The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May (opens in new tab)

My friend who works at the airport in the Galapagos (GPS) was telling me that no one has gotten paid since the tourism stopped. Luckily she can work on farm, but many can't. The local animal shelter there is now out of food, and the dogs will starve if they don't somehow raise money in the next 3 days or so (@patitasgalapaguenas on instagram, you can donate here [0]).

The US is struggling in many ways, but I can't help but think many other less fortunate nations are struggling even more. But the US doesn't show international news so you wouldn't really know unless you go looking for it.

[0]: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donations&busines...

It's a class divide, unfortunately. The people who are getting hit hardest are the people who were already getting hit hardest. Most of those don't frequent the same internet forums we do.

I have two commercial leases. Neither landlord is offering a break. Construction is stopped due to government mandate. There is no bailout from the state due to this intervention. There is a high liklihood of mass layoffs and potential bankruptcy.

I'm past the point of annoyance or despair. I've gotten used to the fact that not only do governments do whatever they want, but people like authoritarian action and don't care about externalities.

It's scary. I was laid-off this month due to COVID-19. Luckily, I am getting paid for one more month because of the WARN Act. I've been looking, but it has been difficult since I'm competing with all the more senior co-workers and peers who were also laid-off.

So how is my budget?

* I know that there will be a time gap between being able to apply for unemployment and receiving it. The unemployment systems in the US are still overwhelmed.

* Since my wife is on my health insurance plan, COBRA is going to be very expensive.

* We moved recently for my job, so a lot of the savings we had are already gone.

We have some runway, but no where near enough to feel safe. We are one of those edge cases where we took a risk, it paid off and life was great, but it didn't last long enough for us save up again so things are looking grim. So finally...

> Yet when I read Redditors talk about quarantine, you'd think everyone in the world was getting paid time off to play Animal Crossing at home or they live at mom's house rent-free. And it seems like it's this crowd that's likely to be pushing for staying in lockdown with no end in sight.

We both still are 100% for maintaining the quarantine. No we are not living some relaxing lifestyle at home. I've been quite stressed out. However, I also know that I would never forgive myself if I contributed to breaking quarantine early and that caused a chain reaction of hospitals to be overrun again and leading to my parents, a relative, or an old friend to die because they could not get the proper treatment.

There is a lot I want to rant about, but rather than that, I would like to leave these thoughts:

Stop thinking of the solution as being so black and white. Lifting the quarantine isn't the only way to help everyone who has been impacted. For example, why not have the same government bodies that enacted the quarantine do something just as drastic to save those who were impacted? What other solutions are out there?

Also, if lifting the quarantine leads to more deaths, then remember that there is an economic impact there too. Have you ever paid for a funeral? I have and at a young age too. It burned a hole in my savings. That set me back several years in saving and investing in myself. Imagine doing the same to the generation of young adults whose parents are in the risk factor group. Far too many of the comments I read, even on HN, are seeing things only through the lens of what politicians say. Outside of compiling raw statistics, I've seen very little independent thought on how to solve the current problems in society.

Thank you for putting into words precisely how I'm feeling about this situation. The goal was to flatten the curve, not protect every single person from getting exposed which is impossible and seems to be what those who are not suffering economic hardship from this (yet) are now asking for.

In the US, the third category is being furloughed and collecting unemployment. Here in Maryland, anyone making $55,000 or below collects as much in unemployment (with the $600/week federal supplement) than they did while employed. The IT systems have done a bad job handling some new categories of claimants (people who couldn’t collect unemployment before but were allowed to under the CARES Act). So some people are waiting for checks. But others are relatively unaffected: when the stay at home orders end, they expect to get called back to their jobs.

It’s a little scary.

I was laid off last year from a non-tech job and at the time, had savings and unemployment to not worry about paying $1800 for rent plus reduced additional expenses for a respectable while (without losing everything) but it's a very different story now.

Since COVID, my landlord said he could let me defer payments for a few months, but honestly that’s not helpful at all since I’ll have to pay in full eventually.

