06-16-2020, 12:49 PM
I praised Newsom earlier, but as we move into outbreak 2.0, I think he's screwing up big time.
First, letting counties decide what to do is dumb. Some of these county health officials have been skeptical about the virus from day one and are more interested in reopening the economy than protecting public health. Sacramento County's public health officer, for instance, has had much more to say about the economy than the people dying from the virus all along. He gave an interview today seeing he is not concerned about any of the increasing numbers because we haven't hit the state criteria yet for un-relaxing the stay at home orders.
Second, and related, these criteria are awfully, awfully weak. If cases spike quickly, it will take a while for the 14-day running average to get up to 8%. And 8% is too high anyway. Florida, currently having maybe the second worst outbreak in the US, is only at about 6% over the last two weeks. The contact tracing criteria are a joke. I'm guessing they are counting "left a message on voicemail" as a first contact. I get so many robocalls that I don't even bother playing my messages from unrecognized numbers--I just go through and delete them en masse every so often. And there are a lot of people younger than me who don't even use their phones as a phone anyway. Are they going to get the messages? Hospital capacity is a trailing indicator of cases. It takes a couple of weeks at least to go from infection to hospitalized. So the criteria for hospitals should be set very conservatively so that the momentum of new cases does not overwhelm a system that was already near capacity when the criteria for closing things down kicked in.
This whole thing seems designed to only reverse the reopening if things get truly awful. Shouldn't the point be to stop before things get that bad?
I'm increasingly convinced that the second go around of covid in the US is going to be much worse than the first, even in the states that did things well the first time around.
First, letting counties decide what to do is dumb. Some of these county health officials have been skeptical about the virus from day one and are more interested in reopening the economy than protecting public health. Sacramento County's public health officer, for instance, has had much more to say about the economy than the people dying from the virus all along. He gave an interview today seeing he is not concerned about any of the increasing numbers because we haven't hit the state criteria yet for un-relaxing the stay at home orders.
Second, and related, these criteria are awfully, awfully weak. If cases spike quickly, it will take a while for the 14-day running average to get up to 8%. And 8% is too high anyway. Florida, currently having maybe the second worst outbreak in the US, is only at about 6% over the last two weeks. The contact tracing criteria are a joke. I'm guessing they are counting "left a message on voicemail" as a first contact. I get so many robocalls that I don't even bother playing my messages from unrecognized numbers--I just go through and delete them en masse every so often. And there are a lot of people younger than me who don't even use their phones as a phone anyway. Are they going to get the messages? Hospital capacity is a trailing indicator of cases. It takes a couple of weeks at least to go from infection to hospitalized. So the criteria for hospitals should be set very conservatively so that the momentum of new cases does not overwhelm a system that was already near capacity when the criteria for closing things down kicked in.
This whole thing seems designed to only reverse the reopening if things get truly awful. Shouldn't the point be to stop before things get that bad?
I'm increasingly convinced that the second go around of covid in the US is going to be much worse than the first, even in the states that did things well the first time around.