Following up on a discussion in comments, the following table lists, on a county by county basis, the mortality due to COVID-19 for the New York City Metropolitan Statistical Area as of yesterday, June 13, 2020 (from Worldometer):
| County | State | Deaths |
| Kings | NY | 6429 |
| Queens | NY | 6902 |
| New York | NY | 3009 |
| Bronx | NY | 4580 |
| Richmond | NY | 1020 |
| Westchester | NY | 1402 |
| Bergen | NJ | 1649 |
| Hudson | NJ | 1280 |
| Passaic | NJ | 988 |
| Putnam | NY | 62 |
| Rockland | NY | 661 |
| Suffolk | NY | 1945 |
| Nassau | NY | 2163 |
| Middlesex | NJ | 1030 |
| Monmount | NJ | 662 |
| Ocean | NJ | 807 |
| Somerset | NJ | 433 |
| Essex | NJ | 1733 |
| Union | NJ | 1112 |
| Morris | NJ | 632 |
| Sussex | NJ | 181 |
| Hunterdon | NJ | 66 |
| Pike | PA | 20 |
| Total | 38766 | |
| Percentage of US mortality | 33.12 | |
So I was wrong. The population of the NYC MSA includes roughly 6% of the U. S. population but accounts for a third of the deaths due to COVID-19 rather than the half that I claimed.
The material of my claim remains true. That mortality is still wildly disproportionate to that in the rest of the country. The policy responses to COVID-19 have been largely conditioned to the situation in New York, probably because of its importance to the national media. A disproportionate number of the national opinion makers live there.
That the other states and MSAs are “catching up” remains an unproven and probably unprovable extrapolation. What the actual science confirms is that there is little relationship between the timing of statewide lockdowns and the number of cases of COVID-19 or mortality due to the disease. If there were California, the first state to impose a statewide lockdown, would have anticipated New York’s experience rather than following it. Furthermore, the claim that the failure of effectiveness of statewide lockdowns is due to non-compliance is circular. I would be interested in actual statistical proof of it but that statewide lockdowns did not halt SARS-CoV-2 in its tracks two months ago does not constitute that evidence.
I don’t know why COVID-19 has hit New York so hard. I would speculate that it is due to some combination of long-term bad public policy at the state and local levels, a bungled initial response by state and local political leaders there, the conditions of life there, and bad luck.
Thanks for this. I think the real story is that NYC got hit hard and early. They had zero deaths on June 5th while the rest of the US had about 800 so there i snow doubt the rest of the country is catching up, but at current rates it would take along time to get there.
” I would speculate that it is due to some combination of long-term bad public policy at the state and local levels, a bungled initial response by state and local political leaders there”
I also read that WSJ article. Some of it was correct, but as you would expect from a right wing source, a lot of it was biased, wrong or just ignorant. Take two parts of that (since I dont want to write War ands Peace here).
The article said they geared up for ICU care but didnt have enough trained staff. It takes months to train an ICU nurse, years to train an ICU doc. NYC begged for other providers from out of state to come help. They waived licensing issues. NJ too for that matter. We just dont have a mechanism to do what they are criticizing. No one ever will. Next, some people got worse when being transferred. Duh. They were leaving a facility that could not take care of them, going to a facility that could. This happens hundreds if not thousands of times daily in the US. If a pt has a major trauma close to one of our tiny rural hospitals the family likely takes them to that local hospital, which doesnt have the means to do definitive care. They get choppered out. Some die on the trip. Maybe in some ideal world every hospital has a full trauma suite (but then you really need two) and the support to take care of trauma patients (which is massive) but in real life we dont. One would have to be ignorant of the medical system, an idiot or an ideologically based writer to have made that claim.
“What the actual science confirms is that there is little relationship between the timing of statewide lockdowns and the number of cases of COVID-19 or mortality ”
In nearly every state and country there was a rapid rise then a fall. The fall is nearly always associated with mandatory or voluntary changes in behavior, with lockdowns being part of the response. There actually are papers claiming that lockdowns had a large effect, but they are all going to be retrospective and will all have trouble separating other interventions from lockdowns.
Steve
Or just the passage of time. In Illinois the peak took place a full six weeks after the lockdown began.
Since people first began studying epidemics about 150 years ago it has been reported that they follow a pattern—”a rapid rise then a fall”. And that was in the absence of lockdowns or even modern sanitation. More evidence is necessary to demonstrate a causal relationship.
The biggest piece of evidence that the lockdowns were effective is seroprevalence that shows about 20% to 30% of New Yorkers got it — and something like 65% of residents of Bergamo got it. i.e. infections stopped well before herd immunity.
The biggest question to that evidence is how many people were somewhat immune due to previous exposure to other coronavirus (i.e common cold). If current research of 40-60% is correct, the lockdowns didn’t do much at all.
