grade going to be a problem for anyone?
Yah. There's a whole big subset of the population that barely manages to stick with school at baseline. Educational interruption in other circumstances has been shown to have bad outcomes. We're trying to do better this time, but the school system as a whole is overtaxed.
I'm a middle school teacher. Even with best practices for remote education, I've seen all kinds of negative impacts. It's going to take a whole lot of support to get these kids to anywhere near a normal curriculum.
Of course you will see negative impacts this year. Online education sucks. But assuming kids are back in school September 2022, will there be lasting effects? No. If there are gaps, they will be addressed because all kids will have suffered the same thing, it’s not like the one kid who got mono and missed 3 months of school by herself.
> assuming kids are back in school September 2022, will there be lasting effects? No.
I’ve only looked at the data for literacy and its impacts on life outcomes. (I do charity in that space.) Something like being 6 months behind in third grade can materially predict high school graduation rates, SAT scores and incomes. Even if one controls for gender, race and income.
That’s if no one else is behind. This is different. Everyone is behind. This is more akin to being in school during a war. Some countries missed entire years of school and we’re fine.
This is bad reasoning. If everyone produces less by the same amount, then even if you produce no less than the next person, the overall production has gone down.
Yes-- both general socialization with peers and social adaptation to the classroom.
Even the 12 year olds I work with who had many years of schooling have had to readapt to meet (greatly relaxed) expectations for in person instruction with several missed months. A whole bunch of 2nd graders with a wasted end of Kinder and 1st grade year is going to be chaotic.
Depression is on a big swing upwards. And there's kids in difficult situations who are not receiving help from caring teachers and social workers. There is going to be impact that lasts for a long, long time.
My interpretation of the statement is that compounding interest applies to education as much as it does to bank accounts. Missing 5k in contributions to retirement accounts at 25 and then making up for it with extra at 26 is very different than making up with an extra contribution at 46. Same applies to education, and if you're trying to make up missed "contributions" in 6/7th grade, you're already the educational equivalent of a 46 year old.
At risk of stretching a thin metaphor even further, this is to say nothing of Social Security (long-term structural impact of system-wide attempts to catch up half a generation of students on 12+ months of education).
The article makes some good points about the contradictions in state policy, for example:
> That the State considers pro sports a critical infrastructure (essential) activity undermines this whole rubric in my mind. Pro sports is very nice to have and is probably a pleasant distraction. It is not essential. ...
This is bad for several reasons:
- sporting events involve close contact between participants
- sporting events draw crowds
- sporting events require infrastructure to service them (restrooms, food, parking, etc)
- the blatant contradiction encourages those who have been told to shut down to disobey the order
I personally think the whole country should focus more on the greater good for everyone by culling the virus instead of doing this open-nd-close back and forth juggling, as to optimize for the best outcome available (similar to New Zealand). But then again I am not well versed on the Nash equilibrium when it comes to highly infectious diseases.
Not really in the nature of NZ, either. Our cultural heroes often feature a sense of "bugger them" if they're not inventing something.
* Hone Heke, kept cutting down a flagpole to mess with the British
* The Southern Man popularised by a beer company, who prefers the company of his horse.
* The Good Keen Man popularised by Barry Crump, who prefers the company of the hills and his rifle.
* James MacKenzie, a sheep rustler who ended up with a sizable part of the South Island named after him (the MacKenzie Country)
* Edmund Hillary travelling to the South Pole by tractor "accidentally on purpose" when he was supposed to be laying out supplies for a British Lord's expedition.
However, what we have in our culture that the US seems to lack (from my _very_ distant POV) is a slight tendency towards collectivism over individualism.
Maybe it's from our long gone years as a "cradle to the grave" social democracy, maybe it's from the emphasis on mateship.
Maybe it's because we don't really like interpersonal conflict. (How do you know a Kiwi didn't like their meal in your restaurant? We haven't figured that out yet).
I'm from Australia, and I've lived in the US, and now live in Canada.
From experience, the difference is entirely in the way our societies are setup, and therefore how we treat each other.
In NZ/Oz/Canada, we have healthcare for all, affordable tertiary education, and we all pay higher taxes to help strangers. Looking out for each other is built into the makeup of our countries, systems and society.
In the US, it is literally "Me vs. You", "Everyman for himself", "Pay your own way", etc. It is simply not in the makeup of their society to help others. While of course there are extremely kind and generous people who do, it's not the way the systems are setup, so it's not the default way people think about things.
