DEATH
P/CAPITA State
2.422 South Dakota
1.987 North Dakota
1.906 Iowa
1.769 Colorado
1.703 New Mexico
1.502 Pennsylvania
1.356 Illinois
1.349 Rhode Island
1.344 Nebraska
1.250 Arkansas
1.244 Michigan
1.241 Kansas
1.185 Wyoming
1.184 Indiana
1.155 Minnesota
1.132 West Virginia
1.128 Mississippi
1.119 Idaho
1.099 Nevada
1.058 Tennessee
0.926 Missouri
0.898 Connecticut
0.881 Arizona
0.842 Montana
0.775 Wisconsin
0.754 Massachusetts
0.747 Louisiana
0.719 New Jersey
0.685 Maryland
0.668 Texas
0.666 Ohio
0.644 Alaska
0.592 Oklahoma
0.530 Alabama
0.474 South Carolina
0.474 New York
0.468 Utah
0.460 Florida
0.454 Oregon
0.440 California
0.438 Kentucky
0.399 New Hampshire
0.386 Georgia
0.385 District of Columbia
0.376 North Carolina
0.351 Virginia
0.343 Vermont
0.337 Delaware
0.298 Washington
0.266 Maine
0.121 Hawaii
I didn’t mean to drag you back in to the thread. I think you aren’t supposed to post here. I don’t want to get you in trouble.
I only cited the quote to show that we’ve exceeded the numbers previously predicted. I used total numbers because that was how the guess was made.
That Texas is only number 30 is not comforting. Just because it is worse elsewhere doesn’t negate that it’s bad here.
Ah, thought I was in a different thread. My apologies. Mod, please delete my post if you can.
:sigh:
George Rutherford, epidemiologist and infectious diseases expert at UC San Francisco, said at a campus town hall meeting last week.
In Europe, “it’s an observed phenomenon that curfews are associated with turnovers in these rates” of high growth in coronavirus cases, Rutherford said.
For example, France — which observed a quadrupling of daily coronavirus cases over the month of October — decided to enact even stronger measures to deal with its second wave: imposing a broader curfew, from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m., in the bigger cities; ordering the shutdown of nonessential businesses such as retail stores, restaurants and bars; and making masks mandatory for anyone age 6 and older, Rutherford said.
In recent weeks, new daily cases have fallen in half from the peak. Other similar measures elsewhere in Europe also seem to be successful, Rutherford said.
“This is good news,” he said, “and it again suggests that these kinds of measures are met with fairly rapid success, like within a couple of weeks.”“A curfew will help prevent more people [from gathering] in the late hours of the night, where more high-risk activity may occur,” said Dr. Grant Colfax, director of public health in San Francisco.
Still the curfew has met with outrage in some quarters. A couple of hundred protesters gathered Saturday night at Huntington Beach Pier in defiance of the state’s coronavirus curfew, which went into effect at 10 p.m. “I think there are too many restrictions as is,” one protester said. Republican lawmakers also slammed the rules as unnecessary.
In L.A., restaurant owners fear they may not survive the latest shutdown of outdoor dining. Still, polls have shown Californians generally support [COVID restrictions.](Californians are wary of reopening too quickly amid coronavirus crisis, new poll says)
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/590879968/politi-fact-california
Yes, Government Shutdowns Help Slow COVID-19 When Combined With Additional Measures, Experts Say
If Your Time Is Short: California state Asm. James Gallagher claimed “Government imposed lockdowns do NOT reduce [COVID-19] cases or stop spikes.” But infectious disease experts say government shutdowns do work by reducing social interaction which, when maintained, cuts down on the spread of COVID-19. Several studies, including from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, show government-imposed closures, when combined with mask-wearing, social distancing and hand hygiene, are effective. The studies and experts also point out there’s no single strategy that works on its own.
There are many other things the decrease in cases could suggest as well. And some that make a whole lot more sense, too, like opening one’s eyes to the very clear patterns of peaks and declines over the course of four to eight weeks that appear…well, pretty much everywhere.
And this continues to be the most anti-science theory that continues to get trotted out there – and by a doctor, not a teetotaling politician! It’s just ridiculous. There’s not a town with a Costco that isn’t having more of its citizens frequent shopping centers during the day than bars at midnight. There is no evidence to back his point of view. But, we’re in an anti-evidence sort of year, so who really cares?
