I think the public transport thing is a little different than what you are imagining - plenty of wealthier* people take public transport to work every day under normal circumstances. What’s different right now is that many of those people can work from home - and many people in the lower income neighborhoods, who work as health care aids, janitors, in delis and restaurants ,supermarkets, warehouse or as truck drivers can’t work from home. And right now, people who can’t work from home are pretty much the only people taking public transport. It’s going to be hard to separate the effects of taking public transportation from the effect of having to work in jobs with contact with the public when those two factors themselves are so closely correlated right now.
Of course, it depends on the level of wealthy - but plenty of people with 6 figure individual incomes take public transport of some kind to get to work. It’s not all working class.
A large part of it is people who chose to live in NY chose to use the city as part of their living space. They use the local cafe’s as part of their eat in kitchen. It is a lifestyle choice that is much more communal, and personal space is much smaller. Mass transit, crowded restaurants with tables very tightly packed together, elevators, grocers with isles that sometimes don’t allow shopping carts due to the size… Everything is packing people together.
Add to this the flow in and out of the 'burbs. A lot of that is by train, which are typically packed (IIRC the LIRR and Metro North both operate at of above 100% capacity, NJT also is packed).
Add to this the NYC work ethic, if your sick but can go to work you do (Hoping this goes away after this and we are more concerned about each other then the almighty dollar)
And as stated it appeared that the strain of the virus was the more deadly strain that hit NYC.
They did? That’s interesting. Testing in NY was not great. We had drive up testing spots set up but they were ‘by reservation only’ and almost no one could get a reservation. As a first responder with mild symptoms I could not get tested, and still am on the call list which I never got called (symptoms have since long gone). I was told that they don’t have enough tests so the tests are only for those when the outcome of the test would dictate a unique treatment for COVID19. The only ones who really got the test except for the most critically ill were the first ‘explosion’ of cases by the traveling jewish lawyer in New Rachelle, NY.
Maybe, but it’s probably more likely that wealthier folks were able to stop using it and work from home sooner, not that they didn’t use it before. I know lots of very wealthy folks who take public transportation to work in the city, either from other parts of NYC or the suburbs. However, many people with higher paying jobs were the first to stop commuting in, because our jobs allowed us to work from home.
I’m pretty well off and I live in a pretty well-off suburb in NJ, and no one in my local social circle is still going to work in an office. They are all, literally all, working from home. However, my friends from my not-as-well-off home town include cops, firemen, and so on, and they still have to go in.
NY also had that super-spreader who went to the bar mitzvah or something up in New Rochelle, gave it to lots of people there, his family, and the guy who drove him to the hospital. It was a big party with people from NY and NJ (another hot spot), probably with lots of people who took public transportation to work. The company I work for is not that big and we had at a person at that party (who I think contracted CV). Once you get that into the commuter trains and subways, it’s going to spread fast, I imagine.
Is it possible that one super-spreader made a material difference? He was early on, so NY and NJ hadn’t taken draconian measures yet. Seems likely he made a material difference, but I’m not an epidemiologist.
I don’t know if this is big enough to be a contributing factor or not, but handshaking is a HUGE thing in Judaism. On Shabbat, rabbi will try to shake as many congregants hands as possible, and may shake some more than once. Everyone who returns from an aliyah, or some other honor shakes a lot of hands on the way back. If you go to daily minyan, you shake even more hands.
Honestly, I would not be surprised if this has something to do with why it spread so fast among Chassidic communities. That, and big Shabbat dinners, as well as the Purim parties, and shlach manos exchanges that probably happened right before the lockdowns started.
Thanks for the explanation. As a Midwesterner/southerner, I didn’t know this. Around here, only the most desperate* take the bus. H/T also to Rittersport who made the same point.
*This is also due to the spotty nature of public transportation hereabouts – it’s extremely inconvenient and time consuming – I assume NYC’s is more comprehensive and gets you there with fewer vehicle changes and delays.
