To great effect, mind you. SF County has the lowest rate of new cases per 100k of any major city in the country by a pretty significant margin [0].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-c...
If you really care about public safety, you should pay attention to homelessness, drug addiction, and the problems in the streets! It's killing people 4x as fast as Covid, and yet nobody cares! This is exactly the problem that GP was talking about, and you come back with a smug "well our Covid rates are really low" comment.
You're ignoring the point by looking only at Covid. Look at the rest of the data. A city is more than its covid rate.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Tw...
> Older Black men living alone in residential hotels are dying at rates far higher than their portion of the city population. And yet most of us will see these statistics, think they’re a shame, and quickly move on.
> Even as [we] devote tremendous time and attention to quashing COVID-19, another public health epidemic that has killed far fewer San Franciscans. As of Saturday, that tally was 123.
> We’re a city that freaks out about a jogger running past without a mask, but doesn’t blink at someone injecting themselves in the neck on a Tenderloin sidewalk.
The article suggests the number was already growing at an alarming rate even before covid. While this is tragic, I'm not sure we can attribute these deaths solely to covid lockdowns.
It also behooves us to consider the practicality of public health measures. It's extremely easy for a californian mayor to tell people to stay home/wear masks and get a relatively high level of compliance. Getting people to stop using drugs is a much taller order.
And do WHAT, for them? What concrete thing are you supposed to DO?
No matter what YOU think is a solution, most of the homeless will refuse consent. Now what?
You can't just force a person into mental health or drug treatment without their consent unless they commit a crime or are an immediate danger to themselves.
Needle exchanges help. Methadone clinics help. And for the people who don't comply?
Most of the "homeless solutions" are effectively "move them somewhere else--preferably jail". That's really what people who want SF to "get control" of the homeless problem actually want.
Edit: Okay all you genius downvoters, let's hear your "solutions" for the SF homeless problem. I'm waiting with bated breath for your glorious insights ...
I have a theory that homelessness is an industry that employs tons of people who are unable to find work elsewhere. The homeless are the product.
Non profit org, public sector employees, donations, city employees, univ PhD researchers, grants etc...for every dollar, more than 60%(I will have to look up the exact number)..will go towards managing the homeless rather than aiding the homeless find a roof over their heads.
This might seem like a cynical way to view this but there is no reason why SF is spending in excess of 500 million dollars in ONE YEAR and still have homeless on the street.
There is literally zero incentive to solve homelessness. Now imagine the problem is resolved..how many people will be out of work? These are not drug addicts or mentally ill..they are educated and normal functioning people who need jobs..they need to be employed. Without a job, they will be unemployed and likely unhoused due to economic necessity.
Of course, people can migrate out of bay area. That would be the rational thing to do. Millions of immigrants do this every single day. But Americans won’t travel coast to coast in the worlds most boring homogeneous country where any freeway or Walmart or mcD in CA is no diff than in NH if economic survival and upward mobility is the imperative.
That’s my 2c anyways.
Since the US isn't an island, anytime SF loosens up, CV will immediately spike anyway, so no real advantage gained.
You end up creating a backlash.
If the vaccines live up to their advance billing some small number of lives will be saved, but it is very unclear whether, in the long run, more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it.
I have yet to see data that shows any evidence of this theory. If you are aware of any existing data that points to this conclusion, I'd love to see it.
Edit: Okay so maybe I skipped to the punchline. Just trying to say politics influences data or lack of data.
Worldwide poverty and deferred healthcare for vaccines and cancer screenings will have a decade the rack up an order of magnitude more deaths than will ever be directly attributed to COVID.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/health/coronavirus-childh...
"CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommend every child continues to receive routine vaccinations during the COVID-19 outbreak." [0]
Personally, I'm hoping vaccinations against COVID are what ends the pandemic.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/visit/vaccination-durin....
The US is running at an average 1500 deaths a day now.
We lost about 132 deaths per day from suicide in 2019. Even if that doubles, that leave a lot of room for additional deaths due to deferred medical care. The numbers just don't add up.
April, May, and June had around 10% excess YLL. July and August had 17.5% excess YLL.
https://healthcostinstitute.org/hcci-research/the-impact-of-...
The data I've seen on suicides is cautiously optimistic in many places.
"Nevertheless, a reasonably consistent picture is beginning to emerge from high income countries. Reports suggest either no rise in suicide rates (Massachusetts, USA11; Victoria, Australia13; England14) or a fall (Japan,9 Norway15) in the early months of the pandemic. The picture is much less clear in low income countries, where the safety nets available in better resourced settings may be lacking. News reports of police data from Nepal suggest a rise in suicides,12 whereas an analysis of data from Peru suggests the opposite.10"
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352
There is good data saying that people have delayed medical care (including me), but I can't find anything about detailed results.
