[trident1000]

The LA mayor is telling people to not walk outside because of covid. If thats not absurd big liberal govt policy idk what is. Who would want to live somewhere where the govt thinks they can do that. Your rights as a person dont vanish in a crisis.

https://fortune.com/2020/12/03/los-angeles-new-lockdown-rule...

dannyincolor - He issued an order. Its not an ask. This isnt a where you live thing, this is a govt overstepping their bounds thing. Id have no problem with asking.

[njudah]

The Attorney General of Texas filed a lawsuit claiming the results of election in four other states were invalid. If that isn't rejection of the constitution and democracy I don't know what is.

[megaman821]

Texas likes to pass a whole bunch of stuff that they know will be struck down by the courts. It is purely for political brownie points, there is no real expectation that these things go anywhere.

In this specific case the Texas Attorney General is being investigated by the FBI and hoping to court favor with Trump for a pardon.

[xyzzyz]

They had a dispute, and filed a court case, which was dismissed. What’s undemocratic about that? If they ignored the court verdict, that would be rejection of constitution and of republican system of government, sure. However, addressing legal and constitutional complaints through justice system is as constitutional and small-r republican as one can get.

[apsec112]

It would be perfectly legal, for example, if a bunch of prominent Democrats got together and filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court demanding that a bunch of prominent Republicans be arrested, tried, and executed for treason. It would be thrown out immediately, for a number of good reasons. But wouldn't that be... disturbing? I don't want to live in a country where prominent political leaders ask for such things, even if they're fairly sure that they'll be told "no".

[wing-_-nuts]

Saying 'you can't walk outside!' is an outright lie. Read the exceptions to the order.

[systemvoltage]

Those who've downvoted this comment, can you please explain? Outdoor risk is extremely low, especially when you're walking and wearing a mask.

[phobosanomaly]

Read the exceptions in the actual order.

https://www.lamayor.org/sites/g/files/wph446/f/page/file/202...

It isn't as odious as it's made to seem.

You can still grab takeout from a restaurant, buy weed, go to the grocery store, do your laundry, go to an outdoor fitness class, go to youth sports, surf at the beach, do some outdoor lap swimming, get your nails done, go to the zoo, etc. The request to fill out an online form is a very, very basic attempt at contact tracing that is pretty non-invasive.

City of LA was facing a situation where its hospitals were going to wind up being effectively closed due to loss of capacity. Seems like a decent justification for extraordinary measures. Look at Barstow Community right now. 114% of inpatient beds occupied by COVID patients (as-of 12/15). Imagine if LA hospitals looked like that. It would be apocalyptic.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/9443799...

As it is, even with that order having gone into effect, ICU capacity in LA county as-of the 11th is 2.7%.

https://www.kqed.org/news/11850757/california-icu-capacity-s...

Plus, if you look at a map of what actually constitutes the City of LA proper, it's a pretty tiny, but extremely high-density slice of the 'Greater LA Area.'

If you really, really want to wander around DTLA, just tell the cops you're walking to the grocery store. They're not walking around arresting anyone who steps outside.

This is a tool that lets city authorities put the brakes on people doing egregiously stupid stuff. They're not stopping people on the street like the gestapo for going about their business.

So, in short the parent comment seemed to express a knee-jerk reaction to a policy without offering an attempt at a reasoned assessment of the context and policy alternatives facing the City, as well as a pragmatic appreciation for the reality of enforcement on the ground. If they offered a viable alternative that seemed reasonable and well thought-out rather than just calling it an "absurd big liberal govt policy" I wouldn't have downvoted. Doesn't matter who runs the city, Repub or Dem, if when you call 911 there's nowhere for the ambulance to take you.

[thu2111]

That >100% of beds can be occupied with COVID should raise some questions about those stats.

ICU beds are flexible, it's more of a designation than a hard constant. Sweden doubled their ICU capacity in a few weeks without much difficulty back in March. So it's normal for ICU to run near "capacity" because it'd be kind of wasteful if it didn't.

