More California COVID Floundering

In a remarkably unserious move,

California public health officials issued an updated travel advisory Wednesday, discouraging non-essential into and out of the state.

The new advisory replaces the pre-holiday advisory that asked travelers coming into California to self-isolate for 14 days. As of Wednesday [Jan 6], the California Department of Public Health says those coming back into the state should self-quarantine for 10 days.

. . . That 10-day period does not apply to health care workers and emergency responders coming in to help the state’s struggling hospital system.

Residents are also being asked to avoid traveling to places in the state that are more than 120 miles from their homes, or to other states or countries.

That recommendation does not apply to residents who have to travel for things like work, study or immediate medical care, or those who routinely travel out of the state or the country for essential reasons.

So let's parse this out. Two weeks ago, the self-quarantine period was 14 days, now it's ten. Science told us to change it. However, this is not enforced -- neither the hotels nor the airlines, which badly need the business, check your Ausweis or your interstate travel authorization, much less law enforcement, which has washed its hands of this. But if they did, if you told them you were under the gotta-do-it-anyhow exception, they'd wave you right through.

Before Wednsday, I could drive as far as Fresno to watch trains, but now I can drive only to San Diego or Bakersfield, but of course, that's non-essential travel, so if I actually needed to drive to Fresno today, I could still. do it. Except,, unless I've come to their attention for something else, the Fresno County Sheriff's Office won't give two flips about it either way.

How will any of this prevent a single case of COVID anywhere in the state? Is there an adult asking this sort of question of any of these people?

There are, though, informed adults around, they just aren't making the decisions.

San Francisco’s indefinite extension of its stay-at-home and 10-day quarantine orders prompted a University of California-San Francisco infectious disease specialist to speak out.

It may actually increase the spread of the novel coronavirus because more people will gather indoors, where scientists have long known the threat of infection is highest, Monica Gandhi, medical director of the HIV Clinic at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, told CBS San Francisco.

Mayor London Breed’s order is not data-driven and is likely to backfire with the public, she said:

She believes a data-driven approach would safely allow outdoor dining with some mitigation protocols and limited indoor gym capacity:

“We never reached those hospitalizations or ICU capacity concerns that the state had set as metrics for this degree of shutdown,” she said. “And then to continue it indefinitely, as kind of our New Year’s present to San Francisco, didn’t make sense to me.”

. . . The mayor is at risk of losing public trust, however, according to Gandhi. She believes a data-driven approach would safely allow outdoor dining with some mitigation protocols and limited indoor gym capacity:

It's increasngly plain that California leadership is driven by a need to look like they're doing something, but their options are limited, because any furher lockdowns will either be ignored or lead to civil unrest. Thus the measures they're enacting in new decrees every couple of weeks are effectively nugatory. This can't continue, but it's reflective of a problem that's reached the national level.