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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Neither site is clear where the testing capacity goal comes from. For NY, it is 30 per 1k (3%). For Bay Area, it is 200 per 100k (.2%). If my math is right, that's a significant discrepancy.
Actually, I see NY's goal is monthly. So I guess that is more like 30 per 1k per 30 days (.1%).
There some discussion of necessary testing rates in this NY magazine article:
It looks like .2% is at the low end of most ready-to-reopen requirements. In any event, it looks we're nowhere near a test for anyone who wants one.
Also, does anyone know of a good chart that graphs daily new cases vs new tests? It seems like that ratio would be significant, especially when comparing case rates between regions.
As far as I know, it's still the case that no reasonably-large country is doing much more coronavirus testing than the US right now. The UK is probably just about over the 30 tests per 1k per 30 days mark averaged over a week as of our last testing increase, Germany might still be slightly below it but I haven't seen recent figures from them and they seemed to have stalled out increasing testing, and other countries are similar.
FWIW my province of 4.4 million is stalled on tests being run because it's run out of additional symptomatic people to test at around 30 tests per 1k per 30 days, even though testing capacity is about double that, and still increasing.
1. You can't actually randomly choose people, so it's being done on a fist-come, first-serve basis.
2. Testing all asymptomatic people on any regular basis would take orders of magnitude more tests, so it's not useful as a containment measure, just as a data-collection measure.
That ranking's not terribly informative. A lot of the countries heading it up are smaller ones since most countries are drawing from the same global pool of testing consumables, meaning that there's not much relationship between the difficulty of carrying out a particular number of tests and the size of the country, it's total tests done which doesn't tell you much about current testing rate, and large developed Western countries are close enough in testing rates that an actual ranking based on them probably wouldn't be very stable anyway.
The problem with talking about per capita testing numbers is that having a bigger population means you need a proportionally larger number of tests to administer to reach the same numbers as smaller countries. The will to test and the money to do so aren’t any issue. The problem is that we can’t just snap our fingers and make tens of millions of tests appear out of thin air. I think this point gets lost on a lot of people when they look at the corona scoreboard (likewise, people fixate on the large number of deaths in the US and ignore that we’re doing better than several European nations on a deaths per million basis).
> The problem is that we can’t just snap our fingers and make tens of millions of tests appear out of thin air.
You are correct - but we (or rather the government) can snap it's fingers and compel some private companies that are well positioned to be able to manufacture tests to do so at a higher priority than other business concerns - or we (again the government) can issue generous contracts for testing supplies that guarantees payment to private companies manufacturing them even if the original quota of tests requested by the government is above the level we end up needing.
I think that large countries actually have an advantage here - a small country might not have any internal industry that'd be capable of manufacturing tests without heavy retooling - or that industry might be so small and specialized that scaling it up is infeasible. But even in that sort of a situation they can use market based solutions to bid on tests in a manner that motivates private companies in other countries to feel confident committing to test production - and that's only needed if there isn't any sort of altruistic world-banding-together-to-fight-the-issue effort.
> can snap it's fingers and compel some private companies that are well positioned to be able to manufacture tests to do so at a higher priority than other business concerns
And we’ve done that with things like masks and ventilators. But there is a key limiting factor with the tests, the reagant supply. Again, can’t just snap our fingers and make it happen faster. This isn’t AWS, we can’t just spin up more supply in an instant.
America does have just as good of an ability to secure reagent supplies as any other countries though, excluding the ones that produce it domestically. The exception time this is that different testing machines require different reagents.
It’s not like every country is getting a ration of the same number of units - so it shouldn’t be harder for large countries. Again this is likely an issue for smaller countries as they have to compete with America for a share of the reagent supply.
Sure, but it likely has ten times the infrastructure to manufacture and deliver them.
The US is, in many ways, a bunch of ~30M person countries, akin to the European Union. Freedom of movement, no customs between them, powerful state-level governments, etc.
> Sure, but it likely has ten times the infrastructure to manufacture and deliver them.
Yes, in theory, but we're talking about trying to produce 10x of something limited by a resource in short supply the world over, with every country's government vying for their own cut. Instead of "reagent", pretend I told you the limiting factor was "Unobtanium." Hey no sweat, just find 10x of it! See how silly that line of reasoning is? Again, to put it in terms the HN crowd might understand, the production of physical goods isn't like spinning up servers in AWS.
