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Comment by kvetching | Hacker News Reader

That's insane. If they're hesitant to open up now, they will never feel comfortable opening up.

Or perhaps they know more about the topic than we random HN readers and have a plan that they're following.

If that is the case then they could communicate that plan a little better. At the end of the day it's their fault if people don't understand why they are taking the actions they are.

I take you're listening to the daily state briefings and similar county press conferences. I have not been having a problem understanding them.

They are understandable but vague.

They should describe in detail when things will reopen and what metrics they’ll use to make that decision.

It's an evolving situation. If they say precise but later-incorrect things, people will get mad. And a lot of the work they're doing is consensus-building, which is always mushy. Vague is fine with me right now if that's all they have.

Proper communication would be written, concise, detailed and clear. These endless press conferences are none of those things.

Or perhaps they have radically different values and think one preventable death is one too many or perhaps they know a lot less about economics than random HN or perhaps they just don’t want to be blamed when more people die (even if it’s the right choice). Opening up society is a fundamentally political decision that I’m not personally willing to cede to unelected scientists.

don't addicts die all day everyday in the streets of SanFran? I think the authorities are so timid because they know it can happen to them and they're terrified.

yes but not to the extent it cripples our healthcare system. That's what they're dealing with here. Addiction isn't contagious.

There were about 320 overdose deaths in San Francisco last year, so close to one a day.

You didn't cede it to unelected scientists. You ceded it to elected executive-branch officials, who then pick staff to work for them. If you don't like that, you can try to recall the mayor and/or the governor.

I doubt it, they don’t teach you much actual science while you are working on a poli-sci major.

Good thing that's not who staffs and runs public health departments.

I think that's because nothings different then when it all started. If we open everything up we'll just see new cases again

This may be true for years.

We need to be realistic, and remember that the goal all along has been to flatten the curve, not eliminate all infections.

Flatten the curve is to make sure there is enough available resources to help people who are sick. Nothings changed though, so opening things up means we'll likely be overwhelmed. Why take the risk to end up like any of regions that were hit hard?

So yes it'll be true for years, we need to learn to live with this virus, we haven't done that yet

"...opening things up means we'll likely be overwhelmed"

Only if you myopically believe there is only one way to "open up". But no one would believe that since it only takes ten minutes to read about the dozens of different ways European economies have already eased their lockdowns in recent weeks. This is not and has never been an on/off proposition.

So what is the plan for re-opening then?

If we continue to shelter in place we just push the curve out instead of flattening it. We need to start reintroducing people to society at a measured pace to actually flatten it.

Don’t misunderstand me, pushing the curve out has tremendous value in that we can better prepare but it also has a tremendous cost.

How many business and livelihoods will be ruined because we couldn’t reopen until a vaccine was available?

It seems crazy to sacrifice most of what makes this city great while the “smartest political minds” do what’s best for their career by transforming it into a partisan issue.

Gavin Newsome gave his criteria for reopening California, it doesn't require a vaccine.

Having people die in large numbers is always worse then some people going through tough times. It's unfortunate our national government is incompetent and making it political.

If the city is great it will bounce back. The bay area isn't the only place going through this, the whole world is

It's not a matter of dying vs not dying. It's a matter of people dying from covid or dying from stress related disease like heart attacks, suicide, etc with economic collapse. It's impossible to know before hand the exact prescriptive policies to minimize death over-all. Make no mistake, leadership is going by their gut on this. There are models, but the models are not precisely predictive, they are directionally persuasive.

There are a thousand gradients between the current lockdown and "open everything up". Almost no one is arguing we should open everything. Hearing this false choice over and over is getting old fast.

Currently workers on beef production are getting sick and factories are closing.

Now you can go to parks, beaches, grocery shopping, order food. What do you so deperately need to do? Have a beer in a bar? 80% of americans dont want to have anything start opening again.

And when you do force things open again you force workers who dont want to go back to work and feel its unsafe to go back to start working again, theres no benefits to recieve.

"What do you so deperately need to do? "

What a bizarre thing to ask. As if we need some special justification for wanting the lockdowns to be both effective and as permissive as possible. It would be strange for someone to want restrictions to be more stringent just for the sake of stringency. Efficacy is what matters, and "more strict" does not necessarily equal more effective.

If we knew we could open up school for small children without causing an intolerable spike in the transmission rate, wouldn't we want to do this? Of course we would. That's exactly what's happening in Germany and Denmark right now.

more people live in los angeles then in denmark. how that can be comparable to the us?

transmission is higher indoors, why would you put kids in schools?

do you have a source on german schools for little kids being open? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-german...

The article you linked is well over a month old. You can google this stuff yourself since you clearly are not keeping up with the news.

The restrictions in Denmark and Germany for schoolchildren are elaborate and inventive. We should be working on something similar here. The size of the country is a red herring, as these are local actions overseen by local schools. Of course I would put my kids in schools with these kinds of safeguards. Children need school.

And remember, our goal is not to prevent all transmission of the virus, only to keep the transmission rate low. Some transmission is unavoidable, so we have to be smart, not mindlessly strict.

They have had their lockdown going for that long. It's disingenuous to present germany like they had school open the whole time. They only just partially reopened. It hasn't been long enough to say whether its been a good idea yet or not.

California has a plan for reopening. Newsom has shared it, its reasonable

If you can point to something about the situation that has changed since the shelter-in-place was initiated that would indicate it's not needed anymore, I'd love to hear it. The virus hasn't gone away, we don't have any medications to make it reliably recoverable, we don't have test + trace ability in place (anecdotally, even if you're symptomatic but not in seriously bad condition it's still very difficult to get tested, let alone if you're not), we don't have herd immunity, there is no approved vaccine, etc. If the Bay Area opens up completely, exponential spread kicks in instantly with a high replication factor and in a month it'll look just like New York.

We are not through this in any way, shape, or form, even if it sucks. We've bought some time. If we did reopen now we'd probably be better off than if we hadn't shut down at all, but it'll still rip through the whole population, and unless we're ready to accept that, we've got to keep measures in place.

I agree that opening up in a dumb way would let the virus rip through the population.

But we now know that surface transmission isn't as big a deal, and that spreading is much less likely when there isn't sustained contact. We also now have everyone wearing masks.

Given those things, I would think that any shop where you ordinarily go in for five or ten minutes and don't touch a bunch of things (shoe repair, sporting goods, NOT bookstores) would be very low risk.

But the employees of those shops are in sustained contact with each other.

Sure, if the shop is too cramped, don't open. Stick in some proviso in the order that nonessential businesses can only have 1 employee for every x square feet.

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