Yes, Donald Trump is an asshole, as the New York Times reports in its feature article “The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus”, but there’s more to the story than that. Bill de Blasio isn’t so hot either!
Near the end of its long “what went wrong” piece/morality tale, the Times acknowledges that the first hour of the COVID crisis did not find the Big Apple and the Empire State at their best:
Like much of Europe, New York responded too slowly to the first wave of the virus. As late as March 15, Mayor Bill de Blasio encouraged people to go to their neighborhood bar.
Soon, the city and state were overwhelmed. Ambulances wailed day and night. Hospitals filled to the breaking point. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo — a Democrat, like Mr. de Blasio — was slow to protect nursing home residents, and thousands died. Earlier action in New York could have saved a significant number of lives, epidemiologists say.
By late March, however, New York’s leaders understood the threat, and they reversed course.
…
The lockdowns and the consistent messages had a big effect. By June, New York and surrounding states had some of the lowest rates of virus spread in the country. Across much of the Southeast, Southwest and West Coast, on the other hand, the pandemic was raging.
Yeah, yeah, but here’s the thing: New York wasn’t just bad; New York was terrible. And you know who was worse? New Jersey! And you know who was almost as bad? Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island!
Here’s the real dope, from “Statista”, “Death rates from coronavirus (COVID-19) in the United States as of August 5, 2020, by state(per 100,000 people)”: New Jersey, 179 deaths per 100,000; New York, 168; Massachusetts, 126; Connecticut, 124; Rhode Island, 95. “Wicked” Florida? 34 per 100,000. Wicked Texas? 25. Crazy California? The same.
There are lots of reasons for these disparities, and I can’t supply them, but the simple, “liberals learned, conservatives didn’t” is jive. I was wearing a mask, well, early March, because I have a girlfriend who is smarter than I am (Is that Trump’s real problem?), and, yes, those “real men don’t wear masks” conservatives were idiots, who just found a new way to demonstrate that fact.1 But there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Paul Krugman’s philosophy.2
1. Maybe they all need girlfriends who are smarter than they are.
2. Actually, I agree with most of what Paul has to say. It’s what he doesn’t say—why he doesn’t ask why the early numbers for the “New York area” were so horrible, for example—that bothers me.
I think you need to compare death rates when each state has relatively equal durations of infection time. so FL reached a case rate of say 1 per 100,000 residents [50] days after March 1, while NY was at that case rate in 22 days….in other words the comparison isn’t equal
There are lots of things that aren’t equal. The northeastern states had lots of cases in the beginning, when very little was known, when there was a shortage of equipment, etc. But the simple fact is, the death rates for these states are far higher than any other, and they are among the richest states in the Union. Well over a third of the total number of deaths for the nation occurred in NY, MA, NJ, and CN. Nobody talks about this. Why?