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Sweden reported a record 170 new coronavirus deaths today in a widely-expected surge after the Easter weekend. : Web Link

Let's have a look at the numbers, shall we?
From the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 website:
Denmark -- 309 deaths
Norway -- 145 deaths
Finland -- 72 deaths
and
Sweden -- 1,203 deaths

Care to guess what the difference among these Scandinavian countries happens to be? Denmark, Norway, and Finland all put in *actual* shelter in place policies, including closing down all non-essential businesses. Sweden, for reasons that no one can seem to grasp, has not. And they are paying the price.

So, "Resident" -- please take your nonsensical posts, and just go away.

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What are Palo Alto's current statistics? Number of cases, hospitalized, recovered, deaths, numbers tested, and the results.

That test, track and isolate criteria could be a show stopper for any early relaxation and getting back to a minimal level of normalcy. Stay tuned to see what the plan is for doing that.

When I first heard and read about the term 'herd immunity' I conjured up an entirely different meaning of it...don't do anything to stem the pandemic...let it roll on...what are 2 million lives in a world of 6-7 billion lives. It would be a thinning out of the herd like what happens in nature...the fittest will survive to pass their immunity and ability to survive on down to their heirs. The weakest will die. That works in nature to the lesser animals in our entire animal kingdom. The food chain is fragile. I wouldn't be posting this if that held true in our homo sapiens realm. We have our wonderful doctors, nurses, and health care workers at all levels, trying to keep us alive so we can think about the issues, debate the issues, and write our Life Stories, our memoirs, and be able to describe our feelings and situation during this time.

Watching Chris Cuomo has convinced me that the idea of actually wanting to get the disease, so you would be immunized for life, is not the way to go. I was a victim of the 1979 flu. Worst 3-4 days of my life. I felt like I could die and in a few rare moments wished I could.

Let's pray for all those that are really being hurt and suffering at this time. That doesn't include professional team sports fans who have been paying thousands of dollars for season tickets. They can watch many archived videos of the most famous events and they can just snap that lid or cap off of their beer cans or bottles. I have no idea what beer costs at a ballpark these days. It was $6 when Pac Bell opened many years ago.

Last Weekend it was beautiful outside. Two people I know went by on bikes. Others were out walking and biking. And today the noise level in my neighborhood is loud with tree cutters, fence fixers, maintenance crews. And so why am I inside? There is a disconnect between what is actually happening and what we are told to do. It is like herding cats. Not going to happen.
A good place to go is Ace Hardware. You can by a plant or something to fix up your house. At least you can feel like you are accomplishing something.

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@ resident

You only have 1/2 the story, now about jobs and lives destroyed from draconian methods to stop the disease. I applaud Sweden.
Do you have stats you can share with us of relative jobs lost etc in scandanavian countries that would give us a better picture of the tradeoffs

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Somebody losing a job is a lot less serious than losing their life, particularly when that person is getting a sepubstantial weekly payment from the government. And if the health care system is overrun, the consequences would be a disaster for many more.

You can open up restaurants but if they are not known to be safe, they won’t have enough business to stay open.

Thank you for bringing truth to this discussion -- something that seems to elude a number of people commenting on Palo Alto Online.

As trying as staying in place has been for a lot of people, it is a lot more preferable to having a situation which is bound to happen in a number of states (e.g. Florida) who are determined to lift restrictions, even though they have not yet reached the peak of cases in their state.

OK, all you peoples who think we can just keep up this SIP indefinitely. At a very basic level, how are we supposed to get food when we’re not making any money? Just that. Just money for food? That doesn’t even account for the rent and utilities, basic necessities. HOW IN THE HECK DO WE PAY THESE BILLS WHEN WE ARENT GETTING INCOME??

Shut downs just prolong the inevitable.
Why are so many comments removed on this article. ALL OPINIONS have merit and should not be removed unless their is a vulgarity. Political opinions are just that, an opinion, and should be encouraged in a FREE society with freedom of Speech.

He talks about science dictating his decisions, but we have never shut down our Calif economy for a Virus before, and the shut down isn’t even working it is just lengthening the time to which you will be exposed. Open the economy May 1 and wear a scarf/mask (the only proven prevention). Scientist can’t even agree on the best distance for “social distancing” . Where is the factual science to close a beach and fine citizen $1000 to go to the public beach our tax dollars pay for! Stop holding our freedoms hostage bureaucrats.

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We were asked to shelter in place to "flatten the curve" , it's been four weeks and counting. We weren't asked to obliterate the curve, the flattening was to allow our health system and hospitals to get better prepared. People will continue to get this virus and die for months more. We've got to have a more balanced response.

When people lose their jobs bad things happen, depression, suicide, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, broken families. And now we've created 22 million unemployed!! And millions more likely to come. Yes government programs can help, but let's be realistic hundreds of thousands, perhaps many millions will be severely impacted, some forever.

