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Comment by 9HZZRfNlpR | Hacker News Reader

I'm not an American but by the look of it the restrictions in California are insane when you look at their case numbers. I'm comparing it with European countries where I live but California can't close their borders either to control the flow of infected from other places.

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Precisely - case numbers are good because of the restrictions.

I hear this regurgitated very often but I've never seen any evidence of this. Basic reasoning follows that there would be some drop in cases as a result of the forced closure of all non-essential businesses, but due to the universal nature of the closures I'm not aware of any way to quantify how much it's helping. It could very well be that widespread social distancing and voluntary measures could produce a similar outcome. Is there any study that confirms or debunks this?

You can generally infer it from restrictions in places that had high case counts and then enforced stay at home measures. Looking at the per-day growth rates in NYC, Italy, LA, etc. before and after the instantiation of stay at home measures is pretty convincing.

We'll probably have some more data as places start to reopen.

I'm not familiar with one, and would think it would be very hard to create the controlled circumstances to so so without so many other variables between the study areas confounding the data too much.

This statement sounds like Aristotle spontaneous generation.

But as I said your state borders are opened, so what's the end game? The whole Europe didn't just stop manufacturing (as a comparison), they just implemented distancing and sanitation rules etc.

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