Also because tens of millions of people are within a millimetre of bankruptcy/starvation/living on the street, they literally have no head space or ability to do anything other than meet their own basic needs.
Here in Canada tens of millions of people have been getting $2k every month since March. Same in Australia.
In the US they got $1,200. ONCE. That changes a lot.
As a frequent traveler between AU/NZ/US/CA, I find the residents of Commonwealth countries tend to be compliant with the law in ways Americans simply aren't. I can't speak for Canada on this, but at least for AU/NZ, there's also zero gun culture. I'm still not sure how much of an impact that has on the public's psyche, but lack of gun culture does seem to point to trusting more in social institutions. As an outsider, my perspective is that Aussies/Kiwis understand viscerally at levels unseen in American culture — and possibly Canadian culture — that nature can kill you, and that the authorities really are a good resource to draw upon when your life is on the line, which it was during the Covid pandemic.
It falls a bit into the trap of assuming people operate with a level playing field of information though as other mention in thread it's deeply refreshing to see a public official act with some humility and respect for it's citizens.
Issue is we live in times of asymmetrical informational warfare.
So we can't just provide strong data and recommendations while limiting intervention relative to respecting freedom.
Consider how we decreased cigarette smoking via reasonable science driven laws around indoor rules that impact health of others ... and yes graphic commercials of the health consequence which can only be described as full scale information warfare.
Would need an accelerated program along these lines to regularly show people suffering in this health crisis to help drive / scare people into doing the right thing.
I was searching for research around the infection risk associated with various activities (outdoor vs indoor dining / gyms etc). Was hoping to see arguments motivated by contact-tracing data. Wasn't able to find much. Did anyone else have better luck?
You will not find much if any based on contact tracing data. Typical participation in CT isn’t remotely close to “I ate at x restaurant on y day”, and the entities tasked with CT are often inadequately equipped to handle the volumes/technical capacity of such a task.
There is, however, a wealth of literature using cell phone mobility, such as shown above.
Just alone that the Movie industry in Los Angeles is allowed to continue their operations while small businesses are shut shows exactly what COVID has become.
People can make their own decisions whether to go out and how to stay safe.
I do believe that most people are responsible enough to take the recommended precautions and encourage their friends and family to do the same and not endanger others.
The only outcome I see here is like one of prohibition.
Our country was built on trust, integrity and distribution of power, much of this is the opposite in the name of public health when the numbers show otherwise.
Closing outdoor dining but letting the movie industry dine outdoors.
Closing salons but our own speaker of the house doesn’t follow.
Prohibition, no less.
> I do believe that most people are responsible enough to take the recommended precautions and encourage their friends and family to do the same and not endanger others.
I know I'm being the "[citation needed]" guy again, but the COVID-19 case numbers in the United States just don't seem like they support this optimistic take. If it were true, we should be closer to the median -- if not below it -- then we are.
I'm not honestly sure where you're going with the Prohibition comparison; your anecdotal examples seem to be "they're telling you to follow these restrictions but they're not following them themselves," which, okay, I guess, but they're still just anecdotes. Is this "they TOLD us not to have liquor during Prohibition, but there were county commissioners who were SNEAKING INTO SPEAKEASIES!"? I mean, sure, probably, but the comparison kind of breaks down at that point. Prohibition was based on a puritanical moral panic; our current pandemic-era lockdowns are based on a very real, highly contagious lethal disease.
Everyone in the film industry gets tested multiple times per week, and my impression from what I have read is that film people are taking the virus extremely seriously and avoiding social contact outside work to the extent possible, because a breach could jeopardize the whole production (disclaimer: I have no inside knowledge).
This certainly does not happen for patrons at miscellaneous restaurants.
> most people are responsible enough to take the recommended precautions
Empirically this is not a sound belief, if by “most people” you mean a large enough majority to stop the epidemic from growing exponentially.
"I think people should stay at home, avoid all non-essential activities, wear masks, and not gather with anyone outside their households. I’ve been saying this for about 10 months now. If you didn’t listen to my (and many others) entreaties before, I don’t think you’ll likely change your behavior based on a new order."