I previously felt relatively comfortable with my opportunities to find new employment in marketing or a career switch to product management. But now, cash is low and what few jobs are available are flooded with applications and high competition from all the layoffs. I can't even get a food delivery gig because they have so many applications.

It could be worse, but my wallet and savings are taking a serious beating and probably will for quite a while.

So if anyone has ANY marketing or PM needs or questions......... Say hi, email in bio! Happy to connect at the very least.

Get off reddit, you won't regret it or miss it at all tbh.

> Yet when I read Redditors talk about quarantine, you'd think everyone in the world was getting paid time off to play Animal Crossing at home or they live at mom's house rent-free

Wouldn't this be a self-selecting population? or is everyone whether rich or poor, good circumstances or bad online?

Yea I am wondering the same thing. I am REALLY lucky to have saved a lot and be in a good living situation where I can quarantine comfortably. But what the hell are people doing who were paycheck to paycheck? I would not blame them if they had to start stealing from supermarkets

We keep in touch with our old nanny from a couple years back who became close with our family — just spoke to her and while they’re doing alright for now, it’s an uncertain and scary time for them. Same for friends and family in service and manufacturing. Some have lost jobs and are in limbo. Older relatives are relying on a network of friends to figure out groceries in areas without delivery.

We’ve continued paying our housekeepers and Montessori throughout all of this; it sounds like most of our community has been doing the same, based on emails from management, and chatter on Nextdoor. But this will vary widely depending on the particular community. Just like when a storm hits, the communities which are already less fortunate will typically get hit the hardest.

And then of course, the local businesses. When the tide recedes, I really don’t know how many of our favorite shops and cafes will still be there. Those folks are sitting on edge right now.

The social media feeds are going to be self-selecting for bored, single, young people. Anyone taking care of young kids at home are too busy looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Kindergarten Cop” to be posting very much right now.

There's another political solution that would maintain the lockdown while preventing thousands of people from dying by reopening the economy: cancel rent. In NJ, they canceled mortgages but not rent, so the landlords get a free ride. In theory rents are "frozen" but they'll become due in September with back rent owed.

No free ride for the landlord class. Cancel rent!

They will do the same thing homeowners will do; not pay. I hope nobody on here owns munis or bank stocks. Or REITs.

I am in Germany and am lucky working remote for my local company.

I talked to my neighbor on Sunday. She is a cleaner working for a subcontractor cleaning schools. She wasn't able to work for 9 weeks (first there were holidays, then Corona stay at home rules). She isn't being paid and her boss does not go through the official process of getting government subsidiaries for her. She is just being left hanging.

Yeah her boss is an ale. It would cost a little bit of time and get all his employees 60% of their net income. He just isn't doing it.

Her sons earn okayish - so they help her out. And we do neighborly community help. Non the less. People left and right are being left behind. Even with government interventions in place.

Alameda county flat out does not allow evictions for non payment of rent for covid-19 related reasons. The landlords can get back rent on a 12 month payment plan, and they can pursue small claims court if this is not paid.

Where on earth are you paying $200/mo for rent?

I've seen you say similar things in a few other threads, and myself and others have said, every time: the risk to everyone is that the hospitals become overwhelmed. They are not right now because of stay-at-home orders. What you think of as failure - hospitals currently low utilization - is in fact success.

+1.

Continuing a lockdown of this severity makes no sense. San Francisco has only had 22 Covid deaths. A city the size of SF would be expected to see 5x as many cancer deaths as that in a normal month [1] and 7x as many heart disease deaths [2]. Instead, we're maintaining a policy that discourages people from seeking preventative treatment for these diseases on the basis that we don't want them contracting a less deadly disease.

The lockdown has proven to be excessive. The doomsday predictions have not come to pass, and we're entering a time of year that is known to be correlated with reduced rates of viral spread (Flu infection rates are 30x higher in the winter than the summer [3]). We need to get people back to work now. Social distancing should still be maintained where feasible but a blanket lockdown will cause way more harm than good.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/research/articles/cancer_202... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm [3] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm

We in fact know very little about the consequences of serious C19 infections in people under 50, and people in their 40s apparently make up a substantial cohort of ICU C19 patients. We also don't know the long-term health implications of a severe C19 case, and there's some evidence to suggest permanent lung damage is one possible outcome. And, even if we didn't know any of those things, avoiding the deaths of people over the age of 50 and the deaths of people of all ages with asthma and hypertension would still be a worthy reason to hit the brakes while we learn more.

