San Francisco bans public events holding more than 1,000 people
thehill.com
thehill.com
Denmark: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22550108
Italy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22550623 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22545430
E3 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22546931
U of Dayton: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22547457
Really?
Before the admins have broken up topics into multiple threads for HN to handle better.
If you or anyone is interested in how we approach this, I recently wrote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527396 about it, and there are lots of links there to previous descriptions.
I believe 8 have been hospitalized.
I don't think gathering limitations can stop the spread however I believe at the very least they can slow it down.
While I am neither a tinfoil hat wearer nor have anything against China, the fact that they were silencing a Wuhan doctor who was trying to alert people and authorities to the virus all the way back in December makes me skeptical of their reported status.
Thanks for sharing, I really appreciate it.
Please correct me if I misunderstood, but the wording makes it sound like they were ordering them from China, i.e., buying, not receiving it as a donation. Which is exactly what I was afraid of. Money is money, and I can totally see some governments, especially the PRC one, prioritizing that over the actual help for their own citizens. Especially in the scenario where they know they are screwed no matter what, so might as well make some quick bucks.
Which is exactly how we get all those leaks and info from silenced doctors.
That does not look like the kind of news you'd fake, or would risk doing purely for propaganda reasons.
Read the WHO/China report. Or look at South Korea.
I'm not convinced yet. This would not be the first time a communist authoritarian regime lied about a bad situation - far from it, it's standard if you look at history in the Soviet Union for example. Authoritarian regimes cannot work without being respected and/or feared by the people, so they are incentivesed to lie to save face and simultaneously punish anyone who questions the lies.
Especially considering that the longer this drags on, the more likely nations and corporations alike are to pull production from China permanently.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/08/china-...
Like guns or not, that's the 2nd Amendment at work.
People own guns for defense. There's reason to believe that if people are being trapped in a building against their will, they may use them.
I understand that this is NOT the flu, but it seems like the best data we have puts the most pessimistic CFR at about 0.6% if you look at the South Korean data (who have done, by far, the best job testing en masse).
I agree that slowing the spread of the virus to help our health care workers avoid being inundated with admissions to the ICU is worth while, but I'm extremely skeptical of embracing what China has done.
Check your stats. 0.77% of South Koreans who tested positive for the virus have died already, and more of them will die in the future. The CFR is likely to be above 1%.
When those same experts see numbers coming out of Italy, they believe very strongly that the number of infected is far higher than being reported because testing is not as widespread.
1) But # infections were growing exponentially, we need to use numbers from the same cohort, which implies much lower # infections & higher CFR. Naive CFR will go up once infections grow more slowly. (It already is higher than 0.6%).
2) South Korean confirmed cases are much younger than their median age, mainly between 20-29 years old (perhaps because of where superspreading events happen—that church). This age group has a much lower fatality rate from Covid-19.
3) # hospital beds per capita in South Korea is second highest among OECD countries (1st is Japan) and ~4 times that of the US. They already have patients waiting for beds. Most countries will do much worse if they reach the same # infections per capita.
But it has a key context: that's the CFR for when all patients are treated. In most of China, there were never enough infections to trigger a healthcare system collapse: that's why in all but one province, the CFR was indeed ~0.4%.
In one province, Hubei, the medical system did collapse.
Its CFR jumped to 3-4%. That is worth going to extreme measures to prevent. In the USA, that would amount to ~10M dead.
That is not a seasonal flu.
I think a superior approach for most of the world is one along the lines of Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea: extensive testing and contact tracing and limited but real quarantine measures. But, yes, everything should be on the table to prevent the nightmare healthcare system collapse scenario.
If they can keep it below 1, it will die out. It's possible there are many more unknown cases, but if unknown cases are increasing, confirmed cases should be too.
It would require very drastic measures but would undoubtedly save a huge number of lives. Amazingly, leaders in all democratic countries seem to be too cowardly, too dumb, or too short-sighted to take the action required.
They want to exchange lives for money. And it might not even be a good trade. Letting 70% of a country get infected, even over time, might end up costing more lives and more money.
All this to say, yes, of course shut downs must occur to stop acute problems in healthcare systems and try best to protect elderly. And this should absolutely be prioritized over financial markets (though risks here still matter). But it is going to spread.
- Virus has exhausted itself with the majority of the population. - Vaccine is developed and universally available. - Virus is eradicated from quarantine (so incredibly unlikely).
I am not an epidemiologist, just writing based off of common sense.
There's really no great alternative to attempting to contain it. We will most likely trade lives for money and then lose the money anyway. Better to just lose the money by paying a big price early on with a radical containment strategy.
If the quarantines last long enough, the virus will be dead. The hosts will either be dead or will have successfully fought the infection and destroyed the virus. Unless it happens to behave like some viruses that can hide in the nervous system and similar – but there's no indication that that's the case.
There is no country on Earth that is gonna lock up all its citizens indoors and starve them to death. Governments aren't that stupid.
And were there not videos of government agents welding bars on windows and destroying food to punish quarantine breakers recently?
