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Very informative and transparent. This should be the standard everywhere.

I'm a bit surprised (and disappointed) something similar does not exist for the Bay Area.

>I'm a bit surprised (and disappointed) something similar does not exist for the Bay Area.

Keep in mind that the total number of COVID deaths in CA is less than than the number of deaths in NY on a single bad week.

While a dashboard like this would be good, I think that an order of magnitude difference warrants perhaps being less disappointed.

Not disagreeing, but don't forget how fast this thing can grow. It was doubling ... every 2 or 3 days? Smaller infected population buys you weeks of time, but that's all.

Exactly. And that's why it's important to remember that CA governor has issued as shelter-in-place order ahead of NY, while we had a 1/10X infection rate, which more than halved the slope of growth on the log scale.

Sure. I think everybody remembers. I imagine the actions by CA's governor not only saved a lot of lives in CA, but probably helped NY get its rear in gear.

But I'm saying something different: A full reopen without proper precautions would put CA right where NY was, in a surprisingly short time.

I think that's not the point though. While we're not hit as bad, we should have a reopening dashboard instead of a silly slideshow[1] with some rhetorical questions

[1]: https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/California...

>While we're not hit as bad

We are not hit as bad because of the actions of the government who has issued the shelter-in-place before NY did, when we had 1/10th the rate of infection.

I don't agree with everything the government does, but let's give credit where credit is due. That we were not hit as bad is not coincidental.

That give, I'm perfectly willing to cut them some slack.

> That we were not hit as bad is not coincidental

Well, you don't know that. There are states and countries that have not gone to "shelter-in-place" extremes and have been outperforming California.

New York is special in America. It's very dense, and every time you get on a subway train, which most of the city does every working day, you're sharing a cramped space with hundreds of random individuals. It's not hard to see why they've been hit harder than anywhere in the US.

To pretend the only possible difference is a binary distinction between lockdown or not is reductionist ad absurdum.

One upside of living near Tokyo is that I can say “I’ve seen denser than that” in arbitrary contexts

Parent comment is nowhere claiming that it is the only reason. Given that there wasn't enough testing capacity, contact tracing capacity or hospital capacity, what would you have differently? And on what basis?

Not hit that bad by C19. But what about other unintended consequences?

For example, in NYC, domestic violence calls are down. The fear is, the abusee is too afraid to call. Suicides are up. Substance abuse is up. Those who are locked down are putting on weight and becoming unhealthy; C19 does better when paired with other conditions. The economic fallout hasn't hit yet. And so on.

I'm not taking sides (i.e., pro v anti lockdown). I am noting that C19 cases and fatalities coded as C19 are not the only KPIs. There's a bigger picture. We need to look at that bigger piture.

We are hit as bad with the government lockdown, or at least in the ballpark. And bigger economy too, so it's more impactful overall.

While I somewhat agree (WA also has a silly slideshow alleging to be a dashboard with no goals on it) NY has completely failed it’s residents, while the Western Pact states have not.

I suspect the reality is these goals are nonsense and just provide a false sense of security.

Genuine questions: what makes ca have such lower number of deaths compared to ny, given it has a comparable number of tourists and both are crowded? Also, ca has a somewhat comparable climate to italy and spain, yet CA has fared much better. What the heck is the missing piece here?

Greece is also similar to italy and spain and it has far less numbers of deaths. East EU countries as well yet Russia is doing far worse. Very odd behaviour from this virus and i dont think the gaps are in counting methodology or over/under reporting.

It is possible that the strains in NY and surrounding are different than on the west coast. There is a very interesting hypothesis that the D614G mutation that is found in NY is more contagious than the strains found in CA for example.

I’ll preface this by saying I definitely don’t know the answer to the question, but I think sensitive dependence on initial conditions and just straight randomness have been severely under discussed as possible contributors around the world.

I think there’s some natural hubris here where humans think they have the ability to control the outcome, without pausing to wonder how accurate that really is.

One major factor is just how early California ordered residents to shelter-in-place (or "lockdown"). Several San Francisco Bay Area counties issued an order on March 17. Governor Newsom then issued a statewide order on March 19. On that day, California had 1,006 cases. Compare this to New York's 7,102 cases on March 20 when its residents were ordered to shelter-in-place, or Italy's 9,172 cases on March 9 when its national lockdown was instituted. So New York and Italy were already quite behind to start with.

California also has a few other things going for it, for example: CA's urban areas are not as dense as somewhere like NYC. Compared to Italy, the population is relatively young. Many people have professional jobs that can be done remotely (companies like Google and Facebook sent their employees home even before March 12). Public transit is very bad in CA, so almost everyone drives their own car.

