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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTwo Coasts. One Virus. How New York Suffered Nearly 10 Times the Number of Deaths as California.
Californias governor and San Franciscos mayor worked together to act early in confronting the COVID threat. For Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, it was a different story, and 27,000 New Yorkers have died so far.
by Joe Sexton and Joaquin Sapien May 16, 5 a.m. EDT
<snip>
In an interview, California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said it was critical to allow Northern California counties to rely on their own experts, act with a degree of autonomy and thus perhaps pave the way for the state to expand on what they had done. And three days after San Francisco and its neighboring counties were closed, Newsom, on March 19, imposed the same restrictions on the rest of California.
Breed, it turns out, had sent de Blasio a copy of her detailed shelter-in-place order. She thought New York might benefit from it.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, however, reacted to de Blasios idea for closing down New York City with derision. It was dangerous, he said, and served only to scare people. Language mattered, Cuomo said, and shelter-in-place sounded like it was a response to a nuclear apocalypse.
Moreover, Cuomo said, he alone had the power to order such a measure.
For years, Cuomo and de Blasio, each of whom has harbored national political ambitions, had engaged in a kind of intrastate cold war, a rivalry that to many often felt childish and counterproductive. When de Blasio finally decided to close the citys schools, it was Cuomo who rushed to make the public announcement, claiming it as his decision.
No city in the state can quarantine itself without state approval, Cuomo said of de Blasios call for a shelter-in-place order. I have no plan whatsoever to quarantine any city.
Cuomos conviction didnt last. On March 22, he, too, shuttered his state. The action came six days after San Francisco had shut down, five days after de Blasio suggested doing similarly and three days after all of California had been closed by Newsom. By then, New York faced a raging epidemic, with the number of confirmed cases at 15,000 doubling every three or four days.
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Post-March 22, I've appreciated and applauded Governor Cuomo's actions, especially the informative pressers. But it was a huge mistake when he dragged his feet for days about the statewide closing.
(Link to donate to ProPublica - they've been doing excellent work throughout this https://donate.propublica.org/give/141278/#!/donation/checkout )
RandySF
(58,933 posts)Dennis Donovan
(18,770 posts)It was 11 days before the statewide shelter-in-place order was put in place. I'd read enough about asymptomatic transmission, and the fact it was starting to spread outside of "downstate", with cases appearing in the Capital Region (Albany), that I was like, "I'm out." I went to the grocery store, which still had plenty of TP and soap, got supplies for a month, and hoped for the best.
roamer65
(36,745 posts)I had a club meeting on March 5 and I told them I wouldnt be attending again until it was safe for our older members.
After that meeting I started shutting it down, personally.
Hermit-The-Prog
(33,356 posts)We live 'way out in the boonies of KY, far from any international airport or large city, but it was clear by March 11 that (a) it was already spreading out from cities, airports, seaports; (b) test and trace wasn't going to catch up; (c) we're all on our own.
secondwind
(16,903 posts)padfun
(1,786 posts)to go into lockdown. And we kept all of the cannabis stores open as they were deemed "essential"
And we don't seem to have many MAGATS going against them. At the stores, I see over 90% wearing masks and you just don't have the issues that middle America seems to have.
shanti
(21,675 posts)but the last time I went to the store (wednesday), 2/3 of the shoppers were not wearing masks.
Squinch
(50,955 posts)pushing closing while DeBlasio was saying the schools and various offices HAD to stay open and would not close.
And that DeBlasio had been saying that for a lot longer than the single work day between 3/19 and 3/22.
BeyondGeography
(39,375 posts)But the city is even denser than its politics. As in population density, which makes it far more vulnerable to a pandemic than any place in California. That said, leaders like Breed and Newsom were way ahead of the game and the results speak for themselves.
jmg257
(11,996 posts)Properly.
RAB910
(3,504 posts)The reality is Trump fucked the NYC area. While the racist and chief had no problem banning travel from China, Trump allowed millions of people (many infected) to come from Europe for at least a week more than they should of. When the region discovered it was present it was everywhere
phylny
(8,380 posts)Wouldn't that hypothesis predict that if California didn't suffer, Trump was nice to Cali?