I think you're dramatically oversimplifying how this all works.
First of all, you have to schedule a specific time slot to go shopping, to ensure that the store never gets too crowded. Secondly, you aren't allowed within two meters of anyone at any point. All of the store employees are wearing protective gear (gloves, masks, etc.). When you checkout, you push your cart up to them, they ring everything up, set it back down, and then you pack your bags yourself while they go away (to maintain a distance of two meters). They might be changing gloves with every checkout, too.
I have less knowledge of China, but I think it's similar. I saw a video of a ranged thermometer being used on every person before being allowed inside. Maybe Italy is doing similar. If and only if you have a fever or a confirmed infection then are you not allowed to leave your dwelling at all (unless it's to go to a hospital); that's when you get your food delivered.
With containment measures this drastic, you can definitely keep the infection rate below 1, which is all you need to stop an infection. And it's exactly these kinds of measures that need to be taken, because food is essential. You cannot have people starving to death en masse. Grocery stores are essential, and it's possible to allow grocery shipping while largely mitigating the spread of disease. Needless to say, all gatherings are banned, most stores are shut, and restaurants are to-go/delivery only (if they're even still open).
And I'm not drastically over-simplifying things, unless you somehow think that "shut down almost everything except for grocery stores and healthcare" is "over-simplified". This is working in China. They are stopping the spread of the disease while simultaneously maintaining access to food and healthcare.
The food production aspect though is more problematic; it can involved larger groups of people and more human contact.
Economies aren't just playthings for little pieces of multicolored paper -- they're the process by which we live a life different from that of a wild animal.
Life without an economy would be smelly, brutal, and short.
Personally, I pray that the US won't try this idiocy, and further pray that people won't stand for it if they try.
The whole supply chain is guaranteed (and related companies allowed to work).
Source: I'm italian and directly affected by this
At this point if you don't have at least a week's supply of rice on hand you're just being careless. It's dirt cheap and large sacks are readily available everywhere.
But in all seriousness, general guidelines are already that, even without stuff like Corona or not.
One advice from the supply chain perspective, so. If you have to stock up, do so in small quantities across multiple stores. reducing the number of stock-outs at the point-of-sale has an unbelievable efeect in stabilizing supply chains. and the last thing we want is unstable supply chains right now. As rediculous as it is, if something like th toilet paper scare happens to more life-ciritical stuff things turn a lot less funny rather quickly.
That's not really true. South Korea and China have proven that this thing can be stopped and R0 can be driven below 1. It just requires decisive action by the state (either heavy quarantining or mass testing coupled with behavioral changes by the population).
really, that's the best solution to saving lives?
if you were really worried about preventable deaths, why don't you direct your fear-mongering and authoritarianism toward eradicating distracted driving, since car accidents kill a million people a year?
otherwise, wash your hands and keep a little distance from coughers/sneezers. if you get sick with (1) a high fever and (2) a dry cough, don't go out for 14 days after you feel better, unless you're so sick you need to go see a doctor.
that's it. stop with the hysteria.
You flat out do need to shut down most things to get the spread rate below 1.0. Cancel all gatherings of people, shut down non-essential businesses, etc. That's all that works.
we're apparently collectively ok with 30K americans dying of flu (or alternatively, auto accidents) every year, so it doesn't make sense to go nuts on stopping this virus that's looking more and more like it's a little worse than the yearly flu.
the point being risks need to be properly assessed and proportionately addressed, without hysteria.
the underlying question about whether we value human lives enough is another matter we certainly should continue to discuss (for the record, i think we should value human lives a little more relative to economic considerations, and the response to something like covid-19 would correspondingly be a little more proactive, but still not hasty and panicked).
You're spreading ignorance.
Every medical expert is saying it is 5-20x deadlier than the seasonal flu, because that's what the data says. They're predicting 40-70% infection rates.
A low estimate of 0.05% mortality rate with 40% infected is: 640,000 dead in the US alone. It could end up being a 1.5% mortality rate with 70% infected: 3,360,000 dead in the US alone.
Please do some reading: https://www.flattenthecurve.com
Of course, this would never happen, since we as a society would enact major policies to slow the spread long before it got anywhere near that bad, just as Italy is doing for example. It just doesn't make any sense to wait for things to get worse to start enacting policies to slow its spread; if we're going to have to do it at some point, might as well do it early and reduce the spread.
That is quite an assumption. We shall see, I hope you are right.
It's a pretty good assumption to make.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-first-communi...
I realize the flu vaccine is not always effective, but it seems possible to me that we and many others have contracted it and already recovered.
Since testing is very rare, there would be no way of knowing until someone gets a severe enough case to go to the hospital and then qualify for testing.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/scientists-identified-strains-...
https://academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nsr...
And, see my other post, but some researchers suspect that COVID was circulating in Washington (likely elsewhere as well) since about mid-january, so very possible.
I'd like to think you're right. It'd be nice to know that I and the people I'm in regular contact with already have some immunity.