SFchronicle seems to be doing a good job with infographic: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Checklist-for-Ba...

Love this. SF seems to be progressing rapidly towards the goal

Edit: Does anyone know why PPE supply is the one metric with little progress ? Seems to be the easiest thing to meet

Neither site is clear where the testing capacity goal comes from. For NY, it is 30 per 1k (3%). For Bay Area, it is 200 per 100k (.2%). If my math is right, that's a significant discrepancy.

Actually, I see NY's goal is monthly. So I guess that is more like 30 per 1k per 30 days (.1%).

There some discussion of necessary testing rates in this NY magazine article:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/white-house-plan-for...

It looks like .2% is at the low end of most ready-to-reopen requirements. In any event, it looks we're nowhere near a test for anyone who wants one.

Also, does anyone know of a good chart that graphs daily new cases vs new tests? It seems like that ratio would be significant, especially when comparing case rates between regions.

As far as I know, it's still the case that no reasonably-large country is doing much more coronavirus testing than the US right now. The UK is probably just about over the 30 tests per 1k per 30 days mark averaged over a week as of our last testing increase, Germany might still be slightly below it but I haven't seen recent figures from them and they seemed to have stalled out increasing testing, and other countries are similar.

“The United States currently ranks 32nd in Covid-19 tests per capita, one spot ahead of Belarus.” https://twitter.com/brianklaas/status/1259942315508064257

That ranking's not terribly informative. A lot of the countries heading it up are smaller ones since most countries are drawing from the same global pool of testing consumables, meaning that there's not much relationship between the difficulty of carrying out a particular number of tests and the size of the country, it's total tests done which doesn't tell you much about current testing rate, and large developed Western countries are close enough in testing rates that an actual ranking based on them probably wouldn't be very stable anyway.

And ahead of the UK, France, and South Korea

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-cumulative-tota...

The problem with talking about per capita testing numbers is that having a bigger population means you need a proportionally larger number of tests to administer to reach the same numbers as smaller countries. The will to test and the money to do so aren’t any issue. The problem is that we can’t just snap our fingers and make tens of millions of tests appear out of thin air. I think this point gets lost on a lot of people when they look at the corona scoreboard (likewise, people fixate on the large number of deaths in the US and ignore that we’re doing better than several European nations on a deaths per million basis).

> The problem is that we can’t just snap our fingers and make tens of millions of tests appear out of thin air.

You are correct - but we (or rather the government) can snap it's fingers and compel some private companies that are well positioned to be able to manufacture tests to do so at a higher priority than other business concerns - or we (again the government) can issue generous contracts for testing supplies that guarantees payment to private companies manufacturing them even if the original quota of tests requested by the government is above the level we end up needing.

I think that large countries actually have an advantage here - a small country might not have any internal industry that'd be capable of manufacturing tests without heavy retooling - or that industry might be so small and specialized that scaling it up is infeasible. But even in that sort of a situation they can use market based solutions to bid on tests in a manner that motivates private companies in other countries to feel confident committing to test production - and that's only needed if there isn't any sort of altruistic world-banding-together-to-fight-the-issue effort.

> can snap it's fingers and compel some private companies that are well positioned to be able to manufacture tests to do so at a higher priority than other business concerns

And we’ve done that with things like masks and ventilators. But there is a key limiting factor with the tests, the reagant supply. Again, can’t just snap our fingers and make it happen faster. This isn’t AWS, we can’t just spin up more supply in an instant.

How long does it take to double the reagent supply? Is there a number? Is it something we have started or not even that?

> Is it something we have started or not even that?

I would assume so. Are you under the impression that the US simply doesn’t want to test as many people as possible?

> Are you under the impression that the US simply doesn’t want to test as many people as possible?

Absolutely.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-says-too-much-coronavi...

> "So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad."

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-on-allowing-grand-pr...

> "They would like to have the people come off. I’d rather have the people stay [on the ship]. But I’d go with them. I told them to make the final decision. I would rather — because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault."

> "So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad."

He's not wrong though, look at the rest of the quote in context:

> "So the media likes to say we have the most cases, but we do, by far, the most testing. If we did very little testing, we wouldn't have the most cases. So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad,"

The correctly identified problem with increased testing is that lots of super geniuses, who apparently can't look past "big number is biggest" w.r.t. corona deaths, try to tie "most deaths" with "worst handling of the situation", completely ignoring, as I pointed out, that the US is doing better on a deaths/million basis than several European countries. Countries that supposedly have superior healthcare systems, healthier populations, and leaders not named Trump. Buuuuttt, no one wants to tie context like that to any of the numbers, so he's absolutely right that increased testing => increased reporting of infection => increased whining about how bad the country is doing.

