As we track the scale of outbreaks in countries around the world and look for insights into what will happen in the United States, one key metric has been the number of days between a full lockdown and when new infections and deaths peaked. For that I’ve been trying to make sense of just when New York City – the center of the outbreak in the US – locked down. There’s no simple answer since the city slowly hunkered down in phases. During the second week of March the city government began encouraging businesses to start work from home for employees who were able to do so. On Sunday, March 15th, Mayor Bill DiBlasio announced that the public schools would close the following day. On March 20th, Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered a statewide “pause”, which is New York’s version of what in other states is being called a “shelter in place”.
But how much impact did these different suggestions and orders have on reducing mobility, density and spread in the city?
It’s too soon to state anything definitively. But today’s extremely grim numbers out of Italy do suggest that the outbreak is at least stabilizing. New numbers just released show that Wednesday was the fourth consecutive day when the numbers of new cases and new fatalities were below the peak on March 21st. I stress: this is not enough data to say the trend is down or even stabilizing. But they point in the direction of stabilization.
Graph after the jump.
I’ve been swimming in numbers over the last couple days. I find numbers, create charts, all to try to make sense of the emerging story. One thing that is very clear in all of this is that there is as yet no US outbreak; even the nationwide numbers are misleading. What you have is a New York state and especially New York City outbreak and then a series of much smaller regional ones, most of which are running significantly behind what is happening in New York. One way to capture this: 68% of the hospitalizations in the country are in New York State.
Earlier this week, President Trump attempted to make up for his use of the term “China virus” to describe COVID-19 by defending the Asian American community, which has faced xenophobia and racist attacks in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.
In his Fox News town hall this afternoon President Trump said he needs good treatment or favors in return if states want the federal governments assistance as hospitals are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. Read the words and then watch them.
“Usually we’ll have 50 governors that will call it the same time. I think we are doing very well. But it’s a two-way street. They have to treat us well, also. They can’t say, “Oh, gee, we should get this, we should get that.” We’re doing a great job. Like in New York where we’re building, as I said, four hospitals, four medical centers. We’re literally building hospitals and medical centers. And then I hear that there’s a problem with ventilators. Well we sent them ventilators. And they could have had 15,000 or 16,000 – all they had to do was order them two years ago. But they decided not to do it. They can’t blame us for that.”
Here’s the video.
I grew up in the oil patch, so this email from TPM Reader DB resonated:
I wanted to write in with a different perspective than the one I’m seeing take hold among progressives. I work in oil and gas (yes; yes; I know. I’m sorry) and, as such, I interact with conservatives all the time. It’s interesting watching the conservative id coalesce as it does.
By now a significant number of us have experienced the self-imposed hardship and uncertainty of being sick but unsure if it’s the rona. TPM Reader DS writes in from Seattle:
Hi Josh. I was just reading your piece about testing, and thought to contribute a personal anecdote about what widespread testing would mean for people and families with relatively mild cases.
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President Trump says he hopes to have the country back to normal operation by Easter – which is less than three weeks away. He also says his insistence on doing so is helping push up the stock market.
Prez Trump says stock market rising because he insists on reopening the country. Says he expects to go back to normal in two weeks. pic.twitter.com/VmEUHC6oL6
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 24, 2020
We’re back to that familiar place: President Trump introduces a claim or argument or policy so absurd it risks crowding out an actual critical question. Here that question is how to balance the public health crisis and our efforts to contain it with damage to the economy over time. The simple reality is that the cost in human lives and the economic damage will both be vast. Nor are they a zero sum. The economy wouldn’t keep humming along amidst a public health catastrophe even if we all managed to be totally indifferent – individually and collectively – to the threat we faced by going about business as usual. It is also true that economic privation has predictable costs in human lives – unemployment, stress-driven ailments, family breakdown, suicide.
This is how it typically goes when President Trump is growing tired of you.