It lasted about 5-7 days and came with a high fever, full body pain and soreness to the extent that any type of movement was difficult, delirium and confusion, difficulty eating, and vomiting for 1-2 days (which isn't typical of the flu as I understand it).
I'm 24 and generally in very good health and felt that without modern medicine and sanitation I could have easily died from this. I lost about 5% of my body weight and a lot of muscle.
The reaction to COVID-19 makes me wish we, as a society, took preventative health more seriously in general as the common diseases can be extremely nasty too.
In fact from everything I've heard about COVID-19, it sounds like it wouldn't have been nearly as bad for someone my age as the flu was for me this year.
Yes, highly possible, one reearcher believes it was circulating in Washington state since at least middle of January. The term of art is "cryptic transmission".
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/coronavirus-may-have-s...
Part of the problem is that the CDC's definitions were so strict at the time that you could not be tested unless you had personally traveled to China, so all cases of domestic transmission were being discounted at that time.
Do you think this problem will be rectified in future epidemics? Or is this just the nature of testing and/or the healthcare bureaucracy at the national/international level?
The amount of times the article mentions Biogen employees getting denied testing, days before the rest of the company would find out they had reached 70, really bothers me.
I think this is such a broad question with so many factors it's not really possible to answer.
I think the fact that it was a flu-like disease contributed to an overall lax attitude towards this. If it had been Ebola, health authorities would have clamped down hard and fast.
I think the fact that it started in China was a contributing factor. China didn't want to look like a source of disease, China didn't want its reputation on the international stage damaged by criticism from CDC and WHO and so those authorities were possibly more mute than normal. And there is another potential dimension here if this ends up being a military weapon that accidentally escaped from Wuhan BSL-4 containment. That may be a reason they came down on those researchers who sounded the alarm - those researchers worked at that BSL-4 facility and may have been discussing something that was classified and the chinese government didn't want discussed. This also may have been one dimension behind the Trump administration classifying the early briefings (although more generally I think they just didn't want to spook the market).
Finally, it's also impossible to separate the response from the administration. The Trump administration cut the budget for the epidemic response teams that would have been our first defense against this, two years ago. And their overall administration has been petty at best and malicious at worst. Just like how he went after the NWS officials who corrected his (completely wrong) forecast predictions for the hurricane landfall, there has been a reluctance to countermand him or correct him even when he's doing something completely wrong lest he come back at CDC or WHO and further sabotage the response in revenge. He spent the first two months of this year arguing that it was a hoax being cooked up by the deep state CDC to damage the economy and hurt his re-election chances. Even the Bush administration would have been far more competent at responding to this, Trump's leadership is exceptionally bad. You can say that's tribalism but the reason people are so all-in on that is because it's true, the Trump administration's petty, childish behavior has significantly damaged the US response to this crisis, both actively and passively.
Most other crises eventually fade from the news. Puerto Rico still isn't rebuilt but nobody cares anymore. etc etc. He hoped it would be a tempest in a teapot that blew over and it didn't. He's reluctantly come to terms with that in the last week.
If this whole question was a trap to make me say something downvotable, oh well, so be it, but it's all factually true and that's my honest opinion.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/anthony-fauci-donald...
> According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, nearly everything the president has said about the coronavirus is wrong.
/shrug
Why do you think that would happen? Why would the president just contradict his subject experts with literally multiple decades of experience in this field? Why would he literally impede the state agencies from doing the testing necessary to monitor and oversee the status of the disease?
Why would he say the hurricane is going to curve into an entirely different state from where the NWS says it's going to go? Why would he then threaten to fire anyone who refuses to cook the forecasts to comply with his incorrect claims?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/climate/hurricane-dorian-...
Dude is an actual literal child who can't stand to not be the smartest guy in the room, and if anyone corrects him they're fired. He's a nightmare boss and the only reason anyone tolerates him is because he's "on their team" Anyone who does is going to end up like Romney: "not physically safe in our presence anymore".
Can't wait for the reversal in a couple years: "nobody ever supported this guy, everyone knew he was a crazy from day 1". But that's only going to be once he's out of office.
I would like to think that I already got it, but in the end it probably doesn't matter. It is pretty unlikely that I am going to die from it, but it is pretty likely that we go into a recession and people pay less for my labor, stocks will be worth less, and food will be in short supply... so I think in the end, getting sick is just an annoyance (to me personally, I know people are dying) and the real problems come from everyone else getting sick. So either way, I'm sure it doesn't matter.
If we assume that the growth chart is similar everywhere, then with our 1,000 confirmed cases in the US, we probably have around 30,000 unconfirmed dark cases.
Also a really crazy fact is that South Korea did a good job of containing 30 out of 31 of their initial cases in the early days. But then the 31st was responsible for thousands of infections.
China has 23 times the population of Italy, but only saw eight times the cases (eventually that will narrow even further). It's obviously absurd, especially given China moved slow to stop the spread in the early going. Every day that goes by we're getting confirmation that China lied aggressively about how extremely infectious the virus is, how easily it is spread, how large of a population it could infect and how quickly. That information would have helped the world a lot.
