The Subways Seeded the Coronavirus Epidemic in New York City | Hacker News Reader

The Subways Seeded the Coronavirus Epidemic in New York City

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There was a lot of cognitive dissonance going on at the beginning of March. The mayor actually took a special ride on the subway to reassure the public and said something to the effect that you were unlikely to contract it on the subway since the CDC said it generally spread when you were exposed to someone infected within 6 feet for 15 minutes. It was clear to everyone that is exactly how people ride the subway except for the mayor who never rides it. I’m lucky that I can WFH as needed and when the first positive case came to NYC decided to WFH and see how things went and obviously haven’t been to the office since. I don’t think shutting it down would have been possible but just encouraging people to work from home earlier would have helped reduce ridership.

NY was in a terrible place, they should have shutdown the subways immediately when they started getting cases there, but it would have crippled the city.

For most people in NY that would have effectively been quarantine already - ignoring entirely that many essential workers in NY have to use the subway even now.

The general theme is everyone should have shut down earlier, and not let people say “the economy!”.

There are still people crowding and riding the subway. There are also plenty of people walking around on the sidewalk without masks on. Oh and Central Park is absolutely packed with people.

The citizens of NYC are their own worst enemy.

What does “reciprocal seeding of infection“ mean?

I'm not sure but I interpreted it as indicating that the appearance of the outbreak centering at the transit hubs was the result of 'seed' infections traveling from outlying sources 'in' toward the transit hub.

A friend pointed out that specific genetic variants in the immune system are prevalent in northeastern Italy and are likely to substantially increase susceptibility to the virus. New York's large Italian population is part of the problem. Same thing in South Florida.

I find most Italian-Americans around here (NY/NJ) claim to be Sicilian or Neapolitan etc. That’s quite genetically distinct no?

Are native Americans and Canadians along the border genetically distinct? Same question, really.

Well after I wrote that I did some reading and it seems that Northern Italians have more Germanic (e.g. Lombard) ancestry while farther South you get Greek and even some Arab. From the fall of the Roman Empire to the reunification of Italy in the 19th century there was little movement or intermarriage between regions hence less gene flow.

I would expect American natives as tribal societies to be even more distinct though not likely along current borders.

I tracked the situation in NY closely because we have family in the region (from NYC to Boston). While I was screaming at our local school district in Los Angeles to shut down the schools, in NY (city and state) they did the unthinkable.

Here are some of the notes I took. Look at the dates. Look at what they are saying. Look at who's saying it. then think about the consequences of what they told millions of people to do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMkBW9ewPz8

    30JAN20
    Dr. Oxiris Barbot, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health
      • The local risk is LOW
      • Our preparedness is HIGH
      • Go about your lives
      • No indication to be using masks
      • We have measures
      • We have screening
      • No indication that going through the subway is a risk factor
      • No indications to be using masks
      • False sense of security
      • The risk is low

https://youtu.be/xXh7jUxfdak?t=2226

    09MAR20
    De Blazio
    Dr. Oxiris Barbot, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health

I'll repeat that. The woman speaking in the video above is the DOCTOR Oxiris Barbot, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health. She is the "Head Doctor" for the entire city of NY.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEhLOp7UGNM

    02MAR20
    Andrew Cuomo, NY Governor
    Bill De Blasio, NYC Mayor
    Ken Raske, President of Greater New York Hospital Association
    
    First case in NY
      • Just like the normal flu
      • We should relax
      • We don't think it's going to be as bad as it is in other places
      • We have been ahead of this from day one
      • Go about your lives
      • Go about your business
      • There has to be prolonged exposure
      • Just wash your hands
      • There is no need to do anything special anything in the community,
        we want New Yorkers to go about their daily lives, ride the subway,
        ride the bus, go see your neighbors
      • We have the equipment
      • It's not like we are dealing with something we haven't dealt with before
      • We have the ability to address this
      • We have the capacity to keep this contained
      • Like the normal flu

Not sure why she still has a job, not to mention the others featured in these and other idiotic press conferences and media declarations. In NY in particular, government officials effectively told everyone to go out there and get infected. Keep in mind that if you overlay the infection and death timeline from Italy onto the NY timeline it is truly incomprehensible that these officials would tell people to go out, gather and move about a city as New York.

If you look at the graphs for the entire US the rate of change of infection and death in NY is massively larger than anywhere else and it is, in my opinion, very directly linked to these and other statements made by officials.

I have lots more links, covering the entire January-March timeline. Both media and politicians jumped on the "nothing to see here" bandwagon in a big way after Trump shutdown travel from China (January 31). New York City, in particular, has a very high density and high usage of mass transportation. They should have reacted very quickly to mitigate transmission. Instead they encouraged everyone to get out there as normal and effectively killed thousands of people as a result. Again, not sure why this woman still has a job.

What's interesting is that the information the NY officials conveyed may not have been accurate for NY, but fairly accurately described SF Bay Area.

Though it looks like SF Bay Area started to get corona in December from connections in China, and it spread quietly through the population.

Calif. had too many ventilators, so donated 500 to other cities.

SF also has a busy subway system, no mention of NY-style issues here though.

NY subway averages almost 2 billion riders annually.

SF averages 50 million.

If SF had a subway system that handled 40x the amount of people you could start to draw some comparisons.

It doesn’t look like the Bay Area started getting coronavirus cases in December. The genetic analysis by nextstrain puts the first case in the USA some time in mid-January. https://nextstrain.org/ncov/north-america

Your notes are incredibly vital for a pandemic historian on the absurdity of bureaucracy. The doctor has nothing to lose by not taking more initiative. From your notes it appears she is just a better-schooled seat-filling administrator, sadly. I am astonished to find the bloat in the FDA and CRDH during this crisis with repeated unresponsiveness.

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