There's a smart thermometer company who publishes data about the percentage of people with fevers in given geographic areas.
It's interesting that there is a seemingly similar downward trend in the percentage of people in NYC with fevers ~5 days after subway ridership drops.
Covid takes ~5 days from exposure to symptoms and ~12 days from exposure to hospitalization. Of course, these broad population measures almost certainly impact other diseases as well (no kids at school to spread flu).
My (almost surely too) optimistic hope is that the huge increases in numbers the past week are mainly due to massive testing ramp ups and that the absolute number of cases has already peaked (for now).
Ridership plummeted to around 10-15 percent of normal last week, but you still have more than 500,000 daily riders.
Obviously, health workers and others still need to go to work somehow but although you take 90 percent out of packed NYC subway cars and platforms, you still have plenty passengers for the virus to continue spreading.
Are the same number of trains running? In London the number of tube trains is down due to drivers+signallers ill/self isolating, meaning that in some cases the trains have been even busier than normal!
It's curious that tube drivers seem to be horribly afflicted with this so we can only run a skeleton service, but the buses (which are much closer to passengers) are running a standard weekend service with absolutely no problems.
Somewhat related/shameless self-plug: I created an R package [1] that provides data on travel times between NYC subway stops. These data can be used to, e.g., visualise and analyse the subway network [2].
It's interesting to see not just how ridership plummeted over the past three weeks, but to see that it wasn't just a per-week phenomenon, but that ridership meaningfully decreased throughout the week from Monday through Friday the weeks of 3/9 and 3/16.
3/9 was the last day I commuted to work and last day I was on the subway. I remember I went into work late and left early to avoid crowds.
That was also the day my company changed our policy from "if you want to work from home, talk to your boss to see if that is appropriate" to "if you can work from home, you must work from home".
My boss and most of my co-workers were already working from home since the previous week (my boss had announced he was OK w anyone working from home), and I only went in on the 9th because I had agreed to meet w someone in the office.
My wife's last day was the 10th but I had tried to get them to stop earlier, basically put my foot down. We actually left the city that Saturday, now we are dealing with driving around northern New Hampshire with NY plates. Locals are starting to take more notice.
while i do agree that anyone traveling from anywhere now (but esp. hard hit areas like nyc) should be self quarantining for 14 days before circulating in the new community, to be fair, 3 weeks ago it wasn't clear what people should and should not be doing and the government was giving very mixed messages to people.
I know several people who left nyc over the last few weeks, mostly to stay w family in neighboring states.
We decided we are staying in nyc, and since the schools closed (march 13 was the last day they were open), we have had very limited exposure to anyone outside our apartment and have not left our apartment at all in 8 days except to go in our small backyard (which i am very grateful for right now).
Similar thing has been happening in France since the lockdown and 1 million Parisians fleeing Paris. In the region of Bretagne several cars with Paris plates have actually been vandalised [1] (first article that I could find, in French).
Not that vandalism is in any way an appropriate response, but people moving away from high infection areas is a big way in how the infection is spreading. Definitely a very selfish move.
If you believed your family was currently virus free but at increased risk of death because of high virus infection rates in your surroundings, would you do anything different than what these people are “selfishly” doing?
I live in Italy in a city with several hundred cases. I have a country house, and we're not moving there. We stay the fuck at home and we are under 50, we'll be fine. Don't be that guy, stay were you are.
I should be able to search an index for relevant datasets, then do a simple ‘install’ command and be able to access them through the popular framework/SDKs, or as a SQL query
It's interesting that there is a seemingly similar downward trend in the percentage of people in NYC with fevers ~5 days after subway ridership drops.
Covid takes ~5 days from exposure to symptoms and ~12 days from exposure to hospitalization. Of course, these broad population measures almost certainly impact other diseases as well (no kids at school to spread flu).
My (almost surely too) optimistic hope is that the huge increases in numbers the past week are mainly due to massive testing ramp ups and that the absolute number of cases has already peaked (for now).
Screenshot of NYC graph: https://imgur.com/a/WeaWKj9
Smart thermometer data map: https://healthweather.us/