If anyone wants a visual representation of what I was talking about in my last post, look at the chart of New Deaths/Day for New York, then compare it to the same statistic for states like Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.
doreen Quote:
Originally Posted by pullin View Post [url=http://web.mit.edu/jeffrey/harris/HarrisJE_WP2_COVID19_NYC_13-Apr-2020.pdf]
Here’s an article [The Intercept] explaining how infection rates followed economic (and racial) boundaries very closely. It appears blacks and Hispanics in NYC were infected at twice the rate of whites. The included charts show a strong correlation between income and infection rates when separated by zip code. This probably supports the theory that public transportation was a main source of transmission, since (I assume) wealthier folks are less likely to use it.
I think the public transport thing is a little different than what you are imagining - plenty of wealthier* people take public transport to work every day under normal circumstances. What’s different right now is that many of those people can work from home - and many people in the lower income neighborhoods, who work as health care aids, janitors, in delis and restaurants ,supermarkets, warehouse or as truck drivers can’t work from home. And right now, people who can’t work from home are pretty much the only people taking public transport. It’s going to be hard to separate the effects of taking public transportation from the effect of having to work in jobs with contact with the public when those two factors themselves are so closely correlated right now.
Yeah, a lot of people who aren’t familiar with the New York City area have difficulty applying their understanding of income, space, and population density to New York. A poster in a different thread was confused because I mentioned how my wife and I live in a 1150 sq ft condo with a family of 4.
I think this is worth exploring more. The virus was probably spreading gradually on the west coast for a while before anyone realized it. But, we were experiencing an extremely warm and dry February and early March (not a drop of rain and hardly a cloud in the sky for 6 weeks in NorCal), which may have blunted the rate of spread. I was wondering if temp and humidity are important factors. ISTM it’s not one thing about the NYC area that made it more vulnerable, but many.
I’ve heard, can’t remember where, that the “west coast strain” came from China, and the “east coast strain” came from Europe. I imagine since Italy was very hard hit, a lot of the cases came from there, given that NY has the highest population of Italians (3.1M) of an place in the US.
California locked down earlier – maybe four days earlier, but at the beginning of an exponential event, that is going to make a huge difference. I think that accounts for a great deal of it. Also, as others have said, NY is way more dense even than California, much less other states, and R0 (when not in lockdown) is probably a lot greater. That’s what I really think is going on.
Now for my completely uninformed speculation time on East Coast vs. West Coast! If this Vitamin D thing has any substance whatsoever, maybe people on the West Coast have just been outside more, as the weather is warmer here, and we have better vitamin D and so as a population can fight the virus better?
The hunch I have gleaned from what I’m reading is that use of transit, combined with promptness of isolation, are the factors leading to the early outbreak.
New York and New Orleans are transit-intensive cities that were slow to impose isolation orders, so the virus went through them like a buzz saw.
US west coast cities are transit-intensive, but they acted early to isolate, so they did fairly well flattening their curves.
Seoul and Hong Kong are large cities that utilize less mass transit for cities of their size. Also, social containment measures were earlier and more aggressive there, so they weren’t as hard-hit.
I feel pretty good about that theory, except that Tokyo is a huge glaring exception as of now. I don’t know why Tokyo hasn’t been harder hit. I know the international airports have thermal scanning, I suspect that most international travelers through Tokyo don’t actually use Tokyo transit, I think that Japanese already have a lot of built-in social distance. But those are all bullshit guesses. The lack of big outbreaks in Tokyo has me scratching my head.
I will just slightly pressure test this - most US west coast cities (except San Francisco) are lower density than NYC and very spread-out. Most people’s transit is alone in their own car, and high-rise housing is rare. Workers still, however, congregated at places of work and shopping, etc., but images of people packed on subway cars and buses like there are in NYC in cities in the west are very rare.
Thanks for that. Note that the numbers for New York are for the entire state, and much of upstate is much lower density than NYC and the surrounding suburbs. California too has areas of high density (Bay Area, Los Angeles, etc) and vast areas of much lower density.