The truly shocking number in the clip below is the fact that only 18 percent of recent hospitalizations came from nursing homes despite Cuomo’s own policy having turned them into death traps.
But yeah, it’s surprising that two-thirds of hospitalizations involved people who were supposed to be at low risk of infection because they were isolated at home. Cuomo says he and his brain trust expected to find higher rates among front-line workers or people who ride the subway frequently for whatever reason, but nope. It’s older people, most of them retired or unemployed, sitting at home to ride out the epidemic and getting infected anyway. How is that happening?
One theory would be that many New Yorkers are chafing at the lockdown and are secretly socializing, leading to transmissions. I know personally of two cases like that, both involving men in their 70s with underlying health problems, and neither case ended well. But the most likely explanation is the simplest one, I think: Family. Some older people who live alone may have been infected by visiting family members who dropped by to keep them company. Others may live full-time with family members who need to be out and about every day and picked up the virus in their travels, bringing it back home with them.
Imagine the anxiety in a multigenerational household where someone in the younger generation has COVID-19. You can prevent infection within the familiy in a four-bedroom house, maybe, but NYC is a land of small apartments. The whole clan shares one bathroom and one kitchen. If one person in the home gets the disease, everyone’s getting it. It’s weird that Cuomo would be “shocked” to see that dynamic playing out even weeks after lockdown.
The solution to this problem is straightforward: Centralized quarantine. Asian countries do it and it works. Set aside some space for infected people to go and ride out the disease for two or three weeks so that they’re not infecting their entire families. NYC has plenty of empty hotels available right now, and in fact has already begun putting them to use for this very purpose. It’s expensive, but everything about containing a pandemic is expensive. (Plus, Cuomo has that extra tax revenue coming in from good samaritans who pitched in to help New York!) Preventing family chains of infection by isolating the sick is probably a money-saver on balance when you factor in lost productivity along those chains.
America’s done it before but it’ll probably never fly in modern red states. People who think masks are some sort of infringement on natural law aren’t going willingly to centralized quarantine, no matter how useful doing so might be in tamping down the epidemic and making it safer for economic activity to resume. But in New York? Sure. They’ll go for it.
In lieu of an exit question, have a peek at this fascinating graph. Does Kinsa have a crystal ball?