Don't see that.
Notice also the acclaim that greeted the travel ban:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/world/europe/europe-coronavirus-travel-ban.html
In his address from the Oval Office on Wednesday, Mr. Trump pointedly described the source of the epidemic as a foreign virus and criticized the European Union for having failed to take the same precautions as he had in restricting travel from China, the source of the outbreak.
As a result, a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe, Mr. Trump said.
In fact, Europe has not been a major source of known infections so far in the United States.
It goes on to make fairly clear that the NYT considered the ban not to be too late but to be completely offensive and wrong. In other words, the opposite of what the NYT now says it said. (It's like the media tweets from late January saying that the novel coronavirus was being contained and wasn't a problem here, so be more worried about the flu ... they vanished because they don't fit the current reality).
DU was mixed. Some said it pointless because it was too late, some were more upset at the exemptions (leaving whether the ban itself was a good idea), some objected to offending Europe so there shouldn't have been a ban.
In short, the same blather we heard in late January when the ban on travel from China was imposed. It won't work in principle, it won't work because there are loopholes, it won't work because too late, or it's simply offensive. It's only in retrospect that the mistakes we make vanish from the pages of history and we've always been right.
RAB910
(3,504 posts)chia
(2,244 posts)that the strain that predominated in New York was from Europe and the strain that predominated on the West Coast was from China, and how the strain from Europe was possibly more contagious.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-05-05/mutant-coronavirus-has-emerged-more-contagious-than-original
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8206625/America-hit-COVID-19-two-continents-studies-suggest.html
(I know it's the Daily Mail, sorry, but the graphics in the story are helpful)
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/05/the-coronavirus-mutated-and-appears-to-be-more-contagious-now-new-study-finds.html
shockey80
(4,379 posts)New York shut down three days after California. That is not the reason New York City got hit hard. The City got hit hard because it is New York City. There is no other place in the country like New York City.
Extremely dense population. Large subway system. Thousands of workers from other States. Thousands of people from around the world travel to the city everyday. When the virus hit the city it spread everywhere overnight. If New City shut down the same time as California, it would have made no difference.
We needed a president who would have ordered the whole country shut down. Testing and tracing put in place. Trump lied for over month as the virus spread everywhere. That's why New York City got hit hard.
not_the_one
(2,227 posts)California is a car culture. NYC is NOT.
NYC residents (by the millions) have no choice but to crowd into tin cans/buses with a ton of other people, where social distancing is not possible. Add to that the huge influx of outsiders (it is the # 1 tourist destination in the US), and if you don't know you got a bug spreading, millions are in immediate danger of being exposed.
Cuomo, once he got his sea legs under him, became the political leader this pandemic needed.
It doesn't do us any good to compare apples and oranges. We know the "heartland" hates New York City. So. Fucking. What. We wear that badge proudly.
NYC will come back, and by its very nature, will again be the # 1 US tourist destination.
New York, New York.. what a wonderful town!
edit in bold
Stuart G
(38,436 posts)I don't know how much it is to park a car in Manhattan..Maybe $100 a day?..Maybe more?
Who can afford $500.00 a week? to park a car? Can you?
Manhattan is not the only place like that..I was in Tokyo Japan in 2007. Same thing. Everyone uses public transportation....Why? at that time, gas was somewhere around $5.00 a gallon...So in today's money..maybe 15 dollars a gallon. (maybe more) Parking in downtown Tokyo is also quite limited. ..Everyone uses the public transportation system. (everyone) And people are pretty respectful,l if I recall, no pushing or shoving, people stand in line to enter subway trains, one person stands behind another, not side by side.
...Also...subway trains come very often. Where I was went, the trains came every 4 minutes. (downtown) That is not true of every place, but in some it is true.
SKKY
(11,813 posts)...comparison for New York. California doesn't have the population density either of those have.