Are your neighbors ignoring the stay at home orders?

[donheff]

The problem is that because of a few rotten apples, the death rate will increase until draconian measures are put in place. In another thread, I just posted a news video of Swedes going about as nothing happens. They just don't care.

My sister-in-law told my wife of an incidence yesterday at a Costco in San Diego. They passed by the store, and saw that they had a chance to enter after a few weeks of skipping it because of the long line. They stood too far from the people in front of them for a safe distance, and a guy just cut in. When they protested, the asshat said that it was because they were so slow. He would not move.

Now, would you want to start a fistfight over that, if it happened to you? But we have people like that in this world.

We saw the same thing here with spring break, the CA beaches mentioned above, restaurants in cities that haven't shut down. All Americans know how serious this is yet it's party central for significant numbers until shutdown orders come. The effect is that, absent stay at home orders, we march down an exponential curve of infection that overwhelms our hospitals. Virtually the entire developed world has decided that letting the wave completely overwhelm us is unacceptable - bodies on the street in front of emergency rooms would eventually provoke a financial crisis anyway so why not shutdown in a more orderly fashion and see if we can tamp down the horror. Maybe we were so late to the decision that we will get the worst of both effects but none of us really know if that is true. I hope that many of us will avoid the situation NYC is in. If we do it will be because we were lucky enough to get a few weeks head start on them.

 

[braumeister]

Thanks for the interesting discussion.