8/25/2023 0 Comments New lockdown california![]() New York has more health professionals per capita: 10 percent to San Francisco’s 6.Ĭity governments responded to the crisis in discernably different ways.Asians are one-third of San Francisco’s population, compared with one-seventh in New York. Half of all New Yorkers are Black or Hispanic, compared with one-fifth of San Franciscans.San Francisco is a lot richer, with a much lower poverty rate and more educated population.Table 1 documents some differences between the two cities that may not be known widely. But COVID-related outcomes in these cities are even more different than those of their states. Their politics are similar: Both have Democratic Party city mayors and both are in states run by Democrats. They have similarly strong linkages with China, measured, for example, by air traffic between Wuhan and these two cities. ![]() ![]() Both are coastal, located on roughly the same latitude (40.8°N and 37.8°N respectively), and their climate in March is not all that different. Two obvious candidates are New York City and San Francisco, the most densely populated cities in these states and the two densest large cities in the U.S. It is more informative to compare cities that are similar but have fared differently in dealing with the disease. But these are big states and they differ in many aspects. states that have had at least 10 COVID-19 deaths New York has been the worst. California is doing the best, New York the worstĬalifornia has been the best performer among U.S. Despite obvious deficiencies in testing in the U.S., developing countries can learn a lot from its experience. The WHO has failed to establish uniform standards and ensure accurate reporting, but we can still compare places within a single country whose data are reliable (Figure 1). One way is to study places that are similar in most aspects but have completely different rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths. There are ways to learn quickly about what works to contain the virus. It all seems pretty hopeless.Īctually, not quite. The third is that Taiwan, which has done the best so far in containing the outbreak and keeping its economy working (while remaining the second most free country in Asia), has been deliberately shut out of the international community. The second is that information being supplied by the Chinese Communist Party, the government with the longest experience in dealing with the disease, is unreliable. One is that the WHO, the agency that should have led the response, has been politicized. ![]() But the confusion among public health experts is being compounded by some avoidable problems. Almost by definition for a novel virus like COVID-19, reliable data are not easy to come by. To be fair, many things affect the spread and severity of any virus: medical conditions, the weather, population densities, economic structures, political considerations, social norms and, of course, government policies. Public health experts admit that without rigorous randomized testing-which is several months away-and a safe and effective vaccine-which may be more than a year away-they cannot tell us for how long economies have to be shut down. We’ll have to wait for accurate and affordable testing to know the extent of the infection. Until we have reliable estimates of infection rates, public health professionals will not be able to tell us much about which places and people are most vulnerable to the virus, what might help to contain it, and how long the epidemic will be around. More than three months into the outbreak, we have no clue about how many people are infected.
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