Holy crap, I had to look this up because I didn't believe it. "Religious services" are actually the first defined type of "essential activities"...and Texas' governor just did the same. Wow, this is incredibly foolish.
Any stay-at-home order which stopped religious services would be found in violation of the US Constitution's first amendment. It's possible a judge would throw out the whole stay-at-home order. To have a stay-at-home order that survives in court, exempting religious services is necessary.
I am just not certain that this is true. The 1A also protects protests- am I allowed to organize gatherings of 10+ people for the purpose of a protest? I believe not. The 1A is comprehensive; it is not all-powerful.
We (Oklahoma) do not have a state-wide order. I'm not sure why not because most of our larger cities do. I guess they have to do what they have to do, but seems like city-wide orders would be less effective since you can't bar people from surrounding small towns.
The amount of contact between people increases in cities, which makes a huge difference in viral load and how quickly pandemic’s spread. This is why NYC has 1/4th of all US cases even with an early stay at home order.
Interestingly, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation [1] out of UW is still predicting Florida will not run out of hospital beds, unlike many other states. I don't know what to do with this data, but I was surprised given the concern in the media for the state due to the older population and lack of stay-at-home order until now.
And now (a day later) the projection is that Florida will be short by 917 ICU beds. And this will keep changing.
As they say in
http://www.healthdata.org/covid/updates
"Our model’s increase in nationwide deaths since the March 31 release is primarily driven by increasing death tolls in states that previously had very few COVID-19 deaths. States with more COVID-19 deaths, such as New York and Washington, show far less fluctuation across daily updates."
Basically, in states with little testing and if they are in the start of the cycle, the data is very unreliable.
See their update for Alabama. In a single day, with newer data, the death projection went up by 540%
"Notably, fitting on new data released on March 31, the cumulative COVID-19 death estimates for Alabama increased to 7,334 (1,130 to 17,040), an estimate that is 6,161 deaths higher than previous estimates."
The data is definitely not update, in my state it looks like the data being shown is a few weeks old and the stay at home order isn't displayed either.
You can even just quote the linked article: UPDATE: Apr. 1, 1:50 p.m. EST — Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced on Wednesday afternoon that he would sign an executive order mandating residents to stay at home for 30 days. The order will say that residents may only go out for essential activities.
That update was posted after I posted my comment, hence the link. Kind of hard to quote something that doesn't exist yet. Thanks for the incredibly helpful post though.
'The previous guidance from the White House regarding an easing back into normal life by Easter “isn’t going to happen,” DeSantis said.'
Of course it isn't. It was a lie.