This article picks on DeBlasio / Cuomo and indirectly DeBlasio’s health commissioner heavily for encouraging continued going out to restaurants and events and riding the subway in late Feb and into mid-March. But remember in late Feb the President was still saying it was going to just magically go away. Bay Area politicians including the speaker of the house Pelosi were encouraging lots of people to come to Chinatown parades. Florida even left their beaches open all the way through mid March for spring breakers to come. While those events have almost certainly led to additional cases and deaths, other areas of the country seem to have largely gotten away with a less proactive and later response than Seattle.
I think we are probably going to see that the real challenge on NY is that we just don’t have another city in the US with New York’s density, air travel volume, and high utilization of public transit. Comparing NY to Seattle just because they are both in the US is probably not as relevant. Given what we know now about the propensity of high volume super spreader events to drive the bulk of the R0, NY can probably only really fairly be compared to London and Paris in the Western world, at least.