By Sunday, about 20 percent of the US will be under shelter in place orders.
To combat the growing coronavirus pandemic, US cities and states are beginning to impose strict measures meant to encourage social distancing and to limit the spread of infection.
Friday, New York and Illinois joined a number of other states, including California and New Jersey, in asking residents to go outside only for necessities. The requests mean by the end of the weekend, more than 70 million people — around one in five Americans — will be under orders to stay home.
“No, this is not life as usual,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday. “Accept it and realize it and deal with it.”
Commonly referred to as “shelter in place” orders, the measures vary slightly by state. However, they largely bar people from leaving home except for exercise and for essential travel: to and from work, hospitals, or the grocery store. The orders can be enforced by law enforcement, but it’s not clear how frequently police will cite people who violate the orders.
Police in San Jose, California, for instance, have said they currently are trying to educate those they observe refusing to comply — a stance the city’s police chief said will evolve: “Our current plan is to move from an educational stance to an enforcement stance on any business that has been contacted, warned, and then reopens,” Chief Eddie Garcia said Friday.
Other officials have taken a sterner stance, like Cuomo, who said Friday, “These provisions will be enforced. … These are not helpful hints.”
States that do try to enforce the orders face a numerical challenge, however. Wendy Mariner, a professor of health law at Boston University School of Public Health, told Vox: There are far fewer police than there are citizens. “All large-scale measures present obstacles to enforcement,” Mariner said.
Other states are not yet mandating residents not leave home, instead closing restaurants, bars, gyms and other businesses as an early attempt to stop people from coming into contact with one another.
Here are the rules in some of the US’ largest and most affected states.
The most populous state in the US, encompassing 40 million people, went under a “stay at home” order Thursday evening.
New York’s policy goes into effect at 8 pm ET on Sunday. This order and others put into place in recent days affect 20 million New York residents.
Beginning at 5 pm CT Saturday, all of Illinois’ 13 million people are under a stay at home order.
Gov. Phil Murphy ordered the state of 9 million to remain home Saturday, as confirmed cases climb above 1,000. According to reporting by the New Star-Ledger:
The state of 3.5 million people has nearly 200 confirmed cases, and Gov. Ned Lamont issued a stay at home order on Friday. Beginning Monday at 8 pm:
Washington, which has been the focal point of early confirmed coronavirus cases in the US, has more than 1,300 confirmed cases and 74 deaths. The state is not yet under a stay at home order, but Gov. Jay Inslee has said he may impose more restrictive measures soon because “we still are seeing people behaving as if this virus was not a mortal threat to people in this state,” NPR-affiliate KUOW reported. Right now:
The state of 21 million has more than 500 confirmed cases and 9 deaths to date. There’s no statewide shelter in place policy; Gov. Ron DeSantis has said he believes local measures are more effective. “If you go too hard, then I think people lose confidence and they rebel against it,” he said, according to the Sun Sentinel.
The nation’s second-most populous state, with nearly 29 million people, faces restrictions that went into effect midnight on Friday and will last through April 3.
As Vox’s Dylan Scott has explained, officials hope these measures will “flatten the curve” — that is, reduce the rate of infections quickly enough to both drastically limit the number of new cases and ensure the US hospital system isn’t overwhelmed by people seeking treatment.
And as Vox’s Ezra Klein has explained, experts believe the best way to flatten the curve is to limit interpersonal contact:
Adam Kucharski, the mathematical epidemiologist, has a very simple calculation on this point. He calculates that if each Covid-19 case leads to 2.5 more infections over five days, then a single case leads to 244 more cases over the course of a month. But if social distancing measures cut that number in half to 1.25 new infections for every case, that’s only four new cases over the course of a month.
This kind of exponential math is really unintuitive. This isn’t about you or even the people directly around you. It is also about the chain you start. If you infect somebody and they have connections, you kick off in that chain that could be very deadly.
How long the shelter in place orders will need to stay in effect isn’t yet clear. But experts believe social distancing will likely need to be practiced for some time — at least until a vaccine becomes available, something that could take up to 18 months.
Author: Riley Beggin
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