[mlyle]

I agree totally, but I don't think that provides guidance here.

The meat plants have largely stayed open as essential businesses, only closing or even putting in controls when there's a number of employee cases that can no longer be ignored. So in this case, we're not looking at the trade-off between closing companies preemptively to save lives and economic output, but instead the trade-off between closing companies in response to severe sickness throughout the workforce vs. whatever economic could remain in these conditions.

I -do- think in a lot of jurisdictions, e.g. the SF Bay Area-- we are going too far. We've had slowly declining ICU occupancy for the past 3 weeks (a trailing indicator behind disease) and now even case counts are falling noticeably even though testing has improved. We should be -slightly- easing controls and seeing if we can keep the disease load constant or falling. Instead we won't even talk about it until May 4th, and I worry we'll either take too much of a step at once or make a tiny movement much later than we should have tried it.

[bsder]

> Instead we won't even talk about it until May 4th, and I worry we'll either take too much of a step at once or make a tiny movement much later than we should have tried it.

The problem is we STILL don't have enough equipment for healthcare workers if that ICU starts filling up.

Part of the reason for the lockdown was to give time for all the equipment industries to spin up. Unfortunately, the US federal government squandered that.

Until the hospitals can deal with a New York scenario and not have the healthcare workers contracting it due to lack of equipment, we shouldn't relax.

[mlyle]

Right now in the SF Bay Area, ICUs are below typical seasonal usage and the usage has been declining slowly for 3 weeks. I'm not saying we should "relax", but I think we have evidence that the slightly looser controls employed from mid-March to early April were effective-- that would be a good first step to go to now. Odds are that results in continued reduction, but if it results in slow growth instead we'd be OK in the time it takes to notice, react, and have the effect of our reaction seen.

Frequent, small changes are good. Not big steps and milestones.

Population behavior has further changed in beneficial ways, too-- e.g. mask wearing. Step back to the initial health order -now-. In a couple weeks, consider opening a slightly larger chunk of retail. After each step, watch what happens.

[amalter]

ICUs are below occupancy, but hospitals even in the Midwest are declining to do elective procedures because they can’t get enough PPE to handle run of the mill stuff.

The US had been losing actual Hospital capacity every week, even with empty beds.

When those beds fill in wave 2, get ready to donate your rain ponchos and industrial garbage bags.

[mlyle]

Here's an interesting article. There's significant health care underutilization in the SF Bay Area due to preemptive cuts of elective procedures to prepare for a surge that didn't happen, and now health care workers are being cut:

https://abc7news.com/health/the-surge-that-never-came-leads-...

[mlyle]

PPE is a real issue-- I'm not arguing with that. I've been manufacturing a number of things at moderate quantity on my printer farm and cutting lasers.

On the other hand, a whole lot of measures seem to be consuming PPE at a fixed rate-- per personnel-day when COVID is present. That is, PPE usage is not strictly proportional with disease load, because the virus imposes a large fixed load.

[hackeraccount]

* everyone likes a disaster * you're doing a service by making everyone worried about what might happen - so you're helping that not happen * when it doesn't happen no one will call you on it anyway * better safe then sorry

[sneak]

> Part of the reason for the lockdown was to give time for all the equipment industries to spin up. Unfortunately, the US federal government squandered that.

It wasn’t an accident. The equipment was stolen (“seized”) by the DHS en route to hospitals and then funneled to friends of those in the federal government to be resold on the open market: look up “blue flame medical” if you want to know more.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/skbaer/coronavirus-ppe-...