How much more of this will we see if L.A. County is closed for five months? Poverty by Joe Green is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
“With all certainty” the safer-at-home orders that have shut down the County of Los Angeles will be extended another three months, through August 15. That will make five months of crippling shutdown along with devastation to the economy along with expected damage to physical and emotional health and the consequent increase in excess mortality.
This discussion will be posted on several of my blogs.
5/12/20 – Daily Bulletin – Ferrer: L. A. County likely to extend stay-home orders for another three months
Had to check that report against other media sources to make sure that it wasn’t just one outfit making it up. Turns out it is not an April fool’s day joke.
The county’s Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer later issued a press release which said the goal is to test every citizen of the county every day. (These posts are going to start naming names for future accountability of the reasonably foreseeable, fully expected excess deaths that will take place.)
Current level of testing in LA County is running at 15,000 per day.
Testing in the United States is running about 150,000 per day.
Population of Los Angeles County is 10,040,000 in 2019.
Los Angeles County constitutes 3.8% of total US output and by itself is comparable to entire output of Saudi Arabia.
So all that is necessary to bring 3.8% of the US GDP back online is to increase testing in the county to 69 times as many tests as are being administered in the entire country. Daily. That is a mere 300 million tests per month.
Then the economy can be opened and the slow recovery from financial destruction may begin.
Shifting goalposts
The goalposts for keeping businesses out of bankruptcy, tenants from being evicted, homeowners from losing their homes, and resuming life-saving “non-essential” medical treatment has transitioned yet again. The moved goalposts:
- starting with smoothing the curve so that hospitals could gear up their capacity,
- to declining rates of infection,
- to testing every person every day,
- and in Illinois only removing the stay-at-home orders when vaccines are in widespread use.
Growing levels of devastation from the shutdown
Next post describes today’s summary of damage caused by the shutdown for consideration by health care experts:
- Study estimates the deaths from suicide in Australia will be greater than the deaths from coronavirus
- Financial devastation to healthcare industry likely to close many facilities and reduce level of care
- J.C. Penney expected to file for bankruptcy any day; will permanently close 200 stores
- Illinois will not allow churches to resume operating until the vaccine is available which is expected to be another 12 or 18 months
- Crews on cruise ships cannot go home
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