California unemployment claims rocket higher, worst in five months
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
Seems extreme, most states are going back to normal
The reality is all these restrictions could very well be taking a bad situation and making it 100x worse.
I highly encourage comparing public data between regions and across policy changes. There is very little correlation between restrictions and impact to key metrics. See for yourself: https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/
If the question asking which state was most restrictive, select the worst looking charge, otherwise select the best looking one.
Kind of indicates that the graphs are cherry-picked.
Nobody's ever done this before. Nobody knows if it works. And it really isn't the critics job to prove that restrictions don't work. It's upon all these people enacting to them to prove they actually work, and do so in a level that justifies their immense social cost. To date, people who point this out are harassed, bullied, mocked and gaslit.
Society is participating in a huge uncontrolled experiment... and nobody even consented to it. Neat, ain't it?
Infections? Mortality? Hospitalizations? Economic?
To save others the bother, the quiz is OC from someone named Tom Wood, an apparent liberatarian, contrarian, freq guest on Fox News, and COVID concern troll of some sort.
That is pretty weak sauce. Does it really matter who published it? It's freaking charts based on public data! It's not like they made any of it up! You can go right to the state websites and the CDC and create the same set of charts on your own!!
Why do so many people get so upset when people present publicly available data that goes against the narrative? Seriously. Do you have any idea how many times I've been called "dangerous" just for simply posting a screenshot of a state covid dashboard? Seriously, what gives?
Current thru 2021/04. Before delta variant.
Per the principle of charity, I'll say this rhetoric contains errors of omission.
Please update this thesis with current data, inclusive of all jurisdictions. Then update again once positivity dips below 1%, which is hopefully sooner than later.
If that doesn't demonstrate to you the benefit of masks, vax, mandates, testing, and whatever else you object to, I ask again:
What measure of proof do you require?
I don't have to prove anything. It bothers me immensely that people think its the skeptics job to somehow prove that what we are doing doesn't work. That isn't how science works. Extraordinary claims (eg: lockdowns work to a degree that justifies their costs) require extraordinary evidence.
> You assume those restrictions work. This has not been proven at all.
What evidence do you require to prove that mask mandates are effective?
You are the judge here, neither plaintiff nor defendant. I do not ask you to prove anything.
He has many many books, and a popular show (not on Fox news) talking about how history can give of insights into how the government has in the past, and will in the future abuse is citizens. He also talks on economics, and public policy from a libertarian angle.
In the age of COVID and the MASSIVE amounts us government abuse that has been since under the guise of "emergency" I feel that is important message to be getting out there
I have bigly doubts that you are any kind of libertarian, left right or center.
Hell you could not even spell the man's name correctly
First, we know that masks help to reduce spread. There have been large-scale studies that show conclusive results along these lines. Like https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask... .
Second, we know that to some degree, mandates affect compliance levels. Here I think the data is less clear. One study (can't find link) showed that a mask mandate was something that just lagged a population increasing mask usage on their own. And it's imaginable that for some populations, a mandate might decrease compliance, when they might have otherwise masked up voluntarily. But for other populations, mandates increase compliance.
But the point is separate from mandates: "mitigation" works. Meaning, social practices like mask use and distancing, whether mandated or not. Those practices drive down disease prevalence. So does vaccination.
And people are Really bad at visualize exponential growth. Here's an example: Given the current understanding of mRNA effectiveness against Delta infection, you can even estimate counterfactual Rt. For instance, right now in Portland OR, regional Rt is around 0.91. So there's a halving rate of a few weeks. But given Portland's vaccination rate, if we had the exact same mitigation levels other than the vaccination rate, but if no one in this region were vaccinated, regional Rt would be around 2, meaning a doubling rate of 1-2 weeks. That is a huge difference in amount of suffering. And estimates of R0 for Delta (absent any mitigation) range from 5-9, so by that measure, current mitigation levels are saving a lot of suffering and a lot of lives.
Explain Florida. Explain Sweden.
When we jumped into this hot mess back in March of 2020 there was not a shred of evidence that any of these mitigations worked. To date, there still isn't--I wouldn't trust any research conducted in the heat of the moment. People don't have a level head right now. It will take decades to fully determine what worked and what didn't.
I bothers me greatly that we are all unconsenting participants in an uncontrolled experiment. When you call all this it for what is, people gaslight you and bully you. All these "experts" are no better than witch doctors or rain dancers. They are making all these mandates with zero clue as to their efficiency. It's highly immoral and unethical.
(Prior to delta. I have no idea where they stand now.)
Unless you're using a different metric?
Sweden did much worse than the other nordics. Who are very similar. The only difference being mandates. Therefore: mandates saved lives.
https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-covid-no-lockdown-str...
Middle of the pack? 145th out of 185. Worse than Russia, better than USA.
This is purely for surgical masks, it found no impact from cloth.
By far most mandate compliant masks even in high mask populations are cloth. There might be a conflation going on here.
Did you mean to say "take a fucking quiz"? Because I was expecting to "see for <myself>" some useful information from that page.
