California Hospitals Have Been Half Empty | Hacker News Reader

California Hospitals Have Been Half Empty

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9 pointsyaa_minu8 comments

...because stay-at-home/shelter-in-place has been working in CA.

Two of the three dramatically upward trending lines in the chart are labeled "with intervention," implying they took those social distancing measures into account.

So while the measures have no doubt had an impact on slowing the spread, the models predicting dire outcomes were also quite clearly inaccurate, in some cases by at least an order of magnitude.

No, the model predicted a completely different load even with intervention(in the chart). That's the point of the tweet.

Right, and now that the transmission rate has been contained we should ease lockdowns, knowing that we have the capacity to handle an uptick in cases. This is what's happening all over Europe right now, save for the parts that are still in the thick of the initial wave.

"An uptick in cases" is what the shelter-in-place is designed to avoid.

The US does not have the testing capacity per capita at the moment to avoid an uptick from a full reopening.

There are a thousand different ways we can alter protocols to allow for a marginal increase in cases that our system can easily handle. There's a lot of things we need more of, including tests, tracking capacity, hospital capacity, medical equipment, new/better treatments, PPE, etc and they will all improve our ability to handle this virus. But at present, the situation we have is already stable enough to start tweaking the equation and seeking a better balance.

It's not stable at all. In the 24-hour period between April 28 and April 29, an additional ~27,000 people have tested positive and ~2,700 have died.

Here are some things Colorado is doing to ease their lockdown: https://coloradosun.com/2020/04/26/colorado-safer-at-home-or...

Denmark, Austria, Germany and others have already opened various schools and businesses, but with lots of restrictions.

Obviously the situation in California has stabilized. The goal was never to get 0 new infections and 0 new deaths. The goal is only to keep the transmission rate low enough to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system. And that has been accomplished in CA and CO and many parts of Europe and the US.

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