Comment by brsg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brsg | Hacker News Reader

I think people's memories are a bit short regarding just how dire things were in NYC back in April. I think things are a bit more complicated than just blaming the governor for shutting down restaurants.

Every resident in or around New York heard ambulances 24/7. Everyone knew someone that got very sick (not that anyone could even prove that they had it since testing was extremely scarce). The virus was still very new and there were legitimate reasons to suspect the death rate was much higher than it thankfully ended being. I even remember hearing rumors from friends, family, and coworkers that the feds were going to enforce a "wuhan-style" quarantine in NYC. In terms of general fright, it reminded me a lot of 9/11.

It would've been political malfeasance for the mayor/governor to do nothing in these circumstances. In terms of infections, the city recovered relatively quickly and most of the lockdown was lifted by Summer (indoor dining obviously being one of the holdouts here that hurt restaurants a lot)

I think the worst "medium-term" effects are the loss of tourists and office workers. There's very few legal restrictions on offices reopening at this point, but very few have actually come back. The triple of lockdowns, vanishing tourists, and vanishing office workers is just too much for small businesses.

> There's very few legal restrictions on offices reopening at this point, but very few have actually come back. The triple of lockdowns, vanishing tourists, and vanishing office workers is just too much for small businesses.

I think this is key. For people trying to blame the governor of New York, just look across the political spectrum to Texas. I am not a fan of Greg Abbott in any sense, but I will give credit where credit is due, and I think his Covid policies have been very reasonable and based in science and data. And even with those looser restrictions, restaurants in major Texas cities have still been hit incredibly hard. Downtown Austin is still pretty ghost-town like, and all the businesses that cater to those downtown office workers and tourists have been devastated despite there being relatively few official restrictions left on offices.

People are protecting themselves. Most are avoiding restaurants, bars, and gyms completely. It doesn't matter that they're open.

Trump has the right idea, that people need to be made less afraid of the virus. But his execution is backwards, people aren't idiots.

The priority should have been relaxing laws to allow existing businesses to do delivery. Allowing stores to sell goods outdoors in the parking lot. Getting a couple good masks to every citizen, even though it meant reusing them. Actually useful things, instead of telling everyone not to worry about it.

Indeed. Half of all COVID deaths in the US by early May were in the Boston-DC metropolis. The per capita death rate for NYC, even after almost no COVID deaths over the last two months, is still 1 in 570, 4x the national rate of 1 in 2300 (along with NJ; CT, RI, MA and LA round out the list of <1 in 1000).

Also NYC hit a hospitalization rate of 1 in 700 at the peak. Legitimate forecasts had hospitalization rates potentially blowing out available capacity. The worst State hospitalization rate now is 1 in 4600, 6x better.

On the other hand, consider the threshold for “just a bad flu” to be twice the per capita death rate from the 17-18 flu season (CDC upper estimate of 1 in 5000, so 1 in 2500). Then half of the US states are still in the “just a bad flu” or better six months on. And even that skewing to the old. Nine states haven’t reached the 1 in 5000 level of the 17-18 flu after 6 months. So, for a lot of the US, their experience was, and continues to be, different than the East Coast and certain key cities like Detroit and St Louis. My numbers say 30% of the US population is in this category.

> The per capita death rate for NYC, even after almost no COVID deaths over the last two months, is still 1 in 570, 4x the national rate of 1 in 2300

That's the per capita death rate for New York state.

The proportion of people who died in NYC with a positive COVID test or with cause of death listed as COVID is more like 1 in 255.

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