> Meanwhile, data is coming out to show that coronavirus has a very low fatality risk to anyone under the age of 50, and to anyone without pre-existing health conditions.

34% of America is aged 50 and over[1]. Almost 40% of America is obese[2], which is a risk factor for COVID-19 complications[3].

> A blanket shutdown does not make any sense when the vulnerable demographic has been clearly identified.

When the "vulnerable demographic" is forty percent of the population, a blanket shutdown makes a lot more sense. We cannot simply consign four out of ten people to severe illness, unknown long-term complications, and/or death.

[1] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/jchs-housin...

[2] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/jchs-housin...

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precaut...

> Blanket lockdown has to end.

I tend to agree.

Why is nobody focusing on Sweden's COVID numbers? Sweden didn't institute city-wide shutdown measures. Yet, there hospitals are not overwhelmed. And, their COVID case counts and death counts are plateauing.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52395866

> How is it moral to order people to shelter in place when their risk of death is 0.01% for 18-45 year olds

The data from your second source indicates that the case fatality rate in New York for 18-45 yr olds is 0.833% (14 deaths in 1705 confirmed cases). Where are you getting 0.01% from?

While I disagree with a bunch of the reasoning you use above, I agree that blanket lockdowns aren’t needed anymore.

Seattle seems to be getting out and about now, but people are being super careful and everyone’s giving each other tons of space. I don’t see why that shouldn’t apply in other places too. In a lot of ways the shelter in place guidance is a mental drain more than a real policy in my mind at this stage.

Our society includes people who are over 50 - how do ensure that YOU do not transmit coronavirus to them if you are under 50 and asymptomatic? I know a lot of people are pretty upset but it's not just about YOU. It's about everyone you come in contact with.

> ...risk of death is 0.01% for 18-45 year olds.

Where do you get this figure? Your first link shows 14 deaths per 100,000 in that age range, or 0.014%, but that is for the entire population, not just people who have had the virus. The same data set reports 1705 cases in that age range. 14 deaths out of 1705 cases is an 0.82% fatality rate.

Of course, that 0.82% figure, reflecting only confirmed cases, is inflated. But conversely, some of those 1705 afflicted 18-45 year olds may still succumb to the virus. The true IFR in this age range in this region _might_ be closer to 0.1% than 0.82%. But 0.01% is just wrong.

I think this is a lot like finishing your full 7 day medication treatment, even though you feel fine on day 3.

That said, I don't know when and how the right way to wind down is, and I don't think anyone else does either. I'm glad we're doing this in a decentralized way over 50 states, so many different strategies can be tried.

I would also add that we who can WFH with full wages do well to remember millions of already less well off people have been left without income and life structure, and they're not just complaining because they're spoiled children!

Funny that this is exactly the same narrative as here in the UK. Initially it was about flattening the curve for healthcare capacity, now we are in some weird holding pattern where the goal is becoming increasingly vague.

The second link is death per 100,000 people (not death of confirmed cases), that, for 18-45, is 14.21 per 100,000 (0.014%). There are confirmed cases of 1705.26 per 100,000 for 18-45. Thus, the death for 18-45 over confirmed cases is 0.83%, much higher than flu for 18-49, which is 0.02%: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html. Noted that the new antibody tests showed much higher cases than the confirmed cases. But the 0.01% number you cited is wrong. Please fix.

I assume you're in agreement that a complete re-opening would be stupid? If so what things specifically would you like to see re-opened specifically?

I think asking to re-open some specific low risk businesses would be reasonable.

The "very low fatality risk" thing only applies to people who can get proper treatment for the disease. If healthcare resources get overwhelmed, the fatality risk will get a lot higher, for the younger population also.

> Our political leaders (in California) are being fearful, afraid to take leadership and base their decisions on data.

Or maybe too much “leadership” that ends up just being another form of authorianism.