Just eye-balling it, but it looks to me like half of the COVID deaths are in the Boston to Washington corridor. Or looking at it another way, the six “states” with the highest number of deaths per capita are New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and District of Columbia.
If the Philadelphia MSA was a state, it would be in the top half of that list as well. Interesting that Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), which is the state’s second most populous county, has had 2.6 percent of the state’s reported cases with 9.6 percent of the state’s population. (Notice I switched to cases per capta; couldn’t find deaths per capita, but it might even be in the lower half among PA counties)
Lot of random stuff going on that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with government policy, but population density and transportation networks seem to overcome the chance of benefiting from the low-side of random.
“…. it has been reported that they follow a pattern—â€a rapid rise then a fallâ€. And that was in the absence of lockdowns or even modern sanitation.”
And here you go. They may have had multiple waves, but all were about as sharp in up down as Covid. No lockdowns.
http://www.iayork.com/MysteryRays/2009/11/16/pandemic-patterns-is-the-influenza-pandemic-going-away/
And……….. Guess who is doing the moonwalk.
“… is interesting that adopting a policy which is short of a full lockdown – they have closed secondary schools and universities and there is a significant amount of social distancing, but it’s not a full lockdown – they have got quite a long way to the same effect.
“That is something we are looking at very closely.
“Lockdowns are very crude policies, and what we’d like to do is have much more targeted controlled transmission going forward, which doesn’t have the same economic impact.”
“Or just the passage of time. In Illinois the peak took place a full six weeks after the lockdown began.”
Which is why you look at other numbers and compare to other places and countries. As CO pointed out you also look at percentages of positive tests. Then you do comparisons of spread by comparing different actions taken besides lockdowns and you compare lockdowns since they arent all the same. You compare when the lockdowns were instituted, not so much based upon a calendar date but based on spread in the community at that time. And then we are going to have to make our best guess. As we have already established we didnt have enough testing while this developed.
We are seeing plateaus and a slow drop off most places. This is different than the flu.
Steve
I don’t know Steve.
If it turns out 40-60% of the population had cross-immunity — then having 20-30% infected is barely below what would be expected if nothing was done.
It should be remembered the epidemic is not over. In states like California that locked down early, the number of cases is still increasing; we don’t know if we have avoided deaths or merely delayed it by a few months. Indeed; even South Korea and China are seeing mild resurgence in number of cases.
I earnestly hope the lockdowns prevented deaths and not merely delayed them for 4 or 5 months.
I agree that it’s different from the flu. It’s more virulent.
I think that California’s experience (not to mention Illinois’s) discredits the entire basis for the lockdowns. Unless you resort to circular reasoning. The key point is that in neither Los Angeles, San Francisco, nor Chicago has the health care system ever been under notable stress. The matter is one for cost-benefit analysis rather than the absolute minimization strategy that has been adopted in both California and Illinois.
“If it turns out 40-60% of the population had cross-immunity”
I think that the evidence for this is so weak I am discounting that. I am biased by some views I have from our ID people and the people at CHOP (Children’s Philadelphia) I still have contact with. Would be a godsend if it is true.
Steve
The latest surge in Covid 19 infections has a racial face as new cases target POC underserved by medical care and burdened by diabetes and obesity largely caused by food deserts created by predominantly white led companies whose only concern is exorbitant, profane profits protected by entrenched racist politicians and police.
Facetious? Not if you came with me to see what the government commodity program hands out free to Native Americans.
Flour, lard, oil, canned pork, their diet has been built around these staples for 150 years. Flour fried in lard is called fry bread, it’s considered traditional food and why not, 150 years is a long time. Point is, it’s not what you’d choose to feed your kids, it’ll make them fat, diabetic, and cause heart disease. But hey, it helps farmers and for some reason pols still chase after their votes.
I agree that the situation with the IHS (Indian Healthcare System) is a scandal and an outrage. The spending per beneficiary is half or a third of what it is in the federal government’s other major healthcare spending programs (VA, Medicare, Medicaid).
It’s a persistent complaint of mine.
Why would you say the evidence is weak?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/before-catching-coronavirus-some-peoples-immune-systems-are-already-primed-to-fight-it-11591959600
Here is an article in Wall Street Journal summarizing the findings so far. 3 different research teams in California, Singapore, Germany have found a significant portion of people have pre-existing immune response against Covid-19.
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200612/p2a/00m/0na/009000c
Here is an article where Japanese researchers
seeing similar results speculate it is a factor East Asia’s success in controlling Covid.
Scientifically, it is not a surprise at all. TB and Leprosy confer cross-immunity to the other. So do viruses in the “pox†family. And finally strains of the flus provide some cross-immunity as well.
In theory…………
https://www.aier.org/article/the-modelers-thought-of-everything-except-reality/