Which state are you in?

Curves are exponential until they aren't. In most states, hospitals were never anywhere near being "overwhelmed", quite the opposite in fact. In my county (Santa Clara, CA), there are under 5% hospital beds occupied by Covid patients.

I would point to other states that never shut down, like Wyoming and South Dakota, and states with light shut downs, like TX or FL (which did far better than NY or NJ). They all followed the same curve. An enormous amount of the case load was from infected nursing homes. Meanwhile, what was the goal of shutting down beaches and parks? Just to spread misery and give people nowhere to go? To deprive people of essential vitamin D and exercise? Madness, all of it.

In my state it's not true that the majority of the case load is from infected nursing homes. Most of the deaths were in the beginning but the new cases and deaths are from the general populace.

Our beaches and parks have been open for weeks now. People have not been forced to stay indoors at all hours. Our governor's order has been exclusively focused on avoiding situations where two people from different households encounter each other for extended periods because that creates a vector from one household to the other. I've been walking outside the entire time we've been "under quarantine." There are runners and bikers and all kinds of people doing the same. The only difference is we give each other a wide berth on the trail.

I think you're blowing the scope of the "quarantines" out of proportion. And you didn't answer my original question. What would you have done differently? What would your plan have been?

We shut down beaches and parks because we didn't know at the time the pattern of spreading. We had theories but we didn't have solid emperical evidence yet about how covid spread.

Also the difference between light and hard shutdowns isn't as much as you'd think. Especially when most people's behavior changes despite whether there is a lockdown or not.

“I’ll point to states not representative of other stares in density at all.”

Texas or Florida are representative of the density of the US. If the mass shut downs had been limited to NY and NJ, without the media working everyone into a frenzy about beach goers in Florida, people in those other states wouldn’t be so upset.

We’re not a single country. We’re 50 different states with vastly different requirements. NYC and NJ did need the extreme shut downs. In fact, they should have shut down earlier and harder. South Dakota, Texas, etc., did not. Many sparse states like Oregon overreacted and shut down more than they needed to.

Of course, nobody can predict these things. Mistakes happen. What drives me nuts is that the same media that flipped out because not all states were taking the drastic measures that were needed in NYC is going to peddle a narrative about what happened that totally glosses over the lesson that those states didn’t really need to take such drastic measures.

> Many sparse states like Oregon

Just like anywhere else, conditions inside a particular state are like conditions inside the whole country, i.e. not consistent and comparable. A large chunk of Oregon is practically empty. Then there is Portland, which has 60% of the entire population of the state.

Locking down Portland arguably made sense. Locking down rural Oregon not as much.

I can’t stress what a huge outlier the NYC/NJ area is. Portland has a population density 1/5 as much as NYC. It has half the population density of DC, which itself probably shut down more than it needed to.

But yes, locking down Portland was at least plausible. Locking down my wife’s mother in law down in Lincoln City, however, generated a lot of ill will to Governor Brown that I can’t say was undeserved.

I agree on all points. Ideologically I should agree with our governor, but I find that her response to the pandemic has been pretty awful. She's not alone, I suppose, it seems like many (most?) state governors were only qualified to hold their position in a time of peace, few seem to have stepped up to the challenge of the coronavirus and taken charge as leaders.

For the longest time we didn't have anything even approximating an actual metric for when we could reopen things, and then all of the sudden we just decided to go ahead with it. I think her hand got forced on that, because when everyone realizes you don't have a plan, they start to make their own.

Sorry for the politics. I just find the entire situation very frustrating.

Lincoln City from when I’ve been there had has a lot of tourists (I presume you meant your mother in law) compared to say Coos Bay and would hardly be that isolated

Lincoln City is pretty sparse until the summer! (I meant my wife's grandmother. Not even close!)

Comparing Wyoming and New York is disingenuous. You'd be wise to compare, say, New York Metro and the Bay Area, [1] two areas of the US that are arguably almost equal density.

Note how San Francisco declared a state of emergency in February. By the first week of March, most were working from home, and the week after, it had a shelter in place order.

1 - https://abc7news.com/feature/health/coronavirus-how-close-wa...