That's a talking point, not an argument. In reality the state governments have broad powers, stemming back to jurisprudence from the time of the framers (cases involving these powers were heard by John Marshal), to employ police powers in the service of quarantines, and those powers were further spelled out by statute as recently as the 2000s in the wake of 9/11. None of those powers are constrained by any notion of "flattening the curve", a "flattened curve" isn't a permanent state, and there are rational goals to quarantines beyond keeping the hospitals occupied at an optimal level.

> there are rational goals to quarantines beyond keeping the hospitals occupied at an optimal level

None of the counties in the San Francisco Bay Area have been willing to outline any specific goals, nor has our Governor. If you can point me to anything more specific from the above than 'if we only save one life', I'd be shocked.

What's your point? Is there a statute you're thinking of that requires San Francisco to spell out specifically what their goals are? You said upthread that the lockdown is a violation of people's constitutional rights, but it seems clear that it isn't, at least not in our jurisprudence. You can find legal scholars debating the constitutionality of quarantine, but only in the context of hypothetical orders that haven't been issued by any state yet that would imprison people in their homes (the way China apparently did). If you don't even have the broad strokes of this right, it seems fair to ask for a citation here.

I require San Francisco to spell out what their goals are! I fundamentally reject the idea that it's our duty as citizens to shut up and do whatever London Breed thinks is best. If she's not willing to explain why these emergency restrictions are necessary and how we'll know when they aren't necessary, we shouldn't comply.

Yes, even if this isn't required by the letter of the law, it certainly does seem to be required by the spirit of US law that the people are not mere subjects to be ordered around. At least in spirit, they deserve to be informed, so that they can make an informed decision about whether they believe their representatives are behaving reasonably. And if they don't agree, they can vote them out, or exercise their free speech rights to voice their dissatisfaction.

Is there a statute somewhere that requires London Breed to spell anything out to your satisfaction? I don't know what California's emergency management laws look like; maybe you're right.

Does there have to be a statute to advocate for a rational, numerical based approach to public policy?

You're a super smart, analytical guy. You don't see any problem with imposing extremely restrictive rules on a population of millions without even a basic attempt to quantify what your desired outcome is?

Why do you want this to be a simple problem? It isn't a simple problem, not by a long shot and erring on the side of caution seems to be the right way to play this because you are at most 4 weeks away from a serious disaster if you fuck it up. The fact that SF does ok is a result of the shelter-in-place order, without it SF would look like NYC or worse.

Nobody said it was going to be simple. I'm just advocating that it not be completely and totally lacking in stated goals when it's such a severe policy intervention.

Those goals could be complex, or detailed, or multivariate, or subject to contingencies and caveats. But they can't be non-existent and they can't be secret. This is a democracy.

> The fact that SF does ok is a result of the shelter-in-place order, without it SF would look like NYC or worse.

Your sentence here is making a quantitative assessment that the result is worse than NYC, without stating the metric you're using to arrive at that assessment, or hinting at the means by which it was arrived at. It's just "worse".

That's fine for an forum comment. But it's a disaster as a government policy almost six weeks into this crisis.

What's being criticized here is the parent story, which is a press release by the actual government, and appears to make no mention of the criteria used to arrive at this drastic and staggeringly expensive policy decision, and contains nary a hint of what metrics they'll use to evaluate it, or critically, determine if the schedule should be delayed or accelerated. That's crazy.

It sounds to me as though you do not trust your leaders to have your best interests at heart.

The idea that everybody will go and pick apart the underlying data to support their favorite little theories may have something to do with the decision to keep the inputs confidential.

You get one chance every so many years to vote in a government that you trust, you're going to have to accept that.

We do not, in fact, have to accept that. That's the value of having a limited government - if they misbehave, you can often just tell them no.

> The same number of people will get sick but over a longer period of time.

Fewer people get sick for two reasons.

Flattening the curve reduces the amount of epidemic overshoot. People assume you reach herd immunity levels and the epidemic then dies out. Reality you overshoot herd immunity.

At some point you can reestablish contact tracing and isolation. That by itself reduces the required level of immunity and containment needed to keep the infection in check. Except for a few countries we don't have that now.

My bet at this point is within a few months. Rapid RNA tests will start being produced in large numbers. Synthetic anti-bodies for covid19 will become available. Contact tracing and isolation containment will be reestablished. Rapid RNA tests make contact tracing possible at scale. Antibody therapy increases the effectiveness of contact tracing. Basically you test everyone with symptoms. You then dose all their contacts with anti-SARS-COV2 antibodies.

Not the end of the world.

> My bet at this point is within a few months.

What if it doesn't? What if a few months pass, and we're at the same spot we are now, except we're all a few months older and poorer?

My jurisdiction is already testing everyone with symptoms with only about half of their current testing capacity, and still has no plan to move forward.

Then we revisit.

Which I'd be fine with if governments were explicit about that timeline .