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Comment by ngngngng | Hacker News Reader

The community I grew up in in California purposefully threw rallies and went out of their way to rebel against every single restriction. I keep this in mind when people say California's restrictions didn't work.

Edit: This was in Orange County CA, not rural. And when I say "rallies" I'm talking thousands of people, not small gatherings.

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Still, the vast majority of cases in California have been in the metropolitan areas that have also had the strongest restrictions.

Except these surrounding towns act as virus reservoirs for the large cities. That limits the effectiveness of restrictions. The “become COVID-19 carriers to own the libs” strategy kinda worked.

The vast majority of cases will basically always be in big cities because that's where the most people live. We'd need per-capita data for it to be a useful comparison.

It's out there. It's also not hard to take raw data and divide by the population size which is publicly available for all counties and cities.

SF fared a lot better than LA, which was a lot looser with restrictions...

Of course SF has a good hospital coverage, displaced a lot of poorer residents. Thus fewer people working high-risk jobs in SF actually end up counted in SF's stats.

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...

Assymptomatic carriers have been observed to carry the virus and spread it to those around them for periods that range between a few weeks up to a couple of months.

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.

No SF had stronger restrictions with high adherence and had much lower per capita case and death rates. It’s hard to say how much of that is causal though (SF has temperate humid weather and a large white collar workforce that could afford to stay home that could have helped independent of lockdown).

The restrictions were almost never enforced, and only occasionally against businesses. Individuals only got arrested when they did something dumb like refusing to leave a business when refusing to wear a mask. The “lockdown” was a joke: people either chose to follow it or did not. People traveled a hundred miles or so to get haircuts in less restrictive counties of California. So it’s not really fair to compare counties when regions were crossed so often.

> Still, the vast majority of cases in California have been in the metropolitan areas that have also had the strongest restrictions.

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.

>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...

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-counties/states/ca

Just in case anyone thinks this was confined to rural areas it was not.

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.

Yeah, the speakeasy gym thing was all across SoCal if not further. Probably given the low compliance we should have left gyms open officially.

It sounds like the restrictions didn't work at all in that community.

You can’t assert this without confirming that zero restrictions would have led to the same number or fewer deaths.

What I meant is that restrictions are ineffective if they are ignored, not that they literally had no effect.

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