Even for the many, many months in many, many parts of the country where case growth was stable and eminently manageable? Wouldn't we want to avoid the hardship caused by extreme restrictions when possible? The better approach is to match the level of restrictions with the circumstances within the region, and adjust as needed. Just because most states/localities have failed to adjust aggressively enough (or have abdicated responsibility altogether) does not mean they should have simply set a dumb and blind policy of maximum restrictiveness and then sat on their hands, assuming no better way was possible.
> What I believed back in May, and what I believe now, is the power and authority to control this pandemic lies primarily in your hands, not mine.
So it’s our fault? Some countries succeeded in crushing this virus because of efficient testing and contact tracing, incisive lock downs, and other measures which are put in place by public authority or institutions.
What a poor way to deflect blame for the incredibly poor job our government and institutions have done to protect us.
Sure, a lot of started from the top down, states need federal funding, and so on and so forth. But to basically tell people they are on their own, is so bad. This is a public health crisis, what authority and power do I honestly have?
It’s incredible that our public officials continue to deflect blame to try to distract from how embarrassingly bad our infrastructure was and still is for handling a crisis like this.
So, this post suggests that lockdowns don't "work": among other things, a lockdown may create reactance causing people to not not only avoid changing their behaviors to reduce risk, it may even make some perform behaviors to increase risk, to themselves and others.
It's just disappointing that, if true, the opposite doesn't work. If only this happened: the gov says "We choose to do no lockdowns, and just have a list of suggestions. No need to follow them. Do your normal activities" and the response: "You can't tell me what to do! Screw you! I'm going to wear masks AND distance, esp among vulnerable populations! Do my normal activities my foot! So there, suck it!".
Reverse psychology always seems to work better in marketing, and low budget movies and sitcoms.
It worked like this in Slovakia, during the first wave. Government told people not to buy masks, people started making their own masks from cloth and selling them to neighbors. Cities started closing schools. Supermarkets limited the number of people allowed in the shop at the same time. Only later government made this mandatory across the whole country. People acted rationally, and I think Slovakia had the lowest infection per capita in whole Europe.
And then somehow everything got wrong during summer. Ironically, because almost no one got sick during the first wave, it became popular to believe that the entire pandemic is just made up by evil Western media. People took vacations all across the world, and in September shared the viruses at schools, which were no longer closed because "education is important".
In the beginning of September, the situation was worse than ever during the first wave, and the government did nothing. In October it was 20 times higher, and in the beginning of Novermber the goverment finally woke up and imposed some half-assed measures, which at least keep the infection rate constant (i.e. still 20 times higher than during the first wave).
Not sure what is the lesson here. Perhaps that reverse psychology can work for a while... and then it may revert again. Because if it is cool to be a contrarian and oppose the government, soon this opposition becomes the new normal, and then it becomes cool to oppose what was done yesterday. And also that the better you protect yourself against a disease, the more people will believe the disease was not real.
Authorities in the US and Europe did essentially say this in the early stages, and were (rightfully) criticized for such a policy by certain people. But that was admittedly pretty small percentage of population and also probably not the kind of people you have in mind.
Travel is the obvious unaddressed issue in the US. This recent surge started with a big spike in the midwest then slowly spread to the rest of the country. Without interstate travel restrictions these lockdown end up being wasted painful sacrifices by millions of people over many months. No matter how restrictive one region is, they could succefully eradicate the virus, but the virus will just incubate in a less restrictive region and come right back.
This will provide an interesting experiment since San Mateo County and Santa Clara County are adjacent, demographically similar, and are pursuing different courses of action.
But analysis will be complicated by the porous border. There will presumably be even more people coming into SMC from SCC to patronize businesses that are more open than those in SCC.
Not really. Santa Clara county has San Jose, a city of 1M. San Mateo's largest city is Daly City (100k). San Mateo county also has a more rural and isolated coast. San Mateo county is also a lot whiter.
Comparisons are never perfect, but we will surely be able to learn from seeing what happens. Also, it's not as if the only data that will come in will be at the county level. Menlo Park and Palo Alto are virtually identical from a demographic perspective and will be following different rules. We'll be able to see how their reported numbers differ. For example, we'll be able to track the case counts in MP and PA school districts.
I agree with San Mateo County's stance. I am in Contra Costa and we joined the other counties to shut down at 30% ICU capacity. I don't think there is any merit to shutting down outdoor dining. I haven't seen any study showing that outdoor dining leads to significant transmission.
