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While I wholeheartedly commend the actions of Bay Area and CA government, this is not an even remotely fair comparison.
Nothing on the West coast compares to the urban density of NYC.
If Donald Trump had put Nancy Messonnier in charge of the response on Feb. 25 instead of throwing her into his dungeon, the numbers everywhere would be exponentially lower.
It took Adam Silver pulling the plug on the NBA season on March 11 to even begin conditioning people to what needed to be done. That was Trumpâs job, and it is the catastrophic failure for which he must be held to account.
Cuomo just last week seemed to double down on the sentiment. âI donât think New Yorkers feel or Americans feel that government failed them here,â
failure 1: Info blackout from state health department, isolating city health department
failure 2: Current sidelining of city health department by DeBlasio.
De Blasio, for instance, again seemed to insult his Health Department when he last week assigned oversight of the cityâs critical contact tracing program to Katz, the city hospital executive who had expressed skepticism in March about the need for the city to close down.
failure 3:
âAs early as the first week of March, the governor and the mayor were being told from all around them that there was active community transmission happening in New York and they needed to take action,â he said. âThey knew. And it seems disingenuous to now claim they were the fastest.â
I have no idea whether NYC or state residents are grateful.
Bozo the orange clown tweeting from fantasy island makes Cuomo look almost like Churchill.
I do know family working to leave NYC, fearing the next wave, even though they nearly certainly had covid in April.
Alternate Headline, Local Democrats Fail to Compensate for Trumpâs Incompetence.
Letâs put aside the apples to watermelons comparison of San Francisco to NYC, the influx of people flying into New York from all over the world. Instead let us focus on the paucity of information that local leaders had at their disposal.
We had a Pandemic Office, that studies these problems, why? Because we have had recent epidemics, this is not something that happens out of the blue. We had a person on the ground in China who could have alerted us to any burgeoning issues.
We have had a whole legion of mid level governmental appointees who never got appointed, who never got a chance to coordinate efforts to combat this problem
But instead lets put the blame on local leaders who were grappling with a problem, that they should not have had to grapple with.
This is Trumpâs Pandemic, this divide and conquer type of reporting only serves Trumpâs interests
âThe differing outcomes will be studied for years, as more is learned about the virus, its unique qualities, its varying strains, its specific impact on certain populations, and the role of factors like poverty, pre-existing health problems and public transportation in its spread and lethality.â
Do all that but it will pale in comparison to the initiative the different governments took in actually doing something about the spreading pandemic. All credit to Cuomo for his honesty after the fact, but he has been and remains slow to actually do anything. A lot of that is attributable to the size and number of east coast states and many many numbers of interacting layers of government, relative to just 3 states on the west coast, so even if Cuomo had been more timely, there still would have been NYers fleeing to FL, ME, wherever, and traffic coming in too, but it could have been better, and the west coast was an example the east coast had right in front of it and chose to ignore at the wrong point of an exponential growth curve.
I think the density difference is the key to the different outcomes. NYC is the most densely populated area of the country and has been noted the international travel into NY is higher than anywhere else. I think itâs that simple and everything else was icing.
DeBlasio should have acted sooner, but at least he and Cuomo did something more useful than recommending people poison themselves.
South Korea and Singapore are very similar in density, if not more so They have fared much better than the NYC area.
Cuba has over double the population of Minnesota. Minnesota has over 14 thousand cases and Cuba has had just over 1,800. Minnesota confirmed their first case on March 6th, Cuba confirmed three cases on March 11th.
So basically Cuomo f***ed up badly because of politics, but his actions were still orders of magnitude better than the president of the united states. How reassuring.
(I also think that one issue that may never be fully explored in this is the role of certain patriarchal religious cultists in making control that much more difficult.)
Interesting article. It would have been more interesting - to look at the âthird coastâ as well. In particular, the large cities in Texas - the timing of the âblue mayorsâ regarding the timing of the idiot state governor.
The piece also noted that London Breed and Gavin Newsom have a good working relationship. The same is true up where I live. The City of Seattle, King County and WA state were/are all on the same page -for the most part. Density and mass transit in NYC was a fatal combination. While bus transportation is widely used here, most of us get around via car. Microsoft has their own mass transit system.
Our cities in Texas are sprawled like LA all over the landscape. IT has helped here.
I agree. Last time I was in NY was the first time I had been there for years and I was surprised by how much more crowded it had gotten. People are in crowds by necessity. Where we sprawl, crowds are mostly by choice. Like LA, everyone here pretty much has their own vehicle.
I take your point, but NYC has >8x the density of Singapore and >4x the density of Seoul.
Also, I would not want to be the one to try to tell New Yorkers that they had to live under the same restrictions placed on those countries.
Itâs difficult to use Singapore in particular considering just how restrictive it is. You canât chew gum on the street.
Once things have wound down and test, track and trace are in place, I do wonder how many businesses will continue having employees work from home.
Here some are going to make at home work more SOP than in the past. IT has worked well for some businesses I understand. But next week Texans are going back to their offices.
âWe need to shut this shit down,â Breed remembered thinking.
On November 3, thatâs exactly what the American people are gonna do to the Trump regime.
There are similar private transportation systems in the SF Bay area in CA. I have a friend who captains one of the boats in a private ferry system owned by, I think, Genentech. The small ferries shuttle tech employees around the Bay from home to work and back.
Low density and private transportation is probably also the reason why Florida is getting off fairly light (so far). Nobody lives in big cities, everyone is spread out in the suburbs and you canât get anywhere without a car.