Or are you just understand the impression that the US, who has produced by far the greatest number of tests (in absolute numbers) of any country in the world, just doesn't have the desire to obtain greater and greater numbers of tests?
The claim was that it’s harder for the USA to get the required levels of unobtanium than a smaller country because it needs more.
In reality the USA has more purchasing leverage because it can exploit (and is exploiting) geopolitics, and can obtain at least as much reagent/unobtanium per capita as other countries right now.
To put it in terms you might understand, the USA has a better ability to source reagent than you do - see if you as an individual are able to procure even 1 litre of the stuff!
> Or are you just understand the impression that the US, who has produced by far the greatest number of tests (in absolute numbers) of any country in the world, just doesn't have the desire to obtain greater and greater numbers of tests?
Yes. (I've answered this in more detail in the other comment thread, but Trump has repeatedly complained that testing = detected cases = bad look for him.)
There's no indication the Trump administration has invoked the Defense Production Act to ramp up reagent production. They'd be wise to do so, if it's a genuine bottleneck.
> "They would like to have the people come off. I’d rather have the people stay [on the ship]. But I’d go with them. I told them to make the final decision. I would rather — because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault."
> "So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad."
He's not wrong though, look at the rest of the quote in context:
> "So the media likes to say we have the most cases, but we do, by far, the most testing. If we did very little testing, we wouldn't have the most cases. So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad,"
The correctly identified problem with increased testing is that lots of super geniuses, who apparently can't look past "big number is biggest" w.r.t. corona deaths, try to tie "most deaths" with "worst handling of the situation", completely ignoring, as I pointed out, that the US is doing better on a deaths/million basis than several European countries. Countries that supposedly have superior healthcare systems, healthier populations, and leaders not named Trump. Buuuuttt, no one wants to tie context like that to any of the numbers, so he's absolutely right that increased testing => increased reporting of infection => increased whining about how bad the country is doing.
And of course, this is all ignoring that it's not his call to make as far as how many tests are performed, otherwise we wouldn't be leading the world in absolute numbers of tests administered by a staggering degree. No, we'd be content to test nobody at all and brag about how no one is infected.
But none of that matters. You have x number of people, you need y number of tests. Just because it's harder to do doesn't mean you need to do it any less.
Yes it does, it’s proportionally more difficult. If you want a country of 300M to have as many tests per capita as a country of 30M, you need _ten times as many tests_.
That said - it's still a bit amusing that at this point there might need to be some sort of second federal government to make up for the fact that the first one keeps fumbling everything.
If only we had a deep state - then maybe we'd get the things that need doing done.
1799 The first quarantine station and hospital in America was built in 1799 at the port of Philadelphia after a yellow fever outbreak in 1793.
1878 The National Quarantine Act was passed in 1878, shifting quarantine powers from state to federal government.
1944 The Public Health Service Act formed the federal government’s quarantine authority in 1944.
1967 CDC (National Communicable Disease Center) took over federal quarantine functions in 1967.
1970s CDC reduced the number of quarantine stations from 55 to 8 because infectious diseases were thought to be a thing of the past.
2004–2007 Number of quarantine stations increased to 20 because of concerns about bioterrorism after World Trade Center attack in 2001 and worldwide spread of disease after SARS outbreak in 2003.
On the flip side the feds might pick a sub-optimal solution, as opposed to 50 separate independent actors who can try different things and converge on a best answer.
Agreed. Especially with the Musk stunt, too many people in the bay area and CA are questioning the continued SIP, and it would be good for the government to come out really transparent in how they are making the decision.
Enough people in NYC have died that you would see the excess mortalities very clearly even if you smeared them out over a few months.
Also tests have shown that almost no people in the Bay Area were infected prior to mid-Feb and only a low single digit percentage had antibodies in Santa Clara county as of early April.
There is no evidence supporting your theory and plenty of strong evidence contradicting it. "Lots of people have Chinese friends and therefore everyone is already infected" is not a convincing line of argument.
Edit: This post is wrong. I didn't bother to read the article and was off base on most of the facts. Leaving this post only so I can remember my shame.
NYC is a single city and county with 350k government employees and they've had a coordinated data effort for nearly a decade.
