Current Events > Why is NY, NJ, and Massachusetts deaths so high compared to their total cases?

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https://i.imgur.com/KRpUnJK.png

I'm not saying death toll a lie. But It just looks so out of place compared to Florida, Texas, and California. When you check the cases. Its almost as if when NY, NJ, MA were at their peak they had to have had thousands of unreported a day. Because I remember 1k dying in NY a day with only 10k cases. Maybe it was actually closer to over 50k cases a day at that time.

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They were hit hardest early on when less testing was being done. A lot of people had it who never got counted as cases.
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NY also did a bad job of working between private and public hospitals when they got absolutely swamped with cases. NYT did a great story on it. The other states; while having high counts now, are more spread out so they didnt have a chance to cause as much havoc on their health care systems

New York has ones of the highest international commute rates in the world. There wasn't any time to prepare. Credit where it's due, they cracked down hard, and now it's one of the few places closer to reopening.

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Guide posted...

New York has ones of the highest international commute rates in the world. There wasn't any time to prepare. Credit where it's due, they cracked down hard, and now it's one of the few places closer to reopening.

I just think going off the trio of CA, TX, FL. They have 10k deaths around 600k cases. It seems to me like NY probably had at least 1.8 million cases to their 32k deaths. NJ Probably had 1 million. And MA probably had around 500k cases.

People are saying they had no time to prepare I get it but that goes for the cases too. People probably still thought masks should be saved for health care workers. Or after it was made mandatory there had to be a period where people still didn't wear masks so the cases were probably through the roof back then.

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Also!

florida and other states are most likely hiding the actual death count

Guide posted...

New York has ones of the highest international commute rates in the world. There wasn't any time to prepare. Credit where it's due, they cracked down hard, and now it's one of the few places closer to reopening.

I read an article saying that some low income parts of NYC most likely already have reached here immunity because so many cases occurred

soulunison2 posted...

Also!

florida and other states are most likely hiding the actual death count

Dunno about the intent, but given the ~200k higher deaths than normal for the year, I can definitely imagine a lot of the counts aren't accurate

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soulunison2 posted...

I read an article saying that some low income parts of NYC most likely already have reached here immunity because so many cases occurred

That requires something like a 90% infection rate, and can really only be obtained through an effective vaccine.

Nobody has achieved herd immunity.

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Early on New York forced senior centers to take covid exposed patients and it spread like wildfire, killing a ton of old people.

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Also we just had the first confirmed case of a re-infection from Hong Kong so dont count on being immune so casually

New York City had around 10% of its population with antibodies as of a few months ago iirc. So yeah, they had a ton more cases than reported. Remember that the massive case amounts in those states happened when tests were short and only people with severe symptoms got tested.

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population density

also wouldn't rule out air pollution as a possible factor in major urban centers

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s0nicfan posted...

Early on New York forced senior centers to take covid exposed patients and it spread like wildfire, killing a ton of old people.

That happened but wasn't NY positive rate in the %40-50 range for at least a month. I think the CA, TX, FL trio positive rate max had to have been in the 10%-20% range.

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i feel like another reason why there's a massive difference is because doctors didn't know how to treat patients back then, they have more knowledge now
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I don't think any of the responses have touched on the real reasons.
Surviving any illness usually comes down to three things, early detection, early treatment, and correct treatment.

In the early days when this was ripping through the states you mentioned, it was because of their status as a major port and high population density. Because we took so long to start taking this seriously all three states already had significant outbreaks before we started taking it seriously. (Remember we only started caring once significant numbers started dying, but this thing has a 7-10 incubation and can take up to a month to kill, so it had a big headstart growing before there was a public reaction)

Initially, we had basically no testing, we only knew people were ill once they were far enough along to need hospitalization basically, so we have basically lost early detection and early treatment already.So now to save lives it takes correct treatment, but in the early days there was no idea what did and didn't work. And even when something did was it anecdotal or broadly effective, you never knew. And even if you have some treatment you believe to be effective how do you communicate that out fast enough to save lives across the system.

That is the reason the deaths per case for NY, NJ, and MA are so high. Until sometime in April a severe Covid reaction was essentially a death sentence and people either didn't know they had it or seek help until it was too late and even once they did the doctors had no effective gameplan against it.

Now we have learnings and experience, we know what is and isn't effective, so we should not see any other state get to that high of a number unless they are just actively trying to kill people.