I’m going to be sorry when the late night TV hosts go back to their studios. I like the broadcasting from home. It’s fresh.
4 Likes
Imagine what we could do if – instead of Trump’s laughable Space Farce – we redirected Pentagon funding to the US Public Health Service, expanding its ranks with millions of idealistic, talented, and unemployed Americans desperate to work and contribute to their country.
And reclassified as “National Security” our true strategic assets: those who harvest our produce, pack our meat, stock our shelves, and ring-up our groceries; truck, bus, and subway drivers; those who care for our parents, veterans, and children; EMTs, doctors, nurses, and hospital janitors…
Maybe if we reorganized our defense policy to protect these heroes – who quietly save and sustain life every single day – with as much resolve as we do “military” assets, this Nation might survive increasingly-inevitable crises like this one with infinitely-less loss to life and treasure.
And we wouldn’t even need to put William Shatner in charge!
34 Likes
God I love everything about that idea. Just everything.
4 Likes
Manhattan is a lot wealthier than the other boroughs. The wealthiest people left the city, or have large enough apartments to comfortably shelter in place and have jobs that allow them to work from home.
All the students living at NYU and Columbia U. left the city.
Plus, fewer Manhattanites need to take the subway to work in Manhattan. Whereas, people in Brooklyn and Queens were still taking the subway to work up to and including on March 15th, and their average ride each way was 30 minutes to an hour.
With a daughter in Brooklyn who suffered through having COVID-19, and who is still struggling with it all, I wish New York’s response was better and faster, especially since my daughter was one of those still taking the subway to her job in Manhattan on March 15th. But I don’t know how much better their response could have been without the federal government leading the way.
This comment is unnecessary.
10 Likes
I was thinking warm temps in CA vs bundled up in NYC so encourages people to be outside exercising etc. Now, don’t mention Seattle also bundles up like NYC. I sure did not when I lived there, light weight jacket for winter months. Heating for the apartment was a small wall space heater, the same type as I currently have in my bath here in TN. And if I remember correctly I would use once or twice a year.
1 Like
Fantasy
Good piece that addresses a crucial issue.
The NYC D of Health has 6,000 employees, including many epidemiologists. One of the latter is a friend of mine. She tells me that as early as January, the NYC D of H epidemiologists were pulling out their hair about the city and state’s inaction re the pandemic, the danger of which was already well known. (It now seems likely that in fact the virus was killing people in NYC as early as January.) Remember: the job of epidemiologists is precisely to think about community spread of a disease–whether it’s SARs, or TB, or AIDS, or what have you. NY taxpayers have such experts on the payroll at great expense precisely in order to counter the age-old threat posed by epidemics and pandemics. Ordinary people–and I would very definitely put myself in this category–can’t be expected to have a good grasp of what’s at stake.
So it was not a total mystifying phenomenon when Covid popped up. Just as the Obama Administration had a pandemic playbook, NYC had protocols and preparedness and highly-trained experts. The big problem was politics: the New York political apparatus disregarded its own public-health experts for reasons of their own. Cuomo was the most culpable, as this piece shows. His obsession with his own personal power and the interests/perceptions of his ultra-wealthy rightwing donors resulted in a failure to act until it was too late. He then turned things around as far as his personal popularity went by becoming an effective and appealing TV personality with an audience desperate for reassurance. He also understood that effective public-health measures were popular and would boost his standing, so he went all-in. But it was too late. His advisors had been telling him since January to start taking action. He didn’t. Some people may not mind, but as someone who lives in NY, I do.
18 Likes
It may not affect the virus, but it definitely affects human behavior and that affects transmission.
4 Likes
It’s not a fair comparison if you don’t include all five boroughs. NYC’s population is 8.4 million people. Still smaller than Seoul, but a fairer comparison.
ETA: NYC’s official population also doesn’t included the millions of daily commuters from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, the international airports, and people from all of the world coming in and out of the city everyday.
6 Likes
I think the jury is still out on that one. From what I’ve read, the theory is that it’s not so much temperature as humidity. Aerosol droplets hang in the air longer when the air is dry, as with indoor heat in Winter, and they fall to the ground faster when the air is humid.
Brazil, of course, is the counter-example showing how bad the infections can be in a warm, humid climate. We’re probably a long way from knowing to what extent climate is a factor. This is a very aggressive virus that may ignore the usual rules about airborne transmission.
4 Likes
Yeah, the density of Manhattan would only be relevant if it wasn’t directly connected to half of NJ.
1 Like
I’ve seen a number of articles express this concern. I’m a bit surprised none of them address the likelihood of ‘alternative use’.
Look - suppose you’ve got a skyscraper with thirty floors of ‘offices’. Now suppose the quarantine causes enough folks to office at home - that half those floors are no longer ‘viable’ as business rentals.
Replace them with housing rentals.
Boom - you now have people living above/around all those small businesses that need foot traffic.
6 Likes
Boy that’s counter intuitive. Usually humidity grabs what is in the air and holds it.
1 Like
Well, the higher the humidity - the more likely you get rain. That’s what the ‘dew point’ is about.
Humidity and temperature ratio.
I put this on another thread but it needs to be spread around…
CDC’s version of what to do to reopen the country. This is the document that wasn’t gonna “see the light of day” if trump had his way. Likely because it makes sense. But it does not comport with his reality where he can just wish the virus out of existence.
5 Likes
Hahahahahaha I know what it’s about - I live in Texas. It’s like Calcutta here in summer.
3 Likes
Do you think security is going to be an issue with working from home? Sure, most people are not working on top secret defense projects but still, competitors may be interested in trying to hijack some work if possible.
1 Like
Which is also deeply misleading. The population density around Queens is far higher than around San Fran, you can’t cherry pick a single area of NYC without including all of it. Obviously there are many factors that went into this but density of a region is as if not more important than that of a single suburb.
1 Like
You can’t fool me. You’re north of me - practically a ‘yankee’. (Says the guy sweltering down near Corpus Christi)
5 Likes
A lot of the terms that have become familiar to us about this disease in recent months, e.g. cytokine storms, innate immunity, ACE2, Kawasaki syndrome, and viral sepsis, were not initially part of the discussion. I think the scientific community, both west and east coast showed the prudent wisdom not to underestimate this novel virus. An odd aspect of the generally chaotic national response is that it has been led by politicians rather than scientists. Again, the politicians that have done best were those who deferred to the scientists early on.
10 Likes