Italy's mortality rate is extreme right now, at 6.6%. Most likely they have a lot more cases than have tested positive thus far, probably at least two to three times as many are infected vs the official tally. I expect this will be a common theme almost everywhere, including in the US.
The learning here shouldn't be that mass coronavirus death is inevitable, but that good policy that takes it seriously can contain it and make it manageable.
How about an asymptomatic case ?
Also it's not just asymptomatic cases, it's also symptomatic but not tested. Some people ignore it since it can present as a minor cold. Some people want a test but can't get one.
The media would love this term. Maybe you should try patent it.
If it survives for 12 hours on surfaces, you only need 1 person to have poor hygiene to expose a LOT of people. And "normal" hygiene levels pass infection around plenty. I wash my hands when I go to the bathroom or before I prepare food. The rest of the time I'm just passing whatever I touch to whatever else I touch. I've given up on not touching my face. I'm sure I'm not the worst in these areas.
As I understand it, you'd have this sort of infection rate with the seasonal flu if there wasn't some level of herd immunity, and you certainly have roughly this level of infection with the common cold - "Con crud" is a thing - it's just not much remarked upon as unexpected.
They're claiming you can't get it by simply breathing the same air, and saying surgical masks are sufficient.
[0] https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/health-and-medicine/articl...
About 175 executives were expected at the Biogen leadership conference on Feb. 26. Employees from Biogen locations around the United States and the world reunited with colleagues they don’t often get to see.
They greeted each other enthusiastically, with handshakes and hugs, and then caught up over breakfast, picking from plates of pastries and the self-serve hot food bar. They were there for two days of discussions and presentations about the future of the Cambridge-based, multinational biotech firm, which develops therapies for neurological diseases. It was the kind of under-the-radar gathering that happens in this region just about every week.
Full article: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/11/nation/how-biogen-lea...
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/coronavirus-inslee-announce...
employer, school, rock concert, or tech conference. which do you think would exercise more care over the other?
seriously, get a fucking clue people.
karma to spare.
https://kuow.org/stories/seattle-public-schools-closes-for-t...
> Gatherings of 250 people or more for social, spiritual and recreational activities including, but not limited to, community, civic, public, leisure, faith-based, or sporting events; parades; concerts; festivals; conventions; fundraisers; and similar activities
Source: https://www.governor.wa.gov/sites/default/files/20-07%20Coro...
The idea here is to reduce, not eliminate, large numbers of people coming together, especially cases where it's going to be a one-off grouping of people who may not normally be in the same place at one time. Depending on the event, it could also involve people traveling from somewhere else, which is also useful to reduce. (Corporate campuses and schools don't fall into that bucket.)
It's a trade off. Saying "no more large employers and no more schools" just isn't feasible from an economic or public education standpoint. Individual organizations can decide for themselves whether or not they want to shut down.
It's a continuum. On one end there's "everyone is hereby confined to their homes and may not leave", and on the other it's "we're making no changes; everyone just do what they usually do". The first one is way too restrictive, and the second one ignores the reality of the situation. The sweet spot is somewhere in between. Picking and choosing what types of gatherings of large numbers of people to allow can help slow spread. Could they restrict more? Sure, but a lot of people (myself included) might consider that unreasonable.
Is a day in the office a 'public event'? No. So I guess it doesn't effect affect it.
There's little downside to decisions like this- healthcare is most likely going to be overwhelmed even with these changes, may as well do everything you can.
Be a leader. Make the tough decisions now.
All public gatherings are banned without special precautions. All larger than 250 are now banned even with special precautions.
I think it is probably a good way to decrease human interaction. But it's not politically feasible everywhere.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/10/cdc-director-border...
Anything is possible.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
I think it's pretty obvious from the numbers that South Korea is the one with the right ideas about how to tackle this with 21st century methods:
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2020/03/09/South-Kor...
The clicker is effective for fire code issues (since you want to make sure X people aren't in the building) but for disease related issues you don't want those people gathering anywhere, and now 1000+ people will have been gathering (at various times of the night) just outside the venue because of the event.
Those without sufficient information shouldn't be making these moral gambles to begin with.
If there is a buck to be made, who am I to not make it??? "Common sense"? I got bills to pay!
Starving has a 100 percent mortality rate.
These kinds of medical judgments on viral epidemics are exactly where we want the government to communicate clear vision and leadership on emergency medical policy...
At the end of the day you have to set the threshold somewhere. One could argue that a 500-person event is still risky, but a balance has to be struck between attempting to slow the spread of the disease, and not unreasonably restricting people's activities.
In this case, what's reasonable is certainly up for debate. No measure will be perfect, unless we want to start advocating for no gatherings whatsoever (public or private) and effectively putting people under house arrest. While that would stop transmission of the disease, I think it's fairly uncontroversial to say that would be an overreaction. But certainly it's up for debate as to, say, whether a 100-person ban would be appropriate, vs. 1,000, 10,000, etc. They chose 1,000. It won't be a perfect number, but it will help.