A lot of people standing way too close together for long periods of time and making out (or doing other things) at your neighborhood Costco?
I’m not sure that’s either here or there, but one thing I do imagine is that those who want to get up close with someone and make out (or worse!) will find a way to do it, before or after 10 pm and inside a public place or not.
Yeah, why let experts and doctors advice the government eh? /s
Well, I will trust them more than an unsupported anonymous opinion from the internet.
Studies have shown that transmission risks increase proportionally with distance and time near infected people. Limiting those situations, most likely to happen in bars at midnight than Costco, would be a proper method to slowing the spread.
If you actually believed in evidence.
But of course, there are absolutely zero studies that show that closing bars at midnight do more to slow the spread than would, say, closing grocery stores. This is where reasoning needs to come in, and judgment, and strategy. All things that are sorely, sorely lacking throughout this whole ordeal.
Reason would tell you that closing down those places where people are most likely to engage in high-risk activities and non-essential activities has no coincidence with low-risk, essential activities.
There’s no study saying closing bars at midnight does more to slow the spread than staying at home with no contact with the outside world, either. Your entire argument is based on ignoring evidence and reason, so why do you continue to use words like that?
Well, your entire argument is based on premises that establish ‘necessity’ in unscientific ways and shroud them in science. And in pretty shoddy science at that, as you keep throwing around the term ‘high-risk activities’ without any evidence at all that blanket curfews address those. It should be very patently obvious that two people sitting together in a restaurant are doing nothing demonstrably ‘riskier’ than they would be sitting in a home together or out shopping.
You can take that as one end of the spectrum, take a packed house of club-goers on other end (though presumably less risky if it’s before closing time), and figure out how to use ‘science’ to determine what the relative risks truly are. And you should make that effort, you really should, before throwing out those blanket terms.
You’ve pretty well summed up SayTwo’s entire schtick.
That is simply bollocks.
On 7 Dec Gigobuster posted a link to study in Nature [again here] comparing the effectiveness of a large range of NPI [Non-pharmaceutical interventions]. Curfews - in the form of individual movement restrictions and more general lockdowns - rate very well. They say [a quote Gigobuster already used]:
The most effective NPIs include curfews, lockdowns and closing and restricting places where people gather in smaller or large numbers for an extended period of time. This includes small gathering cancellations (closures of shops, restaurants, gatherings of 50 persons or fewer, mandatory home working and so on) and closure of educational institutions.
How did they get there? Did they order on their phones and never talk to a human face-to-face? Is the food prepared by robots?
They may not be increasing risk to each other compared to eating together at home, but there is no question that there is an increased risk of transmission to and from restaurant personnel.
I haven’t eaten inside a restaurant or bar since February, and probably won’t until next summer, if then.
Well, it’s presumably the same amount of contact they’d have with workers at whatever stores are open for them to shop in. If the point is that any human contact at all is an opportunity for the spread of disease, then sure, no one is going to argue against that. My point is that the two of them ordering from their server is not for any purposes different than the two of them interacting with a salesperson or clerk at a shop that is open for business, during the day.
I feel for you, I really do, if eating out at restaurants would otherwise have been an enjoyable part of your life. I went without it for two or three months, and man, was I ever glad when I got it back. If it wasn’t such a big part of our social fabric…well, there wouldn’t be so many restaurants in every town. I for one get a great enjoyment out of frequenting them, and I have no shame in that.
Well, evidently a federal judge is not convinced by Gigo and Nature:
Broward County’s rules, prohibiting the sale or alcohol between midnight and 5 a.m., violate the governor’s order and are “speculative and arbitrary,” wrote U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal of the Southern District of Florida.
Speculative and arbitrary. Yeah, that about sums it up. There’s no data, there’s no empirical scientific approach. Instead you get this:
The county argued that late-night hours are especially risky because people drink more freely and lose their inhibitions, meaning they may be less likely to follow COVID-19 precautions.
I guess they found proving the connection between lower inhibitions and higher rates of disease just too high a hurdle to leap. They probably had a hard time measuring it and running trials. Or, I don’t know, maybe their reasoning just wasn’t sound. Or maybe they ignored evidence (like the evident costs of their policies, which theoretically would, by any sane measure, be stacked up against the alleged benefits). Or maybe they were just plain speculative and arbitrary.