> The initial premise of the "flatten the curve" memes was to avoid overwhelming hospitals.

I don't think it was a 'meme' - if you're thinking it was just something on Facebook or something like that. It was and still is a government goal informing their policy.

"We can't let the cure be worse than the problem"

> Blanket lockdown has to end.

What's different now vs before the lockdown started regarding flattening the curve? R0 is a little under 1 right now, but what will it be when most things reopen?

The goal of the lockdown is to keep R0 under 1 until we have measures in place to permanently mitigate the spread [1]. This means lots of testing and contact tracing, which is not even possible right now with case numbers being as big as they are.

Reopening right now would just get us back to #flattenthecurve in a matter of 4 weeks.

> There is no risk posed to the majority of the population from covid-19

There is risk to everybody, it's just lower for some. There's enough evidence of permanent damage inflicted on organs and other gnarly details that I (34M) will be absolutely careful not to get this disease. [2]

[1] https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/California...

[2] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/more-bad-news-on-the...

> The new order will include limited easing of specific restrictions for a small number of lower-risk activities.

It appears that this will be the slow start of ending the lockdown.

Agreed, these are simply political moves

In New Zealand, South Korea and Australia coronaplague is on the way out thanks to testing and contact tracing. Why can't the US muster the political will to do the same?

We are already seeing the damage because a number of meatpacking plants had to go off-line when a substantial part of their workforce was ill and could not report to work, yet many citizens advocate for even lighter restrictions. Nothing of this makes any sense.

You sound far more confident about a number of those details than I think anyone with expertise are.

> are being fearful

This is a conclusion you can only reach retrospectively.

I'm not arguing that the extension is correct; I'm arguing that your assertions do not provide reason to think it is incorrect.

Hopefully this will be the impetus we need to finally start living underground like mole people.

1 more month will probably put a huge number of businesses out of business.

Is there a reason why they'd do something like this, where anyone who looks will see that it's not at all needed?

This is only possible with widespread repeated testing. Unless you can quickly identify and isolate all of the carriers, we are flying blind.

Let's wait and hear what they say this week, hopefully there will be more ease in the current shelter in place guidelines.

> The shelter-in-place has not only had this effect, it's been too effective. Hospital utilization in the bay area is at around 10% when you count surge capacity that has been added [1].

This matters if the end game is herd immunity, but not if the end game is to wait out a vaccine, or a sophisticated testing infrastructure. Unfortunately, I don’t think we know what the end game is going to look like now.

I've been wondering for a while what the end game is.

There seems to only be 3 options:

1: Lockdown forever.

2: Everyone becomes immune.

3: Vaccine.

1 is unrealistic. 3 will take a year. 2 the lockdown is too effective - we need at least some people to get infected, and hospitals to be utilized at a manageable rate.

Is there a 4th option I did not think of? Because I can't figure out how they are going to end this.

I guess reopen a state, let people get infected, then close again? Basically a poorly done version of 2?

To anyone reading the comment above, it is extremely poor advice and should not be followed.

Stay at home and shelter in place orders are not solely for the purpose of protecting ones-self from contracting the virus. They also serve to limit the spread from unsuspecting carriers. You can carry and spread the virus unknowingly and this will result in susceptible people contracting it and dying.

The only way we know that shelter in place orders worked is if they feel like an overreaction after this is all over with.

We're all scared and desperately seeking answers and relief. We all want this to be over as soon as possible.

But we must put the public health above all else. This is not the time for egocentric defiance of the recommendations from our leaders.

In circumstances such as these, widespread civil disobedience is justifiable.

US is not ready for that. https://time.com/5826918/hokkaido-coronavirus-lockdown/

The thing I'm confused by is why a costco is open that has like 1000 people per day and a flower shop that has 20 customers per day isn't open. Is the flower shop dangerous? Is it less essential on the yearly timeframe? This lockdown isn't measured in days right now, it's measured in months. What's "essential" in days is not what's "essential" in months.

From what the SF and CA governments have been saying, that's definitely next. Part of the goal of having mask orders now is to get people used to it. But until our test-and-trace capacity exceeds the rate of new infections, putting more people on the streets is only digging the hole deeper.

