The estimates of the likelihood of dying from COVID are currently ranging from about .004 to .01 (not %, proportion). If the .004 is true, and NY has had 32,375 deaths (number from Worldometer), that would suggest that around 8,000,000 NYers have had COVID. Which could be getting close to herd immunity, if such a thing exists with COVID. It's very hard to get a handle on this.
A really good question, though.
We have that data (I have links to everything I'm about to post, but it's a chore to provide them frequently - I can if you like). Antibody testing in NY done over multiple surveys, with the last one completed on 6/13, showed that 13.4% of 20MM New Yorkers have antibodies, or 2.68MM, a far cry from 8MM and a far cry from the estimated 55-80% herd immunity (unknown, since we don't know the true R0 transmission rate yet, plus it gets complicated by the possibility of "cross-reactivity", as some work has shown that maybe 50% of unexposed people have blood that actually produces a T-cell immune response to COVID in cell cultures, but it's not known if that confers none, a bit or a lot of immunity in the real world), although as per my post last night in the main thread, some neighborhoods in NYC have over 50% with antibodies (and some less than 15%, which makes sense, with the City having 21.6% overall; Corona - yes Corona - Queens has 68%! - and an IFR of about 0.73%). The 30K NY deaths at the time translate to an infection fatality rate of 1.1% in NY, the only state that right now even has an estimated IFR. Most experts believe the "inherent" IFR (if no treatments/cures/vaccines) would eventually drop to 0.5-1.0%, which is what I've been saying for months. However, we're already likely seeing significant death rate decreases due to improved medical procedures and treatments, so the IFR from here on out will likely continue decreasing, which is good.
Why has there not been a significant spike in COVID hospital admittance/ICU/death in NYC over the last few weeks?
It made perfect sense why NYC was the epicenter at the outset - dense population, subways/mass transit, highrises with elevators....perfect storm.
Now that the city has started to re-open, combined with the large gatherings of protesters in close quarters, I cannot square why there has not been the same type of huge blow up as we have seen in FL & TX.
I have not seen even one news story making that observation or exploring what NYC is possibly doing so right.
I know that social distancing and mask wearing has been much more adhered to in the northeast- I live in Bucks County, PA, right across the river from Mercer Co. and everyone is in full effect following all guidelines, but it still doesn’t square the circle. Young people everywhere want to go to bars & play the get down game (including New York), the protests were rampant in NYC with social distancing and mask wearing not the focus and the demographics of the city haven’t changed from what made it so susceptible in the first place.
Somebody please help me understand without this becoming a red/blue/tool food fight.
For the OP, I've covered all of this in the pinned thread (as have others), but there are several reasons why NYC (and NJ too) have not seen spikes: i) we're significantly more infected than the rest of the US, with 22% in NYC with antibodies, so there are less people to infect; ii) the shutdowns and distancing hugely reduced transmissions, resulting in a very low infection % in the population; iii) the slow, controlled reopenings in phases, where very explicit criteria were achieved and where the vast majority of people are practicing masking/distaning during these reopenings (at least in all indoor and most crowded outdoor spaces), has kept the transmission rate very low, although it has crept back up to an R0 near 1.0, which means we could start to see cases increase.
In addition, NYC actually had a pretty high compliance with mask-wearing during the protests and as per the linked paper, most cities seeing protests actually saw a net increase in overall population distancing, so even if there were some increased cases among that population (we don't actually know that), they were outweighed by the impact of distancing by non-protesters, resulting in no net increase in cases. Also, and this is a guess, I imagine that there are some increased cases among young people going on, but far more others are practicing distancing/masking, such that it cancels out any increases among the young (analogous to the protester argument). Let's hope it stays that way.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w27408.pdf
Finally, I have to add the hugest driver to your assessment (all of which was spot on) of what led to the NYC outbreak being the worst seen in the world so far - lack of testing. The complete lack of testing through early March and minimal testing through mid-March, when we had, by retrospective analyses, tens of thousands of cases in NYC and simply didn't know it yet. Had we been testing by mid/late February like other countries, we wouldn't have flown blindly into a pandemic. Also add to your list that our area received far more infected travelers from Europe than any other location in the US. Much more on this in the post below. Hope this helps
https://rutgers.forums.rivals.com/t...ventions-and-more.198855/page-28#post-4631669