"Bay Area" is like 8 counties and dozens of cities, each which have their own tech stacks and legal teams, pulling their efforts in different directions.
I'm disappointed that the state of California hasn't come up with a few APIs which could easily reduce the redundant efforts of tens of thousands of localities. I've been prototyping some ideas to show the state what modern government could be like if there was a coordinated effort.
This comment and the great edit are a positive combo. They help remind people that California doesn't have uniquely high population density.
Without reminders, that assumption tends to go unchecked. Silly (but real) example: I have heard someone say that SJ has higher population per sq mi than Manhattan.
i think what many people don't understand are how many other layers will block re-opening once the gov. gives a green light.
plenty of businesses are closed in states where the Governor has given a green light to re-open.
It can be plain common sense by the business owner, city laws, office buildings enforcing impossible rules such as 1 person per elevator, liability from lawsuits and the insurance fees that come from that, office layout that needs a complete rebuild, workers scared for themselves or people they live with, and many more
My partner works for [LARGE BUSINESS]. She works on their real estate team, and until two months ago was working on a massive densification project to get more desks in existing square footage to accommodate a hiring boom.
Now? Shit, the C-level has asked her team to entirely scrap that and instead do the exact opposite, rethinking their entire company’s footprint to encourage distancing and limiting daily office occupancy.
Her head is spinning a bit but it has been fascinating to watch from the outside.
> i think what many people don't understand are how many other layers will block re-opening once the gov
Separately from regulation, there's also the question of how comfortable people are at returning to their old virus-care-free routines. One anecdote reported from a visit to Wuhan is that after restrictions were lifted and people were permitted to more freely move around outside, there weren't many people who were interested in going back to eat at restaurants -- to the extent that a restaurant owner who was planning to reopen a number of restaurants ended up leaving them closed.
Even more, I don't think the people who talk about reopening no matter the cost in deaths realize that they're undermining any effort to get people to feel safe in an opened economy, which will impact people spending money in that economy.
What percentage of people don't understand that (serious question)?
I'm in nyc so my perspective is likely a little skewed, but I can't see anyone who can avoid doing so rushing back into restaurants, subways, or really any avoidable indoor or crowded activity. :(
But, yeah, I see the protesters desperately wanting to reopen everything in the midwest, so I guess a lot of people must think the problem is politics not biology and physics?
>I'm in nyc so my perspective is likely a little skewed, but I can't see anyone who can avoid doing so rushing back into restaurants, subways, or really any avoidable indoor or crowded activity. :(
I've heard multiple people in their 30s in NYC say they'd prefer to just get infected now so it's over with since it's inevitable. I also doubt the people packing every park a couple weeks back when the weather got nice would care too much. If anything after being cramped in small apartments people in NYC will be more likely to go out than in the mid west where they have space at home.
I’m in nyc and I’m ready to do that. I will do my part to protect the community by wearing a mask etc, but less than 500 people age 25-34 have died of this in the US. It approaches crossing the street risk.
Well, I live in NYC too and will be back in restaurants and bars the day they open. I’m not really worried about covid, but even if I were, I think I’ll almost certainly get it eventually regardless of whether I go out or not, so there’s no point trying to avoid it.
So, now you know of at least one person.
By the way: “how much health risk are we willing to accept to avoid a given amount of economic damage” is one of the most clearly political questions I can imagine. The effects of the virus have to do with biology; weighing multiple different tradeoffs is politics.
It’s politics when you are deciding what groups of people should do. When you make personal decisions it is about biology.
I know many people feel like you do. And it may be inevitable that most of us get exposed.
But I’m inclined to postpone my exposure for as long as possible, preferably not until the disease is better understood and there are better treatments available.
I do appreciate that I’m lucky enough to have the financial flexibility to make that decision and not everyone has that luxury.
I miss the restaurants and bars and museums and even the subways too. I’m just not going to be rushing into them after what we’ve witnessed in this city the last ten weeks.
> That’s fine. But you claimed you couldn’t imagine anyone behaving differently, when (clearly IMO) quite a lot of people will.
That's a fair criticism.
I should have said "anyone I know" as that was where my thoughts were.
Most of the people I know are over 40 with kids, so that group tends to be a bit more cautious than some. Although I was surprised by how many (over 50%) of my <35 year old co-workers just got out of the city by mid-march.
