‘Escape communities’ are the newest hideaways from the pandemic | Hacker News Reader

‘Escape communities’ are the newest hideaways from the pandemic

thehustle.co

39 pointselorant59 comments

The Scottish Government was pretty blunt:

“Let me be crystal clear – people should not be travelling to rural and island communities, full stop. They are endangering lives. Do not travel.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/21/scottish-gover...

I believe subsequently there were restrictions introduced so that only local could travel out on ferries from the mainland - which seems pretty sensible to me.

Edit: I live fairly close to one of the main roads north to the Highlands - the last time I filled my car with petrol a couple of weeks back it was very noticeable that there were a lot of people in campers and with caravans heading north with their families.

Just to back this up with some numbers. So there's about 50000 people in the Hebridean islands off the west of Scotland, most islands have at best a couple of beds where the best you can hope for is the local GP can put you on oxygen. There is 1 air ambulance and 2 coastguard helicopters covering this region. If half the population gets it that is 25,000. If 1:20 of those need hospital treatment that is 1250. The protocol for critical care 'Big Sick' situations like breathing difficulties is immediate medevac by air to either Glasgow or Inverness. Lets say a typical helicopter evacuation might be possible to complete in 2 hrs. 1hr fly out, land, transfer casualty to chopper. 1 hr back to drop off at hospital and clean up. So one chopper can do 12 evacs every day. 1250 requiring evacuation for breathing difficulties requires a helicopter to be in operation continuously for about 100 days 24/7 to meet the demand. That is a best case scenario as many parts of the Hebrides are more than a 2 hr turnaround, aircraft maintenance, crew rest, enough trained crew to cover 24 hr operations, etc

If you go to the islands and you've got it and you end up requiring hospital treatment, you will be much more likely to die from it as there will be no capacity to medevac you in time.

What people used to do, and probably should do again in this case, is quarantine all travelers. Not this voluntary but mostly unenforced self-isolation, but actual 3 weeks locked up in full quarantine until it's clear whether or not they carry the virus. That's the only way to be sure they're not bringing the virus to a new community.

Many countries did this already, for example here in Czech Republic you need to stay in quarantine for two weaks if you travelled to affected area (which at this point is pretty much after any travel) or risk jail time.

It event went so for as banning cross border work with neighboring countries after a few cases of infection tracked to that.

I don't think either side comes out of this well. Rich folk fleeing to their hideaways belies a kind of sociopathic contempt for the plight of their fellow humans, who are indeed often the people they rely on for their livelihood. But then the people from these communities are often quite happy to sell up and pocket the London money being offered them for property, and often also to reap the benefits of ever-increasing numbers of tourists, so it does seem to me a little like some of the people in these communities are trying to have their cake and eat it - and the 'outsiders go home!' attitude being voiced isn't pretty. In other circumstances the left-wing media, Twitter etc. would be screaming blue murder about narrow-minded xenophobia.

In Scotland at least, the "outsiders go home" mentality is largely rooted in concern about level of resources available in the area to deal with Covid-19 cases. The highlands region in scotland (which has ~300k people not counting temporary residents) had < 20 beds and ventilators suitable for people suffering serious cases.

There's also long distances to anything resembling a hospital and few general practitioners.

The simple fact is that cities, which have most of the people, are best suited to treating people and if a load of cases start coming up in places like the highlands, it will very quickly overwhelm the limited resources available.

At least the RAF is pre-positioning helicopters to the area and has been using larger transport aircraft to move patients from places like Shetland. However, those transport links could easily be overloaded given a full emergency.

I'm not so sure most of those locals benefit from that 'London money'. But they do get the added inconvenience and risk brought by entitled rich people.

You do realize those are not the same people? It's core capitalism, those that reap the concentrated benefits (pocket the money) dump the negative externalities on the community (viral infections).

Macro v micro behaviours

In my hometown, like in many central European towns is a plague column, commemorating a deadly plague epidemics that happened in the 17th century. The story goes that it was caused by the Habsburg royal court fleeing the plague from Vienna & staying in the town for a few days before continuing onward.

Of course there were some people already infected in the royal court, the infection spread to the town people as well and many died.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_and_Holy_Trinity_column...

The Thai king with an entourage, has moved to some German town and rented out a whole hotel. And the claim is members of the entourage that tested positive were sent back to Thailand.

In my country the wealthy went ... in their summer house on the islands.

You know, the typical location which is usually not self-sufficient and definitively not autonomous when it come to medical care facilities.

Theres nothing wrong with seeking comfort in this weird time. Even if you're rich and have a house on an island.

There's plenty wrong with being a damned fool, especially if your damnfoolishness poses a real risk of harm to others.

How does driving to your second house pose a real risk?

It shouldn't need explaining to anyone who's been paying attention at all for the last two months, but: You can spend up to two weeks infected and contagious before you start showing symptoms. So when you drive a long way, from a place with lots of cases to a place with few or none, and then do stuff like go to stores to get groceries or whatever the hell rich people do to open up a vacation house that's been uninhabited for a while, you're quite likely to be spreading the disease without realizing it. That's a favor to the virus, but not so much to the townies of whatever picturesque vacation destination you're gracing with your property taxes - and where hospital support is weaker in any case than wherever you conceive of yourself as fleeing from, because picturesque vacation destinations don't need much or any ICU resource most of the time.

