I think that's not the point though. While we're not hit as bad, we should have a reopening dashboard instead of a silly slideshow[1] with some rhetorical questions
We are not hit as bad because of the actions of the government who has issued the shelter-in-place before NY did, when we had 1/10th the rate of infection.
I don't agree with everything the government does, but let's give credit where credit is due. That we were not hit as bad is not coincidental.
That give, I'm perfectly willing to cut them some slack.
Well, you don't know that. There are states and countries that have not gone to "shelter-in-place" extremes and have been outperforming California.
New York is special in America. It's very dense, and every time you get on a subway train, which most of the city does every working day, you're sharing a cramped space with hundreds of random individuals. It's not hard to see why they've been hit harder than anywhere in the US.
To pretend the only possible difference is a binary distinction between lockdown or not is reductionist ad absurdum.
Parent comment is nowhere claiming that it is the only reason. Given that there wasn't enough testing capacity, contact tracing capacity or hospital capacity, what would you have differently? And on what basis?
Not hit that bad by C19. But what about other unintended consequences?
For example, in NYC, domestic violence calls are down. The fear is, the abusee is too afraid to call. Suicides are up. Substance abuse is up. Those who are locked down are putting on weight and becoming unhealthy; C19 does better when paired with other conditions. The economic fallout hasn't hit yet. And so on.
I'm not taking sides (i.e., pro v anti lockdown). I am noting that C19 cases and fatalities coded as C19 are not the only KPIs. There's a bigger picture. We need to look at that bigger piture.
While I somewhat agree (WA also has a silly slideshow alleging to be a dashboard with no goals on it) NY has completely failed it’s residents, while the Western Pact states have not.
I suspect the reality is these goals are nonsense and just provide a false sense of security.
Not disagreeing, but don't forget how fast this thing can grow. It was doubling ... every 2 or 3 days? Smaller infected population buys you weeks of time, but that's all.
Exactly. And that's why it's important to remember that CA governor has issued as shelter-in-place order ahead of NY, while we had a 1/10X infection rate, which more than halved the slope of growth on the log scale.
Sure. I think everybody remembers. I imagine the actions by CA's governor not only saved a lot of lives in CA, but probably helped NY get its rear in gear.
But I'm saying something different: A full reopen without proper precautions would put CA right where NY was, in a surprisingly short time.
Genuine questions: what makes ca have such lower number of deaths compared to ny, given it has a comparable number of tourists and both are crowded? Also, ca has a somewhat comparable climate to italy and spain, yet CA has fared much better. What the heck is the missing piece here?
Greece is also similar to italy and spain and it has far less numbers of deaths. East EU countries as well yet Russia is doing far worse. Very odd behaviour from this virus and i dont think the gaps are in counting methodology or over/under reporting.
One major factor is just how early California ordered residents to shelter-in-place (or "lockdown"). Several San Francisco Bay Area counties issued an order on March 17. Governor Newsom then issued a statewide order on March 19. On that day, California had 1,006 cases. Compare this to New York's 7,102 cases on March 20 when its residents were ordered to shelter-in-place, or Italy's 9,172 cases on March 9 when its national lockdown was instituted. So New York and Italy were already quite behind to start with.
California also has a few other things going for it, for example: CA's urban areas are not as dense as somewhere like NYC. Compared to Italy, the population is relatively young. Many people have professional jobs that can be done remotely (companies like Google and Facebook sent their employees home even before March 12). Public transit is very bad in CA, so almost everyone drives their own car.
I’ll preface this by saying I definitely don’t know the answer to the question, but I think sensitive dependence on initial conditions and just straight randomness have been severely under discussed as possible contributors around the world.
I think there’s some natural hubris here where humans think they have the ability to control the outcome, without pausing to wonder how accurate that really is.
It is possible that the strains in NY and surrounding are different than on the west coast. There is a very interesting hypothesis that the D614G mutation that is found in NY is more contagious than the strains found in CA for example.
Neither site is clear where the testing capacity goal comes from. For NY, it is 30 per 1k (3%). For Bay Area, it is 200 per 100k (.2%). If my math is right, that's a significant discrepancy.
Actually, I see NY's goal is monthly. So I guess that is more like 30 per 1k per 30 days (.1%).
There some discussion of necessary testing rates in this NY magazine article:
It looks like .2% is at the low end of most ready-to-reopen requirements. In any event, it looks we're nowhere near a test for anyone who wants one.
