Coronavirus pandemic

[jakeroot]

Not to mention the logistics involved with water rights would pretty much make it a non-starter.  If something like that was going to happen it needed to before the big public works projects of the early 20th Century. 

Despite what you all might hear reported in other states there really isn't any kind of will power here to move towards making California it's own country.  Look to other examples like how close Quebec has come at times from splitting away from Canada as a closer analog to how something like that would work in reality.

IIRC, when Quebec came closest to voting for secession, Canada's federal government issued dark reminders just before the vote that secession can be a two-way street, and that the First Nations that control a lot of Quebec's hydropower resources might leave Quebec to stay with Canada.

In a similar "West Virginia" scenario, California's redder regions might be encouraged to remain with the Union, and take much of California's water supply with them.

Any coastal state trying to leave the union is going to have trouble for those same reasons (all are politically split, although west coast "reds" seem slightly more purple when compared to the midwest or south). Washington and British Columbia have several of North America's busiest ports. For Canada to lose BC, or the US to lose WA (never mind Oregon or California) would be disastrous because of the sheer amount of product that is processed at those ports. In terms of power supply, I think it's simply a matter of whether these new countries could promise them good benefits. After all, staying in the US would still mean sharing power and water with the rest of the US.

IMO, any coastal state (east or west) trying to secede would have some merits, particularly if it sends more taxes out than it takes in. States like WA, NJ, and MA do well in this regard, as does CA.

[kalvado]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2020/04/23/2-7-million-new-yorkers-may-have-been-exposed-to-coronavirus-study/amp/

About 20 percent of New Yorkers could have the virus...

Assuming that's accurate...

On some levels that is good.  It shows that many people who get the disease are asymptomatic.

The bad news is that, even with all of that death, we are nowhere near herd immunity even in the hardest hit part of the country.

At least part of that test was upstate, where official hit rate is about 1 in 1000

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

Some of you talk wistfully of California leaving "your country." But down south, white folk want Texas to leave the union.
https://www.texastribune.org/2016/06/24/can-texas-legally-secede-united-states/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/the-secessionist/600739/
https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/texas-secessionists-2019/

[Max Rockatansky]

Not to mention the logistics involved with water rights would pretty much make it a non-starter.  If something like that was going to happen it needed to before the big public works projects of the early 20th Century. 

Despite what you all might hear reported in other states there really isn't any kind of will power here to move towards making California it's own country.  Look to other examples like how close Quebec has come at times from splitting away from Canada as a closer analog to how something like that would work in reality.

IIRC, when Quebec came closest to voting for secession, Canada's federal government issued dark reminders just before the vote that secession can be a two-way street, and that the First Nations that control a lot of Quebec's hydropower resources might leave Quebec to stay with Canada.

In a similar "West Virginia" scenario, California's redder regions might be encouraged to remain with the Union, and take much of California's water supply with them.

Any coastal state trying to leave the union is going to have trouble for those same reasons (all are politically split, although west coast "reds" seem slightly more purple when compared to the midwest or south). Washington and British Columbia have several of North America's busiest ports. For Canada to lose BC, or the US to lose WA (never mind Oregon or California) would be disastrous because of the sheer amount of product that is processed at those ports. In terms of power supply, I think it's simply a matter of whether these new countries could promise them good benefits. After all, staying in the US would still mean sharing power and water with the rest of the US.

IMO, any coastal state (east or west) trying to secede would have some merits, particularly if it sends more taxes out than it takes in. States like WA, NJ, and MA do well in this regard, as does CA.

San Joaquin Valley and Owens Valley are as red as they come I've found.   Even the Mojave Desert regions aside from Owens Valley tend to not follow the blue side of things you see in the coastal areas.  Considering that divide stretches onto both sides of the Sierras getting anyone to get on anything in California is hard and in the case of leaving the Union near impossible. 

