There's no real evidence to support the thesis that the MTA was a primary vector of spread in NYC. Granular data of infection rate by neighborhood is spotty, but the data that does exist doesn't show any clear trends towards increased infection rates nearer subway lines. And the borough with the highest infection rate is the borough with the least transit ridership, and the borough with the lowest infection rate is that with the highest transit ridership...

(Source cite: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/04/15/the-subway-is-...).

The subway is a shared space with poor air quality and many hard surfaces that are touched by many people every hour.

The blog post you are "citing" tries to draw conclusions by zip code in a map that is not granular enough to support the claims. You yourself acknowledge this so I'm not sure why you use that blog post as evidence.

Also, Jeff Harris (the MIT professor who wrote the paper with which the blogger disagrees) is a doctor as well as being an economist. That doesn't mean he is infallible, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss his thoughts.

I use an inner city transit system every day on my usual commute, but the transit system hub I access it from is about 15 miles away from where I live. I use a bus and then a regional train network to get to it, then go into the underground.

Yes, subways are crowded, but so is everything else in NYC. As for why NYC is doing much worse than other comparably dense cities worldwide, my thesis is that it's a failure at all levels of civic participation (federal, state, local, and even residential and commercial proprietors) to be proactive in counteracting the spread of coronavirus.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/30/opinions/eye-opening-south-ko...

The case study covers infections in a 19-story mixed commercial-residential building. First case was reported on March 9, 2020. The office seating diagram provided in the article shows extended (10 min or 1hr not sure), very close proximity spacing physically is the main reason for the spread.

Note that this was a call center so people were sitting and talking without masks on for extended periods.

* On March 9, one day after the first cases were reported, the entire building was closed. Testing was performed almost immediately on 1,143 people (workers, residents and a few visitors) with rapid results available to those affected and the team working to control the situation. The testing showed that 97 people (8.5% of those occupying the building) were infected. Most of the cases were women in their 30s and almost all (94 of the 97) worked on the 11th floor of the building, in the call center.*

I counted colored seats in the diagram and found 84 people in the call center got infected.

I think NYC got hit particularly hard because of subway cars. Enclosed in nearly airtight space for 10 - 30 minutes at a time.

I agree that everything is more crowded in NYC, but the only thing I can think of more crowded than a subway car is a nightclub. Estimating from ridership numbers, the average New Yorker rides the subway 15-30 minutes per day. The ceilings aren't even that high, just the number of people per unit volume is incredible.

One of the case studies I saw showed it spreading on a long distance bus between people sitting four rows away from each other.

That’s rush hour. Let’s not kid ourselves.

(I'll also point out that you picked literally the busiest station on the entire system to use as an example.)

The thing about the subway is that we all try to hold onto a pole or bar, total vectors for the spread. It’s not just an obvious case of being near each other, we’re forced to touch the same surfaces so we don’t collide every 30 seconds.

Rush hour on a subway is about as close as your going to get (no pun intended) to a clear cut ‘yep, this is how it spread’.

Some countries are still trying to avoid testing. Many Japanese hospitals are turning people away from testing unless they have severe symptoms lasting several days, so naturally, numbers look tiny. And let's be frank, China's numbers just shouldn't be believed.

The US doesn't have high quality national excess death data, apparently. That's surprising. Part of the distorted response to this outbreak is because most countries only seem to publish relatively recent excess death data - often only a few years. But when longer term data is examined it shows that there have been plenty of flu seasons with similar death rates. That's why people keep comparing it to the flu.

At a national level the peak in the USA was at 20,000 excess deaths. In 2017 the peak was at about 7,000

(https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/cdc-releases-detailed-nat...)

So it must be much worse, right?

Well, not really. If you look at the longer term data for a hard-hit country like the UK, where there are a lot of lockdown-created excess deaths due to excessively underloading the hospitals:

http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/

You can see that this outbreak had at the end of April an almost identical number of excess deaths so far this year to 2017, 1999 (which was worse), 1998, 1996 and 1995.

It seems flu care might have got better over time, or perhaps vaccinations had the impact. But so far the impact on COVID on the UK is not much different to disease outbreaks throughout the 1990s.

The UK stats will go up and it'll be worse than any other outbreak for sure, because at this point the population is in a state of fear and avoiding hospitals - even if they don't want to, critical treatments for other diseases have been cancelled to free up space for a surge that never came.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/27/care-homes-see-r...

"UK's biggest provider says deaths among residents at three times last year's rate, but only half of additional deaths linked to virus"

And this is with almost any death being ascribed to COVID, without requiring tests or evidence. The lockdown will claim more lives than COVID will.

What a rubbish site. Its first argument is that deaths are not worse than 2018, so its not bad. Even though you can see that number of deaths quickly surpasses 2018 in 2-3 weeks and rises a lot higher faster, while it started a lot lower.

It's third argument is even more ridiculous. "Look at this graph showing a strong correlation between lockdown stringency and infection cases, stringent lockdowns increase infections!" is akin to saying people should stop using umbrellas because they increase rain.

(Also that graph is useless because the number of cases is not normalized inhabitants per inhabitants, so its x axis is bad)

talk about ridiculous claims.

However this is only really in over 60s

The explanations would be

1) more covid deaths than have been mentioned on death certificate 2) more deaths from other reasons

I haven’t seen any detailed breakdown of cause of death other than “covid mentioned” (and thus not mentioned)

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/29/tube-chat-ca...

You get the impression that a lot of people in Western society would rather risk infection than be seen wearing a mask - defies logic.

So if people got contaminated there, in a couple of days they probably were somewhere else already.

As a similar example, a lot of people in NJ work in NY but a case on a NJ resident would be counted as NJ.