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.
California’s page about this is an easy read: https://covid19.ca.gov/stay-home-except-for-essential-needs/
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.
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.
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.
