Not to mention that it is pretty easy to overwhelm rural hospitals.
The playbook remains simple:
So, they are pretty much at the same level of restriction that most of us are at now.
Our economy is not shut down. It’s has been massively disrupted, for sure but it’s not shut down by any means. I think a good analogy is a computer running in safe mood. A lot of the bells and whistles aren’t working and the many functions that are visible to the user are disabled, but the engine and the underlying processes are running just fine.
The DHS list of essential workers is really broad. My nephew and his wife are on family leave ( new baby!) but both of their companies are still operating. She works for a vet and they are fully staffed, there are just a few new protocols to minimize customer contact.
My nephew drives a cement mixer for a construction company. Their company has been deemed essential by DHS, as has most of the construction industry. New York put some further restrictions on construction last week, but there are still a lot of construction workers going to work even there, as public works projects, construction of health care facilities and construction involving affordable housing is still happening, even in the epicenter of the epidemic. Pretty much every apartment building has some “affordable” units, developers can get a huge tax break by cheaping out on the finishes in the lower floor less desirable units and renting them out for $2000 a month instead of $3000, so almost every apartment building under construction qualifies as affordable construction.
According to commercials I see on TV, home remodeling has been deemed an essential industry and this is the perfect time to refurbish your old ugly bathroom.
And apparently the advertising industry is booming, and people that make TV commercials are still going to work.
The factories that supply the construction industry are still running strong, making light fixtures, tiles, appliances, paint , plumbing fittings, thermostats…etc.
The food industry is operating at full speed. The farms and factories that supply us with milk, bread and eggs are still running. So are the factories that bring us a 100 varieties of bagged candy, the factories that make energy drinks, flavored coffees, and little pretzels stuffed with fake cheese.
The health care industries that comprise 20% of our economy are going strong and working overtime.
Yes, our big beautiful economy was meant to be shut down. But it barely is. And if I have to stay “grounded” for another month in order to keep the very large essential economy on-line, it’s really not a big deal.
I expect the pot to boil over as the weather gets much nicer, cabin fever gets more pronounced, and more people get cited for :
troopers ticket woman for taking a drive while under stay-at-home order NOTE: Updated The DA dropped charges.
His citation simply says "stay at home order.
Citations were issued to 22 people found near the beach in Encinitas
I certainly did not agree to what boils down equivalent to house arrest.
It’s not house arrest. :rolleyes: I haven’t seen a single local or state official on TV berating people for not respecting social distancing who didn’t also remind the public that you can still go outside for exercise and indeed encourage the public to do so responsibly.
People are outside Ohio State house protesting for freedom!Yes yes!! It says they can be heard in background. We are not all sheep. Woot
And if they get sick with Covid from this, will they exercise their freedom to stay home, or will they go like sheep 
to the hospitals and increase the pressure on a strained medical system? :rolleyes: My bet is that their libertarianism will end at the end of their [del]hacking coughing mouths[/del] noses and they’ll seek treatment.
Fellow Ohioan here. I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not.
While I feel the frustrations created by the stay-at-home orders, I think they’re necessary and we ought to suck it up to help protect each other and to flatten the curve.
I see the police in Toledo had to bust up a party of 200 people yesterday. Christ. :smack:
The amount of dog poop around our block went from “usually near none” to “10+” over the last couple of days.
The poop bag dispensers around the block are fully stocked and the bags are still completely free to take and use. The people who clean up around the building are still working every day.
Not conclusive but I take it as a sign that people are starting to go into a pretty major funk.
If you lock a dog up for too long that it isn’t able to dispense of all of its energy, it will start to eat the couch, poo all over the place, etc.
My expectation would be that, for a human, if you do the same they’ll start going loopy and start pulling “pranks” just to keep entertained. And while they might intend to just get up on your balcony and wag their weeny around, there’s very little to stop them from going, “Oh hey, this door is open. Let’s go in and give them a real scare!” Frenetic craziness can escalate into criminality real real quick.
I’d suggest that you all make sure that you’re keeping your doors and windows all locked.
I said expose, not infect. If you think about it, if I drive out there, stop for gas and take out food, get there, interact with hotel staff, the maids, the breakfast at the hotel, customers and staff, the open attractions in Kansas, customers and staff, lunch customers and staff, more attractions with customers and staff, dinner customers and staff, bar customers and staff, etc. X 3 days…I think 150 is pretty modest.
If they show up with the right kind of symptoms, yes. Here is the current Kansas criteria, revised April 8. If you don’t have a history of exposure to someone with lab-confirmed COVID-19, then you absolutely must have a fever of 100.4 Fahrenheit AND several other symptoms before you are eligible for testing through the Kansas state lab. (You may or may not be eligible for testing through private labs; even some of the largest hospitals in the state can’t do their own testing yet.)
