Why New York Got Hit So Hard

are reminders the pandemic is far from over. COVID nineteen deaths among Florida residents jumped the most since May eight. Florida began a phased reopening on May four. Hong Kong extended virus prevention measures after a new cluster of cases and Tokyo's infections spiked, and in the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to reset his government's agenda with the financial statement and a speech on the post pandemic landscape

and now our main story. Mayor build A Blasio still plans to begin reopening New York City, the epicenter of the COVID crisis, in the US on Monday. That's despite the unrest related to protests over the death of George Floyd and a curfew that will continue for the rest of the week. Hundreds of thousands of people will return to work in construction, manufacturing, wholesale, and curbside retail during

the first phase of the city's reopening. At least twenty one thousand New Yorkers are dead from COVID nineteen, with a few dozen added to the city's count. Every day, New York's outbreak eclipses others around the world. Drew Armstrong, Bloomberg's Health Team editor, looked back on the statements of experts, officials, and politicians to better understand the root causes of New York City's devastating outbreak. I recently talked to Drew about

what he found out, so Drew. On March fourth, New York reported its first coronavirus case of unknown origin in a lawyer from Westchester County who worked in the city. Is that how the New York outbreak started. So the March fourth case was the first one in New York City that nobody could figure out where it came from.

And that's really important because when we talk about the start of these outbreaks, especially in New York City, it's really important to remember that there were almost certainly cases popping up that weren't caught before that, and so we only found out about the lawyer because he got sick enough to be hospitalized. And you have to remember that back in early March, there was barely any testing for

this disease. We halted travel for many people from coming from China the month before, but there was an outbreak spreading to Europe and growing there, and plenty of people were traveling freely back and forth between Europe and the

US during those weeks. People get really fixated on this idea of a patient zero, where one person gets infected and starts an outbreak, but with COVID Night Team, because the lack of testing early and how easily it spreads, that's not really the right way to think about it. The sick lawyer was just the tip of an iceberg that was already there. He was the first one to get sick enough for anyone to notice and test him, But there was almost certainly many, many more cases before

he was diagnosed. So if we had shut down most travel from China, where did the cases come from, so it does seem like some of the early cases came from China. And there's this great study that looks at the genetic history of the virus done by researchers at the Los Almost National Laboratory in Mexico that shows how this works. So all viruses mutate, and most of these mutations are tiny, so we can do more or less the same thing we do with a genetic test to

find family members like some lost grade aunt. With the virus. You look at the tiny mutations of virus. Has you trace the family tree to see which branch ended over here and started an outbreak in which and which branch went somewhere else. And what we see in the US and in New York is really really interesting. In the US, you see a bunch of cases from a genetic strand of the virus that came from China in February and

early March. But while that was happening, there was a major outbreak in Italy and the US hadn't limited travel from there. So when New York gets hit, it doesn't get hit from China, gets infected with this variant of the virus from Europe, and New York is a huge

travel portal from Europe. In the week before the US limited European travel, New York City Airport, it's had two hundred and seventy four thousand travelers arrived from there, and some of those people coming here probably helped start the outbreak, but nobody knew because we weren't testing or checking anyone. Here's what Governor Andrew Cuomo has said about that. In April news conference, everybody said the facts where the virus was coming from China, those were not the facts. The

virus had left China. The virus went to Europe, and nobody told us, and people came from Europe to New York and to New Jersey into Connecticut, and three million European travelers came January February March before we did the European travel band, and they brought the virus to New York and that's why the New York number was so high.