Remember also that "COVID patient" means "patient who tested positive for COVID", it doesn't mean that's the primary thing wrong with them. Hospitals are super-spreading sites, lots of patients turn up for something uninfected and pick up COVID in hospital. So the stats have to be interpreted carefully, even if you accept the premise that poor planning in the hospital system is justification to tell people they can't go outside. Also consider that COVID spreads inside, not out!

[phobosanomaly]

As an alternate perspective, that >100% of beds can be occupied by people with COVID could terrify you. People in gurneys lined up along hallways, PPE running low, overflow tents in the parking lots, nurses WAY over ratio handling more patients than is safe, doctors burned-out and scared.

So, any patient in a hospital that tests positive should be going into a negative-pressure room so that the hospital doesn't become a super spreader event. When you get too many patients, it becomes impossible to actually do that, and it gets kind of scary both for people with non-COVID issues, as well as the staff. Doctors, and nurses, and ER techs, and social workers, and respiratory therapists, and security, and janitors, and radiology techs, and CNAs aren't disposable.

The other issue is that you need doctors and nurses to run the ICU. Critical care physicians and nurses are in high demand all over the country right now, and LA may not be able to double their number of ICU specialist staff on a week-by-week basis.

Sweden has a universal, socialized healthcare system, so they are able to allocate resources nationally based on demand. In the United States, it's a checkerboard of private, nonprofit, and county facilities, each with different structures, policies, health record systems, profit sources, etc. so planning and coordination becomes very complex.

Again, the order does not prevent people from going outside, there is a long, long list of exempted activities in the actual order.

I have turned this problem over in my head a lot, and I really can't think of a good alternate policy approach specific for the highly dense urban setting of LA city proper. I don't have a good answer along the lines of 'this is what they should be doing instead.'

[thu2111]

People in gurneys lined up along hallways, PPE running low, overflow tents in the parking lots, nurses WAY over ratio handling more patients than is safe, doctors burned-out and scared.

'Terrified' is all relative, right? Such things are reported in recent years with nobody panicking like in 2020:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/saline-solution-s...

“This is a serious situation and right now we are at the limits of our conservation and adaptation strategy,” said Dr. Paul Biddinger, director of the Center for Disaster Medicine and vice chairman for emergency preparedness at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “We have seen an increase in the number of flu cases compared to last year. If this continues the current trend, we are worried that this will stress our system and make us run out of IV fluids,” added Dr. O’Neill Britton, chief medical officer at Mass General.

https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...

"Hospitals Overwhelmed by Flu Patients Are Treating Them in Tents"

A lot of things that are actually not that alarming and do not cause mass deaths, have been recast this year into apocalyptic end-of-days events that must not be allowed to happen at literally any cost. It's not rooted in anything hard or real, it's to do with the scale of the original projections (which were all wrong).

[phobosanomaly]

Happy to hear your alternate policy proposal.

If you were mayor of the City of Los Angeles, what would you do differently, and what would be your justification to the citizens for your policy?

Do you feel the policy you outlined would be judged to be significantly better than the current policy by the majority of voters of the City of Los Angeles?

If so, how much better, and measured by which metrics?

Do you feel that there would be pushback against your policy by City Council, Public Health Officials, Public Safety Officials, or other key stakeholders?

What would be the risks if your policy was wrong and you had misjudged the situation? What would be your contingency plans?

If your policies are workable, let's get them concisely outlined and email them to some key interest groups so that they can start getting them out to the public and key stakeholders.

Do you have experience in Public Administration and Public Health? If you're an epidemiologist or city official, your credentials will give your policies more weight and your knowledge and experience will be highly valued since it likely takes into account a variety of 'Chesterton's Fences' that a layperson wouldn't have considered.

Even if you have no knowledge of the field, you might have some great ideas.

[dannyincolor]

*asking people to.

Also, public health policies have to track with population density.

This would be a massive encroachment on freedom in rural Texas or somewhere of that nature, but is a reasonable ask in the most populous city in the country.

[ewmiller]

This is classic troll bait. Railing against the mayor of LA in a thread about housing and employment in the Bay Area. No opportunity to rant about big government must be left untaken, no matter how much of a stretch it is.