It is not so simple. Some examples: If there is no lockdown, companies are not forced to have employees WFH. So while you may be OK with getting the virus, I might not be, but I am no longer free to not go out since I might lose my job over that. Sure, you could say that it is my choice to give up a job that requires me to work. Then it's a question of values and politics, and in my value system, that is unfair to me and not a good decision.
Second, let's say that the lockdown is lifted and hospitals are running out of capacity. Doctors and nurses are having to leave people to die because there are no beds or ICUs. Let's say the people dying are all above 50 yrs of age, but there is clear evidence that without lockdown, 2000 people die everyday and with lockdown, 200 people die everyday. Is your freedom worth sacrificing 1800 people every day?
Yes. I am against the government forcibly removing people from their jobs and doing nothing to get them the unemployment they have been paying into. This fiasco has made me even more resolute in never trusting the government (local, state, and federal) to do anything remotely efficient
Politics is definitely important here, because at the end of the day it is a question of values. If the majority of the nation wants to keep business open even at the cost of hundreds or thousands of lives every day, that is a question of politics. I can only say that I hope they have all the right, accurate information when making this judgement.
My parents still can’t get NYS unemployment benefits processed since they started applying in March due to all the website and process problems. Sure wish they’d focus there.
Planning to reopen businesses across the state is certainly one aspect of fixing unemployment, and I doubt the graphic designer and web developer here had any significant impact on the maintenance of the unemployment computer systems.
I work for a city, I think you can be pretty certain that they are doing both. Hell, the team that’s working on unemployment benefits probably didn’t hear about this project before they read about it here on HN.
> Region must show a sustained decline in the three-day rolling average of daily hospital deaths over the course of a 14-day period.
This excludes people dying in their homes, no? Is that a significant enough number of people to warrant concern? I get that it's harder to track cause of death when it doesn't occur in a hospital, but that would seem to be a necessary thing to do.
I love the specificity of these metrics and thresholds here. We're lacking that in WA, where the goalposts on reopening phases and variance by region remains vague and ever changing.
- Approx 50% of deaths are from residents of extended care facilities. Those are a special case and should be tracked separately.
- A running tests to positives ratio is essential. 100 new cases from 200 tests is not the same as 100 new cases from 300 tests.
- A running per capita of "active" cases would be helpful. Is it increasing or decreasing? That is, in the broader non-hospitalized population approx how many carriers are there?
- Hospital capacity status is helpful but preventing the healthcare system from being overwhelmed is not the same as stifling the progress of the virus. It's a helpful proxy but it's still a proxy.
Mean 30 people doing manual contact tracing full time? If so, it seems like a fuzzy metric, since it would just measure butts in seats rather than any kind of efficacy. If it's measuring something else, excuse my ignorance.
Butts in seats might be all that can be expected. Contact tracing is a fairly specialized, skilled occupation and doing it on a large scale is not a normal public health intervention so there's no existing base of staff, but supposedly hiring lots of people and rapidly setting them up contact tracing is how China defeated this so everyone needs to do the same. At least if they don't want headlines about how they're killing everyone by not having appropriate measures in place to re-open, and those will ruin any reopening attempt as surely as actual problems.
It starting to bother me that the US lockdown does not appear to have a clear goal. In some countries, it is clear that the goal is to eliminate the virus from the country. Contact tracing is key as well as regional lockdowns. In the US, I don't see much evidence we are heading towards a sustainable elimination of the virus. In the well discussed Sweden example, the goal is a managed herd immunity strategy. I am curious what every else believes the goal of the lockdown currently is:
1) The elimination of the virus. If so, do you believe this is likely to happen given the current implementation?
2) Maintaining a hospitalization rate below the number of available beds while heading towards heard immunity. If so, do believe these metrics target this, or simply attempt to minimize infections.
3) Minimize infections while buying time for something we don't currently have. A vaccine, better medical treatments, more masks, something else?
Does anyone feel like they understand what the current goal is?
We're essentially trying to do the minimum possible in the US, with the hope that if we cut enough corners, we won't have to rely on legislation, cause that would never take place in a timely manner.
