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.
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.
New Zealand also used a lockdown strategy. stats: https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...
Suicide rates in the most affected Australian states were surprising: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/09/suici...
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.
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).
> 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.
The "Bully Pulpit" is a real thing.
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.
BTW, the "bully pulpit" specifically
From March
"The Silicon Valley Doctor Who Doesn’t Mince Words on Coronavirus Threat"
they are using the pandemic as convenience to an extent. they don't have a holistic solution and they don't know what they are doing.
yes, it does keep case numbers lower and lagging.
the health official here is right though.
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.
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.
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?”
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].
It's hard to disagree with his sentiment.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Co...
[2]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2020/sf-overdoses-inter...
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.
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.
Maybe some of his colleagues believe that sheriffs report through the Attorney General, as per the California constitution.
If they are elected, I want them out.
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?
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.
Even ignoring financial considerations, expecting people to have no in-person contact with anyone outside their homes for 9+ months is utterly unrealistic.
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?
This is directly from the horse’s mouth. This is San Mateo County’s health website.
Also Nextdoor.
Also if you subscribe to emails from your city.
Also the local news.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/us/coronavirus-san-mateo-...
Gasp!
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.
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.
Links:
https://covidtracking.com/data/state/south-dakota
https://public.tableau.com/views/COVID-19CasesDashboard_1593...
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/12/03/california-health-official...
San Carlos is white, rich, and old. East Palo Alto it not.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They went into EXTREMELY hard lockdown for 6-8 weeks, and now they haven't had a single case in four weeks.
https://www.vox.com/2020/12/4/22151242/melbourne-victoria-au...
Well yeah, after the first wave people threw all caution to the wind and decided to go back to their old habits. So of course cases are surging again.
This isn’t rocket science. Not sure why everyone is pretending there’s some sort of huge mystery. We know how the virus spreads.
I’d contest that characterization of the Bay Area - even in Santa Clara County where I live, I’ve not seen ubiquitous mask wearing.
It’s not within the regions power to shut down the state and interstate highways.
Spread was going to come from the rest of the country no matter what they did.
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.
How did a virus cause businesses to close permanently? This doesn't happen during flu season or even with the h1n1 pandemic.
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).
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.
Just to be clear - it was near perfect and not 100%
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
edit: formatting/proofreading
I came to comment the same thing about this quote. I don't understand how he comes to this conclusion either. Anyone know?
> 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
- 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 think there’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there, which is the leading cause of people disobeying the order(s).
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.
* 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).
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.
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fB5pysccOHvxphpTmCG_TGdy...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not sure how to solve that problem, and agree it is a difficult one. However, I don’t think that justifies public officials shifting the blame.
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.
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.
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.
this is all we can expect of our health officers. look at the data and make the best decision possible.
if the data changes i hope he will also quickly change his mind
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.
Absolutely not. The federal government has no authority to force states to close and this is a good thing.
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.
[1] https://www.dhhs.vic.gov.au/victorian-coronavirus-covid-19-d...
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.
The whole Bay Area has a population of closer to 8M.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-newzea...
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.
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.
That’s several times higher than how many positive test results have been logged in the past 14 days.
https://thecovidcomplex.com/state/california/san-mateo/summa...
Disclosure: this is my website based on data from the New York Times.
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).
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.
Instead we get BS numbers that make it seem like every person that is contagious is still running around.
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 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.
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
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.