Switzerland actually started reopening with haircuts and manicures.

Certainly pressure from groups representing hairdressers was a big part of it, but the justification they use is that contact tracing can be done reliably in such a situation.

Keep in mind that they also want to reopen schools, citing dubious claims about children not contributing much to the spread, staying silent about the likely true motivation (sending the parents back to work).

The local public health departments need time to get testing and tracing working. It is the only way to open up safely. We are way behind the Asian countries that learned the lessons of SARS.

why haircuts and manicures? Its a low population setting (1:1). If there is proper hand washing between clients, each new client gets a squirt of sanitizer, and both clients and stylists wear a mask? Require every haircut to start with a shampoo for mechanical disinfection.

We are seeing them, they're just in early phases; e.g. Italy has already announced its plans, and CA/OR/WA are talking about very specific goals before opening back up (https://abc7news.com/when-is-california-opening-up-reopening...)

Texas is about to start opening up some businesses. the flower shop example we see below would fall under that.

time will tell, though.

We don’t even have enough PPE for current use levels yet do we? I hope people are trying to solve issues like that too, but I feel we’ve got quite a ways to go.

especially for the businesses who are struggling. At least let the most desperate ones open up and get some income. Gov should have some compassion on the small businesses that depend on monthly incomes.

You can start opening things up, it doesn't mean people will go out to eat, get haircuts, visit movie theaters, workout at a gym or travel. As long as the virus is out there and actively spreading, people will voluntarily shelter. Businesses will still go bankrupt as most retail stores and restaurants run at around breakeven in net income. Also there is the liability issue. If we want to get back to normal getting community spread to 0 should be the goal and we need to keep everything locked down to achieve that.

You can't have the expectation of paying debts and simultaneously take away people's means for repaying it. Responsibility without control is cruel.

Growing up, my parents maybe would have had an extra $100 at the end of the month. My dad would have probably been out of work - given that, each month they were out of work would have put them in a year's worth of debt. A financial death.

I hear what you are saying, but I am glad I am not the one making the decisions about this.

It is clear that sheltering does reduce the speed of infection growth, but it is also very clear that sheltering puts enormous stress on individuals, families and companies. I have empathy for those who have to work at home while simultaneously home schooling their children, or families that are in economically over-stressed situations where they don't have an option to work at home, or for communities that don't have adequate running water and other resources.

Why is it that you're afraid of this being "split down political party lines," but OK with the fact that "Republicans have come out as pro-reopening?"

If the science supports shelter-in-place for now, it's automatically bad that Democrats support that to avoid splitting from Republicans?

I hate how the idea of reopening has split down political party lines. This is definitely not the time for partisanship. Now that Democrats have come out in support of gradually tapering the quarantine, Republican mayors will be chomping at the bit to reopen their cities. 60,000 COVID-19 deaths will be too few.

The new order includes several approved low risk activities and transparent indicators that will be used to gauge safety to further reopen. Is there something about this you don’t feel is backed by science?

Are you okay?

Just over a month ago, you were talking about Japan's reduced rates of COVID-19 cases thanks to their mask-wearing culture compared to western societies.

Would you like to revisit that topic before we talk about reopening anything? Or how about Hokkaido facing another wave of cases due to reopening too early? Because it seems to me it's only a matter of time for any country that's currently open to see a spike in cases regardless of their culture.

Its disappointing that you bemoan the partisan politics in a time like this and immediately assume/mock that San Francisco will take a partisan decision when so far they have done a good job and stuck to science.

Almost none of what you said is true. This is not voluntary, there are laws which give these powers, essential businesses can stay open regardless of their size, recording breaking the law while conducting non essential business won’t help you in the supreme court, the federal government is saying lots and doing very little.

I'm not aware of any lockdowns which are specifically targeted at small retailers while competing large retailers are allowed to be open. Where I am the small coffee shops are closed for walk-in business, but so are the Starbucks; the difference is that small coffee shops are not able to pivot to a centralized delivery platform en masse the way Starbucks is.

