Seattle’s leaders let scientists take the lead, New York’s did not

While this can be great for team execution, by definition it insulates managers from the nitty-gritty of design/development, which is where most of the preventative measures happen. However if you try to remedy this and bring the manager into the fold, you invite micromanaging and harm execution, as well as preventing the manager from doing more managerial things.

It's when things go wrong and heroes emerge that people get raises and promotions, if simply because the manager can point to those highly visible efforts as rationale for why this person gets more. Also in large orgs a manager might not know all their direct reports personally so those incidents make the person stick out, like how a professor knows the kids who sit at the front of the class the best.

I suppose the ideal would be a technically experienced manager who understands how to promote good design practices and lets his team do so, but on sheer educated faith with no metrics. Given that metrics are the lifeblood of large-org management careers, the incentive structure isn't there to produce such people en-masse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21872355

You would be surprised to find out how many of essential workers rely on public transport to get to their jobs.

We're just slowing it to a manageable rate with fairly extreme measures like lock-downs (which will likely be loosening soon anyways), and I don't see small pockets of uncooperative people making a sizable difference in the general outcome, not at this stage.

A minor but salient point: in common usage, a hoaxer would be a person perpetrating a hoax, not a person who believes (incorrectly) that someone else is perpetrating a hoax. The people who you are referring to hear are better labelled "denialists" than "hoaxers".

We just had the NFL draft this week. Plenty of these players will have their bodies seriously harmed in the next few years, while others will get multiple concussions and potentially set themselves up for CTE or other brain damage. Not once did anyone raise any alarms about, maybe these young people shouldn't go into this line of work...

I can imagine more groups. For example people might need to get out of the city/house for psychological reasons. Taking a small chance to get/spread the virus might be better than hurting oneself/others.

So aside from the shit show of the Trump administration, I’m not seeing even the areas that are being praised as being the “best” in America really take this seriously.

At this point, it looks like we’re way off the trajectory of squashing the outbreak. The curve has plateaued, but we aren’t on track to get the numbers low enough to safely open businesses again and go back to containment and contact tracing. We’re failing at the “hammer” stage of the hammer and the dance, and it seems to me like the probable outcome at this point is a whack a mole of continuous, half hearted hammering for the next year or more where we won’t be able to lift this lockdown much at all.

Lots of people have at least some intention to take it seriously, but not the steely heart for the hardcore isolation that’s required.

Of course, "idiot" is pretty relative, and not everyone going out is an idiot, but that would undermine your eugenics argument

Always follow the first link on a Wikipedia page (excluding parentheticals with etymology and pronunciation), rinse and repeat: you eventually end up at philosophy.

The thing is, it's really dark. I have a pretty dark streak in my sense of humor, but were are a lot of moments when I thought to myself, "Did these guys forget that this show bills itself as a comedy?"

SPOILER ALERT

I think the most horrible scene was when some of the passengers get the idea that they aren't really trapped in space, that it's all a simulation and they're really on Earth after all. And so they decide they want to leave. Through the airlock...

And Captain Laurie and the engineer who won't shut up about being underappreciated by the morons around her (Why would you care about their opinions? They're morons) are in between them and the airlock.

Now maybe this means I'm a bad person, but my first gut reaction was, "Hey, let them go outside. It's evolution in action. A problem that solves itself, yeah?"

But then my real self kicks in and points out that, unless I try my very hardest to prevent these fucking morons from sucking vacuum, letting them spacewalk sans spacesuit is tantamount to murder. And I'm not a murderer.

Even though they are useless fucking morons who seemingly only exist to cause problems, standing by and letting them kill themselves is wrong. You'll hate yourself if you do.

That's the downside of self-awareness and intelligence. If you are the only person on the spaceship who knows the score guess where the buck stops?

Attending an anti-lockdown protest without taking proper social distancing measures is more akin to driving drunk on the freeway than it is to shooting heroin into one's veins. The latter can in many circumstances be understood to have negligible impact on the rights of others, the former cannot.

The question of "at what point do social distancing measures overstep the legitimate exercise of government power" is a nuanced one. It requires weighing individuals rights against one another in a situation where cause and effect are at best thinly statistical, emergent from collective behavior, and regionally variable (NYC != rural Kentucky).

No government is going to get their response to COVID-19 100% right, but I'm pretty sure focusing exclusively on individual self-harm would be an abysmal heuristic.

3rd paragraph is the grovelling the school district needed to do to deal with the interference of the King County Health Department.

There is also the "red dawn" emails which clearly show that King County was not doing a single thing in the face of knowing it was a problem - Dr. Duchin (King County Health) on March 1st - not 4 days after this public rebuke of the school idstrict.

"We are having a very serious challenge related to hospital exposures and impact on the healthcare system. Would be great to have a call to discuss. Will be meeting with your team here this morning and then maybe we can chat after that"

So it goes from laughing to all hell breaking loose to doing nothing for almost 2 more weeks? That's the Health Department leading the way?

The US would probably be at over a million deaths by now if life had continued normally without lockdowns.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/21/boy-with-covid...

No one who's been to NYC can miss the fact that it's one of the filthiest places in America, from the perspective of disease possibilities. Many parts simply pile their trash on the curb and there are rats are everywhere. People pack into subway cars like sardines, and there's no way to avoid droplet transmission. During my time there, I saw several people vomit in public and just walk off.

There are plenty of great things about the city, but lacking a real culture of cleanliness (e.g., Tokyo), density breeds disease.

