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Comment by Rebelgecko | Hacker News Reader

It's weird because back in October the head of LA County Health Department gave a briefing where she said that contact tracing shows that 15% of COVID cases are due to outdoor dining.

Then the the board of supervisors asked her more specific questions about the data when they were preparing the latest lockdown order. Instead of reiterating or expanding on what she said before, she walked back her claims and said there was no specific data about the spread of COVID due to outdoor dining.

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Back in October the LA County Health Department lied. Apparently the actual number is less than 4%.

> The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health admitted during a Board of Supervisor's meeting Tuesday that there is no hard scientific evidence linking the recent COVID-19 surge to back up their move to shut down outdoor dining.

https://abc7.com/covid-19-data-restaurants-outdoor-dining/82...

https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/los-angeles-department...

It's really strange to me, that we have a vaccine, but we don't have real, deep insight into where transmission really do take place. What public transport for example where people usually don't talk. What about workplace meeting rooms. I would want money spent on researching transmission pathways in depth.

They do have such investigations in South Korea, Taiwan, and similar places with low spread and competent leadership.

In the US community spread is far too out of control and contact tracing is far too underfunded to get anywhere close to comprehensive data about this.

There have been some useful small case investigations published by the US CDC.

Its rather simple, fill out a form for every patient admitted to ICU. Were you wearing a mask? how diligently? were you going outside? how often? where? Add random check by scanning peoples social media profile photos to see if they lied.

Instead we dont even know what percentage of hospitalized actually used masks, something super basic and easy to check.

Not worth checking if they were wearing a mask. You wouldn't learn much from that. People lie, stretch the truth, and mis remember all the time.

> Its rather simple, fill out a form for every patient admitted to ICU.

With all due respect, it's like you've never met Americans. People wouldn't cooperate if asked to, and the hospitals can't afford to hire the people it would take to process the forms.

The primary question to ask in America is always this: "Can an investor make money out of this?"

There is no specific data because measuring is basically impossible. You´d need to control for all variables in a situation like that and that just cant be done or at least wont be doable any time soon.

This is all just an emotional reaction based on what you consider to be probable. It isnt based in science or data, it´s based in hypotheticals.

That's absolutely not true. Contact tracing is a thing. Most of the restaurants I've patronized in L.A. this year required a contact name / number before being seated for tracing purposes.

Contact tracing can work and NZ has had success, mostly meeting its “80% traced in 3 days” target. However the system cost is something like NZ$70m and can handle up to 1000 cases daily. Doing this for 225k cases per day seems almost insurmountable from way down here.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/122433365/... https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/oversight-contact-tracin...

Which only tells you who was there at any given time. And I doubt that data is correct, we had multiple cases where people lied on the forms. And then you still don't know where they caught it. It only tells officials who to call. They is always a huge margin of error. And that is when contact tracing is working at scale. German authorities basically gave up on it because there are too many cases.

That's insane. Here in Nashville, TN I have NEVER been required to give my personal information to visit to a restaurant or bar. At what point do the people of California start to wake up about big brother, destruction of freedoms, and government control? I am so happy I left San Francisco in 2018.

Utah bars scan the dotcode on dyrovers licenses, so even if you are just there for music or friends, a record might be kept. That was well before 2020.

Utah loves laws that hassle drinkers, because they're a bunch of Mormons.

Calm down. It's BS, LA resident never even been asked for info.

From outside the US, this attitude is impossible to understand when there's 9/11 worth of horrible, miserable, lonely deaths each and every day.

It's so strange. After 9/11, Americans completely remade their society and started a series of pointless, losing wars. But COVID has killed a hundred times as many, seriously injured god knows how many more, and people just go on about "big brother, destruction of freedoms, and government control".

That's what's "insane" to me - a major, deadly pandemic that the world's richest country refuses to deal with due to clinical paranoia.

After the initial outbreak we never got low enough in LA for tracing to actually be useful.

I'm in the Bay Area and I have never been asked for contact info for outdoor dining. Apparently restaurants are supposed to ask people who dine indoors.

I've dined outdoors at about 10 different restaurants in the past couple months, but only one has asked for contact details (they just immediately entered me into their reservations app). So agree that this does not seem to be a widespread practice.

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