> Why is it ok for people to shop at Walmart and not at their local small business that sells the same goods and is better equipped to enforce social distancing, with customers explicitly opting in to visit the smaller store?

Small local businesses in the Bay Area that sell similar items to Walmart are open right now, from hardware stores to produce markets. I imagine apparel stores are shut, though many around me are doing online and appointment apparel shopping.

If Walmart is the only store open where you are, it's likely the only store that exists selling essentials where you are, and that is a different problem.

If nothing else, at least we'll come out of this pandemic with some clear Supreme Court decisions to clarify what emergency powers state and local governments actually have. One nuance that people seem to miss is that timing matters. So a very short restriction on Constitutional rights may be acceptable, but the court places increasing scrutiny on those restrictions the longer they remain in place.

State and local governments have far greater abilities to issue orders like this than the federal government. What, exactly, is unconstitutional about a city issuing an order that revokes the ability of a business to operate due to a health emergency?

Uh, there are plenty of laws to keep people in their houses. In my state, anyone outside w/o an excuse can be charged with disorderly persons offense at the very least.

What evidence is there that the SIP is limited in effectiveness? The existing evidence I am aware of is starkly contra that assertion. Anecdotes of seeing people too close together in the park are not evidence of an ineffective SIP.

> The problem is that the shelter-in-place rule is already limited in effectiveness

I've mostly read that the "control" we have over covid-19 now is due to the SIP. Can you source your claim?

The primary goal is to keep the rate of infection under what the health care system can handle.

If the rate of infection exceeds it, the whole house of cards starts coming down. Imagine doctors, firemen and policemen starting to succumb.

The stated goal is to decay to 1 infection per million residents so that robust contact tracing works. Back of the envelope math puts that between 6 and 18 months of continued progress of the health order to get it to this level.

(60 or so in Santa Clara County ICU == ~6000 infections. ICU occupancy decaying by 40% per month; 0.6^15 months * 6000 = ~3 )

On the flip side, NYC just showed us they can suffer through 20% of the population becoming infected at about the same time without their hospitals utterly collapsing.

There is probably some happy medium somewhere. For certain, flattening the curve so much that there are just a few new infections every week is not how we end the lock down.

It's only orderly so far because of a) food supply has not been affected yet*, and b) the gov issued unprecedented bailouts and put money in the hands of many people/businesses. However, we can't just keep printing money forever, if this goes on another 6 months it could be a whole different ball game.

There seem to be lots of people that think actual chaos is the only sufficient justification for a shutdown. No averting anything, let it get bad and mop up afterwords.

You could argue it the other way from the same data. Given that public health officials jumped on it early and got us such a low death rate, maybe we should keep trusting their judgment and let them decide when it's safe to reopen.

That’s great. Here in Minnesota we average 20 a day and the number of cases keeps increasing despite a 1 month lockdown.

People want to open up and get we didn’t even pass the first test!

Meanwhile LA county seems to be ramping up. This is no time to balk in major metros.

Here are the conditions for lifting the CA stay at home orders: https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/California...

It basically comes down to being able to contain disease spread by contact tracing and testing.

Probably downvotes because the answer to your question is the same as to 90% of all uninformed questions online - "we don't know". There are so many unknowns, things go day by day or week by week at best. I too get annoyed at the 1000'd idiot asking 'but will I be able to go on holiday in August?'. Not saying you're an idiot, just trying to explain why others, like me, would be annoyed at your post and would want to see less posts like it.

This is untrue. We may have plateaued but we haven't yet seen a significant drop from the peak yet. 4 days ago there were 115 deaths, then 93 the next day, then 89 the next, that's as high as the peak you're referring to. Source - daily department of health releases https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/OPA/Pages/New-Release-2020....

The drop you are inferring from your graph appears to be a be a reflection of a noisy data set, and the graph is a week out of date.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22999983.

Edit: Nothing particularly wrong with it! It's just a meta-fire which should be allowed to burn in some scrub somewhere.

The hive mind is terrifying in general. It's bad here, too.

There are mindless zombies arguing for endless quarantine and nothing else will do.

There are mindless zombies arguing that lockdown must end immediately or their freedoms will be irrevocably harmed.