On the other hand, if you are trying to distinguish COVID from the effects of trying to control it, I would like to point out that none of the "lockdown" restrictions have restricted access to medical care. That is either a personal choice or a consequence of overwhelmed facilities.
Yeah. But this idea breaks down as soon as one needs to leave the house for basic necessities. In that case, you would be much better off in a community which takes the issue seriously.
> more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it
Not many lives should be lost by lockdowns, if at all. Perhaps if this issue wasn't so politicized, governments could intervene (and some have, in Europe) to help those in need.
https://youtu.be/bzh6HwN0gbw?t=398
Better yet, watch the whole thing. And check the public numbers.
Stop spreading misinformation.
See for yourself at https://thecovidcomplex.com/state/california/san%20francisco...
Full disclosure, I built this website. Data is sourced from the New York Times. It’s the same dataset they use to power the interactive map that was linked. And I just discovered I have an error sharing links to counties with spaces. Go figure lol
Edit: 4 minutes since posting and a downvote. At least explain yourself.
I disagree with the statement that the number is meaningless. Media outlets are free to singularly report the number of positive cases. I see it all over mainstream media (CNN being the worst offender), Twitter, etc.
What's the issue with simply reversing that metric to show many people are COVID negative?
Final note, I'm happy to make updates based on additional data but public datasets are slim pickings. And I'm not in to tapping individual state/county datasets.
NYT publishes daily case counts and death counts across the United States by county.
edit: COVID negative is unequivocally the incorrect term to use. That was a mental mistake on my part. The specific term I use is “did not get a positive COVID test”.
Second, the number of positive cases is an affirmative result from people that have taken, and failed, covid tests. Your metric takes people who have never taken a test and lumps them into "COVID negative," which is pretty self-evidently extremely misleading.
I contend that if you are not taking a test it’s because you didn’t need a test.
It’s also misleading to report only case positivity. Some areas of the country allow only people who have active symptoms to get a test thereby skewing the results.
Another reason you might not take a test is that you don't know you need it.
Asymptotic transmission is real (per the CDC) so I’ll accept that as fact. Ultimately if you view yourself as a high risk then it should be a personal responsibility to protect yourself. I believe my family and I to be low risk - citizens should be free to decide their tolerance for risk and act accordingly. Other families across the country and world have similar feelings about health.
I’m frustrated watching small business owners get crushed, bad their employees lose their livelihood.
There is significant damage being done with shutdowns and lockdowns that is with great chance worse than this disease itself.
But I think your point is strong enough to be presented without exaggeration or misleading.
I understand this is your site and you built it, and it's hard to let that go. But, I would implore you to rethink it until you get the data needed to add real insights to the conversations, not misleading stats based on what you have now.
> What's the issue with simply reversing that metric to show many people are COVID negative?
I need to do better.
True, but the statistic is still useful with respect to comparisons to other locations in the country under the same reporting constraints.
We can't make claims about how much of the population at large is healthy because we don't actually know who is healthy and who is covid-positive/infectious/asymptomatic (and this is precisely why there are indiscriminate mask mandates in SF and elsewhere)
"Simply reversing" that metric gets a number that mostly shows how many people have not been tested within 14 days and thus noone has any idea on their COVID status. It's negligent to imply that this means that they are or would be negative.
Furthermore, even the original data point seems not literally true - this is based on net new cases, which would exclude people who became a net new case 15 or more days ago but actually have received a positive test recently because they are, for example, in the hospital right now and have gotten a repeated test that shows that they are still positive.
I would argue that making factually true statements for which the obvious implication actually is not true is inappropriate - and if it's not by mistake (as it seems out of your other comments) then it's intentionally misleading and should be downvoted.
One shows the minimum scale of the problem - if it's big, that's a problem, even if it's no bigger than the value reported. E.g. if 10% tested positive, that'd be unambiguously worrying / news-worthy.
The other shows the maximum awareness of a problem. If it's big, you have no idea if awareness is low (many neutrals) or if incidence is low (many negatives). Everyone in SF could have COVID, and that 99.798% number could still be factually correct. Or it could be that only those .202% got it. There's no way to know from that number alone.
On your site, El Paso is still at around 98% negative tests, which makes it appear like everything is under control when in reality the hospitals were mostly overrun and had to send patients outside of the county.
There are three groups. Positive, negative, and untested. The untested group is the biggest, and you can't call them COVID negative, because there's really no reason. They're not (yet) either positive or negative.
No where on thecovidcomplex.com do I use the term "COVID negative".
I applaud people who want to confirm what I have provided. All data is available on the page and I’ve provided links to all sources.