There is a way to do it safely: follow the same 14-day self-quarantine regimen that's recommended for anyone who's traveled. Don't go to stores, don't go to gas stations, pretend like there is nuclear fallout outside.

I feel like that's a lot of benefit of the doubt on behalf of someone who's already behaving selfishly, you know?

Sorry, but how is it selfish? If you can leave a dense area and self-quarantine for 14 days, you're actually doing a net positive by reducing density. The only added "risk" is that you might crash your car on the way. That feels less bad than retransmitting the disease in a crowded area.

You can just as effectively, maybe more effectively, self-quarantine in a dense area, and not risk any circumstance at all leading to transmission elsewhere.

It is vastly easier to avoid casual contact in rural areas. Even going to get my packages in my building I walk past people and touch elevator buttons etc. In a rural area I just get my packages from my porch.

And relatively few people are going to voluntarily stay confined to their small city apartment for weeks. I live in a semi-rural house and I can easily go out my door and walk in the woods for an hour or two. (Or drive somewhere else quiet which I mostly haven't been doing.)

The only real contact I've had with people is having gone to the grocery store a couple of times--and I could probably have used delivery for that (although with the lack of stock, that might have been challenging).

But they're not being selfish if they're doing it correctly, as the previous comment describes.

> It shouldn't need explaining to anyone who's been paying attention at all for the last two months

Your condescending attitude is not necessary.

If you have it in a dense area and don't know it as your example, but are still out on occasion to get whatever critical supplies you may need, you would be likely exposing MORE people.

You're also assuming the destination has no cases at all and will never see any. Locals in these places often get supplies outside of their town. And yes, if people own homes there, you can't stop them.

Driving to a 2nd home in a more sparsely populated area might endanger people if some people leaving cities are carrying Covid 19. If those more sparsely populated areas have relatively easily overwhelmed healthcare systems, then they're especially dangerous places to have or spread the virus. Covid 19 is likely to be more common in big cities, which tend to have the best resourced healthcare.

Driving to a 2nd home in a more densely populated area might be less dangerous, but could still spread the virus.

As long as you self-quarantine for the recommended 14 days after arriving somewhere new, you're actually decreasing the number of potential spreading vectors by removing another person from the densely-populated area. It's key that you be strict with your quarantine and don't go to stores/gas stations/etc.

Have you met rich people?

You don't have to be rich to have a second home in a rural area.

Sure, and those people I'm more confident would be conscientious neighbors. But people who have second houses in tourist destinations, well, (X) doubt.

Don't you?

You can get a second home outside of the NYC area for under $70k. It can come to as little as $15k down and $500/month all-in including utilities/taxes/*. Not chump-change but certainly not "rich" levels of money.

That describes 99.99999% of locations.

So, I live in a rural area and own some acreage. While I firmly believe home prices will tank in the next year, I also firmly believe secluded property that is still accessible will see a value increase.

I'm just far enough away from a city center to be inconvenient for people to just come here, but close enough that if you have a reason, it's not terrible.

And I bet I have a shitload of new neighbors after this when the local 'wealthy' folks try to get out of town.

Don't know what all that means, just something I've been thinking of this week.

I don’t know how prevalent it is, but there have always been “day after” doomsday preppers from live-off-the-land types as well as Hollywood types with ranches or “caves/bunkers” in Montana/Idaho. It’s not something new to those people. They were always thought of as kooky, but maybe it will gain more traction from the haves.

I do wonder if it will cause any shift in the current fashion for urban living among certain demographics. After all, it doesn't need to be a huge change percentage-wise at the margin to have a big effect. After all, the current urbanization trend is relatively small in terms of the overall numbers.

And there are lot of places--even though not really in the Bay Area--where you can get to at least semi-rural places while still being within an hour or so of a major city. (And really in the country within 2 or 3 hours.)

Honestly, I don't think it will change the urban living trend. Those folks tend to be younger and looking for a certain type of lifestyle, regardless of the health and safety impacts. That lifestyle just doesn't exist out here. Our 'fun' revolves around standing or sitting around talking for hours on end.

My spouse jokes that you need to factor in an extra 2 hours to any small errand just for the bullshitting sessions that will inevitably accompany.

I'm guessing this will be older, wealthier folks moving out here. Maybe that's too myopic for my area, though - there's not really any employment areas offering big money for younger folks like tech does.

One thing to remember, when you live in a city, there are things to do and people around. Out here, you either make your own fun (everyone has a hobby of some kind - the three of us within 1 mile of each other do machining, woodworking, and blacksmithing respectively), or you leave to go somewhere else.

It is a hard transition for folks not used to it. The boredom and isolation are real. It took my wife (Chicago city native) about two years to get used to how loud it is here at night due to all of the animals and insects, while it's absolutely quiet at the same time because of no people. She still (12 years later) has problems with feelings of isolation.

Former country kid here, but inching my way toward having spent half my life living in urban areas.

