Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[Josephus]

Sometimes I wonder whether social distancing guidelines were a mistake, especially after masks became available.  Clearly it seems like there are compliance issues with both masks and social distancing, maybe picking one would've made the burden less onerous.  As it happens, we're now going to observe what would've happened had we not locked down.

I know some of you think I'm a broken record, but as I have been saying since March, the guidelines should have been written with an eye toward sustainability. If you tell people that they need to give up 80% of their activities and stay home, you eventually get mass disobedience. If you instead told people that they need to give up 20%, that could have worked.

Birdwatching was never a high risk activity. That shit easily feeds into an atmosphere where people are go to church without masks and sing hymns.

Yeah, but then you'll have everyone out saying they are bird watching. That's not enforceable. You either have a full lockdown or none at all, imo.

[alfred russel]

And there's not even, by the looks of it, local test-and-trace efforts. It seems like large parts of America just stopped lockdown because they got bored and are now just okay with this

I think it is pretty much over in terms of people staying in. Rush hour traffic in downtown Atlanta is almost back to normal, which is actually really wild since a lot of major employers are shut down.

The gym was packed yesterday. The sauna, spa, and massage services at the gym are reopening today. At first people were staying spaced out and wiping down machines - there are signs to do so before and after use - but it really looks like everything is back to normal and half the gym wipes are out anyway. Almost no one wears a mask (which is tough to work out in).

In the climbing gym the crowds have stayed away, but I wonder if that is because you have to wear a mask while climbing.

Restaurants are filling up--I had lunch at a place with basically every table filled. The capacity restrictions are supposed to be lifted here on June 16th--but I guess this restaurant jumped the gun? I don't think they removed any seating capacity.

I went to the mall yesterday and it seemed like it was doing a brisk business. I'd guess 50% of people were wearing masks. A bizarre group of customers were wearing their masks on their chin--leaving their nose and mouth uncovered--they were a minority (maybe 10-15%) of customers wearing masks but I believe their presence is an indictment of the US education system. I think most employees were wearing masks that way, but I understand that more--it is uncomfortable to wear a mask all day and it also makes it tough to do a job.

In the DC/MD/VA area, lots of restaurants are still carry-out only and many employers that allow for WFH are planning to do so through the rest of the summer. Traffic has picked up, but its still definitely lighter than normal, especially around rush hour.

We'll have to build a wall along the VA-NC border to keep out the COVID hordes. Or maybe blow the bridges across the Rappahannock.

I doubt it. Urban density still seems to be a major driver. The covid hordes are up where you are.

(also, while the government response is quite different--I'm not sure we aren't describing different sides of the same coin. I'm working from home through at least September, and in the heart of Atlanta stuff has been slower to reopen than where I live which is before the suburbs but not really in the heart--kind of no mans land).

Deaths per million as of today per realclearpolitics:

The DC area and surrounding states:
Washington DC: 729.7
Maryland: 486.1
Virginia: 181.1

The states to the south of the Virginia / NC border:
Georgia: 230.8
South Carolina: 116.5
Tennessee: 69.5
North Carolina: 107.9
Florida: 136.6

[DGuller]

Sometimes I wonder whether social distancing guidelines were a mistake, especially after masks became available.  Clearly it seems like there are compliance issues with both masks and social distancing, maybe picking one would've made the burden less onerous.  As it happens, we're now going to observe what would've happened had we not locked down.

I know some of you think I'm a broken record, but as I have been saying since March, the guidelines should have been written with an eye toward sustainability. If you tell people that they need to give up 80% of their activities and stay home, you eventually get mass disobedience. If you instead told people that they need to give up 20%, that could have worked.

Birdwatching was never a high risk activity. That shit easily feeds into an atmosphere where people are go to church without masks and sing hymns.

Yeah, but then you'll have everyone out saying they are bird watching. That's not enforceable. You either have a full lockdown or none at all, imo.

Evidently both options lead to a de facto "none at all", so maybe a third option would've been optimal?  Compliance should always be a consideration in rule-making. 

A classic example of compliance/security tradeoff are password policies.  You want passwords to change from time to time, but you can't be stupid about that.  If you ask me to create a new secure password every 90 days, I may actually do that.  If you ask me to create a new password every 24 hours, and every new password has to differ by at least three character from every other password I ever used (which makes it obvious that passwords aren't encrypted and thus useless), I'll just do what I need to do to make it convenient for myself.  I'll write it down, I'll make it algorithmic, I'll make it easy to figure out for myself.  The system admin in the second system may think they're being more hardcore than the first one, but actually their criminal cluelessness makes them more dangerous than any hacker.

