Quote:
Originally Posted by Rockstar
Sorry Vienna it wasn't meant to be a serious poke at Newsome or California.
When travel from China was restricted this may have helped reduce California's exposure to COVID. According to information gathered by https://nextstrain.org/ most infections in New York arrived from Europe. Those borders didn't close until over a month later. By then it was too late.
Los Angles Times reported 24 March California is far behind New York in testing and its a "big Problem" too. So California's current numbers may not be fully known yet. Unlike New York, California didn't underestimate the seriousness of the situation and according to current projections found at http://www.healthdata.org/ appears to be very well prepared to handle it. |
I really didn't take your comment as "a serious poke" at all; I just thought perhaps a bit of background might help explain why CA seems to have been on the better end of the Covid-19 crisis, even though with this pandemic, there really isn't much of a 'better end'...
The restrictions against travel from China may have helped, but there was already a very large number of Chinese nationals already in CA at that time; LA gets a huge amount of the Chinese tourist trade; living in Hollywood, I've seen a really big upswing in Chinese tourism over the past several years, owing, in part, to the rising Chinese standard of living and more disposable income; they are all over the place here in Hollywood and in Beverly Hills; I'm going to guess San Francisco is equally overrun; I'm not sure if it is still true, but SF has been said to have the largest immigrant Chinese population of any city outside of Asia; here in SoCal, the San Gabriel Valley has a huge Asian population, heavily Chinese; I do know LA has the largest Korean immigrant population outside of Asia and, in the early days of the pandemic, there was a big scare in the Korea Town community when news came out of two or three KAL crew members tested positive for the virus. Given all that, it wouldn't have been a surprise if there was a really big outbreak in SoCal or in CA as a whole...
No one was as surprised as I about how really well the whole process has been handled here in LA; usually there is a roil of political, racial, ethnic and any other factional bickering one can think of when there is a pie-cutting of who gets what; instead, an unusual amount of cooperation and deference is being exhibited and the various factions have dialed way, way back on the usual rhetoric and squabbling; I don't how long it will last, but it a very pleasant change for the time being...
Re testing: it has been reported a couple of weeks ago that testing numbers had doubled, a time shortly after the Times reportage you cited; Newsom very publicly took responsibility for the problems with testing at that time, and, from what I've seen on the local news here in SoCal, testing has really stepped up and is more widely available; I think a big factor in the testing problems has been the lack of labs to process the tests; like a lot of other aspects of modern society, a few, very big, labs have been doing almost of the test processing, in a situation akin to how cell phone service is down to just a very few companies; one test processor, Quest Diagnostics, has a huge share of the market and is the lab of choice for pretty much all of the medical institutions who would be dealing with the Covid-19 testing; Labs like Quest have, for man, many years, maintained there capacities at levels really designed to deal with only minor fluctuations in demand and had/have no scalability with which to deal with such a drastic surge in demand; likewise the smaller labs make do with 'just enough to get by' as a business philosophy meaning they really don't have contingency plans or facilities or manpower to deal with anything other than minor fluctuations in demand; basically, you can test all you want, but there isn't a sufficient lab infrastructure to process all those tests, hence severe backlogs, long delays in test results, etc. ...
California didn't underestimate the threat at all and Washington State was even more on the ball than CA in rapid response. While the Federal response has been hampered by a reluctance to act proactively and decisively, states like WA, CA, and NY, upon seeing the threat, moved on their own to take action, much to the annoyance of the White House; but time and circumstance has proven what were once deemed as 'overreaction', or ''alarmist', or 'political grandstanding' by those states is now seen as what should have been done from the very beginning; very serious crises require very serious and proactive response...
Today it was announced by LA Mayor Garcetti there will be an extension of the stay home orders, and other attendant orders, until 15 May,so down here were looking at a bit over month more of the lock down, but, if the reports out of South Korea and elsewhere of cases of reinfection of patients who had been 'cured' of the virus hold true, it is possible the lock downs may be here for a long while...
Here is an article from 10 Apr addressing the testing problems and going into more detail about the labs, etc. noted above:
Why America is still failing on coronavirus testing --
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/10/212142...ial-distancing
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