My sense is that a population-level trend toward country living simply can't happen. There are too many people, and they can't all move out to the country without causing it to not be the country anymore.

The difference over the past couple decades in the are where my mom lives is stark. Night isn't noisy anymore, because, thanks to land developers, all the wildlife has been crowded out by McMansions. Growing up, we roamed an area of quite a few square miles on foot and on bike. Nowadays I'm not sure I'd let my kids do that, because there are just so many more people blasting down the road in their Audis while fiddling with CarPlay.

Yup, grew up in rural-ish burb, lived in VT, spent many, many, many miles on my road bike, both workouts, point-point rides, and racing.

But traffic has changed so much that I haven't been on it in years, so my Mtn bike & trail running shoes get all the action

>where you can get to at least semi-rural places while still being within an hour or so of a major city. (And really in the country within 2 or 3 hours.)

Whew, 2-3 hours is the next major city, in the South you're easily in the country in 20-30 and seriously rural in 60 minutes. You can get XX acres reasonably priced inside some major metro areas.

I guess it depends on what qualifies as a major city and seriously rural. I'm about an hour outside of Boston and, depending on the town, there are farms, orchards, etc. and land can be (again depending on the town) relatively inexpensive. Between my two neighbors and I we're on about 100 acres total abutting conservation land.

However, I don't really consider that to be seriously rural. There are supermarkets, a Walmart, hospitals, etc.--all within a few miles. You probably really need to go a couple hours to Western Mass or southern NH before things start to get what I'd consider "seriously rural." And even then you're certainly closer to civilization that you'd be in large areas out West.

You can even get to very low density within an hour of the Bay Area. This is less than an hour from the middle of downtown San Francisco [1].

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.6650248,-121.6998585,3a,75y,...

Probably means it's time to start thinking about selling. You'll probably come out ahead on the deal, and rich people make the worst neighbors anyway.

That's the thing, though. Out here, you don't really make choices as an individual. I mean, it's a weird balance.

Lots of us live out here because we didn't want to be told what to do by a government (outside of the don't steal, don't murder sorts of laws). Some of my neighbors moved out here after living under an HOA and getting pissed off.

But when it comes to something like selling the property to someone from outside, or moving and leaving a place empty, that is always discussed in the community. It's like a weird family made of distant cousins. You don't want to leave them with shitty neighbors, but you also don't want them bothering you.

Country living is odd.

Oh, no doubt. I grew up that way and there's a good deal I still miss about it, for all that I appreciate city conveniences.

But if you're getting new rich neighbors, one assumes you're not considering selling in a vacuum, either. And my experience has been that the loose communality you describe is far from immune to the influence of a lot of money. One of my own distant cousins sold a place to a developer a few years back, without consulting anyone, that'd been in the family for four generations. Even those relations most infuriated by the sale eventually had to concede that, for the just shy of a million the developer paid her, they'd have done the same.

I've lived next to all sorts of people, and I can tell you with certainty that wealth isn't a factor in being neighborly.

And I can tell you just as certainly, out of my own experience, that you're wrong about that. If you appreciate the place where you live for its own sake, the worst thing that can happen to it is an influx of people who appreciate it only for what they can turn it into, and who also have the financial power to do so.

Whether or not they're nice people is maybe not entirely orthogonal to whether their behavior has a noxious effect, but it's certainly close.

One of the benefits of acreage out in the country is that your neighbors are far enough away that you really don't have to care.

Literally the only reason I bought the property that I did. We sit on a hill, with woods between us and the two nearest neighbors. I want to buy the place across the road, just so I never have to worry about someone building over there.

New neighbors built a new place down the road (half mile or so) and put up a security light and have lights under their eaves all the way around the house. For the life of me I can't figure out why you would move out to where it's dark, just to get rid of the dark.

"I also firmly believe secluded property that is still accessible will see a value increase"

Maybe. At least more likely today than it was a month ago :)

I have some friends currently cruising on a boat. They are stuck. The island is on lockdown so they can’t leave for another destination, can’t leave the boat because they are quarantined. And can’t even resupply because they aren’t clear to land. They have provisions for a few weeks, can make their own water and electricity. But once the former runs out they aren’t sure what they are going to do.

It was a reminder that even when you are at sea you are still dependent on those ground based resources no matter where you are.

I guess they should start lerning ocean fishing.

Like, seriously. The biggest issue for shipwreck survivors has always been drinking water and exposure. Looks like they don't have a problem with either, so as long as they can catch some edible fish they should be fine in principle.

Most liferafts will have a small fishing kit as part of the survival kit.

Until their diesel runs out...

This is stupid on so many levels. Not only you're potentially spreading the virus further but you're now in a place from which it is difficult to get to a hospital if you do need it.

There's a reason Colorado's highest number of cases per capita are in the mountain counties, and it has nothing to do with the locals.

There is an item in today's Washington Post opinion page by a commissioner of Tillamook County, Oregon, complaining of just this.

Was actually thinking about this scenario whereby the US becomes divided between those CV19 pos vs. neg. Or insert whatever the next major pandemic will be.

I think we will see the next genuine counter culture formed because of this.

It's most likely to be young people and what's amusing is that we will be the squares this time around!

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