[crazy canuck]

Well, yes and no.  In a country as vast as the US it makes no sense to have one policy response for the whole country. 

That cannot work

Eg. NY, NJ and CT cannot have their own contact tracing systems because people move across state boundaries in massive numbers.

The US made a policy decision to court death because it was too much of a pain in the ass to do it right and because our federal government is led by someone who after declaring a state of war existing between COVID and the American people, has sided with the disease.

Well it can work.  As mentioned that is how we did it.  The bit you cut out of my post. There other things going on in your country beyond the failure of your federal government.  And btw your numbers are way too high for contact tracing to work.

[Sheilbh]

I mean with density it really depends where you look.

In Europe megacities were badly hit - but they were all in countries that failed to adequately respond. So London, Istanbul, Paris, Madrid were hit disproportionately and the same seems to happen with New York. But on a global basis density doesn't seem that important given the success in Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo all of which are still open to one degree or other and still operating with public transport. 

In Europe once you remove the megacities there's not really a huge difference between being in, say, Lyon or Manchester or the suburbs or rural areas. The bigger factors seem to be income deprivation (which may be because of more "internal" density/overcrowding in accommodation or because they are less likely to be able to work remotely) or age profile. This is also reflected in the impact in those megacities - so in New York, Manhatten wasn't badly hit it was the less dense areas like Staten Island, Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn. There's something similar in London, where the worst hit areas weren't the densest and some of it we still don't know as well as BAME communities for example, in London the Jewish community was disproportionately hit - largely in North-West London and there's currently no explanation for why there was such a big and bad outbreak in that area, which is fairly middle class single-occupancy houses rather than denser blocks (my guess is that I think it's a community that's typically older and an area of London with more care homes than average).

Edit: You can see this in the London boroughs in the map here:
https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/coronavirus--covid-19--cases

The highest density boroughs are basically in the middle: Camden to Hackney (Cmd to Hck), Hammersmith to Tower Hamlets (Hms to Tow) and, south of the river, Lambeth and Southwark. The worst hit boroughs are generally outer boroughs: Barnet, Brent, Croyden, Bromley, Newham and Ealing which are between 1/3 and 1/2 the density of the inner boroughs.

[Sheilbh]

That cannot work

Eg. NY, NJ and CT cannot have their own contact tracing systems because people move across state boundaries in massive numbers.

The US made a policy decision to court death because it was too much of a pain in the ass to do it right and because our federal government is led by someone who after declaring a state of war existing between COVID and the American people, has sided with the disease.

My understanding is contact tracing and public health is done on a federal level in Germany - I don't know if there's then some central repository/framework that they all feed into?

Evidently both options lead to a de facto "none at all", so maybe a third option would've been optimal?  Compliance should always be a consideration in rule-making. 

Yes - but this seems like a particular issue in the US, which I think is around your politics and civil society.

There was a lot of concern in the UK that we wouldn't comply, it was apparently one of the reasons the modellers didn't really look at lockdown as an option. But, actually we've overcomplied and have, surprisingly, been the slowest in Europe to respond to lockdown being lifted - basically British people are surprisingly comfortable with staying at home and not seeing anyone (in polls general happiness in lockdown increased every week ). Similarly in Italy there were concerns about it breaking down, especially in the South which was less impacted by the disease but more impacted by the economic issues. One shop was looted, but that didn't spread and compliance was high.

Now that things have been lifted I wonder if we'll get such high compliance if lockdown is re-imposed. But only the US seems to have had such a strong reaction against lockdown/unwillingness to comply in the first month or two of lockdown.

[crazy canuck]

I mean with density it really depends where you look.

In Europe megacities were badly hit - but they were all in countries that failed to adequately respond. So London, Istanbul, Paris, Madrid were hit disproportionately and the same seems to happen with New York. But on a global basis density doesn't seem that important given the success in Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo all of which are still open to one degree or other and still operating with public transport. 

In Europe once you remove the megacities there's not really a huge difference between being in, say, Lyon or Manchester or the suburbs or rural areas. The bigger factors seem to be income deprivation (which may be because of more "internal" density/overcrowding in accommodation or because they are less likely to be able to work remotely) or age profile. This is also reflected in the impact in those megacities - so in New York, Manhatten wasn't badly hit it was the less dense areas like Staten Island, Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn. There's something similar in London, where the worst hit areas weren't the densest and some of it we still don't know as well as BAME communities for example, in London the Jewish community was disproportionately hit - largely in North-West London and there's currently no explanation for why there was such a big and bad outbreak in that area, which is fairly middle class single-occupancy houses rather than denser blocks (my guess is that I think it's a community that's typically older and an area of London with more care homes than average).

