Yeah, there’s a strong tendency even if people think they are fighting it to:
-compare just within the US
-let their pre-existing political views influence which evidence they emphasize and their conclusions
I see no clear answer why the pandemic has hit various places in the world more than others. It’s obviously not just that NY relies so heavily on mass transit. That distinction is a pretty strong one in the US, but much less so once you consider the whole world, Tokyo and other dense mass transit-oriented world cities.
And unfortunately, there’s a lot of basic stuff we simply still don’t know. For example Cuomo gave recently figures from antibody tests implying 21% of the City has had Covid, implying ~0.7% infection fatality rate. Antibody tests have implied a lower rate elsewhere in the US and abroad, with same pattern of total cases a multiple of officially confirmed ones. But the studies being questioned already on possibility of high rate of false positives as well as statistical methodology. In fact many are press releases not whole studies, not peer reviewed. So like almost every other point about COVID, you’d just need better data to know what NY’s IFR, or anywhere else’s, actually is before trying to explain why it’s higher or lower than somewhere else. Although it’s indisputable than NY has had a much higher rate of serious cases (hospitalization, ICU, death) than many other large densely populated world cities relying heavily on mass transit…so far.
Although in comparing the infection rate in NY to the predominantly car-based US as a whole, it’s hard to believe the density and transportation method difference isn’t at least a significant reason. That people’s faces need to be inches, not 6’, apart when commuting, and COVID got going in NY when there were basically no precautions. But again obviously if that were the reason, every big mass transit oriented city in the world would have around the same rate.
NY(c) is younger than US avg, NY(s) about US avg: that’s not it. I think a theory like ‘NY keeps old people alive longer’ is far fetched enough on its face to be required to show solid evidence before serious consideration. Underlying health conditions which correlate to bad COVID outcomes correlate highly with race, class and regional culture in the US. NY has more of the racial groups which tend to be vulnerable than US avg, but so do lots of places in the US, including places with a regional tendency to eg. diabetes (South, partly on account of high African American %, but also higher white rate). The COVID map so far in US shows suggests variation in demographics from US avg is one factor, but doesn’t seem close to an ‘explanation’ why NY in particular is such a large % of serious cases in the country.
Could it be something as simple as the Japanese wearing masks (and to a lesser extent, gloves) in public long before somebody bit a bat? They’ve been a cool-kid accessory for at least 2 years, they’re so ubiquitous.
Those are all very good questions that need to be examined closely. Scary to think of the lethality of New York being typical. The only logical thing that comes to mind for me is that there might be a large population of people who have severe health issues but because of good healthcare they are still living where in most places they may have other wise died.
Conversations with friends from Europe come to mind where they have discussed how the healthcare systems tend to consider quality of life as opposed to just stretching it out as long as they can. I think in America they tend to look at very old and very sick people as ATM machines where they can keep stringing their life along. If this is the case at any given time we would have a much larger than normal population of people who would be at extreme risk.
The recent evidence that SARS-CoV2 was slowly building for two to three months or more until it was even noticed in New York, California, or Washington states, raises the possibility that it is just still very early for Japan.
Its an interesting thought. They recorded their first death on the 13th of February. But what is odd is that they had an almost constant death rate for weeks, up until the 3rd of April, when the death growth rate swung up to 1.1 per day.
As someone that lived in New York City until recently, I’m surprised that everyone is surprised.
The mass transit is, of course, a huge factor but not the only factor. It’s the walk to the train station or bus stop, then the walk to the office at the other end. You’re crowded in with 10-15 different strangers every time you stop at a crosswalk waiting for the light to change. The sidewalks are crowded, you’re going to be within 6 feet of 30-50 people walking a block on a major city city street.
If you stop in the corner store for a bottle of water, you’re going to be within 6ft of another 10-20 people.
I was there in early March. The day I arrived, I checked into my hotel, then I went to 3 shops, one in Manhattan and the other two in my old neighborhood in Queens. Then I went to my hotel and in the evening I went out to meet a friend for dinner. Just for fun, I decided to estimate how many people I came into contact with that day, using 6 feet as the metric. I figure it was roughly 300 and I think I am being really conservative. 500 might have been a better estimate.
Now these estimates are pre-virus and I havent been there since early March. But even if distancing reduces the contact by 90% or 95%, that’s still a LOT of contact.
seems to imply that it’s a combination of a LOT of separate introductions (upwards of 100) of the virus from Europeans traveling to NYC, as well as a less conservative approach to locking down early and hard than say… California. And I’m sure stuff like high public transit use, cultural differences, population density, etc… just amplified that from there.
Again that’s true v almost anywhere else in the US, but not so much compared to various other very large ‘world class’ cities. Tokyo was mentioned. I’m from NY but have lived in Tokyo. You don’t necessarily come closer to more people in NY in a typical day than Tokyo, where you have the famous subway lines where transit employees help stuff the passengers into the cars (though that’s only a few lines/stations/times, most places and times the Tokyo subway is no more crowded than NY’s).
So like I said above, I agree NY’s density and reliance on mass transit almost has to be one reason it has been hit so hard relative to the rest of the US on average, there must be other factors which explain the also large differences in serious case rates among various very big and dense mass transit-oriented cities worldwide.