It is worth reading many of Dr Morrow's previous statements on the pandemic. This statement reflects the learnings across 10 months of fighting this virus. We really do need to some moving, congregating, and gathering in groups indoors. So on some level forcefully shutting everything down should achieve that, but we are humans and will make mistakes. So should we shut our way down into compliance or focus more on the specifics of what science says reduces transmissions? Dr Morrow makes a clear case for the latter. The only trick is how you convince everyone to comply.
I despise lockdowns and my state won't enforce them. I am so thankful to be in a level headed state. Forcing people into poverty is just as bad or even worse as getting a virus.
In my area beyond after the initial reopening its business as normal. Everyone is having parties and celebrating, living a normal life.
I'm thankful to be in state with limited covid rules. I started working out three months ago at a gym and have lost 15 lbs. I would have easily gained that if I was forced to stay home.
Don't even act like objections are all for people who want to party.
Some people don't realize that the working class have jobs, and as a free people with dignity they're entitled to keep them and it shouldn't be up to some wealthy politician to declare they can't work over ill-defined risks with unproven mitigation efforts.
There is a very clear tradeoff based in uncertainty and fundamental inability to quantify risk and countermeasure effectiveness, and many people are acting as though the cost to large swathes of the population (those with the least power!) is just the price we have to pay.
None of these politicians who are pulling the levers, destroying any semblance of normal life, plunging entire working class populations into despair are at ANY risk of financial ruin or losing their livelihoods.
Meanwhile all the insufferable city liberals are shaming anyone who dares to try to sustain themselves at their job they devote themselves to in order to pay rent, feed themselves and take care of their families.
I hope when this is all over we can have an apolitcal discussion and learn some lessons for next time.
I appreciate the statement, and it's nice to see the reasoning of a health official laid bare. That said, it seems to be an inconsistent message and not something I think a health official should be putting out in the midst of a politicized pandemic rife with misinformation.
I really wish we had a functioning central government to help coordinate local responses, assist with data collection and monitoring, disseminate clear information, etc, etc.
> I really wish we had a functioning central government to help coordinate local responses, assist with data collection and monitoring, disseminate clear information, etc, etc.
Absolutely not. The federal government has no authority to force states to close and this is a good thing.
Whenever I read statements like these I am torn because it's difficult to decide whether to cast it aside as "feel good rhetoric, but rhetoric nonetheless" or take it as it is. Do I simply gather the facts and make up my own truth of things, or do I listen to someone pen something like this up where there are so many self-admitted contradictions that you cannot help but wonder if these people are intentionally ruining social order, if they are just that ignorant of their actions.
It takes leadership of government, focus, sacrifice, and understanding of the citizens to fight this virus.
I'm based in Australia, Victoria (population of 6m+, exceeding the 800k mentioned in the Bay Area [EDIT: San Mateo county]) and we have now had over 30 days of zero cases of coronavirus, after having a peak of 680+ per day [1].
We went into a tough lockdown, stamped out the virus, and are slowly easing restrictions. We are working towards a "COVID normal" holiday season.
We had stay at home orders, restricted access to shops (supermarkets remained open but most closed, with one trip per day per household), social distancing orders, and months of wearing masks, and 10-20,000 COVID tests performed per day (again, free).
Our Premier Daniel Andrews faced a lot of criticism for pushing this hard, and it was a lot of pressure on small businesses and the mental health of citizens, but ultimately it was the right decision -- the alternative was untenable, let it become out of control and watch our (universal, free) health care become overwhelmed, and no one would even be able to do anything -- an acceptance of the virus flourishing was not acceptable.
If you don't have a leader capable of fighting this virus, get rid of them. It's frustrating and sad watching from afar this virus run amuck in the United States (and the health care system failing you - I'd _never_ want your insurance system anywhere near me - but that's another battle).
I hope and wish for the health of everyone affected by this pandemic.
It did come at a terrible economic cost that has yet to be fully understood, and arguably was only possible due to the rest of Australia being largely COVID free and open.
Did any non island democracy do well? Also just to note I'm including South Korea as an "island" as its effectively one being a peninsula and its only land border being with North Korea.
Edit: Also, one of the main reasons vaccines were able to get through trials so quickly is precisely because countries like the United States, Brazil, the UK, etc did so poorly handling the pandemic. Doing phase 3 drug trials in a country that successfully dealt with SARS-COV-2 such as Australia would take significantly longer.
