The Case for Staying Home - Now it gets hard

I’ve been tracking LA closely this week.  And, unfortunately, we’re not seeing the numbers we want to see.

We are now entering the time when people’s patience for staying indoors is wearing thin.  Protests are happening demanding that we open everything up again.  Disgusting displays, including blocking an ambulance in Michigan, and protests here in Huntington Beach (“Liberate Huntington Beach”, echoing the inflammatory rhetoric of Trump) are starting to happen.  House parties are still going.

And yet, in theory, if nobody came near anybody for a period of two weeks, we’d see new cases crash to zero.  But that’s not happening.  And, it’s not happening because people don’t understand what’s happening, and they feel that social distancing doesn’t apply to them.  We aren’t doing enough - and we certainly can’t afford to slide backwards.

I was quite excited earlier this week.  It really looked liked LA would hit zero new cases before the end of April.  We’d then monitor to keep those cases at zero, and then we’d be done.  I was looking forward to celebrating that event.

That day is looking further and further away.  Today it was announced that in the last 24 hours we reached 11,391 confirmed cases in LA County, and added another 537 new cases - that’s where we were April 3.  At the rate we’re falling, instead of hitting zero new cases by the end of April, we’re now looking at the third week of May (assuming that there isn’t yet another resurgence from people gathering around Easter).  I’m hopeful that with each passing day people treat this with more seriousness, not less.  We need to to get through this.  We must maintain the strength to get through this - by supporting ourselves and supporting each other. 

We have avoided the nightmare of New York, but if you look, Florida just had more new cases in one day than ever before.  The US refuses to peak and decline as regional infection zones begin to grow (we reached over 700,000 cases here in the US today).  Italy, while declining, is doing so at a snails pace and isn’t likely to hit zero new cases until late May, and now we’re seeing Canada backtrack and start to ramp up a second peak. 

This is the cost of complacency.

 

I also want things to get back to the way they used to be.  But in order for that to happen, we need this number to be zero.  Then, we need this number to stay zero until we are sure that there are no lingering cases.  We need this to happen as quickly as possible.  And it’s not happening fast enough.

All data from Johns Hopkins: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu