Yet Another Lockdown Policy in California

This week California announced a new Coronavirus lockdown policy. It layers atop the the state's existing four-tier, color-coded safety plan (link to recent blog). This one focuses on a different metric, remaining hospital capacity, and it applied at the regional level rather than the county level. This infographic from the Sacramento Bee helps illustrate it:



As the chart notes, the driver behind this policy is hospital ICU capacity. With Coronavirus cases on the rise virtually everywhere in the US (and in many countries worldwide) hospitals are filling up with sick people requiring acute care. There's concern hospital could soon be pushed over capacity— which would lead to people being unable to obtain life-saving care. That was part of the tragedy in Italy's northern Lombardy region this past Spring, when Coronavirus first surged. People died in the hallways of overtaxed hospitals for lack of beds, equipment, and doctors and nurses to care for them. It's not possible to build hospitals or train doctors and nurses overnight, so we've got to focus on bringing down the rates of infection. Yes, this is Flatten The Curve all over again, 8½ months later.

Okay, so what changes?

As an immediate matter, nothing changed. Yet. The state order (link to ca.gov page) announced on Dec 3 doesn't take effect until this afternoon (Saturday, Dec 5). Real soon now, though, it looks like four of the 5 regions could go into this new level of lockdown based on ICU capacity already below 15%, according to a recent CNN article (3 Dec 2020).

Once the new condition is triggered various closure policies will tighten. Outdoor restaurant dining will be curtailed. Restaurants can still be open for takeout and delivery service. (Indoor dining was already curtailed for most of the state already in the Purple Tier.) Non-essential businesses like hair salons have to close again. Essential businesses like grocery stores will have slightly tighter limits on capacity.

California's still among the LEAST hard-hit states!

Every time new Coronavirus restrictions are announced in California there's a predictable reaction of tut-tutting about how awful the spread of the virus must be here. It's bolstered by news headlines about the raw number of cases in the state. As I've written numerous times before, raw-number comparisons are literally a logical fallacy. The fact is on a per-person basis California remains one of the least hard-hit states in the US. Our infection rates are just slightly over half the US average. The real question is not, "What's so bad about California that they have to act?" but, "What's so wrong with politicians in other states that they don't act!"

Biden ahead by 7 million votes

As states continue to tally the results from the US presidential election held more than a month ago, President-elect Joe Biden's lead continues to grow. As reported by CNN's election tracker today (retrieved 5 Dec 2020) Biden is now up by just over 7 million in the popular vote.



These 7 million votes represent a margin of almost 4.5% of all votes cast.

While this election has felt like a close result— to a large extent because Trump has been Tweet-storming the past several weeks claiming, with zero evidence, that he actually won, and partisan news media have repeated his lies uncritically— the actual numbers are not that close. Not in terms of the total popular vote, anyway. Only one presidential election since 2000 has seen the winner lead by more than Biden's 4.5 point margin. That was Barack Obama's 2008 win— with Biden as vice president.