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| -Signs, Portents, and the Weather- |
| MIT Professor: Subways Seeded the Massive Coronavirus Epidemic in NYC |
| 2020-04-21 |
| [Breitbart] A National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper by MIT Professor Jeffrey E. Harris concludes that the New York City subway system "seeded the massive coronavirus epidemic" in the city. Even more significantly, the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA) decision to reduce subway service exacerbated the problem because the more crowded subway cars "most likely accelerated the spread of coronavirus." Metropolitan New York City remains the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. More than half of the more than 40,000 coronvirus deaths in the United States as of April 19 have taken place in two states: New York and New Jersey. The bulk of the deaths in those states have been in the Metropolitan New York City area, which is not only the most densely populated region of the country, it also has by far the heaviest daily usage of mass transit, particularly subways. "New York City’s multitentacled subway system was a major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle — of coronavirus infection during the initial takeoff of the massive epidemic that became evident throughout the city during March 2020," Harris, who has a Ph.D. in Economics and an M.D. and is both a practicing physician and a professor of economics at MIT, wrote in the abstract of the NBER working paper published on April 13: The near shutoff of subway ridership in Manhattan — down by over 90 percent at the end of March; correlates strongly with the substantial increase in the doubling time of new cases in this borough We should have touched on this early on, heavy air vortices on the subway platforms. |
| Posted by:Woodrow |
| #7 Seems ike Coronavirus hates every liberal pet project. |
| Posted by: ruprecht 2020-04-21 19:00 |
| #6 Pretty sure that's where I got it. |
| Posted by: Iblis 2020-04-21 18:19 |
| #5 Anything to do with foreign travelers coming to the U.S. through NYC? NYC, because of the U.N., has many foreign travelers coming to NYC as a destination. One would think, by this reasoning, that D.C. would also be a hotspot. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2020-04-21 17:41 |
| #4 Great quote P! |
| Posted by: Woodrow 2020-04-21 15:52 |
| #3 P2k, what you have posted may be true but please don't tell Newsom. He wants all of California to look like NYC. Gotta have affordable house for all those illegal immigrants and the way to do it is to turn this whole state into one vast slum. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2020-04-21 12:28 |
| #2 Thanks for finding this P2K. |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2020-04-21 10:33 |
| #1 Posted over at Insty - New York City is sick, and journalists, pundits, and politicians have made a diagnosis: The city’s exceptional density is the problem. That is certainly the self-serving conclusion of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. It’s a convenient bit of fatalism for a man presiding over a catastrophe. . . . Like any misdiagnosis, this one will make it harder to find the cure. A cursory look at a map shows that New York City’s coronavirus cases aren’t correlated with neighborhood density at all. Staten Island, the city’s least crowded borough, has the highest positive test rate of the five boroughs. Manhattan, the city’s densest borough, has its lowest. Nor are deaths correlated with public transit use. The epidemic began in the city’s northern suburbs. The city’s per capita fatalities are identical to those in neighboring Nassau County, home of Levittown, a typical suburban county with a household income twice that of New York City. True, New York City apartments are crowded. The share of housing units with more than one occupant per room is almost 10 percent. But that number is 13 percent in the city of Los Angeles. As a metro area, New York isn’t even in the top 15 U.S. cities for overcrowding. It’s not even the American city with the most apartments per capita (Miami) or immigrants (also Miami), to take two other characteristics that critics say might be associated with coronavirus infections. New York City has a lot of restaurants per capita, places where people gather with strangers every night. But not as many as San Francisco, which, though it ranks second in the U.S. for both residential density and transit use, had just 20 COVID-19 deaths as of Friday. If you expand your comparison internationally, New York City looks less exceptional still. It is not as dense or transit-dependent as, say, Paris (which has less than half of New York’s fatality rate) or Seoul, South Korea, where the pandemic has been all but controlled. So what is it about New York City that made it a hot spot? Right now, it looks like the most exceptional thing about New York is its leaders’ belief that the city is unique. This presumption served first as a reassurance that New York would not follow Lombardy’s example, and later as the reason why it had. . . . Tragically, what seems to have put New York on such a different trajectory from San Francisco was that its leaders were so late to shut down public life. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2020-04-21 09:25 |