Los Angeles County’s stay-at-home orders will “with all certainty” be extended for the next three months, county Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer acknowledged during a Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday.3 months? Are they insane? Where are they going to get all of that money they love to spend?
Well, the truth of the matter is that sweet, sweet money is going to keep coming into the city government. Most of it comes from property taxes which will be due whether you can go to work or not.
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Governor Newsom, Goober to Ohioan, is going to be in a different kettle of fish once he jumps out of his frying pan. Or something like that. His money comes from income taxes. Of course, much of it won't hit him until Fiscal Year 2021, but still ...
My first impressions of the LA lockdown were wrong. They won't see much of a drop in their budgets at all. Goober, on the other hand, is screwed.
Of course it's crazy. But unless the Goober relents on his reopening criterion of "14 days in a row without a death", they might as well say they expect to stay locked down until the sun goes cold. I mentioned (in a comment to your post of May 9) that the odds of San Diego opening by random chance were about 1 in 23 trillion. Well, we've had a few more days pass and the updated odds have improved considerably. Now it's 1 in 340 billion (that's almost 70 times better, although I am reminded that 70*0 = 0). That's San Diego County. LA County has 3.06 times as many people. If you believe that the number of cases should go roughly as the population squared, then you'd expect almost 10 times as many deaths (SD has 190 deaths and LA has 1613, a factor of just over 8). Using the observed ratio, their odds will go down on the order of a factor of 10^13 (to about 1 in 3 octillion). Just for fun, if the sun exists for 4 billion more years (or so) then there are 365.25*4*10^12 (= 1,461*10^12) strings of 14 days. San Diego should be released just by random chance (probably during the first billion years). LA would have 1 chance in 2 billion of opening before the sun dies. So really, staying closed the next 3 months seems like a safe bet.
ReplyDeleteI was surprised that the MN governor is allowing the state to open back up on Monday.
ReplyDeleteRestaurants etc at 50% capacity.
As said in the video of the owner of a 80+ year old restaurant, 50% he might loose more money than staying closed.
The new model predicts between 16000 and 44000 deaths in MN in the next 12 months. Sounds like a WAG.
We lead the adjacent states in cases for 2 reasons. 1) North and South Dakota have no people in them. 762k and 884k. Iowa has less people than the Minneapolis/St Paul Metro area. And Milwaukee area is less than half of MSP. 2) Minnesota leads the nation in testing due to Mayo Clinic and Karl Anthony Townes donations after his mother died.
Mostly - Yes, those are WAGs, well SWAGs. My guess is that they think (like you) that due to higher testing rates, MN is capturing more of the actual cases than most places. That makes trying to figure out the ratio of total cases to confirmed cases much harder. If you take the current CoViD-19 numbers MN is reporting (11,799 confirmed cases and 591 deaths) and use the total population (5.64 million), then all you need is to know is the true ratio of total cases to confirmed cases (R) to make a good projection for deaths in the next year (assuming you think you know the final number that would be infected, which I suspect is essentially the total state population). The math says you would predict the total added deaths (D) as
ReplyDeleteD = (5,640,000 - R*11,799) / (R*11,799) * 591
To make that come out to 16,000 to 40,000 you get 6.5 < R < 18. Since the studies done, that allow one to compute R, come out in the range 16 - 190 (mostly in the range 30-90), I would bet they think that MN is capturing something like 5 times more cases per total cases than most of the previous studies. However, if Minnesotans are as reasonable as I suspect from the few I know personally, and if they are extra careful to protect those that are at higher risk, those totals could easily be kept down by anywhere from a factor of 5 to a factor of 20 (producing a range of 800 to 8,000 additional deaths).