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East Coast, West Coast
Numerous studies have documented the leftist bias of our national media. Some of that is clearly intentional, some is simple laziness, but some is also a lack of curiosity. We see this now in the arms-length disinterest in the potentially “game-changing” hydroxychloroquine treatment. Also largely ignored are the order-of-magnitude differences in cases and deaths comparing New York and California.
I spent a half-hour expanding this to an Atlantic Coast (Maine to Florida, DC) vs Pacific Coast (Washington, Oregon, California). As of Friday (per Worldometer), the East Coast has 10 times the cases and eight times the deaths. Yes, the East Coast states have twice the population and 50 percent more coastline than the West Coast states, but this is still an astounding result.
If anything, with the extensive Chinese and Pacific Rim travel including the Chinese New Year, the West Coast should be further down the curve than the East. Indeed, this all started in the state of Washington. Could it be as some have speculated that “herd immunity” has already taken hold in the western US, that this Wuhan virus actually arrived before January? Does that further explain the significantly lower numbers in the middle of the country?
It isn’t just the media not curious. Even our esteemed Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx seem uninterested, especially when this disparity clearly challenges our current “one size fits all” national strategy. There’s at least one untold story here, including the silence.
Published in General
There’s no “silence” on this–VDH, among others, has written about it–and doctors have a theory why: warmer weather than the east coast, and lower population density. Seattle’s on the west coast, and it’s been hit hard, because it’s cold and damp.
Give it three weeks, and let’s see how well we’re doing then.
I agree that the spread is perplexing. I don’t see how “herd immunity” could explain it. If the disease causes death in some relatively small, but still significant, proportion of the population, then rapid spread of the disease will necessarily accompany a significant number of deaths. We didn’t see a significant number of deaths in the Western US. It’s hard to see how they could be hidden, as the main mechanism of death from COVID-19 seems to be pneumonia, which is essentially drowning in the fluid produced by your own lungs.
There was some speculation that the virus is temperature sensitive, but I don’t find this very convincing, because people spend a lot of their time indoors in this country, mostly in climate-controlled buildings in a fairly narrow temperature range.
Perhaps the disease is spread by extremely close contact in cities with very high population density. But, though I haven’t checked, I wouldn’t expect that the population density of Queens is any higher than San Francisco.
At the moment, I don’t have an explanation for the difference between the east and west coasts. Though it might be more of a difference between the NYC metro area and almost everywhere else (New Orleans excepted).
More likely due to the density of population in NY/NJ and the overwhelming use of mass transit, specifically the subway and train systems.
Last night, just for kicks, I was looking at the stats for Yakima, WA (where I live). I saw that they keep track of all sorts of things, and ended up looking at the tracking of flu deaths. The number of flu deaths this year wasn’t terribly high, but it was higher than current covid deaths. It is a possibility that this thing circulated in WA this winter and because we weren’t looking for it, the deaths were lost in the noise. I’m not saying that is likely, but that it is a possibility. Also, think about what happened w/ the Spanish Flu, where the 2nd wave was much worse. I think it is at least worth exploring (for those smart enough to do so) the possibility that what we’re now experiencing is actually the 2nd wave. Again, maybe it would be written off after a moment’s thought. I don’t know.
Wow. Mind blown.
Plus the fact (that is not publicized, but can be inferred from individual stories in the NY Post and some other news sources) that the significant population of Hasidic Jews in the NYC area refuse to cooperate with the social isolation idea. There have been several arrests at engagement parties, bar mitvahs, and funerals. Some of the highest rates of infection are in parts of NYC and towns near the city where there are big populations of Hasids.
From Washington Post:
Mandatory social distancing works. The earlier the better, preliminary data from two weeks of stay-at-home orders in California and Washington show.
Those states were the first to report community cases of covid-19 and also among the first in the nation to mandate residents stay at home and close businesses and schools to keep people physically apart…
It has been 16 days since counties in the San Francisco Bay area told some 6 million residents to stay at home, and 13 days since the order extended to all of California. As of Tuesday, the number of confirmed infections per capita in densely populated New York City was 15 times that of the Bay Area. In New York City, a flood of coronavirus patients has overwhelmed local hospitals and 1,096 people have died. New York state ordered people to stay home 11 days ago.
Compared with the Boston area, which has a more-similar population density, California’s Bay Area has about a third of the of the cases, per capita. The state of Massachusetts ordered people to stay home 8 days ago…
“The ER is eerily quiet right now,” said Jahan Fahimi, an emergency care physician at UCSF Health in San Francisco. He credited early action by policymakers in the Bay Area, even as he braced for what’s next. “The surge is still coming. It’s not that we’ve averted anything,” he said.
More than just that, you had elected local governance officials in New York City actively telling people though the first week of March not to change their lifestyles and to simply keep doing what they were doing. On the West Coast, you might have had Nancy Pelosi venturing into Chinatown to do the same thing, but she has no municipal governing power in the way Bill de Blaiso does in NYC, and West Coast pols by the start of March already had the concerns in the Seattle area to take into consideration for not acting the same way.
Separated from the Seattle outbreak by 3,000 miles, de Blaiso and his department heads in NYC were more sanguine that this wasn’t something that was going to affect them in the near future (and there may have been a bit of “Whatever Trump and his people say, do the opposite,” mindset in effect, since the COVID-19 threat seemingly was an opening for a big government guy like de Blaiso to exercise his power, but didn’t, possibly because by the end of February Trump was getting more cautious based on what Fauci and Birx were saying. So in order to Fight the Power, you had the mayor suddenly becoming Warren the Libertarian, refusing to close schools or put restrictions on restaurants, bars and gyms, either just to defy Washington or in the case of the gyms, because he didn’t want his own personal lifestyle to be negative impacted).
I think people were really reluctant to lockdown because of the impact on the economy. That’s all people in Government, because they fear paying at the polls. Same thing here in Australia, with a Right Wing Government. They started with ‘like the flu’ and now we’re in lockdown till end June.
Astounding? Density matters.
We assume the disease was in transit before PDT cut the air bridge from China, and I’m sure that’s right. But dose matters a lot, for both initial infection and eventual severity. Dosage influences the course of disease in both individual victims and their populations.
What I’m saying is, Washington state got an early concentrated dose of COVID-19 thanks to a State Department employee. Who works for us.
It’s also annoying that even tho’ I remembered that article I had difficulty finding it today to link. The only mention of it I’ve seen outside the Daily Mail (a real American journal of news) was at Gateway Pundit.
A relative of mine says that she and several people she works with all got sick last December with symptoms that sound like Corona virus. I’d love to see them get tested to find out if that’s what it was.
That’s right, just as we’re entering warm weather yours is cooling. What’s your fall and early winter weather like? I guess we’ll see how much weather affects the virus.
I think it is density and San Francisco, as dense as it is, still has less people per square mile and more people per subway car than BART. Chicago and Detroit are also hot spots and it has been pointed out elsewhere that blacks may be affected heavily for reasons still not clear. New Jersey has some small hot spots that correspond to commuter trains from NYC
One thing is clear from the discussions, we don’t know cr.. about it. It’s as likely an attack as a second wave, or a random spread based on weather and density. But there’s a nagging question. Why were the Chinese so quick to dominate it and keep it from spreading to the rest of China rather than to the entire world?
isn’t warm weather a major deterrent to the virus?
They weren’t.
Well, that has been the thought because most flu viruses peter out when warm weather hits. However, I read an article recently that said that data from the Middle East seems to show that there was no lessening of the virus in temps over 68F. If so that is disheartening.
I’m hoping so because otherwise India is boned.
It’s the combination of temps over 52 and high humidity. New England right now in terms of weather looks a lot like Wuhan and Lombardy at their peak for the virus. That’s why it’s peaking here right now.
I’m hoping the temperatures in the mid-fifties and higher humidity will give New York City a break next week.
Vietnam was not hit anywhere near as hard as China, immediately to its north. Although the Vietnamese government is taking credit for containing the disease, some of us believe the high humidity combined with higher temperatures (the combination that drives the flu away each spring and summer) was responsible. It is a virus, as is the flu, and if we’re very lucky, the same weather conditions that impede the flu will impede the virus.
Plus, people on the West Coast definitely get more sunshine in the wintertime than people on the New England-New York coast. All that vitamin D is bad news for the virus. :-) The healthier people are, the stronger their immune system.
The problem for now is that the rate of infection in some places is really high so the virus can go from host to host without encountering the outside warmer and more humid air. I’m just hoping that the human immune system will be gain strength in the warm spring and defeat the virus in people who get it. On the other hand, I’ve heard it said that there is nothing nastier than a summer pneumonia.
These people should be wearing masks
Except for Louisiana.
Most of the cases in Louisiana is in New Orleans, metro area
Because the Mayor Latoya Cantrell did not cancel Mardi Gras, with over 100,000 attendees crushed together watching parades. She said that if she had been given “any clear direction” from the federal government, she would have been a leader and cancelled it. I guess she didn’t get the part about leaders “leading.” She thought leaders followed. (BTW, flights from Wuhan had been shut down a month before Mardi Gras.)
Yes, more than 50%, less than 75%