And of course, this is all ignoring that it's not his call to make as far as how many tests are performed, otherwise we wouldn't be leading the world in absolute numbers of tests administered by a staggering degree. No, we'd be content to test nobody at all and brag about how no one is infected.

America does have just as good of an ability to secure reagent supplies as any other countries though, excluding the ones that produce it domestically. The exception time this is that different testing machines require different reagents.

It’s not like every country is getting a ration of the same number of units - so it shouldn’t be harder for large countries. Again this is likely an issue for smaller countries as they have to compete with America for a share of the reagent supply.

> It’s not like every country is getting a ration of the same number of units - so it shouldn’t be harder for large countries.

It is though. Again, if a country with 300M people wants to test as many people per capita as a country of 30M, it needs _ten times as many tests_.

Sure, but it likely has ten times the infrastructure to manufacture and deliver them.

The US is, in many ways, a bunch of ~30M person countries, akin to the European Union. Freedom of movement, no customs between them, powerful state-level governments, etc.

> Sure, but it likely has ten times the infrastructure to manufacture and deliver them.

Yes, in theory, but we're talking about trying to produce 10x of something limited by a resource in short supply the world over, with every country's government vying for their own cut. Instead of "reagent", pretend I told you the limiting factor was "Unobtanium." Hey no sweat, just find 10x of it! See how silly that line of reasoning is? Again, to put it in terms the HN crowd might understand, the production of physical goods isn't like spinning up servers in AWS.

Or are you just understand the impression that the US, who has produced by far the greatest number of tests (in absolute numbers) of any country in the world, just doesn't have the desire to obtain greater and greater numbers of tests?

> Or are you just understand the impression that the US, who has produced by far the greatest number of tests (in absolute numbers) of any country in the world, just doesn't have the desire to obtain greater and greater numbers of tests?

Yes. (I've answered this in more detail in the other comment thread, but Trump has repeatedly complained that testing = detected cases = bad look for him.)

There's no indication the Trump administration has invoked the Defense Production Act to ramp up reagent production. They'd be wise to do so, if it's a genuine bottleneck.

The claim was that it’s harder for the USA to get the required levels of unobtanium than a smaller country because it needs more.

In reality the USA has more purchasing leverage because it can exploit (and is exploiting) geopolitics, and can obtain at least as much reagent/unobtanium per capita as other countries right now.

To put it in terms you might understand, the USA has a better ability to source reagent than you do - see if you as an individual are able to procure even 1 litre of the stuff!

But none of that matters. You have x number of people, you need y number of tests. Just because it's harder to do doesn't mean you need to do it any less.

> But none of that matters.

Yes it does, it’s proportionally more difficult. If you want a country of 300M to have as many tests per capita as a country of 30M, you need _ten times as many tests_.

That's not what "proportionally" means.

FWIW my province of 4.4 million is stalled on tests being run because it's run out of additional symptomatic people to test at around 30 tests per 1k per 30 days, even though testing capacity is about double that, and still increasing.

Why not start testing randomly chosen asymptomatic people?

They did this week, but it has some limitations:

1. You can't actually randomly choose people, so it's being done on a fist-come, first-serve basis. 2. Testing all asymptomatic people on any regular basis would take orders of magnitude more tests, so it's not useful as a containment measure, just as a data-collection measure.

Insider knowledge here, but...the tools are rapidly being developed in California.

It would be great if the states had some kind of united way to collaborate on these efforts rather than individually inventing the wheel 50 times.

They can of course collaborate, it's not like there are federal regulations preventing that from happening.

I think the snarky point was that the Feds (in theory) exist to provide that sort of coordination.

That said - it's still a bit amusing that at this point there might need to be some sort of second federal government to make up for the fact that the first one keeps fumbling everything.

If only we had a deep state - then maybe we'd get the things that need doing done.

The Western States Pact is in some sense a second parallel federal government.

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/04/27/colorado-nevada-join-calif...

Of course state governments have previously formed multilateral agreements on other topics such as water rights.

It's been fascinating to watch several of these pop up, especially the big three (Western, Midwest, and Northeast).

https://twitter.com/johnrobb/status/1253455955666382848

That's not what the Federal Government is for, though, even in theory. The Federal government handles foreign affairs and interstate disputes.

Sure, that’s why we have the Federal Emergency Do-Nothing Agency and the Centers for Disease Non-Control.

A pandemic is very much an interstate problem, so it's in scope even using your narrow and outdated definition of the US government structure.

I just found this very relevant history:

1799 The first quarantine station and hospital in America was built in 1799 at the port of Philadelphia after a yellow fever outbreak in 1793.

