California, Los Angeles see jump in new cases, Bay Area continues down | Hacker News Reader

California, Los Angeles see jump in new cases, Bay Area continues down

eastbaytimes.com

39 pointsMilnerRoute42 comments

LA has recently made testing available to anyone which is a great move! https://lacovidprod.service-now.com/rrs

Free, for everyone... even those without symptoms. It does feel like "number of tests administered" per region during said time period would be an important stat for context. But who am I to let details get in the way.

Apparently, all slots are full... so they seem to have maxed out for now.

Two Bay Area stats from the article:

There were seven deaths on Wednesday, bringing the region’s total to 283. But Wednesday’s reported deaths represents a 66% decrease from the 21 deaths recorded on April 22.

In fact, Santa Clara County, once the region’s epicenter of its COVID-19 crisis, recorded its lowest number of new cases in a single day — just 12 — since the pandemic began.

How many tests were taken over this period in the Bay Area versus LA? And what people are being tested in each area?

They still barely even acknowledge that the amount of testing is part of this.

The reporting should be about estimated total infection spread and the ways they are estimating it.

Throughout this I've tried to focus on the number of deaths. It's certainly not a perfect measure due to undercounting in some areas and localized epicenters but it seems to smooth out the noise between regions far better than number of positive tests.

The CA Governor Newsom had said on a press conference recently that they had increased testing last week by about 40%, and planned a similar pace in the weeks to come. Don't know about how that relates to LA or how accurate that is.

My go to tracking site https://covidtracking.com/us-daily/ doesn't seem to break down historical by state.

It's in the next tab over, "State by State" [1]. Click on the state name to see the breakdown. For example, if you click on "Alabama" it will take you to historical data [2]. Cheers!

[1] https://covidtracking.com/data

[2] https://covidtracking.com/data/state/alabama

The curve has been flattened and I’m past ready for lockdown to end.

I understand the sentiment, but what exactly do you expect will happen when the lockdown is lifted?

People aren't going to just say "yay, it's over!" and have a grand day out on the town, going to their favorite now-open-and-bustling-once-again restaurants, cafes, and crowded weekend destinations for shopping and people watching.

The majority of people are going to continue to be so nervous and cautious that even if these businesses were allowed to open tomorrow, they are going to remain practically empty for a good long time.

There was never an endgame to these lockdowns. You flatten the curve... and then what? If people go mingle again in anything resembling normal capacity, it'll pick right back up where we left off.

Why is it always a question of lockdown versus no lockdown? There are shades of lockdowns. The most realistic way to fight this is to regulate the number of people who get it without triaging care. Full lockdown is not going to fulfill that and neither is no lockdown.

The plan needs to make sense though. Texas is opening restaurants tomorrow but limiting capacity to something like 25% of normal. No business can make that profitable but the supports, however meager, from the state will cease because "hey you're open for business now".

SF is increasing their number of public health nurses doing contract tracing from 10 to 150. People are starting to wear masks and distance themselves properly. The percentage of people testing positive continues to fall.

Containment was lost. SIP was declared to clamp down on the spread. Resources are being marshalled to increase containment to the level needed. As that comes on line SIP rules will be relaxed and modified.

Frankly do not get why this hard for a lot of people here to comprehend.

Given that we seem to know (1) a vaccine will almost certainly not be finished within a year (2) the US government doesn't have the competence or trust to successfully implement contacting tracing (3) years of lockdowns are infeasible ... I find it hard to arrive at any other conclusion except that the band-aid will need to be ripped off, Swedish style.

Unfortunate you’re getting downvoted. Flattening the curve was about limiting cases so hospitals don’t get overrun. Now they’re trying to eradicate the virus which isn’t going to happen unless you lock everyone down for over a a year.

Yup, it’s ok, I have karma to burn, just checking sentiment and zeitgeist as my house begins to mindfully break lockdown. There was a mediocre acoustic act performing on the waterfront at Jack London square an hour ago; we might do some shows there or throw a rave at Brooklyn Basin.

You can’t lock down the healthy in America for a year to protect the weak. Those in fear think this is going to end soon but it isn’t. Instead, people need to decide how to live their lives in our new, fundamentally unsafe pandemic society.

I’m glad that you are sure that you are immune and that everyone that one you care about is also immune. Enjoy that rave

Money wise, everyone I know who wasn’t doing too well before the pandemic, is now totally broke.

One of my acquaintances, hasn’t paid rent last month, and frequents food banks now. The promised relief checks have yet to arrive too.

The job market post pandemic looks like it will be pretty rough, so the longer this goes on without relief the more debt people will incur.

I am personally not against continuing the lockdown, even though it’s deeply emotionally draining, but the government needs to consistently provide money for people to live, or else simple desperation is going to become a wide spread problem.

