New York state has 10 times the Covid-19 cases California has. Why? | Hacker News Reader

New York state has 10 times the Covid-19 cases California has. Why?

sfchronicle.com

6 pointsMilnerRoute8 comments

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

IIRC, NY provides much more in the way of government assistance for people who would in CA simply become homeless. NY hospitalizes mentally ill people while CA is famous for ignoring them and allowing them to wander the streets until they commit a serious crime and end up in California's asylum, prison. It's possible that we have a significant number of 'homeless deaths' state wide that aren't being scrutinized enough to add to our covid19 tally.

Population density would seem to be the obvious culprit.

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