What happened to reason? What happened to recognizing that this lockdown is awful, but useful, and we need to make an intelligent decision about when it ends? There are good reasons to end it now. There are good reasons to extend it for years. The right answer is somewhere in the middle, and only reasonable humans are going to be able to find it.

Mindless hive zombies are not welcome in my world.

I intentionally moved from reddit to HN after this same specific realization. After a few years it seemed like reddit would be a good place for hyper local info on covid, but I quickly saw the same effect— misanthropy in the face of so many people trying to do the best they could for others during hard times. It’s off topic here, but I seriously wonder what specifically caused reddit to adopt the largely toxic culture it has.

Humanity used to be a lot worse, you just didn't have a way of knowing that because ... reddit did not exist. Reddit and social media has generally progressive effects for the same reason that increased communication between diverse people has progressive effects. Yes bad ideas spread but good ideas spread faster

Agreed, especially when it comes to how easy it is to build a bias. It seems it’s impossible to find any viewpoints that differ from what the hive mind consensus, even if it’s devils advocate or constructive. This likely applies to all forms of social media, including hn.

I do my best to keep within more niche subreddits that mostly focus of interests, but sometimes I find myself pulled into r/all.

Both parties are corrupt, and both advocate for reasonable and unreasonable policies. Part of their power derives from convincing much of their base to despise the "other side", to never properly listen to the other side, and never fairly consider the other side's position. Politicians on both sides benefit from inflaming this dynamic.

Because their Dear Leader thinks that UV light & Lysol is going to play a role in treating COVID-19 patients?

As usual, American leaders are choosing OPTION 3 which is the worst option:

OPTION 1. (SWEDEN) Control spread just enough to not overwhelm the health care system, but no more than that, in order to get to herd immunity as quickly as possible. This assumes that the area-under-the-curve will be very similar to any option that spreads the time-frame out. This level of lockdown is possible to implement for long periods of time because its impact on regular life is relatively moderate and it doesn't require extreme testing availability or extreme population compliance.

OPTION 2. (S KOREA) Control with aggressive contact tracing in order to attempt to eradicate or outlive COVID. This assumes that COVID can be controlled and that doing so will ultimately reduce the area-under-the-curve (because if it didn't, spreading the time-frame out would be pointless). This level of lockdown is possible to implement for long periods of time because its impact on regular life is relatively moderate but it does require extreme testing availability and very high population compliance.

We don't yet know what the full impact of 1 vs 2 will be because of externalities that are hard to model, but both seem like legitimate approaches.

OPTION 3. (USA) Control spread aggressively so herd immunity won't be reached for a very long time, do this using a shelter-in-place model that will destroy the economy so you'll be forced to abandon it at some point, have no post shelter-in-place plan so resurgence is practically guaranteed since the goal isn't herd immunity nor aggressive contact tracing.

Option 3 is the most destructive, so let's choose that one.

The Bay area is not setting up the area for herd immunity -- there are only a hundred cases a day, so it would take many decades to get herd immunity (effectively never, given births and gradual loss of immunity).

Not a chance that will be the case.

it is a game of Russian roulette where there is one bullet per 100K empty chambers.

This problem generalizes to state-lines as well.

Moreover, restrictions are not uniform. For example, San Mateo county restricts movement to within 5 miles of one's residence. Other bay area counties like Santa Clara do not. So legally somebody from Santa Clara county can visit San Mateo county (for exercise), but not the other way around.

A well-managed response would include curbs on movement, be it at the state or county level.

Which is why it makes no sense to continue the lockdown.

The Wuhan lockdown was also far more strict.

It does allow them to implement more specific restrictions. For example, with today's extension, SF is closing more street to cars inside Golden Gate Park to allow people to exercise outdoors while maintaining a safe distance.

Yes, just in case the state curbs their's abruptly.

I can't help but wonder - is the bay area housing crisis being resolved now?

If we intend to keep the lockdown going until we reach herd immunity, then Congress needs to open the taps and let the basic income flow. Trillions upon trillions of dollars, for as long as it takes. And they might want to get medicaid eligibility ramped up as well. We don't have to call it single payer.