COVID-19 # 63

The New York Times reported that most viruses nationwide appear to be related to the strain from the outbreak in New York, rather than the initial one in the Seattle area (oh yeah ... remember that one??).

Even in Utah 90% of the viruses sequenced are from New York. In turn, that strain appears to have come from Europe, in particular Italy. This suggests a couple of things. First off, long-distance travel (primarily planes) is really effective at spreading the virus. But second, even so, the virus did not take off in many locations the same way that it did in the NYC area. So there's something else going on ... subways maybe.

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What's worse, is that those same researchers figure there were 10,000 undiagnosed cases spreading in NYC by March 1. It's hard to recall this now, but both New York City and New York state dawdled rather than shut down. For example, San Francisco shut its schools 3 days earlier than NYC, which had 18 times as many positives at the time with only 9 times as many people. The entire Bay area beat NYC with a stay-at-home order by 5 days.

It seems that NYC may be the lily pad case outlined by Megan McArdle. She focused on the end game: if lily pads on a pond are doubling every day, and it takes 30 days for them to double, on what day do they cover half the pond? The answer is day 29. But, if you flip that around, if you can delay the lily pads at the start by 1 day, you'll only have half the pond covered by day 30. Looking back at the data, deaths in NYC doubled (almost exactly) 3 times between March 17th and March 22nd. By May 1st, they'd only doubled 6 additional times.

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As is typical, the media are availability entrepreneurs. And the politicians in New York have been available. Governor Cuomo and Mayor DeBlasio are getting a lot of attention.

But the real heroes in all this may be political executives like California Governor Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed. We're not hearing a lot about them because they made better choices first, rather than fixing their initially bad choices. †

† There's an analogy to quarterbacks here. It frustrates me endlessly that sports journalists extol the number of 4th quarter comebacks made by quarterbacks (John Elway was famous for this). Perhaps they should be asking about quarterbacks who never get themselves into that position in the first place.