[LM117]

NC governor is announcing a reopening plan today.

https://www.wral.com/coronavirus/governor-cooper-expected-to-announce-reopening-plan-thursday-afternoon/19067407/

Here's the plan, which includes extending the stay-at-home order to May 8.

https://governor.nc.gov/news/governor-extends-stay-home-order-through-may-8-plans-three-phase-lifting-restrictions-based

[kalvado]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2020/04/23/2-7-million-new-yorkers-may-have-been-exposed-to-coronavirus-study/amp/

About 20 percent of New Yorkers could have the virus...

Assuming that's accurate...

On some levels that is good.  It shows that many people who get the disease are asymptomatic.

The bad news is that, even with all of that death, we are nowhere near herd immunity even in the hardest hit part of the country.

At least part of that test was upstate, where official hit rate is about 1 in 1000

OK, a bit more details:
New York City accounted for the highest percentage of those tested with the antibodies at 21.2 percent, according to statistics compiled by the governor's office. Long Island is the second highest at 16.7 percent. Across upstate, the study indicated that 3.6 percent of the population are carrying the antibodies

[Scott5114]

Ending lockdowns now will create a spike in the number of cases, which you would have to have your head buried pretty deep in the sand not to understand.

Considering the number of cases still turning up even with the lockdowns being in place for a month now. . .

Nothing says you cannot stay in on your own.

Too true. If you live in an area where lockdowns are being relaxed, but you object to it and are still concerned that you might contract Coronavirus, just keep staying inside. When lockdowns are added, they're saying "everybody must stay inside". But when lockdowns are removed, they're NOT saying "everybody must go outside". I have a feeling that even in those areas, much of the lockdown will continue, but it'll be self-enforced.

I'm still employed (and getting paid) but my day job is closed for business. If the lockdown ends, and my boss says "You must go back to work", I can choose to either go to work and catch something from one of our disgusting customers, or become unemployed. I'd rather us have a lockdown in place so that I can stay safe.

The real tyranny in the United States emanates from the private sector, not the government.

[bandit957]

They keep saying Ohio is lifting its martial law lockdown on May 1 (though some limits on businesses will continue). I'll believe it when I see it.

At this point, however, is there any state that makes these orders anything more than a secondary offense? Pretty soon, people are going to stop taking it seriously.

The moment May 1 hits, I'm gonna go to Ohio and bubble.

[jakeroot]

Not to mention the logistics involved with water rights would pretty much make it a non-starter.  If something like that was going to happen it needed to before the big public works projects of the early 20th Century. 

Despite what you all might hear reported in other states there really isn't any kind of will power here to move towards making California it's own country.  Look to other examples like how close Quebec has come at times from splitting away from Canada as a closer analog to how something like that would work in reality.

IIRC, when Quebec came closest to voting for secession, Canada's federal government issued dark reminders just before the vote that secession can be a two-way street, and that the First Nations that control a lot of Quebec's hydropower resources might leave Quebec to stay with Canada.

In a similar "West Virginia" scenario, California's redder regions might be encouraged to remain with the Union, and take much of California's water supply with them.

Any coastal state trying to leave the union is going to have trouble for those same reasons (all are politically split, although west coast "reds" seem slightly more purple when compared to the midwest or south). Washington and British Columbia have several of North America's busiest ports. For Canada to lose BC, or the US to lose WA (never mind Oregon or California) would be disastrous because of the sheer amount of product that is processed at those ports. In terms of power supply, I think it's simply a matter of whether these new countries could promise them good benefits. After all, staying in the US would still mean sharing power and water with the rest of the US.

IMO, any coastal state (east or west) trying to secede would have some merits, particularly if it sends more taxes out than it takes in. States like WA, NJ, and MA do well in this regard, as does CA.

San Joaquin Valley and Owens Valley are as red as they come I've found.   Even the Mojave Desert regions aside from Owens Valley tend to not follow the blue side of things you see in the coastal areas.  Considering that divide stretches onto both sides of the Sierras getting anyone to get on anything in California is hard and in the case of leaving the Union near impossible.