It took time to see just how fast and how deadly this new virus was and as we now know, we were poorly prepared to scale up the response. People and administrators were caught unprepared in a modern global supply chain optimized for just in time production and stocking. None of this was helped by our increasingly sensationalist press hyping estimates of body counts and stoking fears and accusations. The models, we now understand, we're seriously flawed. 188 people are hospitalized now in Santa Clara County out of 1.9 million people with 76 in intensive care. 85% of the 65 people who have died from Covid-19 had one or more serious underlying health issues.
Hospitals, county officials, emergency services, and businesses and none of everyone else were prepared for this. In spite of that, there is sure to be plenty of scandal and finger-pointing to come.
It's quite reasonable to wonder if we didn't overreact. Trillions in debt on top of record indebtedness and massive destabilization of the global economy isn't going to be easy on the future as we begin to think beyond the shutdown and the tens of millions without work. Too many people, business, government agencies had little or no reserves to weather such a calamity and it's unlikely the public purse can support them much longer.
I think we have learned that wholesale shutdown across every sector and non-essential activity may not be the best reaction. 42% of the nation's counties have no cases at all. We have to learn how to keep going with more selective quarantines and better emergency planning. Everyone will think of this differently but a future plan has to begin with actual data in real time - sheltering and restrictions and resourcing where and when it develops to a point of critical and avoiding a total shutdown. We also have to prevent the officials from implementing testing and tracking requirements that brings us yet further to the state monitoring our every move. The 'testing' everyone' demands are a bad idea which only furthers the greedy ambitions of the surveillance state. We should be really careful about that.
In the meantime, everyone who can needs to get back to work with care. We don't want to see our economy degrade to where things slow to a crawl, the shelves are bare, and millions more fall by the wayside.

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I'm actually glad to see that states have the power decide what is right or wrong in terms for restrictions. BUT, if Governors are making decisions that shutdown businesses, dry up tax revenues, explode unemployment then deal with the consequences and don't run to the Federal government for a bailout.

I am so thrilled that so many anonymous posters have greater expertise than our health care professionals and elected government safety decision makers.

As to the poster who brought up Sweden, Sweden has much higher per capita death rates than the rest of Scandinavia.

Get a grip, folks. The economy is not coming back with a bang, but a whimper.

Having to shut down the economy a second time will be far worse than waiting it out and doing this in a proper fashion.

It will be 18 months or longer before a vaccine is developed and the SIP can be lifted. People need to come to terms with that and realize that there is no quick solution to this virus. We are not going to sacrifice lives at the expense of profits, it is out of the question.

Fortunately help is on the way in the form of stimulus checks, eviction moratorium, and donations from the community. We'll all get through this together.

@JR We cannot shelter in place for 18 months, So much privilege in even suggesting that. People would start looting/rioting and I wouldn’t blame them — you cannot expect people not to earn an income for more than a few months and our support systems are not robust enough to sustain them long term.

I’m sure things won’t go completely back to normal for quite a while but I expect they will start opening the economy up significantly (perhaps while asking those privileged enough to work from home to do so) within a couple of months. I just don’t see how people who aren’t earning an income can survive otherwise. They’ll just have to monitor hospital capacity and make adjustments as needed, but we aren’t going to completely get rid of the virus by sheltering at home and we also can’t stay at home not working for the 18 months it will take to get a vaccine. So we just have to accept that we are going to have some more spread, but hopefully can keep it under hospital capacity.

I hear FOX NEWS encouraging right wingers to protest the shelter-in-place order. Photos of some of these protests show large numbers of people (often heavily armed) that are standing much closer than 6 feet apart and many are not wearing masks. I have to say that wearing masks to these protests means that maybe you don't really believe in what you are protesting for. What is the FOX NEWS end game? Some, perhaps many, of these protesters will catch the COVID-19 virus at these protests. Won't that just dilute the numbers of FOX NEWS voters?

It is time to start discussions regarding how we begin relaxing virus-related restrictions and get people back to work. Joblessness has been shooting up, businesses large and small have been collapsing, and people have started thinking long and hard about what the future holds.

The longer this goes on, we will have to deal with more deaths, divorces and unemployment-related social upheaval. This is a recipe for disaster.

Let's start talking about getting people back to work before it is too late.

@bill or put in place the needed support systems for people going through unemployment and increased stress from being cooped up in the same home together.

It seems like what you're getting at with deaths is how suicide rates have gone up in previous depressions (5-10% increase from the sources I've seen, annual number of suicides in 2017 was ~50k) -- though from a pure number of deaths perspective the increase in deaths from suicide would need to be 10x what they were in previous depressions to match the current number of COVID-19 deaths in the US (~32k). Obviously implementing robust programs to help deal with the stress and providing continuous support (e.g. guaranteed money each week/month for unemployment) could help keep any increase below what has been seen in past depressions -- keeping the programs in place after the current crisis is over could even lower the baseline suicide rate below what it was before.


I'm not saying that more suicides are okay, but there are trade-offs that make it much more complicated than just saying "alright people, get back to work before its too late" as doing that could result in even bigger consequences as far as deaths and livelihoods go.

As a parting thought, I found this article Web Link that has an interesting bite-sized summary of some research on deaths during the Great Depression. In particular the decrease in automotive related fatalities was interesting and is something that looks like is also happening with SIP (accidents, injuries, and fatalities in CA are down by half). Of course there are many differences between back then and today, so we probably won't have a clear picture of the outcomes of our decisions until this is all over (widespread vaccinations/immunity).

"California hospitals should be prepared to face significant strain from the coronavirus if social distancing measures are lifted, researchers have warned in a new study." Mercury-News report: Web Link

FOX NEWS says we should reopen the economy even if the national fatality rate increases by 3%.

Donald Trump says he doesn't want to decide when to open the economy. He wants the governors to make the hard leadership decisions so he can criticize them later.

Summerwinds Nursery was taking phone orders and bringing items to people!s cars, it was perfect and much needed for many. Apparently someone complained and the Sheriff shut them down, now they can only make deliveries. This severely limits their business and is absolutely ridiculous. And if anyone is aware of a way to help change this please say so, I will gladly get involved and help.

We need to open things back up. Perhaps not to the full extent that it was before but for gods sake, use some common sense and let these businesses stay afloat!