It also ignores the intention of the rule, which is to reduce unnecessary risk. If 1001 people in a single venue is dangerous, so is 999.
I imagine a function using things like transmission vector diffusion rate, windspeed, incubation period, critical care percentage, number of ICU beds, and such as parameters, and outputs the maximum allowable gathering size that will keep the spread slow enough that everyone who requires hospital recovery can get admitted. Public officials could then ban public gatherings greater than 80% of that number.
Seems like a paper describing it could be worth some academia brownie points.
I think it's fairly uncontroversial to say that we absolutely do need a quarantine that keeps almost everyone in their homes, except for those providing critical services (medical staff, police, national guard, plus some needed amount of infrastructure for groceries, pharmacies, electricity, water, etc.). For the next 2 or 3 months, I fully expect to only leave home maybe every few days or week to go to the grocery store or pharmacy, like you see today in most of South Korea. It's just a question of when at this point, and the sooner we start it, the less disruptive it'll be in the long term and the fewer people will die.
So you're right, of course.
Whenever you make rules, you define some region of acceptability that's recommended and then if people go too far from that region, you say that's against the rules. The boundary is set some distance from what's recommended. You don't set the number at exactly recommended because people working in good faith still sometimes have honest reasons they need to go past that. But then you get bad faith actors going to the limit too.
If you don't have a good reason not to play it safe during a pandemic, then play it safe. Otherwise, screw you. Just because the law lets you be a dick, doesn't mean it's okay.
In order to say "that's against the rules" but allow some leeway, you need it to be under-specified so you can enforce it selectively.
But the next part suggest you over-set the norm, so people with honest reasons can go beyond the ideal without breaking the rules and everyone has an moral duty to stay well within the specified norms.
Anyone who brings a large group of people together for frivolous reasons or without taking precautions is being unethical.
What's a large group? It's like porn - you know it when you see it.
And can you id some such events? I think the 'organizers' need to feel some pushback for their lack of responsibility.
https://twitter.com/TheSteinLine/status/1237805678023999495
Also is there something significant about a limit of 1000 people? Why that number?
To be fair, after being the first team in the NBA to be eliminated from playoff contention last night, they probably weren't going to draw very large crowds anyway.
Edit: Geez it was just a joke about how poorly the Warriors are doing.
> Also is there something significant about a limit of 1000 people? Why that number?
It's arbitrary. It's a "big" number.
it would be shocking if several thousand people at the least weren't going to show up. the warriors are insanely popular even during this down period.
you ever catch a knicks game on TV? they've been terrible for like an entire decade and there are definitely plenty of people in the seats...
As a fan, Curry's return, had a full house the other day, and every single person in attendance knew we wouldn't make the playoffs.
The new people on the team are insanely fun to watch. Yeah, getting walloped by the Clippers last night wasn't fun to watch, but there are plenty of games which are really fun.
Banning large conferences or sport events with people likely coming from further away seems like a good start.
> Till when? For as long as the disease outbreak is contained (it is not going to be forever)
> How will people put food on the table if economic activity stops? No idea! Maybe something like UBI will help? But the question will remain and will be more troublesome if the outbreak is not contained for sure.
How will that help the people who don't have your magical ability to derive sustenance directly from bank balances?
UBI is not a substitute for economic activity. Goods still need to be produced. We need to deal with the outbreak without shutting the system down.
To expand a bit more, UBI might help service workers and others other hourly wage workers to take care of themselves. The service workers are the people who interact with other people the most, so an infected service worker who doesn't have an option but to work will end up spreading the disease. UBI might be the answer to temporarily keep them alive.
All of us have to live on reserves if there's a shutdown. Just like China did. It is not going to be great. But the alternative is much worse. And I am not claiming this is a permanent solution.
Shutting everything down isn't an option. The economy isn't some nice-to-have thing you can turn on and off on a whim. It's an essential part of providing the basic necessities that people need to live—which includes much more than just food.
No one is saying to shut down everything, because of course you don't want to starve everyone (starvation has a mortality rate much worse than COVID-19).
It's shutting down most things that is being suggested. Healthcare and food stay open.
Comment by "luckydata" in this thread:
> they have to shut down EVERYTHING now.
Only a person in bad faith would think something different.
But this thing is going to be a huge fucking problem no matter what, if we keep doing what we're doing about 17M people are going to die.
Bars, pubs, gyms, museums, theaters, cinema and dozens of others could be stopped right away with minimal impact (except for the companies).
It's hard to imagine a better demonstration of how our economic systems are utterly unable to deal with real-world challenges, because they have no mechanisms for pricing non-trivial real-world consequences of externalities of all kinds, and provide no incentives for intelligent collective behaviour.
The reason of social isolation is to ensure the 3% that do get serious don’t overwhelm the healthcare system. The virus will spread, we just want to slow the spread.