I guess that may be. I've always felt like there was a divide amongst those on the right geographically, much like how there is a divide amongst the left geographically. WA tends to vote more conservative locally (relative to our streak as a left stronghold nationally), but only because our local conservative politicians are more left of national conservatives. For example, they oppose toll roads because they consider it unfair to low-income households...that's definitely not a national opinion.

I bring this slightly-political topic up because when we talk about secession, we have to consider how local lefts or local rights might actually appreciate a separation from national parties. This is common in other countries (BC's Liberal Party is centre-right, compared to Canada's national Liberal Party which is centre-left), but not so much in the US. Conservatives in the San Joaquin Valley could develop a new party in a separate California; I highly doubt they have that strong of a devotion to national parties (I wouldn't consider voting for a national party as being a commitment to fight for them in a war on California).

[TheGrassGuy]

The following states have not officially called off school for the rest of the year: Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Carolina, West Virginia, Wyoming

I'm surprised that NJ and NY (which are top-two in cases) haven't called off the remainder of the school year.

A couple news agencies are reporting some autopsies from those who died in early February in Santa Clara County are testing positive for COVID-19.  That is a couple weeks in advance of the first documented deaths in Washington state. 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/autopsies-reveal-first-confirmed-u-042339932.html

This would mean we might be a little closer to herd immunity, especially along the west coast, since those people who died in early February were likely exposed in mid-January if not earlier. Considering what we know now about how it is spread, it was likely spreading in Wuhan in early to mid December 2019 (and Wuhan didn't get locked down until around January 21) and had likely made it to Europe and North America around the Christmas/New Year holiday season.

OK, you can remove Nevada and South Carolina from that list now.

And now Minnesota, Rhode Island, and West Virginia. Also, add Nebraska

[tradephoric]

There's been a lot of talk about how California developed herd immunity to the virus earlier this winter.  To that point recent autopsy results have revealed that two Californians died of coronavirus in early and mid-February -- three weeks before the previously known first US death from the virus.  I think most people assume that if the virus showed up in California early this winter that there must have been a silent outbreak that infected millions of Californians.  But it appears the virus just isn't as contagious along the West Coast (for whatever reason) than it is in the rest of the country. 

What I don't understand is this fascination with contact tracing especially given the data coming out of NYC (where it's estimated 21% of the city has virus antibodies).  This is a highly contagious virus, at least in parts of the country, and with so many people being asymptomatic, contact tracing is going to be largely ineffective.  Singapore attempted to contact trace and quarantine all their cases (and they had fewer than 100 cases to track compared to the US which has over 800k cases).  They were able to delay the spike by a few weeks in Singapore but now the daily number of COVID cases are skyrocketing.  How do you contact trace cases where the individual spreading the virus is asymptomatic?

[AsphaltPlanet]

I think there are a couple of things to note.

I have read that some doctors have some concern about the accuracy of the antibody tests.  I have read some articles that suggest that the tests to not search for enough proteins to really understand if a person has had the disease.  Obviously I'm not sure though, and it would be wonderful if indeed the disease is more prevalent, and therefore less severe than originally thought.

The numbers of cases in California, even if the antibody tests are accurate, are not indicative of herd immunity.  It is however indicative that the hospitalization rate of the disease would be lower than first thought.

Contract tracing was used extensively to stop the spread of SARS, as well as MERS.  It's a powerful containment method.  Obviously if as many as one in five people in a given geographic area has had the disease it's probably impracticable to contract trace on such a large scale.  If the outbreak is of a smaller scale, then contract tracing makes a lot more sense.

[1995hoo]

....

Contract tracing was used extensively to stop the spread of SARS, as well as MERS.  It's a powerful containment method.  Obviously if as many as one in five people in a given geographic area has had the disease it's probably impracticable to contract trace on such a large scale.  If the outbreak is of a smaller scale, then contract tracing makes a lot more sense.

I read on another site that one of the things they want to do for contract tracing is to call people. That doesn't seem particularly effective in today's world where most of us don't answer calls from unknown numbers. I know they can use cell-site location information as well, though that's imperfect and has been the subject of a lot of litigation in other contexts.