Now, does everyone with mild to moderate COVID-19 have a fever? For truly severe cases, the answer appears to be yes, but for those not so severe, the symptoms seem to be wildly variable, ranging from nothing at all to feeling a little tired to full-blown fever and malaise and difficulty breathing. That means people who are not eligible for testing may still be able to spread the virus. How do you identify those people and get them into quarantine, in the absence of widespread random testing?
No, we aren’t all sheep, some of us aren’t even that intelligent.
CMC fnord!
Exposed != Infected.
Pretty easy to expose a lot of people in public places. The vast majority of those probably won’t get sick.
I am already starting to see signs they are fed up. Two men were walking, they were father and son and the son said “Dad, you need to move out of the way, when people get close.” And the father replied “I’m 80 years old and if I can’t take a walk on a nice spring day, I’d rather be dead.”
Well, old people have always been stubborn. Many of them were fed up on Day 1.
There are a substantial number of people who never bought into it; the old and stubborn, the stupid, religious fanatics, conspiracy theorists, and Trumpists are, in their millions, just ignoring it. How much they’ll screw it up for everyone else, I don’t know.
Here in the California Bay Area, they’ve shut down all the parks, and have issued a more restrictive order (vs. the state-level one) which limits outdoor recreation to within 5 miles of your house.
Meanwhile, the number of new cases and deaths here have been flat for two weeks and the hospitals are practically empty.
The government has refused to specify any criteria that they will use to end or loosen the lockdown, and certainly not committed to any specific timeframe. They’ve literally said “Wait a few weeks and we’ll let you know.”
My frustration is that the details of the lockdown are completely arbitrary and no one has insisted the government defend its logic. Yes, closing bars and restaurants is probably necessary, and recommending WFH for office workers is reasonable too. But is there actually any evidence that you can receive an infectious exposure to nCOV2 from a full parking lot, or by passing next to someone at a trailhead? Even if this is theoretically possible or has anecdotally occurred once or twice, is the actual increase in transmission rate sufficient to justify the limitation on people’s activities? What about if everyone is wearing a mask?
The 5-mile restriction is especially galling to me. Where did that come from? The county health officer pulled it out of his ass, that’s where. It was not subject to even cursory democratic debate or public discussion in any way.
I recognize that this was emergency and that the officials had to do what they thought was right, in the heat of the moment. So I’m not going to criticize them for instituting these restrictions in the first place. But the acute phase of the emergency is now over, and it’s time for them to be more transparent about their rationale and plans for the future. What is the exit strategy here? Are we going to sit at home for 18-24 months and hope that some scientist - who is not allowed any form of recreation or travel either - invents a vaccine? Are we going to allow everyone to be exposed and build up herd immunity (in which case, we’re wasting valuable time with every day the hospitals are not at max capacity)?
A single politician making these decisions, solely at their own discretion and without any requirement to justify them to others, determining who is allowed to earn money, who is allowed to operate their business, who is allowed to travel, who is allowed to meet with other citizens - is, in a literal sense, a dictatorship.
If I see evidence that there’s a rational plan and reasonable chance of success here, I’ll certainly follow the orders. But if the plan is “spend two years of your life under house arrest so that 1% of the population can live to die of something other than COVID19” - no, sorry, not gonna do it.
Here’s a question I just thought of when I heard about the California extension: are the state governments just assuming that they’ll be able to get their citizens and local businesses federal financial help when this is over, or if they have to do it again? If so, isn’t that a rather dangerous assumption to make, with the President and Senate control both being Republican? What if they say, “sorry, that trillion dollars was all we’re going to give. From now on, people, businesses, and states are on their own financially”? What do the states do then? How can they keep the medically necessary lockdown going if it becomes clear that there will be no financial help coming?
Doesn’t sound like the hospitals are empty to me.
Please give me a cite saying there is no problem any more. Yes, new cases and ICU usage is trending down, at last, but that doesn’t mean there are no new cases.
My town has no five mile limit. I walk 45 minutes a day, and I see lots of people on the street with no on getting hassled.
Sounds like the intelligent strategy to me - especially if the models say there could be a surge in May.
The parks were not close originally. They got closed because people were violating the order and congregating there. That was on all the news channels. They closed the parking lots to discourage this.
You sure about that? He or she didn’t consult other experts. In this kind of issue, the democratic debate should include only people who know what the fuck they are talking about.