I think you nailed it. Banning large meetings basically shuts down travel, but lets local events continue. This make things easier to handle without a large influx of people coming in from the outside for a show/conference/event/etc...
[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/coronavirus_switzerlan...
It's somehow like all countries are adopting the limitations gradually, like a bit of denial that it will really happen. Wouldn't it make sense to skip some steps and be proactive? At the end we all seem to take the direction of Italy [1], maybe we should consider quarantine directly. It may be a bit more brutal, but it will cost less lives and be over sooner.
The federal council is meeting on Friday morning if I'm not mistaken, I would not be surprised to see new measures during Friday lunch.
Lets say that a country, for example Sweden with its 500 known cases and 10M population goes into a total lockdown for. A few new cases emerge and after a few weeks of no new infections they open up everything again. But since other countries are still infected, they will be reinfected within days.
The only way to stop it would be if the whole world goes into lockdown for a month or so, but that wont happen.
We will have to live with no mass gatherings for 1-2 years, until someone comes up with a good vaccine
In Wuhan, they got it down to 0.3 with the huge lockdown and also aggressive testing and out-of-home quarantine. We will need a period of that to get the case count down to near zero.
Then it's possible to let up, but just a bit. People will need to wear masks and wash their hands a lot, but if R0 is say, 0.8, each new case leads to just a few more cases and then it dies out instead of exponentially growing. That's the flip side of an exponential function.
So it plausibly makes sense to reduce the limits over time. I don't know how much science is actually going into determining these limits, though.
Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are the notable exceptions. They've controlled the epidemic well.
For other countries, the number of cases, or quite probably consistently, the number of deaths noted, is a more accurate measure of overall surveillance and spread.
At a ~1% mortality rate, each death corresponds to roughly 100 cases, two weeks ago. Growth over 14 days, based on confirmed cases has been increasing at about 100x, though that likely indicates increased monitoring and detection of previously cryptic (undetected) cases, not the actual ground-truth growth rate.
Adam Kucharski, author of The Rules of Contagion offers a similar logic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/health/coronavirus-deaths...
His book (not yet available in the US):
https://www.worldcat.org/title/rules-of-contagion-why-things...
I'd though of noting the cumulative deaths per day after 100 cases are noted as more uniform and reliable metric of spread. Bodies are harder to hide than viruses, though countries with poorly-developed medical infrastructure will still lag.
I also suspect we now have a case of countries with known COVID-19 epidemics, and countries with unknown epidemics, rather than countries with no actual epidemic.
Update:
Graph showing cases by country, days after reaching 100 confirmed cases. Note that this only looks at 16 days' cumulative history, China's curve HAS now flattened out.
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/cda527b0448101384fd2005056264...
- events with more than 100 people forbidden
- all schools will close
- all non-critical employees must stay home.
- all private employees as much as possible.
- stay in your home.
- don't travel to [many] countries, more restricts will come.
Tomorrow they will create the law which forbids all kinds of events.
Yesterday 262 cases, today 514.
Edit: All indoor cultural institutions, libraries, leisure facilities, etc. are closed.
https://www.sfsuperiorcourt.org/divisions/jury-services/jury...
(To be fair, this morning they added a note saying call first if you are "experiencing any acute respiratory illness")
It's not an inconceivable measure, but it's not one to be taken remotely lightly - probably not until you ban all gatherings altogether.
That said, reasonable people are avoiding being in closer quarters with sub-1000 people, and it seems like some assurance besides "call if you're so symptomatic you should see a doctor" might be prudent until a little more is known about the virus.
Maybe I'm just salty that I have jury duty this week (:
It's not during times of crisis that we should be more willing to accept abridging of our civil rights. It's during times of crisis where the state's ability to continue respecting the civil rights of its citizens is most important. Pandemic or not, we need to hold politicians accountable when they erode civil rights like this.
There's so much we could have done, but we aren't going to fully wake up until the critically ill are packed in hospital hallways.
This sort of outbreak is exactly the type of crisis for which we rely on governments to plan. Here we are facing an oncoming hurricane and proposing draconian, untested, and unplanned solutions and people driven by fear are willing to give up any rights they have for un-guaranteed safety.
https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/Infektionen-werden-weite...
The prediction is very uncertain, for example it looks quite good in China as of today. If we can copy their success we're good.
Obviously this is the simplest possible way to look at it, not modeling how many of those people actually come in contact with one another, the probability of transmission, etc.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+%281-%280.999%29%...
At around the 700 mark, the probability is > 0.5. So if you are in a crowd of 700+ people, someone's likely sick. Of course, you need to have some reasonable estimate of how many are carrying the virus in a given population to do this calculation.
Not counting the 2 outdoor amphitheatres, I can name 8 theatres in my area with capacity >1000. Several more in the 800-999 range, and I'm not sure if these thresholds would apply to "audience in the house" or "total souls in the building".
Seattle's gathering limit is much lower (250) than SF's, and includes "social distancing" and other limitations, which essentially shuts down all concerts, plays, musicals, conventions, and lectures.