Sure, let's compare Iowa and Michigan (spoiler, those are the two states in the first question) when they have different demographics, different population densities, just completely different situations.
You don't compare a death line from Iowa with a death line from Michigan, and conclude Iowa is "better" than Michigan just because it has a lower death rate at one point in time. You compare a single state to what it might have been had the restrictions been better or worse. You look at counterfactuals. And you can do that with science and data.
So yes, you can take a region like, say, NYC, which had horrible lines in the beginning of the pandemic, and still conclude that it would have been far worse if not for the mitigation efforts it put in place. And you can look at other regions with lower population density, or populations that weren't well-tracked, regions with better death numbers than someplace like NY, and still conclude that they completely mismanaged the situation compared to what the numbers could have been.
To just take two death lines from two different areas with completely different on-the-ground realities is just cherry-picking - at best motivated reasoning and at worst dishonest intent.
Besides all that, even examining the numbers in the way the quiz wants to - but with current numbers, numbers that extend past the arbitrary cutoff point in those graphs - they show that Iowa currently has a worse Rt than Michigan, worse test positivity, disease prevalence that is almost twice as bad as Michigan, and checking today's data, Iowa's deaths per million are actually worse than Michigan's. (https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/us-coron...) In a state with less than 1/3 the population density.
Throughout this thread you're also using absolutist language and exaggeration in ways that are literally untrue. You're demanding proof and then rejecting proof when it's presented. Really straining the boundaries of the "assume good faith" rule we follow on this site.
I hope the mask mandates stay, especially for places where distancing is hard. Everyone who knowingly exposes others to illness is at least forced to reduce the trajectory of their droplet spread somewhat now.
Somehow up until now, society has managed to function just fine without everybody wearing masks all the time. How do you even know masks work? Trusting some rushed research done in the middle of all this with tons of outside pressure to get the "correct" result?
Even if masks do work, to what extent? And seriously, society has done fine without them. Plus, I dunno about anybody else but masks are a pain in the ass and I like seeing faces... if I had to wear a mask all the time that would have a substantial impact on my mental health (not to say it already has had impact on my mental health)
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...
One cannot question Covid orthodoxy without getting burned.
“Thanks to millions of vaccinations, California’s economy is open. There are no county tiers, capacity limits, or physical distancing requirements” - https://covid19.ca.gov/safely-reopening/
The only new restrictions I’m aware of is verifying people are vaccinated. Given ca’s vacs rate that shouldn’t be a huge issue.
My guess would be this was caused by the delta variant concerns by companies and individuals, not any restrictions. Companies pushed back their back to office and we didn’t see a delta surge like elsewhere and that could be due to personal choices which prevented the surge being as significant but also cut commerce back a bit.
Edit: Jeeze downvotes for pointing out its not state restrictions. Everyone really wants to bag on CA govt regardless of what’s actually happening.
Notably, on a county-breakdown, unemployment rates are highest in rural counties where anti-vax settlements are pervasive. (https://edd.ca.gov/newsroom/unemployment-august-2021.htm)
Also notable: the CA labor department hasn't actually released an update for September, or a PR release about jobless claims through Sep 18, so I'm curious as to where the Mercury News got its information.
But yeah, blaming restrictions on any dip in jobs is not justified based on data, at least none mentioned in this thread or that I’m aware of at the moment. As the OP phrased it with the sarcastic use of “wild guess” it seems that in their opinion since it’s CA it was by definition regulations and actual evidence is not needed. It seems some are searching for any way they can gripe about CA policies.
As I’d said, if it’s Covid related then my guess is the public seeing headlines about the fiascos in other states for the past several months led to pull backs.
Cases down? Keep the restrictions, they clearly are working! Cases up? Keep the restrictions, we still need them! And the cycle continues forever.
Nowhere does anybody actually ask “do the restrictions actually work?”. The answer seems to be “not really”. Compare data and see for yourself: https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/
They're probably on the verge of being able to relax some mitigation measures, but those mitigation measures are what keeps those numbers low, so that requires a big degree of caution. I definitely wouldn't say they are being too conservative with it, they're just on the verge of being able to relax a smidge.
This circular logic makes me tear my hair out. "Cases down? Lockdowns are working! Can't stop now" "Cases up? We need to keep these lockdowns!". There is zero exit criteria in this logic, which is why we are trapped in this vicious cycle of unending restrictions.
It's the exact same argument as "Is it raining? Yes? It means rain dances work! Better keep doing them!" and "It is raining? No? It means we haven't done enough rain dances!"
And all these restrictions might as well be rain dances at this point. It is just shit people threw against the wall in some panic'd attempt to "do something". Nobody seems to care if any of it works and asking questions is met with vicious attack.
I personally look at four metrics - ICU capacity above/below 85%, test positive ratio above/below 5%, Rt above/below 1, and Case prevalence above/below 10/100k. If all four are below, then I'm hosting parties with my vaccinated friends. Otherwise, I'm trying not to contribute to spread.