For a man who walks around banging a saucepan and shouting ‘science, science, science’ you seem to have a lot of trouble differentiating between science and not-science.
I suggest your grasp of it is about as shaky as the learned judges’. And, as usual you’ve not responded to evidence that meets your call for peer-reviewed research but dragged in some procedural law wackiness as a distraction.
I’m surprised that anyone – anyone who has remotely paid attention to current events in 2020 – would think that one article in one journal has definitively settled any matter of science at all, much less ones that are so terribly confounded and difficult to measure as those NPIs.
One thing you really need, to do good science, is for your results to be repeatable. It’s a must. If an NPI demonstrably works, it needs to always work, or at least more often than not. Not sometimes, in some narrow circumstances. Not two hairdressers with masks on, per the CDC’s ‘demonstration’ of science, but all the hairdressers everywhere. Not a few counties in Kansas for a narrow window of time and only a narrow window of time, when a couple months later their situations entirely reverse themselves and invalidate the conclusions drawn from the terribly shaky data to begin with. You know, like in the case of that one study of small counties all across the nation that supposedly proved mask mandates work because those counties had fewer cases but then had to be retracted because it turned out they got lots and lots of cases later on and they could no longer draw those (biased) conclusions.
It needs to be repeatable. And the only thing that is repeating in this case, consistently and without fail, is that these NPIs do…not…work. They’ve been tried in place after place after place, and the result has been the same. If they worked, we wouldn’t have California’s situation right now, because God knows California can follow the rules, if anyone can. And if the absence of those NPIs clearly demonstrated their need, we wouldn’t have Florida’s situation right now. The evidence is all there, for anyone to see. The data is in. It’s not going to change by running any more studies, because you can’t change the past. The data is in.
But the saddest part is – again – that this is really a matter of politics that is being dressed up in the guise of science. No one disputes that closing any business or industry, at any time of day, would result in less spread of disease in so far as it does result in less human contact. (Though I don’t know if it’s entirely clear that’s the case when it comes to closing restaurants an hour earlier than normal, but I’ll leave that aside.) What people dispute is whether it’s a good idea, whether the gain is worth the cost. That’s a matter of judgment and policy. Science, and especially not ‘The Science’, doesn’t make those calls. People do. And it’s right about time that people, all over the country, start using better judgment. And quit hiding behind science and using it for cover.
For another perspective, here’s the San Francisco Gate:
This is from “Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at UCSF”:
“California is unique because this particular lockdown came off as arbitrary and not data driven,” she said. "That’s why the opposition to it is not just from those who believe COVID is a hoax; there’s also opposition from medical professionals, lawmakers, parents and those with nuanced thinking who believe it’s too restrictive, and didn’t incorporate the biology of virus. A good example was the playground closures, which ended up getting reversed because it was not nuanced and didn’t take equity into account.
“Another example is outdoor dining. We all saw that viral video from LA. Cities and states have yet to provide data to restaurateurs that they had any contribution to driving spread if they did everything right. So I think the current opposition comes not because California is more rebellious or fatigued, but Californians have listened to the news, they have seen the data on the virus, they know that being outside is safer, they know impact the lockdown will have on businesses that could die forever, and they just don’t buy it. It’s fascinating; the opposition is quite widespread.”
Perhaps the most damning criticism, the truly worst-case scenario, would be this:
A new shutdown coupled with minimal compliance yields a worst of both worlds scenario: Thousands of lives lost and immeasurable economic damage.
Just how how many deaths the current surge will bring remains to be seen, but when it’s all said and done, there’s a real chance California’s deaths per capita numbers — widely used to defend the state’s strict restrictions — could eclipse several states that have been far less restrictive. Cox would find that both tragic and ironic.
“It feels like during this whole pandemic, the people in charge have been acting like this is an experiment in a lab at Stanford,” he said. “It’s all about, ‘How can we win the COVID death rate race,’ with no regard given to any other real-world concern that impacts society like livelihoods, well-beings and mental health.”
That’s what one scientist observes about The Science, in this case. Or the policy, if you will.