What Victoria has done is highly commendable. The issue in the US is that there is no national commitment to reduce transmission to your levels. In turn, a single county, region, or state will be unable to reach the result you’ve achieved.
> We went into a tough lockdown, stamped out the virus
Unfortunately no one here in the USA in a position of power recognizes that this should be the goal. Instead the lockdowns last only long enough for the ICU capacity to free up, then reopening the economy becomes the major goal.
We need to stamp this virus out entirely, like you and your neighbors in NZ and TW have done.
It shouldn't be a goal. The virus cannot be stopped with our current medical technology, but you can certainly punish people into poverty and homelessness with draconian lockdowns.
You say it is not possible, but it absolutely is as it has happened. There are countries in this world which have had community spread and then stamped the virus out entirely, like Taiwan and New Zealand have. There are countries which have been in as bad a situation as we are (like Australia and South Korea) and then gotten their numbers down to the point where TW/NZ were at their peak. So there is a pathway from rampant community spread to eradication.
> These countries you mention are vastly different in terms of population size and geography.
Yes, South Korea and Australia span the gamut. So do Taiwan and New Zealand. The USA is somewhere in-between.
> Also, pretending that there are no costs associated with strict lockdowns is terribly flawed.
Those costs are largely suffered by this lockdown-reopen-lockdown cycle, without the benefit of getting rid of the disease. Indeed our trajectory is worse economically, because there's no light at the end of the tunnel.
Life in Taiwan and New Zealand goes on pretty much uninterrupted right now. We could have had that. We still could, if severe actions were taken.
Why should the US have an extremely costly lockdown (which will almost certainly fail) to stamp out a virus for which we will have a vaccine being rolled out in a week? Mask orders and other low-impact restrictions are great but I don't understand why you would try to get rid of the virus with lockdowns at this point.
It’s going to take at least a year to get the vaccine at scale and a significant portion of the population straight up won’t take it because they don’t want 5G autism.
There were many people (other politicians, news/press stories, etc) saying it was unachievable and unrealistic, which added more pressure to our Premier to abandon his plans because it was keeping businesses shutdown and impacting mental health.
As you mention NZ did a great job (and the PM even offered to consult to other health officials [1] in how they carried out the lockdown), such leadership should be commended and people resisting should get out of the way to let leaders lead.
Agreed, but what is missing from all of these explanations and defenses is a concrete plan for exiting SAH and lockdown orders. Where does it end, or is it preferable that it never ends?
Hesitant to respond because I think your fishing for a certain response with that line, but the state has guidelines for each stage of lock down we're in.
My fellow humans are idiots. I'm an idiot. This isn't the right way to be a leader. Nuance is not for the masses. They need to be told the right thing to do, especially in a crisis. And then you assume literally everyone will bend the rules as they see fit, because they will.
All this long screed does is mess with people's heads and cause more problems than it solves. The virus doesn't care where the county line is. If everywhere else in the Bay Area is locked down, San Mateo should as well.
Even if the lockdowns do nothing to stop the spread?
San Mateo county isn’t an average joe middle America bumble-nowhere county. It’s populace is highly educated with the nuance something all can comprehend.
It’s important to distinguish between true case burden and diagnosed case burden.
Testing is prone to variance due to behavior, test availability, development of symptoms, contact tracing effectiveness, etc... I suspect their modeling efforts use a more principled measure than positive tests.
Without even seeing the data I would infer among all tests a high positivity rate (certainly double digit).
I think it is a clear implications we still don't have enough testing even though CA as a whole is doing relatively well on testing. It seems like once your positive % goes above 5-10% it really means you're missing many cases.
Colorado is telling us that 2.5% of the state population is actively contagious. I don’t know the state number of positive cases off the top of my head but many counties I look at around right around 1% or less of positive cases / county population.
How can Colorado estimate at roughly 2.5x and San Mateo county is 4-7x? I’m shocked that the variance can be so great between counties.
Not sure if this is still the case, but in the past multiple people from one household / coming to the drive-through testing place together were not get all checked. It was "one of you has symptoms, you all isolate; one of you with symptoms tests positive, you're all positive". (but not recorded positive) Which means the true cases number is at least tests x avg-people-per-household + asymptomatic people not tested + ...
There’s something that should be said about people that are contagious yet should be in quarantine meaning they’re no longer actually infecting people.
