[Goose]

I know if I avoid exposure to anything I’m safer, but can’t live life in hiding forever either.

That is exactly the issue driving these openings. Santa Clara County is being more conservative than the State is, but even they are only a week or two behind. I think the public and the politicians are coming to grips with the fact that there is no fully "safe" way to re-open, and that each step of opening increases the risk. The fear is that we will have flattened the curve, but as we re-open we will just see it go up again. If our county health departments had used the time to develop adequate contact tracing and testing, we could say that would prevent a big increase in cases by getting the positives and likely soon to be positives out of circulation promptly.
Unfortunately, the is little evidence that the counties have developed this capability. SCC has give us a schedule that shows them having a capability to operate at a case load of 100 per day by July 15. However, this requires the integration of 955 new people who have just been trained (for a week) and who have no experience in contact tracking into a department that is now about 45 people. I can't imagine that will go well. Had they started this process even 30 days sooner, we would have some idea how messy it was going to be, how many of the new people were unsuited to the work and how many cases they actually could track. They didn't. I have no idea what San Mateo county is doing. Given this uncertainty, it is tempting to say keep everything shut down until we are "ready". However, in the absence of any apparent, credible  sense of urgency in getting ready, that isn't politically or socially practical. So here we are, open and see what happens.

[Goose]

I know if I avoid exposure to anything I’m safer, but can’t live life in hiding forever either.

That is exactly the issue driving these openings. Santa Clara County is being more conservative than the State is, but even they are only a week or two behind. I think the public and the politicians are coming to grips with the fact that there is no fully "safe" way to re-open, and that each step of opening increases the risk. The fear is that we will have flattened the curve, but as we re-open we will just see it go up again. If our county health departments had used the time to develop adequate contact tracing and testing, we could say that would prevent a big increase in cases by getting the positives and likely soon to be positives out of circulation promptly.
Unfortunately, the is little evidence that the counties have developed this capability. SCC has give us a schedule that shows them having a capability to operate at a case load of 100 per day by July 15. However, this requires the integration of 955 new people who have just been trained (for a week) and who have no experience in contact tracking into a department that is now about 45 people. I can't imagine that will go well. Had they started this process even 30 days sooner, we would have some idea how messy it was going to be, how many of the new people were unsuited to the work and how many cases they actually could track. They didn't. I have no idea what San Mateo county is doing. Given this uncertainty, it is tempting to say keep everything shut down until we are "ready". However, in the absence of any apparent, credible  sense of urgency in getting ready, that isn't politically or socially practical. So here we are, open and see what happens.