And that's the beauty of state and to some extent even more locally based strategies versus national mandates. As long as there is a national agreed upon mechanism for measurement - its actually quite great that some states are willing to be guinea pigs and their citizenry are willing to go with different riskier strategies and experiments.
In fact the steadfastness and persistence of some states sticking to their strategies even in the face of significant headwinds is a plus as it creates an even richer dataset for research and analysis.
The headwinds these states are facing provides assurance to those in states with the stricter mandates that the mandates aren't just a pure power grab and government control and actually do have a benefit that is measurable.
I mean technocracy is great an all... but I'd prefer to not be a participant in a huge uncontrolled experiment. Usually when you do experiments on humans you get their consent first. It's usually quite a process to go through.
Doing experiments on humans when those experiments can straight lead people to losing their livelihoods, their jobs, their families, their mental health, their lives.... pretty fucking evil. Not sure that would pass any university's review board at all. In saner times, it would probably get investigated by some UN agency for human rights violations but hey... who cares about all that when it's a global pandemic, right? Inalienable human rights are just a formality, right?
So yeah, I really don't consent to participating in this experiment. How do I opt out?
Stay home, don't physically interact with others. If that's not to your liking, move to a state or country with less strict rules and less robust governance.
Why should I move? I don't recall any of these mandates on the ballot, do you? I didn't vote for any of this, did you? Surely over a year and half the public should be able to provide at least some guidance, right? You cannot even erect a cell phone tower on top of a building without a public design review in many places.
And even if it did win on some ballot does that mean any of what we are doing is okay at all? Could it just not be tyranny of the majority? Plenty of real dictators had popular support from the public... does that make what they did okay?
I mean anybody that tries to express skepticism or criticism about what we are doing usually gets called incredibly foul language, gets bullied, downvoted and in real life a hell of a lot of hostility. People by and large refuse to acknowledge that well intentioned people might not agree with any of what society has chosen to do for covid. There is heaps and heaps of groupthink piling onto our chosen course. It doesn't help when the average person supporting these mandates thinks if they catch covid, their odds of dying are 10%[0].
One of the fundamental reasons I believe most of what is driving covid policy is public hysteria and not grounded disease mitigation is the fact that you absolutely are not allowed to question any of this crap. It's like a religion.
Our reaction to covid scares me far more than covid.
I voted to empower my representatives and their delegates in the public health departments of my state and county to make these decisions, and they are doing so. The history of representative government is full of officials making decisions like this, or even more impactful. Just because it's been decades since we've been afflicted by a pandemic of this sort (the 1918 flu being the most well-known, but there have been others) doesn't mean that those officials don't have the powers that they're exercising, it only means that I (and probably you) were unaware that they had said powers. The laws describing and backing those powers have been on the books for years.
Officials having powers like these is a part of the social contract that lets us live in a country with good schools, a healthy citizenry, robust infrastructure, and safe streets. Other officials in the same government have the power to force you to engage in military action in a war. That power is more widely-known than the power of public health officials, but both are powers of our existing governments. If you don't want to be subject to those rules and benefit from those investments and privileges, then moving is the best option for people who are of age and strongly desirous of a different freedom/responsibility mix.
> And even if it did win on some ballot does that mean any of what we are doing is okay at all?
Perhaps, perhaps not. The remedy is through the democratic process and the courts. Government officials are overseen by elected officials, and if the broader public doesn't like the decisions those officials make, that will show up in how people vote. We can certainly see that in the current pandemic; lots of people in Florida are going to be considering the Governor's decisions during the next election; Governor Newsom was nearly recalled over his policy decisions regarding the pandemic.
That's up to your discretion that no one else can answer for you.
Agree nobody voted for each state to do what it did in an emergency; but you've got a ton of new data that will suggest how your state's majority wants your state government to act for the remainder of this pandemic and the next pandemic.
There's a term "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." If you chose to ignore the warning signs then don't be surprised about the outcome.
There's also the concepts around - Exit, Voice and Loyalty. By far the easiest is to just exit/leave the group. The alternatives are to remain loyal to the group and voice your discontent in an attempt to change group decision that may have already been made. That can be like beating your head against a brick wall though.
The beauty of diversified approaches being tried within the United States is that 'exiting' becomes just about relocating to a state that is either stricter or less strict as you desire without the hassle of changing citizenship.
Other points of interest:
R value eat at or higher than one increase anti-spread measures
R value a little less than one - hold current social measures
R value much smaller than 1 consider relaxing measures
However we should also analyze That just about at every turn many places are relaxing too bringing numbers back up and re-stressing icus.
Hence my rain dance analogy. Until you prove this crap works, what we are doing is no better than rain dances.
I don’t think it’s hampering the recovery, people are going into work, shopping and eating out more than a few months ago as far as I can tell.
https://www.sfgate.com/bay-area-politics/article/London-Bree...
Claim numbers are not going to net change due to the ending of the federal program, only increases in unemployment will change the numbers as they are.