For example, I see the 5th Avenue Theatre here (capacity: 2100) just cancelled their entire run of a show that opens this Friday (8 performances/week for 3 weeks). That would have potentially been >50,000 people.
I estimate bans like this will prevent the intermingling of at least several hundred thousand people each month, in each metropolitan area which enacts it. I'm no expert on the spread of disease but that seems pretty significant.
It's not only the fact that it's a large number of people gathering, but also that it's a large number of people in close proximity to people they wouldn't otherwise be from out of town who are at higher risk of having been exposed to the virus. They pass it on to a few people at the event, who in turn take it home and give it to family members and in a few weeks the city has a big problem.
Governmental employees unless necessary sent home from Friday for 2 weeks.
Arrangements with more than 100 people closed down.
on edit: Link to Danish news site https://nyheder.tv2.dk/2020-03-11-alle-elever-i-danmark-og-m...
There's probably better child care options in Denmark; if they did that in the US, it would be a catastrophe.
I didn't follow the speech very well myself because my daughter thought it was fun to throw a one person party celebrating not going to school for two weeks, my wife started yelling she couldn't understand what was being said because my daughter was being too loud (wife being Italian has sometimes difficulties following Danish language)
But anyway there are a variety of child care options in Denmark, one is thing were a person watched 3 or 4 children during the day at their house, I don't know how that is affected. I suppose it is affected the same as other services but on the other hand it might be reasonable if that was left open because I am expecting that to make the tedium somewhat manageable there will be a lot of play dates for the next couple weeks - so essentially people will have 3-4 kids at their houses they just won't be getting paid for it.
I think long distance train operators should put measures into place to avoid walking between railcars (like, shut down the restaurant car).
https://www.gunnisontimes.com/content/gunnison-and-great-inf...
IMHO we will be exposed to this virus no matter what.
Check out flattenthecurve.com.
But if that infected person is walking around anyway, is it really better for them to wander the streets going to other random locations, infecting other people?
I'm not sure it's an effective gesture.
"Please wash your hands frequently."
Hygiene is the most important thing to stopping it. Everyone needs to do it.
Also, banning all public events is much more likely to be found unconstitutional.
Honestly, this sort of large gatherings restriction is just par for the course for epidemics, we just haven't had one that could potentially get this bad in quite a while.
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...
Several bars in Seattle have already announced they're shutting their doors and that's just because they've seen low business over the past few weeks.
Right now it's going to be businesses that were already struggling, but in a month it's going to be a LOT more places.
In Germany we currently have 28,000 beds in ICU (I expect we will try to increase this number ASAP). If (as expected) we have say 10% of the populace infected and 10% of them require intensive care we need 800,000 beds. What happens to people who don't get proper care when they desperately need it? A lot of them will die.
If the measures result in less simultaneous infections it will save lifes for sure. The more of a delay we can achieve the better.
But however we slice it, this is going to be bad. One professor from the University of Nebraska estimates it might result in 480,000 deaths in the US. That's a guess, but one made with conservative inputs, not from a harebrained or cranky analyst, and not out of line with the the guesses of others in this field. It's not the end of the world, but it will be quite socially and economically disruptive.
https://www.businessinsider.com/presentation-us-hospitals-pr...
If the government wanted, they would lower it. In fact I would bet my money on them lowering it again in a week.
And in cases like this, where the emergency is biological rather than political in nature, pedantic legalism is going to lose to common sense and pragmatism.
I too wonder if 1,000 is off the mark.
End of freedom of assembly.
We need to really think about this...
Once we've overcome the knee-jerk reactionary "Don't change anything" response, then the system becomes popular and untouchable, much like Social Security and Medicare.
1) Whether or not it would be a good idea for Trump to have monopoly power over healthcare.
2) How good of a job the relevant government authorities are doing in response to this issue.
Suggesting that people will accept a new norm after some time is irrelevant.
2. Oh, the whitehouse is running around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off - state and local officials are doing pretty well and I am pretty convinced the CDC is doing a lot of work to make sure we accelerate the vaccine development.
I really really dislike the Trump administration, but it hasn't caused my to lose faith in the idea of governance. Also, to clarify, I'm not suggesting that I'd love to see Trump establish a single payor system - I assume such a system would be immeasurably damaged by intent and exist solely to damage the concept of single payor healthcare.
Once the CDC "allowed" private clinics to develop COVID tests it took a private Cleveland clinic 9 days to create a test that takes 8 hours, as opposed to the previously used test which took 2-3 days. The Cleveland hospitals are developing drive-thru testing. The best thing the CDC did was get out of the way and stop prohibiting the private clinics from developing tests. The private systems are more agile and more capable of adjusting to demand.
