
How California has contained coronavirus – and New York has not - KKKKkkkk1
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/08/how-california-has-contained-coronavirus-and-new-york-has-not/
======
Whinner
The article doesn’t mention public transportation at all. Nyc has huge numbers
of people on subways and buses. LA is predominately cars. The bart in the Bay
Area is somewhat comparable to nj transit and commuter trains into nyc but SF
has nothing like the nyc subways

~~~
danielfoster
Look at the situation from a different perspective. Dozens of large dense
cities with mass transportation-- Seoul, Shanghai, Tokyo, Singapore-- were
able to contain the pandemic much more readily than New York.

The takeaway here is that given its density NYC should have taken measures to
contain the spread of coronavirus much sooner. It definitely had the resources
to do so.

~~~
Whinner
The article is about California and NYC. I don’t think there is a comparable
European city for LA

~~~
danielfoster
The article is about the impact of a failure to practice social distancing in
NYC versus LA. You brought up the issue of mass transportation, which I showed
is not a relevant factor by bringing in external examples.

------
flocial
NY and California are as different as two countries by most measures despite
sharing the same language, culture and federal government. The way the
pandemic is playing out in NY seems much more similar to Europe.

~~~
DeonPenny
Its the only place even close to the density of a European city

------
leourbina
This style of analysis has the implicit assumption that the timeline of
confirmed cases is accurate. Despite the infection growing visbly rapidly in
NY, it could be argued that increased testing in NY state has been a
contributing factor to the perceived acceleration of the rate confirmed cases
compared to other states with fewer tests. To this day throughout the US there
are many reports of people who present symptoms at home and are not able to
get tested. Without testing uniformly throughout the country, how can we make
any kind of comparative analysis of how different state's infections are
progressing?

How are any of these analysis taking testing rates into account to truly
understand the spread of covid19?

~~~
olliej
I mean you can also use actual fatality rates as a proxy for the actual
infection rate, that's harder to artificially inflate or deflate, and CA is
much below NY there as well.

~~~
pmiller2
Fatality rates are still subject to bias due to lack of postmortem testing if
it's not a confirmed case. This would likely include almost everyone who dies
outside of a hospital.

~~~
wahern
For the past couple of weeks I've been plotting the data from
covidtracking.com, along with generated data for perfect 3-, 5-, and 7-day
doubling. On a log scale the graphs unequivocally show California has been on
a 5-day doubling curve since almost the very beginning. NY was on a 3-day
curve until a couple of days ago. The US curve follows NY, which isn't
surprising. Unless testing criteria changed day-to-day in a very specific,
mind blowing coincidence, the difference in infection rates is pretty clear.

And in case you haven't played with the data yourself, the difference between
a 3- and 5-day curve is _huge_ in terms of the absolute numbers you reach. As
the article says, faltering for just a few days absolutely could have made all
the difference between the infection getting out of control. Of course, NYC is
far more dense than the Bay Area and so it's no surprise how quickly NYC got
out of control. But 1) SF could have gone in a similar direction, but didn't;
and 2) plenty of other regions with similar or even less density to the Bay
Area were or still are on a 3-day curve.

The article also fails to mention that Bay Area tech companies started work-
from-home a week before the Bay Area shelter-in-place order. That _may_ have
helped considering that the inflection point for positive cases in California
(on a non-log scale where the curve starts to shoot upward) occurs at about
the same time the Bay Area ordered shelter-in-place, but there would have been
a lag between infections and hospital visits. OTOH, the "inflection point" may
be meaningless, and in any event the numbers were rather small at that point.

The trends are extremely clear. Quibbling over testing criteria is pointless.
Though, if we ever want to get past sheltering we absolutely need massive,
randomized testing. And unfortunately even living in the Bay Area I'm not
seeing much if any activity or news on that front, even though we _should_
already be well along that path, at least in terms of planning and
organization. All the talk about tracing contacts is a side-show; tracing is
neither necessary nor sufficient. In the absence of tracing you can simply
institute sheltering orders in hot spots. But without widespread, pervasive
testing you'll never find those hot spots quickly enough to squash, tracing or
no tracing.

------
JPKab
Anecdote:

My coworker works from Brooklyn. She took a photo last night from her window.

The street was packed with what appeared to be 250 Hasidic Jews for two
funerals.

None were wearing masks. Zero. All jammed together.

Best part:

One of the dead was a covid fatality.

~~~
lonelappde
For better or for worse, every Hasid in Brooklyn (Crown Heights) was likely
heavily exposed weeks ago. Is guess they've already passed their peak.

------
DeonPenny
Less dense city. As someone who lived in both places LA and SF are not nearly
as dense. You could say the same about 90% of the US. 50%-60% of the case are
in NY daily

~~~
PopeDotNinja
SF isn't as dense as NYC, but it's still pretty dense in places. For example,
the Tenderloin has ~71,000 people per square mile. [1] That's a lot of people
in small area compared to just about anywhere else.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenderloin,_San_Francisco](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenderloin,_San_Francisco)

~~~
DeonPenny
Yeh but having small pocket and having an entire city is different you can do
something about the pocket by making less dense places a little more dense for
a while. You can't do that with NYC. It's like a heat map. You can distribute
one hot zone but not a map filled with hotzones.

------
lonelappde
This is silly

The article doesn't mention population density at all. Compared to NYC tri-
state area (talking about NY State misses the point), CA is a bunch of small
towns.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density)