Yup, no evidence we need flattening in the SF Bay Area:

https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx#ho...

It's all about Governor Newsom running for President now.

Based on the data I've seen, all we need to end the lockdown now is provide and wear a mask, and ground pax airlines until we confirm herd immunity.

>Flattening the curve was about limiting cases so hospitals don’t get overrun

I agree that was one of the more widely repeated intentions, but ascribing it to every national and state official is inaccurate. The White House's recommendation for lockdowns was primarily motivated by Imperial College's worst-case death projections[1], not the hospitalization numbers.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/29/inside-the-white-ho...

The curve is beyond flat. It's trending down. The refrain was "flatten", and we've decimated the workforce in order to overshoot the mark.

Flattening the curve isn't about the direction of the slope, it's about the height of the peak.

Logically, if isolation is keeping the curve flat and you still have patients to "burn" through then won't ending isolation make the curve pop back up potentially back over capacity?

It always seemed to me you needed to continue isolating to keep the curve flat as time went on until you reached a critical number where letting it go couldn't overwhelm health services.

No, the idea is to let the curve approach capacity before flattening. That did not happen, so we've decimated America worse than any war it has ever participated in, yet made next to no progress against this invisible enemy.

I mean, the Bay Area can read a graph and understand math. It's the dominant industry here, math and data. I don't think the same can be said of the LA region...

Please don't take HN threads into regional flamewar.

It would be nice if the article contained a graph. There's data about reproduction numbers and case numbers for each state at https://rt.live/ but the estimate Rt is at an all time low for California, so that's not useful for understanding this article (since maybe LA and SFO balance out). Are there any sites with good visualizations that help one to see a statement like the claim of this article?

LA Times has statewide and by-county graphs here: https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-case...

The trends there and in news reports like the OP are going to look different from your R_t site because it's based on the official numbers rather than a model.

Presumably this is the Easter bump coming in from people who didn't take it seriously--it's been 3 weeks. Southern California has a lot more Catholics than the Bay Area.

I get what you are going for but LA has about 10x more people in general than the Bay Area, and to my knowledge most christians celebrate Easter, not just Catholics.

Infection rate is population size insensitive.

Easter also seems to be quite a bit more important to Catholics than most christians (see: Ash Wednesday, fasting, etc.)

Yeah but a lot of people celebrate Easter with egg hunts and candy. Not everyone celebrates it with mass. Was mass cancelled for Easter?

Yes. Bishops in the US closed parishes in March. The Pope granted a dispensation so that Catholics do not have the obligation to attend Mass during Lent and Holy Week.

Protestants go to church services for Easter probably as much as Catholics go to mass for Easter.

I wonder if Orange County will see a bump in another week or so. A lot of people I know from down there were out at the beach last weekend while LA's beaches were still on lockdown.

I’m from the area (not living there anymore) and I’m also interested. There’s an “OC vs. Gavin” showdown going on, and I’m not sure which side to be on. Based on what I’ve heard from local authorities, the beachgoers maintained proper distance and the orders from Gavin are solely retaliatory.

> the beachgoers maintained proper distance

I sure hope this was the case for their sake and that of everyone else in southern CA, but I feel like it'd be really tough to maintain distancing in a public place like the beach (and while going to and from, parking, etc). And that's if you're actively trying to and aware the whole time.

Thankfully most people I see do seem to be trying to keep a 6-foot radius between households, even in the pictures of crowded beaches that make it to the news.

Is there any evidence that brief incidental contact can spread the virus in significant amounts? I seem to recall that at one point officials were saying you needed extended (15 minutes or more) close contact to be considered at risk. If that is the case then I don’t see much risk in walking past another person on your way to the beach. And if it’s not the case then we might as well give up on contact tracing, because without massive invasions of privacy we can’t trace down every passerby of an infected individual. Of course the science has been moving fast here, so this could be outdated.

What's the governor's interest in "retaliation"? Presumably he doesn't have much to gain by upsetting people who want the beaches to be open unless there's a larger constituency he makes happier (in which case that sounds like democracy...)

And we know only Catholics pack the California beaches out, right?

Hate to contradict the HN "the world is falling, omg!" corona narrative, but ...

The Bay Area is likely approaching herd immunity levels, since we had a lot of travellers to and from China since December.

Corona mortality levels in SF have nothing to do with the lockdown, and never did. I've been watching the Bay Area hospitals dashboard, and there never was a crisis:

https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx#ho...

Scroll down half-way to the hospital beds chart and graphs - no significant change in 2 months.

This is no way implies "herd immunity". That would require 60% of the population to have not only been exposed to the virus, but to have actually achieved full immunity thereafter.

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