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Comment by pkaye | Hacker News Reader

I live close to that plant. I hope they don't just keep spreading that virus and negate the effort we are doing by the "shelter in place". I'm a dialysis patient myself and have no idea what this virus will do to me. I'll probably be cannon fodder if the health system is overloaded.

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Are you in contact with people from the plant or do you use separate toilets, cafes, and supermarkets?

Shelter in place is about preventing person-to-person spread of the disease through direct contact or via intermediary such as a bench, chair or physical currency.

COVID-19 is not going to spread from the plant to your house without some kind of transmission mechanism.

It could plausibly spread between workers at the plant, whether while working, while commuting, while on break, while passing through doors, or via touch surfaces such as doorknobs.

Same everywhere. Grocers are still going to be open.

tesla working living in fremont to tesla working living in alameda to supermarket worker in alameda to other alameda residents.

Alameda county, as with most of the counties in the bay area, already has outbreaks.

Shelter in place gives time for current cases to go symptomatic & become traceable, among other benefits. Testing only effectively started last week, and is still a joke compared to what other countries with outbreaks of this level are doing.

I'm suspecting Tesla is employing sock puppets, or people with too much invested in Tesla, are overly eager to void the shelter-in-place effort for an arbitrary 10K people.

Testing only helps if sensible and sustainable transmission control protocols are in place. Shelter-is-place is absolutely unsustainable, and wholesale testing of the population is economically infeasible in a population the size of California.

There have been successes with wholesale testing in towns in Italy but those populations are small enough to test while everyone is quarantined for a short period. Then when the quarantine ends the disease will spread anyway thanks to false negatives or new imports.

I'm not in contact with people in the plant. I'm just not sure if they can maintain the social distancing with the number of workers in that plant. If they keep spreading the virus between themselves it means the shelter in place may need to extended longer because the cases keep increasing. I wish there was more extensive testing so we can assess how concerned we should be of community spread.

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