What’s Going On with New York? By JIM GERAGHTY

What’s Going On with New York? By JIM GERAGHTY

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/whats-going-on-with-new-york/

Excerpt: Throughout much of the early months of 2020, city officials insisted New Yorkers could not catch the virus by riding public transportation. City Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Bardot told the public February 6, “we’re telling New Yorkers, go about your lives, take the subway, go out, enjoy life, but practice everyday precautions . . . If it were likely that it could be transmitted casually, we would be seeing a lot more cases.” She repeated March 4, “there’s no indication that being in a car, being in the subways with someone who’s potentially sick is a risk factor, because, again, it goes back to the issue of casual contact.” On March 5, Mayor de Blasio specifically rode the subway to demonstrate that the system was safe. “I’m here on the subway to say to people nothing to fear, go about your lives and we will tell you if you have to change your habits but that’s not now.” The next day in a radio interview, the mayor declared, “If someone’s on the same train car as another person, that does not, from what we know so far, create a dynamic where you have an opportunity to catch this disease. It’s just a different reality.” (By March 15, the city closed all public schools.) ... Even worse, the transit authority’s management handled this as badly as any cynic would fear: In mid-March, a bulletin came out mandating that conductors make an announcement every 15 minutes. Wash hands, soap and water, sanitizer, elbow-sneeze. “Together we can help keep New York safe.” The irony was that we didn’t have soap and water. At my terminal at that time, the restrooms were closed for three days after a water main break. Most employee restrooms are in similarly bad shape. Crew rooms are packed. The M.T.A. takes stern action against workers seen without goggles or cotton knit safety gloves. Yet we had to work without protection against the coronavirus. ... New York City’s coronavirus outbreak grew so large by early March that the city became the primary source of new infections in the United States, new research reveals, as thousands of infected people traveled from the city and seeded outbreaks around the country. The research indicates that a wave of infections swept from New York City through much of the country before the city began setting social distancing limits to stop the growth. That helped to fuel outbreaks in Louisiana, Texas, Arizona and as far away as the West Coast. The findings are drawn from geneticists’ tracking signature mutations of the virus, travel histories of infected people and models of the outbreak by infectious disease experts.