I think that's not the point though. While we're not hit as bad, we should have a reopening dashboard instead of a silly slideshow[1] with some rhetorical questions

[1]: https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/California...

>While we're not hit as bad

We are not hit as bad because of the actions of the government who has issued the shelter-in-place before NY did, when we had 1/10th the rate of infection.

I don't agree with everything the government does, but let's give credit where credit is due. That we were not hit as bad is not coincidental.

That give, I'm perfectly willing to cut them some slack.

> That we were not hit as bad is not coincidental

Well, you don't know that. There are states and countries that have not gone to "shelter-in-place" extremes and have been outperforming California.

New York is special in America. It's very dense, and every time you get on a subway train, which most of the city does every working day, you're sharing a cramped space with hundreds of random individuals. It's not hard to see why they've been hit harder than anywhere in the US.

To pretend the only possible difference is a binary distinction between lockdown or not is reductionist ad absurdum.

One upside of living near Tokyo is that I can say “I’ve seen denser than that” in arbitrary contexts

Parent comment is nowhere claiming that it is the only reason. Given that there wasn't enough testing capacity, contact tracing capacity or hospital capacity, what would you have differently? And on what basis?

Not hit that bad by C19. But what about other unintended consequences?

For example, in NYC, domestic violence calls are down. The fear is, the abusee is too afraid to call. Suicides are up. Substance abuse is up. Those who are locked down are putting on weight and becoming unhealthy; C19 does better when paired with other conditions. The economic fallout hasn't hit yet. And so on.

I'm not taking sides (i.e., pro v anti lockdown). I am noting that C19 cases and fatalities coded as C19 are not the only KPIs. There's a bigger picture. We need to look at that bigger piture.

While I somewhat agree (WA also has a silly slideshow alleging to be a dashboard with no goals on it) NY has completely failed it’s residents, while the Western Pact states have not.

I suspect the reality is these goals are nonsense and just provide a false sense of security.

We are hit as bad with the government lockdown, or at least in the ballpark. And bigger economy too, so it's more impactful overall.

Not disagreeing, but don't forget how fast this thing can grow. It was doubling ... every 2 or 3 days? Smaller infected population buys you weeks of time, but that's all.

Exactly. And that's why it's important to remember that CA governor has issued as shelter-in-place order ahead of NY, while we had a 1/10X infection rate, which more than halved the slope of growth on the log scale.

Sure. I think everybody remembers. I imagine the actions by CA's governor not only saved a lot of lives in CA, but probably helped NY get its rear in gear.

But I'm saying something different: A full reopen without proper precautions would put CA right where NY was, in a surprisingly short time.

Genuine questions: what makes ca have such lower number of deaths compared to ny, given it has a comparable number of tourists and both are crowded? Also, ca has a somewhat comparable climate to italy and spain, yet CA has fared much better. What the heck is the missing piece here?

Greece is also similar to italy and spain and it has far less numbers of deaths. East EU countries as well yet Russia is doing far worse. Very odd behaviour from this virus and i dont think the gaps are in counting methodology or over/under reporting.

One major factor is just how early California ordered residents to shelter-in-place (or "lockdown"). Several San Francisco Bay Area counties issued an order on March 17. Governor Newsom then issued a statewide order on March 19. On that day, California had 1,006 cases. Compare this to New York's 7,102 cases on March 20 when its residents were ordered to shelter-in-place, or Italy's 9,172 cases on March 9 when its national lockdown was instituted. So New York and Italy were already quite behind to start with.

California also has a few other things going for it, for example: CA's urban areas are not as dense as somewhere like NYC. Compared to Italy, the population is relatively young. Many people have professional jobs that can be done remotely (companies like Google and Facebook sent their employees home even before March 12). Public transit is very bad in CA, so almost everyone drives their own car.

I’ll preface this by saying I definitely don’t know the answer to the question, but I think sensitive dependence on initial conditions and just straight randomness have been severely under discussed as possible contributors around the world.

I think there’s some natural hubris here where humans think they have the ability to control the outcome, without pausing to wonder how accurate that really is.

It is possible that the strains in NY and surrounding are different than on the west coast. There is a very interesting hypothesis that the D614G mutation that is found in NY is more contagious than the strains found in CA for example.