
New York state has 10 times the Covid-19 cases California has. Why? - MilnerRoute
https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/NY-has-10-times-the-coronavirus-cases-CA-has-Why-15154692.php
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kjaftaedi
NYC subway alone has almost 2 billion riders annually.

Small enclosed spaces where everyone has to breathe the same air, be packed in
close to each other, and share handles to keep from falling over.

LA subway averages 100 million riders annually.

One can only imagine that this is likely a huge transmission factor.

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mattzito
It’s really a lot less complicated than the author makes it. NY is testing
more than 3x the number of people with < 1/2 the population. On top of that,
more than 50% of the cases are in one city, and iirc another 25% are in
Westchester, the county next door to NYC. It’s all concentrated in one
incredibly dense part of the state.

NYC is almost twice as dense population-wise as SF. One day earlier of shelter
in place helps I’m sure but the geography helps much more.

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mhkool
Nobody knows the real number of infected people since to know that the whole
population must be tested, so we can only guess. My guess is that the people
in California have higher levels of Vitamin D which regulates the immune
system and that there _appear_ to be less cases in California since there are
fewer people with symptoms.

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gscott
In Hong Kong those living in high rise structures were catching corona virus
from neighbors multiple stories up.

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ColanR
Is CA testing for the virus as much as NY? California also has a very high
homeless population that they have had a hard time dealing with, and I wonder
if the homeless are being hospitalized and accounted for as much in CA as in
NY.

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MilnerRoute
The article addresses testing:

 _New York is testing far more people — three times as many as California —
and therefore identifying more cases..._

 _But testing alone doesn’t explain why New York’s case counts are so much
higher than California’s, or why the rate is spiraling up so fast on the East
Coast. The death toll in New York was four times higher than California’s —
210 deaths to 51, as of Tuesday evening. Deaths tend to be a much more
reliable marker of the spread of the disease than cases because determining
how someone died is not dependent on the availability of testing kits._

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DamnYuppie
Population density would seem to be the obvious culprit.

