Four years out, let’s look back on the Shelter-In-Place order for Santa Clara County

It’s four years since Santa Clara County (SCC) ordered shelter-in-place to limit the spread of COVD-19. This was the first such order in the country when they did this on March 16, 2020. It is a decision which gets much criticism today from some quarters. Is that criticism deserved? Let’s start with a simple metric to see how well SCC did in general: the death rate. Deaths due to COVID divided by total population. For SCC, the rate is 0.16%. [1] That’s 3081 people who died of COVID since we started counting. Let’s compare that to other locations (data as of March 2, 2024) and ask, is the SCC number lower? Here are some values: SCC:                0.16% California:       0.287%. United States: 0.357% Florida:           0.380% The methodology is different than what I used for Santa Clara County, but not so different as to explain the very large differences in the death rate. Santa Clara County is well under the US average. It’s well under the value for Florida (which famously decided against COVID prevention measures). We can’t say it’s because of the shelter-in-place measures, but certainly something (more likely some things, plural) went well in SCC. Let’s put this in terms of lives lost.  First off, had Santa Clara County had the same rates as the US as a whole, another 3000 or more people would be dead today. That’s a lot of grandparents. That’s a lot of parents.  That’s a lot of people. Humans who didn’t have to suffer the painful and terrifying death that comes with COVID. Consider the US as a whole. About a million people have died of COVID.  If the country had the same death rate as Santa Clara County, that number would be under 500,000. Five hundred thousand Americans. Of course we can’t say, “SCC did shelter-in-place and that’s why their numbers are as low as they are”. A lot of factors were in play. But shelter-in-place kept the hospitals from overflowing.  Shelter-in-place meant that a lot of people didn’t get sick until there was a vaccine that dramatically lowered the chance of death. So I’m willing to say that shelter-in-place saved people. Am I saying it came without any cost? Absolutely not. But I will add this–there was going to be a huge disruption no matter what. It was a pandemic. A lot of people in places like Facebook argue that anything bad that happened was all due to shelter in place and other pandemic limiting measures. — By Matt Carey