Edit: You can see this in the London boroughs in the map here:
https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/coronavirus--covid-19--cases

The highest density boroughs are basically in the middle: Camden to Hackney (Cmd to Hck), Hammersmith to Tower Hamlets (Hms to Tow) and, south of the river, Lambeth and Southwark. The worst hit boroughs are generally outer boroughs: Barnet, Brent, Croyden, Bromley, Newham and Ealing which are between 1/3 and 1/2 the density of the inner boroughs.

The problem is JR didn't copy what I was saying could work.  What can work is allowing different regions to deal with their own circumstances.  The pandemic in BC is different from other Provinces and it would have been problematic if the federal government had created one size fits all policies and restrictions.

[Grey Fox]

I mean with density it really depends where you look.

In Europe megacities were badly hit - but they were all in countries that failed to adequately respond. So London, Istanbul, Paris, Madrid were hit disproportionately and the same seems to happen with New York. But on a global basis density doesn't seem that important given the success in Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo all of which are still open to one degree or other and still operating with public transport. 

In Europe once you remove the megacities there's not really a huge difference between being in, say, Lyon or Manchester or the suburbs or rural areas. The bigger factors seem to be income deprivation (which may be because of more "internal" density/overcrowding in accommodation or because they are less likely to be able to work remotely) or age profile. This is also reflected in the impact in those megacities - so in New York, Manhatten wasn't badly hit it was the less dense areas like Staten Island, Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn. There's something similar in London, where the worst hit areas weren't the densest and some of it we still don't know as well as BAME communities for example, in London the Jewish community was disproportionately hit - largely in North-West London and there's currently no explanation for why there was such a big and bad outbreak in that area, which is fairly middle class single-occupancy houses rather than denser blocks (my guess is that I think it's a community that's typically older and an area of London with more care homes than average).

Edit: You can see this in the London boroughs in the map here:
https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/coronavirus--covid-19--cases

The highest density boroughs are basically in the middle: Camden to Hackney (Cmd to Hck), Hammersmith to Tower Hamlets (Hms to Tow) and, south of the river, Lambeth and Southwark. The worst hit boroughs are generally outer boroughs: Barnet, Brent, Croyden, Bromley, Newham and Ealing which are between 1/3 and 1/2 the density of the inner boroughs.

The problem is JR didn't copy what I was saying could work.  What can work is allowing different regions to deal with their own circumstances.  The pandemic in BC is different from other Provinces and it would have been problematic if the federal government had created one size fits all policies and restrictions.

It tried tho. Got told to deal with the border first.

[crazy canuck]

It tried?  How?

[HVC]

as far as I know cross border travel in the states is much higher then in Canada. People commonly live in one and work in another.

[Malthus]

as far as I know cross border travel in the states is much higher then in Canada. People commonly live in one and work in another.

Yup, with some exceptions there is much less travel between Canadian provinces. Manitoba can easily have a separate system from Ontario, because not many regularly go between Manitoba and Ontario. Many go between Ontario and Quebec, Ottawa/Hull of course straddles the border, but for a while Quebec closed the border.

[Grey Fox]

It tried?  How?

Minister Hadju had said, in March, that the federal government, would enforce the strickier measures if the provinces didn't play ball.

[crazy canuck]

It tried?  How?

Minister Hadju had said, in March, that the federal government, would enforce the strickier measures if the provinces didn't play ball.

link?

[crazy canuck]

as far as I know cross border travel in the states is much higher then in Canada. People commonly live in one and work in another.

The joint statement by the Alberta and BC ministers telling Albertans to stop going to their cabins and second homes in BC is an example of the inter provincial cooperation.   All of the Maritime provinces cooperated to create a common zone to keep others out.

I am not sure why US states cannot cooperate with nearby states but perhaps as JR states that is not possible in the US context.

[The Larch]

as far as I know cross border travel in the states is much higher then in Canada. People commonly live in one and work in another.

The joint statement by the Alberta and BC ministers telling Albertans to stop going to their cabins and second homes in BC is an example of the inter provincial cooperation.   All of the Maritime provinces cooperated to create a common zone to keep others out.

I am not sure why US states cannot cooperate with nearby states but perhaps as JR states that is not possible in the US context.

Some states did cooperate back at the beginning for procurement, but they had to improvise and do everything ad-hoc. I guess this is a more complicated issue, though.