Why NY happened to have more than 6% of the cases of covid-19 in the world

Paralyzed by the rapid advance of the coronavirus, New York has gone from being “the city that never sleeps” to a silent and unrecognizable epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, waiting for the worst.

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in New York State climbed to 25,665 this Tuesday, almost 5,000 more than the previous day, more than half of those registered in the US and 6.5% of the world total.

More than 14,000 of these infected people are in New York City, which has about 40% more confirmed cases per capita than Italy, the country with the most deaths from the virus and the second with the most registered infections after China.

The pandemic had claimed 125 lives in New York as of Tuesday.

The state government gradually increased restrictions in an attempt to lower the wave of infections, closing schools, restaurants and other businesses, as well as asking people to avoid going out on public roads.

These measures have emptied and silenced the city’s streets of skyscrapers, but they still seem far from achieving their goal and authorities warn that the outlook is bleak.

“The íindex of new infections doubles every three days. That’s a dramatic increase, ”New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said Tuesday, warning that the peak of the crisis is projected higher and earlier than expected, 14 to 21 days into the future.

The question, then, is why New York has gotten into this situation and how does it try to reverse it.

“The perfect environment”

The sudden increase in proven cases of coronavirus in New York is due both to the high rate of spread of the infection and to a significant leap in testing made to detect it.

The number of people tested daily for the virus in New York rose from 1,000 to 16,000 in the past 10 days, after the state was authorized by the federal government to test on its own, Cuomo said.

He added that the current rate of testing in New York is the highest in the United States. and exceeds even per capita to what has been done by South Korea, considered a successful case of virus containment through massive tests that made it possible to detect and isolate those infected in time.

On the other hand, experts point out that New York City has characteristics that promote a faster spread of the virus than in other parts of the country.

For example, the 8.6 million New Yorkers make this the US metropolis. with the highest concentration of people: 28,000 per square mile.

“The problems we face are not exclusive” but “are amplified in New York due to the high population density: we live on top of each other,” says Theodora Hatziioannou, associate professor of virology at Rockefeller University in Manhattan.

“Is the perfect environment for a virus that is very easy to spread ”, says Hatziioannou to BBC Mundo.

Add to this the fact that New York is a diverse and highly connected city to the world, with thousands of people arriving daily from different regions.

“New York is at the epicenter because we are an international center and obviously there were a lot of infected people who had traveled in the last few weeks. These infected people came here until flights from heavily affected countries were banned, ”says Robyn Gershon, professor of epidemiology at New York University’s school of global public health.

The new battle

Specialists believe that things got worse in New York also due to to a delay in detecting the advance of the virus and taking the necessary measures in time.

In fact, other US states closed their schools because of the virus before New York, and Governor Cuomo just applied the biggest restrictions on Sunday, such as ordering non-essential business workers to stay home or banning gatherings.

Cuomo himself admitted Monday that such “density control” measures they were insufficient and he demanded a plan from the mayor to impose more limitations, especially for young people and in parks that had significant flows of visitors over the weekend.

The top medical authority in the US, Surgeon General Jerome Adams, even observed that “New York is closing in on Italy”, a country that reacted late according to experts.

“The numbers of cases that you see reflect what happened two weeks ago. Too many people are waiting too long to take these 15 days seriously to stop the contagion, “Adams alerted on Monday on CBS.

The governor and mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, demanded more help from Washington, for example demanding to the factories produce face masks and respirators, which are becoming scarce.

De Blasio argued that without such critical material in a few days the public hospital system will be unable to keep people alive who would otherwise survive.

Cuomo announced that they may need up to 140,000 hospital beds to receive people infected with coronavirus, he said he is talking with hotel owners to expand that capacity, while the National Guard and the Army help to install new hospitals

However, US President Donald Trump has so far avoided forcing factories to produce certain goods as in times of war and indicated that “soon” he expects the country to resume economic activity.

“We cannot let the cure be worse than the disease,” Trump tweeted Monday, alluding to the economic debacle caused by health measures.

On the other hand, experts recommend the opposite path, especially for New York.

“Unless there is access to a huge amount of tests to start evaluating everyone … social distancing is the only measure we have to try to contain the epidemic,” says Hatziioannou.

According to her, the virus probably has been in New York since January and the lack of available evidence made it difficult to detect it and determine how quickly it was spreading.

“The lesson is to limit contact with people who could be potentially infected: the best way to do this is through rapid testing of suspected cases and to force the self-isolation of infected people, if they do not require hospitalizations, ”Gershon tells BBC Mundo.

“If they require hospitalization,” he adds, “they should be isolated there.”

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