[jemacedo9]

Two pieces of misinformation on this thread:

No state has issued actual martial law - these shelter-in-place and stay home orders fall short of actual martial law.

No area in the US is anywhere near herd immunity.  Herd immunity means that a large majority has already been infected and/or vaccinated...the lowest estimate I've seen noted is 60%...and it is not a magic specific number; each virus has it's own characteristics.  The most optimistic estimate I've seen is the above NYC study that estimates 21% in the dense, urban NYC area, has been infected.  So if that is accurate, and if we can extrapolate that across the entire US (both suspect), we need 3x more infections before we maybe start to achieve herd immunity.

 

[1995hoo]

Two pieces of misinformation on this thread:

No state has issued actual martial law - these shelter-in-place and stay home orders fall short of actual martial law.

....

The person who keeps using that term knows it's not martial law but doesn't care. He's prone to hyperbole (witness some of the very strange threads he's posted) and uses that term deliberately.

[ixnay]

Not to mention the logistics involved with water rights would pretty much make it a non-starter.  If something like that was going to happen it needed to before the big public works projects of the early 20th Century. 

Despite what you all might hear reported in other states there really isn't any kind of will power here to move towards making California it's own country.  Look to other examples like how close Quebec has come at times from splitting away from Canada as a closer analog to how something like that would work in reality.

IIRC, when Quebec came closest to voting for secession, Canada's federal government issued dark reminders just before the vote that secession can be a two-way street, and that the First Nations that control a lot of Quebec's hydropower resources might leave Quebec to stay with Canada.

In a similar "West Virginia" scenario, California's redder regions might be encouraged to remain with the Union, and take much of California's water supply with them.

I give the chance of California seceding at about 0.01%

I agree, and I give Texas the same percentage chance.

Perhaps Some of you should troll on freerepublic.com with this secession/are the protestors' motives pure debate.

ixnay

[LM117]

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/494473-trump-remarks-on-injecting-disinfectants-draw-blowback-from-doctors

[Roadgeekteen]

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/494473-trump-remarks-on-injecting-disinfectants-draw-blowback-from-doctors

That's what you get when we elect a reality tv star as president.

[Max Rockatansky]

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/494473-trump-remarks-on-injecting-disinfectants-draw-blowback-from-doctors

That's what you get when we elect a reality tv star as president.

I'm curious were people saying the same thing when Ronald Reagan was in office?  I was too young really remember what any of the adults remember regarding Reagan being an actor aside from the quip in the first Back to the Future movie.  Granted, Reagan had an actual lengthy body of works in politics leading up to his presidency. 

[Roadgeekteen]

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/494473-trump-remarks-on-injecting-disinfectants-draw-blowback-from-doctors

That's what you get when we elect a reality tv star as president.

I'm curious were people saying the same thing when Ronald Reagan was in office?  I was too young really remember what any of the adults remember regarding Reagan being an actor aside from the quip in the first Back to the Future movie.  Granted, Reagan had an actual lengthy body of works in politics leading up to his presidency.

Reagan was different, he was governor of California.

[Max Rockatansky]

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/494473-trump-remarks-on-injecting-disinfectants-draw-blowback-from-doctors

That's what you get when we elect a reality tv star as president.

I'm curious were people saying the same thing when Ronald Reagan was in office?  I was too young really remember what any of the adults remember regarding Reagan being an actor aside from the quip in the first Back to the Future movie.  Granted, Reagan had an actual lengthy body of works in politics leading up to his presidency.

Reagan was different, he was governor of California.

Yes, but there has been a lot of celebrity governors and Reagan was one of them. 

[J N Winkler]

Contract tracing was used extensively to stop the spread of SARS, as well as MERS.  It's a powerful containment method.  Obviously if as many as one in five people in a given geographic area has had the disease it's probably impracticable to contract trace on such a large scale.  If the outbreak is of a smaller scale, then contract tracing makes a lot more sense.

