LA Mayor Eric Garcetti said yesterday that we are about a week behind NewYork City in coronavirus cases and deaths. The numbers here are doubling every three days. But it’s still a bit mystifying why we would be so far behind. We had some of the first cases and the early quarantines were all here. There is an immense amount of trave from Asia which undoubtedly sent infected people here before the porous ban was enacted. What gives?
Anyway, there are lots of theories:
New York’s coronavirus outbreak has violently erupted over the past few days, and the state is now driving the national epidemic — while on the West Coast, public health experts are wondering if an early and aggressive response saved California from a similar fate.
California reported some of the earliest coronavirus cases in the United States in late January. And in the first week of March, California and New York were neck and neck on cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. But over the past week, New York case counts have doubled every few days, and the state now has 10 times the cases California does: 25,000 to 2,500.
Infectious-disease experts say early maneuvers in California, especially in the Bay Area — first discouraging people from gathering in crowds and then ordering them to shelter in place — may have had a dramatic impact, even if they came only a few days ahead of those in New York.
But other factors may also be in play. New York is testing far more people — three times as many as California — and therefore identifying more cases, for example. And it’s possible that what’s happening 3,000 miles away could be California’s future.
“New York may just be three or four days in front of us. We’re going to see an increase in the number of cases here as well,” said Dr. Warner Greene, a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco who specializes in HIV but is studying the new coronavirus. “Days matter — they really matter. You think you’re fine, you’re absolutely fine, but this thing is just waiting to explode.
“But we went into shelter in place quicker; we got people apart quicker,” Greene said. “That could be a contributing factor to what we’re seeing in California now. And that’s why I think the whole country should be sheltering in place.”
The World Health Organization on Tuesday identified the United States as the next potential epicenter of the pandemic, with China and South Korea both on a path to recovery and Italy starting to see signs of its outbreak slowing down, though gradually.
New York state now makes up roughly half of the United States’ 50,000 cases of COVID-19. Tuesday afternoon, experts on the White House Coronavirus Task Force advised that residents who have fled New York City, where the bulk of cases are located, should place themselves in a two-week quarantine to avoid infecting people in other parts of the country.
The state is also testing more people than anywhere else in the country — 90,000 as of Monday, compared with about 27,000 in California.
How and why New York’s testing is so far beyond California’s isn’t clear. California officials will “explain the ambiguity” on Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom said earlier this week when asked about the discrepancy at a news conference.
But testing alone doesn’t explain why New York’s case counts are so much higher than California’s, or why the rate is spiraling up so fast on the East Coast. The death toll in New York was four times higher than California’s — 210 deaths to 51, as of Tuesday evening. Deaths tend to be a much more reliable marker of the spread of the disease than cases because determining how someone died is not dependent on the availability of testing kits.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued “stay at home” orders last Friday, one day after Newsom did the same for California and four days after Bay Area health officers told 6.7 million people to shelter in place.
I think density may have something to do with it too. San Francisco is pretty dense but there aren’t a lot of huge apartment buildings. LA has some tight neighborhoods but it’s nothing like New York.
And could it be possible that LA’s natural”social distancing” through sprawl may have contributed to lessening the spread all at once? We famously don’t use public transportation, many of our malls are outdoors and we spend a lot of time in our cars by ourselves. Perhaps our lifestyle just naturally “flattens the curve” in ways that other more dense cities does not?
It’s certainly possible this will catch up with us over the next few days. We’ll know soon enough. They have not been testing much here so it might just be that. But the lower death rate so far is an indication that we might not get that huge surge that New York is dealing with right now.
Fingers crossed. The last thing we need is the health system of the second biggest city in the country overwhelmed the way New York is overwhelmed right now. It will be bad no matter what but what’s happening in New York is just horrific.