We are just beginning to test. The drive through test facility in my town got 37 cases in the first week. Open up too soon, and the cases will skyrocket. The reason we are in relatively good shape is that we clamped down early.
As mentioned, you are not under house arrest. I walk, I go to the grocery store.
And I’m in the at-risk population. None of my friends are rebelling. We are all frustrated, but understand the reason.
And I’d thank you to not put my life at risk so that you can go to a bar earlier.
I’m not at all sure what you’re basing that on. Just because the curve seems to be flattening in CA, doesn’t mean it couldn’t skyrocket again with a relaxation. Pretty much every CA physician and epidemiologist I’ve heard interviewed has made that same point.
But that’s not what is happening in the Bay Area. It’s basically a mishmash of elected representatives and health experts in multiple counties negotiating with each other and trying to come to some informed consensus. There’s all sorts of ways for that to breakdown and fail, but it is hardly sliding into dictatorship territory.
A sizeable section of the planet is in this limbo right now. Curve is flattened, or at least flattening. There is perhaps a hiatus to draw breath. But, this is just the end of the beginning. Whilst there are any active infections in the community releasing the restrictions may just put everything back to where it was say six weeks ago. Probably.
Certainly best evidence, and experience of other outbreaks, tells us that opening restrictions right now does nothing but undo the good done by the previous weeks of lockdown. So, what is needed is decisions on the next phase. Realistically, there is no expectation that any lockdowns can be freed up much for at least another month. But, and this is important, there is increasing knowledge being gained right now that can and will guide the next steps.
Availability of many more antigen test kits, and the introduction of antibody test kits means we will know soon a lot of very important parameters about how the infection really exists in our various communities. There are critical numbers we just don’t know yet. Informed with much better information decisions about the next step can be made. Sure, everyone wants to know the answer now, but it just isn’t possible.
The range of options is, with our current knowledge not wide. In the worst case, lockdown runs until mid next year and then everyone gets vaccinated. That can’t be discounted, but is a worst case. When we know more best case may be evidence for very wide asymptomatic infection and an already large base of immunity in the populace. They could guide a very different strategy. But you would not want to be counting on it. It is an outlier best case. Absent any unexpected good news we might expect continued travel restrictions, mandatory isolations for some, very wide continuous testing, and a relaxing of some lockdown restrictions. Even then, there will (or should) be a lot of caution. The nature of the beast is that it is overly sensitive to the parameters we try to impose, and the lag in understanding the current situation from imposing measures to affect it, means that, if we get it wrong, we won’t know until it is already really bad, and at that point small scale changes will not be enough - so we end up back in lockdown. Careful measured step to avoid that possibility is likely to be the most sensible path.
I didn’t say there were no new cases, I said the rate of new cases is not accelerating. Your article is from a week ago and anticipates a surge of new cases that has not occurred and will not occur on our present trajectory.
It’s not a strategy. They’re saying “Wait a few weeks and we’ll tell you the strategy.” I’d like to hear the strategy now. I don’t need a date - but I’d like to hear “We will do X when Y happens.”
I’m not sure what point you’re making. The parks are closed now, despite the fact that all the thoughtless rule-breakers who dared to go outside did not lead to an explosion of cases.
I can’t be sure, because they haven’t provided any explanation of their rationale.
As for democracy - why is this issue special? Why not limit democracy in general to “only people who know what the fuck they’re talking about”? We could, for instance, give people a test before they’re allowed to vote, to ensure that they are sufficiently enlightened to have a say in their own lives.
Fine. What’s “too soon”? What’s the plan? When can we “open up” and not have cases skyrocket? In 2022?
What’s the difference between this and house arrest? Because authorities have deigned to permit me to exercise within a 5-mile radius? In many ways, this is more restrictive than house arrest. House arrest still allows you to go to work, earn money, have visitors, etc.
As for putting your life at risk - you’re welcome to shelter at home as long as you like. I’ll gladly wear a mask when I go outdoors. And I’ll stay 6 feet away from you if you dare to venture outside. But as I said - if you want me to stay at home for two years while we hope someone comes up with a vaccine, because you’re worried that you will catch the virus - nope. That’s too much to ask. We can’t eliminate all risk. Trump fucked up, China fucked up, and now all our lives are a bit more dangerous. We’re all going to have to deal with it, and some people are going to die of COVID19 instead of heart attacks, cancer, strokes, or whatever else would have killed them otherwise.
I could donate 50% of my salary to charities that fund life-saving medical treatments for the poor. I choose not to - and I spend that money on all manner of useless frippery instead. Does that make me reprehensibly selfish? Maybe - but in the same vein, I’m just not going to shelter in place for more than few months.