We went into lockdown when there were 30 new cases a day. Now there are 300 new cases a day. Dozens of people are dying each week in our county and we haven't seen the worst of it yet. We're going to need more than face masks in public.

If only all people were really wearing face mask. If they were, we'd be in a very different situation.

No one wants to understand that even with the best mask wearing, the problem will not become "normalized" until we have a good treatment or vaccine that practically everyone takes with no exceptions.

The idea that we could have had maybe a strict 90 day lockdown to "burn out" the virus was very short, by the time the WHO issued the alert it was probably too late.

And every time we "opened" up, we simply made it worse.

Our Medical Professionals hands were tied by the Federal and State Governments inability to understand the "LONG GAME". These governments mindset was you had to PROVE the population was sick and in danger FIRST in order to "LOCKDOWN". This is like the Space Shuttle Challenger when Morton Thiokol engineers warned of the solid rocket booster problem but NASA said you have no proof it will fail and launched it making it explode. WE still don't learn from history do we?

We are still in perhaps only starting a second wave, but there are 2 NEW strains off COVID 19 that even the new vaccine may not work on. They didn't state it covered them.

I am still hopeful, but we are not out of this mess yet.

Everything is about the mask. If you wear a face mask, the entire world would have beat the virus within 6 days. Not.

The face mask is a secondary mitigation as specified in the county and state orders. Stick to the primary and more effective mitigations of keeping at least 6 feet from people outside of your household, outdoors is much less risky than indoors (even with a face mask!) and minimize your time around people outside of your household.

Taking the figures in the article and the population of Santa Clara lets do the math.
1.928 million people
433 covid deaths so far
.022%

I think we are doing a terrific job in keeping the virus from spiraling out of control in SCC.
Lets not scare people so much.

Steven Goldstein doesn't want to understand that irrespective of any "treatments or vaccines," stopping this disease's transmission -- and masks have proven a great help in doing so -- would halt the epidemic, cold, and could have done so months ago. That's not some theory, it's history. That's how most epidemics in history were stopped. That is how the 1918-1920 pandemic was stopped.

If public health officials were to impose one really useful mandate on "everyone with no exceptions," it might be to stop individuals advocating pet armchair theories (there are hundreds) that contradict current medical consensus.

This is a really good website to check out for causes of death in SCC before Covid.
Very interesting indeed.
Web Link

In response to Common sense you wrote:

“Steven Goldstein doesn't want to understand that irrespective of any "treatments or vaccines," stopping this disease's transmission -- and masks have proven a great help in doing so -- would halt the epidemic, cold, and could have done so months ago. That's not some theory, it's history. That's how most epidemics in history were stopped. That is how the 1918-1920 pandemic was stopped.”

You have an incomplete picture here. Here is some information from the CDC website found here (Web Link Let me demonstrate:

“With no vaccine to protect against influenza infection and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections that can be associated with influenza infections, control efforts worldwide were limited to non-pharmaceutical interventions such as isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings, which were applied unevenly.”

That disease did burn out but it cost 675,000 Americans and 50 million people worldwide. There were 10.6.5 Million people in the U.S. in 1920 so approximately 0.63% died of the 1918 pandemic. But COVID has a rate of about 2% fatality. Even if you use the original 1918 pandemic fatality rate you will see 2,091,000 Americans dead. That means another 1,850,000 more people will die. But with the COVID fatality rate of 2% you will see 6,600,000. Which means that another 6,360,000 will die if we go with your model.

The problem is that currently we are not enforcing isolation, quarantines, or limitations on public gatherings EVENLY. If you only do personal hygiene and use of disinfectants, it is not going to do the job. And you know it. The key phrase is these actions were applied UNEVENLY. Allowing people to move from one population zone to another simply negates the “County By County” controls unless you isolate all people within the counties. Otherwise it will just flare up again. Masks are not going to be the solution to this problem in the long run. You wrote:

“If public health officials were to impose one really useful mandate on "everyone with no exceptions," it might be to stop individuals advocating pet armchair theories (there are hundreds) that contradict current medical consensus.”

First, I like that you constantly take your time to single me out instead of discussing the topic again. Second, please provide any information that I have said that CONTRADICTS MEDICAL CONSENSUS. The reality is that the influenza virus had a much shorter life span outside the body.

I find it interesting that the County Dept of Health has not updated the Blueprint Dashboard since Nov 5, when it gets updated weekly. We are expecting an update tomorrow.

Probably the DPH already has bad news, the Code will go from Orange to Red given the latest surge in the ADJUSTED rate.

It got a lot of complaints when it had to shut down businesses earlier this year after opening them up again.

It may get worse if the UNADJUSTED goes back to Code Purple.

We are only getting 88% of the contact tracing done and 41% of the cases are caused by the persons being traced. This means that old cases are causing as much as 50% of the new cases regarding Santa Clara County RESIDENTS.

But realize this, this is just counting the Santa Clara County and not the cross county travelers impact. We never stopped the intercounty traveling and we seem to not ever consider it.

We aren't doing half of what we did during 1918-1920 influenzas, thus there is no end in sight regarding COVID until we do.

OMG,

The latest COVID Blueprint update for Nov. 9, 2020 is out regarding Santa Clara County, we are now back in the Code Red state.(Web Link

Its just a matter of time an announcement of the change will happen. The Adjusted rate went up .9 a relative change of 28% plus.

It is just a matter of time

@Tina does .022% seem like a good number to you? It's not. It's over 7 1/4 MILLION dead Americans. Those are Holocaust numbers, not great numbers.

@Tal for the US at SSC death rate:
350,000,000 x .000225= 78,750
For Santa Clara county
433/1928000=.000225

In response to Tina please consider this information based on your claim you wrote:

“350,000,000 x .000225= 78,750”

Your fatality factor is completely wrong. Because the number of infected in the nation is not complete. In fact if you read the information from Johns Hopkins found here (Web Link regarding KNOWN COVID infections and deaths the U.S. has a fatality rate of 2.3% of those infected. The reality is that the shutdowns reduced the know infection in Santa Clara County to only 27,124 infection counted with 441 deaths (that we know of) which comes to 1.6% fatality regarding the known infection. The data comes from the Santa Clara County COVID 19 Cases dashboard found here (Web Link Your basis is simply incorrect.

The real facts are the COVID 19 Santa Clara County Public Health Orders kept the infections down and the deaths down, if the general population wound up getting COVID based on that percentage we would lose 1,928,000 Times .016 or 31,360 people dead in the county. You don’t understand how to make the correct calculations it seems.

Given that the U.S. has 350,000,000 and the national fatality rate on infection is 2.3% and you want to claim that every person will get the disease then you wind up with 8,050,000 dead.

I know it is hard to swallow, but our actions have saved tens of thousands of lives at this time.