I agree with all of your points, really. Tesla very well may be able to provide a relatively safe environment.
> This is locking down for the sake of locking down, not an evidence-first safety driven approach.
The problem is here, I think.
Let's say I never drink poison. I have no data supporting that poison does any harm at all, therefor my policy of not drinking poison is not evidence-driven.
If lock-in is successful it may very well look like it was unnecessary.
> If lock-in is successful it may very well look like it was unnecessary.
Absolutely. This is the curse of most public health programs, and indeed a lot of public programs in general: when they work correctly it looks like they're not needed. The Covid pandemic has just shoved this process front and center rather than leaving it in the background.
HN readers, of all people, should remember the Year 2000 bug: we heard dire, almost apocalyptic predictions of the havoc it could wreak; we spent extraordinary effort and money scrambling to fix as many date-handling bugs as we could find across countless systems and software packages; then the year rolled over and... nothing much happened. But, of course, the end state of "the Year 2000 bug was vastly overblown" and the end state of "all our painful work paid off and saved us" were effectively identical. So it is with the lockdown.
There are many businesses open and millions of people all around the state going to work, shopping, eating, and generally interacting outside. This lock-in effectively ended weeks ago.
Even if every person is still seeing exactly as many people as before, which I doubt, being mostly constrained to gathering in outdoor places is still a healthy degree removed from "No Lockdown."
People are together inside stores, restaurants, hospitals, and other buildings. Delivery services are driving hundreds of miles through many neighborhoods while handling food and packages which are taken inside and opened. Public transportation has full planes, trains, buses and even Ubers. People are breathing the same air and touching the same things like doors, benches, gates, chairs, signs, and many other surfaces. Many wear a flimsy mask, several wear it incorrectly, and almost nobody has gloves. Every day that goes by, people get more lazy, tired and complacent.
My UPS driver last week wore shorts, short-sleeve polo, no gloves, no mask, and directly handed me a package and the tablet to sign. The idea that a highly contagious disease is somehow still contained in such a populous area defies any rational explanation.
Obviously not every area is the same, hence why CA state and Alameda county don't agree.
The point is that there has been no real social distancing for weeks in many places because most people are already in plenty of contact with each other.
> This is locking down for the sake of locking down, not an evidence-first safety driven approach.
The problem is here, I think.
Let's say I never drink poison. I have no data supporting that poison does any harm at all, therefor my policy of not drinking poison is not evidence-driven.
If lock-in is successful it may very well look like it was unnecessary.