Where I live, Ohio, it was initially 2. But then the hospitalizations never arrived so we kept the lock down going with no clear plan. When the state had to make budget cuts the lock down exit plans magically appeared the next day
This is not at all close. NY has defined metrics with specific numbers (14-day rolling average, share of total beds above X%, etc etc) while WA has an opaque, made-up, zero transparency bunch of photoshopped dials set to whatever arbitrary position the state government decides is right.
If, as many projections suggest, we may be in for a medium-term future of local closures as outbreaks flare up, an interface like this will be important for helping people understand and comply.
Anyone know how they (or other states) are gathering this data? Do hospitals have some daily email report? Do certain healthcare providers expose stats over an API?
That’s probably less of a problem than you might imagine. As long as NYC, Long Island and Westchester go at the same time there’s nowhere else that they can really “flood” from one region to another.
It didn't happen because we locked down and flattened the curve. Remember those first couple weeks when it was doubling so fast it was hard to keep count of the cases and the hospital system came close to breaking under the stress? We stopped that from crashing the system by staying indoors. The models said, here's what'll happen if things continue as they are. They didnt say what would happen if we implemented a lockdown, so of course they were "wrong." Not only did we keep the system from blowing it's capacity, we also gave ourselves enough time to learn about how to treat the disease (ventilators worse than we thought, remdesivir, etc) so even if we get the same number of cases as we would have without lockdown, we've time shifted a lot of them to a point where we know more about the disease. So, things went pretty well.
I'm referring to New York, not the rest of the country. I'm not talking about the majority of the country. The comment I'm replying to is apparently [flagged] [dead], so maybe it's not visible? For context, my comment is responding to a comment that is regarding the projections for NY and "Furher Cuomo's" response to it. My reply is discussing what was happening in new york. certainly the response we had here would not have made sense in another area that wasnt on the edge of hospital system collapse, but that's not what this comment chain and thread is discussing, it's discussing New York.
The problem is that exponential growth looks flat until it looks vertical.
People either get this or they don't or they choose not to.
New York was going vertical. The rest of the country went "Oh, hell, no" and locked down to prevent that from even starting.
But, it's okay. We're running a nice set of experiments right now with the experimental group (red states reopening) vs control group (blue states staying locked down until criteria are met). We'll get lots of nice data in about 3 weeks.
And the reason we need to try analogies and hyperbole is because even people who are arguing in good faith don't get exponential growth.
Normal people look at 2 on day 1, 4 on day 4, 8 on day 7 and think "Oh, about 4 every 3 days. Shrug. No big deal." Horizontal.
Epidemiologists look at that and go "AHHHHH! Doubling every 3 days. Shut everything down or we'll have a million in 2 months and 10 million a week later." They're looking at the vertical section of the curve.
This is similar to people misunderstanding fire. Most people have experienced a campfire. The energy drops off like 1/r^3, so it's no big deal. Most people haven't experienced a wind driven wall of flame where the energy drops off like 1/r so things simply spontaneously combust next to the flamefront. And that's just cubic vs linear.
> Normal people look at 2 on day 1, 4 on day 4, 8 on day 7 and think "Oh, about 4 every 3 days. Shrug. No big deal." Horizontal.
Yeah well HN is mostly a bunch of software engineers who spend most of their day relying on the fundamental that at the end of 32 days in your example, there'll be 4 billion, so...
On the other hand your example is extremely contrived, because exponential growth in epidemiology is mostly not possible except for short periods.
You’re incorrect. Figures were doubling in the first few weeks because testing was ramping up. More testing = more infected. And this may be a shock to you but the virus didn’t come to NY or the state in March or Feb. It’s been around since December if not earlier. Govt officials believed those projections and prepped the Javits center and brought in that Navy hospital. Cuomo begged for ventilators that he already had and forced elderly back into their assisted care homes.
What’s happening here has nothing to do with health or safety.
Yes it seems to inform the citizens of how the government is making this decision. What’s your criticism with it? You don’t want this communicated or just not in this way?
It clearly explains what the criteria for reopening is and shows which of those criteria each region has met, and quantifies how far they’ve got to go. And it’s kept up to date. I can’t imagine anyone looking at this and not immediately seeing how informative and useful it is.
Probably nothing, but it provides a way for the government to answer the question "when are we going to open back up?" to being "when all the checkmarks are green" instead of "when we say so".