And so the US stopped a lot of cases from coming in from China, but the outbreak was global by then, and there were fifteen thousand confirmed cases in Italy in early March, and probably a lot more than that that hadn't been found. And the janetic detective work shows that they nike of a big majority of what hit the city, So what happened when they got here? Didn't lots of other cities bring in cases and seed their outbreaks. You know they did, But there's some structural parts of New

York City that made things even worse. The subways, the buses, the trains. A lot of people here don't have cars. And for all of our complaints about the city's mass transit system, it works really well most of the time. I lived in Brooklyn for most of my time in New York, and I took the subway. I live in the suburbs now and I take the train in and it's often packed, but it's great. So it's also, though not hard to see how it's also a really perfect

way to transmit a disease. If you've ever been on the four five line during rush hour, your short shoulder and when the outbreaks started, the advice New York leaders were giving out was that it was all fine. So just listen to this March second clip of New York City Health Commissioner Oxyrus Barba. There's no need to do any special anything in the community. We want new Yorkers to go about their daily lives. Ride the subway, take

the bus, go see your neighbors. The important thing, as both the Mayor and the Governor have said, we want New Yorkers to lean even more into frequent handwashing and covering their mouths and their noses. And if you can't get to a water source, make alcohol based sand a hand sanitizer your new best friend. Everybody thought that this was basically a disease where if you covered your coffee, your sneeze, and you washed your hands, things were going to be more or less fine, and that was wrong.

We talked to Mayor build a Blasio last week and he now describes the subways and busses as a major vector for the disease, and epidemiologists think the same thing. So basically, you take a crowded, dense place like a New York City subway, and then you go to a dense, crowded New York City restaurant or office or elevator, and then you go to a small New York City apartment. You kind of get the idea here. You know, the four most dense counties in America are New York City boroughs.

Is a really crowded place, and I personally love that about it. People in interaction. That's would makes the city and I missed that everyone does. But it's also absolutely perfect for a virus. Viruses don't spread in states or cities or countries. They spread between people. In New York City has a lot of them, all well within six ft of each other for a lot of a day. By March twentieth, the state announced business closures and stay at home orders for work. But I'm getting the impression

you think it was too late by then. Yeah. Probably. I mean if you look at the first case, that lawyer from March fourth, and you have to figure that there was a significant amount of spread by them that hadn't been detected. You know, he's one guy who was commuting in and out of the city. There had been a spike in flu like illnesses reported around this time, and by the time the city more or less shut down, there were four thousand cases a day. And you gotta

remember at this time testing was barely happening. You combine that with an incubation period of four or five days, meaning a lot of people had already been infected but hadn't started chewing symptoms, and we're kind of well into the acceleration phase of the outbreak. You know, there's been some research showing that earlier closing would have saved lives, and it's probably true. The Blasio and Governor Cuomo, they had a couple of days of disagreement before they shutdown happened,

but the outbreak was here. I think it's important to remember well well before then. And if you look at how easily this disease spreads and how perfect the city is to spread it, then a lot of what happened may have been inevitable, at least with the tools we had in place and how we used them. Let's look forward. Is the city ready to open back up? And what about the protests going on? Yeah, the protests are of a wild card. Cases and deaths in New York City

have been falling for weeks. But now you've got people out in the street demonstrating and very rightfully angry, and they're outside, but there's a lot of density. A lot of them are in masks, which is good, but some aren't. We really don't know how this is going to play out. We might see a surgeon cases in New York and elsewhere these protests are happening or we might not. I think it's a huge, huge, huge unanswered question. So businesses are starting to come back, but if you look at

how it's really a trickle um. There are a handful of offices opening back up, but if you read the reports, it's really only a tiny percentage of people who are going back in. We don't have the million plus people who come into Manhattan and leave every day, all those commuters. It's gonna be really slow, in part because people in businesses just aren't ready yet. It seems like from everybody we've spoken to, I think the big question is what

happens next time? There are more viruses out there like this one, and this isn't gonna be the last time we do this. I just hope we do it better. That was Drew Armstrong and that's our show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com, flash Coronavirus Us and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way

to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily Edition is produced by top foreheads Jordan Gospore, Magnus Hendrickson, and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Drew Armstrong. Original music by Leo sidron Our. Editors are Francesca Levi and Rick Shine. Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.