As someone who runs a restaurant in the Bay Area, that's not really accurate. We were busy right up until the shut-down.
That probably is why the shut down and lack of demand line up so closely for businesses in the Bay Area.
Either way, Inslee and Breed deserve more credit. Preventing a crisis is superior to responding effectively after its started.
They both started off as a complete joke on this. Cuomo has at least since been improving, but de Blasio remains a complete joke. He's incapable of so much as even closing some empty streets (or some lanes on streets) to give pedestrians more space to spread out. Other cities have been doing this to great success, but de Blasio has only ever understood things from the perspective of being behind a windshield.
The disease hit New York first before it hit anywhere else in the US and hence had a lot of time to develop. I heard from one source, that it was already present in New York back in december and that one of the first worldwide cases came to New york early. that was from a Joe Rogan podcast episode.
Scroll down and click "city" instead of country. SF bookings on OpenTable were consistently down starting the last week of February. Your restaurant might have had different performance for a number of reasons.
They would have nearly all vanished once the hospitals started filling up had there been no formal order. And then it would have lasted longer.
I also skipped a former colleague’s leaving town party for the same reason.
So I would have needed to have stopped doing things several weeks prior to the government actually getting off its ass and acting in order to be safe, but I didn't have the understanding of how widely in the community it was already spreading at that point, or how severely we were under-testing. As a city we were unbelievably late to act, and the over 10,000 dead in NYC alone (with ~750 more every day) are a testament to that.
It's the peak of absurdity to imagine the city somehow going on as normal under this unbelievable toll if only we weren't being told to shelter in place, when the only street noise you can hear a lot of the time is ambulance sirens.
Wishing you a speedy recovery fellow HN reader friend.
I've since mostly recovered, but my lungs are still giving me problems (this is apparently expected; it can take months to recover from severe pneumonia, so I'm doing better than that at least). I haven't gone running in over a month whereas I used to go several times a week, and even stuff like playing Beat Saber has kicked my ass. Ironically, wearing masks is hard for me now because they interfere with how much oxygen you can take in, so I can wear them while walking leisurely, but I start walking faster, or try to carry a heavy load (groceries), or climb stairs with a mask on, then I really start feeling shitty. So I haven't been wearing a mask while outside and only don one for being inside stores (which is fine, it's been way more than 14 days since I last experienced any symptoms of infection).
So yeah, a weird illness, quite different from the usual human viruses like the cold flu that we all know and "love". I don't know if I have any tips other than don't expect to get better from it quickly (you don't bounce back in a few days like you would from the cold), and lying prone helps you breathe better (but I fortunately never got serious enough to the point where I was struggling to breathe even while being sedentary; it was only after activity). Oh, and if you do anything like smoke or vape (I don't), quit that right now. You want your lungs to be in the best possible condition before going into this because you're gonna lose a lot of capacity and if that puts you below the level required to sustain your basic sedentary metabolism, you could die, or at the least require supplementary oxygen in a hospital. Heck, take up running or some similarly aerobic activity now if you haven't already; that'll help.