One thing I see often is people are unwilling or unable to freely state the trade-offs. Things like immigration or socialized medicine are discussed as either wholly good or wholly bad. The truth is that there are costs and benefits. I freely admit by advocating for a free market, a much more free market than we have currently in medicine, I'm making a trade. I'm trading short term universality for two benefits: short term agility and long term technological progress. I recognize that in the short term some treatments might be unavailable to the poor, but in the long term more and better treatments will be available at commodity pricing. I'm sacrificing some today for a better tomorrow. What do you believe are the real costs vs benefit analysis for single payer?
Side note: apparently this makes getting unemployment benefits a little trickier (but not impossible), since I don't have "an employer" and I wasn't let go from a job. I have "those 4 or 5 companies that do all the conventions and who hired me in the past but aren't hiring anyone this year".
SF does monthly tent counts, it's been less than 500 for a while.
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...
The Bay Area is managed by leaders with no vision and no leadership, and this is just one more instance of that.
The article assures us this will be bad, but it doesn't say "fuck it all, go make out with everyone". It says to take precautions, like the one SF has done.
I think it is a matter of law vs. recommendation. It's really tricky.
TLDR Legal and constitutional.
IME, it's somewhat common for those in positions of authority (employers, municipalities, etc.) to simply assert a legal position that benefits their leadership, without mentioning that courts may disagree. In most cases there are no repercussions for being misleading in that way, aside from eroding the trust of those lied to.
"In case that any parish, town, or city, or any portion thereof, shall become infected with any contagious or infectious disease, to such an extent as to threaten the spread of such disease to the other portions of the state, the state board of health shall issue its proclamation declaring the facts and ordering it in quarantine, and shall order the local boards of health in other parishes, towns, and cities to quarantine against said locality"
That sure sounds like it's talking about local quarantines to me.
If you want to succeed in Western countries it's worth internalizing this. In the absence of legal advice to the contrary, just assume that what you're doing is legal and assert it confidently, and most people won't challenge you. If they do, it helps to have lots of money to afford lawyers on retainer, so that a.) you're more likely to actually be right when you assert that what you're doing is legal and b.) you can craft very good arguments to persuade the judge and jury if it turns out you're wrong.
- I've already accepted that fire codes can legitimately limit the number of people in a building.
- The rule is agnostic with respect to the purpose of the meeting. E.g., it's not obviously being used to suppress political or cultural movements.
- It has a real, plausible purpose for public safety.
That being said, I can also see some valid reasons against it:
- It sets precedent, which is a powerful factor in the U.S. court system.
- The 1000-person rule seems a bit arbitrary. I would think the number needs to be much smaller for the effect to be meaningful. And I'm guessing something more nuanced is what's really needed, for example spacing between persons, air recirculation / flow rates, frequency of surface cleaning vs. # persons present, etc.
- It implicitly discriminates what kinds of groups can meet as before. One salient example would be that Christian mega-churches and really large Roman Catholic parishes couldn't meet as before.
- It also potentially prevents mass protest marches, depending on the wording of the ordinance, and how willing protestors are to ignore the ordinance.
This is one scenario where I wouldn't be surprised if there are groups that refuse to uphold the order and file lawsuits over it infringing on their right to practice their religion (and assemble, of course).
> Some jurisdictions have resolved this tension through compromise: TB patients cannot be forced to undergo treatment, but they may be isolated or detained if they refuse treatment.
And... honestly... not a lot of sensible people are going to complain. Only the very fringes are going to object. The vast "middle" majority, in this case 98%+, is going to agree, conform, and be upset at the people objecting to the quarantine and who break it, not at the government. That counts for a lot too, in practice.
It's frankly a very good idea. I'd even say to lower the number to 50 or maybe 100 at most. Some of the gatherings in South Korea that are believed to have been super-spreading events have been less than that (that church group).
I do not believe this is unconstitutional. It is not meant to keep people from exercising their First Amendment rights. It's speech neutral (time/place/manner restrictions are subject to a much lower level of judicial scrutiny than content-based restrictions).
It only applies to events in facilities owned or managed by the City of San Francisco. It does not prevent people from gathering in public spaces, nor prevent private venue operators who want to hold large gatherings from doing so (not that anyone with a modicum of liability insurance wants to take such risks).
I'm almost certain you're incorrect due to the fact that basketball games will be effected and those aren't run by the city - teams remain private entities.
This does effect intentional private gatherings in public spaces, so if you have an extended family with more than 1000 people in it then your family reunion would be effected.
That said, this is absolutely legal and constitutional and that clarity lies on the backs of many historical disease outbreaks in the US that have resulted in similar restrictions.
Congress shall make no law ...abridging ... the right of the people peaceably to assemble.
Nevertheless the reference itself comes from a really terrible case where the supreme court wrongly infringed on the rights of a war dissenter. It is not a concept that ought to be continued to be parroted.
Saying "no gatherings of more than 1000" is facially legal. Plenty of protests have been told it's time to disperse before.
Furthermore, SCOTUS typically grants even wider powers in extigent circumstances. It is probably also legal to say "no gatherings at all, everyone back to your houses for the duration of this crisis". An example would be something like the boston bomber crisis, although I don't think it was litigated, that probably would have been found to be legal as well.