How are you responding to friends/family who think that based on NYC numbers it won't hit that hard here, so is it really worth it to shut down the city? (midwest)
That's a really great question. This could be its own post (and maybe it will be sometime soon). But here are a few quick factors to think about:
It's not just coastal cities like Boston, New York, and San Francisco that have been hit hard. Louisiana, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana have also seen a surge in cases.
When you look at the map of confirmed cases, the dots are spaced out all over the country: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html. Some of these confirmed cases, especially in more rural areas, haven't exploded as they have in cities -- but there's no reason they won't, especially as time goes on. This virus does not discriminate by geography.
We're also seeing some effects of uneven testing here. For a long time, for instance, Ohio didn't have a single confirmed case -- because they weren't testing. That's changed quite a bit. In places where they are actually testing, they're going to report higher numbers -- but that doesn't mean other places don't have similarly high or even higher numbers. We just don't know about it yet.
But the bigger point is: The ideal way to keep the virus from spreading is to close some things down *before* it gets really bad. If your city reacts swiftly and decisively, and you end up not reporting a lot of cases -- then it's working! The whole game here is to act before things get really bad.
How are you responding to friends/family who think that based on NYC numbers it won't hit that hard here, so is it really worth it to shut down the city? (midwest)
That's a really great question. This could be its own post (and maybe it will be sometime soon). But here are a few quick factors to think about:
It's not just coastal cities like Boston, New York, and San Francisco that have been hit hard. Louisiana, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana have also seen a surge in cases.
When you look at the map of confirmed cases, the dots are spaced out all over the country: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html. Some of these confirmed cases, especially in more rural areas, haven't exploded as they have in cities -- but there's no reason they won't, especially as time goes on. This virus does not discriminate by geography.
We're also seeing some effects of uneven testing here. For a long time, for instance, Ohio didn't have a single confirmed case -- because they weren't testing. That's changed quite a bit. In places where they are actually testing, they're going to report higher numbers -- but that doesn't mean other places don't have similarly high or even higher numbers. We just don't know about it yet.
But the bigger point is: The ideal way to keep the virus from spreading is to close some things down *before* it gets really bad. If your city reacts swiftly and decisively, and you end up not reporting a lot of cases -- then it's working! The whole game here is to act before things get really bad.