How California has contained coronavirus – and New York has not | Hacker News Reader

How California has contained coronavirus – and New York has not

mercurynews.com

29 pointsKKKKkkkk119 comments

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

something to be said to every person who always yells for fewer cars and more buses/subways

Or, you can mass transport systems like Japan and have people use masks.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

And in those cases you look at cause of death. Are pneumonia or respiratory related deaths elevated compared to last year? This is exactly the type of correlation that was being used to estimate infection in places like africa without available testing.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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...

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