Data Shows Shelter-in-Place Is Ending, Whether Governments Want It to or Not | Hacker News Reader

Data Shows Shelter-in-Place Is Ending, Whether Governments Want It to or Not

forbes.com

31 pointsnostromo45 comments

Driving through Las Vegas, you would hardly know there was still a mandatory quarantine. Stores and restaurants have big signs saying "Open", the roads have normal traffic, and there's normal sidewalk activity too. Yet, the Governor is regularly on TV talking about how the state is still in quarantine and the plan to gradually reopen. What is true is that casinos are shut down and large public activities, like concerts and sporting events, aren't happening. I won't speak to the morality because people have wildly different opinions, but the reality is that a lot of people refuse to quarantine any more.

Did Vegas see a large outbreak? It is actually one of the places that convinced me before that we have a bad understanding of this virus. No model of community spread made any sense as to how it was not in Vegas.

It's really hard to tell because it doesn't sound like there's reliable testing to verify. A recent official count was around 5000 or so. My gut feeling is that a lot of people have had it and didn't know for sure. Given the amount of international visitors and the fact that we have a sizable Chinese business community, it seems like the numbers are potentially higher than what is officially announced.

I happened to see a map of covid over the whole US, and my first reaction was to remember the xkcd about how a lot of maps are just relabeled population maps.

However, there was a slight difference between it and a generic population map - it is very skewed towards the eastern US and coast.

Overall, it seems (and this was suggested in other things I've read) that covid in the US has been spread primarily from Europe and not Asia. If it had come from Asia more, surely it would have hit California and the west coast harder.

The other bit is that west coast cities responded earlier. Seattle got hot early but locked down pretty hard, SF locked down before it got bad, and both locked down well before nyc.

It seems like there is a surge in California now though.

With how skewed this is to older population, it really is tough to just look at populations as a whole. NYC had more people over sixty than Seattle has people.

It is odd. This is far far more dangerous than a flu if you are older than sixty. More than just looking at population level IFR implies. Not so clear cut off you are under sixty. Simply put, we don't have the data to say.

I fully agree that we don't want the data the hard way.

An outbreak in Vegas would be more a case of tourists infecting each other than the residents of the town getting sick.

And if you've caught something in Vegas and spread the disease across your hometown, you're probably not going to admit it. This virus is no exception.

What you’re saying is true for all major cities in the country.

There's no evidence to suggest that the government would intentionally lie about numbers, let alone in Las Vegas. If anything, it's likely due to ignorance and lack of resources in testing.

It's not about the government lying. It's about individuals visiting vegas, leaving after a few days, coming back and then having to come clean that they were feeling a little under the weather when they got on the plane (which could arguably be manslaughter depending on the exact circumstances).

No matter how seriously you value your life, no matter how seriously you take the quarantine, you simply cannot overlook the fact that all of this looks exactly like every other recent TV sensation: it comes out of nowhere; the media capitalizes on it; and now we're slowly getting bored, waiting for something substantial to happen in our lives.

I’m not sure I would call 65,000+ dead from coronavirus “waiting for something to happen”.

To be fair that's just over US the flu death rate last year, and outside of our most dense city everything has been rather manageable. It's gonna have to bump up another exponent to hit Spanish Flu levels, and even that didn't really affect the US very adversely if the Roaring 20s are anything to go by

Comparing COVID-19 deaths to flu deaths is like comparing apples to oranges. The former are actual numbers; the latter are inflated statistical estimates. See: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-...

The problem is even if that doubles in 2018 flu had like 90k. Lets say by November it doesn't reach 90k how angry would people be. All the business owners and workers that were laid off.

If you deploy a contingency plan you can't then later say "see it wasn't so bad" using the measured numbers. You have to use a model of what it would have been without the containment measures.

Based on the fact states/countries have used different levels of contingency and some states have similar sizes its easy enough to use states as A/B tests and figure out the p-value.

But Idk if it needs to be that complicated. People are simple. If texas which just opened kills fewer people total and fewer people per million than NYC. Theres no way people in texas don't look at this as a success.