The other obvious factor is when and to what degree a city was ‘seeded’ with many people returning from travel in previously highly affected areas. If that was early enough for there to be few countermeasures that could make a serious difference compared to even moderate measures that would likely now in almost any city worldwide. Also it was said above that Tokyo has a lot of people coming to/from China (and generally the world) and that’s true compared to rural Japan, obviously. But while not sure how to statistically measure it, seems to me NY has more of that. NY has for example many more people with family in other countries, extensive close contact more than a tourist or business traveler might.
They were going to happen anyway. That point was already a lost cause. By the time, politicians and people reacted, it was said that 40-80% of the population is going to get it. So those deaths would have happened anyway. This isn’t about avoiding getting the virus, because at this point no matter what, that cat is out of the bag and can’t be stopped.
The only purpose of the shutdown was to keep inflow within capacity for this first wave, to prevent a triage situation where you’d have extra preventable deaths due to lack of medical care.
So that’s what I mean by “fine”, as in, as long as everyone got medical treatment and there was no surge, the initial purpose was fulfilled.
True. Greater NY is not just the biggest gateway hub but also is itself a major cosmopolitan center so instead of all scattering widely, many of the arrivals remain in the general dense area. Then you get as **bump **puts it, multiple different overlapping front waves of the outbreak jumping the ocean there and staying there.
You could ask them. I’ve not seen it on global aggregator sites like Worldometer, but I’ve not needed to know. Considering there are differences in how even deaths are being counted, you might have to go to individual jurisdictions for that info.
11, 12, 13 and 14 on the population density list are all also on the Paris metro (subway) network.
Population density for what we call the “petite couronne” is actually substantially higher than NYC (though lower than Manhattan), but we have an inner city ‘proper’ that’s primarily commercial and heavily zoned, so more people live around the periphery. A lot of people also left the city just before the lockdown, but presumably the virus had already spread at that point.
Death rates for Paris and “petite couronne” are similar to NYC, over 1 000 per mio. There are a lot of different numbers flying around, but this also gels pretty well with incremental deaths from all causes year on year, so it’s probably a conservative estimate. The numbers are similar for other hotspots in the wider region, Milano, Madrid etc
Death rates in the rest of France are considerably lower (there’s one other major hotspot) but most other cities are around 100 to 200 deaths per million, and small towns and rural areas have “zero” deaths - or not enough to register in the stats.
From my POV this is not very encouraging, as it seems to mean that we’re simply in the early stages of propagation, and the rest of the country hasn’t really been touched yet, and this may be the case for the US too.
On the other hand the huge differences between European and Asian numbers (especially Chinese) might point to different strains - or at least one or more “x-factors” that we haven’t pinned down yet (geography, weather, genetic factors or who knows what). We’re even seeing substantial differences between south west Europe and Northern Europe which are hard to account for.
I gotta admit though, so far I’m leaning more towards the “it hasn’t reached there yet” hypothesis. Still, if we’re playing for time then I guess we’re doing OK…
Yeah I agree lots of factors many still unknown, and the basic bad health outcome* rates various places might be quite different if we were analyzing this in 2023 (even besides, I hope, knowing a lot more about the disease itself by then).
To add a little fuzziness to the population density numbers, Manhattan is a distant 4th in deaths among NY boroughs behind Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, which have respectively ~1/3, 1/2, 1/2 the population density of Manhattan (Queens and Brookyn also somewhat bigger populations than Manhattan but the death rate is still higher). So it’s obviously not an exact function of population density. However general situation of very high density compared to US avg and heavy use of mass transit is IMO inescapably a major factor, and a reason I tend to doubt it’s going to be anything like as bad in rest of the US. It’s not as bad as it will get many places probably, but lots of other places ending up like NY I tend to doubt. And I think same goes to some degree for major metro areas in other countries so far little touched. In many cases it isn’t getting going there with people taking no precautions. ‘Too rapid reopening’ might be a disastrous mistake in some places, but still not the the same as completely ‘as before’ life with no precautions as was in the case in NY into March, when the virus was widely ‘seeded’ there well before, apparently.
*recent antibody tests in various places suggest though don’t yet prove the suspicion that official case rates are a small fraction of actual infection rate, so official infection rate is of perhaps very limited relevance. Rate of people being hospitalized, ICU or dying is more concrete though also subject to uncertainty.
Regarding the population density: that figure will be calculated using only the ground floor area. Manhattan has many high rise buildings, making more area available to people, that extra area is not reflected in the population density figures.
Does that make a difference, though? If there is an apartment building that occupies one acre and containing 600 residents, doesn’t that make the population density 600 per acre? Meanwhile, my parents are on one acre by themselves, so their population density is 2 per acre. Either way, it doesn’t matter how tall the building is.
Yes, your calculation here does take the extra area of buildings with many floors into account. My point is that the usual computation of population density does not do that.
I’m not sure it does - I think the apartment building occupying one acre was meant to be one acre as measured on the ground. ( acre isn’t typically used as a measure of floor space) In any event, I’m not sure what you mean by the calculation of density should take the extra floors into account - if my neighborhood is full of 4 unit buildings on 3000 square foot lots, it’s clearly denser that a neighborhood full of two -family houses on the same size lot which in turn is denser than a neighborhood of single family houses on 3000 square foot lots, even though the four unit building may have four floors , and the others may have two , with each floor in the two family having twice the square footage of each floor in the single family.