[danhak]

There are many factors at play, but in L.A. I don't believe premature reopening is one of them. Bars, indoor dining and gyms have been shut down for pretty much the whole pandemic. Outdoor dining was banned (again) about a month ago.

My take is that L.A.'s issues have more to do with housing density, high number of people living with roommates and high number of multigenerational households. Also perhaps some some challenges communicating with an extremely large and diverse immigrant population.

[jchonphoenix]

I'll point you to Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Tokyo as counterexamples. All of those cities are 3-7x denser than LA, more populous, and culturally multigenerational.

I think it's quite clear to anyone who's been paying attention at this point that behavior has more to do with containment than anything else. The US and perhaps LA in particular for some reason or another is unwilling or unable to implement the same behavioral safety measures of other countries and cultures.

Mask wearing is the obvious one. If you go to any of those 4 cities I mentioned, 100% of individuals in public are masked, whether indoors or outdoors. 6ft social distance is very strictly followed with public shaming for those that take off their masks or do not follow social distancing guidelines in public.

[stevegalla]

I suspect those 4 cities are doing more than just wearing masks. I’m having a hard time tracking down the interviews (I think it was Dr. Jim Yong Kim who said this), but there are two types of transmission between households and within households. Mask wearing, social distancing, quarantining, contact tracing, and some other measures can help to reduce between house transmission. However, you need to stop the within house transmission, too. To stop within house transmission, people are removed from their home and isolated in medical facilities in some parts of Asia.

Stopping between house and within house transmission is what I suspect those 4 cities you mentioned are doing. North America is more focused on stopping between house transmission.

Anecdotally, I know some cities in South Korea have quarantined people by placing them in an isolation room (4 people per room spread 6 feet out each wearing a mask 24/7) until they test as being COVID free. This was around 20-30 days from what I understand.

In Canada, if you quarantine, it’s 14 days in your own home. Mostly this is on the honor system. If you live in a condo / townhouse / strata or your neighbors know you’re quarantining, they can report you for violations. When quarantining, you’re restricted to a single room if you live with others, but there is still risk of passing it on to others. Anecdotally, I know of a case in Canada where an individual quarantining in their room has managed to pass COVID to 3 others who live in the house. These people were wearing masks around the house when not in their own room. If this original person was isolated in a hospital, the spread would stop at one. Since they weren’t, it ended up infecting the entire house.

[cameldrv]

This is also key. China used converted stadiums, convention centers, etc for this after a few weeks. According to them, this reduced R from about 0.8 to about 0.3. People were actually being rounded up and taken to these places forcefully.

With the number of now empty hotel rooms we have, this could easily have been provided on a voluntary/strongly encouraged basis. Instead what we got in SF for example was hotel rooms for the homeless (that hypothetically could have COVID) and no hotel rooms for people that actually tested positive for COVID.

[DanBC]

Here's a twitter thread about someone who lives in South Korea returning home from a trip abroad.

https://twitter.com/koryodynasty/status/1345210393715564544?...

People should wear masks, but there's so much more they need to do as well.

[danaliv]

At some point, “this is a free country” became “I don’t have to apply impulse control under any circumstances.”

[MattGaiser]

Indeed. LA is not that densely populated by any global standard.

[crx07]

LA is one of the most connected cities in the world. It's not LA's fault necessarily, but the country as a whole should've been on complete lockdown from April until whenever the situation was under control. Our national wealth and GDP have plenty of room for a complete quarantine, even if that means paying everyone's paychecks for a year or longer. We deliberately chose to allow 350,000+ peoples lives to end instead.

[danaliv]

I just moved to LA from New York State in December, and it seems to me that the number one problem here is noncompliance. So many people are just out and about like nothing unusual is going on. People aren’t wearing masks, or they are but not covering their nose. The number of house parties I’ve seen in the past month is shocking—and no one at these events has worn a mask. Outdoor places like beaches and trails are packed with unmasked people, which by itself isn’t necessarily a hazard, but then they aren’t maintaining a safe distance.

I’m not saying NY was perfect; not by a long shot. But here it’s like people aren’t even trying.

[Animats]

I just moved to LA from New York State in December, and it seems to me that the number one problem here is noncompliance.

Agreed. I see far too many people out without masks. It's scary.