Irrational actions based on an apples-oranges comparison fallacy by ignorant, impulsive people who lack delayed gratification is why advisory and legal mandates are necessary. Loosening up the lockdowns without evidence (good testing) and a vaccine or infected carriers reduced to zero just restarts the pandemic curve all over again and the pain becomes all for nothing. Easily-distracted, angsty, confused, selfish, short-term-focused, un-empathetic people who lack critical thinking skills and proper perspective can't anticipate the consequences of their actions or self-reflect. If some people are going to be dangerous assholes or clueless liabilities to others, the government has to step-in and prevent undue permanent harm. Otherwise, there will be another 100k deaths. If officials in all states acted with complete negligence and denial, they would've lost their next elections and there would've been somewhere between 500k-1m additional deaths. These are deaths can still happen since few % of the overall population is immune, and there's a possibility of importing a deadlier Italian strain to supplant the weaker West Coast US strain.

Almost 40.000 die in traffic accidents year after year in the USA and there’s barely a peep about that. Everything about life requires risk.

I would just like to point out that there are factions around here who will let you know about all the ways car companies lobbied to make the US dependent on driving long distances and driving frequently to the point of social ruin.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/28/coronavirus...

This is 50% fake news.

https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/

Honestly I don’t really understand the end game of disinformation campaigns like this.

It’s one thing to spread propaganda in order to influence elections and get a crooked bureaucrat into power that can enrich some corporate buddies. But it’s another to deceive people about a global health crisis. If you’re successful, people go outside and trigger a second wave of infections - lots of people die and we’re back to square 1. Economy will still be fucked.

What am I missing here?

Don't hurry to attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity

If 1-2% of people die quickly, the economy will not be fucked. That's a politicized untruth put out to counter other politicized untruths.

The people protesting and doing other stupid things are actually helping those of us that are isolating. The quicker they spread it and create herd immunity, the less time we have to wait. This obviously depends on whether an individual can get reinfected, but I haven't seen anything conclusive one way or another and it feels like this has also been misleadingly politicized.

Obviously a deluge of cases is absolutely terrible for the healthcare workers, as well as other essential employees that are exposed to the mob-herd (eg grocery store workers) and likely won't receive adequate healthcare. So I'm certainly not advocating, merely analyzing.

Why do you care more about "the economy" than the lives of 2% ~= 6 million people? The Fed could take back it's massive Wall Street bailout and give it to workers. Rich people would hoot and holler but no one would starve, and the public would be much less anxious to lift the quarantine.

>herd immunity

There is no natural herd immunity for the flu or common cold. It's totally possible that after a few months people who survive become reinfected, which would massively increase the death rate if you already have lung damage when you get it again.

Try reading my whole comment instead of jumping at phrases that match your political attack target.

>The quicker they spread it and create herd immunity, the less time we have to wait.

If we are going to allow most people to become infected anyway, such that we encourage people to go to large gatherings without even wearing masks, then surely there is no reason to have any quarantine at all, so we wouldn't be waiting to lift it. But you seem to think we would still be waiting, just for a shorter amount of time, so you are clearly very confused about this whole situation.

>I'm certainly not advocating, merely analyzing.

So am I.

If you think it is a Russian campaign, as people have previously asserted, you might get some perspective by looking at what seems to be happening in Russia right now. There is a Wikipedia page on covid in Russia.

The Russian statistics look fishy to me, but not in the same way as the Chinese ones. They have surging numbers of new cases, but a outlier very low claimed death rate. Of course, the latter might just be lagging. And there are supposedly similar protests in Russia as in the US - what does that mean? Are they real? Is it, say, the CIA? Or some internal conflict, or genuinely grassroots?

The Washington Times is not a reliable news source. It's a nutty right-wing paper run by a cult leader who's main job is pushing anti-science view points.

I think it was offered as evidence for a line of propaganda/nonsense being pushed, not as promoting the claims.