Also, does anyone know of a good chart that graphs daily new cases vs new tests? It seems like that ratio would be significant, especially when comparing case rates between regions.
As far as I know, it's still the case that no reasonably-large country is doing much more coronavirus testing than the US right now. The UK is probably just about over the 30 tests per 1k per 30 days mark averaged over a week as of our last testing increase, Germany might still be slightly below it but I haven't seen recent figures from them and they seemed to have stalled out increasing testing, and other countries are similar.
FWIW my province of 4.4 million is stalled on tests being run because it's run out of additional symptomatic people to test at around 30 tests per 1k per 30 days, even though testing capacity is about double that, and still increasing.
1. You can't actually randomly choose people, so it's being done on a fist-come, first-serve basis.
2. Testing all asymptomatic people on any regular basis would take orders of magnitude more tests, so it's not useful as a containment measure, just as a data-collection measure.
That ranking's not terribly informative. A lot of the countries heading it up are smaller ones since most countries are drawing from the same global pool of testing consumables, meaning that there's not much relationship between the difficulty of carrying out a particular number of tests and the size of the country, it's total tests done which doesn't tell you much about current testing rate, and large developed Western countries are close enough in testing rates that an actual ranking based on them probably wouldn't be very stable anyway.
The problem with talking about per capita testing numbers is that having a bigger population means you need a proportionally larger number of tests to administer to reach the same numbers as smaller countries. The will to test and the money to do so aren’t any issue. The problem is that we can’t just snap our fingers and make tens of millions of tests appear out of thin air. I think this point gets lost on a lot of people when they look at the corona scoreboard (likewise, people fixate on the large number of deaths in the US and ignore that we’re doing better than several European nations on a deaths per million basis).
> The problem is that we can’t just snap our fingers and make tens of millions of tests appear out of thin air.
You are correct - but we (or rather the government) can snap it's fingers and compel some private companies that are well positioned to be able to manufacture tests to do so at a higher priority than other business concerns - or we (again the government) can issue generous contracts for testing supplies that guarantees payment to private companies manufacturing them even if the original quota of tests requested by the government is above the level we end up needing.
I think that large countries actually have an advantage here - a small country might not have any internal industry that'd be capable of manufacturing tests without heavy retooling - or that industry might be so small and specialized that scaling it up is infeasible. But even in that sort of a situation they can use market based solutions to bid on tests in a manner that motivates private companies in other countries to feel confident committing to test production - and that's only needed if there isn't any sort of altruistic world-banding-together-to-fight-the-issue effort.
But none of that matters. You have x number of people, you need y number of tests. Just because it's harder to do doesn't mean you need to do it any less.
That said - it's still a bit amusing that at this point there might need to be some sort of second federal government to make up for the fact that the first one keeps fumbling everything.
If only we had a deep state - then maybe we'd get the things that need doing done.
On the flip side the feds might pick a sub-optimal solution, as opposed to 50 separate independent actors who can try different things and converge on a best answer.
Agreed. Especially with the Musk stunt, too many people in the bay area and CA are questioning the continued SIP, and it would be good for the government to come out really transparent in how they are making the decision.
Enough people in NYC have died that you would see the excess mortalities very clearly even if you smeared them out over a few months.
Also tests have shown that almost no people in the Bay Area were infected prior to mid-Feb and only a low single digit percentage had antibodies in Santa Clara county as of early April.
There is no evidence supporting your theory and plenty of strong evidence contradicting it. "Lots of people have Chinese friends and therefore everyone is already infected" is not a convincing line of argument.
Edit: This post is wrong. I didn't bother to read the article and was off base on most of the facts. Leaving this post only so I can remember my shame.
NYC is a single city and county with 350k government employees and they've had a coordinated data effort for nearly a decade.
"Bay Area" is like 8 counties and dozens of cities, each which have their own tech stacks and legal teams, pulling their efforts in different directions.
I'm disappointed that the state of California hasn't come up with a few APIs which could easily reduce the redundant efforts of tens of thousands of localities. I've been prototyping some ideas to show the state what modern government could be like if there was a coordinated effort.
This comment and the great edit are a positive combo. They help remind people that California doesn't have uniquely high population density.
Without reminders, that assumption tends to go unchecked. Silly (but real) example: I have heard someone say that SJ has higher population per sq mi than Manhattan.
Keep in mind that the total number of COVID deaths in CA is less than than the number of deaths in NY on a single bad week.
While a dashboard like this would be good, I think that an order of magnitude difference warrants perhaps being less disappointed.