Edit: This was in Orange County CA, not rural. And when I say "rallies" I'm talking thousands of people, not small gatherings.
I had to go do business in LA specifically around Manhattan Beach and Inglewood, and the folks that live there were taking me to strip malls where all the businesses looked closed but we're all actually open.
They just had their windows covered. I'm talking about an MMA gym next to a hair salon next to an Ethiopian restaurant.
But I don't think that SF's 62 deaths/100k (compared to e.g. 240 for LA and 232 for Miami) is solely explained by that, and that the tighter (and more adhered to) restrictions did play a role.
Without the poorly considered relaxations in Oct/Nov, despite clear indicators for a worsening situation, it'd have ended up better...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
All it takes is a single spreader moving from outside of the metro area to negate the effect of the lockdown, specially if a considerable portion of the population is quite militant in their refusal to follow even the most basic health and safety precautions.
So are the vast majority of people, and greater population density makes it harder to control the spread of communicable disease. So you’d expect, all other things being equal, not only thr vast majority of cases but the highest per capita cases to be in the metro areas.
But, actually, the highest per capita infections (both total and current) were mostly in rural, not metropolitan, counties.
Can you please cite your sources for this claim? I just did the math using the numbers of infections[0] and the county populations[1] and it doesn't really seem to match up with your claim at all.
There are 58 counties in California.
San Bernardino, LA, and Riverside counties are numbers 4, 5, 6 respectively for highest cases per capita and all have populations above 2.2 million.
Of the bottom 10 counties in cases per capita, only 2 have a population larger than 100k (SF, Humboldt)
[0] https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...
Another study in Eur J Clin Inv had similar findings comparing countries: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484
COVID went wild basically everywhere. There were a few strong exceptions: China (apparently), Australia, New Zealand and some others. What these had in common was very strict police enforcement, which led to some dramatic scenes like people getting welded into their houses in China, or houses in Australia getting broken into by police on suspicion of too many people gathering.
In my _opinion_, lockdowns didn't work elsewhere because most cases are not from casual public transmission in places like stores, restaurants etc. Rather, events like kickbacks, dinner parties, and practices like in-home workers (nannies, cleaners etc) continued throughout the pandemic, or resumed shortly after the original March 2020 shockwave. While strident police enforcement of physical distancing could eliminate cases, and seemed to in a few places, the half measures used by most of the world did little-to-nothing positive while being an economic and cultural disaster.
Personally, I never caught COVID and rarely socialized during the pandemic. All the cases I heard of stemmed from the kind of thing I mention above: private dinner parties, nannies and so forth, rather than casual public transmission.
You, or any individual may have taken social distancing seriously but it's clear many or most did not, including people on both political "sides", up to and including governors, members of congress etc.
Further, as a comparison, Tokyo Metro has 38 million people, California has 38 million people. Tokyo Metro has ~6500 people per square mile, California has 240 per square mile. Tokyo Metro had and still has people commuting in very crowded trains every weekday. California mostly people drive cars. California closed restaurants. Tokyo Metro never closed restaurants.
Yes, Tokyo is going through a "spike" right now but compared to California it's still tiny. Compare Tokyo Metro's current "spike" (~2k people per day) with any of California's spikes at 40k per day, 20x more.
Some people will claim testing but that doesn't fit the facts either. Deaths from COVID in Tokyo Metro. California 62k death, Tokyo Metro, 2k dead. And, if you believe the attribution of death by COVID is bad then all you have to do is look at the death rate from all causes and see that Japan is doing much better than the USA
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
I have no idea what Japan did right or got lucky with. Various speculations abound. Japanese don't shake hands, hug and kiss friends. Japanese may be commonly taking some medicine for unrelated things that happens to provide protection. Japanese might have more people with genetic immunity. Japanese mask compliance might be higher. Japanese aren't obese (I'm sure there's some other non-obese country they can be compared to). Japanese have a different diet (not sure what other countries have similar diets)
I recognize that even with restaurants open it's possible just the various other factors are/were enough to keep R low enough.... I really have no clue. Personally I mostly stayed locked up. I live alone. Saw less than 1 person a month in person, usually an outdoor walk with masks on.
My guess is that the low obesity rate is the critical factor, but that remains somewhat speculative.
A) Japan has a more temperate climate
B) Japan is an island and was pretty strict about locking down travel and forcing everyone entering the country to quarantine for 14 days
C) Japanese culture seems to promote very rigid adherence to rules and proper social etiquette.
If you can act earlier, maintain a external boundary, and maintain a low enough level to trace then I think you can stay in a very good state with minimal inconveniences. But once the infection rate has passed a certain level, more stringent strategies are needed to get back to the same low state.
At least in hindsight, the closing of schools might have been a huge mistake.
In Nov-Feb, I was losing 40-60 employees a week to infection or quarantine. Mostly people in essential IT support positions
My sons school was open most of the year, but shutdown for a month due to teacher quarantines.
> Hospitalization rates in children are significantly lower than hospitalization rates in adults with COVID-19, suggesting that children may have less severe illness from COVID-19 compared to adults.
Less severe response to it, not "less chance of getting it." And then just two lines later:
> Recent evidence suggests that compared to adults, children likely have similar viral loads in their nasopharynx,7 similar secondary infections rates, and can spread the virus to others
I don't know how you arrived at your opinion here.
But I don't follow the science closely enough. I hope they're making the right call, because it's really hard on the kids. I'm just glad my own little guy is not of school age yet, and in fact is young enough to be mostly oblivious to the whole thing.
There are a lot of confounding variables in these analyses. It’s going to take years to tease them apart, and we may never truly know for certain in some cases.
The point is not "is it wise to take precautions"; that's obvious. The point is we don't necessarily have great data on which precautions work better than others because they're largely all being put into effect at the same time.
We actually do, though, and it's preventing close contact of non-household members and preventing sharing enclosed spaces with non-household members for long periods of time.
People spread the virus before they even know they're sick, and a subset of sick people either need to go to work despite being sick, or they just don't care.
It's going to take time and years of research to tease out things like "did closing schools specifically help".
It wasn’t until we closed schools that the trend reversed.
People are so quick to blame fear without actually looking at the data
The other way to think about it is that it wasn’t until things got bad that people got cautious.
Kind of how people take homeopathic drugs when they are sickest.
Unfortunately, some of the things done were disruptive, and if they were also ineffective, that will lead to blame. But our mission should be honesty first, and have faith that reasonable people can accept that the best decisions were taken with the information available at the time.
Regardless, school is being done online. Kids that needed laptops got them.
Right, I forgot University of Phoenix regularly matches their in-person counterparts in terms of quality. Keep telling yourself that teachers who were never trained to do remote teaching are anywhere near the same effectiveness as before. You ever dissect something virtually? Somethings can simply not be learned through a screen. Physical education, dealing when your crush looks at you in the eye, literally anything "hands-on" like swinging a hammer at a nail, the of useful skills that can only be developed in the presence of another human are tremendous. Funnily, most of the useful things learned at school for most people are not the curriculum and it is these things that are missing.
How do you isolate when there's more members than actual rooms in the home & only one one restroom?