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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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

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.)

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.

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...)

> 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.

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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