Instead we get BS numbers that make it seem like every person that is contagious is still running around.
What an incoherent mess. The county should fire this dope. Government health officials need to be out there with a unified message that hits the main points:
1) Stay away from other people
2) Wear a mask if forced to go out
3) Go back home as soon as possible
This 15-point stream of words will only serve to confuse. The reason our kids are suffering from this year-long school outage is because our leadership is so confused. With unified, clear leadership we would have beat this thing in 6 weeks, tops. It is exactly this framing as a difficult moral wrestling match faced independently by millions of equals that has brought America to this depth of failure.
I understand that Dr Morrow is a health professional and not a writing professional. For this reason, I would recommend that San Mateo county hire a public relations / social media expert to do some editing on this and future posts. It lacks the structure and coherent message that a public notice needs. I read it from start to finish and I’m not sure exactly what purpose it served beyond Dr. Morrow justifying his decision to the public. Which I’m not sure anyone asked for.
I think this could be cut down to a few salient points:
(1) Social distancing, mask wearing, and staying at home are the best ways to keep you and others safe.
(2) Based on the best available information about hospital capacity, San Mateo is not issuing a Stay at Home order at this time. This means outdoor dining, take out, full capacity grocery remain open at the retailer’s discretion. San Mateo will comply with a Governor’s order if and when that order is issued.
(3) Schools will remain open in San Mateo with appropriate sanitation and distancing measures as appropriate.
The other 11 points are not needed and should be eliminated. There is also a significant amount of hedging that is not appropriate for a public official / medical professional. He’s a leader and an expert, he should state his opinion as one.
to each his own. but i appreciated the thoughtful, non public relations speak writing. it shows me a person doing his best, with the data that he has, and all of the various factors he has to struggle through to come to the decision.
it actually immensely increases my trust in him to understand the thought process behind his decision vs “let me lead and sound authoritative. trust me i know best”
in fact i’ve just about had enough of that style of leadership from politicians
I appreciated all the detail he put into it. It gave me a lot of insight into everything that he considered. I think the detail proves that it's just not a simple problem. If you want to give a complete explanation, you're going to need more detail.
I do appreciate the willingness of a public official to acknowledge complexity and offer insights into why a decision was made. That’s risky, because it opens up debate on individual points that could throw the discussion off. I suppose it’s the style that I don’t appreciate, as I’d like for this information to be presented more like a medical report in layman’s terms than a heart to hear. Overall, Dr Morrow sounds exasperated. I don’t blame him for that.
If I'm not mistaken, your claim is that: In times of crisis, leaders need to clearly and succinctly convey direction.
This is generally a good rule to follow because we want to maximize compliance, and being anything but succinct defeats that goal.
However, this case is an exception to the rule because there's no action that requires compliance. The official is, in fact, asking for no compliance. Therefore, there's no need to be succinct. In fact, it's a great opportunity to build trust with the general public so that when compliance is required, you are able to achieve it.
Right, no new policies, just a reiteration of existing ones to contrast what’s been announced for neighboring counties. Which itself has value. But I don’t think the rest of the justification/hedging has value to the public. In times of crises, leaders need to clearly and succinctly convey the state of the world and the policies in place to address that state. This statement does not do that. It offers explanations and logic that are more at home in a personal blog post.
While I detect a hint of futility in this statement, I am nonetheless deeply heartened to know some public health officials are themselves questioning some of the simplistic premises that have been driving policy to this point at all levels of government. Really there at least three attributes that I see in this statement that I don't typically see in utterings of our bureaucrats:
1) I actually get the sense of outright honesty from this statement. Not some overly messsaged, PR driven/reviewed statement by some spokes-hole. I actually think this statement is really what this guy believes... a public statement that even expresses some vulnerability. Despite the subject, very refreshing and I'd be more likely to listen seriously to what he has to say in future.
2) Struggling with right and good uses of power and seeing not using one's power as itself a public good. Good heavens... this guy should run for President! I expect I'd disagree with much of his politics, but I'd vote for him just for having such thoughts and expect the nation would be better off no matter his other leanings.
3) Questioning the mandates, their effectiveness, and whether they might be causing more harm than good. And not doing so from some artificial posturing to show "the right politics", but honest, genuine questioning.
Whether you agree or not... I wish more of our public officials were this thoughtful on critical issues such as face us in this pandemic.