Which is actually quite valuable as transparency from decision makers makes it much easier to evaluate the quality of their decisions and to understand whether they are being foolishly capricious or they are using facts and reasonable judgement about what should be done about an ongoing crisis.
Then if you disagree with the government's position, you can base an objection on facts (e.g., one of these metrics is not set at an appropriate level or is not impactful enough to guide decision making) instead of just yelling that the government is wrong and should change what they are doing.
IMO this might be the biggest benefit. Whenever I feel like the US is a failed state, the reason always seems to be people demanding 1-bit answers to 128-bit questions. This shows the criteria, quantifies everything, sources everything, and clearly shows what the goals are and what the current state is. If people want to argue about when to reopen, this turns the arguments into deciding what the criteria should be and how it should be measured, rather than bullshit like "I want everything to reopen now because that's what the angry man on TV told me to think".
A lot of people screaming about reopening don't even seem to realize there are criteria and metrics involved, rather that it's just some arbitrary decision arbitrarily made by governors, which is why their whining is so useless. I'd be much more open to hearing people's reopen arguments if they came in the form of, "we don't need to care about this metric, because <blah> and this other metric can be lower, and this whole stage of the process doesn't need to exist, therefore we can think about reopening earlier." Instead you get neckbeards with AR-15s and Confederate flags (in Canadian border states!) screaming at public servants about...something. I don't know. They're mad and they want something to change but they have no ideas and they don't know how to communicate with people.
As a business owner it might let you plan around how likely it will be that you'll still be allowed to be open next week and get an idea of how safe potential customers are feeling.
I think it doesn't do a lot for folks that just work in an office - but there are a lot of people, business owners and HR folks, that are trying to help their employees get a better grip of what the situation is and how it's trending.
You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink. How you consume and process this information is up to you and what is important to you. Expecting the government to tell you what this information means would be overreach and presumptuous. This is great data on the state of New York in terms of metrics.
All the employers need to know this information so they know when they can reopen. It's not like they all have some direct hotline to the governor that will call them when they can open.
This is a good way to keep workplaces up to date so they can let their employees know to come back. Especially since the governor is letting every one of these regions handle reopening themselves, so it won't be some statewide announcement on TV.
But this dashboard has no information / makes no claim about potential timelines. For example, Mid Hudson has a 28% share of total beds available vs 30% threshold. There is no way for a non expert to know if a 2% delta is small or large gap.
There is a difference between having a lot of data and knowing what any of it means. Business owners are (by and large) not health care experts, and I think it's a bad idea to implicitly encourage people to make their own conclusions on a very complicated issue.
i think what many people don't understand are how many other layers will block re-opening once the gov. gives a green light.
plenty of businesses are closed in states where the Governor has given a green light to re-open.
It can be plain common sense by the business owner, food handling rules, city laws, office buildings enforcing impossible rules such as 1 person per elevator, liability from lawsuits and the insurance fees that come from that, office layout that needs a complete rebuild, workers scared for themselves or people they live with, and many more
I'll tell you what. All of you who ain't questioning the whole corona event and have been zealously obeying the orders - you are just so terrified to by the powers that be, so afraid to look like a black sheep or to be marked as disloyal, so afraid of losing your status quo, so hooked on credits and mortgages that you will readily vane into whatever stinky fart that happens to blow into your masked faces! All of you are personally responsible for this triumph of lies and psychological terror, and for the fascist world of distancing and slavery that your children will inherit - especially you, lunatic flaggers in the service of censorship. Wake up until it's too late!
While interesting, let's not be deceived by this dashboard or these goals. It gives the impression that NY is on the cusp of opening up. The reality is that any of these metrics can have strong downward trajectory at any time. And some (such as contact tracing) might not even be feasible in some of the boroughs.
Everybody seemed on board when it was "14 days to flatten the curve". Now it's indefinite. I can already see cracks appearing, with many more people outside and meeting together. We weren't meant to live like this, and there's going to be a lot of negative externalities (domestic abuse, child abuse, suicide, drug abuse relapse, etc[1]). Remember, it's only been barely a month.
I predict soon these states are going to either be forced to open because of a rebellious population, or be forced to criminalize a lot of otherwise normal people.
I'm a bit surprised (and disappointed) something similar does not exist for the Bay Area.