1878 The National Quarantine Act was passed in 1878, shifting quarantine powers from state to federal government.

1944 The Public Health Service Act formed the federal government’s quarantine authority in 1944.

1967 CDC (National Communicable Disease Center) took over federal quarantine functions in 1967.

1970s CDC reduced the number of quarantine stations from 55 to 8 because infectious diseases were thought to be a thing of the past.

2004–2007 Number of quarantine stations increased to 20 because of concerns about bioterrorism after World Trade Center attack in 2001 and worldwide spread of disease after SARS outbreak in 2003.

https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/quarantine-stations-us.html

So fighting pandemics officially became a function of the federal government almost a century and a half ago.

Yes, it's more of an intrastate disagreement with this particular infectious disease.

If you learned there were such regulations, would it surprise you? :/

On the flip side the feds might pick a sub-optimal solution, as opposed to 50 separate independent actors who can try different things and converge on a best answer.

Why is this inside knowledge? Why does the government not tell people what is in the pipeline?

If only there was a team, a national team...tasked with coordinating this effort.

Then we'd have it next year instead of some now.

A team for tasks, like the Air Force for air and Space Force for space?

Like some kind of team tasked with disease control? Or emergencies.

Like a health force? It's like space force but for health.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna11...

Now that would be a good idea no? Some sort of, I don't know, decently funded.... center maybe? Set up for disease control.

It exists for Santa Clara:

https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/bay-area-health-o...

San Mateo now has a nice dashboard with daily cases and cases per city: https://www.smchealth.org/post/san-mateo-county-covid-19-dat...

There's a guy on the /r/bayarea subreddit that's been doing god's work and providing transparency on all new cases and deaths in our 9 counties.

Agreed. Especially with the Musk stunt, too many people in the bay area and CA are questioning the continued SIP, and it would be good for the government to come out really transparent in how they are making the decision.

California desperately needs something like this.

Is it informative? Where did these numbers come from? Why are they good thresholds?

As someone living in NYC, getting to some threshold Cuomo pulled out of his ass doesn't mean anything to me.

Need a McKinsey press conference.

Newsom wants to run for President, so expect a timid response from him on re-opening the Calif. economy.

Ironically, the Bay Area has close ties to China, so we're probably the closest to herd immunity of any US location.

You can look at the local hospital dashboard and see there's no Bay Area corona crisis - the numbers have been the same for 2 months now:

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

You think Bay Area is closer to herd immunity than NYC?

That's not how herd immunity works. If the bay area was close to herd immunity, you would see >NYC level death numbers from there.

No, the Bay Area corona ramped up starting Dec., so you won't see NY-style weekly death rates.

Let me put it this way. If you live in the Bay Area, you know people from Wuhan. We got a huge head start on the rest of America.

Enough people in NYC have died that you would see the excess mortalities very clearly even if you smeared them out over a few months.

Also tests have shown that almost no people in the Bay Area were infected prior to mid-Feb and only a low single digit percentage had antibodies in Santa Clara county as of early April.

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/04/testing-poole...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v...

There is no evidence supporting your theory and plenty of strong evidence contradicting it. "Lots of people have Chinese friends and therefore everyone is already infected" is not a convincing line of argument.

Edit: This post is wrong. I didn't bother to read the article and was off base on most of the facts. Leaving this post only so I can remember my shame.

NYC is a single city and county with 350k government employees and they've had a coordinated data effort for nearly a decade.

"Bay Area" is like 8 counties and dozens of cities, each which have their own tech stacks and legal teams, pulling their efforts in different directions.

I'm disappointed that the state of California hasn't come up with a few APIs which could easily reduce the redundant efforts of tens of thousands of localities. I've been prototyping some ideas to show the state what modern government could be like if there was a coordinated effort.

This dashboard covers all of NY state

NYC has five counties and still has some vestiges of county governance like sheriffs.

I don't think NYC does. Nassau County, yes - but that's outside of city limits.

Every borough is a county.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Sheriff%27s_Offi...

NYC is a city made up of 5 counties, whereas Los Angeles County is a county made up of several cities.

Every state does things differently, so I can see the confusion.

Nah, this is about state level data nice explanation though

NYC is actually within five counties: New York County, Kings County, Bronx County, Queens County, and Richmond County.

And each county is a borough.

New York = Manhattan

Kings = Brooklyn

Bronx = The Bronx

Queens = Queens

Richmond = Staten Island

Just to keep things extra complicated...

The linked webpage covers 62 counties, way more than the Bay Area.

This comment and the great edit are a positive combo. They help remind people that California doesn't have uniquely high population density.

Without reminders, that assumption tends to go unchecked. Silly (but real) example: I have heard someone say that SJ has higher population per sq mi than Manhattan.

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