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I'm getting a little obsessed with West Coast coronavirus vs NYC. I think because people are using it to beat up hyperbolic and omnipresent NY pols, arguing that it proves Friday instead of Monday school closings saved an entire state.
Without defending bad decisions, I don’t think it proves that. I think it proves something far more interesting - that Fortress America is a reckless idea, and why preparedness for a pandemic means we have to actually care if other countries can do it, too.
It’s hard to argue NYC should have shut things down before March 1, the day it detected its first case. Yet by then a lot of things had gone wrong in NYC that hadn’t gone wrong in California, and it was all fallout of decisions made entirely at the federal level and overseas.
To get into it, we now know that - for I’m sure very path-dependent reasons - the West Coast had high exposure to infection via Asia travel, NYC had it via European travel. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/new-york-coronavirus-cases-europe-genomes.html
Because of Trump Administration screwups, neither locality had many tests. And both localities were hobbled by Trump’s CDC rules that these precious tests could only be used when there was a known case or a China travel history. https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/HAN00426.asp
So, everywhere in the US, new cases from travel to the rest of Asia & Europe would be largely missed until testing rules changed on 2/28. The West Coast saw the first case detected in the US, from Wuhan, on 1/20. From then until the end of February...pretty quiet.
This is odd because South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan all had outbreaks in February. Yet despite a *very* long period on the West Coast when we would have missed any US cases stemming from these introductions, we saw no sign of outbreaks.
In fact, when we finally did see community transmission on the West Coast at the end of February, it tied back to *Wuhan.* It’s unclear to me if there were any travel cases from other parts of Asia in February. https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1239427193945485312?s=20
But this isn’t because the West Coast did anything right! It’s because South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan all kept their cases low, making them less likely to export to other areas. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-maps.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=STYLN_coronahub&variant=show®ion=header&context=menu
Now, NYC. Like California, it had almost no tests, and as in California, there had to be a China connection to test. In Mid-February, even as Italy locked down cities, coughing New Yorkers who’d been there couldn’t get tests. https://gothamist.com/news/coronavirus-spreads-sick-new-yorkers-who-suspect-exposure-say-they-cant-get-tested
Unlike most of Asia, in most of Europe cases were exploding, people were traveling into and out of hotspots and in many countries there was minimal screening or testing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/coronavirus-explodes-in-italy-cases-surge-from-3-to-more-than-200-in-a-few-days/2020/02/24/e4640f60-5687-11ea-8efd-0f904bdd8057_story.html
So, on March 1, where were both localities?
By 3/1, the West Coast had spent a month and a half throwing all it had at a series of travel-related outbreaks from China. It ended with a nursing home decimated, multiple loci of local spread, and not nearly enough tests. A real "new tactics" moment. https://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-timeline.html
In contrast, on 3/1, NYC found its first case. Four days later, community case. Two weeks later, the first death. Its entire timeline for local action was far more intense and more compressed than California’s. And unlike California, disease was already incredibly widespread.
Did people make mistakes at the local & state level? Wait too long? Yup. But looking at Google’s mobility reports, I’m not seeing at a glance a huge difference in when each locality went to ground. (Admittedly, this is...not the best way to study that) https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/
I love dunking on pols, but I think it’s key to realize decisions made in Asia, Europe & DC almost certainly had a *much* larger impact on the current size and scope of the respective outbreaks in CA and NY than decisions made a few days apart in March by mayors or governors.
The same federal testing failure affected both. But because South Korea handled its outbreak well, coronavirus didn’t make it to CA to silently reproduce. CA had a smaller, slower crisis. Because Italy handled its outbreak poorly, NYC got a bigger hit and less time to react.
We need international teamwork, not just n95 masks, to stop pandemics. Because mistakes made in Rome blow up New York. Good decisions in Seoul spare California. Fortress America simply won’t work. Because if the feds make even one mistake - like testing - we’re cooked.