I read on another site that one of the things they want to do for contract tracing is to call people. That doesn't seem particularly effective in today's world where most of us don't answer calls from unknown numbers. I know they can use cell-site location information as well, though that's imperfect and has been the subject of a lot of litigation in other contexts.

The approach to contact tracing I have seen discussed has basically two elements:

*  Old-fashioned in-person contact, but at scale--in the US 300,000 people would be doing this work (equivalent to 0.1% of the population)

*  Cellphones collecting encrypted keys from other cellphones in the immediate vicinity and later comparing them against a distributed database to see if any of the keys are associated with a phone belonging to someone who has tested positive (eliminates the need for GPS tracking or cellphone tower triangulation; won't necessarily help people who don't carry their phones with them everywhere they go, and has potential to generate needless alerts in situations where virus spread is basically impossible, such as when two phones are on either side of a wall)

The use of cellphone apps in South Korea conferred a significant automation benefit to contact tracing and is considered a key part of the reason the country has succeeded in keeping a lid on COVID-19 without having had to resort to a countrywide lockdown.  There are definite privacy concerns, and it has to be noted that South Korea has a long history of being among the more authoritarian countries in the free world.  This is part of the reason Apple and Google have been working on solutions that rely on distributed key storage.  South Korea also had the advantage, which we denied to ourselves, of having early on ramped up production of test kits at a time when tests were expensive and unreliable but the case count was small enough that the virus could be smothered by aggressive testing and contact tracing.

With asymptomatic spread, it is inevitable that contact tracing will be leaky.  But the real goal here is to keep the basic reproduction number below unity without having to incur the disruption and economic cost of continued lockdown.  Leaky methods can work as part of the total solution as long as the leakage is low enough.

[US71]

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/494473-trump-remarks-on-injecting-disinfectants-draw-blowback-from-doctors

That's what you get when we elect a reality tv star as president.

I'm curious were people saying the same thing when Ronald Reagan was in office?  I was too young really remember what any of the adults remember regarding Reagan being an actor aside from the quip in the first Back to the Future movie.  Granted, Reagan had an actual lengthy body of works in politics leading up to his presidency.

Reagan was different, he was governor of California.

Yes, but there has been a lot of celebrity governors and Reagan was one of them. 

How many had the IQ of a turnip?

[SEWIGuy]

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/494473-trump-remarks-on-injecting-disinfectants-draw-blowback-from-doctors

That's what you get when we elect a reality tv star as president.

I'm curious were people saying the same thing when Ronald Reagan was in office?  I was too young really remember what any of the adults remember regarding Reagan being an actor aside from the quip in the first Back to the Future movie.  Granted, Reagan had an actual lengthy body of works in politics leading up to his presidency. 

Yes there were many people who mocked him because of his acting background and questioned his intelligence.  But I do think there were a couple of differences.

Reagan's acting days were pretty long behind him.  He had been a politcal leader and a governor for some time.  Also, while I didn't like his policies, he was clearly a leader.  He was by and large consistent with his messaging and tried to (mostly) unite people instead of divide them.  He was also an eternal optimist. 

Politics is so different now than it was then.

[US71]

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/494473-trump-remarks-on-injecting-disinfectants-draw-blowback-from-doctors

That's what you get when we elect a reality tv star as president.

I'm curious were people saying the same thing when Ronald Reagan was in office?  I was too young really remember what any of the adults remember regarding Reagan being an actor aside from the quip in the first Back to the Future movie.  Granted, Reagan had an actual lengthy body of works in politics leading up to his presidency. 

Yes there were many people who mocked him because of his acting background and questioned his intelligence.  But I do think there were a couple of differences.

Reagan's acting days were pretty long behind him.  He had been a politcal leader and a governor for some time.  Also, while I didn't like his policies, he was clearly a leader.  He was by and large consistent with his messaging and tried to (mostly) unite people instead of divide them.  He was also an eternal optimist. 

Politics is so different now than it was then.

yes and no.