Your argument would basically be saying at that point "China has much more cases even though they have stricter restrictions, which means restrictions don't work!"

Saying that New York's approach wasn't science based is absurd. The most notable screwup was the delay in school closures due to the dependence that many have on getting breakfast and lunch at school. IMO, at the time I don't think awareness that asymptomatic "super spreaders" may exist was known. (Assuming that is true, much of the data known to CDC is now classified so it's difficult to really know!)

Looks like you have a possibly important point:

If so, then they would be well on the way to herd immunity and, thus, essentially at the end new cases and the end of the epidemic.

So, for your point, at

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/04/23/andrew-cuomo-1...

is in part:

"Andrew Cuomo: 13.9% of New Yorkers Tested Positive for Coronavirus Antibodies; 21% in NYC"

The 21% is huge.

So, it looks like the virus spread much faster than symptoms indicated and now ballpark 1/4th NYC has been "exposed" to the virus and is either infected without symptoms or recovered without ever having significant or any symptoms. Amazing. So, if want to accept the usual situation for viruses, then the 1/4 of the population soon can't get or transmit the virus.

Ah, but wait; there's more: As at

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/in-four-us-state-prisons-n...

is, call it an exploitation of a captive audience,

> When the first cases of the new coronavirus surfaced in Ohio’s prisons, the director in charge felt like she was fighting a ghost.

> “We weren’t always able to pinpoint where all the cases were coming from,” said Annette Chambers-Smith, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. As the virus spread, they began mass testing.

> They started with the Marion Correctional Institution, which houses 2,500 prisoners in north central Ohio, many of them older with pre-existing health conditions. After testing 2,300 inmates for the coronavirus, they were shocked. Of the 2,028 who tested positive, close to 95% had no symptoms.

> “It was very surprising,” said Chambers-Smith, who oversees the state’s 28 correctional facilities.

and the article has more such data.

Then if want to accept an estimate that 50% of the population immune means herd immunity, NYC is ballpark half way to herd immunity which would be close to the end of the epidemic. E.g., even people in NYC so far never exposed to the virus would not get infected even from infected new arrivals before they were recovered or dead.

So, a guess is that the virus SARS-COV-2 is very strange in two respects: (1) It is astoundingly communicative, that is, spreads very easily and (2) has some huge fraction of people with the virus but without symptoms.

A guess at an explanation: In NYC, the virus was often getting spread just via the air, e.g., via building central HVAC systems?

The good news, if want to believe all such evidence and related common assumptions, is that we can get to a fraction of the population with immunity large enough to have herd immunity and, thus, essentially be well on the way to the end of the epidemic, all surprisingly quickly.

That's why the phrase "slow the spread" makes sense. Even if we can't prevent people from getting infected eventually, we can slow the spread enough that hospitals can handle incoming patients. If everyone gets infected at the same time, there won't be enough ventilators to treat everyone.

According to virologist Dr. Drosten, this idea has been mostly disproven. Some scientists believed it initially but after more debate, the consensus has emerged that both Italy and Germany got their virus directly from Wuhan or Shanghai.

Source (in German language): https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/coronaskript174.pdf page 79

It might well be that containment failed, and that a single person caused hundreds or thousands of the deaths in Italy, much like patient 31 in South Korea.

On the other hand, without those extra deaths, authorities would simply have waited a bit longer with a lockdown, people would have acted as usual for longer, and the end result might just have been very similar with a delay of a few weeks.

So far, they've had 10 deaths. The total projected number of deaths through August 3rd is 93.

New York is projected to suffer 23,232 deaths for the same time period.

https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/sout...

Can the state government close airports and prevent flights from Europe landing in NYC?

On the trails - I think we could easily force them to operate at half density by closing half the lot at popular trailheads. People would spread out to other locations as a result.

Even so, you don’t have to be 6 feet apart all the time. The WHO’s guidance is only 3 feet, for one. But you also get a benefit from just MOSTLY reducing contact, and even on crowded trails people aren’t on top of each other except at the destination. With mask requirements the risk is likely low.

Greenlake cannot be cordoned off though, so it has to be just closed.

Parks, golfing, fishing are all open in CA. Private construction should have been permitted this entire time since it is trivial to do it responsibly - but everything from new home construction on an open air site to remodels done by one person are not permitted. Numerous European countries have already taken their first incremental steps to reopening things but we don’t even have a date for those first steps in WA. And yet jogging and cycling are fine even though many studies show they’re more dangerous than most other outdoor activities.

As for parks - the city prevented people from gathering in open areas and likely caused them to gather in closed areas or in smaller parks. The big parks have tons of room and can easily be used responsibly, and the city and state need to strike that nuanced balance, instead of just using the most risk averse approach possible.

Still a little awkward but not bending the language to the breaking point. Pretty sad considering New Yorker's editorial prowess.

The frequently-visited man died.

The day after he'd had all the visitors, he died.

A vaccine showing up before we have to relax controls is not a given. If we have to rely on population immunity, a certain number of people need to get sick for us to attain it. Of course, we want the least vulnerable people to do that, and for it to happen at a rate that doesn't cause healthcare overload and excess mortality (which NYC came perilously close to).

If you do it too late then more people will die than could have, if you do it too early you will end up overreacting and sending economy into a tailspin every other year without a good reason. You will also lose trust of the people, killing your chances at effective containment in the future.

Also, sorry about the downvotes you're getting. I think you're raising a good point and in a good manner.