1. Have a politicized society that is so dysfunctional that it is incapable of coherently focusing on a shared problem.

2. Downplay common sense individual actions like wearing masks, because it would demonstrate lack of preparation

3. Bail out large businesses quickly, throw individuals and small businesses some scraps as a distraction.

4. After gross shutdowns are effected, don't spend the effort to refine them - eg reopening various small businesses that could operate hygienically.

5. Reject fine-grained policy that would repudiate business-uber-alles, like forcing new safety guidelines on essential industries.

6. Get fatigued from the above, and write off everything that was attempted as unnecessary waste doomed from the start. (thread article)

7. Rationalize that nothing could be done, things just happen. The idea we could do anything about it was a hoax. (your article)

8. Repeat for next disaster.

We've basically given up, end of story. I keep trying to grasp the idea that this is the societal death spiral taking hold, but I can't yet wrap my head around it.

As an Aussie I grew up on a healthy diet of US exceptionalism propaganda. At some point I came to the realization that the US is an empire in decline.

Now, I’m starting to think the US is already a failed state. I’m pretty frightened to be living in this timeline. It’s like the collapse of Rome, but with wifi, vape pens, memes and nuclear arsenals.

The seeds of the civil war were sown during the writing of the Declaration of Independence. The cracks were always there. I see the same left/right arguments from friends in the UK and Brazil.

This has been the party line since at least the 1970s if not earlier. Like a lot of similar predictions, it's sure to be true eventually. However, the propaganda makes it impossible to judge if it's happening now.

There may be a resurgence in covid cases in the US shortly, but it's interesting that there are some countries not named America, Italy, or Spain, that are seeing daily growth of 5-10% and we're not talking about them.

Keep in mind that Rome collapsed over centuries, and as it did so many people barely noticed it happened and lived out their lives like generations before them in small farming communities. Even if the US collapses, there'll be vast parts of the world like in Africa and India where it'll just be an interesting international news tidbit with little impact on their actual lives.

As for someone living in Australia, you'll be fine in that corner of the world. Why do you think so many billionaires are buying bunkers in New Zealand?

>As for someone living in Australia, you'll be fine in that corner of the world.

(While not a member) Australia relies on NATO. Without it they would exist at the mercy of China. Without the US, NATO goes limp, especially in the naval power department.

Why would China wander over to Australia? China would probably look west into the Indian ocean more than they would look east, because that's where their oil comes from. They'd also have to get past Indonesia first, and frankly Australia has had more foreign policy problems with Indonesia in the past than with China. East Timor and illegal migrants come to mind.

Australia is as safe from a war in Eurasia as the Americas are. The events of WW2 made that quite clear. Imperial Japan even at its greatest extent was only able to make bombing runs on Australia's north coast. Frankly, there's nothing really worth fighting over as far away as Australia is from the rest of the world. Australia's key foreign policy objective is to play nice with the global naval power. Not because it needs protection, but it needs to not get locked out of the global shipping and trade network.

This whole argument is silly. War is dead. China will not conquer your land but they will buy your corporates and leaders souls. Why did the brush fires happen?

The decline of the USA, to the extent that there is one, is due to demographic and dysgenic changes.

This can be alleviated by fixing housing costs in the most productive cities - SF etc. - where the most intelligent and productive people congregate. Cheaper housing will encourage these people to have children instead of forgoing them.

It can also be fixed by fixing immigration, so that the most intelligent and productive can migrate, ensuring diversity (no more than 10% from any one country) and equality (no more than 50% male from any one country).

The country also needs to fix the 'welfare cliff' - where under certain conditions it is more financially rewarding to have children and not work than to do the opposite.

> This can be alleviated by fixing housing costs in the most productive cities - SF etc. - where the most intelligent and productive people congregate.

You can barely convince these intelligentsia that street defecation is problem that can actually be solved. No thanks.

Please be more concerned about China. Why did so extreme brush fires happen? It wasn’t US stealing your water was it?

What a weird and disconnected response. Why divert attention to China when the US is being discussed? Feels like whataboutism.

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