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Comment by creato | Hacker News Reader

Neighboring counties have already allowed work like construction to resume. Is a car factory really that different in terms of risk? Just based on the sheer size of the facilities, I can't imagine the density of people is that high, and due to at least some of the work going on, ventilation is probably good.

It definitely makes sense to keep businesses like bars and restaurants closed given their nature as a "hub" in the graph of human contacts, but we also need to allow what work we can to continue as long as it doesn't contribute to significant spread of the virus.

At the same time, last I saw, car sales had fallen off a cliff. Is there much point to aggressively reopening if those cars can't be sold? But that's a question for Tesla to answer, not Alameda County.

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> ventilation is probably good

I'm not clear on what ventilation being "probably good" means in the context of reducing SARS-Cov-2 exposure to a safe level. What if the air is recirculated and the filters don't capture enough of the virus?

Nobody knows anything for certain. We do not even have good data on mask effectiveness. The basis of all the restrictions is already a gut feeling/whim of the governors, not any concrete scientific data about what works and what doesn’t. Asking whether air conditioning system is good enough doesn’t make sense if we don’t even know what’s good enough. Nobody is doing any studies in that direction anyway, so we’ll never know.

I don’t know if lockdowns and restrictions make any practical difference or not, but people affected are definitely justified in complaining about large degree of arbitrariness in all of it. For example, NYC is still running subway and never stopped through all of it. Sure, people are relying on it to get places in New York, but so is everyone else in this country relying on their job to make a living, and yet many of their jobs were banned just like that.

New infections in NY i heard are majority 76% from ppl staying indoors. Not sure how are they are getting it, from recirculated air in apt complexes?

Last measured antigen rate in NYC was north of 20%. My bet is almost all “essential” workers have been exposed and that part of the “herd” is immune.

Who does that leave but everyone else, who are still shopping, going for walks, exercising, doing laundry in communal facilities and all the other minutiae of life that cannot be paused.

I’ve seen this comment a few times and don’t see the mystery. The virus has saturated the mobile and now is finding vectors into the less mobile.

This is a feature, not a bug, since the pickup rate is hopefully under the critical care capabilities.

> I’ve seen this comment a few times and don’t see the mystery.

Well, its not clear to me what "people who are staying indoors" means. I am exclusively inside my apt for last 8 weeks and have groceries delivered and workout on my bike trainer/zwift indoors.

I feel like there should be some distinction between, 1. mostly staying indoors 2. exclusively staying indoors.

If second group of people are getting it, then yea its mysterious.

If an average person lives with two other people, it’s safe to assume that something between half and two thirds of all infections will be from people staying indoors, because people getting out will easily infect other people in their household.

This is for the Palo Alto HQ as well. Tesla HQ is one of the most densely packed open office plan I have seen. It’s going to spread like a meat packing plant if the workers are asked to come back.

that lawsuit is about Fremont (Alameda County) factory (the last car factory in CA).

The HQ is in Palo Alto which is in a different county

But the fact that it's the 'last' car factory doesn't have any bearing on the choice of opening, right?

The demand for Tesla's seems to be very strong. Also, arguably, the people who would consider buying Tesla are the ones who are less affected by covid economically than the ones who buy cheaper cars

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